jackharman.bsky.social
Infrastructure finance professional wondering why Anglosphere costs are so high
4,103 posts
804 followers
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Also for cats
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Oy
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Hey, be fair to the rest of the Anglosphere, this is a uniquely American phenomenon!
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Fourthly, the last several National Statisticians have all come from a *social* statistics not an *economic* statistics background. Diamond, Pullinger, Matheson, Dunnell all fitted this mould. The last NS with some genuine economic statistics chops was acerbic Kiwi Len Cook, who departed in 2005.
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Firstly, ONS spent the late 2000s entirely consumed by a prolonged, difficult (yet Treasury-mandated in the name of "efficiency") relocation of its HQ from London to Newport in South Wales. And it was specifically the London-based economic statistics operation that was most impacted.
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Though it was really more "designated left-icepicker"
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Given the ethnicity of many unionised NYC construction workers...
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ChatGPT disagreed, however
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Nothing too exciting, just the question of whether, when you apply an overtime rate, you multiply just the worker's base wage by 1.5 (and leave benefits the same), or whether you multiply the wage and benefits by 1.5.
Fortunately the actual official document is very clear about this!
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Thanks for letting me know I can get one ;)
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CW not delivered by Crossrail, of course!
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Sincerely a very difficult project.
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100%, though a lot of the new gentrifiers are NIMBYs in my experience!
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In that case, going from zero to all lines restored in 3 years is an incredible indictment of the previous management
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Pretty wild how much progress they have made on ATO since Randy Clarke took over, after zero apparent progress in the prior 12 years. Wonder if they were working steadily behind the scenes, or if he really turned things around. IIRC they said they were giving up on ATO entirely some time pre-COVID?
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They are quad-tracking through Ravensthorpe!
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The option that I'm surprised they didn't take up is to re-open the two closed Standedge tunnels
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I think the issue is that the only greenfield non-tunnelled location where you'd need a passing loop is between Slaithwaite and the Standedge tunnel, which is very constrained due to topography. IDK whether they looked at doing it there rather than quad-tracking from Huddersfield to Dewsbury
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I think the challenge is that, like a state (or really any group of people), the pro-social aspects of a neighbourhood come from people identifying with others in it - which necessarily means excluding others. It's very powerful, but also causes problems
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But also, the UK's problem is not a shortage of social housing - we have some of the highest rates in Europe
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RETVRN
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Oof. Not good.
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It's basically pulling out all the stops short of a full new alignment - electrification, (partial) quad-tracking, station rebuilds, alignment changes
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How big a paper is this? It's pretty astonishing stuff
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Yep agreed
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"it was because of this immigration that No side won in 1995."
When Jacques Parizeau said on election night in 1995 that the Yes camp was defeated by "l'argent puis des votes ethniques" ("money and the ethnic vote"), it was considered a scandal. Now you can just write it in Le Journal de Montréal!
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Quebec is as poor as Manitoba? Wild.
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This was all discussed in greater detail at our webinar with @chittimarco.bsky.social and @calelectricrail.org.
To learn more watch the full video and read our event recap here:
www.seamlessbayarea.org/blog/2025/5/...
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As someone who is actually doing it as a day job, I actually do think the posting is very important (though obviously not sufficient). Politically, it's so much easier to push ideas about high costs now that ordinary people know and ask about it, than it was 10 years ago
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Good piece, and applicable to many places in Britain. Incredibly painful to look at cities with two stations separated by a few km. I think we need a national through-running plan, so we can standardise approaches, learn, and bring costs down