I tend to stay away from the Meta universe, except for WhatsApp. Meta are so aggressive at trying to get you back into Facebook or Instagram that I find it easiest to keep myself signed out and everything uninstalled.

As "the king of banter" I love walking into one of Leeds' now good pubs and remarking that "I preferred it when this place was shit, at least you could get a seat" and such like. But what I realise is that many people think this unironically, and regardless of the seat.

My vibe is that Argon 4 is a bit better for data analysis, especially being precise and correct about what it's doing and making sensible choices. Opus 5.5 is more creative, which is generally not something I want, but many will. Sol 6.1 is incredibly cheap and a good balance.

I've been using three models for "creative thinking" tasks over the last week (I use Qwen 3.6 35B A3B for a lot of grunt work). Opus 5.5, Argon 4, Sol 6.1. They're all really good. They fail and need to be guided mostly in similar ways. Feels, for my use cases, quite converged.

Got you. Yes a fundamentally different way of looking at it. My guess is that this leads me to be more supportive of anti-trust measures by government for example. In the great divide of Europe vs. the USA on competition policy it sounds like you're more USA and I'm more Europe.

They see the inefficiency in the expensive cities that won't grow. That's correct and easy to measure. But they rarely look at the market opportunity that this offers other places. Bad competitors in a market stimulate new entrants, and for those new entrants to grow quickly.

In the cities case, the papers on "what if SF and Cambridge expanded" are pretty simple. Productivity is higher in SF and Cambridge, if people could move there we know how much that would boost overall productivity. They consider too little how productivity displaces over time.

Austin gets its chance to compete because San Fran won't expand and got expensive. Manchester gets its chance to compete because Oxford, Cambridge, and London won't expand and got expensive. Aldi gets its chance to compete because Sainsbury's and Asda got expensive and bad.

Happily not. No, this is absent of any compulsion.

"If superstar cities permitted growth too" always feels similar to a "if we nationalised the supermarkets we could keep the profit for ourselves" argument to me. It's definitely true in theory and the papers are fine. But it always seems to underweigh the power of markets.

Obviously there's a bit of room for wiggle in all of this kind of stuff. Have a sit down with national highways, reassure them in some way. If the locals aren't kicking off about the nature, you can sway that too. You can "clarify" the local plan a bit, or find an exemption.

Presumable, further to what Joe has said, the officers would say "not a lot you can do tbh, we've applied the local plan, we've applied the local nature rules, and we've got national highways all over this, you can try change the decision but you'll get into trouble for it".

It's possibly a disconnect in our levels of knowledge of the law (with mine being lower) but I really do think that BANES could have referred this to committee (which every council I know describes as "calling in") rather than leave it fully with the officers as they did here.

How is California able to be at the forefront of technology and Texas at the forefront of energy when locals in Connecticut can block housing! The Federal Government MUST intervene.

<parody of American economists tweeting about Britain> it's amazing that the USA has any economic growth at all when everyone and everywhere is a NIMBY like this! </parody of American economists tweeting about Britain>

It hinders it, but it doesn't block it.

I don't think I've been fortunate. I think I've chosen and voted well. And unless that carries some advantage and power, people won't vote well.