@MattBrookes3 @lukas_ohl @ajwillshire 'Mazin' how quick you can pick up Russian if you're trying to make money in it....
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Tim Worstall
75.4K posts
Tim Worstall
@worstall
Freelance classical liberal around and about. Substack at https://t.co/U6iYpigGfh
Albufeira, Portugal Katılım Ekim 2009
432 Takip Edilen8.5K Takipçiler
@worstall @lukas_ohl @ajwillshire I always thought I was rubbish at languages until I spent 3 months in Latin American, where I discovered necessity is the mother of learning.
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Move to Portugal, Mateys. idealista.pt/imovel/3419053… For the price of the average London house (£650k) get a 15,000 sq foot (no, really, 15k sqf) house on half an acre, with pool. Already tarted up. Bit rural mind, but it's nice rural there.
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@MattBrookes3 @lukas_ohl @ajwillshire Easiest? Pronunciation can be tough.....now, the former Soviet Trade Rep to Portugal did say to me P was the easiest romance language for Russians. Because all the sounds in P are already there in Russian. The z in cerveza is the same as the Z in Zhiguli etc.
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@lukas_ohl @worstall @ajwillshire A friend in the FO told me that when he joined they make you learn a language for overseas postings, and the language they teach the no-hopers is Portuguese as it's easiest.
Because that's the one he learned... spent five years in Brazil as a result.
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Well, no, they wouldn't. Because the entire problem with renewables is intermittency. Therefore the useful constraint is when are they not producing and how do we get 'leccie then?
Colin Walker@colinwalker79
People who ‘follow the data’ would probably use a sample period that’s a little longer than 12 hours How about, say, the last 12 months? In which time renewables have generated 42% of the UK’s electricity Gas, meanwhile, is at 28%
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@ret_ward Jeebus, Bob. We all know and agree you can make the steels we desire in arc furnaces. 14 years back in The Guardian even: theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
What you cannot do is run arc furnaces on intermittent wind or solar power. You'll destroy the furnace that way.
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For those still trying to pretend that we cannot make the steel we need with electric arc furnaces, I invite you to read this from U.K. Steel: uksteel.org/electric-arc-f…
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The argument isn't that nothing should be done. It's that this method of doing that thing is grossly expensive, costing more than it can possibly be worth. Bloke got a Nobel for pointing this out in fact.
Chris Packham@ChrisGPackham
On BBC Question Time, @Helen_Whately just said ‘we can’t afford Net Zero’ . She is a human health hazard and grossly misinformed or lying . Time to call out the lunatics leading us to hell . No facts , no truth , no integrity - no hope.
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@Timothy37619215 To repeat. The oil - and gas - belongs to The Crown. None of it has been sold. Only licences to extract at ruinous tax rates have been sold.
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Apparently that nationalised planning of building land since 1947 has been so successful in forcing us all into chicken coops that they're going to extend the amount of land planning. Joy, eh? adamsmith.org/blog/what-joy-…
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@simon_fawthrop @worstall @lukas_ohl @ajwillshire My kids brought up in an English-Spanish home in Spain attended the French School. Terms at a school and Uni in the UK.
Fluent in 3 languages. At a minimum very useful.
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@cwalenta Yep, all the usual financing forms exist in halal banking, just with different contract terms and names to reach the same solution.
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Worth noting that all the countries which use interest as the time value of money are rich while all those that didn't aren't.
Anon Opin.@anon_opin
Multiple societies throughout history all came to the conclusion that charging interest on loans was immoral. Punishable by death in some cases. Now we've all done a collective 180 and decided it's the glue holding the world economy together? I think we got it right first time.
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@plzpassthepie @danielking100 @luxemiaa I grasp that it's a new thing. But the basic ticket price has also declined at the same time.....
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@worstall @danielking100 @luxemiaa Not missing the point, I was merely pointing out that they never used to do it, it is just a money grab - they brought it in as an option, over time it’s pretty much become a necessity if you want or need to sit next to others in your booking.
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This woman on Instagram shared: I’m at the airport and there’s a family of 8 people on my flight with small children, I just overheard the dad say, “All of our seats are all over the place, no one is close to each other because I didn’t want to pay extra for assigned seats. We’ll switch around when we get on the plane.” Suffice it to say, I hate them....
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@Ella_M_Whelan So, test public opinion. No, really. Talk to the general public. Restrict yourself to women? No, not at a meeting of whoever or whatever. Out, Vox Populi. Abortion at mother's choice, unrestricted (so no disability thing) up to 39 weeks? Doubt you'll get a majority in favour.
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This kind of frothing hatred for women's freedom is just so out of touch with public opinion on abortion. MPs with even the tiniest liberal bone in their body need to have some courage and come out and defend our bodily autonomy, because at the moment Westminster is sounding like a house full of loons.
James McMurdock MP@JMcMurdockMP
I dont think being overly emotional is particularly helpful when it comes to matters of the law but for the first time since becoming an MP I am genuinely sad about what parliament has done. I am sad because I know what the consequences will be. I am sad because I know nervous first time parents might give way to doubt and opt out of parenthood and how the reality of that means they'll be denied the greatest gift life will ever give them and instead inherit a life of monstrous guilt. I am sad because, now, healthy babies will be destroyed. I am really sorry that the UK has legalised full term abortion. For what it's worth, I voted NO. I am going to squeeze my children a little tighter and thank the universe a little more than normal this morning. You cannot become unpregnant. You just become the parent of a child you killed. That is the reality of life. We must face it. My babies.
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Oh. That's rather good. Yes, like that.
Paul Street@pstreetski
@neolatyno In Neal Stephenson's work of fiction 'Termination Shock' Queen (Regnant) Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia, is likewise a commercial pilot. Stephenson's character justifies her decision to work occasionally as a pilot for it takes skill that cannot be denied as a benefit of birth.
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@owenjonesjourno @RossKempsell "Vassal". As to global power, running a decent blue water navy which can do its historic job of being able to launch the British Army then go collect it again when it has won. Or, in other terms, stop all the soft power shite and go back to having some hard power.
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@RossKempsell What does being a global power mean to you? I'm interested in what this means in concrete terms.
And what evidence is there that you don't want the UK just to be a vessel of the US
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@jacobin There are some of us who would take much more kindly to this if you all grasped how capitalism redistributes wealth already. By lowering consumer prices thereby making consumers richer.
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Some on the Left believe that the capitalist system will not tolerate any greater interventions in its operation or redistribution of its spoils. There is no good evidence that this is true. jacobin.com/2026/03/capita…
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@janrosenow @BBCNews This is absolutely gorgeous. So, a professor tells us that energy is a demand problem, not a supply one. OK, well, maybe, but let's accept that, arguendo.
So the solution is a change in the supply method. Eh?
Is logic no longer necessary at British universities?
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I just told @BBCNews:
Energy crises are fundamentally demand problems, not supply problems.
80% of our energy is fossil fuels, much of it imported, leaving us exposed to price spikes.
The only long-term fix: electrify the economy with clean power.
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@I_D_A_U_ @WilliamXnote @ZackPolanski Yes, I think so. Boost our terms to get us to agree to the change in them. Even, maybe, ROCs aren't making enough money so those with ROC contracts are pushing the change....but then I'm a cynic.
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@worstall @WilliamXnote @ZackPolanski The proposal would get lost in judicial review unless it offered more lavish funding see new Drax/Lynemouth CFDs. The only way to tackle cost is to pursue a low cost system, not high cost renewables + MoreGeid, curtailment, overbuild, backup, stabilisation etc.
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Bills could be cut by up over £200 a year by stopping gas setting the price of energy in the UK.
Government could do this now as part of a series of measures to insulate us from the shockwaves of this war.
This isn't a time for half-measures, we need serious action and fast.
Common Wealth@Cmmonwealth
Today we argue the Government should pass “emergency legislation and instruct the National Energy System Operator to act as a single buyer of power”. This would decouple electricity prices from gas. Our latest report discussed in the @NewStatesman. newstatesman.com/politics/uk-po…
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@plzpassthepie @danielking100 @luxemiaa Ah, missing the point. There's only so much money that can be gouged out of the number of people willing to travel from A to B at 10.30 am next Tuesday. But *who* you can gouge it out of changes. Change the terms - luggage, seat nos, meals - and different people pay diff prices.
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@worstall @danielking100 @luxemiaa They never used to charge for them though, and you just used to get sat with or near the others on your booking. This pay for you seat thing has only become a thing in the last 10 years. It’s a money grab. It costs them nothing to just allocate the seats in booking group.
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@riversorare @grok The value of a rhetorical point is that it makes people think about the point rather than being told the result.....
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Grok, define the productivity and value add of the lanyard industry.....
Merryn Somerset Webb@MerrynSW
So very modern Britain. £180m spent. Result: absolutely nothing at all.
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@Clare97097915 @db_fink Risks to title? Zero. Prop taxes are reasonable here. Not non-existent, but reasonable.
The reason for the price of this place is that it's too large, too grand, for the location. The same thing in Lisbon would be 10x the price. At least.
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@I_D_A_U_ @ZackPolanski It's fun watching @BenGoldsmith go ballistic now that the Greens aren't in fact about Uncle Teddy's preoccupations. Wot, you mean we finally gain major traction but only by ignoring all the ideas?
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@worstall @ZackPolanski Greens are no longer dependent on environmentalists. Zakat...
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