Dan Davies

I read an article in an old (post-war) Life magazine that explained the process of importing wine. The Wine Committee met, tasted a bunch of wines, and sterling was set aside to import the winners. It's just really hard to get your head around.

It helps to look convincingly happy about the things you're doing. It helps sell the sense that you're doing something because it aligns with your values. This government's default mode is to do something while handwringing that they had no other choice because someone else made them do it.

Fell 2.7% in nominal terms for new private lettings (which is the series I try to pay attention to because I feel like it's more descriptive of the active margin - you're right about the total including rent rises on existing contracts which I guess is an equally valid measure)

The most positive read a feedback I ever got was for writing "Jamie Dimon thinks that offices are full of creative serendipity for the same reason the Queen thinks the whole world smells of fresh paint"

Investment banking went through "it's technically impossible -> compliance won't allow it -> you need the buzz of the trading floor -> well maybe but nobody's going to do an M&A deal over zoom -> actually it's about apprenticeships" before Jamie Dimon finally admitted "because I say so, that's why"

Still does my head in that Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty isn't a proscribed organisation, despite having successfully intimidated the entire banking system through violence.

And does it work? No! but that's not the point. Making money is a nice to have but controlling the means of production is a got to have.

I mean like I say, if you are trying to help someone build a case that it's causing unreasonable restriction on free speech, it's comprehensible but I don't think that was what the Met were trying to do

If the met police had been trying to get the proscription reversed by malicious compliance it's hard to see what they would have done differently.

It still winds me up disproportionately (disproportionately because it's not the worst thing about it) that people don't understand that taking women out of the workforce would be a much more immediate and bigger economic disaster than the low birth rates they are so worked up about.

I'm not sure the "can't get laid & salty about it" hypothesis has been fully disproved yet.

It's neither more nor less a lie than saying that the Greens are a populist party and therefore like Reform. tbh my view is "politics ain't beanbag", if people want the Green Party to be a serious political party rather than a hippie pressure group they can't complain when it acts like one

I think the real problem is that "the London housing market" is like "the economy of Italy" - a completely fictitious concept created by averaging very different locations, which doesn't describe any specific place at all.

I have been making this point from kalecki since before you were probably born laddy!

I think it's possible to tell those stories (although I am less convinced than the median blue sky poster that residential construction in London is an important growth policy) but "prices and rents are falling" surely has to be part of the story why new construction has fallen

... and of course if the prices are falling (rents fell too in the last year) there needs to be a story about why this doesn't mean there is excess supply rather than excess demand at the current price and why it's still a policy goal to add more supply.

I think it's kind of odd to not mention at all that London house prices are falling rather than rising. As well as presumably being part of the explanation why people aren't starting construction, I thought not so long ago we were saying construction costs were small compared to land value...

(what the two have in common of course is the CEO-owner class terror of not being able to control skilled workers)

"everyone has to get back to the office because the important thing about business is human interaction" is dying, but "white collar jobs will be replaced by AI agents within 18 months" cannot yet be born; in this interregnum a variety of morbid symptoms appear.

They have drugs that can block that

Labour letting Reform take a winnable seat

But the Windermere ferry is closed in the winter!

LLM's have adopted "posting through it"

London is overall number one for culture obviously, but it sticks in my mind that Windermere Lake Cruises does twice as many numbers as Tate Britain, despite costing about £13 rather than being free.

(even if it gets those searches down from an hour a day to 10 minutes, which would be a lot more than it actually is, I am not a server farm and can't just frictionlessly reallocate those 50 minutes to having ideas)

He always eats desserts at surface temperature and pressure?

Oh you would be surprised. Particularly in financial payment rails I don't think it will be difficult at all to get them to sail back.

There is a very under covered Piero Cipollone speech where he mentions that the digital euro standard could easily be extended to provide an API for any other currency in the world; I really noticed that he has mentioned this precisely once and never again

Europe Worries Trump Poses Threat to Its Financial and Tech Sovereignty

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/b...

I can still bully the latest version of Claude into giving the wrong answer to my expected log utility problem.