Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface.

While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.

I don't do football. (Grew up in Leeds in the 1970s. Football there was indellibly associated with the National Front, i.e. violent fascist skinheads.)

Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.

I'm a fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberal, and I think fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberalism is an ideological stance that needs defending-if necessary, with a hob-nailed boot-kick to the bollocks of budding totalitarianism.

I don't like Amazon (wearing my author hat, not my customer hat).

I believe modern SF needs to at least be aware of the singularity, if only so that it can dismiss it intelligently (or work around it). But I suspect the singularity is like faster-than-light travel for the IT generation. We may hope for it, and the rules don't forbid it, but we don't know how to do it yet (and it may not be possible).