Sam Bowman
@s8mb
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Editor at @WorksinProgMag and @StripePress.
London
Joined January 2007
I’m a fan of design codes, but this is what you get when the designs are chosen by a state agency and its ‘stakeholders’ rather than directly by the people who will live next to them.
Canada’s new government just released the Housing Design Catalogue. It has 50 standardised housing designs that builders will use to streamline approvals, cut through red tape, and get millions more homes built, faster.
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Feels like an important moment - the energy companies are finally breaking cover and explicitly saying that it isn’t wholesale (gas) prices that are the problem, it’s policy costs (renewables). Wholesale prices could halve and bills would still rise!
An absolute must watch. Energy bosses have just told Parliament that EVEN IF gas prices halved by 2030, the soaring policy costs of renewables would mean bills go UP. Ed Miliband’s plan means more grid, more expensive renewable subsidies, more paying wind farms to turn off.
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Is the British state about to introduce rent control by accident? It seems incredible, but the quoted drafting does seem to support what @s8mb is saying. If so, here is an especially striking feature of the situation: unlike in classical 1914-1990 rent control, landlords are
Under this bill, new tenants will be able to challenge their rent at a tribunal within six months of moving in. This means tribunals will be able to control all market rents, not just rent rises within a tenancy. This is straightforward rent control across the entire market.
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I’d previously thought that this bill was bad, but survivable. Now I realise that it controls rents *between* tenancies as well as within them, I believe that it is bringing first-generation rent controls to the English rental market. This could be very, very bad.
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The pretext of the bill is that tribunals will have to refer to market rates to determine if rent rises are ‘too high’. But this is circular: all market rents, including new tenancies, will be set under rent tribunals’ jurisdiction. There will be no ‘market rate’ to refer to.
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Under this bill, new tenants will be able to challenge their rent at a tribunal within six months of moving in. This means tribunals will be able to control all market rents, not just rent rises within a tenancy. This is straightforward rent control across the entire market.
My sincere thanks to Peers for completing their scrutiny of the Renters’ Rights Bill yesterday. With no Lords amendments coming back to the Commons, the Bill will soon receive Royal Assent allowing us to transform the experience of private renting for millions of tenants.
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What an excellent tweet.
There's nothing else like "la frontera" -- once you've lived down there, nothing compares. After spending a couple years' worth of time down there, I honestly don't think I have enjoyed living anywhere else as much. Perhaps the biggest reason for this is that the people are the
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NEW EPISODE of HARD DRUGS! What if you could design a protein never seen in nature? Scientists are using new AI tools like RFDiffusion, AlphaFold & ProteinMPNN to hallucinate entirely novel proteins. Last episode, @jacobtref and I talked about hacking proteins. This time, we
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Yesterday I got to see Sen̓áḵw, a new development in Vancouver being built by the Squamish Nation on land that they have zoning rights over. A very cool project!
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Now you can subscribe to Works in Progress with stablecoins! https://t.co/PoUJhC9HEn
worksinprogress.co
You can now accept stablecoins for recurring payments with @Stripe. 🔄 Let customers use their crypto wallets to pay for subscriptions 👩💻 Manage fiat and stablecoin subscriptions together from your dashboard 🌏 Reach global customers at lower costs Here’s how it works:
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This is extremely cool – the detail and thought that has gone into the plans is incredibly impressive, and it looks like a genuinely great place to live. Cannot wait to visit it as it gets built.
1/ 🇺🇸 Today, @CAForever submitted detailed plans for the next great American city, an hour north of Silicon Valley, including: Solano Foundry, America’s largest manufacturing park, Solano Shipyard, our largest shipyard, and walkable neighborhoods for 400,000 Californians.
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It's extraordinarily challenging to find high-value and well packaged information on the operational side of modern industrial manufacturing systems. One painful option is to pick up the average operational science book, manually decoupling the valuable bits of information from
Out now: https://t.co/KEyYy67F90 200 years on from the Industrial Revolution, we still struggle to understand what makes a production process more efficient. The Origins of Efficiency fills in that gap. Examining industries from steel to semiconductors to auto manufacturing,
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For years, @_brianpotter has been writing the best newsletter about infrastructure and productivity on the internet. Today @stripepress publishes his first book: The Origins of Efficiency. https://t.co/TfAscdWQ4i A little more about why we wanted to publish this book *now*:
press.stripe.com
An examination of how production processes—from penicillin to steel to semiconductors—get more efficient over time, and a powerful argument for efficiency as an underrated driver of progress.
Out now: https://t.co/KEyYy67F90 200 years on from the Industrial Revolution, we still struggle to understand what makes a production process more efficient. The Origins of Efficiency fills in that gap. Examining industries from steel to semiconductors to auto manufacturing,
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This is THE book to read to understand manufacturing and mass production.
Out now: https://t.co/KEyYy67F90 200 years on from the Industrial Revolution, we still struggle to understand what makes a production process more efficient. The Origins of Efficiency fills in that gap. Examining industries from steel to semiconductors to auto manufacturing,
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Please DM me if you want to volunteer in the fight for free speech in the UK. Video editors, researchers, social media aficionados, writers, people with legal expertise or experience in politics - lend us your talents!
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Out tomorrow, from @stripepress.
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