Anything is possible, there is this concept of "It'll see me out" amongst some as well. Usually not so visible among go-getters like CEO's, but you never know. I think given the technical issues around electric flight, my gut feeling is that the electric aviation probably has no prospects of massive returns in the foreseeable future, and relies on significant technical advancements in batteries to make it economical, so RR is probably trying to divest itself of that segment.

Spinning off a business isn't anything particularly special, the thing to watch is where to key management end up. If they go with the new electrical offshoot, then it's clear that the old business is destined to ride off into the sunset, meanwhile the electrical part is where they think the growth is. When it comes to non-consumer brands, the name is more or less meaningless. Reputation is important, but being called "Rolls-Royce" bears no weight in business decisions, so I wouldn't be surprised if the offshoot abandons the brand recognition.

This has happened a few times in the automotive industry, because investment in combustion powertrains has pretty much died off, so some companies have split themselves up, and kept the name with the old established hydrocarbon reliant parts of the business, while the spun off section is profitable and has a somewhat more resilient business, fit for the future.

It's all for naught, since godot never comes anyway.

In general, dealing with carbon dioxide emissions ultimately means having to do something about first world living standards. Just about everything that we've become accustomed to in the developed world uses energy and lots of it.

Headlines like this only give me hope in the thinking that, if the world was fair, and a tax were equitably applied, then clearly it should affect the wealthiest far more than even the middle classes, as the headlines suggest that the wealthiest are responsible for significantly more carbon dioxide emissions.

The problem really is that the world isn't fair, and a lot of the bickering, I don't doubt, is so that the burden disproportionately falls on the many, in order to subsidise the lifestyles of the wealthy.

The problem is, and I think it's a compelling argument, that a country's economy doesn't operate like a household budget, so when severe austerity kicks in, it actually operates like a negative feedback loop, counteracting the intended savings. This was demonstrated in Greece, because the debt didn't accumulate as severely, but debt-to-GDP shot right up, as all the austerity negatively affected the countries GDP.

Greece was overly generous in certain situations, such as retirement, but there's a lot of things that happened, and the fundamental issue I think was that Greece uses the euro, and couldn't devalue its currency to make itself competitive again. So negotiating its way through the whole situation, in general, it was doing so with other external interests basically holding most of the levers that could do anything.

I'm convinced that any company which becomes "too big to (let) fail" needs to be broken down into as many chunks as necessary, until they are acceptable to fail. Invariably all these problems exist because we have these nominal rules, but certain companies always manage to play by a different set of rules, unavailable to mere mortals, and tend to get rewarded when they fail through government bailouts.

In short, privately held debt got transferred over to European taxpayers, as initially the relevant European institutions weren't allowed to buy or issue debt, but then the appropriate measures were implemented so that national debt could be moved from privately held banks, to public the relevant public institutions.

All the private banks got bailed out from their "bad debt", and for all intents and purposes, Greece is on paper worse off than how it was when the crisis began, but when dealing with funny money, who knows what's going on. During the crisis Greece's debt was about €300 billion, it's around €400 billion now, and debt to GDP went from around 127% then, to around 167% now.

I get the impression that a lot of this creative accounting is basically to create monetary instruments that would be similar to myself having two credit cards with no limits, and I basically run up a debt on one, pay it off with the other, and then pay that off with the first and do that all the time, and so on and so on. I can't see bailouts doing anything else except making someone else, in this case; the taxpayers, essentially bear the load.

He really should show his working. My only suspicion is, without understanding how all this works, that maybe the offshore tax minimisation schemes may be included in Varoufakis' figure, while official earnings don't, but again, that's just speculation on my part.

To his credit, the government he was a part of went to elections and won on an anti-austerity platform. The eurocrats were twisting their arm to make them renege on their electoral promise. Actually one of Veroufakis' descriptions of the negotiations was that their response to the eurocrats was that since it was an election promise, they'd have to go back to the people with a referendum/plebiscite and ask them whether they want to agree or not, the response from the eurocrats was "how can you let the people make such an important decision?".

This is probably why there's a push to bring manufacturing back to the US, since having stuff to sell is probably the only way the US can extract themselves out of a prospective death loop.

I think this is the part which is the clincher. The US is not a disinterested party, and its strategic intentions with China are very clear, especially when the USA is doing everything it can to maintain alliances in Asia, to encircle and mount a capable naval blockade around China, so maintaining that the USA is disinterested in China's trade, well, I'm sorry but it's just wrong. In this context, nothing is necessarily being done because it's beneficial in pure business terms, but there's also national strategy behind it, so one would need to consider what is China trying to build from it?

The stability of the USD is due to consistent trade, but it has brought significant benefits to the USA and probably at the expense of other nations, since other countries need to obtain USD in order to enact transactions, while the US just sets its money printers to go brrrrr, and a huge amount of the USA's power really comes down to the value of the USD. I suspect that it's in China's interests to start to undermine that power, and start building up their own currency, to become a stable and viable unit for trade. When you consider the amount of trade China already does, and that trade largely resulting in propping up the USD, and not their own, they're probably keen to see that change.

In isolation, this may not make a lot of sense, for the reasons you point out, but in a strategic sense, with longer term goals, I think for China it makes lots of sense and probably should be a concern for the USA. But also to add a bit more context, I think we're also starting to see the peripheries of USA hegemony being tested, and some opinions are that WW3 has already begun. It appears like the US interests are being attacked at numerous fronts, with the goal of undermining confidence in the USA.

I don't really know, and certainly am no expert, but I think it probably should be considered that China does a lot of manufacturing and trade, and putting it in context, any oil rich country, is probably quite happy to skip currency conversion by having to deal with the petrodollar, and just get stuff that they'll be importing from China, anyway. In this context, it probably makes a lot of sense, given the risks, and control that the US maintains on international trade.

If anything, this is something which will work to make China more difficult to sanction in the future, which may similarly be in the interests of the countries selling China oil.

I think the difference here is, when the customers are gamers, they'll generally take it and accept it. When the customer is a business, they look at their bottom line, and will happily switch if a cheaper alternative is available. I get the feeling that CEO's like Riccitiello tend to have the one trick up their sleeves, and that's raise prices, and increase margins. At EA he may have gotten away with it, because gamers. Good that devs have him backpedalling.

As someone from Australia, who hears a very similar sort of rhetoric, the latter argument just doesn't really get blamed, even though Australia probably has a somewhat more lucrative benefits system. Australia has had a very long bipartisan policy, going for about 20 years now, surviving numerous governments, of relatively high immigration intake, and keeping the unemployment level sufficiently high. During the pandemic, closing the borders actually meant that many immigrants left, and very little new ones were coming back to take their place. This meant that conditions for Australians actually started to improve, but, kick in politics, and parliament moved very quickly to not let that go on for too long. The government even changed to a nominal "workers party" who are hell bent on siding with the other party, to make sure that the workers get the short end of the stick.

Bottom line is, with such a long period of time where business gets the upper hand in recruiting, government is there to ensure the free market is not allowed function in labour markets. This is where business is loathed to start offering more money to attract workers. Immigration policy may bring benefits, but in general, it's not necessarily to the middle and lower classes. You can see that in the US in how your middle class is getting hollowed out. It may be visible for those deciding to not work, but it's a broader shift, and no one is out there talking about those whose conditions have worsened and are more or less leaving the middle class by joining a lower one.

Just a note, Norway isn't in the EU!