General News
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Just to add overall last week i was slightly up.
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I guess that, given that the different portfolios perform differently then whether your personal outlook bumped up or down was a matter of your personal distribution.
FWIW, I was down (heavily) overall last week but it nudged up slightly from Thursday to Friday (i.e from Friday to Saturday results.) But, as I so often bore everyone with, it's a long game.
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Microsoft, Nvidia, and Anthropic have announced a landmark partnership that reshapes the AI landscape. Nvidia is committing up to $10 billion and Microsoft up to $5 billion in Anthropic, valuing the company at $350 billion — nearly double its September valuation.
Previously tethered to AWS for its compute needs, Anthropic will now spend $30 billion on Microsoft Azure and secure additional capacity up to one gigawatt, effectively making Azure its primary cloud platform. Anthropic’s Claude models, including Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5, will be available across all three major cloud providers — Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS — giving Claude unique multi-cloud access.
Nvidia and Anthropic will collaborate to optimise future models for Nvidia’s next-generation architectures, including Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin, keeping Anthropic away from AWS’s Trainium and Inferentia chips. The move is a clear coup for Microsoft, strengthening its AI foothold while limiting Amazon’s influence despite its prior investment.
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Jensen said last night...
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told investors on an earnings call. “From our vantage point, we see something very different.”
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I believe the budget was leaked early by the OBR-google is your friend
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Compare & contrast with that great lettuce budget - the Liz Truss special
Remember when it causing a plummet in the pound's value, a sharp rise in government borrowing costs (gilt yields), and a significant increase in mortgage rates. The unfunded tax cuts, estimated to be worth around $45 billion, triggered market turbulence and forced the Bank of England to intervene to restore financial stability.I like my budget days to be a bit ‘meh’.
The classic freezing of allowances is a bit of a nasty stealth tax, but no big surprise.Even as an EV owner - the anomaly over income from people like me was always coming home to roost.
Not entirely sure how they will manage it - the obvious way (to me) is to use DVLA records, & introduce a “MOT-lite” thing in years 1 and 2 to catch newer cars, where just the mileage is recorded.
….but they will probably make it more tortuous -
In other countries the owner/operator buys blocks of miles eg 0-10k, 10-20k etc and displays the 'sticker' like an old MOT. It's not exactly difficult. Whether it's fair to tax hybrids in this manner or miles driven outside the UK is an entirely different matter.
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In other countries the owner/operator buys blocks of miles eg 0-10k, 10-20k etc and displays the 'sticker' like an old MOT. It's not exactly difficult. Whether it's fair to tax hybrids in this manner or miles driven outside the UK is an entirely different matter.
@PM3 said in General News:
EV miles ? Ask the Chinese to send the data
Bwahahahaa! They could add the tax onto the rubbish we all buy from them
@Adam-Kay said in General News:
In other countries the owner/operator buys blocks of miles eg 0-10k, 10-20k etc and displays the 'sticker' like an old MOT. It's not exactly difficult. Whether it's fair to tax hybrids in this manner or miles driven outside the UK is an entirely different matter.
Interesting. Not heard of that (but then, I've not looked into it either!)
I doubt they have thought this through, but it is pretty clear something needs to fill the gap in fuel duty that the ICE drivers have paid forever.
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True - the fact that there will need to be some form of taxation of electric cars has been obvious for a while. The question is 'how?'
Initial reports suggested asking owners to propose a likely annual mileage and pay at the point of proposal, and then top up if necessary. This sounds primitive, hugely open to abuse and impractical for people who drive abroad as well as in the UK. A sticker sounds interesting, but will surely be open to all these same concerns?
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I guess any 'self-declared' number will potentially be open to mild abuse....but (perhaps contrary to popular belief!) most people are moderately honest, & won't want to risk being fined for lying.
In my shoes, I would naturally chose to slightly underestimate & let the HMRC payments catch up in the future....but not madly underestimate.I still feel the DVLA has all the base information (cars, owners), but is not obviously linked to HMRC...yet.....
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Compare & contrast with that great lettuce budget - the Liz Truss special
Remember when it causing a plummet in the pound's value, a sharp rise in government borrowing costs (gilt yields), and a significant increase in mortgage rates. The unfunded tax cuts, estimated to be worth around $45 billion, triggered market turbulence and forced the Bank of England to intervene to restore financial stability.I like my budget days to be a bit ‘meh’.
The classic freezing of allowances is a bit of a nasty stealth tax, but no big surprise.Even as an EV owner - the anomaly over income from people like me was always coming home to roost.
Not entirely sure how they will manage it - the obvious way (to me) is to use DVLA records, & introduce a “MOT-lite” thing in years 1 and 2 to catch newer cars, where just the mileage is recorded.
….but they will probably make it more tortuous@mikeiow said in General News:
introduce a “MOT-lite” thing in years 1 and 2 to catch newer cars, where just the mileage is recorded.
That is exactly what is being proposed, from the consultation that I saw last night, Mot centres would need to offer a service to verify the mileage, they already have all the computer kit for entering Mot details, so a simple back end change to that system would make it available for every Mot centre in the country.
Once they Beta tested on EV's I'm sure they'll apply it to ICE cars.
Many cars can easily be clocked, but I do wonder what the implications on on modern cars that report mileages back to the manufacture, will they start flagging up clocking???
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Highly impressive. Rapid progress is being made re robotic(humanoid) locomotion. https://x.com/BenjaminDEKR/status/1996435568004370809?s=20
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Slightly better than the Russians
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuUSR8TyZDE -
You could tell it was built from Lada parts the moment it tried to stand upright. Even gravity looked offended.
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Highly impressive. Rapid progress is being made re robotic(humanoid) locomotion. https://x.com/BenjaminDEKR/status/1996435568004370809?s=20
@Adam-Kay said in General News:
Highly impressive. Rapid progress is being made re robotic(humanoid) locomotion. https://x.com/BenjaminDEKR/status/1996435568004370809?s=20
Way (way, way) back in the mists of time, my PhD was in the field of seeing how to get paraplegic folk “walking” using exoskeleton braces and wearing all
sorts of computers and power packs. They looked more like Neil Armstrong on the moon. Things seem to have come on a bit.
