OMG OpenAI attract all the 'best' people!
Former UK chancellor George Osborne finds something to do at OpenAI
OpenAI has hired former UK finance minister George Osborne, continuing a trend of British politicians whose careers have peaked cozying up to US tech giants. Osborne, who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016 under Prime Minister David Cameron, announced the move on X, the social media site formerly known as …
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Wednesday 17th December 2025 19:15 GMT Fruit and Nutcase
Perish the thought.
No, just the name: Brad Lightcap
Famke Janssen - that's an altogether different train of thought/fantasy.
Incidentally, old George was initially known as Gideon Oliver Osborne.
He decided when he was 13 to be known by the additional first name of "George". In an interview in July 2005, he said: "It was my small act of rebellion. I never liked it [the name 'Gideon']. When I finally told my mother she said, 'Nor do I'...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Osborne
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Wednesday 17th December 2025 13:03 GMT breakfast
It has to happen soon
This is how we can tell the crash has got to be imminent - George Osborne has never been involved with anything successful.
It's great for brand consistency though - a stupid, vapid, disappointment of a man who is hated by everybody except the wealthiest CEOs is very OpenAI-coded.
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Wednesday 17th December 2025 21:10 GMT Fruit and Nutcase
Re: Historical
"He's a spring chicken compared to his friend,"
If I may be allowed to use that as cue to imagine if Farage was a Chicken...
Given that Farage is of the male persuasion, the "Old Cock/Rooster" would be inferior to a hen for raising for meat -
Roosters are known for being much more aggressive than hens because they are very territorial.
Keeping multiple roosters in a flock is a recipe for disaster because their aggressive tendencies cause them to fight each other.
Rooster meat tends to be tougher and stringier than hen meat, making it more difficult to process.
Sound familiar? See a pattern developing?
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Wednesday 17th December 2025 16:12 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Wonderful choice... not
"Another one who has never had a proper job."
Unlike the current one who's had lots of proper jobs - some of them even existed.
Chancellors have a habit of being unsuccessful but if you want to find a really unsuccessful one then you have to go back a bit further to Gordon Brown.
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Thursday 18th December 2025 14:33 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Wonderful choice... not
Why was he unsuccessful as a PM? Because Blair stood aside at exactly the moment the full effect of his financial policies were due to hit.
What were those policies?
1. Charge current expenditure to the future. e.g. start taxing dividends on investments in pensions. That killed the final salary pensions. OK for those of us already in a scheme but not for our children.
2. Have interest rates target 2% inflation on an index that excluded housing costs. The result was that cheap money went into house price inflation and cheap loans secured against house values. 125% mortgages? That brought about the credit crunch. It painted future chancellors into a corner as any correction would have wiped out those with over-priced houses and those whose savings had been loaned on them. All in the name of a low headline interest rate.
Arguably the after-effects are still with us. I haven't seen anyone successfully pick up the pieces. No wonder he was followed by austerity.
A successful chancellor? I don't think so.
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Thursday 18th December 2025 22:06 GMT Dan 55
Re: Wonderful choice... not
Paul Krugman: How the ‘unforced error’ of austerity wrecked Britain
This was written just before the last election. Krugman argues there was no market pressure on the UK to impose austerity, the Tories chose to do it and they did it in their usual way which is cut services and lower taxes for the rich. And he was right about Labour, they became the continuity austerity party.
About 2, I'm sure allowing high loan-to-value lending was a thing since the first half of the 80s and right-to-buy. Nobody following Thatcher got rid of it.
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Thursday 22nd January 2026 10:22 GMT rg287
Re: Wonderful choice... not
I haven't seen anyone successfully pick up the pieces. No wonder he was followed by austerity.
Being folllowed by austerity wasn't inevitable. Although it didn't feel like it at the time, the UK economy was bouncing back pretty hard by the time of the election. Brown's policies were largely working, and the crash was largely external - the US Housing Market was outside his control.
It took a special sort of Tory fuckwittery to say "Hey, the best thing to do when the private sector stop spending is for the public sector to stop spending as well and deepen the crisis". They built an entire heterodox economic policy on the back of a single academic paper which had not been peer-reviewed and which was later discredited by a grad student, who identified cherry-picked data and basic excel formula errors.
The entire point of a currency-issuing government is to provide counter-cyclical spending when the markets lose confidence and prevent a slide into long depression.
We can't blame Brown too much for externalities in the same way we can't directly blame the Tories for the cost of gas/oil spiking in 2021/2 (although not closing the Rough gas facility would have smoothed the spike, as would not cutting "all that green crap" in the 2010s. It's almost like they want us to be dependent on Russia and the Middle East).1
A successful chancellor? I don't think so.
As neolibs go, Brown was a pretty steady hand who sorted out some of the overdue basics like giving the BoE it's independence (albeit he did this in his first 3 days). He and Blair had an unhealthy obsession with PFIs and crashing the gold price was silly - albeit inconsequential in the scale of government spending. Their greatest failure was not to wind back the excesses of Thatcherism such as re-regulating the financial sector (not perhaps as hard as pre-1980s, but enough to control the trading of debt such as MBS and CDOs - the US Housing market was outside his control, but he could have tried to restrict UK exposure). Nonetheless, he didn't directly trigger any boom-and-bust cycles in the usual Tory fashion (e.g. Maudling's 1963 Dash for Growth, the 1972 Barber Boom, the 1986 Lawson Boom, Black Wednesday 1992, or the the 2022 Truss/Kwarteng "Growth Plan"). Brown's got no "Black <Day>" events to his name.
Fundamentally we haven't had a decent Chancellor since Keynesianism died. Friedman/Neolib schools compel them to act against long term economic stability in favour of doing whatever the big business boys demand - which tends to favour deregulation, development of monopolies and a short-term focus on share price (especially since C-Suite started getting their bonuses as stock options, which incentivises them to juice the share price just before their options mature, which is arguably more destructive than being paid a cash bonus for "short term" goals.).
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1. Nor indeed can we blame either the Tories or Labour for Nixon ending Bretton Woods in 1971 or OPEC's oil shocks in the 1970s. People like to beat Labour with a big stick for inflation in the 1970s, but they actually did a half-decent job under the circumstances, which were largely driven by external factors. The world economy was finding a new equilibrium based on floating exchange rates and energy prices were out of their hands, the way they were out of Tory hands in 2021/22. The IMF "Bailout" that people like to hark back to was not actually needed and less than half of it was used (and quickly repaid). It was more about assuring markets that Sterling was back-stopped in a time when people were still thinking in terms of gold-standard economics.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
