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On Pensions, Productivity, and Fairness

  Image shows an elder man in a turquoise shirt sitting at a wooden table, working on a laptop The UK Parliament - not simply the current party of government, but the majority of the House of Commons - are, according to an unnamed whistleblower, and the I Paper of Thursday 16th April 2026, all in agreement that the  UK State pension triple lock  - the requirement that UK pensioners with at least 35 years' National Insurance contributions benefit from increases in the amount of pension they receive as a taxpayer-funded benefit rises each year by whichever is highest; inflation, average earnings, or 2.5% -   needs  to be reformed, but are equally  all afraid to come out and talk about even the concept  of reform, much less how it could look in practice. UK State pension provision currently accounts for 55% of the UK welfare bill, at £146.1billion per year. This is nearly double the £77billion pounds annually spent on supporting disabled people through St...
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AI: Its Problems and Potential

  Image shows a black typewriter with a sheet of paper reading "AI Ethics" on a wooden desk In recent weeks on Instagram, I've seen "whatabout-ism" around AI - "You're actually just racist, anti-Black, and operating from a colonialist mindset if you don't support AI",   "Neurodivergent people like me need  AI to achieve our potential!" LinkedIn is overwhelmingly in favour of AI, because of course it is - for people who talk such big games about how "business-minded" they are, how "hard" they work, and how "lazy and undeserving" people who are unemployed or under-employed are, the folks on LinkedIn, especially the white cis men, don't like to actually do work.  They actually have a lot in common with the AI-as-a-disability-inclusion-right ADHD folk on Instagram; "I'm an ideas person; I shouldn't be hamstrung by the fact that there just isn't the time for me to get all my ideas out in a...
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Popular Finance Doesn't Work When You're ACTUALLY Broke

  Image shows a pile of UK cash notes beneath an X on a red circle background I watch a lot of finance videos on YouTube. Currently, I'm mostly focused on Ramit Seti ("I Will Teach You To Be Rich"), having ditched Caleb Hammer ("The Financial Audit") for a very strong swerve to "right-wing screaming", an attitude of "I'm not gonna bother qualifying to actually be a financial advisor, so nothing I say is actually advice", and ramping up from "roasting is a banter-y part of the process" to "this channel is now just me getting to rage on people", none of which are my cup of tea, and Chelsea Fagan of The Financial Diet for "OMG, men are just literally the worst, they ruin women's financial lives, let me just present all the women who've BROKEN FREE from TERRIBLE men! Oh, yeah, the ONLY reason I'm not f-ked by all the debt I ran up in college is I married a rich dude who took care of that for me, but I'...
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The Most Obvious Sign of Classism? The Way the British Approach Bank Holidays

I'm not a Christian, but I follow a focus on energies and expectations which centres a world beyond the one I walk through and work in.   I do not believe I will have an eternal life elsewhere as the form of "myself" people who knew me in life would immediately recognise, but I do believe some aspect of me - what people mean when they talk about a 'soul' - will  endure, in some altered form.  I believe everyone's essence and energy endures, as part of the collective unconscious, the source of those moments of inspiration, those sudden thoughts, those flashes of insight, that the living feel "come out of nowhere." Good Friday, for me, isn't about commemorating the Christian God. But it is  a position in liminal time - a period where the energies of the physical world shift, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes more noticably.  And, for me, whose focus includes a Dedication to a Goddess of Death, it is a day to centre and honour death. To become comf...
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Burnout, but it's life, not just the job

  Every article that comes up when you search "How to recover from burnout" is either just the usual bare-minimum basic "human life maintenance" of "oooohhh, get enough sleep! Eat fruit and veggies! Exercise! Be outside! THERAPEEEEE!!!!" - okay, tell the "get enough sleep" to my insomnia.  I go to bed around 10pm routinely. I don't scroll my phone or bop about on my laptop when I'm settling to sleep. I know I need to have background noise, so I set that up before I settle down. I take half an hour before I start to try to sleep, I check in with whether I need more/fewer blankets, or if I need the window open.  I sleep alone (I'm married, my wife and I have very contradicting sleep needs.) I'm a grown adult without food sensitivities or allergy triggers - I eat fresh fruit and vegetables as a routine, daily thing.  Along with knowing my body's tolerance for protein (I have high protein needs owing to multiple physical health ch...
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What's Wrong With Non-Profits?

  In the past two days, two UK non-profits - Access Community Trust in East Anglia, and Well Women Wakefield, based in Yorkshire, have collapsed.  Access Community Trust had been in existence for 50 years.  Well Women Wakefield, for forty. Across the UK, and globally, non-profits are struggling. Many are very close to failing.  That means shut doors, withdrawn support for those basically abandoned by the UK government, and facing insurmountable barriers across every single path to even the smallest success, lost jobs, and unpaid wages. It means questions, suspicions, accusations - not just against these organisations and their Trustees, but against their service users. The most vulnerable in society. Accusations that, maybe, they "didn't really need" the help they were getting.  That maybe they were "scroungers", "skivers".  People who, somehow, were taking things they weren't "entitled" to. The slurs start, even if only in peoples' m...
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