Kieron

[Matthew Syed @matthewsyed]

Starmer was hated. Says far more about the electorate than the man. Impossible to govern when people want welfare, triple lock, tax loopholes, NIMBYist vetoes, while also hating the low growth, high debt economy this entails. Starmer was a good man leading an ungovernable country

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

This is the worst “strong support” I’ve ever received.

However, the malevolent uselessness of @EnvAgency is not limited to the recent incident on the Aldersbrook. Over the last 10 years I have been battling, along with hundreds of dedicated local volunteers, to protect & restore the River Roding against all the odds. The Environment Agency has not lifted a finger to help in these actions & indeed has often been a blocker to our work on the river.

Here’s some examples of the “strong support” we’ve received from the Environment Agency over the years… 🧵

[Wolfgang Richter @WolfgangRichtEU]

I recently gave a lecture on how to manage government agencies at a Pan-European event. I shared what I call "The Big Four" rules.

(1) Don’t let new employees lower morale amongst the older workers by being productive. Take the least productive person and set that as the bar.

(2) Always demand more money, even if you don’t need it. Worst case you can distribute this to your friends through contracts. This way all agencies grow each year, leading to an ever-expanding and more powerful state.

(3) Our main task is taxing productive people and redistributing it in accordance with our morally superior agenda (immigrants, LGBTQ, ecology). This can upset and reduce morale amongst the productive base, so use the threat of cancellation by the mainstream media to control dissent.

(4) Don’t hire people capable of critical thought. They may challenge state ideology with facts and the appropriateness of appointing unqualified political allies to important roles. Critical thinkers are therefore dangerous to the state.

Have a wonderful European weekend,

Wolfgang

[Kieron @kieronscrutton]

OMG. This is just awful.

[Sarah Pochin MP @SarahForRuncorn]

For the sake of women’s safety we need England to keep winning 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

[Peter Berezin @PeterBerezinBCA]

Cross-ownership among AI companies is artificially inflating profits. The “other income” category was equal to 40% of hyperscaler operating profits in Q1, mainly reflecting mark-to-market gains on their holdings of private companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI.

[Windrush WASP @WindrushWasp]

@WaterUK It was an amazing achievement conducted under public ownership by the way. Then you came along and trashed it to extract cash.

[Handre @Handre]

In 1968, while teenage Red Guards beat their professors to death with clubs in Beijing courtyards, Jean-Paul Sartre sat in Paris calling Mao's Cultural Revolution a model of revolutionary democracy. The most celebrated intellectual in France looked at a country burning its own libraries and saw liberation. He sold the Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple on French street corners himself, holding it aloft like a sacrament.

Consider what he was endorsing. Between 1966 and 1976, the Cultural Revolution killed somewhere between 500,000 and two million people. Schools shut down across the entire country. Students dragged teachers onto stages, hung placards around their necks, forced them to kneel on broken glass, then murdered them. The historian Bian Zhongyun, vice-principal of a girls' school in Beijing, died on August 5, 1966, beaten by her own students with nail-studded clubs. Sartre called this the people governing themselves.

You should understand why a man this intelligent got it this wrong. Sartre believed knowledge served power, that truth was whatever the revolution required, that the individual existed to be dissolved into the collective will. So when Mao abolished the distinction between teacher and student, between expert and mob, Sartre cheered. He had spent decades arguing that bourgeois reason was a class weapon. Here was a regime taking him at his word and clubbing the reasoners to death.

This is what economic illiteracy buys you. A university, a price, a contract, and a peasant's grain stockpile all carry knowledge that no central planner can seize or replicate. Mises explained the calculation problem in 1920. Hayek explained dispersed knowledge in 1945. Sartre had access to both and chose the dunce cap of the collective instead, then handed out its propaganda on the Rue de Rennes.

He died in 1980, mourned by 50,000 followers, never having retracted a word about Mao. The professors of Beijing got no such funeral. They got a ditch, and a philosopher in Paris explaining that their murder was freedom.

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Victoria Derbyshire, "Elon Musk had already hit out, calling the UK a police state"

"Adding, the real goal is to enable the UK government to track everyone"

Speaking of tracking people, here are 30 ways Twitter does it:

1. Account activity (posts, likes, reposts, follows, replies, searches)
2. Time spent viewing specific posts
3. Clicks on links and media
4. Cookies stored in your browser
5. IP address
6. Device identifiers
7. Browser fingerprinting signals (browser type, screen size, language settings, etc.)
8. Mobile advertising IDs (Android Advertising ID, Apple Advertising Identifier where available)
9. Location data (GPS if permitted, IP-based location, Wi-Fi/network information)
10. Contact uploads (if you grant access)
11. Email address and phone number
12. Payment information (for paid services)
13. Cross-device matching (linking your phone, tablet, and computer to the same user)
14. Embedded X posts on third-party websites
15. X Pixel tracking on external websites
16. Websites using X advertising or conversion tools
17. Apps using X SDKs or integrations
18. Login with X integrations on third-party sites
19. Ad interactions and conversions
20. Inferred interests and behavioural profiling
21. Social graph analysis (who you follow, interact with, and are connected to)
22. Content analysis of posts, messages, and media
23. Network and connection information (mobile carrier, ISP, network type)
24. Diagnostic and crash reports from the app
25. Approximate location derived from activity patterns
26. Data obtained from advertising partners and data providers
27. Engagement with videos (watch time, rewatches, completion rates)
28. Search history on the platform
29. Hashtags, topics, and communities you engage with
30. Account recovery and security information

[Kieron @kieronscrutton]

@bobservant I am guessing you have strong and longstanding connections with both Ghana and Panama as well?

[Kieron @kieronscrutton]

@MichaelKantro Are these earnings containing MTM investments treated as earnings on circular investments between AI co’s and Mag 7?

[Handre @Handre]

McDonald's announced they're replacing cashiers with kiosks in California just after the $20 minimum wage kicked in. Shocking to absolutely no one who understands basic economics. When you artificially price labor above its market value, employers find substitutes. Machines, automation, or they simply eliminate positions entirely.

The teenagers who desperately need that first job experience? Gone. The single mother trying to re-enter the workforce after years away? Priced out by someone with more skills. You've just created a legal barrier that prevents the least skilled workers from competing on the one thing they had going for them: willingness to work for less while they build experience.

Politicians pat themselves on the back for "helping workers" while unemployment among young minorities hits double digits. The workers who keep their jobs benefit (temporarily), but the invisible victims, those who never get hired in the first place, don't make headlines. Economics doesn't care about your good intentions.

[Vfynn_🥷🏼 𐙚 @Vfynn_]

🚨🗣️New: Thierry Henry reacts to the USA vs Paraguay stoppage for TV commercials:

“I’ve spent my entire life in this beautiful game — as a player at the highest level, as a fan, and now as someone who analyses it every week — and what unfolded during that USA versus Paraguay match left me deeply frustrated. The fourth official standing there on the touchline, arm raised high, instructing the referee to hold the restart… not for any injury, not for tactical reasons, and not even primarily for player hydration in that scorching heat. No. It was because the broadcast team hadn’t finished airing all their commercials. That’s not football. That’s a television show pretending to be a World Cup match.

The beautiful game is being strangled by greed. Players are out there in the heat, ready to restart, momentum building like a storm about to break — and we pause everything so the sponsors can cash in. It’s like stopping a symphony mid-crescendo because the advertisers want their jingle heard. Football didn’t conquer the world by turning into American sports with endless timeouts and ad breaks. We had rhythm, flow, emotion that flowed like a river. Now? It’s dammed up for dollars.

This isn’t about hydration or player welfare anymore — it’s a slippery slope where the soul of the game is sold piece by piece. Fans deserve better. Players deserve better. The referee on that pitch looked like a puppet on strings controlled from some broadcast truck. Enough is enough. We need to protect what made this sport the greatest on Earth before it disappears completely.”

The World Cup should be football’s cathedral. Instead, we’re turning it into a shopping mall with a pitch in the middle.

And here’s the question nobody wants to answer: if the fourth official is waiting for commercials, then who is really running the game? FIFA? The referee? Or the broadcasters?

Because the moment football starts asking advertisers for permission before asking the players, you’ve crossed a line.

The World Cup is supposed to be the showcase of football. Not the showcase of who paid the most for airtime.”

[Kieron @kieronscrutton]

@PPGMacro And I remember that we all knew that https://t.co/l3AUFDNxlI was never going to be a success but thought that there would be “a greater fool” to sell to.

I can’t think of any IPO’s like that today!

[Kieron @kieronscrutton]

@hkuppy I’m hoping that there is also hurricane risk downside?

Ideally the cost of insurance but partnered with the unlikelihood of a successful claim post outage?

[Kieron @kieronscrutton]

@UltraRunnerPod Material World by Ed Conway.

It is fascinating. But you will annoy the person in the seat next to you by repeatedly asking, “Did you know that …”

[@Athirty4 @Athirty4]

@Feargal_Sharkey One for you, Feargal. I put the sign up a couple of hours ago or so.

[Kieron @kieronscrutton]

@ttmygh But … $13k !!

[Kieron @kieronscrutton]

@catdeans @denbypottery If you want to support Denby, then buy their products.

Don’t ask the taxpayer to step in.

And you should, they are great and last decades.

[Nico @NicoHQ1]

“I think I’m going to cry. It’s an absolute monster!!”

Fully appropriate reaction 😂