The Commoner

Friday, November 13, 2026

Sup, freaks.

The British government’s own audit gives its citizens plenty of reasons to distrust the people in charge. Its security minister seems to think they should hand over more of that trust anyway.

WHAT TO EXPECT IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Britain’s child-protection failures, surveillance powers and the public’s right to demand answers.
• A coding agent that pays for inference with bitcoin.
• Treasury’s 30-year borrowing cost and PJM’s argument over who pays for new power.
• German banks build a fraud-information network, while Barr considers who benefits from AI.
• Aperture gives builders the seller side of Lightning-paid inference.

Marty's Bent

Britain Has Not Earned This Trust

I called the UK a police state. There are many reasons why I think that description fits, but the failure to protect young girls from rape while authorities worried about the political consequences of talking about their abusers is enough to make me question every new demand for power coming out of that government.

Read Baroness Casey's audit, published last year. It describes organisations avoiding questions about the ethnicity of offenders “for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems.” Police forces told the audit that local authorities discouraged them from publicising successful convictions because they feared raising tensions. Even after getting a conviction, there was pressure to keep quiet about it.

These were children being raped. Casey describes girls treated as “wayward teenagers” or collaborators in their own abuse. In the audit's account of Operation Stovewood in Rotherham, nearly two-thirds of those convicted were recorded as having a Pakistani ethnic background. The people responsible for protecting these girls needed to investigate the men abusing them, wherever that investigation led. Instead, the audit documents years of failures and avoidance, with victims left without adequate justice or accountability.

“It is not racist to want to examine the ethnicity of offenders,” Casey writes. It is completely insane that this needed to be spelled out in a government report. Understanding who is committing a crime is part of stopping it. Hiding the information leaves the girls exposed and makes it harder for the public to hold anyone responsible.

Britons should be able to object to illegal immigration, question the people running their country and demand answers about these failures. When local authorities discourage police from publicising convictions, I see an attempt to keep people from making a fuss about crimes they have every right to be furious about. The girls were already failed. Keeping their abusers out of the news protects officials from scrutiny and leaves other victims less likely to hear that someone has finally been prosecuted.

This is what I mean by anarcho-tyranny. The authorities fail at protecting people from horrific crimes, then expect those same people to trust them with control over what they say and do. I do not think the United States should consider the UK an ally while it behaves this way. Shared history does not excuse the treatment of the people living there.

Now read what Security Minister Dan Jarvis told the Investigatory Powers Commissioner's Office this week. He celebrated more than 350,000 authorised requests for communications data in 2025 and defended powers requiring telecom operators to retain data or make it available in intelligible form. He emphasised independent oversight, necessity and proportionality. These are powerful tools. The government's own audit shows why assurances about responsible officials are not enough for me.

Jarvis also pointed to AI as a reason to keep the surveillance framework under review. He said communications providers, wherever they are located, should not provide a means to “hide from justice.” My fear is that this demand for access will extend into deciding which intelligence ordinary people are allowed to use. People could use these tools to work through public records, question official explanations and make their own lives better. I do not want the government deciding that those capabilities are too dangerous for its citizens.

SIGNAL

A coding agent that can pay its own inference bill

Lightning Labs has introduced pi402, an extension that lets a Pi coding agent buy inference with bitcoin over Lightning. The agent encounters an HTTP 402 payment request, checks its spending policy, pays and retries. One payment buys a bundle of tokens, with subsequent usage drawing down the balance. The seller holds the upstream provider’s API key, so the buyer does not need that key to use the service.

This is a useful job for programmable money: let software purchase the computation it needs within a budget its operator controls. The README makes the current limitation clear. There is no hosted seller to point it at yet, and a fresh installation defaults to regtest. Developers still have to put the pieces together. They now have an open implementation to work with.

Thirty-year Treasury debt clears at 5.441%

Treasury’s November 12 auction priced a $25 billion offering of 30-year bonds at a 5.441% high yield, with a 2.36 bid-to-cover ratio. The bonds carry a 5.375% coupon, will be issued November 16 and mature in November 2056.

Washington found buyers. It also locked in another long-lived obligation to pay interest. The Treasury and Fed still have room to maneuver. That does not make thirty years of interest payments disappear. Taxpayers will be servicing this debt long after many of the politicians spending the money today have left office.

PJM’s monitor wants new data centers to bring new generation

PJM’s independent market monitor finds that its energy market was competitive during the first nine months of 2026, but says recent capacity-market results were not, primarily because of forecast data-center demand. It recommends arrangements in which large new data-center loads bring matching new generation, with an interconnection queue until adequate capacity is available. These are the monitor’s recommendations, not adopted PJM rules.

The report puts average wholesale costs at $111.61 per MWh, up 40.9% from the same nine months of 2025. That is a wholesale comparison, with multiple cost components, rather than a measure of household bills. I want more data centers and more generation. Requiring a large new customer to arrange power for its project gives it a reason to help build the supply instead of leaving existing customers to absorb the cost of a tighter market.

German banks are building a shared fraud-warning network

Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank and the German Savings Banks Association have announced a joint venture for sharing fraud-related information across institutions. Its first application is in advanced development. The proposed system uses multiparty computation to compare specified information without disclosing all the underlying data, and each receiving institution decides what protective measures to take.

A bank identifying an account used in a scam could help another bank stop the next payment. The harder question is what happens when the first bank gets it wrong. Who corrects the flag, and how does the customer get an answer? The announcement describes privacy safeguards and plans for more compliance applications, but does not settle those questions. Before expanding a network that informs access decisions, the banks should explain how an innocent customer can challenge the information being shared.

Barr’s AI question comes down to who gets to use it

In a November 12 speech at Yale, Fed Governor Michael Barr laid out two possible paths for AI. Competition could make useful intelligence cheap and broadly available. Concentration could let a few firms capture the gains while smaller businesses fall behind. He also said worker displacement has been relatively limited so far and vigorous competition has kept access fairly broad.

That last observation deserves attention. Small businesses can use these tools now, while the debate over their long-term effects continues. A sole proprietor does not need to wait for a consensus forecast before learning how to automate the paperwork eating up his afternoon. Keep access open, make the tools easier to use and let people figure out what they can build.

⚡ FREEDOM TECH CORNER

DATA SNAPSHOT

Spot price, block height and hashrate estimate: November 13, 2026, 10:06:29 AM ET. Bitcoin Lab daily series: November 12, 2026. U.S. spot ETF flows: November 11, 2026 (latest available; November 12 not yet available from TFTC).

Sources: Kraken spot quote, mempool.space block height and hashrate, Bitcoin Lab daily metrics, and TFTC ETF flows. Daily metrics use the provider's November 12 observation, not live intraday estimates. ETF data was rechecked November 13 but remains dated November 11.

Enjoy your weekend, freaks.

Marty Bent · TFTC · Nostr

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