Duncan Willis

@drdoot 💯. An attitude dating back at least two decades.

HSBC owned brand space on every aerobridge in Singapore, London and Hong Kong any other cities I frequently fly to for what feels about 20 years. I've probably walked through 1,000 HSBC-branded jetbridges. Tried to open a business account with them. Then a wealth account. Ghosted both times. Two decades of marketing and god knows how much they've spent to win me over and zero minutes spent replying to me. If the rest of the bank had the same go-getting attitude as their marketing team... they'd be unstoppable. Instead... they've probably facilitated the massive rise of neo banks.

@BladeoftheS Maintenance costs rise with inflation but the rental income doesn't. Soon there's not enough money for routine maintenance, let alone free capital (profit) to invest in further development. Everywhere rent control has been tried it's been a disaster.

Rent control causes house building. Because if they can't charge more money they will have to build more houses to make more profit. And if the Renters pay less they can save to buy a house. All you are doing is repeating a paradoxical lie spread by Landlords.

@JeremyCliffe How about embracing "leave us alone"?

1) Embrace "picking winners". Everyone does it now: identifying tech and industrial niches and backing them harder than before. UK does it too but more apologetically than most (ghosts of British Leyland etc). Overcoming those inhibitions would go a long way.

Apparently the incoming Burnham government is looking for "big ideas". Here are 10 of them:

@ChrisMartzWX They'll have to prise my aircon from my cold dead hands. Come visit, there remain pockets of sanity.

The UK is a seriously retarded country. I always wanted to visit, but now I’m not so sure. I probably have an arrest warrant there anyways lol.

@FinanceDocUK Not worth it without leverage, and unless you plan to scale up, the company route and expenses will chew your returns, plus you have zero diversification if the tenant defaults. Low cost funds in ISA is the way, tax free roll-up and no CGT (for now)

Real estate is something I want to get involved with later in life. Not via a mortgage however, but I’d want to buy the property with cash. Perhaps somewhere in the midlands, for £100-150k. Rent it out each month. Capital appreciation with time. Perhaps in a Ltd Co setup. Has anyone thought about real estate moving forward?

@neso_energy Tight margins tomorrow evening. This is due to it being kinda gloomy late in the day, over-reliance on other intermittent sources and an inability to build baseload nuclear plants. Fixed it for you.

Our forecasts are showing tight margins on the electricity system for tomorrow evening. This is due to the impact of extremely high temperatures affecting Great Britain and the continent and low wind.

@EmSilverwood91 Sadly true. Cambridge is one of our nation's crown jewels and the lack of civil pride is truly depressing. Filth, overflowing bins, e-bikes, the disgraceful terrorist barrier. Mostly within the last decade. @markrwilliamson

@lewis_goodall And yet here you are, posting on his platform.

Musk as a trillionaire- anyone as a trillionaire- is a grotesque economic, moral and political problem. We cannot have individuals with that level of power, whatever they might have achieved.

@CindyXiaodanYu I don't know how you got your figures but to reduce by 87% means reducing by a *factor* of 8. This means that in the next five years it must halve. It must halve again in the following five years, and again in the last five years. A prospect that's completely delusional.

Labour is about to double down on net zero, setting the UK some of the strictest climate targets in the world. This will only be achievable by becoming even more reliant on Chinese tech. It has presented the Seventh Carbon Budget to parliament, which will go through a vote this month. When passed (as it presumably will, with Labour's majority), it will set the government a legal mandate to cut carbon emissions by 87 per cent on 1990 levels by 2040 That's a three-quarters reduction from current levels of emission, in the next 14 years. It requires a • 6x increase in offshore wind • 2x increase in onshore wind • nearly 4x increase in solar • three quarters of cars and vans on British road to be electric Plus the average Brit to eat a quarter less meat and a fifth less dairy The Seventh Carbon Budget celebrates the fact that costs have come down so much. 'The global average cost for new electricity generation has fallen by 88 per cent for solar photovoltaics, 60 per cent for wind and nearly 90 per cent for battery storage since 2010' But most of that cost saving has come down to China's success in the renewables sector, from creating end products in wind and solar to dominating the supply chains of batteries and rare earths. If Britain follows this pathway, in 2040, it would be much more green. But it would also have built a new energy infrastructure deeply dependent on Chinese supply chains, companies and technology. We know that these can be weaponised into chokepoints. Every now and then, the British gov reacts to a situation that arises out of Chinese presence in critical national infrastructure. Huawei, Hinkley Point, and British Steel just last year. But these new net zero targets show that they haven't learned anything from these experiences. They continue to build dependencies without thinking about what that might open the door to in the future.

@peterkyle @BBCSimonJack What? Parody, surely? Or is the idea to deliver pizzas to tech workers staying late ( but obviously not late enough to break the working time directive)

I want to find the UK’s first trillion-dollar firm. That’s why this morning I've unveiled our bespoke concierge service to support businesses of the future to start, scale, and stay in the UK. When I say I’m aggressively ambitious in pursuit of economic growth, I mean it.

@RollingHedge That means emissions must halve every five years (three halvings). Not happening but the damage in trying will be catastrophic.

The man is genuinely mentally ill. He has just made it illegal for Britain to take part in the automation revolution. Genuinely. Absolute raving lunatic. The most dangerous man in Britain. Great repeal act can’t come fast enough. First 100 days of new govt requires mass Afuera’ing of virtually everything enshrined in law since 1997. @MCRReiners can help with this.

@markrwilliamson @RowanPelling Delivery bikes are an absolute scourge

‘Cambridge is a cycling utopia but a death trap for pedestrians’ - @RowanPelling telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/3…

@BladeoftheS You can literally go to an online broker and buy as little as a single share of Tesco or Sainsbury etc and be a co-owner, with the same rights to receive some of the ("obscene") profits & vote the board, as many others do, either directly or via fund managers like BlackRock.

Co-op is the only supermarket in the UK NOT owned by Private Equity It's not just Morrisons Tesco, Sainsbury's and M&S are all owned by a combination of Blackrock/HSBC/Vanguard. So they are basically one supermarket The others are all owned by a single usually American company

@RachelReevesMP Yet another debt funded pointless gimmick.

Good news for families - every child aged 5-15 in England will travel free on buses this summer, with unlimited journeys, no registration required, and no cost to families. Our economic plan is the right one. Tackling the cost of living and building a stronger Britain.

@OnyxCrack @tommithetechie Later additions included a monitor ROM and more RAM (?4K) on other boards. Programs could be stored and loaded via cassette player. There was also a serial character based terminal that output to a TV

@tommithetechie bootloader needed to be switched in if you want to load a paper tape I would imagine

This gorgeous mess is the Bear Microcomputer Systems 77-68, better known as the Newbear 77-68, a British home-computer kit built around the Motorola 6800 processor. The basic kit was gloriously bare-bones, packing a whopping 256 bytes of RAM, and no keyboard, ROM, or video display. To be clear, you did not even need a keyboard nor display to use it. You interacted with the machine through the front panel itself, using toggle switches to enter binary values and LEDs to inspect memory contents. To program it, you had to stop the CPU and toggle your code in by hand on the front panel, which is equal parts amazing but also intimidating to me. Talk about...tactile! The machine could be expanded with extra boards and peripherals, as you can see in the photos, a more built-out system was taking shape. Honestly, kind of amazing to me. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newbear_7… archive.org/details/newbea… computinghistory.org.uk/det/72149/Newb… #RetroTech #VintageComputing #TechHistory

@tommithetechie Built this as a fourteen year old. Scrounged the CPU from an industry friend. Featured in national newspapers of the time. Worked pretty much the first time once I learned that my switches were upside down. Later designed and built 6809 system with graphics based on the same bus.

@MerrynSW The collision with mathematical inevitability will be epic. The BBC will run endless interviews with the usual suspects on how come no-one saw it coming.

Political will (of which there is none) required. "4-in-10 Brits (38%) believe the state pension ‘triple-lock’ should be made permanent, compared to just 6% who want it to be scrapped, new research from AJ Bell reveals"

@WulfrunianChris A few sunny days has brought out all the village idiots

This solar farm could basically power the entirety of a large town while still being used as grazing land for animals. This is a win-win for farmers who get to diversify their income, and residents who get to benefit from energy security.

@PhilRodgers The Murray Edwards dome?

Good to see that the University of Cambridge now has a portable planetarium to take into schools, but I have long thought that Cambridge could really do with a large permanent planetarium. cam.ac.uk/stories/cambri…

@Ed_Miliband Decisions like these are destroying our country you delusional cretin.

2/ We need as much clean power as possible to get us off the fossil fuel rollercoaster, to give us energy sovereignty and abundance. Decisions like these are vital for our energy security.

1/ Today as we approve Springwell Solar farm, set to be the UK’s largest approved power‑producing solar farm, @NESO have confirmed a new solar record, with over 14.4GW of clean power generated at the peak. independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-n…