If you fancy spending a lot of money upfront in return for a promise of reimbursement, there are a number of good books you can read, starting with "The Art Of The Deal"

I wrote section 230 to protect user speech, not a company's own speech. I've long said AI chatbot outputs are not protected by 230 and that it is not a close call. Given that the Trump administration is going to the mat to protect pedophiles, states should step in to hold Musk and X accountable.

This is really bad; Grok is now going into is third day of regularly producing nonconsensual deepfake pornography and nobody is doing anything about it. The "Mechahitler" and "white genocide" episodes were stopped much more quickly. I suppose this tells us all about relative priorities.

Awks......

"Gosh, the Princess of Wales in a bikini!"

Also I'm sorry but if you're focused on whether your niche social media site can grow instead of posting for the love of the game, you're doing it wrong. Ego scribo, ergo sum, or something.

Although it is quite possible that something shady went on, this really wasn't a black swan; the David McWilliams podcast predicted that something would happen in the next couple of months for example.

There are about 19.1 million families in the UK. It is obviously not true that more than half of them use X as their main news source. Bizarre that anyone would cite this stat without thinking "wait a minute"

I'm old enough to remember when Elon Musk said it was so easy to remove bots that any social platform that failed to do it was prima facie committing fraud

Whenever people spoke about the harms and chilling effect on speech caused by the OSA, these guys were right in with "so you love child porn huh?" Once again: there are no rules, there are no principles, there are no standards. There is just whatever these people want, forever.

There is also a huge body of excellent work on the dual internal and external threats dictators face (links below). But my favorite source on this is a letter to President Kennedy from John Kenneth Galbraith, then Amb. to India, on South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem, in Nov 1961. 4/

Huh www.ft.com/content/8816...

This position – that a tighter labour market, alongside somewhat higher interest rates, can have a positive impact on productivity through creative destruction – had a grain of truth in the postwar period, but I'm not convinced it's been accurate at any point since the late 1980s in the UK

Over at Alphaville, I explore the boundary between bank supervision and speculative fiction. www.ft.com/content/4f19...

Also a zombie apocalypse is where you get more zombies not fewer!

This is tasteless, as well as being quite debatably bad economics. The "mild zombie apocalypse hahaha" is thousands of families losing their source of income. And there is no mechanism by which they will be immaculately replaced by "more productive firms".

"errors of post-war planning", as if you could have the war first and the plan later.

If you want to ‘bash the boomers’ don’t go for a benefit that you’ll need yourself one day. Better to tax the final salary pensions you’ll never see. Cutting NI and raising income tax would have done that.

For my enemies, straight-talking realpolitik about the consolidation of power, control of the judiciary, and rampant corruption. For my friends, a complex host of extraordinary legal issues at the intersection of international law and the presidency.

An underrated detail is that Kneecap are just a less funny and more basic version of the Rubber Bandits.

I spend more time than I care to admit stewing about how awful, craven, and shameless the American press are. Then I see just like a throwaway headline from a UK outlet and react like someone got hit by a car in front of me

I was wondering how this might all turn out to have been my fault

tbh it might be a listener to the David McWilliams podcast, where they predicted this pretty much over the holiday episode

It’s funny because the US oil companies definitely were trying to buy something but it’s more likely boring stuff like some ESG rollback, less EV support, land looser anti-trust enforcement. Like they already have too much oil, they don’t need more!

Of course the UK is powerless to do anything because of "New London"'s role as lackey and butler to crooked American money.

Worth considering whether the proliferation of constraints on government (imagined and real) is not just feature versus bug but a *positive* feature.

America is rich and the UK is poor… True but this statistic shocked me… The average wealth per American adult is $620k but the median is only $124k! The average wealth per UK adult is $339k and the median is $176k. 🧵

Dan Davies's @dsquareddigest.bsky.social concept of an "accountability sink" comes to mind

It’s going something else when US government officials defend Grok over this

I wonder if the guy who designs users interfaces for Android phones has switches in his house which you press in one direction to turn the lights on and the other direction to call up an AI assistant

People say it’s odd that governments still use Twitter/X to communicate, but it’s only like how the John Major government announced its ongoing Maastricht negotiations through the readers’ erotic stories pages in Men Only magazine.

"When contacted by Reuters for comment by email, xAI replied with the message 'Legacy Media Lies'."

Same for Germany

It gets better. DID YOU KNOW: - the millions of pensioners (some of them millionaires) who benefit from the triple lock - millions of people who receive benefits - the strategically critical wind energy sector - and the laws of citizenship are all fringe "stakeholders" the govt can just ignore?

This might be homeostatic; the tort system, pretty consistently, costs about 50% of the amount it redistributes.

Long-term equity market return forecasts be like: www.ft.com/content/534a...

This is a crime in Irish law too - if your twitter app buffered this image when you scrolled, thats 12 months in prison for possession of CSAM under the Child Trafficking and Pornography Act 1998. bsky.app/profile/dsqu...

This is quite an important point; if you are a UK citizen with Twitter on your phone, opening it up is like playing Russian roulette that the algorithm might commit a strict liability offence on your behalf.

There's going to be a lot of "it's only for absolutely exceptional cases, why are you making such a fuss about atrocious people" and "this will never ever apply to the overwhelming majority of lawful dual citizens" but ultimately the intent is 100% as follows: bsky.app/profile/zata...

I did not expect that! (It must have flown up from Dawlish)

for these situations, i think: - the person who prompts it should be charged with a crime - the company who owns it must be regulated to put reasonable prompt rejection to prevent someone from trying - there are companies whose entire business model is this; they should be fined and jailed to hell

One trillion of AI investment is riding on this being legal

My best pictures of 2025 flic.kr/p/2rPAvbU

So close to getting it. The idea that Keir Starmer is worse than Boris Johnson or Liz Truss *is* nuts, but that's not the question being asked. The question being asked is "Do you see the current Prime Minister favourably or unfavourably?". 1/2

Got a take on this - rebranding machine learning as AI is good for attracting funding/sales, but bad for reputations. Fundamentally, it is fine to use data driven mathematical modelling to predict changes in demand and if this A&E stuff was framed like that then there would be fewer complaints.

Excited to see my new article "Regulatory Sandboxes: One Decade On" out in print. There's not much evidence that fintech sandboxes have benefitted anyone other than tech businesses - something we should bear in mind as policymakers rush to adopt AI sandboxes. www.law.georgetown.edu/internationa...

This, from the Home Office strategy "Having a Sensible Conversation about Immigration" is really good: sensible, balanced and evidence-based. Exactly the right approach for a centre-left government.

First coffee break at the "Forum on Europe's Changing Demographics" and I am slowly beginning to realize that nobody else here wants to talk about pension regulation.

Right, it's IMO truly one of the dumbest bits of fake-savvy political thinking to go 'there will be no state pension for me'. Who is going to vote to take it from you? Zombies? Should be much more worried that you will get a state pension but no state.

Pro bozo