Do you know what’s extremely energy hungry and that you turn on and off? Direct sequestration of carbon dioxide from the air and doing reverse osmosis to turn salt water into fresh water.

Never trust anyone who doesn’t attach a timeline to a prediction of a risk of government default. Or who doesn’t quantify ‘a serious risk’. There is a premium of maybe 0.5%/year in gilts across the curve due to the fiscal situation not being ideal.

One thing that was interesting in the reeves presser was her insistence that no decisions have yet been made. And I can’t help thinking that the journalists should have pressed her on this. We are two weeks from probably the defining fiscal event of this government, and no decisions have been made?

This is a stupid comparison. Bush read History at Yale where he had a GPA of 77 which is AIUI slightly above average for Yale students and then did a MBA at Harvard business school. Trump failed to graduate on the honours list from Wharton. These are not the same.

Just had a brief skim but I think it misses an essential point. Since wealth tends to compound it should be the case that older age groups are much wealthier except that if incomes are growing younger people have much higher real wages than the prior cohorts.

Hundreds of likes and quote tweets except I would like to question the use of the word ‘just’.

FYI, I've fleshed out some recent comments on Tesco bashing into a blog... 🤔✍️ julianhjessop.substack.com/p/its-time-t...

So eh how long before Nvidia investors get worried about this? www.livescience.com/technology/c...

Academics’ and planners’ single-minded focus on making *brand new* homes affordable to the poorest people has been a disaster for poor people’s’ ability to afford housing.

I had no idea how many people on blue sky are open borders advocates. Complete madness to think a country should have no control of immigration numbers.

One for @stephenkb.bsky.social

Niche blog post #1: what stamp duty statistics say about how many home purchases are for "additional" dwellings rather than primary homes jamesjgleeson.wordpress.com/2025/10/19/a...

1980: NHS spending as a % of GDP: 5.1% Defence spending as a % of GDP: 5% 2024: NHS spending as a % of GDP: 10.9% Defence spending as a % of GDP: 2.2% This is such a common applause line, but it’s also total bullshit.

Ok if I was to be serious for a second. There is mechanically a set of relationships between equity levels, credit, equity vol and rate vol, and according to those relationships (equity high, equity and rate vol low) it makes sense for credit spreads to be at all time tights….but…

Polls show that only 33% of Americans blame Democrats for the shutdown. But at this Atlantic staff Zoom meeting, that percentage feels much higher.

@nearlylegal.co.uk if I look on Southwark web page it appears that the council has designated every ward for selective license. Do you think thats lawful given the statutory requirements? www.southwark.gov.uk/housing/priv...

Honestly we should forget trying to work out housing need which is a mugs game anyway and just set targets for how much extra capacity a local plan needs if every site allowed was built and those targets should be in the 50-100% of stock range.

I think this article is missing the point of planning reform and what it needs to achieve.

I can’t stress this enough: you cannot understand politics without reading this paragraph about why there’s no such thing as a 1/3rd pound hamburger

The Uk should get rid of stamp duty and council tax and have a tax on the market value of homes and I don’t care if you call it a property tax or a wealth tax. That’s my actual real position!

The British public implicitly believe if that if you are renting with £1m in the stock market you are wealth and if you take that money and buy your flat for £1m you suddenly have zero wealth. That’s bizarre and funny!!!

I always find the ‘people with X amount of wealth’ tax results funny because it’s very clear that the British do not consider their home as wealth and if you actually started a property tax at £200k of annual value they would scream bloody murder. But housing is where the wealth is!

And in conclusion: ban all non competes and limit notice periods to a couple of months at most.

It turned out the answer to this question was Yes. Take that Betteridge.

Pretty much the only short term move you can make to address the housing crisis is to change taxes in a way that forces older people to sell their family homes to young families. This is the only effective way to redistribute housing in the short term. In the long term we need 4-7m more homes.

"Fury as MP spends £5 of taxpayer cash on sackcloth and ashes despite looming tax rises"

I have good news for you, 16% of all houses ~45% of the rental market is under social democratic control of either councils or local housing authority. Clearly having such a huge fraction of the private market in social democratic control has already solved the problems

Is the story here that @torstenbell.bsky.social is basically a stoic with incredibly cheap tastes in office furniture?

The problem with buying back properties to fix "the social housing crisis" is that it isn't *just* a social housing crisis. You're taking away useful first time buyer homes to make social homes, so it's a bit of a zero sum game. Really need to build more homes.

People are too doomer on America. America is still America: the richest large country on earth with a long tradition of imperfect democracy and an equally long tradition of civil society leaping into action just when things looked hopeless.

I am losing my gd mind seeing the number of people on here who are so doompilled that they cannot imagine that telling millions of people, including tons of MAGAs, that they’re out of food money and they also can’t have health insurance anymore might have any effect whatsoever on anything

People keep saying there is no link between migration numbers and public concern about migration but I think it actually tracks gross immigration (as opposed to net immigration) quite closely.

No one is better placed to decide the trade offs between a particular bit of managed woodland and a solar farm than the forestry commission that is literally the expert on forests so it’s natural they should make the decisions here!

The reaction to the proposal to let the forestry commission build some solar farms is honestly insane. archive.ph/OEQw7

Democrats should just start rolling out ad after ad of Reagan voiceovers.

It’s that they are both complete fantasists.

The Tories immigration policy is absolutely mad here. As written, if you claimed child benefit but paid the HITC so got zero net benefit from it they would throw you out. (This is common since it allows a wife on maternity leave to accrue a year of NI entitlements!)

‘Management does nothing’ is a surprisingly prevalent position in British thought.

I am going to tap the sign: ________________________ |A tight labour market is| |better for your policy | |goals than any of your | | policies. | |________________________|

Think this argument is wrong because it doesn’t account for the actual behaviour of governments which are highly asymmetric. Almost every government that gets a positive fiscal surprise will immediately dole out that money so in practice the fiscal rules are exactly as asymmetrical as the door.

Apparently I am a Labour Party apologist now. News to all my friends I’m sure. Meanwhile let’s check the detail of the housing policy act which was almost David Cameron’s last piece of legislation before he resigned. 🤔

This is something lots of blueskiers seem to believe but isn’t true. Here is a list of policies the center right would never have done: - VAT on school fees - renters rights bill - Genuine energetic planning reform - 30bn of extra NHS funding - workers rights bill

Always found lack of right wing entryism weird. Incredibly hard to do on the left because it’s full of sociopaths who love arguing with people they hate for three hours every other Thursday. Comparatively simple on right

This is true but actually the number is more like 100,000 and actually you could achieve most of it with <15,000. With the latter number properly distributed, you could control every selection in every plausibly winnable seat the party could have at its peak.

What we are seeing is that uk politics without a viable center right party is a shit show. only way to save the British right is for 500,000 broadly normal professionals and homeowners to join the Tory party. Calling on all utilitarians and consequentialists: your duty is clear.

Do affordable mandates reduce housing supply? Yes!

A few days ago blue sky was discussing the change in affordable housing mandates and a few people in my mentions made the argument that affordable mandates just equilibrates in land prices and thus doesn’t reduce housing supply. I think that is mistaken argument and I wanted to come back to it.

An argument against PR in one photo.

I refuse to believe a monopoly can exist in dating apps. You can never monopolise dating because you can just date people you meet in RL.

The problem with this argument is that if the affordable mandates lead to even a modest reduction in building they quickly become self defeating. If a 25% mandate leads to a 20% reduction in supply then you are constantly exchanging two market rate homes for one affordable home.