Odds and Ends #35: The business of Taylor Swift

Plus my London Mayoral endorsement, some clever TV broadcasting tech, a mad AI development, and an unrepentant graffiti artist.

Photo by blocks on Unsplash

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your mini newsletter-within-a-newsletter, containing the most interesting links I’ve seen this week, plus some shorter takes for your content-consuming delight.

Apologies for the slight irregularity of these mini-newsletters. I’ve had a busy few weeks working on other projects, but the good news is that I’ve recently voluntarily given up one of my regular commitments to spend more time on my Substack.

So now is a great time to take out a paid subscription to tell me this wasn’t a silly idea. In fact, here’s a special link that will get you 20% off annually if you subscribe in the next few days.

Anyway, let’s get on with the #content:

My official London Mayor endorsement

The worst thing about being priced out of London hasn’t been anything tangible. I now live close enough that the city is still the centre of my social and professional life, but it does meant that I have to suffer the psychic pain of no longer technically being a Londoner.

However, this does have advantages too. For example, I’m free from having to make the difficult choice of who to vote for in next week’s Mayoral election – made all the more challenging by the new voting system being first-past-the-post.

The reason for the difficulty will be obvious to regular readers: I’m a squishy centre-left voter, who historically has meandered between Labour, the LibDems and even the Greens over the years (sorry about that).

At the next General Election, I’m very much looking forward to enthusiastically voting for Keir Starmer’s Labour, as the party aligns with a bunch of my views (even if they’ve mistakenly rowed back on HS2 and climate).

But if I were voting in London? There would surely only be one choice – as it is on the LibDem candidate, Rob Blackie, who has officially endorsed liberating the Postcode Address File as part of his manifesto¹. And hey – his other policies are pretty good too!

So that’s a retail-politics offer that I wouldn’t be able to refuse. And given that Khan is (probably) going to win by a significant margin anyway, I think it’s pretty safe to give your vote to Rob – and vote to Free the PAF!

The business of Taylor Swift