This World, This Life

  So here we are.  New year, new goals, as I've written elsewhere.  And it's started pretty well. all things considered.  Spending the New Year break flat and cat sitting in London for my son helped: the solitude (not to mention a week indoors with a streaming cold) meant I could crack on and try to write something and read more than I usually can at home surrounded by kids and animals and other distractions. -------------------------------------------------------------- The writing was easier than it has been for a while, and led to a rage against social media in general and Facebook in particular that perhaps went on a bit too long (but what the hell - I was happy with it and it made the points I wanted to make) and a travelogue about the area of  London I was staying in.  Both went live on my blogs during January, together with a 2024 review/2025 plan that I wrote and published at the end of December. Very different subjects....  I had a comment fro...

  I've written before about social media not being all it's cracked up to be, and definitely not the panacaea to all ills that its devoted fanboys and practitioners insist it is.  For a year or two I've been vacillating back and forth between staying put and dumping it from my life - and I still am.  But I think crunch time is almost upon me to make a final call.  It's all to do with how people, the ones that run this stuff and in so doing generate obscene profits for themselves (and presumably less obscene profits for the minions who work for them) are behaving.   I'm talking about you, Elon.  And you, Zuck. I accept platforms like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter - sorry, I will not call it by its ridiculous single letter re-brand - and their various competitors serve a useful purpose to a lot of people, me included.  To re-iterate, I am an ex-pat, and increasingly rarely get the chance to go back to my homeland, so Facebook is a fast and effe...

  ...and frankly I'm bloody glad to see the back of it. I've been racking my brains to say anything good at all about 2024, anything even vaguely positive, and have come up with very little. So let's try listing my thoughts, in no particular order, good and bad. --------------------------------------------------------------- Good Stuff. Well, the Tories were voted out of office.  Finally.  After 14 years of ruining the country, incompetence and lying. In a landslide. Their demise also got rid of no-marks like Hancock, and Truss, and Johnson, and a whole list of other crook s, chancers and dead-weights who no-one (apart from their families, probably ) cares about.  Good riddance to them all. In came Keir Starmer and Labour, full of plans to improve the lot of the ordinary man in the street (rather than fleece them like the Nasty Party did). Hurrah. I am still alive, and healthy. Cancer free (with the caveat that I am due a further check up in January).   I'...

    This is a very good book.  It's a collection of short stories and essays set in a possible (probable?) future just 17 years away where AI and related technologies are reaching maturity and playing an increasingly important role in the world - and hence in all our lives.   The stories are all written by Chen Quifan, a Chinese science-fiction writer who, after university, worked for Baidu and Google in various senior positions related to AI development before turning successfully to writing.  Each story delas with one specific aspect (or prediction) of how the techincnology can - and no doubt will -be used in the near future, whether in education, in healthcare, in warfare or employment (amongst others).  There is a lot of thought provoking stuff in there.   The essays, meanwhile, one for each story, are written by Kai-Fu Lee, another Chinese authority on this developing technology, and elaborate in detail the specific aspects covered, thei...

This  seems to be one of The BIG questions in today's business environment. Influencers are everywhere - they all seem to be young and beautiful and full of fetching pouts and winning smiles, long blond hair or designer stubble. Oh, and wealthy. I've only ever seen one under the age of about 30 (although decent make-up can hide a multitude of imperfections and knock years off your apparent age) and he was an old Polish geezer on breakfast tv over the weekend: white hair, neatly trimmed white goatee, blathering on about something or other. My Beloved turned to me and said witheringly, "He's over 70 like you, and an influencer, making lots of money. Why can't you do that?" I couldn't answer. Because I have absolutely no idea how to become an Influencer. Or even what they are supposed to do, Apart from looking presentable, what exactly are the qualifications? How do you get them? How do you decide what you want to influence people in? And how do you actually ...

 .....at least for most of us Brits.  Those, like me, living outside the UK, for whatever reason, may still face difficulties - but then our non-residence shields us somewhat from the worst of British life in the '20s.   But the General elecation in Britain, called by a rain-sodden Sunak for July 4 (I assume his spads missed the irony there of the electorate voting for independence from the fragmented and failing Conservative Party on US Independence Day - which goes a long way in showing the mess the party is in: it would never have happened under Churchill or Thatcher or even Major), is not the only election this year.  The Indian election has just returned Modi with a reduced majority in the world's most populous democracy - the voting process took a month to complete.  This weekend sees the EU's Parliamentary election, and of course in November we have a re-run of Trump v Biden in the US.   Taken indivudually each country involved (all 29 of t...