Wanderly Luxemburgo

I wear a cowboy hat it is my business hat

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

The US is spending $50 billion on data center construction, exceeding the combined spending on airports, ports, and mass transit, per Bloomberg.

[Wanderly Luxemburgo @halfmanhalfmon]

@TheBull4You @consequence Nope

[Maxwell O'Dowd @Maxiboi23]

So you’re telling me, associate sides have to play in a 3 year 50 over tournament, to qualify for a qualifier to qualify for another tri-series qualifier to then qualify for a World Cup.

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

Donald Trump cashed in on his Presidency to the tune of billions of dollars last year, largely through the sale of crypto tokens. https://t.co/DtN5zQMZKk

[Wanderly Luxemburgo @halfmanhalfmon]

@Simon349689 @novaramedia Yeah because she sold them off you daft cunt

[Wanderly Luxemburgo @halfmanhalfmon]

@818Gatsby @GoonerTop133628 @CeilNoyle @DanNeidle Why don’t they have power

[Warren Gunnels @GunnelsWarren]

Can't stop thinking about Elon Musk, the wealthiest man alive worth $828 billion, spending $290 million to elect Trump, becoming $563 billion richer since Trump was elected and ending humanitarian aid that will lead to the deaths of 4.5 million of the poorest kids on the planet.

[Wanderly Luxemburgo @halfmanhalfmon]

@TIME Yes, it’s very human to ask machine what to say to other human

[Alex Jones @RealAlexJones]

⚠️EXTREME VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED: The Man Hired By The Onion To Take Over Infowars Produced Pro-Pedophile / Child Torture & Murder Shows For Adult Swim In Conjunction With Will Ferrell Who Took Part In Satanic Rituals With Spirit Cooking High Priestess Marina Abramović!

The Satan Obsessed Tim Heidecker Has Openly Bragged That He Is Set To Steal Alex Jones' Job, And That He Plans To Steal Alex Jones' Identity In Order To Destroy The Infowars Brand!

Alex Jones & His Legal Team Have Already Filed & Are Planning To File Major Legal Challenges To This Attempted High Jacking Of Infowars & His Identity By These Democrat-Backed Deranged Lunatics!

🔴WATCH/SHARE THE LIVE ALEX JONES SHOW NOW:
https://t.co/DR06XxJNz2

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

This one will require a stiff drink.

In the early 1990s, the government came up with a clever idea. Instead of borrowing money cheaply to build hospitals, schools, and roads, it would get the private sector to build them and then pay the private sector back over 25 to 30 years. The Private Finance Initiative. PFI.

The attraction was obvious. You got a shiny new hospital today. The bill didn't show up on the government's books. The cost was deferred into the future. Politicians got ribbon-cutting ceremonies without the awkward conversation about borrowing.

It was, in effect, the nation's credit card. Buy now, pay later. Except the interest rate was extraordinary.

The total capital value of everything built under PFI was around £50 billion. As of March 2024, there were 665 PFI contracts still running across the UK, with roughly £136 billion in remaining payments stretching out to the early 2050s. These are payments public bodies are contractually locked into. Hospitals, schools, councils, government departments. Paying for buildings that in many cases were constructed twenty or thirty years ago.

And the terms are extraordinary.

PFI contracts were structured so the private sector would not just build the facility but manage its services. Cleaning. Maintenance. Catering. Portering. These services are bundled into long-term contracts with built-in inflation increases that the public sector cannot renegotiate, cannot exit without paying massive penalties, and often cannot even fully scrutinise because of commercial confidentiality clauses.

In one case raised in Parliament, a hospital was charged £333 to change a lightbulb. That isn't an urban myth. It was cited in Hansard.

The NHS has been hit hardest.

According to parliamentary analysis, the capital cost of NHS PFI projects was around £13 billion. The total repayments are estimated at around £80 billion. And the peak of NHS PFI annual repayments isn't even here yet. It arrives in 2029. The bills are still going up.

In 2020-21, NHS trusts paid £457 million purely in interest charges on PFI contracts. Not services. Not maintenance. Interest. In the last five years, NHS trusts have handed over more than £1.8 billion in PFI interest alone. We Own It calculates that money would have covered the starting salaries of over 50,000 new doctors.

One NHS trust, Essex Partnership, has reportedly paid back 27 times what was originally borrowed. Some hospitals are spending more on PFI repayments than on medicines for patients. And remember, these repayments come out of the same NHS budget that's supposed to fund patient care, staff, and equipment.

Scotland got it just as badly. Audit Scotland reported that Scottish taxpayers will pay a cumulative £40 billion for PFI assets worth just £9 billion. North Ayrshire Council will have paid £440 million by 2038 for four schools that cost £83 million to build.

Now here's what makes this worse.

Many of these contracts are starting to expire. The buildings are being handed back to the public sector. And the NAO has warned of significant risks around the handback process, including cases where public bodies were dissatisfied with the condition of assets being returned to them. Decades of payments. And some of these buildings may come back needing significant further investment.

So what actually happened?

The government could have borrowed money at significantly lower rates to build these hospitals and schools itself. Sovereign borrowing has always been cheaper than private finance. Instead, it paid the private sector to borrow at a premium and passed the inflated cost on to the taxpayer. The private sector took the profit. The taxpayer took the risk. The buildings are now ageing. The debts are still being paid. And the services that were supposed to benefit are being squeezed partly because so much of their budget is locked into contractual obligations they cannot escape.

PFI wasn't investment. It was an accounting trick. A way for governments to build things without the borrowing showing up in the national debt figures. It made politicians look fiscally responsible while loading future generations with obligations they had no say in and no ability to renegotiate.

Both parties did this. The Conservatives created PFI in 1992. Labour massively expanded it after 1997. More than 700 projects were signed. The coalition eventually wound it down. The current government scrapped the latest version. But the contracts remain. The payments continue. And the damage is already done.

This is what it looks like when a country chooses to buy its infrastructure on hire purchase instead of investing properly. You lock in above-market rates for decades. You lose control of the assets. You tie the hands of future governments. And when the bill keeps coming due, you're told there's no money for doctors, teachers, or social care.

There was always money. It just went somewhere else.

[Bruno Maçães @MacaesBruno]

Best summary of America I have seen

[Isabella M Weber @IsabellaMWeber]

The war on Iran is causing gas and oil price explosions.

Our research shows: Fossil fuel prices are the most important prices for inflation and inequality. Energy price shocks are redistribution shocks. The poorer you are, the larger the share of income you spend on essentials.

[Ros Atkins @BBCRosAtkins]

The Trump administration has offered varying explanations for why it's at war with Iran. Here's 3 minutes on the different statements we've heard. https://t.co/Cm00jsXPdX

[yoshimi battles video game addiction @nise_yoshimi]

every labour MP is like "I was born labour. bred labour. I shit and cum labour. my dad was a coal mine and my mum a council estate single mum who knew the value of hard work. I love labour. that's why we have to euthanize the unemployed."

[Wanderly Luxemburgo @halfmanhalfmon]

@davidsirota How quaint. Viewed from here it feels almost viscerally of another time, in how at odds it is with the current grift culture-even though it wasn’t really that long ago really. Assume this is around the period Reagan’s mind is deteriorating?

[Wanderly Luxemburgo @halfmanhalfmon]

@MarialanaKinter @TrackAIPAC And a load of poor brown people usually

[Wanderly Luxemburgo @halfmanhalfmon]

@spectator Thanks for the nonce angle on this one, I think we were all wondering what the Massive Paedophile community has to say on the Venezuela topic

[John Hinckley Jr. Jr. @HinckleyJrJr]

One of Dulles’ first gigs as a lawyer was facilitating regime change in Colombia at the behest of US oil. Same shit different day.

[Ed Conway @EdConwaySky]

📽️Donald Trump wants you to know he's targeting Venezuela because of illegal drugs.
But what if this were really about something else altogether...?
Dig into the murky world of crude oil refining and you find another, even more intriguing explanation...
Full primer 👇

[Eyup Lovely @eyuplovely]

Guy who raped his sister: I want to know everything about everyone’s life forever from the day they were born until the day they die