iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

If this required additional context, I feel sorry for you.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

It's a good thing that people with extremely conservative views also think racism is bad.

Jacob Rees-Mogg is few people’s idea of a moderniser — a reputation that the double-breasted, Eton-educated, faux-Edwardian former Conservative MP for North East Somerset has assiduously cultivated. And this extends beyond the cosmetic.

From his extraordinary remarks at the start of the 2019 general election, in which he appeared to blame victims of the Grenfell Tower tragedy for following the fire brigade’s ‘stay put’ guidelines, to his opposition to abortion in all circumstances, including cases of rape and incest, Rees-Mogg says what he thinks, no matter what his usually more conciliatory party leaders would prefer.

And yet, in one crucial regard, Rees-Mogg has been something of a radical in this iteration of the Conservative Party. For he has been utterly — and publicly — consistent in his rejection of an old idea that has gained traction among elements of the new Right: that Englishness or Britishness is somehow a matter of racial or genetic purity.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

This painting hung in the downstairs loo of my childhood home and it really helped.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It's not a tax (this government? push costs onto businesses?) It's collection. Just don't make it cheaper...

Get consumers to pick up from their local service station or Amazon locker instead of their homes. This cuts congestion in a few ways. First, by consolidating deliveries that would otherwise go to different locations, but also because of when these items can be delivered. DPD can attend to a 24-hour service station or automated locker facility in the dead of night, thereby reducing congestion during peak periods.

So, Amazon and the like should cut the price for pick-up? No! Terrible idea! Price signals change behaviour but not always in the way one expects. Make it cheaper for customers to pick up their package and many will immediately perceive it to be an inferior experience, one that could only benefit the provider. As for cutting congestion for other people, who cares? Instead, the trick is to make convenience the hero.

No waiting around all day, no one nicking stuff from your front door and certainly no ‘we tried and you weren’t in’ when you abso-fucking-lutely were. Moreover, messaging can be tailored to different segments, so office bods can pick up on their way home, working parents when it fits their routine, shift workers any time, day or night. It sells itself!

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I'm being quite snarky for someone who thinks it's good policy both politically and economically but then again.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

My vote (subsidised botox for substackers) is also for sale.

For some time, the Tories have effectively been telling voters who don’t consider Brexit a triumph or climate change a fuzzy, future-tense phenomenon, that they can take their business across the street. Consider, also, which party currently holds:

Chesham and Amersham in Buckinghamshire

Henley and Thame in Oxfordshire

Wokingham in Berkshire

Guildford in Surrey

Tunbridge Wells in Kent

Mid Sussex in West Sussex

Wimbledon in South London

Now, where do many people earning at or near £100,000 a year live?

No question, the Tories are in an unenviable spot, with a real and curiously well-funded competitor to their right. But unless the party wins back Lib Dem seats in the south of England and stop them from peeling off more (reminder: things can always get worse) the path to victory is, erm, narrow.

The Conservatives don’t need to become the Lib Dems. They do, however, need to give their natural supporters a reason to hold their noses on Brexit, net zero and the cultural stuff and vote Conservative.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Grimly fascinating that Green voters, overwhelmingly in favour of immigration, are also, at 51%, the most likely to want to reduce migrant numbers from Israel. Which does rather beg the question: if Israel is to be eliminated, but Israelis barred from the UK, where exactly are they to go?

Which countries to 2024 voters want to see fewer migrants from?

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Also, TW for the Barnier staircase of doom, which has started to take on Giggs-at-Villa-Park-FA-Cup-semi-final status in my head.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

At least Brexit had a theoretical deadline. Rejoin enjoys no such luxury. ✍️ www.linestotake.com/p/brexit-ref...

As any first-year philosophy undergraduate will tell you, finitude gives life meaning. Mortality generates urgency, deadlines make choices weigh something. In that spirit, if the biggest problem with Article 50 was its finality, then Article 49 — the legal basis for any European state to join the EU — appears to suffer from the opposite affliction.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Starting to notice a narrow but persistent majority of all the YouTube videos I watch reference the Jones Act.

The Jones Act, which refers to Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (P.L. 66-261), requires that vessels transporting cargo from one U.S. point to another U.S. point be U.S.-built, and owned and crewed by U.S. citizens. The act provides a significant degree of protection for U.S. shipyards, domestic carriers, and American merchant sailors.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Enjoyed a writer's work? Tell them. ✍️ www.linestotake.com/p/dear-slim-...

Dear Slim,

It seems a bit twee. Needy. Low-key deranged behaviour, further evidence of your ongoing downward spiral from upstanding-member-of-society-who-qualifies-as-a-countersigner-on-UK-passport-applications-and-other-legal-documents to Stan, the obsessive super fan in the eponymous song by Eminem.

And sure, there’s a way to be a creep about it but it’s fairly easy to avoid. For instance, don’t request a lock of a person’s hair, suggest an alternative ending or, if you’re a man and the author/artist is a woman, raise the prospect of sex in return for your kindness.

But a simple note saying how much you enjoyed a thing and perhaps why it was meaningful to you? Why would you want to keep that to yourself?

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Unlike Liz Truss, Andy Burnham clearly believes that time is on his side. ✍️ www.linestotake.com/p/hope-defer...

Pensions triple lock, social care, electoral reform, Brexit — if there was a third rail of British politics, Andy Burnham intended to step on it. At the same time, there was a curious asymmetry with regards to how fast he was prepared to go.

The triple lock won’t be scrapped reformed until 2030, social care is for the next parliament, the voting system to be determined by committee, the EU gets more talks about talks. Contrast this with Liz Truss, who had similar ambitions to rewire the country, in her case by cutting taxes and rolling back regulation. But she wanted to do it at break-neck speed, which was ultimately her downfall.

For Truss, haste was a product not simply of impatience but of her own insecurity. She needed to create facts on the ground before her limited political authority (little support from MPs, even less in the country) evaporated. She was there for a good time, not a long time. Burnham appears more confident that time is on his side.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Friends don't set their friends homework.

It is tempting to think that, when left on read, you are the victim. Sometimes, I guess. But who wants to be made to feel like the culprit?

One piece of advice I’ve tried to deploy in my professional life is if I’m hoping to catch a minute with a contact or potential mentor, I don’t message with something vague such as “I’d like to pick your brain.” This makes the person far less likely to agree because they don’t know what you want and suspect, rightly, that you don’t actually know either.

In that vein, “Hey, how’s things?” is, with notably rare exceptions, a terrible, verging on bullying message to send, akin to setting someone homework. Obviously it’s context- and closeness-specific but why not ask them about their holidays, their hobbies, anything but “Gimme a pithy, breezy, 250-character update on your life in time for tomorrow’s all-hands meeting k thanks bye.”

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

This part is just weird. 1. You can't live in an index fund 2. You certainly can't take out an unsecured loan to do so

“My husband got sold the dream of getting on the property ladder,” Dean said. “If he had put that money into the stock market, it would have been a much better result.”

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

On what Man City's 114 guilty verdicts can change, and what they can't. ✍️ www.linestotake.com/p/man-city-1...

The point of football may be to score more goals than the other team, but the point of football fandom is moments. Glorious victories, agonising defeats and bore draws all shared in the company of best mates and total strangers. Sorry to sound like a TV advert for a mass-market lager but it’s true.

As is the flip side. If the 2011-12 league title is stripped from City, what is Sky Sports supposed to do — call up Martin Tyler and ask him to re-record his seminal “Agüeroooooo!” commentary? Demand that old men in flat caps who went to their graves with that line scorched onto their brains be exhumed, resuscitated and re-educated?

The past is a foreign signing

When we think of time, we tend to imagine it absent-mindedly flowing forward like a river. But it doesn’t, really. Rather, best as we can tell, the universe started out in a remarkably low-entropy state. That is, extremely well ordered. But as time goes by, that entropy or disorder increases: milk swirls into coffee, glass shatters into pieces, tidy bedrooms become messy.

Should City run out of legal road, they could face substantial sporting sanction. But rewriting history is harder. The Agüero moment has already been swirled into our memories, shattered the dreams of Man Utd fans and made a mess of many a football accumulator.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

On reflection, the failure of the Gerard Houllier-Roy Evans joint manager experiment set back the cause of job sharing in Britain by at least a decade.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Because I can’t help myself, I compare it to Concorde in the piece which was also a bit tight (but, erm, you got to fly Mach 2). Poor Sting — he looks so uncomfortable!

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Look what Japan Airlines has done with the exact same space on the same aircraft!

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Good for those with foot fetishes though.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The problem is visible from sea level.

First class passengers get enjoy a two-metre-long fully flat bed and a separate reclining armchair. The logic is obvious: if wealthy people are going to spend an entire day of their lives on a plane, they may enjoy the benefit of sleeping somewhere different to where they sit. No one wants to go to bed on a mattress covered in crisps (or, being first class, Black Sea Caviar).

But the compromise is visible from sea level — both bed and seat look pretty darn tight Compare that with one-bed Japan Airlines opted for in its first class on the A350, with a maximum width of 48 inches, more than double that of Qantas.

The ineluctable problem with two-seat suites is that the square footage doesn’t magically double because you’ve plonked two pieces of furniture in it. Instead, you get a seat that isn’t quite a comfy lounge chair and a bed that isn’t quite a proper bed.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Not optimistic enough to be a buyer at any price.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Some absolutely wild numbers in this Hamptons report. www.hamptons.co.uk/articles/30-...

For every £1.00 invested in the average UK buy-to-let property in late 1996, landlords have seen £22.30 in total returns by 2026 (including capital growth and net rental income after running costs). That represents a 2,130% total return over the 30-year period.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

George Osborne. Quite political.

Turning peasants into Tories

From time to time, and only fleetingly, really, I try to make the case that Osborne was the more important chancellor than Gordon Brown. But I just can’t make it stick. If you grant the Bank of England operational independence, that’s basically the ballgame. Nevertheless, Osborne is a key figure in this story.

In the July 2015 budget, Osborne announced that individual landlords would lose the ability to deduct mortgage interest from their rental income at their marginal income-tax rate. This hurt higher rate taxpayers, who previously could receive tax relief at 40% or 45% but were now restricted to the basic 20% rate. Then, in the November Budget (Osborne loved a fiscal event), he announced a 3% stamp duty surcharge on buy-to-let.

The point of these measures was to tilt the market away from investors and towards current or potential Tory voters owner-occupiers or first-time buyers. That was the tax side of the equation. Then came Labour with a whole host of regulation in the form of the Renters’ Rights Act.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

But with Trump in the White House, the cost of living as dividing line is a hostage to fortune. Plus, sometimes it's the government's job to make things more expensive.

It remains an open question whether a political dividing line centred around the cost of living is a wise one for any government. On the one hand, voters really do care about the growing cost of the weekly shop and visibly wince at the forecourts.

On the other hand, no prime minister is in control of the cost of living, let alone given the proclivities of the current occupant of the Oval Office, who is proving adept at raising the price of everything from oil to government bonds.

And there’s another problem — sometimes it is the government’s job to make things more expensive. The UK placed sanctions on Russia following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine to degrade its war effort and uphold international law, which was broadly supported by the public despite the costs.

Thanks to child labour and animal welfare laws, it costs a little extra to get your chimney swept or make scrambled eggs. Governments have introduced building codes to prevent fires and banned asbestos to cut cancer rates. There they go again, promoting safety, fairness and sustainability over short-term affordability.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

My go-to grounding exercise for when the mind won't damn well sit in neutral. ✍️ www.linestotake.com/p/holy-groun...

I sometimes think of it as a deus ex machina that, if it occurred in the third act of a film, you’d reflexively roll your eyes and halve your emotional investment. It has a name that could do with zhuzhing up a bit: the 5-4-3-2-1 technique. But it delivers exactly what it promises.

Simply name five things you can see, four you can feel, three you can hear, two you can smell and one you can taste.

This may not make you feel better. For me, it sometimes reveals a cosmic background radiation of anxiety I didn’t even know was there. But what if I’d told you instead to go for a run — your first in years — and you returned home an aching, sweating wreck? That would hardly come as a galloping shock.

Grounding is a muscle. A habit. A series of neural pathways for which you may only be at the planning permission stage and the local authority is stacked with councillors elected on an aggressively NIMBY platform.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Spent a fun* five minutes in my head trying to make the case that Osborne was a more important chancellor than Brown but frankly BoE independence nukes any argument I could muster. *in a queue for a pastry

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The driving force was a shift in government policy from 2015, under then chancellor George Osborne. Reacting to longstanding criticism that landlord investors were squeezing out first-time buyers, he used his Budget to phase out tax relief on mortgage interest costs for individual buy-to-let owners. This left landlords who owned within a company still free to deduct these costs, and set the stage for the subsequent growth of the professional, incorporated landlord, often with larger portfolios.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I have questions about the Instagram algorithm and what it thinks I get up to on weekends.

Australian government warning me to stay alert at intersecting runways

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I cannot stress this enough, people: do not pick your mortgage provider on the basis of who will give your frequent flyer points.

And it can lead to some truly dismal decisions, such as taking out a mortgage with a particular provider because they offer you airline points with each monthly payment. Now, I’m not a financial advisor but picking your mortgage seems too important to be decided by maybe getting a slightly cheaper holiday but you maybe also lose your home?

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Uber driver: “What the heck are y’all doing in Houston for a weekend?” Me, ashen faced: "It was the only destination with Avios availability." ✍️ www.linestotake.com/p/why-im-qui...

“What the heck are y’all doing in Houston for a weekend?” I remember this question, posed by the Uber driver as he skilfully navigated the maze of short-term parking around George Bush Intercontinental Airport, for a couple of reasons. First, because you don’t forget your first-ever Texas “y’all”. And second, because there was no good answer.

A city break in Paris or Prague, why not? Even New York is doable if you don’t mind the jet lag or $30 Big Macs. But the sprawling, business-oriented capital of the southern US? That is sure to invite a sceptical eyebrow, not least from the locals.

I wish I could have told the driver that I was a consultant for one of the oil majors or a glutton for Texas barbecue. But on the basis that I’d never see him again and the truth is the easiest thing to remember, I blurted it out: “This was the only destination for which British Airways still had Avios availability.”

And this is how I came to celebrate my 30th birthday surrounded not by friends or family, but in downtown Houston with 40,000 or so Astros fans, eating hot dogs and trying to establish the rules of baseball.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Who needs reasons when you’ve got protein rice?

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

‘omg guys, things are so much worse than we thought’ only works if you actually plan to do something about it.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

‘omg guys, things are worse than we thought’ only works if you actually plan to do something about it.

You don’t need access talks with civil servants to know that the public finances are in a mess, bond yields are uncomfortably high and spending pressures — from an ageing population to climate and defence — are only rising. The OBR publishes documents to this effect multiple times a year, as do a range of widely respected think tanks.

“Things are worse than we thought” only works if you actually go on to do the difficult things, which on the broad-based taxes, the government has ruled out. And we’ve been here before, right? Following the 2024 election, Rachel Reeves did the ‘omg guys, things are worse than we thought’ thing, to understandable eye-rolling.

But did she use it to do politically painful things like raising income tax or did she scramble around for random pots of money, such as farmers’ inheritance tax, which required an awkward U-turn and in any event was never going to raise the sort of sums required?

Healey appears to want the political benefit of saying the situation is worse than expected without accepting the political consequences that ought to follow. If the public finances really are in such a parlous state, then he must raise serious money, make deep cuts to spending or accept the market reaction to doing neither.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

This is like when I started a chant at Highbury (North Bank, upper) vs Lokomotiv Moscow in 2003.

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Jack Kessler @jackkessler.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Though on one of the rare occasions she did so, she contrived to text Greg Hands by mistake, which was then read out by George Osborne in the chamber. I kept the Hansard, as a memento.