What is the point re the health service? We should be enriching people like musk instead of looking after the health of citizens? We spend money on loads of stuff just wondering why you think the NHS needs to be singled out as if it is using resources that could be used to find space exploration/launches.
Healthcare is a bottomless pit. Demand is effectively infinite so no amount of funding will ever be enough. That's not to say we should eliminate it, but there has to be a balance. We shouldn't dump so many resources into healthcare that it strangles other sectors like space launch that are pushing human society forward for the long term. Whether that enriches certain individuals or not is completely irrelevant.
And you present a false choice. No matter what it does, the NHS can only ever have a relatively minor impact on the health of UK citizens. In terms of lifespan — and more importantly healthspan — it's less significant than lifestyle factors: exercise, diet, substance abuse, sleep hygiene, violence, toxin exposure, etc.
The listed figure is about 3,500£ per year per person. Seems quite low for what it is.
For comparison, the US government spends something like $5,500 per year per person on health care, and doesn't come even remotely close to covering the entire population with that spending.
OK, so what? The US also has a much higher GDP per capital and is the world leader in pretty much everything related to space. If the UK wants to avoid being left behind then they need to adjust priorities. Or they can stick with stagnation.
The point is that this "bottomless pit" you describe is not actually very expensive in practice. You imply that too much is spent on the NHS. Based on what?
As I was saying the other day, I think the main problem with the NHS is misallocation of funds. It receives a lot of money and has some good buildings (when it doesn't sell them off), yet that doesn't always translate into good patient care.
However the notion that we have a binary choice between American style healthcare where you pay through the nose and the NHS where you wait for years is a false one. It would be better to study continental Europe and Japan maybe.
If the UK wants to have a place in the future global economy then they're spending too much on things other than space launch. The NHS is one of those other things. In order to achieve different results they would have to reallocate spending priorities, and generally shift from a managed decline policy back to a growth policy. But if UK citizens prefer to have continued stagnation then that's also an option.
That seems like a lot. Can I ask where you got that figure? Is "day-to-day" denoting some kind of specific budget?
I just tried to Google it and their AI responded with "The NHS and social care account for roughly half (49%) of all day-to-day public service spending controlled by the Westminster government.", linking me to a report from the The King's Fund [1].
But on reading that report, it seems to say only that 49.5% is the cost of staffing the NHS from its own budget, which it states as £205 billion in 2024/25 - that's more like 20% of the year's public spending [2]. Which seems more in line with what I had assumed.
Out of all day to day government spending on services (health, schools, police, courts, etc), the NHS consumes about 40% of departmental expenditure limits [1]. Although it is pre-covid and the picture has worsened significantly since then, this BBC article is quite good too at examining the different figures [2].
I'd imagine a similar ballpark to any other day-to-day government spending. It might affect perception around the absolute number on the balance sheet, but it won't significantly affect the proportion of spending.
The guy is walking off a cliff and he is blinded by the flag. I assume it is a commentary on Brexit. It is just short of a decade since that vote. Nationalism blinded people and they did something stupid. Not dissimilar to what is going on in the US too.
The Brexit vote was a decade ago and though many mourn the outcome, it’s a bit late to be erecting artwork about it. References to being blinded by a flag now are probably about the particular far-right organizing of the last year or so that employs the English and UK flags in a very particular way. [0]
More likely a commentary on the flying of flags. Since late 2025 and throughout 2026, the UK has seen a surge in flags (the Union Jack and St George’s Cross) being tied to lampposts, bridges, and roundabouts.
This campaign, which has been highly visible on social media and in physical neighborhoods, claims to promote patriotism. However, it has been deeply polarising, with critics and anti-racism groups arguing it is being used by far-right groups to mark territory and intimidate immigrant communities.
This is a weird one, some of the posts are obviously a human, some are a mix and some are AI entirely. Maybe I just don't understand the point in posting AI generated content at all in this scenario.
I feel more that it is a commentary on "blind nationalism" of which Brexit is one example, but not the only one, or the most recent. Brexit may be "over" now, but the mindset is still very much with us in the UK and elsewhere. In other words, any successful art relates to more than one specific situation, and allows more than one reading.
It probably is partly about Brexit. (I voted Remain by the way!!!) But he has made the blank flag so general that it could be interpreted to be so many other things like a NATO flag, an Esperanto flag, the flag of Essex or an autism pride flag.
This comment seems addressed to the portion of the population that both doesn’t know how to safely buy illegal drugs and also is able to determine which drug sellers are reputable. i can only assume this is an extremely small amount of people
Even proper capitalism would be anti whatever this current system is. It's a bastardization of capitalism which has been molded to allow those in power and with money to accumulate more of both.
They say socialism works in theory but not in practice, whereas capitalism should not work in theory but does in practice. Which is bullshit, because we have never tried either approach without a corrupt government layer that seems to enrich themselves over everyone else.
I have lived in Germany, Norway, and now the Netherlands. I think they all have socialism as Americans talk about it while also having capitalism. And none of those seem terribly corrupt.
The corruption is just legal. That's the difference. So you still get lobbyists and political donors, the Jobs for MPS after they leave office. So yes the corruption is there. It's just legalized and doesn't look like brown envelope stuffed with cash
I mean its a nice idea. But short of FTL/Wormholes there is never going to be a practical need to do this. If the sun goes supernova then perhaps it would happen but even then we would spend centuries in space terraforming planets to make them liveable,
If the planet is sterile it will need to be terraformed, if it isnt it will likely kill us. Just moving people round this planet caused deaths by the introduction of diseases to new communities.
so we then need to sterilise the planet before terraforming it. There just doesnt seem to be a need for expansion to other planets. Short of our star going supernova everything else is cheaper to fix here.
