"After the 2008 financial crash, unlike many other countries the UK decided to have massive cuts to public spending instead of stimulus."

There were no cuts in public spending, let alone massive ones. Public spending increased, in real terms, just at a slightly lower rate than Gordon Brown.

If you've got some old code, when you have to change it, then rewrite that part of into Java and have COBOL call it. Do this until most of a program is in Java then rewrite the rest.

There's really not much point in rewriting working code. You don't know COBOL? Learn it.

The first iPhone was actually lame and didn't sell very well. It was only when they released the 3G model the following year that it took off.

VR has been around for slightly longer than the web was a thing. There's an old UK ad featuring VR from 1995

The major problem is that people hate wearing headsets more than they love "spatial". Like, people enjoyed 3D for a short spell, then it was gone. And 3D glasses are much less of an imposition than a headset.

And if anyone is going to make this work, it's Steam, because that's the gaming platform, and gaming works better than anything. And people don't care about VR gaming much, either.

This isn't a "CNN is bad" or "Fox is bad" or "The MSM is bad". I'm talking about the whole concept of news. Something where people put together a daily or weekly or hourly show based on things they've received.

For one thing, almost nothing in "the news" needs to get to you that day. Joe Biden has Covid? Think about it. If you knew about this tomorrow, would it matter? Or next week, or frankly, if you didn't know at all.

But the other thing is that shock sells which distorts reality. Parents want their schools turned into fortresses because of school shootings, but in reality their kid is much more likely to die in their neighbour's swimming pool. Or because of medical malpractice. Or someone using their phone while driving.

Finally, most journalists in most media don't properly understand what they're writing about and when they talk to experts, they don't really get it, but just write something based on it that is entertaining

The best writing today is experts doing brain dumps. People who have other jobs and then just write about things. Like accountants writing about a tax law or economists writing about the economy. Many of them are good at dismantling the entertainment and writing something informative about the subject. And on top of that, they write about things that aren't shock, but they write about long term trends. Many of which tell you the truth, like the world is getting richer and safer.

It strikes me that the PHEV is a smart compromise. As you say, 30 miles is fine for what most people need most days and if you aren't going and doing many visits, that could mean that nearly all your driving is electric.

But when you're doing a family trip, you often need a lot more miles than that. And you don't want to muck about with hour long charging times.

I'm not sure what you have, but there are large PHEVs like the BMW 5 series. That's something you can't get with EVs at the moment.

I don't have any car at the moment, but I would definitely opt for PHEV over EV.

OK, it's not over today, or tomorrow, but once you start letting bureaucratic parasites into a company, the rot will start setting in, and is hard to reverse.

Companies start off small and lean, they're full of busy people doing useful jobs. They hire people with useful skills. At a certain point, two things happen, the founders leave or die, and the public realises it's a big successful company.

Once these two things happen, you then have management who don't really care that much, and lots of people who just want to join the company purely to earn money, sit around in pointless meetings and drink coffee. These people then try and takeover. Not by being better people for the company but by political games. They try and create huge bureaucracies (e.g. HR, legal, diversity) and then overrun the company. And as this happens, useful people either leave or don't join.

True, Android phones don't get updates for as long, but you can get phones like the Moto G10 for £120, where the cheapest iPhone is £399. Even if the iPhone lasts 5 years, the Android phone being disposed of every 3 years is still a better deal at £240 total instead of £399. Plus, the phone you get in 3 years will probably outperform that iPhone.

I'm not an expert on military strategy, but I have read some military history.

There's clearly cases where high tech wins: a machine gun vs a load of guys with spears, for example. Tanks vs horses.

But when you're at the level of tank vs tank or plane vs plane, one thing that's really important is mass production vs craft production. For warfare, it's better to make something that isn't quite the best, but which can be produced in high volume by not particularly skilled workers, and easy to maintain.

An example of this is the Hawker Hurricane. Everyone thinks the Supermarine Spitfire was the decisive aircraft of the Battle of Britain. It was a great aircraft in the sky. But, the Hurricane was easier to maintain. If the Hurricane took any damage, the ground crew could generally fix it. The Spitfire was more complicated and had to return to the factory. So overall, the Hurricanes outperformed them.

Why do warlords in Africa use AK-47s? Because it's cheap and reliable.

The F-35 is about corruption, jobs and entertainment. Nighttime news doesn't want a boring, practical plane. And the former model interviewing the guy from the arms company or politician will nod along as he explains all the cool stuff it has.

The union that goes on strike at the drop of a hat and has underground drivers on £60K?

The UK has about 20x as much offshore wind energy available than it currently uses as electricity. It could not only supply itself all year round, but export massive amounts too. All for less than the cost of nuclear. Nuclear in the UK is eye-wateringly expensive, despite the government's best efforts to make it cheaper.

And when the wind is blowing, what happens then?

The problem with wind and solar is variability. It's why we haven't scrapped all the power stations running on gas. Because when that wind drops, you need the gas power to take over, Roughly speaking, for every 10MW of wind power, you need 8MW of conventional backup.

The benefit of nuclear power is that it's like gas in that you can produce to meet demand.

There is a shortage of rail capacity.

Prove it. And not with videos but with data. If there is a capacity problem, that should show in high rail prices in the midlands, due to demand, but it doesn't.

HS2 is a scam. It's not just those people who oppose it but also anyone who cares about government spending money well. You can tell it's a scam because they keep rewriting the justification. It started as economic value, by shorter travel times. People proved this was nonsense as it didn't include people working on trains. Then they said it was about Birmingham to London demand rising, but for a few years before Covid, peak demand was falling. So now, it's freeing up the network.

In general, commuter demand for rail is going to crash after Covid. I work freelance. Before Covid, I travelled to most clients most days. Of the work I looked at, I would say that 30% of it was 5 days in the office. The other 70% was either total remote, or 1 day in the office. It's not just going to take away the capacity problem. In some areas it will probably make a lot of rail unviable.

Most of the reason that Apple is doing well today is because of what Steve Jobs built: iPod, iPhone, Apple stores and created a highly desirable brand. Even if you stop doing much that's interesting, that brand value keeps pushing things for some time after. Like people were still paying a premium for Sony stuff in the late 90s, even though Samsung and LG stuff had been as good for years.

You really always need to be within a travelling distance of the office, because you sometimes need to go in. The question is how often, which leads to how far. I spoke to someone about a client 2 hours away and they want me to go in once a week, which is fine. If that was twice a week, it wouldn't be.

I would say that 3 days in the office gives no advantage, though. You're still going to have to live in the same place as if you do 5.

It's not going away everywhere, not even close. I'm looking for a new project right now, and I would say that 60+% of work is remote (or 1 day in the office). Remote work was slowly growing for years before all of this for all sorts of reasons. Most notably that companies didn't have to pay to be in tech areas, so salaries and office rents are cheaper.

It's going to change the nature of managers. The people who rely on presenteeism and looking busy are going to be exposed. These people are desperately trying to hang on. You see them having hour long daily Zoom meetings with a dozen people, as if that isn't a colossal waste of people's time.