Rhys Davies

Pretty cool stuff that we let European chemicals start to die because energy and then went all in on a region that is extremely geographically vulnerable.

So I guess we have the cards after all.

And yes I do enjoy the irony of it .

"I asked God to forgive me, which he has."

Honestly this is the biggest perk of serving in Congress. Most people have to ask forgiveness and wonder. If you're in Congress you get a same day answer from the big guy.

YouTube video by Richard J Murphy Billionaires won’t leave if we tax them – and even if they do, so what?

Billionaires won’t leave if we tax them – and even if they do, so what? We might well be better off. youtu.be/XW0TQjabXNA?...

Guardian Snippet: Net migration might turn negative this year, with dire consequences for crucial public services, especially hospitals, care homes and universities as well as many private employers.

With high unemployment, massive underemployment (on benefits),& rising youth unemployment, we'll take our chances on low immigration, thanks George.

(Why do certain Englishmen always deny the existence of the English as an ethnic group?).

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

In the four years to the 2024 general election, this country experienced levels of migration not seen in more than four decades. Net migration hit 2.5 million people. It wasn’t only the scale, but the nature and pace of change. After the Conservatives dropped visa requirements, this country experienced the largest and fastest expansion in low-skilled migration in its history. Visa routes were loosened without safeguards. Large numbers of people arrived without clear pathways into skilled work.

It's reassuring to see a senior politician who gets the nature of the problem.

The scale of recent immigration (2.4m in 4 years!) could never be absorbed by the labour market without forcing up unemployment & underemployment (the British-born young on benefits).
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Comparative Advantage is not Competitive Advantage David Ricardo showed in 1817, in his landmark Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. that if each country produces according to its comparative advantage, global output is maximized. When the P...

*Persistent* trade deficits certainly are a problem.

The purest sign of that is that they become politically salient and send Trump, running on a tariff agenda, to the Whitehouse. Twice.

open.substack.com/pub/michaelp...

Wikipedia graph of the US trade balance since 1895 showing the collapse from the 1970s and the persistent trade deficit there after.

The problem predates Trump by a long way.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance...

False equivalence, I feel. The Iran war is a war of choice; the tariff war is a war of necessity.

America's trade balance is horrific, and something had to be done about it. If it wasn't Trump, some other politician would have come along with the same objective.

The illegal war would probably end tomorrow if they changed the name of the Persian Gulf to Trump Gulf.

U.S. sub sinks Iranian warship off Sri Lanka, killing 87 and expanding war zone A U.S. submarine sank an Iranian warship off the southern coast of Sri Lanka, killing dozens of sailors and dramatically widening Washington's pursuit of the Iranian navy.

A US submarine sinking a lonely, dinky Iranian surface ship an ocean away from the theater of the main conflict—and 9000
miles from North America—makes it pretty clear the US is fighting a general war, without the declaration required by the Constitution. www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...

This is like an old VHS on repeat. Applying the same medicine and hoping for different results.

Ah yes, hoping for a conflict to both be limited and fundamentally reshape the geopolitical landscape of an entire region of many different sovereign nations. A completely reasonable combination of wants.

Autocracies.
Always.
Overreach.

Has anyone ever over-estimated solar growth? We are still in the early days of solar deployment, IMO.

Manufacturing matters: The cornerstone of a competitive green economy | IPPR UK manufacturing has declined far more than other advanced economies in the G7. This matters, even for a country that rightly prides itself on its services

Manufacturing matters.

www.ippr.org/articles/man...

Landmark in knowledge: Jean-François Champollion, French philologist, founder of Egyptology, deciphered Rosetta Stone hieroglyphs by 1822; died #OTD 1832. Discovered in 1799, the granodiorite Stele is most popular display at British Museum.
Portrait by Cogniet 1831 Musée du Louvre | British Museum

uh oh

Those 2-3x returns are mainly waiting at the airport.

If it’s true Reform UK’s Treasury spokesperson Robert Jenrick told a business audience last night that renewable companies are "screwed" if Reform get in, it tells you everything about their readiness to inflict national self-harm in pursuit of ideological war on climate action.

I can't agree with this. No senior doctor, lawyer, or experienced tradesman will go into politics on that basis. We will just end up with an even more SPAD set of MPs than we have now.

People with other careers who might only be in parliament for 5 years need to keep an oar in.

At this point, there are probably good odds the whole tournament will get moved to Europe at short notice.

As long as there is an understanding that no one signed up for this, and we're not interested in any mission creep or being strong-armed into an extended war.

I suspect many, like me, are simply exhausted of Middle East wars and extraneous explanations for involvement.

This is one of the reasons I feel in my gut that London's productivity is overstated - the problem you describe has kicked in.

We have an apparently vibrant capital in a stagnant economy, but that is an illusion: London is just drawing rents from its many monopolies on the rest of the country.

By using monetary values only with extreme caution & after checking whether you have indeed grown 15,500 apples or made 110 cars & not just increased the price.

Billable time is an example of the prod limitations in many service industries - it can never exceed 1 if hours worked is the denominator.

This is the case if you think of productivity as revenue/hour worked. If you think of it as physical output/hour worked, you can disregard revenue and get to the heart of the matter.

By instinct (manufacturing accountant), I define productivity as economists like Fourastié do: physical output (items, kWh, hp, bits, etc.) per unit hour worked, not revenue per hour; and consider that the only long-term measure of productivity is falling prices.

Pharma is unambiguously a manufacturing industry that has stellar productivity because it does R&D -> expensive initial (physical) output -> scale -> price falls.

Insurance and Finance can rarely show any true productivity or price falls because their costs are basically linked to wages.