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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