T.W. Webb

Will is everything.

[Samuel Hughes @SCP_Hughes]

The elites of Victorian Britain got up late, drank ceaselessly, worked short hours, partied through the night, and knew nothing about science, technology or engineering. And yet, by their own lights, they were hugely effective.

https://t.co/TvbuWtaPRJ

The Victorians are often held up as a model against the supposedly soft, feckless, humanities-educated elites of today. But I argue that the genius of their system may have been its drastic weighting towards soft skills, team-building and intra-elite networking:

- A Victorian’s gentleman’s office hours typically began about 11am and finished about 5pm, including a multi-course lunch with wine.

- Upper-class Victorians drank ceaselessly. Conduct guides recommended four or five glasses of wine at dinner *for married women*. Port was often served in pints.

- Party culture was intense and nocturnal. Balls started at about 10pm, peaked after 1am, and continued till dawn. During the social season, bankers, judges and politicians might go to several balls per week.

- Elite Victorians learnt almost no STEM at school or university. At least half of class time was given over to ancient languages, often as much as 80 percent. One leading educationalist remarked that it was not worth teaching science to gentlemen because it does not involve ‘continued reasoning’.

- Sports and character formation were valued far above transmitting facts. A top headmaster described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’.

This cannot have made elite Victorians more productive individually, but maybe the dense social and emotional network it created helped them to work as a sort of extended team.

Perhaps we should think again about what makes groups of people effective.

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

I had not realised before that the Bronze Age Collapse was literally *caused* by iron.

Bronze age powers like the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians used bronze weapons, made by combining copper and tin. Tin was so scarce that only the richest and most powerful groups could access it and the bronze weapons it allowed. (Tin was so rare that it was being transported from Cornwall to the Middle East more than 1000 years BC.) The scarcity of tin gave these empires a near-monopoly on violence.

Iron weapons are not actually any better than bronze ones – they're not stronger or easier to work with, as I'd assumed. They're just much, much easier to mass produce once you have bloomeries, which are the first furnaces that were hot enough to melt iron in a way that made them useable for weapons.

Bloomeries meant that iron ore, which was widespread, could be used to make weapons anywhere. That led to warlords, bandits and city-states rising in a massive decentralization of military power, which the Bronze Age empires were unable to resist.

After the invention of the bloomery, skeletons show a measurable increase in weapon-inflicted injuries. 'Destruction layers' with bones and signs of burning have been found from this time at archaeological sites including Troy. Ancient writers – including Herodotus, Ovid, and the writers of the Old Testament – believed the invention of iron had unleashed a new age of violence.

New at Works in Progress, WEAPONS OF MASS DECENTRALIZATION: how iron itself brought about the Bronze Age Collapse. And what technologies could do the same today?

https://t.co/Ni4DfPYBhr

[T.W. Webb @twwebb1]

Diabolical work from @espn to play 3 minute commercials on a delayed game

[T.W. Webb @twwebb1]

Hour and a half delay, but @espn didn’t get in enough geico and Aflac commercials in that time

[Bd@irB@ll @Bd_irB_ll]

Sorry you know how funny it is that Americans spent the entire World Cup complaining about added time and not knowing when the game ends only for WEEK 1 of college football to prove that apparently 0:00 doesn't end the game

[T.W. Webb @twwebb1]

@BishopDespenser Based FC

[Dominic Pino @DominicJPino]

Data centers are the cleanest, least invasive large-scale industrial buildout of physical stuff that we've seen, and people still oppose it.

Good thing to remember when people whine about how "we don't build physical stuff in America anymore."

[Build American AI @BuildAmericanAI]

Quincy, Washington shows what a good data center deal looks like.

About 30 facilities shoulder an estimated 57% of local property taxes, funding a $120M high school, library, hospital, and police and fire stations.
https://t.co/I4kB0ieXbX

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Virginia’s Loudoun County expects $1.3 billion in data center tax revenue next year, helping the county cut residents’ property taxes by roughly 30% over the past decade.

[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump]

I love Twitter.... it's like owning your own newspaper--- without the losses.

[Nicholas Decker @captgouda24]

We need more innovative thinking like this in government

[CFB Kings @CFBKings]

Totally understandable.

After a long, grueling offseason of SEC practices, Alabama was gassed in Week 1.

[Brian Morgenstern @MorgensternNJ]

Columbia County, GA is eliminating property taxes due to the revenue from a Google data center.

Richland Parish, LA is giving teachers $50k bonuses due to a Meta data center.

Southern Company is freezing residential rates due to data center revenue.

Data centers are good!

[Mikita Orthodox ☦️ @mikitaposts]

Ironically the mission was actually accomplished

[T.W. Webb @twwebb1]

The Alchian-Allen effect is everywhere, if you have the eyes to see it.

[Ben Southwood @bswud]

The entire modern world, including capitalism and industrialisation, happened because we beat NIMBYism and vetocracy in 18th-century England.

Today, the vetocracy, the stakeholder state, the NIMBYs stop us building the nuclear power plants, railways, houses, towers, bridges, roads, gas turbines, solar panels, and powerlines that we need for growth.

Then, they stopped people from consolidating their land, transporting goods freely, investing in irrigation, and mortgaging their property to invest. The events that led to their downfall are called the Glorious Revolution. I think we can repeat what they did and have another Glorious Revolution of our own.

https://t.co/5PrKLK1nah

Early modern Europe was sclerotic, stifled by NIMBYs of its own: the aristocrats, guilds, and clergy who stood against the reforms that were necessary for 18th-century progress. Everyone knew that inheritance rules split land up too much, everyone knew that common land was overgrazed, everyone knew that property rights restricted making best use of land, labour, and capital.

Each one of them decided the answer was consolidating power in an absolute monarch. Each one of them failed completely. They didn't crush the NIMBYs: the NIMBYs crushed them.

One country launched itself into rapid growth, creating the industrial modernity we live under today: England. It did this, as everyone agreed was necessary, by overriding the tangle of landowner property rights that prevented best use of land. But it tried something almost unbelievable: to get the landowner NIMBYs to crush themselves.

England did not attempt to set up an absolutist state: quite the opposite. It gave landowners supreme power, and they used it to crush their fellows: the minority of landowners who were opposed to progress.

There are lessons for today. Many modern reformers think that the answer to NIMBYs is demonising them, trying to build an angry coalition of forces who hate homeowners or boomers or Republicans or environmentalists. But many of the most successful reform schemes operating around the world today try a different tack: bring a majority of homeowners onside, and it is much, much easier to crush the remaining NIMBYs.

We can still learn from England's Glorious Revolution.

Read my latest article, with historian Kara Dimitruk, in @WorksInProgMag.

[Alejandro Berry @alejandroberry]

We DO NOT cut to commercials during the hydration break. Join us for uninterrupted football on @Telemundo and @TelemundoSports

[Chelsea FC @ChelseaFC]

Come and visit London’s Home of Trophies. 🏆

Book your Stadium Tour at Stamford Bridge now. ⭐️⭐Come and visit London’s Home of Trophies. 🏆

Book your Stadium Tour at Stamford Bridge now. ⭐️⭐Come and visit London’s Home of Trophies. 🏆

Book your Stadium Tour at Stamford Bridge now. ⭐️⭐Come and visit London’s Home of Trophies. 🏆

Book your Stadium Tour at Stamford Bridge now. ⭐️⭐Come and visit London’s Home of Trophies. 🏆

Book your Stadium Tour at Stamford Bridge now. ⭐️⭐Come and visit London’s Home of Trophies. 🏆

Book your Stadium Tour at Stamford Bridge now. ⭐️⭐️