Hey everyone!

Apologies for not getting a longer essay post out yet this week – I’ll be dropping it tomorrow in a rare Saturday post for paid subscribers, so you can look forward to that!

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Anyway, the reason I’m writing now is because I need your help with a future post!

I was blown away by the response to my recent piece on some of the cool things I’ve done recently with AI. It’s made me more convinced than ever that you really need to see AI doing something cool, and practical that is relatable, to truly understand the implications of the technology.

So in that spirit, I want to put together a post for a future week that will attempt to inspire my readers to experience. I’m going to host an AI Show & Tell! I want to hear your personal stories about your own personal AI projects – the apps you’ve built, the widgets you’ve vibe-coded, and the prompts you’ve sent that have blown your mind.

Here’s some ground-rules for what I’m looking for:

• I want projects that you, personally have created or worked on.

• I want to hear about things you made for fun or personal utility – please don’t pitch me your business.

• Bonus points for cool hardware projects, or ideas that other people might be able to replicate on their own.

• And please don’t necessarily expect an email back as my inbox is a horror, but I do read everything and your contributions are appreciated!

If you’d like to share your story, drop me an email on psythor (at) gmail.com or reply to this email. Please provide a maximum of 300 (human-written) words describing what you did, or what you’ve built, and please attach a maximum of two screenshots/photos.1

Then in a future week I’ll put together a round-up of the best!

Cheers,

James

PS: Don’t forget to listen to this week’s YIMBY Pod too, as I think it’s a good one!

PPS: Separate from this, I’m always interested in hearing what obscure bits of the public sector are doing with tech, so I can write more articles like this. So do get in touch and tell me about cool stuff that is happening!

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POD! On YIMBY POD this week, Martin and I talk about why it appears that the Clean Power 2030 pledge might have been quietly dropped. Then we speak to the excellent Thomas Ableman, about what a technological revolution 200 years ago can teach us about AI. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-regular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen lately. Do read on, as this time I’m featuring:

• A maddening story from the heart of what should be Britain’s growth engine

• How AI can now geolocate almost any video...

• Another example of how grim times are for local journalism

• Perhaps the most impressive ministerial TV appearance I’ve ever seen

• A great piece on the importance of Jean-Luc Picard

• Sadiq Khan embracing O’Malley Thought

• And a brutal demolition of Owen Jones’ new book

Now let’s get started!

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• We talk about the seismic shift in British energy policy announced during the budget – and wonder if the shift in priorities from ‘clean’ to ‘cheap’ means the grid decarbonisation pledge is dead.

• Then we speak to returning champion Thomas Ableman, who has been thinking about AI and what we can learn from the tech revolutions that gave us the railways and cars. Plus he updates on the exciting progress he’s making on his Mini Switzerland plan.

Thomas’s piece on lessons on AI from a 200-year-old industry is here.

James’s exhaustive long-read on how energy bills are calculated and the political choices around Net Zero is here.

James’s Substack is here, and this week he wrote more about how he’s personally using AI.

Martin’s Substack is here, and this week he wrote about the government’s attitude to disaster preparedness. His latest video on the Rainham Volcano is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, I talk more about TfL’s potential countdown to disaster, and then we speak to transport consultant Jon Worth all about his epic rail journey from northern Finland to southern Portugal – and what it tells us about the state of European rail integration. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

Reading my AI post from a year ago feels like looking back at life in the Stone Age.

Last December, I wrote a surprisingly popular piece about how AI has made my life better. It was my attempt to describe in practical terms how I was using the technology on a day-to-day basis, to try and explain to doubters and sceptics why this really is a big deal.

A couple of months later, in February, I then wrote a follow-up post – this time focused on my early adventures in vibecoding – the act of having the AI write software for you. In that piece, I described how I’d built a bunch of tools that are useful for my work, such as an app to help me manage my invoices, and another to help me collate links for my Odds and Ends links newsletters.

And though I have written about AI a lot since then, I haven’t really said much more about how I’m using AI today, in autumn 2026. Because, for me, over the last year, it has definitely transformed from being something that’s extremely useful, to something I can’t really imagine living without.

Today, ChatGPT is the app I click on first when opening up my laptop, and it’s often my first port of call on my phone too.

So I thought it was time for a check-in. Here’s how I’m using AI today, and I’m going to tell you about the nine most interesting things I’ve used it for lately, including:

• How I’ve obtained god-like powers.

• How AI has saved Christmas already.

• The single-purpose app that has removed a major friction from my life.

• What I think could be a genuinely wholesome use of the tech for saving history.

• And (most importantly), how AI has helped me settle a 20-year-old score.

Now let’s get started!

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Binformation Technology

If you watch enough ultra-nerdy tech videos on YouTube, eventually you’ll notice a certain phrase that keeps being used - the ‘wife acceptance factor’. Sometimes the presenter will pretend it is a gender-neutral thing, and reference instead a ‘spouse acceptance factor’, but the reality is that the entire scene is almost entirely bald or balding, heterosexual, middle-aged men. We are legion.

I mention this because I thought I’d start by telling you about the AI intervention I’ve made that has won the highest approval of my partner, Liz. I’ve built a bins app.

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POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, I talk more about TfL’s potential countdown to disaster, and then we speak to transport consultant Jon Worth all about his epic rail journey from northern Finland to southern Portugal – and what it tells us about the state of European rail integration. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-irregular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen lately. Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve sent one of these out – writing extremely long pieces about buses and picking fights with media entrepreneurs is surprisingly time-consuming. I’ll try to get back into a more regular cadence as soon as I can.

Anyway, though, let me make it up to you with some super fun links. As this time I’m featuring:

• Why driverless cars are a progressive cause

• A damning indictment of the non-serious political class

• How Labour should frame the push for ‘re-industrialisation’

• Why the AI national security crisis is almost here thanks to a scary new development

• A cool dataviz showing why your bus was late yesterday

• The truth about how Mamdani is actually an abundance-pilled centrist dad.

• Why Ukraine blowing up Russian data centres DIDN’T cause bot traffic to fall

• And an adorable map of London you won’t want to miss

Now let’s get started!

Driverless cars are a progressive cause (me)

However, safety is not the only prize from autonomy. The invention of this technology is a huge opportunity for social justice in terms of mobility. Too much of our society is designed around car ownership, which puts everyone without a driving licence and access to a vehicle at a disadvantage, and this disproportionately impacts the young, poor, elderly and disabled. Autonomous vehicles are an opportunity to narrow this inequality.

How? The most important implication of autonomy is that it can dramatically reduce the cost of mobility. The most expensive part of running a vehicle service, whether private taxis or public buses, is paying for the human driving it. If we can remove them, suddenly it transforms the economics of transport, and enables services to serve more places, more regularly.

I was very excited last week to be asked to write again for the progressive journal Arguably. This time I made the explicitly progressive case for autonomous vehicles, so I’m looking forward to hoards of angry taxi drivers blockading my house.

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James tells Martin about how Transport for London is upgrading almost 9,000 buses – and why there’s an extremely tight deadline.

• And then we’re joined by freelance transport consultant Jon Worth to talk about his epic journey on the longest train trip it is possible to ride inside the European Union – and he tells us what he’s learned about just how integrated Europe’s railways are.

Jon Worth’s #CrossBorderRail blog is here, and the video of his journey is here.

James’s Substack is here, and his big iBus write-up is here.

Martin’s Substack is here, and his latest video on the Rainham Volcano is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD!
On YIMBY Pod this week, I get very mad about how Britain is spending money not generating electricity, and we speak to former West Midlands walking and cycling commission Adam Tranter about why I’m completely wrong about pavement robots. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods.

If you want people to use a bus service, then you need to give them certainty.

This matters just as much as making sure the service is frequent, or that ticket prices are reasonable, because if you’re left standing at the bus stop in the cold, with no sign of a bus ever turning up, you’re not going to want to use it ever again.

And this is why one of London’s most under-appreciated pieces of infrastructure is the bus countdown system.

Today, you can stand at any bus stop served by a Transport for London (TfL) bus, and call up on your phone real-time updates showing exactly how long it will be until your bus arrives. Some busier stops even have a digital display built in, showing the number of minutes you’ve got left to wait.

At least, that’s the theory anyway.

Though the countdown system works well most of the time, there are still times when it behaves strangely. Perhaps the bus you’ve been watching go from 10 minutes… to nine minutes… to eight minutes… suddenly disappears, at least for a couple of minutes.1

The reason for this is complicated – which we’ll get to – but the good news is that this could be about to change. Behind the scenes at TfL, £160m is in the process of being spent on giving almost 9,000 London buses a sort of brain surgery – to upgrade their on-board computers, and make countdown predictions and bus announcements more accurate than ever.

And here’s the mad part. This isn’t just an upgrade of convenience. TfL is also up against a ticking clock – and if the upgrade isn’t complete in time, bus countdown might just stop working entirely.

So what’s going on? All aboard as I take you into the inner workings of a system known as iBus.

If you want to read more nerdy deep-dives into hidden systems like this, and want to receive my scorching hot takes on politics, policy and much more, make sure you’re subscribed (for free!).

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A short history of bus tracking

London was one of the first cities in the world to build a system to track its buses – and it started long before the advent of mobile data. The first trials began in 1992, with the number 18 bus in north-west London, and over the following couple of years, the first digital displays began to appear at bus stops on a number of routes.

Perhaps surprisingly, though, the initial motivation for tracking buses wasn’t entirely about passenger convenience. It was actually driven by a need to monitor bus performance following the privatisation of London’s buses,2 as the fees operators received were in part determined by the quality of service they delivered. Improving information for passengers was just a nice bonus that could take advantage of the same data.

So how did it work? Though GPS was tested in the early 90s (the number 73 trialled the technology a couple of years later in 1994), the system London Transport3 landed on instead made use of roadside beacons, which were typically strapped to lampposts and bus stops.

The idea was pretty clever – essentially the beacon would transmit a radio signal, which would be picked up by the bus, telling the on-board system that the bus had reached a certain waypoint.4 The bus would then transmit this back to a central system using VHF radio waves, and that system would then update the countdown signs at bus stops, which were connected over an old-fashioned BT phone line.5

I haven’t been able to establish exactly why this system was chosen over GPS at the time, though in principle it makes a lot of sense. In the 90s, GPS was significantly more unreliable than it is now, as there were fewer satellites in orbit, and it was less accurate too, as until 2000 the signal was deliberately degraded for non-military uses, meaning it was only reliable to between 30 and 100m.

Anyway, fast-forward a decade to the early 2000s and the decision was made to upgrade the bus tracking system to something more modern. This was the era of the iPod and iTunes, so of course the new system was named ‘iBus’ – and the way it works is by using GPS (now much more reliable!), along with a 2G internet connection to send the data back to base over the mobile networks.

Then just as importantly, it was tied to a backend computer system which computed the arrival times for signage and (eventually) apps like Citymapper and Google Maps – the latter of which gave Londoners real-time bus countdown information for every single stop for the first time.

And amazingly, two decades on, this is the system that is still in use today. Even though we can stream live HD video of ourselves over 5G from pretty much anywhere, this critical London infrastructure is still running on the equivalent of an old Nokia.

In fact, I understand that in many cases even though the buses themselves are regularly replaced (the average bus today is 7.96 years old),6 the actual tracking hardware is often two decades old – as it has been repeatedly taken from one bus on retirement, and moved to a new one.

Needless to say, then, iBus is getting on a bit. And there’s a bigger, more imminent problem too – a ticking clock.

In the not too distant future, the phone signal the system currently relies on will be switched off. iBus currently uses the O2 network to connect to buses, but O2 plans to begin switching off 2G from summer 2029. The other networks are planning the same, and 2G is expected to be completely dead by 2033.

So unless new technology is rolled out across the bus fleet now, TfL’s ability to track its buses will die with it.

And in fact, we might not even need to wait until the official switch-off for this to be a problem.

I spoke to Simon Reed, who used to work for TfL as head of technology and data for surface transport – the man who led the introduction of the original iBus system – and he suspects that the connectivity could be getting worse7. This is because the original hardware is starting to break, and because there are ever more 2G blind spots where buses lose signal, and therefore disappear from countdown displays across the city.8

So that’s why TfL is currently prepping the bus fleet for brain surgery, with the creation of ‘iBus 2’. It’s a programme that will both upgrade the system to work on 4G and 5G, and the hope is that it will make tracking that little bit more reliable too.

Introducing iBus 2

Despite the updated hardware, iBus 2 isn’t that fundamentally different to what came before. Buses will still calculate their position using GPS satellites, and beam their coordinates back to TfL via a mobile internet connection, exactly like before.

So as much as I’d love to tell a story about how each bus is going to have some cutting-edge new hardware that enables some dramatic new capability, this isn’t really the case. The hardware upgrade on the buses is more about keeping the tracking system alive following the end of 2G.

But what’s just as important, and where the real innovation is taking place, is in the backend systems that receive and process the bus location data. The original iBus was built on the constraints of 2000s technology, and components were tightly integrated, but with the upgrade the new system will be built around modern communication standards and APIs, making it easier to plug bus data into other systems.9

And what this means in practice is that the new architecture will make it possible for TfL to use the data to make more accurate countdown predictions.

For example, at the moment the way arrival times are predicted is based on historic data and the current position of a given bus. If it usually takes ten minutes for the 159 bus to traverse the length of Whitehall on a Thursday afternoon, iBus 1 might display a 10-minute wait on a countdown indicator.

But what if there’s a protest blocking the road? Or roadworks? Or the road has been closed as the SAS has finally been sent in to deal with loud, anti-Brexit protester Steve Bray? The current system couldn’t account for that, but with iBus 2, the plan is to take real-time information from prior journeys on the same day into account, and base predictions more closely on real-world road conditions.

Then on a similar note, iBus 2 will also improve how diversions are handled.

At the moment if you’re on a bus that has been diverted, the iBus system simply… stops working. The automated voice will stop calling out stops and digital displays may not update correctly, turning the journey into a mystery tour if you’re unfamiliar with the area. And of course, it throws off the countdown system at stops too.

But the good news is that iBus 2 is being designed to better handle these situations, such as having the bus recognise when it is on diversion, and it will automatically share information with the people on the bus too.

For example, iBus 2 will apparently display diversion maps on the driver’s screen, saving an awkward radio back-and-forth as the controller has to describe in words where to go, allowing the driver to concentrate on the road.10 And the new system will cascade disruption and diversion information more effectively to passengers, through digital displays, apps, and automated audio announcements.

TfL under pressure

What’s pretty surprising about iBus 2 is how the actual upgrade programme is relatively modest in its ambition – as you can imagine how modern technology could conceivably enable TfL to do so much more.

Couldn’t 4G and 5G make it possible to transmit live CCTV footage, to improve bus security? Could there be scope for using some sort of technology to count the number of passengers on every bus, so that apps can tell you exactly how busy the bus will be?

According to Simon, experiments have been trialled over the years, but didn’t work out. In the case of live CCTV, amusingly it was because TfL discovered it actually delayed emergency response times, as instead of dispatching the emergency services, operators would waste time examining the footage themselves first.11

But in any case, the reality is that even this modest upgrade is proving difficult enough.

Simply upgrading the tracker on the existing fleet means updating the hardware on almost 9,000 vehicles – and these are owned by different operators, and encompass dozens of different bus models, and so on. It’s like if you had to design a new dashboard widget that worked on every type of car.

And we know the difficulty is very real, because there have already been significant problems that have delayed the rollout beyond the original planned launch in, er, 2025.

The full technical details haven’t been made explicit by TfL, but the biggest problem is related to how Oyster card readers interface with the new iBus hardware – something they need to do so TfL can work out what specific journeys people are taking, where passengers are boarding, and whether the card reader is actually working.12

And this brings us back to the ticking clock. As we know, 2G will stop working around 2029. So when is iBus 2 due to be ready?

According to TfL’s latest projections, the rollout will take place between 2027 and… 2029. Yikes.13

So here’s hoping that TfL can get the iBus 2 transplant ready in time for the 2G switch-off – and before the original iBus dies on the operating table.

Phew! You reached the end! That must mean you like my stuff, so make sure you subscribe (for free!) to get more of it direct to your inbox.

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• We talk about how thanks to Britain’s lack of grid infrastructure, we’re spending millions of pounds every day on ‘balancing payments’ on the grid, and James gets surprisingly mad about it.

• And then former West Midlands Walking and Cycling Commissioner Adam Tranter joins us to explain why James is completely wrong in his enthusiasm for pavement robots.

Pavement Overload can be found here. Our previous episode about pavement robots is here

James’s Substack is here, and he picked a fight with Amol Rajan here.

Martin’s Substack is here, and his blockbuster new video on the Rainham Volcano is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we talk about the Green Party’s unenthusiastic U-turn on nuclear energy, and discover why London could soon be getting a massive new heat-network spanning all the way from distant East London, right into the centre of the city. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

I finally decided to see what all of the fuss was about.

After years of reading absolutely incomprehensible posts from friends about The Traitors, I gave in and tuned into the first few episodes of the new celebrity series. After all, nine million people can’t be wrong, right?

However, I’m sad to say my reaction to the show was pretty lukewarm. Don’t get me wrong, many of the personalities on the show are fun to watch, including the excellent Hannah Fry, who once said nice things about my newsletter (and, implicitly, PAF liberation). But my frustration is with the format of the show itself, which beneath the dramatic music and gothic imagery, seems a bit half-baked.

Why? Essentially it’s not really clear why the ‘Traitors’ are traitors, and there simply isn’t enough actual information for the people guessing to go on, for the speculation at the core of the game to be meaningful.

Now, I admit that maybe this is part of the fun and I’m just a killjoy. I’ve heard the argument that the real appeal of the show is that it is a grand experiment in human psychology. We get to see how people spot patterns in noise, and how tribes and groups emerge even when there is no underlying signal.

But I just can’t get past the comparison to a similar, but much better gameshow, called The Mole, which aired way back in 2001 on Channel 5.

At the time, the show was very much Channel 5’s attempt to build something as splashy as Big Brother, and it largely failed in this endeavour. But for the few who watched, it was instantly compelling.1

The premise was simple: There were ten players tasked with completing different missions, similar to those on the Traitors, to earn money for a total prize pot. But one player had been secretly designated as the titular Mole, and their job was to try and actively sabotage the games. At the end of each episode, the players took a quiz, and the person furthest from guessing the identity of The Mole was booted off.

What made this format work better than Traitors was that it gave the missions a purpose in the context of the wider show.2 In Traitors, there’s no incentive for sabotage or any other, well, Traitor-like behaviour – and so for half of each episode’s runtime, it’s like the players are competing in a completely different show.3

But anyway, this is all a sidebar and an excuse to reminisce about a much better show. What I really want to talk about this week is one of the Traitors contestants. Not the strangely eccentric Richard E Grant, as I’ve got no idea what was going on there4 – but the first person who was booted out of the castle, Amol Rajan.

In case you missed it, tomorrow Rajan is due to launch his new podcast-slash-media-venture, The Amol Rajan Connection (ARC). He’s clearly aiming high with the show, and there’s clearly quite a lot of money behind it.

Yet with my media-business-analysis hat on,5 as likeable as Rajan may appear on screen, I must admit I’m incredibly doubtful that the new venture will prove successful.

So I thought this week I’d follow in the grand tradition of my analysis of other media properties like the New Statesman, Observer, Newsnight and Owen Jones, and make the case for why I think he’s unfortunately doomed to failure.

Now let’s get started.

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• We talk about the Green Party’s surprising kinda-sorta-endorsement of nuclear energy, and whether it’s a big deal or not.

• And then we speak to Aaron Gould, CEO of the Association for Decentralised Energy all about the prospects for building more heat networks in Britain!

Martin’s Substack is here, and his blockbuster new video on the Rainham Volcano is here.

James’s Substack is here, and his recent essay on AI and government is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• We talk through two of the highlights in Andy Burnham’s conference speech – his pitch to build historic quantities of council housing, and plans to create “GB Grid’.

• Martin gets a birthday treat in the form of some intriguing news about enemies of the pod Natural England.

• And we speak to economist Omer Bor about his fascinating piece ‘Britain wants to build homes near trains it can’t afford to run’.

James wrote up his longer thoughts on Andy Burnham’s conference speech, and a deep dive into which MPs are the most and least memorable in Westminster.

Martin wrote ‘The AI Apocalypse is Extremely Boring Now’, and his YouTube channel is here – a new video is dropping tomorrow!

Try James’s two stupid games: MP Recall and MP Chain!

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I talk about the BBC’s pathological scepticism towards the new Universal theme park and how Andy Burnham has (reportedly) thrown a spanner into the works at Heathrow. Then we speak to Anya Martin about why we should impose a tax on autonomous vehicles – before it’s too late! Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

Last week I went mildly viral – at least within a half-mile radius of Parliament.

You might have seen why. Following the New York Times theory that nobody actually cares about written words, and what people really want is games, I created two little games of my own.

MP Recall came first, and this was a memory test. Players were given five minutes to type the names of as many Members of Parliament as they could remember, aided only by some floating faces in rotation, to help jog memories.

Then I made MP Chain. This was a more fast-paced game, where players were given the name of an MP, and asked to identify a given member, when presented with two headshots.1

Both games were pretty successful – MP Recall has had over 7,200 completed games with over 245,000 MPs successfully recalled, and MP Chain was played over 60,000 times,2 with over 300,000 choices recorded.3

However, I’m not dropping some big numbers just to show off – that’s merely a happy side-effect. What’s more important is that these games have inadvertently given me a rich dataset.

For a long time I’ve been obsessed with how much people actually know about politics. I still regularly think about the 2020 survey where 11% of people claimed to know “a fair amount” about then Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds, which I think is just laughably untrue. Nobody knows “a fair amount” about Anneliese Dodds – the survey just showed that 11% of people are liars.

Now, my data does not speak to exactly this question of what the general public actually knows, nor am I making any claim that my data is in any sense meaningful or scientific.

But I think it is perhaps a snapshot of which Members have made an impact in the inside-game of politics. Not the air war, in the battle for attention from the real general public – but in terms of impact amongst the brain-poisoned Westminster obsessives who either work in and around Parliament, or at least spend a lot of time posting on social media like they do. The real sickos, in other words.

So let’s dig through the data, and discover who are some of the Westminster Village’s most and least recognisable faces.

Make sure you subscribe to my newsletter (for free!) to get more like this direct to your inbox.

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Recalling the data

Let’s start with MP Recall, and the Members who were most often remembered off the tops of people’s heads.

I think this was a surprisingly tricky challenge. Even for obsessives like the people who read obscure Substack newsletters about politics, when you’re presented with such a large and general category, there’s no reliable way to methodically work your way through all of the names in your head in just five minutes.4

And I think the data on who people actually remember is, to an extent, pretty unsurprising. At the top of the list is the Prime Minister – a full 76% of players successfully named Andy Burnham, and he was followed by all of the other big hitters you’d expect, including Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey. Though the drop-off is quite stark – how quickly people have forgotten Rishi Sunak and Rachel Reeves!

In fact, I think the data is arguably evidence that for most people, the cast of known characters in politics is rather small – the top ten most recalled MPs accounted for 17.3% of all names entered, and the top 50 accounted for 47.8% – suggesting a small core of ultra-visible MPs, and a very long tail of MPs, who are presumably spending less time on TV and podcasts, and more time doing thankless constituency work.

On the flip side, the least recalled list is dominated mostly by Sinn Féin MPs, who refuse to actually take their seats in Westminster – so are effectively just names on ballot papers every few years, and that’s it. They don’t turn up or do anything, and they don’t even have photos on the Parliament website.

However, Sinn Féin aside, there are also four Labour MPs at the bottom of the list, with the lowest-ranked being Paul Foster, MP for South Ribble. I’d never heard of him either – but he spent 15 years in the army, serving in both the Gulf War and Kosovo. So now we all know something about him.

The least recognised Labour MPs also have something else in common: They were all elected in 2024. Which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising – as MPs elected in 2024 had an average recall rate of 2.8% – compared with 7.9% for all MPs on average. So stick around long enough, and people might remember who you are.

Only connect

Now let’s look at MP Chain. Unlike the first game, this wasn’t a test of memory – but of recognition. Who has a face that people vaguely recognise?5

Here’s the leaderboard for most and least recognised MPs, with the percentage of times the player guessed them correctly in head-to-head match-ups with another MP:

I think again unsurprisingly the most recognised MPs are all household names – at least in the homes of the sort of weirdos who played this game.

Perhaps the most surprising thing in the data then – which I probably should have predicted, is that disproportionately some of the most recognised MPs were those members from minority backgrounds. Though I suspect some of this is an artefact of the way the game was designed.

For example, here are the top twenty most recognised Labour MPs who aren’t in the Cabinet – they’re either pretty famous in Westminster terms, or have a name that gives little doubt which face they’re most likely to be when drawn against another MP at random.

…Except, that is, in two cases.

This is going to get a little awkward, because the two least recognised MPs – the only two with less recognition than a coin toss would predict – are Mark Hendrick and Peter Bedford. Hendrick is of Anglo-Somali heritage, and Bedford has British Indian and English heritage – but I guess their names offered fewer clues to players.

Anyway, the other striking thing about the Chain data was that the 2024 factor also made a difference here, with MPs elected recently getting recognised correctly 77.3% of the time on average, compared to 85.8% for older MPs.

The big list

So those are some stats on which MPs are the most memorable and most recognisable in Westminster. But the chances are there will be certain Westminster insiders reading and thinking… what about me? Or what about my boss? And what about that bastard who got the ministerial job I wanted?

The good news is that I’m going to publish the full list below – but the bad news is because I’m a smart business guy, I'm going to put it behind my paywall. So if you want to see the full list, why not consider subscribing to support my work?

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Now here’s the list in full:

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Yesterday afternoon, Andy Burnham gave his first conference speech as Prime Minister, and judging by the breathless commentary on my timeline, it will find itself placed in the historical pantheon of political speeches positioned somewhere between the Gettysburg Address and I Have A Dream.

In all seriousness though, I think there were many things to like in the policy-heavy speech, as well as many other things that left me with further questions about the question I posed back in July: whether Andy Burnham is serious or not.

So this week, here’s a breakdown of what I liked, what I didn’t – and what left me scratching my head.

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As I write, SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket has just achieved another huge milestone. It has successfully made it to orbit for the first time. It’s another major milestone towards a total transformation of the economics of space – so to celebrate, here’s a re-up of my previously paywalled post from October 2024 about the downstream implications of Starship, and why it is important.

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A former SpaceX employee once described to me why he thinks Elon Musk is… the way he is.

As he sees it, Musk thinks like an engineer. You try to build something, continue to iterate on it, and once you’ve successfully built it… you have been proven correct – whatever you end up with is proven to be the correct way to do it.

And the problem is that this approach is, as we know, utterly disastrous if you’re trying to build a social network like Twitter, because people are not just widgets that respond mechanically to the laws of physics. People are complicated.

However, there is some value to this approach.

For example, if you’re building electric cars or rockets, thinking like an engineer is extremely effective. In those cases, development is about changing variables and seeing what works best. If prototypes blow up en route, it doesn’t matter, as each experiment nudges you closer to your goal.

We saw this for ourselves on Sunday. On the fifth ever fully-stacked launch of SpaceX’s new Starship rocket, Musk’s company successfully used a pair of ‘chopsticks’ on the launch tower to capture the ‘Super Heavy’ first stage booster of the company’s new Starship rocket as it returned to Earth.

I watched the live stream, and I can safely say that it was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen. Even more so than when the company landed two Falcon Heavy boosters for the first time six years ago.

Why? Because Starship and the Super Heavy Booster are together the height of a 40-storey building, and capturing the first stage is equivalent to precision manoeuvring a 22-storey building, and plucking it out of the air.

However, it’s not just the visual spectacle or the feat of engineering that was important. What really makes it incredible is what this technological moment represents.

In the medium to long term, this is the first rocket we’ve ever built that could conceivably one day, get humans to Mars.1

But in the short-term, this was the moment that SpaceX transformed the economics of space… again.

And I think the consequences of this are going to be a really, really big deal for everyone back on Earth, for reasons that I’ll now explain.

Collapsing prices

SpaceX has already changed the economics of space once before.

Only a few years ago, getting a kilogram of material to orbit cost somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000. But in 2015, SpaceX changed the world by successfully executing a controlled landing of the first stage of the Falcon 9, the company’s smaller rocket.

This is a more recent landing – scenes like this are now routine.

In an instant the ability to land slashed the price of launching payloads to orbit, for the same obvious reason it’s cheaper to re-use an aeroplane than build a brand new one for every flight. Today, the price per kilogram to orbit is around $2700.

What this means in practice is that we2 can get a hell of a lot more into space, for cheaper. Instead of having to build a new rocket every time, SpaceX now has a fleet of boosters that are reusable. Some have now flown around 20 times, and without having to manufacture many more,3 the company is today able to launch multiple times per week – something that was unimaginable before.

And this alone has transformed what we’re able to do in space. For example, it’s become feasible for smaller companies and start-ups to launch their own small satellites.

That’s why we’re currently living through a boom in satellites designed for things such as environmental monitoring (eg, GHGSat, which monitors greenhouse gas emissions), asset tracking (so that companies can monitor shipping containers and the like), and scientific research.

There are also new imaging satellites that can experiment with less proven technology. For example – in 2022 a British company called Sen launched a small satellite on a Falcon 9 that can deliver live, 4K footage from space – something that hadn’t been done before. This makes it conceivable that eventually we could have an entire network of cameras providing virtually real-time views of the entire Earth.4

And it’s how Sen was able to capture a video of Hurricane Milton – which looks like something we’d only usually see in a computer-generated simulation:

Anyway, this doesn’t even scratch the surface of what capabilities have emerged now that we humans have access to this new launch capacity. Not least because I haven’t even mentioned SpaceX’s own Starlink satellite internet yet, which today has over 6000 satellites in orbit providing broadband-style speeds to, well, conceivably everywhere. If SpaceX hadn’t reduced the cost of spaceflight, there’s no way that such a network could ever have been built.5

An order of magnitude

However, though the above is cool, it’s almost old news now.

What the Starship launch and catch demonstrated is that the components of the new rocket work: That something of its size can make it to space, and that its constituent parts can return to Earth to be used again. I’m sure there will be more explosions and mishaps before the rocket is fully ready, but the fundamental theory of Starship has been demonstrated.

In other words, Musk has been proven correct. This is officially how a Mars-capable rocket works.

So now it is only a matter of time before the design is finessed, and flights become routine – much like the Falcon 9 now.6 And once this happens, the price for launching stuff into space will collapse all over again.

In fact, Musk himself has claimed that Starship could make a mere $10 (yes, ten dollars) per kilogram to orbit possible. And whether or not he is bullshitting, as per his previous wild claims, the reality is that given the payload capacity of the new rocket and the cost of launching, prices to orbit will almost certainly fall by several orders of magnitude.

And this is why I wonder if we – humans – are not quite prepared for what this will mean.

The new, new economics will transform what is possible in space – because costs falling and scale increasing can lead to new, emergent capabilities.

For example, smartphones went from expensive, experimental devices that only the rich could afford, to something that can be picked up for £50. As a result, there are now over seven billion smartphones in the world, and all but the very, very poorest have access to the technology – which has changed how the world communicates, shares information, and does business.

So what new capabilities will emerge from the new economics of space?

One obvious one is that it will become viable to launch many more probes to explore the solar system. And it might be possible to send probes to places faster too, because Starship can carry more propellant, so it can burn more fuel to increase speed. I won’t be surprised if future missions to Mars and Venus don’t just send one probe, but send a fleet.

I wonder if we could also see the rapid emergence of new space telescopes too. The James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in 2021 cost $10bn – and though something like that was always going to be expensive, it’s conceivable that the next telescope could be cheaper. This isn’t just because of the cost of launch, but because Starship’s larger payload bay will mean that telescopes won’t require such a wildly complicated mechanism to fold out its mirror – so money can be saved in the design phase.

There are many other possible pure science applications too – of varying levels of plausibility. For example, Casey Handmer has already written a great post about some of them, covering everything from how Starships could be connected together in orbit to form huge new space stations, to how they could deliver the large payloads to the Moon that we’re going to need to establish a permanent presence on the lunar surface.7

But much as with the Falcon 9 cost collapse, this isn’t just about scientific research. What’s probably more important in the short-term is how Starship will make it possible to launch many more satellites that look back at the Earth.

For example, it will make deploying Starlink even cheaper. At the moment, a Falcon 9 can deploy up to 60 Starlink satellites in one go – and with Starship, this will increase to up to 400 with each launch. That could make it even more plausible to have broadband access everywhere.

And as with the small satellite examples above, launching satellites will become more affordable for even smaller companies and organisations.

And hell, there’s even some mad-sounding proposals to use space-based solar panels to generate electricity, which would then be sent via microwave link back to Earth – just like in Sim City 2000. I’ve no idea how plausible this is, but Starship will at least nudge us closer to experimenting with it.

Scale and the Musk of it all

I think what makes Starship so exciting – and so important – is the scale it enables. Just as the container ship revolutionised the transportation of goods around the world, and just as modern passenger jets were a step-change from the tiny propeller planes in the early years of flight, Starship is going to change humanity’s relationship with space.

That’s why I wonder if we’ve collectively not yet woken up to what is about to happen.

And perhaps this is unsurprising, as it would have been hard to predict how the world was about to change a year before the launch of the iPhone, or the public release of ChatGPT. Similarly, I suspect that Elon Musk being such a hateful person makes us not want to acknowledge the importance of this technological moment.

But I think what Sunday’s launch confirmed is that Starship is now not a matter of “if”, but “when”. And that means when we think about the near future we now need to imagine a world where space is a much bigger part of our everyday lives.

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• We talk about how progress sometimes has winners and losers, by looking at the case of someone who is almost uniquely screwed by the new Universal theme park.

• Then we follow up on three things we’ve talked about on the pod – on-street EV charging, environmental delivery plans and… how the bloody Prime Minister has cast doubt on Heathrow’s third runway again, after it all seemed like it was happening.

• And we speak to Anya Martin about her fascinating new paper, arguing that we need to create an autonomous vehicle tax now – before it’s too late!

James wrote about how access to AI compute is a social justice issue (and don’t forget to check out last week’s post about why we should turn East Anglia into Britain’s Shenzhen.)

Martin wrote ‘The AI Apocalypse is Extremely Boring Now’, and his YouTube channel is here.

And try James’s two stupid games: MP Recall and MP Chain!

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I do our best impression of Tim Harford on More or Less, debunking some questionable Guardian reporting on data centres. Then we speak to James Howat from ThinkLabour, who argues that we can build more infrastructure if we bring back municipal bonds. Listen here!

GAME! How many MPs can you remember? Try my stupid little MP memory game to find out!

My partner asked me what I want for Christmas the other day.

This is a surprisingly difficult question. We’re middle-class and childless, and though we’re not particularly wealthy in any meaningful way, this does mean that if there’s something reasonably priced that we want, like a book or a video game… we just buy it. We don’t wait for a special occasion, because why bother?

So I sat there thinking for more than a few moments, my mind blank, when all of a sudden something depressing hit me. Could she buy me some more AI tokens?1 Does ChatGPT sell gift cards?

As bizarre as it may seem to most people, a lack of AI compute is, with only a little exaggeration, one of the biggest problems in my life. ChatGPT has proven so useful to me as a knowledge engine, software development platform and work assistant, that I’ve recently found my supply of AI tokens running dry, to the point where, even though I pay for the $20/month ‘Plus’ tier, it eventually refuses to respond to my queries for several hours – or even days.2

From a business perspective, this makes total sense for OpenAI. Though an app on a computer screen may feel weightless to the user, the computation to make the magic happen is extremely resource-intensive. If you prompt ChatGPT, in order to compute the answer, something roughly equivalent to an entire rack of computers in a data centre briefly dedicates itself to your query. That’s why AI energy usage is a significant environmental concern, as well as a bottleneck for development – it’s a non-trivial expense that the AI companies need to pay for.

But from my perspective, knowing this does not make it less annoying. Though there is a way around this – I could simply pay more. ChatGPT would love me to upgrade to the $100/month tier for a 5x increase in the number of AI tokens I can use.

However, here I hit a different roadblock. I can’t really afford to spend $100/month on AI compute. I mean, I suppose I could – but at that level it becomes a middle-class spending trade-off, where I’m forced to choose between my precious tokens and, say, subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and a myriad of other subscriptions. And I should probably continue to pay my half of the mortgage, for the sake of my relationship and having a house to live in.

Anyway, it was when I was experiencing this great pain that I realised something important. Though my dilemma was simply annoying, I think in the not too distant future it could become an important challenge for society.

Because what happens when this problem hits people who are not as fortunate as I am? If the most optimistic predictions about AI are true, and it really is world-changing in its utility, and if compute remains a constrained and expensive resource – what will limitations on AI usage mean for the poorest people in society? Won’t it be unfair if the rich can buy all of the compute they need, and the poor are left without?

In other words… Am I crazy to think that AI could soon become a social justice issue?

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Power to the processors

I wrote recently about how AI has broken the link between human brains and cognition.

Though we can debate at exhaustive length about exactly which tasks AI can perform, or the limits of its ‘intelligence’, it’s increasingly true that human-like cognition can be spun up on demand with a credit card.

This is a weird analogy, but it’s a bit like the transition to cloud computing in the mid-2000s. In the before times, companies and individuals needed to make huge capital outlays on computing equipment – essentially placing bets on their future needs.

But then cloud arrived and smoothed the correlation between demand and costs. When more people want to use your app, the cloud platforms automatically spin up more computers to meet the demand, and when fewer people use it, it scales down again.

And we’re arguably already witnessing the same happen with ‘intelligence’. The amount of smarts you will have to dedicate to any given task will be the sum total of both your brain and however much AI compute you have access to.

In other words, there will be a similarly smooth correlation between intelligence and how much you can afford to pay.

So wind the clock forwards and the implications of this are scary. The rise of AI could end up having significant distributional impacts, and could become a source of significant inequality.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Finally O’Malley gets it! That naive AI booster is conceding that the hectoring critics have been right all along!”

So let’s be clear. I’m not talking here about the potential AI impact on jobs, intellectual property or any of the other well-worn criticisms of the technology. Those are different debates for other pieces.

What I’m talking about specifically is access to AI intelligence – especially if the most optimistic Silicon Valley predictions about AI turn out to be true.

This is because if AI is as transformative as the Tech Bros hope, the technology will inevitably be woven into all aspects of our lives. If intelligence is available on tap, it’s plausible that we’ll all essentially have AI agents running in the background of our lives and this will be completely normal – a bit like how today it is basically impossible to function in society without a smartphone.

What will these agents be doing? It would be silly to speculate on what specific products might emerge. Though, for the sake of giving you something to picture, imagine a virtual personal assistant that is like Siri on steroids. Something that can proactively work on your behalf, without needing prompting. It could manage your money, organise your calendar, negotiate with the government over your benefits, or perform ten billion other tasks basically autonomously to reduce the friction in your life.3

Whatever conveniences end up being invented will require compute resources – and those resources will be subject to the same dynamic: Those with more money will have access to more compute, and therefore will be able to do more stuff, further entrenching a society of haves and have-nots. And unless we plan for it, it could turn out that not having access to compute is just as debilitating as living without a phone is today.

Uncertain assumptions

Obviously, my argument here is highly speculative. It rests on several assumptions about the future coming true. Perhaps the AI sceptics will be proven right.

But even if the technology does prove maximally useful, there are other examples where analogous to this where any problems have simply disappeared.

For example, when my parents first got a dial-up internet connection in the 90s, access to the internet cost a penny per minute, which meant that time online was severely rationed. I couldn’t spend an evening wasting my life, scrolling listlessly because there was a permanent ticking clock running, and it could add up to serious expense.4

But eventually, this problem mostly disappeared as the market shook out so that instead today everyone pays a flat fee, in exchange for internet usage that is effectively unmetered, no matter how long we spend on Geocities, or whatever it was we did in the 90s.

The same happened to mobile internet usage too. At the beginning of the iPhone era, phone contracts severely limited everyone’s data allowance, but eventually mobile infrastructure caught up and the cost of data collapsed, which is why today most people can afford a package that is either unmetered, or large enough for data limits not to really matter.5

So there is a strong argument that AI will likely go the same way. The reason you can easily hit a hard limit on ChatGPT and Claude today is that the availability of compute is severely limited. As soon as the world builds more data centres (as is happening), the theory is the price of compute will fall and AI use will be effectively unmetered.

And then there’s the related argument that in the future, most AI compute will happen locally – your AI data crunching won’t happen in a distant data centre, but on the chip inside your phone or computer. That would mean no need to pay a subscription, and you can use AI as much as you like for free.6

I readily concede that, maybe, this is a possible future too. However, I must admit, I’m a little sceptical in the medium term, because of the huge gulf in capability between local models, designed to run on home devices, and the latest frontier models that run in the cloud. Maybe I just lack the imagination, but given the hardware and energy requirements, I’m not sure how all of that can be shrunk down into a smaller model that can work just as effectively on significantly less capable hardware.7

But anyway, my point is that though these are two possible futures – there is a third. And this is where the danger lies. What if the cost of compute doesn’t fall, or if the price equilibrium lands somewhere inconvenient and out of reach of many people?

We got lucky with broadband and mobile – it’s so cheap that most people can afford a home internet connection and a SIM card with a reasonable data allowance.

But what if AI is so unbelievably useful to the rich and to corporate users that the cost of compute for people on low incomes, or small businesses just starting out, is just too out of reach? So that when rich and poor compete for access to this new, scarce resource, there’s only one winner?

I don’t think this is as hard to imagine as it might seem, as we’ve already seen a microcosm of what this might look like, and the victims are some of the least sympathetic people on Earth.

I’m talking, of course, about gamers.

A significant consequence of the AI boom is that because data centres require similar chips, RAM and other components to the computers in our homes, manufacturers have dedicated their capacity to providing for data centres – sending the cost of home computing spiralling.

For example, earlier this year Apple raised the price of the entry-level MacBook Air from £1,099 to £1,299, and amazingly the cost of a new Playstation 5 today is £569.99 – 27% higher than when the console was first released six years ago.

This is completely unprecedented. Typically what you’d expect to happen is for consoles, phones and computers to get cheaper over time as devices age and components become cheaper to make. But cold business logic dictates that spending on AI is just much more lucrative, which has left everyone else paying over the odds for hardware.

So my point is – what if we end up in a similar position in terms of access to compute? What if the marginal value of a little bit of extra compute is much higher to a large corporation to the point where it makes compute unaffordable for regular people? And what if this isn’t a problem that goes away quickly like we might expect as supply catches up to demand?

Similarly, I don’t think this is as unlikely as it might sound.

Though the current AI build-out is often described as a bubble, the record investment could simply be a reflection that this really is a world-historic, valuable technology. And perhaps we are starting to see the first signs of this. Anthropic is now forecasting that it expects to bring in upwards of $100bn in the next year. That’s not hype – that’s cash from customers who want to buy the AI capabilities that the company is selling.8

And I think demand for compute could still conceivably go even further too. As I wrote previously, this is a new general-purpose technology – there are countless tasks to which this new resource of cognition-on-demand can be applied. And as Ben Thompson has argued, what will drive this demand for compute – or ‘inference’9 – isn’t just humans typing queries, but AI agents working autonomously – compute begetting more compute without human intervention:

Today’s agents are fancy answer inference; in the future true agentic inference will be work done by computers according to dictates given by other computers, and the market size scales not with humans but with compute.

Given that agentic computing is already exploding, I think it is at least plausible that we will reach a point where it is far more valuable for corporations to pay a premium for marginal compute, creating the market failure I describe above. And it’s not a given that just because demand will be there from individuals, supply will catch up – because building isn’t without friction, as data centres are hugely controversial and subject not just to market forces, but the arbitrary whims of planners and other political interests.

And if this sounds familiar, it’s because though I’m describing a hypothetical problem for AI, there’s another sector where the corporations and individuals are already locked into a competition for the same scarce resource that is subject to the same dynamic: energy.

As things stand, if electricity was a pure free market, we’d build vastly more energy infrastructure to reduce price and service demand, but energy infrastructure is subject to other constraints. And likewise, if domestic energy prices were set by the market, they would be significantly higher, and the prices would disproportionately punish the poor.

That’s why, in the case of energy, the government created the energy price cap. Though it doesn’t completely delink household energy costs from the market, it does attempt to mitigate it to reduce the burden.

So is it that crazy to imagine something similar being required to ensure AI compute is shared fairly too?

Left behind?

So that’s my wild speculation on how access to compute could conceivably, in the not-too-distant future, become a social justice issue. Like I say, perhaps it won’t happen – perhaps one of the other futures will emerge, and availability of compute will be so commoditised this simply doesn’t become an issue.10

But if this is what the future looks like, and AI does live up to the hype, if you care about social justice and poor people, then this is something everyone – particularly those on the left of politics – is going to have to think about.

And so far, I don’t see much thinking along these lines. Much of the left-of-centre response to AI so far has been either outright denial of its capabilities11 or has been stuck in the intellectual dead end of “do we even want this?”, as though the LLM genie can somehow be stuffed back into the bottle. Then more credibly, there are more serious leftist critiques that are worth taking seriously, such as the impact AI will have on jobs, or how it will shift power from labour to capital.12

But what has been missing from all of this is any discussion of how to manage AI if the most optimistic expectations are right. We’ve invented this incredible new technology, capable of so many potentially positive things – but how can we ensure that the fruits of artificial intelligence are fairly shared?

I suspect the reason for this blind spot is mostly because, for people on the left, it is faintly embarrassing to talk about such a sci-fi idea, and not to mention politically awkward to contemplate given other ideological commitments. To entertain the idea that compute is a social justice issue is to implicitly concede that the hated Tech Bros will have created something good for the world.13

But I do think issues like this have a habit of seeming like a joke until suddenly they are very much not.

It wasn’t so long ago that you would have sounded mad for worrying about the moderation policies of a social platform for university students – but now those same rules help decide elections. Likewise, the micro-blogging platform where you used to post jokes and memes has helped smash the cordon sanitaire between the mainstream and fascist right. And that funny video app where people post dancing videos and comedy skits? It’s handed the Chinese Communist Party the tools to shape the minds of younger generations across the West.

So if AI does turn out to be as transformative as many people expect it to be, we should start thinking now about how to ensure that access to compute does not further entrench inequality in society, and so that everyone can share the benefits of this new technology.

I’d ask ChatGPT how to get started with this, but I’m all out of tokens.

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Your usual newsletter essay will be arriving later this week, but in the meantime I couldn’t resist sending you my latest creation – a memory challenge to see how many MPs you can remember in five minutes.

It’s surprisingly tricky – I managed 44, and I’m completely brain-poisoned by Westminster politics. The best score I’ve seen so far is 61.

If you want to try it, click here. And don’t forget to share your results on social media for bragging rights/pity.

Anyway, enjoy!

James

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• We try to channel the spirit of Tim Harford and debunk some rather strange numbers in the Guardian’s data centre reporting.

• Then we speak to James Howat from ThinkLabour about how bringing back municipal bond markets to get Britain building again.

James wrote up his Guardian debunking here, and covers two other bad data centres stories too.

Martin’s Substack is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

In 1979, the city of Shenzhen in southern China was little more than a fishing village. Today, however, it is a city of 17 million people, and the centre of the global electronics industry.

Sure, most software we use is written in the United States, and Silicon Valley is where the most important hardware is designed. But most of the actual production lines that turn blueprints, raw materials and components into finished devices are found in Shenzhen. In fact, there’s a good chance the phone or laptop you’re reading this on right now was made there.

If you want to read about this in detail, I strongly recommend the fantastic Apple in China by Patrick McGee. It is, of course, a book about Apple, but it also tells a broader story of how this one Chinese city came to dominate tech manufacturing.

It’s a story into which Apple is tightly woven – the smartphone boom that fuelled the city’s growth is all downstream of Tim Cook’s mastery of supply chains and outsourcing. But it’s also a story of how, by satiating the West’s desire for cheap, reliable manufacturing, China has steadily built up its own domestic giants. This is what enabled China to ascend from the bottom of the ‘value chain’, manufacturing basic widgets, to the top, as a home for extremely high-end manufacturers.

It’s why today China is the best country in the world at everything from drones to humanoid robots to electric cars, and the stereotype of the cheap Chinese knock-off is almost as out-of-date as when people used the same slur against Taiwan and Japan.

But how exactly did this transformation happen?

In one of the most striking passages in the book, McGee talks about how, ironically, despite the globalised nature of modern tech supply chains, agglomeration really is critical to Shenzhen’s success:

Indeed, China sports a level of technical sophistication that multiple experts struggle to even comprehend. The layperson often believes Foxconn could just open a factory in a different country; but the Foxconn hubs in China are surrounded by hundreds of sub-suppliers all ready to compete for the next major order. “For Apple to give that system up is tricky,” says Jay Goldberg, founder of D2D Advisory, a tech consultancy. If Foxconn, for example, needs to install sonic welders-a process to merge different metals or plastics with ultrasonic energy-it can call up any number of firms to run the line and hire the labor.

“There’s all these subcontracted, specialty niche firms, and nowhere else does that exist,” Goldberg says. What China offers, in other words, is not simply labor, but an entire ecosystem of processes developed over more than two decades.

This brings me to Britain – and Europe more broadly.

As much as we are beneficiaries of decades of cheap manufacturing in China, there has been an implicit trade-off. We have lost almost all of our ability to manufacture and build at home – a fact that has been made stark by the war in Ukraine, which was fought at the beginning with almost exclusively Chinese-made consumer drones. Even today, though Ukraine has rapidly developed a sophisticated domestic drone industry, many of the underlying components, like motors, control chips and magnets, are still sourced from China.

This, then, represents a huge strategic vulnerability. Which is why one recurring theme in our politics is the need to reindustrialise Britain, to protect ourselves from the more volatile global situation. And slowly the government is moving in this direction.

Just this week, Andy Burnham visited the motorsport company McLaren to trumpet the firm’s plans to invest in domestic manufacturing – as domestic manufacturing is not just good for high-minded security concerns, it’s good for creating vocational jobs too.

But even though he visited an F1 team, I’m worried that Burnham is not moving fast enough.

Don’t get me wrong – the noises being made are all of the right ones. Politicians from Burnham down clearly recognise the problem that if Russia invades a NATO ally, or if China moves on Taiwan,1 it’s not going to matter all that much that Britain is a global hub for TV production or corporate legal services.

However, I also think that if we take the geopolitical threats seriously, then we need to be more ambitious. Which is why today, I want to sketch out, on the back of a proverbial envelope, something bigger – a real attempt to get Britain manufacturing again.

Because though there is a lot of talk about the opportunity for a ‘knowledge corridor’ in the Oxford-Cambridge arc, which will provide new homes and graduate jobs in the London commuter belt, Europe also needs a powerful manufacturing ecosystem of its own.

And if we know this is something our continent needs, why can’t we build it ourselves? Which is why this week, I’m going to explain why – and how – we should turn East Anglia into Europe’s Shenzhen.

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Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-regular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen lately, plus some shorter takes.

This time I’m featuring:

• Some sobering facts about the plan to build near train stations

• The ultimate Treasury Brain case study

• Mark Carney showing Andy Burnham how to communicate

• Burnham acting like a human on camera

• This one weird trick could help Britain build tonnes more infrastructure without spending more money

• The sporting event I’ve found most compelling recently

• Some intriguing data journalism about the final tracks on albums

• And a pre-9/11 blast from the past that feels extremely weird now

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