One regulator which could make a huge difference to the economy is the MHRA (in conjunction with the NHS).
Figure out a better national framework for clinical trials, which are hard for drug companies to set up, and even harder for willing patients to access.
The UK is already a pretty good place to conduct research; making it better would benefit manufacturers, patients, and the economy.
The recovery platform trial for covid was so good... it seems incredible we can't do more of that.
That's the sort of model I had in mind, though clearly that was a very particular case, but typical of many trials.
There's probably reasons why this is complicated... but why can't everyone with dementia in UK be offered to enter a clinical trial. A platform trial of that would be very attractive to drug companies I would think. And we could finally run down whether generic medicines, like viagra which have been theorised to help... actually help.
On topic, regulators don't create growth, business small, medium and large does.
Regulators role is just to ensure large businesses especially do not push so hard for growth they get into more debt than they can afford and which risks that viability if income streams and repayment of that debt starts to dry up
Regulation isn’t just about financial stability. It’s also about creating the conditions that allow pro-growth markets to exist at all. If you fail to disincentivise the fraudulent & actively harmful products that destroy buyer confidence your market collapses & everyone ends up worse off.
Efficient markets require regulation, otherwise they get taken over by bad actors who destroy them for their own short term benefit.
How would raising taxes to pay the EU membership fees create growth? Shackling ourselves to the cratering German and French economies in the hope they will buy much more of our stuff does not look a winning strategy.
get rid of the massiv ehassles and cost of doijng business and travelling which will be far more than we ever contributed as we see very clearly.
For a vanishingly small, and ever decreasing proportion of our trade.......
And why is it decreasing? Because we created added costs on it.
EU membership is about more than trade, or even trade and defence, there are major cultural issues too. I've been pro-Europe since the current concept started, back in the 50's, and I still hope to see us in our rightful place at the European top table before I die.
'Sir Keir Starmer has been warned his ratings have suffered a “catastrophic” fall among countryside voters angered by his “family farm tax”.
Just one in five voters believes Labour cares about people who live and work in the countryside, polling for The Telegraph has found.
A survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted by Public First, the political consultancy, found only 22 per cent believed Labour cared about those in rural areas.
'Sir Keir Starmer has been warned his ratings have suffered a “catastrophic” fall among countryside voters angered by his “family farm tax”.
Just one in five voters believes Labour cares about people who live and work in the countryside, polling for The Telegraph has found.
A survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted by Public First, the political consultancy, found only 22 per cent believed Labour cared about those in rural areas.
“Public First is a Westminster-based research and PR firm founded in 2016 by political strategists and former Conservative advisers, Rachel Wolf and James Frayne.”
I’m sure this is a completely unbiased article in the Telegraph, that well known bastion of support for the Labour Party.
One regulator which could make a huge difference to the economy is the MHRA (in conjunction with the NHS).
Figure out a better national framework for clinical trials, which are hard for drug companies to set up, and even harder for willing patients to access.
The UK is already a pretty good place to conduct research; making it better would benefit manufacturers, patients, and the economy.
Meanwhile, Innovate UK with the MHRA has just announced something like £7.5m funding for new regulatory science networks to work on such issues (in health and beyond).
The more regulators, the more performative box-tickers. From Ofsted to the Gambling Commission via whoever in the City is supposed to stop billions evaporating every few years, we have too many regulators who seem wilfully ignorant of their subject areas, and legislators who see more rules as the answer to every problem from keeping children from being beaten to death with cricket bats, to keeping children from being burned alive in tower blocks.
We need fewer regulators but more regulation. A regulatory system that relies on clear rules and culpability, rather than voluntary arrangements overseen by shady quangos who deliver their own rather mealy justice.
The environment is not being served by the current arrangements.
Regulation being on a tiny list of subjects that I pronounce on at pb.com, and which I have some actual experience of, I think I disagree with you. It usually comes down to the interpretation and application of rules. Who will determine Organisation X is doing what they need to do?
We need regulators that actually do something other than fill their pockets with huge salaries and produce reams of crap reports. If the beggars actuallty did something to ensure quality and doing what they are supposed to do then nobody would be worried. We have legions of highly paid public service drones doing a crap job and allowing parasites to bleed us dry for crap services.
As just noted, we do have a few The MHRA is pretty effective (which is why we were the centre for EU drug regulation before Brexit). They would be one example where planning involving government, industry, and the NHS could move the dial quite significantly.
Yes, the MHRA are already good. But fast-tracking approvals and supporting health research is all well and good, but sadly not the primary driver for when and where companies will do R&D or locate IP. Nor is tax (which is very favourable for IP rich pharma companies in the UK). The biggest ones are size and profitability of the market. And the USA, with its huge population, unconsolidated buyer market and hence eye popping reimbursement pricing, is the motherlode that cross-subsidises everywhere else.
Not really true; the US is quite prepared to offshore R&D - even to China - so long as they can onshore some of the profits.
The unique advantage we still have is the NHS; a national clinical trials framework might leverage that.
It's not a zero sum game, but we need to leverage our advantages to stay in it.
They offshore the cheap routine stuff. The point is the market is vast and profitable, so that’s where a. there is more availability of new medicines, and often earlier, and b. most of the corporate profits arise.
Yes we have some advantages including our consolidated patient data. It’s not so say there isn’t plenty that can be done, and we’re already doing some of it. Just that I don’t see it having a meaningful impact on GDP. We lost some of the pan-European management of trials and a lot of centralised European supply chain management after Brexit - I was involved in helping companies move their operations and out. Some of that is mobile and could come back but some, notably the supply chains and regulatory activities like QA and batch release, are gone for good.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
On topic, regulators don't create growth, business small, medium and large does.
Regulators role is just to ensure large businesses especially do not push so hard for growth they get into more debt than they can afford and which risks that viability if income streams and repayment of that debt starts to dry up
There's the size of the cake and there's the division of the cake. Regulation and much of government policy-making is about dividing the cake. But the more regulation there is the smaller its size.
The 2008 global financial crisis was a huge impediment to growth. Regulators exist to reduce the chance of that happening again. That is a very worthwhile function.
On topic, regulators don't create growth, business small, medium and large does.
Regulators role is just to ensure large businesses especially do not push so hard for growth they get into more debt than they can afford and which risks that viability if income streams and repayment of that debt starts to dry up
Regulation isn’t just about financial stability. It’s also about creating the conditions that allow pro-growth markets to exist at all. If you fail to disincentivise the fraudulent & actively harmful products that destroy buyer confidence your market collapses & everyone ends up worse off.
Efficient markets require regulation, otherwise they get taken over by bad actors who destroy them for their own short term benefit.
Regulation is first and foremost about protecting people. I think that gets lost sometimes when we get into regulation bad deregulation good arguments.
We see the results of weak or poor regulation when something goes wrong: people get poisoning from badly handled food. Rivers get full of sewage after rain. Patients suffer from medical misconduct. Debt markets crash. Cars emit ten times more NOx than their manufacturers claim. Factories leak toxic chemicals into watercourses. Consumers face monopolies and high prices. Investors get shafted in Ponzi schemes or missold pensions.
The thing is effective and efficient regulation, not more or less of it.
'Sir Keir Starmer has been warned his ratings have suffered a “catastrophic” fall among countryside voters angered by his “family farm tax”.
Just one in five voters believes Labour cares about people who live and work in the countryside, polling for The Telegraph has found.
A survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted by Public First, the political consultancy, found only 22 per cent believed Labour cared about those in rural areas.
“Public First is a Westminster-based research and PR firm founded in 2016 by political strategists and former Conservative advisers, Rachel Wolf and James Frayne.”
I’m sure this is a completely unbiased article in the Telegraph, that well known bastion of support for the Labour Party.
I'm not sure it's much change on the support Labour got in rural seats in July, whether polled by ex-advisors or highlighted in The Telegraph. Their actual percentage vote achieved across the eligible population was little different to this.
A vignette on regulation and why growth got added to the regulators portfolio. Probably.
I was working for one of the alt-banks. Very successful. Their security was actually excellent, the customer interface was of a small number of calls from the Web API/App, using standard (but top of the line) encryption and all the other usual stuff.
As they were growing, it was decided to create a Cyber Security department. With the goal of preventing cyber attacks.
This stopped all work on the platform.
This is because the new Cyber Security department would not sign off on any release, without a 100% guarantee that this did not increase the risk of attack. Since nothing in reality is 100%, no one would give such a foolish assurance.
So even releases to improve security (a non-stop, ongoing thing) were impossible.
The Cyber Security people had not been given a goal of *even letting the business function* - their sole aim was to prevent attacks.
Within half a day, the goals of the Cyber Security department were re-written to include business performance.
It is easy to imagine the kind of clipboardista, who confronted with the complete stoppage of housing construction in the UK, who would point out that this meant 0 defective houses were being completed.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
And how would Musk turning up and ranting about the AfD and Reform UK being the future have benefitted a growth summit?
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
On topic, regulators don't create growth, business small, medium and large does.
Regulators role is just to ensure large businesses especially do not push so hard for growth they get into more debt than they can afford and which risks that viability if income streams and repayment of that debt starts to dry up
Regulation isn’t just about financial stability. It’s also about creating the conditions that allow pro-growth markets to exist at all. If you fail to disincentivise the fraudulent & actively harmful products that destroy buyer confidence your market collapses & everyone ends up worse off.
Efficient markets require regulation, otherwise they get taken over by bad actors who destroy them for their own short term benefit.
Regulation is first and foremost about protecting people. I think that gets lost sometimes when we get into regulation bad deregulation good arguments.
We see the results of weak or poor regulation when something goes wrong: people get poisoning from badly handled food. Rivers get full of sewage after rain. Patients suffer from medical misconduct. Debt markets crash. Cars emit ten times more NOx than their manufacturers claim. Factories leak toxic chemicals into watercourses. Consumers face monopolies and high prices. Investors get shafted in Ponzi schemes or missold pensions.
The thing is effective and efficient regulation, not more or less of it.
We also need to define what is "more or less" regulation.
If you are doing a loft conversion project, in the UK, you can
1) Create a telephone book sized pile of documents to be in compliance 2) Not create them and hope no one looks.
Increasingly, 1) is dealt with by computer generating them. They are never read.
Since no-one does any enforcement (building control seem to try, but a quick inspection at the end of the project...) none of this really matters.
In practical terms, we have next to no regulation of this kind of building work. Yet we have enough laws and regulations to allow people to specialise in the area.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
And how would Musk turning up and ranting about the AfD and Reform UK being the future have benefitted a growth summit?
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
One area that he does know something about is accelerating the TRL level of technology.
Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes form the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself, or that is something that other people (probably the Chinese) do. In any event, this requires a lot of mucky, dirty hands stuff. Even worse, it means investing money in mucky, dirty hands stuff. Stuff with the wrong kind of numbers {snigger}
If you want more growth, figuring out how to turn inventions into products and getting people to invest in this is a good thing to look at.
This isn't because Musk is an unfathomable genius. His ideas of insourcing and vertical integration are rather reminiscent of mid-stage Henry Ford, historically.
EDIT: and lots of pretty obvious stuff. If you want batteries, build a factory to build batteries. Not talk about batteries, hold summits about batteries, have a battery enquiry etc.
And it's not just tech, it's everything from trains to football clubs.
I read this piece and thought it was on point. Let’s take the party politics out of it and step back from the snipers nest. Our economy is structurally broken. We long ago stopped investing and started selling off everything we had. We have a serious productivity issue. We’ve made existence expensive via weaponising property (an investment, not a home), and marketising energy costs to the point where despite being increasingly flush with clean energy we price it based on imported gas we don’t import.
Then we have Europe. Mention it and the usual suspects on both sides freak out. Park the politics remember and just look at the economy. Cutting ourselves off from our primary market is bonkers. The primary market isn’t the EU - that’s why it’s called the EEA and isn’t the same as the EU. Nd yet we can’t have free access to it like non-EU states such as Iceland because morons think it’s the EU / think we can’t join without begging the EU to let us back in.
My manifesto for change: 1. National program to invest in our infrastructure. Roads, railways, fibre broadband etc all pays positive ROI. It’s called capitalism. Look it up. 2. Tax businesses getting bought by foreigners looking to expatriate them. The reason why Germany still ha industry is that Germany didn’t let them be sold to foreigners looking to expatriate them. 3. Invest in education, training and universities. We can’t afford to go progressively stupider no matter how much stupid people insist that we can’t afford teachers or research. 4. Build a shitton of houses through housing associations. Rent. Not buy. Decouple housing from investments. 5. Decouple energy costs from imported crap we import in declining numbers. Invest in building the hardware we’re installing - lunacy to need 20k turbines nd import ll of the because we can’t afford to invest
How would raising taxes to pay the EU membership fees create growth? Shackling ourselves to the cratering German and French economies in the hope they will buy much more of our stuff does not look a winning strategy.
get rid of the massiv ehassles and cost of doijng business and travelling which will be far more than we ever contributed as we see very clearly.
For a vanishingly small, and ever decreasing proportion of our trade.......
And why is it decreasing? Because we created added costs on it.
EU membership is about more than trade, or even trade and defence, there are major cultural issues too. I've been pro-Europe since the current concept started, back in the 50's, and I still hope to see us in our rightful place at the European top table before I die.
I admire your optimism. I'm about 30 years younger than you and I don't expect to do so.
That's why I'm so frustrated by the lack of any ideas at all about what we should be doing with our (now not very) new-found freedom from those that espoused the idea. We may be out of the EU, but nothing else has changed. Largely, we're still sticking to EU rules. We still have have most of the disadvantages (if that's what they were) and few of the advantages.
'Sir Keir Starmer has been warned his ratings have suffered a “catastrophic” fall among countryside voters angered by his “family farm tax”.
Just one in five voters believes Labour cares about people who live and work in the countryside, polling for The Telegraph has found.
A survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted by Public First, the political consultancy, found only 22 per cent believed Labour cared about those in rural areas.
“Public First is a Westminster-based research and PR firm founded in 2016 by political strategists and former Conservative advisers, Rachel Wolf and James Frayne.”
I’m sure this is a completely unbiased article in the Telegraph, that well known bastion of support for the Labour Party.
I'm not sure it's much change on the support Labour got in rural seats in July, whether polled by ex-advisors or highlighted in The Telegraph. Their actual percentage vote achieved across the eligible population was little different to this.
It is reflected in today's MoreinCommon MRP poll which shows Labour losing its majority and losing lots of rural seats it won in July.
Seats like SW Norfolk, Suffolk Coastal, Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, NE Hertfordshire, NE Somerset and Hainham, Mid and South Pembrokeshire, NW Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire Dales, Hexham, North Northumberland, Penrith and Solway, and Banbury for instance all largely rural marginal seats the Tories are projected to regain from Labour https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/poll-labour-lose-seats-rghscklnk
"Investors threaten to call in police over huge losses after collapse of Alastair Campbell son's football betting syndicate - after former Labour spin chief and his wife 'invested £300,000 into business venture'"
And it's not just tech, it's everything from trains to football clubs.
I read this piece and thought it was on point. Let’s take the party politics out of it and step back from the snipers nest. Our economy is structurally broken. We long ago stopped investing and started selling off everything we had. We have a serious productivity issue. We’ve made existence expensive via weaponising property (an investment, not a home), and marketising energy costs to the point where despite being increasingly flush with clean energy we price it based on imported gas we don’t import.
Then we have Europe. Mention it and the usual suspects on both sides freak out. Park the politics remember and just look at the economy. Cutting ourselves off from our primary market is bonkers. The primary market isn’t the EU - that’s why it’s called the EEA and isn’t the same as the EU. Nd yet we can’t have free access to it like non-EU states such as Iceland because morons think it’s the EU / think we can’t join without begging the EU to let us back in.
My manifesto for change: 1. National program to invest in our infrastructure. Roads, railways, fibre broadband etc all pays positive ROI. It’s called capitalism. Look it up. 2. Tax businesses getting bought by foreigners looking to expatriate them. The reason why Germany still ha industry is that Germany didn’t let them be sold to foreigners looking to expatriate them. 3. Invest in education, training and universities. We can’t afford to go progressively stupider no matter how much stupid people insist that we can’t afford teachers or research. 4. Build a shitton of houses through housing associations. Rent. Not buy. Decouple housing from investments. 5. Decouple energy costs from imported crap we import in declining numbers. Invest in building the hardware we’re installing - lunacy to need 20k turbines nd import ll of the because we can’t afford to invest
Actually, a big chunk of the German downturn is that they exported layers of manufacturing.
They kept some high end lines in Germany, but with increasingly final assembly of imported sub components. In addition they made a fortune selling machinery for production lines and to make other machinery to China et al. Who have hit a bit of recession and have started to make their own production line machinery and machinery to make machinery.
4 - the problem isn't buying or renting. Both are too expensive. Some people are spending more than 50% of their post tax income on housing. Build, build, build like crazy.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
And how would Musk turning up and ranting about the AfD and Reform UK being the future have benefitted a growth summit?
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
One area that he does know something about is accelerating the TRL level of technology.
Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes form the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself, or that is something that other people (probably the Chinese) do. In any event, this requires a lot of mucky, dirty hands stuff. Even worse, it means investing money in mucky, dirty hands stuff. Stuff with the wrong kind of numbers {snigger}
If you want more growth, figuring out how to turn inventions into products and getting people to invest in this is a good thing to look at.
This isn't because Musk is an unfathomable genius. His ideas of insourcing and vertical integration are rather reminiscent of mid-stage Henry Ford, historically.
EDIT: and lots of pretty obvious stuff. If you want batteries, build a factory to build batteries. Not talk about batteries, hold summits about batteries, have a battery enquiry etc.
“Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes from the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself” is not true. Innovate UK, NIHR and other government funding is constantly going on about TRLs. We’ve got tons of translational research offices in universities, translational research collaborations, etc. etc. Maybe there should be even more, but this is 100% recognised by government as important.
'Sir Keir Starmer has been warned his ratings have suffered a “catastrophic” fall among countryside voters angered by his “family farm tax”.
Just one in five voters believes Labour cares about people who live and work in the countryside, polling for The Telegraph has found.
A survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted by Public First, the political consultancy, found only 22 per cent believed Labour cared about those in rural areas.
“Public First is a Westminster-based research and PR firm founded in 2016 by political strategists and former Conservative advisers, Rachel Wolf and James Frayne.”
I’m sure this is a completely unbiased article in the Telegraph, that well known bastion of support for the Labour Party.
I'm not sure it's much change on the support Labour got in rural seats in July, whether polled by ex-advisors or highlighted in The Telegraph. Their actual percentage vote achieved across the eligible population was little different to this.
It is reflected in today's MoreinCommon MRP poll which shows Labour losing its majority and losing lots of rural seats it won in July.
Seats like SW Norfolk, Suffolk Coastal, Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, NE Hertfordshire, NE Somerset and Hainham, Mid and South Pembrokeshire, NW Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire Dales, Hexham, North Northumberland, Penrith and Solway, and Banbury for instance all rural marginal seats the Tories are projected to regain from Labour https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/poll-labour-lose-seats-rghscklnk
No, it doesn’t. Because there isn’t an election soon. And you are focusing only on the trend you like - Lab to Con - and not the one you dislike - Con to Ref.
Apparently we can ignore all trends when they disagree with us.
"Investors threaten to call in police over huge losses after collapse of Alastair Campbell son's football betting syndicate - after former Labour spin chief and his wife 'invested £300,000 into business venture'"
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
And how would Musk turning up and ranting about the AfD and Reform UK being the future have benefitted a growth summit?
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
One area that he does know something about is accelerating the TRL level of technology.
Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes form the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself, or that is something that other people (probably the Chinese) do. In any event, this requires a lot of mucky, dirty hands stuff. Even worse, it means investing money in mucky, dirty hands stuff. Stuff with the wrong kind of numbers {snigger}
If you want more growth, figuring out how to turn inventions into products and getting people to invest in this is a good thing to look at.
This isn't because Musk is an unfathomable genius. His ideas of insourcing and vertical integration are rather reminiscent of mid-stage Henry Ford, historically.
EDIT: and lots of pretty obvious stuff. If you want batteries, build a factory to build batteries. Not talk about batteries, hold summits about batteries, have a battery enquiry etc.
“Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes from the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself” is not true. Innovate UK, NIHR and other government funding is constantly going on about TRLs. We’ve got tons of translational research offices in universities, translational research collaborations, etc. etc. Maybe there should be even more, but this is 100% recognised by government as important.
By portions of the permeant apparatus of government. If you talk to politicians, or the Treasury....
You'd be (un)surprised by the number of "business leaders" who run a mile at the sound of development and investment.
"Investors threaten to call in police over huge losses after collapse of Alastair Campbell son's football betting syndicate - after former Labour spin chief and his wife 'invested £300,000 into business venture'"
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha....
'Sir Keir Starmer has been warned his ratings have suffered a “catastrophic” fall among countryside voters angered by his “family farm tax”.
Just one in five voters believes Labour cares about people who live and work in the countryside, polling for The Telegraph has found.
A survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted by Public First, the political consultancy, found only 22 per cent believed Labour cared about those in rural areas.
“Public First is a Westminster-based research and PR firm founded in 2016 by political strategists and former Conservative advisers, Rachel Wolf and James Frayne.”
I’m sure this is a completely unbiased article in the Telegraph, that well known bastion of support for the Labour Party.
I'm not sure it's much change on the support Labour got in rural seats in July, whether polled by ex-advisors or highlighted in The Telegraph. Their actual percentage vote achieved across the eligible population was little different to this.
It is reflected in today's MoreinCommon MRP poll which shows Labour losing its majority and losing lots of rural seats it won in July.
Seats like SW Norfolk, Suffolk Coastal, Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, NE Hertfordshire, NE Somerset and Hainham, Mid and South Pembrokeshire, NW Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire Dales, Hexham, North Northumberland, Penrith and Solway, and Banbury for instance all rural marginal seats the Tories are projected to regain from Labour https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/poll-labour-lose-seats-rghscklnk
No, it doesn’t. Because there isn’t an election soon. And you are focusing only on the trend you like - Lab to Con - and not the one you dislike - Con to Ref.
Apparently we can ignore all trends when they disagree with us.
The same MRP poll has the Tories losing not a single seat to Reform. While Labour would lose 67 seats to Reform, from Dagenham and Thurrock to Llanelli, East Thanet to Bolsover and Bassetlaw, North Durham to Blyth and Ashington, Burnley and Hyndburn to Stoke on Trent North and Kingston Upon Hull East
One regulator which could make a huge difference to the economy is the MHRA (in conjunction with the NHS).
Figure out a better national framework for clinical trials, which are hard for drug companies to set up, and even harder for willing patients to access.
The UK is already a pretty good place to conduct research; making it better would benefit manufacturers, patients, and the economy.
The recovery platform trial for covid was so good... it seems incredible we can't do more of that.
That's the sort of model I had in mind, though clearly that was a very particular case, but typical of many trials.
There's probably reasons why this is complicated... but why can't everyone with dementia in UK be offered to enter a clinical trial. A platform trial of that would be very attractive to drug companies I would think. And we could finally run down whether generic medicines, like viagra which have been theorised to help... actually help.
Consent would be ethically ... complicated. But no reason those of us at the aging end of the couldn't sign up in advance.
And it's not just tech, it's everything from trains to football clubs.
I read this piece and thought it was on point. Let’s take the party politics out of it and step back from the snipers nest. Our economy is structurally broken. We long ago stopped investing and started selling off everything we had. We have a serious productivity issue. We’ve made existence expensive via weaponising property (an investment, not a home), and marketising energy costs to the point where despite being increasingly flush with clean energy we price it based on imported gas we don’t import.
Then we have Europe. Mention it and the usual suspects on both sides freak out. Park the politics remember and just look at the economy. Cutting ourselves off from our primary market is bonkers. The primary market isn’t the EU - that’s why it’s called the EEA and isn’t the same as the EU. Nd yet we can’t have free access to it like non-EU states such as Iceland because morons think it’s the EU / think we can’t join without begging the EU to let us back in.
My manifesto for change: 1. National program to invest in our infrastructure. Roads, railways, fibre broadband etc all pays positive ROI. It’s called capitalism. Look it up. 2. Tax businesses getting bought by foreigners looking to expatriate them. The reason why Germany still ha industry is that Germany didn’t let them be sold to foreigners looking to expatriate them. 3. Invest in education, training and universities. We can’t afford to go progressively stupider no matter how much stupid people insist that we can’t afford teachers or research. 4. Build a shitton of houses through housing associations. Rent. Not buy. Decouple housing from investments. 5. Decouple energy costs from imported crap we import in declining numbers. Invest in building the hardware we’re installing - lunacy to need 20k turbines nd import ll of the because we can’t afford to invest
On the EEA - are we able to influence the rules if we join that and not the EU? My hazy recollection is that the EU sets the rules but I've forgotten now.
"Investors threaten to call in police over huge losses after collapse of Alastair Campbell son's football betting syndicate - after former Labour spin chief and his wife 'invested £300,000 into business venture'"
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha....
And it's not just tech, it's everything from trains to football clubs.
I read this piece and thought it was on point. Let’s take the party politics out of it and step back from the snipers nest. Our economy is structurally broken. We long ago stopped investing and started selling off everything we had. We have a serious productivity issue. We’ve made existence expensive via weaponising property (an investment, not a home), and marketising energy costs to the point where despite being increasingly flush with clean energy we price it based on imported gas we don’t import.
Then we have Europe. Mention it and the usual suspects on both sides freak out. Park the politics remember and just look at the economy. Cutting ourselves off from our primary market is bonkers. The primary market isn’t the EU - that’s why it’s called the EEA and isn’t the same as the EU. Nd yet we can’t have free access to it like non-EU states such as Iceland because morons think it’s the EU / think we can’t join without begging the EU to let us back in.
My manifesto for change: 1. National program to invest in our infrastructure. Roads, railways, fibre broadband etc all pays positive ROI. It’s called capitalism. Look it up. 2. Tax businesses getting bought by foreigners looking to expatriate them. The reason why Germany still ha industry is that Germany didn’t let them be sold to foreigners looking to expatriate them. 3. Invest in education, training and universities. We can’t afford to go progressively stupider no matter how much stupid people insist that we can’t afford teachers or research. 4. Build a shitton of houses through housing associations. Rent. Not buy. Decouple housing from investments. 5. Decouple energy costs from imported crap we import in declining numbers. Invest in building the hardware we’re installing - lunacy to need 20k turbines nd import ll of the because we can’t afford to invest
Actually, a big chunk of the German downturn is that they exported layers of manufacturing.
They kept some high end lines in Germany, but with increasingly final assembly of imported sub components. In addition they made a fortune selling machinery for production lines and to make other machinery to China et al. Who have hit a bit of recession and have started to make their own production line machinery and machinery to make machinery.
4 - the problem isn't buying or renting. Both are too expensive. Some people are spending more than 50% of their post tax income on housing. Build, build, build like crazy.
We are building. What the developers want to build, where they want to build them. An awful lot of granted permissions not being built.
Build build build executive style houses and we’re building the wrong properties in the wrong places and selling them for £unsustainable.
The point about LHA builds is that they can rent at viable rents, way below market rates. The value is irrelevant as they’re not for sale, re not investments: they’re homes.
Why would that do to private rentals? Crash the market, forcing loads of property on the market for people to buy at prices that are more realistic. Lots of people take a short term bath on their “investment” but find that they don’t need to sub their kids tens of thousands to buy.
And it's not just tech, it's everything from trains to football clubs.
I have the oddest feeling he wouldn't care if were were selling them off to France or Germany.
That's hardly a refutation of the article.
And in any event, Europe doesn't have quite the same level of rapacious private equity, which has worked out how to asset strip the UK's 'open for business' economy.
And it's not just tech, it's everything from trains to football clubs.
I read this piece and thought it was on point. Let’s take the party politics out of it and step back from the snipers nest. Our economy is structurally broken. We long ago stopped investing and started selling off everything we had. We have a serious productivity issue. We’ve made existence expensive via weaponising property (an investment, not a home), and marketising energy costs to the point where despite being increasingly flush with clean energy we price it based on imported gas we don’t import.
Then we have Europe. Mention it and the usual suspects on both sides freak out. Park the politics remember and just look at the economy. Cutting ourselves off from our primary market is bonkers. The primary market isn’t the EU - that’s why it’s called the EEA and isn’t the same as the EU. Nd yet we can’t have free access to it like non-EU states such as Iceland because morons think it’s the EU / think we can’t join without begging the EU to let us back in.
My manifesto for change: 1. National program to invest in our infrastructure. Roads, railways, fibre broadband etc all pays positive ROI. It’s called capitalism. Look it up. 2. Tax businesses getting bought by foreigners looking to expatriate them. The reason why Germany still ha industry is that Germany didn’t let them be sold to foreigners looking to expatriate them. 3. Invest in education, training and universities. We can’t afford to go progressively stupider no matter how much stupid people insist that we can’t afford teachers or research. 4. Build a shitton of houses through housing associations. Rent. Not buy. Decouple housing from investments. 5. Decouple energy costs from imported crap we import in declining numbers. Invest in building the hardware we’re installing - lunacy to need 20k turbines nd import ll of the because we can’t afford to invest
1. National program to invest in our infrastructure. Roads, railways, fibre broadband etc all pays positive ROI. It’s called capitalism. Look it up.
I agree but we cannot afford to increase our deficit by enough to make a difference so we need to cut current spending to release money for capital spending.
2. Tax businesses getting bought by foreigners looking to expatriate them. The reason why Germany still ha industry is that Germany didn’t let them be sold to foreigners looking to expatriate them.
No. We need to sell £50bn of assets a year to offset our trade deficit. This means we have to put up with people buying our businesses and, hopefully, developing them here. We need tax policies that encourages that not tax policies which would encourage foreigners to get out of dodge soonest. Of course eliminating our trade deficit is even more important for our future well being than growth.
3. Invest in education, training and universities. We can’t afford to go progressively stupider no matter how much stupid people insist that we can’t afford teachers or research.
We actually do spend reasonable money on basic research. What we are really poor at is converting that research into businesses and then getting the capital to those businesses to allow them to grow. That is the problem. I am not seeing many answers right now.
4. Build a shitton of houses through housing associations. Rent. Not buy. Decouple housing from investments.
We certainly need a lot more houses. Personally, I am not fussed if they are publicly or privately owned.
5. Decouple energy costs from imported crap we import in declining numbers. Invest in building the hardware we’re installing - lunacy to need 20k turbines nd import ll of the because we can’t afford to invest.
In an open economy with a large number of interconnectors it is silly to pretend that we can decouple our energy costs from the going rate to a material extent. What we need to do is build up our capacity so we become a net energy exporter (see balance of payments).
'Sir Keir Starmer has been warned his ratings have suffered a “catastrophic” fall among countryside voters angered by his “family farm tax”.
Just one in five voters believes Labour cares about people who live and work in the countryside, polling for The Telegraph has found.
A survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted by Public First, the political consultancy, found only 22 per cent believed Labour cared about those in rural areas.
“Public First is a Westminster-based research and PR firm founded in 2016 by political strategists and former Conservative advisers, Rachel Wolf and James Frayne.”
I’m sure this is a completely unbiased article in the Telegraph, that well known bastion of support for the Labour Party.
I'm not sure it's much change on the support Labour got in rural seats in July, whether polled by ex-advisors or highlighted in The Telegraph. Their actual percentage vote achieved across the eligible population was little different to this.
It is reflected in today's MoreinCommon MRP poll which shows Labour losing its majority and losing lots of rural seats it won in July.
Seats like SW Norfolk, Suffolk Coastal, Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, NE Hertfordshire, NE Somerset and Hainham, Mid and South Pembrokeshire, NW Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire Dales, Hexham, North Northumberland, Penrith and Solway, and Banbury for instance all rural marginal seats the Tories are projected to regain from Labour https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/poll-labour-lose-seats-rghscklnk
No, it doesn’t. Because there isn’t an election soon. And you are focusing only on the trend you like - Lab to Con - and not the one you dislike - Con to Ref.
Apparently we can ignore all trends when they disagree with us.
The same MRP poll has the Tories losing not a single seat to Reform. While Labour would lose 67 seats to Reform, from Dagenham and Thurrock to Llanelli, East Thanet to Bolsover and Bassetlaw, North Durham to Blyth and Ashington, Burnley and Hyndburn to Stoke on Trent North and Kingston Upon Hull East
We know you aren’t stupid, so it’s just dogmatic bloody-mindedness. Reform don’t take the seats now, if we hold an election tomorrow. But there won’t be an election tomorrow, will there?
Play the trends forward for another 4 years and surmise what seat exchanges my look like then.
And it's not just tech, it's everything from trains to football clubs.
I have the oddest feeling he wouldn't care if were were selling them off to France or Germany.
That's hardly a refutation of the article.
And in any event, Europe doesn't have quite the same level of rapacious private equity, which has worked out how to asset strip the UK's 'open for business' economy.
And it's not just tech, it's everything from trains to football clubs.
I read this piece and thought it was on point. Let’s take the party politics out of it and step back from the snipers nest. Our economy is structurally broken. We long ago stopped investing and started selling off everything we had. We have a serious productivity issue. We’ve made existence expensive via weaponising property (an investment, not a home), and marketising energy costs to the point where despite being increasingly flush with clean energy we price it based on imported gas we don’t import.
Then we have Europe. Mention it and the usual suspects on both sides freak out. Park the politics remember and just look at the economy. Cutting ourselves off from our primary market is bonkers. The primary market isn’t the EU - that’s why it’s called the EEA and isn’t the same as the EU. Nd yet we can’t have free access to it like non-EU states such as Iceland because morons think it’s the EU / think we can’t join without begging the EU to let us back in.
My manifesto for change: 1. National program to invest in our infrastructure. Roads, railways, fibre broadband etc all pays positive ROI. It’s called capitalism. Look it up. 2. Tax businesses getting bought by foreigners looking to expatriate them. The reason why Germany still ha industry is that Germany didn’t let them be sold to foreigners looking to expatriate them. 3. Invest in education, training and universities. We can’t afford to go progressively stupider no matter how much stupid people insist that we can’t afford teachers or research. 4. Build a shitton of houses through housing associations. Rent. Not buy. Decouple housing from investments. 5. Decouple energy costs from imported crap we import in declining numbers. Invest in building the hardware we’re installing - lunacy to need 20k turbines nd import ll of the because we can’t afford to invest
Actually, a big chunk of the German downturn is that they exported layers of manufacturing.
They kept some high end lines in Germany, but with increasingly final assembly of imported sub components. In addition they made a fortune selling machinery for production lines and to make other machinery to China et al. Who have hit a bit of recession and have started to make their own production line machinery and machinery to make machinery.
4 - the problem isn't buying or renting. Both are too expensive. Some people are spending more than 50% of their post tax income on housing. Build, build, build like crazy.
We are building. What the developers want to build, where they want to build them. An awful lot of granted permissions not being built.
Build build build executive style houses and we’re building the wrong properties in the wrong places and selling them for £unsustainable.
The point about LHA builds is that they can rent at viable rents, way below market rates. The value is irrelevant as they’re not for sale, re not investments: they’re homes.
Why would that do to private rentals? Crash the market, forcing loads of property on the market for people to buy at prices that are more realistic. Lots of people take a short term bath on their “investment” but find that they don’t need to sub their kids tens of thousands to buy.
Which is about granting local monopolies to big house builders - sometimes justified in the name of "efficiency".
Notably, the Victorians and Edwardians avoided this. If you look at the streets they created, you see patterns - one side a bit different to the other, or it changes half way down. This is because they would sell half a street of plots to one builder, the other to another. This resulted in frenzied attempts to be first to finish. It also had an effect on quality (sometimes) - because there would be local choice, people would buy the better built houses at a premium.
On topic, regulators don't create growth, business small, medium and large does.
Regulators role is just to ensure large businesses especially do not push so hard for growth they get into more debt than they can afford and which risks that viability if income streams and repayment of that debt starts to dry up
Regulation isn’t just about financial stability. It’s also about creating the conditions that allow pro-growth markets to exist at all. If you fail to disincentivise the fraudulent & actively harmful products that destroy buyer confidence your market collapses & everyone ends up worse off.
Efficient markets require regulation, otherwise they get taken over by bad actors who destroy them for their own short term benefit.
Regulation is first and foremost about protecting people. I think that gets lost sometimes when we get into regulation bad deregulation good arguments.
We see the results of weak or poor regulation when something goes wrong: people get poisoning from badly handled food. Rivers get full of sewage after rain. Patients suffer from medical misconduct. Debt markets crash. Cars emit ten times more NOx than their manufacturers claim. Factories leak toxic chemicals into watercourses. Consumers face monopolies and high prices. Investors get shafted in Ponzi schemes or missold pensions.
The thing is effective and efficient regulation, not more or less of it.
We also need to define what is "more or less" regulation.
If you are doing a loft conversion project, in the UK, you can
1) Create a telephone book sized pile of documents to be in compliance 2) Not create them and hope no one looks.
Increasingly, 1) is dealt with by computer generating them. They are never read.
Since no-one does any enforcement (building control seem to try, but a quick inspection at the end of the project...) none of this really matters.
In practical terms, we have next to no regulation of this kind of building work. Yet we have enough laws and regulations to allow people to specialise in the area.
The over-engineering of building regulations applies to everything from individual properties to nuclear power stations.
In the latter case they aren't ignored; they just triple the construction costs.
And it's not just tech, it's everything from trains to football clubs.
I read this piece and thought it was on point. Let’s take the party politics out of it and step back from the snipers nest. Our economy is structurally broken. We long ago stopped investing and started selling off everything we had. We have a serious productivity issue. We’ve made existence expensive via weaponising property (an investment, not a home), and marketising energy costs to the point where despite being increasingly flush with clean energy we price it based on imported gas we don’t import.
Then we have Europe. Mention it and the usual suspects on both sides freak out. Park the politics remember and just look at the economy. Cutting ourselves off from our primary market is bonkers. The primary market isn’t the EU - that’s why it’s called the EEA and isn’t the same as the EU. Nd yet we can’t have free access to it like non-EU states such as Iceland because morons think it’s the EU / think we can’t join without begging the EU to let us back in.
My manifesto for change: 1. National program to invest in our infrastructure. Roads, railways, fibre broadband etc all pays positive ROI. It’s called capitalism. Look it up. 2. Tax businesses getting bought by foreigners looking to expatriate them. The reason why Germany still ha industry is that Germany didn’t let them be sold to foreigners looking to expatriate them. 3. Invest in education, training and universities. We can’t afford to go progressively stupider no matter how much stupid people insist that we can’t afford teachers or research. 4. Build a shitton of houses through housing associations. Rent. Not buy. Decouple housing from investments. 5. Decouple energy costs from imported crap we import in declining numbers. Invest in building the hardware we’re installing - lunacy to need 20k turbines nd import ll of the because we can’t afford to invest
I don't think your distinction between the EEA and the EU will be useful in any negotiation with the EU and through them with EEA institutions. Fact is we have already done the "bonkers" cut off from our primary market. Now it's just damage limitation .
And it's not just tech, it's everything from trains to football clubs.
I have the oddest feeling he wouldn't care if were were selling them off to France or Germany.
That's hardly a refutation of the article.
And in any event, Europe doesn't have quite the same level of rapacious private equity, which has worked out how to asset strip the UK's 'open for business' economy.
On topic, regulators don't create growth, business small, medium and large does.
Regulators role is just to ensure large businesses especially do not push so hard for growth they get into more debt than they can afford and which risks that viability if income streams and repayment of that debt starts to dry up
Regulation isn’t just about financial stability. It’s also about creating the conditions that allow pro-growth markets to exist at all. If you fail to disincentivise the fraudulent & actively harmful products that destroy buyer confidence your market collapses & everyone ends up worse off.
Efficient markets require regulation, otherwise they get taken over by bad actors who destroy them for their own short term benefit.
Regulation is first and foremost about protecting people. I think that gets lost sometimes when we get into regulation bad deregulation good arguments.
We see the results of weak or poor regulation when something goes wrong: people get poisoning from badly handled food. Rivers get full of sewage after rain. Patients suffer from medical misconduct. Debt markets crash. Cars emit ten times more NOx than their manufacturers claim. Factories leak toxic chemicals into watercourses. Consumers face monopolies and high prices. Investors get shafted in Ponzi schemes or missold pensions.
The thing is effective and efficient regulation, not more or less of it.
We also need to define what is "more or less" regulation.
If you are doing a loft conversion project, in the UK, you can
1) Create a telephone book sized pile of documents to be in compliance 2) Not create them and hope no one looks.
Increasingly, 1) is dealt with by computer generating them. They are never read.
Since no-one does any enforcement (building control seem to try, but a quick inspection at the end of the project...) none of this really matters.
In practical terms, we have next to no regulation of this kind of building work. Yet we have enough laws and regulations to allow people to specialise in the area.
The over-engineering of building regulations applies to everything from individual properties to nuclear power stations.
In the latter case they aren't ignored; they just triple the construction costs.
Tbf, I’d rather that way than the other. Chernobyl is within my lifetime.
And it's not just tech, it's everything from trains to football clubs.
I have the oddest feeling he wouldn't care if were were selling them off to France or Germany.
That's hardly a refutation of the article.
And in any event, Europe doesn't have quite the same level of rapacious private equity, which has worked out how to asset strip the UK's 'open for business' economy.
Have you looked at who bought the utilities?
Indeed - but the poster child of rapacity there is the Australians.
Monopoly utilities are one of the worst examples of 'open for business', as they're an invitation to plunder.
On topic, regulators don't create growth, business small, medium and large does.
Regulators role is just to ensure large businesses especially do not push so hard for growth they get into more debt than they can afford and which risks that viability if income streams and repayment of that debt starts to dry up
Regulation isn’t just about financial stability. It’s also about creating the conditions that allow pro-growth markets to exist at all. If you fail to disincentivise the fraudulent & actively harmful products that destroy buyer confidence your market collapses & everyone ends up worse off.
Efficient markets require regulation, otherwise they get taken over by bad actors who destroy them for their own short term benefit.
Regulation is first and foremost about protecting people. I think that gets lost sometimes when we get into regulation bad deregulation good arguments.
We see the results of weak or poor regulation when something goes wrong: people get poisoning from badly handled food. Rivers get full of sewage after rain. Patients suffer from medical misconduct. Debt markets crash. Cars emit ten times more NOx than their manufacturers claim. Factories leak toxic chemicals into watercourses. Consumers face monopolies and high prices. Investors get shafted in Ponzi schemes or missold pensions.
The thing is effective and efficient regulation, not more or less of it.
We also need to define what is "more or less" regulation.
If you are doing a loft conversion project, in the UK, you can
1) Create a telephone book sized pile of documents to be in compliance 2) Not create them and hope no one looks.
Increasingly, 1) is dealt with by computer generating them. They are never read.
Since no-one does any enforcement (building control seem to try, but a quick inspection at the end of the project...) none of this really matters.
In practical terms, we have next to no regulation of this kind of building work. Yet we have enough laws and regulations to allow people to specialise in the area.
The over-engineering of building regulations applies to everything from individual properties to nuclear power stations.
In the latter case they aren't ignored; they just triple the construction costs.
Tbf, I’d rather that way than the other. Chernobyl is within my lifetime.
That's not the choice, though. We've had this debate before on PB.
And it's not just tech, it's everything from trains to football clubs.
I read this piece and thought it was on point. Let’s take the party politics out of it and step back from the snipers nest. Our economy is structurally broken. We long ago stopped investing and started selling off everything we had. We have a serious productivity issue. We’ve made existence expensive via weaponising property (an investment, not a home), and marketising energy costs to the point where despite being increasingly flush with clean energy we price it based on imported gas we don’t import.
Then we have Europe. Mention it and the usual suspects on both sides freak out. Park the politics remember and just look at the economy. Cutting ourselves off from our primary market is bonkers. The primary market isn’t the EU - that’s why it’s called the EEA and isn’t the same as the EU. Nd yet we can’t have free access to it like non-EU states such as Iceland because morons think it’s the EU / think we can’t join without begging the EU to let us back in.
My manifesto for change: 1. National program to invest in our infrastructure. Roads, railways, fibre broadband etc all pays positive ROI. It’s called capitalism. Look it up. 2. Tax businesses getting bought by foreigners looking to expatriate them. The reason why Germany still ha industry is that Germany didn’t let them be sold to foreigners looking to expatriate them. 3. Invest in education, training and universities. We can’t afford to go progressively stupider no matter how much stupid people insist that we can’t afford teachers or research. 4. Build a shitton of houses through housing associations. Rent. Not buy. Decouple housing from investments. 5. Decouple energy costs from imported crap we import in declining numbers. Invest in building the hardware we’re installing - lunacy to need 20k turbines nd import ll of the because we can’t afford to invest
On the EEA - are we able to influence the rules if we join that and not the EU? My hazy recollection is that the EU sets the rules but I've forgotten now.
(Edit - Vanilla screwup)
Yes. EEA members have huge influence on the rules. As much as any full EU member state. The only thing they don't have is a vote on the final acceptance. But they are full members of all the institutions that set the rules up to that final vote. They also have a veto on accepting the rules if, after the years of helping to craft them, they do not like the final result. This is rarely used because of their full involvement in developing the legislation. It is daft to veto something you were part of developing. But it has been used in the past. It is a system which works. Which is why the EFTA members of the EEA have no interest in joiing the full EU.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
And how would Musk turning up and ranting about the AfD and Reform UK being the future have benefitted a growth summit?
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
One area that he does know something about is accelerating the TRL level of technology.
Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes form the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself, or that is something that other people (probably the Chinese) do. In any event, this requires a lot of mucky, dirty hands stuff. Even worse, it means investing money in mucky, dirty hands stuff. Stuff with the wrong kind of numbers {snigger}
If you want more growth, figuring out how to turn inventions into products and getting people to invest in this is a good thing to look at.
This isn't because Musk is an unfathomable genius. His ideas of insourcing and vertical integration are rather reminiscent of mid-stage Henry Ford, historically.
EDIT: and lots of pretty obvious stuff. If you want batteries, build a factory to build batteries. Not talk about batteries, hold summits about batteries, have a battery enquiry etc.
“Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes from the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself” is not true. Innovate UK, NIHR and other government funding is constantly going on about TRLs. We’ve got tons of translational research offices in universities, translational research collaborations, etc. etc. Maybe there should be even more, but this is 100% recognised by government as important.
By portions of the permeant apparatus of government. If you talk to politicians, or the Treasury....
You'd be (un)surprised by the number of "business leaders" who run a mile at the sound of development and investment.
Haha, well you might not like it (and other anti-EU zealots) but for good or ill, joining one of the largest trading blocks in the world would certainly help growth. You can wank yourself off to blindness over phoney concepts of "sovereignty" (that we never lost or regained) but the reality is that the country is economically poorer as a result of the self-harm vote of 2016.
The mistake being the idea that we have to join the EU to be part of their trading bloc. A mistake made by the zealots on both sides (including yourself it seems).
We could of course do what I always advocated and join the trading bloc by joining the EEA (which is the real trading bloc rather than the political entity). The pro-EU zealots would hate it because it removes much of their argument for rejoiing the EU. The Reform types would hate it because it would mean freedom of movement and they would see it as a sneaky backdoor back into the EU.
But it would maintain our sovereignty -a concept you have always managed to completely fail to understand even in its most basic definition - and allow us the trading benefits of the Single Market without the trading negatives of EU membership.
sovereignty is a joke for mugs.
A sentiment almost half of your fellow countrymen strongly disagree with. Besides, I thought you were a Scots Nationalist (though not an SNP supporter).
And it's not just tech, it's everything from trains to football clubs.
I read this piece and thought it was on point. Let’s take the party politics out of it and step back from the snipers nest. Our economy is structurally broken. We long ago stopped investing and started selling off everything we had. We have a serious productivity issue. We’ve made existence expensive via weaponising property (an investment, not a home), and marketising energy costs to the point where despite being increasingly flush with clean energy we price it based on imported gas we don’t import.
Then we have Europe. Mention it and the usual suspects on both sides freak out. Park the politics remember and just look at the economy. Cutting ourselves off from our primary market is bonkers. The primary market isn’t the EU - that’s why it’s called the EEA and isn’t the same as the EU. Nd yet we can’t have free access to it like non-EU states such as Iceland because morons think it’s the EU / think we can’t join without begging the EU to let us back in.
My manifesto for change: 1. National program to invest in our infrastructure. Roads, railways, fibre broadband etc all pays positive ROI. It’s called capitalism. Look it up. 2. Tax businesses getting bought by foreigners looking to expatriate them. The reason why Germany still ha industry is that Germany didn’t let them be sold to foreigners looking to expatriate them. 3. Invest in education, training and universities. We can’t afford to go progressively stupider no matter how much stupid people insist that we can’t afford teachers or research. 4. Build a shitton of houses through housing associations. Rent. Not buy. Decouple housing from investments. 5. Decouple energy costs from imported crap we import in declining numbers. Invest in building the hardware we’re installing - lunacy to need 20k turbines nd import ll of the because we can’t afford to invest
On the EEA - are we able to influence the rules if we join that and not the EU? My hazy recollection is that the EU sets the rules but I've forgotten now.
(Edit - Vanilla screwup)
Yes. EEA members have huge influence on the rules. As much as any full EU member state. The only thing they don't have is a vote on the final acceptance. But they are full members of all the institutions that set the rules up to that final vote. They also have a veto on accepting the rules if, after the years of helping to craft them, they do not like the final result. This is rarely used because of their full involvement in developing the legislation. It is daft to veto something you were part of developing. But it has been used in the past. It is a system which works. Which is why the EFTA members of the EEA have no interest in joiing the full EU.
We had someone yesterday claiming that stopping UK farmers from exporting to the EU and getting in cheap labour from the EU was great. Because they could send their meat and two veg to Australasia instead.
I wonder what he'd have said if Musk City had been started on Mars.
Your post indicates you find selling food to Australia and NZ unlikely - so why the danger of a flood of Australian beef and New Zealand lamb to our plucky farmers? If food can be imported from there, it can also be exported to there.
I'm struggling with the logic there. You import things you don't have, have a shortage in or which is cheaper elsewhere. You export for the reverse reasons. You don't export what you don't have or have a shortage in or which is more expensive than the importer can produce it for. So the logic of if we can import something from someone we can also export it to them is odd. Although will happen a little, particularly if we/they add value, but generally we won't export much lamb to New Zealand. It is 'Coals to Newcastle' scenario. It will happen and kudos if you achieve it, but it isn't normal.
"Investors threaten to call in police over huge losses after collapse of Alastair Campbell son's football betting syndicate - after former Labour spin chief and his wife 'invested £300,000 into business venture'"
Winning at betting on football is extremely extremely extremely difficult, especially if as it says in the report they bet on top flight football. The bookies have very good models and the sharps are even better. Remember Tony Bloom with years at it, his 100+ top PhDs working at his research firm and huge resources allegedly beat the market by no more than 2% in the long run these days.
If you have that sort of financial clout there are easier ways of getting 2% return on your money.
We had someone yesterday claiming that stopping UK farmers from exporting to the EU and getting in cheap labour from the EU was great. Because they could send their meat and two veg to Australasia instead.
I wonder what he'd have said if Musk City had been started on Mars.
Your post indicates you find selling food to Australia and NZ unlikely - so why the danger of a flood of Australian beef and New Zealand lamb to our plucky farmers? If food can be imported from there, it can also be exported to there.
I'm struggling with the logic there. You import things you don't have, have a shortage in or which is cheaper elsewhere. You export for the reverse reasons. You don't export what you don't have or have a shortage in or which is more expensive than the importer can produce it for. So the logic of if we can import something from someone we can also export it to them is odd. Although will happen a little, particularly if we/they add value, but generally we won't export much lamb to New Zealand. It is 'Coals to Newcastle' scenario. It will happen and kudos if you achieve it, but it isn't normal.
Aus/NZ farms have scale which our farms do not. Scale means lower costs means cheaper food. We have a desire for cheap food, they don’t have a desire for more expensive versions of the same food they already have.
The deal was simple: Truss is simple. She wanted deals for performative reasons, who cares what the deal is or how it works.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
And how would Musk turning up and ranting about the AfD and Reform UK being the future have benefitted a growth summit?
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
One area that he does know something about is accelerating the TRL level of technology.
Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes form the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself, or that is something that other people (probably the Chinese) do. In any event, this requires a lot of mucky, dirty hands stuff. Even worse, it means investing money in mucky, dirty hands stuff. Stuff with the wrong kind of numbers {snigger}
If you want more growth, figuring out how to turn inventions into products and getting people to invest in this is a good thing to look at.
This isn't because Musk is an unfathomable genius. His ideas of insourcing and vertical integration are rather reminiscent of mid-stage Henry Ford, historically.
EDIT: and lots of pretty obvious stuff. If you want batteries, build a factory to build batteries. Not talk about batteries, hold summits about batteries, have a battery enquiry etc.
“Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes from the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself” is not true. Innovate UK, NIHR and other government funding is constantly going on about TRLs. We’ve got tons of translational research offices in universities, translational research collaborations, etc. etc. Maybe there should be even more, but this is 100% recognised by government as important.
By portions of the permeant apparatus of government. If you talk to politicians, or the Treasury....
You'd be (un)surprised by the number of "business leaders" who run a mile at the sound of development and investment.
'Sir Keir Starmer has been warned his ratings have suffered a “catastrophic” fall among countryside voters angered by his “family farm tax”.
Just one in five voters believes Labour cares about people who live and work in the countryside, polling for The Telegraph has found.
A survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted by Public First, the political consultancy, found only 22 per cent believed Labour cared about those in rural areas.
“Public First is a Westminster-based research and PR firm founded in 2016 by political strategists and former Conservative advisers, Rachel Wolf and James Frayne.”
I’m sure this is a completely unbiased article in the Telegraph, that well known bastion of support for the Labour Party.
I'm not sure it's much change on the support Labour got in rural seats in July, whether polled by ex-advisors or highlighted in The Telegraph. Their actual percentage vote achieved across the eligible population was little different to this.
It is reflected in today's MoreinCommon MRP poll which shows Labour losing its majority and losing lots of rural seats it won in July.
Seats like SW Norfolk, Suffolk Coastal, Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, NE Hertfordshire, NE Somerset and Hainham, Mid and South Pembrokeshire, NW Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire Dales, Hexham, North Northumberland, Penrith and Solway, and Banbury for instance all rural marginal seats the Tories are projected to regain from Labour https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/poll-labour-lose-seats-rghscklnk
No, it doesn’t. Because there isn’t an election soon. And you are focusing only on the trend you like - Lab to Con - and not the one you dislike - Con to Ref.
Apparently we can ignore all trends when they disagree with us.
The same MRP poll has the Tories losing not a single seat to Reform. While Labour would lose 67 seats to Reform, from Dagenham and Thurrock to Llanelli, East Thanet to Bolsover and Bassetlaw, North Durham to Blyth and Ashington, Burnley and Hyndburn to Stoke on Trent North and Kingston Upon Hull East
We know you aren’t stupid, so it’s just dogmatic bloody-mindedness. Reform don’t take the seats now, if we hold an election tomorrow. But there won’t be an election tomorrow, will there?
Play the trends forward for another 4 years and surmise what seat exchanges my look like then.
Extrapolating trends on polling forward is as foolish as assuming that the general election will look just like now.
And it's not just tech, it's everything from trains to football clubs.
I read this piece and thought it was on point. Let’s take the party politics out of it and step back from the snipers nest. Our economy is structurally broken. We long ago stopped investing and started selling off everything we had. We have a serious productivity issue. We’ve made existence expensive via weaponising property (an investment, not a home), and marketising energy costs to the point where despite being increasingly flush with clean energy we price it based on imported gas we don’t import.
Then we have Europe. Mention it and the usual suspects on both sides freak out. Park the politics remember and just look at the economy. Cutting ourselves off from our primary market is bonkers. The primary market isn’t the EU - that’s why it’s called the EEA and isn’t the same as the EU. Nd yet we can’t have free access to it like non-EU states such as Iceland because morons think it’s the EU / think we can’t join without begging the EU to let us back in.
My manifesto for change: 1. National program to invest in our infrastructure. Roads, railways, fibre broadband etc all pays positive ROI. It’s called capitalism. Look it up. 2. Tax businesses getting bought by foreigners looking to expatriate them. The reason why Germany still ha industry is that Germany didn’t let them be sold to foreigners looking to expatriate them. 3. Invest in education, training and universities. We can’t afford to go progressively stupider no matter how much stupid people insist that we can’t afford teachers or research. 4. Build a shitton of houses through housing associations. Rent. Not buy. Decouple housing from investments. 5. Decouple energy costs from imported crap we import in declining numbers. Invest in building the hardware we’re installing - lunacy to need 20k turbines nd import ll of the because we can’t afford to invest
Actually, a big chunk of the German downturn is that they exported layers of manufacturing.
They kept some high end lines in Germany, but with increasingly final assembly of imported sub components. In addition they made a fortune selling machinery for production lines and to make other machinery to China et al. Who have hit a bit of recession and have started to make their own production line machinery and machinery to make machinery.
4 - the problem isn't buying or renting. Both are too expensive. Some people are spending more than 50% of their post tax income on housing. Build, build, build like crazy.
We are building. What the developers want to build, where they want to build them. An awful lot of granted permissions not being built.
Build build build executive style houses and we’re building the wrong properties in the wrong places and selling them for £unsustainable.
The point about LHA builds is that they can rent at viable rents, way below market rates. The value is irrelevant as they’re not for sale, re not investments: they’re homes.
Why would that do to private rentals? Crash the market, forcing loads of property on the market for people to buy at prices that are more realistic. Lots of people take a short term bath on their “investment” but find that they don’t need to sub their kids tens of thousands to buy.
Which is about granting local monopolies to big house builders - sometimes justified in the name of "efficiency".
Notably, the Victorians and Edwardians avoided this. If you look at the streets they created, you see patterns - one side a bit different to the other, or it changes half way down. This is because they would sell half a street of plots to one builder, the other to another. This resulted in frenzied attempts to be first to finish. It also had an effect on quality (sometimes) - because there would be local choice, people would buy the better built houses at a premium.
All discussion of housing reform is rendered moot by (1) the lack of skilled workers to put the things up (which is an important contributor to the pitiful quality of so many new builds,) and (2) the addiction of the country to mass immigration, both to plug skills gaps and shore up the tax base as the existing population gets older and sicker with every passing year.
When I bother to think about politics nowadays (seldom, mercifully, for what is the point?) then I spend about half the time despairing of the politicians' inertia and the other half feeling sorry for them, because the action that's needed to rescue the situation is too radical for the electorate to stomach. The housing situation is so bad and the dependency ratio of the population so challenging that all I can see going forward is more managed decline.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
And how would Musk turning up and ranting about the AfD and Reform UK being the future have benefitted a growth summit?
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
One area that he does know something about is accelerating the TRL level of technology.
Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes form the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself, or that is something that other people (probably the Chinese) do. In any event, this requires a lot of mucky, dirty hands stuff. Even worse, it means investing money in mucky, dirty hands stuff. Stuff with the wrong kind of numbers {snigger}
If you want more growth, figuring out how to turn inventions into products and getting people to invest in this is a good thing to look at.
This isn't because Musk is an unfathomable genius. His ideas of insourcing and vertical integration are rather reminiscent of mid-stage Henry Ford, historically.
EDIT: and lots of pretty obvious stuff. If you want batteries, build a factory to build batteries. Not talk about batteries, hold summits about batteries, have a battery enquiry etc.
“Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes from the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself” is not true. Innovate UK, NIHR and other government funding is constantly going on about TRLs. We’ve got tons of translational research offices in universities, translational research collaborations, etc. etc. Maybe there should be even more, but this is 100% recognised by government as important.
By portions of the permeant apparatus of government. If you talk to politicians, or the Treasury....
You'd be (un)surprised by the number of "business leaders" who run a mile at the sound of development and investment.
I’m talking about government. I have no comment on business leaders.
How far up the TRL ladder does that research hub go? We have lots of research in the UK. It's the productionisation that is missing.
All the way, baby, all the way.
I'm not saying we couldn't do more to balance out the country's great pure research tradition with more applied work, but I do lots of very applied research, mostly funded by the government but sometimes by industry. Government is not ignorant of the importance of productionisation.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
And how would Musk turning up and ranting about the AfD and Reform UK being the future have benefitted a growth summit?
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
One area that he does know something about is accelerating the TRL level of technology.
Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes form the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself, or that is something that other people (probably the Chinese) do. In any event, this requires a lot of mucky, dirty hands stuff. Even worse, it means investing money in mucky, dirty hands stuff. Stuff with the wrong kind of numbers {snigger}
If you want more growth, figuring out how to turn inventions into products and getting people to invest in this is a good thing to look at.
This isn't because Musk is an unfathomable genius. His ideas of insourcing and vertical integration are rather reminiscent of mid-stage Henry Ford, historically.
EDIT: and lots of pretty obvious stuff. If you want batteries, build a factory to build batteries. Not talk about batteries, hold summits about batteries, have a battery enquiry etc.
“Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes from the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself” is not true. Innovate UK, NIHR and other government funding is constantly going on about TRLs. We’ve got tons of translational research offices in universities, translational research collaborations, etc. etc. Maybe there should be even more, but this is 100% recognised by government as important.
By portions of the permeant apparatus of government. If you talk to politicians, or the Treasury....
You'd be (un)surprised by the number of "business leaders" who run a mile at the sound of development and investment.
I’m talking about government. I have no comment on business leaders.
How far up the TRL ladder does that research hub go? We have lots of research in the UK. It's the productionisation that is missing.
We have private equity in excess; we don’t have the venture capital.
And up until very recently, universities have wanted an unrealistically large slug of the equity in ventures using their research.
But it’s probably access to capital to grow businesses which is the gpbuggest hurdle. $200m for an early stage (listed or unlisted) biotech in the US is fairly easy, and pretty common; over here it’s a real rarity.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
And how would Musk turning up and ranting about the AfD and Reform UK being the future have benefitted a growth summit?
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
One area that he does know something about is accelerating the TRL level of technology.
Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes form the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself, or that is something that other people (probably the Chinese) do. In any event, this requires a lot of mucky, dirty hands stuff. Even worse, it means investing money in mucky, dirty hands stuff. Stuff with the wrong kind of numbers {snigger}
If you want more growth, figuring out how to turn inventions into products and getting people to invest in this is a good thing to look at.
This isn't because Musk is an unfathomable genius. His ideas of insourcing and vertical integration are rather reminiscent of mid-stage Henry Ford, historically.
EDIT: and lots of pretty obvious stuff. If you want batteries, build a factory to build batteries. Not talk about batteries, hold summits about batteries, have a battery enquiry etc.
“Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes from the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself” is not true. Innovate UK, NIHR and other government funding is constantly going on about TRLs. We’ve got tons of translational research offices in universities, translational research collaborations, etc. etc. Maybe there should be even more, but this is 100% recognised by government as important.
By portions of the permeant apparatus of government. If you talk to politicians, or the Treasury....
You'd be (un)surprised by the number of "business leaders" who run a mile at the sound of development and investment.
I’m talking about government. I have no comment on business leaders.
How far up the TRL ladder does that research hub go? We have lots of research in the UK. It's the productionisation that is missing.
We have private equity in excess; we don’t have the venture capital.
And up until very recently, universities have wanted an unrealistically large slug of the equity in ventures using their research.
But it’s probably access to capital to grow businesses which is the gpbuggest hurdle. $200m for an early stage (listed or unlisted) biotech in the US is fairly easy, and pretty common; over here it’s a real rarity.
I work in digital health. The big challenge for digital health start-ups is that it's really difficult to sell into the NHS.
The problem the UK has held for quite a while, too many people are risk averse from those funding businesses to those in say universities who could spin out an idea. What i tell PhDs i come into contact with is what's the worst that could happen, you have a PhD, you work on something for 3-4 years it doesn't pan out, you will still get a good job. However most all they want to do is go and work at insert big tech company.
The US is totally opposite end of the spectrum.
There was a blog post i linked to a while ago from a Brit at Y-combinator who surveyed stufents at top US and UK unis and the difference was stark on how many wanted to work for themselves on a startup.
"Investors threaten to call in police over huge losses after collapse of Alastair Campbell son's football betting syndicate - after former Labour spin chief and his wife 'invested £300,000 into business venture'"
Winning at betting on football is extremely extremely extremely difficult, especially if as it says in the report they bet on top flight football. The bookies have very good models and the sharps are even better. Remember Tony Bloom with years at it, his 100+ top PhDs working at his research firm and huge resources allegedly beat the market by no more than 2% in the long run these days.
If you have that sort of financial clout there are easier ways of getting 2% return on your money.
Yes, football's not the easiest to make money on. There is, though, quite a lot of groupthink in the punditry on it. I look to oppose that where I feel it's being overdone and leading to value on it being wrong. Eg that Liverpool would NOT struggle after Klopp.
Oddly, one of my most consistently profitable sports is F1, which I'm not knowledgeable on, and one of my least is golf, which I am. I think that's because being too knowledgeable can have you not seeing the wood for the trees. A bit of distance can help with the big picture.
Cyclefree's article reads like "some risk exists; therefore no". See for example the end, where the existence of any problems is a reason to resist any de-regulation. (To add, the assumption that existing rules are ipso facto optimal compared to change, aka "Chesterton's fence".) It's a lawyer's view. If it were overall more true than false, ultra-regulated and even socialist economies would outperform more capitalist ones like America. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
"Investors threaten to call in police over huge losses after collapse of Alastair Campbell son's football betting syndicate - after former Labour spin chief and his wife 'invested £300,000 into business venture'"
Winning at betting on football is extremely extremely extremely difficult, especially if as it says in the report they bet on top flight football. The bookies have very good models and the sharps are even better. Remember Tony Bloom with years at it, his 100+ top PhDs working at his research firm and huge resources allegedly beat the market by no more than 2% in the long run these days.
If you have that sort of financial clout there are easier ways of getting 2% return on your money.
Yes, football's not the easiest to make money on. There is, though, quite a lot of groupthink in the punditry on it. I look to oppose that where I feel it's being overdone and leading to value on it being wrong. Eg that Liverpool would NOT struggle after Klopp.
Oddly, one of my most consistently profitable sports is F1, which I'm not knowledgeable on, and one of my least is golf, which I am. I think that's because being too knowledgeable can have you not seeing the wood for the trees. A bit of distance can help with the big picture.
Course if you can fuse the two, you're rocking.
Anybody who listens to the mainstream football punditry for advice on betting wants their head explaining.
We had someone yesterday claiming that stopping UK farmers from exporting to the EU and getting in cheap labour from the EU was great. Because they could send their meat and two veg to Australasia instead.
I wonder what he'd have said if Musk City had been started on Mars.
Your post indicates you find selling food to Australia and NZ unlikely - so why the danger of a flood of Australian beef and New Zealand lamb to our plucky farmers? If food can be imported from there, it can also be exported to there.
I'm struggling with the logic there. You import things you don't have, have a shortage in or which is cheaper elsewhere. You export for the reverse reasons. You don't export what you don't have or have a shortage in or which is more expensive than the importer can produce it for. So the logic of if we can import something from someone we can also export it to them is odd. Although will happen a little, particularly if we/they add value, but generally we won't export much lamb to New Zealand. It is 'Coals to Newcastle' scenario. It will happen and kudos if you achieve it, but it isn't normal.
Aus/NZ farms have scale which our farms do not. Scale means lower costs means cheaper food. We have a desire for cheap food, they don’t have a desire for more expensive versions of the same food they already have.
The deal was simple: Truss is simple. She wanted deals for performative reasons, who cares what the deal is or how it works.
What's wrong with cheaper food?
If they can do food for cheaper then we should import it, pay less for food, and use our limited land for something far more valuable than unproductive agriculture.
The problem the UK has held for quite a while, too many people are risk averse from those funding businesses to those in say universities who could spin out an idea. What i tell PhDs i come into contact with is what's the worst that could happen, you have a PhD, you work on something for 3-4 years it doesn't pan out, you will still get a good job. However most all they want to do is go and work at insert big tech company.
The US is totally opposite end of the spectrum.
There was a blog post i linked to a while ago from a Brit at Y-combinator who surveyed stufents at top US and UK unis and the difference was stark on how many wanted to work for themselves on a startup.
As an individual employee the expected value from picking the big tech co is definitely higher, though -- the chances of actually making millions off shares are pretty tiny, and even a good-ish exit for the startup probably only ends up bringing you back up to what you would have got by working at the big tech co for those few years. (The odds are better if you're a VC funding a pile of startups or if you're founding one and have a big stake in it rather than an early employee's share.)
So the "worst that could happen" is "you don't get multiple years at 80 to 100K GBP starting salary plus an entry on your CV that makes it a lot easier to get your next job"...
The problem the UK has held for quite a while, too many people are risk averse from those funding businesses to those in say universities who could spin out an idea. What i tell PhDs i come into contact with is what's the worst that could happen, you have a PhD, you work on something for 3-4 years it doesn't pan out, you will still get a good job. However most all they want to do is go and work at insert big tech company.
The US is totally opposite end of the spectrum.
There was a blog post i linked to a while ago from a Brit at Y-combinator who surveyed stufents at top US and UK unis and the difference was stark on how many wanted to work for themselves on a startup.
As an individual employee the expected value from picking the big tech co is definitely higher, though -- the chances of actually making millions off shares are pretty tiny, and even a good-ish exit for the startup probably only ends up bringing you back up to what you would have got by working at the big tech co for those few years. (The odds are better if you're a VC funding a pile of startups or if you're founding one and have a big stake in it rather than an early employee's share.)
So the "worst that could happen" is "you don't get multiple years at 80 to 100K GBP starting salary plus an entry on your CV that makes it a lot easier to get your next job"...
If money was your only motivation and trading instant win / lose on money in your pocket, you wouldn't spend 4-5 years doing a PhD in the first place or doing a post-doc. Also, yes that's 3 years without say £100k a year, but being a start-up founder isn't wasted time or a disadvantage. The Y-Combinator guy said this, firms love start-up founders that pursed a clever idea, it shows they have something about them and makes them an easy hire. Also, you don't even have to actually win with your start-up, you might well create some tech that somebody else wants to buy the IP for e.g. Sam Altman got his start like this. His start-up failed, but people bought the IP, and he met Paul Graham and the rest is history.
Also, in big tech world, £100k a year isn't much. Get yourself a good job at Deepmind etc, you can make up the lost £300k very easily. A low level OpenAI employee is on $1 million a year, Google regularly pays $300-500k.
The problem the UK has held for quite a while, too many people are risk averse from those funding businesses to those in say universities who could spin out an idea. What i tell PhDs i come into contact with is what's the worst that could happen, you have a PhD, you work on something for 3-4 years it doesn't pan out, you will still get a good job. However most all they want to do is go and work at insert big tech company.
The US is totally opposite end of the spectrum.
There was a blog post i linked to a while ago from a Brit at Y-combinator who surveyed stufents at top US and UK unis and the difference was stark on how many wanted to work for themselves on a startup.
As an individual employee the expected value from picking the big tech co is definitely higher, though -- the chances of actually making millions off shares are pretty tiny, and even a good-ish exit for the startup probably only ends up bringing you back up to what you would have got by working at the big tech co for those few years. (The odds are better if you're a VC funding a pile of startups or if you're founding one and have a big stake in it rather than an early employee's share.)
So the "worst that could happen" is "you don't get multiple years at 80 to 100K GBP starting salary plus an entry on your CV that makes it a lot easier to get your next job"...
I worked for ?three? startups in my time (depending on how you define 'startup'). I made zero money from share options at any of those companies, but I *really* enjoyed the work, and much more than I would at the large company Mrs J now works at.
When you're young, it isn't just about money. As one of only three software engineers at a company that now employs hundreds, I did everything, from requirements capture (talking to customers...) through to testing and release. Once the companies became too big, they became much less fun as I became more pigeonholed.
It can be more about lifestyle than money. And I don't mean hookers and cocaine, but developing great products well, and being central to the process. But perhaps that's just me.
Nowadays, I'd still go for a startup for the fun, LOLs and intensity, but only if Mrs J had a good, safe job.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
And how would Musk turning up and ranting about the AfD and Reform UK being the future have benefitted a growth summit?
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
It's this type of thinking that shows your bias, that imagines that the world's richest person, the head of Department of Government Efficiency for US, a man who has had a lifetime of involvement in tech companies and is now prominent in government, has nothing to tell us.
That instead, we should be listening to a group of regulators to lead us into growth.
All because you don't like him (nor do I particularly). No wonder we have no growth, when we have no imagination.
The problem the UK has held for quite a while, too many people are risk averse from those funding businesses to those in say universities who could spin out an idea. What i tell PhDs i come into contact with is what's the worst that could happen, you have a PhD, you work on something for 3-4 years it doesn't pan out, you will still get a good job. However most all they want to do is go and work at insert big tech company.
The US is totally opposite end of the spectrum.
There was a blog post i linked to a while ago from a Brit at Y-combinator who surveyed stufents at top US and UK unis and the difference was stark on how many wanted to work for themselves on a startup.
As an individual employee the expected value from picking the big tech co is definitely higher, though -- the chances of actually making millions off shares are pretty tiny, and even a good-ish exit for the startup probably only ends up bringing you back up to what you would have got by working at the big tech co for those few years. (The odds are better if you're a VC funding a pile of startups or if you're founding one and have a big stake in it rather than an early employee's share.)
So the "worst that could happen" is "you don't get multiple years at 80 to 100K GBP starting salary plus an entry on your CV that makes it a lot easier to get your next job"...
Also, the U.S. has two advantages. You start with extra political goodwill versus overseas rivals. And you have many more tiers of 10- and 100-times millionaires to provide funding. Without them, funding models look very different and more like Europe - which suggests that perhaps part of the reason why the U.S. has more startups is to suit the preferences of their multi-millionaires.
The problem the UK has held for quite a while, too many people are risk averse from those funding businesses to those in say universities who could spin out an idea. What i tell PhDs i come into contact with is what's the worst that could happen, you have a PhD, you work on something for 3-4 years it doesn't pan out, you will still get a good job. However most all they want to do is go and work at insert big tech company.
The US is totally opposite end of the spectrum.
There was a blog post i linked to a while ago from a Brit at Y-combinator who surveyed stufents at top US and UK unis and the difference was stark on how many wanted to work for themselves on a startup.
As an individual employee the expected value from picking the big tech co is definitely higher, though -- the chances of actually making millions off shares are pretty tiny, and even a good-ish exit for the startup probably only ends up bringing you back up to what you would have got by working at the big tech co for those few years. (The odds are better if you're a VC funding a pile of startups or if you're founding one and have a big stake in it rather than an early employee's share.)
So the "worst that could happen" is "you don't get multiple years at 80 to 100K GBP starting salary plus an entry on your CV that makes it a lot easier to get your next job"...
If money was your only motivation and trading instant win / lose on money in your pocket, you wouldn't spend 4-5 years doing a PhD in the first place or doing a post-doc. Also, yes that's 3 years without say £100k a year, but being a start-up founder isn't wasted time or a disadvantage. The Y-Combinator guy said this, firms love start-up founders that pursed a clever idea, it shows they have something about them and makes them an easy hire. Also, you don't even have to actually win with your start-up, you might well create some tech that somebody else wants to buy the IP for e.g. Sam Altman got his start like this.
Also, in big tech world, £100k a year isn't much. Get yourself a good job at Deepmind etc, you can make up the lost £300k very easily. A low level OpenAI employee is on $1 million a year, Google regularly pays $300-500k.
I was being moderately conservative with the figures by picking the levels.fyi figure for google for UK for entry level SWE. US figures are higher, obviously, as are figures for those with more experience or with, say, a PhD in a hot area like ML.
And the thing about compound interest is that three years without 100K (plus pension) at the start of your career is a much bigger deal than later on. So in that sense it is wasted time.
I don't say this to say that picking the startup route is a bad idea if that's what you really want to do, merely to point out that there is a reason why all those PhDs you're talking to are tending to favour the big tech option if they can get it. Because you need to really value what you get out of doing the startup to balance out the financial loss and the stress.
(I spent the first ten years of my career at somewhere that was sort of startup in that it was still dependent on VC money and eventually went bust because the VCs pulled the plug; I don't regret working there but the 15 years following at a much bigger company have been I think a better fit for what I want out of a job. I certainly don't miss the excitement of "is the company going to get this round of funding so it can actually pay us?"...)
On topic in the last couple of years I’ve been contacted by headhunters looking to fill vacancies at financial services regulators, I said no.
Regulators, for me, always seem to relighting the last war rather than looking at new threats.
Look at Andrew Bailey and how he fell upwards.
And you're not up for the challenge of changing that?
Fair enough - you prefer an easy life I suppose.
It wasn’t for an easy life, I would have had to give up PB and that was a deal breaker.
They have strict social media policies.
Well, I'm glad you're still here.
As long as that's the case, there's still the hope of educating you about the excellence of Hannibal and the finer points of history.
Indeed. I've just been looking at the Drachinfels youtube on Greek fire recommended by @MattW yesterday. Definitely something not in my Latin lessons at school - though that might have been because they didn't get into the Byzantine period, on reflection.
It's exactly the sort of thing my teachers would have enjoyed - we never got beyond hydrogen / oxygen 2/3 / 1/3 (other 2way round?) explosions.
But these days the 14 year olds would probably apply it to the school buildings, or someone who looked at them the wrong way.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
And how would Musk turning up and ranting about the AfD and Reform UK being the future have benefitted a growth summit?
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
It's this type of thinking that shows your bias, that imagines that the world's richest person, the head of Department of Government Efficiency for US, a man who has had a lifetime of involvement in tech companies and is now prominent in government, has nothing to tell us.
That instead, we should be listening to a group of regulators to lead us into growth.
All because you don't like him (nor do I particularly). No wonder we have no growth, when we have no imagination.
AIUI the 'Department of Government Efficiency' is *not* a government department, but a proposed presidential commission. As such, even the name is disingenuous.
And he tells us a hell of a lot - for better or worse, it is like we have a phone line into the depths of his psyche.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
And how would Musk turning up and ranting about the AfD and Reform UK being the future have benefitted a growth summit?
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
It's this type of thinking that shows your bias, that imagines that the world's richest person, the head of Department of Government Efficiency for US, a man who has had a lifetime of involvement in tech companies and is now prominent in government, has nothing to tell us.
That instead, we should be listening to a group of regulators to lead us into growth.
All because you don't like him (nor do I particularly). No wonder we have no growth, when we have no imagination.
Musk ‘s political ‘advice’ (which barely deserves the description), has bugger all to do with UK growth.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
And how would Musk turning up and ranting about the AfD and Reform UK being the future have benefitted a growth summit?
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
It's this type of thinking that shows your bias, that imagines that the world's richest person, the head of Department of Government Efficiency for US, a man who has had a lifetime of involvement in tech companies and is now prominent in government, has nothing to tell us.
That instead, we should be listening to a group of regulators to lead us into growth.
All because you don't like him (nor do I particularly). No wonder we have no growth, when we have no imagination.
It isn't "instead" - that's a lazy comment. It's one set of people who can usefully be consulted.
I don't see any reason to listen to Musk - he comes across as a lobotomised, bigoted, self-obsessed nutjob. I don't care whether he is the richest man in the world - that is irrelevant. I require a measure of evidence-based thinking, and logic.
The weird thing about Musk's content (which I put down to something in Musk's head - perhaps a feedback loop from spending too much time on Twatter), is that the stuff he puts out is overwhelmingly either fabrications he has made up or swallowed, or BS.
It's not just that he has no filters, he has no engaged grey cells either.
1. Invest in infra (esp. in the north), and in housing. 2. Figure out a path toward cheap energy 3. Rejoin the single market 4. Reform the pensions industry in order to restore a British capital market capable of funding new ventures
That’s it.
It also needs a leader capable of articulating the above in a compelling way.
Keir is not capable of that, and his team have in large reverted to their comfort zones of operating in the interests of public sector unions.
On topic in the last couple of years I’ve been contacted by headhunters looking to fill vacancies at financial services regulators, I said no.
Regulators, for me, always seem to relighting the last war rather than looking at new threats.
Look at Andrew Bailey and how he fell upwards.
And you're not up for the challenge of changing that?
Fair enough - you prefer an easy life I suppose.
It wasn’t for an easy life, I would have had to give up PB and that was a deal breaker.
They have strict social media policies.
Well, I'm glad you're still here.
As long as that's the case, there's still the hope of educating you about the excellence of Hannibal and the finer points of history.
Indeed. I've just been looking at the Drachinfels youtube on Greek fire recommended by @MattW yesterday. Definitely something not in my Latin lessons at school - though that might have been because they didn't get into the Byzantine period, on reflection.
It's exactly the sort of thing my teachers would have enjoyed - we never got beyond hydrogen / oxygen 2/3 / 1/3 (other 2way round?) explosions.
But these days the 14 year olds would probably apply it to the school buildings, or someone who looked at them the wrong way.
Is Naptha the same root work as Napalm?
Napalm = Naphthenate + Palmitate, ie.carboxylic (fatty) acid salts used (apparently) (do not try this at home)
Naphthenic acid = a carboxylic acid derived from stuff in petroleum
Naphtha = ancient word for petroleum, more recently a word for certain fractions from distilling petroleum
So the first two and a half letters (on average) are the same root ... somehwat to my surprise as I thought Napalm was short for sodium palmitate.
And school lessons or not I'd have used eye/face protection and a screen ...
PS OED also comes up with this little gem:
Cooked roux is called Cajun napalm in my restaurant's kitchen because it is extremely hot and sticks to your skin. Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen i. 28
We had someone yesterday claiming that stopping UK farmers from exporting to the EU and getting in cheap labour from the EU was great. Because they could send their meat and two veg to Australasia instead.
I wonder what he'd have said if Musk City had been started on Mars.
Your post indicates you find selling food to Australia and NZ unlikely - so why the danger of a flood of Australian beef and New Zealand lamb to our plucky farmers? If food can be imported from there, it can also be exported to there.
I'm struggling with the logic there. You import things you don't have, have a shortage in or which is cheaper elsewhere. You export for the reverse reasons. You don't export what you don't have or have a shortage in or which is more expensive than the importer can produce it for. So the logic of if we can import something from someone we can also export it to them is odd. Although will happen a little, particularly if we/they add value, but generally we won't export much lamb to New Zealand. It is 'Coals to Newcastle' scenario. It will happen and kudos if you achieve it, but it isn't normal.
Aus/NZ farms have scale which our farms do not. Scale means lower costs means cheaper food. We have a desire for cheap food, they don’t have a desire for more expensive versions of the same food they already have.
The deal was simple: Truss is simple. She wanted deals for performative reasons, who cares what the deal is or how it works.
What's wrong with cheaper food?
If they can do food for cheaper then we should import it, pay less for food, and use our limited land for something far more valuable than unproductive agriculture.
Win/win.
The same problem as with imported energy. It's fine until it isn't there. As we might find shortly with imports from Norway. One would think it is a nice stable country which can give us a stable supply. Of course that assumes we can stop our enemies cutting that supply.
But even without that threat it seems we might not be able to rely on that supply much longer as there is very strong political pressure in Norway to end the energy export deals as they have caused a massive increase in energy prices in Norway.
The more you rely on imports of good and energy the greater your exposure to price shocks and possible supply interruptions.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
And how would Musk turning up and ranting about the AfD and Reform UK being the future have benefitted a growth summit?
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
It's this type of thinking that shows your bias, that imagines that the world's richest person, the head of Department of Government Efficiency for US, a man who has had a lifetime of involvement in tech companies and is now prominent in government, has nothing to tell us.
That instead, we should be listening to a group of regulators to lead us into growth.
All because you don't like him (nor do I particularly). No wonder we have no growth, when we have no imagination.
It isn't "instead" - that's a lazy comment. It's one set of people who can usefully be consulted.
I don't see any reason to listen to Musk - he comes across as a lobotomised, bigoted, self-obsessed nutjob. I don't care whether he is the richest man in the world - that is irrelevant. I require a measure of evidence-based thinking, and logic.
The weird thing about Musk's content (which I put down to something in Musk's head - perhaps a feedback loop from spending too much time on Twatter), is that the stuff he puts out is overwhelmingly either fabrications he ha made up or swallowed, or BS.
It's not just that he has no filters, he has no engaged grey cells either.
Love that you can say 'It isn't "instead" - that's a lazy comment. It's one set of people who can usefully be consulted' and you can completely dismiss the world's richest man as irrelevant.
'Sir Keir Starmer has been warned his ratings have suffered a “catastrophic” fall among countryside voters angered by his “family farm tax”.
Just one in five voters believes Labour cares about people who live and work in the countryside, polling for The Telegraph has found.
A survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted by Public First, the political consultancy, found only 22 per cent believed Labour cared about those in rural areas.
“Public First is a Westminster-based research and PR firm founded in 2016 by political strategists and former Conservative advisers, Rachel Wolf and James Frayne.”
I’m sure this is a completely unbiased article in the Telegraph, that well known bastion of support for the Labour Party.
I'm not sure it's much change on the support Labour got in rural seats in July, whether polled by ex-advisors or highlighted in The Telegraph. Their actual percentage vote achieved across the eligible population was little different to this.
It is reflected in today's MoreinCommon MRP poll which shows Labour losing its majority and losing lots of rural seats it won in July.
Seats like SW Norfolk, Suffolk Coastal, Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, NE Hertfordshire, NE Somerset and Hainham, Mid and South Pembrokeshire, NW Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire Dales, Hexham, North Northumberland, Penrith and Solway, and Banbury for instance all rural marginal seats the Tories are projected to regain from Labour https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/poll-labour-lose-seats-rghscklnk
No, it doesn’t. Because there isn’t an election soon. And you are focusing only on the trend you like - Lab to Con - and not the one you dislike - Con to Ref.
Apparently we can ignore all trends when they disagree with us.
The same MRP poll has the Tories losing not a single seat to Reform. While Labour would lose 67 seats to Reform, from Dagenham and Thurrock to Llanelli, East Thanet to Bolsover and Bassetlaw, North Durham to Blyth and Ashington, Burnley and Hyndburn to Stoke on Trent North and Kingston Upon Hull East
We know you aren’t stupid, so it’s just dogmatic bloody-mindedness. Reform don’t take the seats now, if we hold an election tomorrow. But there won’t be an election tomorrow, will there?
Play the trends forward for another 4 years and surmise what seat exchanges my look like then.
Extrapolating trends on polling forward is as foolish as assuming that the general election will look just like now.
When Boris was elected and Hartlepool happened, I seriously started to work out how to bet a large proportion of my life savings on Con winning in 2024. There was a defacto limit of £120-ish on political bets in the shops at the time, so it involved me walking from shop to shop each Saturday, laying down about £350 each week for about four years. COVID, lockdown and a basic laziness prevented me, and by the time things settled down in 2022/3 they were behind in the polls.
In short, we don't really know what will happen in 2029. My guess is that the WFA and 22bn to Miliband for magic gas has Ratnered the brand, but I don't know and won't know until the election campaign proper starts in four year's time.
My main experience of regulators (FCA) is that they have imposed huge burden on industry, particularly where none was asked or necessary. Creating huge, expensive, complex requirements on businesses that fail to solve problems or target wrong areas. To the point, where it was one of the reasons for not wanting to go back into the industry.
Ultimately, all of this endless regurgitated regulation was always being paid for by customers.
These people would be the last ones I would ask for opinions on growth.
Anyway, I could have sworn that just a few months ago, Starmer and Reeves hosted a growth summit, specifically excluding Musk. Looks like that went well. They haven't a clue. Desperate times.
You think aligning yourself with Musk would look good? The man who this week pissed off the half of Americans who still liked him? The man who has shown himself to be incredibly petty by banning or demonetising people who disagree with him on X? The man who said Matt Gaetz was a great choice for Attorney General?
You don't have to align yourself to him. You could maybe just listen, rather than completely snub (he probably wouldn't have turned up). At least it would look like you were trying.
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
And how would Musk turning up and ranting about the AfD and Reform UK being the future have benefitted a growth summit?
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
It's this type of thinking that shows your bias, that imagines that the world's richest person, the head of Department of Government Efficiency for US, a man who has had a lifetime of involvement in tech companies and is now prominent in government, has nothing to tell us.
That instead, we should be listening to a group of regulators to lead us into growth.
All because you don't like him (nor do I particularly). No wonder we have no growth, when we have no imagination.
Musk ‘s political ‘advice’ (which barely deserves the description), has bugger all to do with UK growth.
Since Musk says a British civil war is ‘inevitable’, I guess it would be useful to know how to avoid it. Vote Farage would be part of it I imagine.
Peter York on the radio this morning said Musk was now living his teenage years in opposition to the prematurely balding nerdy adolescent he was; (I paraphrase) chaotic Ill judged relationships with girls, lots of drugs and bellowing his half informed opinions at the world.
Comments
To be fair, it was an all-round team effort. Three bowlers took four or more wickets, Bavuma and Markram both scored runs.
But without Rabada’s key wickets in the second innings through those sensational deliveries plus his runs at the death South Africa would have lost.
Efficient markets require regulation, otherwise they get taken over by bad actors who destroy them for their own short term benefit.
I've been pro-Europe since the current concept started, back in the 50's, and I still hope to see us in our rightful place at the European top table before I die.
Just one in five voters believes Labour cares about people who live and work in the countryside, polling for The Telegraph has found.
A survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted by Public First, the political consultancy, found only 22 per cent believed Labour cared about those in rural areas.
Even among those who voted for Labour at the most recent general election, this only rose to two in five (40 per cent).'
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/12/28/starmers-ratings-catastrophic-with-rural-voters-farm-tax/
I’m sure this is a completely unbiased article in the Telegraph, that well known bastion of support for the Labour Party.
Meanwhile, Innovate UK with the MHRA has just announced something like £7.5m funding for new regulatory science networks to work on such issues (in health and beyond).
Yes we have some advantages including our consolidated patient data. It’s not so say there isn’t plenty that can be done, and we’re already doing some of it. Just that I don’t see it having a meaningful impact on GDP. We lost some of the pan-European management of trials and a lot of centralised European supply chain management after Brexit - I was involved in helping companies move their operations and out. Some of that is mobile and could come back but some, notably the supply chains and regulatory activities like QA and batch release, are gone for good.
Tech selloffs not only cost tax revenue and jobs, but are turning the UK into a vassal state
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/29/britain-great-again-stop-flogging-our-top-companies-to-the-us
And growth!
And it's not just tech, it's everything from trains to football clubs.
We see the results of weak or poor regulation when something goes wrong: people get poisoning from badly handled food. Rivers get full of sewage after rain. Patients suffer from medical misconduct. Debt markets crash. Cars emit ten times more NOx than their manufacturers claim. Factories leak toxic chemicals into watercourses. Consumers face monopolies and high prices. Investors get shafted in Ponzi schemes or missold pensions.
The thing is effective and efficient regulation, not more or less of it.
I was working for one of the alt-banks. Very successful. Their security was actually excellent, the customer interface was of a small number of calls from the Web API/App, using standard (but top of the line) encryption and all the other usual stuff.
As they were growing, it was decided to create a Cyber Security department. With the goal of preventing cyber attacks.
This stopped all work on the platform.
This is because the new Cyber Security department would not sign off on any release, without a 100% guarantee that this did not increase the risk of attack. Since nothing in reality is 100%, no one would give such a foolish assurance.
So even releases to improve security (a non-stop, ongoing thing) were impossible.
The Cyber Security people had not been given a goal of *even letting the business function* - their sole aim was to prevent attacks.
Within half a day, the goals of the Cyber Security department were re-written to include business performance.
It is easy to imagine the kind of clipboardista, who confronted with the complete stoppage of housing construction in the UK, who would point out that this meant 0 defective houses were being completed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAk448volww
This government is showing it has no ideas, it's telling everyone it has no ideas. It's sounding desperate.
If anyone wants to “listen” to Musk, he posts non-stop on X. If anyone reads everything Musk posts, they’ll soon realise that there’s very little value in listening to him.
If you are doing a loft conversion project, in the UK, you can
1) Create a telephone book sized pile of documents to be in compliance
2) Not create them and hope no one looks.
Increasingly, 1) is dealt with by computer generating them. They are never read.
Since no-one does any enforcement (building control seem to try, but a quick inspection at the end of the project...) none of this really matters.
In practical terms, we have next to no regulation of this kind of building work. Yet we have enough laws and regulations to allow people to specialise in the area.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/29/wealthy-parents-greatest-asset-is-the-assets-they-will-pass-on
Foreign countries sell holidays to this country.
Nearly everyone in government (and many in business) seem to assume that a new thing goes form the lab-coats-and-test-tube stage by itself, or that is something that other people (probably the Chinese) do. In any event, this requires a lot of mucky, dirty hands stuff. Even worse, it means investing money in mucky, dirty hands stuff. Stuff with the wrong kind of numbers {snigger}
If you want more growth, figuring out how to turn inventions into products and getting people to invest in this is a good thing to look at.
This isn't because Musk is an unfathomable genius. His ideas of insourcing and vertical integration are rather reminiscent of mid-stage Henry Ford, historically.
EDIT: and lots of pretty obvious stuff. If you want batteries, build a factory to build batteries. Not talk about batteries, hold summits about batteries, have a battery enquiry etc.
Then we have Europe. Mention it and the usual suspects on both sides freak out. Park the politics remember and just look at the economy. Cutting ourselves off from our primary market is bonkers. The primary market isn’t the EU - that’s why it’s called the EEA and isn’t the same as the EU. Nd yet we can’t have free access to it like non-EU states such as Iceland because morons think it’s the EU / think we can’t join without begging the EU to let us back in.
My manifesto for change:
1. National program to invest in our infrastructure. Roads, railways, fibre broadband etc all pays positive ROI. It’s called capitalism. Look it up.
2. Tax businesses getting bought by foreigners looking to expatriate them. The reason why Germany still ha industry is that Germany didn’t let them be sold to foreigners looking to expatriate them.
3. Invest in education, training and universities. We can’t afford to go progressively stupider no matter how much stupid people insist that we can’t afford teachers or research.
4. Build a shitton of houses through housing associations. Rent. Not buy. Decouple housing from investments.
5. Decouple energy costs from imported crap we import in declining numbers. Invest in building the hardware we’re installing - lunacy to need 20k turbines nd import ll of the because we can’t afford to invest
That's why I'm so frustrated by the lack of any ideas at all about what we should be doing with our (now not very) new-found freedom from those that espoused the idea. We may be out of the EU, but nothing else has changed. Largely, we're still sticking to EU rules. We still have have most of the disadvantages (if that's what they were) and few of the advantages.
Seats like SW Norfolk, Suffolk Coastal, Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, NE Hertfordshire, NE Somerset and Hainham, Mid and South Pembrokeshire, NW Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire Dales, Hexham, North Northumberland, Penrith and Solway, and Banbury for instance all largely rural marginal seats the Tories are projected to regain from Labour
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/poll-labour-lose-seats-rghscklnk
"Investors threaten to call in police over huge losses after collapse of Alastair Campbell son's football betting syndicate - after former Labour spin chief and his wife 'invested £300,000 into business venture'"
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14232547/Investors-police-collapse-Alastair-Campbell-sons-football-betting-syndicate.html
They kept some high end lines in Germany, but with increasingly final assembly of imported sub components. In addition they made a fortune selling machinery for production lines and to make other machinery to China et al. Who have hit a bit of recession and have started to make their own production line machinery and machinery to make machinery.
4 - the problem isn't buying or renting. Both are too expensive. Some people are spending more than 50% of their post tax income on housing. Build, build, build like crazy.
Apparently we can ignore all trends when they disagree with us.
You'd be (un)surprised by the number of "business leaders" who run a mile at the sound of development and investment.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha....
But no reason those of us at the aging end of the couldn't sign up in advance.
(Edit - Vanilla screwup)
Build build build executive style houses and we’re building the wrong properties in the wrong places and selling them for £unsustainable.
The point about LHA builds is that they can rent at viable rents, way below market rates. The value is irrelevant as they’re not for sale, re not investments: they’re homes.
Why would that do to private rentals? Crash the market, forcing loads of property on the market for people to buy at prices that are more realistic. Lots of people take a short term bath on their “investment” but find that they don’t need to sub their kids tens of thousands to buy.
And in any event, Europe doesn't have quite the same level of rapacious private equity, which has worked out how to asset strip the UK's 'open for business' economy.
1. National program to invest in our infrastructure. Roads, railways, fibre broadband etc all pays positive ROI. It’s called capitalism. Look it up.
I agree but we cannot afford to increase our deficit by enough to make a difference so we need to cut current spending to release money for capital spending.
2. Tax businesses getting bought by foreigners looking to expatriate them. The reason why Germany still ha industry is that Germany didn’t let them be sold to foreigners looking to expatriate them.
No. We need to sell £50bn of assets a year to offset our trade deficit. This means we have to put up with people buying our businesses and, hopefully, developing them here. We need tax policies that encourages that not tax policies which would encourage foreigners to get out of dodge soonest. Of course eliminating our trade deficit is even more important for our future well being than growth.
3. Invest in education, training and universities. We can’t afford to go progressively stupider no matter how much stupid people insist that we can’t afford teachers or research.
We actually do spend reasonable money on basic research. What we are really poor at is converting that research into businesses and then getting the capital to those businesses to allow them to grow. That is the problem. I am not seeing many answers right now.
4. Build a shitton of houses through housing associations. Rent. Not buy. Decouple housing from investments.
We certainly need a lot more houses. Personally, I am not fussed if they are publicly or privately owned.
5. Decouple energy costs from imported crap we import in declining numbers. Invest in building the hardware we’re installing - lunacy to need 20k turbines nd import ll of the because we can’t afford to invest.
In an open economy with a large number of interconnectors it is silly to pretend that we can decouple our energy costs from the going rate to a material extent. What we need to do is build up our capacity so we become a net energy exporter (see balance of payments).
Play the trends forward for another 4 years and surmise what seat exchanges my look like then.
Notably, the Victorians and Edwardians avoided this. If you look at the streets they created, you see patterns - one side a bit different to the other, or it changes half way down. This is because they would sell half a street of plots to one builder, the other to another. This resulted in frenzied attempts to be first to finish. It also had an effect on quality (sometimes) - because there would be local choice, people would buy the better built houses at a premium.
In the latter case they aren't ignored; they just triple the construction costs.
Monopoly utilities are one of the worst examples of 'open for business', as they're an invitation to plunder.
We've had this debate before on PB.
I’m talking about government. I have no comment on business leaders.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/12/28/without-tory-reform-pact-britain-sunk-egos-get-in-the-way/
If you have that sort of financial clout there are easier ways of getting 2% return on your money.
The deal was simple: Truss is simple. She wanted deals for performative reasons, who cares what the deal is or how it works.
When I bother to think about politics nowadays (seldom, mercifully, for what is the point?) then I spend about half the time despairing of the politicians' inertia and the other half feeling sorry for them, because the action that's needed to rescue the situation is too radical for the electorate to stomach. The housing situation is so bad and the dependency ratio of the population so challenging that all I can see going forward is more managed decline.
Always writing with such aplomb."
I'm not saying we couldn't do more to balance out the country's great pure research tradition with more applied work, but I do lots of very applied research, mostly funded by the government but sometimes by industry. Government is not ignorant of the importance of productionisation.
And up until very recently, universities have wanted an unrealistically large slug of the equity in ventures using their research.
But it’s probably access to capital to grow businesses which is the gpbuggest hurdle. $200m for an early stage (listed or unlisted) biotech in the US is fairly easy, and pretty common; over here it’s a real rarity.
The US is totally opposite end of the spectrum.
There was a blog post i linked to a while ago from a Brit at Y-combinator who surveyed stufents at top US and UK unis and the difference was stark on how many wanted to work for themselves on a startup.
Oddly, one of my most consistently profitable sports is F1, which I'm not knowledgeable on, and one of my least is golf, which I am. I think that's because being too knowledgeable can have you not seeing the wood for the trees. A bit of distance can help with the big picture.
Course if you can fuse the two, you're rocking.
If they can do food for cheaper then we should import it, pay less for food, and use our limited land for something far more valuable than unproductive agriculture.
Win/win.
So the "worst that could happen" is "you don't get multiple years at 80 to 100K GBP starting salary plus an entry on your CV that makes it a lot easier to get your next job"...
Also, in big tech world, £100k a year isn't much. Get yourself a good job at Deepmind etc, you can make up the lost £300k very easily. A low level OpenAI employee is on $1 million a year, Google regularly pays $300-500k.
When you're young, it isn't just about money. As one of only three software engineers at a company that now employs hundreds, I did everything, from requirements capture (talking to customers...) through to testing and release. Once the companies became too big, they became much less fun as I became more pigeonholed.
It can be more about lifestyle than money. And I don't mean hookers and cocaine, but developing great products well, and being central to the process. But perhaps that's just me.
Nowadays, I'd still go for a startup for the fun, LOLs and intensity, but only if Mrs J had a good, safe job.
That instead, we should be listening to a group of regulators to lead us into growth.
All because you don't like him (nor do I particularly). No wonder we have no growth, when we have no imagination.
I gave him alimony"
And the thing about compound interest is that three years without 100K (plus pension) at the start of your career is a much bigger deal than later on. So in that sense it is wasted time.
I don't say this to say that picking the startup route is a bad idea if that's what you really want to do, merely to point out that there is a reason why all those PhDs you're talking to are tending to favour the big tech option if they can get it. Because you need to really value what you get out of doing the startup to balance out the financial loss and the stress.
(I spent the first ten years of my career at somewhere that was sort of startup in that it was still dependent on VC money and eventually went bust because the VCs pulled the plug; I don't regret working there but the 15 years following at a much bigger company have been I think a better fit for what I want out of a job. I certainly don't miss the excitement of "is the company going to get this round of funding so it can actually pay us?"...)
But these days the 14 year olds would probably apply it to the school buildings, or someone who looked at them the wrong way.
Is Naptha the same root work as Napalm?
And he tells us a hell of a lot - for better or worse, it is like we have a phone line into the depths of his psyche.
I don't see any reason to listen to Musk - he comes across as a lobotomised, bigoted, self-obsessed nutjob. I don't care whether he is the richest man in the world - that is irrelevant. I require a measure of evidence-based thinking, and logic.
The weird thing about Musk's content (which I put down to something in Musk's head - perhaps a feedback loop from spending too much time on Twatter), is that the stuff he puts out is overwhelmingly either fabrications he has made up or swallowed, or BS.
It's not just that he has no filters, he has no engaged grey cells either.
1. Invest in infra (esp. in the north), and in housing.
2. Figure out a path toward cheap energy
3. Rejoin the single market
4. Reform the pensions industry in order to restore a British capital market capable of funding new ventures
That’s it.
It also needs a leader capable of articulating the above in a compelling way.
Keir is not capable of that, and his team have in large reverted to their comfort zones of operating in the interests of public sector unions.
Naphthenic acid = a carboxylic acid derived from stuff in petroleum
Naphtha = ancient word for petroleum, more recently a word for certain fractions from distilling petroleum
So the first two and a half letters (on average) are the same root ... somehwat to my surprise as I thought Napalm was short for sodium palmitate.
And school lessons or not I'd have used eye/face protection and a screen ...
PS OED also comes up with this little gem:
Cooked roux is called Cajun napalm in my restaurant's kitchen because it is extremely hot and sticks to your skin.
Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen i. 28
But even without that threat it seems we might not be able to rely on that supply much longer as there is very strong political pressure in Norway to end the energy export deals as they have caused a massive increase in energy prices in Norway.
The more you rely on imports of good and energy the greater your exposure to price shocks and possible supply interruptions.
Well done, you made laugh.
In short, we don't really know what will happen in 2029. My guess is that the WFA and 22bn to Miliband for magic gas has Ratnered the brand, but I don't know and won't know until the election campaign proper starts in four year's time.
Peter York on the radio this morning said Musk was now living his teenage years in opposition to the prematurely balding nerdy adolescent he was; (I paraphrase) chaotic Ill judged relationships with girls, lots of drugs and bellowing his half informed opinions at the world.