Utch Stokie 

Wind turbine construction: The base of a wind turbine, or foundation, can weigh between 600 and 1,000 tons. Wind turbine blades are built with balsa wood which is obtained by deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Wind turbines contain concrete, carbon fiber, steel, cast iron, copper, aluminum, boron, chromium, cobalt, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, and rare earth elements.  They have an operational lifespan of up to 25 years. It is estimated that globally, around 43 million tons of wind turbine blade waste could pile up by 2050. The diametric opposite of environmentally sustainable. Not exactly “green” is it?

A sight that is commonplace across Britain. Dirty road signs. They have turned into abstract mud sculptures with a faint suggestion of public information underneath. Despite increased council tax, the local councils can’t even be arsed with maintaining the basics anymore.

The UK government intends to spaff away £22 billion on carbon capture machines. A massive wealth transfer of taxpayers’ money to major corporations. Plant more trees instead - the most natural, cost effective, long lasting, beautiful carbon capture machine of them all. 🌳

You used to walk into a bank and hand a human a bit of paper. They understood what it was. Now the same transaction requires three apps, a password you last knew in 2023, a text code that arrives after the app lockout, a captcha gameshow contest in which you must correctly identify every blurred bicycle and a chatbot that glibly says “I understand your frustration”. Buying a sandwich used to involve money and a person. It now often requires Wi-Fi, a QR code that expired forty-seven seconds ago, two-factor authentication, and a phone perilously lurking at 1% battery while the app decides whether your own face looks sufficiently human enough actually to pass off as you. We used to lose our keys and get locked out. Now we get locked out of our own phone if we lose a password or it doesn’t even recognise our own face. You used to get lost and ask a stranger. Now you stare at a blue dot until the signal dies and realise you have no idea which way is north and the the satellite navigation map would like to know your precise location forever in exchange for the privilege of being wrong. Customer service used to be a person. It is now a massive FAQ articulated b a robot who has never seen the product, followed by “was this helpful?”, then a survey about the survey on the standard of customer service. The queue had people in it. The chatbot has a script and an inability to deal with specific questions. We swapped paper maps for phones that need signal, paper tickets for apps that crash at the barrier and paper books for subscriptions that vanish the moment a company “updates its terms.” Meanwhile, the countryside is being paved with data centres so an algorithm can generate a picture of a cat in a tiny hat and you still get a hosepipe ban because it was sunny for four days despite the data centre guzzling vast resources of water. Friends now socialise primarily through a group chat in which nobody has suggested the pub since March. The elderly require an adult child, a login and an IT degree just to see a doctor. Banks close. GPs go app-only. Parking, menus, council tax, pensions and the electricity bill all demand another code, another verification, another proof that you are not a robot trying to pay for your own heating bill. We are less free, more tracked, constantly interrupted and still late because the parking app crashed because of poor wifi signal in the street. But at least we correctly identified the online traffic lights in a captcha grid to prove we are human. Progress. Apparently.

We used to pay taxes for safe communities, libraries, community leisure and sports facilities, fit for purpose schools and hospitals, quick diagnosis and treatments within the NHS, unblocked road drains, clean road signs, emergency services arriving on time, roads without potholes and drains and rivers that were regularly cleared to prevent flooding. Now we pay higher taxes yet all of the above are diminishing - yet our tax money is being spent on endless wars, MPs expenses, politicians and royalty flying around the world on private jets, whilst telling us plebs to reduce our carbon footprints, dodgy contracts given to government cronies and endless forms of digital ID and surveillance. We are being fleeced by our own governments to be on the receiving end of diminished public services and infrastructures but at the same time, the super-rich are benefiting from the biggest transfer of wealth in history. The social contract is now an absolute piss-take.

A simple but effective way of explaining how we are being completely tax fleeced by the government. Credit to @robprogressive.