Putting things like basic ethics aside... ... does anyone really believe that the Home Office, which cant deal with its present asylum responsibilities, is going to be able to review every application, every 30 months? I have a bridge to sell you

Like, Kalshi sucks no doubt but ask yourself if you want death to trigger event contracts

Oh definitely, that’s just an extreme example. It’s immensely frustrating that so much of the market and government’s narrative is about “getting on the ladder”. But it does sound like the buying public is learning its lesson given first-time buyers are buying bigger and largely avoiding flats

I've been saying for nearly 10 years that it was a huge mistake to take a particular set of conditions that existed between about 1955 and about 1988, give them a name like "the housing ladder" and treat them as a fundamental economic and social fact.

Denmark has *far* worse outcomes - economic, social and integration - than the UK. Just a fantasyland for those who want an excuse for their own xenophobia and/or are incapable of doing the hard work of confronting the UK's real problems. www.thetimes.com/world/europe...

There’s a scenario here — not yet the central scenario by any means — where we have to revisit the debate about how to handle inflation driven by external supply shocks AKA terms of trade shocks and reconsider the lessons we failed to learn in 2023-24. Policy interest rates are a blunt tool.

“I’ll tell you what happens with impossible explanations. You start with far-fetched assertions... they are then pickled into a rigid dogma… and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour government – a Labour government – scuttling round studios insulting its voters.”

I didn’t think the absurdity of “we vibecoded past Bloomberg’s moat” could be topped, but now we have “one day someone might vibecode past Joe Weisenthal’s posting moat” h/t Alexandra Semenova

Hot take incoming: Brendan O’Neill hates women

Rich alludes here to the wisdom of the judges at the Nuremburg trial: “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

I see the point here, but there are different ways to be rude and I think that politics brain might make you less aware that it is already a bit tiresome to be in the pub with someone you are friendly terms and start doing How Do I Tell My Children

'Isn't really that much evidence' is very kind indeed. The maths just ain't mathing, as they say.

Just launched a premium version of my Substack on hedge funds, trading firms, financial market structure and fintech. Will also be more active on here as I exit “the other place” for good. open.substack.com/pub/rupakgho...

A Rabbit Rides a Chariot Pulled by Geese in an Ancient Roman Mosaic (2nd century AD)

Using boilerplate messaging that would use for George Galloway about Hannah Spencer personally & how she will approach being an MP is tin eared, graceless, implausible to the immediate audience (Labour MPs) and esp the broader one (Labour waverers/switchers) underpinned by the wrong strategy

Wouldn't it be funny if we ended up getting drugs policy reform simply because everyone negatively polarized themselves against this stupid attack line which Labour thinks might land

@dsquareddigest.bsky.social ICYMI

Earlier in the year I was worried about CON/REF tactical voting but I think it is looking like that is now already happening and maxed out. There is actually not much wrong with British politics except a stupid electoral system we are stuck with because the party which could change it won't.

In other news, migration policies look to hurt our public finances www.ft.com/content/7408...

This is a good point, and also makes it worth asking what Reform takes from this now that they have challengers that are way more online and further to the right, but also can’t really function if they become softer or more moderate

Interesting that there might have been some material underestimate of Green support as well as the tactical squeeze - you don't get from both a little under 30% to 41/25 purely within the bloc.

That's more than they ever managed to do about his links to sanctioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska

Jings! I had no idea this stuff existed. To think, all these years I’ve been wasting my money on booze.

Not obvious who is behind it but this is definitely in Phil Woolas territory

Discourse on my latest post: PROBLEM: this model has a dozen different fudge factors! SOLUTION: we will replace all the parameters with distributions and do Monte Carlo analysis PROBLEM: this model has two dozen different fudge factors.

Catching up on Bank of England speeches, and oh boy, is there still work to do. www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/...

X degens “My meme stock losses are all Citadel Securities fault” Move on now… “My long Bitcoin/short gold losses are all Jane Street’s fault…they are to aggressive and manipulate market”

I’m sorry what? He’s on trial for saying he did drugs in 1989 and didn’t like it?

the author will not be entering into correspondence on whether "fudgily" is a word backofmind.substack.com/p/what-is-re...

Enjoyed this thoughtful piece by Rupak on how "entrepreneur blogger" research is disrupting the sell side - a process that kicked off with MiFID II/unbundling and accelerated with the rise of easy online self-publishing

It’s not just ignorance or stupidity it’s betting fever too. >> The growing link between gambling and racist abuse of Premier League players www.nytimes.com/athletic/706...

Do you think his partner knows he's about to flush $30k down the toilet betting on a guy who has to crowd source his ideas from Twitter a week before the deadline?

This contained a nice reminder that Ben has a book coming out about computational frameworks for decision making and how he doesn't like any of them. Preordered!

a good reminder that despite the name Lib Dem Bar Charting is a broadly nonpartisan issue, largely because it seems to work at the margins; I really don't think you can make it go away (though moving away from FPTP might help a bit)

interesting to me that if this works (you can create Grokkish-Claude by distilling Claude), then the argument that evil vectors are correlated with stupid vectors gets weaker. maybe you gotta break bad to get there, but there's an evil orthant in the not-stupid subspace

at Alphaville, I point out that the G20 has no agenda (as in, I am not just saying it's a bit rudderless, there is literally a placeholder website where its program usually lives) and this may be a problem www.ft.com/content/84ad...

“the “enshittification” of investment analysis”…it’s a vibes world! rupakghose.substack.com/p/is-the-cit...

when broadcasters repeat Mandelson claim he was “not motivated by financial gain” please also report the $75,000 of financial gain Mandelson received from Epstein in 2004 and 2004 and the £10s of thousands Mandelson’s husband received from Epstein in 2009/10 plus free flights & mansion stays

There has been a remarkable radicalisation of *elite* political and media discourse on mass deportations and remigration. This is based on an elite perception (+ misperception) of what the public want. Media and political elites have not spotted how skewed their perception of what the public is

Let's be clearer on the 8 people who were killed: Mostly 12 and 13 year old kids.

Or both

Sort of a critical moment for written public comments as a thing. Indiscriminate clicktivism was bad enough, but slop is going to kill them off once and for all.

[me, a journalist who spends all day every day on a social media app where the discovery algorithm is personally controlled by its owner, captain birdseye] you know, a lot of people are talking about fish fingers, we should probably cover that

new post! 🕵🏼‍♀️🕵🏼‍♀️🕵🏼‍♀️ www.instagram.com/p/DVEWaFzGdX...

Standards matter. Every time a Labour MP - a Minister no less! - is able to say things like this, our standards drop little by little where they matter. Starmer should think about the political culture he wants to model from the top.