Robert Smith

@kingjobbie @Sam_Dumitriu Here’s the data: gov.uk/government/sta…

@randomdorman @Sam_Dumitriu Alternatively, appointments dealt with a bottlenecking issue caused by lots of people arriving around same time There hasn't been a sudden spike in flytipping that I've seen. & flytipping is largely trade rather than domestic waste anyway. It isn't people who used to use the tip

Why does the UK have such a bad fly-tipping problem? In the Guardian, George Monbiot blames deregulation and not enough spending on enforcement. To me, the cause is obvious. Britain has the highest landfill tax in Europe. The returns to flytipping are just higher here.

@kingjobbie @Sam_Dumitriu If your tip was a ‘nightmare’ to access before booking was introduced, and appointments are now ‘readily available’, it’s highly unlikely to be purely a matter of managing bottlenecks. Government figures show 60%+ of fly tipping is domestic, not trade. That share is growing.

@kingjobbie @Sam_Dumitriu Any additional complexity reduces uptake. I never had to queue to get into my local tip, though there were quieter and busier times. Post the introduction of booking, it’s dead every time go. If your tip was rammed, but appts are now readily available, the same must be true.

@randomdorman @Sam_Dumitriu I would regularly put off going because I didn't want to queue & didn't know when it would be quiet. Now I, like all other users, know that when I have an appointment, queueing will be minimal Appointments are quick to book & readily available. Why would that drive people away?

@kingjobbie @Sam_Dumitriu So, rather than expanding the facility to meet the extra demand, or opening a larger facility nearby, they’ve driven the demand away. That makes the facility quieter, but increases the risk of fly tipping.

@randomdorman @Sam_Dumitriu My local tip was a nightmare to get in and out of before they brought in booking. You often had to queue in your car for ages on a public road to get in, then once you were in you couldn't get near the skip you wanted. Booking here takes about a minute & fixed both those problems

@colinwalker79 @Telegraph In 2009, county councils in England spent 8 to 12% of their budgets on road maintenance. Today, the figure is 3 to 6%. They know this is nowhere near enough, but are legally obliged to meet ballooning social-care costs that the government isn’t providing the funding to cover.

Crafty bit of EV misinfo from the @Telegraph here Headline 'asks' 'do EVs cause potholes?' Expert basically says 'no, not really' This is a classic example of 'Betteridge's Law' - which states that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered with "no" 1/6

@NathanpmYoung Polanski wasn’t charging for such therapy, but he was plainly using it for publicity. Either he naively believed it to be a valid, well-founded approach, or he was being duplicitous. And he was in his 30s, so not some kid. Not smart for the Greens to defend it, either way.

Polanski doing an obviously scammy thing years ago is a pretty big red flag. Bigger than unwholesome views. Because the public also have unwholesome views. But they know that someone offering breast enlargement hypnosis sessions is probably a wrong-un.

@K_Niemietz It’s an oft-observed effect of rent control that it increases the number of flats coming onto the market: the black market, that is.

Can't speak for Crémieux, but it's quite clear that by "new homes", he meant "new homes coming on the rental market", not "new homes being built". Rent controls have a huge negative impact on the former. They also have an impact on the latter, but they're not the main determinant

@michael_diamant I don’t like ‘before’ at all. But the fenestration on ‘after’ is irredeemably plodding, worse, even, than before. And no match for its neighbours. This ‘improvement’ is nowhere near good enough.

🇬🇧 REMOVING A CARBUNCLE ON DRAYCOTT AVE: When beauty became seen as relative at architect schools, a Pandoras box opened in our cities (thread)

@K_Niemietz I wouldn’t worry; most of them didn’t actually leave. Despite the flouncing and dramatic ‘departures’, they just rode two horses for a while.

I feel a degree of Schadenfreude about this, because I hate everyone on Bluesky. But I also want the platform to do reasonably well, because if it doesn't, they'll all come back here.

@thomasforth Living near a town with no train service (lost in the Beeching cuts), I’d take this and call it progress.

Train service looks a bit vintage.

@Neilsocialist Rail in the UK was built by private enterprise and its golden years were in private hands. Nationalisation brought the Beeching cuts and chronic underinvestment. Re-privatisation was flawed, but passenger numbers soared as investment improved.

Royal Mail privatisation - failed Electricity privatisation - failed Gas privatisation - failed Water privatisation - failed Rail privatisation- failed Steel privatisation - failed

@7Kiwi It depends where the batteries are installed. The grid itself is a net consumer of energy that’s prone to localised failures. Consumers pay more to import than they’re paid for export. Batteries make good sense for consumers with solar who are subject to frequent grid outages.

Batteries are a really expensive way of adding fixed costs to the grid while being a net consumer of energy.

@DerbyChrisW @DavidPintoD MMT economists do not claim that the government ‘has access to as much money as it wants’; at least not without inflationary consequences. This misunderstanding is one reason why many believe that MMT would be dangerous in the hands of politicians.

🤦‍♂️Here's another 'Labour' MP talking utter garbage about the UK's monetary system. MPs like @DavidPintoD try to fool the public into thinking a good society is unaffordable. It's despicable, dishonest politics. But have you noticed how politicians like this guy can always find the money for war? The reality is the govt issues the currency so it has access to as much money as it wants. But nobody is saying the govt can spend without limit. Not me, not @ZackPolanski, not @RichardJMurphy not anyone. Govts are limited by the availability of real resources in the economy such as workers, infrastructure, machinery, energy, transport etc. If govts spend beyond the economy's ability to absorb that spending then inflation will ensue. Govts should focus their attention on building these real resources to make the country more resilient when crises occur around the world, like the illegal war being waged against Iran by Israel and the US. This MP also refers in his fancy video to govt borrowing. But he is wrong about that, too. For a start, govt 'borrowing' is a misnomer. What govts are really doing is selling govt bonds. So in reality, if truth be told, the govt is providing savings accounts for banks, insurance companies, pension funds and wealthy individuals. But govts are not obliged to sell bonds to fund govt spending, for the reasons I have already spelt out. Interestingly, the Bank of England, which is owned by the govt, holds around 30% of govt bonds. So to use David Pinto's terminology, that's the govt 'borrowing' from itself. It's it bit like taking £10 out of the left pocket of your trousers and putting it in your right pocket, and then saying the right pocket of your trousers owes the left pocket £10. But it's the same pair of trousers. Of course Mr Pinto might be spreading this blatantly false propaganda because he doesn't understand how the monetary system works. That wouldn't surprise me because I can tell you from my time as an MP, most parliamentarians haven't got a clue about the intricacies of the monetary system.  If that is the case, I hope he will start following @RichardJMurphy and maybe read @StephanieKelton's book 'The Deficit Myth', because as Mark Twain said: "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." It was the American industrialist, Henry Ford, who reportedly said: "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."  We need to bring about that revolution to sweep away politicians like David Pinto, who defend this broken neoliberal system, and replace them with representatives who will stand up for the people instead of faceless corporations and wealthy oligarchs.

@moving_charlie As much as anything else, this would be yet another layer of admin and reporting that many hospitality businesses would be burdened with.

The avoidable wounds of ideology

@CreativeDeduct Yes! Money and fractional reserve banking were private innovations, with control gradually ceded to the govt. because of problems such as over-issuance leading to inflation. Wooliness over how new money will drive real growth promises to replicate that problem but in govt. hands.

@randomdorman That is one of the big problems with MMT.

Polanski is on dangerously thin ice here. He's not an MMT scholar. He has picked up a few phrases to form part of an incoherent argument about how public spending shouldn't be constrained by the capital markets. This is why Modern Monetary Theory is so poisonous: it provides pseudo intellectual cover for reckless politicians. It needs to be challenged by people who understand the pitfalls of MMT's policy recommendations.

@PatHarrison2 @TaxJusticeUK This poll shows that 58% of people worth more than $1m support a 2% tax on those worth more than $10m. So the ‘tax our wealth’ claims based on this poll are misleading.

@TaxJusticeUK The rich are all for it. theguardian.com/business/2024/…

Working for a living shouldn’t be taxed more than owning things for a living. Nobel Prize–winner Joseph Stiglitz calls out the injustice. The UK should listen and bring Capital Gains Tax rates in line with Income Tax rates & add NICs to profits from ownership too.

@gregory_nico @TaxJusticeUK Quite! CGT is blind to inflation, therefore it taxes inflation and real-terms losses, not just gains.

@TaxJusticeUK Your basically advocating double taxation. Let’s not forget capital gains can be a capital loss…

@geeceevee @tonymc39 Indeed, but at no point does it become completely flat, much less start to decrease. And common sense dictates that increased wealth will come with a weaker impact on happiness at the higher margins. You might even expect a negative turn.

@randomdorman @tonymc39 Logarithmic x-axis, the improvements flatten out after a certain point.

The reason many of us are not living in slums wallowing in our own shit, as many did in the 19th century, is because of wealth creation. Are people so stupid now they don’t understand that?