Steam Elephant
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steamelephant.bsky.social
Steam Elephant
@steamelephant.bsky.social
Internally xiled
The consumer surplus would accrue to the non SNAP customers. There are also convenience (for economists) based assumptions about utility functions which might not apply well to access to food. It’s also not a given that prices will fall if only the consumers with higher incomes remain.
November 2, 2025 at 10:57 PM
BP & Shell?
October 31, 2025 at 11:01 AM
Shale fracking
October 22, 2025 at 5:59 PM
Without assuming a specific way of delivering it, less diversified equity portfolios would mean more bond investments and debt financing and concentration of equity in fewer hands. That’s not obviously an improvement. It’s not what is great about Japan.
October 21, 2025 at 5:31 AM
Is it the Greenspan put and ‘too big to fail’ blackmail that may make it inevitable that makes it a problem? Identifying diversification as the problem suggests that reducing it solves some problem but its immediate effect would be to make savings and retirement more of a lottery than it already is.
October 21, 2025 at 5:02 AM
Are Fidelity and American Funds better than Vanguard in some way? Is that difference the important problem? Is diversification within companies also problematic? Is insurance also bad? I wasn’t convinced by David Frum’s explanation of why he thought so.
October 21, 2025 at 4:30 AM
Is your objection to private investment in secondary markets, like using 401ks for pension provision, delegation of investment decisions to fund managers, or doing so by choosing or offering index funds?
October 21, 2025 at 3:35 AM
Belvoir
October 8, 2025 at 10:04 PM
The Houses of Parliament in London have breeding peregrine falcons nesting in the building!
October 6, 2025 at 12:03 PM
He sounds like a Spiked editorial.
September 16, 2025 at 8:29 AM
Eventually there will be ads in AI chat to pick up the slack and they won't have to share with publishers.
September 8, 2025 at 9:02 AM
3 Leeds United
August 15, 2025 at 8:16 AM
The world as will and representation
July 3, 2025 at 6:38 AM
A quiver full of arrows

Normal people

The Killing floor

The Direct Sum of all Fears

The Green, Green Grassmanian
July 3, 2025 at 6:37 AM
I doubt the civil service is short of people who could solve this. The problem is they are working for Simon Case or similar.
June 21, 2025 at 8:45 AM
For example, it is a big clue that the diagram is sufficient to pose the question despite not being drawn to scale.

It would however be much more obvious after some courses than others.

It’s on a par with weekend paper quizzes or Wordle. A lower bar than the Times crossword.
June 21, 2025 at 8:39 AM
GCSE maths would include everything you need to know and once you have the solution you can explain it to a 12 year old.

The answer is nice but it is the kind of question that is much easier when you can assume there is a nice answer.
June 21, 2025 at 8:30 AM
Is there reason to believe things would be done differently if happened again?
May 30, 2025 at 7:51 AM
It’s a pretty good example for the areas where concrete policy interventions to improve infrastructure and investment are concerned.
May 17, 2025 at 8:56 AM
The manifest failure of the system is a symptom of the difficulty of setting up a system that neither manages decline as Ofwat has nor lets companies charge the reservation price of water.
May 17, 2025 at 8:39 AM
“Just” here applies to a key part of the problem and of the financial engineering. “Operates” might be better than “works”. That setup transfers investment risk to the regulator and the customers and experience lead to low trust and confidence decision making.
May 17, 2025 at 8:33 AM
How does a lab leak work in the miasma theory of disease?
May 15, 2025 at 2:18 PM
Reposted by Steam Elephant
“Expecting someone to have [one new thoughtful opinion] per week, let alone per day, is unrealistic. Worse, it depletes their intellectual resources, turning them into opinion machines, wandering through the world looking for things to publicly have opinions about.“
David Quinn, Shirley Temple, and The Milkman’s Cheery Whistle
www.tuppenceworth.ie
May 15, 2025 at 6:29 AM
From his TBI bio:

Ben leads our work on reimagining government for the 21st century, and has co-authored TBI’s New National Purpose series with Tony Blair and William Hague. He has also worked to develop TBI’s partnership with satellite internet service Starlink.
May 1, 2025 at 10:05 AM