Back in April this year, I got a letter in the mail from the Office of the Sheriff for NSW. For a minute there I thought this had to be a fake, but who fakes a letter in the year 2017? For that matter in the year 2017, how do we have a sheriff? Isn’t that one of those anachronisms that disappeared somewhere in the 19th century? But no, here was a real letter… Opening it up, I discovered I’d been put on the shortlist for jury duty this year. Ah. I’m reasonably civic minded, and jury duty has certainly been something I’d previously been keen to see how it worked. Seeing the inner workings of the justice system was always something of interest, and I’d have been happy to do so under any ordinary circumstances… but the 12 month period to come was looking like a busy one, and I’m not sure I would be able to juggle everything. At that point it was just a notification, so it would be fine. Three days later I got another letter, informing me I had been selected, and would be required at the Supreme Court shortly. So much for that theory. It just happened to be that the summons date was when I was going to be out of town on a mini-holiday - and I’d only booked it literally the day that I had received the summons, so I went online and applied to be excused on that basis with some mixed feelings. I thought maybe that was that for the year, that I’d be put back in the process and who knew if I would get chosen again. Of course, just when you most don’t want it, the universe conspires against you. It’s like getting randomly selected at the airport, the days when you just most don’t need the delay are the days that you get chosen and look most uncomfortable. So come July, I received another notice. And… it happened to clash with a day that I was going to be out of the state again (thank you NSW for the August bank holiday), and I was once more excused prior to the day. You know what’s coming next right? ...

Ben Thompson of Stratechery writes of Facebook & to a lesser extent Google’s model here: What makes Facebook and Google unique is that not only do they have zero transaction costs when it comes to serving end users, they also have zero transaction costs when it comes to both suppliers and advertisers. An interesting way to think about it; Facebook’s suppliers are its users, since they produce the content; this attracts and retains other “suppliers” - you and me, the friends of those on Facebook, and in turn that gives Facebook its “product” that it sells to its market, the advertisers. ...

Winter’s over before it got cold. I mean, like, really properly cold. I think went out of my way this year to get exposed to something resembling the winter of old - biting cold that makes you happy to be inside. I went to Melbourne and to the mountains and to the valleys outside Sydney because it felt like autumn never ended at home, like a cold snap was just around the corner, like I’d need to take out my blanket next week, but now the calendar tells me winter is over for another year. ...

A draft starts in April, and then it was May. And despite the fact that May feels like the longest month ever - did you realise it’s 31 days? Does anything actually happen in May after May Day? A day so boring they couldn’t even come up with a more interesting name for it? Is it even a month that counts given the uncertainty expressed in its name? - it ended up being a rather wholly busy month, and so it was June, and you know what June is like. Honestly, May should trade its 31st day to June so we can have a chance to get some things done before the middle of the year arrives all in a huff. It shouldn’t be surprising when 30th June shows up and all of a sudden you’re in the back half of Twenty bloody Seventeen and 2018 is just around the corner. Remember when it was still 2016 and you thought “how can this year get any shittier?” and then 2017 arrived and the conclusion was “oh, yes, this is how,”? Well, we’re now further away than ever from the utopia that was 2016, and it’s now under six months to go until 2018. If you conceived a child today, it wouldn’t be born until March 2018. The end of March 2018. That’s where we are now. Or will be in 9 months time, you get my point. ...

This thinkpiece is opinion with some small basis in researched reality, but please don’t take this as definitive. All my own views. The argument being made in the US post-Trump and in the UK post-Brexit is that the forces of globalisation and free trade have led to increasing inequality, and that’s what the working class of these countries is getting upset about - their increasing distance from the “elite” that are perceived to benefit from the globalisation at the cost of the working class. ...