Welcome

Every now and then I review, rewrite & update sections, especially as I come across new relevant articles to reference.  Significant changes & additions are listed on my updates page.

I developed a lot of the ideas here on economics, energy and transport before 2006, but created most of the content on this site over 2-3 years from 2015/16, when I discovered the metro rail plans (I say "discovered" as in a strange way they just seemed to reveal themselves to me — I simply saw the "dots" and joined them up!).

Some of my ideas on this site I have a high degree of confidence in; others are just speculative but plausible hypotheses to solve a problem or fill a gap in current knowledge.  A fair bit of it I consider to be common-sense or obvious, but I have realised that what is "obvious" to me often isn't obvious to others, so it might be worth publishing my thoughts. 

The commonality in what I do is my ability to identify patterns and inconsistencies, and my willingness to think without boundaries in order to generate transformative solutions to social, economic, environmental & technical/scientific problems.  You can see I'm a deep thinker, and I also like radical change — humankind will not progress by staying the same (the only kind of Status Quo I like is deep, or crazy like here!).

This is my personal site (nothing confidential IMO), but some things could be commercially valuable as well as beneficial to society, so if you're a prospective investor or partner you can contact me via LinkedIn.  You may also like to see my business advisory web site, "PrincipalAdvice.com" (though it's mostly replicated here under "Advisor"), and you can also find a rambling blog of further pontifications & rantings on Twitter and in my public Facebook posts.

I know this site isn't very stylish, but I'm hoping the content will make up for it (a bit like me really!) — feel free to volunteer to make it look fancy! (I've added some pictures I found on the web to liven it up, which if you click should take you to the source, so it's free advertising for the source sites, but please let me know if there's a problem.)

As it's quite informal, you can see I often use rather long "brain dump" sentences (often also extended as I add new references) – sorry, I'd make them shorter if someone actually paid me to devote more time to it!

Now before you dive in, if you're one of those people who like to judge others based on a label, then firstly, please don't, but anyway, if you're wondering – given my public policy emphasis – whether I'm left or right wing, then I have to say that, like many others, I'm so disillusioned with current political parties & their destructive tribal battles (especially when political labels are so often used to disrespect people and block debate) that I'm happy not to fit in any category these days.  I suppose I reasonably conform to the adage, "If at age 20 you are not a communist then you have no heart, but if you're still a communist at age 30 then you have no brains."  Overall, I would say I stand for "compassionate, creative & logical leadership", and I still have a heart, so despite recognising the benefits of capitalist markets, I now support a reformed "stakeholder capitalism" with a progressive tax & welfare system to redistribute wealth, because I remain passionate about equality, although I'm open-minded as to how to achieve this.  However, whilst I think it can be useful to identify some "groups" in society who are more disadvantaged than others, I despise "identity politics" (pursued especially by the Left) and am concerned by increasing attacks on individual freedoms in Western societies through politically-correct culture wars (although I accept the need to limit extreme hate speech) and via totalitarian State-controls (often by "right-wing" governments, contrary to their traditional libertarian philosophy).  And on this, a warning - despite my left-leaning inclinations, my "Turbulent Architect" personality, with free-thinking and direct/blunt-Aspie writing style (which might explain my non-tribal sense of identity) may offend the "woke" and hard-line feminists, particularly in my comments on DV, gender and queer issues.

Similarly, I've always been committed to protecting the environment (which is why I did a Ph.D in solar energy), yet am heartily sick of irrational Green zealots, who are so often their own cause's worst enemy.  In some respects you could say I'm an occasionally socially-conservative but broad-minded & compassionate, radical market-reforming, economically-rational, green-leftie anti-PC libertarian, if that makes any sense!  And as a well-educated, ruthlessly-objective engineer, I'm also a big supporter of Tony Blair's "radical centre" philosophy (radical reform based on moderate values) that is guided by the pragmatic ideology of, "What works is what matters" (which unfortunately he seemed to abandon for righteous & blinkered ideology when he turned psycho and joined US war criminals to invade Iraq based on a “dodgy dossier” full of lies) — or in other words, following the Jeet Kune Do style of applying the best elements from all philosophies to achieve maximum impact with minimum effort!

Not that any of this about me matters; it shouldn't, because what matters, I hope, are my thoughts about the various issues on this site, which now exist independently of anything else about me.