hogFeast

I grew up in this environment. These people are extraordinarily violent: football hooligans are violent, and English hooligans are notorious throughout Europe (someone was killed during Euro 2020). In the 90s, some grounds were genuinely unsafe. And I lived in London when Copeland was planting bombs...it went on for weeks, a guy running around the city planting nail bombs in crowded areas. Jo Cox murdered. Combat 18 were linked to the murder of a politician in Germany last year. As these groups have gone underground, they have become more dangerous not less.

Also, the reason why these groups exist is because they splintered out of political organizations. They weren't tolerated at any time but the BNP did not broadcast the violence or their links to it publicly. There is a distinction between a group like Britain First, which has people who are clearly dangerous but they retain a political profile, and Combat 18 who are active neo-Nazis like Atomwaffen in the US. Terrorist organizations are banned in the UK, there is a huge amount of surveillance of these groups.

Yes, there are a number of banned neo-Nazi organizations in the UK. Combat 18 is probably the most well-known (British Movement, White Wolves...there are a few).

These groups are offshoots of political parties, as fascist parties started to splinter in the 90s as it became less acceptable to be overly racist/fascist. Under Tyndall the BNP, which was a political party, was very violent (Combat 18 supposedly provided "protection" for their rallies). No terrorism but organising attacks on minority groups certainly (in the early 90s before Nazi groups went underground, there was a strong link with football hooliganism as certain clubs had groups that were overtly racist...Birmingham's firm is the only one I am aware of that wasn't racist). Tbh, these groups are more like criminal gangs in the US than anything else (and they had very little electoral success until Griffin moved the party away from overt fascism).

Also, it is worth pointing out that Copeland was a member of the BNP. He was obviously a nutjob but he was closely associated with the party, and the overt racism/violent rallies was still part of the BNP until the late 90s (and even after Griffin took over).

The UK also had a brief period in the early 2000s, before Islamic terrorism really took off and after right-wing groups started to really lose steam, where environmental terrorism was the main source of attacks. Environmental groups sent anthrax to academics who experimented with animals, and groups (iirc, ALF) were trying to bomb animal testing facilities (that is why animal testing facilities in the UK usually have multiple rings of barbed wire 20ft high, guard posts, cameras everywhere...I actually live near one of these places, and it was built when this was picking up: no signposts at all, tiny one-car road down to the facility, forest completely surrounds it so you can't see it from anywhere else, not built near any main road).

Btw, the whole premise of the original argument is ludicrous...these groups know they are being watched. I am sure that online communications are used after suspect has been identified but indoctrination is largely happening within in-person groups. With Islamic fundamentalism, it is same mosques, it is the same groups of people. I don't think any level of surveillance will stop lone wolf attacks either.

If your business model includes: "we put people in an office in the hopes that their random interactions will create value"...then that sounds like the problem is something else.

Random encounters that create value sound good. It sounds less good when you flip this logic, and ask whether the reliance on randomness is a function of weak information-sharing within formal structures. It is easier to break down silos if you put this online, then there is genuine sharing. That is what the internet is for.

The reduction in choice happened at the start of Covid.

They have a huge database product (kdb). The company that owns Kx is a billion dollar company.

It really isn't clear to me why they do what they do (not just with regards to the language). They have a large consulting business (q/kdb consultants can make £1k/day easily) so it doesn't make a difference. I believe some parts of q/kdb are open-source but some parts are not. And I think this really does hurt them because there isn't a big eco-system around their products (for example, they have had to hire people internally to build ML libraries for q).

It is very weird: they are at the eye of the storm for data analytics, their product is fast, they are growing modestly doing lots of business with banks and in other industries that need streaming analytics particularly...but they are still niche, and growing a lot slower than you would expect (part of this is that management insists on being profitable...people rip on SV companies for not making money...well, Kx are the other side of this...they are modestly profitable, but not really growing).

EDIT: I should add, if you see the stuff that is open...a lot of the code is a total shitshow.

Not sure I want to respond to someone who suggests that only people who read the Guardian care about child rape.

classy

But yes, take the moral high ground...you are showing everyone how smart you are.

They pay more for non-distribution jobs. You, usually, have to pay thousands to train on an HGV, it requires substantial time and training, and it is relatively stressful job...and you can make more working in Tesco stacking shelves. You make way more working in an Amazon warehouse. The pay for distribution jobs in Tesco outside of online and Amazon deliveries is actually pretty poor.

There was a huge shortage of HGV drivers before Covid, and before Brexit...it is just the govt and industry did literally nothing, even though they knew the average age of drivers is 55+, and all the drivers are retiring because of the conditions.

I think the big problem was less Brexit, and more the fact that the industry relied very heavily on cheap foreign labour that all went back to their countries when Covid hit.

There are problems with production too but they are largely: people having to self-isolate, and industrial action (it hasn't been in the media but strikes have hit certain companies, unf the big trade unions smell blood so they are pushing hard to shutdown the economy again).

But most supermarkets got what they had coming to them. Lidl was totally boycotted earlier last month because they had a habit of making drivers wait hours until they were ready to unload, and refusing any delivery if it was 15 minutes late. Some stores were totally empty...and they learned their lesson.

Also, I will say too: I haven't really noticed any shortages, two months ago my supermarket had some trouble getting a certain brand of bakery products for a couple of days...that was it (although some producers have been hit, it isn't widespread at all). Newspapers in the UK just have a real fetish for this topic because Brits are obsessed with this kind of thing (the panic buying at the start of Covid was insane...even then, there were no real shortages but Brits love this kind of thing).

Okay, and how do you explain the fact that the statistics don't bear this out? The North East has the second-lowest proportion of young people attending university in England.

Everything that I said is also based on data. There are stats on who is attending uni, there are stats on sexual violence in schools, there are stats on bullying.

What is surprising is that you imply that my account is not representative in some way, and then say that I am wrong because you did it...how does this make sense to you? What you did makes no difference.

And, unless you are more specific about where you came from, it makes no difference because, as I took great care to mention, the issue is not about poverty. There is nowhere else poorer than Middlesbrough in the UK but the issue is that there is nowhere else with lower opportunities for you in life. So this is a problem that is specific to regions, it is largely non-existent below Birmingham. In all of these areas which have poverty, there is high social mobility...this is least true in the North-East, some places along the East coast, some places in the Midlands, many places in Wales and Scotland.

Also, I think it is truly tragic when someone points out things like bullying in schools and sexual violence against children for someone to say..."Oh, you must be a Guardian reader"...is it only people who read the Guardian who care about children being raped? Well...at least we know your views on the subject. I bet the moral high ground feels great. University was wasted on you.

That isn't an option in this part of the UK. There are almost no jobs. And the schools there are not good (and university isn't really an option for these people anyway, even if you get the grades). It also isn't easy to move anywhere, there is nowhere to move to, housing is short in any area people want to live.

For reference, Middlesbrough is one of the most deprived places in Europe (inc. Eastern Europe). I know people who grew up round there, I have been there quite a bit...it is unlike anything you see in most developed countries (the only place I have ever been like this was slum areas in Milan, and rural areas of Eastern Europe).

Even if schools had the teachers (most of them just don't teach some subjects, like computer science, at all...they don't have the staff, no-one will live there), bullying is off the charts, sexual violence against girls in school is an epidemic, teachers sexually abusing students is an epidemic...although hopefully ending...I would say it is close to impossible for most people in this situation to lift themselves out (particularly given the parents, not just school). I know people who went to schools around here, I know people who teach in these kind of areas in the UK...these places aren't developed country.

Btw, if you grow up in an urban environment in the South in the UK, even if the area is heavily impoverished...your school is top-tier. The issue is complex.

So the author went to Middlesbrough, saw the total deprivation everywhere, and thought...these people just need financial literacy lessons?

I accept the micro point that people in these situations make bad financial choices but the reason they make these choices, as the survey shows which finds a high overall level of financial literacy, is the lack of better options.

I actually can't remember the details. I believe we were talking about Babel...so, technically, a transpiler. Or it actually could have been one of those code bundlers (I seem to remember they were using browserify...this was a while ago but I believe most people were already using webpack then...JS...what a mess).

Actually can't find him at the company anymore. But the company isn't doing too well (although they seem to have moved into a nicer office). Revenue down 50% last year (from a small number to an even smaller number), costs up 60%, losing substantially more money than they have revenue, the operations guy who did my interview isn't there anymore either...true "tech company things". I didn't the impression that the company was that bad, they were more "much steam, no fire".

That makes no sense because, presumably, the alternative is to have no-one. If you don't hire someone because you are worried about the team, you don't need to hire anyone (this risk is, also, not avoidable anyway...if your product is so fragile, the risk isn't making a hiring mistake).

I have heard that Bezos, Brin, and Ellison have a Spades group together. Huge lessons for business strategy.

I interviewed for a front-end dev position (it was my first ever interview in the industry, I vomited before I got there so it was a pretty crazy day).

I come in. The front-end guy starts asking me questions to try and solve something he is working on. No-one else is there yet. He is asking me about why a JS compiler is removing his comments, I say I don't know, I have never had that issue before...I make an off-hand comment that I use React and most of my JS code doesn't have comments because I am just working on projects by myself, and I don't do a lot of library code...the manager comes in at this point, and proceeds to berate me about why commenting is essential. I say: I use comments where they are needed. Off he goes, again.

Interview starts. Manager proceeds to go through a series of questions designed to expose my ignorance. None of which are related to the job. One classic was him explaining to me that database normalization made no difference to the size of the database because "the data is all the same on the disk" (which is, ofc, not accurate...I tried to explain, he just kept repeating that over and over...he actually said as I was leaving "make sure you understand databases for your next interview" with a massive shit-eating grin). For some reason, there was also a back-end guy there who, upon hearing that I built something in Java, proceeded to launch into a series of questions on internals of Java (for example, he asked me what the difference was between certain versions of Java and the size of the heap...perhaps unsurprisingly, he also got some of this stuff wrong but began laughing when I said I thought X was Y).

The only two questions that I had about front-end dev were: the front-end guy trying to ask me to help solve an issue he was having (before the interview, when no-one was there), and a question about the value of this in arrow functions (which I got wrong, but is also an excruciating thing to try and explain, so I don't think the guy knew whether I got it wrong...it is a terrible question). That was it.

This is something that I have never quite understood. In most of the places where software engineering is big, you have very loose labour laws. But companies treat hiring as if employees are signing on for life (compare this to how they treat downsizing). It is very strange, particularly given: the fact that almost no-one thinks current hiring practices are perfect, and the difficulty in producing a process that actually works (again, it seems odd that people hiring are engineers but take an approach to hiring that is very precisely wrong, rather than roughly correct...this confusion between precision and correctness seems common with engineer backgrounds).

I agree with the thrust of the article. Most personal finance experts are...a bit weird (I have no idea why Tony Robins is an expert...he knows literally nothing, isn't he a motivational speaker...only in America could this be a job).

But there is a reason why spend less is the best advice for most people: they can't start a business, they have limited scope to increase their earnings significantly, and you can actually become relatively rich if you just spend less.

Personal financial advice really isn't about attempting to become rich, it is about stopping people doing things that make no sense. We aren't talking about becoming Jeff Bezos...that isn't the goal for most people, the aim is to help people retire with dignity. Telling everyone to start their own business is terribly unhelpful because it won't improve anything as most people will fail (this is why personal finance experts exist...because most people think in these unreasonable ways i.e. the only way I can become rich is by taking huge risks...rather than just not buying stupid shit I don't need, ppl reason in very weird ways).

To say this another way, most people do not understand the long-term value of a $1 saved today. Obviously, exactly how you calculate this is a little complicated but if people realised that $1 now was worth $4 or $6 or $8 in 30 years then they would consider what they do today more carefully (and even then, some people are just weird...they will say: I am going to die before then, or I don't care...then they will get to retirement and everything is fucked).

Btw, I used to work in this industry, I have seen people who didn't consider any of this. We had a client who worked all his life in a decent paying job but had little savings, took to drink, wife divorced him, lost his job in his late 60s, got drunk one day, fell down the stairs when he was on his own in his rented house (he lost his house a few months before), died. This all happened within a few months. It will happen. You will get old. You can't control everything in life but something that is relatively easy to control is your spending. I try not to give people specific advice but the number one thing that everyone can do is: control your spending, think about what you need, you can't avoid some expenses but the peace of mind later down the road from small changes is huge.

This kind of thing is unfashionable as hell though because it does put that pressure back onto the individual. Lots of young people today have this attitude of: everything is rigged, telling me to change anything when X person is so wealthy makes you an oppressor, etc. Unsurprisingly, this attitude tends to be linked with taking decisions that are unwise, and abrogating all responsibility for the consequences.

Yep, there were free-trade laws to protect independent grocers and the chain department stores set up in suburban areas which took away business from independent inner-city department stores (typically family-owned).

Interestingly, I think the implosion of chain department stores in the US is linked far more to growth of online sales (even though, online sales are far higher in the UK) and overbuilding of retail capacity. The UK is seeing demographic/infrastructure changes with greater suburbanization.

Stores that are in out-of-town retail parks, more like US strip malls, are actually doing very well. One example is Next, a big clothes retailer, they used to have a lot of high-street/inner-city locations but moved stores out-of-town, and they are doing quite well (they also have a very nice business online, they even do third-party fulfilment from their warehouses). And there are lots of new chains focused around retail parks that are growing very fast.

Online is definitely a factor that is shrinking the overall offline retail market. But a lot of these department store chains started having problems in the 2000s, and just imploded in the 2010s. The comparison with the US is very interesting though.

That BHS in Edinburgh has been converted (I have heard, I live near Edinburgh and haven't been into the city centre for about ten years) into a mini golf, pool, bowling, etc. place...that only takes up the basement. I remember walking through that place once in the 2000s, and it was totally dead then and ludicrously large.

> My council claim it's a source of revenue, but then moan that they own the shops in the town

This is widespread. A lot of councils (when they were complaining about central govt cuts, and threatening to cut vital services) actually bought into retail properties. I believe central govt put a stop to it but a lot of the damage has already been done.

I read about a local council that got an opinion on a shopping centre, their consultant told them not to buy it, they did anyway...lost it all. Truly staggering levels of incompetence.

The US went through exactly the same phase after WW2: suburbanization, increase in car transport led to the death of single-location department stores which were concentrated in the city centre.

This didn't occur in the UK because of better public transport, and less suburbanization (marginally).

All of the stuff you say is correct but local councils, generally, didn't approve retail parks...they just couldn't find a good enough reason to say no or they were built just outside the council area. And now councils are reaping what they sowed because they stopped houses going up in cities...now the locus of money has moved to the suburbs as new houses get built (and, somewhat unbelievably, councils made this worse but shutting down car parking on high streets during Covid...the economic mismanagement is staggering...but all due to their greed around house prices and trying to restrict cars to boost house prices in the areas local councillors live).

For a roadmap, look at the US after WW2 (we are somewhere in the 60s when independent department stores started failing en masse). We had department store chains built up in inner city areas so the collapse is, if anything, more violent. Most high street areas/shopping centres will fold, Debenhams was an anchor tenant in so many shopping centres. Tier 2 cities/towns high streets will be literally deserted in a few years. Most retailers that anchor shopping centres will fail (the big one that hasn't failed already is M&S, even Sainsbury's is vulnerable because I believe they anchor some small shopping centres), and you will see new chains thrive as retail parks spring up. I live near a town with under 10k people, they have put a retail park there with 4 stores, and before they all opened they added another two units. Aldi, Home Bargains, Food Warehouse...all fast growing chains offering products that undercut all the old economy shops.

It is really great to see. A lot of these chains are offering real value. In the town I mentioned, it was only Tesco who was known for gouging in locations where they were the only shop in town. Now they are being overrun: Tesco, Sainsburys, Aldi, Home Bargains, Food Warehouse.

Ah, that makes sense. So it is any decline in equity assets through which the rate of selling is faster than the decline in the underlying assets (presumably...if the rate of selling was slower then the ratio would be less than 50%?).

I still have the same problem. The reason cycles cycle is because of the movement in money demand...which tend to be correlated to everything else. Being able to predict who will panic-sell could be correlated to other things (always a problem in financial economics).

I will need the read paper properly but would be interested to see how they deal with cash coming into and out of the account.

There is always going to be some timing strategy which beats holding.

If we flip this and imagine that everyone knew with certainty what the underlying values (earnings, dividends, etc.) should be then the return on stocks would always just be the return on the underlying values (it is a bit more complex than this, in reality the cost of capital differs between individuals so you are always going to get volatility...but the point is that because people are trade their portfolios faster than fundamentals change, then there is always going to be a timing strategy that works...that is how HFTs make money most days over decades).

I thought I understood briefly...I don't anymore. I think the part that is confusing is the 50% part...50% of what? But I am right in saying that the drop in assets has to be at least 90%?

What timing? There are plenty of market timing strategies that will beat holding (the market is more volatile than underlying values so this is a natural certainty)...but it depends what you mean by timing.

Most of the conventional things that people understand about holding are wrong though...unsurprisingly, given that most of these conventions are produced by people trying to sell you something (I know this, because I worked in financial services, and used some of these conventions to sell things...it makes sense because individuals are stupid enough to do themselves real harm by trying to be clever...but this does not mean that being clever doesn't work, it just means you are stupid).

They are also selecting for 90% drops in equity (why 90%? what were the results when different numbers were selected?).

In these cases, someone has lost most of their net worth and so they may find the rest of their assets are being liquidated, and they need to empty their account to discharge other liabilities. The reason why market downturns are correlated with panic selling is because market downturns are correlated with other things. The reason market cycles happen is largely because of the changing value that people place on cash...in 2008, lots of people needed cash.

And 90% is a very large number, the max drawdown on the S&P in crashes is usually less than half this number...so I am not quite sure why they are looking at this number when it doesn't really reflect a realistic scenario for most people. Losing 90% is inherently extreme, I worked in finance, I am relatively good at investing...if I lost 90% of my money, I would time myself out. I know of no investment business in the world that would keep someone on after a 90% loss...zero. Some multi-strategy firms will fire you if you lose 5%.

Additionally, as you say, people who have money tend to protect their downside. If you have $1m, and you lose 90%...you still have $100k. This tends to be particularly misleading when you look at a sample in which the market has always gone up and recovered...because it always looks like there was an opportunity cost from exiting (and if there wasn't, these papers don't get written). The paper is inferring reason to a decision that they don't really know the reason of. I 100% agree that "freaking out" can be (and often is) a rational choice.

Ask someone who "freaked out" in 1991 when Japan tanked. I actually know a firm that didn't "freak out", they were strong investors...firm nearly died, they lost pretty much all their client's money, and the Japan business effectively folded...but yes, those idiots who "freaked out"...rakakakaka.

Ah yes, that is quite a problem.

I would consider carefully if it is really worth it for you. Making tables responsive is utterly hellish.

But what you can do is make the table horizontally scrollable. This isn't too complex but, of course, it creates a new problem which is: what do you do if the user needs to look at one col at the start of the table and one col at the end? In the cases where I have added scrolling, I froze the first col (which gets a little involved when you have to freeze the first col and then scroll all the others). It is tricky, afaik there are no library impls of this, but there are no other options if you have a really data-heavy website and mobile users.

A strong implementation of horizontal scrolling with first col freezing is the NBA's stats website - https://www.nba.com/stats/player/201566/

Doing cards is a definitely an option in some circumstances but if you are building an application where the user needs to scroll through rows then it becomes problematic. For example, if you have a website like the NBA...it makes sense (I think) to do cards for a team's upcoming matches...you don't need to display a whole lot of information (the opponent, the date, the venue), users aren't going to scroll through 20 rows. But if you are doing a player's stats with lots of columns and users might want to go back 10 years and compare AST today with AST 10 years ago...then cards aren't a good solution.

Very nice.

I am running a similar site, and I wonder whether it isn't a bit overwhelming to have all the bells and whistles on the one page, upfront. In my experience, you get tons of bounces because people don't know (yet) what your site is for (but as someone who does know what options are, it does look useful). I don't think there is any single "answer" though.

My "solution" in the past has been either to break up all the options into a sequence of choices (so the user only has to make one choice at a time, rather than worry about all the other knobs and dials/what they do/what they have missed), or (where possible) divide the choices between pages in some way that makes sense (this wouldn't make sense in this case but you would do puts and calls on separate pages).

Would be interested to hear any other solutions though. I do these kind of sites (tables, lots of things to select, lots of data) almost exclusively and so I am always looking for more solutions.

Some other thoughts: maybe make the top bar smaller to give yourself more room.

I am not a big fan of centred data in tables because the spacing can feel irregular. And I would try to standardize column title length (for example, using abbreviations/tooltips) so your spacing is even too. My eye is drawn immediately to the underlying price column because of the gap created by centring/title length, which isn't good because this isn't really an important column. I would also consider working out which column is most important and making that more prominent (if possible) so the table is scannable (another option is hiding some columns, again I am not sure how this fits with your vision for users but is the user scanning rows and only needs to look at the delta later? Some of your columns are clearly duplicated in the description too, do you need separate columns for bid/ask...lots of options I think to cut the table down a bit...I have a 15" laptop and 10 columns feels like a lot).

Finally, very minor point, but I wonder whether the font on the unselected multi-select buttons is too light...it is very, very slight but just blends a bit too much with the background, imo (generally, the colour scheme/contrasts for your selections are excellent, I feel my eye is drawn to the right places and nothing is distracting).

Well done though. I think there is a huge niche for these kind of financial information products.

EDIT: Open Interest is spelt wrong in the table's column headers.

Yes, what people really need when they browse the internet is to be asked every ten seconds what kind of cookies they want, every time a different form with different options that loads so many third-party scripts that my browser chokes...and then you have to fill out the form.

I can see why bureaucrats like this system though, try to inflict the horror of their jobs onto everyone else.

And ofc, this makes no difference for tracking at all. Most people just click whatever option is the default, they have no idea what cookies are, they have no idea how the cookies are being used because the forms don't tell you...what is the decision that is supposedly been improved here? People are still being tracked, but we showed them a totally baffling form and they clicked "Yes"...society has been preserved.

Oh, and you have now split the internet into different regions...it was all worth it, no ragrats.

The US used to have "fair trade" laws with these kind of agreements. These were used to protect independent grocers from chain department stores...they were the Amazon of the 1940/50s. Plus ca change.

But the legality of this kind of thing depends on the circumstances. From what I have read, it seems unlikely to be illegal (it is perfectly normal for a manufacturer to supply a product and attempt to stop a buyer selling into a particular channel) but I am not sure it is a great idea to say you are doing this specifically to increase prices.

To give you an example I came across recently, when Sony came to the US they dealt with US wholesalers. Some wholesalers would sell to product to retailers who wanted to aggressively discount product. So Sony eventually stopped selling to wholesalers, and sold directly to retailers who wouldn't discount their product. It is a fine line but the manufacturer always has the choice of not selling to a certain buyer anyway (and tbf, as dollar stores have shown, some retailers will get around the manufacturer's rules anyway).

So I don't think it is particularly unreasonable for a manufacturer to tell customers to stop putting product into a certain channel, and it probably isn't anticompetitive (because it doesn't limit the ability of competitors to sell on Amazon).

Yep, I studied economic history, I have read all of his books (including his first book on statistics in early 20th century Germany). His latest book wasn't that well received, and it is very far from the best book on the 2008 financial crisis (it is far too early to say which book is the best, but Tooze framed that book in terms of the bete noires of the left at the time, Trump and Brexit, which massively takes away from the book's broader relevance...it happens, it is how publishers sell books, it is not how writers produce great ones). Deluge and Wages of Destruction are considered his best books, and Wages is clearly superior (Deluge and Crashed are really more popular history).

Either way, I don't think I made any specific claims about the limits of Tooze's knowledge (I have no real idea what Tooze does or does not know). My point was simple: if you look solely at Nazi Germany fiscal policy between 1931 and 1944, it will appear very much like there are no limits to spending. He references this multiple times throughout the article. I also mentioned that the other very common place that you see this is is people who have studied Japanese economic policy in the 70/80s. If you take these periods and you want to believe that there are no limits in spending, these periods will allow you to make that argument (and it is common to see this generally: people who are experts in one period of history, often see everything through that lens...human nature). It is extremely common for people who believe in MMT or some variant of MMT to reference these periods (and again, not make any reference to other aspects of how that was possible i.e. politics).

The problem with this is that this information does not generalize (and I have said specifically why this information doesn't generalize in these cases). He refers to post-WW2 as an example of there being no limit to spending but, again as I explain specifically, it is an example of the opposite. I made no claim about why that is: all I said is that Tooze's expertise is periods in which the limits to spending aren't clear, and he is referencing a period which is a the textbook example of limits to spending (post-WW2).

I didn't say this but I know why he is making this argument: Tooze is left-leaning. Most economists aren't particularly familiar with the details of 1950s monetary policy (there are very few books on this subject, it isn't fashionable) but even if there were, people would still believe in MMT. The reasons why people in believe in certain things are not limited to evidence (Tooze was one of the public figures that was behind Corbyn's MMT-funded spending plans, he has taken a political stance on this). If this wasn't the case, I do suspect he would have a different interpretation of the post-WW2 period.