I should clear up, whenever I write Ngozi Fulani, keep in mind this could also mean Ngozi Headley; Ngozi Headley-Fulani; Marlene Headley; Marlene Fulani; Mary Headley; Mary Fulani; Mary Headley-Fulani; or Sister Ngozi. For avoidance of any doubt, this is all the same person.
The charity sector seems riddled with this kind of stuff. The captain Tom mob had a lot of allegations thrown at them - no idea how it turned out.
I was Santa last night for a local Lions club on a charity collection in the snow. Lions commit 90% of all donations back into the local community and the remainding 10% to overseas appeals. All raised by people in their spare time. I worry about people who work in the charity sector. Why not work in another job and give up your free time to help out?
In all honesty, the Brexit lot have been very lucky. Covid has masked the shit-show of it, the Putin war has continued that, and very shortly the fact that thinking jobs will become automated (if the internet was this day's equal to the printing press then the steam engine and so forth will be the equivalent to AI's new thought as a job unless it's very specialised/creative) will make that seem a sideshow too. We are living the next industrial revolution. The prior one, as said was started with the printing press (information) and was seen manifest by the steam engine and more (labour).
Funny how the promised immediate Brexit recession didn't happen after the leave vote, after Article 50 was invoked, after Brexit actually happened or after the transition period ended. Then, after we face economic hard times through a global pandemic and major European war, it's supposedly all hiding the deadly damage of Brexit. Remainers just move goalposts until a ball eventually gets through them.
Whilst its entertaining that you cling to "project fear" even long after it all turned into fact, I do have to ask how you manage to maintain such a state of denial?
That was only the 26th test match to be played in Pakistan between England and the home team, (although 2 of those took place in what is now Bangladesh).
The Tories have just been called out as liars (I know, a shocker) by the UK Statistics bods about their "new trade" claims. Yet there remain many people out there who don't know anything about anything who may still believe the lies.
There will come a time when someone links the person who did those trade deals with the same team crashing the economy
On topic: No. Brexit is political hell, even all this time and so many events later.
We know that we will reform our trading arrangement with the EEA so that its as close as we can get it, but that isn't the same as begging the EU to let us back in - and it would need to be begging.
The Tories have just been called out as liars (I know, a shocker) by the UK Statistics bods about their "new trade" claims. Yet there remain many people out there who don't know anything about anything who may still believe the lies.
So tread softly, slowly. Get the job done. Win the election. Then reveal the Shocking News that the Tories have told a Massive Lie and now the new government needs to fix it.
I've got my shocked face ready already. One of the key skills of teaching is acting shocked when you aren't really. I trust that the entire Shadow Cabinet is having regular shocked face training ("we knew things were bad, but not THIS bad") in preparation for the aftermath of the election.
I should clear up, whenever I write Ngozi Fulani, keep in mind this could also mean Ngozi Headley; Ngozi Headley-Fulani; Marlene Headley; Marlene Fulani; Mary Headley; Mary Fulani; Mary Headley-Fulani; or Sister Ngozi. For avoidance of any doubt, this is all the same person.
The charity sector seems riddled with this kind of stuff. The captain Tom mob had a lot of allegations thrown at them - no idea how it turned out.
I was Santa last night for a local Lions club on a charity collection in the snow. Lions commit 90% of all donations back into the local community and the remainding 10% to overseas appeals. All raised by people in their spare time. I worry about people who work in the charity sector. Why not work in another job and give up your free time to help out?
I think a review of charities is long overdue.
Depends on the charity, would be tricky legislation.
For example, the RSPB need to employ some good scientists if they are to make effective interventions on planning applications (and that work is a source of income from government grants etc).
Even food banks/soup kitchens - during the pandemic, the church down the road had a team of furloughed chefs sorting the meals out. Tasted incredible, but their real skill was managing to cater for c200 people. Worth employing a chef for a few hours each week.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base.
The Apple Car is going to be the vehicle of (overwhelming) choice for that demographic. They should do a deal with BMW and call it the Mini Woke.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
“People” seeing his tweets? Or “accounts” seeing his tweets.
He's seen a sharp decline in number of replies too.
Could be noise.
Could be that he's simply not posted as much that is interesting.
Or it is possible that it is something more nefarious.
Six years on the British public are still struggling to acknowledge the two essential facts about Brexit:
It was a mistake. Quite a big mistake with bad consequences.
We are not going to reverse that mistake. We won't rejoin any time soon.
I suspect Starmer is one of the clearer sighted politicians who understands that damage limitation is the best we can hope for at this point. "We got this wrong as a country but Labour will aim to deal with a few of the worst bits of it" isn't a winning platform, so he keeps quiet.
I do wish he would lighten up the rhetoric though. It wouldn't cost anything to make warm noises about the UK being at the heart of Europe.
Oh it would cost Labour some (possibly a lot) of potential Red Wall votes. And while they may not be Labour votes Labour will want them to vote for whatever party Farage runs rather than the Tory party. And the best way of ensuring that is to make the Tory party focus on other issues.
Most are great, from the Wellcome Foundation to Oxford University to Great Snoring Duck Pond Society they contribute massively to society.
Recently a sort of person/ group has discovered two things:
That starting a charity is a great way to attract respectable attention. (The BBC is a total sucker for it).
That it can operate without being any actual use. ("Raising awareness"!!).
That very few ask hard questions, including the Charity Commission.
That it is a general licence to ask the entire nation for money, including the money needed to pay both Rabbit and his friends and relations to 'administer'.
I should clear up, whenever I write Ngozi Fulani, keep in mind this could also mean Ngozi Headley; Ngozi Headley-Fulani; Marlene Headley; Marlene Fulani; Mary Headley; Mary Fulani; Mary Headley-Fulani; or Sister Ngozi. For avoidance of any doubt, this is all the same person.
That thread would have been a lot more powerful if it had consisted of 7 to 12 tweets, and he'd skipped the bit about twerking.
Granted Richard Burgon isn't the greatest MP but he isn't wrong here.
@RichardBurgon · 3m Nurses are now earning £5,000 a year less in real terms than when the Tories came to power.
There are now 47,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS.
The NHS crisis can't be resolved without paying nurses properly.
No he is not wrong. But everyone is avoiding the hard part. If in relative terms group X relatively recovers their position economically, then other groups will relatively lose ground.
Some groups will lose ground substantially. There will be winners and losers. Everyone has a favoured list of who should be winners (midwives, hedge fund managers, teachers, drug dealers or whoever), but no-one wants to talk about the losers.
OT (sorry). The first real electricity supply pinch is coming up this evening. It's cold and dark, and the wind is expected to be light. Octopus have asked us to reduce power consumption for 2 hours, 5pm to 7pm, and I believe that other suppliers are taking similar steps.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base.
The Apple Car is going to be the vehicle of (overwhelming) choice for that demographic. They should do a deal with BMW and call it the Mini Woke.
Ha, good one. I’d forgotten about the Moke, a staple of my Dinky collection. I suppose they go for big money nowadays, not that they’d be much use to me.
OT (sorry). The first real electricity supply pinch is coming up this evening. It's cold and dark, and the wind is expected to be light. Octopus have asked us to reduce power consumption for 2 hours, 5pm to 7pm, and I believe that other suppliers are taking similar steps.
Granted Richard Burgon isn't the greatest MP but he isn't wrong here.
@RichardBurgon · 3m Nurses are now earning £5,000 a year less in real terms than when the Tories came to power.
There are now 47,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS.
The NHS crisis can't be resolved without paying nurses properly.
Agree, but where does the money come from, without contributing to inflation?
From the rest of us - wealth tax, income tax, windfall tax, borrowing, we can debate, but clearly a situation where we can't get either an ambulance or reasonable care within hours is not acceptable, and more important than most of the things we spend money on. We pay the Government to prioritise, and at present they seem to be prioritising doing nothing very much for fear it might make MPs rebel. That, I suggest, is not a priority for most people.
OT (sorry). The first real electricity supply pinch is coming up this evening. It's cold and dark, and the wind is expected to be light. Octopus have asked us to reduce power consumption for 2 hours, 5pm to 7pm, and I believe that other suppliers are taking similar steps.
Yes, I'm in.
I'm in too. The tricky bit is persuading the teenagers in the house to switch off their PCs and hairdryers for a bit!
Granted Richard Burgon isn't the greatest MP but he isn't wrong here.
@RichardBurgon · 3m Nurses are now earning £5,000 a year less in real terms than when the Tories came to power.
There are now 47,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS.
The NHS crisis can't be resolved without paying nurses properly.
Agree, but where does the money come from, without contributing to inflation?
From the rest of us - wealth tax, income tax, windfall tax, borrowing, we can debate, but clearly a situation where we can't get either an ambulance or reasonable care within hours is not acceptable, and more important than most of the things we spend money on. We pay the Government to prioritise, and at present they seem to be prioritising doing nothing very much for fear it might make MPs rebel. That, I suggest, is not a priority for most people.
Paying taxes to fund public services? What are you Nick - some kind of Socialist???
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla makes around $10,000 dollars profit on each car, how much does BMW and the others make?
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
Brexit's costing my employer both directly and indirectly. Dutch accountants doing well out of it though.
What are the direct costs?
Payment to said accountants for Dutch (EU) VAT registration/returns so we can go VAT free on triangulation which was previously covered by a simple intrastat return.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base.
The Apple Car is going to be the vehicle of (overwhelming) choice for that demographic. They should do a deal with BMW and call it the Mini Woke.
Granted Richard Burgon isn't the greatest MP but he isn't wrong here.
@RichardBurgon · 3m Nurses are now earning £5,000 a year less in real terms than when the Tories came to power.
There are now 47,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS.
The NHS crisis can't be resolved without paying nurses properly.
Agree, but where does the money come from, without contributing to inflation?
From the rest of us - wealth tax, income tax, windfall tax, borrowing, we can debate, but clearly a situation where we can't get either an ambulance or reasonable care within hours is not acceptable, and more important than most of the things we spend money on. We pay the Government to prioritise, and at present they seem to be prioritising doing nothing very much for fear it might make MPs rebel. That, I suggest, is not a priority for most people.
Ask "most people" whether nurses should be paid more. They all say yes. Then show them the current pay scale, remembering to explain the DB pension scheme which adds circa 40% on to the said pay scale. Then see if their view changes.
Secondly, when people clamour for higher nurses pay, why the focus on nurses? What about doctors, porters and admin staff? Why just nurses? I don't know for sure but I'm guessing that nurses total less than half of the NHS staffing.
Isn't this just an emotive way of building a narrative to alter the balance between the public sector vs the private sector in favour of the former? Isn't this the real agenda?
I should clear up, whenever I write Ngozi Fulani, keep in mind this could also mean Ngozi Headley; Ngozi Headley-Fulani; Marlene Headley; Marlene Fulani; Mary Headley; Mary Fulani; Mary Headley-Fulani; or Sister Ngozi. For avoidance of any doubt, this is all the same person.
Not bothering with the thread, since it's evidently victim-blaming. The point isn't that Fulani is or isn't a wonderful person. It's that she was subjected to aggressive questioning about her background by a trusted adviser to the Palace. It was seen by two witnesses, not denied by Hussey, and confirmed by the Palace. Fulani could be an axe-murderess and it wouldn't change anything.
I was chatting yesterday to a high-flying banker, born in Britain of Egyptian descent. He says it's routine for people to ask him where he "really" comes from, even when he identifies where he was born and grew up (Liverpool), though not to the same persistent extent as Hussey. He rolls his eyes and says you get used to it, but it's not great.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base.
The Apple Car is going to be the vehicle of (overwhelming) choice for that demographic. They should do a deal with BMW and call it the Mini Woke.
Ha, good one. I’d forgotten about the Moke, a staple of my Dinky collection. I suppose they go for big money nowadays, not that they’d be much use to me.
Edit: ISTR that the Dinky came with a parachute so you could fling it oot the windae for added play value.
I remember that someone whose family had a cafe managed to collect enough cigarette coupons from customers for a free Mini-Moke. Not the Dinky, either, but the 1:1 scale model.
Granted Richard Burgon isn't the greatest MP but he isn't wrong here.
@RichardBurgon · 3m Nurses are now earning £5,000 a year less in real terms than when the Tories came to power.
There are now 47,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS.
The NHS crisis can't be resolved without paying nurses properly.
Agree, but where does the money come from, without contributing to inflation?
From the rest of us - wealth tax, income tax, windfall tax, borrowing, we can debate, but clearly a situation where we can't get either an ambulance or reasonable care within hours is not acceptable, and more important than most of the things we spend money on. We pay the Government to prioritise, and at present they seem to be prioritising doing nothing very much for fear it might make MPs rebel. That, I suggest, is not a priority for most people.
Ask "most people" whether nurses should be paid more. They all say yes. Then show them the current pay scale, remembering to explain the DB pension scheme which adds circa 40% on to the said pay scale. Then see if their view changes.
Secondly, when people clamour for higher nurses pay, why the focus on nurses? What about doctors, porters and admin staff? Why just nurses? I don't know for sure but I'm guessing that nurses total less than half of the NHS staffing.
Isn't this just an emotive way of building a narrative to alter the balance between the public sector vs the private sector in favour of the former? Isn't this the real agenda?
There are 47,000 nursing vacancies. Many of them will be being filled on a shift by shift basis (because the Hospital has no choice but to pay whatever is demanded) by contract staff charging far more than the cost of an salaried staff member.
So we are currently not paying nurses enough for them to work AND the NHS is probably paying billions to agencies in a desperate attempt to avoid not having to close wards down at short notice.
So it's not a question of what the general public may think - it's a question of what level of pay is required to ensure nursing staffing levels return to sustainable levels - because the total cost will be far less than you think.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
Ultimately, however, the fuel is fungible to be sure - a lot will be renewable energy even now.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla makes around $10,000 dollars profit on each car, how much does BMW and the others make?
Tesla's operating margin is about 15%, which is very slightly behind Porsche (16.5%), and slightly ahead of BMW (13%). If you compare it to mass market players, like VW (6.5%) or Toyota (7.5%) then it looks great.
However, that operating margin does include renewable vehicle credits it sells to other auto makers. If you exclude those, the margin drops to around 12%. Which is very decent.
The issue to me is that Tesla's operating margin befits its industry position: i.e. it's selling mostly vehicles that cost £40k+. Can it maintain that level of profitability when it starts selling £15-25k vehicles?
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
Even if the electricity used to charge an EV were 100% generated by fossil fuel power stations, it would still be more environmentally friendly to drive an EV than a conventional car. That's because power stations are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than car engines are, and electricity transmission losses are relatively small.
But of course a significant proportion are our electricity does come from non-fossil fuel sources, especially at night when many EVs are charged, which swings the equation even more in their favour.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base.
The Apple Car is going to be the vehicle of (overwhelming) choice for that demographic. They should do a deal with BMW and call it the Mini Woke.
Ha, good one. I’d forgotten about the Moke, a staple of my Dinky collection. I suppose they go for big money nowadays, not that they’d be much use to me.
Edit: ISTR that the Dinky came with a parachute so you could fling it oot the windae for added play value.
I remember that someone whose family had a cafe managed to collect enough cigarette coupons from customers for a free Mini-Moke. Not the Dinky, either, but the 1:1 scale model.
Yes, it's all coming back to me. Afaicr the parachute was of limted use resulting in chipped & bashed Mokes.
I should clear up, whenever I write Ngozi Fulani, keep in mind this could also mean Ngozi Headley; Ngozi Headley-Fulani; Marlene Headley; Marlene Fulani; Mary Headley; Mary Fulani; Mary Headley-Fulani; or Sister Ngozi. For avoidance of any doubt, this is all the same person.
Not bothering with the thread, since it's evidently victim-blaming. The point isn't that Fulani is or isn't a wonderful person. It's that she was subjected to aggressive questioning about her background by a trusted adviser to the Palace. It was seen by two witnesses, not denied by Hussey, and confirmed by the Palace. Fulani could be an axe-murderess and it wouldn't change anything.
I was chatting yesterday to a high-flying banker, born in Britain of Egyptian descent. He says it's routine for people to ask him where he "really" comes from, even when he identifies where he was born and grew up (Liverpool), though not to the same persistent extent as Hussey. He rolls his eyes and says you get used to it, but it's not great.
I am overseas at the moment. I am frequently asked where I come from. I sometimes, just for fun, give a misleading answer. Then I get asked where I am really from. I don't mind.
I should clear up, whenever I write Ngozi Fulani, keep in mind this could also mean Ngozi Headley; Ngozi Headley-Fulani; Marlene Headley; Marlene Fulani; Mary Headley; Mary Fulani; Mary Headley-Fulani; or Sister Ngozi. For avoidance of any doubt, this is all the same person.
Not bothering with the thread, since it's evidently victim-blaming. The point isn't that Fulani is or isn't a wonderful person. It's that she was subjected to aggressive questioning about her background by a trusted adviser to the Palace. It was seen by two witnesses, not denied by Hussey, and confirmed by the Palace. Fulani could be an axe-murderess and it wouldn't change anything.
I was chatting yesterday to a high-flying banker, born in Britain of Egyptian descent. He says it's routine for people to ask him where he "really" comes from, even when he identifies where he was born and grew up (Liverpool), though not to the same persistent extent as Hussey. He rolls his eyes and says you get used to it, but it's not great.
I am overseas at the moment. I am frequently asked where I come from. I sometimes, just for fun, give a misleading answer. Then I get asked where I am really from. I don't mind.
In most parts of the abroad the only acceptable answer is the name of a PL football club. I say Liverpool usually.
I should clear up, whenever I write Ngozi Fulani, keep in mind this could also mean Ngozi Headley; Ngozi Headley-Fulani; Marlene Headley; Marlene Fulani; Mary Headley; Mary Fulani; Mary Headley-Fulani; or Sister Ngozi. For avoidance of any doubt, this is all the same person.
Not bothering with the thread, since it's evidently victim-blaming. The point isn't that Fulani is or isn't a wonderful person. It's that she was subjected to aggressive questioning about her background by a trusted adviser to the Palace. It was seen by two witnesses, not denied by Hussey, and confirmed by the Palace. Fulani could be an axe-murderess and it wouldn't change anything.
I was chatting yesterday to a high-flying banker, born in Britain of Egyptian descent. He says it's routine for people to ask him where he "really" comes from, even when he identifies where he was born and grew up (Liverpool), though not to the same persistent extent as Hussey. He rolls his eyes and says you get used to it, but it's not great.
I am overseas at the moment. I am frequently asked where I come from. I sometimes, just for fun, give a misleading answer. Then I get asked where I am really from. I don't mind.
In most parts of the abroad the only acceptable answer is the name of a PL football club. I say Liverpool usually.
Not quite true - Newcastle has always been a valid answer - in the way that Sunderland / Middlesbrough isn't.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base.
The Apple Car is going to be the vehicle of (overwhelming) choice for that demographic. They should do a deal with BMW and call it the Mini Woke.
Ha, good one. I’d forgotten about the Moke, a staple of my Dinky collection. I suppose they go for big money nowadays, not that they’d be much use to me.
Edit: ISTR that the Dinky came with a parachute so you could fling it oot the windae for added play value.
I remember that someone whose family had a cafe managed to collect enough cigarette coupons from customers for a free Mini-Moke. Not the Dinky, either, but the 1:1 scale model.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
Even if the electricity used to charge an EV were 100% generated by fossil fuel power stations, it would still be more environmentally friendly to drive an EV than a conventional car. That's because power stations are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than car engines are, and electricity transmission losses are relatively small.
But of course a significant proportion are our electricity does come from non-fossil fuel sources, especially at night when many EVs are charged, which swings the equation even more in their favour.
They are also more efficient in terms of energy expended going from A to B.
I suppose after Leon shitting the bed yet again that he’ll bringing one of his other skins out of the portfolio.
Is this another temp ban or a permaban ?
Whatever it is he will be back. He's usually interesting but, my word, he is really into some barking conspiracy theory stuff on COVID. Right up there with Matt Le Tissier and the bald pop stars, from the nineties.
I should clear up, whenever I write Ngozi Fulani, keep in mind this could also mean Ngozi Headley; Ngozi Headley-Fulani; Marlene Headley; Marlene Fulani; Mary Headley; Mary Fulani; Mary Headley-Fulani; or Sister Ngozi. For avoidance of any doubt, this is all the same person.
Not bothering with the thread, since it's evidently victim-blaming. The point isn't that Fulani is or isn't a wonderful person. It's that she was subjected to aggressive questioning about her background by a trusted adviser to the Palace. It was seen by two witnesses, not denied by Hussey, and confirmed by the Palace. Fulani could be an axe-murderess and it wouldn't change anything.
I was chatting yesterday to a high-flying banker, born in Britain of Egyptian descent. He says it's routine for people to ask him where he "really" comes from, even when he identifies where he was born and grew up (Liverpool), though not to the same persistent extent as Hussey. He rolls his eyes and says you get used to it, but it's not great.
I am overseas at the moment. I am frequently asked where I come from. I sometimes, just for fun, give a misleading answer. Then I get asked where I am really from. I don't mind.
I recently had an interview for a senior management role at an engineering company in Newton Aycliffe and one of the first questions I was asked was where I was from originally as I don't have a North East accent.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
In addition to all the above, the proportion of renewables will continue to rise. And the point about such a massive re-engineering of both our transport and energy generation is that it's a decades long process. A snapshot this year doesn't tell you very much. And you can't just wait until there's sufficient capacity if either battery production or renewable generation, because that wouldn't happen without the government incentives over the last decade.
We're now around the point where the market, rather than government, will be the primary driver of change.
I should clear up, whenever I write Ngozi Fulani, keep in mind this could also mean Ngozi Headley; Ngozi Headley-Fulani; Marlene Headley; Marlene Fulani; Mary Headley; Mary Fulani; Mary Headley-Fulani; or Sister Ngozi. For avoidance of any doubt, this is all the same person.
Not bothering with the thread, since it's evidently victim-blaming. The point isn't that Fulani is or isn't a wonderful person. It's that she was subjected to aggressive questioning about her background by a trusted adviser to the Palace. It was seen by two witnesses, not denied by Hussey, and confirmed by the Palace. Fulani could be an axe-murderess and it wouldn't change anything.
I was chatting yesterday to a high-flying banker, born in Britain of Egyptian descent. He says it's routine for people to ask him where he "really" comes from, even when he identifies where he was born and grew up (Liverpool), though not to the same persistent extent as Hussey. He rolls his eyes and says you get used to it, but it's not great.
That thread is way too long to bother with anyway.
Clearly there are some issues here with the charity that need to be looked at, if only to give it a clean bill of health.
It in no way mitigates what Lady Hussey did and it is somewhat unpleasant that the focus on the charity seems to come, partly, from people out to get at the victim of lady Husseys interrogation
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base.
The Apple Car is going to be the vehicle of (overwhelming) choice for that demographic. They should do a deal with BMW and call it the Mini Woke.
Ha, good one. I’d forgotten about the Moke, a staple of my Dinky collection. I suppose they go for big money nowadays, not that they’d be much use to me.
Edit: ISTR that the Dinky came with a parachute so you could fling it oot the windae for added play value.
I remember that someone whose family had a cafe managed to collect enough cigarette coupons from customers for a free Mini-Moke. Not the Dinky, either, but the 1:1 scale model.
With parachute ?
Yes. It was originally developed in an attempt to gain some of the Land-Rover market, as a light vehicle that the Amry could use, drop with paratroops, etc. Something of the relationship to the Mini that the German Kuebelwagen had to the VW KdF-Wagen/Kaefer/Beetle.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
I assume that EVs emit much less harmful pollution, particularly in our cities where air quality is still pretty damaging.
Musk is doubling down on the criticism of Fauci: @elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base.
The Apple Car is going to be the vehicle of (overwhelming) choice for that demographic. They should do a deal with BMW and call it the Mini Woke.
Ha, good one. I’d forgotten about the Moke, a staple of my Dinky collection. I suppose they go for big money nowadays, not that they’d be much use to me.
Edit: ISTR that the Dinky came with a parachute so you could fling it oot the windae for added play value.
I remember that someone whose family had a cafe managed to collect enough cigarette coupons from customers for a free Mini-Moke. Not the Dinky, either, but the 1:1 scale model.
With parachute ?
Yes. It was originally developed in an attempt to gain some of the Land-Rover market, as a light vehicle that the Amry could use, drop with paratroops, etc. Something of the relationship to the Mini that the German Kuebelwagen had to the VW KdF-Wagen/Kaefer/Beetle.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
Even if the electricity used to charge an EV were 100% generated by fossil fuel power stations, it would still be more environmentally friendly to drive an EV than a conventional car. That's because power stations are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than car engines are, and electricity transmission losses are relatively small.
But of course a significant proportion are our electricity does come from non-fossil fuel sources, especially at night when many EVs are charged, which swings the equation even more in their favour.
They are also more efficient in terms of energy expended going from A to B.
Sure: but efficiency numbers need to include quite a lot of transitions when energy will be lost:
(1) At the power station when electricity is generated (2) In the transmission network (3) In the charging process (4) In the battery itself (5) In the electrical motor converting it into motive power
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% is suddenly not a million miles from a petrol engine's efficiency.
Musk is doubling down on the criticism of Fauci: @elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base.
The Apple Car is going to be the vehicle of (overwhelming) choice for that demographic. They should do a deal with BMW and call it the Mini Woke.
Ha, good one. I’d forgotten about the Moke, a staple of my Dinky collection. I suppose they go for big money nowadays, not that they’d be much use to me.
Edit: ISTR that the Dinky came with a parachute so you could fling it oot the windae for added play value.
I remember that someone whose family had a cafe managed to collect enough cigarette coupons from customers for a free Mini-Moke. Not the Dinky, either, but the 1:1 scale model.
With parachute ?
Yes. It was originally developed in an attempt to gain some of the Land-Rover market, as a light vehicle that the Amry could use, drop with paratroops, etc. Something of the relationship to the Mini that the German Kuebelwagen had to the VW KdF-Wagen/Kaefer/Beetle.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
Even if the electricity used to charge an EV were 100% generated by fossil fuel power stations, it would still be more environmentally friendly to drive an EV than a conventional car. That's because power stations are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than car engines are, and electricity transmission losses are relatively small.
But of course a significant proportion are our electricity does come from non-fossil fuel sources, especially at night when many EVs are charged, which swings the equation even more in their favour.
They are also more efficient in terms of energy expended going from A to B.
Sure: but efficiency numbers need to include quite a lot of transitions when energy will be lost:
(1) At the power station when electricity is generated (2) In the transmission network (3) In the charging process (4) In the battery itself (5) In the electrical motor converting it into motive power
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% is suddenly not a million miles from a petrol engine's efficiency.
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% = 40% which is indeed not a million miles away for the 20% to 35% (according to Wikipedia) achieved by a petrol engine, but still better. And that would be for a 100% fossil-fuel powered grid.
If elected Starmer will have an almost entirely free hand on rebuilding the UK’s relationship with the EU. A rapprochement will not split Labour as it would the Tories and most voters will not care. But it’s getting to that point which is the challenge. Reviving Brexit as an issue makes things tougher, so there’s no sense in doing it.
That said, I think Foxy is right: should Labour take power and nothing much changes the party will bleed votes to those who are bolder. My guess is that Starmer understands this well enough. If he doesn’t, however, his colleagues and members (far less Corbyn-inclined, much more EU-friendly than before) will make it clear.
Opinion is moving more against Brexit as each month passes so I think Starmer will play it like he is for now but will change the tone when the numbers believing Brexit was a mistake gets to a 2-1 majority.
If we could rejoin on the same terms that we left on I believe we would rejoin in about 10 years time. Unfortunately that is unlikely to be the case and why I'm so pissed off with the leavers. They have prevented us ever returning to where we were so even if we do rejoin the Brexiteers have ensured that the country will be worse off than before. Well done.
Will all depend on how much the EU want us back when the time comes.
Granted Richard Burgon isn't the greatest MP but he isn't wrong here.
@RichardBurgon · 3m Nurses are now earning £5,000 a year less in real terms than when the Tories came to power.
There are now 47,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS.
The NHS crisis can't be resolved without paying nurses properly.
Agree, but where does the money come from, without contributing to inflation?
From the rest of us - wealth tax, income tax, windfall tax, borrowing, we can debate, but clearly a situation where we can't get either an ambulance or reasonable care within hours is not acceptable, and more important than most of the things we spend money on. We pay the Government to prioritise, and at present they seem to be prioritising doing nothing very much for fear it might make MPs rebel. That, I suggest, is not a priority for most people.
Ask "most people" whether nurses should be paid more. They all say yes. Then show them the current pay scale, remembering to explain the DB pension scheme which adds circa 40% on to the said pay scale. Then see if their view changes.
Secondly, when people clamour for higher nurses pay, why the focus on nurses? What about doctors, porters and admin staff? Why just nurses? I don't know for sure but I'm guessing that nurses total less than half of the NHS staffing.
Isn't this just an emotive way of building a narrative to alter the balance between the public sector vs the private sector in favour of the former? Isn't this the real agenda?
There are 47,000 nursing vacancies. Many of them will be being filled on a shift by shift basis (because the Hospital has no choice but to pay whatever is demanded) by contract staff charging far more than the cost of an salaried staff member.
So we are currently not paying nurses enough for them to work AND the NHS is probably paying billions to agencies in a desperate attempt to avoid not having to close wards down at short notice.
So it's not a question of what the general public may think - it's a question of what level of pay is required to ensure nursing staffing levels return to sustainable levels - because the total cost will be far less than you think.
Also, concentrating on pay misses the fact that this is a complex system that the NHS is compelled to engage with by its very nature, of which pay is just one lever. Pay does make a difference, because money can smooth over a lot of small difficulties, but you can’t solve every problem by throwing £ at individual members of staff:
At the boundary, increasing pay may tempt some existing trained nurses back into nursing from other jobs, but the supply of trained nurses that exist in the UK at the current time is finite: If there aren’t enough nurses then you cannot fill the vacancies unless you import nursing staff from abroad, which carries it’s own costs. (I note in passing that the government decided to cancel bursaries for nursing courses.)
How much stress your staff are under & whether they are able to cope is not strongly linked to pay: Many staff worked incredibly hard during the pandemic under extremely difficult conditions & are completely burnt out. In many cases they were already working at 110% of sustainable output before the pandemic, as evidenced by the high rate of people leaving the nursing profession.
You can extend similar arguments to teaching. It’s not /just/ pay (although more pay will help). It’s also the stress the staff are under & the relentless workload because the government seems to be happy to pile on more work without actually employing sufficient people to do the work, expecting the existing staff to cope. What actually happens is that, at the margins, staff begin to quit because they can’t cope with the increased stress. This puts more work on the rest of the system & ultimately it either sheds workload somehow, or the work that is being done declines precipitously in quality.
The government has refused to engage with these issues in any kind of serious fashion & you’re seeing it across the board in the services sector - police, NHS, teachers all seem to be utterly exhausted whilst the quality of service they provide has fallen through the floor. Individual pay may be part of the problem, but personally I believe what’s driving this collapse is a refusal to match services adequately to the load put upon them, often by the government itself, leading to a self feeding downward spiral as staff quit for greener pastures elsewhere.
We’re now in a very difficult position & much of it is self-inflicted, even if the final trigger was an external stressor (Covid-19).
If elected Starmer will have an almost entirely free hand on rebuilding the UK’s relationship with the EU. A rapprochement will not split Labour as it would the Tories and most voters will not care. But it’s getting to that point which is the challenge. Reviving Brexit as an issue makes things tougher, so there’s no sense in doing it.
That said, I think Foxy is right: should Labour take power and nothing much changes the party will bleed votes to those who are bolder. My guess is that Starmer understands this well enough. If he doesn’t, however, his colleagues and members (far less Corbyn-inclined, much more EU-friendly than before) will make it clear.
Opinion is moving more against Brexit as each month passes so I think Starmer will play it like he is for now but will change the tone when the numbers believing Brexit was a mistake gets to a 2-1 majority.
If we could rejoin on the same terms that we left on I believe we would rejoin in about 10 years time. Unfortunately that is unlikely to be the case and why I'm so pissed off with the leavers. They have prevented us ever returning to where we were so even if we do rejoin the Brexiteers have ensured that the country will be worse off than before. Well done.
Will all depend on how much the EU want us back when the time comes.
Apparently it's not their fault though. It's the fault of the Remainers for failing to persuade them not to vote for this idiocy.
This is all fanciful. We are not going to rejoin for decades. No PM will give up Sterling
I don't think that "saving the British pound" is quite the killer punch you believe it to be, at least with voters under 60. It didn't do much for William Hague's as I recall and that was 20 years ago.
Granted Richard Burgon isn't the greatest MP but he isn't wrong here.
@RichardBurgon · 3m Nurses are now earning £5,000 a year less in real terms than when the Tories came to power.
There are now 47,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS.
The NHS crisis can't be resolved without paying nurses properly.
Agree, but where does the money come from, without contributing to inflation?
From the rest of us - wealth tax, income tax, windfall tax, borrowing, we can debate, but clearly a situation where we can't get either an ambulance or reasonable care within hours is not acceptable, and more important than most of the things we spend money on. We pay the Government to prioritise, and at present they seem to be prioritising doing nothing very much for fear it might make MPs rebel. That, I suggest, is not a priority for most people.
Ask "most people" whether nurses should be paid more. They all say yes. Then show them the current pay scale, remembering to explain the DB pension scheme which adds circa 40% on to the said pay scale. Then see if their view changes.
Secondly, when people clamour for higher nurses pay, why the focus on nurses? What about doctors, porters and admin staff? Why just nurses? I don't know for sure but I'm guessing that nurses total less than half of the NHS staffing.
Isn't this just an emotive way of building a narrative to alter the balance between the public sector vs the private sector in favour of the former? Isn't this the real agenda?
There are 47,000 nursing vacancies. Many of them will be being filled on a shift by shift basis (because the Hospital has no choice but to pay whatever is demanded) by contract staff charging far more than the cost of an salaried staff member.
So we are currently not paying nurses enough for them to work AND the NHS is probably paying billions to agencies in a desperate attempt to avoid not having to close wards down at short notice.
So it's not a question of what the general public may think - it's a question of what level of pay is required to ensure nursing staffing levels return to sustainable levels - because the total cost will be far less than you think.
Also, concentrating on pay misses the fact that this is a complex system that the NHS is compelled to engage with by its very nature, of which pay is just one lever. Pay does make a difference, because money can smooth over a lot of small difficulties, but you can’t solve every problem by throwing £ at individual members of staff:
At the boundary, increasing pay may tempt some existing trained nurses back into nursing from other jobs, but the supply of trained nurses that exist in the UK at the current time is finite: If there aren’t enough nurses then you cannot fill the vacancies unless you import nursing staff from abroad, which carries it’s own costs. (I note in passing that the government decided to cancel bursaries for nursing courses.)
How much stress your staff are under & whether they are able to cope is not strongly linked to pay: Many staff worked incredibly hard during the pandemic under extremely difficult conditions & are completely burnt out. In many cases they were already working at 110% of sustainable output before the pandemic, as evidenced by the high rate of people leaving the nursing profession.
You can extend similar arguments to teaching. It’s not /just/ pay (although more pay will help). It’s also the stress the staff are under & the relentless workload because the government seems to be happy to pile on more work without actually employing sufficient people to do the work, expecting the existing staff to cope. What actually happens is that, at the margins, staff begin to quit because they can’t cope with the increased stress. This puts more work on the rest of the system & ultimately it either sheds workload somehow, or the work that is being done declines precipitously in quality.
The government has refused to engage with these issues in any kind of serious fashion & you’re seeing it across the board in the services sector - police, NHS, teachers all seem to be utterly exhausted whilst the quality of service they provide has fallen through the floor. Individual pay may be part of the problem, but personally I believe what’s driving this collapse is a refusal to match services adequately to the load put upon them, often by the government itself, leading to a self feeding downward spiral as staff quit for greener pastures elsewhere.
We’re now in a very difficult position & much of it is self-inflicted, even if the final trigger was an external stressor (Covid-19).
Very interesting comments.
BTW it was the UKG which cancelled byursaries in England with knock on effects for budgets for the devolved admins, but nevertheless bursaries for nursing still exist in Scotland - no idea about NI or Wales.
This is all fanciful. We are not going to rejoin for decades. No PM will give up Sterling
I don't think that "saving the British pound" is quite the killer punch you believe it to be, at least with voters under 60. It didn't do much for William Hague's as I recall and that was 20 years ago.
I was only 14 at the time, but even I knew the reason Hague's "save the pound" campaign had no impact. No one thought there was any realistic prospect for the UK joining in the Euro. It simply wasn't going to happen.
Ask "most people" whether nurses should be paid more. They all say yes. Then show them the current pay scale, remembering to explain the DB pension scheme which adds circa 40% on to the said pay scale. Then see if their view changes.
Secondly, when people clamour for higher nurses pay, why the focus on nurses? What about doctors, porters and admin staff? Why just nurses? I don't know for sure but I'm guessing that nurses total less than half of the NHS staffing.
Isn't this just an emotive way of building a narrative to alter the balance between the public sector vs the private sector in favour of the former? Isn't this the real agenda?
No, I don't think so. If we leave emotion and indeed human beings entirely out of it, and imagine that patients weren't getting treatment for 8 hours because of a shortage of widgets, it would surely be reasonable to consider increasing spending on widgets, purely to address the shortage. The private/public split is fairly irrelevant in the context of emergency response, as there is very little private emergency care - we could change that, but it would be a project taking many years.
I agree that there is an emotional overlay in concentrating on nurses, and there may be a shortage of radiographers or porters too that we don't hear so much about. But the basic point remains that if one considers emergency health care to be a vital service, we need to pay people enough to attract sufficient people to work in it. Whether they "deserve" it or have angelic natures is quite beside the point.
Granted Richard Burgon isn't the greatest MP but he isn't wrong here.
@RichardBurgon · 3m Nurses are now earning £5,000 a year less in real terms than when the Tories came to power.
There are now 47,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS.
The NHS crisis can't be resolved without paying nurses properly.
Agree, but where does the money come from, without contributing to inflation?
From the rest of us - wealth tax, income tax, windfall tax, borrowing, we can debate, but clearly a situation where we can't get either an ambulance or reasonable care within hours is not acceptable, and more important than most of the things we spend money on. We pay the Government to prioritise, and at present they seem to be prioritising doing nothing very much for fear it might make MPs rebel. That, I suggest, is not a priority for most people.
Ask "most people" whether nurses should be paid more. They all say yes. Then show them the current pay scale, remembering to explain the DB pension scheme which adds circa 40% on to the said pay scale. Then see if their view changes.
Secondly, when people clamour for higher nurses pay, why the focus on nurses? What about doctors, porters and admin staff? Why just nurses? I don't know for sure but I'm guessing that nurses total less than half of the NHS staffing.
Isn't this just an emotive way of building a narrative to alter the balance between the public sector vs the private sector in favour of the former? Isn't this the real agenda?
There are 47,000 nursing vacancies. Many of them will be being filled on a shift by shift basis (because the Hospital has no choice but to pay whatever is demanded) by contract staff charging far more than the cost of an salaried staff member.
So we are currently not paying nurses enough for them to work AND the NHS is probably paying billions to agencies in a desperate attempt to avoid not having to close wards down at short notice.
So it's not a question of what the general public may think - it's a question of what level of pay is required to ensure nursing staffing levels return to sustainable levels - because the total cost will be far less than you think.
Also, concentrating on pay misses the fact that this is a complex system that the NHS is compelled to engage with by its very nature, of which pay is just one lever. Pay does make a difference, because money can smooth over a lot of small difficulties, but you can’t solve every problem by throwing £ at individual members of staff:
At the boundary, increasing pay may tempt some existing trained nurses back into nursing from other jobs, but the supply of trained nurses that exist in the UK at the current time is finite: If there aren’t enough nurses then you cannot fill the vacancies unless you import nursing staff from abroad, which carries it’s own costs. (I note in passing that the government decided to cancel bursaries for nursing courses.)
How much stress your staff are under & whether they are able to cope is not strongly linked to pay: Many staff worked incredibly hard during the pandemic under extremely difficult conditions & are completely burnt out. In many cases they were already working at 110% of sustainable output before the pandemic, as evidenced by the high rate of people leaving the nursing profession.
You can extend similar arguments to teaching. It’s not /just/ pay (although more pay will help). It’s also the stress the staff are under & the relentless workload because the government seems to be happy to pile on more work without actually employing sufficient people to do the work, expecting the existing staff to cope. What actually happens is that, at the margins, staff begin to quit because they can’t cope with the increased stress. This puts more work on the rest of the system & ultimately it either sheds workload somehow, or the work that is being done declines precipitously in quality.
The government has refused to engage with these issues in any kind of serious fashion & you’re seeing it across the board in the services sector - police, NHS, teachers all seem to be utterly exhausted whilst the quality of service they provide has fallen through the floor. Individual pay may be part of the problem, but personally I believe what’s driving this collapse is a refusal to match services adequately to the load put upon them, often by the government itself, leading to a self feeding downward spiral as staff quit for greener pastures elsewhere.
We’re now in a very difficult position & much of it is self-inflicted, even if the final trigger was an external stressor (Covid-19).
Very interesting comments.
BTW it was the UKG which cancelled byursaries in England with knock on effects for budgets for the devolved admins, but nevertheless bursaries for nursing still exist in Scotland - no idea about NI or Wales.
One of the many stupid decisions of the Blair Government was to make nursing a degree-entry job. There are plenty of nursing tasks that can be done by someone without a degree and I see there is the new role of nursing associate coming into play. Yet the damage has already been done.
Granted Richard Burgon isn't the greatest MP but he isn't wrong here.
@RichardBurgon · 3m Nurses are now earning £5,000 a year less in real terms than when the Tories came to power.
There are now 47,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS.
The NHS crisis can't be resolved without paying nurses properly.
Agree, but where does the money come from, without contributing to inflation?
From the rest of us - wealth tax, income tax, windfall tax, borrowing, we can debate, but clearly a situation where we can't get either an ambulance or reasonable care within hours is not acceptable, and more important than most of the things we spend money on. We pay the Government to prioritise, and at present they seem to be prioritising doing nothing very much for fear it might make MPs rebel. That, I suggest, is not a priority for most people.
Ask "most people" whether nurses should be paid more. They all say yes. Then show them the current pay scale, remembering to explain the DB pension scheme which adds circa 40% on to the said pay scale. Then see if their view changes.
Secondly, when people clamour for higher nurses pay, why the focus on nurses? What about doctors, porters and admin staff? Why just nurses? I don't know for sure but I'm guessing that nurses total less than half of the NHS staffing.
Isn't this just an emotive way of building a narrative to alter the balance between the public sector vs the private sector in favour of the former? Isn't this the real agenda?
There are 47,000 nursing vacancies. Many of them will be being filled on a shift by shift basis (because the Hospital has no choice but to pay whatever is demanded) by contract staff charging far more than the cost of an salaried staff member.
So we are currently not paying nurses enough for them to work AND the NHS is probably paying billions to agencies in a desperate attempt to avoid not having to close wards down at short notice.
So it's not a question of what the general public may think - it's a question of what level of pay is required to ensure nursing staffing levels return to sustainable levels - because the total cost will be far less than you think.
There's a kind of frugal virtue signalling going on here, and has been for ages.
The pay scales and changes in the public sector are easily available and easily understood. Squeezing those looks like it is being careful with public money. Unfortunately, the cost of filling gaps with agency staff is usually hidden, unless someone wants to FOI the numbers to tell a story. So the government ends up paying more for less. Agency staff may be no better or worse than permanent staff, but they can't have the institutional memory.
This sort of thing ought to be well understood by people on the right. It's the same process you got in Soviet food markets. Either try to pay the official price and not get enough food, or go to the tolerated-on-the-margins free markets and pay the economic price for things.
Staff, like other things, cost what they cost. Try to get away with paying less and the supply eventually dries up.
This is all fanciful. We are not going to rejoin for decades. No PM will give up Sterling
I don't think that "saving the British pound" is quite the killer punch you believe it to be, at least with voters under 60. It didn't do much for William Hague's as I recall and that was 20 years ago.
Well quite, especially given the demise of the bank note since then. It's like arguing Britons will never stand for petrol sales by the litre.
If elected Starmer will have an almost entirely free hand on rebuilding the UK’s relationship with the EU. A rapprochement will not split Labour as it would the Tories and most voters will not care. But it’s getting to that point which is the challenge. Reviving Brexit as an issue makes things tougher, so there’s no sense in doing it.
That said, I think Foxy is right: should Labour take power and nothing much changes the party will bleed votes to those who are bolder. My guess is that Starmer understands this well enough. If he doesn’t, however, his colleagues and members (far less Corbyn-inclined, much more EU-friendly than before) will make it clear.
Opinion is moving more against Brexit as each month passes so I think Starmer will play it like he is for now but will change the tone when the numbers believing Brexit was a mistake gets to a 2-1 majority.
If we could rejoin on the same terms that we left on I believe we would rejoin in about 10 years time. Unfortunately that is unlikely to be the case and why I'm so pissed off with the leavers. They have prevented us ever returning to where we were so even if we do rejoin the Brexiteers have ensured that the country will be worse off than before. Well done.
Will all depend on how much the EU want us back when the time comes.
Apparently it's not their fault though. It's the fault of the Remainers for failing to persuade them not to vote for this idiocy.
On that basis I guess we also have to blame 3 out of the last 5 Tory PMs (with one other swthering on self interest lines). How shit were they?
If elected Starmer will have an almost entirely free hand on rebuilding the UK’s relationship with the EU. A rapprochement will not split Labour as it would the Tories and most voters will not care. But it’s getting to that point which is the challenge. Reviving Brexit as an issue makes things tougher, so there’s no sense in doing it.
That said, I think Foxy is right: should Labour take power and nothing much changes the party will bleed votes to those who are bolder. My guess is that Starmer understands this well enough. If he doesn’t, however, his colleagues and members (far less Corbyn-inclined, much more EU-friendly than before) will make it clear.
Opinion is moving more against Brexit as each month passes so I think Starmer will play it like he is for now but will change the tone when the numbers believing Brexit was a mistake gets to a 2-1 majority.
If we could rejoin on the same terms that we left on I believe we would rejoin in about 10 years time. Unfortunately that is unlikely to be the case and why I'm so pissed off with the leavers. They have prevented us ever returning to where we were so even if we do rejoin the Brexiteers have ensured that the country will be worse off than before. Well done.
Will all depend on how much the EU want us back when the time comes.
"Where we were" wasn't a sustainable position, so of course we won't be able to return to it. Failing to acknowledge this was just one of the dishonesties of the useless Remain campaign.
This is all fanciful. We are not going to rejoin for decades. No PM will give up Sterling
I don't think that "saving the British pound" is quite the killer punch you believe it to be, at least with voters under 60. It didn't do much for William Hague's as I recall and that was 20 years ago.
It did enough to persuade Blair that he couldn't join the euro without a referendum, and to persuade him not to call such a referendum because he would lose it.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
Even if the electricity used to charge an EV were 100% generated by fossil fuel power stations, it would still be more environmentally friendly to drive an EV than a conventional car. That's because power stations are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than car engines are, and electricity transmission losses are relatively small.
But of course a significant proportion are our electricity does come from non-fossil fuel sources, especially at night when many EVs are charged, which swings the equation even more in their favour.
They are also more efficient in terms of energy expended going from A to B.
Sure: but efficiency numbers need to include quite a lot of transitions when energy will be lost:
(1) At the power station when electricity is generated (2) In the transmission network (3) In the charging process (4) In the battery itself (5) In the electrical motor converting it into motive power
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% is suddenly not a million miles from a petrol engine's efficiency.
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% = 40% which is indeed not a million miles away for the 20% to 35% (according to Wikipedia) achieved by a petrol engine, but still better. And that would be for a 100% fossil-fuel powered grid.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
Even if the electricity used to charge an EV were 100% generated by fossil fuel power stations, it would still be more environmentally friendly to drive an EV than a conventional car. That's because power stations are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than car engines are, and electricity transmission losses are relatively small.
But of course a significant proportion are our electricity does come from non-fossil fuel sources, especially at night when many EVs are charged, which swings the equation even more in their favour.
They are also more efficient in terms of energy expended going from A to B.
Sure: but efficiency numbers need to include quite a lot of transitions when energy will be lost:
(1) At the power station when electricity is generated (2) In the transmission network (3) In the charging process (4) In the battery itself (5) In the electrical motor converting it into motive power
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% is suddenly not a million miles from a petrol engine's efficiency.
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% = 40% which is indeed not a million miles away for the 20% to 35% (according to Wikipedia) achieved by a petrol engine, but still better. And that would be for a 100% fossil-fuel powered grid.
Also, the burning methane gives off less carbon dioxide per joule of energy than petrol and diesel.
I see the BBC have withdrawn the 'much of the country' suffering from snow to refer to bits of the South and Scotland. Covering a sizeable number of people, for sure, but a long way from 'much of the country'
If elected Starmer will have an almost entirely free hand on rebuilding the UK’s relationship with the EU. A rapprochement will not split Labour as it would the Tories and most voters will not care. But it’s getting to that point which is the challenge. Reviving Brexit as an issue makes things tougher, so there’s no sense in doing it.
That said, I think Foxy is right: should Labour take power and nothing much changes the party will bleed votes to those who are bolder. My guess is that Starmer understands this well enough. If he doesn’t, however, his colleagues and members (far less Corbyn-inclined, much more EU-friendly than before) will make it clear.
Opinion is moving more against Brexit as each month passes so I think Starmer will play it like he is for now but will change the tone when the numbers believing Brexit was a mistake gets to a 2-1 majority.
If we could rejoin on the same terms that we left on I believe we would rejoin in about 10 years time. Unfortunately that is unlikely to be the case and why I'm so pissed off with the leavers. They have prevented us ever returning to where we were so even if we do rejoin the Brexiteers have ensured that the country will be worse off than before. Well done.
Will all depend on how much the EU want us back when the time comes.
I think as an issue Brexit doesn't really excite the average voter any more. From the comments of my less politically interested friends, it's done so time to move on. Yes, it is causing problems but some of those they view as the EU being petty (e.g. making UK citizens going through immigration queues with everyone else when EU citizens can use the e-gates at airports). Only those who haven't moved on - on either side - get worked up any more.
The problem with rolling back the result of the vote is that it would play into the view of politicians ignoring the populace. Labour's problem in its heartlands is its image - it is seen as a middle-class, graduate run party that looks down on its traditional voting base as racist, ignorant and thick proles. Starmer has managed to pick up support because - at the moment - the focus is all on the Tories and he hasn't really said that much (having Rayner helps). But bringing Brexit up again would rekindle a lot of that sentiment.
This is all fanciful. We are not going to rejoin for decades. No PM will give up Sterling
I don't think that "saving the British pound" is quite the killer punch you believe it to be, at least with voters under 60. It didn't do much for William Hague's as I recall and that was 20 years ago.
It did enough to persuade Blair that he couldn't join the euro without a referendum, and to persuade him not to call such a referendum because he would lose it.
TWTTIN.
And there's exceptionalism at work here. The mark, franc, lira and peseta were equally proud, history-laden symbols of their nations. Only person I have discussed it with was Irish, and she said she had got over the punt-euro switch by lunchtime on day 1. It helped that the two were near parity at the time, an advantage we might also see...
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
Even if the electricity used to charge an EV were 100% generated by fossil fuel power stations, it would still be more environmentally friendly to drive an EV than a conventional car. That's because power stations are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than car engines are, and electricity transmission losses are relatively small.
But of course a significant proportion are our electricity does come from non-fossil fuel sources, especially at night when many EVs are charged, which swings the equation even more in their favour.
They are also more efficient in terms of energy expended going from A to B.
Sure: but efficiency numbers need to include quite a lot of transitions when energy will be lost:
(1) At the power station when electricity is generated (2) In the transmission network (3) In the charging process (4) In the battery itself (5) In the electrical motor converting it into motive power
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% is suddenly not a million miles from a petrol engine's efficiency.
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% = 40% which is indeed not a million miles away for the 20% to 35% (according to Wikipedia) achieved by a petrol engine, but still better. And that would be for a 100% fossil-fuel powered grid.
Also, the burning methane gives off less carbon dioxide per joule of energy than petrol and diesel.
On the other hand, building an EV has a higher environmental cost than building an ICE car, does it not?
This is all fanciful. We are not going to rejoin for decades. No PM will give up Sterling
I don't think that "saving the British pound" is quite the killer punch you believe it to be, at least with voters under 60. It didn't do much for William Hague's as I recall and that was 20 years ago.
Watch Labour's polling crash if it ever gets traction that "Starmer would give up our pound".
The problem before wasn't the message, but was the messenger - and a Blair still who walked on water then.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
Even if the electricity used to charge an EV were 100% generated by fossil fuel power stations, it would still be more environmentally friendly to drive an EV than a conventional car. That's because power stations are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than car engines are, and electricity transmission losses are relatively small.
But of course a significant proportion are our electricity does come from non-fossil fuel sources, especially at night when many EVs are charged, which swings the equation even more in their favour.
They are also more efficient in terms of energy expended going from A to B.
Sure: but efficiency numbers need to include quite a lot of transitions when energy will be lost:
(1) At the power station when electricity is generated (2) In the transmission network (3) In the charging process (4) In the battery itself (5) In the electrical motor converting it into motive power
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% is suddenly not a million miles from a petrol engine's efficiency.
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% = 40% which is indeed not a million miles away for the 20% to 35% (according to Wikipedia) achieved by a petrol engine, but still better. And that would be for a 100% fossil-fuel powered grid.
Also, the burning methane gives off less carbon dioxide per joule of energy than petrol and diesel.
On the other hand, building an EV has a higher environmental cost than building an ICE car, does it not?
That again is a moving target, though. With the new battery formats predominating in a couple of years time, I suspect the answer to that will be no. And large scale recycling will become part of the calculation by the end of the decade.
Granted Richard Burgon isn't the greatest MP but he isn't wrong here.
@RichardBurgon · 3m Nurses are now earning £5,000 a year less in real terms than when the Tories came to power.
There are now 47,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS.
The NHS crisis can't be resolved without paying nurses properly.
Agree, but where does the money come from, without contributing to inflation?
From the rest of us - wealth tax, income tax, windfall tax, borrowing, we can debate, but clearly a situation where we can't get either an ambulance or reasonable care within hours is not acceptable, and more important than most of the things we spend money on. We pay the Government to prioritise, and at present they seem to be prioritising doing nothing very much for fear it might make MPs rebel. That, I suggest, is not a priority for most people.
Ask "most people" whether nurses should be paid more. They all say yes. Then show them the current pay scale, remembering to explain the DB pension scheme which adds circa 40% on to the said pay scale. Then see if their view changes.
Secondly, when people clamour for higher nurses pay, why the focus on nurses? What about doctors, porters and admin staff? Why just nurses? I don't know for sure but I'm guessing that nurses total less than half of the NHS staffing.
Isn't this just an emotive way of building a narrative to alter the balance between the public sector vs the private sector in favour of the former? Isn't this the real agenda?
There are 47,000 nursing vacancies. Many of them will be being filled on a shift by shift basis (because the Hospital has no choice but to pay whatever is demanded) by contract staff charging far more than the cost of an salaried staff member.
So we are currently not paying nurses enough for them to work AND the NHS is probably paying billions to agencies in a desperate attempt to avoid not having to close wards down at short notice.
So it's not a question of what the general public may think - it's a question of what level of pay is required to ensure nursing staffing levels return to sustainable levels - because the total cost will be far less than you think.
Also, concentrating on pay misses the fact that this is a complex system that the NHS is compelled to engage with by its very nature, of which pay is just one lever. Pay does make a difference, because money can smooth over a lot of small difficulties, but you can’t solve every problem by throwing £ at individual members of staff:
At the boundary, increasing pay may tempt some existing trained nurses back into nursing from other jobs, but the supply of trained nurses that exist in the UK at the current time is finite: If there aren’t enough nurses then you cannot fill the vacancies unless you import nursing staff from abroad, which carries it’s own costs. (I note in passing that the government decided to cancel bursaries for nursing courses.)
How much stress your staff are under & whether they are able to cope is not strongly linked to pay: Many staff worked incredibly hard during the pandemic under extremely difficult conditions & are completely burnt out. In many cases they were already working at 110% of sustainable output before the pandemic, as evidenced by the high rate of people leaving the nursing profession.
You can extend similar arguments to teaching. It’s not /just/ pay (although more pay will help). It’s also the stress the staff are under & the relentless workload because the government seems to be happy to pile on more work without actually employing sufficient people to do the work, expecting the existing staff to cope. What actually happens is that, at the margins, staff begin to quit because they can’t cope with the increased stress. This puts more work on the rest of the system & ultimately it either sheds workload somehow, or the work that is being done declines precipitously in quality.
The government has refused to engage with these issues in any kind of serious fashion & you’re seeing it across the board in the services sector - police, NHS, teachers all seem to be utterly exhausted whilst the quality of service they provide has fallen through the floor. Individual pay may be part of the problem, but personally I believe what’s driving this collapse is a refusal to match services adequately to the load put upon them, often by the government itself, leading to a self feeding downward spiral as staff quit for greener pastures elsewhere.
We’re now in a very difficult position & much of it is self-inflicted, even if the final trigger was an external stressor (Covid-19).
Very interesting comments.
BTW it was the UKG which cancelled byursaries in England with knock on effects for budgets for the devolved admins, but nevertheless bursaries for nursing still exist in Scotland - no idea about NI or Wales.
One of the many stupid decisions of the Blair Government was to make nursing a degree-entry job. There are plenty of nursing tasks that can be done by someone without a degree and I see there is the new role of nursing associate coming into play. Yet the damage has already been done.
Blair may have made mistakes with nursing degrees but let's not go overboard. To a first approximation, the old 3-year apprentice-like nurse training was replaced by shiny new 3-year nursing degrees. Nursing is not a degree-entry profession in the sense you need a degree in history or media studies before you can start nurse training. This has created its own problems particularly around funding but that started with the previous Conservative government closing nurse accommodation.
Granted Richard Burgon isn't the greatest MP but he isn't wrong here.
@RichardBurgon · 3m Nurses are now earning £5,000 a year less in real terms than when the Tories came to power.
There are now 47,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS.
The NHS crisis can't be resolved without paying nurses properly.
Agree, but where does the money come from, without contributing to inflation?
From the rest of us - wealth tax, income tax, windfall tax, borrowing, we can debate, but clearly a situation where we can't get either an ambulance or reasonable care within hours is not acceptable, and more important than most of the things we spend money on. We pay the Government to prioritise, and at present they seem to be prioritising doing nothing very much for fear it might make MPs rebel. That, I suggest, is not a priority for most people.
Ask "most people" whether nurses should be paid more. They all say yes. Then show them the current pay scale, remembering to explain the DB pension scheme which adds circa 40% on to the said pay scale. Then see if their view changes.
Secondly, when people clamour for higher nurses pay, why the focus on nurses? What about doctors, porters and admin staff? Why just nurses? I don't know for sure but I'm guessing that nurses total less than half of the NHS staffing.
Isn't this just an emotive way of building a narrative to alter the balance between the public sector vs the private sector in favour of the former? Isn't this the real agenda?
There are 47,000 nursing vacancies. Many of them will be being filled on a shift by shift basis (because the Hospital has no choice but to pay whatever is demanded) by contract staff charging far more than the cost of an salaried staff member.
So we are currently not paying nurses enough for them to work AND the NHS is probably paying billions to agencies in a desperate attempt to avoid not having to close wards down at short notice.
So it's not a question of what the general public may think - it's a question of what level of pay is required to ensure nursing staffing levels return to sustainable levels - because the total cost will be far less than you think.
Also, concentrating on pay misses the fact that this is a complex system that the NHS is compelled to engage with by its very nature, of which pay is just one lever. Pay does make a difference, because money can smooth over a lot of small difficulties, but you can’t solve every problem by throwing £ at individual members of staff:
At the boundary, increasing pay may tempt some existing trained nurses back into nursing from other jobs, but the supply of trained nurses that exist in the UK at the current time is finite: If there aren’t enough nurses then you cannot fill the vacancies unless you import nursing staff from abroad, which carries it’s own costs. (I note in passing that the government decided to cancel bursaries for nursing courses.)
How much stress your staff are under & whether they are able to cope is not strongly linked to pay: Many staff worked incredibly hard during the pandemic under extremely difficult conditions & are completely burnt out. In many cases they were already working at 110% of sustainable output before the pandemic, as evidenced by the high rate of people leaving the nursing profession.
You can extend similar arguments to teaching. It’s not /just/ pay (although more pay will help). It’s also the stress the staff are under & the relentless workload because the government seems to be happy to pile on more work without actually employing sufficient people to do the work, expecting the existing staff to cope. What actually happens is that, at the margins, staff begin to quit because they can’t cope with the increased stress. This puts more work on the rest of the system & ultimately it either sheds workload somehow, or the work that is being done declines precipitously in quality.
The government has refused to engage with these issues in any kind of serious fashion & you’re seeing it across the board in the services sector - police, NHS, teachers all seem to be utterly exhausted whilst the quality of service they provide has fallen through the floor. Individual pay may be part of the problem, but personally I believe what’s driving this collapse is a refusal to match services adequately to the load put upon them, often by the government itself, leading to a self feeding downward spiral as staff quit for greener pastures elsewhere.
We’re now in a very difficult position & much of it is self-inflicted, even if the final trigger was an external stressor (Covid-19).
Very interesting comments.
BTW it was the UKG which cancelled byursaries in England with knock on effects for budgets for the devolved admins, but nevertheless bursaries for nursing still exist in Scotland - no idea about NI or Wales.
One of the many stupid decisions of the Blair Government was to make nursing a degree-entry job. There are plenty of nursing tasks that can be done by someone without a degree and I see there is the new role of nursing associate coming into play. Yet the damage has already been done.
Not sure that is particularly relevant here. Nurses etc always needed professional qualifications whether you call them a HNC or SRN or degree.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
Even if the electricity used to charge an EV were 100% generated by fossil fuel power stations, it would still be more environmentally friendly to drive an EV than a conventional car. That's because power stations are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than car engines are, and electricity transmission losses are relatively small.
But of course a significant proportion are our electricity does come from non-fossil fuel sources, especially at night when many EVs are charged, which swings the equation even more in their favour.
They are also more efficient in terms of energy expended going from A to B.
Sure: but efficiency numbers need to include quite a lot of transitions when energy will be lost:
(1) At the power station when electricity is generated (2) In the transmission network (3) In the charging process (4) In the battery itself (5) In the electrical motor converting it into motive power
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% is suddenly not a million miles from a petrol engine's efficiency.
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% = 40% which is indeed not a million miles away for the 20% to 35% (according to Wikipedia) achieved by a petrol engine, but still better. And that would be for a 100% fossil-fuel powered grid.
Also, the burning methane gives off less carbon dioxide per joule of energy than petrol and diesel.
On the other hand, building an EV has a higher environmental cost than building an ICE car, does it not?
That again is a moving target, though. With the new battery formats predominating in a couple of years time, I suspect the answer to that will be no. And large scale recycling will become part of the calculation by the end of the decade.
EVs are evolving rapidly. ICE cars aren't.
Agreed, but at the moment you seem to imply the answer is yes.
This is all fanciful. We are not going to rejoin for decades. No PM will give up Sterling
I don't think that "saving the British pound" is quite the killer punch you believe it to be, at least with voters under 60. It didn't do much for William Hague's as I recall and that was 20 years ago.
Watch Labour's polling crash if it ever gets traction that "Starmer would give up our pound".
The problem before wasn't the message, but was the messenger - and a Blair still who walked on water then.
If I were the ERG I'd introduce legislation to rename it the Pound Spitfire just to be on the safe side.
Nobody knows what sterling means anyway. Might be short for Easterling meaning the Hanseatic League, their currency being less debased than ours. If that is right it is virtually a euro anyway if you think about it.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
Even if the electricity used to charge an EV were 100% generated by fossil fuel power stations, it would still be more environmentally friendly to drive an EV than a conventional car. That's because power stations are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than car engines are, and electricity transmission losses are relatively small.
But of course a significant proportion are our electricity does come from non-fossil fuel sources, especially at night when many EVs are charged, which swings the equation even more in their favour.
They are also more efficient in terms of energy expended going from A to B.
Sure: but efficiency numbers need to include quite a lot of transitions when energy will be lost:
(1) At the power station when electricity is generated (2) In the transmission network (3) In the charging process (4) In the battery itself (5) In the electrical motor converting it into motive power
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% is suddenly not a million miles from a petrol engine's efficiency.
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% = 40% which is indeed not a million miles away for the 20% to 35% (according to Wikipedia) achieved by a petrol engine, but still better. And that would be for a 100% fossil-fuel powered grid.
Also, the burning methane gives off less carbon dioxide per joule of energy than petrol and diesel.
On the other hand, building an EV has a higher environmental cost than building an ICE car, does it not?
Depends a lot on what you value, how you convert different values into a single scale and what you can easily mitigate. Like working out the total value of a fruit salad containing melons, grapes, kiwi and who knows what else.
Depends also on how you combine the "capital" costs of making a new machine with the "revenue" costs of running it. So it's mostly not worth replacing things until their performance is bad and can't be viably improved. (Reuse and repair before recycle.)
But most of us struggle to balance capital and revenue costs when they are both expressed in money. Once it's comparing a dozen different harms, it's even harder.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
Even if the electricity used to charge an EV were 100% generated by fossil fuel power stations, it would still be more environmentally friendly to drive an EV than a conventional car. That's because power stations are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than car engines are, and electricity transmission losses are relatively small.
But of course a significant proportion are our electricity does come from non-fossil fuel sources, especially at night when many EVs are charged, which swings the equation even more in their favour.
They are also more efficient in terms of energy expended going from A to B.
Sure: but efficiency numbers need to include quite a lot of transitions when energy will be lost:
(1) At the power station when electricity is generated (2) In the transmission network (3) In the charging process (4) In the battery itself (5) In the electrical motor converting it into motive power
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% is suddenly not a million miles from a petrol engine's efficiency.
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% = 40% which is indeed not a million miles away for the 20% to 35% (according to Wikipedia) achieved by a petrol engine, but still better. And that would be for a 100% fossil-fuel powered grid.
Also, the burning methane gives off less carbon dioxide per joule of energy than petrol and diesel.
On the other hand, building an EV has a higher environmental cost than building an ICE car, does it not?
That again is a moving target, though. With the new battery formats predominating in a couple of years time, I suspect the answer to that will be no. And large scale recycling will become part of the calculation by the end of the decade.
EVs are evolving rapidly. ICE cars aren't.
Agreed, but at the moment you seem to imply the answer is yes.
At the moment, I have no idea. Though given the dominant battery chemistry is now lithium/iron/phosphate, a substantial change from a couple of years ago, it might well be no.
This is all fanciful. We are not going to rejoin for decades. No PM will give up Sterling
I don't think that "saving the British pound" is quite the killer punch you believe it to be, at least with voters under 60. It didn't do much for William Hague's as I recall and that was 20 years ago.
Watch Labour's polling crash if it ever gets traction that "Starmer would give up our pound".
The problem before wasn't the message, but was the messenger - and a Blair still who walked on water then.
If I were the ERG I'd introduce legislation to rename it the Pound Spitfire just to be on the safe side.
Nobody knows what sterling means anyway. Might be short for Easterling meaning the Hanseatic League, their currency being less debased than ours. If that is right it is virtually a euro anyway if you think about it.
Granted Richard Burgon isn't the greatest MP but he isn't wrong here.
@RichardBurgon · 3m Nurses are now earning £5,000 a year less in real terms than when the Tories came to power.
There are now 47,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS.
The NHS crisis can't be resolved without paying nurses properly.
Agree, but where does the money come from, without contributing to inflation?
From the rest of us - wealth tax, income tax, windfall tax, borrowing, we can debate, but clearly a situation where we can't get either an ambulance or reasonable care within hours is not acceptable, and more important than most of the things we spend money on. We pay the Government to prioritise, and at present they seem to be prioritising doing nothing very much for fear it might make MPs rebel. That, I suggest, is not a priority for most people.
Ask "most people" whether nurses should be paid more. They all say yes. Then show them the current pay scale, remembering to explain the DB pension scheme which adds circa 40% on to the said pay scale. Then see if their view changes.
Secondly, when people clamour for higher nurses pay, why the focus on nurses? What about doctors, porters and admin staff? Why just nurses? I don't know for sure but I'm guessing that nurses total less than half of the NHS staffing.
Isn't this just an emotive way of building a narrative to alter the balance between the public sector vs the private sector in favour of the former? Isn't this the real agenda?
There are 47,000 nursing vacancies. Many of them will be being filled on a shift by shift basis (because the Hospital has no choice but to pay whatever is demanded) by contract staff charging far more than the cost of an salaried staff member.
So we are currently not paying nurses enough for them to work AND the NHS is probably paying billions to agencies in a desperate attempt to avoid not having to close wards down at short notice.
So it's not a question of what the general public may think - it's a question of what level of pay is required to ensure nursing staffing levels return to sustainable levels - because the total cost will be far less than you think.
Also, concentrating on pay misses the fact that this is a complex system that the NHS is compelled to engage with by its very nature, of which pay is just one lever. Pay does make a difference, because money can smooth over a lot of small difficulties, but you can’t solve every problem by throwing £ at individual members of staff:
At the boundary, increasing pay may tempt some existing trained nurses back into nursing from other jobs, but the supply of trained nurses that exist in the UK at the current time is finite: If there aren’t enough nurses then you cannot fill the vacancies unless you import nursing staff from abroad, which carries it’s own costs. (I note in passing that the government decided to cancel bursaries for nursing courses.)
How much stress your staff are under & whether they are able to cope is not strongly linked to pay: Many staff worked incredibly hard during the pandemic under extremely difficult conditions & are completely burnt out. In many cases they were already working at 110% of sustainable output before the pandemic, as evidenced by the high rate of people leaving the nursing profession.
You can extend similar arguments to teaching. It’s not /just/ pay (although more pay will help). It’s also the stress the staff are under & the relentless workload because the government seems to be happy to pile on more work without actually employing sufficient people to do the work, expecting the existing staff to cope. What actually happens is that, at the margins, staff begin to quit because they can’t cope with the increased stress. This puts more work on the rest of the system & ultimately it either sheds workload somehow, or the work that is being done declines precipitously in quality.
The government has refused to engage with these issues in any kind of serious fashion & you’re seeing it across the board in the services sector - police, NHS, teachers all seem to be utterly exhausted whilst the quality of service they provide has fallen through the floor. Individual pay may be part of the problem, but personally I believe what’s driving this collapse is a refusal to match services adequately to the load put upon them, often by the government itself, leading to a self feeding downward spiral as staff quit for greener pastures elsewhere.
We’re now in a very difficult position & much of it is self-inflicted, even if the final trigger was an external stressor (Covid-19).
Very interesting comments.
BTW it was the UKG which cancelled byursaries in England with knock on effects for budgets for the devolved admins, but nevertheless bursaries for nursing still exist in Scotland - no idea about NI or Wales.
The court system is falling apart, with court dates delayed multiple years. It‘s completely unsustainable & having knock on effects on the rest of the criminal justice system (probably the wider economy too) yet the government doesn’t appear to care.
This is all fanciful. We are not going to rejoin for decades. No PM will give up Sterling
I don't think that "saving the British pound" is quite the killer punch you believe it to be, at least with voters under 60. It didn't do much for William Hague's as I recall and that was 20 years ago.
It did enough to persuade Blair that he couldn't join the euro without a referendum, and to persuade him not to call such a referendum because he would lose it.
Hague's save-the-pound was the most stupid campaign in election history because Gordon Brown had already saved the pound. There was never any danger of us joining the Euro, with or without a referendum.
Besides being entirely redundant, Hague's campaign apparently led to local parties feeling pressured by CCHQ (probably Central Office back then) to give false feedback on voter-engagement with it, so Hague was further isolated from reality.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
Even if the electricity used to charge an EV were 100% generated by fossil fuel power stations, it would still be more environmentally friendly to drive an EV than a conventional car. That's because power stations are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than car engines are, and electricity transmission losses are relatively small.
But of course a significant proportion are our electricity does come from non-fossil fuel sources, especially at night when many EVs are charged, which swings the equation even more in their favour.
They are also more efficient in terms of energy expended going from A to B.
Sure: but efficiency numbers need to include quite a lot of transitions when energy will be lost:
(1) At the power station when electricity is generated (2) In the transmission network (3) In the charging process (4) In the battery itself (5) In the electrical motor converting it into motive power
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% is suddenly not a million miles from a petrol engine's efficiency.
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% = 40% which is indeed not a million miles away for the 20% to 35% (according to Wikipedia) achieved by a petrol engine, but still better. And that would be for a 100% fossil-fuel powered grid.
What do you make of the fusion result ?
It's interesting that the improvements in the target and laser focussing have yielded the improvements that they have, but while the achievement of Q > 1 sounds a big deal, it's really just another increment. Remember, Q refers to the ratio of energy released by fusion to the energy supplied by the lasers. Not the energy used by the lasers, which is considerably more due to the losses incurred in converting electrical energy to light energy.
Remember too that the energy released is thermal energy, and further losses would be incurred in converting that is useful energy. And then you have to think about how on earth you go about operating an inertial confinement device on a continuous basis. Currently each target is meticulously set up up before being zapped.
On the whole, I see tokamaks as being more promising than inertial confinement devices for continuous energy production, but even they have a long, long way to go yet.
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
Even if the electricity used to charge an EV were 100% generated by fossil fuel power stations, it would still be more environmentally friendly to drive an EV than a conventional car. That's because power stations are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than car engines are, and electricity transmission losses are relatively small.
But of course a significant proportion are our electricity does come from non-fossil fuel sources, especially at night when many EVs are charged, which swings the equation even more in their favour.
They are also more efficient in terms of energy expended going from A to B.
Sure: but efficiency numbers need to include quite a lot of transitions when energy will be lost:
(1) At the power station when electricity is generated (2) In the transmission network (3) In the charging process (4) In the battery itself (5) In the electrical motor converting it into motive power
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% is suddenly not a million miles from a petrol engine's efficiency.
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% = 40% which is indeed not a million miles away for the 20% to 35% (according to Wikipedia) achieved by a petrol engine, but still better. And that would be for a 100% fossil-fuel powered grid.
Also, the burning methane gives off less carbon dioxide per joule of energy than petrol and diesel.
On the other hand, building an EV has a higher environmental cost than building an ICE car, does it not?
Yes, depending on how your electricity is generated IIRC you have to drive an EV somewhere between 60k & 90k miles before it’s a CO2 win over an ICE car.
But you can expect this to improve rapidly as grid generation comes increasingly from non CO2 generating sources. Future EV cars may be able to use batteries that have been recycled from existing stock, in which case driving an EV will put you ahead much sooner, but nobody is able to do that economically right now.
This is all fanciful. We are not going to rejoin for decades. No PM will give up Sterling
I don't think that "saving the British pound" is quite the killer punch you believe it to be, at least with voters under 60. It didn't do much for William Hague's as I recall and that was 20 years ago.
It did enough to persuade Blair that he couldn't join the euro without a referendum, and to persuade him not to call such a referendum because he would lose it.
Hague's save-the-pound was the most stupid campaign in election history
Nah. The Remain campaign beats it by a country mile.
Fascinating from Starmer fans on Brexit this morning: he should shut up about his real agenda until he's safely elected and then claim a free mandate and show his hand.
This is precisely what I've been warning about for months.
Granted Richard Burgon isn't the greatest MP but he isn't wrong here.
@RichardBurgon · 3m Nurses are now earning £5,000 a year less in real terms than when the Tories came to power.
There are now 47,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS.
The NHS crisis can't be resolved without paying nurses properly.
Agree, but where does the money come from, without contributing to inflation?
From the rest of us - wealth tax, income tax, windfall tax, borrowing, we can debate, but clearly a situation where we can't get either an ambulance or reasonable care within hours is not acceptable, and more important than most of the things we spend money on. We pay the Government to prioritise, and at present they seem to be prioritising doing nothing very much for fear it might make MPs rebel. That, I suggest, is not a priority for most people.
Ask "most people" whether nurses should be paid more. They all say yes. Then show them the current pay scale, remembering to explain the DB pension scheme which adds circa 40% on to the said pay scale. Then see if their view changes.
Secondly, when people clamour for higher nurses pay, why the focus on nurses? What about doctors, porters and admin staff? Why just nurses? I don't know for sure but I'm guessing that nurses total less than half of the NHS staffing.
Isn't this just an emotive way of building a narrative to alter the balance between the public sector vs the private sector in favour of the former? Isn't this the real agenda?
There are 47,000 nursing vacancies. Many of them will be being filled on a shift by shift basis (because the Hospital has no choice but to pay whatever is demanded) by contract staff charging far more than the cost of an salaried staff member.
So we are currently not paying nurses enough for them to work AND the NHS is probably paying billions to agencies in a desperate attempt to avoid not having to close wards down at short notice.
So it's not a question of what the general public may think - it's a question of what level of pay is required to ensure nursing staffing levels return to sustainable levels - because the total cost will be far less than you think.
There's a kind of frugal virtue signalling going on here, and has been for ages.
The pay scales and changes in the public sector are easily available and easily understood. Squeezing those looks like it is being careful with public money. Unfortunately, the cost of filling gaps with agency staff is usually hidden, unless someone wants to FOI the numbers to tell a story. So the government ends up paying more for less. Agency staff may be no better or worse than permanent staff, but they can't have the institutional memory.
This sort of thing ought to be well understood by people on the right. It's the same process you got in Soviet food markets. Either try to pay the official price and not get enough food, or go to the tolerated-on-the-margins free markets and pay the economic price for things.
Staff, like other things, cost what they cost. Try to get away with paying less and the supply eventually dries up.
The NHS is rife with false economy, derived from failure to invest (usually in people). It is not efficient for people to use A&E for primary healthcare, but that is where so many people have to end up.
I've mentioned on here that I've been dealing a lot with my dad being in and out of hospital a lot - but again, costly inefficiency at play because he originally got two minutes with a consultant who he's not seen before or since, who sent him home with a treatment which, while ostensibly fine, a more careful consideration of his history would have shown to be inappropriate (so back we come, blue lights, overnights, more paramedic doctor and nurse time etc.).
I should clear up, whenever I write Ngozi Fulani, keep in mind this could also mean Ngozi Headley; Ngozi Headley-Fulani; Marlene Headley; Marlene Fulani; Mary Headley; Mary Fulani; Mary Headley-Fulani; or Sister Ngozi. For avoidance of any doubt, this is all the same person.
The charity sector seems riddled with this kind of stuff. The captain Tom mob had a lot of allegations thrown at them - no idea how it turned out.
I was Santa last night for a local Lions club on a charity collection in the snow. Lions commit 90% of all donations back into the local community and the remainding 10% to overseas appeals. All raised by people in their spare time. I worry about people who work in the charity sector. Why not work in another job and give up your free time to help out?
I think a review of charities is long overdue.
I think the issue is that there are different types of charities. There are charities that basically just raise funds and distribute them to deserving people. There are small local groups doing important but small-scale things and relying on volunteers to keep things going. And then there are large scale organisations doing complex tasks, often on behalf of the public sector. The latter simply can't operate on a volunteer basis. If you don't think those types of organisations should be charities, then you are arguing for their activities to be carried out by the government or by a profit making firm instead, or for their activities to cease altogether.
This is all fanciful. We are not going to rejoin for decades. No PM will give up Sterling
I don't think that "saving the British pound" is quite the killer punch you believe it to be, at least with voters under 60. It didn't do much for William Hague's as I recall and that was 20 years ago.
Watch Labour's polling crash if it ever gets traction that "Starmer would give up our pound".
The problem before wasn't the message, but was the messenger - and a Blair still who walked on water then.
If I were the ERG I'd introduce legislation to rename it the Pound Spitfire just to be on the safe side.
Nobody knows what sterling means anyway. Might be short for Easterling meaning the Hanseatic League, their currency being less debased than ours. If that is right it is virtually a euro anyway if you think about it.
We should change the pound sign too, from the quisling, continental florid 'L' to something more comfortingly British. Maybe change it to a stylised poppy?
This is all fanciful. We are not going to rejoin for decades. No PM will give up Sterling
I don't think that "saving the British pound" is quite the killer punch you believe it to be, at least with voters under 60. It didn't do much for William Hague's as I recall and that was 20 years ago.
I was only 14 at the time, but even I knew the reason Hague's "save the pound" campaign had no impact. No one thought there was any realistic prospect for the UK joining in the Euro. It simply wasn't going to happen.
Also Hague and his mob were fairly obviously lightweight and lost in patriotic bilge in place of actual policy.
I should clear up, whenever I write Ngozi Fulani, keep in mind this could also mean Ngozi Headley; Ngozi Headley-Fulani; Marlene Headley; Marlene Fulani; Mary Headley; Mary Fulani; Mary Headley-Fulani; or Sister Ngozi. For avoidance of any doubt, this is all the same person.
The charity sector seems riddled with this kind of stuff. The captain Tom mob had a lot of allegations thrown at them - no idea how it turned out.
I was Santa last night for a local Lions club on a charity collection in the snow. Lions commit 90% of all donations back into the local community and the remainding 10% to overseas appeals. All raised by people in their spare time. I worry about people who work in the charity sector. Why not work in another job and give up your free time to help out?
I think a review of charities is long overdue.
I think the issue is that there are different types of charities. There are charities that basically just raise funds and distribute them to deserving people. There are small local groups doing important but small-scale things and relying on volunteers to keep things going. And then there are large scale organisations doing complex tasks, often on behalf of the public sector. The latter simply can't operate on a volunteer basis. If you don't think those types of organisations should be charities, then you are arguing for their activities to be carried out by the government or by a profit making firm instead, or for their activities to cease altogether.
If the entire awareness-raising sector vanished overnight, I am not sure who would be worse off for it (other than those milking it from the inside).
Fascinating from Starmer fans on Brexit this morning: he should shut up about his real agenda until he's safely elected and then claim a free mandate and show his hand.
This is precisely what I've been warning about for months.
I'm not sure that's what I took from what I read down-thread. It seemed more like people were saying Starmer can't do anything material on Brexit but could tidy things up a bit to try to reduce the economic harm. That seems like a reasonable position, doesn't it?
@elonmusk I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
I like Elon Musk, he is someone who sees problems and handles them. That is a lot better than the vast majority of people today.
He's clearly at a state of wealth whereby he doesn't care for money anymore. Good on him to sort twitter out.
Yes, media may say his "wealth" has halved. But this is an information space, and he understands this. Over the next 10 years this world will move forward to that. In some ways, despite the short or even medium term hit, he has made a major investment that I believe will pay off in the longer term as paradigms change and hard AI hits eventually.
The overpayment was just one of those things, there was no way to know the entire tech market would dump shortly after he made his offer.
Musk is kind of complicated because he's a huge bullshitter but also he sometimes delivers. Hopefully the problem he's currently working on is that Trumpists and antivaxxers are tribally aligned against electric cars.
Musk has two problems:
Firstly, as you say, the people who buy his solar products or his electric cars are exactly the people who dislike his rhetoric on this. This is probably good news for other electric car makers.
Secondly, his businesses (whether Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX) are dependent on him hiring very smart people. And those smart people are in a lot of demand. Does he find it harder to recruit and keep the right people?
Separately, I have a friend on Twitter who is a money manager and has been a fairly long time Tesla bear. Since Musk took over, he's seen a dramatic decrease in the number of people seeing his Tweets: https://twitter.com/AlbertBridgeCap/status/1601990554526654466
I feel the very long product development times are slowly strangling Tesla. The Model S launched ten years ago and has one very minor cosmetic update since then. Meanwhile BMW have done two and a half generations of 5 Series.
Their competitive advantages that compensated for the stale (and poorly built) products were the charging network and range but the Tier 1 OEMs (particularly VAG) are constantly whittling those margins away.
Even though I know nothing about the world of wankers with six giant monitors covered in graphs I don't blame him for being pessimistic about Tesla.
Maybe EiT is on to something. Dark Elon has turned into an alt-right shitlord to make wannabe alt-right shitlords buy Teslas.
There are several reasons that I don't own a Tesla, including not trusting a dickhead to care about quality control. You are right on the Tesla ranges looking very tired. Tesla is the Model T of the modern era, a breakthrough commercially but overtaken by the rest of the world.
Tesla's biggest selling point was its novelty and difference, bolstered by the feeling that you could splash out on a luxury item while "saving the world". Rather like the Toyota Prius (albeit less luxury) when it first came out. It's just not a novelty anymore.
Compounding this is Musk's trashing of his reputation among the very same affluent left-liberal Twitterati he had build up as his customer base. People who find him distasteful will now steer clear of Teslas, especially in the polarised US.
It's a very social media-age phenomenon, the clash between culture warfare and consumer behaviour. Two European examples I can think of with exactly the same dynamics: Dyson - until 2016 the archetypal middle class John Lewis shopping vacuum cleaner choice. Now soft-boycotted by its previous core base seemingly in favour of Henrys. But in his case the business has diversified internationally and in product terms so it's not dependent on that demographic anymore. And Nutella: ultimate middle class holiday family spread now shunned by almost everyone in its former consumer group because of the palm oil.
Actually Nutella and palm oil is a fascinating dilemma. A company with long term, well established investments in a core commodity which it's under pressure to ditch but if it did it would be consigning thousands of low paid workers in poor countries to unemployment. A kind of veg oil version of closing the coalmines.
For now Tesla should be fine. There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
I've never understood why EVs are seen as better for the environment given that the main energy source for many is whatever fossil fuel is being used by the electricity generators.
Even if the electricity used to charge an EV were 100% generated by fossil fuel power stations, it would still be more environmentally friendly to drive an EV than a conventional car. That's because power stations are more efficient at extracting energy from fossil fuels than car engines are, and electricity transmission losses are relatively small.
But of course a significant proportion are our electricity does come from non-fossil fuel sources, especially at night when many EVs are charged, which swings the equation even more in their favour.
They are also more efficient in terms of energy expended going from A to B.
Sure: but efficiency numbers need to include quite a lot of transitions when energy will be lost:
(1) At the power station when electricity is generated (2) In the transmission network (3) In the charging process (4) In the battery itself (5) In the electrical motor converting it into motive power
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% is suddenly not a million miles from a petrol engine's efficiency.
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% = 40% which is indeed not a million miles away for the 20% to 35% (according to Wikipedia) achieved by a petrol engine, but still better. And that would be for a 100% fossil-fuel powered grid.
Also, the burning methane gives off less carbon dioxide per joule of energy than petrol and diesel.
On the other hand, building an EV has a higher environmental cost than building an ICE car, does it not?
Yes, depending on how your electricity is generated IIRC you have to drive an EV somewhere between 60k & 90k miles before it’s a CO2 win over an ICE car.
But you can expect this to improve rapidly as grid generation comes increasingly from non CO2 generating sources. Future EV cars may be able to use batteries that have been recycled from existing stock, in which case driving an EV will put you ahead much sooner, but nobody is able to do that economically right now.
That figure varies considerably depending on where the battery was made and where the car is driven. According to this site, dating from April 2020, a car with a battery build in Sweden and driven in Sweden emits, on average, 81% less CO2 than a petrol car, while a car with a battery built in China and driven in Poland emits 28% less CO2 than a petrol car.
Ben Stokes is a literal gamechanger. He is revolutionising a sport and potentially saving it from itself. It is truly wonderful to see.
SPOTY
Lioness Beth Mead is long odds-on, 1/25 with some firms, to win SPotY, yet there is no guarantee she will even be shortlisted by the BBC; other lionesses are available. In an open year with a (possibly) false market, Ben Stokes cannot be entirely ruled out but I'd caution that there's not been much coverage in this country. If I had to bet now, 100/1 Tyson Fury is interesting, but I don't and I'd rather take 8/1 once I'm sure he has been nominated and Mead has not, than 100/1 in ignorance of these crucial factors. Many fingers were burned last year when the BBC ignored a lot of Olympic gold medallists. ETA Stokes is 40/1 in a place which is not tempting.
Comments
I was Santa last night for a local Lions club on a charity collection in the snow. Lions commit 90% of all donations back into the local community and the remainding 10% to overseas appeals. All raised by people in their spare time. I worry about people who work in the charity sector. Why not work in another job and give up your free time to help out?
I think a review of charities is long overdue.
http://static.espncricinfo.com/db/STATS/TESTS/MISC/COMPLETE_LIST.html
For example, the RSPB need to employ some good scientists if they are to make effective interventions on planning applications (and that work is a source of income from government grants etc).
Even food banks/soup kitchens - during the pandemic, the church down the road had a team of furloughed chefs sorting the meals out. Tasted incredible, but their real skill was managing to cater for c200 people. Worth employing a chef for a few hours each week.
Dutch accountants doing well out of it though.
Could be noise.
Could be that he's simply not posted as much that is interesting.
Or it is possible that it is something more nefarious.
Council has a 'transport hierarchy' but the cycle paths and pavements remain treacherous.
@RichardBurgon
·
3m
Nurses are now earning £5,000 a year less in real terms than when the Tories came to power.
There are now 47,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS.
The NHS crisis can't be resolved without paying nurses properly.
Most are great, from the Wellcome Foundation to Oxford University to Great Snoring Duck Pond Society they contribute massively to society.
Recently a sort of person/ group has discovered two things:
That starting a charity is a great way to attract respectable attention. (The BBC is a total sucker for it).
That it can operate without being any actual use. ("Raising awareness"!!).
That very few ask hard questions, including the Charity Commission.
That it is a general licence to ask the entire nation for money, including the money needed to pay both Rabbit and his friends and relations to 'administer'.
Some groups will lose ground substantially. There will be winners and losers. Everyone has a favoured list of who should be winners (midwives, hedge fund managers, teachers, drug dealers or whoever), but no-one wants to talk about the losers.
There's a capacity shortage for EVs and batteries; if they can continue controlling a significant slice of battery manufacturing, they'll sell everything they can produce for the next few years.
To attract seed capital.
Secondly, when people clamour for higher nurses pay, why the focus on nurses? What about doctors, porters and admin staff? Why just nurses? I don't know for sure but I'm guessing that nurses total less than half of the NHS staffing.
Isn't this just an emotive way of building a narrative to alter the balance between the public sector vs the private sector in favour of the former? Isn't this the real agenda?
I was chatting yesterday to a high-flying banker, born in Britain of Egyptian descent. He says it's routine for people to ask him where he "really" comes from, even when he identifies where he was born and grew up (Liverpool), though not to the same persistent extent as Hussey. He rolls his eyes and says you get used to it, but it's not great.
I remember that someone whose family had a cafe managed to collect enough cigarette coupons from customers for a free Mini-Moke. Not the Dinky, either, but the 1:1 scale model.
So we are currently not paying nurses enough for them to work AND the NHS is probably paying billions to agencies in a desperate attempt to avoid not having to close wards down at short notice.
So it's not a question of what the general public may think - it's a question of what level of pay is required to ensure nursing staffing levels return to sustainable levels - because the total cost will be far less than you think.
However, that operating margin does include renewable vehicle credits it sells to other auto makers. If you exclude those, the margin drops to around 12%. Which is very decent.
The issue to me is that Tesla's operating margin befits its industry position: i.e. it's selling mostly vehicles that cost £40k+. Can it maintain that level of profitability when it starts selling £15-25k vehicles?
But of course a significant proportion are our electricity does come from non-fossil fuel sources, especially at night when many EVs are charged, which swings the equation even more in their favour.
They sing, dance and interact with their fans just like any other band.
In fact, there's mainly one big difference between them and any other pop group you might know - all 11 members are virtual characters.
Non-humans, hyper-real avatars made with artificial intelligence.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-63827838
Didn't know this. Real life catching up with William Gibson's Idoru 1996.
Whatever it is he will be back. He's usually interesting but, my word, he is really into some barking conspiracy theory stuff on COVID. Right up there with Matt Le Tissier and the bald pop stars, from the nineties.
And the point about such a massive re-engineering of both our transport and energy generation is that it's a decades long process.
A snapshot this year doesn't tell you very much.
And you can't just wait until there's sufficient capacity if either battery production or renewable generation, because that wouldn't happen without the government incentives over the last decade.
We're now around the point where the market, rather than government, will be the primary driver of change.
Clearly there are some issues here with the charity that need to be looked at, if only to give it a clean bill of health.
It in no way mitigates what Lady Hussey did and it is somewhat unpleasant that the focus on the charity seems to come, partly, from people out to get at the victim of lady Husseys interrogation
https://www.alamy.com/1964-austin-mini-moke-with-parachute-on-display-at-the-haynes-international-motor-museum-sparkford-somerset-uk-image452340047.html
TUD's version:
https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/843988523/vintage-dinky-toys-austin-mini-moke-with
Edit: And no, the parachute didn't come with the civilian version.
(1) At the power station when electricity is generated
(2) In the transmission network
(3) In the charging process
(4) In the battery itself
(5) In the electrical motor converting it into motive power
55% * 95% * 95% * 95% * 85% is suddenly not a million miles from a petrol engine's efficiency.
https://silodrome.com/mini-moke-prisoner-tv/
https://www.silverstoneauctions.com/sa077-lot-16973-1965-the-prisoner-mini-moke?el=16973&pn=1&pp=100
If we could rejoin on the same terms that we left on I believe we would rejoin in about 10 years time. Unfortunately that is unlikely to be the case and why I'm so pissed off with the leavers. They have prevented us ever returning to where we were so even if we do rejoin the Brexiteers have ensured that the country will be worse off than before. Well done.
Will all depend on how much the EU want us back when the time comes.
At the boundary, increasing pay may tempt some existing trained nurses back into nursing from other jobs, but the supply of trained nurses that exist in the UK at the current time is finite: If there aren’t enough nurses then you cannot fill the vacancies unless you import nursing staff from abroad, which carries it’s own costs. (I note in passing that the government decided to cancel bursaries for nursing courses.)
How much stress your staff are under & whether they are able to cope is not strongly linked to pay: Many staff worked incredibly hard during the pandemic under extremely difficult conditions & are completely burnt out. In many cases they were already working at 110% of sustainable output before the pandemic, as evidenced by the high rate of people leaving the nursing profession.
You can extend similar arguments to teaching. It’s not /just/ pay (although more pay will help). It’s also the stress the staff are under & the relentless workload because the government seems to be happy to pile on more work without actually employing sufficient people to do the work, expecting the existing staff to cope. What actually happens is that, at the margins, staff begin to quit because they can’t cope with the increased stress. This puts more work on the rest of the system & ultimately it either sheds workload somehow, or the work that is being done declines precipitously in quality.
The government has refused to engage with these issues in any kind of serious fashion & you’re seeing it across the board in the services sector - police, NHS, teachers all seem to be utterly exhausted whilst the quality of service they provide has fallen through the floor. Individual pay may be part of the problem, but personally I believe what’s driving this collapse is a refusal to match services adequately to the load put upon them, often by the government itself, leading to a self feeding downward spiral as staff quit for greener pastures elsewhere.
We’re now in a very difficult position & much of it is self-inflicted, even if the final trigger was an external stressor (Covid-19).
BTW it was the UKG which cancelled byursaries in England with knock on effects for budgets for the devolved admins, but nevertheless bursaries for nursing still exist in Scotland - no idea about NI or Wales.
Edit: also paramedics and midwives, in Scotland.
https://www.gov.scot/publications/support-paramedic-nursing-midwifery-students-scotland-2022-23/pages/4/
I agree that there is an emotional overlay in concentrating on nurses, and there may be a shortage of radiographers or porters too that we don't hear so much about. But the basic point remains that if one considers emergency health care to be a vital service, we need to pay people enough to attract sufficient people to work in it. Whether they "deserve" it or have angelic natures is quite beside the point.
The pay scales and changes in the public sector are easily available and easily understood. Squeezing those looks like it is being careful with public money. Unfortunately, the cost of filling gaps with agency staff is usually hidden, unless someone wants to FOI the numbers to tell a story. So the government ends up paying more for less. Agency staff may be no better or worse than permanent staff, but they can't have the institutional memory.
This sort of thing ought to be well understood by people on the right. It's the same process you got in Soviet food markets. Either try to pay the official price and not get enough food, or go to the tolerated-on-the-margins free markets and pay the economic price for things.
Staff, like other things, cost what they cost. Try to get away with paying less and the supply eventually dries up.
The problem with rolling back the result of the vote is that it would play into the view of politicians ignoring the populace. Labour's problem in its heartlands is its image - it is seen as a middle-class, graduate run party that looks down on its traditional voting base as racist, ignorant and thick proles. Starmer has managed to pick up support because - at the moment - the focus is all on the Tories and he hasn't really said that much (having Rayner helps). But bringing Brexit up again would rekindle a lot of that sentiment.
And there's exceptionalism at work here. The mark, franc, lira and peseta were equally proud, history-laden symbols of their nations. Only person I have discussed it with was Irish, and she said she had got over the punt-euro switch by lunchtime on day 1. It helped that the two were near parity at the time, an advantage we might also see...
The problem before wasn't the message, but was the messenger - and a Blair still who walked on water then.
With the new battery formats predominating in a couple of years time, I suspect the answer to that will be no.
And large scale recycling will become part of the calculation by the end of the decade.
EVs are evolving rapidly. ICE cars aren't.
That's impressive.
Nobody knows what sterling means anyway. Might be short for Easterling meaning the Hanseatic League, their currency being less debased than ours. If that is right it is virtually a euro anyway if you think about it.
Depends also on how you combine the "capital" costs of making a new machine with the "revenue" costs of running it. So it's mostly not worth replacing things until their performance is bad and can't be viably improved. (Reuse and repair before recycle.)
But most of us struggle to balance capital and revenue costs when they are both expressed in money. Once it's comparing a dozen different harms, it's even harder.
Though given the dominant battery chemistry is now lithium/iron/phosphate, a substantial change from a couple of years ago, it might well be no.
The court system is falling apart, with court dates delayed multiple years. It‘s completely unsustainable & having knock on effects on the rest of the criminal justice system (probably the wider economy too) yet the government doesn’t appear to care.
Besides being entirely redundant, Hague's campaign apparently led to local parties feeling pressured by CCHQ (probably Central Office back then) to give false feedback on voter-engagement with it, so Hague was further isolated from reality.
Remember too that the energy released is thermal energy, and further losses would be incurred in converting that is useful energy. And then you have to think about how on earth you go about operating an inertial confinement device on a continuous basis. Currently each target is meticulously set up up before being zapped.
On the whole, I see tokamaks as being more promising than inertial confinement devices for continuous energy production, but even they have a long, long way to go yet.
But you can expect this to improve rapidly as grid generation comes increasingly from non CO2 generating sources. Future EV cars may be able to use batteries that have been recycled from existing stock, in which case driving an EV will put you ahead much sooner, but nobody is able to do that economically right now.
FFS, it got beaten by the side of a bus.
This is precisely what I've been warning about for months.
I've mentioned on here that I've been dealing a lot with my dad being in and out of hospital a lot - but again, costly inefficiency at play because he originally got two minutes with a consultant who he's not seen before or since, who sent him home with a treatment which, while ostensibly fine, a more careful consideration of his history would have shown to be inappropriate (so back we come, blue lights, overnights, more paramedic doctor and nurse time etc.).