The feed of updates to Rod McLaren: Words that work
21 July 2026 The word “ doctor” meant “ teacher” in Latin. The meaning spent a few centuries drifting from the person who instructs you to the person who examines you. That drift is the fate waiting for “ test and learn”. Anna Goss has a great post about the Riskiest Assumption Test here: From the RAT to the Magenta Book . “ It had long since felt like MVP had lost its way in the five years since…
18 July 2026 ISAs are getting more complicated - here’s what is changing. The government wants to encourage retail investors to invest in growth rather than just save cash 1 . So it is changing some of the rules. Cash ISA limit reduced to 12k, and you’ll pay tax on interest in non Cash ISAs Here’s a quick summary: The overall ISA contribution limits of £20,000/year for over 18s aren’t changing.…
1 July 2026 AI is good at making everyone sound competent and polished. And it does it cheaply. The results is more words, but less connection and impact: Alice Bartlett on publishing: “ Please don’t “ use AI to polish” your blog posts. It makes them sound like every other blog post on the internet and therefore makes them very boring to read. I like your idiosyncratic little voice ok? Your silly…
19 June 2026 The UK gov has published the 2026 carbon emission conversion factors . You can use numbers like these (or from sources like Climatiq ) to work out your organisation’s carbon emissions. The major changes document is interesting. Electricity is -26%, partly as the grid decarbonises, but also because they’ve changed the methodology: switching from 2 year lag to 1 year, means 2026’s…
12 June 2026 Notes from a Sustainable AI seminar by Professor Chris Preist on 10 June 2026, part of a series of events on responsible AI by ClimateAction.tech with ustwo. My thoughts in [square brackets] - any errors will be mine. Direct emissions: digital’s own footprint. Enabling: good and bad things the AI lets/makes happen. Systemic: induced larger social change. Digital tech has roughly same…
12 May 2026, updated 21 May 2026 to add market-based scope 2 numbers now I have them from Octopus. This has reduced my headline emissions by 1,405 kgCO2e. (The June 2026 GOV.UK emission factors means My company’s total carbon emissions are 4.26 tonnes CO2e per year , for the year 1 March 2025 - 29 February 2026. Carbon emissions Scope Emissions kgCO2e Note Scope 1: direct emissions 187.94 Wood…
10 December 2025 A pal asked about companies with UK freelancer/contractor talent networks or search-for-a-contractor-role, so here’s a list. It leans strongly digital transformation/management consulting, and a little bit public sector. Companies in bold I’ve worked with and can recommend: Public Digital Projects by IF DXW TPX Impact Kainos Hippo Digital PWC Capgemini Bain Deloitte These ones…
5 December 2025, updated 16 June 2026 (Hand pointing to the left with 3 fingers with nonsensical labels, by Google Gemini) Present 3 things. Or decide between 2 options. Or show 1 thing. And whichever you choose, the piece should have only 1 aim. OK , sometimes a piece does need more than 3 things. But your audience has a lot going on, so the more things in your piece, the harder it becomes for…
11 November 2025 Last month I looked at UK data centre efficiency , through the lens of Power Usage Effectiveness ( PUE ) 1 . Here’s the same exercise for US companies: 1.08 - Meta 2024 from the environmental data report . Meta used to have a live PUE and Water use dashboard for 2 of its data centres , but these have disappeared. See also . 1.09 - Google 2024 global fleet average, trailing…
28 October 2025, updated 12 November 2025 If a petrol car was as efficient as a data centre, you could drive 3,000 km or more before needing to fuel up, like New York to Los Angeles, or London to Kyiv and back. And if you were were efficient as a data centre, maybe you could jump over it. 1 Here’s a list of UK data centres, ranked by Power Usage Effectiveness ( PUE ) 2 : 1.09 - Google 2024 global…
13 October 2025 What are grid operators, UK Gov and industry saying about future electricity demand for data centre hosting? Spoiler: everyone says it’s growing a lot. NESO , the grid operator In March 2022, the UK ’ s National Energy System Operator ( NESO ) thought data centre energy demand would grow from 3.6 TWh/year in 2020 to ~13 - 35 TWh/year by 2050 . (To give a broad comparison, UK as a…
8 October 2025 In October 2025 Which? “ examined the policies of 16 current account providers in the UK with help from two non-governmental research organisations, Reclaim Finance and Global Canopy”: Are you bankrolling the climate crisis? The big picture (and the bad news) is that banks are watering down their commitments to sustainability. Some finance fossil fuels through routes that still…
1 September 2025, updated 19 September 2025 Woodrow Wilson, 1908: “ government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs…
24 August 2025, updated 25 August 2025 The big AI platforms are starting to disclose some energy and resource use and emissions. When comparing different platforms, treat these as indications rather than absolute measurements because every platform is going to measure things with different methods. Anyway: Energy Wh Emissions gCO2e Water mL Resources mg of Sb eq Google Gemini “ median Gemini Apps…
8 August 2025 Mistral published Our contribution to a global environmental standard for AI , a “ first-of-its-kind comprehensive study to quantify the environmental impacts of our LLMs”. Mistral AI Infographie Acv V6(1). What’s interesting: looking at the diagram, most of the the emissions are in model training and inference (inference = usage). The inference emissions cover 18 month of use. It’s…
4 August 2025 Amazon had 1.5 million employees at the end of 2024. “ As of December 31, 2024, we employed approximately 1,556,000 full-time and part-time employees. Additionally, we use independent contractors and temporary personnel to supplement our workforce.” - from Amazon’s 10K , page 4 “ Human capital” And 1 million robots in June 2025. “ We’ve just deployed our 1 millionth robot, building…
27 June 2025 “ If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” - Jim Barksdale and yet “ When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.” - Jeff Bezos and yet “ The @Tesla_AI robotaxi launch begins in Austin this afternoon with customers paying a $4.20 flat fee!” - Elon Musk , valuing meme narrative more than data. And the HiPPO…
17 June 2025, updated 23 June 2025 I joined a really good workshop on Estimating digital carbon emissions by Chris Adams and Katrin Fritsch of the Green Web Foundation last week. You should join one of the workshops - it helped me understand the landscape of tools and approaches much better, and talking to participants who are on the same journey is energising. Loved it! When I tried to work out…
17 June 2025 Last week’s AI emissions news: Very bad : xAI data centre methane emissions - regulatory loopholes let x.AI run methane-burning generators to power their data centres. And they leak unburned methane, which traps much, much more heat than carbon dioxide. Also here . Needs disclosure : Altman hints at some OpenAI inference numbers - “ the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours [and]…
10 June 2025, updated 19 June 2026 Update: 2026 numbers are here . The UK gov has published the 2025 carbon emission conversion factors . You can use numbers like these (or from sources like Climatiq ) to work out your organisation’s carbon emissions. The major changes document is interesting. Electricity is among the numbers that have changed because the UK is cutting emissions. Others have…
29 May 2025 Change at scale is hard. Here’s a reckon: if a desired change is strongly associated with people’s identity, or if it is embodied in the real world, people are more likely to resist that change 1 . I’ve no evidence to support this, but it feels true. Ternary plot with three axes, Identity, Embodied and Abstract. Starting at Abstract and moving toward the Identity/Embodied line are…
8 May 2025, updated 11 June 2025 Can the big AIs tell you what their carbon emissions are? On the whole, not really because no-one discloses emissions, so while some AIs will try make an estimate, the ranges are big. I asked some LLMs these questions: Hi [ LLM name], what model are you? Has [organisation that built the LLM ] worked out a measure of carbon emissions per token or chat? If so, are…
25 April 2025, updated 11 Jun 2025 Carbon.txt is a service by the Green Web Foundation which lets you declare your organisation’s sustainability data in way that software can read. “ Carbon.txt is a single, discoverable location on any web domain for public, machine-readable, sustainability data relating to that company. It’s a web-first, connect not collect style approach, of most benefit to…
4 April 2025 Infinigate/KnowBe4’s corporate security training is quite poetic. 00:00:09 Because remember—as an employee, 00:00:11 you serve as a human firewall for your organisation. 00:00:23 So be a hero. 00:01:15 Hasty clicks are dangerous clicks. 00:01:18 Slow down and thoroughly inspect 00:01:19 emails before taking any action. 00:01:19 Protect both with strong passwords. 00:01:22 Beware of…
27 March 2025 Ripple Energy is in administration , but the windfarm co-ops its platform helped set up are still running. How it works: A wind farm co-op owns (or co-owns) a company called a Special Purpose Vehicle, which owns the windfarm, which hires Ripple Energy to provide “ day-to-day services to the co-op such as member administration, management of the contractual relationship with the…
16 March 2025 2 screenshots of my pension transfer in progress (Vanguard) and complete (InvestEngine). A pink arrow and text explain that it took 12 weeks. In December 2024 Vanguard announced a change to their pricing model: from %-of-portfolio fee to a 4/month fee for portfolios under 32,000 and a capped 0.15% fee for portfolios over 32,000 . This change isn’t good for customers with tiny SIPP…
10 March 2025 Anna and I wrote a Checksies about whether you should act urgently to beat a deadline for making manual topups to your state pension . Worth a read if you’re a freelancer or in your 40s+. Very rough rule of thumb, for most people ( NI has lots of small rules): if you voluntarily pay for 1 year’s worth it will probably cost you either £179 or £907 , depending on the class of NI you…
6 March 2025 Both of these energy experiments sound really useful. And I love that they’re grounded in experiment, rather than confidently assuming that they already know the answer. Do, test, learn, repeat. Flexibility without the fuss: could a secondary supplier be the solution?, by Energy Systems Catapult : “ What if we separated flexible energy use from everyday consumption? Imagine your EV…
20 February 2025 Content style guides that are written for every audience (because government’s audience tends to be all of its citizens), or have some universal application because they’re written for no particular organisation or audience: GOV.UK several other governments’ style guides Readability guidelines National Center on Disability and Journalism’s Disability language guide - this and the…
27 January 2025 More wind means more energy, except when the wind farm equipment must be protected or the grid balanced. Protecting the turbines Generators manage turbines to protect them from damage. The wind farm might “ feather” the wind turbine blades, changing their pitch so they catch less of the wind. Or even “ cut out” the turbines to avoid damage to them if the wind is particularly high.…
16 January 2025, updated 19 May 2025 A messy spreadsheet: Metrics for UK retail investment/saving/digital wealth fintechs . I’ve been collecting revenue, user, profit, asset etc numbers for companies like Chip, Freetrade, InvestEngine, Moneybox, Plum in the UK retail investment/saving/digital wealth fintech space. Some of them are brokers, some savings apps, but they’re increasingly overlapping.…