Revealed: 1.5m children in England studying in unfit school buildings: Years of insufficient budgets mean that buildings used for services like education, health and justice in the UK are literally crumbling.

£100m spent in England on failed efforts to block children’s Send support: Only 1.2% of council’s decisions to refuse to provide special educational funding for children are supported by courts when appealed.

Welcome to Britain’s Victorian Christmas, where volunteers in Santa hats fulfil the basic functions of the state: A decent country would not rely on the whims of charitable donations to meet the basic human needs of its population.

Starmer urged to change donation rules amid talk of Musk bankrolling Reform: Yep, it’s probably not a great idea to allow foreign billionaires to make huge donations to UK political parties by having their companies do it.

Vatican ‘on the brink of Bankruptcy’ due to dramatic decline in global donations under Pope Francis' Leadership: Even the Pope isn’t immune to worldly financial crises.

Retrospective, financial: ‘We long for the security that money brings, but to get it we must sacrifice what’s worth securing: our health, our relationships, our creativity.’

This is My Most Expensive Habit: Anxiety.

AI’s Walking Dog: ‘AI itself has much to offer, but it has not lived up to its potential to serve the public good, and the context of AI’s development explains why’

One million elderly people skipping meals as costs bite: Neither eating or heating is affordable for some.

More than one in three children in poverty as UK deprivation hits record high: Along with a quarter of adults.

To turn Britain around, we need a proper understanding of life for poorer workers: Plagued by ill health and the cost of living crisis.

What happened to Bhutan’s ‘kingdom of happiness’?: Sadly even the country that pioneered measuring Gross National Happiness has its own problems.

Reeves’s £40bn tax rises will boost growth ‘sustainably’, says IMF: The IMF supports Labour’s new budget, which means it’s probably nowhere near radical enough for my tastes.

Budget 2024: key points at a glance: Bullet-point summary of this government’s first budget; at first sight feels to me like the right direction

Pluralistic: The housing crisis considered as an income crisis: ‘The American rich are the Spiders Georg of house prices.’

Ed Newton-Rex, who organised the recent anti AI ingesting everyone’s work for free statement that artists of all sorts of fame levels are signing makes a good point.

There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two - sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third - training data - for free.

Big tech AI companies aren’t stingy with their money for everything. That’s one reason why they’re so unprofitable. It’s just that magic third ingredient that often attracts the $0 compensation rate.

New commission may ban English water companies from making a profit: Good: water is both a life essential and a natural monopoly, normal rules of capitalism cannot apply.

All What Is Delicious to Man: Today’s implausible vision of superabundance is a lot grimmer than the one that they were promised in the 1830s.

The Subprime AI Crisis: Ed Zitron worries about what happens when the unprofitability of the current generative AI business becomes unsustainable.