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Theo Bertram
@theobertram
·
3h
The Catch 22 of British politics is that to win a second term you need to tackle the cost of living but to tackle the underlying causes of the cost of living (increase housing supply, build new energy plants) you need two terms.
Theo Bertram
@theobertram
·
3h
Solving this Catch 22 is the key to avoiding a doom loop of failed progress & populism. Part of my answer would be to make Permanent Secretaries not only accountable for progress on 10 year goals but for public confidence in those goals. Progress needs to be metered & clear.

https://x.com/theobertram/status/1934882411994558905

In other words, the most patriotic thing the opposition can do right now is make themselves unelectable enough that the next election is a boring walkover. (One of Blair's failures was to largely fail to seize the opportunity presented to him by Hague, IDS and Howard.)

On that basis, the Conservatives are being true patriots right now.

China doesn't take a decade to build new energy plants, I'm not sure why we should.

China isn't a democracy.

EDIT: Also, I think 5 waste to energy plans are being built in Scotland right not, in less than a decade.

We didn’t take a decade back in the 50s or 60s either. See the Stonehaven report I linked to previously for an analysis of the legal barriers to “just building things” that have built up in the UK since the early 70s.

Dominic Cummings' (I know) recent lecture is also interesting on this topic.

I have a lot of respect for Cummings’ diagnoses of the problems the UK faces. Rather less respect (understatement of the year?) for his ability to actually implement solutions.

He is still ploughing the only solution is burn it all down and start again.

Anyone who has worked in IT is familiar with this. We could spend a day or two understanding what this program does and where the bug lies, but instead we need to rewrite the whole thing from scratch in a more fashionable language.

We saw this of course during the Covid pandemic. All the experts agreed there was a problem with Imperial's modelling but despite its source code being published, wanted to replace it rather than fix it.

As ever, it depends.

If you have a pile of spaghetti code, there is of course a very strong temptation to rewrite the lot from scratch in a (hopefully) much more structured way. Sometimes you really have little choice; the original code is so badly broken that it has become unmaintainable. Then a rewrite becomes unavoidable.

It's not a decison to be taken lightly, though. That old spaghetti code has had years and years to take into account every possible edge case, and its shiny new replacement will almost invariably take much more blood, sweat and tears to create than anticipated as well as reintroducing a whole load of bugs from edge cases that had previously been dealt with in the old version.

The best compromise is typically to methodically isolate particular functionality and rewrite just that part of the code in a modular fashion. Then move on to the next part, and so on. The iterative approach has a lot to be said for it.

Socially, it's the approach that Britain has generally taken over the years. We don't really do revolutions, but we have typically followed a policy of renewing the bits that need to be renewed. This way of doings things has served us well; we abandon it at our peril.

BBC BREAKING NEWS...Yellow Health Alert, temperature sets to be 28o in London this week, maybe getting up to 33o by the weekend...

Are we getting a bit silly with these, its not 40+. Most people have been on a foreign holiday to Europe in the summer where it is that hot every day.

Absolutely, its not a heatwave, its summer.

Mortality is far far worse in hot weather than in cold for the elderly. We don't do summer air con payments though.

Few years ago now but at the time I started writing for a new client and had to cry off my very first day of work because of the heat. Luckily it was the hottest day recorded ever in the UK, so that did at least make it look more reasonable and a bit less wet blanket.

It annoys me that we built the Cairo to Khartoum railway but a little bit of heat in the UK brings the trains to a standstill.

If it makes you feel any better my small, south-facing office easily becomes a cooker. Glad the worst of the heat is over the weekend, but it'll probably somewhat curtail activity at the end of this and start of next week.

One of the reasons I work early is to help mitigate the problem of summer heat. 'Only' 26C is way more in here.

I feel your pain, part of my house has air con which is a bliss, but where I WFH is an east facing glass oven, but I am grateful for having Dyson blade less fans, they are amazing.

You want a VacMaster Air Mover Fan.....

Where can I buy one?

Just found this website called OnlyFans, will it be on there?

Yesterday afternoon I mentioned that one of the sides, Iran, was busy looking for a ceasefire. Stories today suggest they are indeed looking a way out or at least a halt to the shooting war then negotiations that involve the usual can kicking.

The comments by Trump about evacuating Tehran are hard to assess. Coudld be any number of things:

1. The US are going to get involved. Very mixed signals from Washington on this but its fair to say that the sheer amount of refuelling assets that came across the Atlantic last night isnt necessarily for some combat air patrol work, they have that already. Its the kind of thing that would support a large bomber force over long distances. People in Eastern England may find their nights disturbed.

The logic of why he US wants to get involved may be strategic sense that they can strike a blow against Irans nuclear infrastrucrure that no one else can, especially since the Irans appear to be unable to seriously contest overflight right through to Trump feeling he wants to do something to say he is on a winning side here. 'Look we did this'. Never underestimate FOMO with that guy. His military is divided as no doubt his advisors are, but his chief on the ground in the Middle East seems to consder it a feasible step.

2. Its Trump bargaining. There is a sense that the Iranian regime is on the run, as the attempts to secure a ceasefire suggest, so booting up the fear raises the costs to Iran to get things brought to a close

3. Its Trump personality, feeling left out so he makes some noise as if he is front and center. He isn't on this right now, Israel is doing all the work here

There is now indisputrable evidence that the Israelis do have air superioty and indeed could be close to air supremacy. A long range surveillance UAVs was reportedly seen just circling over Tehran. It should have been shot at, given there is still some AD in and around Tehran but no.

We should, however, be aware of something. Iran is a big old place and the Israelis do not have tons of air refuelling birds. There are rumours that modified F35s and perhaps F15s can run the route without refuelling, In addition, rumours are that 3rd parties may be supplementing the air refuelling capability.

Air refueling availability is a limiter on weapons loads, loiter and therefore combat potential. If you wanted to say bomb out a large underground facility, you cant put lots of very large bombs that tend to be used for this work on the Israeli inventory which means you need lot of aircraft. The issue gets more problematic if you dont have adequate refuelling to manage load & sustained time over target. Even if the Israelis have the type of bombs in quantity, which is in question, delivery of the sheer weight isnt easy.

The guy is a moron

@atrupar.com‬

Trump with Mark Carney: "The G7 used to be the G8. Barack Obama and a person named Trudeau didn't want to have Russia in, and I would say that was a mistake, because I think you wouldn't have a war right now if you had Russia in."

I don't agree with Trump about the war, but I did think that the whole raison d'être for the G8 was that it brought together the world's 8 biggest economies (or whatever the correct criterion is), who sometimes disagreed profoundly, without fear or favour. What's the point if it's just some club where you can blackball the naughty members? Inviting Ukraine I thought was particularly unserious.

Slightly more than "naughty".

The United Nations is the United Nations, not the United Nice Nations - if it were that it would be considerably less well-attended and it would defeat the purpose. The same is surely true of the G8/7. Yes, it may not have prevented the Ukraine war, but it certainly would have kept communication going a top level. That has value. As it is, the G7 is just an announcement and a press call on a lawn.

No, the G7 is a group of mostly likeminded advanced economies that share the values of pluralism, liberal democracy and representative government.

At one point Russia was pretending to share those values. When it dropped the veil, they were kicked out of a club they didn't belong to.

Its not the biggest economies, if it was, then China would be a member and Russia still wouldn't be anyway. Russia isn't even in the top 10.