Thurston Hyde

[Arthur Downing @DowningAm]

"Decline is a choice". It’s a phrase having a moment.

One of the most famous theories of *why* nations decline was made by Mancur Olson in 1982. He argued stability was a drag. Without exogenous disruption societies silt up with lobby groups that throttle growth.

To update one corner of his theory I build a database of the 80,000 lobbying associations that exist in Britain today. The rate of formation has inexorably accelerated since the 1970s.

New piece on the endogenous production of red tape 👇

[Despotic Inroad @DespoticInroad]

I find this “defence as an engine for growth” stuff v tiresome. THERE ARE FEW THINGS LESS EFFECTIVE TO SPEND MONEY ON IF YOU WANT ECONOMIC MULTIPLIERS/LONG-TERM PRODUCTIVITY GAINS ETC.

Capital expenditure on: transport infrastructure + energy grid/generation + housebuilding + digital infrastructure/connectivity + investment in skills training are absolutely foundational for future growth.

We’re talking about depriving these areas of £££ so that we can give more contracts to Raytheon & BAE for shitty equipment that doesn’t work/is unsuited to modern warfare. We’re fretting over our ability to protect bases in Bahrain, defend the UAE from attack (for some reason) & send frigates to Cyprus, when we can’t build infrastructure outside of London, can’t stop daily dinghies arriving on the Kent coastline, we’ve effectively legalised petty criminality, & we’ve seen 0 real wage/productivity growth in ~20yrs.

I’m all for targeted defence-industrial investment that’s GENUINELY leveraged to NATIONAL production/regional manufacturing jobs/NATIONAL resilience etc.:
👉Shift £££ from maintaining foreign bases/overseas deployments to domestic supply chains in post-industrial areas, making drone equipment, conventional weapons etc.
👉Supporting R&D in advanced materials, AI systems, microchips, satellite/space technologies etc with dual military/civilian uses
👉Boost cyber defences, national cyber resilience & attack capabilities
👉Drive to energy independence via nuclear, O&G, AND renewable investment; drive to food security

I’m not, however, prepared to forgo much-needed investment in civilian infrastructure & the public realm in order to placate the Sensible Realists™️who insist the most pressing issue facing the country is the fact that we can’t punctually deploy the Royal Navy to the Gulf, or that we’re “losing our influence” on the “world stage”, or that we, a rich island NATO member in the Eastern Atlantic, apparently can’t defend ourselves from a country 1500 miles away that’s unable to hold territory in a poor, corrupt, Russian-speaking, Russian Orthodox region of a non-NATO neighbour, full of people who used to vote for pro-Kremlin oligarchs.

It’s insane, frankly.

[Thurston Hyde @thurhyde]

I really like the Dacia Hipster, hope it makes production. Want to see more cars with no-frills functionalism.

https://t.co/Q6wLmwgLky

[Thurston Hyde @thurhyde]

@seld_on I really like this idea. Weaponise their own gay little marketing strategy against them.

"Oh, you think your product is a security risk? Thanks for letting us know. Please now cease operations."

[Seldon @seld_on]

Reminder: they do all this to hype their product, not because it can actually create a superweapon or end the world

[Thurston Hyde @thurhyde]

@RossKempsell The fundamentals fucking suck and the entire thing is sustained by ephemeral hype.

[Thurston Hyde @thurhyde]

@AdrianBonenber1 @edzitron @MerrynSW Its actual TAM is quite small. Outside of militaries and airlines (already tapped), all it has that couldn't just choose broadband or cell networks are off grid communities - not really people with much spending power.

[Thurston Hyde @thurhyde]

@lifeisnotanovel @SO3_Clausewitz Who is shilling this guy? Feels like the intelligence community's candidate, utter AstroTurf with all the establishment press claiming that he's leadership material.

[Thurston Hyde @thurhyde]

@seld_on I genuinely find myself despairing at the hype for the gadgetbahn tier shit.

There are real orbital industrial niches and the market is hyped about a fucking server rack for some slop LLM.

[Thurston Hyde @thurhyde]

@rah_66_comanche The optics and hard engineering of the good and glorious biz are being used to massage some predatory VC Ponzi tier shit. It's vile.

[Thurston Hyde @thurhyde]

@rah_66_comanche The core launch biz is incredible. Falcon 9 and Heavy are amazing and have caused a space renaissance.

Starship is a nonsensical and fragile boondoggle that is stuck in development hell, and basic thermal management questions nix ODCs.

[Adam Wren @aswren]

For all the rhetoric about ‘rising above hate’ and ‘divisive language’. There’s no compelling answer from the left about how to actually stop this, and as it continues to happen the public will continue to move violently to the right

[Thurston Hyde @thurhyde]

I love the core space launch business of SpaceX.

But the Starship programme, AI, and orbtial data centres are stupid fucking bets and the fact that so many boomer morons don't both to do the basic due diligence on these is ridiculous. Completely overvalued.

[Thurston Hyde @thurhyde]

@TomChivers It's disingenuous that you're just using real scepticism about productivity gains as part of this strawman.

Sheer lines of code and releases do not matter. Revenue at AI firms is terrible and almost certainly borderline fraudulent.

[Thurston Hyde @thurhyde]

@TomChivers Your entire narrative is predicated on an extremely speculative and vague story as to how AI will actually drive productivity growth.

[Firas Modad @firasmodad]

This immoral emotional blackmail demands a response.

The duties of a leader include prudence and justice. It was always evident that mass immigration would trigger violence, precisely because it is unjust. And the system that is required to compel the public to tolerate mass immigration has been especially and exceptionally unjust.

The violence we are seeing in Britain was entirely predictable. Of course, each individual is responsible for his own actions. But those most responsible are certainly the evil maniacs who imposed this experiment on an unwilling public. It was their failures in their duties, and their clinging to delusional utopianism even as it turned into a nightmarish bloodbath, that led to yesterday's violence.

It's no use trying to hide behind children or their beds, Matthew. Your unhinged worldview, and your insistence upon it in the teeth of all the evidence, is the primary culprit. You failed as a leader and now your entire nation is paying the price.

[Aris Roussinos @arisroussinos]

After taking this photo of burned out houses in East Belfast, two local lads scrolled through my phone photo library to ensure I hadn’t captured any faces, telling me “with no animosity, like” to “fuck away off before you get kneecapped”

[Aris Roussinos @arisroussinos]

Burning barricades being set up in North Queen St, North Belfast (taking photos not advisable)

[Seldon @seld_on]

Most of the largest investors in US AI projects are based in Asia, SoftBank being the most notable. SoftBank itself is heavily backed by GCC sovereign wealth funds, who also invest directly in US ventures as well. And as we all know, that Gulf money comes from oil.

Institutional investors in Asia and the Middle East flock to US financial markets chasing yields or a safe haven, or both. Their countries have current account surpluses, either from being a petrostate or because of high-end manufacturing. It is useless to simply hold a bunch of dollars, so those has to be reinvested somewhere where there is actual growth (and where the investment won't magically disappear because of corruption, etc).

An energy supply shock due to the ongoing war in the Persian Gulf cuts this flow of capital. For the Gulf countries, if they can't export, they don't make any money, which they need to import goods they are vitally dependent upon.

If energy prices rise, the cost of manufacturing increases across the board. Helium also comes from natural gas extraction, and this is needed for EUV chip fabrication; most of the helium used by Asian manufacturers comes from the Gulf. Overall this leads to more expensive finished products, particularly consumer electronics, causing a drop in overall demand, and so forth.

Expensive energy also makes everything else more expensive, everywhere. This leads to a global economic contraction.

This is incredibly bad for AI firms because they have highly aggressive growth models which are predicated upon AI delivering economic expansion via massive increases in productivity. But if consumption declines for exogenous reasons, those improvements simply won't matter and the entire scheme collapses.