Dear me,
Oh dear! How hard is this? How do I even know you’ll be around to read this, some years from now?
I’m not going to tell you when I wrote to me. That’s for me to recall – if my memory is still any good by then, lolz.
But I can give me some hints:
Well, first off, of course this post has a date attached to it; so you can easily see when it was written. But what does that mean? What was actually happening? And how is it shaping you up, you 100-year old?
Today the world is in turmoil. The yellow-headed kiddie threw all his toys out of his pram and bombed Iran. Clearly been listening to Netanyahu too much. What is it (was it) with Western Governments, especially USA, with their continuing support for Israel despite big shifts in public opinion? The whole mess was of the West’s making in the first place anyway. And now one of them is just trying to ‘clear it all up’ – history tells us how that’s going to go.
Another thing – and I can see how my thoughts on this have clearly changed since I was younger: In the 1980’s I thought privatisation of UK public sector initiated by Thatcher – railways, telecoms, post, water, electricity, gas – was a good thing. I got free shares from a lot of it that set me on the road to investing in stocks and shares. And I thought it was good that bloated public sector (for which, read ‘Government controlled’ organisations) were getting a dose of the commercial realism I was growing up with as a young career software engineer in a fast-moving high-tech sector. (Do you remember that?)
Now, forty years later, I’m no longer convinced. Forty years is long enough to see and feel the effects – lack of investment in water infrastructure being a highly visible one. Creaming off profits to satisfy shareholders another. And what about ‘leaving it to the market to decide’, eh? Surely the lesson of slow and delayed broadband investment should have been a clear signal for decisions on infrastructure subsidies for electric vehicle charging? Nowhere near enough chargers everywhere they’re needed. How is it now that I’m 100? Not that I need a car, or may be I have a self-driving one by now?
On the whole AI thing, Anthropic just declared in early 2026 that it couldn’t be sure that Claude, it’s Large Language Model, isn’t sentient. Anthropic can’t say Claude is sentient but they’re not sure about the reverse. How’s that turned out? Are we ruled by the machines now?
Oh, I could go on and on.
But perhaps the best thing to do is to ask myself whether the funeral plan I invested in all those years ago is going to work for you / me.
Are you still waking up each morning?
Cheers.
.END
Alex Hardisty 