'Where's your fucking poppy ?'

See also bsky.app/profile/thed...

"More young adults to leave UK because of low salaries and rising tax burden" - on.ft.com/498VbP7 I really don't understand why the FT carries stories based largely on quotes from wealth managers. It's very thin stuff

Today I learned from The Rest is History that the combined firepower in action at Trafalgar was ten times the total deployed at Waterloo. Incredible.

This is an incredibly positive angle on Britain, and doesn't feel unrealistic to me. Like many countries, it's maintaining a lot of strengths despite its politicians www.economist.com/britain/2025... From The Economist

"China can produce almost a terawatt of renewable-energy capacity in a year. That is enough to supply as much energy as more than 300 big nuclear-power plants." www.economist.com/leaders/2025... I love The Economist's bullishness here

A UK study from many years ago concluded that the primary reason for newly launched innovations to fail in the market was that they solved a problem the customer did not have. In my experience it remains a very common problem.

Sounds like the crypto treasury self-scamming Ponzi has come to an end for now, and obviously it's the retail bubble chasing suckers who have ultimately paid the insider promoter grifters, as Matt Levine explains. Thus it will ever be...

Theory: really successful innovations were based much more on insights into consumer demand than technological supply/possibility. E.g.: - punters would buy an EV if it were cool enough - people will trust online shopping - a computer in every house - they'll provide social media content for free 1/

My own guess is that this Optimus robot is to Musk what the Metaverse is to Zuckerberg, but plenty of people much richer than me seem to think differently- on.ft.com/3LpFJV3 When will we know?

“Don’t put up income tax, NI or VAT”…in the same interview “spend more money”. While I think the Labour leadership should have thought more intelligently (read: at all) about how to get out of their tax pledges, can see why they made them!

Heartening to see the Conservative former secretary of state for Justice pointing out how very unfunded the prisons system is. Rather a pity his timing wasn't a little better, because just a tenth of the money used on unnecessary pre election tax cuts could have made a huge difference

Joe’s going to murder Nick for realsies #CelebrityTraitors

Future generations will gawp and snigger at this foolishness, we can only hope on.ft.com/3LJUgLc

My "I am not a cormorant" t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the shirt.

Saw a shoal of small fish flash by in the brook near the Thames just now. Always makes me happy

"“Funding the railways through a bubble, rather than through central planning (as was the case in much of Europe), left Britain with a very inefficiently designed rail network,” says Quinn" "Are bubbles good, actually? on.ft.com/4hHEaOe by @timharford.ft.com Worth reading alongside Stratechery

Reeves poised to unveil Budget plan for EV drivers to pay per mile charges - on.ft.com/4hIo5rv This makes sense, surely? But it would be even better if it involved some kind of tracking that linked payments to congestion and enabled more widespread congestion charges ...

Am midway through the most amazing production of A Very Expensive Poison by the students at Mountview theatre school in Peckham. Hard to get tickets, sorry!

Read of the day: Ben canters through recent pro-bubble literature. The most surprising thing for me is his argument that by massively augmenting the demand for energy at this (imho fraught) time, the data centre bubble might leave a hugely positive legacy. stratechery.com/2025/the-ben...

The IFS has calculated that the effective carbon price on household use of gas is negative, thanks to its lower VAT rate. ifs.org.uk/articles/tax.... This obviously sets back the carbon transition. Let's hope the Government is looking to make this better!

Fantastic piece you should all read

Free link to an excellent Economist article on how AI might start to erode the problems of asymmetric information in services markets The end of the rip-off economy www.economist.com/finance-and-...

Yesterday's result shows that everything I thought turned out to be right. In my case, it's that Jasmine is a generational talent and Tom just took too many weird risks with ingredients

"This is not the result of dumb luck, although a shift lower in US yields has helped. Reeves and her team have worked hard on understanding the limits of what the bond market would stomach" on.ft.com/43NcG3R by @katie0martin.ft.com

Mamdani wins New York as Democratic electoral sweep deals blow to Trump on.ft.com/43eVzYD

Democrats have flipped 2 seats in the Mississippi senate, and in so doing they've broken the GOP's supermajority in the chamber.

A chart from the great @bennsteil.bsky.social — showing how US importers did, in fact, absorb most of Trump’s tariffs at first. But not for long. @cfr.org www.cfr.org/article/who-...

open.substack.com/pub/geoffmul... A lot of very important points in a short post

Cast iron rule of BlueSky: if you're desperate to bring some irascible morons onto your feed, suggest some spending cuts might be justified. Works all year

I have a theory. thecritic.co.uk/sharkbait/

I urge the fast food outlets of London to create and sell this thing, I would buy

"Put another way, the cost of supporting Ukraine without America to the remaining members of nato will need to increase from about 0.2% of gdp to 0.4%" Bargain. www.economist.com/internationa... From The Economist

ISM SURVEY: “.. Wonder has turned to concern regarding how the tariff threats are affecting our business. Orders are down across most divisions, and we’ve lowered our financial expectations ..” #ISM 🇺🇸 peterboockvar.substack.com/p/quick-ism-...

In case you missed it ... The largest number of foreign doctors working in the German health sector are now Syrians who came to Germany as refugees 10 years ago.

This is apparently excellent

Whatever else people think of OpenAi and Sam Altman, somehow he hasn't had to insist that he owns a massive chunk of the company himself in order not to be utterly demoralised and uninterested in it doing well, which puts him many notches above Certain Other CEOs

Bravo @garrykasparov.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/cf99...

this article is redolent of a piece ordered by the editor: "someone say why it doesn't make sense to make council tax more progressive". www.thetimes.com/business-mon... when you're best argument is "people in high value homes *already have to pay more for their homes* why hit them again"

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Very unusual UK think tank report in being pretty honest and not obviously party political. Which is why I suspect the most important message - that there are no easy answers to the UK's economic position - will be ignored.

It is normal to think that good or bad growth comes reflects the performance of the government. In 2003-6, labour productivity growth averaged ~2.0%. Since Covid, we have scored ZERO. If you dropped in on the government in 2005, what would you find that it was doing better than ours today?

I have pretty solid admiration for this PX report by @igmansfield.bsky.social @benramanauskas.bsky.social et al, not because I love everything in it, but its honest about how if you want to cut spending, you must do hard unpopular things. policyexchange.org.uk/publication/...

I have carefully calculated how many people the actual Government of our country should have working on semantic arguments about what constitutes a "working person" and have come out at the astonishing figure of zero

Any sympathy for the anti development angle here (which I struggle to see) is defeated by the nasty ad hom tone

I hope the BBC will challenge Nigel Farage today over the economic damage caused by the Brexit he championed. He needs to be held to account for the damage he's done instead of always being given an easy ride.

Rachel Reeves cannot start to blame Brexit now for her economic fix @jillongovt.bsky.social takes a closer look at why the government is talking about Brexit and the economy again www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/rach...

www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/... These numbers are unbelievably fatuous. "New figures reveal that if you accumulate annual numbers over an entire working life, you get a big number that impresses a journalist". GDP has much more than doubled since 1977 too, so work that out....

An absurd suggestion in the first place. You may as well say you need one for leaving the house. Risk is part of life. You can't, and shouldn't, try to totally minimise it

City bosses warn on pay as minimum wage closes in on graduate salaries - on.ft.com/3JivCRk Thoughts: 1. I remember when Osborne began this process of rapid NMW increases in 2015: at the FT we warned of higher unemployment. A wrong call in the immediate term, but maybe just early?