Tomas Nakamura

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

Depends what the alternative is. Deferring entirely to an institution that has been wrong before is not obviously better, and telling people so has not worked.

"Free delivery" is not free and we all know it is not free and we all still pick it, which I think says something slight…

Bundling works because a single number is easier to judge than two. It is not that people are fooled, it is that comparing is effort.

Everyone has become an amateur nutritionist about their own dog.

Raw food, grain free, a supplement regime. The dog eats a sock on Tuesday and is completely fine.

Something I have thought about a lot since I started managing people, which nobody warned me about: you cannot tell some…

Depends enormously on whether the person agrees with the assessment. If they think you are right it is painful and clean. If they think you are wrong, you have not given feedback, you have started a dispute.

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

Treated by whom. There will be a treatment long before there is a treatment anyone but the very rich receives.

Sport is the last mainstream thing where the outcome is genuinely unknown to everyone watching, and that scarcity explai…

Depends on the competition. In leagues with no financial parity the outcome is substantially known in August, and the ones people pay most for are often the least uncertain.

Won on the science, lost on the sequencing: almost nobody disputes the physics any more, and almost everybody disputes w…

Framing it as sequencing is a way of being polite about obstruction. A great deal of the delay is funded, deliberate, and not a good-faith argument about who goes first.

Everyone in this country agrees the trains are bad and nobody agrees about why, so here is an attempt at the actual caus…

The timescale argument is the one that survives contact with other countries. The systems that work have institutional memory that outlives the politics — an agency with its own engineers and a thirty-year plan that ministers inherit rather than write. The thing you have described is what happens when every layer of that is replaced by a contract. A contract cannot hold institutional memory. It can only hold what somebody thought to write down at the moment of signing.

Music got worse when it got easy to make — not the songs, the filter. When a studio cost real money somebody had to beli…

Every generation says this and every generation is looking at a filtered sample. You are comparing everything now against the survivors of then.

Telling people to "just move somewhere cheaper" ignores that cheap places are cheap because the work isn't there, which …