@ianbetteridge Greetings from Muskau https://leavex.eu/posts/greetings-from-muskau/
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How angry? Well let's put it this way... the brave little warrior who paid billions of dollars to protect "free speech" on what was Twitter now thinks that people who say mean things about him should go to jail.
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One of the useful things about having a (temporary) X account is that it's the best place to find out about Musk's meltdowns. Today, he is being very very angry at Kara Swisher, for this interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6wJ0ABvYfs&list=PLe3Hq64x5WOY&index=2
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As I approach 60, I can share one of the most useful lessons my life has taught me.
When you treat yourself to a new pair of earbuds, the original pair has a funny way of turning up within a week.
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Every one of those is a public investment problem. The private sector engine Haldane wants to prime runs on public roads.
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Restraint on day-to-day spending is sound advice, and a chancellor who ignores it will learn the lesson Liz Truss did. But Haldane's call for "slimming government spending" draws no line between running costs and investment, and in practice that line is the first thing to go: capital is always the easiest cut, because nobody notices the hospital that was never built.
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That is how the 2010s happened. Repeating it would be a choice, not a necessity.
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Which brings us to Haldane's strongest-looking point: that households and businesses have fuel in the tank and merely need an enabling environment.
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But if balance sheets are healthy and firms still will not invest, the constraint is not the tax rate. British business investment has been the weakest in the G7 under high taxes and low, under governments of both parties. What firms consistently say they lack is a healthy, available workforce, reliable infrastructure and a planning system that works.
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But it does not rule out investment that pays. Consider the 2.8 million people out of the labour force through long-term sickness, a large share of them waiting for treatment the NHS cannot deliver. Each one returned to work pays tax, stops drawing benefit and adds to output.
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The return on clearing that queue can be scored, and it clears any plausible hurdle rate. The same is true of childcare that returns parents to work, and of early-years spending with the best evidence base in social policy.
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"A larger state" is the wrong frame. The question is which specific investments beat the cost of capital, and the honest answer is that quite a few do.
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It is the invoice for not having made it.
The second problem is that Haldane's prescription does not follow from his diagnosis. His case rests on borrowing costs now exceeding the economy's nominal growth rate. -
Grant that, with the caveat that the relevant figure is the average cost of the debt stock, not a 30-year yield inflated by term premium. What follows is a test, not a prohibition: borrowing is justified where the return exceeds the cost. That rules out a great deal.
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Then the maintenance backlog becomes a failure, the ageing system needs three people to do the work of one, and the costs come back larger than the savings.
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That is the public sector's story since 2010: an NHS maintenance backlog approaching £14bn, concrete falling from school ceilings, courts that cannot sit, and rising headcount to compensate for kit that no longer works. Flat productivity is not an argument against investment.
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Andy Haldane is right that austerity was economic vandalism, and right that the gilt market of 2026 is not the gilt market of 2012. But his column contains a contradiction that undoes its own conclusion.
https://www.ft.com/content/dec723c9-54d5-407c-a275-f302344feeac?syn-25a6b1a6=1
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He concedes that cutting investment in the 2010s opened a £2tn gap with our competitors. He then cites flat public sector productivity as evidence that the state cannot be trusted with more money. These are not two separate observations. They are cause and effect.
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A business that stops investing in its people and systems is treating its operation as a cash cow. For a while, the numbers always look fine.
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The last thing I need is being on social media more, and X remains the kind of place where you will end up arguing with people who believe the planet isn't warming, the world is flat, and Donald Trump tells the truth.
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Not my jam, even leaving aside that Musk is a white supremacist scumbag.
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Am I going to stick around beyond the end of the month? Probably not.
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But none of that is integrated into the main timeline. Nor is the timeline integrated well into anything else. It's just a collection of stuff, which doens't make it an "everything app".
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Take, for example, Radar. Now this is a good feature. If you have a paid account, you can set up global searches which show you the latest posts on a topic, along with some pretty graphs about its trending over time.
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Musk wasn't joking when he said he wanted to turn it into "the everything app", but it's not really been done in a coherent way. There are lots of features here, but they don't really add up to more than the sum of their parts.
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It's just basically piling stuff in and selling it cheap. Yes, you can talk to Grok from within the interface. But other than that, a lot of it is just there, but not really integrated.
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So what do I think so far? Well, if you were a completely new user and not someone who used to have a five-figure Twitter number, you would probably find it confusing.
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As some of you will know, I'm currently testing out the new user experience on X (I hate calling it that, by the way). It's several years since I was on it for more than a very brief moment, but this time I'm going to give it a month before running away screaming.
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When considering Elon Musk's actions and attitude towards Ukraine, it's always worth remembering who has helped him get money.
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Anyone got any idea how BBC Alba has the rights to show some Italian football live?