I think this might be what @adapalmer.bsky.social calls the "new fridge" effect; once corporate landlords get embedded into the system, some of them will be as lousy as the MoD or housing associations.

At Snaefell in the Isle of Man, you can see five countries from ground level.

Although of course the single market is not exactly just something which happened to Luxembourg independently of its own policy...

Luxembourg is also an unassuming and low key advertisement for managing very significant cultural and demographic change without going on about it. Today, 25% of the population are Portuguese speakers even though the steelworks which drove that immigration wave are more or less gone.

Viva Napoli!

The Toyota Method is very Germanic lol

It's the definition of capitalism! (good ole Kalecki). If you are a class defined by control of the means of production then production is a nice to have, but control is a got to have.

The problem from their point of view is that rapid decarbonization requires public, collective decisions about the organization of production, in a way that threaten capital-owners' authority over both the production process and the political system.

Yes I think we would have to be talking about new statute law to do something like this, and it would be really controversial law because as I say it engages a lot of quite major human rights issues

Don't get me started on those bastards

Like I say this is quite spicy stuff in human rights terms because what we're talking about is specifically putting controls on public democratic participation, but it might be that there is no less bad way out.

it‘s also changed the incentives a bit. You don’t get on a programme by leading a campaign or having expertise in an area, you get on it by saying something a bit spicy on Twitter before 11am in the hope that an overworked 24 year old researcher books you.

Much worse in London than anywhere else afaict. Moving to Exeter was a real "omg a better world is possible" experience (and afaict from my daughter's experience this is true of student lettings here too, where they do the best that can be done with a fundamentally inadequate market)

Yeah it's not a cheap solution for social housing in Edinburgh but nor is anything else! And for private renters, who matter too, it is a significant benefit to be dealing with a lettings agent with a guaranteed baseline of competence and accountability, rather than hoping to be lucky.

And if you're sending payments cross border, you're probably going to be using a dollar stablecoin anyway...

yep

I have been going on about this since I found out about it from Dan Cookson five years ago, so I hope someone will one day listen to one of us!

absolutely, particularly since the kind of rental accommodation that institutional investors can realistically manage at a profit doesn't match up particularly well to the current stock of "bits and pieces located wherever the owners happened to buy them"

But like half of those things involve reading!