Best Of

New Ukranian ground drone is taking no prisoners.

https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/2014634820962255204

It is genuinely scary how rapidly the battlefield is changing. I look at the MOD still trying to get fighters updated after 20 years and I despair. Our armed forces are dangerously close to not being fit for purpose.

Obvious reference

https://youtu.be/d74lpFaV97g?si=AoKKmExEL1mXrDVe

The curious bit is that much of it could have been done decades ago. But Doctrine.

See the BAe proposal for an anti tank rocket on a stand with a camera and a vehicle recognition system. The idea was a hidden, off route mine system that would only attack specified vehicles. 1986, IIRC

@steverichards14

Powerful and much needed framing from Andy Burnham in the Guardian..should be repeated every day by ministers or they will find they are blamed for ‘broken Britain’:
“If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit.
In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.”

https://x.com/steverichards14/status/2014612676777779396?s=20

Almost at the fiftieth anniversary of Blame Thatcher. How long can they drag it out? I assume this is aimed at the Party Faithful.

I keep recommending "Late Soviet Britain" by Abby Innes https://www.waterstones.com/book/late-soviet-britain/abby-innes/9781009373630

She suggests that the privatisation program just doesn't work. In order to make the services attractive to the private sector requires long contracts (greater than the electoral cycle) and once privatised, the companies are free to be late/inadequate/corrupt, and there is no workable command-and-control system any more. At this point Governments are reduced to begging (she calls this "bargaining games") the companies to just work pleeeeze.

She illustrates this by comparing the deteriorating of Government in the UK to the deterioration under the Soviet Union. This is provocative (and makes the book much longer than it needs to be) but it is a commanding analogy and illustrates one of the many problems of Thatcherism.

The right has not yet internalised that Thatcherism (privatisation, globalisation, deindustrialisation) really did fuck up the country and now the chickens are coming home to roost. It may have had its advantages at the time (let's concede that to show good faith) but the inheritance has broken the country.

Can we do anything in the UK without it taking 10 20 years....

500km of railway, 20+ years. China, 50000km, 10 years. They built a bloody 20 million person world class city from scratch in 30 years. Are we still talking about new garden cities (that aren't really new cities), haven't they been in the works for 15 years???

China isn't necessarily tge best example to follow. They have 80 million empty houses because they built far too many because it made the GDP figure go up; their trains ferry around a lot of empty air, and their infrastructure is quite fally-downy

If you don't like China, you can have Singapore.

But having been in China for a month, I can tell you for instance "trains ferry a lot of empty air" isn't true, certainly not in Eastern China. The 1000 person trains were full. And the bullet trains are miles ahead of the rest of the world now in every aspect and they can make more in a year than the rest of the world combined x10. They have production lined train manufacture in a similar way to cars, but in a way no other company has. The train lines in the far north are the criticism for empty air, but it kinda of irrevelant in the grand scheme. There is politics / "control" in play, but also engineering testing for high speed in very cold temps and high desert, as they are exporting high speed to rest of the world now.

I think a lot of the poor quality stuff ends up being linked to corruption in lower tier cities. The Tier 1 cities are better than basically every Western city now.

Yes China keep their GDP up by doing effectively Keynsian ecomics of building in the down times and have overbuilt housing. But the point was they get shit done....the West, particularly the UK, don't get shit done, its more shit stuff gets done.

China gets stuff done by having no democracy, planning law, health & safety or environmental standards.

If they want to build something, they'll move you out of your house in 24 hrs - no questions- then bulldoze it, and they don't really care how many die in building the new stuff.

If you take that attitude, you can get quite a lot done quite quickly with an authoritarian state.

But would you want to live in one?

I am obviously not blind to that and obviously an extreme example. Singapore certainly gets shit done without total loss of rights. The problem in the West we are at the other end of the extreme spectrum. Also, what I have noticed across the up and coming countries of Asia, shit get done daily, in terms of something is broken, fixed immediately. Then I flew back to the UK, Heathrow, first toilet I walk into broken (and clearly been broken for a while), and loads of other stuff just like that.

But you are also missing a point a little. They can build 10x high speed trains of everybody else not because of making people homeless or even working people 100hr weeks or even having to have a million people working at it, its because they have this huge drive to scale production efficiently. We see it in every industry they get good at, solar panels, wind turbines, drones and now cars and robots.

The way they build the physical trains (and the track), they have taken the car production line model and gone big. The US used to do that kind of thing last century in many areas, tech is the last remaining one. In Europe, our productivity is laughable bad. All other train makers are still making them in an incredibly inefficient manner.

Yes India is incredibly efficient and their trains notoriously hi tech and up to date

I was pretty impressed by the Indian Railways on my recent trip. Admittedly the local trains looked a bit rough, but the long distance ones were pretty impressive and ran to time.

It will be great to see Kemi slaughtering Labour if they do insist on an all BAME (I thought it was Global Majority now?) shortlist

I was doing some interviews for a management post last week. One of the candidates described herself as BAME spontaneously in the interview.

It's not a great descriptor, but it is a damn sight better than 'Global majority' which is just plain dumb.

Yes: there isn't a global majority, unless the argument is that all non-whites have something in common.
Genetically, arguably the global majority is everyone not negroid.

BAME irritates me for two reasons: first, why did 'minority ethnic' suddenly become more correct than 'ethnic minority'? That's not hiw we construct English. And second, redundancy: "black" is an ethnic minority - so is covered already by the ME bit. It's almost exactly like Cheshire West amd Chester. Just "West Cheshire" would do.

Yes, its not a term that I would use. Neither would I use Global Majority.

But there are a number of similar curiosities. Using "Coloured People" is likely to end in disciplinary action but using "People of Colour" is fine and dandy.

The difference between those two is group vs individual

“People [who happen to be] of Colour” vs a group based segregation-associated classification