The retaliation against individual government members is a new thing. This got started against Russia, where various individuals were sanctioned for financial crimes and then more recently over the war in Ukraine. But it's not something that historically one government has done to another in the past, pressure individual lawmakers over their votes.
It is however a massive alarm that the UK cannot afford to use US cloud services for anything governmental, and especially should not be signing any contracts with Palantir. Perhaps revoking the Palantir one should be used as leverage here? Or do we just admit to being a sort of damp version of Puerto Rico, not a state but subject to US governance?
Then there's the F35s, the ""independent"" (not) nuclear deterrent, and so on.
We really are in a weird state of dependency with the US regarding deterrence - missiles sourced from US stocks, UK nuclear material built into warheads using a US design.
I wonder if there is a block in the missiles to stop them being used against the US?
Edit: I don't think there is any dependency on the US once a UK Trident sub is at sea - for the simple reason there no external dependencies (no codes or anything) - the crews have all they need to launch.
Also what has changed is that European countries came up with extraterritorial laws and started to fine the US companies and want to have saying how they run their business. GDPR was the first step, and was still reasonable, but now there are several censorship laws. Most notable UK and Italy, where the latter wants to nuke anything they say from global DNS in 15 minutes without due process.
Extraterritorial? Those companies are doing business in the EU, it's exactly the same in any country on Earth: if you want to do business in their territory there are local laws to follow.
What happens is that European companies buy services that are produced in the US, not in Europe. The European countries are free to ban and fine companies buying those services like Russia does. Italy, for example, can start by fining companies using Cloudflare, IP blocking Cloudflare and face the political consequences of it. But they don't want politicalconsequences which is the source of the friction. An Italian would be really pissed off for politicians if someone shows up their house and takes away computer because of watching football illegally.
Doesn't matter where they are produced, it matters where they are sold.
They are sold in the EU, they need to follow the laws for the market where they are sold. I can't go to the US, produce a death trap of a car, and sell it in the US because it goes against US laws; I could produce the same car in the US, not sell it in the US, and be fine if I find a market where I can export it too, it's stupid but not against the law.
US companies want to sell to Europeans, they could choose to not do business here and wouldn't face any repercussions if breaking EU law. Since they do like the money from a very rich bloc of countries they do business in the EU and need to follow its laws.
It's very very simple, I don't know why you are trying to complicate a rule (or worse, victimise companies) that exists anywhere in the world. If I want to sell something in the USA I need to follow USA's laws regarding that, if I don't then I can't do business there.
Fairly sure the US started this process with things like the PokerStars case, the MegaUpload raid, heck even further back Dmitry Skylarov's PDF reader. Not to mention the secondary sanctions on Cuba and the complex rules about providing financial services to overseas Americans.
I'm also fairly sure that the Italian requirement only applies to blocking Italian DNS access.
> The authority set the multi-million euro fine with the resolution now published based on one percent of Cloudflare's global annual revenue. It justifies this calculation with the company's cross-border structure: Since Cloudflare's infrastructure is globally oriented and enables the circumvention of local blocks, the sanction must also have a corresponding "deterrent effect" and go beyond the national framework.
The NatWest Three - UK nationals, working in the UK, for a UK company. "Defrauded" their UK employer and were convicted by a US court and jailed in the US for the crime.
For the confused reader, "CSAM-as-a-service" means they will ban your account and sic the cops on you if you use their service to create CSAM:
“We take action against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary,” X Safety said. “Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”
The trick here is that the sexualised but not actually naked pictures of children are not actually illegal in the US (or quite possibly England as well). Just very disturbing.
It's an odd shadow war though, because the government haven't even pulled their own Twitter accounts from the service (which they can and should do).
And so can you run local models which can generate far worse material.
And horny teens have always fantasist about celebrities, or that girl they have a crush one etc. And there always had been people people cutting physical images together to place the head of their obsession on some erotic magazine sourced body.
But like you saied it's creating a feed of all the people which have been sexualized against their will.
There is a huge difference between someone doing something in your mind (or room) and it staying there and it being posted international for billions of people to see (and download, and re-post, and cherry pick preferred pictures and then feed into AI model which will actually full undress people etc.)
and a huge company making money from not just sexualizing people against their will, but also putting creating a public feed about all the people they have sexualized against their will
and then the owner going out of their way to claim that that is all free speech they won't change anything and anyone who tries is fascist, communist, evil etc.
except that definitions of what free speech means vary largely between countries and huge parts of the world have definitions where stuff like "creating sexualized images of people against their will" (or systematic harassment, cyber mobbing, death threads, and a bunch of other things) are very clearly _not_ covered by free speech.
realistically speaking this is also AI output, i.e. not speech of a person (weather natural or legal/company), i.e. it's questionably if Grok posting generated images does even count as speech (in the US and many other countries)...
Such content includes anything using the word cisgender, posting pictures of Herr Musk from before their gender reaffirmment surgery, and referring to the Grand Pedophile in Chief in a non-brownnosing manner, I presume.
Do the actually do this, or do they just say they do this?
If they do it, why don’t they preemptively block it instead? I know they don’t have anywhere near the manpower to find this stuff manually so it would have to be automated. If it’s automated then they could detect it as it’s happening and prevent it from being made in the first place.
> Do the actually do this, or do they just say they do this?
they do it within limits
- you trick it into generating actual naked people (instead of bikini pictures or sexualized poses etc.)
- it blows up (bad press, a lot of abuse reports)
which means effectively for most of this pictures there are no consequences
heck Elon has personally argued they fall under free speech and nothing need to be changed.... (but in EU, UK, and large parts of the world they don't. Also in a round about way free speech probably doesn't apply to it in the US either: because speech needs a speaker which is a person (natural or legal) and AI doesn't count as a person (and hence can by itself not hold copyright either)).
and Musk went further saying it's free speech and implying if you try do anything against it you are fascist
and you could check the Grok "~feed" and get tons over tons of examples of them _not_ doing anything. And if that changed, then it did very recently. I mean the UK is not the only country where the topic of regulating X to to them failing to self regulate and outright intentionally ignoring local laws was opened up. And as much as Musk might say he don't care and it's implied that the US will retaliate against any country which enforces actions against X for not complying with their law when doing business in their country, it still is a huge headache for X (company) and it's not like people in the US are supper happy about that either.
Why do you know about CSAM-as-a-service companies?
How could something like that even exist without it being a government operation like Epstein Island?
I'm not sure what is "ridiculous and twisted" when I point out that obviously X does not facilitate CSAM "as a service".
No, X is not a sewer.
It's a perfectly usable platform that I find pushes less political content to my feed than other alternatives, such as Reddit.
They also offer AI services with less guardrails than more risk adverse competitors. It appears this may have been a mistake in combination with image editing capabilities.
The obvious issue is that there's potential for any of the AI models to be tricked into producing dodgy content, so if you ban Grok for this you're then obligated to act against the rest too. I'm 100% sure I'm not the first person to realize this, between the various agitators here. Personally I think that de-anonymizing so that existing laws against the content produced can be prosecuted is the way forwards.
The other major AI providers do not have a social media platform attached to it. I also doubt that the guardrails in Gemini or OpenAI are as lax as the ones on Grok.
Things would quieten down considerably if Twitter stopped showing them to the UK, as then the number of people being harassed by indecent images of themselves would drastically reduce.
You are trying to use reason and rationality to make sense of lying and narcissism. You are correct, you are not the first person to think of that, but the objective is to find, hunt, attack, assault, damage, destroy, and root out places where the human right of free speech/expression may exist.
The last thing you want to do is play right into the hand of psychopathic narcissists by "de-anonymizing" everyone. You simply do not understand what you are proposing and thereby condemning your children and all of humanity to with that mentality. It is advocacy for tyranny.
I'm confused, I thought the US would refuse entry to anyone who wrote something against the Trump admin? I wish they'd make up their minds if they're for free speech or not.
Are you really confused though or are you feigning?
The US Constitution applies to American citizens, if you are not a US citizen, you do not have the rights protected by the Constitution, which prohibit the government from infringing on those inalienable, God given rights. Maybe you should look into copying the Constitution where you are if you also want it. We encourage it.
It's like when you are a member of some club, let's say a wholesale club. If you are a member, you are allowed to enter and follow the rules of the club. If you are not a member, you do not get to do that and must leave.
You are free to create your own wholesale club with your own rules, but conflict arises when you demand or even force entry into our club illegally. That is where we have been for many decades now and security is enforcing the rules because the members of the club that have been paying are getting extremely pissed off after having had to pay for freeloaders for decades now and be abused and disrespected by them for it on top of it.
It's not hard to understand, it just seems most people are intentionally and deceptively feigning ignorance. If they are not, we have a way bigger problem that will invariably result in open conflict at some point.
If you want to free speech, I suggest you start your own free speech club wherever you are, or if you gain entry to our free speech club, you have to follow the membership rules and if it were up to me, you would have a trial period, restricted rights, and you would have to pay a freeloader rate.
These are all very reasonable things to abide by in order to keep peace, but we are now all having to learn the hard lessons of what happens when you allow bad behavior to get away with things, and you do not enforce clearly defined rules against those who even blatantly defy them and disrespect you and what you have created, and even do so in your own home. It didn't need to be like this, but it seems most humans are incapable of simply letting well enough be. It seems one of the most universal human characteristics. It applies from the personal to the government to the ideological/psychological level and it is the origin of all human conflict; you have something someone else wants and they'll end up stewing over it until they try to take it from you by hook or crook if you allow them to. The peace comes from keeping a balance. There has been no balance for as long as anyone is old and then some.
The British Prime Minister's chief of staff started an anti-misinformation pressure group called the "Centre for Countering Digital Hate" largely designed to stop Twitter because they didn't like its lurch to the right.
I'm not saying they shouldn't. I'm saying they're getting exactly what they're dishing out, and even for the same reason (disagreement over how much free speech should be allowed).
What are we doing here bud? Do you think these situations are remotely comparable? The UK legislated against the automated creation of CSAM, and sexual imagery of non-consenting women. You think banning UK officials from entering the USA for that is comparable to stopping a blatant racist (author of "The Great Replacement", rofl) entering the UK? Notably, not a French official btw.
Maybe you have problems with the UK exercising the right to control borders? :)
> So why then does the bank of England have and need the right* to print as many USD as they need, whenever they want.
The BoE does not even "print" the GBP (except paper/coins through the mint), never mind the USD. Money in the UK, like most countries, is created by banks through credit issuance (loans, mortgages):
And if the US wants to cut swap lines, thus making people more nervous about using and holding USD, thus reducing USD as a considered safe haven… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The UK is extremely dependent on American LNG to serve as a vital component of the UK's home heating infrastructure. The UK would have significant affordability problems with making up the difference from other gas exporting countries and would likely just have rationing and rolling outages instead.
"Extremely dependent" seems to be overstating things a bit - 11% of imported gas comes from the US with is about a fifth of what we import from Norway and a third of domestic production?
>> The UK is extremely dependent on American LNG to […]
> "Extremely dependent" seems to be overstating things a bit - 11% of imported gas comes from the US with is about a fifth of what we import from Norway and a third of domestic production?
If the GP wants to hold to his logic, then the US would be "extremely dependent" on Canada, given that 25% of all crude oil refined in the US comes from their northern neighbour:
Pipeline-based providers are still a significantly greater percentage of the UK's overall gas consumption
Could the UK not rebalance its imports from LNG to more pipeline-based gas? It seems like the UK has managed to cut out Russian LNG imports completely already.
The retaliation against individual government members is a new thing. This got started against Russia, where various individuals were sanctioned for financial crimes and then more recently over the war in Ukraine. But it's not something that historically one government has done to another in the past, pressure individual lawmakers over their votes.
It is however a massive alarm that the UK cannot afford to use US cloud services for anything governmental, and especially should not be signing any contracts with Palantir. Perhaps revoking the Palantir one should be used as leverage here? Or do we just admit to being a sort of damp version of Puerto Rico, not a state but subject to US governance?
Then there's the F35s, the ""independent"" (not) nuclear deterrent, and so on.
""independent"" (not) nuclear deterrent"
We really are in a weird state of dependency with the US regarding deterrence - missiles sourced from US stocks, UK nuclear material built into warheads using a US design.
I wonder if there is a block in the missiles to stop them being used against the US?
Edit: I don't think there is any dependency on the US once a UK Trident sub is at sea - for the simple reason there no external dependencies (no codes or anything) - the crews have all they need to launch.
> I wonder if there is a block in the missiles to stop them being used against the US?
When test firing gets into the news, it's because it has the opposite problem and goes towards the US.
> The retaliation against individual government members is a new thing
It's Donald Trumps SOP.
Also what has changed is that European countries came up with extraterritorial laws and started to fine the US companies and want to have saying how they run their business. GDPR was the first step, and was still reasonable, but now there are several censorship laws. Most notable UK and Italy, where the latter wants to nuke anything they say from global DNS in 15 minutes without due process.
Extraterritorial? Those companies are doing business in the EU, it's exactly the same in any country on Earth: if you want to do business in their territory there are local laws to follow.
Have you thought about this for even a second?
What happens is that European companies buy services that are produced in the US, not in Europe. The European countries are free to ban and fine companies buying those services like Russia does. Italy, for example, can start by fining companies using Cloudflare, IP blocking Cloudflare and face the political consequences of it. But they don't want politicalconsequences which is the source of the friction. An Italian would be really pissed off for politicians if someone shows up their house and takes away computer because of watching football illegally.
Doesn't matter where they are produced, it matters where they are sold.
They are sold in the EU, they need to follow the laws for the market where they are sold. I can't go to the US, produce a death trap of a car, and sell it in the US because it goes against US laws; I could produce the same car in the US, not sell it in the US, and be fine if I find a market where I can export it too, it's stupid but not against the law.
US companies want to sell to Europeans, they could choose to not do business here and wouldn't face any repercussions if breaking EU law. Since they do like the money from a very rich bloc of countries they do business in the EU and need to follow its laws.
It's very very simple, I don't know why you are trying to complicate a rule (or worse, victimise companies) that exists anywhere in the world. If I want to sell something in the USA I need to follow USA's laws regarding that, if I don't then I can't do business there.
So what? You can also buy meat from outside the EU, but if you want it to be used inside the EU, it has to conform to EU standards.
Otherwise you are simply not allowed to sell it in the EU.
Fairly sure the US started this process with things like the PokerStars case, the MegaUpload raid, heck even further back Dmitry Skylarov's PDF reader. Not to mention the secondary sanctions on Cuba and the complex rules about providing financial services to overseas Americans.
I'm also fairly sure that the Italian requirement only applies to blocking Italian DNS access.
There was that recent rant on twitter/x by the Cloudflare CEO that seemed to indicate otherwise (w.r.t. Italian DNS blocking)
All hail our pizza-baking Internet overlords:
> The authority set the multi-million euro fine with the resolution now published based on one percent of Cloudflare's global annual revenue. It justifies this calculation with the company's cross-border structure: Since Cloudflare's infrastructure is globally oriented and enables the circumvention of local blocks, the sanction must also have a corresponding "deterrent effect" and go beyond the national framework.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Cloudflare-record-fine-Italy-s-...
The NatWest Three - UK nationals, working in the UK, for a UK company. "Defrauded" their UK employer and were convicted by a US court and jailed in the US for the crime.
> and started to fine the US companies and want to have saying how they run their business IN EUROPE.
Fixed that for you.
Maybe the US could do something about their CSAM-as-a-service companies instead?
There is no CSAM. Musk confirmed it and Starmer confirmed Grok is acting compliant.
https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/2011434416837361794?s=20
For the confused reader, "CSAM-as-a-service" means they will ban your account and sic the cops on you if you use their service to create CSAM:
“We take action against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary,” X Safety said. “Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/x-blames-users-f...
The trick here is that the sexualised but not actually naked pictures of children are not actually illegal in the US (or quite possibly England as well). Just very disturbing.
It's an odd shadow war though, because the government haven't even pulled their own Twitter accounts from the service (which they can and should do).
That is not accurate as far as I know.
I am told that in the US, possession of material that is "lewd" or intended to be sexually provocative can very well be a crime.
The UK is supposedly even stricter, with the law using the broad term "indecent".
The UK had 16 year old tits on page 3 of the national newspapers till 2004.
As far as I know gemini and chatgpt will also create these images, they just won't post them automatically as social media posts.
And so can you run local models which can generate far worse material.
And horny teens have always fantasist about celebrities, or that girl they have a crush one etc. And there always had been people people cutting physical images together to place the head of their obsession on some erotic magazine sourced body.
But like you saied it's creating a feed of all the people which have been sexualized against their will.
There is a huge difference between someone doing something in your mind (or room) and it staying there and it being posted international for billions of people to see (and download, and re-post, and cherry pick preferred pictures and then feed into AI model which will actually full undress people etc.)
and a huge company making money from not just sexualizing people against their will, but also putting creating a public feed about all the people they have sexualized against their will
and then the owner going out of their way to claim that that is all free speech they won't change anything and anyone who tries is fascist, communist, evil etc.
except that definitions of what free speech means vary largely between countries and huge parts of the world have definitions where stuff like "creating sexualized images of people against their will" (or systematic harassment, cyber mobbing, death threads, and a bunch of other things) are very clearly _not_ covered by free speech.
realistically speaking this is also AI output, i.e. not speech of a person (weather natural or legal/company), i.e. it's questionably if Grok posting generated images does even count as speech (in the US and many other countries)...
> We take action against illegal content on X
Such content includes anything using the word cisgender, posting pictures of Herr Musk from before their gender reaffirmment surgery, and referring to the Grand Pedophile in Chief in a non-brownnosing manner, I presume.
Do the actually do this, or do they just say they do this?
If they do it, why don’t they preemptively block it instead? I know they don’t have anywhere near the manpower to find this stuff manually so it would have to be automated. If it’s automated then they could detect it as it’s happening and prevent it from being made in the first place.
> Do the actually do this, or do they just say they do this?
they do it within limits
- you trick it into generating actual naked people (instead of bikini pictures or sexualized poses etc.)
- it blows up (bad press, a lot of abuse reports)
which means effectively for most of this pictures there are no consequences
heck Elon has personally argued they fall under free speech and nothing need to be changed.... (but in EU, UK, and large parts of the world they don't. Also in a round about way free speech probably doesn't apply to it in the US either: because speech needs a speaker which is a person (natural or legal) and AI doesn't count as a person (and hence can by itself not hold copyright either)).
"Automated" can mean banned/escalated to human review after 20 users report it.
Who says they don't?
It is my understanding that in response to this issue, X has tightened content moderation for their image generation features.
maybe much later they did
initially they outright said, there is no problem
and Musk went further saying it's free speech and implying if you try do anything against it you are fascist
and you could check the Grok "~feed" and get tons over tons of examples of them _not_ doing anything. And if that changed, then it did very recently. I mean the UK is not the only country where the topic of regulating X to to them failing to self regulate and outright intentionally ignoring local laws was opened up. And as much as Musk might say he don't care and it's implied that the US will retaliate against any country which enforces actions against X for not complying with their law when doing business in their country, it still is a huge headache for X (company) and it's not like people in the US are supper happy about that either.
[flagged]
You really need to look at what is happening closer to home before engaging in such trolling.
EDIT: Look what is happening to those in authority who speak out and disagree with the US president.
They're quoting or paraphrasing a common online criticism of the UK, given by people who insist there's no possible way for a tweet to be unlawful.
When the pot calls the kettle black, as we say in the UK, it's fair to tell the pot about it's own soot residue.
I am a free speech absolutist
>free speech absolutist
Did blitzar ever get remarried after he murdered his wife and embezzled 10 million dollars?
They are in the Epstein files
Does that include a private corporation's freedom to ban anti-vaxxers, election deniers, or race baiters from their platforms?
Why do you know about CSAM-as-a-service companies? How could something like that even exist without it being a government operation like Epstein Island?
[flagged]
> It takes a special kind of thinking to believe major US companies at any point intentionally permitted CSAM
Of FFS. What a ridiculous and twisted thing to say.
Try replacing "intentionally permit" with "massively facilitate".
Xitter is a sewer.
I'm not sure what is "ridiculous and twisted" when I point out that obviously X does not facilitate CSAM "as a service".
No, X is not a sewer.
It's a perfectly usable platform that I find pushes less political content to my feed than other alternatives, such as Reddit.
They also offer AI services with less guardrails than more risk adverse competitors. It appears this may have been a mistake in combination with image editing capabilities.
The obvious issue is that there's potential for any of the AI models to be tricked into producing dodgy content, so if you ban Grok for this you're then obligated to act against the rest too. I'm 100% sure I'm not the first person to realize this, between the various agitators here. Personally I think that de-anonymizing so that existing laws against the content produced can be prosecuted is the way forwards.
The other major AI providers do not have a social media platform attached to it. I also doubt that the guardrails in Gemini or OpenAI are as lax as the ones on Grok.
The debate is whether to ban X, not Grok though.
Doesn't help if it's people outside the UK using it to make deepfakes of UK nationals.
How would banning AI in the UK help there either?
Things would quieten down considerably if Twitter stopped showing them to the UK, as then the number of people being harassed by indecent images of themselves would drastically reduce.
You are trying to use reason and rationality to make sense of lying and narcissism. You are correct, you are not the first person to think of that, but the objective is to find, hunt, attack, assault, damage, destroy, and root out places where the human right of free speech/expression may exist.
The last thing you want to do is play right into the hand of psychopathic narcissists by "de-anonymizing" everyone. You simply do not understand what you are proposing and thereby condemning your children and all of humanity to with that mentality. It is advocacy for tyranny.
The US banned Thierry Breton a few weeks ago[0], also essentially over Twitter moderation[1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46374248 ("Former EU commissioner and activists barred from US (theguardian.com)")
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-moderation... ("EU warns Elon Musk that being too lax on Twitter moderation could get the platform banned in Europe" (2022))
Is Titter a US company, or is the US government working for Twitter?
Please tell me that first typo was intentional...
Thierry also wrote a letter as an EU officer to cancel Trump's interview
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-elon-musk-donald-trump-in...
@grok put them in a bikini
I'm confused, I thought the US would refuse entry to anyone who wrote something against the Trump admin? I wish they'd make up their minds if they're for free speech or not.
Rules based disorder: "I do dis, you no do dis."
In one word: hypocrisy.
Are you really confused though or are you feigning? The US Constitution applies to American citizens, if you are not a US citizen, you do not have the rights protected by the Constitution, which prohibit the government from infringing on those inalienable, God given rights. Maybe you should look into copying the Constitution where you are if you also want it. We encourage it.
It's like when you are a member of some club, let's say a wholesale club. If you are a member, you are allowed to enter and follow the rules of the club. If you are not a member, you do not get to do that and must leave.
You are free to create your own wholesale club with your own rules, but conflict arises when you demand or even force entry into our club illegally. That is where we have been for many decades now and security is enforcing the rules because the members of the club that have been paying are getting extremely pissed off after having had to pay for freeloaders for decades now and be abused and disrespected by them for it on top of it.
It's not hard to understand, it just seems most people are intentionally and deceptively feigning ignorance. If they are not, we have a way bigger problem that will invariably result in open conflict at some point.
If you want to free speech, I suggest you start your own free speech club wherever you are, or if you gain entry to our free speech club, you have to follow the membership rules and if it were up to me, you would have a trial period, restricted rights, and you would have to pay a freeloader rate.
These are all very reasonable things to abide by in order to keep peace, but we are now all having to learn the hard lessons of what happens when you allow bad behavior to get away with things, and you do not enforce clearly defined rules against those who even blatantly defy them and disrespect you and what you have created, and even do so in your own home. It didn't need to be like this, but it seems most humans are incapable of simply letting well enough be. It seems one of the most universal human characteristics. It applies from the personal to the government to the ideological/psychological level and it is the origin of all human conflict; you have something someone else wants and they'll end up stewing over it until they try to take it from you by hook or crook if you allow them to. The peace comes from keeping a balance. There has been no balance for as long as anyone is old and then some.
[dead]
Fascism.
The British Prime Minister's chief of staff started an anti-misinformation pressure group called the "Centre for Countering Digital Hate" largely designed to stop Twitter because they didn't like its lurch to the right.
This is just a new front in this war.
https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/election-excl...
[flagged]
https://archive.is/smrsh
So no country should ever ban someone from entering.... unless they're an immigrant of course!
I'm not saying they shouldn't. I'm saying they're getting exactly what they're dishing out, and even for the same reason (disagreement over how much free speech should be allowed).
What are we doing here bud? Do you think these situations are remotely comparable? The UK legislated against the automated creation of CSAM, and sexual imagery of non-consenting women. You think banning UK officials from entering the USA for that is comparable to stopping a blatant racist (author of "The Great Replacement", rofl) entering the UK? Notably, not a French official btw.
Maybe you have problems with the UK exercising the right to control borders? :)
Is this finally a severe enough escalation for the UK to stop using the US dollar as a reserve currency?
We use the Great British Pound in the UK.
So why then does the bank of England have and need the right* to print as many USD as they need, whenever they want.
If they only use sterling?
* - along five other central banks
> So why then does the bank of England have and need the right* to print as many USD as they need, whenever they want.
The BoE does not even "print" the GBP (except paper/coins through the mint), never mind the USD. Money in the UK, like most countries, is created by banks through credit issuance (loans, mortgages):
* https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-is-money-crea...
Oh sweet summer child. Answered below.
> Oh sweet summer child. Answered below.
Thank you for your condescension: it helped convince me the error of my ways…
> Actually I see its 14 central banks that have this USD FX swap facility (but the BoE, ECB, and BoJ are essentially uncapped).
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46616169
I am aware of swap lines, and how they were used in the GFC (2008/9) and COVID (2020/1):
* https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/central-bank-l...
* https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2023/03/coordinated-central-bank...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank_liquidity_swap
Swapping ≠ printing.
And if the US wants to cut swap lines, thus making people more nervous about using and holding USD, thus reducing USD as a considered safe haven… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is the first I've heard of this? Where's this legislated? Or is this misinterpreting contracted out physical printing services?
Quick search says it does not. What is your source for this claim?
I thought I would garner these comments above and the down-votes :) So as requested.
Actually I see its 14 central banks that have this USD FX swap facility (but the BoE, ECB, and BoJ are essentially uncapped).
My sources:
1. I did some early work in a very early precursor of this with Reuters
2. The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) https://www.bis.org/speeches/sp230324a.pdf
3. The Federal Reserve Banks (Richmond) https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...
How it works is:
The BoE needs USD, say $10 billion, so it SIMULTANEOUS conjures out of absolute thin air a single ledger entry:
- GBP ₤ 7,437,400,000 - liability to US FED
- USD $10,000,000,000 - asset to UK BoE
It then:
- lends the $10 billion to whoever needs it in the UK
- later (so not immediately*) lets the Fed know it has a new GBP asset.
It later promises to pay it all back. If it can.
But, be very clear, 14 central banks, can and do conjure up USD out of thin air. They call it something boring ("FX swaps").
The modern fiat monetary system is weird. (And I want to be a bank).
But to my earlier point - this print on demand, let us know later facility is only needed because of the demand for USD.
Probably Grok AI :-)
The UK is extremely dependent on American LNG to serve as a vital component of the UK's home heating infrastructure. The UK would have significant affordability problems with making up the difference from other gas exporting countries and would likely just have rationing and rolling outages instead.
"Extremely dependent" seems to be overstating things a bit - 11% of imported gas comes from the US with is about a fifth of what we import from Norway and a third of domestic production?
https://www.sunsave.energy/blog/uk-gas-sources
>> The UK is extremely dependent on American LNG to […]
> "Extremely dependent" seems to be overstating things a bit - 11% of imported gas comes from the US with is about a fifth of what we import from Norway and a third of domestic production?
If the GP wants to hold to his logic, then the US would be "extremely dependent" on Canada, given that 25% of all crude oil refined in the US comes from their northern neighbour:
* https://www.afpm.org/newsroom/blog/how-much-oil-does-united-...
That does not make the distinction between pipeline gas and LNG, but I do not know if that is a distinction worth making
It doesn't make much difference in terms of the actual gas. It's an alternative transportation mechanism for what's basically the same sort of stuff.
The UK does produce its own LNG though - I watch the tankers sailing past my house!
Pipeline-based providers are still a significantly greater percentage of the UK's overall gas consumption
Could the UK not rebalance its imports from LNG to more pipeline-based gas? It seems like the UK has managed to cut out Russian LNG imports completely already.
I suspect it absolutely could rebalance, resulting in some other country taking the US gas instead while we take their previous non-US gas.
Rebalancing US cloud services out is impossible, though. That's the real UK economy kill switch.
And payment clearing, incidentally. Bank interlending (including BoE) in the UK is almost entirely built on US systems.
Their precious pipelines could just be blown up by an unknown actor the moment the US president says the UK will not get any gas through them.
The North Stream scenario could just repeat.
Well - according to a quick search, 99% of Canadian LNG goes to the US - am sure we would be happy to switch customers at this point in time...
Does Canada have the port systems to load boats to the UK? Of not, can they add such facilities without raising the price?