Have to say it’s deeply frustrating that the BBC News team simply cannot ask a tough question about POLICY rather than politics. It is infantilising the audience - unless the audience is other journalists in the lobby.

Playing with Fire. British banks expect their capital requirements to be eased. Lower capital requirements and higher leverage to be permitted as post-2008 crash reforms scrapped. Banks will do more gambling to boost profits. Public purse will bear the cost of bailouts. archive.ph/hygat

During WWII a German vessel fired upon sailors floating in the sea after the Greek vessel Peleus was sunk. The officers were tried and convicted in the Peleus War Crimes trial.

Imagine all cars were electric, and then one Volkswagen engineer comes up with another idea … #EMobility

Tesla was the first and is still a leader in some segments. They showed the world wanted electric cars and showed they can be profitable. I would always love them but also I am not going to miss them and Musk most of all.

China’s BEV trucks are breaking the freight economy: $63k–$92k USD for a purpose-built electric heavy truck — each one a lithium vacuum. BEVs now ~22% of China’s heavy-truck sales as diesel falls. The freight S-curve is igniting, & LFP/LMFP demand is about to explode. #Lithium #LFP #LFMP #Disruption

The relative underperformance of North England’s economy is a mystery…….

Love or hate Tesla, this effectively ends the argument: 11 MW of solar and 39 MWh of Megapack storage powering a 164-stall, fully off-grid Supercharger in California. Proof that not just transport, but electricity itself, no longer needs fossil fuels. The tech exists. The excuses are gone. #Lithium

What do these corporations have in common? Netflix Ford Tesla T-Mobile Duke Energy DISH Network Metlife Dominion Energy United States Steel In recent years, they all paid their execs more than they paid in taxes. This is what a corporate-rigged system looks like.

Be thankful for the NHS. This below is for a complex operation, but under any health system, the need, if at all, for the patient or their family to see the potential cost is unnecessary & unhelpful above a certain point. So ok perhaps for prescriptions, pointless for operations.

The housing crisis is fueling the far-right vote

The Lib Dems had their chance in power and gave us Austerity, which sowed the seeds of so many of the problems of this country. Danny Alexander, David Laws, Ed Davey all chose ministerial cars over their principles.

A better way of visualising the historic awfulness of our current productivity growth performance. Are we really saying technological progress has come to an end and there's nothing more we can do about it? (Also, please join my campaign against plotting the derivative of noisy data)

If a phone still works fine, it’s not “device hoarding” to keep using it. It’s common sense.

"What of the claim there are certain jobs that Americans will not do? This usually means jobs that Americans (and legal immigrants) will not do at the price that employers are willing to pay" Analysis of the impact of US labour market constraints by Michael Lind www.commonplace.org/p/why-there-...

"Switzerland has the highest manufacturing value add per capita in the world; Singapore is somewhere between numbers two number four, depending on the year. They have strong service sectors because they have a prosperous manufacturing industry. Their high value services mainly sell to manufacturing"

"These technologies are not risky or experimental. These are largely industrial heat pumps and thermal batteries, which is technology that is mature and proven," @industriouslabs.bsky.social's Teresa Cheng told me: www.quittingcarbonmedia.com/california-h... 🔌💡

What if you never feel at home in your own life? What if your temporary life chaos never goes away? Van Gogh understood this. He spent his career painting what it’s like to never fully arrive. What can we learn from him? 🧵👇 #artbots #vangogh

This post gets to the crux of our difficult economic situation - & this is the crucial plot. Our problem - we didn't invest in the future, & now the future has arrived. Now we need to move from consumption led growth to investment led growth.

This sort of innovation looks to be taking off in several jurisdictions. Wonder whether it ever will in the UK, or whether current wiring standards and safety regs mean it can't?

A very insightful post here on the likely outcomes of resolving global trade imbalances which will be most painful for surplus countries.

11/18 American economists insisted that the resulting decline in US manufacturing share was a consequence of rising US manufacturing productivity, but they had completely confused declining manufacturing employment with declining manufacturing share. www.wsj.com/opinion/are-...

2/18 As I see it, everyone (even Europe, eventually) is relearning what we used to know: a highly globalized trading regime can only work when all major economies choose more or less the same tradeoff between global integration and economic sovereignty.

Maybe the next generation will set its sights on solving systemic problems instead of “My burrito is at a restaurant, but I’m all cozy here so, can a guy with a medical degree from another country bring it to me.” We’ve got that covered, and then some.

View of Auvers with Church - 1890 https://botfrens.com/collections/46/contents/15554

Monet sometimes painted with twenty brushes in rotation—each loaded with a different tone of the same color.

National Library of France 🇨🇵

Happy to hear German Chancellor Merz doesn’t support ​​Russia’s return to the G8 . He said it could only happen if all G7 member states agree, but right now all of them, except for the US, well, kinda don’t wanna. Music to my ears.

@bsky.app can we get location verification please. Although vpns exist, it would still be a great community security & verification tool, as X has proved. Also, forcing trolls to pay vpn fees might create at least a small troll hurdle.

Everything about this might be the saddest thing I’ve ever seen

Since Reeves is looking for ideas for her budget, here are mine. Announce a plan for fiscal consolidation over a number of years, including replacing fuel duty with road pricing and replacing the triple lock with an earnings link when the state pension reaches an agreed % of average earnings.

Really looks like the United States is about to launch a regime change war against Venezuela with: -No casus belli -No authorization from Congress -No allies or international support -No plan for a post-Maduro Venezuela -No preparation for any sort of stabilization or containment of the fallout

I’m morbidly curious about where everyone is from. I wish Bluesky had this feature.

Holy shit. So Elon decides it would be nice to know what region of the world people are posting from. So they add that little feature. 2 hours later they figure out that many Trump supporters with millions of followers are posting from other countries. Surprise! That "feature" is now gone.

Excellent video advocating for the need to regrow manufacturing.

At the very least, this ought to prompt X users to question the quality and validity of many of the accounts they engage with. By the looks of it, it's all a massive spam factory. Wonder what Bluesky does to protect its integrity in this regard, if at all?

This says something terrible about the current twitter leadership, and yes the folks who still post there. But we should also be mad at the pre-musk twitter leadership, who could've shown this info a lot earlier.

All EU leaders in Geneva know that Russia wrote the plan that Witkoff is pretending to be American. The idioms and syntax are clearly Russian. And they all must pretend that they don’t know Witkoff is Putin’s creature. This is America’s role in the world now.

Twitter pays people based on engagement (views, retweets, comments, etc). It appears that many MAGA accounts are based abroad and they use AI technology to generate low-effort rage bait. My guess is that this will get worse as AI tech improves. For instance, fake videos of minorities doing crime.

So many MAGA raigebait accounts turned out to be from India that Elon Musk had to disable the feature within an hour. Turns out he had outsourced billionaire propaganda machine to the cheap Indian trolls.

Switzerland has a law that makes it illegal to own just one guinea pig. Anyone who adopts them has to keep at least two so they can interact, groom, chatter, and bond the way they naturally do.

Thank goodness he gets it. Disarm Ukraine, even partially, and Putin will be back for more. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

An interesting history of labour sourcing in US agriculture.

This is one of those occasions the government did the right thing by society, in the face of libertarian doomsterism and we all benefitted.

Making them citizens won’t help since then they will have to pay them far higher. Companies do not want them legalized, they want them undocumented and reliant upon them for the little income they get.

This is not a peace plan. It is a proposal that weakens Ukraine and divides America from Europe, preparing the way for a larger war in the future. In the meantime, it benefits unnamed Russian and American investors, at the expense of everyone else. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Literally.

I have loved books as Christmas presents ever since I was a small child both giving and receiving. These days bookshops as much as the books are a delight for me from small and intimate to large where I can sit with a coffee like this one. A favourite