Startups are a worse deal for employees than they were ten years ago. Same hours, same risk, a much thinner slice, and the exit that justified it happens far less often.

Something I have thought about a lot since I started managing people, which nobody warned me about: you cannot tell someone they are underperforming in a way that does not change the relationship permanently. I do not mean they resent you, though sometimes they do. I mean that afterwards, every ordinary interaction has a second layer. You ask how the weekend was and they are checking whether you are asking because you are being normal, or because you are softening something. That layer does not go away when the performance improves. It just gets quieter. I still think you have to do it. Letting someone carry on failing is worse, and the version where you say nothing and then act surprised at review time is the genuinely unkind option. But I have stopped pretending it is a neutral conversation that a good manager can have without cost. It costs something every time, and the honest thing is to spend it deliberately rather than believe the technique makes it free.

Job hopping is the only reliable pay rise and companies have nobody to blame but themselves. Three percent internally, twenty percent to leave, every year, forever.

Most of what psychology published before about 2015 does not replicate, and the field has been much more graceful about admitting it than any other would have been.

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

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.

Hot take: the reason nobody trusts polls any more isn't that polls got worse. It's that we started reading them as predictions instead of measurements, and then blamed them for failing at a job they never claimed to do.

Most people who say they "believe in science" mean they trust institutions, which is a completely different thing and much easier to break.

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.

The best sporting moments are almost never the winning ones, which is inconvenient for everybody who sells sport.

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

Moving house is the only reliable way to find out what you actually own, and the answer is always "far less than this".

Calling it phone addiction misses it. Most people are bored at work, and the phone is the only thing that isn't.

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

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.

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.

The best manager I ever had appeared to do almost nothing. It took me three years to work out that was the job.

Polarisation gets the blame, but the lasting damage from social media might be flattening — every subject arrives at the same size, in the same box, with the same three reactions available, whether it is a war or a sandwich.

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.

Nobody tells you that recovering from something takes about three times longer than the leaflet says, and that the last third is almost entirely boredom.

Denzel curry is better than lil dicky. They're not even in the same league

If you could only fix one, fix your sleep, not your exercise. Nobody wants to hear it because you cannot post about sleeping.

Every restaurant is too loud now and I refuse to accept it is just me getting old.

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

Getting a GP appointment has become a competitive sport and the people who are worst at sport are the ones who need it most.