UK government choices for Chancellor:
Ed Miliband: zero private sector economics or financial experience.
Wes Streeting: zero private sector economics or financial experience.
Shabana Mahmood: zero private sector economics or financial experience.
America's equivalent....
Scott Bessent: Founded his own macro hedge fund, was CIO at Soros Fund Management, 30 years managing global capital
Comedic contrast. The UK has a political competency crisis
While we are doing our autopsies of Keir Starmer’s unimpressive premiership, I’d like to suggest he is a prime example of a certain personality type that causes us problems.
He has been a high achiever his whole life. From the 11+ onwards he passed tests and ascended every hierarchy he found himself in. This, I believe, shaped his worldview in a way that made him absolutely unsuited for the office.
For Starmer, you accept the rules of the system, you play the game, and when you win you get rewards. Number 10 was just the last objective that he earned by mechanically playing society like a video game - it was his by right for ticking all the boxes correctly.
His visible confusion and inability to grasp the job of actual leadership is, I think, a result of never having had to deal with the world beyond whichever social game he was playing at the time. Law is such a bounded game where a rigid, goal oriented thinker like Starmer can and did thrive.
A better leader would be someone who has some experience doing something which contacts base reality, where outcomes are not socially determined. Business, STEM, the military etc all fall into this category. Those people who spend their careers in the purely social feedback loops of law and politics do I think make poor leaders even if they excel at the process that gets them to the leadership.
I know what you’re thinking. The biggest majority in a generation. A historic landslide, a singular mandate, zero organised opposition. How is it even possible for me to fuck this up?
Refill your popcorn. You’ll love this next part.
Wild animal vaccines are a thing. In 1978, Switzerland airdropped 4,000 vaccine-laden chicken heads from helicopters over the Alps. And it worked: fox rabies was eliminated.
For most of history, our approach to sick wild animals was to treat it as not our problem. Turns out that was a bad idea, because roughly 60% of human infectious diseases come from wild animals.
So scientists got creative. Rabies was spreading through raccoons, foxes and coyotes despite culling hundreds of thousands of them — which, besides being grim, didn't even work. The solution? Hide vaccines inside food and let the animals vaccinate themselves while having no idea they're participating in a public health program.
Switzerland went first. Their method of choice was vaccine-stuffed chicken heads, which were thrown out of helicoters. This eliminated fox rabies from the entire country by 1999.
The US followed with fishmeal blocks dropped near dumpsters to vaccinate raccoons. They now distribute up to 10 million baits a year. This is how Texas wiped out two rabies variants entirely. Vaccinating wild animals is cost effective: every dollar spent saved up to $13 in human treatment costs.
Now we're going further. Australia approved a koala chlamydia vaccine in 2025 (yes, koalas have chlamydia). Researchers are also developing anti-fungal gels for bats.
And we are moving on the "philosophical" dimension too.Disease isn’t bad solely because it threatens a species’s survival but because it causes suffering. Every koala or raccoon that contracts a fatal illness spends days or weeks vomiting, seizing, blind, feverish, or paralyzed. None can hope for treatment. Then, alone and in pain, they die. We can prevent this!
Complaining about nightlife when you *checks notes* choose to live in Soho is like living in South Kensington and complaining about the museums. Or moving to Hackney and grumbling about creatives. Living in Richmond and hating green space. It's all getting a bit silly, isn't it?
Everyone who tries to debunk this resorts to sci-fi stuff like asteroid mining, missing out on the much more obvious point that: (at current growth rates) world gdp per capita in 2100 will still be far below Denmark's in 2026
Given the Danes emit less CO2 per capita (4.34T) than the world average (4.89T) and life there shows no signs of butting up against the edges of thermodynamic limits, its clear we are very very far away from this being a problem
The last remaining person in Parliament who served in the Armed Forces in the Second World War retired on Wednesday.
Labour peer Lord Christopher, aged 101, bowed out, 81 years after WWII ended.