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@Tren It is a universal reality that public funding for the arts, or indeed any sector, almost invariably comes with conditions, administrative oversight, and specific performance metrics. Whether it is a government body like Arts Council England or a private sponsor, those providing the capital often require a degree of accountability or alignment with their own institutional goals.

The situation with Wigmore Hall highlights the tensions that arise when a public body shifts from being a facilitator of art to a regulator. The core of the issue, as often cited by those in the sector, is that government-approved funding especially when tied to strategies like "Let's Create" can become an exercise in micromanagement. Even in the private sector, donors and investors rarely provide capital without expectations of behaviour or output, and it is common for conflicts to arise when a venue’s artistic direction or moral stance diverges from that of its financial backers.

What makes the Wigmore Hall case significant is not that they rejected funding, but that they reached a level of financial independence—having raised £10 million in private donations that allowed them to opt out of that compromise entirely. It demonstrates that for high-profile institutions, the "cost" of state funding, in terms of staff time spent on compliance and the perceived dilution of artistic excellence, had simply become too high to justify. It is a reminder that autonomy is rarely free; it is usually purchased, either through the acceptance of external conditions or through the hard work of achieving financial self-sufficiency.

That’s good, since funding from the arts council comes with conditions and a lot of administration. Opting for the private route offers autonomy and independence that arts council funded venues don’t have, meaning they can do and show whatever they want as long as it’s legal, while saving huge amounts of time on administrative tasks and focusing instead on creativity. In this case, I believe the grant was £345,000, which made up just 2% of the venue’s income.

@Siddo Looking at your posting history, most of what you share isn’t commentary for this page either, but that doesn’t stop you from posting it. If he wants to share his private life, there’s no rule against it. The only rule is that whatever they choose to share shouldn’t include personal details like their real name, address, phone number, or email address. Outside of that its open season.

@Punter1234 I enjoy your posts when you target me, they’re always filled with envy over the fact that I’ve lived a full and successful life. What you write doesn’t faze me, since that’s clearly how you get your kicks. Keep them coming, and every now and then I’ll respond in my usual calm, composed manner, laughing to myself knowing it gets under your skin.

"Yes, that's why they need to get people "addicted " as early as people."

It appears you are addicted to this forum I wonder what other self imposed addictions you carry. My own "addictions" are collecting craft studio gadgets (like various lasers), garden plants, and computers. I have nine computers in total to run everything from my workshop to my off-grid power systems both here and at my smallholding, whilst keeping my small estate in France nearly tech-free, as it is used as a bolthole from modernity. A computer placed inside fortified Medieval-Renaissance architecture in a medieval landscape just feels out of place. And of course, writing small essays on this forum with a little help from my friendly AI program.

Acquiring a competitor does not destroy competition unless the entity is fully liquidated to eliminate choices. Corporate acquisitions are usually driven by a desire to scale technology or enter new markets, and anti-monopoly frameworks exist to stop unfair market dominance, not growth. Take Associated British Foods (ABF): it operates a highly diversified, decentralised portfolio where dozens of brands and hundreds of products and businesses actively compete and operate independently despite shared corporate ownership.

Virtually every modern product is a choice, not a necessity; users simply choose to treat them as necessities through a preference for convenience. You cannot do without shoes, but you can do without designer brands, and you can only wear one pair at a time—my wife has about 40 pairs, while I own just four, including my wellies. The same applies to clothes; my wife fills three wardrobes, whereas I fill half of one, only owning multiples of different waterproofs for outdoor work.

Even basic survival comes down to choice. You cannot do without food, but consumers choose to buy it ready-made for convenience rather than producing it themselves. During the pandemic lockdowns, everyone clamoured for an allotment; now that convenience has returned, nobody wants to put the work in. The market responds directly to consumer demand, blaming the provider for filling it is a complete inversion of reality.

@troublesome The greedy billionaires are often put on a pedestal and blamed for all and sundry, but people tend to forget who put them there. It is society that buys the products, utilises them, and demands the upgrades; those billionaires just provide for the demands of the users.

If you want to blame anybody for the advances we have made, continue to make, and what we enjoy, the first port of call is that reflection in the mirror, as that is who is truly to blame.

"AI hasn't just popped up from nowhere -- it's a continuation of a half-century tech evolution (revolution). Quite astonishing that so many folks still struggle to grasp that change!"

AI has been around for half a century; it is only being widely recognised now because it has finally manifested into the public-facing space and had an evolutionary coding leap in 2016. Suggesting others are struggling to grasp the change, when you appear to be facing the exact same problem, is rather ironic, don't you think?

The true transformative tech boom has only really hit over the last 20 years since the widespread adoption of the internet. If you are going to stretch the definition to include every incarnation of computing from the last 50 years to find the roots of modern AI, you would logically need to go even further back and include Babbage's analytical engine and the World War II Enigma coding machine.

Furthermore, while the US is undoubtedly strong in semiconductor design, other global regions are leaps and bounds ahead in hardware integration and scaled deployment. In fields like industrial and humanoid robotics, quantum computing infrastructure, smartphones, and green tech, nations, mainly within Asia, are well ahead of US companies. China is catching up to the US at an accelerating pace, and in several sectors, other nations are already streets ahead. Be careful that US arrogance does not prove to be its downfall.

@NudgeNudgeWinkWi That is exactly my point. I once went to an interview in a T-shirt and jeans with my CV in hand. I did not get the job, so I started running my own businesses instead. I sold my last one for £16.6 million in 2023. More fool them for not hiring me; they went bust in 1992, the same year my business made its first million.

I am semi-retired now. I was supposed to be fully retired, but I recently went for an interview because I could see many inefficiencies that could be amended, alongside budget cuts that would have been detrimental to people in my area, including my own family. I knew I could fix them, and the position to do so had become available. Also, because I was a tad bored. The interview was in front of a panel of six, and I turned up wearing mucky jeans and a shirt, having been doing some gardening and forgetting to change. It was the first of three interviews, for all of which I dressed the same way. When they asked why, and they did, why I was not in a suit and looked a bit bedraggled, I replied with a slightly confused look: "Sorry, I thought you wanted my qualifications and experience, not my wardrobe," and smiled.

I have never owned an interview notebook and have never taken notes. It helps that I knew exactly who was interviewing me, their life histories, the job on offer, and the intricacies of the trust's financials before I even entered the room. I interviewed them rather than allowed them to control the room. I got the job out of over 70 candidates.

I am not sure how you could work out how prepared somebody is before they have even sat down. Psychic ability is just psychology and body language dressed up as something else, and it is impossible to perceive knowledge until you have actually heard someone speak, asked them questions and tested them on their ability. Your preconceptions and bias may well have cost you an many incredible additions to your employer.

When I have interviewed people, I have looked at the person's experience, not their polished shoes. I tested them on the actual job and quizzed them on their interests. I was a manufacturer; a suit does not fit the position, overalls to keep you clean would be a better fit, and in the back office, you are not customer-facing anyway. I would say you, as an interviewer, were not prepared, as you treated candidates with preconceived misconceptions and biases rather than interviewing them as an equal and from a position of neutrality, taking on board their actual ability.

I will stick to evaluating the experience of the people and the fundamentals of the company. You stick to appearances and polish, and let us see who the winner is.

@Eightyeight88 Indeed. Approaching the millennium, we witnessed the dawn of the digital and internet revolution. What we are experiencing now with Artificial Intelligence is a cognitive revolution, shifting from automating mechanical, muscular labour to automating cognitive, analytical processes.

There will undoubtedly be a sharp divergence between the eventual winners and losers. However, the true distinction of this revolution is its compressed timeline. While the Industrial Revolution took roughly 150 years to fully saturate global economies and restructure society, the structural shift driven by AI is unfolding across a single generation.

We are seeing parallel step-changes across foundational physical sectors like agriculture, where autonomous harvesting, computer-vision weeding, and AI driven precision farming are rapidly converting traditional, labour intensive husbandry into a highly technical, capital intensive software industry. Our tractors can drive themselves guided by satellite now using AI. Driver just sits there trawling the internet in case there is a glitch which occurs less and less with each update.

This transformation is equally absolute within the investment world. We are moving past basic algorithmic high frequency execution into an era where AI is actively replacing human brokers, fund managers, and traditional decision makers. Institutional portfolio construction, risk management, and quantitative signal discovery are being entirely automated by multi agent systems operating at speeds and data scales that human analysts cannot match. Within this arena, the market dynamics will increasingly consist of AI competing against AI neural networks continuously exploiting the micro inefficiencies of rival algorithms to dictate the ultimate winners and losers of global capital allocation.

Because this shift alters the fundamental cost and speed of processing information, decision making, and labour across both white collar and blue collar domains, the core question is whether human institutional and social structures can keep pace with the velocity of adoption. When technological change outpaces a society's capacity to retrain, redistribute wealth, or absorb displaced workers, historical precedent suggests that the resulting structural frictions inevitably manifest as deep economic displacement and acute social unrest.

The future, though exciting, is equally worrying on a societal scale.

The future though exciting is equally worrying on a societal scale.

@skier1 They lose them too. Nvidia's $5.2 trillion valuation isn't an annual revenue statement; it is simply the net present value of its expected profits discounted decades into the future.

Furthermore, the fact that there are only ten $1 trillion companies in the US out of 30.4 million companies driven entirely by capital-light software, design, and data platforms that scale globally with near-zero marginal cost doesn't suggest America makes them "for fun." It indicates an extreme concentration of value in global monopolies.

If America makes anything for fun, it is leverage. The US holds the highest total volume of national debt (now surpassing $39 trillion), corporate debt ($13.7 trillion, this averages out to over $2.2 million in debt per company), household debt ($18.7 trillion. Spread across roughly 131 million households, the average American home carries $143,000 in debt (with the subset of mortgage-holding households averaging closer to $268,000)), and individual personal debt (the average debt held by an individual American adult sits at $67,630) of any nation globally. The entire corporate and personal ecosystem is heavily underpinned by structural borrowing.

Worth noting on the economic comparison: comparing a company’s market capitalization (a cumulative stock measurement of total asset value) to a nation's Gross Domestic Product (an annual flow of economic output) is fundamentally apples-to-oranges. The population is 67 million rather than 80 million.

The UK economy generates roughly £3 trillion ($3.8 trillion) in fresh economic output every single year. Nvidia's $5.2 trillion valuation represents the net present value of its expected profits decades into the future and generated just $215.94 billion in fresh revenue output. If the UK economy was valued the same way as NVidia it would carry a valuation of £36 trillion ($48.49 trillion) which is more than the valuation of every US trillion dollar company combined if that sort of comparison is what you want to use.

Is this an orchestrated dip or simply a retrace after the recent gains? We’re still 14% higher than last week and 33% above last month, so a retrace seems normal in these situations.

@Dietch666 As an aside, the irony of your post shouldn't be overlooked. Simply accessing the internet, routing your query, and publishing a comment means your data has just passed through, and is now stored on, multiple servers.

Every byte of data transmitted and stored requires electrical power, which is entirely rejected as waste heat. By using the platform to complain about data centre energy consumption, you are actively contributing to the exact thermal load you are criticising. Every click, post, and view leaves a physical thermal footprint.

"AGMs, company presentations, and professionalism in front of the mic or camera aren’t a big deal to investors, eh? Food for thought, Bo and HEX team."

For investors, probably not, but for traders driven purely by sentiment, then yes, most likely. Investors care about the numbers, not whether a meeting looks like a polished TV production or has the occasional technical glitch. This drop has given me the chance to increase my holdings at a bargain price. The fundamentals remain strong and are actually improving, so if public appearances matter more than company progress to some, they can trade that way. I’ll stick to the fundamentals and reap the rewards.

It would require 17.3 million hyperscale data centres operating simultaneously for an entire year to raise global ocean temperatures by 0.01 degrees C. For context, there are currently estimated to be only around 10,000 to 11,000 data centres of all sizes in existence globally so I think we're safe for the immediate future.

Today’s 'politics' on Lloyds has been about how well Micron and Sandisk have performed over the past year, both of which I’ve held for a couple of years. Micron is up about 910%, and Sandisk an incredible 4325% in the last 12 months. I doubt you’ll see those kinds of gains with QHE, which is currently down 22% over the past year. Even HEX has managed an 86% rise despite all the troubles you’ve imagined for it.

In relation to your "you pay for what you get sometimes" quip. Remember you are invested in QHE you do indeed know how to pick them. No doubt you will be going after ENET next.

"When would they have fessed up eventually if they hadn't or even longer delay getting spare part? "

Probably after it became known it was a foregone conclusion, as it would have been material information, but the 'what if' scenario never happened. It's better to focus on what actually occurred rather than chase fantasy scenarios that didn’t, haven’t, and won’t happen, as that time has come and gone. If you spend your life imagining potential fantasy scenarios for how a company might operate negatively in the future, you might as well give up investing now or short every company you’re interested in, because with such a negative focus on hypotheticals, no matter how well a company performs, you’ll never be satisfied.

@STP Indeed, like the one recently completed in Shanghai and the one currently under construction in Scotland. In Norway, there are other innovative uses for waste heat, such as in Rjukan, where excess heat from the Green Mountain data centre is piped directly to a large-scale land-based trout farm. The warm water keeps optimal temperatures for fish production, while the cooled water is returned to the data centre to support its cooling cycle. There are also plans for data centre facilities in Oslo’s Hovinbyen area to channel their waste heat into the city’s district heating network. Once fully operational and scaled, these facilities could supply enough surplus heat to serve around 12,000 residential flats. In Norway most data centres run on 100% renewable hydropower, making the energy "clean" from the outset.

@Skippysb01 Bo hinted at the number of wells that might be drilled by noting how many acres each well drains. Since each drill will be self-funded through revenue cash flow, and drill access is a clear limitation, it’s straightforward: no drill, no drilling. There’s no way to guarantee a timeline for drill and crew availability. If they promised one a month but only managed one a year due to constraints, people would be outraged, so it’s better to stay quiet than share unreliable information.

It could still happen depending on the hydrogen potential. If you were expecting it to reach £1 based solely on helium extraction, that was never realistic for 2026, as each additional well only adds about 3p–4p to the share price. Market expectations were around 54p in 2026, rising to as much as 93p in 2027. The real value comes with hydrogen in the mix. The current drop in price is purely sentiment-driven and could just as quickly reverse once people calm down and actually take in what was said, rather than complaining about hearing a train go by or that an unscripted meeting didn’t run like a TV production.