1) Expand night tube service: include Northern Line Bank branch, run on Thursdays
2) Licensing decisions in the Central Activities Zone made at the mayoral rather than borough level.

Possibly a trial run for branching the Jubilee Line at North Greenwich towards Thamesmead and Abbey Wood?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee...

Inside you there are two Groks: one has horny, one has antisemitism. You have horny antisemitism.

I don't think there's much overlap between people who take the Staten Island Railroad and the rest of the subway. It might technically be "a subway", but there's no reason to call it that. If TfL bought Merseyrail, would it be "the tube"?

I'd be more likely to call the PATH train the subway...

Farmers protests at 6:30am driving past my house. I no longer believe in free speech

Ah fair, definitely true that living wage is higher in London but minimum wage is the same

Is that true? I thought both were now £12.21/hr (except if you're younger than 21)

Maybe wage compression is coming with price compression, i.e. the cheapest goods are also inflating faster?

Certainly true that minimum wage has outpaced all measures of AVERAGE costs: after tax + NI, minimum wage is still up 71% since 2015 (vs overall prices up 40%, 1 bed rent up 49%, food up 44%)

Direction is the same for larger rentals, and for different regions (although, for London, it's only a decrease from 115% to 93%...)

Rent data here: www.ons.gov.uk/economy/infl...
Minimum wage I pulled from Wikipedia, and used the highest-age rate

Minimum wage increases have also outpaced rent over the past decade:

January 2015
Median 1 bed: £736/mo
Minimum wage: £1018/mo*
Median rent = 72% of minimum wage

January 2025
Median 1 bed: £1070/mo
Minimum wage: £1792/mo
Median rent = 60% of minimum wage

* That's 40hrs/week, 47 weeks/yr

That's as of 2018-2020, here: www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...

"Going for pensioners" is good. Pensioners are the richest people in the country.

The median 25-44 year old has £52k
The median 65-74 year old has £338k

By contrast:
People with disabilities are 4% poorer than those without.
People born outside the UK are 60% poorer than those born here.

When the "nice things" budget is shared with the "take care of the elderly" budget, there isn't much money left for nice things.

When I worked at a video game company, we accidentally released a game that basically had the difficulty turned off.

Would be funny if Silksong accidentally got released with "difficulty=DebugTestMaximum" or some such.

Fun trick: ask someone how to say "why" in their language, and then ask how to say "for what" or "what reason" as the realisation hits them. Works with Farsi and Russian. Russian even has "for this" for "because".

Doesn't work with English's "why", but we do at least have "wherefore"/"therefore".

Rush:
- The woke left are going to make guitars illegal and ban the word "I"
- 'Live for yourself. Begging hands and bleeding hearts will only cry out for more'
- Song about a guy using his fortune to pay homeless people to beat each other up

Nevertheless, bangers from the 1st album to the 19th

What if I'm nostalgic for the golden age of uncontrolled immigration into the United States

A map of travel-to-work flows in England and Wales, showing commutes as white lines. Cities are clearly visible spiky white splotches. By contrast, patches of countryside (Peak District, the North Pennines) are blank, showing the areas that people DON'T cross over for work.

This map relies on the fundamentally wrong idea that cities should be amputated from their surrounding regions. This is precisely the opposite of correct.

Instead: start with Travel-To-Work regions, and iteratively merge regions with the most-crossed borders, until you have 10 regions or so.

Penn Station to Grand Central seems like it should be trivial, but Hoboken to Atlantic Terminal (or at least Hoboken to New York!) would be pretty cool.

If they introduce through-running commuter rail to New York, I may be forced to concede that New York is better than London...

Rich councils may get richer, but rich people would get poorer. I think that's a fair trade, especially since councils are largely responsible for how nice an area is.

Only exception is big cities, where the metro mayors should be getting the property tax receipts.

Why not simply pay those key workers more?

November substack is up! Not as fun as the past few: motivated mostly by exhaustion, and a righteous disdain for millionaire rural landowners.

Nevertheless, HERE'S a budget with some chest hair (Property Tax, UBI, and nerd stuff)

open.substack.com/pub/distants...

Greens seeking to preserve tax loophole for millionaire landowners. Curious.

Joining the dakotas

Cutting new jersey in half

Join the dakotas and cut new jersey in half.

Benefits:
1. Bipartisan. Each party loses 2 senators
2. Dakota would be soooo big
3. Solve the bob menendez bribe scandal
4. New Jersey dumb state anyway