iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

My hand-wavey view of this is that there is a low, but non-zero, risk of something like the Kessler Syndrome, but for computing

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 16h

Though, people aren’t necessarily wrong to assign a non-zero price to the possibility that the sovereign in this case would do something like that, since he’s been doing much more stupid things and no one has been stopping him

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The comparison with earnings is kind of pointless - UK pensioners have a lower tax regime and also lower housing costs. A worker would need at least 2X the state pension as salary to get the same after taxes and housing

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I now have an answer to "why did people hold equities instead of buying the bonds in September 1987?"

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Rapidly rising interest rates, a general fear that equities are overvalued in a bubble, attempted political interference in the currency, lack of confidence in monetary policy

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

People making comparisons with the dot com bubble are using the wrong crisis. The strongest similarity is with 1987, which was in many ways a nothing burger. Though it didn’t feel like it at the time

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

“Brexit made us a bit worse off, so we are going to have to end the triple lock sooner,” is a really important lesson that the electorate do need to be told, especially if you are changing to a system in which votes more directly determine policy

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

People had plenty of opportunity during the pandemic to learn that everything that looks like an exponential always turns into a Sigmoid

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

You absolutely do not get a £25k state pension in Denmark. I worked there for 10 years and the basic pension is slightly less than the UK

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Now include the difference in housing costs and taxation between workers and pensioners. Workers have to pay housing costs out of post-tax income, and also pay 8%NI

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It didn’t help that the road was narrow and cars were pushing past, so my attention was on that and not looking down at the floor!

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Taking housing costs and taxes into account, the UK SP is probably broadly equivalent to a working person earning ~£25-30k. It’s below median wage, but lots of people do live on that and IMO is totally fine as a safety net

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

They had things like this in Istanbul, but they were a bit lower at knee height and below the eye line. Extremely painful when I walked into one, so it can apply not only to drivers!

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

My observation about the triple lock is that the claim that it’s the lowest pension in Europe is not true and extremely annoying and childish. The UK state pension is a safety net - we can argue about the level - but It’s not supposed to be compared to a contributory occupational pension

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

This “lowest pension in Europe” claim that a lot of people make is not true and is annoying. You’re comparing a basic UK state pension with a contributory system more like a private pension. I worked in Denmark, and the basic pension I am entitled to from that is less than the UK equivalent

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

What really hits is when you realise that countries are themselves examples of such “clubs”

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Only sometimes of software. Why would you think that?

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

This is a correct take. I did appreciate his recent interview in which he specifically called out Hinton when he said a few years ago that there will be no need for radiographers by now

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

What are “real people”? Do myself and my approximately 200 neighbours not count?

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Is the government’s penny dropping a good thing or a bad thing for those of us who already noticed? Will they encourage that behaviour, or seek to shut it down?

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The government could literally go "20% off your IHT bill if you participate." Kind of like what they did with the AIM thing, but more intentional and better organised for the average person

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Obviously the concept that housing can permanently grow in real terms and more than wages does demand some explanation, but those who believe it are rarely pushed on this

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I agree. The government should be figuring out how to tell people it's not true any more and change this culture

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I don't disagree, but moving homes is always going to be a pain and many won't want to do it, or are already living in their ideal place. The point would be to release equity without requiring them to move

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

A logical consequence of this is that you used to buy a house in order to become rich. Now you have to become rich first before you can buy a house. Many people haven't caught on and are still trying to do things in the wrong order

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Cladding isn't a problem for new builds and 1 & 2 often both have the same cause and resolution: gas-communal heating. I pay nearly £100/month just because a gas boiler exists in my building, which is also useless at cooling it down. Replace gas by a heat pump and the costs and temperature both fall

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I toy with the idea that a really good thing the government could do is create, regulate, incentivise and backstop an easy and fair equity release product to encourage older homeowners to get their cash out and into the economy. Could use a bit of the tax-stick to further incentivise this behaviour

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

There should be a mini-scandal about communal gas heating systems IMO though. As a country we don't talk enough about the scam that the gas lobby has perpetrated by locking us (not just flat-dwellers) into their legacy infrastructure with FUD

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Yes! You are probably better off these days stacking your pension and ISA instead of building house equity, but almost nobody does it

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I want the crash TBH: bought a shared ownership in 23 on the smallest possible share. The reason is it de-risked building equity against a likely falling market, and gives option to buy more If conditions become favourable. But it depends on the surveyor value being In line with the actual market

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

A very relevant question for me is how are RICS surveyors reacting to this situation in their price estimates? Are they being realistic and marking them down, or are they also staying stubbornly high?

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

What happens to prices after a lot of unsold inventory builds up?

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Austerity 2.0: this time the guy doing it is wearing a red rosette and has a northern accent

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The root cause of everything being a bit shit is we thought were could be prosperous by selling each other houses, and the government kept trying to make it happen. Please, just let the market correct so we can finally get out of the mess, don’t prop it up

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Seeing all the policy wonks explaining how Burnham is right to pump house prices up and thus make me poorer because developers can‘t make money if property prices fall makes me want to yeet my phone across the room

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

From outside, the Shor analysis of the US seems dumb. We watched A Time to Kill yesterday - filmed in the 90s and set in the 80s. There’s a diner scene between McConaughey and Bullock where he’s complaining about city liberals - it could have been set yesterday. It’s not a recent change

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Speaking of Blackadder - why is it not in this list?

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

ha - I think the early Thick of It are the best, apart from the episode in the final series when Tucker lays it all out at the inquiry - the politics equivalent of the final Blackadder scene

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

More importantly, how is Veep so far above The Thick of It?

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Another problem the very progressive tax rates creates is if you are self-employed or otherwise earn a lot one year and not very much the next you will pay *a lot* more tax than if you earned the average of those amounts consistently. It incentivises against risk taking

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The median London full time worker must by now be a higher rate tax payer, no? Median London FT salary was 49.7 last year and wage growth is around 4%. Frozen thresholds are broadening the base slowly, but I don’t think it’s as simple as “people are under taxed”

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The freezing of the tax thresholds is exactly the policy to reverse the Osborne tax cuts though. They are literally doing it. The optics of raising the base rate are terrible, and if you raise the upper end it isn’t broad based and makes the problem worse. Freezing is the solution, slowly

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I’d unfortunately, and amazingly, have to swap Bohnson and Sunak in this list. Bohnson was the only one who didn’t get fully brain-wormed by migration

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Building a direct high speed railway link between Heathrow and Gatwick would be an excellent way to solve this problem. But recent history suggests the government is simply not capable of doing it :(

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Schiphol will stop sending them cakes though if they permanently cancel it. The cake orders benefit the bakery trade close to Heathrow. Will nobody think of the bakers?

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

When I was a post doc we used to (semi-) jokingly say it would be less work and more transparent if they simply rolled a dice to determine who gets the grant. The monkey paw sure did curl on that one!

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Without abstraction it is impossible to reason. Software without abstraction is impossible to understand

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The obvious thing to do is to run the model on a set of speeches from Hansard that predate LLMs. It would be interesting to plot the false positive rate over time, as that would show changes in speech patterns

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Pangram is itself a type of AI model, so this is a bit hypocritical at best - if we are to judge people for thoughtlessly using models, that also applies to detection. LLM writing style is IMO quite similar to that of a politician; deliberately bland and making very repetitive arguments

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James Monk @twoev.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

IANACC, but from what I can understand the energy that would normally be driving Atlantic storm formation is getting dumped in the Pacific instead as El Niño. We also had an extraordinarily hot summer in Europe, and I've read the polar vortex is bouncing back hard against that, which might affect

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