Land in NYC and San Francisco is so valuable now that reclaiming land from the sea today, as happened until the 1970s across America's greatest cities, would be like printing money. There is no engineering reason they can't – only a regulatory one.

My son’s current favourite toy is this Stalin doll that he carries around everywhere and refers to simply as “The Man”.

JD Vance’s speech at Munich is worth watching in full. It’s a much more nuanced and broadly reasonable argument than I think Europeans are used to hearing from the American right.

I like France, but what an inconvenient country it can be. Saturday evening: all shops are shut. Sunday: all shops are shut. Monday: for some reason many shops are shut. Tuesday evening: you better believe it, all the shops are shut.

If only they’d done this sooner - we could be charging our iPhones with one of these right now.

Recently learned that in Minions canon the Minions are biologically hardwired to serve whoever the most evil person on earth is, so the plot has them locked in a cave between 1812 and 1968 to avoid the issue of them serving Hitler.

It is really strange how Americans all seem to think you need to put “seasoning” (chilli powder and other dried spice mixes) on meat to make it taste of something. Is it something to do with the quality of American meat?

I don’t have to verify my age here because my Twitter account is more than 18 years old

It’s really sad how many people without kids I meet who have heard that having a baby is absolutely gruelling, endless, exhausting work. Sure, it’s a challenge and a change of pace, but it’s nowhere near as bad as is often suggested. We’ve got to stop being so down on parenthood!

Oh no - I think my house is haunted!

If you’re at the London fireworks and managed to get a recording on your phone, please make sure to share it. Would love to take a look.

If we can’t automate wedding DJs with a playlist I have no idea how we’re going to be replacing everyone else with AI.

Nasty. This guy isn’t harming anyone, doesn’t say anything anti-British, he’s just ignorant in a way plenty of other British people are, of whatever ethnicity. So what’s the significance of the clip? Him being black?

I think the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, built in a Classical style in 1915, is proof that authenticity doesn’t really matter at all in buildings. If it looks good you can just build a Greek temple in the middle of a West Coast American city and people will love it.

Had the opportunity to try lab-grown salmon this weekend. Very good - texture was not quite as good as the animal-grown stuff, not enough bite, but would be perfectly good on scrambled eggs. It won’t be long until we don’t need to keep salmon around at all.

Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated. A new essay by @bswud, @SCP_Hughes & me. Why the UK's ban on investment in housing, infrastructure and energy is not just a problem. It is *the* problem. And how fixing it is the defining task of our generation. ukfoundations.co/

If you didn’t know who these people are you’d assume Yusuf was the sensible spokesman for the governing party, explaining basic constraints on what the law can do, and the woman sneering and complaining that he’s allowed to speak was from the right-wing populist party with 4 MPs.

Macron has enacted some absolutely crazy housing policies.

In Britain you now have to submit a photo ID to read /r/cider.

An argument from the author of Edinburgh University’s racism review.

I know, it’s sick.

What problem do these things solve? Why do normal locks seem to be fine everywhere else except for on trains?

1) Americans need to get that if Putin wins in Ukraine with a peace deal that is good enough that it vindicates the invasion, World War 3 is far likelier. 2) Europeans need to get that the era of fantasy politics - being the “regulatory superpower”, giving up economic growth to “lead the world on Net Zero”, endlessly growing welfare states, elite consensus in favour of immigration policies that voters hate - is over. We cannot rely on America anymore. Not in five years - now. Economic growth and self-defence override all other priorities.

If I told you there was a small modular reactor company that - Wants to build 20+ microreactors in Britain - Needs no taxpayer money - Has new sites lined up for deploying them - Can deliver them in two years BUT - Is in limbo because the Office for Nuclear Regulation hasn’t prioritised it What would you say the govt should do?

Feels like an important moment - the energy companies are finally breaking cover and explicitly saying that it isn’t wholesale (gas) prices that are the problem, it’s policy costs (renewables). Wholesale prices could halve and bills would still rise!

I love how the rankings are - fashion company - weight loss company - company making the most important and technically sophisticated industrial machines on the planet, utterly vital to the existence of modern technology - make-up company - handbag company

Russia is about to annex large parts of Ukraine, aided by the US. Germany's economy is in ruins, and it's unclear which European states have the will and capacity to answer a Article 5 call from the Baltics, let alone if the US would. And still, prominent European politicians are taking this as an opportunity to warn us about the dangers of *Google and Facebook*. This is madness. If you want to see an example of how Europe has got itself into this desperate position, read this article. ft.com/content/30d6f79f-d1ee…

This is nuts

Clever: American bottle caps are designed to fully come off, so they don’t poke into your face. Hope this comes to Europe some day!

I'm amazed that inheritance tax is so popular with UK elites. It strikes me as being really appalling – distortionary, anti-investment, invasive, and undermining of one of the most basic motivations humans have, which is to provide for our children.

Last year the UK had the highest number of fatal dog attacks in 40 years, the vast majority caused by a single breed, the American Bully XL. Ban it and terminate with extreme prejudice. telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07…

What's so incredible about the Covid mRNA vaccines – apart from how well they worked – is how fast they were developed. This was the timeline for the Moderna vaccine: Jan 11, 2020: Chinese authorities share Covid's genetic sequence. Jan 13: Moderna finalizes the sequence for the vaccine and begins production. Feb 7: First clinical batch of the vaccine is completed and begins internal testing. Feb 24: First vaccine batch delivered to NIH for Phase 1 review. That's *44 days* from start to finish. investors.modernatx.com/news…

The BBC defines "democratic socialism".

I’ve often thought that, in schools, instead of streaming the top kids away from everyone else, we should remove the bottom kids who are disruptive, struggle most to keep up, etc, on the principle that they make things worse for all the other kids. Does anywhere do this?

Ireland ran a 22 billion euro budget surplus last year, by the way.

This Cambridge housing plan sounds so good. A new quarter for the city, with a gentle density, agreeablist design code, hundreds of thousands of new homes and lots of new lab space. Incredibly good news for UK science & tech. Remarkably anti-cheems! gov.uk/government/news/we-wi…

An underrated cost of regulation is the sheer number of smart people who work on zero-sum activities like impact assessments and other compliance documents. Freeing these people up to do other things is a benefit, not a cost, of deregulation.

I’m very proud and excited to have become a father today. Our new son is a delight - it’s been so lovely to meet and start to get to know him today. He and Flo are both doing great.

What on earth is Ofgem thinking here? This is just a way of raising taxes on high earners – it's completely inappropriate for an independent regulator to propose something like this.

Sounds like that mandatory bee brick regulation in Brighton wasn’t such a good idea after all. Oops!

I don't want to single anyone out here, but it's important to realise that a sizeable share of people involved in public policy think you need some kind of formal expertise to judge whether £100m is an appropriate price to pay to protect a colony of bats from a train line.

This is how posh people show off status - I’m so much above all the others here, I don’t need to worry about being neat and presentable the way they do.

New post by me: The UK is much poorer than it ought to be – the US is nearly 40% more productive than we are. To get richer, we need to start thinking like a developing country and focus on getting the basics, like housing and energy, right. sambowman.co/p/britain-is-a-…

Why are university “rewildings” so universally ugly? It’s like they’re all little portals to Pripyat.

The goal should be quintupling Cambridge while maintaining it as Britain’s most beautiful city. This is entirely feasible from a technological and economic perspective, even though it sounds far-fetched. But we do have to actively and consciously choose it.

It’s pretty disappointing to focus on Musk here, rather than the rape gangs inquiry story. Just once, could the BBC’s political journalists look beyond gossip and prattle to the substance?

Racially diverse casting can work well in period TV – eg, "The Great". But Wolf Hall S01 was notable for its authenticity: candles for lighting, costumes made using 16th Century cloth designs. And yet the new series has a black guy *on Henry VIII's privy council*. Come on!

“People who travel to Europe are middle class” is today’s “flat screen TVs in council houses”. I’m pretty sure working class people visit Europe from time to time too!

If Labour bring in an exit tax as they double capital gains tax, the UK will become the worst place in the developed world to move to as a founder or investor. telegraph.co.uk/business/202…

Every single one of these is skin-crawlingly bad. It's not just that the specific ideas are cringey (The Sunflower Line, named after the lanyards, is brilliant though), it's inherently naff to name a train line after "some good thing" instead of some facet of geography.

What if I told you there was a city that has built a new tramway 🚋 in eight weeks for just £15m/km? 💷 You'd no doubt assume it was in China 🇨🇳, Spain 🇪🇸, or France 🇫🇷 But what if I told you that city is Coventry, right here in good old England? 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🦁

Trump vetoing the appalling plan to give away the Chagos islands would be quite extraordinary. A US President doing more for Britain's interests than its own government. politico.eu/article/donald-t…

Anyone here know about whisky? Which of these would go best with Diet Coke?

Feels like a problem that we’ve only had one PM since Gordon Brown with much of a sense of why they wanted to run the country, and that that person was Liz Truss.

Bizarre experience on this transatlantic flight I'm on. I reclined my seat to sleep and the grown man behind me started violently shaking and kicking my seat, and refused to stop until a flight attendant told him to. Then his wife loudly declared that I was a sociopath.

Everybody involved with rioting, looting, intimidation or violence should be imprisoned for a very long time. But any diagnosis of why this has happened that doesn't acknowledge the insanity of filling hotels across the country with asylum seekers is fundamentally unserious.

This is absolutely crackers. What are they thinking.

So the first time “BBC Verify” could have been really useful, the BBC immediately jumped to conclusions based on Hamas statements, including sending out a worldwide push notification blaming Israel to tens of millions of people? And these now seem wrong? Do I have that right?

I’m starting to think that this bill has not been written particularly well.

I don't know how people manage without air conditioning in this weather. The idea that opening a few windows and turning a fan on is good enough is crazy. The people responsible for stopping aircon from being built into in new build housing in Britain really should be in jail.

Nice one. Now that a teenage girl has said it, we might see greens start to change their minds.

The government's Renters' Rights Bill looks like it will be a catastrophe, inadvertently introducing rent controls and reducing the supply of housing even more. It is the clearest evidence that the whole British state that has brought it about is completely broken: • Written by the civil service • Introduced by the Tories • Passed by Labour and the Lib Dems • Cheered on by the mainstream media The bill's core provision is to eliminate "no-fault evictions". Many understand this to mean evictions during a rental lease. In fact, this is already impossible. What the new bill does is to stop landlords from being able to regain their property after a lease has expired. This means that renting a property to someone now means that they get to live in that property indefinitely. A landlord can only evict them if they are selling the property, or plan to move into it themselves, or if a tribunal gives them permission after ruling against the tenant for bad behaviour. Within these indefinite contracts, rent increases will be capped at whatever the 'market rate' is determined to be by a tribunal. Tribunals will not be able to *raise* rents, as they currently can and often do – only lower them or keep them where they are. The only risk to a tenant is that their challenge is deemed "vexatious". Not only will rent increases *within* contracts be controlled by courts, rents for *new* contracts will also be controlled by them. Tenants will be entitled to agree a rent, move in, and then immediately take their landlord to a rent tribunal on the grounds that the rent they have just agreed to is "too high". Rent tribunals will thus have the power to control all rents. All rents will be set under the threat of a tribunal intervening. There will be no "market rate", so the tribunal will have no independent "market rate" to refer to. A tenant who challenges a rent increase will have their rent frozen at the old, lower rate while their challenge is ongoing (which could take over a year). Like the Building Safety Regulator right now, tribunals are likely to be extremely backlogged, creating huge delays where tenants do not have to pay their new higher rents, if they ever do. Tenants will have huge incentives to challenge nearly all rent increases. We have already seen how bad courts are at ruling on prices, eg in cases where Next's shop workers have been given the same pay as factory floor workers, and in Birmingham where the council was forced to pay £760m to care workers and teaching assistants because a court decided that these roles were equivalent to jobs like rubbish collectors. All this amounts to rent controls. These are terrible for many reasons. 1. They will cause landlords to sell up and leave the market. This is both to avoid the risk of being stuck with a bad tenant, and because once the rent has been kept artificially low by a rent tribunal, landlords will be losing money compared to just selling into private owner-occupation. Rental properties allow for easy doubling up (housesharing) which is much messier under owner-occupation. The effective supply of housing is about to drop. In Ireland, postwar rent controls shrunk the rental market from 26% to 8% of the total housing stock in 40 years. In Britain, 1916–88, the share of properties available for rent went from 75% of the market to 10%. 2. They cause landlords to neglect their properties. Landlords receiving artificially-depressed rents for their properties have no incentive to maintain them. Rent controlled properties, famously, become neglected and fall into decay, as leaks, cracked plaster and broken windows are left unaddressed. The country's housing stock that remains in renting will decay. Our cities will become more decrepit. 3. They stop people from moving around for better jobs. We already have this effect with social housing, where huge amounts of inner London housing (30–40%!) are held by tenants in low wage jobs, or who have no job at all, instead of by people who could move to London to earn and produce more. This will happen to large swathes of the rental market too, stopping people from moving into prosperous cities where they could get better jobs. 4. They stop the supply of new homes for rent. Under rent controls, there is no incentive to build new homes for renting. Britain built essentially no private flats for rent between 1945 and the end of rent controls in 1988. The same was true in France between WWI when it introduced rent controls and the slow end of rent controls in the postwar era. 5. They push renters into the black market. To actually get a place to live, a lot of people will sidestep these new rules and rent informally, with none of the protections we currently have for renters like the deposit protection scheme. This is the sort of scenario that allows landlords to *really* exploit and steal from their tenants. – Do not assume that anyone involved with this knows what they're doing. We have already seen, in the case of the Building Safety Regulator and the second staircase regulations (brought in by the same Housing Secretary who designed this bill), how disastrous the consequences of well-intended but misconceived interventions in the housing market can be. London building has already ground to a halt. And things are about to get even worse.

Rip-off Britain: my friend won a pub quiz at Ten Bells in Shoreditch in May. Prize: a £50 voucher for drinks. Showed up this evening and they refused to honour it, right up to the manager. Absolutely shocking - they’ve lost a customer for life in me and I hope many others.

This book is a magnum opus.

2025 will be the year of the smartphone. People will start to run their whole lives through their phones, including banking, email, and appointments. Some people will watch entire movies on their phones, and, for many, video-calling will be the norm.

Just got married! 🥰

Sometimes I think about when the Tories had three months left in government, staring electoral oblivion in the face, and for their final policy swing went for a football regulator, national service, and a ban on smoking.

The parenthood pay gap. No wonder birth rates are collapsing.

This is a crazy idea. We’re about to throw away 20 years of extracted plutonium for no good reason.

New by me in today’s Sunday Times: Britain is being overtaken by Poland, Slovenia and South Korea, and left in the dust by America. If we want to grow again we need to let people build houses, energy supply, roads and railways. thetimes.co.uk/article/why-h…

If the IMF come in, instead of just scrapping the triple lock, they could cut the state pension (£221.20/week) to what it would be if it had risen in line with earnings since 2010 – £142.46/week. That would save a whopping £52 billion a year!

Buying household appliances these days is a bizarre experience. You have to spot the ones that talk a lot about how good they are for the environment, and make sure not to buy those.