Years ago, in the 1990s, me and my boss were looking at a client's rental accounts. He asked was I sure about the mortgage repayments. I said I had checked them with the bank. "They can't be less than the rent," he said, "That never happens. Not on a 90% mortgage." Seems like... ...a small thing from long ago, but we were looking at the beginning of what was to become the housing crisis. On the radio on Thursday, a landlords' representative was saying "but at lower rents we can't repay the mortgage". I was shouting at the radio: you're not supposed...

I remember discussing this with my primary school history teacher in the early 70s. At the time, our textbooks said the world population was 2 billion, but were out of date and anyway didn't really know. Together, we wondered what a world of 8 billion people would be like, but... ... what we didn't grasp was that it was not the green curve on the right that mattered but the red one on the left, and that had already changed in his lifetime & would shape mine. While the total number of ppl in the world matters a lot, it's the rate of change matters more...

Just to quickly unpack the, er, errors here.
Dev did not visit the German legation.
There was no book of condolences and Dev didn't sign it.
Dev visited Hempel, who had met his criteria of not being a Nazi on appointment. The Nazis later made Hempel join the party as a "gotcha".

https://twitter.com/afneil/status/1792615936425439505

But let's have a look at Hempel (and Dev's accuser, who fed the original lies to the GB newspapers. This was the US ambassador, Gray. Gray had extensive connections with the Londonderrys in the North, who were Nazi sympathisers (That's them in Ishiguro's Remains of the Day)...

Students of management accounting should direct their attention to the UK university sector right now as it appears that the extremely well paid cadre of vice-chancellors wish to imitate British Leyland's 1970s coat allocation death spiral stunt, but with a woke flavouring.

https://twitter.com/HigherEd_UK/status/1735401428578132345

Coat = cost

Blackrock is called Black Rock for a reason. This was only one of a long strung of maritime disasters that occurred there. It led to the building of the harbour at Dun Laoghaire as a refuge. It's a harbour far larger than it ever needed to be for commerce or even leisure craft.

https://twitter.com/RobLooseCannon/status/1694598342406271034

In the time of sailing ships, the chances of a shipping disaster were not small but significant. A Northeasterly would drive ships onto an unsheltered lee shore composed entirely of rocks and sand shoals, with only a tiny harbour at Dun Leary for refuge. Medieval ships...

The competitive destruction of institutions has definitely become a thing, along with an unholy cartel between left & right, whose (remunerative) amusement it is.
The cautionary tale is the dissolution of the monasteries, which left England without a welfare system for centuries.

https://twitter.com/syrpis/status/1650785184843980802

The name of the game is the transfer of communal wealth into private hands, AKA "asset stripping". It has become the business model of a new and pernicious elite, some of whom doubtless sip lattes, whilst others may wear flag print underwear, but in this, they cooperate.

In which Britain has problems with the model that it introduced in the 1950s after three decades of trying to manage the impact of universal suffrage (which only came in in 1918), and the instability that generated in their constitution-free monarchy.

https://twitter.com/duncan_morrow/status/1636286372720914433

That model was the 'homeowners' democracy' model, in which the awkward lower classes wd be bought in by giving them the opportunity to purchase their own homes. Over the following decades, tax breaks and other goodies were dangled to encourage them to buy their way to conformity.

It has come to my attention that, contrary to the express wishes of An Taoiseach, Irish ppl have not been respecting unionism on Twitter as they should. Assuming that this failure arises solely from our own ignorance & backwardness, I have put together a thread to assist. 👇 First, and most importantly, unionism must not be regarded as having any responsibility for the Troubles. No reference should be made to the period 1966-69 when Paisley went around NI, preaching the expulsion of Catholics from NI, while random Catholics were murdered & tortured.

In Ireland, ascendancies rise like fireworks, higher and and higher, becoming more arrogant and extreme and alienating adherents until they eventually explode.

In this decade of centenaries, we are watching the modern Irish ascendancy follow the Home Rulers into the sky.

https://twitter.com/dramdarcy/status/1518001096349913089

It is a lie, written by relics of 19th Century Liberal decency in the Irish Times, that the foundation of the Republic was a war between protestant unionism & republicanism; the real battle was between Republic and Home Rule; the 26 county protestant ascendancy was dead 50 years.

@jeuasommenulle That sounds about right. Noticeable that it's a China backed lessor that has the largest exposure, and I wonder if there might not be a Chinese state sponsored workaround there. @jeuasommenulle Further down the road, if Russia ever expects to fly internationally again, it will have to reinstate lessors' ownership of aircraft. A final mitigation rests in what the insured loss is here; full capital value or lost payments? The latter cd spread the risk impact over decades.

A good question here for the 'large single state agency using consultants for big projects' model.

Does it ever really work?

https://twitter.com/thejournal_ie/status/1453251717512974344

Part of the problem here is that 'consultants' in this context aren't really consultants. What they are is organisations that put together teams of people to do administrative tasks. There's flexibility in that, but there are also problems. Civil services could also do that.

What exactly happened at @uniofleicester? The answers relate mostly to governance failure, leading to poor management choices, leading to declining cash flows, whilst high risk, leveraged projects were committed to. Thread 👇

https://twitter.com/timeshighered/status/1410479028692295680

Curriculum transformation.
The university business model is a simple one. Students arrive, and pay fees, either themselves, or by grants, over three to four years. These are fixed, and predictable. How do you screw that up? Curriculum transformation is the answer...

For the benefit of all our friends in the European Union who may be puzzled by the relationship between Britain and Ireland; the rule is that Britain demands that Ireland not upset it with too much reality, and Ireland usually finds it easier to go along with that. Thread👇 Long history of lies I

1171 - Henry II of England "I am the lord of Ireland"

Irish princes, lords and a couple of Norman ones "Sure you are, grand so, and off you go"

With Covid-19 affecting Dublin far more than the rest of the country, it's probably time to think hard about Ireland's spatial strategy. Thread 👇 It's tempting to think of Covid-19 as a once in a lifetime, extraordinary event, and therefore not something that needs to be planned for, or that can be avoided by actions we take. This isn't true on a number of levels. Covid-19 is the third such event in the last century.

From the beginning it has been pretty clear to most Irish commentators that #Brexit is a fight between the Brits about Britain; the EU is a sideshow. Brexit has forced British ppl to take sides, removed an obstacle to the battle and given them colours to paint each other. Britain has massively transformed in 70 years. It needed to adjust to the loss of the empire which squared a lot of the UK's circles; giving jobs & opportunities. The biggest change was the NHS/Welfare State; a reversal of the dissolution of the monasteries 500 years before.