Do you see the moorhen, serene on her nest, amongst all the trash?

A moorhen is nestled into the reeds on her nest on an artificial island made of black tubes and wire mesh, surrounded by trash

The beginnings of foliage

Signs of a leaf as spring returns to a tree in Hackney in front of a Victorian redbrick building

Chicken bucket

Two speckled hens foraging in a green garden bucket in a coop on the banks of the river Lea against a backdrop of cloudy blue sky and a construction site

Forgotten card

A solitary, forgotten Christmas card on a Christmas-red noticeboard stuck with pins

Spring flowers at the Trinity Community Centre in Canning Town

Colourful flowers behind a black iron fence in front of a bunker-like community centre on a sunny morning

Toy duck at Cody Dock

A yellow toy bathtub duck sits on a pre-war red-painted cast-iron crane at Cody Dock

Say AGI isn’t hype to dazzle customers and bamboozle regulators, but something the AI bros believe in and are working towards. They are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to create the enslaved digital entities they plan rent out to do the world’s bullshit jobs. They could invest the money in real jobs to tackle the climate crisis. The problem here is that real workers expect to get paid.

Interesting Owen Jones piece in the Guardian today. Worth a look.

The line-up of British politics right now is right-nationalist/cod-right-nationalist/right-libertarian (Reform/Conservative Party), and conservative/centre-right (Labour).

The Tories’ chance of winning is infinitesimally small. What matters now is whether anyone who wants to redistribute wealth and power is denied a voice in Starmer’s administration […] When inevitable disillusionment with a government rooted in deceit and lacking any solutions to Britain’s woes seeps in, it will be the radical right that stands to benefit.

Apologies for the inconvenience

A fallen notice reads “apologies for the inconvenience”

What does Altman mean by “very subtle societal misalignments”? Valley gibberish, or does he have something in mind?

english.elpais.com/technolog…

Heterodox macroeconomist and campaigner Richard Murphy has produced a Taxing Wealth 2024 report to show how wealth can be taxed fairly in comparison to wages. His worked example restating Rishi Sunak’s tax bill is bang on.

Rishi Sunak’s tax for 2022/23: a Taxing Wealth Report 2024 case study:

The additional tax owing would be £761,378. This is a tax rate of 57% […] The resulting tax liability is fair. What Rishi Sunak paid in 2022/23 was not and was instead an insult to all people who worked for a living and paid much higher rates of tax than the prime minister.

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak paid around 23% tax on £2.2M income because most of his income is capital gains and dividends. Investment income enjoys a huge tax subsidy. Had Sunak “earned” a £2.2M wage, he’d have paid roughly 56% tax1 including student loan repayment.


  1. back of the envelope. ↩︎

So far this year - as of 4 February 2024 - on my daily walks, and every single day since 1 January, at least one car has run red lights on a pedestrian crossing.

Wryly amused at our blundering elite who spent the last 45 years doing more damage to our productive industrial infrastructure than Hitler lecture us that we are moving from a post-war to a pre-war status.

The UK political class has used WhatsApp to avoid democratic scrutiny. They weren’t bamboozled by the tech or confounded by advice from their private office. They knew what they were doing. They knew it was wrong. They did it anyway.

Funny how aging TINA neoliberals accuse the kids of being intolerant of diverse opinions

An occasional series of East London chicken shops. Peck! Peck! by Sutton and Sons, Graham Road, Hackney, London E8. Sutton and Sons is a chain of North-East London chip shops.

Two takeaway food shops on a Victorian street in East London with rental e-bike in front and a food delivery rider.

It seems to me British politics reached its nadir some time ago. And now, various Tory wannabees are wrestling in the muddy slops below the bottom of the barrel.

Average car insurance cost in UK nears £1,000 after prices rise 58%

“Like a lot of our expenses, car insurance is getting more costly. And this is likely to be the case for some time. Claiming is one of the biggest factors when it comes to insurers pricing up policies. And with the cost of paying out for claims being considerably high, insurance prices are going to be too.”

From my perspective as an inveterate pedestrian, car driving has got a lot worse in London since the pandemic.