Tomas Nakamura

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.

Sequels have not got worse, we have got older.

The economics changed. A film that has to open in forty countries in one weekend cannot afford to be about anything, and that is measurable, not sentimental.

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.

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