Nick Taylor

Mostly fungi 🍄

A few Autumn/Winter Epping Forest photos

Trapped at the Concession Stand - The American Prospect Captive pricing follows when customers have no choices. Policymakers can do something about it.

To close our affordability series, I wrote about captive pricing.
If you're at the ballpark or the movie theater and have no choices for concessions, they've got you.
But it's more widespread than that: ambulances, auto sales, airports, anesthesia... it's becoming inescapable.

Wild how the Fed chair saying that *entire regions of the United States* won’t be able to get a mortgage in the next decade barely registered as a news event

Well done to Steve & others involved in producing this 👏

Now we just need university governance to live up to such principles! The code, usefully, lays out practical steps towards this. It's collective/political pressure & organising that can make it a widespread reality.

UK farmers lose £800m after heat and drought cause one of worst harvests on record Many now concerned about ability to make living in fast-changing climate after one of worst grain harvests recorded

2025 was heat and drought. 2024 was incessant rain

Three of the five worst British harvests on record have now occurred since 2020

Some farmers are asking whether the growing impacts of the climate crisis are making it too financially risky to sow their crops

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

1/6 🚨🌾🧵
Everyday cereal products across Europe contain high levels of the forever chemical #TFA, our new PAN Europe study reveals. #TFA is an ultra-short #PFAS and a breakdown product of other PFAS, including PFAS #pesticides.
www.pan-europe.info/press-releas...

THE ASSET CLASS, my first book, will be published by @wnbooks.bsky.social on 9 April 2026. It’s a narrative investigation of private equity, a secretive and relentlessly destructive wing of finance that penetrates almost every aspect of our lives - and it’s available to pre-order now!

The classic early retirement story! @will-davies.bsky.social & I wrote about this movement & all its contradictions back in 2020. doi.org/10.1080/1753...

I assume FIRE has been turbocharged post-pandemic, with the combo of job disillusionment & asset appreciation.

Last week, Comptroller Lander recommended NYC’s pension funds drop BlackRock + 2 other public asset managers due to inadequate decarbonization plans.
 
After evaluating the pension systems’ 49 managers, only 3 failed to submit plans with the seriousness we expect.
comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/com...

Bubble or Nothing Policymakers concerned about the deployment of clean energy and compute-focused infrastructure over the long term need a framework for managing the uncertainty in the AI sector's investment landscape—...

Today's new @publicenterprise.bsky.social report is a comprehensive analysis of the capital structure of the entire AI sector: data center real estate, GPU markets, private credit, you name it.

It's also a financial risk management framework for policymakers!

publicenterprise.org/report/bubbl...

Revealed: MPs rack up huge rent expenses while pushing through cuts to benefits MPs are allowed to rent a second home, but while they are simultaneously cutting benefits for the vulnerable, the cost feels hard to swallow.

Senior MPs including Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick and Darren Jones are claiming tens of thousands of pounds a year in taxpayer-funded rent expenses while either calling for or implementing benefit cuts on the poorest

By me, for the Big Issue www.bigissue.com/news/politic...

Volume 25 Issue 4 | Global Environmental Politics | MIT Press

GEP's Special Issue on "The North–South Politics of Global Just Transitions" is now out, guest edited by Chuks Okereke, Ken Mbeva, Reuben Makomere. Several articles are available open access, including the introduction. Check them out at the link below!

direct.mit.edu/glep/issue/2...

Iran president says capital move now a necessity as water crisis deepens Iran’s capital must be moved because the country “no longer has a choice,” President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Thursday in remarks carried by state media, warning that severe ecological strain has mad...

'Iran’s capital must be moved because the country “no longer has a choice,” President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Thursday in remarks carried by state media, warning that severe ecological strain has made Tehran impossible to sustain'

#Iran 🇮🇷

Worth remembering as this unfolds that it was disabled people and people from ethnic minority backgrounds who disproportionately died. Tens of thousands needlessly lost their lives, many who died alone or with just an iPad. Thousands more were left with life changing Long Covid. A true scandal.

As @glenpeters.bsky.social says, we're way off target for any 1.5°C scenario.

To see how far off, each of the red/green bars represents the decrease in CO₂ emissions during COVID. Even if we achieved that from now until the end of 2030, we would still miss our 1.5°C target by a significant margin.

‘Most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent suicides’: Human capital and endogenous mortality in Gary Becker’s work Chicago School economist and Nobel Memorial Prize winner Gary Becker writes that ‘most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent “suicides” in the sense that they could have been postponed if more re...

Check out the brilliant @cibled.bsky.social in @econsocjournal.bsky.social on the extremes of Becker's human capital theory & its normalisation of inequality.

doi.org/10.1080/0308...

🚨You always wondered about how to make sense of the many accounts on Green Finance? We got you covered:
@nataschavanderzwan.bsky.social @danmertens.bsky.social ky.social Julius Kob and I critically review existing accounts and argue for an integrated analytical approach👇
doi.org/10.1017/fas....

Martijn Konings, Fiscal Dominance? — Sidecar Trump and the Federal Reserve.

"the Fed's primary concern is the systemic threat that [firm or sector risk] poses – even if stabilising measures benefit the too-big-to-fail constituency first & foremost. The administration ... is more interested in a discretionary, patronage-based approach."

newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

turns out if you want people to live car-free you need to emphasize the safety and accessibility of modes that aren't cars

Today is the official UK publication day for Silicon Empires! I'm excited to have it out and hear what people think.

There's an enormous amount happening every day in AI, and it's difficult to gain a stable perspective. I wrote the book to try and get some secure hold on that constant flux. 🧵

And here was me walking around warning people of the 8-9% success rate 😮‍💨

Taps previous post sign

bsky.app/profile/ntay...

Chief Economist at Nesta, the 'innovation agency', seems to have run out of innovative ideas...

On it being talked about, for e.g. 2 popular books, Tim Smedley's Clearing the Air & Beth Gardiner's Choked, both came out in 2019. Deaths from air pollution are also a well established part of the public discussion on e.g. low emissions zones or new road infrastructure.

I feel like this one is talked about, tho it could always be more so. The question is rather why not enough change is happening despite the fact that we know how bad things are. In many ways the answers got more obvious recently.

“[Last year] CO2 in the global surface atmosphere increased by 3.5 ppm, the largest one-year increase since modern measurements began... This increase was driven by continued fossil CO2 emissions, enhanced fire emissions and reduced terrestrial/ocean sinks… which could signal a climate feedback.”

🎉 Just launched!

We’ve collaborated with @cplusc.bsky.social to launch @transitionsec.bsky.social — a new research centre that will develop alternative approaches to security and investigate the US & UK military industrial complexes as economic, climate and geopolitical threats.

Find out more. 👇

It's finally here! 100+ scholars, global scope, practical insights. “Climate Obstruction: A Global Assessment” shows how organized interests stall policy—and how governance can respond.

Open access available now! Or order for paperback and hardcover. cssn.org/wp-content/u...

techpolicy.press/generative-a...

Lots of good stuff in this article on AI and productivity, including the concept of 'workslop':

“AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”