Slightly facetious: the Nixon presidency (1968 if you want a date). The southern strategy, Vietnam and the opening of relations with China. Retrospectively the key point where it could all have gone another way.

Real life advice from (checks notes) … the Observer’s “chocolate correspondent”?

It’s incredibly bad advice and I can only hope the questioner gets some better response somewhere else or this is going to fuck them up.

Not acceptable in the timelines of Brits

"Will be renationalised by the Labour government after Parliament passed a law allowing it to do so" seems like something a journalist could write.

@plantpollinator.bsky.social you might enjoy this one

I begin to wonder if we are moving from a basically liberal regime of openly competing human interpretations of somewhat publicly available information, to something more like a medieval arrangement of incomprehensible ideological claims and opaque institutions

I love his slightly left-field genre projects. Have you seen The Color Out Of Space?

AstraZeneca and I have of course both moved to Cambridge in the years since.

There’s a slightly earlier generation (already established in the 70s) that was more-or-less actively pushed from ICI to consultancy around the 90s, and now retiring. They would have loved to keep building UK industries. (I was a middle class kid in Teesside in the 90s.)

I’m not at all convinced that the people who can’t relax in shops are the people who are doing this. Software firms don’t want to eliminate human interaction per se, they want to insert themselves as a gatekeeper-middleman into every interaction including with your light switch and then monetise.

Like, we only had 140 characters because we needed to be able to post by text message from a phone with an 84x48 display, that kind of thing?