I accept Boris is a deeply flawed PM but he does have charisma and "boosterism" which I think all the alternatives lack. Some may be quite competent but it's not obvious to me that that is the case. Who would you make the case for on the grounds of competence or better still ability?
I've already said that I think Hunt is the best bet, but I'm not really fussed too much. There are a few people I think would be worse, but anyone ANYONE will do.
I don't want charisma. That's for game show hosts. I want someone who can do the job. We need to quit this destructive pattern of thinking that says politics is entertainment.
How about Theresa May?
Theresa May shows why charisma is a part of the job.
Its not just relevant at election time, its also about being able to connect with others in order to get them to get the job done in Parliament and elsewhere by passing votes etc
Theresa May was the worst PM in centuries and was utterly unable to get her flagship policy through Parliament despite it being the one thing she spent her premiership working on for years and spending months trying to ram it through Parliament.
Modern Prime Ministers who have been able to get stuff done have all had charisma, different types of charisma, but they've all had it.
You need both integrity and charisma. May was bad, Boris is worse.
The fact May couldn’t pass Brexit had as much to do with integrity free Boris manipulating the situation for a run at no10 than it did Mays lack of charisma.
And you don't get to the top with no charisma at all. Think of 1992 Major, May telling the Conservatives uncomfortable truths about their Nasty Party reputation. Brown in full-on Son of the Manse mode.
They didn't have enough charisma to win, because they ended up against Blair, Johnson, Cameron and Events (dear boy), but that's a slightly different matter. Any of us condemning them for being uncharismatic would be like a Sunday footballer telling an England player that they're rubbish.
Besides, if we have moved from a world where charisma is an important thing, to a certain kind of charisma being the determining thing, that's not good.
Although it obviously rained overnight, the sun is shining now so it looks quite a nice morning.
Surely part of Mrs May's problem was that she tried to be something she wasn't . If she'd been what she is, a somewhat schoolmistressy type, she might have been OK, but it was it was that appalling Dancing Queen bit that was really wrong.
That's not to say I'd have voted for her, of course!
Yes, it was Lynton Crosby who almost lost 2017 by campaigning as if May were David Cameron. Of course, Labour had done the same by trying to turn Gordon Brown into Tony Blair (and other stunts) instead of playing it straight. Doubtless when Boris is replaced, we shall see Jeremy Hunt or Liz Truss donning high-viz to hide in fridges.
May lost by introducing a death tax within the campaign without the necessary x months of warming people up to the scale of the social care problem.
Did May lose? I thought she formed a government after the election. If Starmer leads a coalition after the next election, or uses confidence and supply to do the same, will he have lost? She did not win a majority, but its surely not correct to say she lost.
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Someone pointed out to me that the track bed between Northallerton and York needs to be repaired as its end of life (not surprising as it's been in use for 100+ years and trains are way heavier than they used to be).
The cost is definitely Oh Boy...
One thing a certain billionaire is right about - unless we get a handle on reducing infrastructure costs, we are going to have less and less infrastructure. Not more.
Railways at a zillion pounds a mile are not sustainable.
HS2 is so costly because it was engineered to be cost safe by gold plating the design and doing everything including all risks upfront in a waterfall method.
The Elizabeth line is expensive because it's not completely new so needed to integrate with existing systems (never a great idea in the first place even worse when they are multiple existing systems).
Basically we are crap at doing these type of projects and the Treasury makes it worse by not accepting the risk of cost overruns and then scrapping stuff for no good reason. HS2E has cost over £1bn in waterfall development costs that will now need to be redone because of the delays..
Mr. Pete, one does wonder what was going through Labour's collective head on that.
Did they think if May got ousted the Conservatives would do anything but move in a more sceptical direction?
May's deal was the most pro-EU one they were going to get.
I was as guilty as anyone Morris, it looked like a poor deal to me and I was holding out for a best of three. I didn't regard that notion as "undemocratic", but once we had left that was that. There is no going back.
Mrs May's deal looked awful at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, particularly in the light of Johnson's "oven ready" dog's breakfast, it was a work of genius.
Rail seems like a perfect case study for an AI based driving system
It's the same as driverless cars - very easy to do if you can 100% remove all Human Beings from the track / road.
An awful lot harder if you can't.
Remember that all the AI experts on here say that driverless cars aren't the 90/99% problem that most people think they are. They are 99.9999% problems and until you get to 99.9999% no insurance company is going to touch them.
Trains are the same - the AI stuff is easy, removing any chance of a human being appearing on the track or another issue occurring is way harder.
Edit - and driverless cars are here - but only in places where no human beings randomly wander in the same place.
(And that’s in the comparatively constrained environment of the London Underground. The mainline railway is a still more difficult problem.)
Imagine an AI train driver that was able to assimilate CCTV footage from the whole network. Someone's just run across the rails 18 miles up the track? The AI driver knows it's happening real time and can continuously monitor the situation unfolding before a decision needs to be made.
This is why AI will eventually replace all drivers. The capacity to consume huge amounts of data simultaneously will give them more than an edge, it'll blow humans out of the water. Humans are brilliant at narrow-focus tasks, but as soon as that gap is closed, and it will be, we won't look back.
Can I ask what you do for a living - because you clearly don't work in IT
Consider, for a moment, that I'm talking about how things are going to be rather than how things are right now.
Waymo has now driven I believe more than 1 million miles and simulated over 1 billion miles. Yet they still aren't allowed on roads outside a tiny defined area because the AI doesn't know what to do in most instances
Driverless cars is like Nuclear Fusion - allows x years away and unless someone comes up with a different approach (as first light seem to have done with Fusion) it will always be the same x years away.
Do we even need trains with all the whizzy electric cars we're going to be driving in the medium term ? They blow the "green" argument out the water I think.
Mr. Pete, one does wonder what was going through Labour's collective head on that.
Did they think if May got ousted the Conservatives would do anything but move in a more sceptical direction?
May's deal was the most pro-EU one they were going to get.
I was as guilty as anyone Morris, it looked like a poor deal to me and I was holding out for a best of three. I didn't regard that notion as "undemocratic", but once we had left that was that. There is no going back.
Mrs May's deal looked awful at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, particularly in the light of Johnson's "oven ready" dog's breakfast, it was a work of genius.
It was utterly horrendous. It would have kept us trapped in the Single Market and Customs Union via the backstop despite the fact we'd voted to Leave and we'd have no unilateral way out. No Article 50, no legal mechanism if you're bothered about International Law, we would need the EU's permission to ever leave the backstop.
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Rail seems like a perfect case study for an AI based driving system
It's the same as driverless cars - very easy to do if you can 100% remove all Human Beings from the track / road.
An awful lot harder if you can't.
Remember that all the AI experts on here say that driverless cars aren't the 90/99% problem that most people think they are. They are 99.9999% problems and until you get to 99.9999% no insurance company is going to touch them.
Trains are the same - the AI stuff is easy, removing any chance of a human being appearing on the track or another issue occurring is way harder.
Edit - and driverless cars are here - but only in places where no human beings randomly wander in the same place.
(And that’s in the comparatively constrained environment of the London Underground. The mainline railway is a still more difficult problem.)
Imagine an AI train driver that was able to assimilate CCTV footage from the whole network. Someone's just run across the rails 18 miles up the track? The AI driver knows it's happening real time and can continuously monitor the situation unfolding before a decision needs to be made.
This is why AI will eventually replace all drivers. The capacity to consume huge amounts of data simultaneously will give them more than an edge, it'll blow humans out of the water. Humans are brilliant at narrow-focus tasks, but as soon as that gap is closed, and it will be, we won't look back.
Can I ask what you do for a living - because you clearly don't work in IT
I have worked in IT since the Flood. And I agree with this remark. Computers are pretty average for quite a lot of tasks.
AI doesn't work that way - among other things, "AI" as it is currently used is nothing to do with what humans regard as intelligence.
Some years ago, there was a documentary about life on a US aircraft carrier. Planning moving the planes around is a big issue - the carriers are quite congested and the planes are worth (collectively) billions.
In a compartment of the carrier, they have a model of the carrier, complete with die cast models of the aircraft. Grown men push the models around to check for clearance, layout etc.
When asked, the chap in charge agreed that yes, they could try and have a computer system. But that would mean "training" it in all the details of the carrier, the physics of 3D space, the shapes of the aircraft etc. This was cheaper, simpler, provable to be correct and never break down. Also they get to take the "spare" models home for the kids.
I accept Boris is a deeply flawed PM but he does have charisma and "boosterism" which I think all the alternatives lack. Some may be quite competent but it's not obvious to me that that is the case. Who would you make the case for on the grounds of competence or better still ability?
I've already said that I think Hunt is the best bet, but I'm not really fussed too much. There are a few people I think would be worse, but anyone ANYONE will do.
I don't want charisma. That's for game show hosts. I want someone who can do the job. We need to quit this destructive pattern of thinking that says politics is entertainment.
How about Theresa May?
Theresa May shows why charisma is a part of the job.
Its not just relevant at election time, its also about being able to connect with others in order to get them to get the job done in Parliament and elsewhere by passing votes etc
Theresa May was the worst PM in centuries and was utterly unable to get her flagship policy through Parliament despite it being the one thing she spent her premiership working on for years and spending months trying to ram it through Parliament.
Modern Prime Ministers who have been able to get stuff done have all had charisma, different types of charisma, but they've all had it.
You need both integrity and charisma. May was bad, Boris is worse.
The fact May couldn’t pass Brexit had as much to do with integrity free Boris manipulating the situation for a run at no10 than it did Mays lack of charisma.
And you don't get to the top with no charisma at all. Think of 1992 Major, May telling the Conservatives uncomfortable truths about their Nasty Party reputation. Brown in full-on Son of the Manse mode.
They didn't have enough charisma to win, because they ended up against Blair, Johnson, Cameron and Events (dear boy), but that's a slightly different matter. Any of us condemning them for being uncharismatic would be like a Sunday footballer telling an England player that they're rubbish.
Besides, if we have moved from a world where charisma is an important thing, to a certain kind of charisma being the determining thing, that's not good.
Although it obviously rained overnight, the sun is shining now so it looks quite a nice morning.
Surely part of Mrs May's problem was that she tried to be something she wasn't . If she'd been what she is, a somewhat schoolmistressy type, she might have been OK, but it was it was that appalling Dancing Queen bit that was really wrong.
That's not to say I'd have voted for her, of course!
Yes, it was Lynton Crosby who almost lost 2017 by campaigning as if May were David Cameron. Of course, Labour had done the same by trying to turn Gordon Brown into Tony Blair (and other stunts) instead of playing it straight. Doubtless when Boris is replaced, we shall see Jeremy Hunt or Liz Truss donning high-viz to hide in fridges.
May lost by introducing a death tax within the campaign without the necessary x months of warming people up to the scale of the social care problem.
Did May lose? I thought she formed a government after the election. If Starmer leads a coalition after the next election, or uses confidence and supply to do the same, will he have lost? She did not win a majority, but its surely not correct to say she lost.
Yes, I managed to "lose" that qualification when recasting the sentence so it did not look like I was saying Crosby was a terrorist.
Do we even need trains with all the whizzy electric cars we're going to be driving in the medium term ? They blow the "green" argument out the water I think.
Cars won't get 1 million people a day into central London (or however many currently commit in a few times a week). The car park space doesn't (and can't) exist.
And that's before we talk about the pollution from tyres and the upfront cost of an electric car.
Mr. Pete, one does wonder what was going through Labour's collective head on that.
Did they think if May got ousted the Conservatives would do anything but move in a more sceptical direction?
May's deal was the most pro-EU one they were going to get.
The alternate history where Labour abstained on Mrs May’s deal, probably now has Corbyn as PM, the Tories split in half, and the UK stuck in the backstop being told to bend over by Macron because he can.
I am almost liking your dystopian parallel universe. Did they miss the Covid Pandemic too?
Mr. Pete, one does wonder what was going through Labour's collective head on that.
Did they think if May got ousted the Conservatives would do anything but move in a more sceptical direction?
May's deal was the most pro-EU one they were going to get.
I was as guilty as anyone Morris, it looked like a poor deal to me and I was holding out for a best of three. I didn't regard that notion as "undemocratic", but once we had left that was that. There is no going back.
Mrs May's deal looked awful at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, particularly in the light of Johnson's "oven ready" dog's breakfast, it was a work of genius.
It was utterly horrendous. It would have kept us trapped in the Single Market and Customs Union via the backstop despite the fact we'd voted to Leave and we'd have no unilateral way out. No Article 50, no legal mechanism if you're bothered about International Law, we would need the EU's permission to ever leave the backstop.
I accept Boris is a deeply flawed PM but he does have charisma and "boosterism" which I think all the alternatives lack. Some may be quite competent but it's not obvious to me that that is the case. Who would you make the case for on the grounds of competence or better still ability?
I've already said that I think Hunt is the best bet, but I'm not really fussed too much. There are a few people I think would be worse, but anyone ANYONE will do.
I don't want charisma. That's for game show hosts. I want someone who can do the job. We need to quit this destructive pattern of thinking that says politics is entertainment.
How about Theresa May?
Theresa May shows why charisma is a part of the job.
Its not just relevant at election time, its also about being able to connect with others in order to get them to get the job done in Parliament and elsewhere by passing votes etc
Theresa May was the worst PM in centuries and was utterly unable to get her flagship policy through Parliament despite it being the one thing she spent her premiership working on for years and spending months trying to ram it through Parliament.
Modern Prime Ministers who have been able to get stuff done have all had charisma, different types of charisma, but they've all had it.
You need both integrity and charisma. May was bad, Boris is worse.
The fact May couldn’t pass Brexit had as much to do with integrity free Boris manipulating the situation for a run at no10 than it did Mays lack of charisma.
And you don't get to the top with no charisma at all. Think of 1992 Major, May telling the Conservatives uncomfortable truths about their Nasty Party reputation. Brown in full-on Son of the Manse mode.
They didn't have enough charisma to win, because they ended up against Blair, Johnson, Cameron and Events (dear boy), but that's a slightly different matter. Any of us condemning them for being uncharismatic would be like a Sunday footballer telling an England player that they're rubbish.
Besides, if we have moved from a world where charisma is an important thing, to a certain kind of charisma being the determining thing, that's not good.
Although it obviously rained overnight, the sun is shining now so it looks quite a nice morning.
Surely part of Mrs May's problem was that she tried to be something she wasn't . If she'd been what she is, a somewhat schoolmistressy type, she might have been OK, but it was it was that appalling Dancing Queen bit that was really wrong.
That's not to say I'd have voted for her, of course!
Yes, it was Lynton Crosby who almost lost 2017 by campaigning as if May were David Cameron. Of course, Labour had done the same by trying to turn Gordon Brown into Tony Blair (and other stunts) instead of playing it straight. Doubtless when Boris is replaced, we shall see Jeremy Hunt or Liz Truss donning high-viz to hide in fridges.
May lost by introducing a death tax within the campaign without the necessary x months of warming people up to the scale of the social care problem.
May lost because of Lynton Crosby, and the two terrorist outrages during the campaign.
May almost lost (she remained PM, she didn't lose) because she was crap. Lynton Crosby has a great track record, without him she may have actually managed to lose and we might have ended up with one of the greatest shocks of all time and PM Corbyn.
Crosby locked the Cabinet in a big fridge in order to have Theresa May front an ill-suited presidential campaign based round parroting "strong and stable" while U-turning. Not his best work.
Trivial Gossip Klaxon: If I have understood this correctly, the Leader of East Devon Council (which covers Tiv&Hon) who was elected as an Independent, has just joined the Lib Dems.
Hardly a fag paper between East Devon independents and the LibDems anyway. In East Devon, the Claire Wright Independents got 40% in 2019, the LibDems under 3%.
Do we even need trains with all the whizzy electric cars we're going to be driving in the medium term ? They blow the "green" argument out the water I think.
Cars won't get 1 million people a day into central London (or however many currently commit in a few times a week). The car park space doesn't (and can't) exist.
And that's before we talk about the pollution from tyres and the upfront cost of an electric car.
London is a somewhat special case - it has largely been built around mass transit.
If WFH (at least partial) becomes the rule, the idea of a central, single hub for offices will take a hit.
There are already a number of companies that have moved their offices out of central London, creating reverse commuting patterns - will this increase?
The cost of electric cars is continuing to fall - the crossover with ICE in cost is a few years down the road, but it is coming.
As to the tire pollution - an interesting point has been raised by a number ion manufacturers. Because the electric cars still require cooling for various components, they have air intakes, fans etc. Protected from dirt by filters. Many electric cars are provably cleaning the air.
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Or we could go back to pre-privatisation levels of usage of the railways. There was a long-term downwards trend in railway usage until the 1990s and post-privatisation it has more than doubled (pre-pandemic).
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
Mr. Pete, one does wonder what was going through Labour's collective head on that.
Did they think if May got ousted the Conservatives would do anything but move in a more sceptical direction?
May's deal was the most pro-EU one they were going to get.
I was as guilty as anyone Morris, it looked like a poor deal to me and I was holding out for a best of three. I didn't regard that notion as "undemocratic", but once we had left that was that. There is no going back.
Mrs May's deal looked awful at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, particularly in the light of Johnson's "oven ready" dog's breakfast, it was a work of genius.
It was utterly horrendous. It would have kept us trapped in the Single Market and Customs Union via the backstop despite the fact we'd voted to Leave and we'd have no unilateral way out. No Article 50, no legal mechanism if you're bothered about International Law, we would need the EU's permission to ever leave the backstop.
How could that ever be "good"?
You have highlighted some of my fears, but when we can see the only viable alternative to the ERG turned out to be significantly worse, it now doesn't seem so bad.
Mrs May courld have gone EEA or similar with free movement. Brexit would have been done and everyone except to he swivell- eyed would have been content. Her assertion that Brexit means Brexit, when no one knew what Brexit meant, was foolhardy from day one.
Extraordinary. And depressing. Nothing will happen to this man. Imagine if it was some white guy threatening Muslims…
"Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our prophet (pbuh). There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line." #chilling
Mr. Pete, one does wonder what was going through Labour's collective head on that.
Did they think if May got ousted the Conservatives would do anything but move in a more sceptical direction?
May's deal was the most pro-EU one they were going to get.
I was as guilty as anyone Morris, it looked like a poor deal to me and I was holding out for a best of three. I didn't regard that notion as "undemocratic", but once we had left that was that. There is no going back.
Mrs May's deal looked awful at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, particularly in the light of Johnson's "oven ready" dog's breakfast, it was a work of genius.
It was utterly horrendous. It would have kept us trapped in the Single Market and Customs Union via the backstop despite the fact we'd voted to Leave and we'd have no unilateral way out. No Article 50, no legal mechanism if you're bothered about International Law, we would need the EU's permission to ever leave the backstop.
How could that ever be "good"?
working from home, Bart?
Not today, on annual leave. Took it to match the kids holiday, they're back at school tomorrow but still sleeping now, so I thought I'd come on here for now.
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Mr. Sandpit, and the leader after Corbyn might be proposing rejoining.
Not to mention we'd be in a far worse economic position as the pandemic started.
And Ukraine would have significantly less weaponry.
The union is literally doing what they exist to do. Inflation is at 9% and still growing. So they want to secure a pay deal which means their members do not become worse off.
We need to grow our way out of inflation. We had more than a decade of government being able to borrow money virtually for free, of oceans of cash needing something secure to invest in, of big companies piling up cash reserves rather than investing.
So we could have set up Britain to be a production and technology powerhouse. Directly build the stuff we need (power, fibre broadband) and provide huge tax incentives to create and *manufacture* things like wind turbines and tidal power generation here for export.
Even now we could be doing that. Instead we are twatting about with "Free"ports as if the jobs they may create will be new and not just a transfer from somewhere else. This lot haven't a clue what they are doing, what this country needs or how to plan for the future.
THEY are wretched. Not the poor sodding workforce trying to keep food on the table who are suffering from the consequences of the government being shit.
Do we even need trains with all the whizzy electric cars we're going to be driving in the medium term ? They blow the "green" argument out the water I think.
Cars won't get 1 million people a day into central London (or however many currently commit in a few times a week). The car park space doesn't (and can't) exist.
And that's before we talk about the pollution from tyres and the upfront cost of an electric car.
London is a somewhat special case - it has largely been built around mass transit.
If WFH (at least partial) becomes the rule, the idea of a central, single hub for offices will take a hit.
There are already a number of companies that have moved their offices out of central London, creating reverse commuting patterns - will this increase?
The cost of electric cars is continuing to fall - the crossover with ICE in cost is a few years down the road, but it is coming.
As to the tire pollution - an interesting point has been raised by a number ion manufacturers. Because the electric cars still require cooling for various components, they have air intakes, fans etc. Protected from dirt by filters. Many electric cars are provably cleaning the air.
London really shouldn't be - Birmingham / Manchester / Leeds could all have a lot more train commuters if only the fast trains were moved off the existing tracks to expand capacity. Heck when HS2 trains go into Nottingham it's the local routes that will need to be cut back to provide capacity for the HS2 trains.
Do we even need trains with all the whizzy electric cars we're going to be driving in the medium term ? They blow the "green" argument out the water I think.
Not enough road space in our cities to replace trains with electric cars, and if you reengineered our cities to accommodate the cars I think they'd be much less pleasant to live in.
Rail seems like a perfect case study for an AI based driving system
It's the same as driverless cars - very easy to do if you can 100% remove all Human Beings from the track / road.
An awful lot harder if you can't.
Remember that all the AI experts on here say that driverless cars aren't the 90/99% problem that most people think they are. They are 99.9999% problems and until you get to 99.9999% no insurance company is going to touch them.
Trains are the same - the AI stuff is easy, removing any chance of a human being appearing on the track or another issue occurring is way harder.
Edit - and driverless cars are here - but only in places where no human beings randomly wander in the same place.
(And that’s in the comparatively constrained environment of the London Underground. The mainline railway is a still more difficult problem.)
Imagine an AI train driver that was able to assimilate CCTV footage from the whole network. Someone's just run across the rails 18 miles up the track? The AI driver knows it's happening real time and can continuously monitor the situation unfolding before a decision needs to be made.
This is why AI will eventually replace all drivers. The capacity to consume huge amounts of data simultaneously will give them more than an edge, it'll blow humans out of the water. Humans are brilliant at narrow-focus tasks, but as soon as that gap is closed, and it will be, we won't look back.
Can I ask what you do for a living - because you clearly don't work in IT
I have worked in IT since the Flood. And I agree with this remark. Computers are pretty average for quite a lot of tasks.
AI doesn't work that way - among other things, "AI" as it is currently used is nothing to do with what humans regard as intelligence.
Some years ago, there was a documentary about life on a US aircraft carrier. Planning moving the planes around is a big issue - the carriers are quite congested and the planes are worth (collectively) billions.
In a compartment of the carrier, they have a model of the carrier, complete with die cast models of the aircraft. Grown men push the models around to check for clearance, layout etc.
When asked, the chap in charge agreed that yes, they could try and have a computer system. But that would mean "training" it in all the details of the carrier, the physics of 3D space, the shapes of the aircraft etc. This was cheaper, simpler, provable to be correct and never break down. Also they get to take the "spare" models home for the kids.
The "Ouija Board" with the aircraft models has been replaced with the DCAP software for the last ten years as the carriers go through refit.
Do we even need trains with all the whizzy electric cars we're going to be driving in the medium term ? They blow the "green" argument out the water I think.
Cars won't get 1 million people a day into central London (or however many currently commit in a few times a week). The car park space doesn't (and can't) exist.
And that's before we talk about the pollution from tyres and the upfront cost of an electric car.
Why do you need to get 1 million a day into central London? From ~1960 to ~2000 there weren't even a million rail passengers a day in the entire country combined, let alone just into London. In fact in the entire age of Nationalised rail there was almost never a year with over a million passengers a day nationwide.
It is only post-privatisation and with the fuel price escalator making cars heavily taxed and rail ever more subsidised instead that people have been displaced onto rails.
Trivial Gossip Klaxon: If I have understood this correctly, the Leader of East Devon Council (which covers Tiv&Hon) who was elected as an Independent, has just joined the Lib Dems.
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Irony being, of course, there are German, Italian and Dutch companies with franchises here (DB, Trenitalia and Abellio).
Rail seems like a perfect case study for an AI based driving system
It's the same as driverless cars - very easy to do if you can 100% remove all Human Beings from the track / road.
An awful lot harder if you can't.
Remember that all the AI experts on here say that driverless cars aren't the 90/99% problem that most people think they are. They are 99.9999% problems and until you get to 99.9999% no insurance company is going to touch them.
Trains are the same - the AI stuff is easy, removing any chance of a human being appearing on the track or another issue occurring is way harder.
Edit - and driverless cars are here - but only in places where no human beings randomly wander in the same place.
(And that’s in the comparatively constrained environment of the London Underground. The mainline railway is a still more difficult problem.)
Imagine an AI train driver that was able to assimilate CCTV footage from the whole network. Someone's just run across the rails 18 miles up the track? The AI driver knows it's happening real time and can continuously monitor the situation unfolding before a decision needs to be made.
This is why AI will eventually replace all drivers. The capacity to consume huge amounts of data simultaneously will give them more than an edge, it'll blow humans out of the water. Humans are brilliant at narrow-focus tasks, but as soon as that gap is closed, and it will be, we won't look back.
Can I ask what you do for a living - because you clearly don't work in IT
I have worked in IT since the Flood. And I agree with this remark. Computers are pretty average for quite a lot of tasks.
AI doesn't work that way - among other things, "AI" as it is currently used is nothing to do with what humans regard as intelligence.
Some years ago, there was a documentary about life on a US aircraft carrier. Planning moving the planes around is a big issue - the carriers are quite congested and the planes are worth (collectively) billions.
In a compartment of the carrier, they have a model of the carrier, complete with die cast models of the aircraft. Grown men push the models around to check for clearance, layout etc.
When asked, the chap in charge agreed that yes, they could try and have a computer system. But that would mean "training" it in all the details of the carrier, the physics of 3D space, the shapes of the aircraft etc. This was cheaper, simpler, provable to be correct and never break down. Also they get to take the "spare" models home for the kids.
The "Ouija Board" with the aircraft models has been replaced with the DCAP software for the last ten years as the carriers go through refit.
Do we even need trains with all the whizzy electric cars we're going to be driving in the medium term ? They blow the "green" argument out the water I think.
Not enough road space in our cities to replace trains with electric cars, and if you reengineered our cities to accommodate the cars I think they'd be much less pleasant to live in.
We walked past part of one of the numerous new estates around here - would love to know how people are going to charge their electric cars when most families have 2 cars and only 1 parking space.
Trivial Gossip Klaxon: If I have understood this correctly, the Leader of East Devon Council (which covers Tiv&Hon) who was elected as an Independent, has just joined the Lib Dems.
Hardly a fag paper between East Devon independents and the LibDems anyway. In East Devon, the Claire Wright Independents got 40% in 2019, the LibDems under 3%.
Did you ever meet Claire Wright? In Sasha Swire's book she was portrayed as a nasty piece of work. Swire's biased of course, but Swire does seem very honest about all sorts of stuff. An entertaining read.
Extraordinary. And depressing. Nothing will happen to this man. Imagine if it was some white guy threatening Muslims…
"Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our prophet (pbuh). There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line." #chilling
Mr. Pete, one does wonder what was going through Labour's collective head on that.
Did they think if May got ousted the Conservatives would do anything but move in a more sceptical direction?
May's deal was the most pro-EU one they were going to get.
I was as guilty as anyone Morris, it looked like a poor deal to me and I was holding out for a best of three. I didn't regard that notion as "undemocratic", but once we had left that was that. There is no going back.
Mrs May's deal looked awful at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, particularly in the light of Johnson's "oven ready" dog's breakfast, it was a work of genius.
It was utterly horrendous. It would have kept us trapped in the Single Market and Customs Union via the backstop despite the fact we'd voted to Leave and we'd have no unilateral way out. No Article 50, no legal mechanism if you're bothered about International Law, we would need the EU's permission to ever leave the backstop.
How could that ever be "good"?
You have highlighted some of my fears, but when we can see the only viable alternative to the ERG turned out to be significantly worse, it now doesn't seem so bad.
Mrs May courld have gone EEA or similar with free movement. Brexit would have been done and everyone except to he swivell- eyed would have been content. Her assertion that Brexit means Brexit, when no one knew what Brexit meant, was foolhardy from day one.
The present ERG solution is infinitely better because it is democratically accountable. If you don't like it, you can vote to change it. We can unilaterally leave the current trade deal by giving unilateral notice on it, or we can reach an agreement to change it, there was no unilateral option on the backstop so it was completely unaccountable and undemocratic.
Do we even need trains with all the whizzy electric cars we're going to be driving in the medium term ? They blow the "green" argument out the water I think.
Cars won't get 1 million people a day into central London (or however many currently commit in a few times a week). The car park space doesn't (and can't) exist.
And that's before we talk about the pollution from tyres and the upfront cost of an electric car.
Why do you need to get 1 million a day into central London? From ~1960 to ~2000 there weren't even a million rail passengers a day in the entire country combined, let alone just into London. In fact in the entire age of Nationalised rail there was almost never a year with over a million passengers a day nationwide.
It is only post-privatisation and with the fuel price escalator making cars heavily taxed and rail ever more subsidised instead that people have been displaced onto rails.
Do we even need trains with all the whizzy electric cars we're going to be driving in the medium term ? They blow the "green" argument out the water I think.
Not enough road space in our cities to replace trains with electric cars, and if you reengineered our cities to accommodate the cars I think they'd be much less pleasant to live in.
We walked past part of one of the numerous new estates around here - would love to know how people are going to charge their electric cars when most families have 2 cars and only 1 parking space.
Most electric vehicles will charge up where ICE vehicles used to "charge up" - at filling stations. Fast charging requires more power than you can get out of domestic wiring.
Mind you, there is the conversion of lampposts to charging stations. For some reason, the lamp posts in the UK have 20A or 32A supply. Even before going to LEDs, most of that is unused. Round my way, they have a steady program of replacing the lampposts with ones with a charger built in.
Extraordinary. And depressing. Nothing will happen to this man. Imagine if it was some white guy threatening Muslims…
"Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our prophet (pbuh). There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line." #chilling
Mr. Pete, one does wonder what was going through Labour's collective head on that.
Did they think if May got ousted the Conservatives would do anything but move in a more sceptical direction?
May's deal was the most pro-EU one they were going to get.
I was as guilty as anyone Morris, it looked like a poor deal to me and I was holding out for a best of three. I didn't regard that notion as "undemocratic", but once we had left that was that. There is no going back.
Mrs May's deal looked awful at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, particularly in the light of Johnson's "oven ready" dog's breakfast, it was a work of genius.
It was utterly horrendous. It would have kept us trapped in the Single Market and Customs Union via the backstop despite the fact we'd voted to Leave and we'd have no unilateral way out. No Article 50, no legal mechanism if you're bothered about International Law, we would need the EU's permission to ever leave the backstop.
How could that ever be "good"?
You have highlighted some of my fears, but when we can see the only viable alternative to the ERG turned out to be significantly worse, it now doesn't seem so bad.
Mrs May courld have gone EEA or similar with free movement. Brexit would have been done and everyone except to he swivell- eyed would have been content. Her assertion that Brexit means Brexit, when no one knew what Brexit meant, was foolhardy from day one.
The present ERG solution is infinitely better because it is democratically accountable. If you don't like it, you can vote to change it. We can unilaterally leave the current trade deal by giving unilateral notice on it, or we can reach an agreement to change it, there was no unilateral option on the backstop so it was completely unaccountable and undemocratic.
The backstop was not the deal. The backstop was the backstop in the event of there not being a deal.
Boris has done well on Ukraine, just as earlier did well on Vaccines. If you don't believe me, ask the Ukrainians. Those who refuse to recognise this simply undermine the credibility of their own arguments.
None of this means he shouldn't be got rid of now. We have a government that is aimless, devoid of ideas or plans lashing out in silly directions because they need some "red meat" for their more neaderthal supporters. Rwanda is a bloody stupid idea and deeply immoral to boot. Breaching the NIP would be idiotic and yet another problem in a very difficult economic situation. There is a total lack of focus on anything other than what the Mail headline will be the next day and a total lack of credibility because it is led by a proven liar.
There are very significant limitations on what our government or any government can do in the face of a large oil shock, inflation generated by QE, chaos in China distribution, the patchy recovery from Covid etc but they need to work out what they can do and do it. A government that is obsessed with its own survival and an opposition with nothing useful to say is not optimal.
Do we even need trains with all the whizzy electric cars we're going to be driving in the medium term ? They blow the "green" argument out the water I think.
Cars won't get 1 million people a day into central London (or however many currently commit in a few times a week). The car park space doesn't (and can't) exist.
And that's before we talk about the pollution from tyres and the upfront cost of an electric car.
Why do you need to get 1 million a day into central London? From ~1960 to ~2000 there weren't even a million rail passengers a day in the entire country combined, let alone just into London. In fact in the entire age of Nationalised rail there was almost never a year with over a million passengers a day nationwide.
It is only post-privatisation and with the fuel price escalator making cars heavily taxed and rail ever more subsidised instead that people have been displaced onto rails.
That may be the number who did, but its not the number who need to do so.
Prior to the introduction of the fuel duty escalator how many did?
If we put it on a level economic playing field, so that cars and trains operate on a level basis and aren't subsidised or used as a cash cow then you wouldn't see millions a day wanting to use the railways, because you didn't for most of postwar Britain and the 'golden age' of pre-privatised railways.
Do we even need trains with all the whizzy electric cars we're going to be driving in the medium term ? They blow the "green" argument out the water I think.
Not enough road space in our cities to replace trains with electric cars, and if you reengineered our cities to accommodate the cars I think they'd be much less pleasant to live in.
We walked past part of one of the numerous new estates around here - would love to know how people are going to charge their electric cars when most families have 2 cars and only 1 parking space.
Mr. Pete, one does wonder what was going through Labour's collective head on that.
Did they think if May got ousted the Conservatives would do anything but move in a more sceptical direction?
May's deal was the most pro-EU one they were going to get.
I was as guilty as anyone Morris, it looked like a poor deal to me and I was holding out for a best of three. I didn't regard that notion as "undemocratic", but once we had left that was that. There is no going back.
Mrs May's deal looked awful at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, particularly in the light of Johnson's "oven ready" dog's breakfast, it was a work of genius.
It was utterly horrendous. It would have kept us trapped in the Single Market and Customs Union via the backstop despite the fact we'd voted to Leave and we'd have no unilateral way out. No Article 50, no legal mechanism if you're bothered about International Law, we would need the EU's permission to ever leave the backstop.
How could that ever be "good"?
You have highlighted some of my fears, but when we can see the only viable alternative to the ERG turned out to be significantly worse, it now doesn't seem so bad.
Mrs May courld have gone EEA or similar with free movement. Brexit would have been done and everyone except to he swivell- eyed would have been content. Her assertion that Brexit means Brexit, when no one knew what Brexit meant, was foolhardy from day one.
The present ERG solution is infinitely better because it is democratically accountable. If you don't like it, you can vote to change it. We can unilaterally leave the current trade deal by giving unilateral notice on it, or we can reach an agreement to change it, there was no unilateral option on the backstop so it was completely unaccountable and undemocratic.
The backstop was not the deal. The backstop was the backstop in the event of there not being a deal.
The backstop in the event of there not being a deal should always be no deal. Both sides equally able to walk away.
The backstop was a deal, and worse it was a deal without a unilateral exit. That is utterly undemocratic and unacceptable as a matter of principle.
Extraordinary. And depressing. Nothing will happen to this man. Imagine if it was some white guy threatening Muslims…
"Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our prophet (pbuh). There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line." #chilling
Do we even need trains with all the whizzy electric cars we're going to be driving in the medium term ? They blow the "green" argument out the water I think.
Not enough road space in our cities to replace trains with electric cars, and if you reengineered our cities to accommodate the cars I think they'd be much less pleasant to live in.
We walked past part of one of the numerous new estates around here - would love to know how people are going to charge their electric cars when most families have 2 cars and only 1 parking space.
They are converting street lights to provide integrated electrical charging points for cars.
Could you ask him *why* they originally spec'd the street lights to need a 20A or 32A supply? Someone, aeons ago, wrote that in. I can't find the original reason - were they planing on running carbon arc lamps or something!!!?
Mr. Sandpit, and the leader after Corbyn might be proposing rejoining.
Not to mention we'd be in a far worse economic position as the pandemic started.
And Ukraine would have significantly less weaponry.
The union is literally doing what they exist to do. Inflation is at 9% and still growing. So they want to secure a pay deal which means their members do not become worse off.
We need to grow our way out of inflation. We had more than a decade of government being able to borrow money virtually for free, of oceans of cash needing something secure to invest in, of big companies piling up cash reserves rather than investing.
So we could have set up Britain to be a production and technology powerhouse. Directly build the stuff we need (power, fibre broadband) and provide huge tax incentives to create and *manufacture* things like wind turbines and tidal power generation here for export.
Even now we could be doing that. Instead we are twatting about with "Free"ports as if the jobs they may create will be new and not just a transfer from somewhere else. This lot haven't a clue what they are doing, what this country needs or how to plan for the future.
THEY are wretched. Not the poor sodding workforce trying to keep food on the table who are suffering from the consequences of the government being shit.
I am currently in Sicily. Back in my childhood, notoriously the most corrupt poverty stricken region of Western Europe. Now I know there remains industrial scale poverty in the slums of Palermo and Catania, but to my uninitiated eye for the most part it seems more prosperous than Winson Green, Hyson Green or Bootle.
I am minded by confirmed stories of historical Labour and Union Baron corruption in rust-belt England, Wales and Scotland. I am also minded that in my sixty years I have seen just 23 years of non-Conservative led Governments.
Mr. Pete, one does wonder what was going through Labour's collective head on that.
Did they think if May got ousted the Conservatives would do anything but move in a more sceptical direction?
May's deal was the most pro-EU one they were going to get.
I was as guilty as anyone Morris, it looked like a poor deal to me and I was holding out for a best of three. I didn't regard that notion as "undemocratic", but once we had left that was that. There is no going back.
Mrs May's deal looked awful at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, particularly in the light of Johnson's "oven ready" dog's breakfast, it was a work of genius.
It was utterly horrendous. It would have kept us trapped in the Single Market and Customs Union via the backstop despite the fact we'd voted to Leave and we'd have no unilateral way out. No Article 50, no legal mechanism if you're bothered about International Law, we would need the EU's permission to ever leave the backstop.
How could that ever be "good"?
You have highlighted some of my fears, but when we can see the only viable alternative to the ERG turned out to be significantly worse, it now doesn't seem so bad.
Mrs May courld have gone EEA or similar with free movement. Brexit would have been done and everyone except to he swivell- eyed would have been content. Her assertion that Brexit means Brexit, when no one knew what Brexit meant, was foolhardy from day one.
The present ERG solution is infinitely better because it is democratically accountable. If you don't like it, you can vote to change it. We can unilaterally leave the current trade deal by giving unilateral notice on it, or we can reach an agreement to change it, there was no unilateral option on the backstop so it was completely unaccountable and undemocratic.
The backstop was not the deal. The backstop was the backstop in the event of there not being a deal.
Well yes. The backstop was actually a bit of a blunder by the EU: it allowed us to retain all the Single Market benefits until we'd come up with a solution to the hard-border conundrum. If no solution was forthcoming for a while then so much the better for us.
Extraordinary. And depressing. Nothing will happen to this man. Imagine if it was some white guy threatening Muslims…
"Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our prophet (pbuh). There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line." #chilling
Extraordinary. And depressing. Nothing will happen to this man. Imagine if it was some white guy threatening Muslims…
"Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our prophet (pbuh). There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line." #chilling
Mr. Pete, one does wonder what was going through Labour's collective head on that.
Did they think if May got ousted the Conservatives would do anything but move in a more sceptical direction?
May's deal was the most pro-EU one they were going to get.
I was as guilty as anyone Morris, it looked like a poor deal to me and I was holding out for a best of three. I didn't regard that notion as "undemocratic", but once we had left that was that. There is no going back.
Mrs May's deal looked awful at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, particularly in the light of Johnson's "oven ready" dog's breakfast, it was a work of genius.
It was utterly horrendous. It would have kept us trapped in the Single Market and Customs Union via the backstop despite the fact we'd voted to Leave and we'd have no unilateral way out. No Article 50, no legal mechanism if you're bothered about International Law, we would need the EU's permission to ever leave the backstop.
How could that ever be "good"?
You have highlighted some of my fears, but when we can see the only viable alternative to the ERG turned out to be significantly worse, it now doesn't seem so bad.
Mrs May courld have gone EEA or similar with free movement. Brexit would have been done and everyone except to he swivell- eyed would have been content. Her assertion that Brexit means Brexit, when no one knew what Brexit meant, was foolhardy from day one.
The present ERG solution is infinitely better because it is democratically accountable. If you don't like it, you can vote to change it. We can unilaterally leave the current trade deal by giving unilateral notice on it, or we can reach an agreement to change it, there was no unilateral option on the backstop so it was completely unaccountable and undemocratic.
The backstop was not the deal. The backstop was the backstop in the event of there not being a deal.
Well yes. The backstop was actually a bit of a blunder by the EU: it allowed us to retain all the Single Market benefits until we'd come up with a solution to the hard-border conundrum. If no solution was forthcoming for a while then so much the better for us.
Apart from the fact we'd voted to leave the Single Market, so no it wasn't a blunder, it was a trap. We'd have left the Single Market by being in the Single Market, only now without Article 50 and without a way out.
Since you didn't want to leave the Single Market, I can see why you might want that, but its not democratic. Democracy is more important, if you want to be in the Single Market then convince your fellow countrymen to vote for that and we can rejoin.
Extraordinary. And depressing. Nothing will happen to this man. Imagine if it was some white guy threatening Muslims…
"Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our prophet (pbuh). There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line." #chilling
Extraordinary. And depressing. Nothing will happen to this man. Imagine if it was some white guy threatening Muslims…
"Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our prophet (pbuh). There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line." #chilling
Extraordinary. And depressing. Nothing will happen to this man. Imagine if it was some white guy threatening Muslims…
"Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our prophet (pbuh). There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line." #chilling
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
This is a brilliant summary of how the PM's greatest triumph, the 2019 election win, was built on a big lie - just the latest in the litany of falsehoods which have marked his career https://twitter.com/ottocrat/status/1534447809583366144
Rail seems like a perfect case study for an AI based driving system
It's the same as driverless cars - very easy to do if you can 100% remove all Human Beings from the track / road.
An awful lot harder if you can't.
Remember that all the AI experts on here say that driverless cars aren't the 90/99% problem that most people think they are. They are 99.9999% problems and until you get to 99.9999% no insurance company is going to touch them.
Trains are the same - the AI stuff is easy, removing any chance of a human being appearing on the track or another issue occurring is way harder.
Edit - and driverless cars are here - but only in places where no human beings randomly wander in the same place.
(And that’s in the comparatively constrained environment of the London Underground. The mainline railway is a still more difficult problem.)
Imagine an AI train driver that was able to assimilate CCTV footage from the whole network. Someone's just run across the rails 18 miles up the track? The AI driver knows it's happening real time and can continuously monitor the situation unfolding before a decision needs to be made.
This is why AI will eventually replace all drivers. The capacity to consume huge amounts of data simultaneously will give them more than an edge, it'll blow humans out of the water. Humans are brilliant at narrow-focus tasks, but as soon as that gap is closed, and it will be, we won't look back.
Can I ask what you do for a living - because you clearly don't work in IT
Consider, for a moment, that I'm talking about how things are going to be rather than how things are right now.
Waymo has now driven I believe more than 1 million miles and simulated over 1 billion miles. Yet they still aren't allowed on roads outside a tiny defined area because the AI doesn't know what to do in most instances
Driverless cars is like Nuclear Fusion - allows x years away and unless someone comes up with a different approach (as first light seem to have done with Fusion) it will always be the same x years away.
I'm pretty sure there will be solutions that emerge, though it will take time. Your analogy of FLF's inertial confinement approach vs the apparently insoluble problem of magnetic confinement is a good one.
Here's another. Machine vision isn't the same problem as self driving, but it's closely related - and the same brute force computing techniques aren't particularly useful. But elegant and promising ideas that look much more tractable are starting to emerge: https://techxplore.com/news/2022-04-scientists-algorithm-assign-pixel-world.html
Mr. Pete, one does wonder what was going through Labour's collective head on that.
Did they think if May got ousted the Conservatives would do anything but move in a more sceptical direction?
May's deal was the most pro-EU one they were going to get.
I was as guilty as anyone Morris, it looked like a poor deal to me and I was holding out for a best of three. I didn't regard that notion as "undemocratic", but once we had left that was that. There is no going back.
Mrs May's deal looked awful at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, particularly in the light of Johnson's "oven ready" dog's breakfast, it was a work of genius.
It was utterly horrendous. It would have kept us trapped in the Single Market and Customs Union via the backstop despite the fact we'd voted to Leave and we'd have no unilateral way out. No Article 50, no legal mechanism if you're bothered about International Law, we would need the EU's permission to ever leave the backstop.
How could that ever be "good"?
You have highlighted some of my fears, but when we can see the only viable alternative to the ERG turned out to be significantly worse, it now doesn't seem so bad.
Mrs May courld have gone EEA or similar with free movement. Brexit would have been done and everyone except to he swivell- eyed would have been content. Her assertion that Brexit means Brexit, when no one knew what Brexit meant, was foolhardy from day one.
The present ERG solution is infinitely better because it is democratically accountable. If you don't like it, you can vote to change it. We can unilaterally leave the current trade deal by giving unilateral notice on it, or we can reach an agreement to change it, there was no unilateral option on the backstop so it was completely unaccountable and undemocratic.
The backstop was not the deal. The backstop was the backstop in the event of there not being a deal.
Well yes. The backstop was actually a bit of a blunder by the EU: it allowed us to retain all the Single Market benefits until we'd come up with a solution to the hard-border conundrum. If no solution was forthcoming for a while then so much the better for us.
Apart from the fact we'd voted to leave the Single Market, so no it wasn't a blunder, it was a trap. We'd have left the Single Market by being in the Single Market, only now without Article 50 and without a way out.
Since you didn't want to leave the Single Market, I can see why you might want that, but its not democratic. Democracy is more important, if you want to be in the Single Market then convince your fellow countrymen to vote for that and we can rejoin.
We didn't vote to leave the Single Market whatsoever. If Theresa, as democratically elected PM, thought that remaining in it until further work had resolved the NI nuances then fair enough. Once the NI nuances had been resolved to everyone's satisfaction, we could have looked again.
"Brexit merged two antithetical forces: a Conservative party that traditionally convenes around pillars of the British establishment and a demagogic insurrection that defines itself as a scourge of the establishment. Johnson’s campaigning talent was to represent both things at once. But it was an illusion, a spell that can’t be recast once broken. No wonder so many Tory MPs are disoriented and alarmed. They know Johnson is a problem, but also that removing him will expose how much deeper the problem goes. They remade their party in the image of a leader without conscience, integrity or values beyond the desperate pursuit of power. So they don’t like this disreputable “Boris” character that they now see in front of them? They are looking in the mirror."
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
Well, after the success of the Sikh protests against that play, back in the day, it was official. Threaten violence and you get your way.
Apparently, that incident was responsible, in part for the formation of the EDL. The White Power scum thought, apparently, "Street violence & threats gets compliance. We like that. We should have some of that".
Note the way their demos were all about creating a "There will be trouble unless X is stopped" narrative?
Mr. Pete, one does wonder what was going through Labour's collective head on that.
Did they think if May got ousted the Conservatives would do anything but move in a more sceptical direction?
May's deal was the most pro-EU one they were going to get.
I was as guilty as anyone Morris, it looked like a poor deal to me and I was holding out for a best of three. I didn't regard that notion as "undemocratic", but once we had left that was that. There is no going back.
Mrs May's deal looked awful at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, particularly in the light of Johnson's "oven ready" dog's breakfast, it was a work of genius.
It was utterly horrendous. It would have kept us trapped in the Single Market and Customs Union via the backstop despite the fact we'd voted to Leave and we'd have no unilateral way out. No Article 50, no legal mechanism if you're bothered about International Law, we would need the EU's permission to ever leave the backstop.
How could that ever be "good"?
You have highlighted some of my fears, but when we can see the only viable alternative to the ERG turned out to be significantly worse, it now doesn't seem so bad.
Mrs May courld have gone EEA or similar with free movement. Brexit would have been done and everyone except to he swivell- eyed would have been content. Her assertion that Brexit means Brexit, when no one knew what Brexit meant, was foolhardy from day one.
The present ERG solution is infinitely better because it is democratically accountable. If you don't like it, you can vote to change it. We can unilaterally leave the current trade deal by giving unilateral notice on it, or we can reach an agreement to change it, there was no unilateral option on the backstop so it was completely unaccountable and undemocratic.
The backstop was not the deal. The backstop was the backstop in the event of there not being a deal.
Well yes. The backstop was actually a bit of a blunder by the EU: it allowed us to retain all the Single Market benefits until we'd come up with a solution to the hard-border conundrum. If no solution was forthcoming for a while then so much the better for us.
Apart from the fact we'd voted to leave the Single Market, so no it wasn't a blunder, it was a trap. We'd have left the Single Market by being in the Single Market, only now without Article 50 and without a way out.
Since you didn't want to leave the Single Market, I can see why you might want that, but its not democratic. Democracy is more important, if you want to be in the Single Market then convince your fellow countrymen to vote for that and we can rejoin.
We didn't vote to leave the Single Market whatsoever. If Theresa, as democratically elected PM, thought that remaining in it until further work had resolved the NI nuances then fair enough. Once the NI nuances had been resolved to everyone's satisfaction, we could have looked again.
No its not "fair enough" unless there's a unilateral exit for a future democratically elected PM to take.
EU membership had a unilateral exit, Article 50, and before Article 50 existed we could exit by unilaterally repealing the membership acts. The backstop had no unilateral exit. That is fundamentally undemocratic.
Extraordinary. And depressing. Nothing will happen to this man. Imagine if it was some white guy threatening Muslims…
"Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our prophet (pbuh). There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line." #chilling
On Topic - there will be a other push after the by-elections. The results will be terrible for the Conservatives.
I don't actually agree that pushing the vote through rapidly was a mistake by the anti-Johnson side - if just 32 Conservative MPs had voted differently, he would have been gone. This creates a floor for the next vote. I am assuming that the Executive Committee of the 1922 will simply change the rules to have another one.
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
Well, after the success of the Sikh protests against that play, back in the day, it was official. Threaten violence and you get your way.
Apparently, that incident was responsible, in part for the formation of the EDL. The White Power scum thought, apparently, "Street violence & threats gets compliance. We like that. We should have some of that".
Note the way their demos were all about creating a "There will be trouble unless X is stopped" narrative?
The most dispiriting thing about this is that the menace and hate comes from a small repulsive minority, which consistently bullies the other Muslims, let alone the rest of the country
Eg the guy in the first video is the same guy who led the disturbing protests against the Batley and Spen teacher. That teacher now lives under a different identity, in fear of his life, and of his family’s life. For being a teacher
“Batley Grammar School A year on from Prophet Muhammad Batley school row and teacher still in hiding as family 'at risk'”
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
This has happened previously in a couple of places. Bolton being one of them. For context. This is a Shi'ite take on the life of the Prophet. And uses CGI faces. Sunnis don't like that. Nor the tale in general. Not that that excuses any of it. I'm merely adding context.
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
This has happened previously in a couple of places. Bolton being one of them. For context. This is a Shi'ite take on the life of the Prophet. And uses CGI faces. Sunnis don't like that. Nor the tale in general. Not that that excuses any of it. I'm merely adding context.
Great. So the entire country is now subject to the cultural laws of medieval Islam. Brilliant. Well done everyone
Extraordinary. And depressing. Nothing will happen to this man. Imagine if it was some white guy threatening Muslims…
"Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our prophet (pbuh). There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line." #chilling
Where the Hell dio you find these repulsive ultra right websites? More hatred on here than 'Stormfront'
Which is the far-right hate? The guy promising religious violence, the guy posting it on a website?
I am confused - they all seem like nutters.
The nutter is the person who posted it on here. Leon.
Why? Back in the day, at my uni, the Death To The West hatters were carefully ignored. Until it was discovered, a bit later that they were doing a bit more than chanting.
Ignoring the reality is exactly how extremism flourishes.
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
Well, after the success of the Sikh protests against that play, back in the day, it was official. Threaten violence and you get your way.
Apparently, that incident was responsible, in part for the formation of the EDL. The White Power scum thought, apparently, "Street violence & threats gets compliance. We like that. We should have some of that".
Note the way their demos were all about creating a "There will be trouble unless X is stopped" narrative?
The most dispiriting thing about this is that the menace and hate comes from a small repulsive minority, which consistently bullies the other Muslims, let alone the rest of the country
Eg the guy in the first video is the same guy who led the disturbing protests against the Batley and Spen teacher. That teacher now lives under a different identity, in fear of his life, and of his family’s life. For being a teacher
“Batley Grammar School A year on from Prophet Muhammad Batley school row and teacher still in hiding as family 'at risk'”
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
Well, after the success of the Sikh protests against that play, back in the day, it was official. Threaten violence and you get your way.
Apparently, that incident was responsible, in part for the formation of the EDL. The White Power scum thought, apparently, "Street violence & threats gets compliance. We like that. We should have some of that".
Note the way their demos were all about creating a "There will be trouble unless X is stopped" narrative?
The most dispiriting thing about this is that the menace and hate comes from a small repulsive minority, which consistently bullies the other Muslims, let alone the rest of the country
Eg the guy in the first video is the same guy who led the disturbing protests against the Batley and Spen teacher. That teacher now lives under a different identity, in fear of his life, and of his family’s life. For being a teacher
“Batley Grammar School A year on from Prophet Muhammad Batley school row and teacher still in hiding as family 'at risk'”
The thing about these chaps (and similar applies to all extremists) is that it doesn’t say much about their belief system if they feel it’s fundamentally threatened by a film or a book etc.
Surely if their religion is so strong and that Allah/or other is the true god then he is more powerful than these trifling attacks.
Maybe subconsciously they aren’t actually sure and so they can’t risk any criticism in. Case it shows they are wrong?
Surely a “mature ideology” can ignore and laugh off these things……
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
Well, after the success of the Sikh protests against that play, back in the day, it was official. Threaten violence and you get your way.
Apparently, that incident was responsible, in part for the formation of the EDL. The White Power scum thought, apparently, "Street violence & threats gets compliance. We like that. We should have some of that".
Note the way their demos were all about creating a "There will be trouble unless X is stopped" narrative?
The play was Bezhti and I remember protests about it being on the news. It was nearly 20 years ago.
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
Well, after the success of the Sikh protests against that play, back in the day, it was official. Threaten violence and you get your way.
Apparently, that incident was responsible, in part for the formation of the EDL. The White Power scum thought, apparently, "Street violence & threats gets compliance. We like that. We should have some of that".
Note the way their demos were all about creating a "There will be trouble unless X is stopped" narrative?
The most dispiriting thing about this is that the menace and hate comes from a small repulsive minority, which consistently bullies the other Muslims, let alone the rest of the country
Eg the guy in the first video is the same guy who led the disturbing protests against the Batley and Spen teacher. That teacher now lives under a different identity, in fear of his life, and of his family’s life. For being a teacher
“Batley Grammar School A year on from Prophet Muhammad Batley school row and teacher still in hiding as family 'at risk'”
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
Well, after the success of the Sikh protests against that play, back in the day, it was official. Threaten violence and you get your way.
Apparently, that incident was responsible, in part for the formation of the EDL. The White Power scum thought, apparently, "Street violence & threats gets compliance. We like that. We should have some of that".
Note the way their demos were all about creating a "There will be trouble unless X is stopped" narrative?
The most dispiriting thing about this is that the menace and hate comes from a small repulsive minority, which consistently bullies the other Muslims, let alone the rest of the country
Eg the guy in the first video is the same guy who led the disturbing protests against the Batley and Spen teacher. That teacher now lives under a different identity, in fear of his life, and of his family’s life. For being a teacher
“Batley Grammar School A year on from Prophet Muhammad Batley school row and teacher still in hiding as family 'at risk'”
Free speech is an important concept, even for those we find repugnant like this individual.
Having said that, it seems remarkable that he hasn't crossed the line into criminal offences like incitement to violence etc as the hook handed guy did who ended up in jail.
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
This has happened previously in a couple of places. Bolton being one of them. For context. This is a Shi'ite take on the life of the Prophet. And uses CGI faces. Sunnis don't like that. Nor the tale in general. Not that that excuses any of it. I'm merely adding context.
Great. So the entire country is now subject to the cultural laws of medieval Islam. Brilliant. Well done everyone
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
Well, after the success of the Sikh protests against that play, back in the day, it was official. Threaten violence and you get your way.
Apparently, that incident was responsible, in part for the formation of the EDL. The White Power scum thought, apparently, "Street violence & threats gets compliance. We like that. We should have some of that".
Note the way their demos were all about creating a "There will be trouble unless X is stopped" narrative?
The play was Bezhti and I remember protests about it being on the news. It was nearly 20 years ago.
Indeed - the lesson there is that all the fascist nutters are essentially the same. Give license to one lot and the others will follow.
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
Well, after the success of the Sikh protests against that play, back in the day, it was official. Threaten violence and you get your way.
Apparently, that incident was responsible, in part for the formation of the EDL. The White Power scum thought, apparently, "Street violence & threats gets compliance. We like that. We should have some of that".
Note the way their demos were all about creating a "There will be trouble unless X is stopped" narrative?
The most dispiriting thing about this is that the menace and hate comes from a small repulsive minority, which consistently bullies the other Muslims, let alone the rest of the country
Eg the guy in the first video is the same guy who led the disturbing protests against the Batley and Spen teacher. That teacher now lives under a different identity, in fear of his life, and of his family’s life. For being a teacher
“Batley Grammar School A year on from Prophet Muhammad Batley school row and teacher still in hiding as family 'at risk'”
The thing about these chaps (and similar applies to all extremists) is that it doesn’t say much about their belief system if they feel it’s fundamentally threatened by a film or a book etc.
Surely if their religion is so strong and that Allah/or other is the true god then he is more powerful than these trifling attacks.
Maybe subconsciously they aren’t actually sure and so they can’t risk any criticism in. Case it shows they are wrong?
Surely a “mature ideology” can ignore and laugh off these things……
That’s all irrelevant, really. The fact is they are imposing a de facto blasphemy law in the UK. Anything they don’t like, they come out and shout, and every single time we yield. So it works, so they do it again
Meanwhile they can menace a teacher - for teaching western values - to such an extent he has to hide away for years - possibly for the rest of his life - along with his family - in case he is beheaded
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
This has happened previously in a couple of places. Bolton being one of them. For context. This is a Shi'ite take on the life of the Prophet. And uses CGI faces. Sunnis don't like that. Nor the tale in general. Not that that excuses any of it. I'm merely adding context.
Great. So the entire country is now subject to the cultural laws of medieval Islam. Brilliant. Well done everyone
Mr. Pete, one does wonder what was going through Labour's collective head on that.
Did they think if May got ousted the Conservatives would do anything but move in a more sceptical direction?
May's deal was the most pro-EU one they were going to get.
I was as guilty as anyone Morris, it looked like a poor deal to me and I was holding out for a best of three. I didn't regard that notion as "undemocratic", but once we had left that was that. There is no going back.
Mrs May's deal looked awful at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, particularly in the light of Johnson's "oven ready" dog's breakfast, it was a work of genius.
It was utterly horrendous. It would have kept us trapped in the Single Market and Customs Union via the backstop despite the fact we'd voted to Leave and we'd have no unilateral way out. No Article 50, no legal mechanism if you're bothered about International Law, we would need the EU's permission to ever leave the backstop.
How could that ever be "good"?
You have highlighted some of my fears, but when we can see the only viable alternative to the ERG turned out to be significantly worse, it now doesn't seem so bad.
Mrs May courld have gone EEA or similar with free movement. Brexit would have been done and everyone except to he swivell- eyed would have been content. Her assertion that Brexit means Brexit, when no one knew what Brexit meant, was foolhardy from day one.
The present ERG solution is infinitely better because it is democratically accountable. If you don't like it, you can vote to change it. We can unilaterally leave the current trade deal by giving unilateral notice on it, or we can reach an agreement to change it, there was no unilateral option on the backstop so it was completely unaccountable and undemocratic.
The backstop was not the deal. The backstop was the backstop in the event of there not being a deal.
Well yes. The backstop was actually a bit of a blunder by the EU: it allowed us to retain all the Single Market benefits until we'd come up with a solution to the hard-border conundrum. If no solution was forthcoming for a while then so much the better for us.
Apart from the fact we'd voted to leave the Single Market, so no it wasn't a blunder, it was a trap. We'd have left the Single Market by being in the Single Market, only now without Article 50 and without a way out.
Since you didn't want to leave the Single Market, I can see why you might want that, but its not democratic. Democracy is more important, if you want to be in the Single Market then convince your fellow countrymen to vote for that and we can rejoin.
We didn't vote to leave the Single Market whatsoever. If Theresa, as democratically elected PM, thought that remaining in it until further work had resolved the NI nuances then fair enough. Once the NI nuances had been resolved to everyone's satisfaction, we could have looked again.
No its not "fair enough" unless there's a unilateral exit for a future democratically elected PM to take.
EU membership had a unilateral exit, Article 50, and before Article 50 existed we could exit by unilaterally repealing the membership acts. The backstop had no unilateral exit. That is fundamentally undemocratic.
I think you're being a touch hysterical. The backstop wasn't some EU power grab - it was a jointly agreed measure between the UK and the EU to prevent NI exploding before a permanent solution could formulated and implemented. Surely that wasn't beyond the wit of man. Those master negotiators Boris and Frosty could have been given the gig. Anyway, Theresa's deal died before it was even born, so our banging on about it out now seems an indulgence. See you later!
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
Well, after the success of the Sikh protests against that play, back in the day, it was official. Threaten violence and you get your way.
Apparently, that incident was responsible, in part for the formation of the EDL. The White Power scum thought, apparently, "Street violence & threats gets compliance. We like that. We should have some of that".
Note the way their demos were all about creating a "There will be trouble unless X is stopped" narrative?
The most dispiriting thing about this is that the menace and hate comes from a small repulsive minority, which consistently bullies the other Muslims, let alone the rest of the country
Eg the guy in the first video is the same guy who led the disturbing protests against the Batley and Spen teacher. That teacher now lives under a different identity, in fear of his life, and of his family’s life. For being a teacher
“Batley Grammar School A year on from Prophet Muhammad Batley school row and teacher still in hiding as family 'at risk'”
The thing about these chaps (and similar applies to all extremists) is that it doesn’t say much about their belief system if they feel it’s fundamentally threatened by a film or a book etc.
Surely if their religion is so strong and that Allah/or other is the true god then he is more powerful than these trifling attacks.
Maybe subconsciously they aren’t actually sure and so they can’t risk any criticism in. Case it shows they are wrong?
Surely a “mature ideology” can ignore and laugh off these things……
No. There you are wrong.
It is simply a matter of utterly absolute faith. Which is nearly extinct in Christian religious practice in the UK. You can find stuff like that in US Christianity, though.
To understand the mind set - your religion is utterly, perfectly right. It is exactly aligned with God and the universe. Everyone else is Wrong. From there, it is very easy to say that you are saving the world by....
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
Wasn’t one of the reasons HS2 has been so slow, that a lot of railway-building skills had basically been lost, because the UK had done so little of it in the past decades? They had to do an awful lot of training with the teams they recruited, before they could work on the project.
“This is reportedly the manager of a cinema in Sheffield addressing a theocratic mob protesting at the screening of a "blasphemous" film (The Lady of Heaven). Thoroughly depressing to see him capitulate to their demands and confirm the film has been binned.”
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
This has happened previously in a couple of places. Bolton being one of them. For context. This is a Shi'ite take on the life of the Prophet. And uses CGI faces. Sunnis don't like that. Nor the tale in general. Not that that excuses any of it. I'm merely adding context.
Great. So the entire country is now subject to the cultural laws of medieval Islam. Brilliant. Well done everyone
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
We DID used to be much better at these things! We had Road Construction Units who would move from one project to another, with teams of contractors who would win contract after contract. We had railway electrification units who wired up routes on a rolling basis.
This is the British stupidity, our sickness of the last 50 years. We need better infrastructure. Roads. Railways. Fibre Broadband. Power Generation. Public facilities (schools, hospitals). All of which generate a clear return on investment. Which drive economic productivity and output.
And yet all we hear is "who will pay for it" "how much will it cost" "why should I pay more taxes for that". Its always the cost side of the equation and no consideration for the benefit side. And it has become the same with big companies - instead of investing they pile cash reserves up and pay more dividends in the immediate term with little consideration for the future.
If people are threatening violence they should be prosecuted.
And if it is done so by organisations then they can be prescribed and banned as a terrorist organisation. As far as I can see the legislation around this is already in place, just needs some enforcement where violence is being threatened.
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Or we could go back to pre-privatisation levels of usage of the railways. There was a long-term downwards trend in railway usage until the 1990s and post-privatisation it has more than doubled (pre-pandemic).
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
A quick dive into the costs of running the road network in the UK:
In direct expenditure terms, sure: the main tax drivers pay is on fuel & that raised about £26billion in 2021. Vehicle exise duty raised just under £7billion. At the same time, about £12billion was spent on road maintenance that year (source for the first is UK gov website, the latter comes from statistica.) So on the face of it, drivers are paying £33billion for £12billion of services.
So including accident costs drives the cost of the road network to £22billion, even if we ignore the personal cost of the injuries sustained & only care about the economic impact (& that was in a pandemic year: the cost in 2018 was £13billion.)
Are there other externalities we’re not considering? Obviously there’s the cost of pollution which we know has major impacts on death rates in cities due to asthma & other diseases. Noise pollution is a significant cost, although it’s difficult to measure directly. Direct asthma treatment costs the NHS about a £billion / year. Total economic costs are probably at least double that. Hard to know what portion is caused by the road network, but it must be sizable.
Congestion costs are very significant economically - simply by blocking up the road network drivers cost the UK billions a year. Recent estimates seem to be in the £7billion a year region ( https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/94871/traffic-jams-costs-in-the-uk ), although I image that’s a crude number - probably just counting lost hours vs incomes. Still, that is almost totally wasted time, so...
So looking at the numbers, based solely on the externalities that can be directly accounted for (accidents, congestion), drivers are barely paying their way - they paid £33billion in return for £29billion of costs. Adding in reasonable estimates for other externalities (eg, asthma costs the NHS £1billion / year, knock on economic costs are probably twice that, maybe the road network is responsible for a third of that? & so on for all the others) suggests that drivers might be just about paying ther way?
The moment we include any accounting for the pain & suffering imposed on people due to road accidents the cost argument is blown out of the water of course. The UK government statistics include estimates for these costs based on standard economic approaches to estimating them based on revealed preferences.
(If I’ve missed any obvious externalities of driving that we can account for do point them out!)
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
Wasn’t one of the reasons HS2 has been so slow, that a lot of railway-building skills had basically been lost, because the UK had done so little of it in the past decades? They had to do an awful lot of training with the teams they recruited, before they could work on the project.
Sounds right. I don't want to get political about it but rail privatisation has a lot to answer for, in terms of disrupting investment in both infrastructure and rolling stock. In the 1970s BR was developing two advanced new intercity trains (one of which was a huge success, the other much less of a failure than in the popular imagination), electrifying major lines etc. Look at our capacity now in terms of engineering capacity and weep. Ultimately if you don't invest then you don't drive productivity up and you end up with no capacity and high costs.
Maybe the best thing would be a referendum in NI on the issue of the protocol?
I do find Johnson's continued backing for the DUP surprising. Has he actually started to feel guilty about his lies?
No but he is worried about the break up of the union, hence his rebranding the country as the UK rather than Britain. No policy mind, just marketing.
Yes but the policy towards Northern Ireland in some ways undermines the Union with Scotland. After all if Northern Ireland can be a special case why can't Scotland which voted by an even bigger margin to stay in the EU?
If people are threatening violence they should be prosecuted.
And if it is done so by organisations then they can be prescribed and banned as a terrorist organisation. As far as I can see the legislation around this is already in place, just needs some enforcement where violence is being threatened.
They won’t enforce anything. They’ll come round your house for a racist tweet, but you can force a teacher into lifelong hiding, for fear of decapitation, and they wont and don’t do anything
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
We DID used to be much better at these things! We had Road Construction Units who would move from one project to another, with teams of contractors who would win contract after contract. We had railway electrification units who wired up routes on a rolling basis.
This is the British stupidity, our sickness of the last 50 years. We need better infrastructure. Roads. Railways. Fibre Broadband. Power Generation. Public facilities (schools, hospitals). All of which generate a clear return on investment. Which drive economic productivity and output.
And yet all we hear is "who will pay for it" "how much will it cost" "why should I pay more taxes for that". Its always the cost side of the equation and no consideration for the benefit side. And it has become the same with big companies - instead of investing they pile cash reserves up and pay more dividends in the immediate term with little consideration for the future.
Maybe the best thing would be a referendum in NI on the issue of the protocol?
I do find Johnson's continued backing for the DUP surprising. Has he actually started to feel guilty about his lies?
No but he is worried about the break up of the union, hence his rebranding the country as the UK rather than Britain. No policy mind, just marketing.
Yes but the policy towards Northern Ireland in some ways undermines the Union with Scotland. After all if Northern Ireland can be a special case why can't Scotland which voted by an even bigger margin to stay in the EU?
On the other hand Nothing undermines the Union with Scotland quite like Boris Johnson. If he's that concerned he should quit. For the good of the Union.
If people are threatening violence they should be prosecuted.
And if it is done so by organisations then they can be prescribed and banned as a terrorist organisation. As far as I can see the legislation around this is already in place, just needs some enforcement where violence is being threatened.
They won’t enforce anything. They’ll come round your house for a racist tweet, but you can force a teacher into lifelong hiding, for fear of decapitation, and they wont and don’t do anything
Nonsense. Plenty of people are arrested for extreme Muslim terrorism. Perhaps it should be a few more and some edge cases are incorrectly missed, but enforcement does happen against those threatening violence, whatever their religious or political beliefs.
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
Wasn’t one of the reasons HS2 has been so slow, that a lot of railway-building skills had basically been lost, because the UK had done so little of it in the past decades? They had to do an awful lot of training with the teams they recruited, before they could work on the project.
I don't believe that's the case. The initial stages are not particularly railway-specific (land preparation, bridges, tunnels etc), and we have lots of experience of that - Crossrail, HS1, and a thousand and one road projects.
HS2 is very large in scale (they've just opened the first stage of a temporary 50-mile haul road to keep traffic off local roads), but not much of it is railway-specific atm.
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
The other problem is a nearly religious belief in "infrastructure inflation" - which seems to be ahead of other inflation in many countries.
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
Wasn’t one of the reasons HS2 has been so slow, that a lot of railway-building skills had basically been lost, because the UK had done so little of it in the past decades? They had to do an awful lot of training with the teams they recruited, before they could work on the project.
Sounds right. I don't want to get political about it but rail privatisation has a lot to answer for, in terms of disrupting investment in both infrastructure and rolling stock. In the 1970s BR was developing two advanced new intercity trains (one of which was a huge success, the other much less of a failure than in the popular imagination), electrifying major lines etc. Look at our capacity now in terms of engineering capacity and weep. Ultimately if you don't invest then you don't drive productivity up and you end up with no capacity and high costs.
I was told that in the run up to privatisation the Conservative government prevented BR from putting in orders for new rolling stock in order to flatter the books for privatisation & that this resulted in several UK engineering firms going bankrupt, taking with them the instutional knowledge they had built up over decades & leaving us dependent on foreign manufacturers for future rolling stock.
Comments
She did not win a majority, but its surely not correct to say she lost.
The Elizabeth line is expensive because it's not completely new so needed to integrate with existing systems (never a great idea in the first place even worse when they are multiple existing systems).
Basically we are crap at doing these type of projects and the Treasury makes it worse by not accepting the risk of cost overruns and then scrapping stuff for no good reason. HS2E has cost over £1bn in waterfall development costs that will now need to be redone because of the delays..
The unions remain wretched.
Mr. Sandpit, and the leader after Corbyn might be proposing rejoining.
Not to mention we'd be in a far worse economic position as the pandemic started.
And Ukraine would have significantly less weaponry.
Mrs May's deal looked awful at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, particularly in the light of Johnson's "oven ready" dog's breakfast, it was a work of genius.
Driverless cars is like Nuclear Fusion - allows x years away and unless someone comes up with a different approach (as first light seem to have done with Fusion) it will always be the same x years away.
They blow the "green" argument out the water I think.
How could that ever be "good"?
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
AI doesn't work that way - among other things, "AI" as it is currently used is nothing to do with what humans regard as intelligence.
Some years ago, there was a documentary about life on a US aircraft carrier. Planning moving the planes around is a big issue - the carriers are quite congested and the planes are worth (collectively) billions.
In a compartment of the carrier, they have a model of the carrier, complete with die cast models of the aircraft. Grown men push the models around to check for clearance, layout etc.
When asked, the chap in charge agreed that yes, they could try and have a computer system. But that would mean "training" it in all the details of the carrier, the physics of 3D space, the shapes of the aircraft etc. This was cheaper, simpler, provable to be correct and never break down. Also they get to take the "spare" models home for the kids.
And that's before we talk about the pollution from tyres and the upfront cost of an electric car.
@duponline @GeorgeWParker @clivecookson @BorisJohnson Instead Johnson gets:
a) a massive row with Brussels and looming threat of trade war
b) risks political backlash from One Nation grandees
c) continued shut-out of the one EU programme we wanted to join, the €95bn Horizon Europe prog /4
https://twitter.com/pmdfoster/status/1534445460441772032
If WFH (at least partial) becomes the rule, the idea of a central, single hub for offices will take a hit.
There are already a number of companies that have moved their offices out of central London, creating reverse commuting patterns - will this increase?
The cost of electric cars is continuing to fall - the crossover with ICE in cost is a few years down the road, but it is coming.
As to the tire pollution - an interesting point has been raised by a number ion manufacturers. Because the electric cars still require cooling for various components, they have air intakes, fans etc. Protected from dirt by filters. Many electric cars are provably cleaning the air.
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
Mrs May courld have gone EEA or similar with free movement. Brexit would have been done and everyone except to he swivell- eyed would have been content. Her assertion that Brexit means Brexit, when no one knew what Brexit meant, was foolhardy from day one.
"Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our prophet (pbuh). There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line." #chilling
https://twitter.com/maas_uk/status/1534243728096894977?s=21&t=zCx3IV6EpGNtKfxK2Tmj_Q
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
We need to grow our way out of inflation. We had more than a decade of government being able to borrow money virtually for free, of oceans of cash needing something secure to invest in, of big companies piling up cash reserves rather than investing.
So we could have set up Britain to be a production and technology powerhouse. Directly build the stuff we need (power, fibre broadband) and provide huge tax incentives to create and *manufacture* things like wind turbines and tidal power generation here for export.
Even now we could be doing that. Instead we are twatting about with "Free"ports as if the jobs they may create will be new and not just a transfer from somewhere else. This lot haven't a clue what they are doing, what this country needs or how to plan for the future.
THEY are wretched. Not the poor sodding workforce trying to keep food on the table who are suffering from the consequences of the government being shit.
I do find Johnson's continued backing for the DUP surprising. Has he actually started to feel guilty about his lies?
It is only post-privatisation and with the fuel price escalator making cars heavily taxed and rail ever more subsidised instead that people have been displaced onto rails.
How are you Augustus? Do you plan to continue gracing us with your presence?
Atb
PtP
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-02-19/a-day-in-the-life-of-3-million-london-commuters-in-1-minute has 3 million commuters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_London#:~:text=The majority of commuters to,these termini (860,000 daily). has 1 million
Mind you, there is the conversion of lampposts to charging stations. For some reason, the lamp posts in the UK have 20A or 32A supply. Even before going to LEDs, most of that is unused. Round my way, they have a steady program of replacing the lampposts with ones with a charger built in.
None of this means he shouldn't be got rid of now. We have a government that is aimless, devoid of ideas or plans lashing out in silly directions because they need some "red meat" for their more neaderthal supporters. Rwanda is a bloody stupid idea and deeply immoral to boot. Breaching the NIP would be idiotic and yet another problem in a very difficult economic situation. There is a total lack of focus on anything other than what the Mail headline will be the next day and a total lack of credibility because it is led by a proven liar.
There are very significant limitations on what our government or any government can do in the face of a large oil shock, inflation generated by QE, chaos in China distribution, the patchy recovery from Covid etc but they need to work out what they can do and do it. A government that is obsessed with its own survival and an opposition with nothing useful to say is not optimal.
Prior to the introduction of the fuel duty escalator how many did?
If we put it on a level economic playing field, so that cars and trains operate on a level basis and aren't subsidised or used as a cash cow then you wouldn't see millions a day wanting to use the railways, because you didn't for most of postwar Britain and the 'golden age' of pre-privatised railways.
They are converting street lights to provide integrated electrical charging points for cars.
The backstop was a deal, and worse it was a deal without a unilateral exit. That is utterly undemocratic and unacceptable as a matter of principle.
Do you get up every morning with an earnest vow to be even stupider than you were yesterday?
I am minded by confirmed stories of historical Labour and Union Baron corruption in rust-belt England, Wales and Scotland. I am also minded that in my sixty years I have seen just 23 years of non-Conservative led Governments.
I am confused - they all seem like nutters.
The hatred comes from the Fascist Muslim guy in the video. The tweet condemning him is from a group of moderate Muslims!
Since you didn't want to leave the Single Market, I can see why you might want that, but its not democratic. Democracy is more important, if you want to be in the Single Market then convince your fellow countrymen to vote for that and we can rejoin.
Not sure why Roger would call Twitter ultra right though.
It takes me back to university. Wander into the student union.... "Death To The West!".
The Polish society was useful - they were completely up for a fight with anyone. Even the Rugby types..
https://twitter.com/paulembery/status/1533784431818858498?s=21&t=zCx3IV6EpGNtKfxK2Tmj_Q
Beyond bleak. We are yielding to violent thugs. There is no hope for Britain. The Tories are as spineless as Labour
https://twitter.com/ottocrat/status/1534447809583366144
Your analogy of FLF's inertial confinement approach vs the apparently insoluble problem of magnetic confinement is a good one.
Here's another. Machine vision isn't the same problem as self driving, but it's closely related - and the same brute force computing techniques aren't particularly useful.
But elegant and promising ideas that look much more tractable are starting to emerge:
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-04-scientists-algorithm-assign-pixel-world.html
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/08/boris-johnson-tory-identity-crisis-conservative-party
"Brexit merged two antithetical forces: a Conservative party that traditionally convenes around pillars of the British establishment and a demagogic insurrection that defines itself as a scourge of the establishment. Johnson’s campaigning talent was to represent both things at once. But it was an illusion, a spell that can’t be recast once broken. No wonder so many Tory MPs are disoriented and alarmed. They know Johnson is a problem, but also that removing him will expose how much deeper the problem goes. They remade their party in the image of a leader without conscience, integrity or values beyond the desperate pursuit of power. So they don’t like this disreputable “Boris” character that they now see in front of them? They are looking in the mirror."
Apparently, that incident was responsible, in part for the formation of the EDL. The White Power scum thought, apparently, "Street violence & threats gets compliance. We like that. We should have some of that".
Note the way their demos were all about creating a "There will be trouble unless X is stopped" narrative?
EU membership had a unilateral exit, Article 50, and before Article 50 existed we could exit by unilaterally repealing the membership acts. The backstop had no unilateral exit. That is fundamentally undemocratic.
I don't actually agree that pushing the vote through rapidly was a mistake by the anti-Johnson side - if just 32 Conservative MPs had voted differently, he would have been gone. This creates a floor for the next vote. I am assuming that the Executive Committee of the 1922 will simply change the rules to have another one.
Eg the guy in the first video is the same guy who led the disturbing protests against the Batley and Spen teacher. That teacher now lives under a different identity, in fear of his life, and of his family’s life. For being a teacher
“Batley Grammar School
A year on from Prophet Muhammad Batley school row and teacher still in hiding as family 'at risk'”
https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/year-prophet-muhammad-batley-school-23493076
For context. This is a Shi'ite take on the life of the Prophet. And uses CGI faces. Sunnis don't like that. Nor the tale in general.
Not that that excuses any of it. I'm merely adding context.
Ignoring the reality is exactly how extremism flourishes.
Surely if their religion is so strong and that Allah/or other is the true god then he is more powerful than these trifling attacks.
Maybe subconsciously they aren’t actually sure and so they can’t risk any criticism in. Case it shows they are wrong?
Surely a “mature ideology” can ignore and laugh off these things……
Having said that, it seems remarkable that he hasn't crossed the line into criminal offences like incitement to violence etc as the hook handed guy did who ended up in jail.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theboltonnews.co.uk/news/20189479.amp/
That’s all irrelevant, really. The fact is they are imposing a de facto blasphemy law in the UK. Anything they don’t like, they come out and shout, and every single time we yield. So it works, so they do it again
Meanwhile they can menace a teacher - for teaching western values - to such an extent he has to hide away for years - possibly for the rest of his life - along with his family - in case he is beheaded
And they do this with total impunity
https://twitter.com/kajakallas/status/1534219695410249728
It is simply a matter of utterly absolute faith. Which is nearly extinct in Christian religious practice in the UK. You can find stuff like that in US Christianity, though.
To understand the mind set - your religion is utterly, perfectly right. It is exactly aligned with God and the universe. Everyone else is Wrong. From there, it is very easy to say that you are saving the world by....
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theboltonnews.co.uk/news/20189479.amp/
This is the British stupidity, our sickness of the last 50 years. We need better infrastructure. Roads. Railways. Fibre Broadband. Power Generation. Public facilities (schools, hospitals). All of which generate a clear return on investment. Which drive economic productivity and output.
And yet all we hear is "who will pay for it" "how much will it cost" "why should I pay more taxes for that". Its always the cost side of the equation and no consideration for the benefit side. And it has become the same with big companies - instead of investing they pile cash reserves up and pay more dividends in the immediate term with little consideration for the future.
In direct expenditure terms, sure: the main tax drivers pay is on fuel & that raised about £26billion in 2021. Vehicle exise duty raised just under £7billion. At the same time, about £12billion was spent on road maintenance that year (source for the first is UK gov website, the latter comes from statistica.) So on the face of it, drivers are paying £33billion for £12billion of services.
However, that completely ignores other consequential costs of running the road network. In particuliar, the cost of road accidents is crushing. Current government stats ( https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1021949/ras60003.ods ) estimates that the economic cost alone (ignoring the human cost of pain + suffering!) of road accidents in 2021 was £10billion.
So including accident costs drives the cost of the road network to £22billion, even if we ignore the personal cost of the injuries sustained & only care about the economic impact (& that was in a pandemic year: the cost in 2018 was £13billion.)
Are there other externalities we’re not considering? Obviously there’s the cost of pollution which we know has major impacts on death rates in cities due to asthma & other diseases. Noise pollution is a significant cost, although it’s difficult to measure directly. Direct asthma treatment costs the NHS about a £billion / year. Total economic costs are probably at least double that. Hard to know what portion is caused by the road network, but it must be sizable.
Congestion costs are very significant economically - simply by blocking up the road network drivers cost the UK billions a year. Recent estimates seem to be in the £7billion a year region ( https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/94871/traffic-jams-costs-in-the-uk ), although I image that’s a crude number - probably just counting lost hours vs incomes. Still, that is almost totally wasted time, so...
So looking at the numbers, based solely on the externalities that can be directly accounted for (accidents, congestion), drivers are barely paying their way - they paid £33billion in return for £29billion of costs. Adding in reasonable estimates for other externalities (eg, asthma costs the NHS £1billion / year, knock on economic costs are probably twice that, maybe the road network is responsible for a third of that? & so on for all the others) suggests that drivers might be just about paying ther way?
The moment we include any accounting for the pain & suffering imposed on people due to road accidents the cost argument is blown out of the water of course. The UK government statistics include estimates for these costs based on standard economic approaches to estimating them based on revealed preferences.
(If I’ve missed any obvious externalities of driving that we can account for do point them out!)
https://twitter.com/bnonews/status/1534459516728786945?s=21&t=SNsPHLzYbMBz4NIE_dRGVg
Nothing undermines the Union with Scotland quite like Boris Johnson.
If he's that concerned he should quit. For the good of the Union.
HS2 is very large in scale (they've just opened the first stage of a temporary 50-mile haul road to keep traffic off local roads), but not much of it is railway-specific atm.
https://mediacentre.hs2.org.uk/news/hs2-completes-first-stage-of-50-mile-temporary-access-road-in-bucks
We need to see some actual cost reductions.
Don’t have a reference to hand though.