Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they could obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
I own some Shell and some Chevron bonds. I could currently sell them for *more* than the principle and interest I'm due. In other words, they are currently yielding less than zero.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
Owning some bonds does not confer any special inside knowledge of how oil and gas firms are trying to fund their daily operations and I shall leave it at that.
You know Robert used to be one of the largest global investors in the energy sector, right? I think he’s got a pretty good feel for things.
I did not know that. I don’t doubt he would have had an excellent feel of things but all I can tell you is that the times they are a changing.
There are many sources of funds that are not prey to the whims of ESG or Eco Activists though. I agree the times are a changing but until we transition we still need oil and we still need gas and will do for the foreseeable future irrespective of what young eco activists think.
I hope that you do not mistake me for a young eco activist! I merely report what I see with my own eyes and ears, just as I saw it happen for coal. Consider me the canary.
If the government really wanted to have an outsized impact on climate change for a country with 1% of the global population, there is one thing that might work. It just needs to look at where the UK is globally relevant.
Confer a double corporation tax on any profits derived from lending, investing or trading with hydrocarbon companies. And use the proceeds to remove corporation tax on any profits derived from the same in green energy.
You could hit banks hard from the other side of the equation too and charge additional regulatory capital on any exposures to the hydrocarbon industry. Justifiable on the basis that the last governor spoke often about the potential for a financial crisis caused by stranded assets.
Sure, you’d see some displacement activity to other financing centres. But you’d move the dial far more than subsidising 80,000 heat pumps.
It’s hard to think of a government intervention that more clearly screams “we are not fucking around with this anymore”. And you then use your diplomatic pressures to try and convince the Europeans and others to follow suit.
You really wouldn't. Financing is far too fungible.
Ultimately, this is about demand and supply of the actual product, not about how it is financed. If you have an oil & gas company, funding is genuinely the least of your problems.
A good chunk of oil and gas banks would just bin that desk rather than go through the hassle of internationally relocating them, especially with the PR involved. Instead they’d get even more competitive with each other in trying to build up their green desks.
So it probably would have an appreciable impact on financing costs in the RBL market. In turn that would impact the ease (and price) with which declining assets can be divested by majors to juniors. In the absence of a globally mandated carbon tax, I can’t think of a more effective way of the Uk government pricing in co2 externalities that would have a global impact, even if it’s not a silver bullet.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
British hospitals are unusual in the developed world in not having single rooms as standard. I am sure this is a major factor in hospital outbreaks, as is the attempt to run at 95%+ occupancy.
We simply don't have the physical infrastructure or personel to prevent hospital acquired infection.
Notable too was the lack of mention in the budget for postgraduate medical and nurse training. It was tractor stats level with no real attempt to create a fit NHS for the ongoing challenges.
I spent 6 months in Stoke Mandeville, way back in 1979, on a mixed ward, the first 10 weeks or so confined to a bed. Whilst privacy was next to non-existent, the ability to chat freely to other patients, also stuck in bed, was a massive boon.
Not sure how my mental health would have fared isolated in a room tbh.
Lots of small businesses are suffering ongoing regular problems because of Brexit. Something tells me that people who run their own small businesses are underrepresented here.
Interesting, I expect you are correct that running a small business does not leave ample time for posting interminably on pb.com.
Now, lawyers on the other hand ....
It is certainly noticeable how many of our frequent posters are lawyers.
I have always had a suspicion those lawyer's fees at £300-1000 per hour were overcharges for actual work done on the job
A lawyer died of a heart attack at the age of 29. Enraged, he arrived at the Pearly Gates and shouted at St Peter, 'Why did you do that? I was only 29!'
'Really?' replied St Peter, surprised. 'The how did you bill for 114 years' worth of work?'
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
They might get you to net zero power as well. Then it is back to square one. What our leaders should be focusing on is getting the basics right first,. Certainly in this country, clean air and clean water. Both are a long way off where they should be in 2021.
Solutions to generating electricity without emitting carbon exist in vast numbers. As does storage of generated power. And the price on most of them are falling as well.
In many, many categories of pollution apart from CO2, emissions have been falling in the developed world. This has been accomplished by incremental reductions in the maximum allowed rates, for each "generation" of machinery etc. This process has been quietly doing it's thing since the 1950s. This was another thing that Donald Fucking Trump screwed up in the US, by the way.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
British hospitals are unusual in the developed world in not having single rooms as standard. I am sure this is a major factor in hospital outbreaks, as is the attempt to run at 95%+ occupancy.
We simply don't have the physical infrastructure or personel to prevent hospital acquired infection.
Notable too was the lack of mention in the budget for postgraduate medical and nurse training. It was tractor stats level with no real attempt to create a fit NHS for the ongoing challenges.
Some Trusts perform a lot better than others. Like the sheer scale of the hospital spread of virus last winter this is largely kept from the public. What you get from the NHS is largely a postcode lottery and that is certainly something the government could focus on.
The one Brexit shortage we sadly won’t ever see is of complacent posts from our Mr T.
Although the fuel ‘crisis’ is long in the past, and I’ve not seen any stories or posts about gaps on the shelves, or pigs being culled for a while either.
Yesterday a friend asked me where I got my German emissions sticker for my car; when he looked at the website I recommended, it seems that since January they can or will no longer mail them to the UK.
Then I went down the picture framers to collect a picture I left with him three weeks back, but his resupply of frames is snarled in some Brexit import problem and he has no idea when they will arrive. He said he is worrying about his usual pre-Christmas boost in orders, for presents, and added that it is only weeks since he recovered from having problems importing glass.
Lots of small businesses are suffering ongoing regular problems because of Brexit. Something tells me that people who run their own small businesses are underrepresented here.
My nephew, a plumber, has several contracts which apparently he can't proceed with, for lack of (mainly imported) parts.
Brighter morning here.
One of the features of the next decade is going to be a move in production back around the world, reversing the recent trend of concentrating too much production in China and other Asian economies.
China is becoming more politically difficult to deal with as a country, and we have seen clearly the pandemic effect on global supply chains which already had no slack left in them.
How this relocation of manufacturing can happen in conjunction with a promised reduction in domestic carbon emissions, is a more difficult question?
Factories, themselves, are often quite low carbon - machines running on electricity. It is the raw inputs, where the problems are.
A bigger question, is where is all the electricity going to come from? Didn’t a bunch of factories in the UK get shut down by their electricity suppliers last month, after a few days of still and overcast weather reduced the output from renewables to almost nothing?
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
The "elsewhere" are places that people shop, services that people use, and their failure creates the shortage you continue to deny.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
If people are keen to shop there then the company will be able to afford drivers. If not, then we can do without it.
The Councils can prioritise funding drivers and cut something else instead if that's what is required.
Mr. Z, disagree. I'd rather have privacy and quiet.
Happily, I don't get ill very often.
Mr. Cwsc, you need two teachers, though, whereas the number of doctors required would not change.
Also, it's a while ago but some studies I read at university suggested smaller class sizes aren't necessarily much (or any) better. From fuzzy memory, discipline mattered more than class size (and the capacity to throw out the irredeemable).
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
That will reduce their turnover - I suspect the oil companies will stay profitable for some time yet. They will just cut back on production and exploration of the more expensive sources.
The one Brexit shortage we sadly won’t ever see is of complacent posts from our Mr T.
Although the fuel ‘crisis’ is long in the past, and I’ve not seen any stories or posts about gaps on the shelves, or pigs being culled for a while either.
Yesterday a friend asked me where I got my German emissions sticker for my car; when he looked at the website I recommended, it seems that since January they can or will no longer mail them to the UK.
Then I went down the picture framers to collect a picture I left with him three weeks back, but his resupply of frames is snarled in some Brexit import problem and he has no idea when they will arrive. He said he is worrying about his usual pre-Christmas boost in orders, for presents, and added that it is only weeks since he recovered from having problems importing glass.
Lots of small businesses are suffering ongoing regular problems because of Brexit. Something tells me that people who run their own small businesses are underrepresented here.
My nephew, a plumber, has several contracts which apparently he can't proceed with, for lack of (mainly imported) parts.
Brighter morning here.
One of the features of the next decade is going to be a move in production back around the world, reversing the recent trend of concentrating too much production in China and other Asian economies.
China is becoming more politically difficult to deal with as a country, and we have seen clearly the pandemic effect on global supply chains which already had no slack left in them.
How this relocation of manufacturing can happen in conjunction with a promised reduction in domestic carbon emissions, is a more difficult question?
Factories, themselves, are often quite low carbon - machines running on electricity. It is the raw inputs, where the problems are.
A bigger question, is where is all the electricity going to come from? Didn’t a bunch of factories in the UK get shut down by their electricity suppliers last month, after a few days of still and overcast weather reduced the output from renewables to almost nothing?
More diversity in sources is required - see the North Sea Link, the Moroccan thing, mini-nukes* etc etc
That and more storage.
*Would be interesting to see what enrichment the core will be at. No one seems to have asked that question.
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
But you do not believe in the market. You do not think employers should have the freedom to recruit who they need to fill the vacancies they have.
Not all people want care assistants. But many do. They often have low incomes. What happens to those people when they cannot afford the amounts needed for care?
I do think they should have the freedom to recruit who they need to fill the vacancies. They can hire whoever will work for them within the market, when have I ever objected to that?
The people who want care should pay whatever the market's going rate is for care. Deflating the going rate in order to achieve cheap care isn't the solution.
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
The "elsewhere" are places that people shop, services that people use, and their failure creates the shortage you continue to deny.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
If people are keen to shop there then the company will be able to afford drivers. If not, then we can do without it.
The Councils can prioritise funding drivers and cut something else instead if that's what is required.
As always your political dogma is splatting hard against the wall of reality. Whilst you still insist that there will be no shortages AND the shortages (created by barriers to the labour force) are a result of a healthy functioning market.
I had a look at some of the reporting on Facebook recently.
The issue is not that they deliberately go about fomenting extremism and discontent,
The issue is that the dumb algorithms encourage extremism, that Facebook are aware of this, and do very little about it - and next to zero in non-English-speaking countries.
I doubt YouTube or Twitter are very different, allowing for subtleties in form factor.
It's rather that they actively encourage it. Divisiveness tends to increase engagement with the app; they are well aware of that, and have deliberately exploited that.
Just think what archeologists are going to find when they do the A303 Stonehenge bypass!
If they ever do...
When I moved to Salisbury two decades ago, the conversation in the pub was that they’d have the Stonehenge tunnel open in three or four years’ time, and the traffic chaos in the summer would go away.
I’ll believe it will open on the day it does, and expect the archeologists to take over the site for a decade once they start digging.
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
The "elsewhere" are places that people shop, services that people use, and their failure creates the shortage you continue to deny.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
If only Philip's world of fantasy commerce were a reality.
The ash-cart drivers issue is a growing problem. Who would want to share their cab with three stinking bin men bringing cold air in every five minutes when the alternative is an air conditioned Tesco Mercedes with just Ken Bruce for company.
Non statutory collections like green waste have already been curtailed early for the winter.
Where I think Philip's argument falls under the wheels of an Amazon truck is the quaint notion that high paid driving jobs are a permanent fixture of post Brexit Britain. They are not. When supply outstrips demand the wages will equalise. New contracts will be drawn up on a sign it or ship out basis. At least our bins will be once again ccollected.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
They might get you to net zero power as well. Then it is back to square one. What our leaders should be focusing on is getting the basics right first,. Certainly in this country, clean air and clean water. Both are a long way off where they should be in 2021.
Solutions to generating electricity without emitting carbon exist in vast numbers. As does storage of generated power. And the price on most of them are falling as well.
In many, many categories of pollution apart from CO2, emissions have been falling in the developed world. This has been accomplished by incremental reductions in the maximum allowed rates, for each "generation" of machinery etc. This process has been quietly doing it's thing since the 1950s. This was another thing that Donald Fucking Trump screwed up in the US, by the way.
I don't see any solutions to replacing gas as the main UK heat resource anytime soon. Heat pumps are not going to cut it in flats and terraced houses. Once the lights go out it is game over for the greens. Trump made the US energy independent, which is what Bunter could do here, we have the resources, while sorting the air and water. Sewage is dumped in rivers as routine by our appalling water companies and our authorities continue to create air pollution with their traffic policies.
Mr. Z, disagree. I'd rather have privacy and quiet.
Happily, I don't get ill very often.
Mr. Cwsc, you need two teachers, though, whereas the number of doctors required would not change.
Also, it's a while ago but some studies I read at university suggested smaller class sizes aren't necessarily much (or any) better. From fuzzy memory, discipline mattered more than class size (and the capacity to throw out the irredeemable).
Yes, but the studies were completely wrong. It is a well-known mistake.
What happened was, they looked at average class sizes in state schools and noted that the smaller they were, the worse the results were.
They did not appreciate this was because your bottom set of nine pupils all with major behavioural problems and limited intelligence was underachieving *because* of the aforementioned issues, and was small becuase of the aforementioned issues, and lacked discipline because...you get the picture. Meanwhile bright, hardworking and self motivated children had to be put in larger classes to free up space on the timetable.
I teach a top set of 32. I teach a bottom set of 16. Guess which one does better...
But if all classes were cut in size substantially, it would help enormously. Another thing people who have never taught don't appreciate is how children feed off each other when it comes to causing disruption. If you have three badly behaved children in a class of 30 they will form a negative feedback loop where one kicks off as another is being dealt with. Much harder for them to do that if there are fewer in the group.
Dr. Foxy, why aren't single bed rooms standard here?
Why aren't class sizes of 15 standard?
Same reason.
Incidentally what @DavidL says about the NHS could apply to many other parts of the public sector. Education, local government, transport. And when money is spent to correct it a way is usually found to thwart it (Exhibit A - the eastern leg of HS2). The phrase 'false economy' doesn't seem to have crossed the minds of these people.
This is true of much big organisation (not just government spending). It's all about the vested interests...
A perfect example of this is the SLS space launch system in the US.
Which is an interesting one, since it exists in a world where a lunatic nerd decided that he would spend his money on building space launch systems, by..... spending his money on space launch systems.
Instead of "investing in infrastructure", "protecting existing capabilities" and another mile of guff of political/finance nostrums.
Mr. Z, disagree. I'd rather have privacy and quiet.
Happily, I don't get ill very often.
Mr. Cwsc, you need two teachers, though, whereas the number of doctors required would not change.
Also, it's a while ago but some studies I read at university suggested smaller class sizes aren't necessarily much (or any) better. From fuzzy memory, discipline mattered more than class size (and the capacity to throw out the irredeemable).
Yes, but the studies were completely wrong. It is a well-known mistake.
What happened was, they looked at average class sizes in state schools and noted that the smaller they were, the worse the results were.
They did not appreciate this was because your bottom set of nine pupils all with major behavioural problems and limited intelligence was underachieving *because* of the aforementioned issues, and was small becuase of the aforementioned issues, and lacked discipline because...you get the picture. Meanwhile bright, hardworking and self motivated children had to be put in larger classes to free up space on the timetable.
I teach a top set of 32. I teach a bottom set of 16. Guess which one does better...
But if all classes were cut in size substantially, it would help enormously. Another thing people who have never taught don't appreciate is how children feed off each other when it comes to causing disruption. If you have three badly behaved children in a class of 30 they will form a negative feedback loop where one kicks off as another is being dealt with. Much harder for them to do that if there are fewer in the group.
Your last paragraph is one where any parent really *does* know the answer. Anyone who has held a birthday party for a whole class vs a birthday party for 5 friends knows it. To the very depths of their souls.....
I had a look at some of the reporting on Facebook recently.
The issue is not that they deliberately go about fomenting extremism and discontent,
The issue is that the dumb algorithms encourage extremism, that Facebook are aware of this, and do very little about it - and next to zero in non-English-speaking countries.
I doubt YouTube or Twitter are very different, allowing for subtleties in form factor.
It's rather that they actively encourage it. Divisiveness tends to increase engagement with the app; they are well aware of that, and have deliberately exploited that.
I am not sure they do. If you watch videos on YouTube or TikTok on military history, it doesn't take long before you are watching pro nazi, Hitler was right videos. As such the algorithms have turned me off.
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
The "elsewhere" are places that people shop, services that people use, and their failure creates the shortage you continue to deny.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
If only Philip's world of fantasy commerce were a reality.
The ash-cart drivers issue is a growing problem. Who would want to share their cab with three stinking bin men bringing cold air in every five minutes when the alternative is an air conditioned Tesco Mercedes with just Ken Bruce for company.
Non statutory collections like green waste have already been curtailed early for the winter.
Where I think Philip's argument falls under the wheels of an Amazon truck is the quaint notion that high paid driving jobs are a permanent fixture of post Brexit Britain. They are not. When supply outstrips demand the wages will equalise. New contracts will be drawn up on a sign it or ship out basis. At least our bins will be once again ccollected.
Locally Hermes are now doing Amazon deliveries that were previously sent from Newcastle.
Our Hermes driver is already complaining he is running at capacity and there are still 4 weeks until Black Friday really kicks things off.
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
The "elsewhere" are places that people shop, services that people use, and their failure creates the shortage you continue to deny.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
If people are keen to shop there then the company will be able to afford drivers. If not, then we can do without it.
The Councils can prioritise funding drivers and cut something else instead if that's what is required.
As always your political dogma is splatting hard against the wall of reality. Whilst you still insist that there will be no shortages AND the shortages (created by barriers to the labour force) are a result of a healthy functioning market.
It can't be both.
Are you functionally illiterate?
I never said there will be no shortages. I said the market should efficiently eradicate the least productive, least efficient, least wanted elements from itself. Once it does that those things will be gone (or a "shortage") and the shortage will be closed because its become permanent on whatever was least wanted.
If supply and demand are out of balance then price changes are the only long-term solution to fill the shortage. Price goes up, demand goes down, supply goes up, the shortage is removed by being made permanent.
Importing people at below-market prices doesn't fill the shortage because they create their own demand thus expanding Aggregate Demand so the shortage remains unfilled. Hence why twenty years of importing people at below market rates hasn't filled the labour shortages. Einstein's definition of insanity applies here.
Mr. Z, disagree. I'd rather have privacy and quiet.
Happily, I don't get ill very often.
Mr. Cwsc, you need two teachers, though, whereas the number of doctors required would not change.
Also, it's a while ago but some studies I read at university suggested smaller class sizes aren't necessarily much (or any) better. From fuzzy memory, discipline mattered more than class size (and the capacity to throw out the irredeemable).
Yes, but the studies were completely wrong. It is a well-known mistake.
What happened was, they looked at average class sizes in state schools and noted that the smaller they were, the worse the results were.
They did not appreciate this was because your bottom set of nine pupils all with major behavioural problems and limited intelligence was underachieving *because* of the aforementioned issues, and was small becuase of the aforementioned issues, and lacked discipline because...you get the picture. Meanwhile bright, hardworking and self motivated children had to be put in larger classes to free up space on the timetable.
I teach a top set of 32. I teach a bottom set of 16. Guess which one does better...
But if all classes were cut in size substantially, it would help enormously. Another thing people who have never taught don't appreciate is how children feed off each other when it comes to causing disruption. If you have three badly behaved children in a class of 30 they will form a negative feedback loop where one kicks off as another is being dealt with. Much harder for them to do that if there are fewer in the group.
Your last paragraph is one where any parent really *does* know the answer. Anyone who has held a birthday party for a whole class vs a birthday party for 5 friends knows it. To the very depths of their souls.....
Perhaps statisticians are not parents? After all, certain preliminaries have to be met...
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
They might get you to net zero power as well. Then it is back to square one. What our leaders should be focusing on is getting the basics right first,. Certainly in this country, clean air and clean water. Both are a long way off where they should be in 2021.
Solutions to generating electricity without emitting carbon exist in vast numbers. As does storage of generated power. And the price on most of them are falling as well.
In many, many categories of pollution apart from CO2, emissions have been falling in the developed world. This has been accomplished by incremental reductions in the maximum allowed rates, for each "generation" of machinery etc. This process has been quietly doing it's thing since the 1950s. This was another thing that Donald Fucking Trump screwed up in the US, by the way.
I don't see any solutions to replacing gas as the main UK heat resource anytime soon. Heat pumps are not going to cut it in flats and terraced houses. Once the lights go out it is game over for the greens. Trump made the US energy independent, which is what Bunter could do here, we have the resources, while sorting the air and water. Sewage is dumped in rivers as routine by our appalling water companies and our authorities continue to create air pollution with their traffic policies.
The sewage issue requires investment and actually allowing projects to go forward.
The Thames Tideway project, which stops sewage being dumped in the Thames was kicked off in 2001. Construction started a decade later - largely due to a very hard fight to try and stop it happening.
The day after the budget traditionally belongs to the geeks, who have been up all night crunching all the numbers in the small print that the government would rather most people missed. And what the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the independent economics thinktank, had found wasn’t altogether encouraging for Brand Rishi.
First up, there was no help for the unemployed, and middle-earners would face £3k in tax rises. Then there were rising energy prices, inflation and low growth with which to deal. Spending on education was almost nonexistent. Debt was still vast. Tax at its highest level since 1950s. Brexit more damaging to the economy than Covid.
Voters endorse Rishi Sunak plans and back Chancellor's handling of the economy
Boris & Rishi v Starmer & Rachel on managing the economy - 40%/25%
An impressive poll lead that may not see its way to the next election (unless that election is in early 2022).
There is a bumpy ride ahead. What follows 5% or 6% inflation when we are expectant of less than 2% could be brutal. If inflation takes interest rates with it, Sunak better hope he's already been moved into another high office of state.
Mr. Doethur, that does sound like a plausible methodological flaw (and such things do happen: my favourite was a study of the behaviour of Brazilian lorry drivers that didn't actually look at Brazilian lorry drivers but people pretending to be Brazilian lorry drivers) though I don't have the studies to hand so cannot confirm that.
I agree entirely on the badly behaved kids line. My school tried pairing good and bad kids, but it turns out one type of behaviour is more 'infectious' than another, and not the way they wanted. Although more galling was when an idiot teacher asked me if I had been smoking, when I (impeccably behaved) was sat next to a serial acquirer of detentions whose jacket reeked of smoke.
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
The "elsewhere" are places that people shop, services that people use, and their failure creates the shortage you continue to deny.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
If only Philip's world of fantasy commerce were a reality.
The ash-cart drivers issue is a growing problem. Who would want to share their cab with three stinking bin men bringing cold air in every five minutes when the alternative is an air conditioned Tesco Mercedes with just Ken Bruce for company.
Non statutory collections like green waste have already been curtailed early for the winter.
Where I think Philip's argument falls under the wheels of an Amazon truck is the quaint notion that high paid driving jobs are a permanent fixture of post Brexit Britain. They are not. When supply outstrips demand the wages will equalise. New contracts will be drawn up on a sign it or ship out basis. At least our bins will be once again ccollected.
You seem to think you're disagreeing with me, but you're not.
Yes the wages will equalise and the solution will be resolved. Great. What's wrong with that?
The wages will equalise at a higher level than they were when they were below equilibrium, even if they're below what they were while getting to equilibrium.
We just need to let the market do its thing and get to the new equilibrium. If anyone can't afford a driver in the meantime, they'll just have to do without.
Mr. Z, disagree. I'd rather have privacy and quiet.
Happily, I don't get ill very often.
Mr. Cwsc, you need two teachers, though, whereas the number of doctors required would not change.
Also, it's a while ago but some studies I read at university suggested smaller class sizes aren't necessarily much (or any) better. From fuzzy memory, discipline mattered more than class size (and the capacity to throw out the irredeemable).
Yes, but the studies were completely wrong. It is a well-known mistake.
What happened was, they looked at average class sizes in state schools and noted that the smaller they were, the worse the results were.
They did not appreciate this was because your bottom set of nine pupils all with major behavioural problems and limited intelligence was underachieving *because* of the aforementioned issues, and was small becuase of the aforementioned issues, and lacked discipline because...you get the picture. Meanwhile bright, hardworking and self motivated children had to be put in larger classes to free up space on the timetable.
I teach a top set of 32. I teach a bottom set of 16. Guess which one does better...
But if all classes were cut in size substantially, it would help enormously. Another thing people who have never taught don't appreciate is how children feed off each other when it comes to causing disruption. If you have three badly behaved children in a class of 30 they will form a negative feedback loop where one kicks off as another is being dealt with. Much harder for them to do that if there are fewer in the group.
Pedantry compels the observation that that's a positive feedback loop
Dr. Foxy, why aren't single bed rooms standard here?
Why aren't class sizes of 15 standard?
Same reason.
Incidentally what @DavidL says about the NHS could apply to many other parts of the public sector. Education, local government, transport. And when money is spent to correct it a way is usually found to thwart it (Exhibit A - the eastern leg of HS2). The phrase 'false economy' doesn't seem to have crossed the minds of these people.
This is true of much big organisation (not just government spending). It's all about the vested interests...
A perfect example of this is the SLS space launch system in the US.
Which is an interesting one, since it exists in a world where a lunatic nerd decided that he would spend his money on building space launch systems, by..... spending his money on space launch systems.
Instead of "investing in infrastructure", "protecting existing capabilities" and another mile of guff of political/finance nostrums.
Imagine an education system run on the basis of
- Educate children - that's it really
Ah, the Senate Launch System, that couldn’t get approval unless the contractors spent the money across all 48 contiguous States.
Guess who sent astronauts up to the ISS for a few hundred million dollars of private investment, and who’s still trying to get them off the ground having spent close to $25bn of public money?
Dr. Foxy, really? I (fairly often) watch military history type stuff (HistoryMarche, Lindybeige, Shadiversity) and can't recall seeing any Nazi-ish links.
Some big increases in Covid cases in Belgium and Netherlands. Germany is also going upwards and first signs of Italy of the same about to happen. Both France and Spain are staying fairly static for now.
The one Brexit shortage we sadly won’t ever see is of complacent posts from our Mr T.
Although the fuel ‘crisis’ is long in the past, and I’ve not seen any stories or posts about gaps on the shelves, or pigs being culled for a while either.
Yesterday a friend asked me where I got my German emissions sticker for my car; when he looked at the website I recommended, it seems that since January they can or will no longer mail them to the UK.
Then I went down the picture framers to collect a picture I left with him three weeks back, but his resupply of frames is snarled in some Brexit import problem and he has no idea when they will arrive. He said he is worrying about his usual pre-Christmas boost in orders, for presents, and added that it is only weeks since he recovered from having problems importing glass.
Lots of small businesses are suffering ongoing regular problems because of Brexit. Something tells me that people who run their own small businesses are underrepresented here.
My nephew, a plumber, has several contracts which apparently he can't proceed with, for lack of (mainly imported) parts.
Brighter morning here.
One of the features of the next decade is going to be a move in production back around the world, reversing the recent trend of concentrating too much production in China and other Asian economies.
China is becoming more politically difficult to deal with as a country, and we have seen clearly the pandemic effect on global supply chains which already had no slack left in them.
How this relocation of manufacturing can happen in conjunction with a promised reduction in domestic carbon emissions, is a more difficult question?
Factories, themselves, are often quite low carbon - machines running on electricity. It is the raw inputs, where the problems are.
A bigger question, is where is all the electricity going to come from? Didn’t a bunch of factories in the UK get shut down by their electricity suppliers last month, after a few days of still and overcast weather reduced the output from renewables to almost nothing?
More diversity in sources is required - see the North Sea Link, the Moroccan thing, mini-nukes* etc etc
That and more storage.
*Would be interesting to see what enrichment the core will be at. No one seems to have asked that question.
It varies, is the answer. Enrichment level is only one metric, though, since safety depends rather more on the reliability of control and cooling systems - and from a proliferation point of view how easy it is to access the fissile material. There are many concepts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_small_modular_reactor_designs
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
The "elsewhere" are places that people shop, services that people use, and their failure creates the shortage you continue to deny.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
If people are keen to shop there then the company will be able to afford drivers. If not, then we can do without it.
The Councils can prioritise funding drivers and cut something else instead if that's what is required.
As always your political dogma is splatting hard against the wall of reality. Whilst you still insist that there will be no shortages AND the shortages (created by barriers to the labour force) are a result of a healthy functioning market.
It can't be both.
Are you functionally illiterate?
I never said there will be no shortages. I said the market should efficiently eradicate the least productive, least efficient, least wanted elements from itself. Once it does that those things will be gone (or a "shortage") and the shortage will be closed because its become permanent on whatever was least wanted.
If supply and demand are out of balance then price changes are the only long-term solution to fill the shortage. Price goes up, demand goes down, supply goes up, the shortage is removed by being made permanent.
Importing people at below-market prices doesn't fill the shortage because they create their own demand thus expanding Aggregate Demand so the shortage remains unfilled. Hence why twenty years of importing people at below market rates hasn't filled the labour shortages. Einstein's definition of insanity applies here.
Have we ever seen Philip and John Redwood in the same room? I know its been suggested some Tory MPs are hiding on here...
Dr. Foxy, why aren't single bed rooms standard here?
Why aren't class sizes of 15 standard?
Same reason.
Incidentally what @DavidL says about the NHS could apply to many other parts of the public sector. Education, local government, transport. And when money is spent to correct it a way is usually found to thwart it (Exhibit A - the eastern leg of HS2). The phrase 'false economy' doesn't seem to have crossed the minds of these people.
This is true of much big organisation (not just government spending). It's all about the vested interests...
A perfect example of this is the SLS space launch system in the US.
Which is an interesting one, since it exists in a world where a lunatic nerd decided that he would spend his money on building space launch systems, by..... spending his money on space launch systems.
Instead of "investing in infrastructure", "protecting existing capabilities" and another mile of guff of political/finance nostrums.
Imagine an education system run on the basis of
- Educate children - that's it really
Ah, the Senate Launch System, that couldn’t get approval unless the contractors spent the money across all 48 contiguous States.
Guess who sent astronauts up to the ISS for a few hundred million dollars of private investment, and who’s still trying to get them off the ground having spent close to $25bn of public money?
Haven't you heard the news? They are planning to privatise the SLS. Which will cause Boeing to magically cut the cost, because reasons.
So each launch will only cost 1 billion dollars. Instead of 2. Complete with the new version of a reusable rocket engine, which is to be thrown away. For $150 million each.
Meanwhile a loony in a Texas swamp is building a factory to build comparable rocket engines for $250,000 each, reducing from their current price of $2.5 million dollars each.....
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
There was a statistic on the radio last night that 40% of global heating effects are from methane which has a lifetime of a few years in the atmosphere rather than many decades for CO2. We could make a dent in global heating much faster by reducing methane emissions while we work on CO2. Though I don't know the balance of natural versus man made methane emissions, and it makes the possibility of methane release from warming permafrost areas sound like a cliff edge risk...
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
They might get you to net zero power as well. Then it is back to square one. What our leaders should be focusing on is getting the basics right first,. Certainly in this country, clean air and clean water. Both are a long way off where they should be in 2021.
Solutions to generating electricity without emitting carbon exist in vast numbers. As does storage of generated power. And the price on most of them are falling as well.
In many, many categories of pollution apart from CO2, emissions have been falling in the developed world. This has been accomplished by incremental reductions in the maximum allowed rates, for each "generation" of machinery etc. This process has been quietly doing it's thing since the 1950s. This was another thing that Donald Fucking Trump screwed up in the US, by the way.
I don't see any solutions to replacing gas as the main UK heat resource anytime soon. Heat pumps are not going to cut it in flats and terraced houses. Once the lights go out it is game over for the greens. Trump made the US energy independent, which is what Bunter could do here, we have the resources, while sorting the air and water. Sewage is dumped in rivers as routine by our appalling water companies and our authorities continue to create air pollution with their traffic policies.
The sewage issue requires investment and actually allowing projects to go forward.
The Thames Tideway project, which stops sewage being dumped in the Thames was kicked off in 2001. Construction started a decade later - largely due to a very hard fight to try and stop it happening.
It is approaching completion now....
The investment needed would be significant but the results would be tangible and very good for the environment.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
They might get you to net zero power as well. Then it is back to square one. What our leaders should be focusing on is getting the basics right first,. Certainly in this country, clean air and clean water. Both are a long way off where they should be in 2021.
Solutions to generating electricity without emitting carbon exist in vast numbers. As does storage of generated power. And the price on most of them are falling as well.
In many, many categories of pollution apart from CO2, emissions have been falling in the developed world. This has been accomplished by incremental reductions in the maximum allowed rates, for each "generation" of machinery etc. This process has been quietly doing it's thing since the 1950s. This was another thing that Donald Fucking Trump screwed up in the US, by the way.
I don't see any solutions to replacing gas as the main UK heat resource anytime soon. Heat pumps are not going to cut it in flats and terraced houses. Once the lights go out it is game over for the greens. Trump made the US energy independent, which is what Bunter could do here, we have the resources, while sorting the air and water. Sewage is dumped in rivers as routine by our appalling water companies and our authorities continue to create air pollution with their traffic policies.
The US has been energy independent since about 2011, so you've been drinking the Trump kool aid.
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
The "elsewhere" are places that people shop, services that people use, and their failure creates the shortage you continue to deny.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
If people are keen to shop there then the company will be able to afford drivers. If not, then we can do without it.
The Councils can prioritise funding drivers and cut something else instead if that's what is required.
As always your political dogma is splatting hard against the wall of reality. Whilst you still insist that there will be no shortages AND the shortages (created by barriers to the labour force) are a result of a healthy functioning market.
It can't be both.
Are you functionally illiterate?
I never said there will be no shortages. I said the market should efficiently eradicate the least productive, least efficient, least wanted elements from itself. Once it does that those things will be gone (or a "shortage") and the shortage will be closed because its become permanent on whatever was least wanted.
If supply and demand are out of balance then price changes are the only long-term solution to fill the shortage. Price goes up, demand goes down, supply goes up, the shortage is removed by being made permanent.
Importing people at below-market prices doesn't fill the shortage because they create their own demand thus expanding Aggregate Demand so the shortage remains unfilled. Hence why twenty years of importing people at below market rates hasn't filled the labour shortages. Einstein's definition of insanity applies here.
Have we ever seen Philip and John Redwood in the same room? I know its been suggested some Tory MPs are hiding on here...
John Redwood is a bit before my time, but he seems pretty sound on economics-only issues.
But I can assure you, I have never attempted to sing the Welsh National Anthem.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
Late to reply to this but (a) Delta has made herd immunity way harder and (b) with R around 1 in the UK with pretty much no restrictions, we are actually close to or at herd immunity. The missing part of the story about people who develop covid after having two jabs is that you are less likely to become positive in the first place and shed for a much shorter time, so overall there is still a decent suppression effect. And don't forget, mitigating the disease so that it becomes at worst a bad cold means it can be allowed to circulate.
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
The "elsewhere" are places that people shop, services that people use, and their failure creates the shortage you continue to deny.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
If people are keen to shop there then the company will be able to afford drivers. If not, then we can do without it.
The Councils can prioritise funding drivers and cut something else instead if that's what is required.
As always your political dogma is splatting hard against the wall of reality. Whilst you still insist that there will be no shortages AND the shortages (created by barriers to the labour force) are a result of a healthy functioning market.
It can't be both.
Are you functionally illiterate?
I never said there will be no shortages. I said the market should efficiently eradicate the least productive, least efficient, least wanted elements from itself. Once it does that those things will be gone (or a "shortage") and the shortage will be closed because its become permanent on whatever was least wanted.
If supply and demand are out of balance then price changes are the only long-term solution to fill the shortage. Price goes up, demand goes down, supply goes up, the shortage is removed by being made permanent.
Importing people at below-market prices doesn't fill the shortage because they create their own demand thus expanding Aggregate Demand so the shortage remains unfilled. Hence why twenty years of importing people at below market rates hasn't filled the labour shortages. Einstein's definition of insanity applies here.
Have we ever seen Philip and John Redwood in the same room? I know its been suggested some Tory MPs are hiding on here...
Ask him to sing "Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau", if he doesn't know the words he must be John Redwood.
Mr. Z, disagree. I'd rather have privacy and quiet.
Happily, I don't get ill very often.
Mr. Cwsc, you need two teachers, though, whereas the number of doctors required would not change.
Also, it's a while ago but some studies I read at university suggested smaller class sizes aren't necessarily much (or any) better. From fuzzy memory, discipline mattered more than class size (and the capacity to throw out the irredeemable).
Yes, but the studies were completely wrong. It is a well-known mistake.
What happened was, they looked at average class sizes in state schools and noted that the smaller they were, the worse the results were.
They did not appreciate this was because your bottom set of nine pupils all with major behavioural problems and limited intelligence was underachieving *because* of the aforementioned issues, and was small becuase of the aforementioned issues, and lacked discipline because...you get the picture. Meanwhile bright, hardworking and self motivated children had to be put in larger classes to free up space on the timetable.
I teach a top set of 32. I teach a bottom set of 16. Guess which one does better...
But if all classes were cut in size substantially, it would help enormously. Another thing people who have never taught don't appreciate is how children feed off each other when it comes to causing disruption. If you have three badly behaved children in a class of 30 they will form a negative feedback loop where one kicks off as another is being dealt with. Much harder for them to do that if there are fewer in the group.
Your last paragraph is one where any parent really *does* know the answer. Anyone who has held a birthday party for a whole class vs a birthday party for 5 friends knows it. To the very depths of their souls.....
Perhaps statisticians are not parents? After all, certain preliminaries have to be met...
This is one of the many ways people who have never been teachers get teaching wrong - I went in to teaching back in 2003 on the basis that I wanted to 'step down a gear' - ahahahahaha - the biggest but luckiest error I have ever made - I now teach undergrads in an applied science university (ie a poly) but did my time in 16-19 ed at an FE college - I taught programming to arsonists/ car thieves/ home taught oddballs/ Posh kids who were deemed not worth the cost of one of the local privates and many others - all the time being told by the media/ politicians and many friends how cushy my job was and how the only thing a teacher needed was good subject knowledge - of all my jobs teaching is the one with the most ignorant ill-informed opinions bandied about - not least by education researchers - which I was for 6 years and now think is nothing more than a scam to provide work fo people unsuited to useful contributions to society.
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
It has been 20 odd years since the Reps have won in Virginia, they have been bigged up before and failed. McAuliffe might well still sneak a win, could be very tight though.
Meanwhile in NZ they are debating how to get kids back into school. Some schools have been closed for almost 3 months. They had 125 new cases of Covid yesterday. They are certainly prioritising health over education even now with very good levels of vaccinations.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
They might get you to net zero power as well. Then it is back to square one. What our leaders should be focusing on is getting the basics right first,. Certainly in this country, clean air and clean water. Both are a long way off where they should be in 2021.
Solutions to generating electricity without emitting carbon exist in vast numbers. As does storage of generated power. And the price on most of them are falling as well.
In many, many categories of pollution apart from CO2, emissions have been falling in the developed world. This has been accomplished by incremental reductions in the maximum allowed rates, for each "generation" of machinery etc. This process has been quietly doing it's thing since the 1950s. This was another thing that Donald Fucking Trump screwed up in the US, by the way.
I don't see any solutions to replacing gas as the main UK heat resource anytime soon. Heat pumps are not going to cut it in flats and terraced houses. Once the lights go out it is game over for the greens. Trump made the US energy independent, which is what Bunter could do here, we have the resources, while sorting the air and water. Sewage is dumped in rivers as routine by our appalling water companies and our authorities continue to create air pollution with their traffic policies.
The sewage issue requires investment and actually allowing projects to go forward.
The Thames Tideway project, which stops sewage being dumped in the Thames was kicked off in 2001. Construction started a decade later - largely due to a very hard fight to try and stop it happening.
It is approaching completion now....
The investment needed would be significant but the results would be tangible and very good for the environment.
Well, we have a choice (among other choices)
- Have decades long planning processes so that Angry Men In Corduroy Trousers With Bicycle Clips can enjoy themselves. - Or we can build the required infrastructural changes sooner.
What was interesting with the Tideway project was that the opposition was not from the water company. In fact they were pushing it along.
Mr. Z, disagree. I'd rather have privacy and quiet.
Happily, I don't get ill very often.
Mr. Cwsc, you need two teachers, though, whereas the number of doctors required would not change.
Also, it's a while ago but some studies I read at university suggested smaller class sizes aren't necessarily much (or any) better. From fuzzy memory, discipline mattered more than class size (and the capacity to throw out the irredeemable).
The thing is, discipline is usually easier to maintain in smaller classes.
Dr. Foxy, really? I (fairly often) watch military history type stuff (HistoryMarche, Lindybeige, Shadiversity) and can't recall seeing any Nazi-ish links.
John Rentoul Retweeted Martin McDonald @marty_mcd · 10h @JohnRentoul I'm starting to think that we may have a new TB/GB situation. Post the 23/24 election I think it's gonna be Reeves & Phillipson but not in that order
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
It has been 20 odd years since the Reps have won in Virginia, they have been bigged up before and failed. McAuliffe might well still sneak a win, could be very tight though.
Agree. I’d be wary of saying the Fox poll is right. But given the previous 4 polls to Fox essentially had a dead heat and there is general consensus McAuliffe’s campaign is in trouble, there is a disconnect in the betting odds. The value lies with a Youngkin bet.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
They might get you to net zero power as well. Then it is back to square one. What our leaders should be focusing on is getting the basics right first,. Certainly in this country, clean air and clean water. Both are a long way off where they should be in 2021.
Solutions to generating electricity without emitting carbon exist in vast numbers. As does storage of generated power. And the price on most of them are falling as well.
In many, many categories of pollution apart from CO2, emissions have been falling in the developed world. This has been accomplished by incremental reductions in the maximum allowed rates, for each "generation" of machinery etc. This process has been quietly doing it's thing since the 1950s. This was another thing that Donald Fucking Trump screwed up in the US, by the way.
I don't see any solutions to replacing gas as the main UK heat resource anytime soon. Heat pumps are not going to cut it in flats and terraced houses. Once the lights go out it is game over for the greens. Trump made the US energy independent, which is what Bunter could do here, we have the resources, while sorting the air and water. Sewage is dumped in rivers as routine by our appalling water companies and our authorities continue to create air pollution with their traffic policies.
The sewage issue requires investment and actually allowing projects to go forward.
The Thames Tideway project, which stops sewage being dumped in the Thames was kicked off in 2001. Construction started a decade later - largely due to a very hard fight to try and stop it happening.
It is approaching completion now....
The investment needed would be significant but the results would be tangible and very good for the environment.
Well, we have a choice (among other choices)
- Have decades long planning processes so that Angry Men In Corduroy Trousers With Bicycle Clips can enjoy themselves. - Or we can build the required infrastructural changes sooner.
What was interesting with the Tideway project was that the opposition was not from the water company. In fact they were pushing it along.
The choices that tend to get made are chucking public money around and not getting tangible results. I expect this budget to be the same in that regard. Bunter should be using his green credentials for projects that will work, not pie in the sky.
Just think what archeologists are going to find when they do the A303 Stonehenge bypass!
If they ever do...
When I moved to Salisbury two decades ago, the conversation in the pub was that they’d have the Stonehenge tunnel open in three or four years’ time, and the traffic chaos in the summer would go away.
I’ll believe it will open on the day it does, and expect the archeologists to take over the site for a decade once they start digging.
My boss, who ran the pub at Winterbourne Stoke on the A303 in the 1990's, left the pub because he was sure the road was going through imminently in around 1995. My folks live in Shrewton, a village that has become a massive rat run after the road layout changes at Stonehenge. I doubt my dad will see the new road open.
Dr. Foxy, why aren't single bed rooms standard here?
Why aren't class sizes of 15 standard?
Same reason.
Incidentally what @DavidL says about the NHS could apply to many other parts of the public sector. Education, local government, transport. And when money is spent to correct it a way is usually found to thwart it (Exhibit A - the eastern leg of HS2). The phrase 'false economy' doesn't seem to have crossed the minds of these people.
This is true of much big organisation (not just government spending). It's all about the vested interests...
A perfect example of this is the SLS space launch system in the US.
Which is an interesting one, since it exists in a world where a lunatic nerd decided that he would spend his money on building space launch systems, by..... spending his money on space launch systems.
Instead of "investing in infrastructure", "protecting existing capabilities" and another mile of guff of political/finance nostrums.
Imagine an education system run on the basis of
- Educate children - that's it really
Ah, the Senate Launch System, that couldn’t get approval unless the contractors spent the money across all 48 contiguous States.
Guess who sent astronauts up to the ISS for a few hundred million dollars of private investment, and who’s still trying to get them off the ground having spent close to $25bn of public money?
Haven't you heard the news? They are planning to privatise the SLS. Which will cause Boeing to magically cut the cost, because reasons.
So each launch will only cost 1 billion dollars. Instead of 2. Complete with the new version of a reusable rocket engine, which is to be thrown away. For $150 million each.
Meanwhile a loony in a Texas swamp is building a factory to build comparable rocket engines for $250,000 each, reducing from their current price of $2.5 million dollars each.....
Of the many mad decisions made by SLS, having almost nothing re-usable, including four ex-Shuttle RS-25s on each launch, is probably the worst. They won’t be able to launch more than half a dozen times, before they need to start making new versions of a 40 year old design.
Meanwhile SpaceX are flying Falcon 9s half a dozen times each, with very little refurbishment required to turn them around. The latest unmanned Starlink launches don’t even get mentioned on here any more, they’re utterly routine now.
I would like to apologise unreservedly. Not for any offence caused (that's always intentional), but for voting for Nick fucking Clegg.
Clegg of course the only peacetime LD leader since Lloyd George to end up in government and now likely to have had a say in the rebranding of one of the biggest corporations in the world, Facebook, to Meta as their VP of Global Affairs.
Plus earning an alleged $2 million a year and supposedly quite the magnet for women in his youth.
I am sure it makes up for losing his seat and leaving his party in the doldrums in 2015
That's true if you care more about your own personal wealth and status more than the damaging impact you have on the rest of the world. Nick Clegg is a sell out of the highest order.
Facebook has brought more happiness to more people than any political party.
Nick Clegg should be proud to play a role in its success.
That's a good point. Facebook isn't completely evil. Would it have been worse without the oversight board that Clegg introduced and which banned Trump because of his role in the Jan 6th insurrection? There is a lot wrong with Facebook but is it being improved or made worse by Clegg's involvement? One could have said the same about the coalition government.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
Late to reply to this but (a) Delta has made herd immunity way harder and (b) with R around 1 in the UK with pretty much no restrictions, we are actually close to or at herd immunity. The missing part of the story about people who develop covid after having two jabs is that you are less likely to become positive in the first place and shed for a much shorter time, so overall there is still a decent suppression effect. And don't forget, mitigating the disease so that it becomes at worst a bad cold means it can be allowed to circulate.
Unfortunately for very vulnerable people (include obese people in that) the virus develops past normal virus symptoms in decent numbers still. The government really could have used it's resources for a massive national health drive. Existing good health is still your best defence, weight is a very important factor.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
There was a statistic on the radio last night that 40% of global heating effects are from methane which has a lifetime of a few years in the atmosphere rather than many decades for CO2. We could make a dent in global heating much faster by reducing methane emissions while we work on CO2. Though I don't know the balance of natural versus man made methane emissions, and it makes the possibility of methane release from warming permafrost areas sound like a cliff edge risk...
The priority should be the other way round. A large fraction of every tonne of carbon dioxide we release will stay in the atmosphere effectively forever. Therefore the speed at which we reduce carbon dioxide emissions has a massive influence on the equilibrium level of global warming.
Since methane only spends around 12 years in the atmosphere the methane we emit today has little impact on the long-term temperature equilibrium. So we can afford to leave that as a problem to address later. It also means we can reach an equilibrium merely by keeping emissions constant, while with carbon dioxide we have to reduce emissions to zero.
The quick wins are to be found in the halogen compounds, which are extraordinarily long-lived in the atmosphere, have a strong warming effect, and are only used in a relatively small number of niche industrial processes, rather than being the result of our core energy or food use.
Dr. Foxy, why aren't single bed rooms standard here?
Why aren't class sizes of 15 standard?
Same reason.
Incidentally what @DavidL says about the NHS could apply to many other parts of the public sector. Education, local government, transport. And when money is spent to correct it a way is usually found to thwart it (Exhibit A - the eastern leg of HS2). The phrase 'false economy' doesn't seem to have crossed the minds of these people.
This is true of much big organisation (not just government spending). It's all about the vested interests...
A perfect example of this is the SLS space launch system in the US.
Which is an interesting one, since it exists in a world where a lunatic nerd decided that he would spend his money on building space launch systems, by..... spending his money on space launch systems.
Instead of "investing in infrastructure", "protecting existing capabilities" and another mile of guff of political/finance nostrums.
Imagine an education system run on the basis of
- Educate children - that's it really
Ah, the Senate Launch System, that couldn’t get approval unless the contractors spent the money across all 48 contiguous States.
Guess who sent astronauts up to the ISS for a few hundred million dollars of private investment, and who’s still trying to get them off the ground having spent close to $25bn of public money?
Haven't you heard the news? They are planning to privatise the SLS. Which will cause Boeing to magically cut the cost, because reasons.
So each launch will only cost 1 billion dollars. Instead of 2. Complete with the new version of a reusable rocket engine, which is to be thrown away. For $150 million each.
Meanwhile a loony in a Texas swamp is building a factory to build comparable rocket engines for $250,000 each, reducing from their current price of $2.5 million dollars each.....
Mr. Z, disagree. I'd rather have privacy and quiet.
Happily, I don't get ill very often.
Mr. Cwsc, you need two teachers, though, whereas the number of doctors required would not change.
Also, it's a while ago but some studies I read at university suggested smaller class sizes aren't necessarily much (or any) better. From fuzzy memory, discipline mattered more than class size (and the capacity to throw out the irredeemable).
Yes, but the studies were completely wrong. It is a well-known mistake.
What happened was, they looked at average class sizes in state schools and noted that the smaller they were, the worse the results were.
They did not appreciate this was because your bottom set of nine pupils all with major behavioural problems and limited intelligence was underachieving *because* of the aforementioned issues, and was small becuase of the aforementioned issues, and lacked discipline because...you get the picture. Meanwhile bright, hardworking and self motivated children had to be put in larger classes to free up space on the timetable.
I teach a top set of 32. I teach a bottom set of 16. Guess which one does better...
But if all classes were cut in size substantially, it would help enormously. Another thing people who have never taught don't appreciate is how children feed off each other when it comes to causing disruption. If you have three badly behaved children in a class of 30 they will form a negative feedback loop where one kicks off as another is being dealt with. Much harder for them to do that if there are fewer in the group.
Your last paragraph is one where any parent really *does* know the answer. Anyone who has held a birthday party for a whole class vs a birthday party for 5 friends knows it. To the very depths of their souls.....
Perhaps statisticians are not parents? After all, certain preliminaries have to be met...
This is one of the many ways people who have never been teachers get teaching wrong - I went in to teaching back in 2003 on the basis that I wanted to 'step down a gear' - ahahahahaha - the biggest but luckiest error I have ever made - I now teach undergrads in an applied science university (ie a poly) but did my time in 16-19 ed at an FE college - I taught programming to arsonists/ car thieves/ home taught oddballs/ Posh kids who were deemed not worth the cost of one of the local privates and many others - all the time being told by the media/ politicians and many friends how cushy my job was and how the only thing a teacher needed was good subject knowledge - of all my jobs teaching is the one with the most ignorant ill-informed opinions bandied about - not least by education researchers - which I was for 6 years and now think is nothing more than a scam to provide work fo people unsuited to useful contributions to society.
I’ve seen a published, peer reviewed paper in an education journal where the results of a survey of less than a hundred people (of the “on a scale of 1 to 10” sort) was quoted to 10 significant figures; it didn’t do my faith in educational research much good.
In fact most educational research at the time seemed to be designed to validate the prejudices of the authors. Each paper also used its own statistical technique and was virtually impossible to compare with other studies looking at the same thing: again I got the impression that this was by design.
Hopefully things have improved in the last twenty years, but I haven’t been able to take educational research seriously since.
Facemasks really doing the job in Wales then with its highest infection rate in the UK. Almost conclude they are worse than useless in a real world setting
I don't see any solutions to replacing gas as the main UK heat resource anytime soon. Heat pumps are not going to cut it in flats and terraced houses. Once the lights go out it is game over for the greens. Trump made the US energy independent, which is what Bunter could do here, we have the resources, while sorting the air and water. Sewage is dumped in rivers as routine by our appalling water companies and our authorities continue to create air pollution with their traffic policies.
My preferred solution for blocks of flats is district heating. I grew up with that in Denmark 50 years ago and it's still common across the country - you have a central CHP plant which distributes to the blocks using the more efficient or environmentally-friendly (depending on national priorities) tech available. It also saves endless hassle for households as well as some space. When I moved back to Britain and found that everyone had huge boilers in their own flats, each requiring regular maintenance and inspection, I was nonplussed - why would we want to do that?
The solution is less suitable for well-separated detached houses, but those are exactly the ones where heat pumps work well.
Dr. Foxy, why aren't single bed rooms standard here?
Why aren't class sizes of 15 standard?
Same reason.
Incidentally what @DavidL says about the NHS could apply to many other parts of the public sector. Education, local government, transport. And when money is spent to correct it a way is usually found to thwart it (Exhibit A - the eastern leg of HS2). The phrase 'false economy' doesn't seem to have crossed the minds of these people.
The failure to link HS1 and HS2 somehow - not nec in Camden - is another glaring example.
Dr. Foxy, why aren't single bed rooms standard here?
Why aren't class sizes of 15 standard?
Same reason.
Incidentally what @DavidL says about the NHS could apply to many other parts of the public sector. Education, local government, transport. And when money is spent to correct it a way is usually found to thwart it (Exhibit A - the eastern leg of HS2). The phrase 'false economy' doesn't seem to have crossed the minds of these people.
This is true of much big organisation (not just government spending). It's all about the vested interests...
A perfect example of this is the SLS space launch system in the US.
Which is an interesting one, since it exists in a world where a lunatic nerd decided that he would spend his money on building space launch systems, by..... spending his money on space launch systems.
Instead of "investing in infrastructure", "protecting existing capabilities" and another mile of guff of political/finance nostrums.
Imagine an education system run on the basis of
- Educate children - that's it really
Ah, the Senate Launch System, that couldn’t get approval unless the contractors spent the money across all 48 contiguous States.
Guess who sent astronauts up to the ISS for a few hundred million dollars of private investment, and who’s still trying to get them off the ground having spent close to $25bn of public money?
Haven't you heard the news? They are planning to privatise the SLS. Which will cause Boeing to magically cut the cost, because reasons.
So each launch will only cost 1 billion dollars. Instead of 2. Complete with the new version of a reusable rocket engine, which is to be thrown away. For $150 million each.
Meanwhile a loony in a Texas swamp is building a factory to build comparable rocket engines for $250,000 each, reducing from their current price of $2.5 million dollars each.....
Of the many mad decisions made by SLS, having almost nothing re-usable, including four ex-Shuttle RS-25s on each launch, is probably the worst. They won’t be able to launch more than half a dozen times, before they need to start making new versions of a 40 year old design.
Meanwhile SpaceX are flying Falcon 9s half a dozen times each, with very little refurbishment required to turn them around. The latest unmanned Starlink launches don’t even get mentioned on here any more, they’re utterly routine now.
SpaceX are so far ahead of the Senate Launch System that it seems almost impossible for it to become a competition again. It would require a total root and branch reform of the latter and many years of investment to catch up.
This Earth to Earth solution has to be one of the most mental ideas imagined, London to Dubai in 29 minutes and England to Australia in under an hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0
If it were anyone else I'd think there's never a chance of that happening, but with SpaceX it certainly seems like it could possible in the future. I do hope they're working on it, but I suppose all the reuseable and reliable launchers must make it more feasible.
Mr. Z, disagree. I'd rather have privacy and quiet.
Happily, I don't get ill very often.
Mr. Cwsc, you need two teachers, though, whereas the number of doctors required would not change.
Also, it's a while ago but some studies I read at university suggested smaller class sizes aren't necessarily much (or any) better. From fuzzy memory, discipline mattered more than class size (and the capacity to throw out the irredeemable).
Yes, but the studies were completely wrong. It is a well-known mistake.
What happened was, they looked at average class sizes in state schools and noted that the smaller they were, the worse the results were.
They did not appreciate this was because your bottom set of nine pupils all with major behavioural problems and limited intelligence was underachieving *because* of the aforementioned issues, and was small becuase of the aforementioned issues, and lacked discipline because...you get the picture. Meanwhile bright, hardworking and self motivated children had to be put in larger classes to free up space on the timetable.
I teach a top set of 32. I teach a bottom set of 16. Guess which one does better...
But if all classes were cut in size substantially, it would help enormously. Another thing people who have never taught don't appreciate is how children feed off each other when it comes to causing disruption. If you have three badly behaved children in a class of 30 they will form a negative feedback loop where one kicks off as another is being dealt with. Much harder for them to do that if there are fewer in the group.
Pedantry compels the observation that that's a positive feedback loop
I would like to apologise unreservedly. Not for any offence caused (that's always intentional), but for voting for Nick fucking Clegg.
Clegg of course the only peacetime LD leader since Lloyd George to end up in government and now likely to have had a say in the rebranding of one of the biggest corporations in the world, Facebook, to Meta as their VP of Global Affairs.
Plus earning an alleged $2 million a year and supposedly quite the magnet for women in his youth.
I am sure it makes up for losing his seat and leaving his party in the doldrums in 2015
That's true if you care more about your own personal wealth and status more than the damaging impact you have on the rest of the world. Nick Clegg is a sell out of the highest order.
Facebook has brought more happiness to more people than any political party.
Nick Clegg should be proud to play a role in its success.
That's a good point. Facebook isn't completely evil. Would it have been worse without the oversight board that Clegg introduced and which banned Trump because of his role in the Jan 6th insurrection? There is a lot wrong with Facebook but is it being improved or made worse by Clegg's involvement? One could have said the same about the coalition government.
Never get the ire given to Facebook - most people use it to keep in touch , be a bit nosy and show off a bit (a little like politicalbetting !) - The politics stuff i am not even sure there is a case and what is so wrong with pointing people to stuff that align with their values and beliefs? As for the interfering with elections , well every form of media has been exploited by policiticans over the years and why wouldn't it be?
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
They might get you to net zero power as well. Then it is back to square one. What our leaders should be focusing on is getting the basics right first,. Certainly in this country, clean air and clean water. Both are a long way off where they should be in 2021.
Solutions to generating electricity without emitting carbon exist in vast numbers. As does storage of generated power. And the price on most of them are falling as well.
In many, many categories of pollution apart from CO2, emissions have been falling in the developed world. This has been accomplished by incremental reductions in the maximum allowed rates, for each "generation" of machinery etc. This process has been quietly doing it's thing since the 1950s. This was another thing that Donald Fucking Trump screwed up in the US, by the way.
I don't see any solutions to replacing gas as the main UK heat resource anytime soon. Heat pumps are not going to cut it in flats and terraced houses. Once the lights go out it is game over for the greens. Trump made the US energy independent, which is what Bunter could do here, we have the resources, while sorting the air and water. Sewage is dumped in rivers as routine by our appalling water companies and our authorities continue to create air pollution with their traffic policies.
The sewage issue requires investment and actually allowing projects to go forward.
The Thames Tideway project, which stops sewage being dumped in the Thames was kicked off in 2001. Construction started a decade later - largely due to a very hard fight to try and stop it happening.
It is approaching completion now....
The investment needed would be significant but the results would be tangible and very good for the environment.
Well, we have a choice (among other choices)
- Have decades long planning processes so that Angry Men In Corduroy Trousers With Bicycle Clips can enjoy themselves. - Or we can build the required infrastructural changes sooner.
What was interesting with the Tideway project was that the opposition was not from the water company. In fact they were pushing it along.
The choices that tend to get made are chucking public money around and not getting tangible results. I expect this budget to be the same in that regard. Bunter should be using his green credentials for projects that will work, not pie in the sky.
The problem is that *everything* gets opposed - and is supposed to be fed into a decades long planning cycle.
A favourite was the stopping of a reservoir. It would have used a Victorian gravel pit. No, there was no ground contamination. The gravel pit was simply an ugly hole in the ground. The plan was to fill it with water, And wildlife. Killed by anti-reservoir types slow walking it through the planning process.
The anger at the fast tracking of offshore wind farms provides an almost visible glow. I enjoy it.
John Rentoul Retweeted Martin McDonald @marty_mcd · 10h @JohnRentoul I'm starting to think that we may have a new TB/GB situation. Post the 23/24 election I think it's gonna be Reeves & Phillipson but not in that order
Starmer's pals. No chance Ang is way better than those 2. Ang will hit back hard.
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
Saying he is the son of God is Ok but the Som of God is highly offensive
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
The "elsewhere" are places that people shop, services that people use, and their failure creates the shortage you continue to deny.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
If only Philip's world of fantasy commerce were a reality.
The ash-cart drivers issue is a growing problem. Who would want to share their cab with three stinking bin men bringing cold air in every five minutes when the alternative is an air conditioned Tesco Mercedes with just Ken Bruce for company.
Non statutory collections like green waste have already been curtailed early for the winter.
Where I think Philip's argument falls under the wheels of an Amazon truck is the quaint notion that high paid driving jobs are a permanent fixture of post Brexit Britain. They are not. When supply outstrips demand the wages will equalise. New contracts will be drawn up on a sign it or ship out basis. At least our bins will be once again ccollected.
Locally Hermes are now doing Amazon deliveries that were previously sent from Newcastle.
Our Hermes driver is already complaining he is running at capacity and there are still 4 weeks until Black Friday really kicks things off.
I'd have thought where you are your deliveries would have come from the big site not far from where I work in Newton Aycliffe.
I don't see any solutions to replacing gas as the main UK heat resource anytime soon. Heat pumps are not going to cut it in flats and terraced houses. Once the lights go out it is game over for the greens. Trump made the US energy independent, which is what Bunter could do here, we have the resources, while sorting the air and water. Sewage is dumped in rivers as routine by our appalling water companies and our authorities continue to create air pollution with their traffic policies.
My preferred solution for blocks of flats is district heating. I grew up with that in Denmark 50 years ago and it's still common across the country - you have a central CHP plant which distributes to the blocks using the more efficient or environmentally-friendly (depending on national priorities) tech available. It also saves endless hassle for households as well as some space. When I moved back to Britain and found that everyone had huge boilers in their own flats, each requiring regular maintenance and inspection, I was nonplussed - why would we want to do that?
The solution is less suitable for well-separated detached houses, but those are exactly the ones where heat pumps work well.
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
Saying he is the son of God is Ok but the Som of God is highly offensive
Sodom of God would be worse.
That said, there is a hymn that famously contains this verse.
'The foxes found rest and the birds their nest In the shade of the cedar tree. But thy couch was the sod, o thou Son of God In the deserts of Galilee.'
Strangely, that verse is modified in most modern hymn books.
Dr. Foxy, why aren't single bed rooms standard here?
Why aren't class sizes of 15 standard?
Same reason.
Incidentally what @DavidL says about the NHS could apply to many other parts of the public sector. Education, local government, transport. And when money is spent to correct it a way is usually found to thwart it (Exhibit A - the eastern leg of HS2). The phrase 'false economy' doesn't seem to have crossed the minds of these people.
This is true of much big organisation (not just government spending). It's all about the vested interests...
A perfect example of this is the SLS space launch system in the US.
Which is an interesting one, since it exists in a world where a lunatic nerd decided that he would spend his money on building space launch systems, by..... spending his money on space launch systems.
Instead of "investing in infrastructure", "protecting existing capabilities" and another mile of guff of political/finance nostrums.
Imagine an education system run on the basis of
- Educate children - that's it really
Ah, the Senate Launch System, that couldn’t get approval unless the contractors spent the money across all 48 contiguous States.
Guess who sent astronauts up to the ISS for a few hundred million dollars of private investment, and who’s still trying to get them off the ground having spent close to $25bn of public money?
Haven't you heard the news? They are planning to privatise the SLS. Which will cause Boeing to magically cut the cost, because reasons.
So each launch will only cost 1 billion dollars. Instead of 2. Complete with the new version of a reusable rocket engine, which is to be thrown away. For $150 million each.
Meanwhile a loony in a Texas swamp is building a factory to build comparable rocket engines for $250,000 each, reducing from their current price of $2.5 million dollars each.....
Mr. Z, disagree. I'd rather have privacy and quiet.
Happily, I don't get ill very often.
Mr. Cwsc, you need two teachers, though, whereas the number of doctors required would not change.
Also, it's a while ago but some studies I read at university suggested smaller class sizes aren't necessarily much (or any) better. From fuzzy memory, discipline mattered more than class size (and the capacity to throw out the irredeemable).
Yes, but the studies were completely wrong. It is a well-known mistake.
What happened was, they looked at average class sizes in state schools and noted that the smaller they were, the worse the results were.
They did not appreciate this was because your bottom set of nine pupils all with major behavioural problems and limited intelligence was underachieving *because* of the aforementioned issues, and was small becuase of the aforementioned issues, and lacked discipline because...you get the picture. Meanwhile bright, hardworking and self motivated children had to be put in larger classes to free up space on the timetable.
I teach a top set of 32. I teach a bottom set of 16. Guess which one does better...
But if all classes were cut in size substantially, it would help enormously. Another thing people who have never taught don't appreciate is how children feed off each other when it comes to causing disruption. If you have three badly behaved children in a class of 30 they will form a negative feedback loop where one kicks off as another is being dealt with. Much harder for them to do that if there are fewer in the group.
Your last paragraph is one where any parent really *does* know the answer. Anyone who has held a birthday party for a whole class vs a birthday party for 5 friends knows it. To the very depths of their souls.....
Perhaps statisticians are not parents? After all, certain preliminaries have to be met...
This is one of the many ways people who have never been teachers get teaching wrong - I went in to teaching back in 2003 on the basis that I wanted to 'step down a gear' - ahahahahaha - the biggest but luckiest error I have ever made - I now teach undergrads in an applied science university (ie a poly) but did my time in 16-19 ed at an FE college - I taught programming to arsonists/ car thieves/ home taught oddballs/ Posh kids who were deemed not worth the cost of one of the local privates and many others - all the time being told by the media/ politicians and many friends how cushy my job was and how the only thing a teacher needed was good subject knowledge - of all my jobs teaching is the one with the most ignorant ill-informed opinions bandied about - not least by education researchers - which I was for 6 years and now think is nothing more than a scam to provide work fo people unsuited to useful contributions to society.
I’ve seen a published, peer reviewed paper in an education journal where the results of a survey of less than a hundred people (of the “on a scale of 1 to 10” sort) was quoted to 10 significant figures; it didn’t do my faith in educational research much good.
In fact most educational research at the time seemed to be designed to validate the prejudices of the authors. Each paper also used its own statistical technique and was virtually impossible to compare with other studies looking at the same thing: again I got the impression that this was by design.
Hopefully things have improved in the last twenty years, but I haven’t been able to take educational research seriously since.
I remember my physics teacher spending ages teaching us about significant figures.
Your example makes me think she would have pursed her lips, flexed a ruler to breaking point, then proceeded to given them a piece of her mind. In short, declarative sentences. Without raising her voice. And reduced them to a small pile of quivering jelly, by reasoned argument.
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
I am now cut off from the rest of Cumbria let alone the rest of the U.K.
There are only 3 routes out: - the train - closed - east to Kendal - but can't even get to Broughton because Duddon Bridge is closed - up the coast and across to the M6 somewhere near Penrith - also out because a bridge at Holmrook is closed.
Rising water in the rivers rather than actual flooding seems to be the reason.
In theory I could try driving over the fells and hope to get to the central lakes and out that way. But not sensible when there has been lots of rain and local floods and if you get stuck the sheep will do sod all to help.
Not that I want to get out just yet. But have a theatre ticket in London on 8th November so just planning my escape route for then.
The good news though is that some people are ignoring the closed roads signs and driving through anyway. The contempt people round here have for Cumbria County Council has to be seen to be believed.
Perhaps the local council will finally do something about strengthening the bridges, an issue which people have complained about for some time.
Climate change is a concern here. If sea levels rise, a lot of coastal communities round here will be underwater. Not where I am. But nearby and it will affect Sellafield and nuclear storage plans and the West Coast mainline.
And, no, I am not going to tell you about my sex life.
(I hope I've got the new PB posting style right.)
Do you mean the Cumbrian coastline? The WCML goes inland through Penrith and over Shap Fell. If that floods then it’s more than Millom, Whitehaven and Sellafield will be flooded!
Yes of course - silly me. I meant the coastal train service that goes to Sellafield and on up. A lovely journey but the whole thing is in a flood risk zone.
Lots of small businesses are suffering ongoing regular problems because of Brexit. Something tells me that people who run their own small businesses are underrepresented here.
Interesting, I expect you are correct that running a small business does not leave ample time for posting interminably on pb.com.
Now, lawyers on the other hand ....
It is certainly noticeable how many of our frequent posters are lawyers.
I have always had a suspicion those lawyer's fees at £300-1000 per hour were overcharges for actual work done on the job
Some of us try to represent the views of the overworked and very stressed small businesswoman aka My Daughter.
And, yes, she has found it harder since reopening fully. Lots of costs are going up. Food and drink in pubs and restaurants will be more expensive not less, regardless of what Sunak said. Margins will be even tighter. There are unexpected shortages in her deliveries.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
They might get you to net zero power as well. Then it is back to square one. What our leaders should be focusing on is getting the basics right first,. Certainly in this country, clean air and clean water. Both are a long way off where they should be in 2021.
Solutions to generating electricity without emitting carbon exist in vast numbers. As does storage of generated power. And the price on most of them are falling as well.
In many, many categories of pollution apart from CO2, emissions have been falling in the developed world. This has been accomplished by incremental reductions in the maximum allowed rates, for each "generation" of machinery etc. This process has been quietly doing it's thing since the 1950s. This was another thing that Donald Fucking Trump screwed up in the US, by the way.
I don't see any solutions to replacing gas as the main UK heat resource anytime soon. Heat pumps are not going to cut it in flats and terraced houses. Once the lights go out it is game over for the greens. Trump made the US energy independent, which is what Bunter could do here, we have the resources, while sorting the air and water. Sewage is dumped in rivers as routine by our appalling water companies and our authorities continue to create air pollution with their traffic policies.
The sewage issue requires investment and actually allowing projects to go forward.
The Thames Tideway project, which stops sewage being dumped in the Thames was kicked off in 2001. Construction started a decade later - largely due to a very hard fight to try and stop it happening.
It is approaching completion now....
The investment needed would be significant but the results would be tangible and very good for the environment.
Well, we have a choice (among other choices)
- Have decades long planning processes so that Angry Men In Corduroy Trousers With Bicycle Clips can enjoy themselves. - Or we can build the required infrastructural changes sooner.
What was interesting with the Tideway project was that the opposition was not from the water company. In fact they were pushing it along.
The choices that tend to get made are chucking public money around and not getting tangible results. I expect this budget to be the same in that regard. Bunter should be using his green credentials for projects that will work, not pie in the sky.
If you don't want water to cause sewers to overflow, you need either
- A place for rainwater to go that isn't the sewers. - More sewer capacity.
Probably both. And both will require lots and lots of infrastructure.
I will bet that in every single case the local water company has the plan on file, or part way through the planning process etc etc.
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
Saying he is the son of God is Ok but the Som of God is highly offensive
I don't see any solutions to replacing gas as the main UK heat resource anytime soon. Heat pumps are not going to cut it in flats and terraced houses. Once the lights go out it is game over for the greens. Trump made the US energy independent, which is what Bunter could do here, we have the resources, while sorting the air and water. Sewage is dumped in rivers as routine by our appalling water companies and our authorities continue to create air pollution with their traffic policies.
My preferred solution for blocks of flats is district heating. I grew up with that in Denmark 50 years ago and it's still common across the country - you have a central CHP plant which distributes to the blocks using the more efficient or environmentally-friendly (depending on national priorities) tech available. It also saves endless hassle for households as well as some space. When I moved back to Britain and found that everyone had huge boilers in their own flats, each requiring regular maintenance and inspection, I was nonplussed - why would we want to do that?
The solution is less suitable for well-separated detached houses, but those are exactly the ones where heat pumps work well.
District heating presumably means the heating goes on when a bureaucrat at the local town hall says it should, rather than when those in the flat are cold? If it’s like the heating system at school you will have a mixture of people who have to buy electric heaters to get the temperature up to what they want and those that spend all winter with the windows wide open.
Also how do you get a local CHP plant built in centra London (for example)? Close Tate Modern and put it back to its original purpose?
I don't see any solutions to replacing gas as the main UK heat resource anytime soon. Heat pumps are not going to cut it in flats and terraced houses. Once the lights go out it is game over for the greens. Trump made the US energy independent, which is what Bunter could do here, we have the resources, while sorting the air and water. Sewage is dumped in rivers as routine by our appalling water companies and our authorities continue to create air pollution with their traffic policies.
My preferred solution for blocks of flats is district heating. I grew up with that in Denmark 50 years ago and it's still common across the country - you have a central CHP plant which distributes to the blocks using the more efficient or environmentally-friendly (depending on national priorities) tech available. It also saves endless hassle for households as well as some space. When I moved back to Britain and found that everyone had huge boilers in their own flats, each requiring regular maintenance and inspection, I was nonplussed - why would we want to do that?
The solution is less suitable for well-separated detached houses, but those are exactly the ones where heat pumps work well.
And the technology for CHP has improved considerably in the last few years. See, for example, Ceres Power's stainless steel fuel cells.
I don't see any solutions to replacing gas as the main UK heat resource anytime soon. Heat pumps are not going to cut it in flats and terraced houses. Once the lights go out it is game over for the greens. Trump made the US energy independent, which is what Bunter could do here, we have the resources, while sorting the air and water. Sewage is dumped in rivers as routine by our appalling water companies and our authorities continue to create air pollution with their traffic policies.
My preferred solution for blocks of flats is district heating. I grew up with that in Denmark 50 years ago and it's still common across the country - you have a central CHP plant which distributes to the blocks using the more efficient or environmentally-friendly (depending on national priorities) tech available. It also saves endless hassle for households as well as some space. When I moved back to Britain and found that everyone had huge boilers in their own flats, each requiring regular maintenance and inspection, I was nonplussed - why would we want to do that?
The solution is less suitable for well-separated detached houses, but those are exactly the ones where heat pumps work well.
What about privately owned terraces?
They have the option to link up to the network - needs some cable/pipe laying but it will be running close to them for other properties. Denmark is I believe now normally refusing to give permission to new gas boilers - you need to either have a heat pump or link up to the network or show that neither is possible at rteasonable cost.
I had a look at some of the reporting on Facebook recently.
The issue is not that they deliberately go about fomenting extremism and discontent,
The issue is that the dumb algorithms encourage extremism, that Facebook are aware of this, and do very little about it - and next to zero in non-English-speaking countries.
I doubt YouTube or Twitter are very different, allowing for subtleties in form factor.
It's rather that they actively encourage it. Divisiveness tends to increase engagement with the app; they are well aware of that, and have deliberately exploited that.
I am not sure they do. If you watch videos on YouTube or TikTok on military history, it doesn't take long before you are watching pro nazi, Hitler was right videos. As such the algorithms have turned me off.
I am genuinely surprised about that. I watch loads of Youtube history videos and can honestly say I have never been directed to a pro-Nazi video.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
Late to reply to this but (a) Delta has made herd immunity way harder and (b) with R around 1 in the UK with pretty much no restrictions, we are actually close to or at herd immunity. The missing part of the story about people who develop covid after having two jabs is that you are less likely to become positive in the first place and shed for a much shorter time, so overall there is still a decent suppression effect. And don't forget, mitigating the disease so that it becomes at worst a bad cold means it can be allowed to circulate.
Unfortunately for very vulnerable people (include obese people in that) the virus develops past normal virus symptoms in decent numbers still. The government really could have used it's resources for a massive national health drive. Existing good health is still your best defence, weight is a very important factor.
Weight is important, but primarily its the morbidly obese that cannot be proned that is the issue, aside of general unhealthiness associated with being overweight. if you are too fat that you cannot be laid on your front to allow the shit (technical term) to drain out then its a lot harder to treat in ICU.
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
Saying he is the son of God is Ok but the Som of God is highly offensive
Sodom of God would be worse.
That said, there is a hymn that famously contains this verse.
'The foxes found rest and the birds their nest In the shade of the cedar tree. But thy couch was the sod, o thou Son of God In the deserts of Galilee.'
Strangely, that verse is modified in most modern hymn books.
I saw a service sheet where the word “burning” in a hymn had been replaced with “buming”. The person responsible had to spend an hour before the service correcting each one by hand…
Mr. Z, disagree. I'd rather have privacy and quiet.
Happily, I don't get ill very often.
Mr. Cwsc, you need two teachers, though, whereas the number of doctors required would not change.
Also, it's a while ago but some studies I read at university suggested smaller class sizes aren't necessarily much (or any) better. From fuzzy memory, discipline mattered more than class size (and the capacity to throw out the irredeemable).
Yes, but the studies were completely wrong. It is a well-known mistake.
What happened was, they looked at average class sizes in state schools and noted that the smaller they were, the worse the results were.
They did not appreciate this was because your bottom set of nine pupils all with major behavioural problems and limited intelligence was underachieving *because* of the aforementioned issues, and was small becuase of the aforementioned issues, and lacked discipline because...you get the picture. Meanwhile bright, hardworking and self motivated children had to be put in larger classes to free up space on the timetable.
I teach a top set of 32. I teach a bottom set of 16. Guess which one does better...
But if all classes were cut in size substantially, it would help enormously. Another thing people who have never taught don't appreciate is how children feed off each other when it comes to causing disruption. If you have three badly behaved children in a class of 30 they will form a negative feedback loop where one kicks off as another is being dealt with. Much harder for them to do that if there are fewer in the group.
Pedantry compels the observation that that's a positive feedback loop
Clearly you've never been a teacher
Positive does not mean good
Positive feedback = going faster makes you go faster (like a supercharger)
Negative - going faster makes you slow down (watt governor)
In your case a negative feedback loop would mean that one child kicking off caused the others to chill out
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
Saying he is the son of God is Ok but the Som of God is highly offensive
Sodom of God would be worse.
That said, there is a hymn that famously contains this verse.
'The foxes found rest and the birds their nest In the shade of the cedar tree. But thy couch was the sod, o thou Son of God In the deserts of Galilee.'
Strangely, that verse is modified in most modern hymn books.
Yes, the new meaning of sod has spoilt a lot of English literature. Think of Keats's 'To thy high requiem become a sod'.
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
Saying he is the son of God is Ok but the Som of God is highly offensive
Sodom of God would be worse.
That said, there is a hymn that famously contains this verse.
'The foxes found rest and the birds their nest In the shade of the cedar tree. But thy couch was the sod, o thou Son of God In the deserts of Galilee.'
Strangely, that verse is modified in most modern hymn books.
I saw a service sheet where the word “burning” in a hymn had been replaced with “buming”. The person responsible had to spend an hour before the service correcting each one by hand…
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
It has been 20 odd years since the Reps have won in Virginia, they have been bigged up before and failed. McAuliffe might well still sneak a win, could be very tight though.
The Republicans may not have won Virginia at presidential level since Bush in 2004.
However the Republicans last won the Virginia governorship in 2009 during the first year of the Obama presidency
Mr. Z, disagree. I'd rather have privacy and quiet.
Happily, I don't get ill very often.
Mr. Cwsc, you need two teachers, though, whereas the number of doctors required would not change.
Also, it's a while ago but some studies I read at university suggested smaller class sizes aren't necessarily much (or any) better. From fuzzy memory, discipline mattered more than class size (and the capacity to throw out the irredeemable).
Yes, but the studies were completely wrong. It is a well-known mistake.
What happened was, they looked at average class sizes in state schools and noted that the smaller they were, the worse the results were.
They did not appreciate this was because your bottom set of nine pupils all with major behavioural problems and limited intelligence was underachieving *because* of the aforementioned issues, and was small becuase of the aforementioned issues, and lacked discipline because...you get the picture. Meanwhile bright, hardworking and self motivated children had to be put in larger classes to free up space on the timetable.
I teach a top set of 32. I teach a bottom set of 16. Guess which one does better...
But if all classes were cut in size substantially, it would help enormously. Another thing people who have never taught don't appreciate is how children feed off each other when it comes to causing disruption. If you have three badly behaved children in a class of 30 they will form a negative feedback loop where one kicks off as another is being dealt with. Much harder for them to do that if there are fewer in the group.
Pedantry compels the observation that that's a positive feedback loop
Clearly you've never been a teacher
Positive does not mean good
Positive feedback = going faster makes you go faster (like a supercharger)
Negative - going faster makes you slow down (watt governor)
In your case a negative feedback loop would mean that one child kicking off caused the others to chill out
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
The "elsewhere" are places that people shop, services that people use, and their failure creates the shortage you continue to deny.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
If people are keen to shop there then the company will be able to afford drivers. If not, then we can do without it.
The Councils can prioritise funding drivers and cut something else instead if that's what is required.
As always your political dogma is splatting hard against the wall of reality. Whilst you still insist that there will be no shortages AND the shortages (created by barriers to the labour force) are a result of a healthy functioning market.
It can't be both.
Are you functionally illiterate?
I never said there will be no shortages. I said the market should efficiently eradicate the least productive, least efficient, least wanted elements from itself. Once it does that those things will be gone (or a "shortage") and the shortage will be closed because its become permanent on whatever was least wanted.
If supply and demand are out of balance then price changes are the only long-term solution to fill the shortage. Price goes up, demand goes down, supply goes up, the shortage is removed by being made permanent.
Importing people at below-market prices doesn't fill the shortage because they create their own demand thus expanding Aggregate Demand so the shortage remains unfilled. Hence why twenty years of importing people at below market rates hasn't filled the labour shortages. Einstein's definition of insanity applies here.
Have we ever seen Philip and John Redwood in the same room? I know its been suggested some Tory MPs are hiding on here...
John Redwood is a bit before my time, but he seems pretty sound on economics-only issues.
But I can assure you, I have never attempted to sing the Welsh National Anthem.
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
It has been 20 odd years since the Reps have won in Virginia, they have been bigged up before and failed. McAuliffe might well still sneak a win, could be very tight though.
The Republicans may not have won Virginia at presidential level since Bush in 2004.
However the Republicans last won the Virginia governorship in 2009 during the first year of the Obama presidency
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
Saying he is the son of God is Ok but the Som of God is highly offensive
Sodom of God would be worse.
That said, there is a hymn that famously contains this verse.
'The foxes found rest and the birds their nest In the shade of the cedar tree. But thy couch was the sod, o thou Son of God In the deserts of Galilee.'
Strangely, that verse is modified in most modern hymn books.
I saw a service sheet where the word “burning” in a hymn had been replaced with “buming”. The person responsible had to spend an hour before the service correcting each one by hand…
I bet they started by saying, 'oh bugger.'
yeah burning (usually people in hell in a hymm setting) is a lot more socially acceptable than buming isn't it!
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
Saying he is the son of God is Ok but the Som of God is highly offensive
Sodom of God would be worse.
That said, there is a hymn that famously contains this verse.
'The foxes found rest and the birds their nest In the shade of the cedar tree. But thy couch was the sod, o thou Son of God In the deserts of Galilee.'
Strangely, that verse is modified in most modern hymn books.
Yes, the new meaning of sod has spoilt a lot of English literature. Think of Keats's 'To thy high requiem become a sod'.
'Sod' is actually a very old meaning. 'Sodomy' was the technical term for gay sex in the Middle Ages. It is from the Bible, 'Sodomite,' a person of Sodom.
What's been lost is the understanding of its other meaning which causes some hilarity when taken out of context.
'What are you doing this afternoon?'
'Laying lots of sods.'
Now to me, that suggests gardening, but it may be that this person is a homosexual version of SeanT.
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
Saying he is the son of God is Ok but the Som of God is highly offensive
Sodom of God would be worse.
That said, there is a hymn that famously contains this verse.
'The foxes found rest and the birds their nest In the shade of the cedar tree. But thy couch was the sod, o thou Son of God In the deserts of Galilee.'
Strangely, that verse is modified in most modern hymn books.
Yes, the new meaning of sod has spoilt a lot of English literature. Think of Keats's 'To thy high requiem become a sod'.
Except sod as an insult is itself getting archaic
I watched The Last Airbender the other night. It's as bad as everyone says, and there's a bit where someone addresses the hero about the time"when we first realised you were a bender."
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
The "elsewhere" are places that people shop, services that people use, and their failure creates the shortage you continue to deny.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
If people are keen to shop there then the company will be able to afford drivers. If not, then we can do without it.
The Councils can prioritise funding drivers and cut something else instead if that's what is required.
As always your political dogma is splatting hard against the wall of reality. Whilst you still insist that there will be no shortages AND the shortages (created by barriers to the labour force) are a result of a healthy functioning market.
It can't be both.
Are you functionally illiterate?
I never said there will be no shortages. I said the market should efficiently eradicate the least productive, least efficient, least wanted elements from itself. Once it does that those things will be gone (or a "shortage") and the shortage will be closed because its become permanent on whatever was least wanted.
If supply and demand are out of balance then price changes are the only long-term solution to fill the shortage. Price goes up, demand goes down, supply goes up, the shortage is removed by being made permanent.
Importing people at below-market prices doesn't fill the shortage because they create their own demand thus expanding Aggregate Demand so the shortage remains unfilled. Hence why twenty years of importing people at below market rates hasn't filled the labour shortages. Einstein's definition of insanity applies here.
Have we ever seen Philip and John Redwood in the same room? I know its been suggested some Tory MPs are hiding on here...
John Redwood is a bit before my time, but he seems pretty sound on economics-only issues.
But I can assure you, I have never attempted to sing the Welsh National Anthem.
Neither has he...!!!
The trick is to belt out “My hen lid a haddock on top of a tree” very confidently for the opening line and then mime the rest…
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
The "elsewhere" are places that people shop, services that people use, and their failure creates the shortage you continue to deny.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
If people are keen to shop there then the company will be able to afford drivers. If not, then we can do without it.
The Councils can prioritise funding drivers and cut something else instead if that's what is required.
As always your political dogma is splatting hard against the wall of reality. Whilst you still insist that there will be no shortages AND the shortages (created by barriers to the labour force) are a result of a healthy functioning market.
It can't be both.
Are you functionally illiterate?
I never said there will be no shortages. I said the market should efficiently eradicate the least productive, least efficient, least wanted elements from itself. Once it does that those things will be gone (or a "shortage") and the shortage will be closed because its become permanent on whatever was least wanted.
If supply and demand are out of balance then price changes are the only long-term solution to fill the shortage. Price goes up, demand goes down, supply goes up, the shortage is removed by being made permanent.
Importing people at below-market prices doesn't fill the shortage because they create their own demand thus expanding Aggregate Demand so the shortage remains unfilled. Hence why twenty years of importing people at below market rates hasn't filled the labour shortages. Einstein's definition of insanity applies here.
Have we ever seen Philip and John Redwood in the same room? I know its been suggested some Tory MPs are hiding on here...
John Redwood is a bit before my time, but he seems pretty sound on economics-only issues.
But I can assure you, I have never attempted to sing the Welsh National Anthem.
Neither has he...!!!
The trick is to belt out “My hen lid a haddock on top of a tree” very confidently for the opening line and then mine the rest.
I'm fairly sure you'd get a coaled reception if you tried that.
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
Saying he is the son of God is Ok but the Som of God is highly offensive
Sodom of God would be worse.
That said, there is a hymn that famously contains this verse.
'The foxes found rest and the birds their nest In the shade of the cedar tree. But thy couch was the sod, o thou Son of God In the deserts of Galilee.'
Strangely, that verse is modified in most modern hymn books.
Yes, the new meaning of sod has spoilt a lot of English literature. Think of Keats's 'To thy high requiem become a sod'.
Except sod as an insult is itself getting archaic
I watched The Last Airbender the other night. It's as bad as everyone says, and there's a bit where someone addresses the hero about the time"when we first realised you were a bender."
Watch the original cartoon series: it is much, much better.
Dr. Foxy, why aren't single bed rooms standard here?
Why aren't class sizes of 15 standard?
Same reason.
Incidentally what @DavidL says about the NHS could apply to many other parts of the public sector. Education, local government, transport. And when money is spent to correct it a way is usually found to thwart it (Exhibit A - the eastern leg of HS2). The phrase 'false economy' doesn't seem to have crossed the minds of these people.
This is true of much big organisation (not just government spending). It's all about the vested interests...
A perfect example of this is the SLS space launch system in the US.
Which is an interesting one, since it exists in a world where a lunatic nerd decided that he would spend his money on building space launch systems, by..... spending his money on space launch systems.
Instead of "investing in infrastructure", "protecting existing capabilities" and another mile of guff of political/finance nostrums.
Imagine an education system run on the basis of
- Educate children - that's it really
Ah, the Senate Launch System, that couldn’t get approval unless the contractors spent the money across all 48 contiguous States.
Guess who sent astronauts up to the ISS for a few hundred million dollars of private investment, and who’s still trying to get them off the ground having spent close to $25bn of public money?
Haven't you heard the news? They are planning to privatise the SLS. Which will cause Boeing to magically cut the cost, because reasons.
So each launch will only cost 1 billion dollars. Instead of 2. Complete with the new version of a reusable rocket engine, which is to be thrown away. For $150 million each.
Meanwhile a loony in a Texas swamp is building a factory to build comparable rocket engines for $250,000 each, reducing from their current price of $2.5 million dollars each.....
Of the many mad decisions made by SLS, having almost nothing re-usable, including four ex-Shuttle RS-25s on each launch, is probably the worst. They won’t be able to launch more than half a dozen times, before they need to start making new versions of a 40 year old design.
Meanwhile SpaceX are flying Falcon 9s half a dozen times each, with very little refurbishment required to turn them around. The latest unmanned Starlink launches don’t even get mentioned on here any more, they’re utterly routine now.
SpaceX are so far ahead of the Senate Launch System that it seems almost impossible for it to become a competition again. It would require a total root and branch reform of the latter and many years of investment to catch up.
This Earth to Earth solution has to be one of the most mental ideas imagined, London to Dubai in 29 minutes and England to Australia in under an hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0
If it were anyone else I'd think there's never a chance of that happening, but with SpaceX it certainly seems like it could possible in the future. I do hope they're working on it, but I suppose all the reuseable and reliable launchers must make it more feasible.
That’s going to be technically possible within a decade, the challenges will be reliability, scheduling and pricing - oh, and planning permission for something that will shake windows with a sonic boom as it takes off and lands. Maybe the Amercians won’t care as much as they did with Concorde, as it’s an American project this time?
Speaking of Concorde, they will need to make very sure they never crash one, because it will kill the demand overnight. We forget how much safer commercial flight has become over the last half a century.
Comments
So it probably would have an appreciable impact on financing costs in the RBL market. In turn that would impact the ease (and price) with which declining assets can be divested by majors to juniors. In the absence of a globally mandated carbon tax, I can’t think of a more effective way of the Uk government pricing in co2 externalities that would have a global impact, even if it’s not a silver bullet.
I spent 6 months in Stoke Mandeville, way back in 1979, on a mixed ward, the first 10 weeks or so confined to a bed. Whilst privacy was next to non-existent, the ability to chat freely to other patients, also stuck in bed, was a massive boon.
Not sure how my mental health would have fared isolated in a room tbh.
'Really?' replied St Peter, surprised. 'The how did you bill for 114 years' worth of work?'
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/oct/29/astounding-roman-statues-unearthed-at-norman-church-ruins-on-route-of-hs2
Just think what archeologists are going to find when they do the A303 Stonehenge bypass!
In many, many categories of pollution apart from CO2, emissions have been falling in the developed world. This has been accomplished by incremental reductions in the maximum allowed rates, for each "generation" of machinery etc. This process has been quietly doing it's thing since the 1950s. This was another thing that Donald Fucking Trump screwed up in the US, by the way.
The Councils can prioritise funding drivers and cut something else instead if that's what is required.
Happily, I don't get ill very often.
Mr. Cwsc, you need two teachers, though, whereas the number of doctors required would not change.
Also, it's a while ago but some studies I read at university suggested smaller class sizes aren't necessarily much (or any) better. From fuzzy memory, discipline mattered more than class size (and the capacity to throw out the irredeemable).
That and more storage.
*Would be interesting to see what enrichment the core will be at. No one seems to have asked that question.
The people who want care should pay whatever the market's going rate is for care. Deflating the going rate in order to achieve cheap care isn't the solution.
It can't be both.
Divisiveness tends to increase engagement with the app; they are well aware of that, and have deliberately exploited that.
I’ll believe it will open on the day it does, and expect the archeologists to take over the site for a decade once they start digging.
The ash-cart drivers issue is a growing problem. Who would want to share their cab with three stinking bin men bringing cold air in every five minutes when the alternative is an air conditioned Tesco Mercedes with just Ken Bruce for company.
Non statutory collections like green waste have already been curtailed early for the winter.
Where I think Philip's argument falls under the wheels of an Amazon truck is the quaint notion that high paid driving jobs are a permanent fixture of post Brexit Britain. They are not. When supply outstrips demand the wages will equalise. New contracts will be drawn up on a sign it or ship out basis. At least our bins will be once again ccollected.
What happened was, they looked at average class sizes in state schools and noted that the smaller they were, the worse the results were.
They did not appreciate this was because your bottom set of nine pupils all with major behavioural problems and limited intelligence was underachieving *because* of the aforementioned issues, and was small becuase of the aforementioned issues, and lacked discipline because...you get the picture. Meanwhile bright, hardworking and self motivated children had to be put in larger classes to free up space on the timetable.
I teach a top set of 32. I teach a bottom set of 16. Guess which one does better...
But if all classes were cut in size substantially, it would help enormously. Another thing people who have never taught don't appreciate is how children feed off each other when it comes to causing disruption. If you have three badly behaved children in a class of 30 they will form a negative feedback loop where one kicks off as another is being dealt with. Much harder for them to do that if there are fewer in the group.
A perfect example of this is the SLS space launch system in the US.
Which is an interesting one, since it exists in a world where a lunatic nerd decided that he would spend his money on building space launch systems, by..... spending his money on space launch systems.
Instead of "investing in infrastructure", "protecting existing capabilities" and another mile of guff of political/finance nostrums.
Imagine an education system run on the basis of
- Educate children
- that's it really
Our Hermes driver is already complaining he is running at capacity and there are still 4 weeks until Black Friday really kicks things off.
I never said there will be no shortages. I said the market should efficiently eradicate the least productive, least efficient, least wanted elements from itself. Once it does that those things will be gone (or a "shortage") and the shortage will be closed because its become permanent on whatever was least wanted.
If supply and demand are out of balance then price changes are the only long-term solution to fill the shortage. Price goes up, demand goes down, supply goes up, the shortage is removed by being made permanent.
Importing people at below-market prices doesn't fill the shortage because they create their own demand thus expanding Aggregate Demand so the shortage remains unfilled. Hence why twenty years of importing people at below market rates hasn't filled the labour shortages. Einstein's definition of insanity applies here.
1. Listening to Radio 4 on conversion therapy. One of the campaigners for ban conversion is now calling for a ban on “Hate prayer”. Where does that stop then? If I say I believe Jesus is the Som of God, does that make me guilty of ‘hate prayer’ for saying something that offends another.
2. Betting tip
Fox has Youngkin up by 8 in the Virginia Governor’s race and certainly the mood music coming through is that McAuliffe is in trouble. Also, the most votes cast so far have been in the district covering Loudoun County, suggesting the schools issue is cutting through. Yet, on smartest, Youngkin is still at less than 40%. DYOR
The Thames Tideway project, which stops sewage being dumped in the Thames was kicked off in 2001. Construction started a decade later - largely due to a very hard fight to try and stop it happening.
It is approaching completion now....
There is a bumpy ride ahead. What follows 5% or 6% inflation when we are expectant of less than 2% could be brutal. If inflation takes interest rates with it, Sunak better hope he's already been moved into another high office of state.
I agree entirely on the badly behaved kids line. My school tried pairing good and bad kids, but it turns out one type of behaviour is more 'infectious' than another, and not the way they wanted. Although more galling was when an idiot teacher asked me if I had been smoking, when I (impeccably behaved) was sat next to a serial acquirer of detentions whose jacket reeked of smoke.
Yes the wages will equalise and the solution will be resolved. Great. What's wrong with that?
The wages will equalise at a higher level than they were when they were below equilibrium, even if they're below what they were while getting to equilibrium.
We just need to let the market do its thing and get to the new equilibrium. If anyone can't afford a driver in the meantime, they'll just have to do without.
Guess who sent astronauts up to the ISS for a few hundred million dollars of private investment, and who’s still trying to get them off the ground having spent close to $25bn of public money?
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?time=2021-09-20..latest&facet=none&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=ITA~CAN~DEU~GBR~FRA~BEL~NLD~ESP~AUS~NZL
Enrichment level is only one metric, though, since safety depends rather more on the reliability of control and cooling systems - and from a proliferation point of view how easy it is to access the fissile material.
There are many concepts:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_small_modular_reactor_designs
So each launch will only cost 1 billion dollars. Instead of 2. Complete with the new version of a reusable rocket engine, which is to be thrown away. For $150 million each.
Meanwhile a loony in a Texas swamp is building a factory to build comparable rocket engines for $250,000 each, reducing from their current price of $2.5 million dollars each.....
But I can assure you, I have never attempted to sing the Welsh National Anthem.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-delta-outbreak-auckland-primary-school-return-staggered-days-may-not-work-principals-say/BJAPCR4FGGCNMIWPCYZHZGCKMM/
Just up the unnamed road in Fayzabad, though, there's a "Playground".
This is a picture of them playing Buzkashi or "goat pulling" in the "playground"
@_restaurant_bot
کافه دوست Friends' Café; Unnamed Road, Feyzabad, Afghanistan https://google.com/maps/place/?q=place_id:ChIJRyDY2YAHxjgRPHWqZB3QFr8
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8:55 AM · Oct 29, 2021·Rando Restauro
- Have decades long planning processes so that Angry Men In Corduroy Trousers With Bicycle Clips can enjoy themselves.
- Or we can build the required infrastructural changes sooner.
What was interesting with the Tideway project was that the opposition was not from the water company. In fact they were pushing it along.
Martin McDonald
@marty_mcd
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10h
@JohnRentoul
I'm starting to think that we may have a new TB/GB situation. Post the 23/24 election I think it's gonna be Reeves & Phillipson but not in that order
Meanwhile SpaceX are flying Falcon 9s half a dozen times each, with very little refurbishment required to turn them around. The latest unmanned Starlink launches don’t even get mentioned on here any more, they’re utterly routine now.
Facebook isn't completely evil.
Would it have been worse without the oversight board that Clegg introduced and which banned Trump because of his role in the Jan 6th insurrection?
There is a lot wrong with Facebook but is it being improved or made worse by Clegg's involvement?
One could have said the same about the coalition government.
Since methane only spends around 12 years in the atmosphere the methane we emit today has little impact on the long-term temperature equilibrium. So we can afford to leave that as a problem to address later. It also means we can reach an equilibrium merely by keeping emissions constant, while with carbon dioxide we have to reduce emissions to zero.
The quick wins are to be found in the halogen compounds, which are extraordinarily long-lived in the atmosphere, have a strong warming effect, and are only used in a relatively small number of niche industrial processes, rather than being the result of our core energy or food use.
In fact most educational research at the time seemed to be designed to validate the prejudices of the authors. Each paper also used its own statistical technique and was virtually impossible to compare with other studies looking at the same thing: again I got the impression that this was by design.
Hopefully things have improved in the last twenty years, but I haven’t been able to take educational research seriously since.
The solution is less suitable for well-separated detached houses, but those are exactly the ones where heat pumps work well.
This Earth to Earth solution has to be one of the most mental ideas imagined, London to Dubai in 29 minutes and England to Australia in under an hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0
If it were anyone else I'd think there's never a chance of that happening, but with SpaceX it certainly seems like it could possible in the future. I do hope they're working on it, but I suppose all the reuseable and reliable launchers must make it more feasible.
A favourite was the stopping of a reservoir. It would have used a Victorian gravel pit. No, there was no ground contamination. The gravel pit was simply an ugly hole in the ground. The plan was to fill it with water, And wildlife. Killed by anti-reservoir types slow walking it through the planning process.
The anger at the fast tracking of offshore wind farms provides an almost visible glow. I enjoy it.
That said, there is a hymn that famously contains this verse.
'The foxes found rest and the birds their nest
In the shade of the cedar tree.
But thy couch was the sod, o thou Son of God
In the deserts of Galilee.'
Strangely, that verse is modified in most modern hymn books.
Your example makes me think she would have pursed her lips, flexed a ruler to breaking point, then proceeded to given them a piece of her mind. In short, declarative sentences. Without raising her voice. And reduced them to a small pile of quivering jelly, by reasoned argument.
Bless her.
And, yes, she has found it harder since reopening fully. Lots of costs are going up. Food and drink in pubs and restaurants will be more expensive not less, regardless of what Sunak said. Margins will be even tighter. There are unexpected shortages in her deliveries.
- A place for rainwater to go that isn't the sewers.
- More sewer capacity.
Probably both. And both will require lots and lots of infrastructure.
I will bet that in every single case the local water company has the plan on file, or part way through the planning process etc etc.
Also how do you get a local CHP plant built in centra London (for example)? Close Tate Modern and put it back to its original purpose?
Positive feedback = going faster makes you go faster (like a supercharger)
Negative - going faster makes you slow down (watt governor)
In your case a negative feedback loop would mean that one child kicking off caused the others to chill out
However the Republicans last won the Virginia governorship in 2009 during the first year of the Obama presidency
But I see your point.
What's been lost is the understanding of its other meaning which causes some hilarity when taken out of context.
'What are you doing this afternoon?'
'Laying lots of sods.'
Now to me, that suggests gardening, but it may be that this person is a homosexual version of SeanT.
I watched The Last Airbender the other night. It's as bad as everyone says, and there's a bit where someone addresses the hero about the time"when we first realised you were a bender."
Edit: mime, not mine!
Speaking of Concorde, they will need to make very sure they never crash one, because it will kill the demand overnight. We forget how much safer commercial flight has become over the last half a century.