In 2024 there were about 34 million cars registered in the UK and Motability had a fleet of 815,000. Are you telling me that the 3.5 million PIP recipients are using their payments to fund 2-3 cars each outside the Motability scheme?

(Motability buys about 1 in 5 of the new cars registered in the UK.)

This is perhaps another reason people in the UK might be more chill about ANPR: we're smaller and incrementally less carbrained, so to describe ANPR as tracking "all locations any given individual has been seen" sounds like wild hyperbole.

(Of course all our police forces are frothing at the mouth to roll out facial recognition everywhere they can, so kicking off a bit more about surveillance might not be a bad idea...)

"Tall people can reach things on high shelves." Change "tall" for any other adjective and you will see how absurd it is.

(Plus, "milliard, with an 'ard'" doesn't have the same ring to it.)

A faff, of course, but perhaps a better deal than contributing monetarily to Microsoft to have Copilot shoved in your face instead of the features you actually want.

Now I carry an Android phone with an epaper display and a physical keyboard, which feels like a really good middle ground to me. It's good at the things that are important to me (reading, writing, communication), can do whatever other essentials I need it to in a scrape, and is absolute dogshit at scrolling through nonsense. The device itself feels rather less polished than the Pixel I was using before, but since I'm using it much less that doesn't seem like a problem. My old pre-smartphone phones always felt kind of janky too!

Is democracy only for drivers?

I could build a machine that phones my mother and tells her I love her, but it wouldn't obsolete me doing it.