Longform editor @FT Before that retail, @FTLex, @FTMoney and @ichronicle Views and errors my own

Saarfend innit
Joined March 2011
While European carmakers resort to retro marketing gimmicks, the dismantling of their industry - orchestrated and subsidised by Beijing - continues apace and in plain sight ft.com/content/2174fa8e-5b5e…
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I admire their altruism, but the NHS is never going to change It’s a patriarchal misogynistic hierarchy that is obsessed with process instead of outcomes When things go wrong, its quasi-Masonic ranks close bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cxe8…
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For all but the biggest estates, "hard work" is already taxed at a much higher effective rate than inheriting Removing "the family home" (it's never just "a house") means large and largely unearned gains on property are never taxed
Inheritance Tax punishes people for working hard, saving, and leaving something for their children. That’s why we Conservatives are taking the first step towards abolishing it completely. We will scrap Inheritance Tax completely on the family home and raise the threshold for other assets to £1 million for a couple. We are on the side of people who work hard.
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Cutting inheritance tax is the most Tory policy ever. Benefits a relatively tiny number of people, given that only around 5% of estates even pay IHT Everyone else will have to make up the shortfall
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For context: Boots was taken off the UK stock market by KKR and Stefano Pessina in 2007 - for £11bn, or the equivalent of $22bn at the time the deal was announced ft.com/content/c3a6e3b7-e998…
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Help to Buy II is on the way Years ago I did a chart for @FTLex showing how completions, house prices, share prices, dividends and exec pay had evolved under H2B mk 1 The smallest growth was in completions The largest was in exec pay Einstein's dictum on insanity springs to mind
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Maybe we could just raise the personal allowance to the level of the full state pension each year? So at least the people who fund the whole ponzi scheme actually see some benefit, rather than just the "I've paid into the system all my life" brigade ft.com/content/2374a71b-1a31…
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Hospitality companies complain that “tourist taxes” will erode affordability and reduce visitor numbers On the same day that tickets to the Bayeux Tapestry - at £33 a head - sell out until the end of the year Hmmmm…
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Get a landline and buy a fax machine….
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
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So @c2c_rail cuts a quarter of its services out the timetable - and still they don’t arrive on time Many have jumped to the conclusion that this is a result of nationalisation. I’m beginning to wonder if they’re right
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Is that the sound of thousands of irony meters blowing up? [Borrowing costs today are rising across the developed world. The US just intervened to try and bring down yields on Treasuries. By contrast in September 2022 they shot up in one place only....]
Borrowing costs are soaring under Labour. Where are the warnings of economic catastrophe? Where is the hysteria? The double standards are glaring.
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Does anything on clearance at @Argos_Online actually exist in real life?!
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The @c2c_Rail programme of pre-emptive cancellations doesn’t appear to be working…
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More nonsense on business rates Sectors that have had tens of billions in rate relief over past 5-6 years will get another £100mn/year dollop, funded apparently by higher rates on shops selling vapes and other undesirable stuff
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Also, what is this fixation on pubs? Pubs have been closing for years, for all sorts of reasons Even when I worked behind a bar in the late 1980s, my local was more than half empty for much of the time
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My daughter’s uni is charging £35 per head to attend her graduation Is this a thing now? The Ryanair-sation of academia?
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Sod the new prime minister and all his ministerial appointments - today's big news is that the great Doncastrian* Kevin Keegan has died!! [*rejected by his home club for being "too short"]
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