Documenting Life

“when the baby is born, that new little person is tagged to the parents’ profiles. Because the government already knows who the parents are and what they’re eligible for (such as tax benefits or social programs), the state can proactively send them money and access to the resources they need. No application processes to be discovered and completed. Plus, the automation of parts of the process have major time and cost-saving benefits for the government as well, with more than an estimated hour saved in application processing time for each birth”

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/estonian-e-government

“Even putting it together as a joke I felt how seductive the biz opp can be, how we’re all constantly looking for our One Investment, the one ticket out of The Rut with all the other wage earning drones and up to the moon with the ownership class, a dream that seems to be slipping further and further away. Wouldn’t it be nice if my own book was the one product that changed my life? What a scam”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-business-opportunity

“The conclusion I take away is that once more, a simple bonus-malus system (the “no claims bonus”) is not easily defeated, and also that most of the time, big features of datasets are big features that are easy to recover from correlated characteristics. (This is what makes me a big sceptic about futurists talking about genetics in health insurance, telemetrics in motor or AI in everything – if something’s big enough to be relevant to pricing, it’s generally really big and easy to find)”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/sheilas-wheels-within-sheilas-wheels

“All of which I think explains why mid-sized regional cities sometimes now feel so much more vibrant than the ostensibly richer capital. A couple of decades back central London did have its share of decent nightlife. But the truly interesting things got pushed ever outwards, from Farringdon to Shoreditch to Dalston to Hackney Wick, as the developers regenerated one area after another. The further out it went, though, the smaller the catchment area – and the less chance of anything really sparking”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/undocumented-side-effects

“Then, in 2022, attorney general Suella Braverman rewrote the legal guidance. It was like someone had injected crystal meth into a clown’s eyeballs, slapped them repeatedly around the face, thrown them into a children’s ball pit and then demanded they write a detailed legal proposition”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/a-good-man-in-government

“I am in my mid-40s, almost exactly halfway between my graduation and my retirement date (LOL, right). I have known precisely three years of sustained growth. I was a late starter, but to have known proper growth at all of the sort we took for granted for decades – centuries! – you’d need to have your 40th birthday in sight. Any younger than that, and you were probably still in education. That is twenty years of adults who’ve never known a “normal” economy”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/exit-pursued-by-a-bear-market

“Typically the left’s answers to this are “protests” and “political advocacy” and “persuasion in all of its forms.” These are all great and valid techniques. But a quick glance at the state of the world tells us that they are insufficient for balancing out the power on the other side of the equation from us, which consists of all the billionaires and all the corporations and all the guns. Is there a form of direct power that we can wield, that will be effective in this radically skewed battle? Yes. It is organized labor power. That is it, my friends. That is the left’s power vector. That is where our focus needs to be”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/theres-no-justice-without-power

“He may well have been from the land we call Wales – but he wasn’t Welsh because Welshness hadn’t been invented yet. The man we know as Patrick was Romano-British, a mix of class status and ethnic group that no longer exists, and which messes with the internet’s sense of how colonialism works by merging both culture and probably genes of coloniser and subject. Trying to map this onto anything that exists today is madness”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/questions-of-identity