OMG, I forgot to announce! "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions And How The World Lost Its Mind" is now available for pre order! !!!one!
All this archaeology is fascinating, but I get the feeling that if I were to ask the question "how are we managing to exhume all these things from the permafrost right now" I might not like the answer
as I keep pointing out, if they are serving literal dog shit, you bet I have got questions about the chicken. "has it been cooked in a separate oven", "are you sure the chicken does not also have broken glass", things of that nature
I just can't stop rereading the Wall Street Journal story which cites numerous witnesses saying Elon Musk is self-medicating with ketamine; surely this fact ought to be mentioned in every other business story about his decision making?
when you see a commentator saying that "normal decent people are being slurred as the far right", what you are reading is someone who basically agrees with the rioters but doesn't themselves have the nerve to smash the windows of a phone shop (or who has a nicer job to lose).
Guys, I want everyone to remember our core values at McKinsey Middle East - there's no "I" in "team", but there's a "sultan" right in the middle of "consultancy"
guy at the Tortured Poets Department who keeps on calling it the Ministry of Poet Torture even though the reorganisation was nine years ago during the Coalition.
Can you imagine - can you imagine - if our current prime minister had been found dead drunk and barely able to walk in an airport, separate from his security detail while Foreign Secretary, after the birthday party for a Russian oligarch who he later appointed to our legislature?
time to resurrect this correct tweet now that Google is apparently rollin' the old dice to decide whether it's going to tell you that you can mix chlorine bleach with ammonia or not.
One very easy way to “press pause” on AI is just to make clear developers are liable for things that happen as a foreseeable result of their model and then let the courts sort it out. Toss a few devs in jail for CP charges and image generator funding will go to 0 real quick.
BREAKING: Norway's foreign minister says 'if there is an arrest warrant against Netanyahu and Gallant from the Hague Court, we will have to arrest them if they arrive in Norway'
@shaunmmaguire
@mustafa_obeidat
no no not even this. what you said was bad enough but even what you wanted to say is still bad. a 15-year-old boy who grew up in Gaza might be a "militant" on your definition but he is still a 15 year old boy who did not want to die. have some humanity will you.
Whoa no no no. It was *adopted* by the far right. It was *popularised* by the Times, Mail and Telegraph. Let's be clear; there is absolutely no clear blue water at all between Tommy Robinson and the nation's most prestigious opinion pages on this issue.
weren't you the guy crying that if Silicon Valley Bank depositors didn't get $20bn from the FDIC the tech sector would die? I'd shut up about "invented panic to justify stealing our money" for a few years if I were you
"now crossed the Atlantic"? Jo Cox was murdered in 2016. In 2017 Darren Osborne drove a van into a crowd because he had thought Jeremy Corbyn would be there. We had "statue defender" riots in London in 2020.
Anyone who covered January 6th at the Capitol will recognize what has now crossed the Atlantic. The same conspiracy theories, the same smears, even the same incendiary chants. It needs to be denounced decisively before it threatens all political civility.
#January6Parallels
🗳️ GB voting intention - Labour lead by 14pts
🔴 LAB 44%
🔵 CON 30%
🟠 LD 10%
🟢 GRN 6%
🟣 REF 5%
🟡 SNP 3%
----
🔴 Labour majority of 98 seats
Via
@Moreincommon_
, 6-11 April
(This is first poll by this pollster I can find, so no changes)
FTX is neither Enron nor Lehman. It's MF Global. If there is a party who is responsible for prop trading and who is also able to authorise movement of client funds, you are putting temptation in the way. Funds segregation and front office/back office split are hard won lessons.
NO. It arose from over-exposure (on the liability side) to you, and your mates, who stuffed them full of hot money deposits at low interest rates and gave them a huge management problem. That's why everyone's worrying about the moral hazard of letting *you* and your mates off
But it’s important to understand that SVB’s failure didn’t arise from risky startups doing risky startup things. It arose from SVB’s over-exposure to boring old mortgage bonds, which were considered safe at the time SVB bought them.
if you are currently in your 30s, don't have a defined benefit occupational pension and are not able to save 20% of your post-tax income, cutting the indexation of the state pension is about the worst thing the government could do to you.
So anyways, it turns out that if you send your nine year old to school on Roald Dahl Day wearing a housecoat and holding a frozen leg of lamb, you get a letter.
it is difficult to believe that the global payments plumbing is hooked up this way but I promise you Frances is correct - every single interbank dollar transaction, for legal purposes, not only happens in the USA, but specifically happens within the jurisdiction of New York State
All the people "liking" this tweet are ignorant fools. Movements across correspondent bank dollar deposit accounts go via the NY Fed. That's the whole point of correspondent banks. They have the Fed master accounts that their customer banks don't have.
Hello, I'm a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher & economist. You might know me from such hits as "No, let's talk about The Wealth of Nations now." "Was that a hand I felt on my shoulder?" and "Have you been meeting for merriment & diversion but contrived to raise prices instead?"
I've got an email in my outbox dated Jan 19, cancelling a fairly important trip to Bangalore and saying "I don't want to go down in history as the guy who brought COVID19 to Devon". It was as obvious as that as early as that. Anyone claiming there was any uncertainty is lying.
@afneil
Stop posing as some kind of tax justice crusader. You're the chairman of Press Holdings Media Group, owned via a Jersey corporation by Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay. Ask them to bring the ownership of their UK businesses onshore and maybe HMRC wouldn't have to beg ice cream
(in fact, the WSJ claims that he is using it recreationally as well as microdosing it as a self-prescribed antidepressant; I would have thought the space agency contracts people might have wanted to follow up on this)
I've said in the past that a surrounding clique of yes-men and a high media profile has an effect on decision making similar to that of taking psychedelic drugs, but ... so does ketamine?
Just to be clear, football hooligans did not come up with the idea "taking a knee is a Marxist gesture of a movement dominated by shadowy professors using Black people as puppets" on their own and nor did radio shockjock morons. It was in the Times a year ago.
The greatest trick the devil ever played was to convince everyone that venture capital was part of the technology industry rather than the financial services industry.
Now listen, Americans, a year from now, if someone calling himself "disgraced former prime minister Boris Johnson" knocks on your door with a speech and saying he wants $250,000 for it, you just tell him to fuck off, ok?
😡 When you tell people their money is segregated and it's not, when you use one company's bank account and represent it as another, that's fraud! That's the fraud, that bit there! The bit you tried to do! What he means is he never intended to get caught.
I would like to see just one venture capitalist explain exactly why it is that they aren't dipping into their own pockets so that their portfolio companies can make payroll. Bygones are bygones guys, if it was a good investment last Thursday it's a good investment tomorrow.
"Never support any war anywhere ever" is the SP500 index fund of policy thinking - the boneheaded thoughtless non-solution which the majority of genius specialists are incredibly embarrassingly unable to outperform.
As a Treasury official, years ago, I was trained to be sceptical about “spend now, save later” proposals. Sometimes rightly.
But as a country we have been far too open to “save now, spend more later” policies. (And we are now in the “spend more” phase of many of those).
bad news, just got fired from the Effective Altruism movement. I was the guy responsible for making sure all the probabilities of outlandish five billion year outcomes added up to 1.
I do not think that this would be overly picky behaviour, or that the smart thing to do while your seat mate is literally chewing faeces would be to enthusiastically order chicken
The Sunday Times making up a story about BLM wanting to censor the Proms is the sort of thing that ought to be seen more clearly as institutional racism; it's an insidious trivialisation. People associated with the Sunday Times ought to be very angry about it.
I think the bare factual listing of how Diane Abbott was treated, and the phrase "hierarchy of racism", will stay with me a long time from the Forde Report. Surprised that these aren't the things everyone's talking about.
Decades of trying to explain that government spending is not like a household budget, and now someone needs to tell the Prime Minister that his household budget is not like government spending.
as I keep saying, sooner or later someone is going to have to start telling the majority of voters that they're wrong and the longer we leave it the worse it's going to be.
@jawj
@cstross
This is the single craziest American drug pricing. If your kids get threadworm in New York, it's literally cheaper to buy a return ticket to London and go to the Boots in the airport.
Burned down when they decided to convert the tax records to paper from tally-sticks, and the furnace in which they were burning the sticks got out of control. One of the earliest examples of a failed IT upgrade.
The old Palace of Westminster painted in 1815 by Pierre Prévost. Funny how it used to look so much more English than the incredible imperial folly that followed.
So this - from a farm gate in Thanet - isn’t about me above all else, it’s about how the Tories and most of the media have whipped up hatred and violence (via
@andrewjburgin
)
It was less than a year ago that we needed a footballer to persuade the government not to literally starve these kids, and now the problem is too much wokeness?
The use of terms including "white privilege" may have contributed to the "neglect" of white working-class pupils in the education system, a Commons committee has found
it seems ... somehow ... emblematic of British higher education policy that according to the Universities Minister, we appear to have reached a place where BDS is forbidden but Holocaust denial is protected.
Absolutely crazy that a popular former leader gets assassinated and the whole of society concludes "you can't be doing that but otoh he kind of had a point"
BREAKING: Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida says his ruling party will cut ties with the Unification Church following a widening scandal triggered by former leader Shinzo Abe’s assassination last month.
seem to be a lot of people who understand why Liz Truss is misguided to be trying to do Thatcherism without an oil boom, but nevertheless enthusiastic about Starmer trying to do Blairism without a finance boom.
There is no point dunking on Laurence Fox. he is what he is and noone will particularly listen to him any more than they do any other actor. there is every point dunking on the BBC editor who has established this is the way to get on the week's main political debate show.
I'm getting really tired of "politics is no longer about economics, it's about values" takes. If someone is retired, that's an important economic fact about them, and specifically about their relationship to Labour and capital. The big realignment is totally about economics.
Great points Nick. can anyone think of any other major institutions that let sex predators get away with it for years because it was convenient for their other purposes? like maybe somewhere that had an office, which kept a list and spreadsheet of them or something?
In fact, lots of people knew about Brand’s behaviour and lots of people kept quiet. Indeed lots of people laughed out loud, in print and in front of cameras (1/5).
It was a bad idea to go into Afghanistan, it's a bad idea to leave, it would be a bad idea to stay and certainly a bad idea to go back. Sometimes all moves are false and the universe is not obliged to give you a morally acceptable option.
People thinking that "privatisation" means bits of the NHS being sold off, or public money directed to private clinics, are looking in the wrong place.
A friend of mine just paid for a private hospital clinic appt - she couldn’t stand her symptoms any longer
Something that she thought she would never do in her lifetime.
She said:
“This is the start isn’t it? ‘Ordinary’ people like me using their savings for healthcare”
In the US they're taking children from their parents. In Italy they are drawing up a 'register' of the Roma. I've said it before - terrible things are coming. And when they arrive, we can't say we didn't know.
There's plenty of people who had good reasons for not wanting to vote Corbyn, but publicly patting yourself on the back for making sure it was Boris Johnson who was responsible for confronting Russia? That's evidence of poor judgement, on a charitable view.
I don't want to be going around libelling any billionaires, but our lad Elon, based only on his Twitter output, isn't really giving vibes of someone who's totally sober most of the day
apart from the Aeropress and Opinel knives, is there anything else which promises you the world for about twenty quid, then outperforms your expectations?
can't believe people are proposing to take taxes from ordinary working people to plant trees that will create oxygen for university educated professionals to breathe.
I think this "factcheckUK" thing ought to be a bit of a moment for the UK media. Both that CCHQ thought they could get away with it - and how did they come to think that? (1/3)
Counterpoint: not only is it valid, it is almost invariably correct. It's the index fund solution; the absurdly simple benchmark that all the alleged geniuses fail to beat.
The "when someone has $44bn of skin in the game they probably have a better idea of what is good for them than you do" period was a couple of weeks ago, when he was desperately trying not to buy it.
When someone has $44B of skin in the game they probably have a better idea of what is good for them than you do. You may not like the plan, but if you think
@elonmusk
is an idiot because he’s going to charge $8, your first thought should be he knows more about this than you do.
It's really odd and troubling that all the evidence is that unemployment has persistent long term effects and easily gets embedded while inflation can come and go, but policy is based on the opposite assumptions.
@darrengrimes_
@MarcusRashford
This is a bad tweet and at some level you must know that stirring up sh*te for clicks is a silly and disgraceful way to earn what seems not to be a very lucrative living.
There's a lot of these tweets going around where the phrase "the media" should obviously be replaced by the word "me" and when this replacement is made it looks almost like an apology.
government. Think how Labour would be pulverised by much of the media if this had happened under a Labour government. The Tory reputation - perhaps it’s unique selling point - as the party of sound money is being eviscerated, and apparently as an act of deliberate policy
Pen Farthing and his pets were assisted through the system at Kabul airport by the UK Armed Forces. They are currently being supported while he awaits transportation.
Surprises me that so far no pundit seems to have observed that the original Tulipmania also took place largely as a phenomenon among bored gamblers during a bubonic plague outbreak in Haarlem. Go on lads, have this one on me.
@followtheh
how do you raise this issue at a board meeting? "Elon, were you taking recreational psychedelic drugs when you had this idea, or just the usual microdoses of psychedelic drugs?"
...sigh, he used to be such a great lad. Then we spent a period of years vilifying his girlfriend and suddenly he didn't want to come down the pub no more.
"At the end of a tour we would go to the pub...and if he had anything he wanted to talk to you about he would raise it with you."
@ArthurJEdwards
laments how Prince Harry's relationship with the press has changed since he met his wife Meghan. JM
#KayBurley
at
#Breakfast
if you want to redistribute income and wealth, *tax it*! if you specifically want to redistribute away from rich pensioners, make private pension income subject to NI! Don't try to pretend that it's progressive to reduce a relatively ungenerous universal benefit.
I have a solution to the housing crisis. If
@OwenJones84
were simply to sublet all of the rent free real estate he is occupying in Centrist Dad Twitter's heads, there would be no need to build on the greenbelt.
I don't care, I simply don't want to see his train travel documentary. If he goes sampling barbecue in North Carolina he can do it on his own. I don't want to watch him learning about architecture, don't want to see him tracing the route of Genghis Khan do you get this BBC?
I’m stunned. I really mean that.
Rishi Sunak has, since his loss, transformed into an eloquent, measured, witty, gracious, sombre statesman who is truly interesting to listen to… attentively.
Where was this man before? I’m asking in all seriousness.
This also needs to be said: Corbyn's unpopularity is very much caused by the constant red-on-red attacks on him, from people who (often in so many words) regard this election loss as acceptable collateral damage.
This needs to be said over, over and over. Corbyn and his coterie, aided and abetted by Momentum, have betrayed class, party, country and Europe. Political ineptitude on a grand scale, Yes, the heavens wept today. One day it can and must be different. But without them .
Arrived in the UK today from Switzerland. Very, very freaked out.
Every station you travel away from Heathrow the masked level in the train drops by 20%.
Been in the country for going on 10 hours, multiple restaurants and bars, yet to be asked for my vaccine certificate. Why?
The Dutch have been growing taller because it is a small country with high population density. America has lots of open spaces, so the population has been growing wider. It's economics in action.
When Americans came over to Europe in WWII, they towered over northern Europeans. Now they're shorter. It looks (from the chart) like the Dutch overtook Americans in about 1960. Now on average, they're 2 inches (5 cms) taller.
via
@WSJ