Bear in mind that following the sham referendum Zaphorizhzhia is part of Russia as far as Putin is concerned. Taking care of their new citizens in the same way they took care of their Chechens in the 1990s.
As for the bridge, here’s what the railway looks like today. Not sure I’d be putting trains across it. The blown out fuel train is still there.
And contrary to the expectations of @JosiasJessop the track is ballasted.
So there's a huge load on it.
I am not sure I would want to go on a train across that bridge. It might suddenly decide to join the submarine service.
(Warning: rail geekery ahead):
I am surprised by that. For ballast to work properly, it needs to be deep: the heavier the expected load (and speed), the greater the depth. Slab concrete track can be much shallower, and therefore weigh less. Depending on the type ballast weighs 1 to 2 tonnes per cubic metre, and the base needs to be a foot to more thick *under* the sleepers. (All from memory, so should check...) This really increases the load on the bridge.
There are other problems with ballasted track: it costs more to maintain, and alignment can move on curves. Also, in ye olden days it was harder to remove ballast, so fresh ballast used to be dumped on top, raising the track level significantly over the years until the tops of trains start hitting lineside structures. This is less of a problem nowadays, with machines to clean and renew ballast that can dig down to depth.
I think HS2 have opted for concrete slab track for most of the way.
Spitballing, I can see that ballast may have helped by acting as a blanket that kept the worst of the heat from the flames from the steel. Perhaps.
(Incidentally, I believe the first ever 'modern' slab concrete track was laid by slip forming in the 1960s near Duffield in Derby. In the 1990s the concrete base was still visible. I've no idea if it's been broken up since then. Derby was also famously where the first steel rail was used - without the railway knowing...)
All you’d ever want to know about ballast (and a little bit more)…
Oh, I could continue, although I've forgotten a lot.
(I must still have some books about this stuff somewhere in the garage. For anyone wanting to know about the topic in general: Andrew Dow's 'Railway - British Track Since 1804' is sublimely brilliant.)
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
Morning again all, and something espewcially for @dixiedean (alas):
'Headteachers across the country say they cannot fill vital teaching assistant vacancies and that support staff are taking second jobs in supermarkets to survive because their wages are “just a joke”.
Schools are reporting that increasing numbers of teaching assistants are leaving because they will not be able to pay for high energy bills and afford food this winter. And with job ads often attracting no applications at all, heads fear they will be impossible to replace. They warn this will have a serious impact on children in the classroom, especially those with special educational needs, and will make it increasingly hard for teachers to focus on teaching.'
Yes. Just read that. Tallies with the situation in my school. The other point is that the job of a TA is to build relationships with kids who are struggling. And often have very complex physical, mental or emotional needs. This can't be done by agency staff on week long contracts with no experience, training or qualifications whatsoever. Where they exist
Mrs RP and her Scottish colleagues threatened strike action to get a pay rise from fuck all to a little more than fuck all. Their role is simply not valued despite being critical to the operation of schools on their ultra-tight budgets.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
It is tedious that there isn't a more neutral and accurate term than NIMBY available. I am not one, both because I have never in 30 years living in the countryside objected to or even commented on a planning application, and because I object to loss of natural habitat in let's say Lincolnshire, where I have never actually been, and indeed in France and Antarctica.
There isn't a solution. We are growing like a culture in a petri dish, and absent forced killing and/or sterilisation there is nothing to be done about it till we gobble up all remaining natural habitat, and die horribly off.
And preserving natural habitat, or natural beauty, of an area is an externality that isn’t priced into the market such that without planning controls it would be disregarded. Driving about the States I have seen the consequences, factories and power stations plonked down wherever it was industrially most convenient even in spots of relative environmental beauty or value, large advertising hoardings erected on massive poles wherever they can be seen from a main road, long strips of ugly malls sprawling around every town.
The Americans presumably feel they have tons of space and very pro-business politics, but the outcome isn’t to make it a more attractive place, and attractiveness does have value in terms of mental well-being, tourism, residential desirability and environmentally; it’s just that the market can ignore almost all of these.
Has anyone watched This England on Sky? A relatively sympathetic portrayal of the utter chaos in Downing Street, but one that brought back a lot of buried anger and horror at how bad the 12 months from March 2020 were.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
We also need to rebalance the economy, or "level up" to coin a phrase, so new towns and new employment should be concentrated in less advantaged regions.
Has anyone watched This England on Sky? A relatively sympathetic portrayal of the utter chaos in Downing Street, but one that brought back a lot of buried anger and horror at how bad the 12 months from March 2020 were.
Yes I watched it this week. Compelling but not easy viewing!
Does anyone know how the £45 billion figure for the cost of tax cuts in the mini budget was derived. How much for abolishing NI rises? How much for abolishing Corporation tax rises? Where does the rest come from? I know the 45p rate was priced at £2 billion.
It's in Table 4.2 of the Growth Plan document published by HMG, the cost of policy decisions for fiscal year 2026-27.
The NI and corporation tax changes are the two biggest, about £34bn combined.
Thanks.
The scary thing is that what spooked Mr Market was the abolition of planned, future tax increases rather than cuts in existing taxes. So Mr Market wants either taxes to increase or government spending to be cut. This government won't do the first and will struggle to do the second.
Remember that Rishi had already announced the income tax basic rate cut to 19p so there is no reason for that to have spooked the markets, or not on its own. It was the new stuff (cancellation of Rishi's rises and 45p) that did the damage.
The other reason to discount [sic] the 19p cut is that Mr/Ms Market will know that it's bollocks anyway as inflation will take care of it, with the tax allowance being unchanged.
The markets reacted to the generally insouciant attitude to more long-term debt, rather than any single measure - rushing the announcement for no good reason without getting round to the overall financial strategy. The general impression given was a sort of Latin American "who cares about the markets" attitude. If they'd just done the energy cap (and reaped any popular reward for that) and then did daring tax cuts two months later together with a plan for paying for them, that would have been politically more viable.
The long-term strategy announcement is probably their best shot at regaining control of the situation. If it sounds credible, even if the individual measures are unpopular, the markets will calm down. For example, the 3% of GDP for defence is timetabled for 2030, I believe. A freeze for 5 years would save quite a bit - "Britain is best defended after establishing a strong financial base", etc. The Tories do have defence spending hawks, but they are outnumbered by MPs who simply don't want to be 25% behind in the polls.
Bear in mind that following the sham referendum Zaphorizhzhia is part of Russia as far as Putin is concerned. Taking care of their new citizens in the same way they took care of their Chechens in the 1990s.
As for the bridge, here’s what the railway looks like today. Not sure I’d be putting trains across it. The blown out fuel train is still there.
And contrary to the expectations of @JosiasJessop the track is ballasted.
So there's a huge load on it.
I am not sure I would want to go on a train across that bridge. It might suddenly decide to join the submarine service.
(Warning: rail geekery ahead):
I am surprised by that. For ballast to work properly, it needs to be deep: the heavier the expected load (and speed), the greater the depth. Slab concrete track can be much shallower, and therefore weigh less. Depending on the type ballast weighs 1 to 2 tonnes per cubic metre, and the base needs to be a foot to more thick *under* the sleepers. (All from memory, so should check...) This really increases the load on the bridge.
There are other problems with ballasted track: it costs more to maintain, and alignment can move on curves. Also, in ye olden days it was harder to remove ballast, so fresh ballast used to be dumped on top, raising the track level significantly over the years until the tops of trains start hitting lineside structures. This is less of a problem nowadays, with machines to clean and renew ballast that can dig down to depth.
I think HS2 have opted for concrete slab track for most of the way.
Spitballing, I can see that ballast may have helped by acting as a blanket that kept the worst of the heat from the flames from the steel. Perhaps.
(Incidentally, I believe the first ever 'modern' slab concrete track was laid by slip forming in the 1960s near Duffield in Derby. In the 1990s the concrete base was still visible. I've no idea if it's been broken up since then. Derby was also famously where the first steel rail was used - without the railway knowing...)
All you’d ever want to know about ballast (and a little bit more)…
Oh, I could continue, although I've forgotten a lot.
(I must still have some books about this stuff somewhere in the garage. For anyone wanting to know about the topic in general: Andrew Dow's 'Railway - British Track Since 1804' is sublimely brilliant.)
Has anyone watched This England on Sky? A relatively sympathetic portrayal of the utter chaos in Downing Street, but one that brought back a lot of buried anger and horror at how bad the 12 months from March 2020 were.
Been meaning to get around to it, will stick it on after we finish HotD next week.
Has anyone watched This England on Sky? A relatively sympathetic portrayal of the utter chaos in Downing Street, but one that brought back a lot of buried anger and horror at how bad the 12 months from March 2020 were.
Been meaning to get around to it, will stick it on after we finish HotD next week.
Its very good. Although they needed better makeup on KenBran's face to hide the fat padding added.
Has anyone watched This England on Sky? A relatively sympathetic portrayal of the utter chaos in Downing Street, but one that brought back a lot of buried anger and horror at how bad the 12 months from March 2020 were.
No but it brings to mind a thought I had about Truss.
She's trying to play the role of Thatcher. The trouble is she is really playing the caricatured Thatcher as performed by Gillian Anderson, Meryl Streep and others. I'm still not convinced we've seen an accurate dramatisation of the Iron Lady.
In other moaning about the media why are Ukrainian war videos being demonetised by youtube. Denys Davidov is getting about 1m views a days for his updates. His reasonableness in the face of barbarism is admirable.
Bear in mind that following the sham referendum Zaphorizhzhia is part of Russia as far as Putin is concerned. Taking care of their new citizens in the same way they took care of their Chechens in the 1990s.
As for the bridge, here’s what the railway looks like today. Not sure I’d be putting trains across it. The blown out fuel train is still there.
And contrary to the expectations of @JosiasJessop the track is ballasted.
So there's a huge load on it.
I am not sure I would want to go on a train across that bridge. It might suddenly decide to join the submarine service.
(Warning: rail geekery ahead):
I am surprised by that. For ballast to work properly, it needs to be deep: the heavier the expected load (and speed), the greater the depth. Slab concrete track can be much shallower, and therefore weigh less. Depending on the type ballast weighs 1 to 2 tonnes per cubic metre, and the base needs to be a foot to more thick *under* the sleepers. (All from memory, so should check...) This really increases the load on the bridge.
There are other problems with ballasted track: it costs more to maintain, and alignment can move on curves. Also, in ye olden days it was harder to remove ballast, so fresh ballast used to be dumped on top, raising the track level significantly over the years until the tops of trains start hitting lineside structures. This is less of a problem nowadays, with machines to clean and renew ballast that can dig down to depth.
I think HS2 have opted for concrete slab track for most of the way.
Spitballing, I can see that ballast may have helped by acting as a blanket that kept the worst of the heat from the flames from the steel. Perhaps.
(Incidentally, I believe the first ever 'modern' slab concrete track was laid by slip forming in the 1960s near Duffield in Derby. In the 1990s the concrete base was still visible. I've no idea if it's been broken up since then. Derby was also famously where the first steel rail was used - without the railway knowing...)
All you’d ever want to know about ballast (and a little bit more)…
Oh, I could continue, although I've forgotten a lot.
(I must still have some books about this stuff somewhere in the garage. For anyone wanting to know about the topic in general: Andrew Dow's 'Railway - British Track Since 1804' is sublimely brilliant.)
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
A very good day for renewables today. Over 16gw of wind and 4.5gw solar currently. Only 3gw gas (Gridwatch seems to be off, showing 12gw and no solar).
Has anyone watched This England on Sky? A relatively sympathetic portrayal of the utter chaos in Downing Street, but one that brought back a lot of buried anger and horror at how bad the 12 months from March 2020 were.
No but it brings to mind a thought I had about Truss.
She's trying to play the role of Thatcher. The trouble is she is really playing the caricatured Thatcher as performed by Gillian Anderson, Meryl Streep and others. I'm still not convinced we've seen an accurate dramatisation of the Iron Lady.
In other moaning about the media why are Ukrainian war videos being demonetised by youtube. Denys Davidov is getting about 1m views a days for his updates. His reasonableness in the face of barbarism is admirable.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
The History of the Conservative and Unionist Party: The Liz Truss Years
The Liz Truss Months
The Liz Truss Weeks
It was the Time of the Truss... People dreamed of Flights to Rwanda and Pound/Cent parity. The entire population of England bobbed in small boats in the Channel while immigrants took over the mainland.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
The problem is that people have private cars, and quite like them.
Re-designing your town around buses and trains, simply means that everyone with a car goes elsewhere.
Unlike when cars replaced horses, the current generation of car drivers don’t want to change, and see the change being forced upon them.
Having a very long timetable so nothing go done on energy for a long time and Labour had free hits on Truss, plus encouraging early voting as votes could be changed only for the possibility of changing votes being axed so people were locked in to their early choice.
Perhaps OGH should give me the access codes to PB.com, so in the unlikely event that Leon is right, I can keep it going from mid-Atlantic - a Radio Caroline for the modern age?
I thought his first action on appointment as OGH was to write you a letter about this.
I thought PB going offline is confirmation for the Trident sub commanders to fire, along with the BBC being off air?
Likewise, if we don't see a post from Leon for a few days, there's a litter bin in Regent's Park behind which we have to tape an envelope of used twenties.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
The problem is that people have private cars, and quite like them.
Re-designing your town around buses and trains, simply means that everyone with a car goes elsewhere.
Unlike when cars replaced horses, the current generation of car drivers don’t want to change, and see the change being forced upon them.
Yes, it won’t be universally popular. But it is inevitable. The overall social benefits are too great - from the drop in pollution and noise to the freeing up of space
I could see it happening, in a very embryonic way, in central Seville on my recent visit. They have almost completely banished cars from the old town. They have deliberately made driving a nightmare and parking worse
They’ve installed trams and flooded the streets with free ebikes which everyone uses. It makes the city centre a delight. Old Seville, like all European cities, was not built for cars and is better without them
This will happen in every European city. Cars will be slowly strangled, beginning in the centre then moving out
What will happen in suburbs and smaller towns is less obvious. Tho the car will eventually disappear there too I suspect
Perhaps OGH should give me the access codes to PB.com, so in the unlikely event that Leon is right, I can keep it going from mid-Atlantic - a Radio Caroline for the modern age?
I thought his first action on appointment as OGH was to write you a letter about this.
I thought PB going offline is confirmation for the Trident sub commanders to fire, along with the BBC being off air?
I have a strong belief that cockroaches, fruit flies, Everton and PB will be the only things to survive a nuclear war
Is the argument supposed to be "we need a particular subset of immigrants, therefore we should have completely limitless migration from the whole continent they're in"?
I'm not sure that penny will ever drop for Gauke or Scott etc
Though perhaps local engineers should be trained and paid better as another option?
But I'm fine with unlimited immigration past a sufficiently minimum earnings threshold personally, so long as housing is dealt with. It is unlimited immigration as cheap labour combined with restrictive housing planning that is a problem.
Housing won't be dealt with, because the Conservative Party is completely in thrall to nimbyism.
As are the Lib Dems and Labour too.
And if anyone in Government ever proposes sensible solutions, like Boris's reforms to zoning, or Truss's reported proposals, then they'll be opposed automatically by the other side allowing the NIMBY rebels to win.
Find me a NIMBY free party that supports a liberal housing policy and I could vote for them.
We're going to have to wait and see what Labour does. If any party can do it, the one that is weakest in rural areas can.
A Labour Government with a decent majority could target well planned, large scale development in some areas currently classed as green belt whilst upsetting an insignificant fraction of its own MPs and voters, in a way that the Tories simply can't.
That would be a good way to get people like me to quit the party and join the Greens.
To govern is to choose. It would be an awful lot easier if a third of the population simply vanished off the face of the Earth overnight and Government could therefore forget about plonking a load of new houses all over the place, but that's not the reality of our situation. Labour can afford to wave bye bye to a few stroppy greens if it's going to release millions of young people from the prison of insecure tenancies and crushing rents.
The population keeps growing. How else do you propose to house them all, fill Greater London with fifty storey tower blocks?
Well for a start I would take measures to prevent the population from growing.
And in terms of new homes, I would look at derelict former industrial sites and the redevelopment of redundant office and retail premises and existing residential that is unfit for purpose.
Green field sites should be rewilded, not built on.
There isn’t enough of that for the existing population. More houses are needed.
Build three new cities, one in Lincolnshire and one each in such parts of Wales and Scotland as may be nominated by their respective governments.
Perhaps OGH should give me the access codes to PB.com, so in the unlikely event that Leon is right, I can keep it going from mid-Atlantic - a Radio Caroline for the modern age?
I thought his first action on appointment as OGH was to write you a letter about this.
I thought PB going offline is confirmation for the Trident sub commanders to fire, along with the BBC being off air?
I have a strong belief that cockroaches, fruit flies, Everton and PB will be the only things to survive a nuclear war
Has anyone watched This England on Sky? A relatively sympathetic portrayal of the utter chaos in Downing Street, but one that brought back a lot of buried anger and horror at how bad the 12 months from March 2020 were.
No but it brings to mind a thought I had about Truss.
She's trying to play the role of Thatcher. The trouble is she is really playing the caricatured Thatcher as performed by Gillian Anderson, Meryl Streep and others. I'm still not convinced we've seen an accurate dramatisation of the Iron Lady.
In other moaning about the media why are Ukrainian war videos being demonetised by youtube. Denys Davidov is getting about 1m views a days for his updates. His reasonableness in the face of barbarism is admirable.
Perhaps OGH should give me the access codes to PB.com, so in the unlikely event that Leon is right, I can keep it going from mid-Atlantic - a Radio Caroline for the modern age?
I thought his first action on appointment as OGH was to write you a letter about this.
I thought PB going offline is confirmation for the Trident sub commanders to fire, along with the BBC being off air?
I have a strong belief that cockroaches, fruit flies, Everton and PB will be the only things to survive a nuclear war
Does anyone know how the £45 billion figure for the cost of tax cuts in the mini budget was derived. How much for abolishing NI rises? How much for abolishing Corporation tax rises? Where does the rest come from? I know the 45p rate was priced at £2 billion.
It's in Table 4.2 of the Growth Plan document published by HMG, the cost of policy decisions for fiscal year 2026-27.
The NI and corporation tax changes are the two biggest, about £34bn combined.
Thanks.
The scary thing is that what spooked Mr Market was the abolition of planned, future tax increases rather than cuts in existing taxes. So Mr Market wants either taxes to increase or government spending to be cut. This government won't do the first and will struggle to do the second.
The decision was taken to increase those taxes to pay for increased NHS & Social Care spending, and to repair the damage done to the public finances by Covid. The government will have to do something, because the market has clearly signalled that we're reaching the limit of how much they're willing to lend to us.
Perhaps OGH should give me the access codes to PB.com, so in the unlikely event that Leon is right, I can keep it going from mid-Atlantic - a Radio Caroline for the modern age?
I thought his first action on appointment as OGH was to write you a letter about this.
I thought PB going offline is confirmation for the Trident sub commanders to fire, along with the BBC being off air?
I have a strong belief that cockroaches, fruit flies, Everton and PB will be the only things to survive a nuclear war
So that's how Shapps becomes PM!
He’ll need a LOT of cockroaches
I was thinking rather if he survived and our other MPs don't...
Is the argument supposed to be "we need a particular subset of immigrants, therefore we should have completely limitless migration from the whole continent they're in"?
I'm not sure that penny will ever drop for Gauke or Scott etc
Though perhaps local engineers should be trained and paid better as another option?
But I'm fine with unlimited immigration past a sufficiently minimum earnings threshold personally, so long as housing is dealt with. It is unlimited immigration as cheap labour combined with restrictive housing planning that is a problem.
Housing won't be dealt with, because the Conservative Party is completely in thrall to nimbyism.
As are the Lib Dems and Labour too.
And if anyone in Government ever proposes sensible solutions, like Boris's reforms to zoning, or Truss's reported proposals, then they'll be opposed automatically by the other side allowing the NIMBY rebels to win.
Find me a NIMBY free party that supports a liberal housing policy and I could vote for them.
We're going to have to wait and see what Labour does. If any party can do it, the one that is weakest in rural areas can.
A Labour Government with a decent majority could target well planned, large scale development in some areas currently classed as green belt whilst upsetting an insignificant fraction of its own MPs and voters, in a way that the Tories simply can't.
That would be a good way to get people like me to quit the party and join the Greens.
To govern is to choose. It would be an awful lot easier if a third of the population simply vanished off the face of the Earth overnight and Government could therefore forget about plonking a load of new houses all over the place, but that's not the reality of our situation. Labour can afford to wave bye bye to a few stroppy greens if it's going to release millions of young people from the prison of insecure tenancies and crushing rents.
The population keeps growing. How else do you propose to house them all, fill Greater London with fifty storey tower blocks?
Well for a start I would take measures to prevent the population from growing.
And in terms of new homes, I would look at derelict former industrial sites and the redevelopment of redundant office and retail premises and existing residential that is unfit for purpose.
Green field sites should be rewilded, not built on.
There isn’t enough of that for the existing population. More houses are needed.
Build three new cities, one in Lincolnshire and one each in such parts of Wales and Scotland as may be nominated by their respective governments.
You could build a very decent city at Amlwch on Anglesey. It used to be the second largest town in Wales, but has, to put it mildly, declined somewhat. Leaving lots of space to expand.
It's got road, rail, port, power and water facilities all laid on, plus a uni quite nearby in Bangor that could be expanded.
And finally, it's in the poorest area in the whole of Northern Europe. If ever a place needed a massive economic regeneration project it's Anglesey.
"Liz Truss is facing a rural revolt against her plans to prioritise a “dash for economic growth” over nature protection and the environment.
Senior party figures, including ministers under Boris Johnson’s premiership and former Tory leader William Hague, have joined the National Trust, the RSPB, the Angling Trust and Wildlife Trusts in criticising what they see as environmental vandalism.
It follows concerns Truss is treating the leading nature charities as part of a so-called “anti-growth coalition” that she claims to be confronting."
Liz Truss is completely right about an anti-growth coalition.
The problem is it includes a large number of her backbenchers.
Truss is a total moron. What we're liable to get out of her Government - if those backbenchers don't block it, which hopefully they shall - are all the wrong developments in the wrong places. Concreting over nature reserves to build Amazon warehouses: yes. Thoughtfully located and planned housing that makes ownership affordable for young people without access to enormous gifts from the Bank of Mum and Dad: no.
See also: real terms benefit cuts for the working poor whilst continuing to mollycoddle pensioners. All this talk about growth is bullshit. The only thing the Conservative Party is about is redistributing finite resources to its key supporters - elderly homeowners and the very wealthy - from everybody else. This actually *IS* the anti-growth coalition. Choking off investment in skills and infrastructure whilst encouraging the concentration of an ever-increasing share of national wealth in the bank accounts of the already minted and in non-productive piles of overpriced bricks. And they're completely shameless about the whole thing.
"Thoughtfully located and planned housing" is a load of crap. "Planned economies" result in a shortfall in whatever's planned, like in the Soviet Union where people would struggle to buy essentials as there wasn't enough of them, or the UK where our planned housing system means it takes 14 years to get permission to build an estate fought all the way by NIMBYs.
We need unplanned, wild and organically built housing that allows people to get a home built wherever they need it rather than relying upon "plans" to be drawn up for them.
But yes, zone nature reserves as unsuitable for development, I have no qualms with that.
The current model of development, even if legislation were used to confound the nimbies, is no good. Left to their own devices, you'll end up with housebuilders throwing up identikit rows of small, poor quality family houses, offered in inadequate quantities and at exorbitant prices to desperate buyers.
If we're going to have communities that offer decent, affordable homes accompanied by good essential services - proper transport links, adequate healthcare, enough school places, and so on - then some modern equivalent of the post war new town movement will be needed. Legislation to protect sensitive landscapes, provide sufficient local services, improve building regulations, provide enormous sums of money to get the whole thing moving, and to strip nimbies and their puppet local councillors of their power to slow it all back down to a halt.
Simply setting property developers free and letting them do what they want won't work, because the market ain't the solution to every problem. It won't give the country the housing it needs, it'll just give developers licence to throw up more of the overpriced shoddy tat that makes them the maximum possible profit.
Remove the barriers to construction occurring and the developers won't be the only ones building.
If one developer throws up tat, and it's easy to self build or to get another development firm underway, then the tat would wither and die as nobody would want to buy tat if they have an abundance of choice.
Which is what terrifies the NIMBYs. They want people to have no choice so the NIMBYs can extract maximum wealth from them by holding onto the restricted "planned" supply.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
The problem is that people have private cars, and quite like them.
Re-designing your town around buses and trains, simply means that everyone with a car goes elsewhere.
Unlike when cars replaced horses, the current generation of car drivers don’t want to change, and see the change being forced upon them.
Yes, it won’t be universally popular. But it is inevitable. The overall social benefits are too great - from the drop in pollution and noise to the freeing up of space
I could see it happening, in a very embryonic way, in central Seville on my recent visit. They have almost completely banished cars from the old town. They have deliberately made driving a nightmare and parking worse
They’ve installed trams and flooded the streets with free ebikes which everyone uses. It makes the city centre a delight. Old Seville, like all European cities, was not built for cars and is better without them
This will happen in every European city. Cars will be slowly strangled, beginning in the centre then moving out
What will happen in suburbs and smaller towns is less obvious. Tho the car will eventually disappear there too I suspect
That may be the end-state Utopia beloved of town councils and planners - but in the meantime people will either stay at home and shop online, go to a more local cafe or pub, or head to another town, city or out-of-town shopping centre that doesn’t hate cars.
Perhaps OGH should give me the access codes to PB.com, so in the unlikely event that Leon is right, I can keep it going from mid-Atlantic - a Radio Caroline for the modern age?
I thought his first action on appointment as OGH was to write you a letter about this.
I thought PB going offline is confirmation for the Trident sub commanders to fire, along with the BBC being off air?
I have a strong belief that cockroaches, fruit flies, Everton and PB will be the only things to survive a nuclear war
So that's how Shapps becomes PM!
He’ll need a LOT of cockroaches
I was thinking rather if he survived and our other MPs don't...
I was thinking he’s a long way behind on PB, Everton and Fruit Flies.
It’s a well known fact, Fruit Flies prefer a fruitier politics.
Is the argument supposed to be "we need a particular subset of immigrants, therefore we should have completely limitless migration from the whole continent they're in"?
I'm not sure that penny will ever drop for Gauke or Scott etc
Though perhaps local engineers should be trained and paid better as another option?
But I'm fine with unlimited immigration past a sufficiently minimum earnings threshold personally, so long as housing is dealt with. It is unlimited immigration as cheap labour combined with restrictive housing planning that is a problem.
Housing won't be dealt with, because the Conservative Party is completely in thrall to nimbyism.
As are the Lib Dems and Labour too.
And if anyone in Government ever proposes sensible solutions, like Boris's reforms to zoning, or Truss's reported proposals, then they'll be opposed automatically by the other side allowing the NIMBY rebels to win.
Find me a NIMBY free party that supports a liberal housing policy and I could vote for them.
We're going to have to wait and see what Labour does. If any party can do it, the one that is weakest in rural areas can.
A Labour Government with a decent majority could target well planned, large scale development in some areas currently classed as green belt whilst upsetting an insignificant fraction of its own MPs and voters, in a way that the Tories simply can't.
That would be a good way to get people like me to quit the party and join the Greens.
To govern is to choose. It would be an awful lot easier if a third of the population simply vanished off the face of the Earth overnight and Government could therefore forget about plonking a load of new houses all over the place, but that's not the reality of our situation. Labour can afford to wave bye bye to a few stroppy greens if it's going to release millions of young people from the prison of insecure tenancies and crushing rents.
The population keeps growing. How else do you propose to house them all, fill Greater London with fifty storey tower blocks?
Well for a start I would take measures to prevent the population from growing.
And in terms of new homes, I would look at derelict former industrial sites and the redevelopment of redundant office and retail premises and existing residential that is unfit for purpose.
Green field sites should be rewilded, not built on.
There isn’t enough of that for the existing population. More houses are needed.
Build three new cities, one in Lincolnshire and one each in such parts of Wales and Scotland as may be nominated by their respective governments.
You could build a very decent city at Amlwch on Anglesey. It used to be the second largest town in Wales, but has, to put it mildly, declined somewhat. Leaving lots of space to expand.
It's got road, rail, port, power and water facilities all laid on, plus a uni quite nearby in Bangor that could be expanded.
And finally, it's in the poorest area in the whole of Northern Europe. If ever a place needed a massive economic regeneration project it's Anglesey.
Is the argument supposed to be "we need a particular subset of immigrants, therefore we should have completely limitless migration from the whole continent they're in"?
I'm not sure that penny will ever drop for Gauke or Scott etc
Though perhaps local engineers should be trained and paid better as another option?
But I'm fine with unlimited immigration past a sufficiently minimum earnings threshold personally, so long as housing is dealt with. It is unlimited immigration as cheap labour combined with restrictive housing planning that is a problem.
Housing won't be dealt with, because the Conservative Party is completely in thrall to nimbyism.
As are the Lib Dems and Labour too.
And if anyone in Government ever proposes sensible solutions, like Boris's reforms to zoning, or Truss's reported proposals, then they'll be opposed automatically by the other side allowing the NIMBY rebels to win.
Find me a NIMBY free party that supports a liberal housing policy and I could vote for them.
We're going to have to wait and see what Labour does. If any party can do it, the one that is weakest in rural areas can.
A Labour Government with a decent majority could target well planned, large scale development in some areas currently classed as green belt whilst upsetting an insignificant fraction of its own MPs and voters, in a way that the Tories simply can't.
That would be a good way to get people like me to quit the party and join the Greens.
To govern is to choose. It would be an awful lot easier if a third of the population simply vanished off the face of the Earth overnight and Government could therefore forget about plonking a load of new houses all over the place, but that's not the reality of our situation. Labour can afford to wave bye bye to a few stroppy greens if it's going to release millions of young people from the prison of insecure tenancies and crushing rents.
The population keeps growing. How else do you propose to house them all, fill Greater London with fifty storey tower blocks?
Well for a start I would take measures to prevent the population from growing.
And in terms of new homes, I would look at derelict former industrial sites and the redevelopment of redundant office and retail premises and existing residential that is unfit for purpose.
Green field sites should be rewilded, not built on.
There isn’t enough of that for the existing population. More houses are needed.
Build three new cities, one in Lincolnshire and one each in such parts of Wales and Scotland as may be nominated by their respective governments.
You could build a very decent city at Amlwch on Anglesey. It used to be the second largest town in Wales, but has, to put it mildly, declined somewhat. Leaving lots of space to expand.
It's got road, rail, port, power and water facilities all laid on, plus a uni quite nearby in Bangor that could be expanded.
And finally, it's in the poorest area in the whole of Northern Europe. If ever a place needed a massive economic regeneration project it's Anglesey.
Why was it so big? Railway workshops or what?
It was the main copper port for North Wales and as a result also the main centre of Welsh shipbuilding.
Both eventually withered away and went to Liverpool and Swansea, although it still had a modest oil port until the mid 1990s.
As I say, everytime we have this discussion about housing:
Everyone wants to live in London/SE. Yet London is astonishingly low rise compared to its main peers.
And look at the stretch from, say, Canary Whart to Tilbury (ie docklands), both north and south. Nobody gives a fuck about that landscape, with the exception of the RSPB marshes at Rainham, but you could fit millions in there.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
I will bet the problem there is that locals have encountered the unthinking style of “get rid of cars”. They are worried that car parking is being reduced and not replaced.
Instead of designing and implementing changes to decrease the necessity to use cars, local authorities have done some ridiculous “ban cars and wonder why it is fuck up” policies. Abingdon City council killed shopping in a chunk of Abingdon by doing this.
PB is a bit of a depressing experience at the moment. Our PM is not perfect but how long before we realise that our own collywobbling about the situation is worse than the situation itself? I'm not intending to stick around moaning about the moaning (as that's even worse) so I guess I'll re-engage when PB stops being less fun than almost anything else.
Decided to take the plunge on Crusader Kings 3 on PS5, once you get used to the control scheme it's pretty good. Just need to find time to play it now.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
The problem is that people have private cars, and quite like them.
Re-designing your town around buses and trains, simply means that everyone with a car goes elsewhere.
Unlike when cars replaced horses, the current generation of car drivers don’t want to change, and see the change being forced upon them.
Yes, it won’t be universally popular. But it is inevitable. The overall social benefits are too great - from the drop in pollution and noise to the freeing up of space
I could see it happening, in a very embryonic way, in central Seville on my recent visit. They have almost completely banished cars from the old town. They have deliberately made driving a nightmare and parking worse
They’ve installed trams and flooded the streets with free ebikes which everyone uses. It makes the city centre a delight. Old Seville, like all European cities, was not built for cars and is better without them
This will happen in every European city. Cars will be slowly strangled, beginning in the centre then moving out
What will happen in suburbs and smaller towns is less obvious. Tho the car will eventually disappear there too I suspect
There are people who like cars as cars, but for others they are a necessary tool to access work and pleasure. And there may be better ways of doing that access.
Consider gentrified inner cities; rubbish car access but very desirable and expensive because you can access a good life without needing a car. It's hard to replicate that with roads and car parks because they take up so much damn space.
“China began severely restricting the export of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gowns and masks, months before notifying the world of the outbreak of Covid-19, it has emerged.
An altered timeline would significantly challenge the theory that the pandemic originated from a seafood market in Wuhan, where the first cases emerged in December 2019.
Many experts now think that the Covid-19 could have leaked from experiments carried out at Dr Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which was studying bat-borne coronaviruses.
The restricting of PPE exports came around the same time that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) removed a database of bat virus gene sequences, which has never been restored”
As I say, everytime we have this discussion about housing:
Everyone wants to live in London/SE. Yet London is astonishingly low rise compared to its main peers.
And look at the stretch from, say, Canary Whart to Tilbury (ie docklands), both north and south. Nobody gives a fuck about that landscape, with the exception of the RSPB marshes at Rainham, but you could fit millions in there.
I would not live in the SE. When I worked down there I commuted from the NW. My impression was that everyone was jam-packed into sub-size housing and spent every waking moment panicking about the costs of living there.
PB is a bit of a depressing experience at the moment. Our PM is not perfect but how long before we realise that our own collywobbling about the situation is worse than the situation itself? I'm not intending to stick around moaning about the moaning (as that's even worse) so I guess I'll re-engage when PB stops being less fun than almost anything else.
Do you mean that you will be back when we all fall to the ground in helpless adoration of your idol Liz the Saviour of GB?
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
The problem is that people have private cars, and quite like them.
Re-designing your town around buses and trains, simply means that everyone with a car goes elsewhere.
Unlike when cars replaced horses, the current generation of car drivers don’t want to change, and see the change being forced upon them.
Yes, it won’t be universally popular. But it is inevitable. The overall social benefits are too great - from the drop in pollution and noise to the freeing up of space
I could see it happening, in a very embryonic way, in central Seville on my recent visit. They have almost completely banished cars from the old town. They have deliberately made driving a nightmare and parking worse
They’ve installed trams and flooded the streets with free ebikes which everyone uses. It makes the city centre a delight. Old Seville, like all European cities, was not built for cars and is better without them
This will happen in every European city. Cars will be slowly strangled, beginning in the centre then moving out
What will happen in suburbs and smaller towns is less obvious. Tho the car will eventually disappear there too I suspect
There are people who like cars as cars, but for others they are a necessary tool to access work and pleasure. And there may be better ways of doing that access.
Consider gentrified inner cities; rubbish car access but very desirable and expensive because you can access a good life without needing a car. It's hard to replicate that with roads and car parks because they take up so much damn space.
For people who live outside cities, no car equals staying in the village. Buses are very nice, but unless you have a certain size of population, bus services will simply burn more energy than individual cars. There was a reason in The Goode Olde Days people lived and died within a few miles of where they were born.
The solution to that issue is park and ride. But it seems to be blind spot that some councils can’t understand.
Unless your dream is a completely deposited countryside and everyone living in Megacity One.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
The problem is that people have private cars, and quite like them.
Re-designing your town around buses and trains, simply means that everyone with a car goes elsewhere.
Unlike when cars replaced horses, the current generation of car drivers don’t want to change, and see the change being forced upon them.
Yes, it won’t be universally popular. But it is inevitable. The overall social benefits are too great - from the drop in pollution and noise to the freeing up of space
I could see it happening, in a very embryonic way, in central Seville on my recent visit. They have almost completely banished cars from the old town. They have deliberately made driving a nightmare and parking worse
They’ve installed trams and flooded the streets with free ebikes which everyone uses. It makes the city centre a delight. Old Seville, like all European cities, was not built for cars and is better without them
This will happen in every European city. Cars will be slowly strangled, beginning in the centre then moving out
What will happen in suburbs and smaller towns is less obvious. Tho the car will eventually disappear there too I suspect
That may be the end-state Utopia beloved of town councils and planners - but in the meantime people will either stay at home and shop online, go to a more local cafe or pub, or head to another town, city or out-of-town shopping centre that doesn’t hate cars.
And yet central Seville is a huge success. There are no problems with empty shops as in many British cities. It is full of people shopping, eating, drinking. It’s lovely
Has anyone watched This England on Sky? A relatively sympathetic portrayal of the utter chaos in Downing Street, but one that brought back a lot of buried anger and horror at how bad the 12 months from March 2020 were.
No but it brings to mind a thought I had about Truss.
She's trying to play the role of Thatcher. The trouble is she is really playing the caricatured Thatcher as performed by Gillian Anderson, Meryl Streep and others. I'm still not convinced we've seen an accurate dramatisation of the Iron Lady.
In other moaning about the media why are Ukrainian war videos being demonetised by youtube. Denys Davidov is getting about 1m views a days for his updates. His reasonableness in the face of barbarism is admirable.
At a guess because war videos in general are demonetised.
Why?
Not being a Youtuber, I've not studied the situation in any depth but have heard creators complain about the rules. To be cynical, demonetised because a few years ago there was a fuss about ISIS uploading videos of bombings and beheadings. That would be my guess. Hard cases make bad law.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
The problem is that people have private cars, and quite like them.
Re-designing your town around buses and trains, simply means that everyone with a car goes elsewhere.
Unlike when cars replaced horses, the current generation of car drivers don’t want to change, and see the change being forced upon them.
Yes, it won’t be universally popular. But it is inevitable. The overall social benefits are too great - from the drop in pollution and noise to the freeing up of space
I could see it happening, in a very embryonic way, in central Seville on my recent visit. They have almost completely banished cars from the old town. They have deliberately made driving a nightmare and parking worse
They’ve installed trams and flooded the streets with free ebikes which everyone uses. It makes the city centre a delight. Old Seville, like all European cities, was not built for cars and is better without them
This will happen in every European city. Cars will be slowly strangled, beginning in the centre then moving out
What will happen in suburbs and smaller towns is less obvious. Tho the car will eventually disappear there too I suspect
That may be the end-state Utopia beloved of town councils and planners - but in the meantime people will either stay at home and shop online, go to a more local cafe or pub, or head to another town, city or out-of-town shopping centre that doesn’t hate cars.
And yet central Seville is a huge success. There are no problems with empty shops as in many British cities. It is full of people shopping, eating, drinking. It’s lovely
It is the future
It's Seville. We couldn't Orange things like that.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
The problem is that people have private cars, and quite like them.
Re-designing your town around buses and trains, simply means that everyone with a car goes elsewhere.
Unlike when cars replaced horses, the current generation of car drivers don’t want to change, and see the change being forced upon them.
Yes, it won’t be universally popular. But it is inevitable. The overall social benefits are too great - from the drop in pollution and noise to the freeing up of space
I could see it happening, in a very embryonic way, in central Seville on my recent visit. They have almost completely banished cars from the old town. They have deliberately made driving a nightmare and parking worse
They’ve installed trams and flooded the streets with free ebikes which everyone uses. It makes the city centre a delight. Old Seville, like all European cities, was not built for cars and is better without them
This will happen in every European city. Cars will be slowly strangled, beginning in the centre then moving out
What will happen in suburbs and smaller towns is less obvious. Tho the car will eventually disappear there too I suspect
That may be the end-state Utopia beloved of town councils and planners - but in the meantime people will either stay at home and shop online, go to a more local cafe or pub, or head to another town, city or out-of-town shopping centre that doesn’t hate cars.
We have got rid of our cars. With the ever rising costs of the vehicles, the insurance, parking and all the support stuff like MOTs, it is cheaper to use cabs when needed. Advance planning is sometime needed to save money on things like train tickets, but it is not a hardship and if I am really stuck, I can hire a car for a day and use their insurance option too.
Has anyone watched This England on Sky? A relatively sympathetic portrayal of the utter chaos in Downing Street, but one that brought back a lot of buried anger and horror at how bad the 12 months from March 2020 were.
No but it brings to mind a thought I had about Truss.
She's trying to play the role of Thatcher. The trouble is she is really playing the caricatured Thatcher as performed by Gillian Anderson, Meryl Streep and others. I'm still not convinced we've seen an accurate dramatisation of the Iron Lady.
In other moaning about the media why are Ukrainian war videos being demonetised by youtube. Denys Davidov is getting about 1m views a days for his updates. His reasonableness in the face of barbarism is admirable.
At a guess because war videos in general are demonetised.
Why?
Not being a Youtuber, I've not studied the situation in any depth but have heard creators complain about the rules. To be cynical, demonetised because a few years ago there was a fuss about ISIS uploading videos of bombings and beheadings. That would be my guess. Hard cases make bad law.
Advertisers generally don’t want their ads running on videos of actual violence - even if it is plucky Ukranians, shooting the crap out of Mad Vlad’s badly-equipped conscripts.
PB is a bit of a depressing experience at the moment. Our PM is not perfect but how long before we realise that our own collywobbling about the situation is worse than the situation itself? I'm not intending to stick around moaning about the moaning (as that's even worse) so I guess I'll re-engage when PB stops being less fun than almost anything else.
Do you mean that you will be back when we all fall to the ground in helpless adoration of your idol Liz the Saviour of GB?
You may be some time....
No, he means that it has actually become a bit dull, and I agree.
There's nothing much to do for a while but sit back and wait to see what the Tories do next. Labour supporters may taunt gleefully but it's a bit like taunting a sad animal in a cage.
I don't see much reason to expect an early change so my own invaluable contributions will probably be fewer than usual until it livens up a bit.
As I say, everytime we have this discussion about housing:
Everyone wants to live in London/SE. Yet London is astonishingly low rise compared to its main peers.
And look at the stretch from, say, Canary Whart to Tilbury (ie docklands), both north and south. Nobody gives a fuck about that landscape, with the exception of the RSPB marshes at Rainham, but you could fit millions in there.
The developers are ahead of you. There is Barking Riverside on the north bank (you may remember @Sunil_Prasannan's photos of its new station) and south of the river, new flats are going up all points east of Greenwich.
And is London low-rise compared with its peers? Manhattan, perhaps, but while Paris has flats, they are mainly low-rise blocks.
As I say, everytime we have this discussion about housing:
Everyone wants to live in London/SE. Yet London is astonishingly low rise compared to its main peers.
And look at the stretch from, say, Canary Whart to Tilbury (ie docklands), both north and south. Nobody gives a fuck about that landscape, with the exception of the RSPB marshes at Rainham, but you could fit millions in there.
The developers are ahead of you. There is Barking Riverside on the north bank (you may remember @Sunil_Prasannan's photos of its new station) and south of the river, new flats are going up all points east of Greenwich.
And is London low-rise compared with its peers? Manhattan, perhaps, but while Paris has flats, they are mainly low-rise blocks.
Indeed. And everything being built in vaguely central London is tower blocks now - and they are much taller than most of Paris.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
The problem is that people have private cars, and quite like them.
Re-designing your town around buses and trains, simply means that everyone with a car goes elsewhere.
Unlike when cars replaced horses, the current generation of car drivers don’t want to change, and see the change being forced upon them.
Yes, it won’t be universally popular. But it is inevitable. The overall social benefits are too great - from the drop in pollution and noise to the freeing up of space
I could see it happening, in a very embryonic way, in central Seville on my recent visit. They have almost completely banished cars from the old town. They have deliberately made driving a nightmare and parking worse
They’ve installed trams and flooded the streets with free ebikes which everyone uses. It makes the city centre a delight. Old Seville, like all European cities, was not built for cars and is better without them
This will happen in every European city. Cars will be slowly strangled, beginning in the centre then moving out
What will happen in suburbs and smaller towns is less obvious. Tho the car will eventually disappear there too I suspect
There are people who like cars as cars, but for others they are a necessary tool to access work and pleasure. And there may be better ways of doing that access.
Consider gentrified inner cities; rubbish car access but very desirable and expensive because you can access a good life without needing a car. It's hard to replicate that with roads and car parks because they take up so much damn space.
Agreed. People like personal transportation v. mass transportation. But look at how many of the cars people buy that are shit but cheap (the majority). When there is a way to get cheap, personal transportation that does not involve 5k+ of capex/loans, but does keep you warm and dry, people will jump at it far faster than anyone expects.
“China began severely restricting the export of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gowns and masks, months before notifying the world of the outbreak of Covid-19, it has emerged.
An altered timeline would significantly challenge the theory that the pandemic originated from a seafood market in Wuhan, where the first cases emerged in December 2019.
Many experts now think that the Covid-19 could have leaked from experiments carried out at Dr Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which was studying bat-borne coronaviruses.
The restricting of PPE exports came around the same time that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) removed a database of bat virus gene sequences, which has never been restored”
Footage of the bridge linking Russia to Crimea appears to show Gandalf of the Istari striking it with his staff moments before collapse.
Gandalf, who is well known for his dislike of bridges, is understood to have brought down the bridge in order to prevent the passage of a terrible evil which threatened the free peoples.
Pictures from the scene show a gap in the bridge above a terrible chasm which plummets to the very roots of the earth, right next to the former flagship of the Russian fleet.
Huge gouts of flame appear to be either a burning fuel supply train or Durins Bane himself, incandescent in his fury and wreathed in a terrible fire.
However, some commentators have blamed Gandalf himself for provoking the attack.
“By delving too deep, the dwarfs provoked the Balrog of Morgoth who is just defending his legitimate sphere of influence east of the Anduin,” said Nigel Farage on GB News this morning.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
The problem is that people have private cars, and quite like them.
Re-designing your town around buses and trains, simply means that everyone with a car goes elsewhere.
Unlike when cars replaced horses, the current generation of car drivers don’t want to change, and see the change being forced upon them.
Yes, it won’t be universally popular. But it is inevitable. The overall social benefits are too great - from the drop in pollution and noise to the freeing up of space
I could see it happening, in a very embryonic way, in central Seville on my recent visit. They have almost completely banished cars from the old town. They have deliberately made driving a nightmare and parking worse
They’ve installed trams and flooded the streets with free ebikes which everyone uses. It makes the city centre a delight. Old Seville, like all European cities, was not built for cars and is better without them
This will happen in every European city. Cars will be slowly strangled, beginning in the centre then moving out
What will happen in suburbs and smaller towns is less obvious. Tho the car will eventually disappear there too I suspect
That may be the end-state Utopia beloved of town councils and planners - but in the meantime people will either stay at home and shop online, go to a more local cafe or pub, or head to another town, city or out-of-town shopping centre that doesn’t hate cars.
And yet central Seville is a huge success. There are no problems with empty shops as in many British cities. It is full of people shopping, eating, drinking. It’s lovely
It is the future
It's Seville. We couldn't Orange things like that.
They certainly have certain advantages over, say Manchester. (Googling average rainfall...)
Has anyone watched This England on Sky? A relatively sympathetic portrayal of the utter chaos in Downing Street, but one that brought back a lot of buried anger and horror at how bad the 12 months from March 2020 were.
I am half way through, having watched 3 of the 6 episodes. Certainly harrowing. The prosthetics hamper Kenneth Branagh's facial expressions but I felt he had got a lot of Boris's mannerisms.
Has anyone watched This England on Sky? A relatively sympathetic portrayal of the utter chaos in Downing Street, but one that brought back a lot of buried anger and horror at how bad the 12 months from March 2020 were.
No but it brings to mind a thought I had about Truss.
She's trying to play the role of Thatcher. The trouble is she is really playing the caricatured Thatcher as performed by Gillian Anderson, Meryl Streep and others. I'm still not convinced we've seen an accurate dramatisation of the Iron Lady.
In other moaning about the media why are Ukrainian war videos being demonetised by youtube. Denys Davidov is getting about 1m views a days for his updates. His reasonableness in the face of barbarism is admirable.
At a guess because war videos in general are demonetised.
Why?
Not being a Youtuber, I've not studied the situation in any depth but have heard creators complain about the rules. To be cynical, demonetised because a few years ago there was a fuss about ISIS uploading videos of bombings and beheadings. That would be my guess. Hard cases make bad law.
Advertisers generally don’t want their ads running on videos of actual violence - even if it is plucky Ukranians, shooting the crap out of Mad Vlad’s badly-equipped conscripts.
Great work. The cheque's in the post. Only quibble: next time, consider adding "defending themselves by" in front of "shooting the crap out of".
plucky - good badly-equipped - good conscripts - good personifying the enemy - good calling enemy commander a rude name - good use of rhyme - good calling own side a community of Tommy Atkinses - good
And all in 11 words, beginning "plucky". Excellent stuff.
In most places public transport is only getting worse, not better. COVID has made a lot of marginal routes totally unprofitable, passenger numbers aren't really rebounding given the move towards WFH for a lot of people, and the support money is drying up. Plus inflationary pressures adding into the mix too.
How’s about those involved in the broadband rollout actually train some people to do it, rather than mindlessly relying on importing skills?
Indeed, the UK telecoms industry has made huge commitments to fibre rollout*, so they need to match it with staff to complete the work. Of course that doesn't mean you just fling the doors wide open, the whole point of being in control of immigration is that you can make choices about sectors and the scale of immigration.
* Currently IIRC we are second behind France in terms of the speed of rollout, things have changed a lot over the last few year.
That massive fibre rollout is going to look to be a huge waste of money when everyone can sign up to Starlink....*
(*as long as you aren't actively fighting the Russian in your neighbourhood....)
It doesn’t work like that. There is a limit to the number of Starlink (or any other LEO internet provider) subscribers who can be supported per square km. Starlink has a higher number than the competing systems, and is working on increasing that with the V2 satellites. But it will always be there.
What LEO internet constellations are for is for the applications where fibre isn’t an option - remoter areas, ships, planes etc. by itself this is a 100s of Billions market. Imagine providing the backhaul for the cellular market in large chunks of Africa, for example. Or hi speed internet on every plane in the sky.
I'm not talking towns and cities. The expensive stuff has been rolling out to villages and even hamlets where Starlink should have been the obvious option. All the places that government has been pledging to link up at huge cost - the rural (mostly Conservative) voters.
OT rant. My ISA people want me to prove my identity, owing to anti-money laundering regulations. They want me to prove my address and that the money came from my bank account. Surely they already know both of these things? They know where I live because they write to me here. They know the money came out of my bank because their bank can see it going in. Am I missing something or is this mindless box-ticking?
As I say, everytime we have this discussion about housing:
Everyone wants to live in London/SE. Yet London is astonishingly low rise compared to its main peers.
And look at the stretch from, say, Canary Whart to Tilbury (ie docklands), both north and south. Nobody gives a fuck about that landscape, with the exception of the RSPB marshes at Rainham, but you could fit millions in there.
The developers are ahead of you. There is Barking Riverside on the north bank (you may remember @Sunil_Prasannan's photos of its new station) and south of the river, new flats are going up all points east of Greenwich.
And is London low-rise compared with its peers? Manhattan, perhaps, but while Paris has flats, they are mainly low-rise blocks.
Indeed. And everything being built in vaguely central London is tower blocks now - and they are much taller than most of Paris.
Low rise v hig rise is a real red herring. Planners delight in the fact that the densest housing in London is those three or four storey blocks in Mayfair
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
Your notion that the private car is on its way out in towns is one of the oddest and most bizarre thoughts that you have.
For almost all the developed world getting your own private transportation is one of the smartest and most liberating decisions people can make which is why the private car makes up over 80% of all personal transportation.
Ebikes and Uber may be useful in inner city London, but towns are not the same.
Private cars will still dominate in 10-20 years as there is absolutely nothing better or more liberating to use.
There's as much chance of private cars disappearing as there is Keir Starmer winning the next election ... then at the door of Downing Street revealing that he is an alien, who personally developed Covid in a lab, and released it deliberately to aid his species colonisation of this planet, and that he will be appointing his alien accomplice, Jacob Rees Mogg, as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
OT rant. My ISA people want me to prove my identity, owing to anti-money laundering regulations. They want me to prove my address and that the money came from my bank account. Surely they already know both of these things? They know where I live because they write to me here. They know the money came out of my bank because their bank can see it going in. Am I missing something or is this mindless box-ticking?
Unless you are a new customer I would go for option B.
PB is a bit of a depressing experience at the moment. Our PM is not perfect but how long before we realise that our own collywobbling about the situation is worse than the situation itself? I'm not intending to stick around moaning about the moaning (as that's even worse) so I guess I'll re-engage when PB stops being less fun than almost anything else.
Do you mean that you will be back when we all fall to the ground in helpless adoration of your idol Liz the Saviour of GB?
You may be some time....
No, he means that it has actually become a bit dull, and I agree.
There's nothing much to do for a while but sit back and wait to see what the Tories do next. Labour supporters may taunt gleefully but it's a bit like taunting a sad animal in a cage.
I don't see much reason to expect an early change so my own invaluable contributions will probably be fewer than usual until it livens up a bit.
Heck - I took that attitude at the start of the selection process So I can understand what you mean. It only gets interesting when she does something mindbendingly stupid that even a 4 year old would question.
Has anyone watched This England on Sky? A relatively sympathetic portrayal of the utter chaos in Downing Street, but one that brought back a lot of buried anger and horror at how bad the 12 months from March 2020 were.
No but it brings to mind a thought I had about Truss.
She's trying to play the role of Thatcher. The trouble is she is really playing the caricatured Thatcher as performed by Gillian Anderson, Meryl Streep and others. I'm still not convinced we've seen an accurate dramatisation of the Iron Lady.
In other moaning about the media why are Ukrainian war videos being demonetised by youtube. Denys Davidov is getting about 1m views a days for his updates. His reasonableness in the face of barbarism is admirable.
At a guess because war videos in general are demonetised.
Why?
Not being a Youtuber, I've not studied the situation in any depth but have heard creators complain about the rules. To be cynical, demonetised because a few years ago there was a fuss about ISIS uploading videos of bombings and beheadings. That would be my guess. Hard cases make bad law.
Advertisers generally don’t want their ads running on videos of actual violence - even if it is plucky Ukranians, shooting the crap out of Mad Vlad’s badly-equipped conscripts.
Great work. The cheque's in the post. Only quibble: next time, consider adding "defending themselves by" in front of "shooting the crap out of".
plucky - good badly-equipped - good conscripts - good personifying the enemy - good calling enemy commander a rude name - good use of rhyme - good calling own side a community of Tommy Atkinses - good
And all in 11 words, beginning "plucky". Excellent stuff.
Thoughts and prayers for you when you get mobilised by Vlad.
How’s about those involved in the broadband rollout actually train some people to do it, rather than mindlessly relying on importing skills?
Indeed, the UK telecoms industry has made huge commitments to fibre rollout*, so they need to match it with staff to complete the work. Of course that doesn't mean you just fling the doors wide open, the whole point of being in control of immigration is that you can make choices about sectors and the scale of immigration.
* Currently IIRC we are second behind France in terms of the speed of rollout, things have changed a lot over the last few year.
That massive fibre rollout is going to look to be a huge waste of money when everyone can sign up to Starlink....*
(*as long as you aren't actively fighting the Russian in your neighbourhood....)
It doesn’t work like that. There is a limit to the number of Starlink (or any other LEO internet provider) subscribers who can be supported per square km. Starlink has a higher number than the competing systems, and is working on increasing that with the V2 satellites. But it will always be there.
What LEO internet constellations are for is for the applications where fibre isn’t an option - remoter areas, ships, planes etc. by itself this is a 100s of Billions market. Imagine providing the backhaul for the cellular market in large chunks of Africa, for example. Or hi speed internet on every plane in the sky.
I'm not talking towns and cities. The expensive stuff has been rolling out to villages and even hamlets where Starlink should have been the obvious option. All the places that government has been pledging to link up at huge cost - the rural (mostly Conservative) voters.
OneWeb is already being contracted for back haul in this country.
“China began severely restricting the export of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gowns and masks, months before notifying the world of the outbreak of Covid-19, it has emerged.
An altered timeline would significantly challenge the theory that the pandemic originated from a seafood market in Wuhan, where the first cases emerged in December 2019.
Many experts now think that the Covid-19 could have leaked from experiments carried out at Dr Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which was studying bat-borne coronaviruses.
The restricting of PPE exports came around the same time that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) removed a database of bat virus gene sequences, which has never been restored”
Quite possibly but surely stockpiling PPE means only that China knew what was going on long before it told the rest of us. We already knew that.
The wet market theory depends on the “original timeline” - viral emergence in late 2019 - being true. Entire papers have been written about the clusters of initial cases around the market - then promoted as “proving” the natural origins theory
If that timeline is falsified, then lab leak becomes that much likelier
In the future I suspect we will look back in astonishment: that we ever doubted it came from the lab. The circumstantial evidence is now pretty overwhelming
OT rant. My ISA people want me to prove my identity, owing to anti-money laundering regulations. They want me to prove my address and that the money came from my bank account. Surely they already know both of these things? They know where I live because they write to me here. They know the money came out of my bank because their bank can see it going in. Am I missing something or is this mindless box-ticking?
Wait until you try to get hold of the "protected" £85K when they go bust.
You'll have to prove every little thing, then - probably so much that it would be impossible for most people to prove it all before their bellies run empty, they stop caring, and anyway £85K would only buy a jar of yeast extract on the black market.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
Your notion that the private car is on its way out in towns is one of the oddest and most bizarre thoughts that you have.
For almost all the developed world getting your own private transportation is one of the smartest and most liberating decisions people can make which is why the private car makes up over 80% of all personal transportation.
Ebikes and Uber may be useful in inner city London, but towns are not the same.
Private cars will still dominate in 10-20 years as there is absolutely nothing better or more liberating to use.
There's as much chance of private cars disappearing as there is Keir Starmer winning the next election ... then at the door of Downing Street revealing that he is an alien, who personally developed Covid in a lab, and released it deliberately to aid his species colonisation of this planet, and that he will be appointing his alien accomplice, Jacob Rees Mogg, as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
“China began severely restricting the export of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gowns and masks, months before notifying the world of the outbreak of Covid-19, it has emerged.
An altered timeline would significantly challenge the theory that the pandemic originated from a seafood market in Wuhan, where the first cases emerged in December 2019.
Many experts now think that the Covid-19 could have leaked from experiments carried out at Dr Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which was studying bat-borne coronaviruses.
The restricting of PPE exports came around the same time that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) removed a database of bat virus gene sequences, which has never been restored”
How’s about those involved in the broadband rollout actually train some people to do it, rather than mindlessly relying on importing skills?
Indeed, the UK telecoms industry has made huge commitments to fibre rollout*, so they need to match it with staff to complete the work. Of course that doesn't mean you just fling the doors wide open, the whole point of being in control of immigration is that you can make choices about sectors and the scale of immigration.
* Currently IIRC we are second behind France in terms of the speed of rollout, things have changed a lot over the last few year.
That massive fibre rollout is going to look to be a huge waste of money when everyone can sign up to Starlink....*
(*as long as you aren't actively fighting the Russian in your neighbourhood....)
It doesn’t work like that. There is a limit to the number of Starlink (or any other LEO internet provider) subscribers who can be supported per square km. Starlink has a higher number than the competing systems, and is working on increasing that with the V2 satellites. But it will always be there.
What LEO internet constellations are for is for the applications where fibre isn’t an option - remoter areas, ships, planes etc. by itself this is a 100s of Billions market. Imagine providing the backhaul for the cellular market in large chunks of Africa, for example. Or hi speed internet on every plane in the sky.
I'm not talking towns and cities. The expensive stuff has been rolling out to villages and even hamlets where Starlink should have been the obvious option. All the places that government has been pledging to link up at huge cost - the rural (mostly Conservative) voters.
Ironically, these Conservative pledges are probably due to Jeremy Corbyn's proposed BritISP, received by much derision from the right. One imagines that subsequent constituency feedback and focus groups told CCHQ that bad mobile and web links were a real problem for much of the country, especially the blue parts.
How’s about those involved in the broadband rollout actually train some people to do it, rather than mindlessly relying on importing skills?
Indeed, the UK telecoms industry has made huge commitments to fibre rollout*, so they need to match it with staff to complete the work. Of course that doesn't mean you just fling the doors wide open, the whole point of being in control of immigration is that you can make choices about sectors and the scale of immigration.
* Currently IIRC we are second behind France in terms of the speed of rollout, things have changed a lot over the last few year.
That massive fibre rollout is going to look to be a huge waste of money when everyone can sign up to Starlink....*
(*as long as you aren't actively fighting the Russian in your neighbourhood....)
It doesn’t work like that. There is a limit to the number of Starlink (or any other LEO internet provider) subscribers who can be supported per square km. Starlink has a higher number than the competing systems, and is working on increasing that with the V2 satellites. But it will always be there.
What LEO internet constellations are for is for the applications where fibre isn’t an option - remoter areas, ships, planes etc. by itself this is a 100s of Billions market. Imagine providing the backhaul for the cellular market in large chunks of Africa, for example. Or hi speed internet on every plane in the sky.
I'm not talking towns and cities. The expensive stuff has been rolling out to villages and even hamlets where Starlink should have been the obvious option. All the places that government has been pledging to link up at huge cost - the rural (mostly Conservative) voters.
Ironically, these Conservative pledges are probably due to Jeremy Corbyn's proposed BritISP, received by much derision from the right. One imagines that subsequent constituency feedback and focus groups told CCHQ that bad mobile and web links were a real problem for much of the country, especially the blue parts.
Nah, they remember the good old days of the nationalised BT.
Back in 1981 my father placed an order for a landline and was given a date 9 months later, and that's because he was considered a priority.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
Your notion that the private car is on its way out in towns is one of the oddest and most bizarre thoughts that you have.
For almost all the developed world getting your own private transportation is one of the smartest and most liberating decisions people can make which is why the private car makes up over 80% of all personal transportation.
Ebikes and Uber may be useful in inner city London, but towns are not the same.
Private cars will still dominate in 10-20 years as there is absolutely nothing better or more liberating to use.
There's as much chance of private cars disappearing as [a not very interesting example of something that most would agree is extremely unlikely]
What are your steps of reasoning that lead from the premises "they're best" and "they're most liberating" to the claim "the position will stay the same"?
Things that are best and most liberating have to stick around? First I heard of that.
“China began severely restricting the export of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gowns and masks, months before notifying the world of the outbreak of Covid-19, it has emerged.
An altered timeline would significantly challenge the theory that the pandemic originated from a seafood market in Wuhan, where the first cases emerged in December 2019.
Many experts now think that the Covid-19 could have leaked from experiments carried out at Dr Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which was studying bat-borne coronaviruses.
The restricting of PPE exports came around the same time that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) removed a database of bat virus gene sequences, which has never been restored”
Quite possibly but surely stockpiling PPE means only that China knew what was going on long before it told the rest of us. We already knew that.
The wet market theory depends on the “original timeline” - viral emergence in late 2019 - being true. Entire papers have been written about the clusters of initial cases around the market - then promoted as “proving” the natural origins theory
If that timeline is falsified, then lab leak becomes that much likelier
In the future I suspect we will look back in astonishment: that we ever doubted it came from the lab. The circumstantial evidence is now pretty overwhelming
Yes but also there is, or used to be, a distinction between inadvertent leaks and intentional leaks. Mostly it is a distraction from how we responded and how we will act against the next novel virus. Praise was heaped on Obama for treating Ebola as localised to Africa. Maybe, in light of what we know now, he just got lucky.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
The problem is that people have private cars, and quite like them.
Re-designing your town around buses and trains, simply means that everyone with a car goes elsewhere.
Unlike when cars replaced horses, the current generation of car drivers don’t want to change, and see the change being forced upon them.
Yes, it won’t be universally popular. But it is inevitable. The overall social benefits are too great - from the drop in pollution and noise to the freeing up of space
I could see it happening, in a very embryonic way, in central Seville on my recent visit. They have almost completely banished cars from the old town. They have deliberately made driving a nightmare and parking worse
They’ve installed trams and flooded the streets with free ebikes which everyone uses. It makes the city centre a delight. Old Seville, like all European cities, was not built for cars and is better without them
This will happen in every European city. Cars will be slowly strangled, beginning in the centre then moving out
What will happen in suburbs and smaller towns is less obvious. Tho the car will eventually disappear there too I suspect
There are people who like cars as cars, but for others they are a necessary tool to access work and pleasure. And there may be better ways of doing that access.
Consider gentrified inner cities; rubbish car access but very desirable and expensive because you can access a good life without needing a car. It's hard to replicate that with roads and car parks because they take up so much damn space.
Agreed. People like personal transportation v. mass transportation. But look at how many of the cars people buy that are shit but cheap (the majority). When there is a way to get cheap, personal transportation that does not involve 5k+ of capex/loans, but does keep you warm and dry, people will jump at it far faster than anyone expects.
I've often wondered why we don't allow the Marshrutka system in the UK that's popular in both Ukraine and Russia. Essentially private taxis in the form of a minibus that goes along a specific route. So instead of having only one or two bus companies in a town, doing one service every half an hour, let anyone with a minibus pick a route and start serving it as they like.
There would then be many more routes and many more drivers, with the whole thing much more responsive to supply and demand. It's a completely free market solution to getting people out of their cars that Bart should love.
“China began severely restricting the export of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gowns and masks, months before notifying the world of the outbreak of Covid-19, it has emerged.
An altered timeline would significantly challenge the theory that the pandemic originated from a seafood market in Wuhan, where the first cases emerged in December 2019.
Many experts now think that the Covid-19 could have leaked from experiments carried out at Dr Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which was studying bat-borne coronaviruses.
The restricting of PPE exports came around the same time that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) removed a database of bat virus gene sequences, which has never been restored”
How’s about those involved in the broadband rollout actually train some people to do it, rather than mindlessly relying on importing skills?
Indeed, the UK telecoms industry has made huge commitments to fibre rollout*, so they need to match it with staff to complete the work. Of course that doesn't mean you just fling the doors wide open, the whole point of being in control of immigration is that you can make choices about sectors and the scale of immigration.
* Currently IIRC we are second behind France in terms of the speed of rollout, things have changed a lot over the last few year.
That massive fibre rollout is going to look to be a huge waste of money when everyone can sign up to Starlink....*
(*as long as you aren't actively fighting the Russian in your neighbourhood....)
It doesn’t work like that. There is a limit to the number of Starlink (or any other LEO internet provider) subscribers who can be supported per square km. Starlink has a higher number than the competing systems, and is working on increasing that with the V2 satellites. But it will always be there.
What LEO internet constellations are for is for the applications where fibre isn’t an option - remoter areas, ships, planes etc. by itself this is a 100s of Billions market. Imagine providing the backhaul for the cellular market in large chunks of Africa, for example. Or hi speed internet on every plane in the sky.
I'm not talking towns and cities. The expensive stuff has been rolling out to villages and even hamlets where Starlink should have been the obvious option. All the places that government has been pledging to link up at huge cost - the rural (mostly Conservative) voters.
Ironically, these Conservative pledges are probably due to Jeremy Corbyn's proposed BritISP, received by much derision from the right. One imagines that subsequent constituency feedback and focus groups told CCHQ that bad mobile and web links were a real problem for much of the country, especially the blue parts.
Nah, they remember the good old days of the nationalised BT.
Back in 1981 my father placed an order for a landline and was given a date 9 months later, and that's because he was considered a priority.
A red herring, surely, because what improved choice in phones was not privatisation but technological advances in phones and exchanges bought and paid for when nationalised, possibly even under the GPO.
How’s about those involved in the broadband rollout actually train some people to do it, rather than mindlessly relying on importing skills?
Indeed, the UK telecoms industry has made huge commitments to fibre rollout*, so they need to match it with staff to complete the work. Of course that doesn't mean you just fling the doors wide open, the whole point of being in control of immigration is that you can make choices about sectors and the scale of immigration.
* Currently IIRC we are second behind France in terms of the speed of rollout, things have changed a lot over the last few year.
That massive fibre rollout is going to look to be a huge waste of money when everyone can sign up to Starlink....*
(*as long as you aren't actively fighting the Russian in your neighbourhood....)
It doesn’t work like that. There is a limit to the number of Starlink (or any other LEO internet provider) subscribers who can be supported per square km. Starlink has a higher number than the competing systems, and is working on increasing that with the V2 satellites. But it will always be there.
What LEO internet constellations are for is for the applications where fibre isn’t an option - remoter areas, ships, planes etc. by itself this is a 100s of Billions market. Imagine providing the backhaul for the cellular market in large chunks of Africa, for example. Or hi speed internet on every plane in the sky.
I'm not talking towns and cities. The expensive stuff has been rolling out to villages and even hamlets where Starlink should have been the obvious option. All the places that government has been pledging to link up at huge cost - the rural (mostly Conservative) voters.
Ironically, these Conservative pledges are probably due to Jeremy Corbyn's proposed BritISP, received by much derision from the right. One imagines that subsequent constituency feedback and focus groups told CCHQ that bad mobile and web links were a real problem for much of the country, especially the blue parts.
Nah, they remember the good old days of the nationalised BT.
Back in 1981 my father placed an order for a landline and was given a date 9 months later, and that's because he was considered a priority.
High quality Internet access is frequently mentioned in the context of work mobility - not just working from home. Moving offices out of cities is perfectly possible in many cases - but good internet access is vital.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
Your notion that the private car is on its way out in towns is one of the oddest and most bizarre thoughts that you have.
For almost all the developed world getting your own private transportation is one of the smartest and most liberating decisions people can make which is why the private car makes up over 80% of all personal transportation.
Ebikes and Uber may be useful in inner city London, but towns are not the same.
Private cars will still dominate in 10-20 years as there is absolutely nothing better or more liberating to use.
There's as much chance of private cars disappearing as [a not very interesting example of something that most would agree is extremely unlikely]
What are your steps of reasoning that lead from the premises "they're best" and "they're most liberating" to the claim "the position will stay the same"?
Things that are best and most liberating have to stick around? First I heard of that.
They'll stick around for the next ten or twenty years because they're the best for the foreseeable future. In a free society people choose the option they consider the best.
If something better comes along that may change, but it's not on the 10-20 year horizon that Leon stated.
But considering you face being mobilised by Vlad, I can understand why you are not used to being able to make the best choice, let alone your failure to comprehend the concept or value of liberation.
How’s about those involved in the broadband rollout actually train some people to do it, rather than mindlessly relying on importing skills?
Indeed, the UK telecoms industry has made huge commitments to fibre rollout*, so they need to match it with staff to complete the work. Of course that doesn't mean you just fling the doors wide open, the whole point of being in control of immigration is that you can make choices about sectors and the scale of immigration.
* Currently IIRC we are second behind France in terms of the speed of rollout, things have changed a lot over the last few year.
That massive fibre rollout is going to look to be a huge waste of money when everyone can sign up to Starlink....*
(*as long as you aren't actively fighting the Russian in your neighbourhood....)
It doesn’t work like that. There is a limit to the number of Starlink (or any other LEO internet provider) subscribers who can be supported per square km. Starlink has a higher number than the competing systems, and is working on increasing that with the V2 satellites. But it will always be there.
What LEO internet constellations are for is for the applications where fibre isn’t an option - remoter areas, ships, planes etc. by itself this is a 100s of Billions market. Imagine providing the backhaul for the cellular market in large chunks of Africa, for example. Or hi speed internet on every plane in the sky.
I'm not talking towns and cities. The expensive stuff has been rolling out to villages and even hamlets where Starlink should have been the obvious option. All the places that government has been pledging to link up at huge cost - the rural (mostly Conservative) voters.
Ironically, these Conservative pledges are probably due to Jeremy Corbyn's proposed BritISP, received by much derision from the right. One imagines that subsequent constituency feedback and focus groups told CCHQ that bad mobile and web links were a real problem for much of the country, especially the blue parts.
Nah, they remember the good old days of the nationalised BT.
Back in 1981 my father placed an order for a landline and was given a date 9 months later, and that's because he was considered a priority.
High quality Internet access is frequently mentioned in the context of work mobility - not just working from home. Moving offices out of cities is perfectly possible in many cases - but good internet access is vital.
Think Levelling Up.
Indeed, I did read a while back, have FTTP can boost house prices up by £20,000.
Planning and NIMBYism is a really tricky political problem. There are no answers that are both universally popular and effective. That’s just a sad fact of life in a country that is both densely populated with biodiversity and green space at a premium in its most economically active regions, and stagnating due to lack of infrastructure and investment.
You’ll never stop NIMBYs and if you ignore them you won’t win elections, and in many cases they have a point. What’s good for the country is often not good for a local community.
What would I do if I were in government? I think there’s something to be said for concentrating development as much as possible: massive industrialisation, house building, infrastructure building in a small number of very large, intensive urbanised areas including proper new towns, and leave the rest alone.
Yes, that ought to work in principle with well-built high-density housing as on the Continent, though it would need good train connections too as not everyone will work there - maybe along the HS2 route. But it's the kind of megaproject that goes over budget and takes 20 years. In the meantime it does need leadership to get sensible brownfield projects through. Locally we have a project to build inexpensive town-centre housing on part of a large car park (replacing the spaces by building a multi-storey car park at the edge). You'd think it couldn't be less controversial - what could be more brownfield, with zero net loss of parking space? - but the opposition are vigorously campaigning on "Save our car park!"
I am very envious of the continental Europeans, particularly the French, with their multi level underground car parks in most town centres, with colour coded levels.
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
The private car - in cities and towns - will be largely gone in 10-20 years. Replaced by ebikes and self drive e-cars. And maybe autonomous drone taxis for the rich
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
Your notion that the private car is on its way out in towns is one of the oddest and most bizarre thoughts that you have.
For almost all the developed world getting your own private transportation is one of the smartest and most liberating decisions people can make which is why the private car makes up over 80% of all personal transportation.
Ebikes and Uber may be useful in inner city London, but towns are not the same.
Private cars will still dominate in 10-20 years as there is absolutely nothing better or more liberating to use.
There's as much chance of private cars disappearing as there is Keir Starmer winning the next election ... then at the door of Downing Street revealing that he is an alien, who personally developed Covid in a lab, and released it deliberately to aid his species colonisation of this planet, and that he will be appointing his alien accomplice, Jacob Rees Mogg, as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Rejoice in our car-free future. You provincials can go back to ox-carts
Comments
(I must still have some books about this stuff somewhere in the garage. For anyone wanting to know about the topic in general: Andrew Dow's 'Railway - British Track Since 1804' is sublimely brilliant.)
The Americans presumably feel they have tons of space and very pro-business politics, but the outcome isn’t to make it a more attractive place, and attractiveness does have value in terms of mental well-being, tourism, residential desirability and environmentally; it’s just that the market can ignore almost all of these.
The long-term strategy announcement is probably their best shot at regaining control of the situation. If it sounds credible, even if the individual measures are unpopular, the markets will calm down. For example, the 3% of GDP for defence is timetabled for 2030, I believe. A freeze for 5 years would save quite a bit - "Britain is best defended after establishing a strong financial base", etc. The Tories do have defence spending hawks, but they are outnumbered by MPs who simply don't want to be 25% behind in the polls.
She's trying to play the role of Thatcher. The trouble is she is really playing the caricatured Thatcher as performed by Gillian Anderson, Meryl Streep and others. I'm still not convinced we've seen an accurate dramatisation of the Iron Lady.
In other moaning about the media why are Ukrainian war videos being demonetised by youtube. Denys Davidov is getting about 1m views a days for his updates. His reasonableness in the face of barbarism is admirable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBQzGJ1AdX0
So much better use of urban space than surface car parks or ugly multi-storeys
It will be as big a transition in urbanism as the move from horse to internal combustion at the end of the 19th century, when an entire ecosystem - mews, stables, ostlers, blacksmiths, tanners, pure finders, carriage makers - suddenly became obsolete. And European cities had to adapt to the car and the bus
It will free up a lot of space - all those car parks - and streets will be vastly nicer, cleaner, quieter. It’s one reason to be seriously optimistic about the future despite the present
However I do wonder how cities built around the car - eg in much of the USA - will evolve. Difficult
Or something.
Bad news for Truss: 1.7 to go in 2023.
Re-designing your town around buses and trains, simply means that everyone with a car goes elsewhere.
Unlike when cars replaced horses, the current generation of car drivers don’t want to change, and see the change being forced upon them.
I mean - surely both would be an improvement on what we have?
The 1922 Committee, however, could've handled things rather better.
The problem was the MPs, letting someone as unpopular as Rishi Sunak go forward to the membership.
Having a very long timetable so nothing go done on energy for a long time and Labour had free hits on Truss, plus encouraging early voting as votes could be changed only for the possibility of changing votes being axed so people were locked in to their early choice.
I could see it happening, in a very embryonic way, in central Seville on my recent visit. They have almost completely banished cars from the old town. They have deliberately made driving a nightmare and parking worse
They’ve installed trams and flooded the streets with free ebikes which everyone uses. It makes the city centre a delight. Old Seville, like all European cities, was not built for cars and is better without them
This will happen in every European city. Cars will be slowly strangled, beginning in the centre then moving out
What will happen in suburbs and smaller towns is less obvious. Tho the car will eventually disappear there too I suspect
It's got road, rail, port, power and water facilities all laid on, plus a uni quite nearby in Bangor that could be expanded.
And finally, it's in the poorest area in the whole of Northern Europe. If ever a place needed a massive economic regeneration project it's Anglesey.
If one developer throws up tat, and it's easy to self build or to get another development firm underway, then the tat would wither and die as nobody would want to buy tat if they have an abundance of choice.
Which is what terrifies the NIMBYs. They want people to have no choice so the NIMBYs can extract maximum wealth from them by holding onto the restricted "planned" supply.
It’s a well known fact, Fruit Flies prefer a fruitier politics.
Both eventually withered away and went to Liverpool and Swansea, although it still had a modest oil port until the mid 1990s.
Everyone wants to live in London/SE.
Yet London is astonishingly low rise compared to its main peers.
And look at the stretch from, say, Canary Whart to Tilbury (ie docklands), both north and south. Nobody gives a fuck about that landscape, with the exception of the RSPB marshes at Rainham, but you could fit millions in there.
I will bet the problem there is that locals have encountered the unthinking style of “get rid of cars”. They are worried that car parking is being reduced and not replaced.
Instead of designing and implementing changes to decrease the necessity to use cars, local authorities have done some ridiculous “ban cars and wonder why it is fuck up” policies. Abingdon City council killed shopping in a chunk of Abingdon by doing this.
Consider gentrified inner cities; rubbish car access but very desirable and expensive because you can access a good life without needing a car. It's hard to replicate that with roads and car parks because they take up so much damn space.
“China began severely restricting the export of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gowns and masks, months before notifying the world of the outbreak of Covid-19, it has emerged.
An altered timeline would significantly challenge the theory that the pandemic originated from a seafood market in Wuhan, where the first cases emerged in December 2019.
Many experts now think that the Covid-19 could have leaked from experiments carried out at Dr Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which was studying bat-borne coronaviruses.
The restricting of PPE exports came around the same time that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) removed a database of bat virus gene sequences, which has never been restored”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/08/china-began-stockpiling-ppe-months-covid-outbreak/
IT CAME FROM THE LAB
That's a bit unusual, surely, even allowing for all the extra solar that's been brought on stream in the last couple of years?
I remember when we were all impressed it was 20% at noon in midsummer!
You may be some time....
The solution to that issue is park and ride. But it seems to be blind spot that some councils can’t understand.
Unless your dream is a completely deposited countryside and everyone living in Megacity One.
It is the future
There's nothing much to do for a while but sit back and wait to see what the Tories do next. Labour supporters may taunt gleefully but it's a bit like taunting a sad animal in a cage.
I don't see much reason to expect an early change so my own invaluable contributions will probably be fewer than usual until it livens up a bit.
And is London low-rise compared with its peers? Manhattan, perhaps, but while Paris has flats, they are mainly low-rise blocks.
Footage of the bridge linking Russia to Crimea appears to show Gandalf of the Istari striking it with his staff moments before collapse.
Gandalf, who is well known for his dislike of bridges, is understood to have brought down the bridge in order to prevent the passage of a terrible evil which threatened the free peoples.
Pictures from the scene show a gap in the bridge above a terrible chasm which plummets to the very roots of the earth, right next to the former flagship of the Russian fleet.
Huge gouts of flame appear to be either a burning fuel supply train or Durins Bane himself, incandescent in his fury and wreathed in a terrible fire.
However, some commentators have blamed Gandalf himself for provoking the attack.
“By delving too deep, the dwarfs provoked the Balrog of Morgoth who is just defending his legitimate sphere of influence east of the Anduin,” said Nigel Farage on GB News this morning.
It’s a cinch oldie.
plucky - good
badly-equipped - good
conscripts - good
personifying the enemy - good
calling enemy commander a rude name - good
use of rhyme - good
calling own side a community of Tommy Atkinses - good
And all in 11 words, beginning "plucky". Excellent stuff.
For almost all the developed world getting your own private transportation is one of the smartest and most liberating decisions people can make which is why the private car makes up over 80% of all personal transportation.
Ebikes and Uber may be useful in inner city London, but towns are not the same.
Private cars will still dominate in 10-20 years as there is absolutely nothing better or more liberating to use.
There's as much chance of private cars disappearing as there is Keir Starmer winning the next election ... then at the door of Downing Street revealing that he is an alien, who personally developed Covid in a lab, and released it deliberately to aid his species colonisation of this planet, and that he will be appointing his alien accomplice, Jacob Rees Mogg, as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
If that timeline is falsified, then lab leak becomes that much likelier
In the future I suspect we will look back in astonishment: that we ever doubted it came from the lab. The circumstantial evidence is now pretty overwhelming
Who is out first?
Truss or Sturgeon...
You'll have to prove every little thing, then - probably so much that it would be impossible for most people to prove it all before their bellies run empty, they stop caring, and anyway £85K would only buy a jar of yeast extract on the black market.
“This must be a joke. Please tell me this is a joke. @nih just gave @EcoHealthNYC and Peter Daszak a NEW grant for bat coronavirus research?
Including supplying “viral sequences and isolates for use in vaccine development”?
Nope. Not a joke.
The joke, apparently, is on us.”
https://twitter.com/alexberenson/status/1576377456772218882?s=46&t=DpEipnxbsKllHKcJyCjtJw
Back in 1981 my father placed an order for a landline and was given a date 9 months later, and that's because he was considered a priority.
Things that are best and most liberating have to stick around? First I heard of that.
There would then be many more routes and many more drivers, with the whole thing much more responsive to supply and demand. It's a completely free market solution to getting people out of their cars that Bart should love.
Think Levelling Up.
If something better comes along that may change, but it's not on the 10-20 year horizon that Leon stated.
But considering you face being mobilised by Vlad, I can understand why you are not used to being able to make the best choice, let alone your failure to comprehend the concept or value of liberation.