Open-plan schools, hospital targets and the gig economy will look like the same idea wearing three hats — measure the throughput, ignore the thing being thrown through.

Open source got quietly captured by the companies it was supposed to be an escape from. Most of the big projects are staffed by people on three payrolls now, and the licence is the only part that still looks independent.

We should be spending vastly more on stopping the next pandemic, and we will not, because prevention has no photograph attached to it.

The best thing about going to a match is the twenty minutes before anything happens, and no broadcast has ever worked out how to show it.

Open-plan offices are the clearest case I know of an entire industry adopting something because it was cheaper and inventing the reason afterwards.

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.

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

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

Youth sport got professionalised and the result is ten year olds with strength programmes and nobody left to make up the numbers on a Sunday.

Being the person in the group who organises things is a thankless job and it is always the same person, and that person is usually tired.

Tipping culture has completely lost the plot and I'm saying that as someone who used to wait tables.

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

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

Music got worse when it got easy to make — not the songs, the filter. When a studio cost real money somebody had to believe in you before you got in the room.

Ask anyone whether they want the truth from their doctor and they say yes, then go to pieces the moment a doctor is actually blunt with them.

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

I want to defend something unfashionable, which is meetings that could have been an email. Sometimes the point of the meeting is not the information. It is that eight people are now jointly aware that they all heard the same thing at the same time, and nobody can later claim a different understanding. That is expensive and it is doing real work. The email version saves forty minutes and produces eight private interpretations, four of which are wrong and none of which surface until something breaks. Then you spend a great deal more than forty minutes finding out which four. I am not defending the recurring status meeting nobody has questioned since 2019. I am saying the calculation is not "was information transferred" — it is "did we need shared knowledge that everyone knows everyone else has", and for anything contested the answer is usually yes.

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.

Does anyone else think we gave up on repairing things far too easily? Not in a nostalgic way, I mean it was a policy choice and nobody voted for it.

I started leaving my phone in another room and I feel slightly deranged about how much better it is. That cannot be right. It is a phone.

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.

"Just be more confident" ignores that confidence is downstream of having been right in front of people a few times, and nobody can give you that. You can only be handed the room, and whoever is giving the advice is usually the one who decides who gets the room.

Public transport should be judged on whether it is usable by someone with a pram, a suitcase and a bad knee — not on its top speed. Every network that passes that test turns out to be pleasant for everyone else too, and almost every network that fails it was designed around a commuter who is twenty-eight and carrying a laptop.

Half the arguments I have with my partner are about the same four things and we have never once finished one. I am not sure that is a problem, which is new.

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