Just one more cliff edge bro. I promise bro just one more cliff edge and it’ll fix everything bro. Bro. Just one more cliff edge. Please, just one more. One more cliff edge and we can fix this whole problem bro.

“Stop the boats,” is a kind of reverse Trotskyism. The government makes an impossible transitional demand of its own party in order to justify its own radical replacement

The market for buildings insurance in large blocks is completely broken. This is a significant cost, and the government should play the role of the ultimate market maker and apply pressure to fix it

The government should just stop publishing RPI. It’s a bad measure of inflation, it’s always higher than CPI, and it sets inflation expectations higher than they need to be by the mechanism of automatic contract increases. Stop publishing it and those contracts won’t be able to refer to it

Dim and spooky today

“Nation shall give cash bungs unto nation”

It's not the main point, but it says something that that photo of a bike must be around 15 years old based on the now defunct mountain biking parts it has on it. It's like illustrating an article about new car sales with a photo of a 2010 VW Golf

This single chart shows the inter-generational pyramid scheme. That under-taxation during the 90s-10s capitalised into house prices

I think it does boil down to this point. The country is becoming ungovernable because it is impossible to argue in favour of raising the taxes needed to pay for social obligations because the past 15 years destroyed the social contract

It’s obviously bollocks whenever a paper writes something like “scientists discover the Hitler gene.” Obsessing over H’s dna sounds like the kind of thing Hydra gets up to in the Marvel comics anyway

The News makes a lot more sense if you think that any institution premised on the existence of the nation state is inconsistent with the world as it actually functions. Explains the failure of the BBC, party politics, the immigration hysteria. We are entering a post-nation state world

Did anyone make the “which way, Western Man?” joke yet?

Really excited about "scripts"! 🤔 They are a kind of agentic AI model that autonomously interacts with your computer by using "statements" generated through a developer-machine interface. 😲 This is some seriously disruptive stuff and really shoes how much AI is changing the scene! 😳

This overlooks that the US has 5X the population. The most batshit person in the US is significantly more batshit than their UK counterpart because the US populates deeper into the long-tail of batshittery. It’s easy to find 1M batshit individuals in a popn of 350M to subscribe to batshit TV

This misses that our sense of fair taxation has been broken by housing and brexit. Housing because younger people who do not own a house pay massively higher marginal tax rates to earn enough to pay for housing. Brexit because it has destroyed national solidarity and income is concentrated in cities

I remember at school we read the short story “Let’s go to Golgotha” one rainy afternoon, and apparently it had an impact because I still remember it many years later. I think that the same twist as in that story is happening with journalists all shouting “give us Farage”

I actually don’t know whether he’s referring to The Liberal Alliance, which is in fact a hard right libertarian thing, or the New Citizens, which is people who thought DF was too socially democratic (but only for “true” Danes) Frederiksen is bad and racist precisely because she chased DF voters

An under-discussed aspect of UK politics since 2016 is the effect that the government and its outriders constantly throwing insults at metro-libs has on national solidarity. They haven’t exactly rolled the pitch for Londoners to pay more to the Brexity provinces in solidarity and shared sacrifice

The London scheme would be better than what is getting leaked today because it would apply to all cars, not just EVs. The benefit of road pricing as far as drivers are concerned is to reduce congestion, not raise revenue, and that’s the same regardless of how the car is powered

The article is trying to say we should be more like this

The thing is, a working person paying rent/mortgage and into their own pension needs to earn around £80k to have the same disposable income as a pensioner who owns their own home and income just under the WFA threshold of £35k. Who actually are the rich?

The headline is great, but the buried lede is the Sheriff’s name. This must be made up

Cheradenine Zakalwe now writes for the Times and is still traumatised by chairs

This just shows that most people don’t understand numbers. The wealthiest 10% own about £1.3tn, and you need around £3m to be in that group. This policy would raise well less than £10bn. It is not enough to move the needle. It’s magical thinking

They need to improve the boarding experience at St Pancras and especially Gare du Nord. It is already bad and will be a full riot if they increase the train capacity

The price of gig tickets should depend on your height. Tall people should subsidise the rest of us

Just listening to his new album, and I think it’s safe to say that Neil Hannon has no plans to tour the US any time soon

None of the Nordic states have compulsory universal ID cards btw. Dk doesn’t have any ID card at all and they are voluntary in Se and No (and only available to citizens, not residents). The most well regarded welfare states manage just fine without compulsory ID

Like millions of others I live in London, and Andy Burnham seems to have a grievance against us and actively wants to make things worse here. That’s fine for a local mayor, but why would I want that in a PM?

The Dave Matthews tour bus immediately drives over the Kinzie Street bridge

This shape is memorable because it is famously the shape of the rotor in a Wankel rotary engine

I have played that unzoomed game fewer than 10 times. Twice now it has happened that I actually recognised the place and one-shotted it. The first time it was pretty much centred on The Schuster Lab in Manchester - what are the chances from an entire planet it zooms on a building you know well?

It’s a Kobayashi Maru situation, but few people understand the true implications of that and it’s a taboo for people in power to talk about it anyway. So they try to reprogram the sim

Ed Davey was on R4 this morning saying Musk is bad. The interviewer then challenged him “why don’t you call on the gov to leave X then?” And Davey evaded it like it was some sort of gotcha or taboo. I don’t understand why it’s forbidden in polite company to say “yes, you’re right, they should quit”

Shame on Downing Street for going along with this. So much for being committed to a free press

In some seats it is going to start counting against the Tories that when you vote for them you won't know whether you are going to get a Tory or a Reform MP. LD's can start using the argument that at least with them you are safe in knowing what you will get

This is really good news, and completely demolishes the US-driven far right narrative about London. HMG should be pushing that point a lot, but it’s barely covered as of yet www.standard.co.uk/news/london/...

Quite please with this one from Montana El Cepo on La Gomera last month

A man in Washington, DC, plays the Imperial March from Star Wars while following patrolling soldiers. One of the soldiers threatens to call the police.

The Martian Interstellar Serenity

The PM’s response to the far right

It’s happening: www.reddit.com/r/HousingUK/...

“the grown ups are back in charge” said one insider, as they tucked a pistol into their waistband and shot their own cock off

I just travelled from London-Istanbul by train, & one of the places we stopped was Nuremberg, where we did a city tour. The old nazi rally grounds were an eye opener, it was basically designed as a movie set, the influencers of their day. Nothing really changes

The Scorsese film “Silence” is an underrated gem. That last scene is extremely relevant

Not great, not terrible