Mark continues to do the Lord's* work in scrutinising the actual workings of Government rather than its political veneer. *A Pun

Childhood's End: today my daughter was very disappointed to learn that Hatfield is not where the hats are grown.

While there's lots to like here, if we forgive energy debt in an untargeted way and don't restore penalties for non-payment we create tremendous moral hazard. You'd be an idiot if you ever paid your energy bill again.

Its not a new observation - @jim.londoncentric.media has been making it for months now - but this all comes back to a society where it seems there is no consequence for bad behaviour Austerity hollowed out and collapsed the regulatory state. Its the same phenomina with shoplifting, tax dodging etc

I will always describe myself as a pro-market anti-capitalist. Efficient markets should prevent the concentration of capital on anything other than a temporary basis.

Great to see my boy Triceratops take bronze in the Cool Dinosaur awards.

Starmer and Reeves' legacy is stabilisation without a strategy. My unsolicited advice to Andy Burnham and the new Chancellor. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Oh well, back to not caring about football. At least until Brazil next year.

God this is unbelievably pathetic. Any man who's had high T days could tell you that ensuring your soldiers are extra horny is not a war winning strategy.

FAT GASSY CATS: The third in my series on the electricity wholesale market. Today we're looking at how the Capacity Mechanism has distorted the kinds of generators that get built and led to a limited number of plants making a quite astonishing amount of cash. open.substack.com/pub/unbalanc...

I can guarantee you that no-one will lose their jobs because of this. A lack of accountability borne of no 'advice' being in place is a feature of the system.

If you want to reduce the influence of the ultrarich, wealth taxes are terrible way to do it. The sums proposed, like ~2% of assets per year, are typically lower than the growth rate of those assets. All that happens is they get rich slightly slower. /1

Train driver into London Euston has decided that it's hot enough that he can pretend he's flying us into a resort on the Med. Over the tannoy just now: "This is your captain speaking. We are currently cruising at a height of about three feet and a speed of 60 miles per hour..."

I LOVE BRITAIN www.boylesports.com/blog/politic...

Masterful inadvertent trolling from James, in a thread which sees people purport the existence of chess wormholes to avoid the conclusion that knights move in 3D space.

I mean, this shit is called like Bonk and Magic Internet Money. As a species we've wasted way too much time, effort, money, regulatory bandwidth, political capital and computing power on this utter nonsense. The opportunity cost is huge.

It's the morning after the night before, and the streets of my very middle class town are littered with discarded Madri glasses.

Finally my two philosophy degrees are relevant. I have a piece of paper that entitles me to tell you that AI isn't really conscious!

The second part of my series on the electricity wholesale market looks at the Contracts for Difference used to support renewables. open.substack.com/pub/unbalanc...

The shining city on the hill was in fact glistening with grease.

Matt Goodwin is not just repulsive, he hates Britain. Yassin Mohamud's story is a fantastic example of how great this country is. That you can come here as a refugee, work hard and end up as Lord Mayor. That's inspiring! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

One of the very carefully unspoken truths about the transition to renewable energy is that equatorial countries with higher solar output have at least a century's worth of structural advantage on energy costs versus the rest of the world.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WHOLESALE ELECTRICITY MARKET? For the past couple of months I've been talking to people across the sector in an effort to find new ways of cutting bills. /1 open.substack.com/pub/unbalanc...

For anyone in the heat who is considering getting a portable air conditioning unit, some quick advice. /1

It bewilders me how one bit of government can spend years finessing a new policy (mandating solar on newbuild homes), whilst another bit is busy on its own - TOTALLY CONTRADICTORY policy (effectively banning solar on small roofs, and significantly reducing it on all roofs) 🤷

Incredibly it does not include a salary in the ad, I assume because the value of a soul is negotiable.

I have a heat pump, but to be clear I am an eco lunatic and my wife would never have got one without me prompting it. It's less about cost and more about disruption, as well as having to have chunktly radiators.

Considerable respect to Mark for maintaining a consistent position on this for a decade, driven by principle rather than outcome, and also for volunteering to be BlueSky's Main Character for the day.

chat is the special military operation going well

If you wrote this stuff you'd be laughed out of tellyland.

My dad worked in the shipyards and my mother was a nursery nurse. But my mother came from a historically well to do family that lost its manse when my great grandfather spent all the money on communism and all his social credit on defending trade unions.

I remain of the view that regulation of social media is better than a ban for young people. But I also pretty much agree with all these proposals.

Barbara Castle. The Doctor falls into an alternate timeline in which In Place Of Strife is implemented and Thatcher never attains power. Then there are daleks.

Luckily these are the only sites on the internet and so this problem is solved forever. Children are notoriously unable to look for routes round parental imposition and create their own spaces.

The markets have been betting on American surrender, and it does look like they have won that bet. At least for now. For this to last relies on the Americans being able to restrain the Israelis. They have been unable to achieve this throughout the war, and it is not clear what is different now.

This is outrageous. When I hire KPMG to validate my priors I expect to receive the wildly overconfident lies of a 23 year old MBA, not those of some stinking robot.

strong and striking commentary on the MOD-HMT bunfight from @jeegarkakkad.bsky.social jeegar.substack.com/p/the-treasu...

I genuinely think that Whitehall simply does not have the capacity to tackle this issue. It's falling through cracks in a system designed for a very different age.

Keir Starmer's spokesman tells me there has been "no change" to the Government's policy on using X, despite Elon Musk helping to incite the hateful scenes we saw in Belfast last night. Also no new plans to take action against X for its role in the violence

Russia is openly waging a form of hybrid warfare against us and this is part of it.

I genuinely believe that no society can survive if only hatred is seen as authentic and empathy in some way a performance.

The new Piketty thing is absolutely hilarious. We can build a political majority for communism country by country, and the first step is *checks notes* have a political consensus for massive investment in public services. globaljusticeproject.wid.world/insight/chap...

I slightly wonder how anyone can look at the Ukraine conflict and go, "Yep, manned aviation is definitely the future of warfare." Even the concept paints it as an airborne drone hub, which begs the question as to what the human is doing in the sky at all.

Great thread on an incredibly basic bit of admin that the UK refuses to get right. The boundaries of gas networks and electricity networks are different because different firms owned different bits at nationalisation and we have never sought to amend this.

This is exactly it. The work is the point.

There is a terrible unseriousness to this policy, which feels like a desperate effort to avoid regulating the actually bad-for-everyone parts of social media - algorithms designed to prompt addiction, no attempt to gatekeep false statements, and of course the actual horrendous content out there.

Pumped hydro will typically have duration outputs measured in hours, perhaps up to 48 if you are extremely lucky. If this is long duration then batteries can still complete. For longer periods you will need a molecular store.

An excellent thread. One of the reasons for this switch has been the total abdication of the Treasury from its traditional role as the guardian of efficient tax policy. /1

This afternoon Claude failed to fill in a form for me despite getting very precise instructions, but yeah sure it's 'dangerous'. Just create a form it needs to fill in before it takes over the world.

Georgists of the world, unite!