Year: 2024
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A small bookclub
All these novels have fewer than 200 pages, some of them fewer than 100. Together they make up the first couple of batches of books in my family’s Small Book…
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Assisted dying or compulsory suicide?
Do your duty, prepare for your departure. — Tl;dr: Our medical/care system is screwed, governments are all efficiency- and cost-obsessed. They’re fixated on ageing and on the explosion of the…
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How do you fund a monarchy?
There are only two ways: taxation or plunder — In modern monarchies it’s tricky. The sovereign can no longer send soldiers from town to town to extract funds and, since…
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Some bullet-points about regulation
In case you’d got the wrong idea about how the ’regulatory state‘ is supposed to work — UPDATED 23 May 2025. I could update this thing daily. Regulation is always…
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Look like you mean it
Riot season arrived on schedule. — Back in the old days… …lefties used to say things like “the forces of reaction – the capitalists and their proxies – divide us…
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Tape trauma
In the late eighties I lived in the East End of London and I used to rent movies from a little video shop on the A11 near Bow Road underground…
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Eras, golden ages, long decades – periodising the movies
I wrote this to avoid writing about Disney’s big hit of 1946 — Here’s another post lifted from my cinema history newsletter GROSS. I’m reviewing the top-grossing Hollywood movie from…
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Apex capitalism
The Apple Vision Pro represents the end of something. Or possibly the beginning. It’s an apex product from an apex economy. — (updated on 10 June with some new market…