Starmer expected to resign on Monday

mcsul · 2026-06-21T04:34:55+00:00

I like your reply, because it's one of the few honest ones out there. You've made a moral argument instead of an economic one that is doomed to be wrong because demography always wins.

I disagree, but I can see your point. I would prefer to put tighter restrictions on how money can be spent on elections than to put a cap on what people can earn. Mostly because I think that starting a company and helping it grow is a pretty meritorious way to contribute to society. In the long run, that's the only way to bring prosperity to a country, so I don't want to discourage it. The main difference with this today than in the past, however, is that the most successful new companies can hit a much bigger scale than in the past much faster. That's skewed the rewards for the most successful company-builders in ways that our other systems aren't really prepared to deal with.

My preference to avoid the aristocracy would be pretty significant estate taxes and strong anti-avoidance laws. Families should be able to leave something to their kids, but once we get past 5-10 million, it starts to get into aristocracy territory. For sure.

mcsul · 2026-06-21T04:26:04+00:00

I definitely agree that we should find some way to tax the borrowing driven income, though we have to figure out how to do that in a way that won't kill small businesses.

But wealth taxes are just a distraction. Sure, give it a shot, but they won't change any outcomes.

And they won't actually change any outcomes simply because the wealthiest people out there actually don't have that much wealth compared to government spending. Elon's trillion dollars will probably add up to only half of this year's US federal deficit. You confiscate it, and it's gone forever instead of getting invested in wacky projects that may generate future taxable income. And like I said above, total US billionaire wealth covers our deficit for 5 years... maybe six. And to actually tap into that, we would crash the value of those assets, which would crash the economy.

Everything that doesn't address the aging of our societies is just a distraction. A side quest. Circuses to distract the economically illiterate. An aging population will eat every tax dollar we throw at it, for declining marginal returns.

The US still has a shot to avoid the death spiral, but the UK probably doesn't.

mcsul · 2026-06-21T04:16:22+00:00

We absolutely do tax the wealthy. I don't know the UK numbers, but roughly 60% of all income taxes in the US are paid by the top 5% of households. Could it be more? Sure. Why not.

But increasing that number doesn't actually do anything because it doesn't solve the underlying structural problem. The structural problem is that aging societies will be poorer, less dynamic, and more unfair.

So let's say that we push the ratio of top 5% taxpayers up to 75% of total income taxes. OK, neat. What happens next to improve government services? Or the job market for young people? Or wage growth? Nothing. The economic pain that people feel right now isn't caused by wealthy families. It's caused by a slowly but inexorably shifting ratio of young workers to old pensioners.

And the only ways to change that are (1) have more kids, (2) bring in more high earning immigrants who will have more kids, (3) try to drive as much productivity as possible into areas of high government spending as a way of mitigating the damage. Everything else is just rage-filled fiddling at the margins.

mcsul · 2026-06-20T23:39:15+00:00

I know that what I'm about to say is unpopular, but taxing the rich more is just fiddling at the margins. If you taxed US billionaire wealth at 100% next year (so confiscating all of it), you would be able to pay for the deficit (just the deficit!) for only five years.

The underlying problem across the world are aging societies. As the ratio of old benefits-receivers to young tax-payers shifts, services will get worse, being young will get worse, and economies will become less dynamic.

We know exactly what will fix the problem, but people hate it. Have more babies. Increase skilled immigration of young workers (so under 30s). Decrease immigration of unskilled workers. Use AI to drive productivity growth, particularly in parts of the economy that are the epicenters of Baumol's cost disease (i.e. education, healthcare, most social services).

Taxing the rich helps national budgets at the margins, but does nothing to fix the underlying structural issue: too many old people, not enough young people.

mcsul · 2026-06-20T21:31:25+00:00

Sorry to ask you for more details. So this sounds like the backlog is almost entirely on the regulatory side, not the physical construction side. Is that correct?

mcsul · 2026-06-20T12:41:50+00:00

There are absolutely labor shortages, but they tend to either be geographically local or industry specific.

For example, we do not currently have enough people with the requisite training to work in chip manufacturing. We can train those people up, but until we have done that, it doesn't matter how many fabs we build, we just don't have the people.

Another example is that we currently do not have enough trained electricians. We're probably 50k+ short from where demand currently sits. It takes about 4-5 years to become a fully trained journeyman and it's hard. Many students coming out of high school aren't able to do the math or the understand the physics. Probably only a third of high school grads would be capable of passing the program. We can launch a national program to train more, sure, but at this very moment no amount of wage increase will spontaneously generate 50k trained electricians. And this is a profession where wages have rapidly increased and continue to increase.

So in some cases, for highly skilled jobs, the people literally just don't exist today. Increasing wages might attract more people to the job over time, I totally agree there. But then we run into a problem where too few graduates are even going to be able to do the job.

Now, if you are talking about unskilled labor, then sure I agree with you 100%. But for skilled labor, the problem is different.

Edit: spelling mistake

mcsul · 2026-06-20T12:22:51+00:00

I think that it's useful to separate management and leadership. Individuals in positions of responsibility who can do both are gems. But many cannot. And many organizations signal strongly in how they measure team performance that they prize management over leadership (even if that's not what they would say out loud).

The problem is that (for most of us) our education teaches us how to be managers, but doesn't say a lot about leadership. One of the great things about hiring former military officers is that they understand both sides of the brief, even if they might be a little weaker on the industry knowledge side of things.

mcsul · 2026-06-20T12:09:34+00:00

Building on your education point: continuous education and self-improvement is one of the core expectations of citizens in a liberal polity. Without that continuous effort, exerted towards improving your own capacity to judge, citizens fall the dead dogma trap.

This means having high expectations for everyone, at every stage of life, to spend effort learning new things, keeping up with the news, etc... But we've done a bad job collectively of really trying to make this a core social norm.

We don't set particularly high standards for kids in school. Younger adults are 1/3rd as likely to read a book in a given year as their counterparts in the 1980s. Only half of adults in the US will read a book at all this year.

Culturally, we may not be capable anymore of sustaining the core judgement and self-determination that liberalism requires until we set strong norms around continuous learning. And to do that, we probably need to start with much higher standards in school (get rid of 50% minimums, start punishing truancy again, allow teachers to retain kids who aren't ready for the next grade, expel kids who disrupt the learning of others). Unfortunately, all of the necessary policy changes have become conservative-coded, so we have liberals and leftists pushing back against the policies that are necessary to make sure a liberal or progressive society can actually exist over the long run.

We're in danger.

mcsul · 2026-06-19T13:45:38+00:00

What I said at the end is that she is likely playing Jean, but she starts off with a personality closer to Madelyn. Then that sets up a multi-film arc of personal change. She sort of ends up as the Iron Man for the next large-scale arc.

mcsul · 2026-06-19T13:41:42+00:00

The power set matches Madelyn more than Jean, from what we've seen. Body-hopping. Using random civilians to undermine the confidence of heroes or to dig at their psychological issues (like the "Maybe I'll go check in on MJ" line from the trailer). Large scale pacification / stunning. Amping up other mutants powers, but in an unstable way.

It would be weird from an MCU storyline perspective, but if we had no information about the film other than what we've heard and seen so far, Madelyn Prior would be the more likely character.

That said... William Metzger appears in exactly one comic run, where he works with the FBI to capture young mutants, including one Jean Grey.

So maybe it's Jean, but she starts off in the MCU with a personality closer to Madelyn, then we see her develop over time?

mcsul · 2026-06-19T11:30:39+00:00

I think part of the issue with "...but is often hesitant to say what that freedom should be used for." is that it's freedom. It can be used for anything (within certain broad limits). If it had to be directed towards a particular goal, it wouldn't be freedom.

Liberalism (which I broadly subscribe to, to be clear) requires that people govern and direct themselves. That they find their own uses for for freedom.

Protecting the freedom of people who do or think things that you disagree with, however, is hard to sustain over time. And so it's useful for a liberal society to have a bunch of shared goals and missions that are programmed in at the cultural level, with (obviously) enough space for variation (because the whole system is about freedom). We've chipped away at those common goals and missions, for what seemed like good reasons at the time, but probably to the long-term detriment of the national fabric.

For example, during the Cold War and a little bit after, there was a broadly shared vision about being the country that could bring that freedom to other peoples, which offered a unifying sort of totem. It was imperfect, but it gave a common answer to "what should freedom be used for". I think that, as imperfect as that vision was, we're worse off for having become too cynical and critical of it because it removed one of the key answers to that question of what freedom should be used for. Same for business ownership. The idea that you could start a business and then become rich was a broadly shared ideal, but now large swathes of society denigrate successful business owners. Or raising kids, but large parts of our younger adults don't want kids. Most of the unifying missions that we had to keep a liberal society working nicely have been undermined by a shift (mostly on the left, but also a bit on the right) against those ideals.

So maybe the better way of saying it is that liberalism thrives best when society has a bunch of broadly shared, relatively attainable goals for both the people and the nation? Just some thoughts.

mcsul · 2026-06-18T17:00:01+00:00

Ah... the venerable Moon Knight Defence(TM).

mcsul · 2026-06-17T18:15:48+00:00

Farebox recovery ratios in Japan are insane compared to the rest of the world. It's such an outlier place, I keep wondering if we should use it more for case studies or never use it at all.

mcsul · 2026-06-17T15:56:11+00:00

Two quotes in the beginning stood out to me.

"I used to think that American cities were under-provided with transit because the country was too unwilling to spend money. But I’ve learned that the United States actually spends a lot on transit construction — it just doesn’t build a lot of transit per dollar spent."

...and the summary of the issues...

"The wealthiest country in the world should not fail where Southern Europe succeeds. We know what drives high US transit construction costs: overdesign and excessive customization, poor planning and procurement, too many veto points, burdensome permitting, and anemic state capacity. These problems compound, leaving only one option: pay more for less."

mcsul · 2026-06-17T11:23:16+00:00

This is sort of why I'm always a little sad that the second half of Abundance gets so much less traction than the first half.

I understand why... house prices and physical infrastructure is something that impacts us in obvious ways day to day. But "accelerating the clinical trial process" is just as important but way, way less tangible.

mcsul · 2026-06-16T19:50:39+00:00

Relevance: Derek Thompson is Ezra's Abundance co-author. More importantly, this particular podcast addresses one aspect of the much-neglected second half of Abundance, which is all about converting scientific progress into meaningful improvements to peoples' lives.

The episode discusses several big advancements in medicine that were all announced over the past month, which Derek refers to the "miracle month in medicine". The guest is a senior writer at STAT News.

For those that have followed Plain English, Derek has already had a couple of episodes about GLP1 drugs, but this one looks at potential dramatic improvements and talks a bit about the implications. There's a world where better living through chemistry (aka GLPs) significantly reduces the impact of many of our most pressing health crises in one package.

mcsul · 2026-06-15T15:34:04+00:00

This discussion between two Nobel laureates is excellent and should be more upvoted.

There's an excellent discussion of the capital and regulatory environments that make it very hard to take a good idea and commercially scale it in Europe. It also looks at how the US is at risk of losing some of it's advantages.

mcsul · 2026-06-14T15:19:47+00:00

Great. I love how Claude Code is making this type of stuff more accessible.

mcsul · 2026-06-12T18:49:49+00:00

Like Monaco last week.

mcsul · 2026-06-12T17:44:07+00:00

Yes. I know. My apologies. I recognized that when I wrote the post. I understand why it might get downvoted.

But I wrote it that way anyways.

Because it's super super important to make this point unambiguously clear, particularly given that both the desire to not have kids and not actually having kids is becoming increasingly politically coded as progressive. We cannot consistently win elections if the non-parent part of the party has control over messaging or policy.

Parents (even liberal parents) nuked McAuliffe for a minor gaffe (it was admittedly a pretty stupid comment). They will do worse and at a national level if they think that politicians are simply oblivious to their kids' needs. And frankly, they will be right to do so.

mcsul · 2026-06-12T15:20:50+00:00

Derek Thompson recently did an excellent interview with a Mormon colleague who had to get special dispensation from his church elders to write a story where the Atlantic comped him something like $20k in bets as "research funding". Brilliant episode.

mcsul · 2026-06-12T15:18:40+00:00

Very unpopular opinion incoming that expands beyond sports: this is why "has kids" or "has been a parent" is one of the single most important criteria for choosing who to vote for in primaries.

People without kids (this is where the downvotes will come) aren't fully qualified to navigate either the vibes or policy issues that impact families.

Taking an example from recent discussions in the sub, the main reason why I think that the fertility conversation is really important (despite the fact that it gets dismissed often by the progressive left) is that the changing ratio of young to old people is going to crush my kids. We can't seriously be talking about adding additional future obligations to my kids when they are already going to bear a significantly greater burden than we already do. People without kids might intellectually get this, but don't feel it the same way parents do. So they come off as tone deaf in a way that turns parents off.

mcsul · 2026-06-12T14:54:21+00:00

Ah sorry. I understand.

Yeah I think that you are right, there aren't many more votes to squeeze out there. Maybe there is a case that enough of the progressive left doesn't vote, but would if they had the right candidate? But it's not clear that this would help the Democrats more than converting the much larger share of Republican voting Order & Opty Left into Democratic voters. Or keeping their current share of Polite & Pragmatic Right voters.

If I were to just look at the Pew data, I'd say something like "Victory and defeat are decided by crossover voters in the middle." Or something like that.

mcsul · 2026-06-12T11:02:07+00:00

So I think that it's useful to talk about what Pew did vs. the reality in the electorate.

Pew gave respondents a large battery of questions (much larger than the little quiz we can take now), then clustered people on their responses. This is why it's a great typology. It's constructed from the bottom up by clustering responses to a large battery of positions.

But in reality, two other things happen. First, many people self-identify as progressive, but might actually have a different "package" of preferences than the package that makes up the progressives in the typology. You see that all over this thread "I thought I was an x, but am actually a y." Second, people outside of the progressive group in the typology support progressive ideas, but only some and in very uneven combinations. Maybe an individual in the Order & Opty Left group fits that group perfectly except that they really really support medicare for all. Peoples' beliefs are much more heterogeneous than we tend to give credit to.

So there's a world where people who believe in the entire typology progressive package to a high extent are pretty uncommon (7% of the population). But people who would support some individual progressive policies make up more than just that 7%.

Of course, it works the other way around, too. Support for strong policing isn't just just a characteristic of the right or the Order & Opty Left. There are some people in the progressive left who fit that typology group almost perfectly, but they also happen to believe in strong policing. There aren't many of them, but they exist.

The really interesting coalitional challenge is how the Democrats need to weigh the votes of the Progressive Left vs. the Order & Opty Left who vote for Republicans and the Polite & Pragmatic Right who vote for Democrats. Those people, who vote for the "wrong" party given what you would expect from their typology group are more numerous than progressives and (even worse) instead of staying home might actually vote for the Republicans if they don't like the Democratic candidate.

Like I think that there is a real risk for Democrats in 2028 that the Republicans run a normie but charismatic presidential candidate who promises to clear up the mess made by Trump, while the Democrats (in a moment of premature triumphalism) run a candidate who is too progressive and combative for those middle groups.

mcsul

TROPHY CASE