I was going to write a note about how much I am enjoying The Empress on Netflix, or the creepy weirdness of its algo suggesting a film about Rjukan in the war (which I’ve just come back from), but my day at work was shit and I don’t have the energy, so I’m just going to bang on about politics for a bit.
My friends are really down on Trump, obviously, and weirdly split on Musk. I almost feel the other way around, but maybe events of the last few days should have made me more worried.
When he was first re-elected, in some ways I was relieved. It drew a line under things, we all knew what we were getting, and to just ignore most of the rhetoric. If he did succeed in taming Islamism, that would be no bad thing, and I can only hope he comes to a better understanding of Russia and Putin, and the threat it poses. I have no idea any more about China. I’m told Xi is heading in a bad direction, obviously the Uighurs are a shocking situation, but at this point our options in Europe seem to be picking from the least worst allies and adversaries. It is very hard to discern what the right side of history will be. I certainly don’t think it involves rolling over to every special interest group or dramatic victim narrative that makes its way onto the pages of publications written by naive journalists with a hangover and a deadline to meet. You don’t really have to emphasise how everyone needs more – more money, more hormones, more medicines, more time, and then vilify the providers of these things.
Handouts are from taxes. Net revenue for governments is provided by people who don’t receive handouts. If they’re getting other things like roads or schools or an affordable local pool, that is a reasonable contract, but all I seem to get it lots of bitching about how I’m “the rich” and other people should decide what I should have and how much is enough. What’s the point then? I’ll go and do some boring job for half the money and keep it, not twice the money and watch it be consumed by nitwits complaining on Facebook about how the NHS didn’t give them a plaster. In the meantime, the UK has absolutely dire infrastructure, can’t give me a GP appointment, provides airports that look worse than Calcutta’s, and a load of people working for the public sector complaining about how they don’t want to go to work if there’s some snow on the road. Even private companies seem to give up. BA can’t run a flight to Oslo if there’s a bit of fog, but SAS somehow can run a flight at the same time, from the same airport. We’re admittedly world class at duty free shopping opportunities, but then I left Oslo and found they are even better at it.
I can’t easily opt out and go somewhere else, because Boris Johnson implemented Brexit and broke apart many opportunities and soft power for Britain, with nothing to show for it.
So anyway, some things for 2025 that I can be dead wrong about
- Very good for the stock market
- Someone might figure out a business case for AI that makes any sense. Maybe we can find a way of the UK being a world leader by selling the UK biobank data for more than the value of our reserves
- Lots of noise from Trump about a whole range of things. Just I’m strangely not as devastated by him winning as I maybe should be
- Elon Musk will be bad news in a variety of ways, not connected to robots
- We will enjoy our holiday to Australia
- The polar ice caps will do some more dramatic melting
- There will be some sort of more extreme weather event
- There will be more terrorist attacks in Europe
- Timothee Chalamet will win best actor
- Pamela Anderson will win best actress
- Kieran Culkin will win best supporting actor
- Monica Barbaro will win best supporting actress
- Conclave will win best picture
The resting writer 
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