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.

Lending money to family, and why I have stopped. I have done it four times. Twice it came back, twice it did not, and the two that did not are the ones that changed things — not because of the money, which I could afford, but because every subsequent conversation had it sitting in the room. The advice everyone gives is "only lend what you can afford to give away", and I think that is right about the money and wrong about the relationship. What you cannot afford is the asymmetry. They know. You know they know. There is no amount small enough to be invisible once it has not come back. What I do now is give a smaller amount and say it is a gift, out loud, once. It has cost me less and I have not lost anyone over it. It also feels slightly dishonest, because I am managing the relationship rather than helping, and I have not worked out whether that matters.

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 budgets for the thing that actually ruins a month, because the thing that ruins a month is never in the categories.

Group chats replaced forums and we lost the thing where a stranger's answer from four years ago was still there when you needed it.

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.

Shah rukh is indeed the last of the stars. Prove me wrong ✌🏻

Try watching a match with the commentary off. It is a completely different sport and you notice about twice as much.

unpopular opinion but most "food deserts" are actually time deserts. the shop is there, people are working two jobs.

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.

"Trauma" now stretches from genocide to a bad line manager, and somewhere in that stretch the word stopped doing any work at all.

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.

Self-driving is a much harder problem than anyone selling it admits. The driving was never the bit — it is the one situation in ten thousand that nobody wrote a rule for.

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

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.

Money has ruined more sport than it has rescued. Every competitive balance measure in every major league has got worse since it arrived, and that is the table, not nostalgia.

A thing I keep noticing about rereading. I used to think rereading a book was a waste of a life that only has room for so many books. Then I reread one I had loved at nineteen and found a completely different novel inside the same sentences — the bits I had underlined were not the good bits, and the character I had dismissed as tiresome was plainly the one the author cared about. What I had actually done at nineteen was read my own circumstances and call it a book. That is not a criticism of nineteen. It is what reading is. But it means a book you have only read once is a book you have read exactly one way, and the copy on the shelf has more in it than you took. I have no system for this and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I just stopped feeling guilty about the ones I go back to.

Within fifty years ageing will be treated as a condition rather than a fact, and the argument will move to who can afford the treatment.

Football has too much football now.

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.

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.

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

The honest reason I have not switched energy supplier, bank or insurer is that it is dull, and the entire industry is built on exactly that.

"Free delivery" is not free and we all know it is not free and we all still pick it, which I think says something slightly embarrassing about all of us.

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