LISTA EMENDORUM

(Marcus needs to pick up before Livia kills him)
Garum (the good Pompeian stuff, NOT that cheap Lusitanian rubbish)

More garum (you can never have enough garum)

Olive oil, 1 amphora (check for watering down, that crook at the forum did it last time)

Bread, 3 loaves (the ones without the sawdust)

Dormice, 12, fattened (Decimus is coming for dinner, the pretentious bastard)

Flamingo tongues (see above re: Decimus)

Posca for the slaves (vinegar will do, stretch it)

Wine, Falernian if we can afford it, Campanian if Livia isn't looking

Lead acetate wine sweetener (everyone says it's fine)

Silphium (if anyone still has any, which they don't, because you lot ate it all)

Fish, whatever looks least suspicious

Lark tongues, 200 (Decimus again, honestly)

Snails, 1 bucket, milk-fattened

Cumin, because we put cumin in everything

Pepper (remortgage the villa first)

One cabbage (Cato says it cures everything, Cato is a bore but it can't hurt)

Urine, 1 amphora (the fuller needs it for the togas, don't ask)

Sponge on a stick (we're running low and the public ones are disgusting)

If there's change left, new toga. The old one has garum on it. Again.

Should be doable for somebody targeting Mars.

Needed to show being hit by a truck is bad?

"Only to need to pay inflated prices to import power from France's nuclear plants."

Hardly. They PAID Switzerland several times already to take solar and wind power off their hands, forcing the Swiss nukes to shut down.

Sure we think that.
Automatic Weaving Looms (Northrop Looms)
In the textile industry, the introduction of the automatic bobbin-changing loom meant a single operator could manage 20 or more machines instead of just two or four.
This caused widespread "de-skilling" of the workforce and led to intense pressure to increase the "workload" per employee.
This specific type of automation led to massive labor unrest, such as the Lawrence Textile Strike (1912).

Continuous Processing and Automatic Control (1900s–1920s)

In industries like flour milling, oil refining, and chemical production, the industry moved from "batch processing" to "continuous flow." Early pneumatic controls and automatic shut-off valves began to replace manual oversight for pressure and flow.

The Linotype Machine (Late 19th–Early 20th Century)

Before the Linotype, setting type for newspapers was a painstaking, manual process done by highly skilled, well-paid typographers. The Linotype machine allowed an operator to cast an entire line of metal type at once using a keyboard.
and..and...

As it is NOW, they don't even KNOW that they are recidivists, since they do not have the data from previous times.

Did people clutch their pearls also when "Doctor" Marcus Welby did ads?

Wealth taxes sound logical but fail in practice for reasons that are structural, not incidental.

Modern billionaire wealth is not a pool of cash but unrealized appreciation in stock, private equity, and assets held inside foundations, trusts, and holding companies that never die and never sell.

The wealth is real in terms of power and influence but does not exist in any form that is liquid, personally owned, or straightforwardly valued.

Asking someone to pay 5% annually on a private company stake or a foundation's art collection requires first agreeing what it is worth, then finding the cash to pay the bill, neither of which has a clean answer.

Europe ran this experiment for decades. Sweden, Germany, France, Austria, Finland, Denmark and others all introduced wealth taxes and most have abolished them, citing capital flight, administrative chaos, and the fundamental impossibility of consistent valuation across asset classes.
France's ISF drove thousands of wealthy residents abroad before Macron scrapped it in 2017 explicitly because it cost more than it raised. Germany's was ruled unconstitutional in 1995 on valuation grounds alone.

The deeper problem is that the effective tax rate on a correctly structured fortune is already close to zero before any wealth tax is contemplated. You borrow against your portfolio to live, generating no income.

Everything is owned by immortal entities that never trigger a realization event. The rate on zero is always zero, and a wealth tax on assets that are not personally owned, cannot be objectively valued, and cannot be liquidated without market disruption is not a revenue solution. It is a political statement.

His job will be done by AI anyway soon, then he'll have ample time.

16 and under do not vote.

Everybody is now a 'manager' of half a dozen AI agents.

Facebook Home / HTC First "Facebook Phone" — 2013 — discontinued within weeks;
HTC First price cut to $0.99.

Internet.org / Free Basics — 2014 — banned in India 2016; largely abandoned.

Oculus / Reality Labs (VR/AR/metaverse) — Oculus acquired 2014 ($2B); rebrand to Meta 2021 — cumulative operating losses $83.5 billion over 21 quarters as of Q1 2026; budget cut ~30% Dec 2025; 1,000+ jobs cut Jan 2026.

Horizon Worlds — 2021 — missed internal user targets; part of Reality Labs cuts.

Libra renamed Diem (cryptocurrency) — 2019 — consortium partners exited; sold off 2022.

Portal (video-call smart display) — 2019 — discontinued 2022. .....

He's talking about E.T. :-)

...that they are losing money already because people create their own AI stock-photos instead of buying them from ANYBODY.

If I need a photo of an elephant playing the flute, I don't care how it was created.

Not in the EU at least, they can change their mind as often as they want, but as they themselves said many, many times:

Brexit means Brexit.

As long as there's a veto, they won't become a member again.
First, because SOMEBODY would veto their ass and second.

NOBODY will ever want a UK member with a veto.

We learned our lesson.

Also, the EU that the UK left is not the EU from today, the EU finalized tons of regulations and rulings that the UK had been blocking for DECADES.

Good riddance!