“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”
Have you ever heard of a concept called “confirmation bias”?
Professor Robert Garry writes to Anthony Fauci in February 2020
Again, you only cite (secondary) evidence that upholds your view. If I were to post contrary secondary evidence on here you’ll disregard it with an ad hominem about the author being in the pay of the Chinese or similar. So there’s no point. It’s how you work, whatever the topic.
England captain Jos Buttler on the Matthew Wade obstruction incident: "I wasn't sure what happened. They asked if I wanted to appeal, and I thought, 'We're here for a long time in Australia.'
"It would be a risky one to go for so early in the trip."
“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”
Have you ever heard of a concept called “confirmation bias”?
Professor Robert Garry writes to Anthony Fauci in February 2020
Anyway, since you invite a response, Science Magazine publishes a paper in July 2022 proving the outbreak began at the Wuhan Market. Doubtless Science Magazine and all 16 authors of the paper are Chinese shills, am I right?
England captain Jos Buttler on the Matthew Wade obstruction incident: "I wasn't sure what happened. They asked if I wanted to appeal, and I thought, 'We're here for a long time in Australia.'
"It would be a risky one to go for so early in the trip."
Odd reasoning. The Aussies wouldn't think twice about appealing in the same situation.
“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”
Have you ever heard of a concept called “confirmation bias”?
Professor Robert Garry writes to Anthony Fauci in February 2020
Again, you only cite (secondary) evidence that upholds your view. If I were to post contrary secondary evidence on here you’ll disregard it with an ad hominem about the author being in the pay of the Chinese or similar. So there’s no point. It’s how you work, whatever the topic.
“As long as the origin of Covid-19 is a mystery, life can go on, and people – including those with deep economic interests in China, and U.S. policymakers – can more or less live their lives the way they did before the pandemic. The moment someone finds smoking-gun evidence that it was a lab leak, everything regarding China and the rest of the world changes, and likely in dangerous and unpredictable directions.
“We don’t know, because we don’t know. But we also don’t know because we don’t want to know.”
“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”
Have you ever heard of a concept called “confirmation bias”?
Professor Robert Garry writes to Anthony Fauci in February 2020
Anyway, since you invite a response, Science Magazine publishes a paper in July 2022 proving the outbreak began at the Wuhan Market. Doubtless Science Magazine and all 16 authors of the paper are Chinese shills, am I right?
“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”
Have you ever heard of a concept called “confirmation bias”?
Professor Robert Garry writes to Anthony Fauci in February 2020
Anyway, since you invite a response, Science Magazine publishes a paper in July 2022 proving the outbreak began at the Wuhan Market. Doubtless Science Magazine and all 16 authors of the paper are Chinese shills, am I right?
Just looking at a picture of the derailed train on the bridge. Note the first or second wagon in the picture is derailed. A derailment might explain why the train was reportedly stopped at the time of the explosion.
Might the train derailing have been the source of both incidents? How would a derailment and subsequent fire on the train tracks above cause the bridge deck below to collapse? The nearest carriageway might have been protected (in the lee of) the rail bridge's structure, so the other carriageway took the brunt. ISTR that one of the videos before the explosion showed a fire-like glow before the blast.
I doubt it, but I do wonder...
Also note the short rail lengths; I count ~22-24 sleepers for length, so 60-foot rails. No modern Continuously Welded Rail here...
“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”
Have you ever heard of a concept called “confirmation bias”?
Professor Robert Garry writes to Anthony Fauci in February 2020
Anyway, since you invite a response, Science Magazine publishes a paper in July 2022 proving the outbreak began at the Wuhan Market. Doubtless Science Magazine and all 16 authors of the paper are Chinese shills, am I right?
It "proves" nothing of the kind. It is kind of a feature of scientific papers that they don't.
And yes. If you look at the eyepoppingly unprofessional tweets by the authors which accompanied publication you will realise beyond a shadow of doubt that it is a polemical not a scientific piece.
That Chinese paper from early 2020 (since deleted) is quite extraordinary, in retrospect. They come right out and flatly say it: this came from the lab
Of course, at that point only 500 people were dead. Not 20,000,000
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.
You seem to think that driving and using other modes are mutually exclusive.
I drive to work. I am just about to drive to the supermarket. Yesterday I used the train to meet up with some friends for a beery day out. Later this afternoon I have my Covid booster. I would quite like to be able to get a bus, as there is a good pub over the road from the vaccination hub, however I can't as there aren't any on Sundays. It really is not within casual walking distance so I am going to have to drive and limit myself to one pint of something low-gravity.
The problem with driving round towns is it is slow and expensive, due to traffic, urban fuel consumption rates and parking charges. Much better people being able to use public transport for some journeys, you might reduce the number of cars on the road (some couples may be able to run one car if one person can get to work by PT) but you would certainly reduce miles done.
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.
Ah, thanks - completely news to me. I did wonder about metal mining but the shipbuilding was new.
“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”
Have you ever heard of a concept called “confirmation bias”?
Professor Robert Garry writes to Anthony Fauci in February 2020
Anyway, since you invite a response, Science Magazine publishes a paper in July 2022 proving the outbreak began at the Wuhan Market. Doubtless Science Magazine and all 16 authors of the paper are Chinese shills, am I right?
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.
Yeah, I don't see a serious competitor to the private car dominating in that timeframe (which is a pity, because the dominance of the car has a pile of negative externalities and if we could meet peoples' transport desires without so many of the air pollution and traffic side-effects that would be great). More than that, even in cases where technologically something better is possible (eg moving much more longer distance freight by electric train) the up-front costs and difficulty of getting from here to there mean that we're more likely to de-carbonise and reduce staffing costs of road freight by developing electric AI trucks than by switching to rail, even though AI electric trucks are still in the R&D stage at best and we can make electric freight trains today. So I think we'll have a lot of private cars in 20 years because we have a lot of private cars today and all our infrastructure and cultural standards assume that.
I don’t believe that projection. If Labour can reach 30% of the vote they will make significant gains
The Scones are toast
There are almost no SNP/Labour marginals under the new boundaries. The first two (Alba) seats are easy SLab pickings. But No.3 has an SNP majority of over 5,200.. Thereafter it gets extremely tough for Sarwar.
I don’t believe that projection. If Labour can reach 30% of the vote they will make significant gains
The Scones are toast
There are almost no SNP/Labour marginals under the new boundaries. The first two (Alba) seats are easy SLab pickings. But No.3 has an SNP majority of over 5,200.. Thereafter it gets extremely tough for Sarwar.
Also, the current movement of Slab to try and outdo Scons on British nationalism (Edit: and Labour HQ too on "not allowing" democrtically demanded referenda etc) is going to piss off a small but non-trivial part of the current Slab electorate. This is going to be an issue precisely in SNP/Slab contests.
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.
You could be your own slightly less decrepit carer who had access to your mail every day, and wanted to run two ISAs not just one. The bank thing is a bit more of a conundrum.
If you think you have problems, my bank made a demented fuss the other day because I tried to transfer a - gulp - five figure sum to somewhere which would pay me some interest on it (an FSCS recognised bank). Lots of phone calls about Did someone ring me up and advise me out of the blue to make the transfer etc. Culminating with "we apologise for making this fuss, but we have you down as a vulnerable customer."
“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”
Have you ever heard of a concept called “confirmation bias”?
Professor Robert Garry writes to Anthony Fauci in February 2020
Anyway, since you invite a response, Science Magazine publishes a paper in July 2022 proving the outbreak began at the Wuhan Market. Doubtless Science Magazine and all 16 authors of the paper are Chinese shills, am I right?
Surely both are possible. Outbreak started at the lab (maybe only one person infected) and then spread to all and sundry via the market.
I wonder why early cases might have quickly spread from the lab to the market, and then continued from there?
Ah
Well, you don't really have to wonder, lab worker doing shopping at local market covers it.
Yes those Chinese scientists who wrote that paper in January 2020 give what is still - by a distance - the most plausible explanation. A blood spill or contaminated trash at the Wuhan CDC - where they kept and dissected bats - infected a lab worker
That worker, asymptomatic, took that 3 minute stroll to the nearby market. Perhaps several people did this over weeks. Finally the fire caught
It’s the simplest, easiest and likeliest solution, and all the sturm und drang ever since has been a desperate attempt at diversion, by scientists and politicians who dislike the implications. Understandably
I don’t believe that projection. If Labour can reach 30% of the vote they will make significant gains
The Scones are toast
I think that the demise of the Scottish Conservatives will prove to be somewhat exaggerated, especially in the Borders where the SNP have never been as dominant.
But it is very difficult to make progress against a party sitting on 45% of the vote in a FPTP system. Labour has no Tory targets in Scotland at all. It has SNP targets and it needs to focus on that. The current leadership is showing more signs of doing so. There will be a tipping point at which large swathes of seats fall to Labour, just as they all collapsed to the SNP in 2015. Labour are not there yet but it is now conceivable for the first time in a long time.
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.
If they are as serious of balancing the books as they are promising the world markets, there’s a bonfire of welfare state, public spending and councils support grant coming in November 😟
High rise v low rise housing is a red herring. As any planner will delight in telling you if asked, the densest housing in London is actually those three or four storey developments in Mayfair. Posh and apparently large they may be, but they are packed in. The key is having decent public transport and amenity space nearby.
The classic Paris apartment block is six floors. So is the classic New York brownstone.
London? The average is probably something like 2.5 storeys, like my house in Hackney, less than 2 miles from Bank.
Just build up to six floors out to Zone 4. No green belt needed. Job done.
Yuck. 6 floors means sharing the building, garden and everything else. No thanks.
Well, in essence, this attitude is why house prices are so high.
I do understand the attitude, and I fiercely love my garden back in London, but I have to report from Apartment 11a that higher rise living has its perks too.
The classic Paris apartment block is six floors. So is the classic New York brownstone.
London? The average is probably something like 2.5 storeys, like my house in Hackney, less than 2 miles from Bank.
Just build up to six floors out to Zone 4. No green belt needed. Job done.
Yuck. 6 floors means sharing the building, garden and everything else. No thanks.
Well, in essence, this attitude is why house prices are so high.
I do understand the attitude, and I fiercely love my garden back in London, but I have to report from Apartment 11a that higher rise living has its perks too.
Potentially quite a big issue here. There's a chain of logic that goes British provincial cities are fairly low density (definitely true) to British provincial cities are relatively unproductive (definitely true). You can't prove the cause and effect via longer journey times, less viable transit, business doesn't thrive because the cities are smaller than they look on the map. But it's plausible.
So let's imagine there is a chain where mid-rise living improved national prosperity by (say) 10-20% over a few decades. Then we have the question posed by both Truss and The Pet Shop Boys;
Ask yourself this question Do you want to be rich?
The classic Paris apartment block is six floors. So is the classic New York brownstone.
London? The average is probably something like 2.5 storeys, like my house in Hackney, less than 2 miles from Bank.
Just build up to six floors out to Zone 4. No green belt needed. Job done.
Yuck. 6 floors means sharing the building, garden and everything else. No thanks.
Well, in essence, this attitude is why house prices are so high.
I do understand the attitude, and I fiercely love my garden back in London, but I have to report from Apartment 11a that higher rise living has its perks too.
Potentially quite a big issue here. There's a chain of logic that goes British provincial cities are fairly low density (definitely true) to British provincial cities are relatively unproductive (definitely true). You can't prove the cause and effect via longer journey times, less viable transit, business doesn't thrive because the cities are smaller than they look on the map. But it's plausible.
So let's imagine there is a chain where mid-rise living improved national prosperity by (say) 10-20% over a few decades. Then we have the question posed by both Truss and The Pet Shop Boys;
Ask yourself this question Do you want to be rich?
Personally, I think the data you refer to is only part of the story. Look at places like Dallas or Denver, post war cities which sprawl endlessly, are built entirely around the car, but have high productivity.
But, here’s the thing, Texas and Arizona are rather large places. Room to sprawl. Commuting is easy, presumably. Plenty of traffic, but less congestion.
Britain kind of has no option but to follow the typology used in Europe and the NE US.
A lot of people disagreed with me that “everyone wants to live in London/SE”.
But that’s what price signals suggest.
And no, you can’t “make prosperity” by building a large city in Anglesey or Lincolnshire.
Cities need a reason-to-be.
This is where we could use EU trade barriers to our advantage. Turn, say, Great Yarmouth into a major port with modern customs facilities and rail connections.
The classic Paris apartment block is six floors. So is the classic New York brownstone.
London? The average is probably something like 2.5 storeys, like my house in Hackney, less than 2 miles from Bank.
Just build up to six floors out to Zone 4. No green belt needed. Job done.
Yuck. 6 floors means sharing the building, garden and everything else. No thanks.
Well, in essence, this attitude is why house prices are so high.
I do understand the attitude, and I fiercely love my garden back in London, but I have to report from Apartment 11a that higher rise living has its perks too.
Potentially quite a big issue here. There's a chain of logic that goes British provincial cities are fairly low density (definitely true) to British provincial cities are relatively unproductive (definitely true). You can't prove the cause and effect via longer journey times, less viable transit, business doesn't thrive because the cities are smaller than they look on the map. But it's plausible.
So let's imagine there is a chain where mid-rise living improved national prosperity by (say) 10-20% over a few decades. Then we have the question posed by both Truss and The Pet Shop Boys;
Ask yourself this question Do you want to be rich?
If you look at where people live, and maximum bang for buck, you are just talking about concentrating on Glasgow, Liverpool-Manchester-Leeds, and Birmingham.
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.
Am old enough to remember, that was one aspect of life in UK that used to astound Americans.
Ditto quaint olde Englishe custom of, when selling a house, ripping out the plumbing & etc. upon exiting.
Comments
"It would be a risky one to go for so early in the trip."
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
“We don’t know, because we don’t know. But we also don’t know because we don’t want to know.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-search-for-covids-origin-seems-to-have-stalled/
London? The average is probably something like 2.5 storeys, like my house in Hackney, less than 2 miles from Bank.
Just build up to six floors out to Zone 4.
No green belt needed. Job done.
Ah
Might the train derailing have been the source of both incidents? How would a derailment and subsequent fire on the train tracks above cause the bridge deck below to collapse? The nearest carriageway might have been protected (in the lee of) the rail bridge's structure, so the other carriageway took the brunt. ISTR that one of the videos before the explosion showed a fire-like glow before the blast.
I doubt it, but I do wonder...
Also note the short rail lengths; I count ~22-24 sleepers for length, so 60-foot rails. No modern Continuously Welded Rail here...
And yes. If you look at the eyepoppingly unprofessional tweets by the authors which accompanied publication you will realise beyond a shadow of doubt that it is a polemical not a scientific piece.
Westminster voting intention (change, August 2022):
SNP 45% (+1)
LAB 30% (+7)
CON 15% (-5)
LD 5% (-3)
OTH 4% (-1)
But that’s what price signals suggest.
And no, you can’t “make prosperity” by building a large city in Anglesey or Lincolnshire.
Cities need a reason-to-be.
Of course, at that point only 500 people were dead. Not 20,000,000
SNP 53 seats (+5)
SLab 3 seats (+2)
SLD 1 seat (-1)
SCon 0 seats (-6)
The Scones are toast
I drive to work. I am just about to drive to the supermarket. Yesterday I used the train to meet up with some friends for a beery day out. Later this afternoon I have my Covid booster. I would quite like to be able to get a bus, as there is a good pub over the road from the vaccination hub, however I can't as there aren't any on Sundays. It really is not within casual walking distance so I am going to have to drive and limit myself to one pint of something low-gravity.
The problem with driving round towns is it is slow and expensive, due to traffic, urban fuel consumption rates and parking charges. Much better people being able to use public transport for some journeys, you might reduce the number of cars on the road (some couples may be able to run one car if one person can get to work by PT) but you would certainly reduce miles done.
Mind you, he also used the odd term “House Jock” to describe Gordon Brown the other night.
The first two (Alba) seats are easy SLab pickings. But No.3 has an SNP majority of over 5,200.. Thereafter it gets extremely tough for Sarwar.
Second assertion: false
If you think you have problems, my bank made a demented fuss the other day because I tried to transfer a - gulp - five figure sum to somewhere which would pay me some interest on it (an FSCS recognised bank). Lots of phone calls about Did someone ring me up and advise me out of the blue to make the transfer etc. Culminating with "we apologise for making this fuss, but we have you down as a vulnerable customer."
That worker, asymptomatic, took that 3 minute stroll to the nearby market. Perhaps several people did this over weeks. Finally the fire caught
It’s the simplest, easiest and likeliest solution, and all the sturm und drang ever since has been a desperate attempt at diversion, by scientists and politicians who dislike the implications. Understandably
But it is very difficult to make progress against a party sitting on 45% of the vote in a FPTP system. Labour has no Tory targets in Scotland at all. It has SNP targets and it needs to focus on that. The current leadership is showing more signs of doing so. There will be a tipping point at which large swathes of seats fall to Labour, just as they all collapsed to the SNP in 2015. Labour are not there yet but it is now conceivable for the first time in a long time.
NEW THREAD
It’s a dormitory town.
Must have been that other Sweden-based ScotNat.
As any planner will delight in telling you if asked, the densest housing in London is actually those three or four storey developments in Mayfair. Posh and apparently large they may be, but they are packed in.
The key is having decent public transport and amenity space nearby.
I do understand the attitude, and I fiercely love my garden back in London, but I have to report from Apartment 11a that higher rise living has its perks too.
In the central belt they are SNP-Lab fights
A grand total of 5 SNP-Lab Constituencies held by the SNP have a margin of less than 10 points.
So let's imagine there is a chain where mid-rise living improved national prosperity by (say) 10-20% over a few decades. Then we have the question posed by both Truss and The Pet Shop Boys;
Ask yourself this question
Do you want to be rich?
But, here’s the thing, Texas and Arizona are rather large places. Room to sprawl. Commuting is easy, presumably. Plenty of traffic, but less congestion.
Britain kind of has no option but to follow the typology used in Europe and the NE US.
Ditto quaint olde Englishe custom of, when selling a house, ripping out the plumbing & etc. upon exiting.