Most political arguments look like disagreements about facts and are really disagreements about what matters. The first kind can be settled. Nobody in history has settled the second by producing a better statistic.

Anyone else notice that every "wellness" thing at work is something that would be unnecessary if the job were slightly less bad?

We keep calling it a housing crisis like it's weather.

Everything is a franchise now and the honest reason is that an unknown thing is a risk somebody has to personally sign off on.

Peer review does more harm than good at this point. Two anonymous strangers, no accountability, eighteen months, and a result nobody will ever try to reproduce.

Subtitles on, always. I don't care that it supposedly means my hearing is going — I catch about a third more of what is actually said.

Something I keep coming back to and cannot resolve, about the NHS specifically. Dealing with it is slow, repetitive and frequently maddening. You give the same information four times. You wait on a line. You are asked to confirm a date of birth by three separate people in one building. Nobody who has used it recently would describe the experience as pleasant. And I trust it completely, in a way I do not trust any organisation that has ever been pleasant to me. I think those two things are connected rather than coincidental. It has to be procedural because the procedure is the accountability — the repetition is a check, the wait is a queue somebody is being fair about, and the four separate confirmations exist because getting it wrong is unacceptable rather than merely bad for retention. Which leaves me unable to answer the obvious question. When somebody says the NHS should be "more like Amazon", what exactly are they asking for? Because I cannot tell whether the pleasant part can be separated from the part that owes you nothing.

A thing I cannot resolve about giving money to people begging. The argument against is well rehearsed and mostly correct: it may fund an addiction, it does not address the cause, the money would do more good given to an organisation set up to help, and the impulse is partly about how it makes me feel rather than what it does. The argument for is much shorter and I keep finding it harder to dismiss. Someone in front of me has asked for something I can trivially provide, and every framework I use to say no is a framework I constructed after the fact, sitting comfortably somewhere else. What I actually do is inconsistent — sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the variable is mostly my mood and how much of a hurry I am in, which is the worst possible basis. I would rather hold either position honestly than keep operating a policy that is really just weather.

Nobody knows what to do with an afternoon any more. Give most people four unplanned hours and they will tidy something.

Living in a city is greener than living in the countryside, which reliably annoys everyone who moved out for the fresh air.

Make voting compulsory. Australia manages it, turnout sits around ninety percent, and nobody there appears to be living under tyranny.

The best thing about going to a match is the twenty minutes before anything happens, and no broadcast has ever worked out how to show it.

Won on the science, lost on the sequencing: almost nobody disputes the physics any more, and almost everybody disputes who pays first. Which means another decade spent explaining the greenhouse effect is a decade spent answering a question that stopped being asked.

The first time I earned more than my father had, and what it was actually like. I had been quietly aiming at it for years without ever saying so. Then it happened, on an ordinary Tuesday, and the thing I felt was not pride. It was a sort of vertigo — the number had been a fixed point my whole life, the thing a household ran on, and now it was just a figure I had passed. What I had not expected is that it changes the conversation permanently and in one direction. He cannot ask me for advice, because that would be an admission. I cannot offer it, because that would be worse. So we talk about the car and the garden, and the one subject where I could actually be useful is the one we have both silently agreed to leave alone. I do not think either of us is handling it badly. I think there is no way to handle it. The money was never the thing that was being measured, and finding that out did not help as much as I assumed it would.

Watching your team lose is a better test of whether you like the sport than watching them win.

Here is what I think happened to local news, and it is not really about the internet. The classified ads were paying for the journalism. Not the news, not the subscriptions, not the advertising in any form readers noticed — the small ads at the back, cars and jobs and flats. That was the margin, and the reporting was in effect a loss leader that made people pick the paper up. When classifieds moved online they did not move to news websites. They went to dedicated sites that did that one thing well and had no newsroom to fund. So the subsidy vanished, and what vanished with it was the only economic reason anybody had ever paid a person to sit through a council planning meeting. Nothing has replaced it, because nothing was ever paying for it directly. Local journalism was funded by an accident, and when the accident stopped, we discovered nobody had ever been willing to buy the thing itself.

Nobody prepares you for the phone call where your parent becomes the person who needs looking after. It does not arrive as a diagnosis. It arrives as a series of small things you decide individually not to worry about — a missed bill, the same story twice, a car with a scrape nobody mentions. Each one is fine. You notice the pattern about eight months after it started. What I was not ready for is that there is no moment where anybody tells you it has changed. No appointment, no letter. You simply find yourself doing more of the phoning and more of the deciding, and one day you realise the direction reversed some time ago and nobody said. The practical stuff I could handle. What I could not was that he knew too, and was managing it, and that both of us spent about a year protecting the other from a conversation we were separately already having.

Nuclear is the safest energy we have per unit generated, and thirty years of being squeamish about it is a large part of why we are still burning gas.

Football fans do not want their club to be successful, they want it to be theirs. That is why every ownership row goes the way it does.

Every interface is now designed to be learned once and never thought about, which is wonderful until the day it does something you did not ask for.

Cookie banners were meant to give people control and have instead taught an entire continent to click the nearest button without reading anything. We have trained a reflex, not a decision.

We treat mental health at work like it is about resilience training when it is mostly about workload and whether your manager is a decent person.

Every complaint about immigration in my town is actually a complaint about not being able to get a GP appointment, and both parties have found it easier to argue about the first one.

Meetings are not the problem. Nobody distinguishing a meeting for deciding from a meeting for informing is the problem. Half the frustration in any organisation is people arriving in different modes and spending an hour discovering it, then booking a follow-up to do the thing they came to do.

Everybody says they want politicians to admit mistakes and everybody punishes the ones who do, and I include myself in that.