Substack: mjrobbins.com Podcast: abundancepod.com
3,095 followers 209 following 1,062 posts
view profile on Bluesky 
After a year of a new govt people on low to middle incomes are still struggling to reach the Minimum Income Standard (MIS) đ˘ @crsp-uk.bsky.social, supported by JRF, calculated the costs needed to achieve this standard of living in the UK in 2025 1/4
Beyond appalling that the office of Sharon Hodgson MP was set on fire & vandalised. Those in public office must be free to serve & campaign without fear. There is a place to make your views known - at the ballot box! Thank goodness no one was hurt.
Interesting.
A reminder: one of the first significant actions Zack's party took when taking over Bristol Council was to withdraw from plans to build new Council homes.
British NIMBYism is truly a sight to behold. âWe are rejecting this solar farm, because one time I saw an electric vehicle on fire, which reminded me that decades ago a coal mining disaster killed lots of childrenâ.
ICYMI
Very similar examples here, including a local BBC reporter who spoke to three residents in Bedford, all of whom supported the theme back, and described their responses as 'mixed'. I think as @tombaldwin66.bsky.social says it's a structural issues with this approach to reporting.
ICYMI
JRF's minimum income standard (MIS) updated for 2025 is arresting: A working-age couple with two children aged 3 and 7 needs to earn ÂŁ74,000 a year between them to achieve MIS. Remember that covers basics, absolutely no luxuries. No wonder we felt bankrupt after a single holiday this year.
Extreme views are heavily over-represented on social media Social platformsâ tendency to reward hostile content creates incentives that systematically reward simplistic messages and extreme positions and this fuels populism www.ft.com/content/9251... via @jburnmurdoch.ft.com
More from the 'do you want Reform, because this is how you get Reform' beat.
Listen to our Executive Director @aliciagreated.bsky.social on the latest The Abundance Agenda podcast discussing CaSEâs work exploring skilled immigration to the UK and industrial strategy policy. đ§ www.abundancepod.com/p/reshuffle-... @jamesomalley.co.uk @mjrobbins.com
Cheers!
My latest: How Reform are accidentally building a bat tunnel in Lincolnshire, and what it might mean for 2029.
Including this genuine exchange from the councilâs oversight board đ¤ŻđŚ:
My latest: How Reform are accidentally building a bat tunnel in Lincolnshire, and what it might mean for 2029.
Here's something a bit different. We've been reporting from Edinburgh to try to get to the bottom of a mystery in London. Princes Street is the Scottish capital's most famous shopping street â and it's gaining the *exact same* tatty gift shops as London. www.londoncentric.media/p/edinburgh-...
Once again I am begging you all to stop this humiliation
The Mrs Doubtfire from Mrs Doubtfire
Bedfordshire powering into the top 7 there as well, good to see. #MostImportantCounty
And here's a podcast I'm extremely proud of, in which @mjrobbins.com (an LLM-sceptic of sorts) and I (more of an LLM optimist) debate how much of big deal the technology will be. www.abundancepod.com/p/james-and-...
It's nice to see actual film grain on a social media image - almost relaxing somehow.
Yeah, see also how YouTube channels have picked up the baton from Top Gear or cookery shows or gardening programs. I think a lot of it comes back to the weaknesses of linear broadcasting - you can't block out Radio 4 for a six hour history podcast for 100k people.
Radio gave this up to podcasters years ago TBH, it's part of why podcasts (and YouTube) have boomed in recent years, because you can get content from passionate, knowledgeable people at a level that TV and radio couldn't manage even in their prime.
This was the best discussion of LLM tech I've heard, and I say that as a former director of policy at the chartered institute for IT. Tbf, in the first 5 minutes I worried it was going to be like every other naff AI discussion that these days I try to avoid - but I'd thoroughly recommend it.
Martin asks why the local BBC always tries to see the bad side of things....
Build, build, build isn't much use as mantra if you then leave the new homes sitting empty for a year or more while the Building Safety Regulator gets round to approving them. This process used to take a matter of days when local authorities were in charge of it. news.sky.com/story/bluesk...
Finding key information shared at council meetings takes time and effort. Today, we've launched a tool that allows you to search verbatim quotes from council meetings in the UK and Ireland, without the need to watch long recordings or sift through extensive notes. council-search.bellingcat.com
My latest: on the BBC's weird NIMBY campaign against the Universal theme park.
Great piece on the perverse reporting about the new Universal Theme Park in Bedfordshire. By @mjrobbins.com. (As a Hertfordshire resident, I'm a huge fan of it). open.substack.com/pub/martinro...
I mean this is the kind of stuff I want my parish council to be all over, to be fair
Also a partial follow up to Tom's earlier observation on bias at the Beeb:
My latest: on the BBC's weird NIMBY campaign against the Universal theme park.
The attack on Policy Exchange is nuts but somehow made even worse by the number of âwell actuallyâ types turning up in the replies who think itâs fine to have thugs intimidating and threatening people for having politics they disagree with.
This is vile. I cannot see how anyone on the left at this time could think intimidating think tank workers and vandalising their workplace for having different politics is legit. This isnât liberal. This isnât democratic. This is, simply, wrong and should be condemned as such.
Appalling that Policy Exchangeâs offices were violently attacked last night - just the latest in a lengthy series of such intimidatory attacks targeted at think tanks and campaign groups, doing perfectly legitimate work that is part of our democratic process.
On where UK Bluesky does have a blind spot, I havenât seen anything on here about the vandalism of Policy Exchangeâs office (see below). This kind of stuff should be called out and criticised and Iâm very happy to do so.
Excellent analysis of why housebuilding is grinding to a halt in London here. With an important challenge to those who want to focus only on social housing.
Starmer shouldn't give a conference speech â he should give an Apple-style keynote takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/an-apple-a...
A Tory MP is hiring a "red tape researcher" to fight "sclerotic regulations" obstructing "wealth creation". Two clicks away from that ad, on his website, he boasts about his repeated objection to building houses on a field in his constituency.
Original article. I'll be doing an update soon that, incredibly, includes early signs of a dirty tricks campaign.
Fans of the pod/Substack will be delighted to know we've been protesting at Old Bridge Way this morning...
On The Abundance Agenda podcast this week: đ How to pay for the Bakerloo line extension đď¸ And we speak to the brilliant @samfr.bsky.social to get his take on this whole 'abundance' thing! Listen/subscribe: www.abundancepod.com/p/how-to-ext...
Oh god yes, the way it does the ânot as aâŚâ in literally every single paragraph.
I also donât understand how the technology editor of The Guardian can describe an OpenAI chat transcript as the âcofounderâ of a company, something that has zero possible legal basis and is on a par with calling a calculator your âCFOâ. Itâs like facts just donât matter.
Frankly itâs also reckless - you have growing numbers of people exhibiting delusional behaviour toward chatbots, and this straight up encourages it.
It is avtually remarkable how many people I'm aware of who are more right wing than me on social media were vastly more left wing than me ~5-10 years agk.
My daily experience on BlueSky now is having @lewisbaston.bsky.social pop up going âAha! Tricky one but the window pattern on the Khalifa House Museum is a dead giveaway that weâre in Khartoumâ and meanwhile Iâm typing âPittsburghâ for my fifth attempt and Iâve actually been to fucking Khartoum.
I also think *immigration* is code for *a sense that public services/domains are falling apart under the weight of demand and there are too many people to cope with* . Like, people donât understand why taxes go up but the country is broke and they canât get a GP appointment so it must be immigrants.
Lads lads lads itâs the bank holiday weekend, gonna have a large one
âBut the bus is wrong itâs *actually* only ÂŁ180m per week.â
Reading between the lines of some of the anecdotes, a lot of this feels like people who are impacted by other trends (tariffs, etc); struggling with regression to mean after the COVID boom (a lot like the tech industry), refusing to adapt to new tools and ways of working, or not actually translators
It's fascinating because the stories here are... exactly the opposite of what industry data is showing, which is that hiring is strong, translation jobs are growing and diversifying, and in fact it's one of the fastest growing professions in the uS right now.
WhatâŚ. does he think the investments are in đ¤Ż
You say this but I went to Belgium with one pair of trousers one time and it is not a mistake I will ever repeat.
Yeah, plus also the beauty of a lot of places is the home cuisine, like I stayed on an olive farm in Spain where I basically had fresh bread with stunning local olive oil and a bottle of red wine some evenings and it was the absolute best.
Peak âgoodâ time in even luxury hotels is about 3-4 nights per hotel, and maybe 9 nights for a trip. In a 2 week holiday you want at least one self-catering period. More than 1-2 weeks living in any one hotel is a nightmare.
The fact that the thing we're calling artificial intelligence *can't do math* and yet we're jamming it into programs that successfully *have done math* for decades, then warning people against using the AI to do math, seems like an excellent summary of where we are.
This piece says exactly what I've been thinking about AI
The people dominating our political landscape, culture, and economy are just so stupid and full of shit it's almost impossible to describe
Some lunchtime listening! A good one this week I think!
A thing I've long suspected but never got round to rigorously checking is that the Local Democracy Reporting Service is, effectively, structurally nimby - because a disproportionate amount of the available material if you're covering "local democracy" is planning objections
Sorry to hear that, take care of yourself x
But sir that 1960s concrete bus bunker is a local monument and demolishing it would irrevocably destroy the character of Brombley-on-Thames.
Yes, but if Iâm that private bus company I still need to find and invest that money up front, which I suspect is a challenge for many.
Chinaâs also running a deficit of nearly 10% of GDP⌠Iâm not saying itâs not possible, just that I assume most businesses/operators now are put off by the up front costs and lack of infra.
Up front costs would be enormous though, for the buses and all the infrastructure youâd need. As with agriculture, feels like itâs going to a good chunk of demand for e-diesel.
@mjrobbins.com
In the past few days and weeks, a number of friends and colleagues have asked "What's VJ Day?". Here is my brief history of the war in the East, from the perspective of British soldiers who fought it. www.thetimes.com/article/a6f2...
Exclusive: Poll reveals the British public back ending the Sunday Trading nightmare (FREE TO READ!) takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/sunday-tra...
Even if they ended up subsidising 10 million people, that's a billion per month to reset obesity to 1970s levels, reduce heart disease, cancers, strokes, diabetes cases. Absolute peanuts.
The government should just pay for a ÂŁ100pm discount for anyone buying Mountjaro etc. at this point, absolute no brainer for value.
I have Iraq, Sudan, Venezuela, etc., on my passport so I'm barred from the ESTA program and every time I enter the US I'm subjected to a ~30 minute interrogation about my life, CV, travel, etc. Which is actually a welcome relief from the normal immigration queues.
I flew into Khartoum and it was a better experience than Iâve had in most US airports
We may have strong disagreements, but I think we can all bond over the Linux weirdos.
Iâve been forced to use Windows in my current job for the first time since 2012 and⌠I genuinely donât know how people use it, itâs just awful, and I say that as someone who thought pre-11 versions were fine. Like, the task bar is unusable.
UK economy grew 1% in first half of 2025 US economy grew 0.6% I present these figures without comment
OohâŚ
The London collapse in new housebuilding shown here is stark. The reason is largely the disaster that is the building safety regulator - which has processed about 20% of the applications it's been given in the last year.
I think genuinely a significant market was as a kind of meme car to appear in various YouTube videos and TikToks, often ones that destroyed them.
Yes exactly - if the interface doesnât exist to make a simple flight change, an LLM wonât magically create it.
Okay thatâs going on the pod
I worked in this area the last two years, and it's not just that it's a poor claim, it also massively fails to understand how drug development actually works. It's a 10 year process - even if LLMs revolutionised the field in 2025, which it hasn't, we'd see the results in the 2030s.
It cannot be stressed enough that these people believe IQ is a magical superpower that grants unlimited control over other beings and matter, and that their entire understanding of the world rests on this assumption.
Ah yes, large groups of small children, famously easy to control.
I'm as tired of hearing about AI as I suspect the rest of you are but this is a good read.
Hugely recommend the @jemima.bsky.social piece that partly inspired it, and I think captures the weird role-playing game aspect to a lot of this culture. www.ft.com/content/0e24...
ICYMI: My deep dive into the weird crossovers between the AI aesthetic of the new far right and the cult of techno-millenarianism.
Yeah this is insane, itâs domestic abuse, run a fucking mile.
This is tremendous. Triggers a thought about the desperate search for the perfect answer - applied in all domains - which dominates so many peopleâs thinking Itâs underpinned by an approach to the world that sees everything as a problem to be âsolvedâ - which speaks to a particular type of brain
(I think it's tough trying to divine the impact of consumer technology in the workplace though, it's like asking how Google search affected hiring in the 2000s.)
In my experience it hasn't affected our hiring much yet, and it's definitely not reflected in salary growth in 2025. Where the funding is flowing in fintech or healthtech, jobs are booming. Coding is only a fraction of the job of an engineer, and IDEs have been generating boilerplate for years.
Although I have to say, I'm a little sceptical of some of the claims. A lot of this was a perfect storm in 2023-4 that combined a correction to the pandemic-era hiring glut with high interest rates slowing funding. It's not quite 'recruiters buying you gifts' again but it's picking up.
The reflection point is spot on in this thread, IMO. martinrobbins.substack.com/p/plato-vs-g...
I touched a bit on that mediated and reflected selfhood here, I feel like there's a strong link to a kind of generalised anxiety about the 'real world' that informs a lot of culture around AI.
For your lunchtime enjoyment, an exploration of why the emerging culture around AI is so... naff.
Sounds like youâve got rubber bandits
God this is good
I am so, so close to a pleasingly round number of subscribers so any and all shares and RTs appreciated, thank you.