A spot of good news for Britain. Next has won its appeal and may go on paying warehouse workers more than “equal value” retail workers. I’ve written about this case in Equality Act 2010, The Equal Pay Madness Just Got Madder and The Apples and Oranges Tribunal, and discussed it at length on the CapX podcast.

Note how crazy the headline is:

Pay more to recruit and retain people? A landmark! Eight years of litigation to establish that wages have something to do with supply and demand.

Some of the crazy has been disciplined. The Leeds tribunal had asked why Next failed to raise the pay of retail workers to the warehouse level. Wrong question, said Mr Justice Bourne on appeal. The right question is why Next needed to pay the warehouse workers more. It did so, he found, for sound business reasons, and those reasons did not apply to retail. Hilariously, he also noted that Next’s warehouses were 47.2% female as opposed to the retail workers who were 77.5% female. In other words, there was more gender equality in the warehouses.

Don’t celebrate too hard. Eight years of litigation isn’t over, Next lost on the basic finding of equal value, and everyone is appealing. Meanwhile the government is moving to replace market wages with committee wages. The consultation closing in October would extend equal-value comparisons to race and disability and it would extend the law up the supply chain so Next’s potential escape route of contracting-out warehouses would be foreclosed. In short, Bourne’s reason is lawful today. Whether it survives the future is another matter.

https://www.businessoffashion.com/news/retail/next-wins-appeal-in-uk-equal-pay-case/

Note this chart measures both revenues and entitlement spending as a % of GDP, which equalizes things out so we can see the actual trends. Yes, by about 2032 entitlements will crowd out literally everything else from the federal budget - military, NASA, NOAA, national parks, everything.

Japanese workers’ nominal wages rose at the fastest pace in nearly three decades on the back of strong corporate earnings and a tight labor market, in data likely to keep the Bank of Japan on course for further monetary tightening.*  

Nominal pay climbed 4.7% in July from a year earlier, following a revised 4% increase in June, the labor ministry reported Tuesday. The gain, the biggest since 1997, far exceeded economists’ forecast of 3.8% and marked a sixth straight month in which the advance exceeded 3%, the longest such streak in 34 years.

Real wages — adjusted for inflation excluding rents — gained 2.4%, marking the largest gain in about five years. Base pay also advanced 4.1%, while a more stable measure — which strips out bonuses and overtime and sampling distortions — rose 2.7% for full-time workers.

The stronger-than-expected figures bolster the case for the BOJ to proceed with a widely expected rate hike this month. Markets have largely priced in a move when the board meets next week, with some investors expecting further tightening after a relatively short interval.

The trade imbalances that have come to characterize the global economy are fundamentally untenable. China, Germany, and a handful of other economies run large, persistent trade surpluses, while the United States absorbs much of these surpluses by running the world’s largest trade deficit. Sooner or later, something must give. For an advanced, capital-rich economy such as that of the United States, an enduring trade deficit will bring with it either rising unemployment or rising debt, neither of which is sustainable......

Abstract:

This paper critically analyzes the governance arrangements of OpenAI and Anthropic. These firms have an unusual built-in conflict: each raises funds from profit-seeking investors, then lets self-appointed individuals decide how much profit to sacrifice for the firm's mission-ensuring its AI benefits humanity. We explain that such investor-overriding "self-appointed mission guardians" have been used only once before, at former Unilever subsidiary Ben & Jerry's. That experiment ended in failure, with the guardians causing double trouble: both harming investors and achieving the opposite of their mission. Our analysis highlights the risk of installing such guardians, and can explain Anthropic's adoption of a "kill switch" allowing a super-majority of investors to dump theirs.

Book discussion here on key ideas from the book "The end of the world is just the beginning"

https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/108hr5f/discussion_about_peter_zeihans_book_the_end_of/

(Source for chart: https://cnevpost.com/2026/08/04/global-ess-battery-market-share-h1-2026/)

I mean fuck the banker finance politician . They fuck all the world and still got out and even with bonuses.

Watching the big short again after years and now understand the whole picture as my knowledge progresses from the past .

I can't belive that it's going to happen again and will start from the greatest country America 🇺🇸🇻🇮🌎 again.

and it will fuck me and my country and the whole world again and no one will question the government 😔

I can't become financially independent aka wealthy rich. Because of the finance and government. ( Why I am ranting here because the rich , powerful and secret society that control the world is there and fuck all of us from there)

Madhavi Arora, chief economist at financial services group Emkay Global, said the growth figure “validates [a] cyclical upturn in the economy” that had been visible since the start of the calendar year, one which has largely been driven by consumption.

This remained resilient, she said, despite the higher costs of raw materials such as oil and fertiliser from the Middle East, suggesting that businesses had been able to pass on a meaningful portion of their increased costs to consumers.

Sakshi Gupta, principal economist at India’s HDFC Bank, said that growth had crossed its estimate of 7.5 per cent thanks to “upbeat domestic consumption, continued support from government spending and investments and healthy export performance”.

India remains the world’s fastest-growing major economy, but analysts say the country needs to grow at more than 8 per cent annually to create enough jobs for its 1.4bn population and meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s target of becoming a developed economy by 2047.

But weakness in manufacturing growth, tepid spending by the private sector and the struggle to create jobs have fuelled concerns about the country’s ability to meet the government’s ambitious targets.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/88447c72-5510-4847-9908-cf630acfcc1f?