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.

Walking is free, works for nearly everybody, and has no equipment attached, which is exactly why you never hear about it.

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.

I have never regretted spending money on a good mattress or decent shoes. Almost everything else I have regretted.

Small talk gets a terrible press, mostly from people who have never had to sit next to a stranger for two hours.

Ambition gets treated as a virtue and I am not convinced. Half the ambitious people I know are mainly frightened of turning out ordinary.

Nobody knows their neighbours and everybody says they would like to, which suggests the barrier is not that we do not want to.

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

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

Telling people to "just move somewhere cheaper" ignores that cheap places are cheap because the work isn't there, which is the entire thing you needed the money for.

Index funds have made markets less efficient — half the money in the room is now buying without an opinion about anything.

A university degree is now mostly a signal about who your parents were, and only incidentally about what you know. The tell is that employers screen on institution rather than transcript, and institution is set by admissions, which is set by schooling, which is set by money.

A backdoor for one government is a backdoor for everyone, and this is arithmetic rather than politics. A key that exists can be stolen.

Buying a house is the only serious purchase where you bid against a number nobody will show you, and everyone has agreed to find this normal.

You can love the work of someone appalling. I have never once met a person who manages it consistently, but in principle you can.

Half of what gets called "doing your own research" is reading until you find somebody who already agrees with you and then stopping.

We talk about AI as though the hard part is intelligence. The hard part has always been that we cannot say what we want precisely enough.

I have changed my mind about anonymity online, and I want to set out why, because I argued the other side for years. The case I used to make was straightforward. Anonymity protects the vulnerable — whistleblowers, people in hostile countries, anyone whose opinion could cost them a job. Real-name policies were introduced by companies with a commercial interest in identity, and they were sold with a safety argument that the evidence never really supported. All of that is still true and I have not stopped believing any of it. What changed is that I stopped treating anonymity as one thing. There is anonymity from the state, anonymity from your employer, anonymity from other users, and anonymity from the platform itself. These are four different properties. A system can give you the first three and none of the fourth, and for almost everyone that combination is what they actually want. The mistake I was making was arguing about a slider when the real question was who each end of it protects you from. Once I separated them, most of the disagreements I had been having turned out to be people defending different columns of the same table.

I cannot do a phone call any more and I genuinely do not know when that happened.

For most software engineers a degree stopped being worth what it costs. It is now mainly a filter that employers use because filtering is expensive.

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.

We built an entire economy on the idea that people will keep buying things they already have, and then act surprised when the things are designed to stop working.

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.

Museums should explain less. I have started reading the wall text before looking at the thing, which means I am now being told what to see before I have seen it.

Everyone I know who is good with money either earns a lot or was quietly given something early. The budgeting apps are for the rest of us to feel busy with.