Best Of

Weirdly solar has now crashed to zero: https://grid.iamkate.com/

How strange is that?

Serious point though - how does the solar power that's fed in to the grid overnight having been stored at generation site batteries get counted?

There's a section for stored energy generation. We don't have a lot of battery storage though. Solar is still, despite what Robert might say, not viable in the UK. We just need to dump £20bn into the RR modular nuclear reactors and get them started up with a manufacturing pilot line and the first few reactors built and running by 2030. If we approve it and get RR started today we might make it but the government moves like molasses and our tech leadership is slipping away without that big order and backing for RR from the UK.

As a side note I was speaking to an energy investor here in Florence today and he confirmed what I already suspected that RR and other UK companies struggle to get overseas money because they don't have the UK government vote of confidence. It's difficult to get foreign governments to buy something that its own one seems uninterested in and he was saying that's the resistance RR are running into when they make their sales pitch "if it's as good as you say then why is your own government not already placing an order for 10 of these and looking at an American solution instead?" is the question they can't answer.

Are we actually looking at an American solution? Wtf?

We should absolutely look at an American solution as part of a thorough assessment

The issue is that the treasury scoring method puts zero weight on the strategic value of domestic capabilities

There is too much detail involved in trying to rationalise how Trump will run for a 3rd term.

He won't need to run.

Why bother holding elections at all? Not free ones at least - you could lose, and your opponents are Traitors.

Trump is ruling by decree. Congress already passed a law recusing Congress from scrutiny of one issue - simply roll that concept out. An executive President, untrammelled by liberal judges and woke lawyers. Defending the constitution from enemies by continuing in office exactly as it was set out before traitors corrupted it with illegal amendments.

Dictators like elections: it gives them the veneer of public approval and hence allows them to portray anything they do as The Will of The People.

As I've said before, there are five key components to any fair and free election. The earlier in the process these are undermined, the easier it is to hide the interference and to rig the result:

1. Free, fair and easy access to registration, for voters and candidates (and, as a result, an accurate electoral roll);
2. A fair campaign, in which candidates can critique each other, promote themselves and have reasonable access to media, where state apparatus is neutral and efficient, and where neither campaigns nor coverage is skewed by excessive spending or donations.
3. Easy and equal (within reasonable limits of practicality) access to voting, free from intimidation or improper incentives.
4. An accurate and speedy count and declaration.
5. The result being implemented.

Trump went 'wrong' in 2020 by waiting until the fourth and fifth components before attempting serious electoral perversion. It is much better for the dictator to fix things at the first and second stages, as - for example - Erdogan is currently trying.

My primary business is evolving so that we're now an importer of products made by part of Big Client Group. We've been a customer for a while, having designed and then operated a web store for one brand, taking product already imported to the UK. But now we're an importer as well.

And what a bloody faff that is. Its good that I have a pre-existing relationship with a customs broker. But the process of setting up with CDS and IPAFFS is hassle enough, and that's before we start doing actual paperwork. Happily all of the graft is with the exporter, but even so.

The Boris Brexit settlement has made trade so bloody difficult - the exact kind of bureaucratic red tape which Tories used to pledge to cut has now become a core part of their reason to exist. Look at all this red tape we have created for you! This is your Brexit bonus this is, scrapping red tape from pen pushers in Brussels and replacing it with red tape from good honest BRITISH pen pushers.