Freelance journalist. Politics/Tech/Data/Bad Takes. I made @TrumpsAlert. Previously Editor of @GizmodoUK. Subscribe to my Substack!
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Jul 18, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
☀️ To “celebrate” record temperatures today, I am going to re-share my climate writing, in which I argue that we should face climate change in a SMART and REALITY-BASED way. A mini 🧵:
1) First, we need to accept a political reality. There's no time to remake society, or use climate as a cudgel for other concerns. So left-leaning people like me need to accept a truth:
We’re going to have to solve climate change with capitalism.
This is such a frustrating read and is such a wrong-headed approach to climate change. Appealing to people to live more miserable lives is never, ever going to work. Even if a small proportion of particularly virtuous people take the advice, it is futile.
theguardian.com/environment/20…
As I have written ad-nauseum, moralising and finger-wagging isn’t going to work - we need governments to shift our incentives by building a world where we can live sustainably.
I’m going to boldly predict that the extreme sanctions on Russia are going to prove effective at changing the course of the war in the short term. There’s no way life can be made *this* annoying and have the Russian people just tolerate it.
We know from Prospect Theory that people feel a loss more than a gain. People could switch to domestic equivalents of financial services / products / etc in the medium term - but think about how annoying changing your broadband provider is and multiply by 50 different companies.
Jun 29, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Lots of people losing their minds over this but it's fairly obvious that any clip of the Labour leader saying they agree the police should be "defunded" would be political suicide.
Lots of the proposals that have fallen under the "defund" slogan are actually very good! More mental health funding, more community stuff? Sounds great to me. Easy to imagine that stuff in a future Labour manifesto.
But why wrap it in an absolutely toxic bow?
Jun 7, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I see the statue discourse has already begun. Before telling you my opinion (which you’re all dying to know) here is a non-exhaustive list of the questions that I think we can separate out in order to have a good faith discussion.
1) Was Colston a bad person? (Easy one: Obviously yes) 2) Is it right to ‘erase’ history by removing a problematic monument? 3) Will people learn more about slavery and its legacy from the destruction of the statue than from it staying in place?
May 19, 2020 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
On the EasyJet breach, a brief public service thread from me, your neighbourhood friendly technology journalist.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
It’s time to enable TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION on everything important, and USE A PASSWORD MANAGER!
⭐️⭐️⭐️
I know you've heard about them, and they sound annoying to set up - but they will make your life better. It's time to bite the bullet and sort out your digital security! And if you're sorted - why not check your parents are secure too?
May 7, 2020 • 26 tweets • 7 min read
As I've been talking about nothing else, a quick thread on where we're at in the "will the NHS contact tracing app actually work?" mystery.
First, doubts were raised by nerds like me who, knowing how mobile operating systems work, couldn't work out how the app was supposed to work indefinitely in the background, exchanging bluetooth keys with other phones. It just... didn't make sense.
Here’s a very special festive treat that no one has asked for. I’m going to reprise my grand plan and explain to you all once more:
HOW TO REBOOT THE WEST WING.
<THREAD>
The year is 2018. It’s August. But there are dark clouds in the sky. The show begins at Washington National Cathedral. It is a hive of activity. A funeral is taking place.
It’s the funeral of President Bartlet.
May 22, 2019 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
1/ BIG news today for London: TfL is announcing that it is rolling out technology to track passengers using wifi full time from July 8th.
I’ve written about this story for some time, so if you’ll forgive me, a little thread on why this is cool but also… controversial!
2/ So what exactly is happening? TfL will be using the wifi beacons already on the tube to log any devices it picks up. If you have the wifi on your phone switched on, even if you don’t connect to the wifi, it will count you.
Mar 28, 2019 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Some quick stats on #boycottrachelriley as of about 10:10pm today:
🙄 4663 users have tweeted or retweeted the hashtag.
🙄 There were 10530 tweets all together, or 8437 if you exclude retweets.
🙄 The top 10% more prolific users are responsible for 45% of tweets (excluding RTs).
Obviously intent in this dataset is mixed. Three of the most retweeted tweets - like this one from @Baddiel - were pointing out how awful it was.
Here's a dystopian vision of the future: A real announcement I recorded on the Beijing-Shanghai bullet train. (I've subtitled it so you can watch in silence.)
Ironic Update: My tweet implicitly warning about the danger of a social system that values people based on an abstract score has done some good numbers and has increased my Twitter follower count, thus has slightly increasing my social status on here.
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