We’ve all witnessed what exactly is going on in Birmingham wrt their bin-collection services but, across the whole of England, and across the current political spectrum, local councils are suffering grave financial problems. Which begs the question, can a council actually go bankrupt? Short answer, no. However…
Like many people of my age I have a half-decent record collection. Vinyl as it’s now referred to by the recently-smitten hipster types. I play a record once in a blue-moon. During the nineties and noughties I went hell-for-leather for CDs and pretty much duplicated everything and more. I dodged the bullet of minidiscs and drew the line at MP3s and downloads but I’m now the proud owner of a Spotify streaming account and everything else is gathering dust. Why wouldn’t it be?
News that planning permission has been granted for a massive £10bn data centre development on the site of the failed BritishVolt giga factory in the frozen north, further indicates that these businesses are central to modern life but at what cost?
Each and every time I hear the term AI I can’t but help myself from remembering Isaac Asimov’s eerily human-like HAL computer’s famous line “I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.” Oh, if only.
Donald Trump has spent much of his life in real estate and it transpires that, at 2.2 million sq km and being a whole 25% bigger than Alaska, he has good reason for wanting to buy Greenland.
The voice of Britain’s right-wing agent-provocateur, Tommy Robinson is the best-known, infamous figure on the far-right of UK politics and, being the subject of Naughty Nigel and Elon Musk’s high-profile ‘free-speech’ spat, has elevated him even further within the public consciousness. But who exactly is Tommy Robinson?
Another year gone, and as I shuffle closer to the afterlife, I find myself increasingly looking around and thinking ‘the lights are on but no-one’s home’. Not the jogger with her earbuds in. Not the teenager with the oversized headphones listening to his beats.
Die Hard is not a Christmas movie. There. I’ve said it. And I don’t care how many well-read, supposedly celluloid-savvy individuals tell me otherwise, it just isn’t.
As it transpires, President-elect Trump’s call to put ‘America first’ and cease its foreign adventures is nothing new and has a well-established pedigree in US history.
So sang the enigmatic and greatly undervalued singer-songwriter, Mark Hollis, before his premature, Beatles-inspired, demise at the age of only sixty-four. I remain confident, however, that he would’ve had an insightful opinion or two wrt today’s assisted-death discussion.