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Edwin Hayward

@edwinhayward

May 9

There is no US trade deal.

Despite the performative circus yesterday, Starmer on Zoom in Trump's Oval Office press conference, there is no deal.

All that exists is a document setting out in general terms the parameters of a possible deal.

Everything remains to be negotiated.

SOURCE
gov.uk/government/pub…

That explains why two senior Trump staffers talked about chlorinated chicken within minutes of Trump's press conference yesterday: despite what the document says, they know the deal's FAR from finalised.

They see it as a sticking point to be swept away before the Real Thing.

Read 6 tweets

Edwin Hayward

@edwinhayward

May 8

THREAD: My initial take on the new US trade deal

1. It's not finalised. According to the NYT, months of negotiations lie ahead.

2. Issue of food standards isn't dead yet, according to comments made in Trump's press conference (even though the UK side believe it is!)

1/6

3. Not clear what concessions have been made to the USA on agricultural products but their deal readout suggests a "US$250 million opportunity" for US exporters that wasn't there before.

4. British car manufacturers are better off than this morning, but not than months ago.

2/6

5. UK film industry was not part of the discussion. Starmer said this afternoon at his press conference that if tariffs are imposed in the future that would have to be discussed in the same spirit as other sectors.

6. Britain has agreed to Trump's 10% baseline tariffs.

3/6

Read 7 tweets

Edwin Hayward

@edwinhayward

Oct 21, 2024

Some more experiments with AI music generation. See what you think...

(One video per tweet. Each includes a static image with the song as soundtrack. Links to Youtube versions at end of thread, together with a rundown of the tools I used to produce them.)

1. Humanity Ascendant

Tomorrow's Tomorrow

Technological Progress

Read 5 tweets

Edwin Hayward

@edwinhayward

Oct 20, 2024

Perhaps it's unworkable, but this feels like it would be a fair tax system...

1) Set the tax free allowance so that it is the same as annualised minimum wage, and raise it every year in line with inflation. Do the same for NI thresholds. So someone on exactly the minimum wage will never pay tax/NI. If it's really meant to be the "minimum" people need to live on, then let them keep all of it.

2) No clawbacks of the tax free allowance no matter your income level. Everyone gets the same untaxed band.

3) Eliminate all 100%+ tax situations. Work should always pay, regardless of the combination of salary and benefits you're receiving. Set a maximum (say 75% combined for tax + NI) and fiddle with the tax system so there are no cliff edges that create effective tax rates above that 75%. In other words, if your income from any source increases by £1, you should never gain less than 25p.

4) Tax every source of income exactly the same. EVERYTHING falls under the same regime - salary, dividends, capital gains, etc. - with no loopholes or exceptions. (If expensive tax lawyers are left twiddling their thumbs, you know the revised system is working.)

5) Adjust all the rest of the income tax and national insurance bands above the sacrosanct "no tax/no NI" lowest band to allow for 1) to 4). This will almost certainly require more tax bands and more granularity.

Net result:
- There's a sense of basic fairness across society: everyone earning at or over the annualised minimum wage (regardless of the source of the money) gets to keep at least the annualised minimum wage component of their total income.
- Work always pays, period.
- There's no point at all in trying to optimise how you make money or game the system because all sources of income are taxed exactly the same

Ok, over to you. What do you think? Be gentle, please. It may well be a naive plan, but it's a naive well-intentioned plan.

Added:

I also believe that NI should be eliminated and there should be just one combined tax.

But that's not necessary for anything I've outlined above - it just makes things simpler, especially when you're taxing ALL income from ALL sources the same - so I left it out.

Added: Minimum wage is about £20,500 for a 48-week year of 40-hour weeks.

Removing both the income tax and the NI from that would leave over £2,200 more in the employee's pocket.

(MSE income tax calculator below.)

Read 4 tweets

Edwin Hayward

@edwinhayward

Oct 11, 2024

THREAD

As Labour are coming up to 100 days in power, it's good to ponder why their honeymoon was so short, and why they appear to be getting a torrid time from media outlets all across the political spectrum.

I've illustrated what I believe is happening. More below...

1/4

The average person's expectations of the Tories was VERY low. Yet they underperformed even that low bar.

On the other hand, people had high hopes of Labour. The gap between such stellar expectations and reality is wider than on the Tory side - even though Labour are better.

2/4

Dashed hopes can be a terrible thing. Especially after 14 years of despair. So it's hardly surprising that there has been a good deal of negative reaction and pushback.

Labour urgently need to improve their various stances to come much closer to what people expect of them.

3/4

Read 4 tweets

Edwin Hayward

@edwinhayward

Aug 12, 2024

This is what Flux-AI gave me in response to the prompt: "The most quintessentially English scene possible".

Here is Dall-E-3's attempt.

(Same prompt. I'm not picking and choosing. I gave each AI just one shot at it.)

And here's SD3-Turbo's attempt.

Read 5 tweets

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