Tag: rss_source

“The issue here is not really one that can be solved by planning law, because it’s fundamentally a problem of political economy. Whatever powers you give to accelerate and streamline the objection process, if there is any local democracy at all, it is just simply very difficult to do something which is opposed by a large group of energetic and well-connected middle class people. The only currently available strategy for dealing with this political problem – calling them selfish middle class bastards on podcasts – doesn’t really work”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/we-wanted-human-capital-we-got-human

“Pursed by government agencies, criminal syndicates, or corporate interests–though in these movies the boundaries between those three groups is never clear–our characters most often end up dropping off (or being forced from) the grid entirely, not necessarily as free people but as stateless, paperless ghosts, drifting ambivalently through globalization’s wreckage”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/sez-noir

“We understood that owning something meant caring for it and stewarding it, so we expected ownership to be an extension of people’s vocations. Hospitals were to be run by doctors, industrial firms by engineers; homes were to be owned by homeowners, and building was to be organized by builders; and the financing for all of them was to be provided by local bankers and credit unions and saving associations — themselves outgrowths of local business and local thrift and local wealth. There were problems and exceptions, of course, but this was the basic philosophy underlying our political order and our policy apparatus”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-big-homebuilders

“And that’s why I say it’s dangerous to ignore boredom, like any other form of pain. Boredom is, specifically, a signal that you’re reading the wrong thing. If you push through it, then you’re potentially building a flawed understanding; like an overworked joint, you’re going to lose flexibility and have a hell of a time unpicking the things you mislearned. You might be exaggerating the importance of some things and missing others, you might be getting steps out of order, you’re likely to be target-fixated on details rather than understanding how they arise from underlying principles”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/boredom-is-a-form-of-pain

“when the baby is born, that new little person is tagged to the parents’ profiles. Because the government already knows who the parents are and what they’re eligible for (such as tax benefits or social programs), the state can proactively send them money and access to the resources they need. No application processes to be discovered and completed. Plus, the automation of parts of the process have major time and cost-saving benefits for the government as well, with more than an estimated hour saved in application processing time for each birth”

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/estonian-e-government

“Even putting it together as a joke I felt how seductive the biz opp can be, how we’re all constantly looking for our One Investment, the one ticket out of The Rut with all the other wage earning drones and up to the moon with the ownership class, a dream that seems to be slipping further and further away. Wouldn’t it be nice if my own book was the one product that changed my life? What a scam”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-business-opportunity

“The conclusion I take away is that once more, a simple bonus-malus system (the “no claims bonus”) is not easily defeated, and also that most of the time, big features of datasets are big features that are easy to recover from correlated characteristics. (This is what makes me a big sceptic about futurists talking about genetics in health insurance, telemetrics in motor or AI in everything – if something’s big enough to be relevant to pricing, it’s generally really big and easy to find)”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/sheilas-wheels-within-sheilas-wheels

“All of which I think explains why mid-sized regional cities sometimes now feel so much more vibrant than the ostensibly richer capital. A couple of decades back central London did have its share of decent nightlife. But the truly interesting things got pushed ever outwards, from Farringdon to Shoreditch to Dalston to Hackney Wick, as the developers regenerated one area after another. The further out it went, though, the smaller the catchment area – and the less chance of anything really sparking”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/undocumented-side-effects

“Then, in 2022, attorney general Suella Braverman rewrote the legal guidance. It was like someone had injected crystal meth into a clown’s eyeballs, slapped them repeatedly around the face, thrown them into a children’s ball pit and then demanded they write a detailed legal proposition”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/a-good-man-in-government

“I am in my mid-40s, almost exactly halfway between my graduation and my retirement date (LOL, right). I have known precisely three years of sustained growth. I was a late starter, but to have known proper growth at all of the sort we took for granted for decades – centuries! – you’d need to have your 40th birthday in sight. Any younger than that, and you were probably still in education. That is twenty years of adults who’ve never known a “normal” economy”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/exit-pursued-by-a-bear-market