Sam Dumitriu
@Sam_Dumitriu
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Head of Policy ( @BritainRemade ). Adviser ( @TenThinkTank ).
London, England
Joined December 2008
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New: Many of London's post-war housing estates are damp, cramped, and cold. But, it's possible to fix that and cut London's housing shortage.
Here's how an estate renewal revolution can build half a million homes and cut London’s emissions
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Wait let me get this straight, statisticians who can’t predict a single coin toss are now telling us how many times heads will come up (to the nearest 50) if we flipped a coin 10,000 times? 🤔
Wait let me get this straight, people who can’t predict the weather 24 hours in advance are now telling us what global temperatures will be in 10 years? 🤔
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If you have graduated from a top global university then you will be free to move to the UK without a job offer under the new 'High Potential Individual Visa'.
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Is Britain getting a bad deal?
@Ben_A_Hopkinson
and I looked at 242 infrastructure projects across 14 different countries.
Our conclusion? It costs more to build new tram systems, railways, and roads in Britain than almost anywhere else in the world. 🧵
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Apple should put some kind of GPS tracker in every mobile phone. Imagine if you could just show the police where your phone has been taken. Phone theft would be a thing of the past.
Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley and
@MayorofLondon
have called on the mobile phone industry to play their part to help tackle the rising number of robberies in the capital.
Figures show that mobile phone crime is driving the rise in robberies and thefts in the capital.
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Sizewell C's planning application had a 44,260 page environmental impact assessment.
Yet, the project will now be judicially reviewed on the grounds that they failed to consider the environmental impacts. Net Zero is impossible if we don't fix this.
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I don't get the mindset that thinks building a museum is more socially valuable than exploring space!
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Why does it take so long to build new infrastructure in the UK?
Answer: The planning system for major infrastructure projects simply isn’t working. 🧵
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New: London has a shortage of homes, but it doesn't have a shortage of golf courses.
In fact, London’s 95 golf courses take up more land than the entire borough of Brent.
Here's the case for building on some of them.
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The CEO of one of the UK's largest public electric vehicle charging networks on what's holding them back.
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Controversial opinion: You should be allowed to build flats like these within 5 minutes walk to a train station.
I am pleased that a plan to demolish a family home on Riddlesdown Road, Purley and replace it with a large block of flats has been refused. New homes are needed but the right place for new flats is Croydon town centre, central London and brownfield sites.
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South Korea can build nuclear reactors for 4-5x less than the UK.
But to build one in the UK, they'd have to wait at least four years before they could even lodge a planning application.
My latest on how to fix that and get nuclear built faster.
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Perfectly responsible tweet.
Context: the person who died received a placebo.
Volunteer in Oxford coronavirus vaccine trial dies
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Me, a moron: Regulations drive people out of California
You, a genius: It's our housing shortage caused by erm... zoning regulations
The right-wing loves to natter on about how CA’s taxes/regulations drive people/businesses out. Not so. Housing is, by far,
#1
threat to CA’s economy & vibrancy. And even with our housing shortage, our economy is still strong. Wait until we actually decide to prioritize housing!
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Jeremy Corbyn was paid £20k by the propaganda arm of a regime that hangs gay people from cranes.
#Pride2017
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Grads from some of the world's best universities are now free to move to the UK for 2 years without a job offer
My new paper looks at the Government's new High Potential (HPI) Visa and finds its closed to many of the world's best and brightest grads.
🧵
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The UK (population: 67.3m) is building fewer homes each year than Florida (population: 21.8m).
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In the last 25 years, France has built 21 tramways.
Avignon, Besançon, and Caen have tramways despite having fewer than 150,000 residents.
In population terms, it is the equivalent of Lincoln, Winchester, and Carlisle all having tram systems.
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The UK has announced unilateral recognition for medicines approved overseas.
If Japan or the US approves a drug, you will be able to prescribe it in the UK.
Aiming to create fastest route to market in the world for new medicines.
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"If you’re claiming tax-free childcare for three children, and earn £99,999, your take-home pay is £69,884. If you earn £1 more, your take-home pay decreases to £63,942."
In fact, a parent of 3 on £119k has a lower post-tax income than someone on £99,999. Bonkers.
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Last year, Edinburgh capped rent increases at 3%.
What happened? Landlords have upped rents for new tenancies by more than anywhere else in Britain.
The only way to cut London's rents sustainably is to remove the planning barriers to building.
It’s outrageous that it’s become the ‘norm’ to pay £1,000pm to rent a room in London.
And it’s only getting worse, with a further 18% increase expected in the next 4 years.
It’s time the Govt gave me the powers to freeze London rents.
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Sizewell C had a 44,000 page environmental impact assessment. What more do you people want?
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Everything that's wrong with housing and transport policy in the UK in a nutshell.
Ebbsfleet has a 20 minute rail connection to Central London, but permission to build densely near the station has been held up due to the discovery of 'rare spiders'.
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On Fukushima: "We estimate that the increase in mortality from higher electricity prices outnumbers the
mortality from the accident itself, suggesting the decision to cease nuclear production has
contributed to more deaths than the accident itself"
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How can it cost £13bn to restore a single building?
That’s almost as much as Crossrail cost (£15.7bn).
EXC: Major restoration works on the Palace of Westminster are unlikely to progress before the next election.
MPs were meant to choose a way forward this year but will now just vote for more scoping exercises.
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The UK's low productivity explained in one paragraph.
"Median household income in London is 14% higher than the UK average before housing costs, but only 1% higher than the UK average after housing costs."
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Sad news. Someone has broken our Bastiat picture frame. On the bright side think of the wealth that will be created when we get the glass repaired!
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It's a terrifying vision of the future.
What if every visit to the hospital didn't involve 10 minutes of watching a doctor do data entry on a 15 year old computer?
Larry Ellison, who just bought digital health records company Cerner for $28 billion, is one of the largest donors to the Tony Blair Institute.
Meanwhile the TBI is one of the most vocal advocates for vaccine passports and digital health records.
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There is no UK innovation policy that comes close to the impact of 150,000 new homes in Cambridge.
(Except maybe 150,000 homes in Oxford I guess)
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Why I'm a Booster and not a Doomster:
In almost every area of policy I've looked into depth, there are massive low-hanging fruit capable of increasing GDP by at least 3-5% each.
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Comical article.
If you want to avoid Ultra-Processed Foods, a fake concept made up by diet gurus with books to shift, then just buy the most expensive brand for everything.
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Phase 1 of High Speed 2 (🇬🇧) will cost £396m per mile of track.
🇮🇹Naples-Bari Line: £74m per mile
🇫🇷Tours-Bordeaux: £46m per mile
🇯🇵Hokkiado Shinkansan: £51m per mile
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In 2000, Norway built the world's longest road tunnel for around £100m. Britain has spent more than twice that on the planning application for the Lower Thames Crossing alone.
I'm quoted in
@thetimes
on Britain's decade-plus economic stagnation.
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Why is Britain set to have a lower GDP per capita than Poland by the mid-2030s?
Answer below.
Plans to increase the number of homes on a business park in Chipping Barnet, from 1350 to 2428 were refused last night. This is following 778 objections to the scheme spearhead by the Local MP, meanwhile over 3171 households are on the borough’s housing waiting list.
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Why do tiny French cities have trams while Bristol and Leeds don't? Cost.
Tram projects in Britain are two and a half times more expensive than French projects on a per mile basis.
France's most expensive tram project is still cheaper than Britain's cheapest.
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Don’t make me tap the sign.
Downing Street is drawing up plans for retailers to introduce price caps on basic food items such as bread and milk to help tackle the rising cost of living,
@Telegraph
can disclose
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Is tunneling the reason HS2 costs so much more than similar international projects?
It's surely a contributor, but Japan's Hokkaido Shinkansen was built for less and more of it was tunnelled. Our costs are so high that multiple things must be going wrong at once.
Did Nimbyism derail HS2, by sending the costs of constructing it through the Conservative's southeastern heartlands sky high?
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In 1961, West Midlands households earned more on average than households in any other part of Britain.
So, London-based planners banned almost all new building of factories, offices and housing south of Manchester in an attempt to rebalance the economy.
Once a year I remind myself that in the mid-1960s national government was so worried about the strength of Birmingham's economy that they partially banned it growing
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Meanwhile in Britain, Leeds is the largest city in western Europe without a metro system. Over 530,000 people live in the city but have to make do with buses.
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Not many people know this but protecting supermarket car parks from development is actually a core tenet of green ideology.
The figures are staggering for the proposed development on the Harrow Tesco site:
559 new flats across 10 blocks up to 15-storeys high, 155 residential parking spaces, a 20% smaller Tesco store & 1/3 less customer parking
@NoToTescoTowers
@WembleyMatters
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Nuclear power is safe, clean, and reliable, but in five years, Scotland’s only remaining operating nuclear power station, Torness, will close for good.
Thread.
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The US has a stockpile of 20-30m AstraZeneca vaccines that it's not using and almost certainly will never use.
They should share them with India immediately.
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If I spent nearly a grand on a coat, I'd consider wearing it more than once too.
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Yet some projects stand out.
Incredibly, £267m has been spent on the Lower Thames Crossing’s 63,000 page planning application.
Norway built the world’s longest road tunnel and the world’s deepest subsea tunnel for less.
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I’ve realised the maths on this tweet are dreadful. Mentally replace 10,000 with 1,000,000 and 50 with 1,000 to get a more numerically correct gag.
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Ordinary member of the public: What proportion of new cases are caused by variants of concern other than the Kent strain?
Professional journalist: Mr Prime Minister, who will you hug when you get the chance?
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Imagine explaining mobile phone theft to someone from the 1980s.
"There are cameras everywhere and every device is fitted with a tracking device that can't be turned off, but almost all thefts are unsolved by the police."
Reading a bit more about why people’s phones can be snatched from their hands in London, they can identify the house in which their stolen property is being kept, but police do nothing and the victims just watch as their phone is sold abroad
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To be fair, Norway is freakishly good at tunnelling.
Yet, we aren't comparing Norwegian tunnelling and British tunnelling. We're comparing Norwegian tunnelling and British paperwork.
Once you start thinking about Norwegian tunnelling, it is hard to think of anything else.
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In the space of just eight years, Madrid built an entire 81 mile subway network at just £68m per mile.
That’s nine (!) times cheaper per mile than the Jubilee Line Extension built at roughly the same time.
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Some stats about railway electrification in Britain. (Thread)
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Nadine Dorries is reported to have asked Microsoft: "When are you getting rid of algorithms?"
I don't hold much hope that her Online Safety Bill is going to be anything but a disaster.
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In Stockholm, the average waiting time for a rent-controlled property is now nine years.
Rent controls are not a substitute for increasing supply.
The combination of skyrocketing rental prices and having to compete with up to TWENTY others to rent a home is absolutely shocking. Renters in London need a rent freeze—the Government must give me powers to introduce one urgently.
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What about underground rail?
At a cost of £676m per mile, British projects are:
- 2 times more expensive than projects in Italy or France
- 3 times more expensive than German projects
- 6 (!) times more expensive than Spain
Only the US and Canada build more expensively.
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The first step to solving any problem is recognizing there is one.
I'm confident that Britain can fix this and bring costs down, but it's time to admit that Britain has a big infrastructure cost problem.
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When The Guardian attacks the "profits-first" nature of food markets, I have to ask. Do they expect their dinner from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker?
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After a decade of economic stagnation, the UK is facing the deepest fall in living standards in 60 years. But a new campaign believes Britain should be even poorer!
Hello! We are excited to announce the arrival and imminent launch of 'Degrowth London'🧵1/4
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Some recent French projects stand out. Besançon (population: 116,676) built a tram system for just £28m per mile and months ahead of schedule.
Imagine what would be possible if we could build so cheaply.
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Keir Starmer tells the CBI: I've had conversations with CEOs who say 'we could build a wind farm in 2 years, but it takes 7 years by the time you add in the planning and the regulation'.
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There’s something wrong when an MP seriously proposes forcing every young person to spend a year working for the council.
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Labour Leadership candidates as Rupi Kaur poems, a thread.
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It cost National Highways £267m to prepare a planning application to get permission to build 23km of road.
The road, which would connect Essex and Kent, still hasn't gained planning permission.
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It is kind of mad that it was illegal to block a public highway until 2021 and now it's just allowed.
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In his housing speech, Michael Gove cites Gaudi's Barcelona as an example of the sort of densification he wants to see.
Yet this fantastic Gaudi building would be illegal to build under DLUHC's proposed 18m Second Staircase rule.
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Why are Britain's costs so high?
In the
@FT
,
@jburnmurdoch
calls it the Nimby Tax.
To avoid objections, Britain builds more complexly than necessary.
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Rishi Sunak just announced up to £50m in funding for new “focused research organisations.”
FROs are a new way of doing science. In effect, they apply the startup model to scientific research. 🧵
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Moderna's vaccine is a triumph of public markets' long-termism.
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London isn’t building enough homes to keep up with demand.
In fact, for every 10 jobs London has added in the last decade, the capital has only built three homes.
How bad has it got and how do we get London building?
(Thread)
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Basic income, but only for homeowners.
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We don’t need to build more homes because some people have spare bedrooms.
Big insights from one of the UK’s leading universities.
💥New! The cross-party consensus that the way to tackle the housing crisis is to build more homes isn’t working. Instead, we should be pursuing innovative policies that make efficient use of the existing housing stock.
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"Stop the industrialisation of the countryside!"
Poultry Farm (Left), Solar Farm (Right)
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It is almost 300 years since Adam Smith was born, but journalists still speak the language of mercantilism.
Cheaper imports may 'hammer UK farmers' but it also means cheaper food for consumers at a time when food prices are high.
Why focus on the former over the latter?
NEW from Politico:
Extraordinary inside-the-room reporting on the final stages of the UK-Australia trade deal.
Over an epic dinner of Welsh lamb & fine wine, Boris Johnson gave away huge concessions which will hammer UK farmers
Scoop via
@g_lanktree
👇
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It's increasingly clear that the teacher did nothing wrong and should be reinstated immediately.
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To get permission to build sixteen homes on a brownfield site costs a small developer costs £50,000 and takes two and a half years.
The consequence? Smaller developers have been squeezed out of the market.
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Prediction: In the coming years (or months), there will be a point where ChatGPT is in the top 0.5% of GPs for diagnosing illnesses, but it won’t be widely adopted because statistically-illiterate journalists will report on every single incorrect ChatGPT diagnosis.
#GPT4
saved my dog's life.
After my dog got diagnosed with a tick-borne disease, the vet started her on the proper treatment, and despite a serious anemia, her condition seemed to be improving relatively well.
After a few days however, things took a turn for the worse 1/
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London's rents are so much higher than the rest of the England's that the median monthly rent for a 1 bedroom home in the capital is enough to afford a home with 3 bedrooms in all other regions of England.
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Cancel Jamie Oliver and replace him with Nadiya from Bake-Off.
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Me, before going to the gym: Let’s do this.
Me, after going to the gym:
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This take aged like a fine bottle of milk.
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In fact, Norway built a tunnel 290m below sea level at roughly the same cost as Britain built a motorway going through Cambridgeshire.
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The UK is taking a radically different approach to other nations, but has provided little information on why. The best we've got are airport book-level BS vendors speaking as if there's some iron law of social science that social distancing isn't sustainable over two weeks.
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The Rail Industry Association estimate that Britain can get its rail electrification costs down by up to two-thirds.
One key solution is committing to a clear steady programme years in advance. Britain's approach has been the complete opposite.
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Reminder: This is one part of the government spending £267m to ask another part of the government for permission to build a road.
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It's often assumed that 15 minute cities, congestion charging, and parking fees are socialist impositions on the free market.
In reality, when markets are liberalised and subsidies are eliminated, the result is fewer cars and more trips by train.
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My all-time favourite transport map is Alon Levy's map of London's rail system if we could build at Nordic costs.
Crossrail 5 anyone?
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Build 15 of these on Green Belt around tube stations.
A newly built village, with gentle density and different architectural styles. Designed around people and nature. Who wouldn't want to live here?!
📍Op Buuren dorp,
@StichtseVecht
🇳🇱
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If I edited a newspaper and my readers were left with such a poor understanding of economics then I'd feel I had failed in my duty someway.
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Elvis Presley receiving a Polio vaccine in 1956.
Many attribute this image with boosting take-up of the life saving vaccine.
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Not only should this rule be abolished, but anyone involved with its drafting should be banned from public policy for life.
Regulations were recently introduced requiring a minimum window sill or guard height of 1.1 metres. My colleague
@RobertKwolek
at
@createstreets
just spotted this new build, apparently an early example of the small squat windows this will generate. Behold the norm of the future.
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Let's look at rail electrification.
Percentage of railway electrified:
🇬🇧 38%
🇫🇷 55%
🇩🇪 61%
🇮🇹 71%
Why are we so far behind? Again, other countries do it cheaper.
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AOC attacking a highly-respected Obama administration economist because a free-market think tank reposted a paper he presented at a centre-left conference is I think representative of her character and lack of ability.
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