Combined with the already-passed Online Safety Act and the previously announced intention to ban under-16s entirely from social media — a ban that Prime Minister-in-waiting Burnham intends to support — these laws, enacted or proposed, look to anyone except a Labour lickspittle to be a serious erosion of the rights of the British people to access information freely and express their political opinions online.

These draconian measures bear a striking resemblance to the reaction of a seemingly very different British government to ostensibly dissimilar circumstances: William Pitt the Younger’s infamous series of repressive laws enacted during the 1790s.

Pitt’s anti-radical legislation was designed to preserve elite power, control the public narrative, and protect the lower orders from ideas — what we now call misinformation — reckoned likely to lead them astray. The intent of these laws and the fears they were enacted to allay shed considerable light on Labour’s own attempts at gagging us.

– James Martin Charlton

Speaking ill of the dead is not an offence, however offensive. If Heather Herbert joins the @SpeechUnion, we will do our best to help. https://t.co/5WAT2JdeZS

— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) July 16, 2026

“Speaking ill of the dead is not an offence, however offensive. If Heather Herbert joins the @SpeechUnion, we will do our best to help.”

I consider my membership dues well spent.

Murray Rothbard saw government as a predatory, criminal entity and the Microsoft lawsuit of 1998 proved to be a classic example of government organized crime in action.

1. Robots learn from puffins?

2. Claims about cats (NYT).  I guess they have no Coase theorem after all.

3. Iran and the Strait (WSJ).

4. “I used to be one of these people.”  And Timothy Lee.  As for this exchange, in the 2040 scenario strong AI is a power magnet in a way that milk or eggs or electricity are not.  I do understand the claim that one might prefer this extreme governmental power to a greater role for the private sector, but extreme governmental power it is going to be, again at least under the 2040 scenario assumptions about the spread and efficacy of AI.

5. Scott Sumner engages with Fable on market monetarism.

6. “The number of students admitted to Ph.D. programs this fall dropped 15 percent from the previous year, according to data from over 50 top research universities…” (NYT)  Partial data suggest that the year before the decline may have been eleven percent.

7. Inequality does not seem to erode democracy.

8. Kip Thorne on Villarroel.

The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

In my post Equality Act 2010 I discussed the UK’s absolutely insane wage policy:

In short, supply and demand have been replaced by judges and labor boards with the authority to deem which jobs are “equal” and therefore should be paid equally….No one is alleging that male and female warehouse workers were paid unequally or that male and female retail workers were paid unequally or that there was any direct or indirect discrimination. The only claim is that warehouse workers, who are less likely to be female than retail workers, earn more than retail workers. And since these jobs have been judged “equal,” the company has violated Equality Act 2010.

…The warehouse workers were almost 50% female (47.25%). So females were not barred from the higher paying jobs. The fact that 77.5% of the retail workers were female suggests that retail work has special appeal to females relative to males and thus that there are compensating differentials. Any of the three female plaintiffs could have taken jobs in the warehouse. If the jobs are equal and the warehouse jobs pay more this is, on the plaintiffs’ theory, “puzzling”. [Or, as Ayn Rand would say, blank out.]

In fact, the court case reveals that Next was struggling to fill the warehouse positions and offered any retail employee—including the plaintiffs—the opportunity to switch to warehouse work. On cross-examination, one of the plaintiffs admitted that, given the unpleasant conditions in the warehouse—described by the court as “the drone of machinery,…vibration, alarm sirens and the screeching of machinery, wheels and rollers, continuously present in all areas”—the warehouse job “did not seem particularly attractive” compared to the greater autonomy and more appealing environment of the retail job. The plaintiff added that she would only have considered the warehouse job if it paid “a lot more money.”

Well, here is the update. The outgoing Keir Starmer government is trying to massively expand these laws. The “equal value” framework previously applied only to sex discrimination; under the proposed law, employees could also bring equal-value claims based on race and disability. Remember, these laws have nothing to do with discrimination—they are about demanding, at the point of a gun, that apples and oranges sell for the same price because they’re both fruit.

The new law would also establish an Equal Pay Regulation and Enforcement Unit. As I said, Orwellian.

See also my post, How Britain Become as Poor as Mississippi.

The post The Equal Pay Madness Just Got Madder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.