spignal.bsky.social
Charlemagne columnist & Brussels bureau chief, The Economist.
Past stints in Paris, Mumbai, London. Français. Personal feed.
Bio 👇. https://medium.com/@spignal/stanley-pignal-bio-2acd9b705ceb
[email protected]
1,012 posts
14,869 followers
539 following
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Active Commenter
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STOOGE!
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Sure, I agree.
It's just the "EU is undoing the Green Deal" bit I object to.
Beyond being wrong it plays into opponents' hands: "oh the green lot are never happy, when we loosen one regulation they make it sound like we ditched the whole Net Zero agenda. So we might as well drop Net Zero entirely"
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luckily "professional reputation" as a journalist is a comically low bar.
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2012: "Jimmy Carr and those BBC presenters really are awful tax dodgers!"
2025: "so if I attend two Zoom calls a year I'm considered to be managing this nursery, you say?"
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA know the feeling.
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thanks @robarmstrong.bsky.social
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have you given the nice people at Guantanamo Bay your dietary preferences?
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as you "asking for a friend", Christian?
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Cummings editing his blog after the facts to include coronavirus truly was a Moment.
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"40% chance of her leaving within a month" would be the purest form of supposedly-daring-but-massively-hedged conventional wisdom. 40% is lot! Contrarian! but if it doesn't happen, well, you never said it would.
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I think @jkippenberg.bsky.social misses the woods for the trees here.
Over two centuries, Europe became rich figuring out how to turn coal, oil and gas into power, money—and CO2.
It has now committed to net zero within a generation.
*That's* the story, not some acronym regulation.
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I'm staggered it's that high. The installed base is very sticky, so I'd have thought even if new installations were mostly LED, the transition would take longer. Glad to be wrong!
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that seems very vivid. have you considered bringing it up with your therapist?
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Quite possibly the election, also it is fairly normal for countries holding the presidency of the Council of the EU to abstain from signing these kinds of letters. Not a hard and fast rule, but you hear it often. They sometime quietly let it be known they support it, but didn't want to sign.
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I found that NAFO crowd pretty tiresome by about late Feb 2022. I thought Kallas showed a bit of a lack of judgment in the manner in which she engaged with them uncritically.
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This complaint about jargon and acronyms is as old as bureaucracy (whether public-sector or private). All institutions use it. They do so when addressing a public that they think will understand it. People who use jargon that people don't understand naturally get penalised. It's a bit of a non-issue
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Was thinking exactly this. Vance is no Biden, for whom heritage was core to his identity. He's not even like Trump, who cares about it enough to make shit up. Vance is like, I suppose I must have come from this because logically we all come from somewhere.
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We're expecting... synergies!
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I feel like readers need a reminder of what the definition of insanity is. Has any op-ed writer ever opened with, I don't know, a bon mot attributed to someone famous about this kind of thing?
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Looking at the sweep of history, it would be very odd if France had been allowed to run deficits big enough to get to well over 100% debt-to-GDP and for Germany to somehow be constrained by EU budget rules after decades of basically abiding by them.
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sounds like the ideal time to loosen banking regulation!
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This is a gross generalisation obviously, but speak to just about any journalist and they will tell you: women on the whole are far, far less likely to "bluff" about their knowledge outside their immediate field of expertise. I can't tell you why (read Sarah's column!) but it is certainly true.
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Say I'm writing about 19th century labour relations in France.
Man expert: "well my undergrad thesis was on European history, so let me tell you what I think."
Woman expert: "two of my PhDs were on labour relations in France 1850-1890. I don't know the whole 19th century well enough to help you"
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Announced by the justice minister, a tough-on-crime former interior minister, just as the tough-on-crime current interior minister from his former party won its leadership race, in view of the 2027 presidential election.
Expect a lot more panto NO NO ME ME I'M TOUGHER in the months ahead.
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it's all about the pipeline. you have to get stuff onto your shelf that you then have time to get excited about reading.
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That doesn't necessarily undermine the FT column's point about Sweden and the gilded age and so on. But the central, opening argument about there being more billionaires per capita in Sweden than the US looks a bit unproven to me. It may be true, I just don't think the data we have supports it well.
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If you look at the bigshot billionaires like tech magnates, you can decently estimate net worth - kind of, even then it's a lot of guesswork and I don't know how good Forbes is at doing it.
If you look at smaller fortunes, well... Forbes really has no access to any information. It's not good data
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Britain needs to stop being so shellfish
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“Despite the fact that Facebook is banned in China itself, the five most-followed news organisations on Facebook are all Chinese, disseminating news in English” www.economist.com/internationa...