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I kind of miss 'to be consistent with my life's work here is my criticism of this thing' kerfuffles. I think there's far more people who think they have been reading and listening to criticism than have actually been doing so.

And this 'un too youtu.be/lW0mITsVruc?...

Why yes, I am still at work and am relying on fossilised indie unearthed from some kind of floppy fringed bower to get me through.

And this too youtu.be/1lDD968k99c?...

As is this youtu.be/Hke980YE3xo?...

This is such a tune youtu.be/dG65eqfg6bc?...

Large language models are very environmentally destructive Paris in the the Spring machines

I'm not sure when 'nice to have' things acquired the meaning 'pathetic wastes of time and resources'. The 'nice' bit is the important bit. I keep thinking of the millions of folks in the UK for whom nothing nice has happened for ages. Not 'some other necessity disquised as nice' but genuinely nice

I'm not entirely sure exactly when it was declared anathema to believe that part of being a socialist was considering how to make it possible for more nice things to happen for people for whom nice things often do not happen. But it really should be central. Nice things are what people deserve.

I don't know if we ever really had the knack of giving young people in England anything nice, but I feel like it might be time to start. I think they all deserve something nice for a change.

I do not think either of us think that'd be nice.

What I think I would really like is for the British state to give young people more things which are nice which they will remember with fondness into adulthood. It feels like a long time since we as a society collectively gave young people something nice.

Silly policy idea: every young person from age 11 to age 18 gets to spend a week doing out doors-y stuff at a residential retreat/youth hostel/outward bound centre somewhere in the countryside. This includes young people who are working. Just a week, expenses paid, doing fun outdoors-y stuff.

From simple off-the-shelf elements arranged around a 4/4 synthetic kickdrum the 12" created a world where emancipation and transformation seemed possible: initially while the tune itself was infinitely extended, rising and falling, but then inside as a new world beyond the run out gained purchase

*entirely

This is worth your time. The primary argument for 'sorting out social care' is that people who need social care will benefit from social care. It really is that simple. How you get people who don't care about people who need or would benefit from social care to care is another question entitely.

Attitudes to mental ill-health and the fact that it's complex, difficult and doesn't just go away create the conditions for everyone just to 'have a reckon'. It's amazing how many people believe the solution would be to 'just do that one ill-informed thing I think sounds about right'

When we want to spend less supporting those who experience mental ill-health, policy is usually rejigged to some how argue out of existence needs that have previously been regarded as legitimate. This can only be done where there's enough people who believe that mental ill-health is not 'real'

Politics hates mental ill-health as a subject because mental ill-health is an area where there are not simple answers. We know what an absence of support causes, but the relationship between spending more and costing less is very much less clear. So it ends up, in bad times, a contested problem

As I've said over and over, governments decide not to spend on supporting those experiencing mental ill health when they decide there is something else more important to spend upon. The most comfortable way to do this is to argue out of existence the challenges people face, disappearing the problem