Richard Dubourg

Cost of policy: £10bn.

Benefit of achieving government objective of reducing migration: More than £10bn.

Apparently, buying sandwiches doesn't have a distributional impact we should care about. Buying houses does.

Why? The previous situation was one where we had resources tied up in a house which was doing nothing. You're using immigration to provide demand for supply no one wants. That makes no sense.

Which they generally don't. For the reasons I've outlined.

Impact as measured by whether a policy gets on the books, of course, not whether the policy actually had a positive impact.

That requires time and resources to work out and you might find the policy was shit!

Best just get it into the baseline, take the plaudits, and move on to the next one.

The updates are a work in progress, obviously...

They've now punted it on and pocketed the cash.

One peer fewer, at least.

Appreciation *of*. Bloody AI, grammar is crap.

It must be something like that. Deliveries plus Uber means no one needs Zipcar - apart from a vocal minority who use it a lot.

Just coming back to this.

Zipcar apparently has about 500k members in London, and revenues of £50m.

That's £100 each per year.

Sounds like a distinct lack of demand to me.

I wonder how many regular users there are?

I really think voters must take responsibility for what and who they choose to vote for. You can’t be getting all outraged at the accusation of racism if you choose to vote for someone who says and does overtly racist things and whose biggest policy pitches are mass deportations and EU-phobia.

I live in Wales and today received my Join Us letter from Reform UK, complete with SAE which I posted back to them, immediately, empty. If every other person in Wales did this, Reform would spend over £1.5 million on postage. Not sorry. Join me Cymru.

It was the 80s if Farage was 17.

I was there 2003-2011. It at least felt that policy was about enforcing the rules and making the rules enforceable. Trying to prevent asylum seekers destroying their documents was so that their claims could be accurately assessed. This selective demonisation didn't happen.

Looking forward to all those Reform- and Tommy Robinson-supporting England fans at the World Cup complaining the UK is fucked.

It takes a real cynic to conclude that people risk their lives, spending months, years, and thousands of dollars to travel thousands of miles on foot and in the back of lorries, so they can get to the UK, to sponge off it. I used to work at the Home Office. I'd be ashamed now.

Apologies to the sensitive, but this is what happened last night.

Low - Christmas (Studio album, 1999) - YouTube

Time to be playing the best Christmas album of them all.
youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Fair.

Studying lynchings of Black Americans in the South between 1880 and 1940 finds that children of individuals who were exposed (as children) to lynchings see a reduction in their income relative to counterfactual individuals, from Condra, Jones, and Walsh www.nber.org/papers/w34523

This is what a pub should look like.

Sofas in pubs are a modern invention. They go with coffee tables. They're for your lounge. You shouldn't have to move from your seat to reach your pint.

able to "break through" into higher profile outlets. We need a British Paul Krugman but just don't seem to have one.

I hear you. I'm an economist, but not in macro or similar. We desperately lack qualified economists with profile and presence to engage on the public stage. Paul Johnson is the closest we have but he has a very limited view of issues. Jonathan Portes does his bit but doesn't seem to have been

Not showing chess players in a very good light, this discussion, not that we haven't known for decades they tend to be twats.

bsky.app/profile/mcda...

*snigger*

So what are Ireland going to do if they qualify for the World Cup?