Every government IT project fails the same way and everybody involved can describe the failure in advance, which is the part I cannot get past.

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

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

Genuine question: has anyone actually changed their mind because of something they read online? Not softened, not "considered" — changed.

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.

Nobody finishes books and we have all quietly agreed to lie about it.

Cities that solved housing did it by building an unremarkable amount of unremarkable housing for a very long time, which is why nobody can point to a dramatic example. The absence of a dramatic case is the finding, and it is also the politics: a policy whose costs are immediate and local and whose payoff is twenty years out is the hardest thing an elected person can attempt.

Nostalgia is mostly just not paying attention now. The past feels richer because it has been edited down to the good bits and you were not doing the admin.

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.

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.

Antibiotic resistance is the slowest emergency we have and being slow is the entire problem. Nothing that takes thirty years to arrive ever gets a budget.

Your council decides more about your actual week than Parliament does — the bins, the buses, whether the road gets fixed — and you probably can't name a single councillor.

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.

The algorithm has quietly killed the thing where you find something you were not looking for. Every recommendation is a slightly worse version of what I already like.

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.

That dentistry sits outside the NHS is the strangest line anyone has ever drawn through a human body. Teeth are in there. They hurt. Nobody can explain it.

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

F1 drivers are athletes in exactly the same sense footballers are, and the people who scoff have never held their neck steady at 4g for two hours in fifty degree heat.

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 has become an amateur nutritionist about their own dog.

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.

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

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.

Are smart wearables a fad?