embrace the cognitive dissonance; 🇺🇸 in 🇬🇧
Joined May 2018
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Conventional Potato 🥔 retweeted
“Now boarding, Group D,” the PA announces, and you stand up to join the line for the 7am flight. You’re headed to Atlanta for your day job — you’ll be defending some anemic numbers to the executive team.
As you stand in line, your phone buzzes. It’s Ricardo — “Hey boss, the Isuzu won’t start, not sure what to do. We tried jumping it off the F-150, but no luck. Probably a bad starter.”
You step out of the boarding line. “Okay, does anyone on the team know how to replace a starter?”
“Sure, James probably can, but what do you want us to do today? We don’t have the parts to repair it right now.”
“Hang on, I’ll call you back.”
You open up your CRM on your phone — the one that took months to implement and just about killed your team — to look at the schedule. Ugh, today’s one of those multiple small job routes…5 little stops.
“Now boarding, Group E.”
You call the local truck rental shop, they confirm they have a landscaping truck available for $375 for the day, but not until 8am.
You confirm the rental, and text Ricardo the details. You tell him to just have the crew clean equipment to kill 30 minutes.
You message your scheduler Maria, asking her to reschedule the first client of the day, but that you’re expecting the crew will still get to the rest of the jobs.
Maria calls instead of texts. “Boss, I can’t reschedule the first client, that’s Mary Stevens. She already got rescheduled from last week, and she’s pissed.”
You sigh audibly. “Okay, how about you reschedule the last client of the day, and move Mary to that slot?”
“I think she has to be in the mornings, she’s told us that in the past.”
“Okay, let’s just reschedule the second client then and move Mary back by an hour.” Ricardo is calling you too now. “Gotta go, Ricardo is calling.”
“Now boarding, Group F.”
“Hey boss — James is saying he wants more money if you’re gonna have him do repair work too.”
You knead the bridge of your nose. “Can you tell him I’ll discuss that with him when I’m back in town on Friday?”
“I’m not sure boss, he seems kind of pissed off. You know how he gets.”
“Ricardo, I’m sorry but I have to get on this plane. Tell James I’ll call him later today when I land.”
“Final call for boarding flight 1247, service to Atlanta.”
You hustle back to the boarding line, which is now empty. The attendant scans your boarding pass, and smiles warmly. “Thank you for being a OneWorld Ruby flyer, we appreciate your loyalty.”
You do your best to smile back and then walk up the jetbridge. There’s no line anymore, so you go straight to your seat.
You call your local Isuzu dealer, but they’re not open yet. You leave a voicemail asking about they have the starter in stock, and if not, if they can order one.
The plane begins taxiing to the runway as the flight attendants do their safety briefings.
Maria texts — “Mary’s pissed, she said she wanted the first appointment of the day because she has a doctor’s appointment around 9:30am.”
You text back, “Apologize and tell her we’ll knock $100 off her work today.”
Ricardo calls again. “Boss, James is saying he’s not gonna work today unless you give him a $2 raise.”
“How are your numbers today? Can you make it worth without him?”
“I’m not sure boss…it’ll be a tough day.” You know Ricardo generally understates difficulty, so if he says it’ll be a tough day, it’s probably damn near impossible.
“Please turn off all devices or set to airplane mode at this time.”
“Okay Ricardo — tell him I’ll give him the $3 for this week, but we’ll discuss it in person when I’m back. We’re taking off now, so I’ll be off my phone until I can get on the WiFi.”
A text rolls in from your wife. “Hey — the school emailed, apparently Emmy has been getting disruptive in classes and the school wants us to come in to discuss. I’m going to schedule that for Friday, when you’re back. I know work has been brutal on both sides, but I need you to show up for this.”
You put your phone on airplane mode and close your eyes.
Hybrid working is the biggest win for worker rights in a generation, so it makes sense why there is such a big push on social media to dismantle it.
Protecting it should become a key plank in any centre left to left-populist policy platform.
Conventional Potato 🥔 retweeted
It has dawned on me that Washington for decades has been fine about saying these kinds of things about France and saying they’re not an ally and so on, and being performatively hostile to France, but say that about Israel and people have a stroke and say you’re committing treason
Conventional Potato 🥔 retweeted
Hybrid/WFH is objectively the best thing to happen to parents in last 40yrs
You can argue WFH perpetuates the absurd current state where once a quarter parents do some random school thing at 1PM on a Tuesday…but barring a total revolution in parenting, hybrid is obvi a net good
Conventional Potato 🥔 retweeted
Great initiative on a ‘small’ issue that matters: because it’s a microcosm of declining civility in public spaces.
The great thing with policies like this is the resulting negative polarisation. Means opponents say stuff like “I like annoying music on trains, actually!” 🤣
Conventional Potato 🥔 retweeted
He says the name just fine when he’s begging the Qataris for a personal jet or the Saudis for funding for his son-in-law’s private equity firm.
Wonder what’s changed?
Conventional Potato 🥔 retweeted
remote work is amazing for everyone who
1) has kids
2) wants to live close to family
3) wants to have an apartment of decent size and not be bankrupted by it being forced to live city center
remote work is massively UNDERRATED
The version of “faith” in Christianity that makes the most sense to me: I’m confident that if a just God exists, he will do what’s right for me and all people regardless of whether we get our theological views “correct”.
Conventional Potato 🥔 retweeted
What can I say about Trump? He plays a risky game on foreign policy. On one hand:
Venezuela was a success
Greenland was a success
Getting Europe to take charge of Ukraine, and NATO to increase spending, success.
On the other hand:
His Canada policy has been a disaster
Iran has been a disaster
Fracturing NATO could be a disaster
His tariff strong arm policy is terrible.
Queue the trolls on X that disagree with this balanced view.
Good policy but sadly talking about this publicly is a surefire way to commit political suicide
Because of the triple lock, the state pension is set to rise by roughly £488 next year.
Our pensioners absolutely deserve security, and Restore Britain will deliver that, but we also need to be honest about who is now largely funding it.
Younger workers are already facing outrageously high taxes, enormous housing costs and the challenge of saving for their own retirement - yet the triple lock can push pensions up faster than prices, leaving a younger generation of workers with an ever-growing burden.
It’s just not fair.
These are our children and our grandchildren.
Personally, I do not believe they should shoulder the costs of our generation’s selfish and destructive approach to the economy - leaving vast national debt as our inheritance is a shameful legacy for us. It just is.
When I launched Restore Britain as a party, I said we would take the difficult decisions needed to deliver a better Britain for those who come after us. I meant it.
So we will replace the triple lock.
Restore Britain will secure the state pension by linking it to CPI, protecting pensioners' purchasing power.
No other serious political party has the courage to do this.
Restore Britain will not attempt to buy votes today with money tomorrow's workers will have to earn.
Young people deserve a fair deal too. Unbelievable for a party leader to say, I know.
Our economy is broken, almost beyond repair - everybody is going to have to pay the price to drag our country out of the very deep hole it is currently in. I mean, everybody.
That includes replacing the Triple Lock, alongside a vast range of other cuts to the size of the state. Millions of freeloading foreign nationals will be deported, the asylum system abolished, and foreign aid reduced to almost nothing.
But we all have to shoulder the burden, sadly.
Everybody is going to have to pay to fix the mistakes of my generation.
Conventional Potato 🥔 retweeted
I'm glad to read this, but I also think it doesn't necessarily need to be scrapped altogether.
The 40% rate is straight up theft. I think people would be fine with increasing the threshold (which hasn't move in far too long) and making it a more reasonable percentage.
🚨 NEW: Kemi Badenoch is set to announce the Tories will abolish inheritance tax if they win the next election
[@MillardClothier]
Conventional Potato 🥔 retweeted
BREAKING: Saudi Arabia's East-West crude oil pipeline has suffered catastrophic damage in at least 8 locations, per initial reports citing diplomatic channels.
This comes after satellite data showed a fire burning along the pipeline route southeast of Medina with a black smoke plume +100 km long, and consistent with the multiple heat anomalies NASA FIRMS recorded along the same stretch.
Conventional Potato 🥔 retweeted
Every time a new AI agent comes out, or some new capability gets announced, part of me is amazed by it and another part of me feels this weird sense of loss/grief. Like with every upgrade the version of life we grew up expecting gets a little further away.
Work, creativity, the internet, how we learn, how we talk to each other, what it even means to be good at something… all of it feels like it’s starting to move out from underneath us.
I’m excited about the future and I think what’s coming is incredible. But there’s still something in my soul that feels like life as we knew it, or maybe life as we thought it was going to be, is slipping away and we’ll never get it back and never be able to dream up what’s going to be in its place.
Conventional Potato 🥔 retweeted
Every supposed Free Speech Warrior who justified voting for Trump should be mocked relentlessly, and everything they say in the future should be disregarded.
Conventional Potato 🥔 retweeted
Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday.
What I should have said:
There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this.
On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way.
On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project.
On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns.
On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians.
On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers.
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries.
On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land.
Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged.
When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America.
I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw.
Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.
Conventional Potato 🥔 retweeted
Alfalfa uses like half the water from the Colorado River for like 0.1% of the economic benefit. To a first approximation it literally just wouldn't matter if we just stopped growing alfalfa forever.
It's only viable because farmers don't pay market rate for water.
Graphic showing how the Colorado River's water is used.
More water goes to alfalfa than ALL household + non-ag industrial use combined. Is this the correct regional priority?
Long term answer IMO: make water abundant (energy + the ocean)
2024 study:
nature.com/articles/s43247-0…
Conventional Potato 🥔 retweeted
Once you have to engage in all this convoluted spending to make “public grocery stores” work, you might as well just toss the idea and give people money directly. They can spend it on subway fare to go to a high quality grocery store and use money to buy food
Conventional Potato 🥔 retweeted
I have never seen a psy-op more effective than the data center stuff. Absolutely wild how bipartisan the data center hate is for such an incredibly benign industry.
The same folks who'd be wildly enthusiastic over a new steel mill are irate at the idea of a data center.
BREAKING: I just signed an Executive Order implementing the strictest standards in the nation for AI data centers — because I will not allow Pennsylvanians to be bullied by greedy developers and bulldozed by the lawyers working for these big tech companies.
Effective immediately, we’re requiring AI data centers to commit to strict environmental and transparency requirements AND receive approval from the local community if they want to build here.
That’s not all: We’re also removing ALL data centers from our Fast Track permit program and stopping any office or agency under my jurisdiction from signing an NDA with AI data center developers.
I’m putting these developers on notice and letting them know that we will not let them bully Pennsylvanians, disregard our constitutional right to clean air and pure water, and drive up our utility bills.
I’m using the full weight of my executive authority to block the objectionable, unwarranted projects and put the nation’s strictest set of protections in place.
