iang

fighting for the user, issuing her assets since 1995.
Assets are soft, users are hard. The issue isn't the asset, the asset is you.

[iang @iang_fc]

@lizafokht Russia proposed security arrangements before the war. US/Europe ignored them.

So Russia went to war.

If we feel it is too hard to discuss security while there's a war on, and ignored security beforehand ... well, what does it take to get Europe to participate?

[iang @iang_fc]

@lizafokht Why does Europe need to be in the room? They've taken their instructions from US until now, what changed?

[Ben Hopkinson @Ben_A_Hopkinson]

Government imposed policy costs make up 57% of the clearing price of a new flat in London and 42% of a new home in the Home Counties.

Despite a big housing shortage and positive planning reforms, new home starts in England are declining from 182,000 in 2022 to under 125,000 last year.

While the macroeconomic context has worsened with build cost inflation and high interest rates, the Government is imposing more burdens on new homes, not fewer.

Taxes, levies, planning, and mandates add over £440,000 to the cost of delivering a home in London and nearly £225,000 nearby, with several of these imposed recently like the Second Staircase, Future Homes Standard, Building Safety Levy, Biodiversity Net Gain and Residential Property Developer Tax.

Individually these may be justified, but together they are making new homes unviable.

As a result, large developers are buying less land and small builders are going out of business; nearly 4,000 construction firms went bust just last year.

If we want to build more homes, we should be easing the burdens on them, not adding more.

Making housebuilding viable again is the most important issue in housing policy and my co-author, Edward Donovan, has completed excellent modelling showing how big the challenge is.

Read the full report: https://t.co/NWS58oqbTx

And simulate what changing the policies does with Edward's modelling here: https://t.co/IVrLBax2pz

[iang @iang_fc]

@antilachrymose @caitoz It's not bad faith if you're part of the IDF propaganda team.

If you're not part, it's as if. Good luck with your obfuscation programme. We have elephants to get out of the room, and aren't concerned about flies.

[iang @iang_fc]

@antilachrymose @caitoz You're literally inserting "only" and "all" when OP said just use "overwhelming majority" if you like, and if you don't like it, you're arguing in bad faith.

Inserting strawmans is not engaging, it's opposing without an opposing argument.

[iang @iang_fc]

@antilachrymose @caitoz Calling someone out on the difference between a hypothetical and a "fact" when it's plainly obvious that Israel's genocide is causing a rise in anger against Jews ...

Is exactly the same obfuscation as injecting "anti-semitism" into the conversation.

It's not serious.

[iang @iang_fc]

@LanderPeterjohn Most or all bank interfaces that are 'new' are really bad. The capability of banks (or telcos) to put together UX has dropped remarkably over the years. Enshitification has become standard.

And then you add urgent actions into the mix and it becomes a hateful experience.

[iang @iang_fc]

Chips would be an unlikely sink of surplus surpluses. The depreciation of them follows e.g., Moore's law so too fast to be a store of value. That is, it's only going to work if there is sustained productive demand for them.

Also, chips need energy, so large installations are spottable by energy monitoring techniques. Eg bitcoin miners being spotted by marijuana surveillance.

(Just speculating...)

[iang @iang_fc]

@LanderPeterjohn KYC is just anger fuel and automation is just throwing more petrol on a burning pyre 🔥

[iang @iang_fc]

@leashless Whatever happened to that institute for resilience studies? Surely this would be their day.

[iang @iang_fc]

There is now an open mystery on the net:

Why are Western governments asking people to 'prep' -- to buy & hold supplies?

1. Obviously coordinated.
2. Reasons, where stated, don't make sense.
3. Supplies listed in the prepping advice make little sense.

What is also interesting is that this mystery isn't limited to a small intelligentsia or conspiracy corner - it's been spotted by ordinary folk. This is good - it signals a growing awareness that the governments of the day are routinely lying to the people.

[iang @iang_fc]

@antilachrymose @caitoz I'm just commenting on what I've seen.

"Israel stops" might be relevant if Israel stopped. But precious little evidence of that, so the causality between Israel's actions and hate of Jews remains simple & strong. And hypotheticals aren't that interesting while a genocide rolls.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1968 more than a third of adults in England and Wales did not have a single tooth of their own. In parts of the north a full set of extractions was a twenty-first birthday present, and a bride's father paid to have her teeth out before the wedding.

It was considered a kindness. The teeth were going to go anyway, everybody's did, so you had the lot out young, the good ones along with the bad, and spared your future husband thirty years of dentist's bills. A girl walked down the aisle in new dentures the way she might now have her hair done. If you are over 60 you probably knew the glass on your nan's bedside table.

Nobody thought it strange, because nobody could remember anything else. Britain was getting through about 2lb of sugar a head every week, in tea, jam, biscuits and white bread, and had been since Victoria. Mouths were rotten by twenty. The conclusion the country drew, across three generations, was that British teeth were weak.

Dig up a medieval English churchyard and most of the dead still have theirs.

Faced with a food destroying a body part, a whole nation kept the food and removed the body part, did it to its daughters as a gift, and called the problem hereditary.

We do it with stomachs now.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Ukrainians tell pollsters that they want a negotiated end to the war while western proxy warriors chomp on cheesy carb snacks and tweet from their sofas about how great it is to throw Ukrainian bodies into the meat grinder.

[iang @iang_fc]

"the overwhelming majority of the 0.1% instances of actual antisemitism are caused by Israel's genocide and warmongering and would go away if Israel stopped butchering children under the banner of the Star of David."

? Seems about right to me. I've seen an explosion in the last 4 years of people that hate Jews. And it's always bc of Israel's genocide.

[iang @iang_fc]

MPs & Lords in Britain do not want to be included in the Hillsborough Law, which would make it a criminal offence to lie in public affairs.

Hold their toes to the fire: https://t.co/OLnLhFPV5B

[Mark Ames @MarkAmesExiled]

The pro-Ukraine war cause summed up in a tweet

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The dog exists because Ice Age hunters could not live on lean meat.

Wolves and people wanted the same animals, and for a long time nobody could explain why a band of hunters would feed a rival through a winter. In 2021 a team of Finnish researchers did the sums for the coldest stretch of the last Ice Age and found the answer in the human liver.

By late winter a reindeer or a horse has burned through its fat and is nearly all muscle. A person can only clear so much protein. Push it much past a third of what you eat and you get sick, then weak, then worse, however full your stomach is. So a hunting band took what it needed, the marrow, the brain, the tongue, every scrap of fat, and was left sitting on a heap of lean meat it could not safely finish.

A wolf can live on lean meat for months.

The surplus went to the pups by the fire. Nobody was competing for it. A few thousand winters of that and you have a dog.

So the oldest friendship on earth rests on one fact about your metabolism: you are the fat-eater in the partnership. Your ancestors dealt with the skinless chicken breast twenty thousand years ago by throwing it to the wolf.

Today the lean cut is on your plate with a health sticker on it, and his descendant gets a brown biscuit made of maize.

He was better fed in the Ice Age. So were you.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Very thought-provoking argument by Louis-Vincent Gave @gave_vincent, co-founder and CEO of Gavekal (one of the most respected macro research firms on China).

His argument - which is correct - is that one of the The biggest problem for Western governments today (be it France, the UK, the US) is the rapidly rising cost of funding their debt.

He says that governments have 3 broad ways to get it under control:

1) Austerity, cutting spending massively, which basically no politician wants to do because it makes you massively unpopular

2) Specific to the US, they could dramatically reduce AI data center spending, which soaks up a huge share of the world’s capital and pushes up borrowing costs for everyone, governments included. Not good either since it kills the AI boom.

3) Or, they can go back to embracing China, which he calls "the one deflationary force in the world today." He says it's by far the easiest path, and policymakers always take the easiest path.

Louis-Vincent argues that's exactly what Mark Carney (“the least dumb of the western leaders today,” in Gave’s words) did when he opened Canada to Chinese cars: it's a cheap and easy way to fight inflation, and to reduce the cost of funding Canada’s debt in the process.

It's fairly ironic when you think about it: you can actually find plenty of quotes by Western officials castigating China for "exporting deflation" (like Klaas Knot from the European Central Bank here: https://t.co/Kl9W8QaA3U). Louis-Vincent’s argument is basically that, sooner or later, folks in Western finance ministries are going to look at bond yields, then at the inflation numbers, then at all those speeches about China exporting deflation, and go like: "wait a minute..." 😏

Full video of Louis-Vincent’s interview here: https://t.co/CiPX6Dds1R

[iang @iang_fc]

"So we're now in a position where we have gigawatts of windmills installed, doing absolutely bugger all, at times when people are known to need heating and lighting. So now we're scrambling for gas from whatever we can find it, regardless of the cost - and making "resilience" plans for the near future when the grid stops working completely (which they will blame on Russian hackers)."

[iang @iang_fc]

@leashless So, there's a compelling argument that the driver in Europe at least is the climate change everything-renewals debacle, where baseload was gone & the wind stopped - dunkelflaute.

https://t.co/yje5AfRTKe

Eg Spain last year or Germany's cold snap a decade ago. Coming to UK.

[Pete North @FUDdaily]

The grid is looking precarious this winter. Grid balancing costs keep spiking off the charts. I've seen all manner of creative excuses this morning but this is a crisis tewnty years in the making. It was around 2008, or thereabouts, when I joined a large energy firm to do a highly uninteresting job, only made interesting by way of my co-worker being one of the lead programmers on the energy trading desk who explained to me in great detail how the grid works.

I was already dimly aware of the overall energy strategy. The idea was that we were going to blow up our coal power stations and build windmills instead, on the presumption that "the wind is always blowing somewhere" and that the easter bunny would intervene in the event there was no wind.

But we knew about dunkelflaute even back then. They knew very will the wind is not always blowing somewhere. But this was a manageable problem because there wasn't all that much wind capacity to offset. You could disguise the problem with importing energy through interconnectors. It was a relatively small problem that could be disguised.

But then we did start blowing up our coal power stations, letting our nuclear power age out, and didn't bother to replace our baseload capacity. We instead built windmills. Rather a lot of them. We built them in far away places, requiring long transmission lines for intermittent power that the grid struggles to assimilate.

Making up the shortfall always depended on gas because most large energy plants can't be ramped up and down at a moment's notice. The problems started when shortfalls were measured in gigawatts. The more windmills you added, the greater the instability.

This was known in 2008 and the problem was never acknowledged. Even back then, realists were saying this only had one destination; rolling blackouts. It's been looking hairy since 2022, and the situation has only worsened, exacerbated by a deliberate decision to run down and close our gas storage facilities, making us more reliant on the day-to-day gas market - which is notoriously volatile, especially when wars break out in our vicinity.

Some renewable energy enthusiasts did acknowledge this might be a problem, but they said it would be a small problem, and that by now, there would be millions of electric cars plugged into the grid that grid operators could use to even out shortages of wind. On paper that was a good idea, if only to even out the odd hour of wind loss. The strategy, though did not address the prospect of days and weeks of cold conditions with no wind, or the fact that nobody wants an EV.

As more wind generation was added to the grid, this problem became bigger and bigger, with no real thought as to what was going to keep the lights on in a crisis. We also banned extraction of our own fossil fuel reserves meaning that we are now wholly dependent on gas imports from wherever we can get it.

Now at this point, if you're not politically attuned, you're probably thinking this is a seriously dumb policy that's so dumb that our politicians couldn't possibly have been this retarded, so there must be some other explanation. If only that were true.

The problem is that a number of subsidies and market incentives were put in place so that the energy sector would concentrate on building windmills. There was (and is) big money involved, so there is a very influential wind energy lobby that misdirects the national conversation and influences our MPs. They are easily bamboozled and incredibly gullible.

Consequently, realists lost the argument. The warnings we've seen in recent years from the indefatigable @KathrynPorter26 (et al) are just the latest generation of energy wonks to notice that making your power grid weather dependent is a shit idea.

Anyone raising the alarm is immediately accused of being a "climate denier" despite warnings from them that there are certain facets of the climate that we ought to pay more attention to. Namely that Europe is prone to protracted periods without wind and sunshine. While our Liberian energy minister can be forgiven for not knowing this, her many predecessors cannot.

So we're now in a position where we have gigawatts of windmills installed, doing absolutely bugger all, at times when people are known to need heating and lighting. So now we're scrambling for gas from whatever we can find it, regardless of the cost - and making "resilience" plans for the near future when the grid stops working completely (which they will blame on Russian hackers).

This is made all the more precarious because the European power stations we import from have more demand than usual, not least because of the dry conditions this summer, meaning hydro is less available, and we're feeding cruise missiles into a regional conflict that is currently demolishing European grid infrastructure.

This would be a good time to fire up our redundant coal burning stations, but the last Tory government demolished them. This is a situation that energy analysts are describing as "bad".

Of course, that is a matter of perspective. Should there be a cold spell where the grid trips out for weeks, or we're reduced to energy rationing, many of you will simply die, thereby reducing demands on the grid and other public services. This is a necessary sacrifice toward our green energy future which, after all, is the priority here. We no longer cling to the archaic idea that the grid should serve the needs of the economy. It is we who must change!

[iang @iang_fc]

@Adrian123kek @leashless calls it the Black Elephant (in the room).