Coming a bit late to the debate but a few observations.

1. Agree with tightening up the laws on drink driving. I know from my own experience that there is really no level of alcohol I can consume without it affecting my driving. This has always been the way with me even when I was able to drink heavily in my student days. So my rule for my whole driving career has been that I won't drive after drinking any alcohol at all. I think the 0.5 g/l level seems reasonable for legal purposes but think the 0.2 g/l level used in Norway and other Eureopan countries is probably a bit excessive as it does catch out a lot of people with the 'morning after' effect.

2. Whilst I agree with the eye tests, I don't see why they should start at 70. Deterioration in eye function can and does start much earlier for many people. AT 60 my eyesight is no where near as good as it was at 50. Perhaps we should consider an eye test as necessary for veryone renewing their licence every 10 years. As someone pointed out yesterday, setting the starting age at 70 but expecting people with driving jobs to continue until they are 67 (and sure to rise in the future) seems a bit daft to me.

3. What does seem to be missing from these proposals is the need to do far more than just test eyesight for the elderly. I would be interstd to know how many accdents are caused by poor eyesight and how many by other infirmaties. Currently it is pretty much impossible for a concerned relative to get someones driving licence revoked even when it is obvious to family members they are no longer fit to drive. It can be a cause of great animosity within families and as a result often it is just ignored. A test for mental and physical ability to drive safely should become a standard part of a more regular licence renewal for the elderly.

With regard to point 3 see my earlier post below. I will cut and paste to save the search:

"More relevant for the elderly is observation and reaction. Plenty of elderly have glasses giving them vision that will pass any test, but should never be behind a wheel. The driver awareness test for observation and reaction fits the bill. I finally got the keys off my father at 92. He was incapable of driving for years before that. His eyesight (with glasses) was better than mine."

Worth noting it took years to get the keys off him for the reasons you state and we only did after an accident. Fortunately it was minor, but it might not have been. He was plain dangerous, but had perfect vision.

I know from my own experience that there is really no level of alcohol I can consume without it affecting my driving. This has always been the way with me even when I was able to drink heavily in my student days.

I don't get how the second sentence follows the first here ? 'no level of alcohol' -> 'heavy drinking'. Surely an example to illustrate is 'even after a single pint of shandy' or some such...

The point being that even when I drank heavily and was still able to function in most tasks, I recognised that even a small amount of alcohol made me unfit to drive.

As Matt's data shows. Impairment comes much sooner than the buzz.

"Delete old emails to save water, say officials
Environment Agency releases new guidance to reduce water usage as five areas of UK are in drought" (£)

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/11/southern-england-heatwave-amber-alert/

From your link:-

Emails and photos stored in the cloud are maintained by vast data centres, which consume so much energy that they require large amounts of water to keep cool.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/11/southern-england-heatwave-amber-alert/ (£££)

Three facts combined by the tech numpty who wrote the OSA, by the look of it, to reach a silly conclusion.

As an aside, the computing power needed for AI is worrying some green campaigners. Some (even on pb) have suggested that devolved governments in colder and wetter parts of the country should look at building data centres there to take advantage of natural cooling.

We can’t do that. It would mean moving jobs and investment from the south to the north, which is not on.

And imagine the political pressure and lobbying for charging electricity according to the distance from the generator. Wouldn't just be the SNP etc.

Has anyone ever provided a rational explanation of why electricity should be cheaper the further away from the source of generation?

Oh, yes. To encourage cheaper electricity in London and the SE without having to renew nasty power stations where the most important folk/voters live.

Edit: Else they'd have to pay for transmission more than the folk who live in the north/west or downwind from Hinkley Point etc. And we can't have that. Apparently.

https://octopus.energy/blog/zonal-pricing-for-large-businesses/

This is so obvious it drives me crazy. Just slap nodal and 30-minute tariffs on everyone and the market will sort itself out. Instead, we have people in the Highlands desperately putting solar up because they are effectively subsiding London and the SE.

Other than 'Ed Miliband is rubbish' (which might be true, but seems overly simplistic) - what are the reasons why nodal (or zonal if nodal is too complicated) pricing wasn't put forward in the latest review? It seems such an obvious "win" to reduce constraint payments and encourage battery farms and privately funded links between nodes / zones etc that I feel that I must be missing something.

There's a complicated explanation here, but fundamentally if energy producers in Scotland generate more than the transmission network can cope with you either have to boost the transmission network or encourage generation away from Scotland and nearer to the point of most consumption. Zonal pricing encourages neither of those outcomes. The current imperfect arrangement feeds some of the pay not to produce payments back into network upgrades.

https://www.these-islands.co.uk/publications/i403/zonal_pricing_what_happened.aspx

London will not want all the shitty windfarms on their doorstep, better to wreck Scotland , rip them off and force them to pay for it all.

As previous pointed out, multiple times, wind farms are being built where the wind is.

Hence the huge offshore wind farms along the south and east coasts and Dogger Bank (with its multiple phases)

Afternoon all

One or two silly responses up thread in response to stories like this:

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/delete-your-old-emails-to-help-save-water-environment-chiefs-urge-5Hjd8f6_2/

Data decarbonisation is very much a thing and was starting to become a big part of my trade when I retired. The environmental costs of storing terabytes of information on servers which need to not only be permanently powered but often kept at specific levels of heat and humidity is huge. It's also worth pointing out a lot of this accumulated infornation will a) probably never be accessed and b) isn't governed by proper rules of retention allowing for deletion.

In the old days, a bank or law firm would store two million boxes of paperwork and printouts down a salt mine in Cheshire where the environmental conditions are perfect for long term shortage but unfortunately even these tended to suffer from that I used to call the KGB syndrome where every file was stamped "to be preserved forever".

Permanent preservation of historical records is or should be the responsibility of the network of record offices across the country but even they are short of space and there will be another influx of such records following local government reorganisation (will nobody think of the record managers?).

As a famous exchange from the 1960s had it - "We want information - you won't get it - by hook or by crook, we will". If we of course deleted all tweets from 12 months back, we'd lose half the fun of sites like this.

I find really hard to believe that storing emails uses that much power. A one terabyte SSD might use around 10W while being actively accessed and only a few 10s of milliwatts otherwise. This seems utterly trivial compared to, for example, the power used to run LLMs.

Storage uses relatively trivial amounts of power. Even the servers that run Gmail and Google Drive are probably a rounding error in Google's energy bill.

You can pack a 2U rack server full of SSDs and spinning rust and even at full load it will be pulling a few hundred watts, plus the associated cooling power. The CPUs used in these servers prioritise efficiency over performance, a bunch of medium performance low-power cores are fine for this kind of use.

I have a server in my loft that stores 14TB of data on a RAID array, handles my email and provides file sharing. It pulls about 250w at max load, and it's an old system based on a relatively inefficient 2nd gen Intel platform. I could run a dozen of those from a single 240v domestic socket.

An AI server will pull kilowatts easily. Some of NVidia's AI accelerators are specced for 1000W+ and a single server will contain multiple cards. It's not only the GPU chips being hungry, the large amounts of GDDR6/7 they have gulps down a lot of electrons. GDDR6 consumes roughly 100W per 24GB, so on an AI card with 96GB you're looking at 400W per card just for the memory. A server with five NVidia AI cards could easily require 10KW to run and keep it cool.

Stack a few thousand of those in a datacentre and you're well into megawatt territory.

Not surprisingly, Entain has come out against increasing betting duty:

https://www.racingpost.com/news/britain/entain-outperforms-expectations-for-the-start-of-2025-helped-by-the-success-of-betmgm-aWUUM7a0Xqz1/

The key part is the growth of online betting against the stagnation of retail betting though it's fair to say the two start from very different places and a big part of Entain's growth has come from its investment in BetMGM.

It's disappointing but again predictable to see Entain claiming their only recourse to mitigate against the tax changes would be to effectively pass the change back to its customers - they are a hugely profitable company who could look at their own outgoings and indeed might question whether profit levels are really suastainable at a time of general uncertainty.

They are all (wild generalisation here) looking to expand into the United States. British racing punters are a sideshow.

I’ve seen a few videos in the last couple of months, bemoaning that Las Vegas is becoming a relative ghost town.

There’s lots of reasons given, such as the resorts nickel-and-diming the customers with high prices and extra fees, but the overwhelming sense is that gambling has very quickly moved online as States have relaxed laws, and left Sin City behind.