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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 1h

The situation is ... not great, but IMO local campaigners (sometimes including me) sometimes tend to go for the easy target in Southwest Water rather than asking difficult questions about runoff from our lovely farms.

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 1h

As far as I can see its objective of preventing the growth of Birmingham has only been partially successful

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 1h

Hard to say which side of the borders of your mega city of 8 billion Brits would deserve the name "the cursed earth"

Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 1h

Maybe; that's why I said 50/50. But even Tokyo isn't as cheap as people like to think it is. It's basically a problem weirdly reminiscent of education - you can build more good locations but you can't build more best locations.

Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 1h

And willingness/ability to pay prices/rents which will give a decent rate of return on land purchased near the top is very much pointing the other way. The basis of "land banking" is "sensible use of option value".

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 1h

you could always commute

Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 1h

I think any proposal which includes 8 billion Brits is going to come up against some pretty serious opposition and not just from the Irish.

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 1h

In other words it pales in comparison to my solution, encouraging high value added industries to move out of central London

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 1h

As I say this is the only thing that could in principle work but I think the actual chances are no better than 50/50; Paris has crazy high density in the center but roughly the same rent to income ratio.

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 1h

Only one of the other two; for immigration purposes Scots Gaelic will do but Irish not, presumably for the best of reasons

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 1h

Jonathan Franzen is roguishly handsome but Jonathan Foer is more of a goer.

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 1h

Kind of hope that the Home Office would be up on this sort of trivia though

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 1h

(actually I suppose that if the goal is "family house with a garden in Central London which rents at 30% of UK median household income" then you could do that by reducing central London incomes to the national median, but I bet people would quickly be complaining about the consequences of that too)

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 1h

In order to keep the memory of David Ricardo alive, high rises in zone 1 and 2 are the only thing that could possibly give British yimbys what they want (reduce scarcity of convenient locations for high human capital industry) and it's not at all obvious that even that would work.

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 2h

I know it isn't the important point and I know it's tedious to repeat this but really - the Welsh language has equal status in Wales and government press offices should regularly get this right.

The Independent @the-independent.com · 5h

Migrants will need A-level standard English to work in UK

www.independent.co.uk

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 2h

So would I! (It was significantly improved during the editing process by @daviddagan.bsky.social )

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Reposted by Dan Davies

Chris Hopkins @chrishopkins.bsky.social · 5h

The alternate headline - "Towns may have to be abandoned due to floods with millions more homes in Great Britain at risk" kinda gets to the point a bit quicker.

@dsquareddigest.bsky.social's point the other day that lots of bat, snail, ecosystem protection is just the mine-canary for this...

Guardian Environment @environment.theguardian.com · 12h

Millions more homes in Great Britain at risk of flooding, investigation finds

Every constituency projected to be at greater risk, with many areas likely to be uninsurable

www.theguardian.com

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 5h

(capsule summary: Dan and Ezra hope we could combine the engineering dynamism of China with the effective representation of America, while I worry that it's more likely the other way around)

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 5h

It's out! My review of "Abundance", my review of "Breakneck" and the slogan "rent extraction is always what the other guy does"
open.substack.com/pub/hypertex...

What happens when Chinese resolve meets American rent-seeking?

Reading "Abundance" and "Breakneck" side by side suggests that learning from one another is not enough.

open.substack.com

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Reposted by Dan Davies

Lindsey Macmillan @lindseymacmillan.bsky.social · 8h

📈 We find evidence of discontinuities in favour of female students & against those on Free-School Meals

🎓We show that these biases have consequences for university outcomes

🎙️ Governments' considering increasing reliance on subjective assessments should take steps to mitigate this bias

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 6h

tbh I end up thinking that it is a bit midwit.jpg with "the government's cost of capital is lower it should just build everything" at both ends and complicated risk transfer arrangements in the middle. It's just difficult to credibly transfer risk when you're the ultimate backstop of everything.

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 6h

(it's weirdly reminiscence of those apocryphal Soviet quota systems which had factories building a single 50 ton nail)

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 6h

If you had £60bn to build railways, you could probably do more good building them in Africa.

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 6h

Even then it's usually not a good deal; you're effectively buying insurance from a counterparty that is less financially sound than you are.

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 6h

These things just need to be regulated properly, rather than with any presumption against nationalisation. If they go bankrupt they are structured to allow the state to assume the operating responsibilities with no cost.

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