r/TheRestIsPolitics

Just that. Or is it me?

Edit - it's just me. Too keen for a response to Monday's speech by Burnham.

To add a bit of context around some of the statements about aviation in the recent episode, particularly that solutions will be available in 15 years or so, allow me to outline what is actually happening in the industry.

The UK's biggest contributions to aviation in terms of manufacturing exports are wings (Airbus/GKN in Bristol and Broughton), and engines (Rolls Royce in Derby). UK industrial policy has generally been to support both systems with research funding under the Aerospace Technology Institute (ATI). Currently both companies take the bulk of the funding, and critically, RR are sucking up huge proportions of it for their new Ultrafan engine.

RR currently supplies the long-haul market but not the short-haul; Ultrafan is their bet to re-enter that market, and the UKs investment gamble to restore a lot of lost manufacturing jobs in the region (short-haul is 80% of flights).

These developments in engines and wings are being aimed at the next clean-sheet design of short-haul aircraft (known as Next Generation Single Aisle), which are expected to be launched by Boeing and Airbus around 2030, and come into service later that decade. Airbus have suggested that manufacture of this new platform could hit 100/month globally, which is about double the current rate.

In short; it's huge business. The aircraft will be in production until the 2070s, and will shape the future of air travel.

The problem is, none of this matches the climate change politics being discussed. Electrification can't support anything bigger than inter-city travel. Airbus flirted with hydrogen for short-haul for a while, but gave it up for NGSA when it became clear that even if the technology could be ready in time, a global rollout of the supporting infrastructure would not be.

Currently short-haul makes up about four fifths of flights, but long-haul makes up two thirds of emissions, and there is no green alternative available for long-haul flights.

The preferred way forward for the industry is sustainable variant of jet fuel (SAF). This is either made from recycled oil products or electrically produced, and is fully interchangeable with regular jet fuel, requiring no new aircraft or infrastructure at airports. It's also much more expensive. The argument is, however, if you can make fuel from CO2 electrically recovered from the atmosphere, you can burn it while remaining net-zero. The other focus of the industry is on some more unusual aircraft wings which provide fuel burn reductions to the aircraft.

The effect of Hormuz is having an immediate effect on the industry however; there are rumours of cash-flow issues at Airbus as airlines defer airframe deliveries in case they run out of jet fuel to run them.

It remains to be seen if the new political reality around jet fuel supply actually changes what airlines are looking for on a new product.

The point of the Rest Is Politics is to "disagree agreeably" which should include European Commissioners. Instead of creating a useful debate where many of Rory's views could be challenged he merely waited until the end. It's weak and pointless to do this instead of debating front on in a direct manner which could be polite.

To this end the conclusion I garnered as a listener is that he's so set in his views that he doesn't wish them to be challenged. He has spoken to some people, tried to replicate their ideas but is fundamentally unsure why they're true so not prepared to have them challenged.

Let's be clear that is someone pro-climate policy did this the other way around they'd not get away with it.

It was also revealing how Stewart approaches energy security and in particular the issues caused by the strait of hormuz. Three major commodities were heavily affected: fertilisers, diesel, and kerosene. The Commissioner was clear in his phrasing that whilst all three are important on a global scale it's fertilisers and diesel of central importance. Stewart instinctively would lean towards kerosene over the other commodities. This points to a commentator to biased by their own life choices to be objective.

This is why I a developing belief that whilst Stewart is determined to appear that his objections to net-zero are led from first principles they are in fact led by what matters deeply to him at a personal level. The Climate Change Committee have shown very clearly that if the UK's net-zero policies continue on their current pathway within 10-15 years jet-fuel will go from its ~20% share of oil demand to being the majority. Heating will reduce from its current 16% share, road transport is likely to be solidly reducing via electrification.

This is not outlandish because it was this understanding which Sunak used in his weaponisation against net-zero --- the fact it'll become mainly about diet and aviation at the political level.

For those of us who mainly holiday within Europe this isn't troubling. High speed rail, electric planes, EVs, etc. will dominate most mileage within the continent. For someone who's explicitly designed their life to with maximal usage of long haul aviation this does pose challenges. What we are seeing is how intelligent people -- like Stewart -- are realising that net-zero and acting against climate change could quickly become personal.

I've seen an increasing amount of tech/financial journalists pouring deep scepticism on whether the AI revolution will actually happen or collapse into a financial blackhole of unbuilt data centres and unpaid loans.

One recurring theme is how journalists and commentators have fallen for "the lie" and are amplifying it through their platforms in the media by presenting full AI takeover of society as inevitable. If this theory is actually true then Rory is undoubtedly in this category.

I must confess I haven't listened to Rory's special series on AI, did anyone actually bring this point to the table and debate with him? If not, I'd love to hear a debate between Rory and someone from the AI-skeptic side of the debate like Ed Zitron on either their podcast or TRIP

Edit - this perhaps inevitably turned into a debate about AI generally - but my point specifically about the podcast - is that Rory should have it out with one of the prominent nay-sayers as I literally have never heard Rory even acknowledge that there are economic hurdles ahead for these companies (and it'sthere in black and white). It would be an interesting listen for the fans.

I think the US political system cannot tolerate a figure like mamdani for much longer. He has a high approval rating and a huge influence on other elections. The longer he is successful the more other people would rise up and demand similar things in other parts of the country. And i don't think america is compatible with that much democracy. Also Israel would take bigger and bigger risks as it is fading away in the US public and i think this assassination could be one of their last hopes. This is made more likely considering he is from uganda. I think he has ambitions for higher positions than mayor of nyc so when he will be campaigning for the next thing or just after he has won it would be the time i suspect he gets assassinated.

Starmer has surely made some mistakes but overall hasn’t been anywhere as bad to be forced out in 2 years after a landslide election victory.
Now that we are here, who in the Labour Party genuinely has better credentials apart from Starmer to be a PM at this point and should contest a leadership race against Burnham and Streeting? We don’t even clearly know what these guys’ policy positions are!

Update: After 303 comments, hardly anyone’s actually named some strong candidates who have articulated what better they will do versus Starmer? If indeed there have been improvements versus previous few governments (low bar of course) and communication is the problem, why not unite and offer help to fix that rather than try to disrupt to inherit exact same problems with no new solutions?

Rory and Alastair suggesting that Burnham get rid of the Triple Lock whilst he’s riding a popular wave is just crazy. FFS, the first thing that Starmer and Reeves tried to do was get rid of the (much less contentious) Pensioner’s Fuel Allowance and look what happened - it’s still a defining moment of crashing unpopularity now. Imagine the field day the Press would have - “Labour are coming after your Granny again!” It may need to be done at some stage, but now is not the time.

Thought that Steve Rosenberg had a very good a balanced view on Russia in the last Leading episode, very much in line with "liberal" side of Russian politics (mostly underground atm). I found a but strange that Alistair wasn't able to answer the question about reciprocal access of Russian media to UK politics - stories about what has happened during Blair's time are hardly relevant for today's relationships. I also find amusing Rory's naive lack of self-awareness on the topics of "How could we take money from Russian oligarchs? Couldn't we see what they were?" Yes you could - but UK is corrupt as many other places and would happily take money when sums are big enough, there's nothing exceptional. Anyway, as someone who left the county long time ago, soon after protests of 2010s, I found this episode strangely comforting, especially with the song in the end.

As someone who is broadly centre-left, I've been trying to consume more media outside of my personal political affiliation.

I found the James Cleverly episode to be fascinating, and exactly the sort of cross-aisle conversation that TRIP espouses. Whilst i didn't agree with everything he said, I did feel like all three of them did a great job arguing their viewpoints without devolving into personal attacks.

I especially thought that he absolutely nailed Alistair on the anecdote about his Sergeant commenting on his skin colour, and how the former's suspicions of racism completely changed when the sergeant's nationality was revealed. He also didn't use that to go on a tirade, just acknowledged it and moved on.

It makes me wonder where the Conservative party would be now if there wasn't the fumble during the leadership contest (which he also took on the chin).

I couldn't believe that Rory said this on the latest episode of Leading. As an Irish person, this is the kind of casual racist remark that most British people I speak to like to insist is in the past. I felt like this was a real mask off moment from Rory.

What were other people's reactions? Do you think this kind of comment is acceptable?

The idea that Europe can own the "application layer" and data centres and think they won't be held hostage by the US and China is crazy. Inference compute and application layers are such a weak moat compared to owning labs.

I am working with these things every day here's my assessment:

• It basically doesn't really matter where inference or training compute actually happens. With cloud compute it might as well just be a toggle to set it to train/run inference in Delhi or Delaware. If you're using open weights models basically anyone with enough GPU can run inference.
  • "build more data centers" will consume an insane amount of political capital and not really make us much more resilient
• Applications are depending more and more on a layer between the applications and the model called a "harness". The best harness right now is the Claude Agent SDK (Claude Code), it's constantly being updated.
  • We're seeing the models being trained more and more to work in a specific harness.
  • If you're building an application you're tied into this
• The actual data a model is trained with is a huge vulnerability point (and moat) and we have 0 visibility of what the US and China are doing here.
  • there's increasing evidence that tiny amounts of training data can cause unaligned behaviour in highly specific scenarios in LLMs.
  • It would be really, really easy for open weight and closed weight models from China and the US to "bake-in" pro-China/US behaviour into their models under highly specific scenarios which would be almost impossible to track and completely impossible to correct.
    • Imagine an agent on Chinese/American models that under specific scenarios like they check that they're being used for national defence purposes, they do a secretive information leak to their home government.
    • The chinese/American models could be also used to very very gently sway public opinion in their home government's favour.

We NEED top labs. Mistral is way way worse than Chinese open source which is worse (but way cheaper) than American closed source.

How do we get ahead in labs? The ONLY answer is talent + data + competition + capital.

Talent -> the UK is doing pretty well here.

Capital -> UK needs a bigger risky VC industry, but we could probably fix that quickly if the other bits show promise.

Data + Competition -> this is where we're far behind. It's really the key, and our chance to do something really different. Chinese and American companies can access vast pools of data of people speaking the same language to produce amazing LLMs and they have enormously competitive industries.

We can't compete with the amount of data that China and the US collect on a company-by-company basis, especially as established American companies basically have all the data of UK consumers.

Our only hope is to view UK consumers', companies' data as a sovereign, public resource.
We need any UK-based startup to be able to access this massive pool of data for virtually no cost, it cuts the barrier to entry to the market.

Then we can have crazy competition and really unlock UK labs.

Quote from Rory in the latest episode:

“As the performance of this increases, the positive potential for this massively increases so you have much more productivity, you can do much more exciting things with your companies, for productivity brackets, *you can also lay off a lot of employees, right?*”

“And on the negative side, you can use it for bad in a much more powerful way…”

He might well be right about the inevitability of AI, however can’t help but feel disappointed with how blithe - or in this case positive - he is about the potential for mass unemployment.

Heard AC mention that Gabriel Zucman is coming on the show soon, which was referenced in today’s Burnham emergency episode.

I always see a lot of requests for him in comments, but I’m not hugely familiar - who is he / what’s the topline on him?

Both Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting are more socially conservative than even Theresa May

Rory was listing, gleefully I might add, the list of America's failures in its recent Persian Gulf adventure. One of them, that he repeated and expanded on, is how America has destroyed only 25% of Iran's missiles and there were 75% of them untouched "in really deep bunkers" despite America conducting 500 raids a day.

Point 1. If you destroy the launch platforms, it doesn't matter how many missiles they've got.

Point 2. 25/75 doesn't seem to match reality on the ground where missiles being fired at Gulf States dropped to a trickle after a couple of days.

Point 3. 25/75 doesn't seem to take into account how many were fired. If Iran started with 5,000, or 50,000 and fires 50%, and loses 25% that leaves 25% in those "super secret deep bunkers", not 75%.

Point 4. This seems like the same source that claimed Hez Bollah were sitting on two football stadiums full ("100,000") of missiles. Which seems to mean Hez have decided not to fire them at Israel whilst at the same time being smashed into pieces from Israeli bombing.

Rory really needs to stop listening to one of his sources.