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.

The Shareholder Supremacy: One of the many original sins of modern-day capitalism was when we decided companies should focus on pleasing their shareholders rather than their customers.

The Other Bubble: Why “Software as a Service” (SaaS) products - especially the enterprise-oriented offerings - often end up being so awful.

The Return of the Deniers and the Revenge of Patoshi: One of the analyses that suggest that the creator of Bitcoin owns around 1.1 million of them.

Is UK maternity pay excessive and how much does it cost the taxpayer?: No, it’s nowhere near ‘excessive’.

The case for public funding of UK political parties: One possible alternative to the current system of most funding coming from donors.

Almost half of UK political donations come from private wealthy ‘super-donors’: Maybe letting very wealthy people effectively buy elections isn’t exactly ideal for democracy.