The best reader comments and contributions of 2018

I was an Army officer for over a decade, including Iraq and Afghanistan. As the saying goes, ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.’ I contend that the MOD is deliberately not measuring PTSD and suicide in former service personnel, so that it can evade moral and financial responsibility for keeping them alive. There is a compelling moral case for newspapers to lobby for the Ministry of Defence to track former service personnels' wellbeing. This task would not impose on them, and would provide evidence of the scale of the problem.

I spent most of working life in the prison system. When I started senior management were on the ground and in constant contact with prisoners. By the 1990's lot of them were finding excuses to stay in their offices. Over the next fifteen years, the management's retreat to the perimeter became more pronounced. Recently I met a Governor who made it clear, for instance, that the idea of someone of his grade spending time on the shop floor was so outdated as to be deemed prehistoric. 

I have been on a wheelchair for 25 years now (I am 55) and I would suggest to you the following:

1. Being able to do 50% of everything is a vast improvement to none 

2. Life is unfair 

3. Never give up 

4. Life is unfair 

5. You will perhaps accomplish less. The alternative is to accomplish nothing 

6. Life is unfair 

7. Celebrate your accomplishments, you have fought hard to achieve them 

8. Life is unfair 

9. Plan ahead and plan ahead and plan ahead. the alternative is far worse 

10. Life is unfair 

11. Life is wonderful no matter what. Concentrate on what you can do and can achieve. Skip the rest, as if they don’t exist

You are not a common person, you are a very special person with the courage to live life and enjoy it as much as you can. You can certainly do it!

Any appetite for starting a FinTech lexicon? Some offerings:

• "Peer to Peer" = using a new intermediary
• "Soft infrastructure" = intangible assets
• "Thought leader" = will talk for food
• "Disruptor" = will talk for money
• "Accelerator" = concept office for showcasing real estate
• "Sprint" = brief internship
• "as a Service" = rented
• "Sharing economy" = rented
• "Cloud" = rented
• "Blockchain" = database
• "Mining" = environmental catastrophe
• "Proof of work" = lottery
• "Proof of stake" = plutocracy
• "Consensus" = surprisingly difficult thing involving a lot of politics
• "Digital nomad" = contractor
• "Digital native" = see millennial
• "Millennial" = marketing cohort
• "Platform" = balance sheet arbitrage
• "Gig economy" = labour rights arbitrage
• "Ecosystem" = fiefdom
• "Hyper-personalisation" = stalking
• "Paradigm shift" = change
• "AISP/PISP/PIISP/PCI-DSS/PSD2" = I work in payments. save me.

Brexit is like pizza: non-food. A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. 

Use it properly, in full, wherever someone uses it in an interview. It’s juvenile and mealy-mouthed to do otherwise.

For the record, I’m 65, female, and could well be expected to belong to the cohort deemed too genteel for such four-letter words. But I don’t, and neither do the vast majority of my friends. I’m frequently amazed at the real language that was used by earlier generations, rather than the bowdlerised version my generation was brought up on. All the flippings and friggings, and other such absurdities, are merely irritating. 

I may not be ready to have journalists themselves use such blunt language — although anyone who might call Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage a fucking liar would be fine — but reports of speech should be just that, not pissy little euphemisms. So go on, FT, be brave, reject the mealy-mouthed, and embrace the absence of asterisks.

“Joe suggested that many of us have taken the wrong approach to watching trade in the age of Trump. ‘The world continues to change and for too long we have ignored the downsides of the international trading system as set up,’ he says. ‘Time to move on. Better to shift the debate into how best we redesign the system rather than bemoan [the actions of] Trump.’”

Anjana Ahuja (“Britain must stop inflating the biomedical bubble”, July 17) says that some people think that we are living longer because of anti-smoking messages rather than better drugs. But smokers are living longer as well, and I was told by a doctor many years ago that what was making people live longer was the washing of hands and the cleaning of teeth. I instinctively believed this. I am still a smoker at 81 but I wash my hands and clean my teeth regularly. — David Hockney, Los Angeles, CA, US

Social media and smartphone connectivity are the new tobacco. Recently given up the first two, and having also given up tobacco I recognise the signs. Withdrawal is agonising. Tell you later if it is worth it.

I used to believe Facebook was an amazing company. It kinda was. Now I just believe it's evil. Essentially, their business model involves deliberately exploiting vulnerabilities in human psychology to cause addiction, then selling your attention to the highest bidder. It is not advancing humanity — it is just distracting people with mindless nonsense. 

We're not meant to stay connected to everyone we've ever met, like Facebook want us to. We're meant to move on, grow, and put our time and attention into forging new meaningful relationships in the present. Facebook want you to remain stuck in the past, reading daily updates about the life of some guy you knew back in high school. At least the inevitable backlash has finally begun…

His writing in Kitchen Confidential leaped out of the page, filling the reader with delight, fascination, disgust and awe, often all at once. I remember thinking: Wow! What a writer! What energy! What fizz! What unashamed honesty! The mussels festering in their own urine. The bacterial dangers of Hollandaise. Rectum-pecking chickens. The incessant stress, intense heat and proximity to sharp knives constantly provoking underpaid kitchen staff, characters in a gangsterish and merciless underworld. I needed to put down the book just to breathe again.

Summer 1998 Stephen Hawking gave a talk at the University of Crete campus in Greece. The event attracted quite a bit of attention not just by the students but by the locals as well, who flocked into the campus to hear the man speak. Excellent vibes all around, warm summer night, people sitting outdoors watching from huge screens since the main auditorium was absolutely packed. The talk must had an impact in some people's lives.

A month or two later I joined the same university to study physics. 5 years later I moved to London. Today I am sitting in front of my computer, pissing my life away, while coding some hedge fund's strategies. I can't help but feel some sort of nostalgia, contemplating where things went wrong.

I leave my flat keys in the health club locker in the morning. Hence, I am forced to go back and train in the evening.

I had a similar approach to long runs - always go “out and back”, bringing nothing except for keys and music. If you run 10m out, you have to get back somehow . . . so you might as well keep running.

The core hypocrisy of the meritocratic mindset, in my opinion, relates to wealth. US owners receive trillions of dollars in unearned income per year simply for …owning things. Roughly 60 per cent of US wealth — hence the income from that wealth — is inherited. It’s simply impossible to in any way justify this unearned income as resulting from “merit”. And this before even considering the opportunities that wealth and income deliver for wealthholding families. Arguably, “opportunity” is primarily a function of …having money.