Jim

Working in Technology. Passionate about inclusion. Cofounded and sold a digital product agency. Not as active on twitter as I once was.

[Jim @jimhead]

@ItsJamesHall Have kids it’s worse. Yes can dump into pension but hundreds of thousands now keeping post tax living costs below £67k? What does that do for economy?

[Jim @jimhead]

@DanNeidle @maxwell_marlow @CommonsHCLG improve mobility and productivity of the whole economy? I paid ~ £60k stamp duty 3 years ago. Better I pay circa £3k a year for a similar prop. Give me credit for what I paid, and scale down and up based on last transaction date. It's political will that's the problem.

[Jim @jimhead]

One need not hope to undertake, nor succeed to persevere

[Jim @jimhead]

@DanNeidle @Heccles94 Not only that. But are those brackets collapsing in NI. Which has some very odd brackets. And pensioners do not pay.

It’s surprisingly difficult to fix. Once you realise the detail.

Not so difficult: get rid of the existing awful cliff edges and 60% bracket.

[Jim @jimhead]

Potential sequel to “bowling alone?”

[Jim @jimhead]

@MontyCristo11 @OliDugmore Yeah okay. I think it’s dangerous that no one is focussed upon the group that pays half of all income tax. It’s seen as ignorable.

[Jim @jimhead]

@MontyCristo11 @OliDugmore People earning over 100k pay roughly 50% of all income tax. So even if it’s a small 6% of taxpayers… smoothing out some of the cliff edges would help everyone. The 100k-125k 60% tax rate creates a bunch of perverse incentives.

[Jim @jimhead]

@RP98989534 @robprogressive Top 5% of earners contribute roughly 50% of income tax receipts. So you can say who cares but it’s matters more than the 5% looks initially.

[Jim @jimhead]

imagine if developers talked about scrum masters as much as scrum masters talk about developers

[Jim @jimhead]

The genius of windows: Warns me it will restart in 10 minutes. So I restart immediately then join the meeting. Windows restarts again without warning at the 10 minute mark. Technically, it did warn me.

[Ben Southwood @bswud]

Park Lane is an essential part of London's road network, so getting rid of it would be foolish. But what about burying it?

It would restore the easy link between Mayfair and Hyde Park, dramatically improve the public environment on one of London's most famous roads, and release 6.5 hectares of land.

Floorspace there sells for about £2,000 per sqft (and sometimes more, see https://t.co/MBgvlAKMi6), so if we achieved a net floor-area ratio of 8, implying buildings of 16 storeys or so, after putting aside land for a bus and cycle lane, access streets, plus staircases and amenities, we could generate gross:

£20,000 (price per square metre of floorspace) * 6.5 (hectares) * 10,000 (square metres per hectare) * 8 (net FAR) = £10 billion.

After build costs for the buildings that would be more like £7.5 billion. So the upside is £7.5 billion, or so. How much would it cost to cut and cover that strip of land?

The Hindhead Tunnel, the UK's longest non-estuarial road tunnel, was completed in 2011 at a cost of about £50 million per lane-km in today's money: the most expensive road tunnel ever in the UK. It was bored, rather than cut and cover, which usually makes things more expensive, but let's assume conservatively that this is the cost.

£50 (million per lane-km) * 6 (lanes) * 1.3 (kilometres) = £390 million. So our scheme nets out at about £7 billion of profit. Let's say £6 billion, just in case reinforcing the road's roof costs more than we think, or to make sure there is passive provision for railway rights of way we might want to put in the space of the tunnel

Of course, it's not that simple. If you are a Londoner or tourist and you don't drive through London, and you don't own a property currently fronting Hyde Park, then this scheme is a pure benefit for you. But drivers lose out temporarily, during construction, and Park Lane hotel owners lose out permanently. Park Lane itself gets much nicer (less noise, pollution, and traffic), but the prestige of the address falls, and in some properties the views and light might get worse. How to fix this?

I suggest that to pull off this scheme you would give a substantial portion of the benefit to the owners of the properties immediately fronting Hyde Park, on Park Lane.

What I would do is a sort of bespoke land readjustment. I would create a special purpose vehicle company, of whose shares some minority share were owned by the Mayor of London and Westminster Council, and another share were given to the owners of Park Lane properties, in proportion to their value. I would grant planning permission to pull off this development, probably by special development order (https://t.co/MwEdAYLlHj), subject to some charge, on the condition that two thirds of the owners of Park Lane properties voted for it to go ahead. I think the large financial benefit would make the owners see sense (but I don't think they will lose anything remotely like £6 billion in total, so I don't think we need to give them all the value).

Park Lane is a special case, because it's such a no brainer, but if we did generate expertise at burying roads, then London is scarred by some very nasty at-grade motorways. I grew up on the A3 and it really should be underground between Tolworth and Putney/Wandsworth. I live right by the A2 now and I think similarly for certain sections. There are many other cases. If we could get costs down to £10 or 20 million per lane kilometre then we could really go gangbusters.

[Victoria Repa @RepaVictoria]

5 Japanese techniques every leader should know👇

[Jim @jimhead]

is prices law why people always call me square

[Jim @jimhead]

Remember what Twitter was innocent enough that a post like this made sense: Whenever you are thinking of bringing me cake: double it.

[Jim @jimhead]

Amazing that you can write this article and not suggest... building more houses...

https://t.co/S7v3cHwx2r

[Jim @jimhead]

10k iterations not 10k hours. Nice. Why didn’t I think of that.

[Jim @jimhead]

CO2 levels alarmingly high on my 90 minute Thameslink commute. Can’t really open a window. Not great

[Jim @jimhead]

@antony So yeah. Nikon 105mm f/1.4. That would be the one. £1000 second hand though…. sheeeit.

[Jim @jimhead]

Interesting to use a Nikon D610 and a 24-70mm f/2.8 VR lens for photography of an indoor fairly low-light conference. Absolutely at the edge of good enough light. Would upgrading the D610 help... reviews aren't clear. A 70-200mm would be a great add too for reach.

[Jim @jimhead]

@antony Interesting. I was trying to not get too close to the stage to be a distraction. But maybe fixed 100mm ish f1-2 is a good look.