Linkage

Cycling in London has changed my life in more ways than I could have imagined. I really hope you like this one. It's been a passion project of mine to show just how incredible cycling in London really is. I really hope you get a chance to get out there and cycle sometime soon. 

Today the UK Supreme Court, the highest court, returned a verdict that a key piece of equalities legislation — the Equality Act (2010) — explicitly should not be taken to include trans women when referring to women. The judges were unanimous. They said that trans women were still protected under the protected characteristic of ‘gender reassignment’, but that we were not to be included in the category of ‘women’ for legal purposes.

The judges did not meet or consult a single trans person or trans-focussed organisation. It did meet and consult with single-issue pressure groups who exist solely to exclude trans people from public spaces: For Women Scotland, the LGB Alliance, The Lesbian Project (a splinter from LGBA led by Kathleen Stock and Julie Bindel) and others.

The Labour government welcomed the judgement, and recommitted itself to there being ‘sex-based’ rights and spaces. The Conservative opposition openly cheered, with leader Kemi Badenoch gleefully proclaiming common-sense has prevailed and that changing gender is impossible.

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The ruling, which the judges optimistically advised should not be seen as a victory for one side or the other, is at direct odds with the Gender Recognition Act (2004) wherein trans people can legally, for all intents and purposes, be recognised as their correct gender. It is now open season on trans women in any female-coded space, and this will extend to any woman who looks a bit trans. Non-passing trans women, butch women and black women are all going to be harmed by this.

Anti-trans organizations have floated raising the age limit for care to 25 for years, and GOP architects of youth care bans have been explicit: the real goal is to eliminate gender-affirming care entirely. Donald Trump himself has vowed in the past to target trans healthcare “at any age.” Now, with a new letter from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) circulating to clinics nationwide, the first formal warning shots have been fired. Transgender adults should take notice—and prepare. The infrastructure to strip their care is already being built.

According to a recent CMS letter, clinics across the country are being warned against providing gender-affirming care to individuals under the age of 21. “Federal financial participation (FFP) is strictly limited for procedures, treatments, or operations for the purpose of rendering an individual permanently incapable of reproducing and, under 42 C.F.R. 441.253(a), is specifically prohibited for such procedures performed on a person under age 21,” the letter reads, citing a 1978 regulation restricting federal funding for sterilization. But gender-affirming care for adults rarely meets that definition. Many transgender men and women retain the ability to have children after temporarily stopping hormone therapy, and fertility counseling is routinely offered. When sterilization does occur, it is not the goal of the care—it is an incidental outcome of treatment meant to alleviate gender dysphoria.

More troubling is the use of this decades-old regulation to pressure health care centers into dropping transgender care for adults. The expansion of restrictions to include people up to the age of 21 follows a recent Trump executive order barring gender-affirming care for anyone under 19—a category that includes legal adults. Although that order has been blocked in multiple courts, hospitals have still used it to justify halting care for this population. Now, the CMS letter is having a similar chilling effect: Planned Parenthood of Arizona has “paused” gender-affirming care for all adult patients. This is a deeply alarming development, especially considering that Planned Parenthood is the largest—and often the only—provider of transgender adult healthcare in many parts of the country.

First, by inking this deal, Coles frames itself as future-forward and logistically driven. Groceries and grocery-store labour become more data, just like the hedge funds, healthcare, or immigrants that other Palantir clients coordinate.

Supermarkets have been under fire over the past year for increasing profit margins through a pandemic and cost-of-living crisis, and accused of underpaying workers.

The Palantir deal continues this extractive trajectory. Rather than paying workers more or passing savings onto customers, Coles has chosen to invest millions in technology that will “address workforce-related spend” as part of a larger effort to cut costs by a billion dollars over the next four years. Food (and the labour needed to grow, pack and ship it) is transformed from a human need to an optimisation problem. 

Second, dependence. As my own research found, Palantir clients tend to enjoy the all-encompassing data and new features but also become dependent on them. Data mounts up; new servers are needed; licensing fees are high but must be paid.

Much like Apple or Amazon, Palantir’s services excel at creating “vendor lock-in”, a perfect walled garden which clients find hard to leave. This pattern suggests that, over the next three years, Coles will increasingly depend on Silicon Valley technology to understand and manage its own business. A company that sells a quarter of Australia’s groceries may become operationally reliant on a US tech titan.

Victoria is in its worst housing crisis since the Great Depression. This crisis is the direct result of respective governments neglecting housing despite being entirely aware of the sectors proliferating state of disrepair. Current housing minister Harriot Shing is not only complicit in this crisis, but actively an enabler, allowing her friends in big financial and real estate firms to profit from the suffering of the rest of the city.

Couldn't have put it better myself:

Powerful financial actors have done a great job at framing themselves as the solution to, rather than the cause of, the prevailing crisis. They have incessantly pushed the now-dominant narrative that more real estate investment is a good thing because it will increase the supply of much-needed homes. Blackstone, for example, claims to play a “positive role in addressing the chronic undersupply of housing across the continent”. But the evidence suggests that greater involvement of financial markets has not increased aggregate home ownership or housing supply, but instead inflated house prices and rents.

The thing is, institutional investors aren’t really into producing housing. It is directly against their interests to significantly increase supply. As one asset manager concedes, housing undersupply is bad for residents but “supportive for cashflows”. Blackstone’s president famously admitted that “the big warning signs in real estate are capital and cranes”. In other words, they need shortages to keep prices high.

Where corporate capital does produce new homes, they will of course be maximally profitable. Cities such as Manchester, Brussels and Warsaw have experienced a proliferation of high-margins housing products such as micro-apartments, build-to-rent and co-living. Designed with the explicit intention of optimising cashflows, these are both unaffordable and unsuitable for most households. Common Wealth, a thinktank focusing on ownership, found that the private equity-backed build-to-rent sector, which accounts for 30% of new homes in London, caters predominantly to high-earning single people. Families represent just 5% of build-to-rent tenants compared with a quarter of the private rental sector more broadly. These overpriced corporate appendages are a stark reminder of the market’s inability to deliver homes that fit the needs and incomes of most people.

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In recent decades we have been living through an ever-intensifying social experiment. Can housing, a fundamental need for all human beings, be successfully delivered under the machinations of finance capitalism? The evidence now seems overwhelming: no.

As investors have come to dominate, so the power of residents has been systematically undermined. We are left with a crisis of inconceivable proportions. While we can, and should, point the finger at corporate greed, we must remember that this is the system working precisely as it is set up to do. When profit is the prevailing force, housing provision invariably fails to align with social need – to generate the types of homes within the price ranges most desperately required. In the coming years, housing will occupy centre stage in European politics. Now is the time for fundamental structural changes that reclaim homes from the jaws of finance, re-empower residents and reinstate housing as a core priority for public provision.

Housing Lawyer and author Nick Bano came by JOE Towers to chat about his new book Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis which is out now. In this conversation we chat about Britain's housing setup, how is set up to create winners and losers and how to end the age of the landlord.

As food prices keep climbing and grocery chains rake in record profits amid slim margins, it’s time to seriously consider a public alternative to the supermarket giants and dépanneurs: municipally owned grocery stores.

It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. In Madison, Wisconsin, a city-owned grocery store is in the works to serve an underserved neighbourhood after the last private grocer pulled out. Atlanta operates two public grocery outlets to tackle food deserts — where full grocers are distant and inaccessible for whole populations, typically due to community poverty and poor profit margins. Chicago is moving ahead with a city-run food market to help poorer residents afford groceries. These U.S. cities do not want to become supermarket empires, rather,  they are responding to a market failure causing hunger and poverty. When concentrated corporate ownership meets declining margins and socioeconomic gaps, some neighbourhoods are left with no fresh food options at all.

In New York City, 2025 Democratic Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani is pushing for a public grocery store in every borough. It is a bold idea and campaign policy promise that has emerged in response to rising food insecurity among New Yorkers. The concept gained traction during Mamdani’s Democratic Mayoral Primary campaign, where food justice became one of several economic rallying cries alongside other affordability measures like rent control and free public transit. 

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So far, our food policy imagination has been largely confined to subsidies, zoning incentives, and casual price monitoring. We also tried the classic Canadian tactic of knocking on international doors and asking very, very nicely for prices to freeze or come down. Canadians can likely tell you whether they have felt the benefits of these current approaches. But what if we went further? What if we treated food access not just as a supply-chain challenge or a matter of affordability, but as infrastructure: as essential to community resilience as transit or libraries?

Fears about losing jobs to automation have become commonplace, but according to United Workers Union (UWU) research and policy officer Lauren Kelly, who researches labour and supermarket automation, rather than manual work being eliminated, it is often augmented by automation technologies. This broadens the concern from one of job loss to more wide-ranging implications for the nature of work itself. That is, she says, “rather than replace human workers with robots, many are being forced to work like robots”.

In addition to the monitoring tactics used upon workers, supermarkets also direct their all-seeing eye towards customers through an array of surveillance measures: cameras track individuals through stores, “smart” exit gates remain closed until payment, overhead image recognition at self-serve checkouts assess whether you’re actually weighing brown onions, and so on. Woolworths even invests in a data-driven “crime intelligence platform”, which raises significant privacy concerns, shares data with police and claims that it can predict crime before it happens – not just the plot of Minority Report but also an offshoot of the deeply problematic concept of “predictive policing”. Modern supermarkets have become a testing ground for an array of potential rights-infringing technologies.