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I picked up my car about 2 months ago, so I’ve put some actual miles into it now, and can assess what I think of it. Previously I owned a Tesla model S 85D, which I had for about 7 years. That was an ‘autopilot v1’ car, so not as advanced technically. It also had radar (apparently) and ultrasonic parking sensors. Eventually, the software for the main screen started to glitch and bug me, so I upgraded it to a new screen, at my expense. I think it was £2k? it was definitely an upgrade worth doing. Anyway, I got sick of the length of that car, and wanted the latest autopilot tech and better range, so sold my model S privately and bought the model Y performance. I had to wait a year! but it arrived at the end of November.

My very first impressions of the car were pretty good. It felt CHUNKY, in a way that is hard to describe. The Y has laminated double-pane windows, so its quieter inside than my old S, and you can definitely hear the difference. The whole car feels really solid. I don’t think mine has a front or rear cast body, but it does feel like its much more professionally assembled than the old US-made model S (made in Fremont California is 2015).

Something I was kinda dreading was the switch from a 2-screen model S, where the main screen tilts towards you, to the super-spartan and flat-angle screen of the 3/Y. In fact… I got used to it within days. Its actually very very easy to use, and I don’t miss the screen behind the steering wheel one bit. The interior design of the 3/Y is a bit ‘love it or hate it’ but I definitely love it. Looking at all the buttons in other cars just amuses me now.

I opted for red, performance, with full-self driving, which is also known as the ‘give me the priciest options because I’m mad’ choice. What do I think of the value for money? Well… no regrets on the red paint, it looks super awesome, especially when its sunny :D. The performance… is a bit of an overkill luxury. Frankly the sensible choice would have been long range. The performance model is stupidly, stupidly fast (0-60 in 3.5s), and absolutely pointless unless you are a track-racing fan. I am fully aware that I did this purely because I hate buyers remorse, and if I bought a new car and it felt under-powered I’d be sad about it :D.

The full-self-driving stuff is even more of a leap of faith. Right now, it doesn’t get me much, except the car recognizes traffic lights, and stops at them, and then pings to remind you they just turned green. This works perfectly for me. The other stuff is ‘coming soon’, which is Tesla speak for ‘at least 2 years’, but I intend to keep the car at least 5 years so I do actually expect to see the benefits in time.

I will say that the general autopilot performance on this car is WAY better than my model S. I drove about 55 miles recently on a trip back from London where I only steered once, briefly to change from a motorway to an A road. The rest was all 100% computer controlled, in the dark, with high winds and heavy rain. My model S couldn’t have done it that well.

There is one small thing I love about it: the charge-point door will self-close after you unplug (its powered) which is super convenient.

In lots of major ways, its an upgrade on my old Tesla. The range is way better, the energy usage is way lower, it charges tons faster, and it feels like the sound system is just much higher quality. I would hate to go back to my old model S now I have this car. I also have greater access to the supercharger network, because this car has a CCS connector, and newer superchargers only support this newer standard. There are now superchargers absolutely anywhere that I’d want to drive, at the same time that I need them less due to the longer range.

To be honest, my conclusion is that I kinda over-specced the car, but I don’t regret it. The autopilot stuff will likely grow into its valuation. The lack of parking sensors will likely be replaced by better tesla vision stuff soon. I can definitely see me still owning this car in 5 years and being very happy. Actually the ONLY scenario I can imagine where I get rid of the car, is if Tesla offer a smaller car with similar range and performance (or a bit less). I live down a single track lane, and UK parking spots in car parks can be pretty tight with the S or the Y. Offer a Tesla model 2 performance which is a few cm narrower, and maybe 30cm shorter, and I’d be very tempted, especially if it was even more efficient.

I actually got the Y instead of the 3 because I like hatchbacks and hate old fashioned boots/trunks. If the model 3 had been a hatchback I’d likely have got one of those instead, as we don’t have a dog or kids and don’t really need an SUV at all.

TL;DR: The model Y performance is amazing, but the performance bit is likely overkill.

I am well aware of the history of the term ‘640k is enough for everyone’, so hold your horses in your excitement to post it as a ‘gotcha’ response. I would like to lay out a case for a big slowdown in consumer spending, and put it to you, the reader, that although often we are wrong when we predict such things, this is not always the case. We have not all rushed out and bought 3D TVs, as predicted. We did not all buy VR headsets. I have still only seen a single folding phone in the wild…

I’m in the economically enviable position of having some spare cash which, in previous years I would probably have put towards buying some new thing that I coveted. Maybe a new TV, or phone, or gaming PC or laptop, or whatever. However, I am definitely noticing that this is slowing down, at least for me. Maybe this is an age thing? but maybe not…

I’ve had a bunch of mobile phones over the years, right back to the first actually practical ones, which were given to me at work when I was in IT. They were big, they were dumbphones (no apps or games or internet access), they were heavy, they sucked.

The first phone I had which was a smartphone was a revelation. Then, the next one was much thinner, much lighter, and much more powerful. The last one I bought was a samsung S8. Its amazing. It has bluetooth/wifi it has a fingerprint reader, it has GPS, it has a nice big screen that does face recognition, takes amazing pictures, and videos, can post-process them, and can play games. I use it to control my car, my drone, my lights, my TV, to talk to my solar panels and home battery, to surf the net, and to pay for everything. It charges wirelessly. I record my weight on it, and my steps. I take it everywhere.

I’ve had it years now, and there is basically no reason I can think of to get a new one. At least not yet. I’m not just ‘skipping a generation’, I think I’m at the end. It would be *nice* if the phone battery lasted longer, or if it was a bit thinner or lighter, but its not exactly a hardship now. It charges wirelessly in my car anyway, and its hardly heavy or bulky. It fits easily in a pocket, but its not too small to lose track of. Its thin, but not so thin I can break it.

To get me to buy a new phone, you need to REALLY go nuts on the few things that would improve it. Make the battery last 10x as long, and make it 1/5th the thickness (but same strength) and yeah…MAYBE I would pay the money to buy a brand new phone. I don’t anticipate this being possible in the next 5 years though.

My TV is a 43″ TV. I cant go bigger, because it fits in a small alcove. We sit far enough away from it that a 4K resolution would be pointless. The streaming apps *are* a tad slow on it, but can I really be bothered to set up a new TV, and recycle the old one, and tell alexa about the new one… just for a minor speedup in streaming UI? Not really. If a new TV was FREE, and had a slicker, faster UI, then *maybe* I’d bother. But my current TV does the job well enough.

Its not just these two things.

We bought a toaster years ago that seems indestructible and will probably last as long as me. My gaming PC has ridiculous power, and plays 60FPS Battlefield 2042 even on a 5120 res monitor. This laptop is fairly new, and amazing, and frankly…I am not sure if there is any improvement that is worth paying for. If you gave me a voucher for consumer electronics that I had to spend RIGHT NOW, I honestly struggle to think of anything I’d upgrade. Home theater system is fine and will last forever, alexa works fine…err…don’t bother with bluray player any more. No radios, everything is streamed. Nothing needs upgrading. Nothing.

Now obviously this is not the end of consumerism because a) I’m clearly well-off enough to have bought all this, and many people are not and b) I don’t know what crazy tech may come out soon, but I am definitely noticing a change…

chatgpt is amazing. midjourney is amazing, but these two amazing discoveries don’t require me to buy ANYTHING. The most exciting tech breakthroughs right now seem to be software, not hardware. When I see headlines about CES (Consumer electronics show), it just seems laughable. They are running out of ideas now. I really don’t need a phone that I can fold. I don’t need a 3D TV, I cant be bothered to wear a VR headset to be entertained.

The trouble is, our entire societal model of economics seems to be focused on selling new shiny gadgets to the wealthiest 25%. Thats how the system works. Bored wealthy people buy expensive cool cars which in 10 years time end up in the hands of ordinary people. The trouble is, we have run out of ways to get those wealthy people to trade in their current stuff. Its good enough. People now want ‘experiences’ not a slightly thinner, slightly faster phone.

And yet… there is a ton of work for society to do. So many people do not own a refrigerator, let alone a drone or a VR headset. We need to be addressing that huge swathe of people without the basics of western consumerist culture, not working harder and harder to make VR and the metaverse a thing. To be blunt: we need cheap fridges, not AR goggles.

In theory you can fix this with a lot of high taxes and high welfare, taxing those AR goggles like crazy to fund purchases of ‘my first fridge’. In practice, I think we do need to do that, but ALSO we need a shift in thinking in modern technology companies. For the last 30 years or more, it seems that the assumption in ‘tech’ is that the goal is always to produce some new, amazing cool thing that wows the CEO and impresses everyone in the boardroom. The problem is, everyone in the boardroom is rich.

The future may not be ‘look at these AR goggles, they are phenomenal’, but in fact be ‘look at this ordinary fridge. It was made for $30’. Thats what we NEED, but its not what we are getting. Companies are more excited about new features and functionality, but never about low cost. Tech companies want the specs on new tech to always be higher bigger, better. Hardly anybody talks about affordability, or how cheap something is to run.

I don’t know how the politics of the future will work out. We may end up with UBI and a crazy high tax rate on a super-wealthy 0.1% of the population. Who knows? What I do hope for is a future where technologists and industrialists care more about what the bottom 25% cannot yet afford, rather than what the top 0.1% might buy if you can make something 1% faster.

What about you? do you have a big long wishlist of stuff you wish you could afford on amazon? or are you quite happily reading this on a 3 year old phone or 4 year old laptop?

I studied pure economics at the London School Of Economics. At least, thats what I tell people when I am trying to sound clever. Technically its a true statement. What I tend to leave out, is that I pretty much lost interest in the topic after year one, and was mostly coasting in years 2 and 3. I went to the pub a LOT, I drunk a LOT of vodka and whiskey. I played the guitar a lot, I listened to a lot of heavy metal. This was all unexpected, because I was super-good at economics A-level, and was destined to be good at degree level. The problem? I suddenly realised I found economics beyond a certain level boring, and too maths-focused.

Annoyingly, the solution to my interest-failure would soon be at hand, because 2 clever people eventually discovered an entirely new field of economics called behavioral economics, which, to my mind, was 1000% more interesting, and absolutely was the sort of thing I would be interested in, had it been an option. But no, the LSE still taught ‘classical’ economics, which focuses on interest rates. Other things matter, but you would be amazed how much of classical macroeconomics is focused on interest rates. I studied it for 3 years. I still don’t know whether rates should go up or down. This stuff is complex as fuck.

Why are you reading this?

The significant thing here is how those clever people suddenly were motivated to invent behavioral economics. I’ll give you the short version, and tie it in to the title soon. Are you excited?

Classical economics models rational behavior. In classical economics, every ‘agent’ in the system has perfect information and is perfectly rational. All data is available, and all decisions make sense. If offered 2 products, an agent will evaluate all of the properties of each of these products, giving this decision their 100% attention. They then make an absolutely perfect choice, based on the cost/benefit analysis of each choice. There is no regret in classical economics, no buyers remorse.

Classical economists were not idiots. They were extremely clever people, and they knew that is not entirely how people work, and that we all make the odd silly decision, but at the macro level, across large populations, its pretty clear that rationality wins out. The best product, taking into account the best offer in terms of features/price will always win. In the long run, rationality rules.

These economists were at a dinner party (presumably where they would while away an evening arguing about interest rates), and the host was cooking the main course, while the guests enjoyed some small nibbles. The guests were enjoying the nibbles, and suddenly one of them concluded, with the agreement of all present, that they should ‘put these nibbles away so we stop eating them’, presumably because they were concerned they might spoil their appetite for the main course.

So far, so middle class dinner party.

But hold on. One of these clever economists suddenly pointed out that this was irrational. At the moment, everyone present has a choice: Eat a nibble, or wait for the main course. This was a simple choice between instant satisfaction or a potentially better option if they wait. They were all adults, they could all make that decision. But WAIT. Everyone agreed that in fact, they would be better off if this choice was removed. They would actually be better off with LESS choice.

On the surface of it, this is not exactly earth shattering, but actually, its a revelation. In the word of classical economics, more choice is ALWAYS good. The idea that en-masse, intelligent adults with full knowledge of the available choices, would be better off if they removed some choice, is a complete refutation of everything that classical economics tells us about the world. It was the beginning of an entirely new science of behavioral economics, which would make its inventors widely read, respected and famous, and change economics forever. It would lead to studies of the special nature of ‘free’ as a magical price, and a staggering amount of research and publication. Behavioral economics is awesome.

Ok, but so what?

What this massive upheaval of literally hundreds of years of analysis shows us, is that human beings are incredibly irrational. We are extremely good at backwards-justification, where we pretend our choices make sense, but if you actually look at how we make decisions its an absolute car-crash. We are massively irrational, and so far from the happiness-maximizing creatures that classical economists imagined. Even given really, really simple choices such as ‘eat these nibbles now… or more of the main course in 15 minutes’, our brains completely and utterly collapse with the stress. Only PHYSICALLY removing the nibbles from our immediate vicinity enables us to make what we think is the ‘correct’ choice.

Social media is the nibbles.

You probably spotted that early. I’m not Agatha Christie here, but I hope the point rings true. Deep down, we are all aware that the amount of time we spend doom-scrolling on twitter is not maximizing our happiness. We know that having twitter and tiktok on our phones is just leading us to waste endless time getting into arguments, or just mindlessly scrolling for a tiny tiny serotonin hit…

About two years ago I uninstalled twitter from my phone. I also don’t have a facebook or reddit app on there. I’ve never used tiktok or instagram. A few years before that I quit an online community that just sucked me into arguments and flamewars. I was aware for a good time that these things were ‘bad’ for my mental health, but they were the tray of nibbles in front of me, so I kept nibbling.

I still have a twitter account, but the fact that I have to go to a laptop or desktop PC to use it means I’m wasting less time there. This is, for me at least, a good thing. I know a bunch of people who tweet at least 50 times a day, always political, always angry, always distressed. This is *not good*.

The best economists in the world went decades without realizing just how irrational we are, and just how out-of-touch their model of human behavior was. We are THAT delusional about our ability to make choices in our healthy interest. Its incredibly hard to take this lesson to heart and actually do something about it, but once you do it, its pretty amazing.

You should delete all the social media apps from your phone.

The year is almost over, so I thought I would recap. For those unaware, as a side-project (yes its a big side project), I started an energy company called Positech Energy, and decided to build a solar farm. This is an epic tale of frustration and expense, that seems to be endless,, but here is what happened during 2022 for this project!

The first blog update of the year was this one, where I talked about the solar panels. I ordered them way in advance, before we actually had planning permission, because I was hoping to slap them in during summer of this year and start generating actual income. This proved to be both a mistake, and a genius move, depending on your POV.

This was during a time of climate emergency, a global supply chain collapse, and pandemic shutdowns, so it was obvious that lead times on panels would be long, so I ordered them anyway. That means I ended up with over 3,000 410 watt QCells solar panels. They did show up! But by the time we got them… we had no planning permission because it got refused. Oh dear…

I initially decided to forget the whole enterprise at that point, and was quite depressed about it. I tried phoning round wholesalers to sell my panels before they even hit the UK but basically got nowhere. I think people can tell you need to shift them, and offered me a pretty bad price. The company that is managing the project for me did offer to buy them off me at the price I paid, as and when they needed more panels. This was good, and put a floor under my losses, but the trouble is all 70 tons of panels needed storing…

To date I have paid out £15,000 in storage costs for these solar panels. Yup, I PAID £15,000 to keep SOLAR panels in a warehouse during summer. However annoying that sounds to you, it sounds worse to me, but there was no other option. Its still costing me about £600 a week to do this…

Luckily, the price of those panels went up, and I am currently still ahead of the game on this. Assuming they get taken out of storage on schedule (hopefully April), I wont have actually lost out anything except the transport costs for the panels to the site. (Originally that was included, but they needed to be left at a port warehouse instead.

So what else happened?

Well hey we WON planning permission in October, which was a very stressful process, not to mention expensive. In fact the whole process has so far cost me £541,568.94, including buying the panels themselves. Yes, this is a stupid amount of money.

The rough breakdown is:

£50,000 grid connection deposit

£424,000 solar panels

£6,795 for pull-out tests to pick the ground mount system

£3,750 in rent to the farmer for the field so far

..and the rest is planning application and legal bullshit.

Of course the good news is that once you have planning permission…you have it. We cannot get blocked now. The ONLY things standing between us and total conquest of the galaxy is the grid connection and the actual build-out of the site. That means waiting for decent weather, because its in a muddy field near the English/Welsh border, and frankly taking dozens of trucks up a single track lane on very hilly ground when its raining would be a nightmare. Luckily, the UK is so situated that solar output at this time of year is farcically low anyway, so its actually no massive loss.

So where are we left? We are hopefully about a week away from a final, committed quote for the build-out of the farm, and then at that point, the developer will buy the ground mount kit, and order the inverters and other electrical stuff, like the substation. Apparently the first thing that will happen will be putting up a ‘deer fence’ around the whole site as security. Eventually we will have either real or fake CCTV cameras, depending what insurers say.

The aim is to get building in April-ish time. We have mentioned MANY TIMES to the DNO that will put in our grid connection that we really, really want to get connected this year, in Q1 or Q2 if at all possible. These is no free-market for this, and its basically a state-granted private monopoly that does what it likes, so we just have to grin and put up with this.

Also, the cost of the grid connection is likely to go up even more, which is insane. For the love of god, can we nationalize this bit of the grid, and just pay the army to go round the country doing grid upgrades as an urgent matter of national security?

Anyway… a mixed year because we DID get planning permission, but there has not been any real progress on the physical build. I’ll feel a bit more optimistic once I actually see people on site putting up a deer fence. I’ll fill much more optimistic when we see the mounting kit installed and work starts on the grid connection.

Hopefully next years update will be full of amazing progress!

I made the mistake today of reading some social media comments (twitter, reddit, arstechnica, slashdot) on a topic I know a bit about and have read a lot of the background on. As you might guess it was an IQ-barren tirade of abuse, uninformed hot-takes and absolutely baseless bullshit. This isn’t new, but I am beginning to worry that its basically the only means of communication people can cope with now. I think that our IQs have taken a battering, but far far worse, our attention spans have been destroyed, which is the first step towards making us even stupider.

I recall a long while ago, when unemployed, and having temporarily moved back home with my mother because I had nowhere to live… deciding that I should learn how to program in C, instead of the Sinclair BASIC I learned as a kid. I guess I was about 18-21? (I’m terrible with dates).

I was poor as fuck, so the only possible resource for me to learn this was a mail-order course which came on 3 floppy disks. I couldnt afford to buy loads of books, and youtube/internet didn’t exist. Eventually, after spending a lot of time agonizing over which of the 3 potential C books I could buy in a bookshop, I bought one of them, which I read cover to cover numerous times.

To people reading this who are not programmers, C is not considered an easy language to learn. Not by a long shot. I’ve heard C# described as ‘C++ but without pointers, because they are hell’. They are not wrong. Pointers are what make C, and C++ a bit of a pain. Once you really get your head around them, they are simple, and easy, and powerful, and you cannot imagine code without them. I still code in C++ all these years later, because I don’t vaguely worry about pointer bugs, I’m just way too comfortable with coding in this language. I find C++ about as usable to me as the English language. Arguably I can communicate in C++ better and faster…

The reason I take you on this tedious heroes journey about me learning C++ is this: Learning C and C++ on your own, with just one book and 3 floppy disks, and nobody to ask questions…is fucking hard. I remember struggling and getting very confused, and thinking it was all gibberish, but persevering, and persevering and struggling and trying again and again and again until finally I started to understand how it all works.

30 years later and it turns out doing that made me millions and millions of dollars, financial freedom, my own business and lots of stuff to be proud of. In many ways, struggling alone with a seriously complex and hard task, and no distractions was the making of me. (In many ways…not just career. For someone like me who is clearly on the autistic spectrum developing expertise in an absolutely clear definite and logical language that isn’t English is very very comforting).

Again.. why mention this?

I just don’t think many people can do stuff like this now, and that includes me, because society has absolutely fucking ruined us. Back then, when I read the same sentence for the fiftieth time in an academic textbook, and still don’t get it…I just had to keep going. But now? Fuck it…whats new on youtube? any funny cat videos? has someone said something shocking on twitter? are there any new stories on reddit or slashdot? Lets check all of them, then lets check them again, and then start again. Certainly no need to learn anything. Why bother? the internet is free, and provides an endless stream of absolutely vapid intellectually undemanding candyfloss bullshit that can keep my lizard brain scrolling and scrolling and scrolling until I fall asleep.

We have all given in. We have given in to the desire for immediate satisfaction and endorphins at the cost of our ability to ever pursue long term goals. We are now short-term to the absolute extreme. Short-termism in politics used to mean ‘focused only on this year or the next election’. Now it means this afternoons trending hashtags. Absolutely every element of society has been seduced by the idea that we can have it all NOW, RIGHT NOW, not tomorrow or next week, or ‘lolz’ next year. Thats just crazy talk.

There are numerous books out there on how to learn C++ in 21 days. Or even 7 days. I started about 30 years ago. I’ve written probably many millions of lines of code. There are still bits of C++ I barely use and am not that familiar with. 21 days? Think 21 years. But 21 days is likely too long for people now. Why learn C++ in 21 days when you can hack together some crappy bug-ridden mess by copy-pasting from stackoverflow!

WAIT

Thats far too long-term thinking. Just use the handy-dandy new code pilot feature that automates the copy-pasting from the internet to ensure there is zero danger that you might actually learn anything!

Me moaning that kids-these days don’t know how to code is nothing new. This is like cliffskis greatest hits part II. Whats more the point of this article is to point out how the short termism and inability to learn has become absolutely intertwined into our society.

Do you want the TL;DR of that?

Think for a moment how absolutely fucking depressing it is that many if not most of you know that this stands for ‘Too long, Didn’t read’. Not only is it absolutely part of our culture to embrace the fact that we cannot be fucking bothered to read anything longer than two sentences, we cant even be arsed to read ‘Too long, didn’t read’ and need a motherfucking acronym for that. Let that sink in.

TL;DR is the perfect slogan to sum up our modern attitude to information. The idea that something is obviously not reading if it goes into some depth is frankly shocking. How the fuck is anybody going to learn quantum mechanics? how is anybody going to learn anything of any depth? Where is this attitude going to end? Will all university courses have to be summarized as a single paragraph (preferably shorter)? Do you want my simple TL;DR summary of doing a degree in economics:

‘it depends’

The irony of all this, is that society is getting more and more complex. We can get away with a lot of the population having an extremely shallow education on everything, if we don’t expect them to make important decisions that require the evaluation of complex and sometimes partly contradictory data, and assuming that most of those people are just ploughing a field or stacking boxes, or flipping burgers all day. This is no longer the case though. Robots are already flipping burgers, driverless tractors are a thing, and robots will be routinely stacking boxes soon too. The jobs left are the complex ones requiring some training and intellect, and I worry that the current stock of humans is being deliberately trained to just discard complex information and reject any demand that they may need to do some deep learning.

Meanwhile politics wades deeper and deeper into super complex issues and problems, at a time where political speeches have been reduced to the soundbite. We cannot cope with any actual political speeches any more, we just want the soundbite. The speech is simply a delivery vehicle for the twitter-friendly soundbite.

Here is the Gettysburg address

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Here is a modern speech, which is all we can cope with.

Make America Great Again

I’m not picking on that specific politician. here is another one

Tough On Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime

Its just as simplistic, without any need to engage your brain. Don’t panic, no long words were used. The idea that politics has to be expressed in terms so basic that they will fit on a baseball cap or the side of a bus is just so utterly, utterly depressing. One of the many reasons for this, is that simplistic slogans often lead to very, very bad politics. You can blame everything on immigrants in a simple sentence, but a proper discussion of the benefits and issues around immigration would take many pages and can probably, like almost all politics be summed up as ‘it depends’. Nobody is going to stick that on a baseball cap any time soon.

But hang on, its not like this is purely a far right issue either. Is ‘make America great again’ too long for you? Tada:

Even worse. Hope for what? Hope for economic growth? hope for technological progress? Hope for a racially pure America? Hope that we nuke our enemies? Hope is TL:DR politics. Its political sloganing for people who just cant be bothered to read anything.

This should scare the fuck out of you

I’m old. In internet terms, I’m laughably old. I remember before compact disks. Before the internet. My grandfather had a black and white TV and tin bath and no running water in the house. As a child I played in the rubble of the local munitions factory that Hitler’s Luftwaffe bombed. As well as all this 4-yorkshireman bullshit, it also means I remember a different style of politics. Before twitter, before social media of any kind, even before the internet at all. Just 3 TV stations in the UK, and a number of news and ‘current affairs programs’. These programs had a fairly simple format: A politician would be invited on (just one usually) and would be grilled on their policies by an interviewer.

There was no TV audience who would heckle and boo or cheer. There was no opportunity for you to live-tweet your opinions for the presenter to read out. If the topic was the economy, then it would be the minister responsible. This is now ancient history. You would not get a 30 minute (or more) interview of a politician on an issue now! Thats just laughable. How the fuck are we supposed to monetize that shit on tiktok? get real! The only exception is the ‘televised debates’ just before an election.

Have you ever stopped to think ‘whats the point of the audience in a presidential debate?’ This does not have to be a thing. These debates do not have to be a cross between the gladiator pit and a circus. We have the technology still, to have experts in economics, or trade, or the law, or social policy scrutinize politician’s history and proposals and interview them at depth. This is still possible. We have the technology, and the option, but we no longer have the attention span. We have been so conditioned by tik-tok, and youtube ‘shorts’ and other shorter, shorter media, that we are now incapable of actually digesting political debate or policy positions.

I notice it outside of politics too, in fact everywhere. I follow the tech company ‘Tesla’ very carefully from an investor POV. I know a LOT about what the company is doing and what it makes, how it makes it, where it makes it, what that costs, what money they make, and what they are planning. I swear that 99% of articles even in the financial press about this company are either written by AI bots, or churned out by idiots who have no idea about any of that. A typical news story would be something like this:

TESLA CRASHES INTO TRUCK OMFG CLICK HERE

And if you think there would be more detail in the actual ‘story’ then you must be new here. The actual information required to spam-out the story with a clikbait headline is as paper-thin as you get. As long as there is some way to arrange the words CRASH and TESLA in a headline, then the actual article content is considered irrelevant. After all, who gives a fuck, because nobody reads the article anyway. They just need you to click the link, be served some ads, and preferably rage-tweet or share it. There is zero need to provide any information so why bother?

Imagine a world where that article would include, at the very least:

• Information on the circumstances, weather, time of day, etc around the crash.
• Details of who, if anybody, was injured, and how badly, and how that compares to a typical crash of this nature.
• A comparison with other vehicle crashes, and some statistics that put the crash in the context of the number of cars on the road.
• information from genuine experts on the topic regarding the likely cause of the crash, even if that information is not conclusive, with any caveats included alongside each expert’s opinion.
• Actual hard information from highway safety bodies regarding the proven resistance of that specific vehicle to a crash of this nature and the relative safety, as shown by statistical evidence, of this car compared to other similar models.

Ha. Fuck no. Why do that? Most of our readers can no longer read. They just see images, scroll with one finger and click on the like icon, like the pavlovian dogs we have trained them to be.

Every single day, if you google search for TSLA, you will find an article suggested by the almighty google algorithm, that explains WHY TSLA CRASHED TODAY or maybe WHY TSLA SOARED TODAY. The articles are, in my opinion, entirely written by AI bots and contain no actual research whatsoever. Sometimes, if you are really lucky, you strike gold, and get both headlines from the same site at the same time.

I am in a state of despair regarding the ever shortening attention span of our society. The old websites I used to read, like slashdot, ars-technica and reddit increasingly link to articles that are 3 or maybe 4 paragraphs long at best. You cannot inform people about anything worthwhile in 3 or 4 paragraphs. Pick a topic you know a LOT about, where you are considered an expert, then try and mulch it down to a pithy 3 paragraph article. Its a travesty, an absolutely futile exercise. And yet we demand ever shorter and shorter articles, ever shorter media. TikTok is bad enough, but what replaces it? a one-second long video sharing site? Maybe a version of twitter with just a single word?

I do think one of the reasons we don’t notice how bad this has got is because of the way content is now consumed. Some genius decided that every article should have a big phat image on it, preferably sourced from getty, so its totally stock and has absolutely no new information in it whatsoever. Like this:

Whats truly impressive is that they keep the big phat GETTY IMAGES logo, so we are not vaguely pretending this is actually relevant. This image is presumably for people who read ‘Cost of living’ and cannot cope with a concept of such overwhelming complexity unless we pair it with a woman holding a baby and boiling some water because… we don’t understand the story otherwise?

Not satisfied with wasting a ton of space on such crap, websites also discovered the curse of infinite scrolling. Now it FEELS like you are being fed a ton of information, but its actually fuck-all. Just a headline, a few sentences and a payment to Getty Images. Everything is just paper-thin. We have no real information on anything, we are just fed a constant doom-scroll of endless analysis-free crap. Right now, only a small portion of it was written by AI. Within 10 years I suspect all of it will be.

Yes, I could have made this article shorter. I make no apology at all for asking you to suffer the hardship of reading this far. I am trying to convey a concern and get across a point. It takes time to build a case, it takes time to examine the various scenarios that help make that case. It takes time to try and convince someone on a topic. Hopefully this time was well spent.

TL;DR: Read the fucking article.