Two possibilities by SM Stirling . Conquistador is a fun tale of parallel earths . Peshawar Lancers is alt history with a touch of fantasy . Both really good reads . <| sep |> It ' s sad to see Dutch football as it is today . I remember a time when teams like Ajax , PSV and Feyenoord were actually feared opponents , but then they couldn ' t get along with the amounts of money we , Spain and Germany got . Sad to see that the competition where players like Ibra , Romario , Suarez , Bergkamp , Cruijff , RVP made it big is likely to not even have a ticket for the champions league groupfase . Anyway , good result for ManU . Hope we pick it up as a turning point . <| sep |> This is a just a stub piece expressing support for Tory ' s congestion pricing move , but it also links to a longer editorial on this issue that Heath amusingly wrote in back in 2004 . His arguments for congestion pricing make as much sense as ever , but I do find it sweeps a bit of the issue under the rug . The usual promarket case goes something like this 1 . Congestion is a problem caused by overuse of a scarce resource 2 . Put a price on that resource 3 . ????? 4 . Transportation problems are solvedThe trouble is that a huge amount of the GTA simply lacks any reasonable alternative form of transportation and the market is not going to be able to fix that . That means that for the foreseeable future , this mostly amounts to a regressive tax on commuters with a potentially limited upside . Those that are most able to adjust their commuting patterns will be the rich . Of course , it ' s still better to tax bads than goods , but this is an area where the government is going to need to show some leadership and investment to make sure that people actually have the ability to respond to this price signal .