Rachael McKelvey

• English Universal Basic Income Trials
• Embarrassing Excel mistakes
• ‘Duck’ around and find out
• Boris Johnsons weird resignation
• Can the CBI survive?

English Universal Basic Income Trials
England is set to have its first Universal Basic Income Trial, Autonmy is looking for funding to support its 2-year proposal with a trial in the North East and London. The pilot is for 30 people to be paid £1,600 per month as a basic income to understand how it will affect lives.

There is nothing expected in return for that money, <insert your own Rishi Sunak loan joke here>, the pilot wants to assess the potential benefits and any downsides of implementing UBI in the future, it could revolutionize the way we think of the welfare system and address poverty.

I’ve been wanting to have a real discussion about UBI for years now, it’s not very capitalist of me which is why I like it as discussion topic but there have been a few things in my recent lived history where you’d struggle to argue that UBI wouldn’t have made that situation better for people.

Embarrassing Excel mistakes
What’s the most embarrassing mistake excel has ever helped you make? This week it sucked to be the Austrian Social Democrats who announced the wrong leader following a #NULL error in their spreadsheet. Ouch.

Double ouch that the error wasn’t spotted internally but by a journalist who raised the query with the party’s electoral commission and the whole process took 2 days to rectify and re-announce the correct winner.

We’ve all made mistakes using excel, I once went on a second date due to a formula error, I was utterly convinced there couldn’t be a mistake because excel basically holds up the worlds financial systems, nope turns out I had made an error. Now you will find lots of little separate check calculations I add after the fact using different logic to prove the results and even still, I get it wrong sometimes.

‘Duck’ around & find out
Apple is consigning the “ducking” autocorrect to the tomes of history as it promises to no longer autocorrect the F word to the D word in its iOS 17 upgrade due in September, which while hugely frustrating in a social setting is probably an absolute life saver in the workplace.

The origin of the proposed change is probably what is most interesting here as its come from quite a powerful class of AI that learns context by tracking relationships in data, algebra for words. I find the origins of predictive text quite fascinating as it lies in the Enron Corpus, the social impact of just having that much data out in the world.

I don’t have an issue with swearing, I don’t like or condone swearing at someone, that is incredibly rude but sometimes there are just no other ways to quickly convey a sense of gravity than an appropriately placed swear word. Conscious its not for everyone and you only find out by well…ducking around. On a side note if Rachael could stop being auto corrected to Racial that would also improve my life by about 35%, thanks!

Boris Johnsons weird resignation
Oh where do we begin? Well, whenever I go abroad good things happen to bad Tories & why would this holiday be any different? To probably badly quote Martin Luther King, Jr.; “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” With Donald Trump facing 37 criminal charges & Boris Johnson resigning from Parliament, I think its safe to say the arc has been long & the bend towards justice only slight.

It seemed unlikely the Commons Privileges Committee was going to find that Johnson hadn’t mislead parliament over the Partygate scandal but based on his relationship with the truth it’s entirely plausible that he genuinely thought they would.

For someones whose career has revolved entirely on his ability to articulate himself in writing his resignation reads like a desperate ramble of a mad man claimimg the committee was a “kangeroo court” whose sole purpose was to find him guilty “regardless of the facts”. Standing down meerly hours after the publication of the absolutely stellar selection of post resignation honours he wished to hand out were announced (just imagine the ones who didn’t make it) , we can but hope those follow him swiftly out the door & straight into the bin.

Can the CBI survive?
The CBI has won a key confidence vote this week, with a whopping 93% of its membership supporting the plans to reform the organisation following sexual misconduct within the group, including two claims of rape that are currently under police investigation.

But can the CBI really survive this one? With much of its membership still suspended or ceased including 50 of its highest-profile members. I think you’d have to be an eternal optimist to see it.

How can a lobbying institution, albeit a slimmed down one with the intention of cutting it’s wage bill by a third, be successful without influence. Even Rishi Sunak refused to say if the Government will re-establish a relationship (Psst, it’s not very Tory to like the CBI, so I think that’s all but a no) which essentially leaves it sitting duck while its membership slowly fades away, probably to the BCC, which has its own problems.

Current watch:  Easy – After the finale of Succession, I needed some mental floss and you couldn’t want more than Easy, it’s an anthology series made up of 25 half hour episodes set in Chicago.

There is no requirement to watch them in order, they are all standalone episodes, there are some recurring themes and characters but that doesn’t mean you need to know their origin story.

While the accountant in me is very much a rule square, the rest of me very much enjoyed the freedom to flick about the episodes, read the plot and wonder if that’s the subject I want to ponder about today or not.

Current read:
Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict by Elizabeth Day – Oh I don’t even know where to begin with this one, I had the absolute pleasure of attending the book launch for this with a wonderful friend, we enjoyed day in London together rounded off by and evening with Elizabeth Day being interviewed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge at the Southbank Centre way back in March.

I felt compelled to listen this to this an audiobook, if you don’t listen to Days How to Fail Podcast, this is also your sign, what a wonderful book, routed primarily in her own self enquiry it is deeply personal, good and bad, but so generally useful in its findings and research about the impacts and importance of friendships.

The mental floss of performing a friendship audit helped me rationalise and reflect on events and friendships past, present and future. As a deeply private person, it helped me recognise where I probably don’t show up in friendships in ways I would expect them to understand. I definitely feel like this earns a place in the keep to hand category, dip in and out of again category.

Most Impactful Listen: Paper Cuts – A general recommendation based on two episodes, Paper Cuts is out on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays hosted by Miranda Sawyer with a panel of guests discussing headlines and delving a little deeper in stories of interest. They read the newspapers so you don’t have too, which depending on the newspaper in question is more often than not quite a relief.

I’ve really enjoyed both episodes I’ve caught this week and found a genuine little more interest in a couple of stories had I read the headline I’d have probably carried on by. It’s funny and clever and helps keep up with what’s going on in the nicest way possible.