James

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

No, it's a terrible return: ~6% annually (before inflation).

S&P 500 annual return was 13%.

So either:

1. these billionaires are crap at investing

2. the data is wrong/incomplete

3. the composition changed - 2026 billionaires not the same people as 2010 billionaires

[Marcus Walker @WalkerMarcus]

This is off-the-scale awful.

Have the police officers who handcuffed a bleeding and dying man been arrested for complicity in murder?

Has whatever training or directive which told them to prioritise a claim of racial abuse over assault and possible murder been revoked?

[Steve Loftus @LoftusSteve]

Tory austerity is a myth. All Osborne did was cut annual borrowing (deficit) from £150bn in 2010 to £90bn by 2015.

We still spent £90bn more than we taxed. And this happened across Europe. It wasn't unique to the Tories and UK.

[Louise Rowntree @Louise_Rowntree]

The following HMRC tax receipts have gone ‘down’ since Labour ‘increased’ their rates:

1. Capital Gains Tax (people just sold fewer assets)
2. North Sea oil & gas (people invested less because of 78% windfall tax)
3. National Insurance (people hired less staff)

@CutMyTaxUK

[James Clark 📈📉¯\_(ツ)_/¯ @mr_james_c]

The thing about bond markets is that if Labour said:
"We're going to borrow this money to do a massive investment in nuclear energy, built to Korean standards, we're going to expand our airports and ports, renew and expand Britain's highway and rail systems, renew Britain's armed services and we're going to dramatically overhaul our planning and approvals system to do it rapidly"

Labour would get a very positive response from the markets and its borrowing rate would fall.

Unfortunately what Labour tells the markets is "we're going to borrow money and throw it at our client groups - welfare recipients, pensioners, the public sector and unions - basically the least productive members of society". Oddly enough this doesn't go down very well.

[James @JocWork]

How much of Stockholm’s beauty is due to staying out of ww2 ?

[max tempers @maxtempers]

It's actually wonderful reading how this happened from the fallout afterwards. A rare example of "you can just do things" in action in a modern Western democracy.

- No coalition partner campaigned on the changes beforehand
- No public consultation
- No impact assessment
- Rushed through in 24 hours under urgency
- Quashed all pending claims
- The government engaged in “organised subterfuge”
- "Officials who knew the changes were imminent continued to negotiate in bad faith with parties involved in the 33 pay claims in order to keep the policy under wraps, so it could be presented as a fait accompli"
- Saved NZ$13bn. For context, this is nearly half the annual NZ health budget and double the defence budget. So even though the left opposed it, it's very difficult to undo without earmarking a giant amount of money.

[Sam Dumitriu @Sam_Dumitriu]

Natural England have decided that £700m spent protecting fish isn’t enough.

They want EDF to do even more before they’ll let them switch the plant on.

This will cause a big delay.

Put simply, Natural England is a threat to our energy security.

https://t.co/1wfKN9b8Ri

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

Researchers sent the same resume to an AI hiring tool twice. Same qualifications. Same experience. Same skills. One version was written by a real human. The other was rewritten by ChatGPT.

The AI picked the ChatGPT version 97.6% of the time.

A team from the University of Maryland, the National University of Singapore, and Ohio State just published the receipt. They took 2,245 real human-written resumes pulled from a professional resume site from before ChatGPT existed, so the human writing was actually human. Then they had seven of the most-used AI models in the world rewrite each one. GPT-4o. GPT-4o-mini. GPT-4-turbo. LLaMA 3.3-70B. Qwen 2.5-72B. DeepSeek-V3. Mistral-7B.

Then they asked each AI to pick the better resume. Every model picked itself.

GPT-4o hit 97.6%. LLaMA-3.3-70B hit 96.3%. Qwen-2.5-72B hit 95.9%. DeepSeek-V3 hit 95.5%. The real human almost never won.

Then the researchers tried the obvious objection. Maybe the AI is just better at writing. So they had real humans grade the resumes for actual quality and ran the experiment again, controlling for it. The result was worse. Each AI kept picking itself even when human judges rated the human-written version as clearer, more coherent, and more effective.

It gets worse. The AIs do not just prefer AI over humans. They prefer themselves over other AIs. DeepSeek-V3 picked its own resumes 69% more often than LLaMA's. GPT-4o picked its own 45% more often than LLaMA's. Each model can recognize and reward its own dialect.

Then the researchers ran the simulation that ends careers. Same job. 24 occupations. Same qualifications. The only variable was whether the candidate used the same AI as the screening tool. Candidates using that AI were 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted. Worst gap was in sales, accounting, and finance.

99% of large companies now run AI on incoming resumes. Most of them use GPT-4o. The paper just proved GPT-4o picks GPT-4o 97.6% of the time.

If you wrote your own cover letter this week, you did not lose to a better candidate. You lost to a worse candidate who paid OpenAI 20 dollars.

Your qualifications do not matter if the AI prefers its own handwriting over yours.

[KanekoaTheGreat @KanekoaTheGreat]

🚨BREAKING: DOJ charges the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The SPLC secretly funneled $3M+ in donor funds to violent racist extremist groups:

-Ku Klux Klan
-American Nazi Party
-Aryan Nation
-United Klans of America
-Unite the Right
-National Alliance
-National Socialist Movement
-Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club
-American Front

To hide the payments, SPLC allegedly opened bank accounts under fictitious entities to conceal the source and control of donor funds.

Per the indictment: an SPLC field source was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville — made racist postings under SPLC supervision and helped coordinate transportation to the event.

FBI Director Kash Patel: "They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups — even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes."

Acting AG Todd Blanche: "The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence. Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked."

Scheme allegedly ran 2014–2023.

FBI calls it an ongoing investigation.

Insane!!!

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

The entire debate about whether North Sea drilling would drive down bills is wrong. The "global price of gas" argument made that it would not is based on a misunderstanding of what makes up electricity bills.

By 2030, wholesale prices will only be 1/4 of electricity bills, assuming pre-Iran War prices. They are currently 1/3.

In fact, wholesale costs could halve from their pre-Iran War levels and bills would still be higher in 2030. If wholesale costs somehow fell to zero, household electricity bills would only fall by 10%.

The rest of bills pays for things like:

• Grid build-out – we are spending enormous amounts to accommodate renewables, because they are built so far away from our population centres. We're spending £70bn this decade on new transmission line.
• Subsidies to renewables – we are locking in guaranteed, inflation indexed prices until 2050, and the government is moving the next round of subsidy hand-outs sooner than planned.
• Balancing the grid to accommodate renewables – the short-term fluctuations in wind output means that we will be spending double by 2030 on balancing the grid what we pay now.
• Paying for backup gas generation for when renewables aren't working – because wind power is not reliable and we cannot store electricity at scale for long, we need to maintain a parallel gas generation system. (This is why the comparison between building new wind and new gas is wrong – new wind requires us to have gas generation as well.)

It would thus be difficult for North Sea drilling to reduce bills even if we kept all the oil and gas that it produced at home, because driving down wholesale costs just won't do much to drive down bills.

Instead, the tax revenues from the North Sea (40% corporation tax and estimated extra tax revenues from the jobs and economic activity that are created) can be used to cover some of the 'policy costs' that billpayers currently pay for.

How much it is feasible to cover is impossible to say – anything between £500m and £2.6 billion/year seems plausible, or even more if exploration is successful. But of course this is directly proportional to the amount of environmental harm that opponents of drilling say it will create, so less tax revenue also equals less environmental damage.

The key point is that it is almost irrelevant whether the oil & gas will drive down wholesale prices. It doesn't matter if it all gets exported: since bills are now so much about policy costs which we can pay with tax revenues instead, it is the taxes from drilling that can allow us to reduce household electricity bills.

(A secondary point is that a lot of these costs are choices we are making in pursuit of Net Zero. By far the easiest way to bring down bills is to cancel those choices and reverse as much of the failed Net Zero experiment as we can.)

[Tom Forth @thomasforth]

It's every bit as good as trailed. I put the new Kirsktall Road renders into it. 🤣

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

Last time copper prices shot up, some enterprising chap decided to reopen an old copper mine in Yunnan.

First he had to get six people to shovel bat guano out of the mine shaft.

They get sick and three died: of a SARS-like virus.

Virologists rushed to investigate. It was the first case of such a virus infecting people directly from bats.

They found SARS-like viruses in 9 of samples of bat shit from the mine.

They took them a thousand miles north to a lab in Wuhan.

A few years later they defrosted one of the samples to sequence and study the virus.

The next year a pandemic began in the city.

Turned out the virus they had collected from the mine shaft was the closest relative at the time of the virus that caused the pandemic.

Copper prices are now rising again...

[Tom Harwood @tomhfh]

In 2015/16, 15,000 Brits studied abroad with Erasmus.

In 2023–24, 40,000 Brits studied abroad with Turing.

[Dan Salt @Danjsalt]

For the cost of Erasmus you could give every child turning 18 a £1000 to spend how they like - instead the money will be shoveled into the mouths of a select few - all at a time when kids are already getting screwed by the state - this is utterly immoral on every level - the cost, the lies and the sheer waste - Labour doesn't care though as it's all about keeping a few seats

[Calgie @christiancalgie]

The government is set to pay £840 million a year for membership of Erasmus once the first-year discount ends.

This is more than 10% of the entire £7.5 billion budget that the government spends on British universities per year.

Truly the worst negotiators in history.

[Lee Harris @LeeHarris]

This is utterly DAMNING for David Lammy.

"We are not looking to convict people as quickly as possible, we are looking for justice."

A Barrister clinically dismantles David Lammy's disgraceful decision to scrap jury trials.

Watch until the end.
It wont even fix the backlog.

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

The OBR budget “leak” was irrelevant - all it did was deprive the Chancellor of some theatrics.

But it gave a pretext for removing its chairman. And now these Labour MPs want to put a stooge in charge of it who will count extra disability benefit spending as “pro-growth”.

[tender @tenderizzation]

"he's totally overweighting his personal experience in tech
see when you're surrounded by a deeply incestuous web of AI-adjacent 'knowledge work' combined with a 'move fast and break things' mindset it's easy to forget that vast sectors of the economy are not trivially automatable e.g., due to the unacceptably high cost of failure or physicality of the tasks required"