Joe Reeve - 🇬🇧/acc

Announcing plans for the first British city in 50 years in front of 1500 people at the O2 in Greenwich. Amazing. Sign the pledge.

Stop rationing. Start building. We need to build hundreds of thousands of homes. The best way to do it is: - one planning battle - one infrastructure spend - one land agglomeration - one brand new city

Unfortunately, I completely agree that the United States of America is rapidly descending into all-out conflict between left and right. The Luigi left, Kirk killers, anti-Tesla terrorists, and Altman attackers are already in shoot-on-sight mode against conservatives, libertarians, and technologists. The right isn’t there yet; they’re called reactionaries because they only react, so they’re always one cycle behind. Thus, the left has already started shooting while the right is still “only” mirroring the lawfare of last decade’s left. But anyone can see how incandescently angry the American right is getting, so one can expect them to mirror leftist tactics eventually, just as J6 followed BLM. A problem then arises. You see, when communists and nationalists duke it out, technologists tend to be hated by both sides…and tend to leave. That’s what happened in Europe. In the early 1900s, Europe was the undisputed center of science. But then the far left rose to power in Russia, and in response arose a far right in Germany, and then those two psychotic factions blew each other up and took much of Europe with them. The result was that scientists with options left. Shown below is the graph of Nobel prizes. Science used to be centered in Europe when America was still a relative backwater…renowned for cranking out widgets but not much else. Then, as Europe tore itself apart, the smart scientists (and capitalists) simply left for America. Many had no choice; you just couldn’t be a Russian capitalist in the Soviet Union or a Jewish scientist in Nazi Germany, no matter how many years your family might have been in the country. Passionate protestations of ideological loyalty and everlasting patriotism didn’t matter. At best the enemy classes and races were unbanked and denaturalized; at worst they were simply killed. And arguably, all of that — the communism, the nationalism, the wars — all of that arose from the disruption wrought by the Industrial Revolution. We might anticipate similar levels of disruption from the Information Revolution. If so, if America is torn between Democrats and Republicans, or Wokes and MAGAs, or whatever factions succeed them, it’s just not going to be a good place for technological progress. Instead, progress will decentralize to other locations around the world, as it did before.

The UK housing crisis is not going well. In order to alleviate its acute housing affordability crisis, London has been set a target of building 88,000 new homes per year over the next decade. Last year construction started on just 5,891 – 94% below target, a 75% year-on-year decline, the steepest drop in the country, the lowest tally since records began almost 40 years ago and the lowest figure for any major city in the developed world this century.

While overall crime is down, certain crimes are surging: esp shoplifting and snatch theft (below)