These predictions are decidedly “brave” given that parts of the EU are slipping into recession right now and Germany is facing an energy crisis which could wipe 12% off its GDP
“Germany’s economy faces losing around 12 per cent of its annual output — some €429bn — if Russian natural gas supplies stopped abruptly, according to a new study by an adviser to the government.”
Everywhere that is an energy importer (unlike they've been taking advantage of cheap Russian LNG cargoes, *cough* Japan *cough*), is going to see very severe impacts from rising commodity prices.
I suspect (unless the war ends soon) that the UK, Italy and Germany will all be in recession by year end, and that France will only avoid it by a whisker.
The US definitely won’t be in a recession though, after Biden changed the definition of the word ‘recession’.
Did he - or is he just quibbling about a definition that's been around for ages ?
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-strong-us-labor-market-suggests-the-economy-is-not-in-recession/ ...In the United States, the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER’s) Business Cycle Dating Committee uses a range of factors to determine when the economy is in a recession. The committee defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months.” In fact, the committee explicitly rejects the outdated definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.
The NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee explicitly rejects the outdated definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. The committee uses real GDP alongside many other indicators to assess economic activity. When using real GDP, it also uses real gross domestic income (GDI), taking the average of the two. NBER explicitly states that “equal weight” is given to the two measures. Historically, these two measures tend to move in similar directions, and their difference is usually quite small. However, in the first quarter of 2022, real GDI increased by 1.8 percent, while real GDP declined by 1.6 percent....
Aren't you being as dishonest as Biden with your comment ?
He's trying to get people not to use the traditional definition, and the only reason he's doing it now is that he knows that the traditional definition will be met very soon...
Yes, as I said, he's quibbling.
But the spin that Biden has "changed the definition of recession" is just Republican bollocks.
A propos of nothing, (inspired by a cornflake short of a multipack) why don't supermarkets sell variety bags of fruit? Living on my own, I don't want a pack of 10 bananas, or 5 apples, or 15 satsumas. A pack of 6 pieces of random fruit would be good though.
I think that's a reasonably good idea, but the stumbling block is that for large numbers of people there'd end up being at least one item they didn't want.
I have seen some supermarkets sell similar sorts of packs of mixed vegetables, marketed as enough for a stew.
The problem is that you're selling fruit intended for being kept at home and eaten at your leisure. So it can't just be hoyed into a bag as squish happens. And as you say someone will want x and get y and complain - assuming they want t pay the £lots it would cost.
There is a good reason you can buy mixed prepped veg or mixed chopped fruit intended for immediate consumption and not a mix of various things intended to be kept. Farm shops can get away with it because people like to pay for the experience. Would do exciting things to the profit numbers of the Tesco fruit buyer, lets put it that way.
You could just get somebody on the shop floor to put selections of fruit in a paper bag and sell them with a mark up.
Most fruit is sold loose as well as pre-packed - put your own fruit in the bag. Most of the supermarkets have online ordering - if you order 3 apples 2 pears 4 bananas then someone will pick that for you.
So suddenly its solvable.
If you want to buy fruit loose you already can. The OP asked for a mixed pack - instead of a plastic bag of apples a bag with some of this some that and some of the other ready to buy. We haven't solved that...
These predictions are decidedly “brave” given that parts of the EU are slipping into recession right now and Germany is facing an energy crisis which could wipe 12% off its GDP
“Germany’s economy faces losing around 12 per cent of its annual output — some €429bn — if Russian natural gas supplies stopped abruptly, according to a new study by an adviser to the government.”
Everywhere that is an energy importer (unlike they've been taking advantage of cheap Russian LNG cargoes, *cough* Japan *cough*), is going to see very severe impacts from rising commodity prices.
I suspect (unless the war ends soon) that the UK, Italy and Germany will all be in recession by year end, and that France will only avoid it by a whisker.
The US definitely won’t be in a recession though, after Biden changed the definition of the word ‘recession’.
Did he - or is he just quibbling about a definition that's been around for ages ?
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-strong-us-labor-market-suggests-the-economy-is-not-in-recession/ ...In the United States, the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER’s) Business Cycle Dating Committee uses a range of factors to determine when the economy is in a recession. The committee defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months.” In fact, the committee explicitly rejects the outdated definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.
The NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee explicitly rejects the outdated definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. The committee uses real GDP alongside many other indicators to assess economic activity. When using real GDP, it also uses real gross domestic income (GDI), taking the average of the two. NBER explicitly states that “equal weight” is given to the two measures. Historically, these two measures tend to move in similar directions, and their difference is usually quite small. However, in the first quarter of 2022, real GDI increased by 1.8 percent, while real GDP declined by 1.6 percent....
Aren't you being as dishonest as Biden with your comment ?
He's trying to get people not to use the traditional definition, and the only reason he's doing it now is that he knows that the traditional definition will be met very soon...
Yes, as I said, he's quibbling.
But the spin that Biden has "changed the definition of recession" is just Republican bollocks.
It's a bit of a stretch, but it's not bollocks - unless the "new" definition already had some traction? Certainly it's new to me, but IANAE.
A propos of nothing, (inspired by a cornflake short of a multipack) why don't supermarkets sell variety bags of fruit? Living on my own, I don't want a pack of 10 bananas, or 5 apples, or 15 satsumas. A pack of 6 pieces of random fruit would be good though.
I think that's a reasonably good idea, but the stumbling block is that for large numbers of people there'd end up being at least one item they didn't want.
I have seen some supermarkets sell similar sorts of packs of mixed vegetables, marketed as enough for a stew.
The problem is that you're selling fruit intended for being kept at home and eaten at your leisure. So it can't just be hoyed into a bag as squish happens. And as you say someone will want x and get y and complain - assuming they want t pay the £lots it would cost.
There is a good reason you can buy mixed prepped veg or mixed chopped fruit intended for immediate consumption and not a mix of various things intended to be kept. Farm shops can get away with it because people like to pay for the experience. Would do exciting things to the profit numbers of the Tesco fruit buyer, lets put it that way.
You could just get somebody on the shop floor to put selections of fruit in a paper bag and sell them with a mark up.
Most fruit is sold loose as well as pre-packed - put your own fruit in the bag. Most of the supermarkets have online ordering - if you order 3 apples 2 pears 4 bananas then someone will pick that for you.
So suddenly its solvable.
If you want to buy fruit loose you already can. The OP asked for a mixed pack - instead of a plastic bag of apples a bag with some of this some that and some of the other ready to buy. We haven't solved that...
Problem: - Fruit is available loose - If you choose your own selection someone will pack it - @dixiedean sees value in being able to pick a random selection off the shelf
Solution: - Package random selections on the shop floor
You were trying to over-complicate something that has an easy answer.
The challenge now, is to get everyone (except Russia and North Korea) on board with the replacement.
Go to Mars instead of low earth orbit.
Lunar orbital gateway, infrastructure on the moons surface, build a mass driver, head to Mars from there. Should have been done 3 or 4 decades ago
Wait: I thought a moon base was useless for getting to Mars.
Not if you want to go regularly and cheaply. Why waste money carrying shit loads of fuel to break through Earths atmosphere? Mass drivers, you could be firing supplies etc at Mars as regularly as commuter trains
Unless Mars is desperately short of moon rock I see a flaw in this plan.
Water on the moon can be turned into hydrogen - used in rockets. Ambitious but doable.
So can water on Mars.
How much water is there on Mars? Features such as the Recurrent Slope Linea were recently seen to be evidence of flowing seasonal water, but that is very heavily debated. Water might be very common, or exceptionally rare, even as underground ice. It's science at its best, where the same evidence is examined by brilliant people and different opinions formed.
They do agree on one thing though: we need more data,
The ice caps are proven and by themselves offer vast supplies of water.
The challenge now, is to get everyone (except Russia and North Korea) on board with the replacement.
Go to Mars instead of low earth orbit.
Lunar orbital gateway, infrastructure on the moons surface, build a mass driver, head to Mars from there. Should have been done 3 or 4 decades ago
Wait: I thought a moon base was useless for getting to Mars.
Not if you want to go regularly and cheaply. Why waste money carrying shit loads of fuel to break through Earths atmosphere? Mass drivers, you could be firing supplies etc at Mars as regularly as commuter trains
Unless Mars is desperately short of moon rock I see a flaw in this plan.
Water on the moon can be turned into hydrogen - used in rockets. Ambitious but doable.
So can water on Mars.
How much water is there on Mars? Features such as the Recurrent Slope Linea were recently seen to be evidence of flowing seasonal water, but that is very heavily debated. Water might be very common, or exceptionally rare, even as underground ice. It's science at its best, where the same evidence is examined by brilliant people and different opinions formed.
They do agree on one thing though: we need more data,
The ice caps are proven and by themselves offer vast supplies of water.
Wiki I know, but 'vast' is very debatable: "In 2018, scientists reported the discovery of a subglacial lake on Mars, 1.5 km (0.93 mi) below the southern polar ice cap, with a horizontal extent of about 20 km (12 mi), the first known stable body of liquid water on the planet,[65][66] but subsequent work has questioned this detection.[67][68]"
'Proven' is a rather strong thing to say given our current knowledge. Certainly not enough to risk sending people without some solid ground-truthing.
There's other issues with 'water'. Look at Earth: you could look at the polar caps, the Dead Sea, the Atlantic or the Great Lakes and see water. But the water in each is in very different forms, and requires different treatments / processes to extract and use. This is particularly important when some satellite resources can apparently confuse hydroxides with water.
My own 'guess' is that there is lots of water in or on the 'cold' planets. Accessing that water and using it are very different matters, though,
I have a new word to offer: Prattsplaining. This is posting a strawman argument in a particularly sneering way then ending the sentence with an emoji of a person with their hand over their face like thus: 🤦♂️
I would like to propose Teensplaining. Teenagers who earnestly argue from the basis of totally being the first generation ever to experience angst, anything awful or the remotest existential threat or dread.
Splainsplaining - where someone explains something so that opponents of the answer come up with a bizarre excuse why speaking at all was invalid, so they don’t have to deal with the answer.
Brexplaining. Explaining why everything is the fault of brexit, whether or not it is true.
The challenge now, is to get everyone (except Russia and North Korea) on board with the replacement.
Go to Mars instead of low earth orbit.
Lunar orbital gateway, infrastructure on the moons surface, build a mass driver, head to Mars from there. Should have been done 3 or 4 decades ago
Wait: I thought a moon base was useless for getting to Mars.
Not if you want to go regularly and cheaply. Why waste money carrying shit loads of fuel to break through Earths atmosphere? Mass drivers, you could be firing supplies etc at Mars as regularly as commuter trains
Unless Mars is desperately short of moon rock I see a flaw in this plan.
Water on the moon can be turned into hydrogen - used in rockets. Ambitious but doable.
So can water on Mars.
How much water is there on Mars? Features such as the Recurrent Slope Linea were recently seen to be evidence of flowing seasonal water, but that is very heavily debated. Water might be very common, or exceptionally rare, even as underground ice. It's science at its best, where the same evidence is examined by brilliant people and different opinions formed.
They do agree on one thing though: we need more data,
And there's a lot of water on Mars. The detail will be important, but it will almost certainly be massively more economic to extract locally than send from the Moon.
One thing I really don't get is bananas wrapped in plastic bags. They already come with their own natural wrapping, and the plastic only seems to serve to make them sweat if you leave them in it.
Just have a bunch loose, what do you need a bunch in plastic for?
Some supermarkets have stopped using the plastic bags and have found a different way to attach a label to the bunch.
There are specialist shops that sell loose fruit and vegetables in the quantity you choose. There are called fruiterers. Most towns have one.
I have a new word to offer: Prattsplaining. This is posting a strawman argument in a particularly sneering way then ending the sentence with an emoji of a person with their hand over their face like thus: 🤦♂️
I would like to propose Teensplaining. Teenagers who earnestly argue from the basis of totally being the first generation ever to experience angst, anything awful or the remotest existential threat or dread.
Splainsplaining - where someone explains something so that opponents of the answer come up with a bizarre excuse why speaking at all was invalid, so they don’t have to deal with the answer.
Brexplaining. Explaining why everything is the fault of brexit, whether or not it is true.
More like pointing out something cannot be the fault of Brexit because the same delays or shortages are also seen in Uzbekistan or Estonia.
A propos of nothing, (inspired by a cornflake short of a multipack) why don't supermarkets sell variety bags of fruit? Living on my own, I don't want a pack of 10 bananas, or 5 apples, or 15 satsumas. A pack of 6 pieces of random fruit would be good though.
I think that's a reasonably good idea, but the stumbling block is that for large numbers of people there'd end up being at least one item they didn't want.
I have seen some supermarkets sell similar sorts of packs of mixed vegetables, marketed as enough for a stew.
The problem is that you're selling fruit intended for being kept at home and eaten at your leisure. So it can't just be hoyed into a bag as squish happens. And as you say someone will want x and get y and complain - assuming they want t pay the £lots it would cost.
There is a good reason you can buy mixed prepped veg or mixed chopped fruit intended for immediate consumption and not a mix of various things intended to be kept. Farm shops can get away with it because people like to pay for the experience. Would do exciting things to the profit numbers of the Tesco fruit buyer, lets put it that way.
You could just get somebody on the shop floor to put selections of fruit in a paper bag and sell them with a mark up.
Most fruit is sold loose as well as pre-packed - put your own fruit in the bag. Most of the supermarkets have online ordering - if you order 3 apples 2 pears 4 bananas then someone will pick that for you.
So suddenly its solvable.
If you want to buy fruit loose you already can. The OP asked for a mixed pack - instead of a plastic bag of apples a bag with some of this some that and some of the other ready to buy. We haven't solved that...
Mixed fruit is already sold next to the sandwiches: apples, grapes and strawberries or what have you.
A propos of nothing, (inspired by a cornflake short of a multipack) why don't supermarkets sell variety bags of fruit? Living on my own, I don't want a pack of 10 bananas, or 5 apples, or 15 satsumas. A pack of 6 pieces of random fruit would be good though.
I think that's a reasonably good idea, but the stumbling block is that for large numbers of people there'd end up being at least one item they didn't want.
I have seen some supermarkets sell similar sorts of packs of mixed vegetables, marketed as enough for a stew.
The problem is that you're selling fruit intended for being kept at home and eaten at your leisure. So it can't just be hoyed into a bag as squish happens. And as you say someone will want x and get y and complain - assuming they want t pay the £lots it would cost.
There is a good reason you can buy mixed prepped veg or mixed chopped fruit intended for immediate consumption and not a mix of various things intended to be kept. Farm shops can get away with it because people like to pay for the experience. Would do exciting things to the profit numbers of the Tesco fruit buyer, lets put it that way.
You could just get somebody on the shop floor to put selections of fruit in a paper bag and sell them with a mark up.
Most fruit is sold loose as well as pre-packed - put your own fruit in the bag. Most of the supermarkets have online ordering - if you order 3 apples 2 pears 4 bananas then someone will pick that for you.
So suddenly its solvable.
If you want to buy fruit loose you already can. The OP asked for a mixed pack - instead of a plastic bag of apples a bag with some of this some that and some of the other ready to buy. We haven't solved that...
Problem: - Fruit is available loose - If you choose your own selection someone will pack it - @dixiedean sees value in being able to pick a random selection off the shelf
Solution: - Package random selections on the shop floor
You were trying to over-complicate something that has an easy answer.
But *that is already available*. Dixie wanted a pre-packed multipack solution as an alternative. Which isn't available. Because it is overly-complicated.
The challenge now, is to get everyone (except Russia and North Korea) on board with the replacement.
Go to Mars instead of low earth orbit.
Lunar orbital gateway, infrastructure on the moons surface, build a mass driver, head to Mars from there. Should have been done 3 or 4 decades ago
Wait: I thought a moon base was useless for getting to Mars.
Not if you want to go regularly and cheaply. Why waste money carrying shit loads of fuel to break through Earths atmosphere? Mass drivers, you could be firing supplies etc at Mars as regularly as commuter trains
Unless Mars is desperately short of moon rock I see a flaw in this plan.
Water on the moon can be turned into hydrogen - used in rockets. Ambitious but doable.
So can water on Mars.
How much water is there on Mars? Features such as the Recurrent Slope Linea were recently seen to be evidence of flowing seasonal water, but that is very heavily debated. Water might be very common, or exceptionally rare, even as underground ice. It's science at its best, where the same evidence is examined by brilliant people and different opinions formed.
They do agree on one thing though: we need more data,
And there's a lot of water on Mars. The detail will be important, but it will almost certainly be massively more economic to extract locally than send from the Moon.
Yep, Moxie has been a brilliant little experiment. But AIUI that got oxygen from CO2, not water.
But again, saying 'there's a lot of water on Mars' is currently like saying there's a lot of water in the Sahara. It needs ground-truthing to see how much and how usable it is or, more importantly, how we can extract it and make it useful. What if the water is super-saline, for instance?
"As far as I am aware, no government business was discussed."
I realise that BJ's appreciation of the duties of foreign secretary were vestigial but it seems extraordinary that he wasn't aware of the nature of what was discussed.
So a third of Tory voters in the Red Wall think Keir would be a better PM than Truss? Is this historically high or not? Anyone got anything to compare it to?
A propos of nothing, (inspired by a cornflake short of a multipack) why don't supermarkets sell variety bags of fruit? Living on my own, I don't want a pack of 10 bananas, or 5 apples, or 15 satsumas. A pack of 6 pieces of random fruit would be good though.
I think that's a reasonably good idea, but the stumbling block is that for large numbers of people there'd end up being at least one item they didn't want.
I have seen some supermarkets sell similar sorts of packs of mixed vegetables, marketed as enough for a stew.
The problem is that you're selling fruit intended for being kept at home and eaten at your leisure. So it can't just be hoyed into a bag as squish happens. And as you say someone will want x and get y and complain - assuming they want t pay the £lots it would cost.
There is a good reason you can buy mixed prepped veg or mixed chopped fruit intended for immediate consumption and not a mix of various things intended to be kept. Farm shops can get away with it because people like to pay for the experience. Would do exciting things to the profit numbers of the Tesco fruit buyer, lets put it that way.
You could just get somebody on the shop floor to put selections of fruit in a paper bag and sell them with a mark up.
Most fruit is sold loose as well as pre-packed - put your own fruit in the bag. Most of the supermarkets have online ordering - if you order 3 apples 2 pears 4 bananas then someone will pick that for you.
So suddenly its solvable.
If you want to buy fruit loose you already can. The OP asked for a mixed pack - instead of a plastic bag of apples a bag with some of this some that and some of the other ready to buy. We haven't solved that...
Problem: - Fruit is available loose - If you choose your own selection someone will pack it - @dixiedean sees value in being able to pick a random selection off the shelf
Solution: - Package random selections on the shop floor
You were trying to over-complicate something that has an easy answer.
But *that is already available*. Dixie wanted a pre-packed multipack solution as an alternative. Which isn't available. Because it is overly-complicated.
It's not already available. You can't turn up in a supermarket and pick a pre-bagged fruit selection off the shelf, neither can you click a button online to order a random selection of fruit to a certain weight.
That's a huge lead for Truss in the Red Wall, Tories looks like Truss is your best hope
Fag packet but..... On those figures, 5 behind Starmer with a new pm bounce to possibly follow against ths baseline VI... maybe she could look at holding half the gains and maybe cling on in number 10...... the next election may well come down to timing/risk
In "Earthlight", Arthur C. Clarke wrote: "Man could not do without the Moon. It had been his first bridgehead in space and was still the key to the planets. The liners that plied from world to world got all their propellant mass here, filling their great tanks with the finely divided dust which the ionic rockets would spit out in electrified jets. By obtaining the dust from the Moon, and not having to lift it through the immense gravity field of Earth, it had been possible to reduce the cost of space travel ten-fold. Indeed, without the Moon as a refueling base, economical space-flight would never have been achieved." (source: Chapter Five)
Comments
But the spin that Biden has "changed the definition of recession" is just Republican bollocks.
Gas;
Winter ‘22 delivery ~£5/therm
Looks to me like the price cap is heading towards £3700/typical household.
Ouch
- Fruit is available loose
- If you choose your own selection someone will pack it
- @dixiedean sees value in being able to pick a random selection off the shelf
Solution:
- Package random selections on the shop floor
You were trying to over-complicate something that has an easy answer.
"In 2018, scientists reported the discovery of a subglacial lake on Mars, 1.5 km (0.93 mi) below the southern polar ice cap, with a horizontal extent of about 20 km (12 mi), the first known stable body of liquid water on the planet,[65][66] but subsequent work has questioned this detection.[67][68]"
'Proven' is a rather strong thing to say given our current knowledge. Certainly not enough to risk sending people without some solid ground-truthing.
There's other issues with 'water'. Look at Earth: you could look at the polar caps, the Dead Sea, the Atlantic or the Great Lakes and see water. But the water in each is in very different forms, and requires different treatments / processes to extract and use. This is particularly important when some satellite resources can apparently confuse hydroxides with water.
My own 'guess' is that there is lots of water in or on the 'cold' planets. Accessing that water and using it are very different matters, though,
Paltry though it might be.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-perseverance-mars-rover-extracts-first-oxygen-from-red-planet
And there's a lot of water on Mars. The detail will be important, but it will almost certainly be massively more economic to extract locally than send from the Moon.
Labour lead by 11% in the Red Wall.
Red Wall Voting Intention (25-26 July):
Labour 45% (-1)
Conservative 34% (+2)
Liberal Democrat 10% (–)
Green 5% (+1)
Reform UK 3% (-4)
Other 3% (+2)
Plaid Cymru 1% (+1)
Changes +/- 11 July
https://t.co/xaox1uj8zA https://t.co/799VMX6Oty
Liz Truss 38%
Rishi Sunak 33%
Don't Know 29%
Keir Starmer 44%
Rishi Sunak 29%
Don't Know 27%
Keir Starmer 40%
Liz Truss 35%
Don't Know 25%
Liz Truss 47%
Rishi Sunak 34%
Don't Know 20%
Rishi Sunak 48%
Keir Starmer 33%
Don't Know 27%
Liz Truss 54%
Keir Starmer 27%
Don't Know 20%
But again, saying 'there's a lot of water on Mars' is currently like saying there's a lot of water in the Sahara. It needs ground-truthing to see how much and how usable it is or, more importantly, how we can extract it and make it useful.
What if the water is super-saline, for instance?
I realise that BJ's appreciation of the duties of foreign secretary were vestigial but it seems extraordinary that he wasn't aware of the nature of what was discussed.
NEW THREAD
I think I am all debated out. Is this the last one?
https://twitter.com/MichaelWorobey/status/1551949557205938176
Our preprints on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 have now been peer reviewed and published as a pair of Research Articles by @ScienceMagazine
Well worth a read for those still interested.
More recent proposals mostly rely on extracting oxygen, and other elements from Moon dust, but the gravitational benefit would still be there. Here's an example of more recent thinking: https://scitechdaily.com/lunar-soil-can-be-used-to-generate-oxygen-and-fuel-for-moon-astronauts/
I don't know whether the idea of getting fuel on the Moon makes economic sense, but I wouldn't dismiss the idea, given that gravitational advantage.