Tom Adshead

Better is Granny Weatherwax: "There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things"

Another episode in my substack on "Pluribus" and socialist economics and politics, this time comparing the sci-fi show with Hegel's "universal Reason":
open.substack.com/pub/tomadshe...

Came across them on Insta the other day and have started following them, glad to see the recommendation confirmed!

As a Russian specialist, there are no signs he has any particular access in Russia. Anyone can buy a ticket to SPIEF. He clearly knows some high end Russians like Fridman and Milner, but no official contacts apart from Sergei Belyakov. (who is definitely not the FSB insider he is portrayed as)

Russia Services PMI is 53.1, up from 52.3 in December, the strongest growth level for a year, so signs that the economy is beginning to dig itself out of its hole. The rise in VAT is hitting prices, but companies seem to be able to pass this through to customers.
www.pmi.spglobal.com/Public/Home/...

www.pmi.spglobal.com/Public/Home/...
Kazakh services PMI up a bit at 50.5 after 49.5 last month, it's normally a leading indicator, and given that the weak Manufacturing PMI seems to be a one-off related to VAT, it looks like there's slow growth there. Sharp jump in input prices though.

www.pmi.spglobal.com/Public/Home/...
Russia PMI numbers perk up, to 49.4 in Jan, from 48.1 in Dec. Still contractionary though - monetary policy is still tight, and industry is still hurting from crowding out by the military sector. So signs of recovery, but it's slow

Kazakhstan Manufacturing PMI numbers out: www.pmi.spglobal.com/Public/Home/...
Number dips below 50, implying contraction, but this may be because demand was high in December because of anticipated price rises in January, which in turn were due to higher VAT.

Ha! it was exactly the quest for this equivalence that led me to start studying the Soviet economy after I finished my economics degree at Cambridge in the 1980s

Pure James C. Scott

A lot of weasel words there

The reported figure paid to the Ukrainian equivalents was $5 bin. The Russian forces were told to pack parade uniforms as they would be welcomed with bread and salt.

Beyond my ken, I’m afraid

The ICE delegation in Italy will be a bunch of senior management on a boondoggle

I remember graffiti from the mens' loos:

As Titian was mixing Rose Madder
His model posed nude on a ladder
Her position, to Titian
Suggested coition
So he climbed up the ladder and had her

Only in Oxford

YOURS

Rab C Nesbitt as Bobby Charlton?

This is reminiscent of the Russians refusing to believe that courts in the UK are independent and don't take orders from the government

Terminus Nord by Gare du Nord has got a lot better on our last visit.

{Lego} Gunboat diplomacy

Bitcoin, or rather, not about bitcoin How the world of Pluribus is no less fantastic than that which underpins the theory of the efficiency of the free market

New substack post about Pluribus, and what it tells us about the utopianism of the Arrow-Debreu model: open.substack.com/pub/tomadshe...

I think when you have your own kids that age you get more emotionally invested, so you want to see the Academy kids succeed, but you have to be patient (like with your own children)

One of my favourite players, who should develop into Odegaard 2.0. I've spent too much time trying to compose a Nwaneri song to the tune of "Viva Las Vegas"

My friends are telling me that things like the Sber app don't work with a VPN, so you're having to switch the VPN on and off all the time. I'm assuming that Telegram still works, because it's part of the unofficial critical infrastructure.

The US is a structural global borrower of last resort because of its structural BoP deficit. Japan is a structural borrower because of its demographics. The surplus countries need a country with functioning institutions to park their accumulated reserves

Felix Martin's "Money: an unauthorised biography" attributed the enduring appeal of USG debt to the underlying institutions. Now the Trump administration is unwinding those institutions, which makes Japan look much better by comparison, so their debt is more attractive.

They saw that the debt grew; and they forgot that other things grew as well as the debt. A long experience justifies us in believing that England may, in the twentieth century, be better able to bear a debt of sixteen hundred millions than she is at the present time to bear her present load." 4/4

They were under an error not less serious touching the resources of the country. They made no allowance for the effect produced by the incessant progress of every experimental science, and by the incessant efforts of every man to get on in life. 3/n

They erroneously imagined that there was an exact analogy between the case of an individual who is in debt to another individual and the case of a society which is in debt to a part of itself; and this analogy led them into endless mistakes about the effect of the system of funding. 2/n

Found this nice quote in Macaulay's "History of England": "Here it is sufficient to say that the prophets of evil were under a double delusion. 1/n