Half of world oil consumption is road transport. All the countries whose economies are reliant on oil exports are shafted, with the possible exception of Norway, who have done what they can to prepare for the end.
The rest can see what is coming, but are a lot more vulnerable to the consequences.
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
That’ll upset the golfers, they only got $50m or $100m each - although Tiger was rumoured to have turned down something in the $750m range over three years.
He would instantly and surely become the highest paid sportsman of all time. And by a massive distance?
Forbes has CR7 as the top ATM. At $146 m. Only $76 m of that on field earnings.
If that mbappe deal did come off it would be final proof that football has reached an insane level of craziness. A world obsession with global prices
Would seem to me to be more of a particularly Saudi madness, than a global one. They can see the end of an era approaching, and it's producing a series of completely mad responses - war in Yemen, gruesome murder of journalists, bizarre tech-utopia desert cities, and ostentatious displays of wealth (soccer).
I’m not sure that’s true at all
They genuinely have insane amounts of cash. Aramco is an enormous company
More like they can see the eventual end of hydrocarbons and they want to turn Saudi into a UAE x 10
Their strategy makes sense
Yes, if you are close to a pariah state whilst spending $500bn in creating one new city, investing $20bn or something of that order in elite sport to improve your image makes sense to me.
THE LINE.
Truly Saudi Arabia is determined to squander it's fortune.
If that mbappe deal did come off it would be final proof that football has reached an insane level of craziness. A world obsession with global prices
Would seem to me to be more of a particularly Saudi madness, than a global one. They can see the end of an era approaching, and it's producing a series of completely mad responses - war in Yemen, gruesome murder of journalists, bizarre tech-utopia desert cities, and ostentatious displays of wealth (soccer).
I’m not sure that’s true at all
They genuinely have insane amounts of cash. Aramco is an enormous company
More like they can see the eventual end of hydrocarbons and they want to turn Saudi into a UAE x 10
Their strategy makes sense
Really? Pay $1 billion for a player for one year and then he goes to Real Madrid. Seems an odd way to increase Saudi's appeal.
UAE have been much smarter. Sunshine and shopping.
UAE had a far more palatable starting point. Westerners won't go to Saudi as is.
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
This is all Twitter gossip so who knows. The idea is he’d play for one season in Saudi then be free to leave for Real
I can’t see what’s in this for the Saudis. Yes they are insanely rich but €1bn for one player for one season?! What’s the point
Also I don’t think mbappe would ever go to Saudi. Not at this peak career moment. He’ll go to Real, or, failing that, maybe a Chelsea
You are not quite understanding wealth. $1bn is nothing if you have $X,XXXbn or whatever. It is why billionaires happily buy (or try to buy) entire London streets because why not. If you are worth £5bn, and a house in Chelsea costs, say, £10m, then why not buy 20-30 (or more) of them because although in relative terms it is still a chunk of your net worth you still have several billion left.
Back to ULEZ it is an environmentally neutral at best and often worse scheme, doesn't really encourage anyone to "get on their bikes", but probably raises quite a lot in fines as people drive through them (once they have moved the plant pots aside). It is gesture (and, tbf, revenue) over policy.
Half of world oil consumption is road transport. All the countries whose economies are reliant on oil exports are shafted, with the possible exception of Norway, who have done what they can to prepare for the end.
The rest can see what is coming, but are a lot more vulnerable to the consequences.
At least you can eat fish. Unlike sand.
The Saudis have the wrong kind of sand.
No, really
Wind blown sand is too fine for making cement and concrete. In fact it’s banned in the Middle East - causes building collapses.
Also too powdery for sandbags. During the First Gulf War, the US imported sand by the bulk carrier ship to fill sandbags…
Hunter Mahan @HunterMahan The crowd this year is so opposite of all the experience’s I’ve had at @TheOpen . Any ideas why??
Crowds this summer seem to be more common, oiks at Lord's also booed Australia's team and at Wimbledon Djokovic had some boos
Come, come my Essex friend! The worst abuse of the Aussies at Lords was in the Long Room. Members only.
Grey and rather overcast here this morning. Not like summer at all!
Yes people getting MCC membership who shouldn't have it
You mean shouldn’t have it now, as a consequence of their behaviour, or should never have been accepted as members? If the latter, what particular characteristics or life histories do you think should disqualify you from MCC membership?
It's a simple fact that MCC members in previous decades wouldn't have behaved in the way those few people did in the Long Room a few weeks ago.
It was poor, and unacceptable.
I think it arose partly following sandpaper gate, and partly because of the extremely underhand 'stumping' of Bairstow. Whatever provoked it, booing from the crowd is acceptable, confronting the players in the Pavillion by members of MCC is not.
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
This is all Twitter gossip so who knows. The idea is he’d play for one season in Saudi then be free to leave for Real
I can’t see what’s in this for the Saudis. Yes they are insanely rich but €1bn for one player for one season?! What’s the point
Also I don’t think mbappe would ever go to Saudi. Not at this peak career moment. He’ll go to Real, or, failing that, maybe a Chelsea
You are not quite understanding wealth. $1bn is nothing if you have $X,XXXbn or whatever. It is why billionaires happily buy (or try to buy) entire London streets because why not. If you are worth £5bn, and a house in Chelsea costs, say, £10m, then why not buy 20-30 (or more) of them because although in relative terms it is still a chunk of your net worth you still have several billion left.
Is how that world works.
I can easily understand the €300m. It’s the one season for €700m that is a little mystifying
He won’t be around long enough to transform the perception of Saudi football?
However, you make a fair point. If all they want is the status then fuck it. Buy a solid gold Bentley. But mbappe for one season for one billion
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
This is all Twitter gossip so who knows. The idea is he’d play for one season in Saudi then be free to leave for Real
I can’t see what’s in this for the Saudis. Yes they are insanely rich but €1bn for one player for one season?! What’s the point
Also I don’t think mbappe would ever go to Saudi. Not at this peak career moment. He’ll go to Real, or, failing that, maybe a Chelsea
You are not quite understanding wealth. $1bn is nothing if you have $X,XXXbn or whatever. It is why billionaires happily buy (or try to buy) entire London streets because why not. If you are worth £5bn, and a house in Chelsea costs, say, £10m, then why not buy 20-30 (or more) of them because although in relative terms it is still a chunk of your net worth you still have several billion left.
Is how that world works.
One of the Saudi problems is that they have an insanely high level of annual expenditure on subsidies. Once they lose the oil income the wealth will be rapidly spent, just as insanely wealthy aristocratic heirs were able to squander entire family fortunes in a few years of insane gambling.
Saudi Arabia are more likely to end up like Lebanon than with a stable post-oil economy.
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
This is all Twitter gossip so who knows. The idea is he’d play for one season in Saudi then be free to leave for Real
I can’t see what’s in this for the Saudis. Yes they are insanely rich but €1bn for one player for one season?! What’s the point
Also I don’t think mbappe would ever go to Saudi. Not at this peak career moment. He’ll go to Real, or, failing that, maybe a Chelsea
You are not quite understanding wealth. $1bn is nothing if you have $X,XXXbn or whatever. It is why billionaires happily buy (or try to buy) entire London streets because why not. If you are worth £5bn, and a house in Chelsea costs, say, £10m, then why not buy 20-30 (or more) of them because although in relative terms it is still a chunk of your net worth you still have several billion left.
Is how that world works.
I visited a few various art galleries in Munich a few years ago, wonder how long it'll be before the great European artworks (Rubens, Caravaggio, Da Vinci etc etc) of the renaissance end up in the middle east. Some like the Mona Lisa won't go anywhere, but the Rubens might..
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
This is all Twitter gossip so who knows. The idea is he’d play for one season in Saudi then be free to leave for Real
I can’t see what’s in this for the Saudis. Yes they are insanely rich but €1bn for one player for one season?! What’s the point
Also I don’t think mbappe would ever go to Saudi. Not at this peak career moment. He’ll go to Real, or, failing that, maybe a Chelsea
You are not quite understanding wealth. $1bn is nothing if you have $X,XXXbn or whatever. It is why billionaires happily buy (or try to buy) entire London streets because why not. If you are worth £5bn, and a house in Chelsea costs, say, £10m, then why not buy 20-30 (or more) of them because although in relative terms it is still a chunk of your net worth you still have several billion left.
Is how that world works.
I visited a few various art galleries in Munich a few years ago, wonder how long it'll be before the great European artworks (Rubens, Caravaggio, Da Vinci etc etc) of the renaissance end up in the middle east. Some like the Mona Lisa won't go anywhere, but the Rubens might..
Once you think about the scale of wealth it is truly frightening there is theoretically nothing that they can't offer to buy.
Although not all will be successful. Because you don't need to be a billionaire, just quite (OK, very) well off and you can tell the billionaire to go eff themselves. As frequently happens. More than one might think.
Edit: and wrt art there is also the public benefactor element so it might be that there is a Saudi Aramco Museum of Art somewhere (or everywhere). I mean look at historic art collections - often in the hands of a wealthy few but now on public display.
If that mbappe deal did come off it would be final proof that football has reached an insane level of craziness. A world obsession with global prices
Would seem to me to be more of a particularly Saudi madness, than a global one. They can see the end of an era approaching, and it's producing a series of completely mad responses - war in Yemen, gruesome murder of journalists, bizarre tech-utopia desert cities, and ostentatious displays of wealth (soccer).
I’m not sure that’s true at all
They genuinely have insane amounts of cash. Aramco is an enormous company
More like they can see the eventual end of hydrocarbons and they want to turn Saudi into a UAE x 10
Their strategy makes sense
Really? Pay $1 billion for a player for one year and then he goes to Real Madrid. Seems an odd way to increase Saudi's appeal.
UAE have been much smarter. Sunshine and shopping.
Dubai realised two decades ago that they had to build an actual city that wasn’t just based on oil, but on trade, commerce, and tourism.
The Saudis are very late to the party now, but there’s some serious money being spent, and also serious money to be earned out there.
It’ll be many years before the residents and citizens of Jeddah stop coming to Dubai for the weekend though. Many of the workers out there have their wives and kids here, where there’s a social life and good schools.
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier. The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
This is all Twitter gossip so who knows. The idea is he’d play for one season in Saudi then be free to leave for Real
I can’t see what’s in this for the Saudis. Yes they are insanely rich but €1bn for one player for one season?! What’s the point
Also I don’t think mbappe would ever go to Saudi. Not at this peak career moment. He’ll go to Real, or, failing that, maybe a Chelsea
You are not quite understanding wealth. $1bn is nothing if you have $X,XXXbn or whatever. It is why billionaires happily buy (or try to buy) entire London streets because why not. If you are worth £5bn, and a house in Chelsea costs, say, £10m, then why not buy 20-30 (or more) of them because although in relative terms it is still a chunk of your net worth you still have several billion left.
Is how that world works.
Any kind of pleasure from it must be transitory. It seems to be just a case of keeping score.
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier. The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
It’s all relative
Absolutely. Hence the popularity of those fridge magnets showing a sunset behind some aperçu about wealth.
A tracking system, as used in several countries. Box in the car.
Charging is proportional to vehicle size, distance travelled. Given it is registered to a specific owner/vehicle, exemptions and reductions for poorer people becomes easy.
Since it has GPS, easy to enforce speed limits. So get rid of the expensive to maintain road humps that penalise small cars. And cause accidents - they are often placed very badly, causing drivers to swerve left and right to get the lowest bump.
If you want to price use according to car size and distance travelled, perhaps with additional cost for urban use -
why not just tax fuel more?
Emissions vary quite widely among cars with equal mpg.
Also location of the travel is important for congestion.
Fuel will be electricity.
I can seem some case for a levy on charge point electricity as it goes only to fuel vehicles, but that would drive home charging - a good thing for the large majority of people with off street parking perhaps.
On the downside we would need a sharp remedy for the people who create trip hazards by draping cables across pavements.
Trouble with adding a levy to charge points is that you can charge from a normal 13amp socket so a lot of people would be evading the levy
At a max of 3 kw per hour it'll take a while, mind
You could combine the outputs of sockets on different fuses/RCDs if you bond the earths. Apparently you can kill yourself or burn your gaff down to the ground if the impedence loads don't match but I've done it a few times and I'm still here. (As is my house.)
Disapointed, Dura
I'd have thought you'd have just stripped the incoming supply before the cutout (and meter) and crocodile clipped the charging lead on. Or looped a coathanger over overhead wires, if nearby (with a transformer chucked in if needed, depending on the line).
If that mbappe deal did come off it would be final proof that football has reached an insane level of craziness. A world obsession with global prices
Would seem to me to be more of a particularly Saudi madness, than a global one. They can see the end of an era approaching, and it's producing a series of completely mad responses - war in Yemen, gruesome murder of journalists, bizarre tech-utopia desert cities, and ostentatious displays of wealth (soccer).
I’m not sure that’s true at all
They genuinely have insane amounts of cash. Aramco is an enormous company
More like they can see the eventual end of hydrocarbons and they want to turn Saudi into a UAE x 10
Their strategy makes sense
Really? Pay $1 billion for a player for one year and then he goes to Real Madrid. Seems an odd way to increase Saudi's appeal.
UAE have been much smarter. Sunshine and shopping.
Dubai realised two decades ago that they had to build an actual city that wasn’t just based on oil, but on trade, commerce, and tourism.
The Saudis are very late to the party now, but there’s some serious money being spent, and also serious money to be earned out there.
It’ll be many years before the residents and citizens of Jeddah stop coming to Dubai for the weekend though. Many of the workers out there have their wives and kids here, where there’s a social life and good schools.
Both countries face the fairly major problem of global warmjng - and becoming literally uninhabitable within a decade or two
No amount of air conditioned football stadiums with trillion quid footie stars will get round that
Half of world oil consumption is road transport. All the countries whose economies are reliant on oil exports are shafted, with the possible exception of Norway, who have done what they can to prepare for the end.
The rest can see what is coming, but are a lot more vulnerable to the consequences.
In reality is a very mixed bunch.
Saudi and Russia are the two biggest by far and your average Saudi or Russian have been shafted regardless. There are signs your average Saudi might do better in a decade or twos time, and it is hard to see how Russia can be much worse than it is.
Iraq, Libya, Venezuela all shafted too for various reasons. US and Canada diversified enough to make little difference.
UAE and Norway will be fine, as will the likes of Kuwait and Qatar if they can avoid getting invaded. Brazil and Nigeria volatile, could go either way.
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
Latest Nimby News, aka supporting flagship policies, in the Graun feed just now: (an d specially for @JosiasJessop and any grads of Fenland Tech)
'In the news release issued overnight ahead of Gove’s speech, the Department for Levelling up, Housing and Communities said the government was planning “a new urban quarter in Cambridge which will unlock the city’s full potential as a source of innovation and talent”.
But this morning Anthony Browne, the Conservative MP for South Cambridgeshire, has condemned the proposals as “nonsense” and vowed to do everything he can to stop them. [...]
The Browne tweet supports the claim made by Keir Starmer, when he announced Labour’s housing plan, that the Conservatives cannot be the party of mass housebuilding because their MPs routinely block these initiatives on behalf of their “nimby” constituents. [...]'
There are three big areas of unbuilt greenspace within Oxford that aren't floodplain. One is Oxford Golf Club. The second is South Park (no, not that one). The third is Jordan Hill Golf Course.
I am 100% here for the Conservatives fighting GE2024 on a "concrete over golf courses and build urban housing" policy. Not sure Sir Bufton Tufton will approve though.
Southfield (Oxford) Golf Club did strike me as a development waiting to happen, and that was 30 years ago. It often depends on the attitude (and pockets) of the members what happens.
A club I was a member of in a similar urban setting - but nowhere near as expensive as Oxford - was offered millions (in 1985!) to sell up plus a plot of land to build a new, more modern course out of town.
The club turned it down because the whole point of an urban course is that you don't have to drive miles to get there and the members didn't want the hassle.
Similarly a friend of mine is a member of a private allotment site in urban Leeds. They were offered 60k per plot about 10 years ago but being a fairly well to do part they could all afford to turn that down too.
You could argue a golf course isn't much of a facility for the public and therefore fair game, but there are at least a few public footpaths at Southfield which link up with a local nature reserve making it a useable green space.
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
This is all Twitter gossip so who knows. The idea is he’d play for one season in Saudi then be free to leave for Real
I can’t see what’s in this for the Saudis. Yes they are insanely rich but €1bn for one player for one season?! What’s the point
Also I don’t think mbappe would ever go to Saudi. Not at this peak career moment. He’ll go to Real, or, failing that, maybe a Chelsea
You are not quite understanding wealth. $1bn is nothing if you have $X,XXXbn or whatever. It is why billionaires happily buy (or try to buy) entire London streets because why not. If you are worth £5bn, and a house in Chelsea costs, say, £10m, then why not buy 20-30 (or more) of them because although in relative terms it is still a chunk of your net worth you still have several billion left.
Is how that world works.
Any kind of pleasure from it must be transitory. It seems to be just a case of keeping score.
Rubbish. It is I imagine great fun. We who have no such wealth (I'm assuming) find it easy to say "oh well they don't really enjoy it, blah, blah" but actually of course they bloody well do.
And as for the houses, if not to live in then for staff, etc.
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier. The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
It’s all relative
Absolutely. Hence the popularity of those fridge magnets showing a sunset behind some aperçu about wealth.
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
The Saudis make a far better case for stopping oil than the orange shirted eco-loons ever could.
They are still likely to be one if the global energy giants, for gge foreseeable future, given how cheap and reliable solar electricity is in their country.
Plenty of other countries have that sort of advantage & others, Morocco for instance is better placed to serve the key EU market. Location really does matter for solar, unlike oil which can be shipped everywhere. Also massive investment needed everywhere for huge interconnectors if that really is the route they're going down & losses that you just don't get with LNG or oil also.
Egypt (they're already building a 3GW interconnect), Turkey and India are the likely largest markets for them. Along with their own chemicals industry.
In the meantime they've gut a couple of decades of enormous oil revenue to fund it all.
If that mbappe deal did come off it would be final proof that football has reached an insane level of craziness. A world obsession with global prices
Would seem to me to be more of a particularly Saudi madness, than a global one. They can see the end of an era approaching, and it's producing a series of completely mad responses - war in Yemen, gruesome murder of journalists, bizarre tech-utopia desert cities, and ostentatious displays of wealth (soccer).
I’m not sure that’s true at all
They genuinely have insane amounts of cash. Aramco is an enormous company
More like they can see the eventual end of hydrocarbons and they want to turn Saudi into a UAE x 10
Their strategy makes sense
Yes, if you are close to a pariah state whilst spending $500bn in creating one new city, investing $20bn or something of that order in elite sport to improve your image makes sense to me.
THE LINE.
Truly Saudi Arabia is determined to squander it's fortune.
Yes that’s a totally bonkers project, but I wouldn’t bet against it actually happening.
(Not that they encourage betting, of course).
Of more use will be the Black Sea hotel resorts, which are going to try and rival what Dubai has in terms of beaches. Will be a ‘closed city’, with no locals allowed, but with bars and possibly even casinos.
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier. The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
It’s all relative
Absolutely. Hence the popularity of those fridge magnets showing a sunset behind some aperçu about wealth.
Without getting preachy, would one not derive more personal satisfaction from doing some good with all that wealth, rather than just buying stuff that gives you an instant's gratification?
I'm not denying, I'd love to own a townhouse in Chelsea, an estate in Teesdale, a holiday home in Croatia, a big apartment in Madeira, and have enough money to devote myself full time to researching and writing military history. So yes, a multi-millionaire.
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
This is all Twitter gossip so who knows. The idea is he’d play for one season in Saudi then be free to leave for Real
I can’t see what’s in this for the Saudis. Yes they are insanely rich but €1bn for one player for one season?! What’s the point
Also I don’t think mbappe would ever go to Saudi. Not at this peak career moment. He’ll go to Real, or, failing that, maybe a Chelsea
You are not quite understanding wealth. $1bn is nothing if you have $X,XXXbn or whatever. It is why billionaires happily buy (or try to buy) entire London streets because why not. If you are worth £5bn, and a house in Chelsea costs, say, £10m, then why not buy 20-30 (or more) of them because although in relative terms it is still a chunk of your net worth you still have several billion left.
Is how that world works.
Any kind of pleasure from it must be transitory. It seems to be just a case of keeping score.
It is hedonic adaptation. A problem with no solution.
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
This is all Twitter gossip so who knows. The idea is he’d play for one season in Saudi then be free to leave for Real
I can’t see what’s in this for the Saudis. Yes they are insanely rich but €1bn for one player for one season?! What’s the point
Also I don’t think mbappe would ever go to Saudi. Not at this peak career moment. He’ll go to Real, or, failing that, maybe a Chelsea
You are not quite understanding wealth. $1bn is nothing if you have $X,XXXbn or whatever. It is why billionaires happily buy (or try to buy) entire London streets because why not. If you are worth £5bn, and a house in Chelsea costs, say, £10m, then why not buy 20-30 (or more) of them because although in relative terms it is still a chunk of your net worth you still have several billion left.
Is how that world works.
Any kind of pleasure from it must be transitory. It seems to be just a case of keeping score.
It’s very much keeping score. Hence Bezos and his $500m boat.
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier. The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
It’s all relative
Absolutely. Hence the popularity of those fridge magnets showing a sunset behind some aperçu about wealth.
Without getting preachy, would one not derive more personal satisfaction from doing some good with all that wealth, rather than just buying stuff that gives you an instant's gratification.
I'm not denying, I'd love to own a townhouse in Chelsea, an estate in Teesdale, a holiday home in Croatia, a big apartment in Madeira, and have enough money to devote myself full time to researching and writing military history. So yes, a multi-millionaire.
But, after that, what's the point?
Again, you are limited by your own perception (if that's not tautological).
Have all that stuff and set up a foundation to help bring water to remote African villages, or whatever. The one doesn't preclude the other.
Plus I have no doubt that once you have the toys the bills mount up and you can convince yourself that you are struggling (as per @Leon's friend).
That wonderful passage in Bonfire of the Vanities when he catalogues just how it is that earning $1m/year (this was decades ago) meant he was just about on the poverty line.
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier. The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
It’s all relative
Absolutely. Hence the popularity of those fridge magnets showing a sunset behind some aperçu about wealth.
I guess if you are worth a mere £1b then you still have to *worry* about money A BIT (stop laughing at the back)
By that I mean (as an example) you can’t simply buy any house you want in London on a whim. A house in Regent’s Park has just sold for £115m. My friend would actually have to consider that carefully. It’s more than ten percent of his entire wealth. Hmm. Etc
Whereas Elon or Bezos can spend £115m and not even notice it. And if it all goes wrong fuck it. They are still worth 99.9% of what they were worth before
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
The Saudis make a far better case for stopping oil than the orange shirted eco-loons ever could.
They are still likely to be one if the global energy giants, for gge foreseeable future, given how cheap and reliable solar electricity is in their country.
Plenty of other countries have that sort of advantage & others, Morocco for instance is better placed to serve the key EU market. Location really does matter for solar, unlike oil which can be shipped everywhere. Also massive investment needed everywhere for huge interconnectors if that really is the route they're going down & losses that you just don't get with LNG or oil also.
Egypt (they're already building a 3GW interconnect), Turkey and India are the likely largest markets for them. Along with their own chemicals industry.
In the meantime they've gut a couple of decades of enormous oil revenue to fund it all.
A 3 GW interconnect is chicken feed compared to how much raw energy the Sauds export via oil though. I just can't see solar scaling up anywhere near enough to compensate for a theoretical loss of oil export - not in our lifetimes anyway.
Sad news, somewhat tempered by the amazing thought he managed to live for nine years with advanced bowel cancer.
Its no age in modern times.
Our treatments for many types of cancer have progressed remarkably, but so much more to do. At least now if you are diagnosed with 'cancer' you have a 50% chance of still being alive in 10 years.
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
This is all Twitter gossip so who knows. The idea is he’d play for one season in Saudi then be free to leave for Real
I can’t see what’s in this for the Saudis. Yes they are insanely rich but €1bn for one player for one season?! What’s the point
Also I don’t think mbappe would ever go to Saudi. Not at this peak career moment. He’ll go to Real, or, failing that, maybe a Chelsea
You are not quite understanding wealth. $1bn is nothing if you have $X,XXXbn or whatever. It is why billionaires happily buy (or try to buy) entire London streets because why not. If you are worth £5bn, and a house in Chelsea costs, say, £10m, then why not buy 20-30 (or more) of them because although in relative terms it is still a chunk of your net worth you still have several billion left.
Is how that world works.
Any kind of pleasure from it must be transitory. It seems to be just a case of keeping score.
Rubbish. It is I imagine great fun. We who have no such wealth (I'm assuming) find it easy to say "oh well they don't really enjoy it, blah, blah" but actually of course they bloody well do.
And as for the houses, if not to live in then for staff, etc.
Great wealth does not make you happy. What it does is make you happiER, and by God it makes discontent infinitely more bearable
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier. The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
It’s all relative
Absolutely. Hence the popularity of those fridge magnets showing a sunset behind some aperçu about wealth.
Without getting preachy, would one not derive more personal satisfaction from doing some good with all that wealth, rather than just buying stuff that gives you an instant's gratification.
I'm not denying, I'd love to own a townhouse in Chelsea, an estate in Teesdale, a holiday home in Croatia, a big apartment in Madeira, and have enough money to devote myself full time to researching and writing military history. So yes, a multi-millionaire.
But, after that, what's the point?
Again, you are limited by your own perception (if that's not tautological).
Have all that stuff and set up a foundation to help bring water to remote African villages, or whatever. The one doesn't preclude the other.
Plus I have no doubt that once you have the toys the bills mount up and you can convince yourself that you are struggling (as per @Leon's friend).
That wonderful passage in Bonfire of the Vanities when he catalogues just how it is that earning $1m/year (this was decades ago) meant he was just about on the poverty line.
I suppose the life of a billionaire is one that it's just almost impossible to comprehend, unless one is one, or close to being one.
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
This is all Twitter gossip so who knows. The idea is he’d play for one season in Saudi then be free to leave for Real
I can’t see what’s in this for the Saudis. Yes they are insanely rich but €1bn for one player for one season?! What’s the point
Also I don’t think mbappe would ever go to Saudi. Not at this peak career moment. He’ll go to Real, or, failing that, maybe a Chelsea
You are not quite understanding wealth. $1bn is nothing if you have $X,XXXbn or whatever. It is why billionaires happily buy (or try to buy) entire London streets because why not. If you are worth £5bn, and a house in Chelsea costs, say, £10m, then why not buy 20-30 (or more) of them because although in relative terms it is still a chunk of your net worth you still have several billion left.
Is how that world works.
Any kind of pleasure from it must be transitory. It seems to be just a case of keeping score.
Rubbish. It is I imagine great fun. We who have no such wealth (I'm assuming) find it easy to say "oh well they don't really enjoy it, blah, blah" but actually of course they bloody well do.
And as for the houses, if not to live in then for staff, etc.
Great wealth does not make you happy. What it does is make you happiER, and by God it makes discontent infinitely more bearable
For sure, having plenty of money is far better than the alternative.
Hunter Mahan @HunterMahan The crowd this year is so opposite of all the experience’s I’ve had at @TheOpen . Any ideas why??
Crowds this summer seem to be more common, oiks at Lord's also booed Australia's team and at Wimbledon Djokovic had some boos
Come, come my Essex friend! The worst abuse of the Aussies at Lords was in the Long Room. Members only.
Grey and rather overcast here this morning. Not like summer at all!
Yes people getting MCC membership who shouldn't have it
You mean shouldn’t have it now, as a consequence of their behaviour, or should never have been accepted as members? If the latter, what particular characteristics or life histories do you think should disqualify you from MCC membership?
It's a simple fact that MCC members in previous decades wouldn't have behaved in the way those few people did in the Long Room a few weeks ago.
Latest Nimby News, aka supporting flagship policies, in the Graun feed just now: (an d specially for @JosiasJessop and any grads of Fenland Tech)
'In the news release issued overnight ahead of Gove’s speech, the Department for Levelling up, Housing and Communities said the government was planning “a new urban quarter in Cambridge which will unlock the city’s full potential as a source of innovation and talent”.
But this morning Anthony Browne, the Conservative MP for South Cambridgeshire, has condemned the proposals as “nonsense” and vowed to do everything he can to stop them. [...]
The Browne tweet supports the claim made by Keir Starmer, when he announced Labour’s housing plan, that the Conservatives cannot be the party of mass housebuilding because their MPs routinely block these initiatives on behalf of their “nimby” constituents. [...]'
What's his objection? Well-paid jobs for the lower classes?
It's actually an interesting angle:
"Cambridge already has about the highest housebuilding in the country, and under the local plans that is set to double with 50,000 new homes by 2050, effectively doubling the size of Cambridge. But there is one major problem: we have run out of water."
"For the first time ever, the Environment Agency is systematically blocking all major new development around Cambridge because there is no water for them. We are the driest part of the country with the highest population growth."
Worth a read IMO, for the way it's not just about houses, but infrastructure. We've just had a massive storage reservoir built just outside the village.
But he ignores that the houses will not be built overnight, and the new houses won't all be complete in the twenty years it takes to build the reservoirs.
The big outstanding infrastructure issue in water and the one that most of the companies don't want to do much to address is the National Water Grid espoused by the National Infrastructure Commission for many years.
It's extremely rare for all regions in the country to be simultaneously in prolonged drought. Inter-region water transfer links can be built in a fraction of the time of reservoirs, and ensure that we don't have the situation of the dry areas of the country in drought whilst the wetter areas have brim-full reservoirs. They'd only need to be used when needed, as well.
However, the regions in most need of water have companies that don't really want this (because they'd be buying in the water and because the Net Capital Asset Value, which is used to dictate acceptable water pricing for them, is far lower). Building reservoirs dependent on the most water-stressed waterways and rivers is always going to be a hostage to prolonged drought in potential climate change.
The note earlier about plugging leaks can't be overemphasised. Thames Water leaks out a quarter of all its water between source and customer (in one of the most water-stressed areas of the country). That's equivalent to losing the entire capacity of Farmoor Reservoir every fourteen days - and Farmoor Reservoir is twice the median capacity of an English reservoir. Or, to put it another way, TW reducing leakage by one percentage point equates to building another Farmoor reservoir and filling it completely.
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier. The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
It’s all relative
Absolutely. Hence the popularity of those fridge magnets showing a sunset behind some aperçu about wealth.
Without getting preachy, would one not derive more personal satisfaction from doing some good with all that wealth, rather than just buying stuff that gives you an instant's gratification.
I'm not denying, I'd love to own a townhouse in Chelsea, an estate in Teesdale, a holiday home in Croatia, a big apartment in Madeira, and have enough money to devote myself full time to researching and writing military history. So yes, a multi-millionaire.
But, after that, what's the point?
Again, you are limited by your own perception (if that's not tautological).
Have all that stuff and set up a foundation to help bring water to remote African villages, or whatever. The one doesn't preclude the other.
Plus I have no doubt that once you have the toys the bills mount up and you can convince yourself that you are struggling (as per @Leon's friend).
That wonderful passage in Bonfire of the Vanities when he catalogues just how it is that earning $1m/year (this was decades ago) meant he was just about on the poverty line.
Yes, the very rich often have their own charities, most of which actually do good things as well as helping out with the taxman.
The costs of running large houses, boats, planes etc. quickly get astronmonical, and the amount of work required means that you end up hiring people to manage the people.
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier. The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
It’s all relative
Absolutely. Hence the popularity of those fridge magnets showing a sunset behind some aperçu about wealth.
I guess if you are worth a mere £1b then you still have to *worry* about money A BIT (stop laughing at the back)
By that I mean (as an example) you can’t simply buy any house you want in London on a whim. A house in Regent’s Park has just sold for £115m. My friend would actually have to consider that carefully. It’s more than ten percent of his entire wealth. Hmm. Etc
Whereas Elon or Bezos can spend £115m and not even notice it. And if it all goes wrong fuck it. They are still worth 99.9% of what they were worth before
Even Musk had to borrow some of the money to buy Twitter for $44bn. No doubt he could have sold stuff to raise the rest of the cash - but that would have cramped him elsewhere.
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier. The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
It’s all relative
Absolutely. Hence the popularity of those fridge magnets showing a sunset behind some aperçu about wealth.
Without getting preachy, would one not derive more personal satisfaction from doing some good with all that wealth, rather than just buying stuff that gives you an instant's gratification.
I'm not denying, I'd love to own a townhouse in Chelsea, an estate in Teesdale, a holiday home in Croatia, a big apartment in Madeira, and have enough money to devote myself full time to researching and writing military history. So yes, a multi-millionaire.
But, after that, what's the point?
Again, you are limited by your own perception (if that's not tautological).
Have all that stuff and set up a foundation to help bring water to remote African villages, or whatever. The one doesn't preclude the other.
Plus I have no doubt that once you have the toys the bills mount up and you can convince yourself that you are struggling (as per @Leon's friend).
That wonderful passage in Bonfire of the Vanities when he catalogues just how it is that earning $1m/year (this was decades ago) meant he was just about on the poverty line.
I suppose the life of a billionaire is one that it's just almost impossible to comprehend, unless one is one, or close to being one.
A tracking system, as used in several countries. Box in the car.
Charging is proportional to vehicle size, distance travelled. Given it is registered to a specific owner/vehicle, exemptions and reductions for poorer people becomes easy.
Since it has GPS, easy to enforce speed limits. So get rid of the expensive to maintain road humps that penalise small cars. And cause accidents - they are often placed very badly, causing drivers to swerve left and right to get the lowest bump.
If you want to price use according to car size and distance travelled, perhaps with additional cost for urban use -
why not just tax fuel more?
Emissions vary quite widely among cars with equal mpg.
Also location of the travel is important for congestion.
Fuel will be electricity.
I can seem some case for a levy on charge point electricity as it goes only to fuel vehicles, but that would drive home charging - a good thing for the large majority of people with off street parking perhaps.
On the downside we would need a sharp remedy for the people who create trip hazards by draping cables across pavements.
Trouble with adding a levy to charge points is that you can charge from a normal 13amp socket so a lot of people would be evading the levy
At a max of 3 kw per hour it'll take a while, mind
You could combine the outputs of sockets on different fuses/RCDs if you bond the earths. Apparently you can kill yourself or burn your gaff down to the ground if the impedence loads don't match but I've done it a few times and I'm still here. (As is my house.)
Disapointed, Dura
I'd have thought you'd have just stripped the incoming supply before the cutout (and meter)
I used to do that in my parents' house as I was very partially to super high amperage (100+ Amps) experiments as a teenager.
Today's Twitter Poll: Should the UK be introducing more or less green policies, eg to target 'net zero' and cleaner air ?
In general terms which of these is CLOSEST to your view? More green policy 64.9% It's about right now 8.1% Less green policies 18.2% Dont know enough 2 answer
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier. The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
It’s all relative
Absolutely. Hence the popularity of those fridge magnets showing a sunset behind some aperçu about wealth.
I guess if you are worth a mere £1b then you still have to *worry* about money A BIT (stop laughing at the back)
By that I mean (as an example) you can’t simply buy any house you want in London on a whim. A house in Regent’s Park has just sold for £115m. My friend would actually have to consider that carefully. It’s more than ten percent of his entire wealth. Hmm. Etc
Whereas Elon or Bezos can spend £115m and not even notice it. And if it all goes wrong fuck it. They are still worth 99.9% of what they were worth before
Even Musk had to borrow some of the money to buy Twitter for $44bn. No doubt he could have sold stuff to raise the rest of the cash - but that would have cramped him elsewhere.
That's about four month's profit for Aramco.
The *really* rich individuals have most of their net worth in shares of companies they founded. Musk didn’t want to sell too much Tesla stock for the Twitter investment, so he’s borrowed some of the capital and will likely repay for equity over time (or if Starlink gets an IPO). Ther’s a few other heavyweight investors involved in Twitter as well
Today's Twitter Poll: Should the UK be introducing more or less green policies, eg to target 'net zero' and cleaner air ?
In general terms which of these is CLOSEST to your view? More green policy 64.9% It's about right now 8.1% Less green policies 18.2% Dont know enough 2 answer
Today's Twitter Poll: Should the UK be introducing more or less green policies, eg to target 'net zero' and cleaner air ?
In general terms which of these is CLOSEST to your view? More green policy 64.9% It's about right now 8.1% Less green policies 18.2% Dont know enough 2 answer
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier. The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
It’s all relative
Absolutely. Hence the popularity of those fridge magnets showing a sunset behind some aperçu about wealth.
I guess if you are worth a mere £1b then you still have to *worry* about money A BIT (stop laughing at the back)
By that I mean (as an example) you can’t simply buy any house you want in London on a whim. A house in Regent’s Park has just sold for £115m. My friend would actually have to consider that carefully. It’s more than ten percent of his entire wealth. Hmm. Etc
Whereas Elon or Bezos can spend £115m and not even notice it. And if it all goes wrong fuck it. They are still worth 99.9% of what they were worth before
Even Musk had to borrow some of the money to buy Twitter for $44bn. No doubt he could have sold stuff to raise the rest of the cash - but that would have cramped him elsewhere.
That's about four month's profit for Aramco.
Sure. But even Aramco have to carefully consider their investments if they head north of £50bn or so
What i mean is: for a Musk or a Bezos there is no normal domestic decision (where to live, what to personally own - super yachts etc) that will ever be impacted by financial considerations. £200m is probably the most you can possibly spend on a home? Maybe £300m? For the mere £1b billionaire that’s a lot. For the £250b billionaire, not
As a rebrand, X is potentially superior to Meta and Alphabet (neither of which has really worked, except perhaps on some obscure accounting basis)
It's a rebrand but he's also looking at expanding the X brand way beyond twitter. Folding Tesla, SpaceX into it and adding a paypal/banking competitor look to be on the horizon I think.
Today's Twitter Poll: Should the UK be introducing more or less green policies, eg to target 'net zero' and cleaner air ?
In general terms which of these is CLOSEST to your view? More green policy 64.9% It's about right now 8.1% Less green policies 18.2% Dont know enough 2 answer
Today's Twitter Poll: Should the UK be introducing more or less green policies, eg to target 'net zero' and cleaner air ?
In general terms which of these is CLOSEST to your view? More green policy 64.9% It's about right now 8.1% Less green policies 18.2% Dont know enough 2 answer
Today's Twitter Poll: Should the UK be introducing more or less green policies, eg to target 'net zero' and cleaner air ?
In general terms which of these is CLOSEST to your view? More green policy 64.9% It's about right now 8.1% Less green policies 18.2% Dont know enough 2 answer
More but better?
It's like housing isn't it ?
Oh Lord give us green policies but not affecting me just yet.
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier. The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
It’s all relative
Absolutely. Hence the popularity of those fridge magnets showing a sunset behind some aperçu about wealth.
I guess if you are worth a mere £1b then you still have to *worry* about money A BIT (stop laughing at the back)
By that I mean (as an example) you can’t simply buy any house you want in London on a whim. A house in Regent’s Park has just sold for £115m. My friend would actually have to consider that carefully. It’s more than ten percent of his entire wealth. Hmm. Etc
Whereas Elon or Bezos can spend £115m and not even notice it. And if it all goes wrong fuck it. They are still worth 99.9% of what they were worth before
Even Musk had to borrow some of the money to buy Twitter for $44bn. No doubt he could have sold stuff to raise the rest of the cash - but that would have cramped him elsewhere.
That's about four month's profit for Aramco.
The *really* rich individuals have most of their net worth in shares of companies they founded. Musk didn’t want to sell too much Tesla stock for the Twitter investment, so he’s borrowed some of the capital and will likely repay for equity over time (or if Starlink gets an IPO). Ther’s a few other heavyweight investors involved in Twitter as well
The company borrowed it, not Musk. Which is why it's financially crippled compared to anyone else in the space.
A tracking system, as used in several countries. Box in the car.
Charging is proportional to vehicle size, distance travelled. Given it is registered to a specific owner/vehicle, exemptions and reductions for poorer people becomes easy.
Since it has GPS, easy to enforce speed limits. So get rid of the expensive to maintain road humps that penalise small cars. And cause accidents - they are often placed very badly, causing drivers to swerve left and right to get the lowest bump.
If you want to price use according to car size and distance travelled, perhaps with additional cost for urban use -
why not just tax fuel more?
Emissions vary quite widely among cars with equal mpg.
Also location of the travel is important for congestion.
Fuel will be electricity.
I can seem some case for a levy on charge point electricity as it goes only to fuel vehicles, but that would drive home charging - a good thing for the large majority of people with off street parking perhaps.
On the downside we would need a sharp remedy for the people who create trip hazards by draping cables across pavements.
Trouble with adding a levy to charge points is that you can charge from a normal 13amp socket so a lot of people would be evading the levy
At a max of 3 kw per hour it'll take a while, mind
You could combine the outputs of sockets on different fuses/RCDs if you bond the earths. Apparently you can kill yourself or burn your gaff down to the ground if the impedence loads don't match but I've done it a few times and I'm still here. (As is my house.)
Disapointed, Dura
I'd have thought you'd have just stripped the incoming supply before the cutout (and meter)
I used to do that in my parents' house as I was very partially to super high amperage (100+ Amps) experiments as a teenager.
A tracking system, as used in several countries. Box in the car.
Charging is proportional to vehicle size, distance travelled. Given it is registered to a specific owner/vehicle, exemptions and reductions for poorer people becomes easy.
Since it has GPS, easy to enforce speed limits. So get rid of the expensive to maintain road humps that penalise small cars. And cause accidents - they are often placed very badly, causing drivers to swerve left and right to get the lowest bump.
If you want to price use according to car size and distance travelled, perhaps with additional cost for urban use -
why not just tax fuel more?
Emissions vary quite widely among cars with equal mpg.
Also location of the travel is important for congestion.
Fuel will be electricity.
I can seem some case for a levy on charge point electricity as it goes only to fuel vehicles, but that would drive home charging - a good thing for the large majority of people with off street parking perhaps.
On the downside we would need a sharp remedy for the people who create trip hazards by draping cables across pavements.
Trouble with adding a levy to charge points is that you can charge from a normal 13amp socket so a lot of people would be evading the levy
I think an incentive to charge at home is perhaps a good thing.
Many users of charge points use shared resources ie space.
Perhaps applied to on street charging points?
I think there are probably better ways, though, I quite like the idea of an annual axle weight tax based on the 4th power of the axle weight which is the formula for wear on roads, as I have argued before.
One way or the other fuel duty needs to be replaced which will require electricity used to charge cars to be taxed accordingly or some other method such as you suggest. However using the method you describe penalises the people who drive little vs those that drive a lot if just based on axle weight. It will also like result in electric cars with extra axles. No reason a car is limited to 4 wheels
It will also like result in electric cars with extra axles.
Well if it does, that'll be better for road wear.
And worse for efficiency, and thus range, as there will be more surface area in contact with the road and so a higher coefficient of friction.
As a rebrand, X is potentially superior to Meta and Alphabet (neither of which has really worked, except perhaps on some obscure accounting basis)
It's a rebrand but he's also looking at expanding the X brand way beyond twitter. Folding Tesla, SpaceX into it and adding a paypal/banking competitor look to be on the horizon I think.
What he says about becoming a western WeChat makes total sense. A platform for everything (which Facebook might have become, if they’d not gone mad - I remember a moment when it seemed like you needed a Facebook account to simply function - happily it’s gone)
However unlike WeChat he will face tremendous competition. Apple, Google and Amazon would all like to be what he wants to be, and they are significantly richer than him
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
The Saudis make a far better case for stopping oil than the orange shirted eco-loons ever could.
They are still likely to be one if the global energy giants, for gge foreseeable future, given how cheap and reliable solar electricity is in their country.
Plenty of other countries have that sort of advantage & others, Morocco for instance is better placed to serve the key EU market. Location really does matter for solar, unlike oil which can be shipped everywhere. Also massive investment needed everywhere for huge interconnectors if that really is the route they're going down & losses that you just don't get with LNG or oil also.
Egypt (they're already building a 3GW interconnect), Turkey and India are the likely largest markets for them. Along with their own chemicals industry.
In the meantime they've gut a couple of decades of enormous oil revenue to fund it all.
A 3 GW interconnect is chicken feed compared to how much raw energy the Sauds export via oil though. I just can't see solar scaling up anywhere near enough to compensate for a theoretical loss of oil export - not in our lifetimes anyway.
Couple of decades, who knows ?
Strategically, they are quite well placed. Though it's also entirely possible they'll just eff it all up and squander their wealth.
As a rebrand, X is potentially superior to Meta and Alphabet (neither of which has really worked, except perhaps on some obscure accounting basis)
It's a rebrand but he's also looking at expanding the X brand way beyond twitter. Folding Tesla, SpaceX into it and adding a paypal/banking competitor look to be on the horizon I think.
He’s been studying what WeChat in China, and other similar “super apps” in other Asian countries, have been doing.
The key to it all is frictionless micropayments at scale, but no-one in the West has really managed to do it so far.
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
The Saudis make a far better case for stopping oil than the orange shirted eco-loons ever could.
They are still likely to be one if the global energy giants, for gge foreseeable future, given how cheap and reliable solar electricity is in their country.
Plenty of other countries have that sort of advantage & others, Morocco for instance is better placed to serve the key EU market. Location really does matter for solar, unlike oil which can be shipped everywhere. Also massive investment needed everywhere for huge interconnectors if that really is the route they're going down & losses that you just don't get with LNG or oil also.
Egypt (they're already building a 3GW interconnect), Turkey and India are the likely largest markets for them. Along with their own chemicals industry.
In the meantime they've gut a couple of decades of enormous oil revenue to fund it all.
A 3 GW interconnect is chicken feed compared to how much raw energy the Sauds export via oil though. I just can't see solar scaling up anywhere near enough to compensate for a theoretical loss of oil export - not in our lifetimes anyway.
Solar does though seem to offer a perfectly scalable technology. The only limitation being the panels themselves and the batteries to store energy at night (or other energy storage like superheated salt, capacitors and so on). In the vast empty spaces of the Saudi interior you could build interconnected solar farms large enough to reproduce the Kingdom's entire hydrocarbons output, with no planning issues, little or no water requirement, its own energy source (obviously), and few if any employees other than a few people with machine guns on the perimeter fence and a handful of maintenance engineers.
Such vast deployment would have the economies of scale to include its own (solar powered) factories making solar panels, its own rail and road links and port infrastructure.
First the solar farms would power Saudi and all its near neighbours through interconnectors. Then further export could be via longer interconnectors to the European grid and green hydrogen, for which of course Saudi has a lot of the existing hydrocarbons infrastructure.
If there's still surplus energy they might as well build factories to smelt aluminium, make green steel, fabricate carbon fibre and so on.
8 years after the event, just noticed that Con + UKIP polled 51% of the vote in Great Britain at the 2015 general election, (50.7% to be more precise. 37.8% and 12.9%).
I don't think anyone pointed this out at the time. Maybe because we were so surprised about the Tories winning a majority. But in hindsight it was perhaps an indicator of the 51.8% vote for Brexit at the referendum about a year later.
It wasn't pointed out* at the time because it went against comforting Commentariat beliefs that there was (and is) a natural centre-left majority in the country. To the extent it was I bet they then filtered for turnout to make the evidence fit their hypothesis rather than change their hypothesis.
(*It was pointed out on here, by me amongst others)
As a rebrand, X is potentially superior to Meta and Alphabet (neither of which has really worked, except perhaps on some obscure accounting basis)
It's a rebrand but he's also looking at expanding the X brand way beyond twitter. Folding Tesla, SpaceX into it and adding a paypal/banking competitor look to be on the horizon I think.
He’s been studying what WeChat in China, and other similar “super apps” in other Asian countries, have been doing.
The key to it all is frictionless micropayments at scale, but no-one in the West has really managed to do it so far.
They key to a successful financial platform is also trust. That's in very short supply at Musk's X venture.
Remember X.com has been a long running idea of Elon's
From wiki:
Later in 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company with $12 million of the money he made from the Compaq acquisition.[61] X.com was one of the first federally insured online banks, and over 200,000 customers joined in its initial months of operation.[62] Even though Musk founded the company, investors regarded him as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year.[63]
In 2000, X.com merged with online bank Confinity to avoid competition,[55][63][64] as Confinity's money-transfer service PayPal was more popular than X.com's service.[65] Musk then returned as CEO of the merged company. His preference for Microsoft over Unix-based software caused a rift among the company's employees, and led Peter Thiel, Confinity's founder, to resign.[66] With the company suffering from compounding technological issues and the lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in September 2000.[67][b] Under Thiel, the company focused on the money-transfer service and was renamed PayPal in 2001.[69][70]
In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk—the largest shareholder with 11.72% of shares—received $175.8 million.[71][72] In 2017, more than 15 years later, Musk purchased the X.com domain from PayPal for its "sentimental value".[73][74] In 2022, Musk discussed a goal of creating "X, the everything app".
A tracking system, as used in several countries. Box in the car.
Charging is proportional to vehicle size, distance travelled. Given it is registered to a specific owner/vehicle, exemptions and reductions for poorer people becomes easy.
Since it has GPS, easy to enforce speed limits. So get rid of the expensive to maintain road humps that penalise small cars. And cause accidents - they are often placed very badly, causing drivers to swerve left and right to get the lowest bump.
If you want to price use according to car size and distance travelled, perhaps with additional cost for urban use -
why not just tax fuel more?
Emissions vary quite widely among cars with equal mpg.
Also location of the travel is important for congestion.
Fuel will be electricity.
I can seem some case for a levy on charge point electricity as it goes only to fuel vehicles, but that would drive home charging - a good thing for the large majority of people with off street parking perhaps.
On the downside we would need a sharp remedy for the people who create trip hazards by draping cables across pavements.
Trouble with adding a levy to charge points is that you can charge from a normal 13amp socket so a lot of people would be evading the levy
At a max of 3 kw per hour it'll take a while, mind
You could combine the outputs of sockets on different fuses/RCDs if you bond the earths. Apparently you can kill yourself or burn your gaff down to the ground if the impedence loads don't match but I've done it a few times and I'm still here. (As is my house.)
Disapointed, Dura
I'd have thought you'd have just stripped the incoming supply before the cutout (and meter)
I used to do that in my parents' house as I was very partially to super high amperage (100+ Amps) experiments as a teenager.
Were there ever any disastrous results ?
Not really, loads of melted spanners, flickering street lights, etc. I could only really get into it on the rare occasions they went on holiday without me. I did once put a 12g shotgun cartridge in a vice and hit it with a hammer. I then had to explain to my father why he had a concussed and deaf son and why there was a fucking big hole in the back of his shed.
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier. The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
It’s all relative
That is absolutely right. (Pun intended.) It's also ample illustration of the fact that EVERY alpha, deep down, is a beta, motivated by the thought that his tinky is considerably shorter than some other guy's.
Sigmas or "sigma wolves" don't give a toss about waving their widdlers, buying football clubs, showing off, or any other kind of juvenile competitive behaviour. We know we're superior.
Message to any billionaires (or Basil Zaharoff fans) reading this: just keep on competing with those who are willing to compete with you, you silly sods.
Today's Twitter Poll: Should the UK be introducing more or less green policies, eg to target 'net zero' and cleaner air ?
In general terms which of these is CLOSEST to your view? More green policy 64.9% It's about right now 8.1% Less green policies 18.2% Dont know enough 2 answer
More but better?
Generic green policy good.
Any specific green policy, not as good.
Nah, I've been quite specific on changes I'd like to see on ULEZ for example. Even without them it is a good policy, but sub optimal, especially electorally, and unnecessarily divisive.
Policy makers need to put more thought into green policies and be willing to compromise at the edges to bring more people with them.
Reports that a Saudi team have offered €300m for Mbappe
With a salary of - wait for it - €700m A YEAR
Mbappe is a genius of a player, but that is a ridiculous salary.
The Saudis make a far better case for stopping oil than the orange shirted eco-loons ever could.
They are still likely to be one if the global energy giants, for gge foreseeable future, given how cheap and reliable solar electricity is in their country.
Plenty of other countries have that sort of advantage & others, Morocco for instance is better placed to serve the key EU market. Location really does matter for solar, unlike oil which can be shipped everywhere. Also massive investment needed everywhere for huge interconnectors if that really is the route they're going down & losses that you just don't get with LNG or oil also.
Egypt (they're already building a 3GW interconnect), Turkey and India are the likely largest markets for them. Along with their own chemicals industry.
In the meantime they've gut a couple of decades of enormous oil revenue to fund it all.
A 3 GW interconnect is chicken feed compared to how much raw energy the Sauds export via oil though. I just can't see solar scaling up anywhere near enough to compensate for a theoretical loss of oil export - not in our lifetimes anyway.
Solar does though seem to offer a perfectly scalable technology. The only limitation being the panels themselves and the batteries to store energy at night (or other energy storage like superheated salt, capacitors and so on). In the vast empty spaces of the Saudi interior you could build interconnected solar farms large enough to reproduce the Kingdom's entire hydrocarbons output, with no planning issues, little or no water requirement, its own energy source (obviously), and few if any employees other than a few people with machine guns on the perimeter fence and a handful of maintenance engineers.
Such vast deployment would have the economies of scale to include its own (solar powered) factories making solar panels, its own rail and road links and port infrastructure.
First the solar farms would power Saudi and all its near neighbours through interconnectors. Then further export could be via longer interconnectors to the European grid and green hydrogen, for which of course Saudi has a lot of the existing hydrocarbons infrastructure.
If there's still surplus energy they might as well build factories to smelt aluminium, make green steel, fabricate carbon fibre and so on.
They are as likely to look east for their energy markets, as bother with Europe - which as noted upthread is more attractive to N Africa.
Also, very cheap energy will probably make the difference between some of the hotter places in the world remaining habitable or becoming uninhabitable.
A tracking system, as used in several countries. Box in the car.
Charging is proportional to vehicle size, distance travelled. Given it is registered to a specific owner/vehicle, exemptions and reductions for poorer people becomes easy.
Since it has GPS, easy to enforce speed limits. So get rid of the expensive to maintain road humps that penalise small cars. And cause accidents - they are often placed very badly, causing drivers to swerve left and right to get the lowest bump.
If you want to price use according to car size and distance travelled, perhaps with additional cost for urban use -
why not just tax fuel more?
Emissions vary quite widely among cars with equal mpg.
Also location of the travel is important for congestion.
Fuel will be electricity.
I can seem some case for a levy on charge point electricity as it goes only to fuel vehicles, but that would drive home charging - a good thing for the large majority of people with off street parking perhaps.
On the downside we would need a sharp remedy for the people who create trip hazards by draping cables across pavements.
Trouble with adding a levy to charge points is that you can charge from a normal 13amp socket so a lot of people would be evading the levy
I think an incentive to charge at home is perhaps a good thing.
Many users of charge points use shared resources ie space.
Perhaps applied to on street charging points?
I think there are probably better ways, though, I quite like the idea of an annual axle weight tax based on the 4th power of the axle weight which is the formula for wear on roads, as I have argued before.
One way or the other fuel duty needs to be replaced which will require electricity used to charge cars to be taxed accordingly or some other method such as you suggest. However using the method you describe penalises the people who drive little vs those that drive a lot if just based on axle weight. It will also like result in electric cars with extra axles. No reason a car is limited to 4 wheels
It will also like result in electric cars with extra axles.
Well if it does, that'll be better for road wear.
And worse for efficiency, and thus range, as there will be more surface area in contact with the road and so a higher coefficient of friction.
Simply base it on 2 axles for tax purposes .
I think there are plenty of good reasons to incentivise smaller, lighter, more efficient vehicles - including energy consumed in manufacture and use.
We are also discussing a mileage tax by various means - that would provide a foil to the weight tax.
Anecdote: one of my friend's cousins is a billionaire. Their deal is to go to any city's residential district and buy a warehouse-sized, er, warehouse and make them huge domestic living spaces. Or several houses then knock them together.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
I have two close friends who are insanely wealthy
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier. The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
It’s all relative
That is absolutely right. (Pun intended.) It's also ample illustration of the fact that EVERY alpha, deep down, is a beta, motivated by the thought that his tinky is considerably shorter than some other guy's.
Sigmas or "sigma wolves" don't give a toss about waving their widdlers, buying football clubs, or any other kind of juvenile competitive behaviour. We know we're superior.
Message to any billionaires (or Basil Zaharoff fans) reading this: just keep on competing with those who are willing to compete with you, you silly sods.
Both my Crazy Rich Friends enjoy life but I’m not sure either of them is “happy”. More like: cheerful but with lots of normal human problems, and issues. And some abnormal problems that arise from great wealth
A tracking system, as used in several countries. Box in the car.
Charging is proportional to vehicle size, distance travelled. Given it is registered to a specific owner/vehicle, exemptions and reductions for poorer people becomes easy.
Since it has GPS, easy to enforce speed limits. So get rid of the expensive to maintain road humps that penalise small cars. And cause accidents - they are often placed very badly, causing drivers to swerve left and right to get the lowest bump.
If you want to price use according to car size and distance travelled, perhaps with additional cost for urban use -
why not just tax fuel more?
Emissions vary quite widely among cars with equal mpg.
Also location of the travel is important for congestion.
Fuel will be electricity.
I can seem some case for a levy on charge point electricity as it goes only to fuel vehicles, but that would drive home charging - a good thing for the large majority of people with off street parking perhaps.
On the downside we would need a sharp remedy for the people who create trip hazards by draping cables across pavements.
Trouble with adding a levy to charge points is that you can charge from a normal 13amp socket so a lot of people would be evading the levy
I think an incentive to charge at home is perhaps a good thing.
Many users of charge points use shared resources ie space.
Perhaps applied to on street charging points?
I think there are probably better ways, though, I quite like the idea of an annual axle weight tax based on the 4th power of the axle weight which is the formula for wear on roads, as I have argued before.
One way or the other fuel duty needs to be replaced which will require electricity used to charge cars to be taxed accordingly or some other method such as you suggest. However using the method you describe penalises the people who drive little vs those that drive a lot if just based on axle weight. It will also like result in electric cars with extra axles. No reason a car is limited to 4 wheels
It will also like result in electric cars with extra axles.
Well if it does, that'll be better for road wear.
And worse for efficiency, and thus range, as there will be more surface area in contact with the road and so a higher coefficient of friction.
Mu is constant and does not vary with contact area. The system resistance and friction losses might increase but not the CoF - all else being equal.
As a rebrand, X is potentially superior to Meta and Alphabet (neither of which has really worked, except perhaps on some obscure accounting basis)
It's a rebrand but he's also looking at expanding the X brand way beyond twitter. Folding Tesla, SpaceX into it and adding a paypal/banking competitor look to be on the horizon I think.
What he says about becoming a western WeChat makes total sense. A platform for everything (which Facebook might have become, if they’d not gone mad - I remember a moment when it seemed like you needed a Facebook account to simply function - happily it’s gone)
However unlike WeChat he will face tremendous competition. Apple, Google and Amazon would all like to be what he wants to be, and they are significantly richer than him
I cannot imagine what the Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg/Cook equivalent of "I am considerably richer than yaww" is.
As a rebrand, X is potentially superior to Meta and Alphabet (neither of which has really worked, except perhaps on some obscure accounting basis)
It's a rebrand but he's also looking at expanding the X brand way beyond twitter. Folding Tesla, SpaceX into it and adding a paypal/banking competitor look to be on the horizon I think.
Tesla is publicly-owned, not private. SpaceX is owned by a bunch of investors. How can he fold those two companies into Twitter without shareholder go-ahead?
Today's Twitter Poll: Should the UK be introducing more or less green policies, eg to target 'net zero' and cleaner air ?
In general terms which of these is CLOSEST to your view? More green policy 64.9% It's about right now 8.1% Less green policies 18.2% Dont know enough 2 answer
More but better?
Generic green policy good.
Any specific green policy, not as good.
"Something must be done, look at those burning forests!!!"
As a rebrand, X is potentially superior to Meta and Alphabet (neither of which has really worked, except perhaps on some obscure accounting basis)
Yeah, but Meta and Alphabet are corporate-facing brands. Alphabet is entirely corporate; I don't think I've ever noticed it on a Google property. "Meta" shows up as a subtitle on some of the company's products.
Musk appears to want to replace the consumer-facing Twitter brand entirely with the X brand. It's not "Twitter from X" in the same way as "Facebook from Meta", it's just "X".
A tracking system, as used in several countries. Box in the car.
Charging is proportional to vehicle size, distance travelled. Given it is registered to a specific owner/vehicle, exemptions and reductions for poorer people becomes easy.
Since it has GPS, easy to enforce speed limits. So get rid of the expensive to maintain road humps that penalise small cars. And cause accidents - they are often placed very badly, causing drivers to swerve left and right to get the lowest bump.
If you want to price use according to car size and distance travelled, perhaps with additional cost for urban use -
why not just tax fuel more?
Emissions vary quite widely among cars with equal mpg.
Also location of the travel is important for congestion.
Fuel will be electricity.
I can seem some case for a levy on charge point electricity as it goes only to fuel vehicles, but that would drive home charging - a good thing for the large majority of people with off street parking perhaps.
On the downside we would need a sharp remedy for the people who create trip hazards by draping cables across pavements.
Trouble with adding a levy to charge points is that you can charge from a normal 13amp socket so a lot of people would be evading the levy
At a max of 3 kw per hour it'll take a while, mind
You could combine the outputs of sockets on different fuses/RCDs if you bond the earths. Apparently you can kill yourself or burn your gaff down to the ground if the impedence loads don't match but I've done it a few times and I'm still here. (As is my house.)
Disapointed, Dura
I'd have thought you'd have just stripped the incoming supply before the cutout (and meter)
I used to do that in my parents' house as I was very partially to super high amperage (100+ Amps) experiments as a teenager.
So...did any of your test subjects come back? Asking for some friends with an assemblage of body parts and some jump leads.
As a rebrand, X is potentially superior to Meta and Alphabet (neither of which has really worked, except perhaps on some obscure accounting basis)
Yeah, but Meta and Alphabet are corporate-facing brands. Alphabet is entirely corporate; I don't think I've ever noticed it on a Google property. "Meta" shows up as a subtitle on some of the company's products.
Musk appears to want to replace the consumer-facing Twitter brand entirely with the X brand. It's not "Twitter from X" in the same way as "Facebook from Meta", it's just "X".
Yes, X is superior and more memorable, but it is a big risk
However, Musk could be feeling that he’s taken such flak since he bought Twitter he might as well have fun with it: experiment wildly
Today's Twitter Poll: Should the UK be introducing more or less green policies, eg to target 'net zero' and cleaner air ?
In general terms which of these is CLOSEST to your view? More green policy 64.9% It's about right now 8.1% Less green policies 18.2% Dont know enough 2 answer
Today's Twitter Poll: Should the UK be introducing more or less green policies, eg to target 'net zero' and cleaner air ?
In general terms which of these is CLOSEST to your view? More green policy 64.9% It's about right now 8.1% Less green policies 18.2% Dont know enough 2 answer
Remind us how well the Greens did in Uxbridge?
How well did SKS do
I mean seriously Sunil if SKS said sorry but we need to euthnase every brown/ black person over 70 living in the UK as our NHS is falling apart
Centrists like you would say if it makes more people vote Labour, you reluctantly agreed.
As a rebrand, X is potentially superior to Meta and Alphabet (neither of which has really worked, except perhaps on some obscure accounting basis)
Yeah, but Meta and Alphabet are corporate-facing brands. Alphabet is entirely corporate; I don't think I've ever noticed it on a Google property. "Meta" shows up as a subtitle on some of the company's products.
Musk appears to want to replace the consumer-facing Twitter brand entirely with the X brand. It's not "Twitter from X" in the same way as "Facebook from Meta", it's just "X".
Yes, X is superior and more memorable, but it is a big risk
However, Musk could be feeling that he’s taken such flak since he bought Twitter he might as well have fun with it: experiment wildly
He’s not gonna go personally bankrupt
Elon's wealth came to about $450 billion before he bought Twitter for approx $45billion. Estimates on how much the value of that $45 billion has dropped are around $30billion, which would make his current net worth about $420 billion. I think he'll be happy with that.
Today's Twitter Poll: Should the UK be introducing more or less green policies, eg to target 'net zero' and cleaner air ?
In general terms which of these is CLOSEST to your view? More green policy 64.9% It's about right now 8.1% Less green policies 18.2% Dont know enough 2 answer
Today's Twitter Poll: Should the UK be introducing more or less green policies, eg to target 'net zero' and cleaner air ?
In general terms which of these is CLOSEST to your view? More green policy 64.9% It's about right now 8.1% Less green policies 18.2% Dont know enough 2 answer
Remind us how well the Greens did in Uxbridge?
How well did SKS do
I mean seriously Sunil if SKS said sorry but we need to euthnase every brown/ black person over 70 living in the UK as our NHS is falling apart
Centrists like you would say if it makes more people vote Labour, you reluctantly agreed.
You have no principles at all like SKS
You won't see it but that post shows exactly why four fifths of the country has no time for the hard left.
This is a very good tip by @MikeSmithson by the way.
Sadiq has made a huge error with ulez. However, I suspect it will blow over and that he will be re-elected.
It ought to serve as a warning to Labour. It's during their third term in office that they will combine arrogance with fatigue.
History repeats itself. Has to. No one listens.
If you apply the Uxbridge swing to the London Mayoral contest, then Khan wins by the biggest margin in any London Mayoral contest.
That’s the point. ULEZ may have allowed the Tories to hold on in Uxbridge, but there was still a substantial swing against them. The underlying unpopularity of the Conservatives is the bigger factor. Lay Hall.
Or perhaps ULEZ was the reason for the massive swing 😉
I don't know much about London politics, but in a city where 46% of households don't have access to a car at all, I can't see how this can become an issue for Khan without a hysterical misinformation campaign from CCHQ. 90% of those cars are ULEZ compliant, so we are talking about less than 5% of households.
Car ownership is also strongly correlated with earnings and location. The people with cars are already likely to be voting Tory. You might find that non-ULEZ compliant cars are more likely to be owned by poorer drivers, but I'd guess this is still a very small number of possible labour voters.
There are some recent stats that suggest cycling had now overtaken driving in parts of central London, so like with all Pigou taxes, ULEZ will become a smaller issue going forward.
Virtually none of the 46% of households without access to a car are changing their vote because of ULEZ.
A lot of the households with non compliant cars are both incentived to turn out and switch.
As with VAT on private schools it makes no difference electorally that the majority support the policy, the switchers are nearly all on one side.
The gap between Khan and Bailey last time was 120,000 votes - a lot more than that will be impacted by ULEZ. If Corbyn joins the show it feels pretty tough for Khan to me. One quirk is that if Corbyn does join, it might prompt other high profile independents as not impossible the winning number could be in the mid twenties.
I reckon we'd have two Corbyns on the ballot for starters.
If Jezza delivered Susan Hall (who has the potential to become the worst mayor ever elected in a major city) to London I suspect outside of his diehard fans who don't care (and never have) about winning elections, he will lose all sympathy and it'll be a bullet to the brain of Labour's hard left for a generation.
Complete bollocks.
Every Corbyn supporter cared about winning.
It's centrists within Labour who didn't care about winning see the Forde report for evidence of the factional movement of resources at GE2107 away from the winnable marginals to centrist favourites seats with huge majorities.
I saw this same theory on Facebook yesterday. It is the Left’s new rallying cry: Starmer isn’t bothered about winning the election, he just wants to destroy true socialism.
History: a wibble about various forms of civil war/polarisation over the centuries, and three countries that might suffer that fate in the not too distant future:
Comments
Only $76 m of that on field earnings.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brettknight/2023/05/02/the-worlds-10-highest-paid-athletes-2023/?sh=5851f82db156
Truly Saudi Arabia is determined to squander it's fortune.
Is how that world works.
No, really
Wind blown sand is too fine for making cement and concrete. In fact it’s banned in the Middle East - causes building collapses.
Also too powdery for sandbags. During the First Gulf War, the US imported sand by the bulk carrier ship to fill sandbags…
I think it arose partly following sandpaper gate, and partly because of the extremely underhand 'stumping' of Bairstow. Whatever provoked it, booing from the crowd is acceptable, confronting the players in the Pavillion by members of MCC is not.
He won’t be around long enough to transform the perception of Saudi football?
However, you make a fair point. If all they want is the status then fuck it. Buy a solid gold Bentley. But mbappe for one season for one billion
Saudi Arabia are more likely to end up like Lebanon than with a stable post-oil economy.
How awful, we thought, to have to remember your toothbrush and favourite shirt whenever you go to one or other of your houses. Before it dawned on us that of course he has as many toothbrushes and favourite shirts as he has houses.
Because billionaire.
Small and obvious point but most people have initial difficulty in comprehending the scale of wealth we are talking about.
Some like the Mona Lisa won't go anywhere, but the Rubens might..
Although not all will be successful. Because you don't need to be a billionaire, just quite (OK, very) well off and you can tell the billionaire to go eff themselves. As frequently happens. More than one might think.
Edit: and wrt art there is also the public benefactor element so it might be that there is a Saudi Aramco Museum of Art somewhere (or everywhere). I mean look at historic art collections - often in the hands of a wealthy few but now on public display.
The Saudis are very late to the party now, but there’s some serious money being spent, and also serious money to be earned out there.
It’ll be many years before the residents and citizens of Jeddah stop coming to Dubai for the weekend though. Many of the workers out there have their wives and kids here, where there’s a social life and good schools.
The first is worth £1bn+ the second is £250m
I understand the mindset of these people. But with a caveat:
This is going to sound bonkers but the £1bn guy recently said to me “if I was REALLY rich then yada yada”
He feels that he is well below the absolute top tier.
The musks and bezos and Saudi princes. And he struggles to understand how THEY think
It’s all relative
I'd have thought you'd have just stripped the incoming supply before the cutout (and meter) and crocodile clipped the charging lead on. Or looped a coathanger over overhead wires, if nearby (with a transformer chucked in if needed, depending on the line).
No amount of air conditioned football stadiums with trillion quid footie stars will get round that
Saudi and Russia are the two biggest by far and your average Saudi or Russian have been shafted regardless. There are signs your average Saudi might do better in a decade or twos time, and it is hard to see how Russia can be much worse than it is.
Iraq, Libya, Venezuela all shafted too for various reasons. US and Canada diversified enough to make little difference.
UAE and Norway will be fine, as will the likes of Kuwait and Qatar if they can avoid getting invaded. Brazil and Nigeria volatile, could go either way.
A club I was a member of in a similar urban setting - but nowhere near as expensive as Oxford - was offered millions (in 1985!) to sell up plus a plot of land to build a new, more modern course out of town.
The club turned it down because the whole point of an urban course is that you don't have to drive miles to get there and the members didn't want the hassle.
Similarly a friend of mine is a member of a private allotment site in urban Leeds. They were offered 60k per plot about 10 years ago but being a fairly well to do part they could all afford to turn that down too.
You could argue a golf course isn't much of a facility for the public and therefore fair game, but there are at least a few public footpaths at Southfield which link up with a local nature reserve making it a useable green space.
And as for the houses, if not to live in then for staff, etc.
Along with their own chemicals industry.
In the meantime they've gut a couple of decades of enormous oil revenue to fund it all.
(Not that they encourage betting, of course).
Of more use will be the Black Sea hotel resorts, which are going to try and rival what Dubai has in terms of beaches. Will be a ‘closed city’, with no locals allowed, but with bars and possibly even casinos.
UAE is building a casino at the moment. https://www.arabianbusiness.com/industries/travel-hospitality/uae-casino-first-look-at-wynn-al-marjan-island-in-ras-al-khaimah
I'm not denying, I'd love to own a townhouse in Chelsea, an estate in Teesdale, a holiday home in Croatia, a big apartment in Madeira, and have enough money to devote myself full time to researching and writing military history. So yes, a multi-millionaire.
But, after that, what's the point?
Have all that stuff and set up a foundation to help bring water to remote African villages, or whatever. The one doesn't preclude the other.
Plus I have no doubt that once you have the toys the bills mount up and you can convince yourself that you are struggling (as per @Leon's friend).
That wonderful passage in Bonfire of the Vanities when he catalogues just how it is that earning $1m/year (this was decades ago) meant he was just about on the poverty line.
By that I mean (as an example) you can’t simply buy any house you want in London on a whim. A house in Regent’s Park has just sold for £115m. My friend would actually have to consider that carefully. It’s more than ten percent of his entire wealth. Hmm. Etc
Whereas Elon or Bezos can spend £115m and not even notice it. And if it all goes wrong fuck it. They are still worth 99.9% of what they were worth before
Our treatments for many types of cancer have progressed remarkably, but so much more to do. At least now if you are diagnosed with 'cancer' you have a 50% chance of still being alive in 10 years.
[Edit] Not a very x-cellent choice IMO
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66284304
https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/rewind-a-punch-up-in-the-lord-s-pavilion-during-the-centenary-test-1980-474524?platform=amp
John Rentoul
@JohnRentoul
·
1h
Good grief. He is serious about trying to destroy this thing isn’t he?
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1683419523225985027
It's extremely rare for all regions in the country to be simultaneously in prolonged drought. Inter-region water transfer links can be built in a fraction of the time of reservoirs, and ensure that we don't have the situation of the dry areas of the country in drought whilst the wetter areas have brim-full reservoirs. They'd only need to be used when needed, as well.
However, the regions in most need of water have companies that don't really want this (because they'd be buying in the water and because the Net Capital Asset Value, which is used to dictate acceptable water pricing for them, is far lower). Building reservoirs dependent on the most water-stressed waterways and rivers is always going to be a hostage to prolonged drought in potential climate change.
The note earlier about plugging leaks can't be overemphasised. Thames Water leaks out a quarter of all its water between source and customer (in one of the most water-stressed areas of the country). That's equivalent to losing the entire capacity of Farmoor Reservoir every fourteen days - and Farmoor Reservoir is twice the median capacity of an English reservoir. Or, to put it another way, TW reducing leakage by one percentage point equates to building another Farmoor reservoir and filling it completely.
The costs of running large houses, boats, planes etc. quickly get astronmonical, and the amount of work required means that you end up hiring people to manage the people.
No doubt he could have sold stuff to raise the rest of the cash - but that would have cramped him elsewhere.
That's about four month's profit for Aramco.
In general terms which of these is CLOSEST to your view?
More green policy
64.9%
It's about right now
8.1%
Less green policies
18.2%
Dont know enough 2 answer
What i mean is: for a Musk or a Bezos there is no normal domestic decision (where to live, what to personally own - super yachts etc) that will ever be impacted by financial considerations. £200m is probably the most you can possibly spend on a home? Maybe £300m? For the mere £1b billionaire that’s a lot. For the £250b billionaire, not
Any specific green policy, not as good.
Oh Lord give us green policies but not affecting me just yet.
Which is why it's financially crippled compared to anyone else in the space.
The rebrand seems to be a complete irrelevance.
However unlike WeChat he will face tremendous competition. Apple, Google and Amazon would all like to be what he wants to be, and they are significantly richer than him
Strategically, they are quite well placed. Though it's also entirely possible they'll just eff it all up and squander their wealth.
The key to it all is frictionless micropayments at scale, but no-one in the West has really managed to do it so far.
Such vast deployment would have the economies of scale to include its own (solar powered) factories making solar panels, its own rail and road links and port infrastructure.
First the solar farms would power Saudi and all its near neighbours through interconnectors. Then further export could be via longer interconnectors to the European grid and green hydrogen, for which of course Saudi has a lot of the existing hydrocarbons infrastructure.
If there's still surplus energy they might as well build factories to smelt aluminium, make green steel, fabricate carbon fibre and so on.
But, maybe they don’t care and, in fact, the more generic and forgettable it is, the better
(*It was pointed out on here, by me amongst others)
That's in very short supply at Musk's X venture.
From wiki:
Later in 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company with $12 million of the money he made from the Compaq acquisition.[61] X.com was one of the first federally insured online banks, and over 200,000 customers joined in its initial months of operation.[62] Even though Musk founded the company, investors regarded him as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year.[63]
In 2000, X.com merged with online bank Confinity to avoid competition,[55][63][64] as Confinity's money-transfer service PayPal was more popular than X.com's service.[65] Musk then returned as CEO of the merged company. His preference for Microsoft over Unix-based software caused a rift among the company's employees, and led Peter Thiel, Confinity's founder, to resign.[66] With the company suffering from compounding technological issues and the lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in September 2000.[67][b] Under Thiel, the company focused on the money-transfer service and was renamed PayPal in 2001.[69][70]
In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk—the largest shareholder with 11.72% of shares—received $175.8 million.[71][72] In 2017, more than 15 years later, Musk purchased the X.com domain from PayPal for its "sentimental value".[73][74] In 2022, Musk discussed a goal of creating "X, the everything app".
Sigmas or "sigma wolves" don't give a toss about waving their widdlers, buying football clubs, showing off, or any other kind of juvenile competitive behaviour. We know we're superior.
Message to any billionaires (or Basil Zaharoff fans) reading this: just keep on competing with those who are willing to compete with you, you silly sods.
Policy makers need to put more thought into green policies and be willing to compromise at the edges to bring more people with them.
Also, very cheap energy will probably make the difference between some of the hotter places in the world remaining habitable or becoming uninhabitable.
I think there are plenty of good reasons to incentivise smaller, lighter, more efficient vehicles - including energy consumed in manufacture and use.
We are also discussing a mileage tax by various means - that would provide a foil to the weight tax.
Something done.
"Not that, that will cost me money. Are you mad?"
Musk appears to want to replace the consumer-facing Twitter brand entirely with the X brand. It's not "Twitter from X" in the same way as "Facebook from Meta", it's just "X".
However, Musk could be feeling that he’s taken such flak since he bought Twitter he might as well have fun with it: experiment wildly
He’s not gonna go personally bankrupt
I mean seriously Sunil if SKS said sorry but we need to euthnase every brown/ black person over 70 living in the UK as our NHS is falling apart
Centrists like you would say if it makes more people vote Labour, you reluctantly agreed.
You have no principles at all like SKS
It is, of course, complete nonsense.
https://medium.com/@rkilner/polarisation-and-civil-wars-how-states-terminally-wound-themselves-f522c76900d3