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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • Within a few months, Nintendo will have renamed him to Leroy or something, and put out a press release that it had been in the planning for a few years, to refresh the franchise for a new generation of players and so on, and obviously had nothing to do with Luigi having become a symbol of insurrection.


  • You can have more yachts, jets and homes than you know what to do with with well less than a billion, to the point where acquiring new ones becomes a cognitive burden (“which yacht did I leave that on?”), so you hire people to manage your status symbols, and they become more of a token than a source of joy.

    Beyond a certain point (perhaps in the tens of millions, perhaps in the low hundreds), it becomes impossible to spend your wealth on your own desires and joys, and the only uses of it are to jockey for status by wasting it on impractical things (“the other guy just bought a 1km-long yacht, I’d better buy a 1.5km one. Can’t let him outdo me”) or, by buying up labour and political decision-making, diverting society’s efforts from objectives thrashed out by its members (however imperfectly) to your own fantasy projects.



  • For decades, Britain has had campaigners against metric (or the “Napoleonic system” as some of them call it), who were generally on the populist right. There was a grocer who refused to display prices in metric measurements and, when he was fined, refused to pay and was sent to gaol; the tabloids called him the “Metric Martyr”, and lionised him as a hero alongside those who vandalise speed cameras. One of the promises of the Brexit campaign was to abolish the metric system and go back to imperial measures, though after they won, they realised that the imperial measurements have been legally defined in reference to SI units for decades, and establishing a new basis for measurement would be far too expensive and disruptive to do just to placate a bunch of pub bores and opinionated van drivers, so they dropped it.

    So Britain has a mixed system (beer and milk are measured in pints, and road distances/speeds in miles, but most other things are metric), only the fluid ounce, which is 1/20 of a pint, is legally defined as 28.4ml or so. Even worse, road distances given in yards (each being around 0.9 of a metre) are actually in metres, going on the assumption that the average person can’t tell the difference. Of course, they can’t call them metres, as there’d be irate letters to The Times and questions in Parliament.