Move slow and mend things!
Public Key
npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Profile Code
nprofile1qqsfshpkuqt6zwmhywrst6yhhm6j9cp6yzvwmag98yhrh2uwk58wlrspqqqev79f
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Published at
2026-07-26T12:44:22+02:00 Event JSON
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"content": "{\"name\":\"Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷\",\"about\":\"Move slow and mend things!\\n\\nBorn at 314ppm CO2. Escapee from Twitter. 🫤 Tofu-loving woke ex EU citizen. Retired hi-tech entrepreneur, once focused on future cities/buildings, climate \u0026 UBI, now keen on saving the planet and democracy. I dream of the day when I can return my focus to my first loves.\\n\\nIf you don’t like #politics, you probably shouldn’t follow me. 😁 Though I do also have a #creative side, and I'm a #maker too.\\n\\nhe/him Still masking\",\"website\":\"https://mastodon.social/@KimSJ\",\"picture\":\"https://files.mastodon.social/accounts/avatars/110/470/228/980/613/623/original/f982c2dfaf927292.jpeg\",\"nip05\":\"[email protected] \"}" ,
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Last Notes npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 I’m left-handed. Long ago, I learned to curl my thumb when using right-handed scissors, so that the pressure on the blades is ‘normal’. So much so that I now have to consciously *not* do that when using left-handed scissors. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 The idea of a totally standard layout for disabled toilets is a brilliant idea. It’s the sort of project that BRE should take on. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 I have a nightmare that this is all a cunning plan, and Magyar will prove to be the same wolf in new sheep clothing. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 We already have a formula for allocating public money to political parties (Short Money). Something based on votes received would seem to be a good start, though it does make it harder for small parties to gain traction. Membership could also be a useful metric. Maybe an asymptotic formula could help, perhaps with a minimum for any party with more than a certain membership? npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 Personally I would love to see Israel returned to its pre-1967 borders, with its security guaranteed by international forces, and severe economic sanctions applied if it ever tried expansionism again. #NotGoingToHappen npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 Julian Huppert (ex MP for Cambridge) used to point out that demolishing and rebuilding hospitals would massively increase GDP whilst improving absolutely nothing for anybody. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 Meanwhile, this is the official (🤦♂️) UK position… 🤬 npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 But Luke Pollard, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry (degree in Politics from Exeter, and clearly an expert on cyber-security) assures us there is no possible problem with giving all the UK’s MoD data to Palantir… npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 I find myself wondering to what extent these AI spamming accounts are deliberately set up by bad actors intent on destroying the FOSS movement. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 The Epstein files have the potential to make the Panama papers look like a storm in a teacup. No wonder the elite are trying so hard to hide them! npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 I like this distinction, but any rule to force a by-election might have the undesirable side-effect of discouraging defections even when the party moves significantly away from the views of an individual MP. It’s hard to act on one’s principles when a) one will probably lose one’s job, and b) one will therefore lose all opportunity to fight for those principles. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 Exactly mirrored in my college in the 70s. The Left played silly buggers in the undergraduate council all year, totally ineffectually, but for the one meeting when it mattered (when funds were being allocated to the various clubs and societies), the distinctly more practical Boat Club folk turned up en-mass and voted themselves most of the money. Pretty much what happens in national politics these days! npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve just subscribed my son. 👍 npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 Part of the problem is that when it comes to advancement those politicians who are completely focused on developing their own careers always have an advantage over those who are ‘distracted’ by trying to do their job as good MPs. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 A possible answer to that question is that government ownership might ossify a particular solution, preventing innovative alternatives from emerging. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 In a more rational world, all employees would be paid genuine living wages, and otherwise-unviable businesses deemed valuable to society would get government subsidies. #dreaming npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 What new fresh hell is this? No, YouTube, I will not turn off my VPN just so you can track me better! npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 I’ve just asked a German about their rules… npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 Is it certain that 16-18 age group will fall to the the left? There seems to be a scary pro-Andrew Tate faction in that demographic. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 Good point. A system that ‘automagically’ registered some voters but not others would lead to more confusion and errors. Census data is the closest we get to a universal database, but that is only valid for the date of the census, and happens once in a blue moon. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 I have a half-formed thought about what is going wrong with the world, which I think deserves to be explored further. Comments and suggestions welcome… npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 Agreed Chris. Being unable to carry enough of your 403 MPs to pass your most major piece of legislation, and being forced to back down on its content not once but twice sounds like a major misstep to me, especially as what Starmer was trying to do was deeply unpopular in the country. And there is still scope for further misstepping on the issue once the promised review is published. So frustrating! npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 You make good points. Could it be fixed by making the rule that the new dwellings have to be built in areas where the average price is say 20% or 30% above the national average? npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 I wonder whether it would be feasible to levy capital gains taxes on annual increase in capital value, rather than only when the gain is realised? npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 I fear that come the next election we’re going to need a pact between Greens and Lib Dems if we’re not going to split the Left and let Reform in. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 I wish I had your confidence! npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 Whilst that is true, bots can force themselves onto any timeline they can see, and they could easily build a tree of accessible accounts. And that tree-building only needs to be done once, to be used by any new bot account. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 I’ll have another read when I’m more awake. Or is that ‘woke’? 😁 npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 That article doesn’t seem to cover the point that government debt *has* to increase to fund growth, otherwise there is insufficient money in circulation to pay for the new goods and services. Maybe that’s not part of the MMT cannon? Or maybe I just missed that part of the article. 🤷 npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 Labour Party Conferences put forward a lot of the right ideas. It’s time the leadership stopped ignoring what is decided there. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 I have long advocated that stabilising house prices should be a key economic target for Governments, achievable mainly by building the correct amount of publicly owned properties (what we used to call council houses), but also by addressing second home ownership and similar market distortions. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 Can you imagine the reception Nye Bevan’s pitch for the NHS would have got from this Cabinet? Labour has completely lost the plot. LINO indeed! npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 For those who don’t know, currency hedging is a service which (in its useful form) allows companies with a future liability in a foreign currency (for example to buy electronic components) to buy forward enough currency to meet their obligations. That fixes into their own currency the price they will have to pay, allowing them to plan their profit margin, transferring any risk that exchange rates will move against them. Or alternatively, to fix incoming payments, too. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 A great read! The only sentence I disagree with is “In the financial economy, it is a zero-sum game, where the winner takes the losers’ money.” That’s not totally true. The financial economy has to make a profit, and it does so by extracting some of the profit from the real economy. It is in fact largely parasitical. Yes, some services such as insurance and currency hedging are worth paying for, but many are not, and in fact do great damage. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 A member of Westminster’s Fire Safety Committee told me after Grenfell that a Tory on the committee expressed shock at the realisation that what their committee decided had real-world consequences. Apparently, he had believed politics was all just a game. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 I wouldn’t mind PPP so much if it was genuinely a partnership of equals, but politicians and civil servants are such unequal amateurs in the partnerships it’s like watching people entering a tank full of piranhas. npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 Cheezus! Private-Public “Partnerships” for finance. Could this Labour lot become any more Tory? Are they going to repeat *every* mistake the Tories made? npub1npwrdcqh5yahwgu8qh5f00h4ytsr5gycah6s2wfw8w4cadgwa78qvet4lp Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 You see, impatience! Corbyn’s policies were outside the Overton Window. He wasn’t the ‘first step’, he was a wild leap into the unknown (at least that’s how the electorate saw it).
