November 2009
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King's Cross Northern Ticket Hall
Yesterday, the new ticket hall at King’s Cross Underground station opened. The official unveiling had been on Friday, with the Mayor and Minister for London, but it was on Sunday that regular commuters got their own chance to have a look around.
So, first things first: the station works. It’s big - surprisingly big, in fact, given how much of it is in deep tunnels. It’s shiny...
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Tax
nevali:
What if we threw out of all of the existing [personal] taxes, allowances, credits, and bands, and replaced them with a aflat 35% income tax?
I’d be interested to see if anybody’s actually run the numbers and modelled this.
Flat taxes aren’t exactly a new idea, and they’ve been tried, notably in the Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia). They’ve been proposed...
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“King’s Cross already sees more passengers a year than Heathrow”
– Tessa Jowell, Minister for London, quoted in the TfL press release: King’s Cross St. Pancras Tube station doubles in size as state-of-the-art ticket hall opens.
Of course, that’s “opens” as in “photo-op with Boris” as opposed to “opens” as in...
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“The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are...”
– John Maynard Keynes on Wikiquote
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“Once here was one French guy told me, “we are working 35 hours a week whilst...”
– A comment by an anonymous poster on the TechCrunch post European startups need to work as hard as Valley ones – or forget it.
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Not Every Day
This doesn’t happen every day. In fact, I’d be a bit surprised if it’s ever happened before:
Both the Daily Mail and the Guardian have the same headline. It feels wrong, somehow.
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“Why has this trend of melding blog post and magazine article, the “blogazine,”...”
– The Death Of The Blog Post by Paddy Donnelly at Smashing Magazine (via binkythedoormat)
Looking at the sites of four designer/writers who put out customised layouts along with their articles, Donnelly poses this question. I’d suggest the answer is obvious: at a time when long-form blog posts,...
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Important rule changes
noticings:
From tomorrow, each player is limited to three noticings per day. We hope that’ll focus attention on picking the best stuff, not everything you see. Notice wisely.
YEAH.
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The Corruption Of The URL
There’s been a couple of interesting comment piece over the last couple of days on the future of the web: Tim O’Reilly’s The War For The Web and Chris Messina’s The death of the URL, for example. Here’s something I’ve previously ranted about a bit, tangentially related to something Messina mentions, that I wanted to expand on.
Plenty of people have noted that...
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“I did have another job at one point, as a computer programmer, but I kept up...”
– Belle de Jour, in the Times Online in a long interview where she reveals her identity.
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Shared space and its discontents
mostlythis:
Stupid shared space thing in Sloan Square. This is a road, I wandered out of the tube, was obviously fiddling with my iPhone then out of the corner of my eye saw something big and fast, looked up and a car sped past me a foot away, had I of not stopped in my tracks it would of hit me. three more went past equally fast, you would think drivers would go though slowly, but NOPE.
...
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Flight to the Stars
It seems that every few months I think to myself “I should really post about Flight to the Stars”, and once again I’ve seen a link that reminds me to do so. This time, I actually seem to be managing to post.
The book was published by Temple Press Books in London in 1965, and the author has an impressive string of letters after his name¹. It’s subtitled “An Inquiry...
