"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
Thank God I have given up classical music composition for January.
FPT
Romanian is a Romance (Latin-based) language. How many modern European languages are descended from Greek?
Greek is. Apart from that...
I have no idea of the reason for the imbalance. Ancient Rome conducted its business largely in Greek, inscriptions in the Greek world are regularly in Greek with the Latin names transliterated, you'd think Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius sitting in Rome writing his Meditations in Rome would write in Latin, but no. The NT is written in Greek, and so on. There were Greek speaking pockets on the Black Sea and in Italy, but it doesn't give birth to any other languages. Odd.
The Eastern Hellenophone empire fell to a competing civilisation, with its own language and literature ?
Probably exactly that. But the extent of the wipeout is odd, compared to the survival of English post 1066 and of Andalusian Spanish during moorish rule.
It must be something to do with cultural imbalances between the west and east of the Roman empire ? In the east, there were a number of fairly advanced civilisations which long predated the Romans, with their own religions and literatures; far less so in the west.
I don't know much detail of the ancient world, but there are distinctions between languages of the educated elite (courts; law; religion) and the spoken languages of the uneducated. A conquering culture which didn't have a literary tradition would be far more likely to adopt that of those it had conquered, as a matter of both prestige and administrative convenience ?
In the later examples of England and Spain, the cultural disparity was nowhere near as great.
Isn't it more simply that there's a lot of continuous land East of the Eastern Empire and there wasn't any continuous land West of the Western Empire?
Well there was rather a lot of contiguous land in other directions on the borders of the western empire, so intuitively, no. Though as I said, I am a very long way indeed from being expert on this.
You make a decent point about the Iberian peninsula, though.
Yep. With the supply of Russian tanks almost depleted, and with many of those left being relics of the Afghan war with the USSR, the Ukranians need to start being much more offensive to retake ground. A few Western MBTs, used properly (unlike the enemy in this war) would be a formidable opponent.
[snipped the inner quotes as they'd messed up the quoting and I can't be bothered to find the unpaired quote tag]
Ignoring that assortment of strawmen (e.g. no one is proposing eradicating atmospheric CO2) and untruths...
I don't think they are all strawmen, but I have sympathy for your argument and the cartoon - if policies pass the sniff test in all areas, yes, let's do them regardless.
However, some policies that are currently being operated in response to the global climate consensus don't work. The UK's wind farm policy is wholly uneconomical, constraint payment data for 2022 has just been released, and we paid £237 million to wind providers in constraint (up from £143 million the previous year). Wind farms are also harmful to wildlife and areas of outstanding natural beauty. They also need massive construction in these areas, often releasing vast pockets of carbon. They also provide intermittent and unpredictable energy, necessitating dirtier and more reliable forms of power to keep supply constant. They are also very difficult, costly, and environmentally damaging to decommission.
So yes, when a climate change policy represents a universal public good, let's do it. But when it is deleterious in every area except (possibly) making slightly less CO2, let's not do it.
Sorry for the delay, had to dash off.
I agree with the general principle - has to be whole picture, not less CO2 at any cost, of course. I don't think wind power is a particularly good target for your ire, but don't expect to convince you on that - some people dislike wind farms; I don't mind them particularly and certainly prefer them to the three coal power stations I use to be able to see on a walk from my house.
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
The Ukrainians must already be having a nightmare with logistics, with all the disparate weapons systems they are fielding. Not only ammunition, but also spares. But it's probably a nightmare they're very glad to have, given the alternative is not having the kit.
I think the customary procedure here is to blame the employer for not investing enough in things that would allow staff to be more productive. And something to do with allowing too much immigration.
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
Thank God I have given up classical music composition for January.
FPT
Romanian is a Romance (Latin-based) language. How many modern European languages are descended from Greek?
Greek is. Apart from that...
I have no idea of the reason for the imbalance. Ancient Rome conducted its business largely in Greek, inscriptions in the Greek world are regularly in Greek with the Latin names transliterated, you'd think Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius sitting in Rome writing his Meditations in Rome would write in Latin, but no. The NT is written in Greek, and so on. There were Greek speaking pockets on the Black Sea and in Italy, but it doesn't give birth to any other languages. Odd.
The Eastern Hellenophone empire fell to a competing civilisation, with its own language and literature ?
Whereas in the west, Latin remained the language of the educated elite after the fall of empire.
(I am not very knowledgeable about ancient history.)
Two competing civilizations: Arabs and Turks.
Don't forget the great and continuing Iranian civilization of Cyrus the Great is still around, and demonstrating against its usurpers right now. If you want to annoy a Persian, confuse them with Arabs or Turks.
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
If something can’t be challenged critically, then it’s a religion rather than a science. The whole point of science is continuous questioning and critique of our knowledge.
Some areas of ‘science’, such as the climate stuff and a lot of what we saw during the pandemic, do veer towards religion more than is healthy. That doesn’t mean that idiots spouting rubbish should always have a platform, but is does mean that there should be a process by which a ‘consensus’ should be able to be challenged using the scientific method.
Funding sources for research, are of course a significant factor in such ‘consensus’ positions arising in the first place, as is - especially in the US - the tendency for lobby groups to try and use ‘science’ to push a position advantageous to themselves.
Having only just read the 'declaration' - or at least the summary of it, I think it probably reflects my own view fairly accurately:
Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming
The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.
Warming is far slower than predicted
The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.
Climate policy relies on inadequate models
Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools. They blow up the effect of greenhouse gases such as CO2. In addition, they ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.
CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.
Global warming has not increased natural disasters
There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.
Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities
There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. If better approaches emerge, and they certainly will, we have ample time to reflect and re-adapt. The aim of global policy should be ‘prosperity for all’ by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times. In a prosperous society men and women are well educated, birthrates are low and people care about their environment.
That is really hardly even trying. "CO2 is not a pollutant" is pathetic, who ever said it was? Should we disband the RNLI and abandon all construction regs for reservoir dams because H2O is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Hydration is a blessing? Or encourage everyone in the country to double their calorie intake because food is such a good thing? Truly embarrassing stuff.
Ban DiHydrogenMonoxide. It kills!
We all know water can be bad and dangerous in certain contexts, and precious and valuable in others. We speak of water management, respect for water, water as a resource. We don't speak of CO2 management, optimum levels, shortages etc.
A header of no particular value. If everything is so dreadful then we are probably reading about the prejudices of the author rather than a balanced view of where we are in maths and hence any valid points, of which I'm sure there are several, are lost in the morass.
I think @FrequentLurker probably has it more accurately with this line:
"I don't think the current Maths curriculum is that bad. It's not perfect, but it could certainly be worse"
Not as polemical or bite-sized but I'm sure a better description of where we are.
A surprising number of younger shop staff panic if you hand them cash rather than tapping your card. A noticeable number struggle with working out change. Heaven knows how they would have coped with the idiotic Pounds, Shillings and Pence of Imperial Britain
Basic arithmetic is in decline.
The ability to do mental arithmetic and guesstimate answers (to double check calculators etc) is a long lamented, diminished skill. It’s also fairly different to what most people here were talking if in terms of maths.
I use it all the time - an instinctive “is that even the right magnitude?”
But then again, I work with computers full time. Which are brilliant at generating a very exact, completely wrong answer.
Totally agree with that. I'd add that it's vital to know the difference between precision and accuracy; something people get wrong all the time (including myself, at times).
Something can be very precise but also utterly inaccurate; whilst something can be fairly imprecise but also accurate.
As an example, if you want to sanity-check a calculation you could use pi at 3.1 That is imprecise but fairly accurate for the purposes. If you set pi at 5.3421342, that is precise, but very inaccurate.
22/7 is a much better approximation for pi and, ideally, everyone knows their times tables will enough that they can handle the divide by seven.
Whilst that is true, I'd argue it's too accurate for the stated purposes; a sanity check.
Say you have a circle of radius 7cm and you want to work out the area. You get 23.5cm^2. The 'correct' answer is 21.991xm^2 to 3 d.p. Multiplying 7 by 3.1 is easy in your head; you get 21.7; enough to show that the value of 23.5 is way off.
For a sanity check, 21.7 is a good enough answer for most purposes, and it is much quicker to do. More importantly, you are less likely to make mistakes.
Incidentally, a while ago I read a while back that NASA only ever uses up to 15 digits of pi in its calculations; any more is unnecessary.
"How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom, the simplest atom? It turns out that 37 decimal places (38 digits, including the number 3 to the left of the decimal point) would be quite sufficient."
Even professional mathematicians don’t remember more than a few digits of π
I know of two people who memorised pi to an absolutely ludicrous number of decimal places. It always seemed a pointless thing to brag about.
I was much more impressed with the guy at uni who had memorised one event for every year from 0 AD to 1993 (when I knew him). We'd go into a shop and the assistant would say £4.32. He'd reply "Ah, the year St Patrick became a bishop", or somesuch.
He'd admit that the dates were a little vague for the early years, where we cannot be totally sure of years, but it was impressive, especially before Wikipedia.
I can do 0 AD, that's easy. Nothing happened: year did not exist. 🙂
That battle was lost when we celebrated the new millennium in 2000.
Pedantry. Every year starts a new millennium, we have just started the one ending 2122, and we were all at liberty to celebrate the millennium of years beginning with 2. Plus, Futurama showed us the way.
We’ve just started the millennium ending 3022, if you want pedantry.
Good luck to Cosmic Girl tonight. I'm not a fan of Branson and the Virgin companies, but at least Virgin Orbit is doing something different and moderately successful (in the fact they've launched). It's just a shame it's not scalable.
One launch every six months is not a good cadence, either.
We all know water can be bad and dangerous in certain contexts, and precious and valuable in others. We speak of water management, respect for water, water as a resource. We don't speak of CO2 management, optimum levels, shortages etc.
Hey! Did you miss all the news about the Brexit* induced CO2 shortage?
*energy-price induced, was it? but I'm sure someone fingered Brexit for it...
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
Thank God I have given up classical music composition for January.
FPT
Romanian is a Romance (Latin-based) language. How many modern European languages are descended from Greek?
Greek is. Apart from that...
I have no idea of the reason for the imbalance. Ancient Rome conducted its business largely in Greek, inscriptions in the Greek world are regularly in Greek with the Latin names transliterated, you'd think Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius sitting in Rome writing his Meditations in Rome would write in Latin, but no. The NT is written in Greek, and so on. There were Greek speaking pockets on the Black Sea and in Italy, but it doesn't give birth to any other languages. Odd.
The Eastern Hellenophone empire fell to a competing civilisation, with its own language and literature ?
Whereas in the west, Latin remained the language of the educated elite after the fall of empire.
(I am not very knowledgeable about ancient history.)
Two competing civilizations: Arabs and Turks.
Don't forget the great and continuing Iranian civilization of Cyrus the Great is still around, and demonstrating against its usurpers right now. If you want to annoy a Persian, confuse them with Arabs or Turks.
if you want to annoy a Turk, confuse them with an Arab or a Persian.
Forgive me for ignoring the ad hominem rants, but I assume it is boilerplate teacher chat. The rest is good. It sounds from the header like fixing education for everyone requires radical reform. Simply making kids sit more maths classes prior to uni might just push more of them towards useful degrees and away from PPE. And the price of forgoing 2 years of some other qualification seems relatively small.
The practical maths appears to be the sort of thing that people struggle with.
If a new phone costs £900 in cash, or £40/month for three years, should you save up for it or get it on the contract?
If a £50k student loan, at 5% pa interest, for a liberal arts degree, leads to you earning £3k more per year than without the degree, is it worth spending most of your life in debt to pay for three years on the piss?
Plenty of examples of human nature valuing gratification now over higher value in the future.
Should we cut taxes now, or spend the money ensuring that public buildings are better maintained?
Should we aim to pass an unpolluted environment onto future generations, even if it increases prices for us now?
But be prepared to accept that if people are capable of making them, those calculations can also go the other way to the way that you (I assume) want them to. It may be that a lot of the expense and effort expended in decarbonising (especially from a UK perspective) isn't worth the predicted benefit, and merely leaves us with less financial headroom to mitigate any future climate changes.
It may be that but many many economists have done the calculation and found that it isn't. In fact, they have shown pretty clearly that the costs of dealing with the effects of climate change are far, far higher than mitigation methods.
Perhaps, but their calculations will be based on a whole world effort, not based on the UK paying a heavy price to cut its already very low emissions even lower, whilst most of the rest of the world continues unabated.
Their work will also have been publicised more due to its conclusions according with the current global consensus. There are a lot of scientists, many of great repute, who dispute the current climate science consensus completely. A recent 'declaration' from this group is something that I've heard of but not read. My point in mentioning this is that dissenting voices from the global consensus are often ignored or ridiculed.
Show me those scientists of great repute who (a) believe we shouldn't be taking radical action to reduce GHG pollution emissions and (b) are not funded by the oil lobby.
As for the impact of the UK, I think the arguments are even stronger for us. For a start, due to being a long thin island, a disproportionate amount of our population lives close to sea level, whether the coast or tidal rivers. Secondly, the UK has a fantastic scientific base, so our people are more likely to respond to the incentives and come up with technology that will make decarbonization easier. Thirdly, we have disproportionate cultural impact, so our example will have an outsized influence on the rest of the world following us.
There are apparently 1400 signatories - I am sure many will be connected commercially with oil and gas - and many more won't be.
You can perhaps show me scientists on the climate emergency side of the argument who do not benefit from patronage by the corporations, NGOs, Governments, and supranational Governing organisations promoting the current climate consensus.
If something can’t be challenged critically, then it’s a religion rather than a science. The whole point of science is continuous questioning and critique of our knowledge.
Some areas of ‘science’, such as the climate stuff and a lot of what we saw during the pandemic, do veer towards religion more than is healthy. That doesn’t mean that idiots spouting rubbish should always have a platform, but is does mean that there should be a process by which a ‘consensus’ should be able to be challenged using the scientific method.
Funding sources for research, are of course a significant factor in such ‘consensus’ positions arising in the first place, as is - especially in the US - the tendency for lobby groups to try and use ‘science’ to push a position advantageous to themselves.
Having only just read the 'declaration' - or at least the summary of it, I think it probably reflects my own view fairly accurately:
Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming
The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.
Warming is far slower than predicted
The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.
Climate policy relies on inadequate models
Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools. They blow up the effect of greenhouse gases such as CO2. In addition, they ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.
CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.
Global warming has not increased natural disasters
There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.
Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities
There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. If better approaches emerge, and they certainly will, we have ample time to reflect and re-adapt. The aim of global policy should be ‘prosperity for all’ by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times. In a prosperous society men and women are well educated, birthrates are low and people care about their environment.
Ignoring that assortment of strawmen (e.g. no one is proposing eradicating atmospheric CO2) and untruths...
I don't think they are all strawmen, but I have sympathy for your argument and the cartoon - if policies pass the sniff test in all areas, yes, let's do them regardless.
However, some policies that are currently being operated in response to the global climate consensus don't work. The UK's wind farm policy is wholly uneconomical, constraint payment data for 2022 has just been released, and we paid £237 million to wind providers in constraint (up from £143 million the previous year). Wind farms are also harmful to wildlife and areas of outstanding natural beauty. They also need massive construction in these areas, often releasing vast pockets of carbon. They also provide intermittent and unpredictable energy, necessitating dirtier and more reliable forms of power to keep supply constant. They are also very difficult, costly, and environmentally damaging to decommission.
So yes, when a climate change policy represents a universal public good, let's do it. But when it is deleterious in every area except (possibly) making slightly less CO2, let's not do it.
some people dislike wind farms
Someone should design a heritage wind turbine for deployment across East Anglia (the Dutch might be interested too). From the outside it looks just like a windmill in an old Flemish painting, but inside it churns out a mean 8mw of power.
[snipped the inner quotes as they'd messed up the quoting and I can't be bothered to find the unpaired quote tag]
Ignoring that assortment of strawmen (e.g. no one is proposing eradicating atmospheric CO2) and untruths...
I don't think they are all strawmen, but I have sympathy for your argument and the cartoon - if policies pass the sniff test in all areas, yes, let's do them regardless.
However, some policies that are currently being operated in response to the global climate consensus don't work. The UK's wind farm policy is wholly uneconomical, constraint payment data for 2022 has just been released, and we paid £237 million to wind providers in constraint (up from £143 million the previous year). Wind farms are also harmful to wildlife and areas of outstanding natural beauty. They also need massive construction in these areas, often releasing vast pockets of carbon. They also provide intermittent and unpredictable energy, necessitating dirtier and more reliable forms of power to keep supply constant. They are also very difficult, costly, and environmentally damaging to decommission.
So yes, when a climate change policy represents a universal public good, let's do it. But when it is deleterious in every area except (possibly) making slightly less CO2, let's not do it.
Sorry for the delay, had to dash off.
I agree with the general principle - has to be whole picture, not less CO2 at any cost, of course. I don't think wind power is a particularly good target for your ire, but don't expect to convince you on that - some people dislike wind farms; I don't mind them particularly and certainly prefer them to the three coal power stations I use to be able to see on a walk from my house.
Too late to edit...
And, there are two issues here. The declaration is let's bury our heads in the sand, there is no problem. That's very different to the (legitimate) argument that there is a problem but we're tackling it wrong.
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
I'm getting to the stage where I think we just need to send Ukraine any kit we can. Good people are dying because they don't have all the kit they need to keep *us* safe.
We don't face any existential threat to our mainland at the moment (France or Ireland are not going to invade), and we're still bruised from our foreign interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Send Ukraine as much as we can, and buy new kit to replace it - preferably from within the UK. We can do without for a few years.
Send them everything they want aside from nukes (sorry, Malmesbury). It'll probably be cheaper in the long run, especially if other European countries do the same.
"The liver was greatly reduced in size, had a leathery consistency, was ‘blue-green’ in colour, and was covered in bean-sized nodules. These features are consistent with micro-nodular cirrhosis resulting from chronic alcohol-induced liver injury."
There's actually one other modern functioning language descended that way - Tsakonian Greek, a local dialect in Southern Greece from Doric Greek, but only a few thousand people in the Peloponnese speak that.
I'm getting to the stage where I think we just need to send Ukraine any kit we can. Good people are dying because they don't have all the kit they need to keep *us* safe.
We don't face any existential threat to our mainland at the moment (France or Ireland are not going to invade), and we're still bruised from our foreign interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Send Ukraine as much as we can, and buy new kit to replace it - preferably from within the UK. We can do without for a few years.
Send them everything they want aside from nukes (sorry, Malmesbury). It'll probably be cheaper in the long run, especially if other European countries do the same.
The self interest calculus also tends towards sending them more potent weapons sooner, assuming we don't want them actually to lose the war.
Does no one get the fun of chucking lumps of lithium, sodium etc in a sink of water anymore ?
Half the fun of a chemistry lesson was the things that shouldn't have been happening. I recall that the bunsen burners fitted on the water taps, so you would see jets of water shoot across the classroom when the teacher's back was turned. There was always someone setting something on fire, be it the desk, blazers, school books, or bags. Magnesium ribbon was our absolute favourite for burning, a fair amount of that got pocketed.
I always remember a chemistry lesson where a substitute teacher had us doing an experiment which involved heating some gunk in a test tube, and within about 5 minutes or so about half the class had managed to break their test tube. It wasn't even deliberate with us messing around to her annoy her, just carelessness. She must have been glad to get home that day.
So my biggest disaster was in metalwork. The lad behind me turned around with the pointed end of a handle he had just taken out of the forge and which was literally red hot and which he was just about to hammer into a point to fit into a wooden handle. The 'red hot poker' caught me in the backside and melted my nylon trousers. Obviously I had to tell the teacher, who, although trying to be serious, could not restrain himself from collapsing into giggles. The needlework class put a patch on my trousers.
PS There are some cracking videos on the internet of sodium being thrown into toilets and such like.
Hmm. Forgetting there is still a chuck key in the lathe when spinning it up is a good way to make a dent in the wall on the far side of the workshop (from a friend's experience).
There's actually one other language descended that way - Tsakonian Greek, a local dialect in Southern Greece from Doric Greek, but only a few thousand people in the Peloponnese speak that.
According to Wikipedia less than 450 have ever been built. I believe the intention is that we start by supplying 10 then other countries might do similar with their MBTs. Particularly those with Leopard 2's. If the Americans pitch in with some of their Abrams (over 10K built) then that would definitely help. All about slowly upping the equipment being given to Ukraine.
Given this account of what happened the last time American MBTs came up against Soviet ones I would not expect the outcome to be good for the Russians.
Some fairly remarkable statistics, which demonstrate both the need and the effectiveness of treatment programs.
Maine’s Prisons Taught Washington a Crucial Lesson in Fighting Opioids Using drugs to treat addicts inside prison might just be the best way to stem the crisis of overdose deaths.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/01/08/maines-prisons-opioids-00076822 ...Something new is happening in Maine’s prisons, and officials in Washington are watching closely. In recent years, America’s sprawling network of more than 4,400 state prisons and local jails have emerged as a frontline in the nation’s unrelenting opioid crisis, which killed more than 80,000 people in 2021 alone and has helped drag U.S. life expectancy to its lowest levels in a quarter century. About 2.3 million people are incarcerated in prisons each year, and 8-10 million people move through local jails. Roughly two-thirds of them have a substance use disorder, according to a 2010 study regularly cited by the federal government. The vast majority go untreated, putting people with opioid use disorder at high risk when they go back home with reduced drug tolerance to face an increasingly dangerous supply. With a disproportionate number of Black, Indigenous and people of color in the criminal justice system, that puts those groups in particular peril. Individuals leaving prison are as much as 40 times more likely to die from an opioid overdose in the first two weeks after their release than the general population.
But while medications such as buprenorphine and methadone have existed for decades as a treatment for opioid use disorder, they have largely been ignored — or shunned — in jails and prisons across the country. That is beginning to change, with an increasing number of county jails, and, to a lesser extent state prisons, offering medication-assisted treatment. Now, almost every state offers some form of medication for opioid use disorder in at least one jail or prison, according to Georgetown Law’s O’Neill Institute, which researches addiction and public policy.
The results are promising. In Maine, for instance, about 40 percent of inmates across the prison system are now administered drugs to treat opioid use disorder. In a state with one of the highest rates of drug overdose deaths in the nation, fatal overdoses among people leaving prison have dropped 60 percent since the program started in 2019, according to the state Department of Corrections, and drug smuggling, violence and suicide attempts inside state prisons have all plummeted. In New York City jails, a recent study found methadone and buprenorphine treatment during incarceration reduced the risk of overdose deaths in the first month after release by 80 percent...
According to Wikipedia less than 450 have ever been built. I believe the intention is that we start by supplying 10 then other countries might do similar with their MBTs. Particularly those with Leopard 2's. If the Americans pitch in with some of their Abrams (over 10K built) then that would definitely help. All about slowly upping the equipment being given to Ukraine.
Given this account of what happened the last time American MBTs came up against Soviet ones it would not expect the outcome to be good for the Russians.
According to Wikipedia less than 450 have ever been built. I believe the intention is that we start by supplying 10 then other countries might do similar with their MBTs. Particularly those with Leopard 2's. If the Americans pitch in with some of their Abrams (over 10K built) then that would definitely help. All about slowly upping the equipment being given to Ukraine.
Given this account of what happened the last time American MBTs came up against Soviet ones it would not expect the outcome to be good for the Russians.
Didn't you know? Those were the export versions of the Soviet tanks. The proper Russian tanks have all the stuff that was not exported, and are the stronkiest of stronk tanks that ever stronked, far better than any pathetic western tank.
That was actually an excuse the Russians made at the time, perhaps with some truth: the export versions of the tanks did not have quite all the gizmos that the best Russian tanks had. But those gizmos did not make much of a difference.
IANAE, but am of the view that training actually matters more than the very best kit: put an untrained idiot (say, me) in a Leopard II or Abrams and I'd be dead in any battle very quickly. Give the Americans 200 T74s and six months to adapt to them, and they'd be more effective than Russians in Abrams, because the Americans really spend on training. True, they'd lose more people than if they had Abrams, but they'd still beat poorly-trained conscripts - especially with other western weapons such as aircraft and using the tanks as part of combined arms.
I'm getting to the stage where I think we just need to send Ukraine any kit we can. Good people are dying because they don't have all the kit they need to keep *us* safe.
We don't face any existential threat to our mainland at the moment (France or Ireland are not going to invade), and we're still bruised from our foreign interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Send Ukraine as much as we can, and buy new kit to replace it - preferably from within the UK. We can do without for a few years.
Send them everything they want aside from nukes (sorry, Malmesbury). It'll probably be cheaper in the long run, especially if other European countries do the same.
Give them Davy Crockett - put the madness back in MAD
According to Wikipedia less than 450 have ever been built. I believe the intention is that we start by supplying 10 then other countries might do similar with their MBTs. Particularly those with Leopard 2's. If the Americans pitch in with some of their Abrams (over 10K built) then that would definitely help. All about slowly upping the equipment being given to Ukraine.
Given this account of what happened the last time American MBTs came up against Soviet ones I would not expect the outcome to be good for the Russians.
According to Wikipedia less than 450 have ever been built. I believe the intention is that we start by supplying 10 then other countries might do similar with their MBTs. Particularly those with Leopard 2's. If the Americans pitch in with some of their Abrams (over 10K built) then that would definitely help. All about slowly upping the equipment being given to Ukraine.
Given this account of what happened the last time American MBTs came up against Soviet ones I would not expect the outcome to be good for the Russians.
According to Wikipedia less than 450 have ever been built. I believe the intention is that we start by supplying 10 then other countries might do similar with their MBTs. Particularly those with Leopard 2's. If the Americans pitch in with some of their Abrams (over 10K built) then that would definitely help. All about slowly upping the equipment being given to Ukraine.
Given this account of what happened the last time American MBTs came up against Soviet ones it would not expect the outcome to be good for the Russians.
Didn't you know? Those were the export versions of the Soviet tanks. The proper Russian tanks have all the stuff that was not exported, and are the stronkiest of stronk tanks that ever stronked, far better than any pathetic western tank.
That was actually an excuse the Russians made at the time, perhaps with some truth: the export versions of the tanks did not have quite all the gizmos that the best Russian tanks had. But those gizmos did not make much of a difference.
IANAE, but am of the view that training actually matters more than the very best kit: put an untrained idiot (say, me) in a Leopard II or Abrams and I'd be dead in any battle very quickly. Give the Americans 200 T74s and six months to adapt to them, and they'd be more effective than Russians in Abrams, because the Americans really spend on training. True, they'd lose more people than if they had Abrams, but they'd still beat poorly-trained conscripts - especially with other western weapons such as aircraft and using the tanks as part of combined arms.
Many of the tanks the Russians have donated in Ukraine don’t have the gizmos either. Gizmos such as proper armour arrays, night sights, hatch latches…
According to Wikipedia less than 450 have ever been built. I believe the intention is that we start by supplying 10 then other countries might do similar with their MBTs. Particularly those with Leopard 2's. If the Americans pitch in with some of their Abrams (over 10K built) then that would definitely help. All about slowly upping the equipment being given to Ukraine.
Given this account of what happened the last time American MBTs came up against Soviet ones it would not expect the outcome to be good for the Russians.
Didn't you know? Those were the export versions of the Soviet tanks. The proper Russian tanks have all the stuff that was not exported, and are the stronkiest of stronk tanks that ever stronked, far better than any pathetic western tank.
That was actually an excuse the Russians made at the time, perhaps with some truth: the export versions of the tanks did not have quite all the gizmos that the best Russian tanks had. But those gizmos did not make much of a difference.
IANAE, but am of the view that training actually matters more than the very best kit: put an untrained idiot (say, me) in a Leopard II or Abrams and I'd be dead in any battle very quickly. Give the Americans 200 T74s and six months to adapt to them, and they'd be more effective than Russians in Abrams, because the Americans really spend on training. True, they'd lose more people than if they had Abrams, but they'd still beat poorly-trained conscripts - especially with other western weapons such as aircraft and using the tanks as part of combined arms.
Absolutely. One of the features of this war, has been the amount of training given to the Ukranians on the Western kit they’ve been donated. It started several years ago, after the 2014 invasion, with a tearing up of the old Soviet military doctrine in Ukraine, and replacing it with the NATO doctrine under which the weapons were designed to be operated. Thanks to simple-to-train weapons such as NLAW in the early days of the war, it wasn’t a walkover for the enemy, and from there we’ve seen extensive training for the Ukranians on more sophisticated weaponry such as HIMARS. Main battle tanks are the next step up, with only aircraft being more difficult to integrate into the Ukranian military. MBTs need extensive training and logistics support, with several dozen men involved in the operation of each tank and its support vehicles, infantry, and artillery.
I'm getting to the stage where I think we just need to send Ukraine any kit we can. Good people are dying because they don't have all the kit they need to keep *us* safe.
We don't face any existential threat to our mainland at the moment (France or Ireland are not going to invade), and we're still bruised from our foreign interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Send Ukraine as much as we can, and buy new kit to replace it - preferably from within the UK. We can do without for a few years.
Send them everything they want aside from nukes (sorry, Malmesbury). It'll probably be cheaper in the long run, especially if other European countries do the same.
The self interest calculus also tends towards sending them more potent weapons sooner, assuming we don't want them actually to lose the war.
The sooner this is over, the better for everyone.
Assuming optimistically that Ukraine can get back the territories lost in 2022 and potentially those lost in 2014, it's interesting and a little worrying to ponder on what happens then if Russia refuses to back down. There is already an asymmetry in the war because Russia is able to attack Ukraine from within its own borders, whereas Ukraine is limited in what it can do back to Russia - it has been trying, but the country is vast and NAT won;t give it deep strike capabilities for fear of escalation.
So we could end up in the scenario where Russia loses all the annexed territory but keeps lobbing missiles and cheap Iranian drones at Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. In theory it could do so indefinitely. It's a national version of the "if I can't have you then I'll make sure your life is hell" of the psycho ex-husband. Or a large scale version of Hamas in Gaza randomly chucking mortars across into Israel, only without a Ukrainian ability to move in and bulldoze Russian cities.
And then, anything short of complete eviction of Russia from Ukraine defeat will just be a staging post for Putin to march back in later. So really this thing will only be resolved once Putin and his cronies are out of power. Which may not happen anytime soon.
Mr. Password, given we know the climate has always varied even during the blink of a geological eye that is human existence, and can therefore warm and cool for reasons that are entirely independent of human industrial activity, how can you be so confident* that the recent climatic changes must absolutely be down to human action?
As an aside, I am fully in favour of various measures that the ardent warmists like (geothermal energy, fusion, more energy efficient devices etc). I dislike the religious zeal. And I distrust it. The modern trend of seeking to 'win' an argument by demonising the opponent as either some variation of bigot or, in this case, anti-science (when scepticism is the starting point of scientific thinking) is deeply unhealthy.
*as a 16th century Catholic, perhaps.
Straw man, nobody says "must absolutely" but the mechanism by which AGW would happen was predicted in 1911; the facts now fit the predictions; the rate of change is such that it's not good enough for you to say "natural causes," it should surely be obvious which natural cause is at work; even if it's not our fault guv it's nature it's harmful either way and we should moderate our own behaviour to compensate any way.
Eppur si le alpi sono verdi.
The other thing is that if you take the media's desire to whip a religious war out of it, 99.99% of climate science is solid, incrementally improving modelling over 50 years of high quality work. Remove the media-fed denialist loonies and the extremist green fringe, and we have an ever-clearer warning and risk-based path forward.
There is a lot of contention and scientific disagreements at the frontiers of climate science. Some rather heated disagreements. The vitriol that lay behind one sentence in an IPCC report. So a lot of new climate science will turn out to be at least partly wrong. That's the nature of all science.
It's just that the stuff that the so-called sceptics harp on about was all settled ages ago and is now boring to anyone in the field. All the new stuff people are working on necessarily has to take it as a given, in a similar way that chemists don't continue to debate whether the combustion of coal involves the oxidation of carbon.
Sure - and that is "normal" debate! The challenge is getting the media (who are the filter for this for the public) to care about the difference.
There's actually one other modern functioning language descended that way - Tsakonian Greek, a local dialect in Southern Greece from Doric Greek, but only a few thousand people in the Peloponnese speak that.
Aromanian is another Latin-based language spoken in eastern Europe:
The Aromanians (Aromanian: Armãnji, Rrãmãnji)[16] are an ethnic group native to the southern Balkans who speak Aromanian, an Eastern Romance language.[17] They traditionally live in central and southern Albania, south-western Bulgaria, northern and central Greece and North Macedonia, and can currently be found in central and southern Albania, south-western Bulgaria, south-western and eastern North Macedonia, northern and central Greece, southern Serbia and south-eastern Romania (Northern Dobruja).
According to Wikipedia less than 450 have ever been built. I believe the intention is that we start by supplying 10 then other countries might do similar with their MBTs. Particularly those with Leopard 2's. If the Americans pitch in with some of their Abrams (over 10K built) then that would definitely help. All about slowly upping the equipment being given to Ukraine.
Given this account of what happened the last time American MBTs came up against Soviet ones it would not expect the outcome to be good for the Russians.
I read somewhere that the Bradley actually accounted for more tank kills during the conflict than did the M1A1. Is that correct ?
There was one battle at least, during the first gulf war, where Bradleys were hitting what they thought were BMPs - it was night and at long range.
The gunners noticed that even with their usual tactic of aiming for the base of the turret, it was taking a number of 25mm rounds to kill some targets. Some they ended up firing TOW missiles at.
In the morning they found they’d been killing tanks with the chain guns - hammering through the shot trap at the turret ring.
According to Wikipedia less than 450 have ever been built. I believe the intention is that we start by supplying 10 then other countries might do similar with their MBTs. Particularly those with Leopard 2's. If the Americans pitch in with some of their Abrams (over 10K built) then that would definitely help. All about slowly upping the equipment being given to Ukraine.
Given this account of what happened the last time American MBTs came up against Soviet ones it would not expect the outcome to be good for the Russians.
I read somewhere that the Bradley actually accounted for more tank kills during the conflict than did the M1A1. Is that correct ?
There was one battle at least, during the first gulf war, where Bradleys were hitting what they thought were BMPs - it was night and at long range.
The gunners noticed that even with their usual tactic of aiming for the base of the turret, it was taking a number of 25mm rounds to kill some targets. Some they ended up firing TOW missiles at.
In the morning they found they’d been killing tanks with the chain guns - hammering through the shot trap at the turret ring.
And Kontakt reactive armour isn't much use against a chain gun.
Britishvolt and Northvolt — a tale of two gigafactories The world will see more and more gigafactories. Not all of them will succeed
https://sifted.eu/articles/britishvolt-administration-northvolt-gigafactory/ ...Britishvolt was founded in late 2019 by Orral Nadjari and Lars Carlstrom. Both are Swedish nationals, though Nadjari lives in the UAE. Prior to forming Britishvolt, Nadjari worked at corporate bond seller Jool Capital Partner.
In December 2020, news broke that Carlstrom had been convicted of tax fraud in his native Sweden in the late 1990s, though his sentence was ultimately reduced. He resigned from Britishvolt, saying he didn’t want to become a distraction.
At the time, Carlstrom said the conviction was 25 years ago and that he had always intended to pass on his chairmanship of Britishvolt. Britishvolt tells Sifted that Carlstrom no longer has any shares or involvement in the company.
Still, it wasn’t the best start for the young company.
There were also questions over how much battery experience there was within Britishvolt’s team in the early days.
Early directors included Martin Reynolds, who, according to LinkedIn, was a police detective turned adviser to a family office in the UAE; and Courash Ali, the director of MK Development, a construction company that was dissolved in 2019...
...There’s one thing media coverage of Britishvolt tends to agree on: its Blyth site is one of the best the UK has to offer. Britishvolt bought the site for £4m. It’s an area equivalent to fifty football pitches, right next to the sea.
Securing a site with reliable access to clean energy is key for gigafactories; producing EV batteries using fossil fuels drastically reduces the environmental benefit they can bring.
Britishvolt’s site is right next to the British end of the North Sea Link — a 720km cable that connects the country’s electricity grid with Norway’s, set to bring a significant amount of clean energy into the UK from 2024 onwards. Blyth is also home to several offshore wind projects...
I'm getting to the stage where I think we just need to send Ukraine any kit we can. Good people are dying because they don't have all the kit they need to keep *us* safe.
We don't face any existential threat to our mainland at the moment (France or Ireland are not going to invade), and we're still bruised from our foreign interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Send Ukraine as much as we can, and buy new kit to replace it - preferably from within the UK. We can do without for a few years.
Send them everything they want aside from nukes (sorry, Malmesbury). It'll probably be cheaper in the long run, especially if other European countries do the same.
The self interest calculus also tends towards sending them more potent weapons sooner, assuming we don't want them actually to lose the war.
The sooner this is over, the better for everyone.
Assuming optimistically that Ukraine can get back the territories lost in 2022 and potentially those lost in 2014, it's interesting and a little worrying to ponder on what happens then if Russia refuses to back down. There is already an asymmetry in the war because Russia is able to attack Ukraine from within its own borders, whereas Ukraine is limited in what it can do back to Russia - it has been trying, but the country is vast and NAT won;t give it deep strike capabilities for fear of escalation.
So we could end up in the scenario where Russia loses all the annexed territory but keeps lobbing missiles and cheap Iranian drones at Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. In theory it could do so indefinitely. It's a national version of the "if I can't have you then I'll make sure your life is hell" of the psycho ex-husband. Or a large scale version of Hamas in Gaza randomly chucking mortars across into Israel, only without a Ukrainian ability to move in and bulldoze Russian cities.
And then, anything short of complete eviction of Russia from Ukraine defeat will just be a staging post for Putin to march back in later. So really this thing will only be resolved once Putin and his cronies are out of power. Which may not happen anytime soon.
Yes, they could do that. But if they were to, then the sanctions would remain, and they would become a slightly richer version of North Korea. A pariah state.
One of the disappointments of this war has been India's position, which I think will do them few favours in the future. They've backed a horse half-heartedly, but it's the wrong horse. I don't think India have even condemned the invasion?
Britishvolt and Northvolt — a tale of two gigafactories The world will see more and more gigafactories. Not all of them will succeed
https://sifted.eu/articles/britishvolt-administration-northvolt-gigafactory/ ...Britishvolt was founded in late 2019 by Orral Nadjari and Lars Carlstrom. Both are Swedish nationals, though Nadjari lives in the UAE. Prior to forming Britishvolt, Nadjari worked at corporate bond seller Jool Capital Partner.
In December 2020, news broke that Carlstrom had been convicted of tax fraud in his native Sweden in the late 1990s, though his sentence was ultimately reduced. He resigned from Britishvolt, saying he didn’t want to become a distraction.
At the time, Carlstrom said the conviction was 25 years ago and that he had always intended to pass on his chairmanship of Britishvolt. Britishvolt tells Sifted that Carlstrom no longer has any shares or involvement in the company.
Still, it wasn’t the best start for the young company.
There were also questions over how much battery experience there was within Britishvolt’s team in the early days.
Early directors included Martin Reynolds, who, according to LinkedIn, was a police detective turned adviser to a family office in the UAE; and Courash Ali, the director of MK Development, a construction company that was dissolved in 2019...
...There’s one thing media coverage of Britishvolt tends to agree on: its Blyth site is one of the best the UK has to offer. Britishvolt bought the site for £4m. It’s an area equivalent to fifty football pitches, right next to the sea.
Securing a site with reliable access to clean energy is key for gigafactories; producing EV batteries using fossil fuels drastically reduces the environmental benefit they can bring.
Britishvolt’s site is right next to the British end of the North Sea Link — a 720km cable that connects the country’s electricity grid with Norway’s, set to bring a significant amount of clean energy into the UK from 2024 onwards. Blyth is also home to several offshore wind projects...
I should have added:
"Northvolt began shipping batteries from its Skellefteå site in May this year, right on schedule. The company has said it’ll ramp up capacity to 60 GWh a year — enough to power about a million EVs..."
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
It's more like to be a few hundred million; just enough to keep going for a few years before it finally fails.
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
It's more like to be a few hundred million; just enough to keep going for a few years before it finally fails.
Did BoZo not get a photo op in Hi-Viz out of them?
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
It's more like to be a few hundred million; just enough to keep going for a few years before it finally fails.
+1 the problem with British Volt is that I don't know who their customers will be because the industries they are targetting don't really exist in the UK anymore bar say Nissan who already have a battery manufacturer on site.
I'm getting to the stage where I think we just need to send Ukraine any kit we can. Good people are dying because they don't have all the kit they need to keep *us* safe.
We don't face any existential threat to our mainland at the moment (France or Ireland are not going to invade), and we're still bruised from our foreign interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Send Ukraine as much as we can, and buy new kit to replace it - preferably from within the UK. We can do without for a few years.
Send them everything they want aside from nukes (sorry, Malmesbury). It'll probably be cheaper in the long run, especially if other European countries do the same.
The self interest calculus also tends towards sending them more potent weapons sooner, assuming we don't want them actually to lose the war.
The sooner this is over, the better for everyone.
Assuming optimistically that Ukraine can get back the territories lost in 2022 and potentially those lost in 2014, it's interesting and a little worrying to ponder on what happens then if Russia refuses to back down. There is already an asymmetry in the war because Russia is able to attack Ukraine from within its own borders, whereas Ukraine is limited in what it can do back to Russia - it has been trying, but the country is vast and NAT won;t give it deep strike capabilities for fear of escalation.
So we could end up in the scenario where Russia loses all the annexed territory but keeps lobbing missiles and cheap Iranian drones at Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. In theory it could do so indefinitely. It's a national version of the "if I can't have you then I'll make sure your life is hell" of the psycho ex-husband. Or a large scale version of Hamas in Gaza randomly chucking mortars across into Israel, only without a Ukrainian ability to move in and bulldoze Russian cities.
And then, anything short of complete eviction of Russia from Ukraine defeat will just be a staging post for Putin to march back in later. So really this thing will only be resolved once Putin and his cronies are out of power. Which may not happen anytime soon.
Yes, they could do that. But if they were to, then the sanctions would remain, and they would become a slightly richer version of North Korea. A pariah state.
One of the disappointments of this war has been India's position, which I think will do them few favours in the future. They've backed a horse half-heartedly, but it's the wrong horse. I don't think India have even condemned the invasion?
I wouldn't put it past Russia to keep going like that because they seem to think the West will get bored eventually and want a reset. I expect their demands would be drop sanctions and let them keep Crimea + have referendums in Donbas and the South.
I'm increasingly of the view that the thing which will ultimate determine the outcome of this (because I am not optimistic that Ukraine will be able to achieve its full reconquest aims in 2023) will be the oil price, or rather oil and gas prices. It's what's enabled Putin to do his thing since the mid 2000s, it's what's kept Venezuela from complete collapse and it's what enables countries like Qatar to have outsized influence in the world. A 1990s style run of properly low oil prices would cripple Russia and force them back to the table.
As for India, and South Africa, Brazil and a few other "global south" locations it does seem that Russian propaganda has fallen on fertile ground and it's incredibly disappointing. But also self-interest for countries that never felt the Russian jackboot. It's probably Russia's biggest success of the campaign, to manage to position itself as the downtrodden underdog and champion of the multipolar world when it's a pure play imperialist power trying to subdue one of its old colonies.
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
It's more like to be a few hundred million; just enough to keep going for a few years before it finally fails.
+1 the problem with British Volt is that I don't know who their customers will be because the industries they are targetting don't really exist in the UK anymore bar say Nissan who already have a battery manufacturer on site.
Energy generation must surely be a huge potential market.
I mean, this is an area government can absolutely intervene in the market, US style. Require a % of intermittent power sources to be backed by battery storage by year X, and then max out the marginal non-tariff barriers and subsidies to ensure a large chunk of that business goes to BritishVolt.
It's an example of where government intervention in industry should either be very limited, or all in. Not somewhere in between.
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
It's more like to be a few hundred million; just enough to keep going for a few years before it finally fails.
Did BoZo not get a photo op in Hi-Viz out of them?
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
It's more like to be a few hundred million; just enough to keep going for a few years before it finally fails.
See also yesterday's Sunday Times where Rolls Royce look likely to need to wait another year before getting the order for their first mini-nuke stations.
So clearly we don't have an industrial strategy nor an energy strategy (given that we need nuclear power for baseline power at night when the wind doesn't blow).
According to Wikipedia less than 450 have ever been built. I believe the intention is that we start by supplying 10 then other countries might do similar with their MBTs. Particularly those with Leopard 2's. If the Americans pitch in with some of their Abrams (over 10K built) then that would definitely help. All about slowly upping the equipment being given to Ukraine.
Given this account of what happened the last time American MBTs came up against Soviet ones I would not expect the outcome to be good for the Russians.
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
It's more like to be a few hundred million; just enough to keep going for a few years before it finally fails.
+1 the problem with British Volt is that I don't know who their customers will be because the industries they are targetting don't really exist in the UK anymore bar say Nissan who already have a battery manufacturer on site.
Energy generation must surely be a huge potential market.
Batteries don't generate power - they just store it for delivery at a later point.
And there will be some usage there but not that much...
Does no one get the fun of chucking lumps of lithium, sodium etc in a sink of water anymore ?
Half the fun of a chemistry lesson was the things that shouldn't have been happening. I recall that the bunsen burners fitted on the water taps, so you would see jets of water shoot across the classroom when the teacher's back was turned. There was always someone setting something on fire, be it the desk, blazers, school books, or bags. Magnesium ribbon was our absolute favourite for burning, a fair amount of that got pocketed.
I always remember a chemistry lesson where a substitute teacher had us doing an experiment which involved heating some gunk in a test tube, and within about 5 minutes or so about half the class had managed to break their test tube. It wasn't even deliberate with us messing around to her annoy her, just carelessness. She must have been glad to get home that day.
So my biggest disaster was in metalwork. The lad behind me turned around with the pointed end of a handle he had just taken out of the forge and which was literally red hot and which he was just about to hammer into a point to fit into a wooden handle. The 'red hot poker' caught me in the backside and melted my nylon trousers. Obviously I had to tell the teacher, who, although trying to be serious, could not restrain himself from collapsing into giggles. The needlework class put a patch on my trousers.
PS There are some cracking videos on the internet of sodium being thrown into toilets and such like.
Hmm. Forgetting there is still a chuck key in the lathe when spinning it up is a good way to make a dent in the wall on the far side of the workshop (from a friend's experience).
Does no one get the fun of chucking lumps of lithium, sodium etc in a sink of water anymore ?
Half the fun of a chemistry lesson was the things that shouldn't have been happening. I recall that the bunsen burners fitted on the water taps, so you would see jets of water shoot across the classroom when the teacher's back was turned. There was always someone setting something on fire, be it the desk, blazers, school books, or bags. Magnesium ribbon was our absolute favourite for burning, a fair amount of that got pocketed.
I always remember a chemistry lesson where a substitute teacher had us doing an experiment which involved heating some gunk in a test tube, and within about 5 minutes or so about half the class had managed to break their test tube. It wasn't even deliberate with us messing around to her annoy her, just carelessness. She must have been glad to get home that day.
So my biggest disaster was in metalwork. The lad behind me turned around with the pointed end of a handle he had just taken out of the forge and which was literally red hot and which he was just about to hammer into a point to fit into a wooden handle. The 'red hot poker' caught me in the backside and melted my nylon trousers. Obviously I had to tell the teacher, who, although trying to be serious, could not restrain himself from collapsing into giggles. The needlework class put a patch on my trousers.
PS There are some cracking videos on the internet of sodium being thrown into toilets and such like.
Hmm. Forgetting there is still a chuck key in the lathe when spinning it up is a good way to make a dent in the wall on the far side of the workshop (from a friend's experience).
Forgetting to engage the magnet on the bed of a grinder is a brown trouser moment too, from my apprentice days many moons ago.
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
It's more like to be a few hundred million; just enough to keep going for a few years before it finally fails.
+1 the problem with British Volt is that I don't know who their customers will be because the industries they are targetting don't really exist in the UK anymore bar say Nissan who already have a battery manufacturer on site.
Energy generation must surely be a huge potential market.
Batteries don't generate power - they just store it for delivery at a later point.
And there will be some usage there but not that much...
Besides, Lithium batteries are on the way out. Sodium ion are cheaper, safer and the next big thing...
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
It's more like to be a few hundred million; just enough to keep going for a few years before it finally fails.
+1 the problem with British Volt is that I don't know who their customers will be because the industries they are targetting don't really exist in the UK anymore bar say Nissan who already have a battery manufacturer on site.
Energy generation must surely be a huge potential market.
Batteries don't generate power - they just store it for delivery at a later point.
And there will be some usage there but not that much...
That's obviously what I mean.
Everyone keeps banging on about how crucial energy storage will be for our new renewable future with intermittent wind and solar. So make sure all that storage is British made storage.
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
It's more like to be a few hundred million; just enough to keep going for a few years before it finally fails.
+1 the problem with British Volt is that I don't know who their customers will be because the industries they are targetting don't really exist in the UK anymore bar say Nissan who already have a battery manufacturer on site.
Energy generation must surely be a huge potential market.
[snip]
Ok, I'm assuming a deliberate pun here and so pointing out that success also depends on current demand
and, no doubt, there will be some resistance to overcome...
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
It's more like to be a few hundred million; just enough to keep going for a few years before it finally fails.
+1 the problem with British Volt is that I don't know who their customers will be because the industries they are targetting don't really exist in the UK anymore bar say Nissan who already have a battery manufacturer on site.
Energy generation must surely be a huge potential market.
And who is manufacturing large scale battery systems in the UK ?
The reality is that such efforts have so far tended to follow production for EVs, and both require economies of scale and competitive technology in order to keep prices per unit capacity continually falling.
After Brexit we don't seem to have sufficient UK demand to make it worthwhile; meantime manufacturers from China, and S Korea are building factories on the continent. We don't have competitive domestic manufacturing technology - despite being one of the early leaders in battery research - and we don't have a market big enough to attract significant overseas manufacturing investment.
According to Wikipedia less than 450 have ever been built. I believe the intention is that we start by supplying 10 then other countries might do similar with their MBTs. Particularly those with Leopard 2's. If the Americans pitch in with some of their Abrams (over 10K built) then that would definitely help. All about slowly upping the equipment being given to Ukraine.
Given this account of what happened the last time American MBTs came up against Soviet ones it would not expect the outcome to be good for the Russians.
I read somewhere that the Bradley actually accounted for more tank kills during the conflict than did the M1A1. Is that correct ?
There was one battle at least, during the first gulf war, where Bradleys were hitting what they thought were BMPs - it was night and at long range.
The gunners noticed that even with their usual tactic of aiming for the base of the turret, it was taking a number of 25mm rounds to kill some targets. Some they ended up firing TOW missiles at.
In the morning they found they’d been killing tanks with the chain guns - hammering through the shot trap at the turret ring.
Could you please translate last para into English? Beyond "killing tanks" don't have a clue what you mean!
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
It's more like to be a few hundred million; just enough to keep going for a few years before it finally fails.
+1 the problem with British Volt is that I don't know who their customers will be because the industries they are targetting don't really exist in the UK anymore bar say Nissan who already have a battery manufacturer on site.
Energy generation must surely be a huge potential market.
[snip]
Ok, I'm assuming a deliberate pun here and so pointing out that success also depends on current demand
and, no doubt, there will be some resistance to overcome...
Britishvolt and Northvolt — a tale of two gigafactories The world will see more and more gigafactories. Not all of them will succeed
https://sifted.eu/articles/britishvolt-administration-northvolt-gigafactory/ ...Britishvolt was founded in late 2019 by Orral Nadjari and Lars Carlstrom. Both are Swedish nationals, though Nadjari lives in the UAE. Prior to forming Britishvolt, Nadjari worked at corporate bond seller Jool Capital Partner.
In December 2020, news broke that Carlstrom had been convicted of tax fraud in his native Sweden in the late 1990s, though his sentence was ultimately reduced. He resigned from Britishvolt, saying he didn’t want to become a distraction.
At the time, Carlstrom said the conviction was 25 years ago and that he had always intended to pass on his chairmanship of Britishvolt. Britishvolt tells Sifted that Carlstrom no longer has any shares or involvement in the company.
Still, it wasn’t the best start for the young company.
There were also questions over how much battery experience there was within Britishvolt’s team in the early days.
Early directors included Martin Reynolds, who, according to LinkedIn, was a police detective turned adviser to a family office in the UAE; and Courash Ali, the director of MK Development, a construction company that was dissolved in 2019...
...There’s one thing media coverage of Britishvolt tends to agree on: its Blyth site is one of the best the UK has to offer. Britishvolt bought the site for £4m. It’s an area equivalent to fifty football pitches, right next to the sea.
Securing a site with reliable access to clean energy is key for gigafactories; producing EV batteries using fossil fuels drastically reduces the environmental benefit they can bring.
Britishvolt’s site is right next to the British end of the North Sea Link — a 720km cable that connects the country’s electricity grid with Norway’s, set to bring a significant amount of clean energy into the UK from 2024 onwards. Blyth is also home to several offshore wind projects...
So my first takeaway from the article is that it is not really comparing like with like.
It talks about Northvolt having secured grants and loans from Governmental organisations when it was 3 years old (Founded in 2015, first investment in 2018). Further private equity investment followed in the next 2 years.
But Britishvolt is only 2 years old. If you want to compare like with like, what was Northvolt's situation back in 2017 - 2 years after it had been founded and a year before it got its first big investment?
That said I do agree with the underlying message that the Britishvolt leadership looks very light on Battery talent which may well drive away investment.
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
It's more like to be a few hundred million; just enough to keep going for a few years before it finally fails.
+1 the problem with British Volt is that I don't know who their customers will be because the industries they are targetting don't really exist in the UK anymore bar say Nissan who already have a battery manufacturer on site.
Energy generation must surely be a huge potential market.
Batteries don't generate power - they just store it for delivery at a later point.
And there will be some usage there but not that much...
Besides, Lithium batteries are on the way out. Sodium ion are cheaper, safer and the next big thing...
I'm getting to the stage where I think we just need to send Ukraine any kit we can. Good people are dying because they don't have all the kit they need to keep *us* safe.
We don't face any existential threat to our mainland at the moment (France or Ireland are not going to invade), and we're still bruised from our foreign interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Send Ukraine as much as we can, and buy new kit to replace it - preferably from within the UK. We can do without for a few years.
Send them everything they want aside from nukes (sorry, Malmesbury). It'll probably be cheaper in the long run, especially if other European countries do the same.
The self interest calculus also tends towards sending them more potent weapons sooner, assuming we don't want them actually to lose the war.
The sooner this is over, the better for everyone.
I agree with this, and have said so for some time, so it's worth considering whether there's any possible good reasons for not having done so.
The one thing that I can think of, based on the story about the cancelled plan to send Polish fighter jets to Ukraine, is that diplomacy around China is a crucial aspect.
What we want to avoid is China deciding to provide Russia with large quantities of military equipment. I think China will tolerate a Russian defeat in Ukraine, indeed there are some advantages to China either way the war goes, but it's not in their interests for Russia to fail so quickly and dramatically that it brings down the Putin regime and leads to instability and uncertainty in Russia.
It's not in our interests to admit openly that China has some degree of veto on the weapons we send to Ukraine, nor is it in China's interest to admit openly that Western diplomacy is deterring them from providing support to an ally, so this is mostly being left unsaid, but I think this is a plausible reason for the reluctance to provide more support to Ukraine more quickly.
If Ukraine does end up with Challengers, Leopards Abrams (and Leclercs?) to use in a spring offensive, and China does not respond with providing it's own war material support to Russia, then it will have been a great triumph in the diplomatic war.
Britishvolt and Northvolt — a tale of two gigafactories The world will see more and more gigafactories. Not all of them will succeed
https://sifted.eu/articles/britishvolt-administration-northvolt-gigafactory/ ...Britishvolt was founded in late 2019 by Orral Nadjari and Lars Carlstrom. Both are Swedish nationals, though Nadjari lives in the UAE. Prior to forming Britishvolt, Nadjari worked at corporate bond seller Jool Capital Partner.
In December 2020, news broke that Carlstrom had been convicted of tax fraud in his native Sweden in the late 1990s, though his sentence was ultimately reduced. He resigned from Britishvolt, saying he didn’t want to become a distraction.
At the time, Carlstrom said the conviction was 25 years ago and that he had always intended to pass on his chairmanship of Britishvolt. Britishvolt tells Sifted that Carlstrom no longer has any shares or involvement in the company.
Still, it wasn’t the best start for the young company.
There were also questions over how much battery experience there was within Britishvolt’s team in the early days.
Early directors included Martin Reynolds, who, according to LinkedIn, was a police detective turned adviser to a family office in the UAE; and Courash Ali, the director of MK Development, a construction company that was dissolved in 2019...
...There’s one thing media coverage of Britishvolt tends to agree on: its Blyth site is one of the best the UK has to offer. Britishvolt bought the site for £4m. It’s an area equivalent to fifty football pitches, right next to the sea.
Securing a site with reliable access to clean energy is key for gigafactories; producing EV batteries using fossil fuels drastically reduces the environmental benefit they can bring.
Britishvolt’s site is right next to the British end of the North Sea Link — a 720km cable that connects the country’s electricity grid with Norway’s, set to bring a significant amount of clean energy into the UK from 2024 onwards. Blyth is also home to several offshore wind projects...
So my first takeaway from the article is that it is not really comparing like with like.
It talks about Northvolt having secured grants and loans from Governmental organisations when it was 3 years old (Founded in 2015, first investment in 2018). Further private equity investment followed in the next 2 years.
But Britishvolt is only 2 years old. If you want to compare like with like, what was Northvolt's situation back in 2017 - 2 years after it had been founded and a year before it got its first big investment?
That said I do agree with the underlying message that the Britishvolt leadership looks very light on Battery talent which may well drive away investment.
Except you are comparing like with like: the point is there was no real equivalent effort in the UK in 2015. And I don't think I'm being fanciful in arguing that Brexit has hampered serious interest in building battery manufacturing in the UK.
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
It's more like to be a few hundred million; just enough to keep going for a few years before it finally fails.
+1 the problem with British Volt is that I don't know who their customers will be because the industries they are targetting don't really exist in the UK anymore bar say Nissan who already have a battery manufacturer on site.
Energy generation must surely be a huge potential market.
[snip]
Ok, I'm assuming a deliberate pun here and so pointing out that success also depends on current demand
and, no doubt, there will be some resistance to overcome...
According to Wikipedia less than 450 have ever been built. I believe the intention is that we start by supplying 10 then other countries might do similar with their MBTs. Particularly those with Leopard 2's. If the Americans pitch in with some of their Abrams (over 10K built) then that would definitely help. All about slowly upping the equipment being given to Ukraine.
Given this account of what happened the last time American MBTs came up against Soviet ones I would not expect the outcome to be good for the Russians.
Sure, but it's not exactly punching above our weight. It's very much exposing the painful limitations of what Britain is capable of.
Britain was pretty confident the war was going to start a year ago, and what has Britain done in that time in terms of industrial production of armoured vehicles?
So we're left with being able to provide 10 tanks, as part of a choreography that would see the US, Germany, and other countries, provide tanks in numbers of any significance. It's somewhat pathetic.
I don't think they are all strawmen, but I have sympathy for your argument and the cartoon - if policies pass the sniff test in all areas, yes, let's do them regardless.
However, some policies that are currently being operated in response to the global climate consensus don't work. The UK's wind farm policy is wholly uneconomical, constraint payment data for 2022 has just been released, and we paid £237 million to wind providers in constraint (up from £143 million the previous year). Wind farms are also harmful to wildlife and areas of outstanding natural beauty. They also need massive construction in these areas, often releasing vast pockets of carbon. They also provide intermittent and unpredictable energy, necessitating dirtier and more reliable forms of power to keep supply constant. They are also very difficult, costly, and environmentally damaging to decommission.
So yes, when a climate change policy represents a universal public good, let's do it. But when it is deleterious in every area except (possibly) making slightly less CO2, let's not do it.
You're seemingly obsessed with constraint payments. Let's put it into context.
Last year wind generated around a quarter of all UK electricity: that's about 75TWh. Or 75,000 million kWh.
So £237 million represents around 0.3p per kWh.
That's not "wholly uneconomical".
The £237 million on constraint is not why the system is wholly uneconomical, it is merely the most grotesque and egregious expense of the whole shitty shebang. I only learned the other day that wind farms are compensated automatically for their power generation losses (outside of the constraint payments system) when the National Grid asks them to switch off, and that constraint payments are actually there purely to make up for losses in subsidy, which goes some way to demonstrating how heavily wind farms are subsidised when the ARE actually providing power.
If it's not available on John Redwood's forum I fear LuckyGuy might struggle for that list. But let's hope he can produce the readies.
Interesting to remember that Luckguy bemoans the dirtiness of wind farms, its damaging impact on local communities and the environment, the construction associated with it etc. It's the same guy who wants fracking!
I'm getting to the stage where I think we just need to send Ukraine any kit we can. Good people are dying because they don't have all the kit they need to keep *us* safe.
We don't face any existential threat to our mainland at the moment (France or Ireland are not going to invade), and we're still bruised from our foreign interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Send Ukraine as much as we can, and buy new kit to replace it - preferably from within the UK. We can do without for a few years.
Send them everything they want aside from nukes (sorry, Malmesbury). It'll probably be cheaper in the long run, especially if other European countries do the same.
The self interest calculus also tends towards sending them more potent weapons sooner, assuming we don't want them actually to lose the war.
The sooner this is over, the better for everyone.
Assuming optimistically that Ukraine can get back the territories lost in 2022 and potentially those lost in 2014, it's interesting and a little worrying to ponder on what happens then if Russia refuses to back down. There is already an asymmetry in the war because Russia is able to attack Ukraine from within its own borders, whereas Ukraine is limited in what it can do back to Russia - it has been trying, but the country is vast and NAT won;t give it deep strike capabilities for fear of escalation.
So we could end up in the scenario where Russia loses all the annexed territory but keeps lobbing missiles and cheap Iranian drones at Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. In theory it could do so indefinitely. It's a national version of the "if I can't have you then I'll make sure your life is hell" of the psycho ex-husband. Or a large scale version of Hamas in Gaza randomly chucking mortars across into Israel, only without a Ukrainian ability to move in and bulldoze Russian cities.
And then, anything short of complete eviction of Russia from Ukraine defeat will just be a staging post for Putin to march back in later. So really this thing will only be resolved once Putin and his cronies are out of power. Which may not happen anytime soon.
Yes, they could do that. But if they were to, then the sanctions would remain, and they would become a slightly richer version of North Korea. A pariah state.
One of the disappointments of this war has been India's position, which I think will do them few favours in the future. They've backed a horse half-heartedly, but it's the wrong horse. I don't think India have even condemned the invasion?
The Russo-Ukraine War is obviously a calamity for Ukraine, and a self-inflicted one for Russia, but after those two countries India is the country that the war is worst for. It's essentially destroyed their foreign policy strategy, which was to secure Russia as an ally against China, and to enable their strategic independence from the West.
I'm getting to the stage where I think we just need to send Ukraine any kit we can. Good people are dying because they don't have all the kit they need to keep *us* safe.
We don't face any existential threat to our mainland at the moment (France or Ireland are not going to invade), and we're still bruised from our foreign interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Send Ukraine as much as we can, and buy new kit to replace it - preferably from within the UK. We can do without for a few years.
Send them everything they want aside from nukes (sorry, Malmesbury). It'll probably be cheaper in the long run, especially if other European countries do the same.
The self interest calculus also tends towards sending them more potent weapons sooner, assuming we don't want them actually to lose the war.
The sooner this is over, the better for everyone.
I agree with this, and have said so for some time, so it's worth considering whether there's any possible good reasons for not having done so.
The one thing that I can think of, based on the story about the cancelled plan to send Polish fighter jets to Ukraine, is that diplomacy around China is a crucial aspect.
What we want to avoid is China deciding to provide Russia with large quantities of military equipment. I think China will tolerate a Russian defeat in Ukraine, indeed there are some advantages to China either way the war goes, but it's not in their interests for Russia to fail so quickly and dramatically that it brings down the Putin regime and leads to instability and uncertainty in Russia.
It's not in our interests to admit openly that China has some degree of veto on the weapons we send to Ukraine, nor is it in China's interest to admit openly that Western diplomacy is deterring them from providing support to an ally, so this is mostly being left unsaid, but I think this is a plausible reason for the reluctance to provide more support to Ukraine more quickly.
If Ukraine does end up with Challengers, Leopards Abrams (and Leclercs?) to use in a spring offensive, and China does not respond with providing it's own war material support to Russia, then it will have been a great triumph in the diplomatic war.
That's all good and well, except for the fact that Russia and China are not 'allies', and have not been for decades. China giving Russia blatant military support could easily harm China's economy, and for what benefit? It's also possible that a sudden collapse of Russia provide China with some very tempting options.
Worse, there's the chance that the latest Chinese weapons fall into western hands, which they will *not* want. In addition, there's a non-negligible chance that Chinese weapons are shown to be as poor as Russian ones (though that is hard to believe).
China will cope whatever happens to Russia. What they don't want is the 'west' stopping a lot of trade with them because they support Russia.
On topic, and with due deference to those who work on this every day, I'm not sure that our Maths education is as bad as the thread indicates, given where we are in the 2018 PISA rankings (13th in the world, and #1 is blatantly cheating). Of course we can improve it and of course there is no room for complacency, but there are plenty of other areas in which this country does a whole lot worse.
Britishvolt and Northvolt — a tale of two gigafactories The world will see more and more gigafactories. Not all of them will succeed
https://sifted.eu/articles/britishvolt-administration-northvolt-gigafactory/ ...Britishvolt was founded in late 2019 by Orral Nadjari and Lars Carlstrom. Both are Swedish nationals, though Nadjari lives in the UAE. Prior to forming Britishvolt, Nadjari worked at corporate bond seller Jool Capital Partner.
In December 2020, news broke that Carlstrom had been convicted of tax fraud in his native Sweden in the late 1990s, though his sentence was ultimately reduced. He resigned from Britishvolt, saying he didn’t want to become a distraction.
At the time, Carlstrom said the conviction was 25 years ago and that he had always intended to pass on his chairmanship of Britishvolt. Britishvolt tells Sifted that Carlstrom no longer has any shares or involvement in the company.
Still, it wasn’t the best start for the young company.
There were also questions over how much battery experience there was within Britishvolt’s team in the early days.
Early directors included Martin Reynolds, who, according to LinkedIn, was a police detective turned adviser to a family office in the UAE; and Courash Ali, the director of MK Development, a construction company that was dissolved in 2019...
...There’s one thing media coverage of Britishvolt tends to agree on: its Blyth site is one of the best the UK has to offer. Britishvolt bought the site for £4m. It’s an area equivalent to fifty football pitches, right next to the sea.
Securing a site with reliable access to clean energy is key for gigafactories; producing EV batteries using fossil fuels drastically reduces the environmental benefit they can bring.
Britishvolt’s site is right next to the British end of the North Sea Link — a 720km cable that connects the country’s electricity grid with Norway’s, set to bring a significant amount of clean energy into the UK from 2024 onwards. Blyth is also home to several offshore wind projects...
So my first takeaway from the article is that it is not really comparing like with like.
It talks about Northvolt having secured grants and loans from Governmental organisations when it was 3 years old (Founded in 2015, first investment in 2018). Further private equity investment followed in the next 2 years.
But Britishvolt is only 2 years old. If you want to compare like with like, what was Northvolt's situation back in 2017 - 2 years after it had been founded and a year before it got its first big investment?
That said I do agree with the underlying message that the Britishvolt leadership looks very light on Battery talent which may well drive away investment.
Except you are comparing like with like: the point is there was no real equivalent effort in the UK in 2015. And I don't think I'm being fanciful in arguing that Brexit has hampered serious interest in building battery manufacturing in the UK.
So out of that whole article with its many and varied reasons why Britishvolt is struggling, you pick up on one passing comment that they might struggle to get funding from the European Investment bank. Talk about obsessive.
Based on the UK's record to date, it sounds exactly like the kind of company HMG is looking for to pour billions into. Are any of the management team related to the Cabinet?
It's more like to be a few hundred million; just enough to keep going for a few years before it finally fails.
+1 the problem with British Volt is that I don't know who their customers will be because the industries they are targetting don't really exist in the UK anymore bar say Nissan who already have a battery manufacturer on site.
Energy generation must surely be a huge potential market.
I mean, this is an area government can absolutely intervene in the market, US style. Require a % of intermittent power sources to be backed by battery storage by year X, and then max out the marginal non-tariff barriers and subsidies to ensure a large chunk of that business goes to BritishVolt.
It's an example of where government intervention in industry should either be very limited, or all in. Not somewhere in between.
There's actually a constraint pay con on that I think could be a 'good' con (as much as any cons can be good). Wind providers get constraint payments for withholding power from the grid when asked, but can actually double their money by storing that power and selling it later. Yes, it's a con on the billpayer, but if the Government chooses to close down all the other cons, seriously clamping down on its wind largesse elsewhere (something it currently shows no inclination to do), it could drive providers to invest in storage to double their bubble, ensuring a more flexible supply.
Comments
Though as I said, I am a very long way indeed from being expert on this.
You make a decent point about the Iberian peninsula, though.
I agree with the general principle - has to be whole picture, not less CO2 at any cost, of course. I don't think wind power is a particularly good target for your ire, but don't expect to convince you on that - some people dislike wind farms; I don't mind them particularly and certainly prefer them to the three coal power stations I use to be able to see on a walk from my house.
We all know water can be bad and dangerous in certain contexts, and precious and valuable in others. We speak of water management, respect for water, water as a resource. We don't speak of CO2 management, optimum levels, shortages etc.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64190848
Good luck to Cosmic Girl tonight. I'm not a fan of Branson and the Virgin companies, but at least Virgin Orbit is doing something different and moderately successful (in the fact they've launched). It's just a shame it's not scalable.
One launch every six months is not a good cadence, either.
*energy-price induced, was it? but I'm sure someone fingered Brexit for it...
Someone should design a heritage wind turbine for deployment across East Anglia (the Dutch might be interested too). From the outside it looks just like a windmill in an old Flemish painting, but inside it churns out a mean 8mw of power.
Thatched solar panels too.
And, there are two issues here. The declaration is let's bury our heads in the sand, there is no problem. That's very different to the (legitimate) argument that there is a problem but we're tackling it wrong.
We don't face any existential threat to our mainland at the moment (France or Ireland are not going to invade), and we're still bruised from our foreign interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Send Ukraine as much as we can, and buy new kit to replace it - preferably from within the UK. We can do without for a few years.
Send them everything they want aside from nukes (sorry, Malmesbury). It'll probably be cheaper in the long run, especially if other European countries do the same.
I am all for robust internet controversy, but do we really need a War of the Latinists and the Grecians? Latin caught on, Greek did not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsakonian_language
The sooner this is over, the better for everyone.
Given this account of what happened the last time American MBTs came up against Soviet ones I would not expect the outcome to be good for the Russians.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/untold-story-worlds-fiercest-tank-battle-gulf-war
NEW: The EU is set to agree to use the UK’s live database tracking goods moving from Britain to N.Ireland, the 1st sign of progress in the protocol talks. Agreement finalized at lunch between Cleverly, Sefcovic today - w/@alexwickham @AlbertoNardelli 1/
https://twitter.com/EllenAMilligan/status/1612456832928452610
Maine’s Prisons Taught Washington a Crucial Lesson in Fighting Opioids
Using drugs to treat addicts inside prison might just be the best way to stem the crisis of overdose deaths.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/01/08/maines-prisons-opioids-00076822
...Something new is happening in Maine’s prisons, and officials in Washington are watching closely. In recent years, America’s sprawling network of more than 4,400 state prisons and local jails have emerged as a frontline in the nation’s unrelenting opioid crisis, which killed more than 80,000 people in 2021 alone and has helped drag U.S. life expectancy to its lowest levels in a quarter century. About 2.3 million people are incarcerated in prisons each year, and 8-10 million people move through local jails. Roughly two-thirds of them have a substance use disorder, according to a 2010 study regularly cited by the federal government. The vast majority go untreated, putting people with opioid use disorder at high risk when they go back home with reduced drug tolerance to face an increasingly dangerous supply. With a disproportionate number of Black, Indigenous and people of color in the criminal justice system, that puts those groups in particular peril. Individuals leaving prison are as much as 40 times more likely to die from an opioid overdose in the first two weeks after their release than the general population.
But while medications such as buprenorphine and methadone have existed for decades as a treatment for opioid use disorder, they have largely been ignored — or shunned — in jails and prisons across the country. That is beginning to change, with an increasing number of county jails, and, to a lesser extent state prisons, offering medication-assisted treatment. Now, almost every state offers some form of medication for opioid use disorder in at least one jail or prison, according to Georgetown Law’s O’Neill Institute, which researches addiction and public policy.
The results are promising. In Maine, for instance, about 40 percent of inmates across the prison system are now administered drugs to treat opioid use disorder. In a state with one of the highest rates of drug overdose deaths in the nation, fatal overdoses among people leaving prison have dropped 60 percent since the program started in 2019, according to the state Department of Corrections, and drug smuggling, violence and suicide attempts inside state prisons have all plummeted. In New York City jails, a recent study found methadone and buprenorphine treatment during incarceration reduced the risk of overdose deaths in the first month after release by 80 percent...
That was actually an excuse the Russians made at the time, perhaps with some truth: the export versions of the tanks did not have quite all the gizmos that the best Russian tanks had. But those gizmos did not make much of a difference.
IANAE, but am of the view that training actually matters more than the very best kit: put an untrained idiot (say, me) in a Leopard II or Abrams and I'd be dead in any battle very quickly. Give the Americans 200 T74s and six months to adapt to them, and they'd be more effective than Russians in Abrams, because the Americans really spend on training. True, they'd lose more people than if they had Abrams, but they'd still beat poorly-trained conscripts - especially with other western weapons such as aircraft and using the tanks as part of combined arms.
https://twitter.com/J4Years/status/1612297776989339649
Or Annie….
https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/images/nuclear-artillery-test-600px.jpg
The BV - in no other tank can you put the kettle on while hatches closed….
So we could end up in the scenario where Russia loses all the annexed territory but keeps lobbing missiles and cheap Iranian drones at Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. In theory it could do so indefinitely. It's a national version of the "if I can't have you then I'll make sure your life is hell" of the psycho ex-husband. Or a large scale version of Hamas in Gaza randomly chucking mortars across into Israel, only without a Ukrainian ability to move in and bulldoze Russian cities.
And then, anything short of complete eviction of Russia from Ukraine defeat will just be a staging post for Putin to march back in later. So really this thing will only be resolved once Putin and his cronies are out of power. Which may not happen anytime soon.
Britishvolt seeks lifeline with sale of majority stake
Battery start-up has been on hunt for funds for months after narrowly avoiding administration last year
https://www.ft.com/content/89d5b56c-cef2-491a-9996-d2cccd4e40a2
The Aromanians (Aromanian: Armãnji, Rrãmãnji)[16] are an ethnic group native to the southern Balkans who speak Aromanian, an Eastern Romance language.[17] They traditionally live in central and southern Albania, south-western Bulgaria, northern and central Greece and North Macedonia, and can currently be found in central and southern Albania, south-western Bulgaria, south-western and eastern North Macedonia, northern and central Greece, southern Serbia and south-eastern Romania (Northern Dobruja).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromanians
The gunners noticed that even with their usual tactic of aiming for the base of the turret, it was taking a number of 25mm rounds to kill some targets. Some they ended up firing TOW missiles at.
In the morning they found they’d been killing tanks with the chain guns - hammering through the shot trap at the turret ring.
Britishvolt and Northvolt — a tale of two gigafactories
The world will see more and more gigafactories. Not all of them will succeed
https://sifted.eu/articles/britishvolt-administration-northvolt-gigafactory/
...Britishvolt was founded in late 2019 by Orral Nadjari and Lars Carlstrom. Both are Swedish nationals, though Nadjari lives in the UAE. Prior to forming Britishvolt, Nadjari worked at corporate bond seller Jool Capital Partner.
In December 2020, news broke that Carlstrom had been convicted of tax fraud in his native Sweden in the late 1990s, though his sentence was ultimately reduced. He resigned from Britishvolt, saying he didn’t want to become a distraction.
At the time, Carlstrom said the conviction was 25 years ago and that he had always intended to pass on his chairmanship of Britishvolt. Britishvolt tells Sifted that Carlstrom no longer has any shares or involvement in the company.
Still, it wasn’t the best start for the young company.
There were also questions over how much battery experience there was within Britishvolt’s team in the early days.
Early directors included Martin Reynolds, who, according to LinkedIn, was a police detective turned adviser to a family office in the UAE; and Courash Ali, the director of MK Development, a construction company that was dissolved in 2019...
...There’s one thing media coverage of Britishvolt tends to agree on: its Blyth site is one of the best the UK has to offer. Britishvolt bought the site for £4m. It’s an area equivalent to fifty football pitches, right next to the sea.
Securing a site with reliable access to clean energy is key for gigafactories; producing EV batteries using fossil fuels drastically reduces the environmental benefit they can bring.
Britishvolt’s site is right next to the British end of the North Sea Link — a 720km cable that connects the country’s electricity grid with Norway’s, set to bring a significant amount of clean energy into the UK from 2024 onwards. Blyth is also home to several offshore wind projects...
One of the disappointments of this war has been India's position, which I think will do them few favours in the future. They've backed a horse half-heartedly, but it's the wrong horse. I don't think India have even condemned the invasion?
"Northvolt began shipping batteries from its Skellefteå site in May this year, right on schedule. The company has said it’ll ramp up capacity to 60 GWh a year — enough to power about a million EVs..."
Our commitment to Ukraine 🇺🇦 remains steadfast and we will match or exceed last year’s military support in 2023.
https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1612457937074622464
I'm increasingly of the view that the thing which will ultimate determine the outcome of this (because I am not optimistic that Ukraine will be able to achieve its full reconquest aims in 2023) will be the oil price, or rather oil and gas prices. It's what's enabled Putin to do his thing since the mid 2000s, it's what's kept Venezuela from complete collapse and it's what enables countries like Qatar to have outsized influence in the world. A 1990s style run of properly low oil prices would cripple Russia and force them back to the table.
As for India, and South Africa, Brazil and a few other "global south" locations it does seem that Russian propaganda has fallen on fertile ground and it's incredibly disappointing. But also self-interest for countries that never felt the Russian jackboot. It's probably Russia's biggest success of the campaign, to manage to position itself as the downtrodden underdog and champion of the multipolar world when it's a pure play imperialist power trying to subdue one of its old colonies.
I mean, this is an area government can absolutely intervene in the market, US style. Require a % of intermittent power sources to be backed by battery storage by year X, and then max out the marginal non-tariff barriers and subsidies to ensure a large chunk of that business goes to BritishVolt.
It's an example of where government intervention in industry should either be very limited, or all in. Not somewhere in between.
Boris 'jeopardising' UK's first gigafactory as 'not a single penny' of £100m fund received
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1636377/boris-johnson-pmqs-uk-first-gigafactory-britishvolt-ian-lavery-northumberland
So clearly we don't have an industrial strategy nor an energy strategy (given that we need nuclear power for baseline power at night when the wind doesn't blow).
And there will be some usage there but not that much...
https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/sodium-ion-solar-battery-storage
Everyone keeps banging on about how crucial energy storage will be for our new renewable future with intermittent wind and solar. So make sure all that storage is British made storage.
and, no doubt, there will be some resistance to overcome...
The reality is that such efforts have so far tended to follow production for EVs, and both require economies of scale and competitive technology in order to keep prices per unit capacity continually falling.
After Brexit we don't seem to have sufficient UK demand to make it worthwhile; meantime manufacturers from China, and S Korea are building factories on the continent.
We don't have competitive domestic manufacturing technology - despite being one of the early leaders in battery research - and we don't have a market big enough to attract significant overseas manufacturing investment.
It talks about Northvolt having secured grants and loans from Governmental organisations when it was 3 years old (Founded in 2015, first investment in 2018). Further private equity investment followed in the next 2 years.
But Britishvolt is only 2 years old. If you want to compare like with like, what was Northvolt's situation back in 2017 - 2 years after it had been founded and a year before it got its first big investment?
That said I do agree with the underlying message that the Britishvolt leadership looks very light on Battery talent which may well drive away investment.
There was a UK effort developing sodium batteries, but I think they went under.
The one thing that I can think of, based on the story about the cancelled plan to send Polish fighter jets to Ukraine, is that diplomacy around China is a crucial aspect.
What we want to avoid is China deciding to provide Russia with large quantities of military equipment. I think China will tolerate a Russian defeat in Ukraine, indeed there are some advantages to China either way the war goes, but it's not in their interests for Russia to fail so quickly and dramatically that it brings down the Putin regime and leads to instability and uncertainty in Russia.
It's not in our interests to admit openly that China has some degree of veto on the weapons we send to Ukraine, nor is it in China's interest to admit openly that Western diplomacy is deterring them from providing support to an ally, so this is mostly being left unsaid, but I think this is a plausible reason for the reluctance to provide more support to Ukraine more quickly.
If Ukraine does end up with Challengers, Leopards Abrams (and Leclercs?) to use in a spring offensive, and China does not respond with providing it's own war material support to Russia, then it will have been a great triumph in the diplomatic war.
And I don't think I'm being fanciful in arguing that Brexit has hampered serious interest in building battery manufacturing in the UK.
New Thread
Britain was pretty confident the war was going to start a year ago, and what has Britain done in that time in terms of industrial production of armoured vehicles?
So we're left with being able to provide 10 tanks, as part of a choreography that would see the US, Germany, and other countries, provide tanks in numbers of any significance. It's somewhat pathetic.
Interesting to remember that Luckguy bemoans the dirtiness of wind farms, its damaging impact on local communities and the environment, the construction associated with it etc. It's the same guy who wants fracking!
Worse, there's the chance that the latest Chinese weapons fall into western hands, which they will *not* want. In addition, there's a non-negligible chance that Chinese weapons are shown to be as poor as Russian ones (though that is hard to believe).
China will cope whatever happens to Russia. What they don't want is the 'west' stopping a lot of trade with them because they support Russia.