No guest at the airlock this week — no radar contact at all, in fact, because Tom is patching in from a French heatwave, leaving Calum alone in the captain’s seat. Domestic matters first: the long-foretold big score has finally materialised (34 runs, since you ask), and England are in a World Cup semi-final.
Which turns out to be geopolitically relevant, because Britain’s principal adversary this century could well be Argentina. The last country to declare war on us has a standing claim on the Antarctic Peninsula and a date circled for 2048, when the treaty system parking everyone’s claims comes up for review.
Elsewhere: Tom, broadcasting from a continental-sized armpit at nearly forty degrees, discovers France is having a full culture war about air conditioning while Britain quietly makes cooling near-impossible to permit and calls the heat character-building. And a new Acemoglu paper hands the show a victory lap on a long-running thesis: labour scarcity forces innovation.
The episode explores:
Why Britain’s principal adversary this century might be Argentina, with 2048 circled in the diary
“The Antarctic Peninsula is British and it shall remain British. I am sending a task force to Port Lockroy” — the duelling Thatcher impressions
The dream of an episode entitled simply Gotcha
Why there is still no British city on the Falklands despite ten trillion pounds of oil in the neighbourhood
Harry Kane, the Chagos Islands, and the Diego Garcia tattoo
How England should handle Messi (flood the midfield; he doesn’t run very much)
France’s aircon culture war: Le Pen promising cooling for all, Mélenchon scandalised
Air conditioning as civilisational technology — the most important thing Lee Kuan Yew did for Singapore’s civil service
Barocal, the Cambridge spinout doing solid-state barocaloric cooling with no refrigerant and 2-3x the efficiency of commercial HVAC
The Acemoglu natural experiment: wartime labour loss, 9.1 per cent higher GDP per capita fifty years on
The automated car wash you never build while labour stays artificially cheap
The Motor Car Act, the Isle of Man TT, and what the CAA could accidentally do for drones
Politics as downstream of TFR: pensions eating the state and Luttwak’s end of the heroic generation
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