Homelessness is a housing issue: -Toronto and Vancouver have the highest rates -Halifax rockets up as the housing market breaks post COVID -Calgary declines as oil bust keeps housing market weak

Man in Tescos (with what might be considered a surprising amount of urgency): Dolores. Stay with me. I haven’t got a clubcard.

2026 Me: Hey 1996 me, in 30 years time you'll be furious at everything Tony Blair says and think John Major makes some pretty sensible points 1996 Me: Fuck, so I'm doomed to become more conservative as I get older 2026 Me: Well not exactly

It’s really frightening.

A livestream of a volcano in the Philippines captured a meteor crashing to Earth today. What are the odds? Mayon Volcano, Location: Albay, Luzon, Philippines

I'm genuinely relieved how lackluster the enhanced games have been. Drugs don't seem to have mattered much.

the FT has two pieces on the slow-motion collapse of UK higher ed. 4/5ths of unis are doing voluntary layoffs; 38% are doing compulsory. Meanwhile Britain and its flatlined productivity growth sleepwalks through its unprecedented loss of advanced capabilities www.ft.com/content/8097...

From their own words; the now infamous on here "I'll fight till hell freezes over and then I'll cut the ice and fight on" quote was specifically in response to seeing a slaveowner auctioning off his own barely teenaged daughter

YOU’RE LISTENING TO SISYPHUS FM, THE HOME OF NON-STOP ROCK

Not sure if this is one of my most rightwing or my most leftwing takes, but if you believe there is such a thing as “excessive profits” in a sector you really should just go ahead and insource the service you’re paying for:

Remembered this on the EU vs. US productivity discourse.

I don't want to wade too much into this, but the chart going around from that FT birth rates article raised my "making causal claims from time series data" alarm. Compare the figure in the article with the raw TFR data from 1960 onward.

this continues to be the dumbest point, because it's basically 'yes, this is genocide, but what about what people who don't know anything about genocide think genocide has to be?'

I still think these two paragraphs from Ganz are the most important contemporary political writing

Bolsonaro has now spent over 40 pages of this 107-page script in the hospital, which is probably the most accurate thing about the movie

The answer to this question always was, and always will be, HOUSING @financialtimes.com I earn 3 times my mother. Yet I live in a place about half hers, and paid rent for 15 years the get there.

Day 15 of #30dayChartChallenge, correlation. Getting real stupid with it. It actually took me ages to find a source of data that would even mildly correlate. Spurious correlations are hard! Colleague: "I don't know what to say". Me: "Get me The Economist on the phone"?

This story is based entirely on dodgy advisers lying to potential clients to get money out of them. The one person they actually spoke to who used this 'service' was rejected and returned to Pakistan and has since been blocked from returning to the UK.

Shabana Mahmood’s migration changes are expected to save just £600m – about 6% of the £10bn the home secretary claimed, according to the government’s own data. FOI data was obtained by @jdportes.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Haystacks at Sunset, Frosty Weather - 1890/1891 https://botfrens.com/collections/41/contents/10452

Literary studies - The author's intention isn't that important; what matters is what the work actually does. An architect could have a brilliant plan for a building but if it's built and the roof leaks the plans to keep everyone dry don't matter.

“LVT won’t raise rents”. There’s no economic case to be made that a land value tax could raise housing rents but people are obsessed with businesses ‘passing on’ taxes and can’t think about the mechanism by which that happens (or doesn’t)

The Irish Economy is doing well. Too well perhaps

God left us a long time ago and He’s never coming back

Nobody understands this about the government’s settlement reforms. People think it's 10 years for most & 15 years for care workers But its 15 years for all midskill roles, whatever the salary, if not a graduate job role classified at RQF level 6. Lab technicians, data analysts, hotel managers

"Bunch of guys obsessed with Ancient Sparta can't beat the Persians at sea" was probably one of the known-knowns, come to think of it.

The Hibernian Society served as a meeting point for business elites and slave owners in the Irish community in South Carolina to make connections as they sought to enrich themselves via the racial slave system they adopted. One of its early presidents owned approx 400 slaves.

Exciting stuff!

TIL: Ireland’s population still hasn’t recovered from The Great Famine of 1845-52.

The current administration is really living up to its promise of bringing back Spartan military ethos by talking loudly and losing more than winning.

They’re telling me a great empire will be destroyed if I attack Persia. Even the oracles who don’t like me very much, very nasty, they all said to me, “Sir, it’s one of the great empires, and it’ll be destroyed. And all because you attacked Persia.” That’s what they’re telling me.

"We Have Enough Dead Friends" — Lena Oleanderson lena-oleanderson.tumblr.com/post/7810319...

You can specify relative position in ggplot with I(x) I(y). E.g. annotate("text", x = I(.5), y = I(.5), label = "hello!") will place the text in the middle of the plot. This, combined with alignment arguments is like 87% of the magic for me.

Northern Ireland uses a lot of Home Heating Oil. Prices have doubled since the start of the war with Iran. Data is from the Consumer Council for Northern Ireland #rstats #ggplot2

I spent 4 months trying to answer a simple question: has this book been translated into my language? Turns out no one tracks this. Not ISBN registries. Not Amazon. Not Google. Not libraries. So I built a tool that crosses four databases to piece it together. zenodot.app

someone at the pentagon frantically typing “Claude, open the strait of Hormuz for me, quickest possible strategy, make no mistakes.”

New post, on whether I could get Claude Code to complete a data task that had taken me AGES a decade ago… kucharski.substack.com/p/how-much-t...

The Truman show is an odd movie to watch in the era of streaming. People willingly give themselves to a Truman-lite existence

These captchas just keep getting harder #rstats

Net migration about 160k (35k below the OBR forecast for 2025) but now set to drop 150-200k below the OBR forecast in 2026 (to around net 0-50k, or net emigration). That is a fiscal cost of maybe £13 billion. But Home Sec is not asking how that is covered: selective, assymetric use of fiscal claims

Ironic Home Sec argues those oppose her settlement reforms must say how they would meet the fiscal costs 1. this £10 billion is fictitious + misleading - it is a cost in 30 years time - her reforms don't save that cost. 2. Yet Govt finds £5.4 billion negative hit of its immigration White Paper

Sounds great tbh, I’m in

Every Home Secretary of the past 15 years: "migrants contribute little and we need fewer of them" Every Chancellor:

As I understand it, the answer is Yes - because their parents are economic migrants, So working-class children aged 7 should face hurdles & barriers to secure status, family security & educational opportunity that affluent classmates & those in private schools will not

what's a "pipes" ?? #rstats

genuinely astonishing how many people have fallen for the Bhutanese 'happiness index' over the years. Yes, this isolated absolute monarchy that doesn't allow visitors unless strictly controlled and carried out an ethnic cleansing campaign is definitely somewhere that sincerely values happiness!

The Supreme Court:

The graph shows percentage of Sweden's population (aged 16-84) who do not have any close friends, broken down by gender. Source: Statistics Sweden, surveys of living conditions. 8/