Most advice on how to argue better assumes both people want to find out what is true, and in most real arguments at least one person is defending a position they have already told other people they hold.

Nobody has ever explained to me why we accept that a phone lasts three years.

Inheritance decides more about how someone's life goes than education does, and we spend all our time arguing about schools because that is the lever we are allowed to touch.

Most productivity advice is survivorship bias with a system bolted on. Setting the system up feels like work, which is the whole appeal.

First past the post keeps producing governments that most people voted against, and we keep describing this as stability.

UPI is the best thing an Indian government has built in my lifetime and it isn't close. A billion people moving money for free while most of the world still pays a card company three percent to do the same job.

Cricket commentary has got unbearable. Nobody describes anything any more, they just wait for a stat to read out.

The best decisions get made quickly. The ones that drag on for months usually dragged because nobody wanted to say the obvious thing out loud.

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.

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

Lower league football is better to attend and worse to watch, and the people who only do one of those never believe the other.

Football has too much football now.

Every handover document is written by somebody who has already mentally left, which is why none of them are any good.

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

Term limits, everywhere, no exceptions. Nobody should be able to build a forty-year career out of a job that was meant to be temporary.

I have started saying "I don't know" out loud in meetings and conversations and it has been quietly transformative, which I did not expect.

Software has got worse. Everything is a web page in a costume now — slower to open, does less, and it wants an account before it will tell you the time.

A cricket match that ends in a draw is a better result than most wins and this is the single hardest thing to explain to anyone who did not grow up with it.

AI is going to destroy more jobs than it makes. Every previous wave moved people up a ladder; this one is coming for the rungs.

The state of the roads is the most politically radicalising thing in this country and nobody in national politics has noticed.

Follow the rules that make no sense anyway. The alternative is everybody deciding privately which ones are silly, and that unravels faster than you would think.

Years of reading about the Grenfell inquiry, on and off, and the thing that has stayed with me is not the cladding. It is that everybody involved was following a process. The manufacturers tested to a standard. The certifiers certified against the standard. The contractors specified a product that held a certificate. The building control officers checked the certificate existed. At every single link somebody did the thing their role required, and the result was a building that burned in a way everyone had been told was impossible. That is much more frightening than corruption. Corruption you can find and remove. A system where every participant discharges their duty correctly and the aggregate is catastrophic has no villain to sack, and no obvious repair. The inquiry's recommendations are mostly more checks, and I do not know what else they could have been. But every one of them adds a person who will be able to say, honestly, that they did their part.

Football was better without VAR and I will not be moved on this. You cannot celebrate on a three minute delay.

Running is boring and that is the entire point. Every attempt to make exercise entertaining has produced something people stop doing in March.

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.