Stratify is a two part innovative, intelligence-driven startup: a Think Tank, for thought leadership & communications & Capital Raise for Product R&D to market
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I look at it like this:
We have a welfare state.
So either I buy goods or services from you or I pay you to do nothing.
Since successive governments have increased employment costs, energy costs and housing costs, many jobs and businesses have been offshored, exported or bankrupted.
To make a shit situation exponentially worse, successive governments have mass-imported overseas (human) liabilities. These have been added to the above lost jobs/business liabilities above.
It is completely insane.
Interesting
beautiful explanation. this is 100% happening. xitter.cf/sotak/status/211179423…
Stratify retweeted
China does not need to build better AI than America. It needs to make American AI unprofitable.
The playbook is older than the technology. Flood the market with a cheaper version until the domestic industry collapses. China ran it with steel. Ran it with solar. Ran it with semiconductors.
Not a better product. A cheaper one. Good enough at a fraction of the price beats best in class at full cost.
AI is next.
Open-weight models. Lightweight. Inexpensive. Already inside a third of corporations. Not because they outperform. Because a CFO looked at the benchmark gap, looked at the price gap, and made the only decision capitalism allows.
The rational one.
China’s weapon is not Chinese technology. It is American capitalism.
The market has no loyalty. No patriotism. Only price sensitivity. Every procurement decision is a vote, and the vote always goes to the invoice.
American AI companies are valued on one assumption. That corporations will keep paying premium prices for premium intelligence. China’s strategy is to make that assumption false. Not by outbuilding. By undercutting.
Creating value and capturing value have never been the same thing. AI might be the first technology powerful enough to prove it at civilizational scale.
Roughly 40% of the S&P is tied to the AI bet. The majority of recent GDP growth has come from AI capital expenditure. America concentrated everything into a single sector and left that sector’s economics undefended.
The distance between AI boom and American recession is one quarter where enough CFOs make the same rational decision at the same time.
The technology race was the distraction. Who has the biggest model, who wins the benchmark, who reaches AGI first. None of that matters if the business model underneath it cannot survive being undercut.
A technological advantage that cannot sustain its own economics is not an advantage. It is a head start with no finish line.
America built the most advanced AI on Earth.
It has not yet built an economy that survives someone selling it cheaper.
And the country that figured that out is not trying to catch up.
It is trying to make catching up unnecessary.
Stratify retweeted
i kind of thought in my nearly 30 years on this earth i'd watch energy get cheaper. it's done the opposite
electricity was about 7.5p a unit in 2001. if it had just tracked inflation it'd be around 15p. it's 26p
i was hoping it'd end up like water in scotland. you just turn the tap on and never think about it. basically unlimited, basically free
and it's the butterfly effect for everything else. we will not lead in ai without cheap energy. we will not bring manufacturing back at any real scale without it. the cost of living does not come down without it
get energy cheap and plentiful and everything else falls into place
Net Zero is the modern Moai.
The Rapa Nui built giant stone statues across Easter Island, pouring scarce timber, labor, and food into monuments they believed would protect them and honor their ancestors.
By the time the last big trees were gone, the statues still stood but the island’s carrying capacity had collapsed.
Today’s version is Net Zero:
Billions spent in intermittent turbines, battery minerals, transmission lines chopping trees into wood pellets and forced deindustrialization, all in the belief that the climate can be controlled by ritual sacrifice of reliable energy and prosperity.
Same superstition, bigger island.
The principal foundation of arrogance is ignorance.
I'm angry that so many of my constituents who voted to Leave the EU did so because they were bombarded by lies. That’s why @andyburnham’s announcement of a National Centre for Information Defence matters, fighting foreign state influence in our democracy.
Inspired perspective
You might not know much about the history of the internet in Russia. I don't blame you. But there was a time when it was free, in the fullest sense of the word.
In the mid-90s, when dial-up started reaching ordinary people, a country that had been completely cut off from the world could suddenly read news from anywhere and talk to anyone. My first experience of it was in our family's tiny flat in Moscow, in one of those post-Soviet apartment blocks where the mailboxes on the ground floor stank of stale urine. There I was on America Online, of all things, opening Netscape and Eudora for the first time.
The Russian internet grew astonishingly fast. By 2013 the services available to Russians, both government and private, were well ahead of what I could get in Britain, where I'd long since moved. And the company that innovated hardest was @yandexcom - the same company whose data centres are now being hit by Ukrainian missiles.
You may not have heard of it. The name is a play on "index", with the "i" swapped for the Russian first-person pronoun "ya". It never tried to be global. It solved search for Russian speakers by building proper morphological algorithms for the language, and it took @Google years to catch up. In the late 90s, when I was building my own computers from components, Yandex already had a price search that aggregated live listings, so I could find the cheapest Soundblastet card in Moscow. It probably saved my family a fair bit of money. Later it bought @Uber's Russian business, and Yandex Taxi and food delivery didn't just copy Western ideas, they improved on them. It became a near-monopoly - when Yandex launched a feature, a thousand startups died, much like OpenAI today.
But Yandex was also global in a quieter way. It modelled itself on Google, hated nepotism in a country run on it, and hired on merit. Its engineers ended up across the world's tech companies - in the peace years by choice, and after February 2022 not by choice.
Which brings me to now. Russia is a deeply stratified society. The majority lead insular lives, don't speak English, don't follow the world, and their lives barely changed with the war or the sanctions. Tech workers were the opposite cohort: English-speaking, reading news in two languages, friends and colleagues across Europe and America. They built the Russian internet first as an escape from the criminal chaos of the 90s, and then, as Putin tightened the screws, it became the last place with genuine freedom. It's no accident that Navalny emerged as an internet blogger and built his entire opposition online while banned from state TV.
Those same engineers understood exactly what the propaganda was. They knew the Russian invasion was a neo-imperial war of conquest by a dictator who thinks Ukrainians don't get to choose their own future. Then Putin came for Yandex. Censorship was rammed down its throat: no anti-regime results in search, only state-approved outlets in news aggregation, user data handed to the FSB. A company that helped build freedom in Russia joined the ranks of its executioners. About a quarter of staff fled. The rest stayed, and they've run the information blackout ever since.
So I'll repeat what I've said about the people still working at Yandex, VK and the other backbone holdings. There's a special place in hell for you. Unlike the majority of Russians, whose education and curiosity never stretched far, you know exactly what's happening. You speak English. You read the news in both languages. You fork repositories on GitHub. You know who you're serving and why your country is slaughtering civilians, and you serve the dictator anyway. You're vandalising the legacy of the people who built Yandex - one of your co-founders, Ilya Segalovich, is dead, and you're trampling on his grave.
I don't wish you physical harm, and I hope the staff in those data centres stay safe. But if Yandex burns - the IP, the data centres, the whole thing - given what you're doing for that man, I won't shed a single tear.
Stratify retweeted
You don't even need mass unemployment for this. A mortgage is a multiple of salary, and so your house is really a leveraged bet on your salary’s ability to pay it down (so to stay static at best) long term.
Therefore if we see a rehiring of mid-career white collar professionals at around 25% lower wages then they borrow 25% less.
So it follows the pool of buyers who can stretch to £700k shrinks overnight.
If firms continue to stop hiring juniors (first due to NIC and cost implications under Labour, then under AI) then the first-time buyers disappear too, which means the people above them can't sell, which means nobody trades up, and the estate agent’s chain that's supposed to finish at a premium Home Counties front door stalls three rungs below it. This is a problem. A right wing govt might eventually scrap stamp duty to unstick the housing market. But it won’t be enough. The most likely thing to happen that impacts this materially is a big QE print. I’d say that’s almost a certainty now just a matter of when rather than if.
So logically in the meantime then the (left wing) Treasury goes looking for money that can't leave. Bricks can't. Council tax revaluation, CGT on main residences and land value tax all get much easier to sell when homeowners look like the winners and the young look furious. That's roughly how the Chartists eventually got their way. If they print instead, the house goes up in pounds and down in dollars and francs, and dollars and francs are where I'm keeping score.
The fair counter here is that senior people did well in the software example, and senior people are exactly who buys £1m houses in the Home Counties. So - per my recent GBTT articles - prime Surrey Hills probably falls less than Arnold Nottinghamshire. White flight/middle class flight from multicultural urban decay is another. For my money, that is only a reason to expect a softer fall. It's no reason to hold on, because it still relies on the chain below working and on HMRC leaving it alone. Neither looks likely to me.
The only thing that saves the house is Jevons turning up within two or three years with new jobs on good pay. I'd put that at about 10% likelihood based on what I know today. But with the speed of AI now nothing is totally off the table in this respect. Play the hand you are dealt.
Welcome all good faith counters.
Agree there'll be jobs we can't see yet. I have a horrible sneaking suspicion loads more people will end up working in AI regulation and compliance. The horror…
But yeah, this is classic Jevons against Engels isn’t it. Jevons says cheaper output means more demand, and over the long run he's usually right. Roughly 60% of US jobs today didn't exist in 1940, to your point.
Ofc it only works where demand is elastic tho. Cheaper legal advice will find new buyers. Cheaper credit risk reports won't, and as I see it most back-office work is the latter. This is why, IMO, India is turbofucked.
The Engels' pause is the gap in the middle and this is what dislocates the economy. Eg for those less familiar - between 1780 and 1840 British output per worker rose 46% while real wages rose 12%, so the gains went to the owners for sixty years before workers pay packets caught up. The spreadsheet transition took about 40 years, slowly enough that retirement did most of the work. This one looks like it'll take 5 years, so it lands on people mid-career with mortgages. That’s a lot of people.
So let’s scale it up. Let’s say 1m mid-career white collar workers are made redundant and each rehired just £15k lower, that's £15bn of pay gone and roughly £6bn of income tax and NI with it. Those households stop spending, so blue collar / tradies lose their customers too. UC claims rise just as a wave of mortgages refixes against smaller payslips, and HMT is already borrowing at over 5% to cover the gap, so it either taxes the remaining workers harder or prints (never discount both under Labour). Meanwhile nobody hires juniors (already a thing), so an entire generation misses the first rung of the career ladder and the housing ladder with it. That has big demographic and pension implications. They don’t have kids they don’t pay into group SIPPs etc.
Last time this gave us the Chartists. People who did everything right won't wait sixty years for Jevons to turn up (most’ll be retired or dead). It'll be a mess, for my money. Big shitty mess landing on an economy arguably among the least able to deal with it in the developed world.
Stratify retweeted
There is a cover-up at the heart of Government. Ministers have been forced to admit that the “missing” Islamophobia definition documents do exist.
After pressure from the Free Speech Union and Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy, Angela Rayner’s Communities department has conceded that documents that helped shape the “anti-Muslim hostility” definition still exist, despite previously saying they had been destroyed.
It now seems almost certain that the Government tried to bury evidence that could show whether Islamist extremists helped draft what amounts to Britain’s de facto Islamic blasphemy law.
The Free Speech Union has warned that this non-statutory definition will be used — and is already being used — by activists, public bodies and authorities to silence legitimate criticism and debate about Islam, its history and its practices.
A review ordered by Will Garton, the top civil servant at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, found that responses to the Working Group’s consultation on the definition do exist and are “still held on the department’s systems”.
The Free Speech Union threatened the department with a judicial review unless it revealed who had been given the chance to influence the definition.
Enough is enough. There can be no more excuses. Angela Rayner must come clean about what on earth is going on under her watch.
Read more below 👇
If true, criminals and criminally negligent.
Behold ATM BAR AND RESTAURANTS LTD!
A "cocktail bar" in Wickford was assigned 40 Skilled Worker visa certificates in 2023 and 2024.
One of the 2023 roles was a web designer, for a bar with no website
There's no sign it ever opened. Its only premises was an empty former Santander branch. Betfred plans to run the same unit with 6 staff (124m^2).
It never filed a single set of accounts.
It had £1 of share capital. It got three compulsory strike-off notices while sponsoring dozens of workers.
Its licence was gone by June 2026. The company was dissolved in September.
How was this business EVER allowed to sponsor visas? What "genuine business need" could they possibly have shown for ONE worker, let alone FORTY workers?
What on earth is UK Visas and Immigration doing?
This, mostly,
Plus drastic reduction in the cost of energy.
Would utterly transform the British State.
I would cut back the civil service by 50% immediately
I would cut back the benefit bill by 50% immediately
I would return all illegals and nonworking immigrants immigrants immediately
I would stop giving any money to other countries immediately
I would call a election immediately
I would lower national insurance immediately
I would lower the tax rate for
high earning individuals
Immediately.
I would remove at least 20% of politicians for any party that has over 100 MPs and staff.
I would not have a number 10 up north.
I would not let any politicians with a criminal record join any party,
I would not let prisoners out early
I would deport any foreign national who commits any criminal offence at all .
I think I would also introduce another 50% of cutbacks
If the above was put in place, the UK would become a great place again
Ahhh, just a little sanity.
Breathe.
Congressman Fine, that conclusion simply is not supported by the facts.
⠀
Yes, the United States has now withdrawn the bombers which were DEPLOYED to RAF Fairford.
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And yes, the Pentagon has cited security concerns following the suspected plot near the base.
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That deserves to be taken seriously.
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But moving from that to:
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“Britain has fallen”
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and
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“The United Islamic Kingdom is no longer a reliable ally”
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is rhetoric, not evidence.
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There is another rather important piece of context being omitted.
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These aircraft were not all permanently based at RAF Fairford.
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The United States operates Bomber Task Force rotations.
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B-1s, B-2s and B-52s deploy from their home bases in the United States to overseas locations for particular missions and periods, and then return home.
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Fairford has hosted those rotations for years.
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Indeed, the bombers recently at Fairford were being used to support UNITED STATES military operations against Iran.
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So Britain was not simply sitting passively while its own security deteriorated.
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Britain had permitted its territory to be used in support of American military operations.
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That decision itself increased the strategic significance of RAF Fairford.
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Iran's Revolutionary Guards subsequently described the base as a legitimate target because American bombers operating from it had been used against Iran.
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So Britain has actually accepted additional risk through supporting its American ally.
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That rather matters before describing Britain as unreliable.
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And NATO itself has said that the redeployment does not alter the alliance's defensive readiness.
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So let us separate the facts from the outrage.
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FACT:
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US bombers deployed to Fairford have returned to their American home bases.
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FACT:
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Security concerns following the suspected plot contributed to that decision.
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FACT:
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Those bombers had been used in US operations against Iran.
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FACT:
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Fairford remains one of the relatively few European airfields capable of supporting American heavy bombers.
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What has NOT been established is:
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“Britain has fallen.”
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Nor has it been established that Britain has ceased to be a reliable American ally.
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Quite the opposite, Britain has allowed American strategic bombers to operate from British soil during an active conflict, despite the additional security risk that created for people in Britain.
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You can absolutely question whether security at Fairford was adequate.
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You can question whether the suspects should have been granted police bail.
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You can question whether Britain should have permitted US strikes on Iran to be launched from British territory.
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Those are legitimate arguments.
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But “Britain has fallen” is not a factual conclusion drawn from this evidence.
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It is a political slogan.
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And once again, the detail matters.
Stratify retweeted
This is misinformation and deflection from an unelected PM who tells you he is ‘honest’ … er this isn’t honest.
Ofgem itself says our bills include wholesale costs, NETWORK costs and GOVERNMENT POLICY costs (net zero bollocks)
Your own Government admits gas still sets the UK electricity price most of the time.
And what he completely leaves out is the enormous cost of the energy system successive governments have CHOSEN to build.
Renewable subsidies funded by tax payers, Grid expansion where only the shareholders make profit, balancing costs because of Mad Ed and Constraint payments to tempt private investors into business plans that don’t work without tax payer subsidies. Oh and then there’s the £ BILLIONS of new infrastructure WE ALSO HAVE TO FUND.
In fact, this year the Government moved 75% of the legacy Renewables Obligation OFF household electricity bills and onto the Exchequer, THE TAXPAYER NOW PAYS IT.
And Clean Power 2030 requires around £40 BILLION of investment every year to 2030, while NESO is forecasting £3.2bn in constraint costs over just the next 12 months.
So no, Britain does not have expensive electricity simply because we “privatised the basics”.
We have an expensive, gas linked, heavily regulated energy system carrying enormous policy and infrastructure costs.
Changing who owns the funding vehicle for the grid will not make those costs disappear.
Calling it “public control” doesn’t make energy cheap, it just makes him much less honest.
I want to be honest about how we’ve got to a place where British billpayers are paying some of the highest energy costs in Europe.
Over the past 40 years, we’ve given up control of our necessities, outsourced our essentials and privatised the basics. Water, transport, housing. And of course, energy.
Now the public are paying the price. We haven’t invested in the infrastructure we need. Conflict overseas has pushed up energy costs and it’s hurting our businesses and families.
That’s why we need to take back greater control of our energy system.
This week, I announced Great British Grid, which will speed up connections and push down bills.
We’re also giving mayors, local leaders and communities a stronger role. With funding for People’s Power projects, communities will be able to build solar panels on libraries and town halls, hydro schemes in rivers or publicly owned windfarms on local land.
But it’s not just energy we need stronger public control over. It’s also water, housing, transport and care.
So we’re repealing the ban on public ownership of water companies. We’re building more council homes than this country has seen since the end of World War Two.
We’re reforming the leasehold system so families aren’t squeezed for every penny. And we’re opening up home ownership for first time buyers who can’t rely on the bank of mum and dad.
This week I also announced my determination to introduce a National Care Service, to put people above profit and to give pensioners peace of mind.
Together, we’ll rewire the country from top to bottom so that it works for all people in all places.
That is the only way to put Britain back on the right path. It’s the only way to put power back in people’s hands. And it’s the only way we will bring hope again.
Err, no.
But it is terrible management to import a shit-tonne of extra liabilities on top of the ones you have.
But blocked from another - a badge of honour!
Flight tickets should be combined £seat + £hold + £function of total mass.
We need to have a serious conversation about overweight people flying on commercial airlines.
I’m flying on @AmericanAir and after paying extra money to upgrade my seat, I got stuck next to a man who is 300+ pounds and stripped mid flight.
None of the flight attendants wanted to confront him.
He smells like 💩 and weed.
He’s literally sitting in my seat and keeps touching me.
For context, he’s literally 300+ pounds and I’m 120.
Why does American Airlines think it’s acceptable to treat people this way?!
I tried reaching out discreetly during the flight, but they have no avenues to do that.
Stratify retweeted
Dear Andy, you do know this is untrue, don’t you?
Highest energy bills in the world are due to:
* Reckless pursuit of net zero
* Blowing up our coal-fired power stations
* Failing to exploit our own fossil fuels
* Insane dependency on foreign oil and gas. The phrase “over a barrel” springs to mind
* Paying Norway £20 billion plus a year for oil and gas we could get out of our own North Sea
* Subsidizing renewables to the tune of billions by slapping green taxes on bills
* Putting an eco-cult and leftist ideology before the comfort and warmth of the British people
* Allowing good jobs to be lost in pursuit of all of the above
* Claiming your government wants to “reindustrialise” while creating conditions no manufacturer could succeed in
* Closing refineries and gas storage so the UK is uniquely vulnerable this winter and likely to have serious power cuts.
You’re welcome.
@andyburnham
I want to be honest about how we’ve got to a place where British billpayers are paying some of the highest energy costs in Europe.
Over the past 40 years, we’ve given up control of our necessities, outsourced our essentials and privatised the basics. Water, transport, housing. And of course, energy.
Now the public are paying the price. We haven’t invested in the infrastructure we need. Conflict overseas has pushed up energy costs and it’s hurting our businesses and families.
That’s why we need to take back greater control of our energy system.
This week, I announced Great British Grid, which will speed up connections and push down bills.
We’re also giving mayors, local leaders and communities a stronger role. With funding for People’s Power projects, communities will be able to build solar panels on libraries and town halls, hydro schemes in rivers or publicly owned windfarms on local land.
But it’s not just energy we need stronger public control over. It’s also water, housing, transport and care.
So we’re repealing the ban on public ownership of water companies. We’re building more council homes than this country has seen since the end of World War Two.
We’re reforming the leasehold system so families aren’t squeezed for every penny. And we’re opening up home ownership for first time buyers who can’t rely on the bank of mum and dad.
This week I also announced my determination to introduce a National Care Service, to put people above profit and to give pensioners peace of mind.
Together, we’ll rewire the country from top to bottom so that it works for all people in all places.
That is the only way to put Britain back on the right path. It’s the only way to put power back in people’s hands. And it’s the only way we will bring hope again.
