Ben Southwood
@bswud
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Founder & editor, https://t.co/AdNuyGyLll @stripe. Fellow, @createstreets.
Blackheath
Joined June 2012
Write for us! Here are 26 ideas for articles we'd like to commission. https://t.co/TvSd1yunbE
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I wrote for The Washington Post today! The politics of land dominated the late nineteenth century, and disappeared a century ago. But land politics is bubbling back up in America, the form of dual revolts against high rents and climbing property taxes.
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This is the right sort of idea (benefits to the communities that host new housing) but my experience is that people understandably see cash payments as ‘bribes’. The systems that work & produce a lot of housing through this mechanism use other ways of handing over benefits.
More supply is an annoyingly long-term solution to housing costs and people reasonably doubt any given change will benefit them directly. A potential solution from @SearchlightInst — cash payments to residents of communities that embrace more building. https://t.co/RH4F3H4fa7
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A new call for articles that Works in Progress would like to commission. We’re looking for everything from Japanese pension reforms to making certain mosquito species extinct to travelogues about strange ethnic enclaves around the world. https://t.co/iEUmqA7Z75
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😁😁😁
Just started my subscription at the new, fabulous https://t.co/wNruiSOTmX Very excited about what @s8mb & the team are doing here !
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We built FXR Script to give indicator developers a new way to create, share, and reach traders worldwide. With a few lines of code, any trader can create world-class indicators for backtesting. Huge props to @outof0ptions for launching EIGHT new indicators directly on our
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Even though I helped come up with these, it’s still really pleasurable just reading through all the cool ideas for Works in Progress articles.
A new call for articles that WIP would like to commission. We’re looking for everything from Japanese pension reforms to making certain mosquito species extinct to travelogues about strange ethnic enclaves around the world. https://t.co/iEUmqA7Z75
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‘Pay as bid’ is an unbelievably deluded and stupid idea for energy markets. Paying everyone the market price, with profits for those with lower costs, is what we do in literally every market, for a reason: it eliminates the incentive for harmful strategic behaviour.
Ahead of the budget everyone is talking about how to cut energy bills. Many of the ideas are good, but one proposal to ‘break the link’ between gas and energy prices, doesn't stack up in my opinion. A thread on why I’m skeptical and why MPs should be wary 👇
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Fred is a genuine aesthete and connoisseur. Great piece!
Before politics, think tanking and twitter, I spent a few years as a chef. Hugely grateful to @TheCriticMag for giving me the time and space in this month's edition to write about my adventures behind the stove. Please do have a read: https://t.co/XlmZBv9Vl1
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Fertility is collapsing all around the world, not just in the developed West: - Mexico now has lower fertility than the US (even non-Hispanic whites!). - Arab-Israeli fertility is now lower than that of Jewish Israelis. - For first time in 200 years, rich people are having MORE
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Microbes can evolve in hours instead of millennia. Now scientists are using them to understand natural selection – including predator/prey dynamics, how starvation affects evolution, and the origins of multicellular life. New at Works in Progress. https://t.co/2TZhRGoyBb
worksinprogress.co
Generations of microbes evolve in hours, not millennia. By speeding up Darwin’s clock, scientists have watched evolution happen in real time, and it’s changed how we understand natural selection.
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Gabriel Weinberg has a similar thought about total factor productivity, which is the economic measure for how good we are at doing stuff, but sounds like obscure jargon
gabrielweinberg.com
The name of this hidden driver of prosperity is unappealing and not self-defining to mainstream people. What should it be called instead?
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This sounds pretty awesome. I love IfP!
🚨 NEW ROLE AT @IFP 🚨 We're hiring a Director of Operations to improve and oversee the internal systems that power IFP’s work — from finance and compliance to HR and organizational planning. This role will report to me & @calebwatney and will be the senior-most operations role
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Shares of Lundin Mining, a name we own in our gold funds, just hit a 52-week high. Lundin Mining is a diversified Canadian base metals mining company with operations in Brazil, Chile, Portugal, Sweden and the U.S. The company’s operations primarily produce copper, zinc, gold
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Mining rare earth metals for ingredients to make solar panels exposes you to 40 times more radiation than working in a nuclear power plant.
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The MEGA plate is a concentric circle of increasing concentrations of antibiotics. Bacteria progress through it by evolution, which you can watch in real time.
Microbes can evolve in hours instead of millennia. Now scientists are using them to understand natural selection – including predator/prey dynamics, how starvation affects evolution, and the origins of multicellular life. New at Works in Progress. https://t.co/2TZhRGoyBb
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If I didn't have my job, then this would be a dream job for me.
The Anthropic Editorial team is hiring TWO new writers: someone to write about AI and economics/policy, and someone to write about AI and science. This is quite an important time to be thinking and writing about the effects of AI. So please apply!
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Voters in Charlotte, NC, just passed a one percent sales tax increase to fund a $20 billion investment into roads and rail. If UK cities had powers like this we would have much more and better infrastructure. https://t.co/4fPXqU6I0z
wfae.org
Early voting results posted Tuesday night show the Mecklenburg County transportation and transit sales tax leading, roughly 55% to 45%.
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🇨🇦 🇦🇺 🇪🇺 The Works in Progress print edition is now available in Canada, Australia, and the whole European Union. Subscribe now to receive our first print issue, out later this month. https://t.co/LRmNLwDPSF
worksinprogress.co
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Fraud, negligence, hype, and bias together make up more than half of academic science. Big Pharma regularly produces reproducible breakthroughs, in part because their motives are better and in part because the FDA imposes the insights of the open science movement on them.
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Decentralised Robotics 🧵 I/ Building datasets for embodied AI is tough—humanoid robots need real-world human motion task data, but collecting it at scale has been limited to research lab projects or closed source big labs. At Eidon, we started with our wearable IMU trackers.
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This is one of the most impressive cross-party coalition building exercises I’ve seen in years. Brilliant work.
Everyone's talking about tax rises - but what about tax fixes? In a pretty unusual intervention, @CPSThinkTank has teamed up with @CenTaxUK, @ASI, @IPPR, @NEF, @jrf_uk, @WeAreBrightBlue, @LabourTogether & @DanNeidle to argue for sweeping, pro-growth tax reform & simplification.
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Works in Progress, print edition, is now available in • Canada 🇨🇦 • Australia 🇦🇺 • The entire European Union 🇪🇺 🇮🇪 🇩🇪 Subscribe today for six beautiful issues a year. The first edition ships in two weeks. https://t.co/PoUJhC9HEn
worksinprogress.co
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