Tom James

The details of my life are quite inconsequential.

[Tom James @TACJ]

I mean, it's all doable. We just have to build lots of solar, wind, and nuclear capacity; and stop using fossil fuels.

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

1. In the long run, business rates depress rents. A business rate cut will increase rent. The benefit will go to landlords.

2. A business rate cut for small business is bad policy. It distorts decisions, will incentivise small businesses to stay small, and -> avoidance/evasion

[😊 @PontistGirl]

Doctor: we had to remove your appendix.

JRR Tolkien: but that's where I explain why elves hate dwarves.

[A. B. Thompson @procrastixote]

I had no idea there was a British Isles-equivalent of Northern France's Mont Saint Michel. I'm very surprised it's both a near-shore semi-island and using the English version of the name. Very interesting.

[Tom James @TACJ]

@edmundharbord One weird aspect of online discourse is Americans take things weirdly seriously and so the whole debate gets coloured with genuinely extreme yank oddness, rather than the boring tedium of sensible British practices.

[Joe Reeve - 🇬🇧/acc @isnit0]

Calling all YIMBYs.

We need you.

Please respond to the East West Rail Consultation (link in next post).

If you don't respond to it, you don't get to complain about things not happening.

[bernoulli_defect @BernoulliDefect]

Ah yes, because Britain really needs to juice its low productivity non-tradable service sector

[Alexander Kustov @akoustov]

OK, I admit complete defeat here.

I tried to invent the most ridiculous possible version of anti-AI purity politics: ban copy-paste and retype citations by hand. But apparently every reductio of academic gatekeeping is just someone's preferred pedagogy lol.

[John Cochrane @JohnHCochrane]

That's an interesting political-economy observation. Alexander Hamilton wanted government debt in part to create a politically powerful class that would precommit the government to repay its debts. Things have changed.

[Samuel Hughes @SCP_Hughes]

We see here an example of what @jo3hill calls 'everythingism' or @ezraklein 'everything-bagel liberalism' – nice-sounding obligations have been piled on housebuilders until the accumulated weight has crushed the sector, resulting in rising homelessness and housing poverty.

[Tom James @TACJ]

In case readers were wondering how I have so much time for poasting.

[Tom James @TACJ]

Vaguely apropos: but if you set up a greenfield project properly and work with AI, you can be insanely productive in terms of adding new features and maintaining things; and the limiting factor becomes demand for new features.

[Тsфdiиg @tsoding]

Good software is invisible. That's why all software is bad because the managers demand visibility of programmers work.

[Tom James @TACJ]

As well as being aesthetically revolting, pointless stinginess in the public realm (of which not providing the PM with lavish kitchen staff and free meals) is culturally of a piece with everything else that’s gone wrong with Britain as a country.

[Tom James @TACJ]

This is presumably the breakfast he has to pay for himself, and the fact it isn’t paid for by the taxpayer is a disgrace.

[Jack Blackburn 🇺🇦 @HackBlackburn]

Keir Starmer’s premiership all went wrong at breakfast as ministers grumble over measly meals

In this morning’s @timesdiary

[Tom James @TACJ]

The relevant question is “Well what would you have done differently, smartass? *Without hindsight*”

[Tom James @TACJ]

I thought we’d reached the conclusion that Chamberlain was hugely underrated? Calibration needed.

[S. I. Rubinstein @si_rubinstein]

Each Tory PM from the Fourteen Years bar Sunak can make a serious case for being the worst PM in British history (well, probably second-worst, after Chamberlain).

[Steve Paxton @Steve__Paxton]

Narrator:
Income, in real terms, has grown exponentially since the introduction of Income Tax in 1799.

[Vivid Void @vividvoid]

I can't pretend to understand this but God is obviously here on Earth vividly hallucinating that He is you but He only starts to realize who He is when He gets really good at being you and that sometimes takes a lot of deaths and respawns

The universe is kind of a roguelite

[Tom James @TACJ]

Kiss of death.

[JB @JasonBotterill]

Anthropic employees are fucking depressed