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That “assuming nothing else changes” is doing a huge amount of heavy lifting.

Something that I heard a few years ago really demonstrated people’s rightward political shift as they age like nothing else.

Imagine a child born shortly after the end of the Second World War, say 1948-1950. That child would have been a young adult, 18-20, in 1968. That was both the year that the hippie movement gained greatest prominence as well as the year of radical protest where young people around the world organised and fought back against corruption and repression.

Now fast forwards to 2016. Those very same post-war children are now aged 66-68. That’s the demographic that more than any other voted in favour of Brexit. I bet if you’d gone back to those young radicals of '68 and told them they were going to become bigoted, narrow-minded xenophobes they’d have laughed in your face. But it happened.

Looking at that screenshot, even though I’ve been a very happy KDE user for many years now, I do kinda miss the days when many Xfree86 desktop environments were influenced more by NeXTStep than Windows.

Maybe do a simple Google search next time?

Rather than resorting to that age-old cry of the cult member “do your own research!” can I respectfully suggest that if you’re aiming to change somebody’s mind, the onus is on you to provide the evidence, not on them. By all means take hours out of your day to search google and compile a list of things that you think will convince me. Me, personally, I have better things to do with my life.

That’s kind of my point. Blockchain evangelists have been banging the drum for many years saying “This is a perfect fit for the financial industry. Why won’t fintech wake up and recognise that?”

When in fact fintech took a long, hard look at blockchain a long time ago and decided “nope, there’s nothing here that would tempt us” outside of a few very niche applications.

Blockchain has been around as a technology for nearly two decades. If financial institutions thought it could help them you can bet they would be all-in on it by now. As it is, blockchain has no significant advantages over traditional financial ledger systems, so what incentive is there for them to use it.

It’s not something new or cutting edge any more, just waiting for a bright spark to discover the technology and put it to use.

We’ve seen this happen before, and it always ends in failure. A small number of Labour Party members leave the party in disgust, an even fewer number are angry enough and motivated enough to form a new party. It either fizzles out due to burnout, or gets invaded by Trots and destroyed from the inside.

The one example I can think of that’s survived for many years is Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, formed in very similar circumstances to now: a decaying, corrupt, widely-hated Tory government almost certain to lose the next election but the leader of the Labour Party (i.e. Blair) was in no way left wing or promising any socialist policies.

The SLP was set up in 1996 and is still going. After nearly 30 years, how much electoral success has it had? How many people other than ultra-committed political obsessives (such as us!) even know of its existence?