- Blog
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Think before you sign that petition
I like road pricing but it’s a big, important policy and – inevitably – it’s a proper curate’s egg. To start with we need to understand what’s good and what’s bad about it. The good parts: It’s subtle. Much subtler, for instance, than the sledgehammer of general taxation. It’s direct. Tweak the price for this…
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Message to whingeing motorists: shut up!
Did you notice the unsavoury emergence of so-called ‘motoring advocates’ into the pop media after last week’s letter bombs? Their disreputable message: “what did you expect? You pushed us around for long enough. Sooner or later one of us was going to crack…” makes me feel slightly sick. I’m a motorist. I drive my kids…
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Adaptation in action
You’re looking at the kind of spontaneous local adaptation that new technology often undergoes after it’s arrived in its intended home. It’s the coin tray of one of those self-service supermarket check-outs. The machine spits your change into the tray and – a few weeks after the thing was first installed – everybody now knows…
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Blue thought
Nothing like 97,000 pictures of the sky from every corner of the earth to remind you that our planet is just a big lump of hot rock wrapped in the slimmest envelope of air.
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Going on strike
Industrial action is pointless, wasteful and destructive – and essential for a healthy society Why do people still go on strike? Haven’t we got past all that? Didn’t we leave the pointless conflict of boss and worker back in the eighties? Obviously not. Cabin crew at British Airways are flexing their muscles (although their strike…
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Leave the Catholics alone…
Should a modern nation allow religious groups an exception from laws protecting minorities from discrimination? Should groups professing essentially 1st Century prejudices be exempt from 21st Century legislation? You can’t innoculate a society against intolerance. It’s probably written into the genome by hundreds of thousands of years of adrenaline-fueled tribal existence and by the pretty…
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What does a deliberative democracy look like?
Well, I reckon it’ll probably look a bit like the last ten days of Celebrity Big Brother. Why? Well, look at what happened: an ugly incident of racist bullying took place on national TV (the kind of incident, by the way, that probably happens all the the time but usually without the cameras) and the…
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Fair enough…
Sometimes I burn a CD for Olly, my eight year-old, to listen to in bed if he can’t sleep. Couple of nights ago he asked me to choose some tracks for him but specified, firmly, “no old men with guitars and no yodelling“. How’s that for an eight-word summary of my musical taste?
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Unhelpful message
There were 11 weekly women’s magazines on the shelves in our local supermarket this afternoon. Take a look at these pics and see if you can find the one that doesn’t have a feature about a celebrity eating disorder or a great new diet or a dieting disaster (clue: there isn’t one).
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Celebrity democracy
We make a deal with celebrities. We provide them with a good living (often an insanely lavish living) and the proper measure of adoration and they promise to lead their lives like Roman Emperors or Mediaeval Popes. They promise beauty, grace and eloquence but also decadence, arrogance and self-hate. They make a very public gift…