It's a tricky one, and the sort of thing our politicians should really seek to achieve a cross-party consensus on to take the heat out of it.
Retiring at 68 would be fine for most of the well-heeled contributors to PB. But for low-paid manual workers with gruelling jobs, it's a stretch. I can't help but think that a more radical solution may be needed.
The state retirement age is not relevant to the well healed. They can choose to stop work in their 50s or keep going in a reduced capacity into their 70s if the mood takes them.
Watched the end of that. "who?" "Where?" "Playing in what league?"
Has there ever been a bigger upset than this in Scotland or England cup ties? All the big FA Cup ones I can think of we're Conference sides beating old Division One. This lot play in the West of Scotland Premier League - the 6th tier!
I think Hereford vs Newcastle (the Ronnie Redford one) is the same difference, but it’s a heck of a result.
Hereford played in the southern league which was the 5th tier. Darvel play in a league which feeds the Scottish Lowland league which feeds the Scottish Football league. So a further tier down to Hereford.
6th tier - tier 5 is the conference, tier 6 conference north and south.
Worth saying that it’s way easier to end up in the conference then to get promoted from it - it’s why you often see the newly promoted conference side high up in league w the following year.
At the time the Southern League was the 5th tier:
The home team, Hereford United, were playing in the Southern Football League, the fifth tier of the English football league system. The away team, Newcastle United, played in the English First Division, the first tier.
The US is set to approve it's first SMR and the second design (RR) isn't far behind in the approval process. As with everything the UK is going to be left with very little of an industry where we should be 5 years further up the road already given one of our major domestic companies has a viable design and should have a pilot line completing its first unit.
Aiui, if the US gives approval of the RR design they're likely to shift the whole shebang there and we're going to end up importing US built reactor parts to the UK for final assembly rather than own the majority of the supply chain, assembly and maintenance.
It's a fucking shambles and it's literally just the civil service holding up the approval for no reason at all.
It’s not even all the civil service - just the treasury whose models say can’t invest unless all risks are removed.
Which is why RR are off to the States and why first fusion are off to Canada.
No, this is the civil service. RR have the money ready to build out a pilot production line. They're literally just waiting for the reactor design approval which has been held up by the idiots on the civil service for an extra year for reasons they won't say.
It is not our job to worry about Putin, or where his career might go next, or to engage in pointless Kremlinology. Our job is to help Ukraine win – as fast as possible.
Those heroic people are fighting for all of us. The Ukrainians are fighting for the Georgians, for the Moldovans, for the Baltic states, for the Poles – for anyone who might in due time be threatened by Putin's crazed revanchism and neo-imperialism. They are fighting for the principle that nations should not have their borders changed by force.
When Ukraine wins, that is a message that will be heard around the world. So let us help them win, not next year or the year after, but this year, 2023; and don't talk to me, finally, about expense.
If you want to minimise the world's economic pain, if you want to avoid the enormous cost – in blood and treasure – of letting this tragedy stretch on, then let's together do the obvious thing.
Let's give the Ukrainians all they need to win now.
He was always at his best with slightly vague boosterism, it's what he is made for far more than trying to run a country.
I think there is a basic point where a full on invasion of this nature (well beyond even the 2014 snatch and grab) means the kind of tip toeing worry about provoking Putin or giving him an excuse to escalate no longer really works, if it ever did. There's still the sensible worry about him being so mad he might go nuclear, but short of that what further escalation can he realistically threaten, in which case there should be less coyness around backing his opponents in Ukraine.
The bolded bit is the critical bit, but it's the bit you skated over.
It's a tricky one, and the sort of thing our politicians should really seek to achieve a cross-party consensus on to take the heat out of it.
Retiring at 68 would be fine for most of the well-heeled contributors to PB. But for low-paid manual workers with gruelling jobs, it's a stretch. I can't help but think that a more radical solution may be needed.
Office workers should retire at 70. Manual workers should retire at 65. Alternatively, nobody should be allowed to retire until they have worked for 50 years. Went into an apprenticeship at 16? Retire at 66. Went to university and stayed on for a PhD? Retire at 75.
A PhD is practically an apprenticeship, though the point is clearly virtue signalling against education.
On topic, isn't it about time Labour had a female leader? It rather defies probability that they haven't yet had one. I'd like see see Yvette Cooper leading Labour - I'd probably switch my vote from LD if she were.
It is not our job to worry about Putin, or where his career might go next, or to engage in pointless Kremlinology. Our job is to help Ukraine win – as fast as possible.
Those heroic people are fighting for all of us. The Ukrainians are fighting for the Georgians, for the Moldovans, for the Baltic states, for the Poles – for anyone who might in due time be threatened by Putin's crazed revanchism and neo-imperialism. They are fighting for the principle that nations should not have their borders changed by force.
When Ukraine wins, that is a message that will be heard around the world. So let us help them win, not next year or the year after, but this year, 2023; and don't talk to me, finally, about expense.
If you want to minimise the world's economic pain, if you want to avoid the enormous cost – in blood and treasure – of letting this tragedy stretch on, then let's together do the obvious thing.
Let's give the Ukrainians all they need to win now.
He was always at his best with slightly vague boosterism, it's what he is made for far more than trying to run a country.
I think there is a basic point where a full on invasion of this nature (well beyond even the 2014 snatch and grab) means the kind of tip toeing worry about provoking Putin or giving him an excuse to escalate no longer really works, if it ever did. There's still the sensible worry about him being so mad he might go nuclear, but short of that what further escalation can he realistically threaten, in which case there should be less coyness around backing his opponents in Ukraine.
The bolded bit is the critical bit, but it's the bit you skated over.
Why is it critical? If you believe it to be true, weakening our support for Ukraine will not make him any less mad.
Most of the really grueling jobs have high rates of early retirement, though they may well increase the permissible age in line with changes to state retirement age. I'd imagine the really relevant margin for state pension age is non-manual but modestly paid work, like low-level management, clerical and secretarial, public transport drivers, all the jobs you see the old characters doing.
Not really seeing where things can go from here. Turkey are basically demanding free speech and protest not be allowed, as they are demanding people in another country be punished for things they don't like. Which is not really a surprise, but if they are not up for some kind of geopolitical bribe it curtails options.
"No one has the right to humiliate the saints," said Mr Erdogan in his televised remarks on Monday.
"When we say something, we say it honestly, and when someone dishonours us, we put them in their place."
Defence Minister Hulusi Akar said Turkey cancelled a visit by his Swedish counterpart Pal Jonson after "observing that no measures were taken over the... disgusting protests".
It is not our job to worry about Putin, or where his career might go next, or to engage in pointless Kremlinology. Our job is to help Ukraine win – as fast as possible.
Those heroic people are fighting for all of us. The Ukrainians are fighting for the Georgians, for the Moldovans, for the Baltic states, for the Poles – for anyone who might in due time be threatened by Putin's crazed revanchism and neo-imperialism. They are fighting for the principle that nations should not have their borders changed by force.
When Ukraine wins, that is a message that will be heard around the world. So let us help them win, not next year or the year after, but this year, 2023; and don't talk to me, finally, about expense.
If you want to minimise the world's economic pain, if you want to avoid the enormous cost – in blood and treasure – of letting this tragedy stretch on, then let's together do the obvious thing.
Let's give the Ukrainians all they need to win now.
He was always at his best with slightly vague boosterism, it's what he is made for far more than trying to run a country.
I think there is a basic point where a full on invasion of this nature (well beyond even the 2014 snatch and grab) means the kind of tip toeing worry about provoking Putin or giving him an excuse to escalate no longer really works, if it ever did. There's still the sensible worry about him being so mad he might go nuclear, but short of that what further escalation can he realistically threaten, in which case there should be less coyness around backing his opponents in Ukraine.
The bolded bit is the critical bit, but it's the bit you skated over.
Not really, since its a sensible thing to worry about, but if the world had listened to those most worried about that he'd have been permitted to roll over Ukraine already without any support whatsoever, so it seems pretty clear no one has any idea where Putin thinks the line is - it's clearly not at providing support for Ukraine, but would it be if Ukraine starts to win? Boots on the ground seems an obvious one, though his media sometimes claims that's already happened. Russian threats are so hyperbolic its impossible to really know what they actually mean I suspect.
It is not our job to worry about Putin, or where his career might go next, or to engage in pointless Kremlinology. Our job is to help Ukraine win – as fast as possible.
Those heroic people are fighting for all of us. The Ukrainians are fighting for the Georgians, for the Moldovans, for the Baltic states, for the Poles – for anyone who might in due time be threatened by Putin's crazed revanchism and neo-imperialism. They are fighting for the principle that nations should not have their borders changed by force.
When Ukraine wins, that is a message that will be heard around the world. So let us help them win, not next year or the year after, but this year, 2023; and don't talk to me, finally, about expense.
If you want to minimise the world's economic pain, if you want to avoid the enormous cost – in blood and treasure – of letting this tragedy stretch on, then let's together do the obvious thing.
Let's give the Ukrainians all they need to win now.
He was always at his best with slightly vague boosterism, it's what he is made for far more than trying to run a country.
I think there is a basic point where a full on invasion of this nature (well beyond even the 2014 snatch and grab) means the kind of tip toeing worry about provoking Putin or giving him an excuse to escalate no longer really works, if it ever did. There's still the sensible worry about him being so mad he might go nuclear, but short of that what further escalation can he realistically threaten, in which case there should be less coyness around backing his opponents in Ukraine.
The bolded bit is the critical bit, but it's the bit you skated over.
Why is it critical? If you believe it to be true, weakening our support for Ukraine will not make him any less mad.
It's why support for Ukraine has to be moderated. If the Russian army is routed, it becomes more likely that Putin will resort to nukes. The least dangerous strategy is to grind Russia down in a long way of attrition that is less likely to provide a trigger for nuclear war. Ukraine has to win, but nuclear war must be avoided.
It is not our job to worry about Putin, or where his career might go next, or to engage in pointless Kremlinology. Our job is to help Ukraine win – as fast as possible.
Those heroic people are fighting for all of us. The Ukrainians are fighting for the Georgians, for the Moldovans, for the Baltic states, for the Poles – for anyone who might in due time be threatened by Putin's crazed revanchism and neo-imperialism. They are fighting for the principle that nations should not have their borders changed by force.
When Ukraine wins, that is a message that will be heard around the world. So let us help them win, not next year or the year after, but this year, 2023; and don't talk to me, finally, about expense.
If you want to minimise the world's economic pain, if you want to avoid the enormous cost – in blood and treasure – of letting this tragedy stretch on, then let's together do the obvious thing.
Let's give the Ukrainians all they need to win now.
He was always at his best with slightly vague boosterism, it's what he is made for far more than trying to run a country.
I think there is a basic point where a full on invasion of this nature (well beyond even the 2014 snatch and grab) means the kind of tip toeing worry about provoking Putin or giving him an excuse to escalate no longer really works, if it ever did. There's still the sensible worry about him being so mad he might go nuclear, but short of that what further escalation can he realistically threaten, in which case there should be less coyness around backing his opponents in Ukraine.
The bolded bit is the critical bit, but it's the bit you skated over.
Why is it critical? If you believe it to be true, weakening our support for Ukraine will not make him any less mad.
It's why support for Ukraine has to be moderated. If the Russian army is routed, it becomes more likely that Putin will resort to nukes. The least dangerous strategy is to grind Russia down in a long way of attrition that is less likely to provide a trigger for nuclear war. Ukraine has to win, but nuclear war must be avoided.
This is just baseless supposition. Russian nuclear doctrine requires a threat to the existence of the state to justify the use of nuclear weapons and you could plausibly argue that a war of attrition that completely guts their armed forces is a greater threat to the state than a swift defeat.
"Don't talk to me, finally, about expense" is something of a slogan for his style of politics. If you could do it all the time, what a world! But you can't.
Kind of a nonsensical comment. By the time they retire they will be old people.
Moreover when the pension was introduced in 1925 to be paid at age 65, average life expectancy was 58. When the payment of pension was linked to retirement in 1948 average life expectancy was 67. Today average life expectancy is 81.
So it hardly seems unreasonable to expect people to work longer for their pension given average life expectancy has moved from 7 years before pension age to 16 years after it.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Yes, that is part of it, and recently sociopathy has become celebrated, for example Donald Trump, Kanye West or Andrew Tate. It has become a lifestyle to desire for many men.
I think now that 15% of teenage girls identify as bisexuality or lesbian, and I understand why. A lot of men are bastards. Increasingly too the Trans community is not M to F, but F to M at young ages. That is a bit more alien to me, but does speak of how difficult being female can be.
The younger generation have been royally screwed .
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
There's a rather shocking table on page 18 of the Civitas report that triggered the Daily Mail, that shows that even the top income quintile of retired people receive more in benefits than they pay in tax.
The younger generation have been royally screwed .
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
To be fair they started working a few years earlier on average, and they married way earlier, which are excellent money saving tips. There is a price to pay for the Friends-style extended adolescence.
Kind of a nonsensical comment. By the time they retire they will be old people.
Moreover when the pension was introduced in 1925 to be paid at age 65, average life expectancy was 58. When the payment of pension was linked to retirement in 1948 average life expectancy was 67. Today average life expectancy is 81.
So it hardly seems unreasonable to expect people to work longer for their pension given average life expectancy has moved from 7 years before pension age to 16 years after it.
I think those figures are exagerrated by using life expectancy of birth, when what matters actuarily is life expectancy at retirement. I am sure that has increased, but not quite so much.
I am in no rush to retire. I recently saw a farmer, 86 years old with a serious life threatening condition. I tinkered with his medication and asked to see him in February. He asked if it would be OK to leave it until March, as in February he will be busy lambing. He said to me "I would rather wear out than rust out" , so I agreed. I feel the same and won't call it a day until I feel that I am not doing a decent job, even if I do cut my hours back.
Kind of a nonsensical comment. By the time they retire they will be old people.
Moreover when the pension was introduced in 1925 to be paid at age 65, average life expectancy was 58. When the payment of pension was linked to retirement in 1948 average life expectancy was 67. Today average life expectancy is 81.
So it hardly seems unreasonable to expect people to work longer for their pension given average life expectancy has moved from 7 years before pension age to 16 years after it.
Does that average include infant mortality, because if so it isn’t useful
The younger generation have been royally screwed .
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
Another idiotic comment. Granny and Grandad grew up in an age when only 10% or so were able to stay in education past the age of 18 - with only 4% going to university. Now that number is just under 40%. The young today have far more opportunity to study than granny and grandad ever did.
The reason misogynistic stuff is hard to root out is very simple and PB is as good an example as any other place. Put up a thread about womens' issues and you get discussion about nuclear reactors and football.
And why not? Men never directly experience women's lives because they are men, not women. So womens' issues hold as much interest for them as football and nuclear reactors do for most women.
It is not that men are evil or are trying to keep women down (outside of the Middle East), they just find it hard to be interested in stuff that bores most of them to distraction.
And Cyclefree's choice of a trans-woman with a history of violence against men was an inspired choice for advancing her cause. Not.
Kind of a nonsensical comment. By the time they retire they will be old people.
Moreover when the pension was introduced in 1925 to be paid at age 65, average life expectancy was 58. When the payment of pension was linked to retirement in 1948 average life expectancy was 67. Today average life expectancy is 81.
So it hardly seems unreasonable to expect people to work longer for their pension given average life expectancy has moved from 7 years before pension age to 16 years after it.
Does that average include infant mortality, because if so it isn’t useful
No. Average life expectancy figures do not include anyone who dies under the age of 1. That has always been the case.
The younger generation have been royally screwed .
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
The proportion of grannies and grandads who were able to study (presumably you mean at university) was much more limited, so you need to bear in mind that you are not comparing like with like. The modal pensioner went to a secondary modern and had no prospect of seeing the inside of a university.
The younger generation have been royally screwed .
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
To be fair they started working a few years earlier on average, and they married way earlier, which are excellent money saving tips. There is a price to pay for the Friends-style extended adolescence.
Yep. When I met Mrs Foxy she was 21 and a Staff Nurse on a regional chest surgery ward, It was a lot of responsibility when she was in charge. We grew up fast at the older end of Gen X.
Kind of a nonsensical comment. By the time they retire they will be old people.
Moreover when the pension was introduced in 1925 to be paid at age 65, average life expectancy was 58. When the payment of pension was linked to retirement in 1948 average life expectancy was 67. Today average life expectancy is 81.
So it hardly seems unreasonable to expect people to work longer for their pension given average life expectancy has moved from 7 years before pension age to 16 years after it.
I think those figures are exagerrated by using life expectancy of birth, when what matters actuarily is life expectancy at retirement. I am sure that has increased, but not quite so much.
I am in no rush to retire. I recently saw a farmer, 86 years old with a serious life threatening condition. I tinkered with his medication and asked to see him in February. He asked if it would be OK to leave it until March, as in February he will be busy lambing. He said to me "I would rather wear out than rust out" , so I agreed. I feel the same and won't call it a day until I feel that I am not doing a decent job, even if I do cut my hours back.
Life expectancy at retirement has increased from 10 years to 20 years over the same period. But given that all those people who don't make it to retirement age will also have been paying for pensions they never receive it seems reasonable to include them in the numbers.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
Kind of a nonsensical comment. By the time they retire they will be old people.
Moreover when the pension was introduced in 1925 to be paid at age 65, average life expectancy was 58. When the payment of pension was linked to retirement in 1948 average life expectancy was 67. Today average life expectancy is 81.
So it hardly seems unreasonable to expect people to work longer for their pension given average life expectancy has moved from 7 years before pension age to 16 years after it.
I think those figures are exagerrated by using life expectancy of birth, when what matters actuarily is life expectancy at retirement. I am sure that has increased, but not quite so much.
I am in no rush to retire. I recently saw a farmer, 86 years old with a serious life threatening condition. I tinkered with his medication and asked to see him in February. He asked if it would be OK to leave it until March, as in February he will be busy lambing. He said to me "I would rather wear out than rust out" , so I agreed. I feel the same and won't call it a day until I feel that I am not doing a decent job, even if I do cut my hours back.
Life expectancy at retirement has increased from 10 years to 20 years over the same period. But given that all those people who don't make it to retirement age will also have been paying for pensions they never receive it seems reasonable to include them in the numbers.
I think that they are not paying for their pensions, but rather the pensions of those already retired, but I get the point on dependency ratios.
The reason misogynistic stuff is hard to root out is very simple and PB is as good an example as any other place. Put up a thread about womens' issues and you get discussion about nuclear reactors and football.
And why not? Men never directly experience women's lives because they are men, not women. So womens' issues hold as much interest for them as football and nuclear reactors do for most women.
It is not that men are evil or are trying to keep women down (outside of the Middle East), they just find it hard to be interested in stuff that bores most of them to distraction.
And Cyclefree's choice of a trans-woman with a history of violence against men was an inspired choice for advancing her cause. Not.
To be fair, as someone who agrees entirely with the thread header but also writes the occasional thread, people talking about something entirely unrelated to the topic at hand is the norm on here rather than the exception. That happens no matter what the topic - unless it is some particularly juicy scandal or a resignation.
The reason misogynistic stuff is hard to root out is very simple and PB is as good an example as any other place. Put up a thread about womens' issues and you get discussion about nuclear reactors and football.
And why not? Men never directly experience women's lives because they are men, not women. So womens' issues hold as much interest for them as football and nuclear reactors do for most women.
It is not that men are evil or are trying to keep women down (outside of the Middle East), they just find it hard to be interested in stuff that bores most of them to distraction.
And Cyclefree's choice of a trans-woman with a history of violence against men was an inspired choice for advancing her cause. Not.
Every thread ends up about reactors or ships or chatbots, and most get there very quickly - e.g. your typical Sunak/Starmer approval ratings header. It is also fair to say that most of the header is about the same position on trans stuff that has been aired a few times by the same author, but with new examples.
The younger generation have been royally screwed .
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
Another idiotic comment. Granny and Grandad grew up in an age when only 10% or so were able to stay in education past the age of 18 - with only 4% going to university. Now that number is just under 40%. The young today have far more opportunity to study than granny and grandad ever did.
Grannie and grandad allegedly would do anything for the grandkids so we’re told. They clearly ignored their wishes and decided to limit the horizons and freedoms of their grandkids. Perhaps they’ll think twice when there’s no care worker to wipe their arse!
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
That doesn't seem to be the case with the Met Police, Andrew Tate or the whole Incel culture. If it was a few old unreconstructed dinosaurs misogyny would be much less of an issue.
The reason misogynistic stuff is hard to root out is very simple and PB is as good an example as any other place. Put up a thread about womens' issues and you get discussion about nuclear reactors and football.
And why not? Men never directly experience women's lives because they are men, not women. So womens' issues hold as much interest for them as football and nuclear reactors do for most women.
It is not that men are evil or are trying to keep women down (outside of the Middle East), they just find it hard to be interested in stuff that bores most of them to distraction.
And Cyclefree's choice of a trans-woman with a history of violence against men was an inspired choice for advancing her cause. Not.
Moreover, given I have a wife and daughter (as well as a son) who are my whole life, I think it is unfair to claim that we never experience women's lives. I live in a constant low level fear for the safety of the female members of my family - apparently far more than they do themselves. I also get angry and frustrated at the way they get treated in daily life. We don't all walk round with our heads up our backsides.
The younger generation have been royally screwed .
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
Another idiotic comment. Granny and Grandad grew up in an age when only 10% or so were able to stay in education past the age of 18 - with only 4% going to university. Now that number is just under 40%. The young today have far more opportunity to study than granny and grandad ever did.
Grannie and grandad allegedly would do anything for the grandkids so we’re told. They clearly ignored their wishes and decided to limit the horizons and freedoms of their grandkids. Perhaps they’ll think twice when there’s no care worker to wipe their arse!
Still blubbering about your beloved EU? Sad idiot.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
That doesn't seem to be the case with the Met Police, Andrew Tate or the whole Incel culture. If it was a few old unreconstructed dinosaurs misogyny would be much less of an issue.
I hope Tate ends up being the prison bxtch and can cry into his pillow as he’s banged mercilessly! His alleged masculinity on steroids might take a hit after that!
Kind of a nonsensical comment. By the time they retire they will be old people.
Moreover when the pension was introduced in 1925 to be paid at age 65, average life expectancy was 58. When the payment of pension was linked to retirement in 1948 average life expectancy was 67. Today average life expectancy is 81.
So it hardly seems unreasonable to expect people to work longer for their pension given average life expectancy has moved from 7 years before pension age to 16 years after it.
I think those figures are exagerrated by using life expectancy of birth, when what matters actuarily is life expectancy at retirement. I am sure that has increased, but not quite so much.
I am in no rush to retire. I recently saw a farmer, 86 years old with a serious life threatening condition. I tinkered with his medication and asked to see him in February. He asked if it would be OK to leave it until March, as in February he will be busy lambing. He said to me "I would rather wear out than rust out" , so I agreed. I feel the same and won't call it a day until I feel that I am not doing a decent job, even if I do cut my hours back.
Life expectancy at retirement has increased from 10 years to 20 years over the same period. But given that all those people who don't make it to retirement age will also have been paying for pensions they never receive it seems reasonable to include them in the numbers.
I think that they are not paying for their pensions, but rather the pensions of those already retired, but I get the point on dependency ratios.
Yes I agree. It is an argument I have had many times with people saying they have 'paid in all their lives for THEIR state pension'. They don't understand the principle on which the whole system was devised.
The younger generation have been royally screwed .
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
Another idiotic comment. Granny and Grandad grew up in an age when only 10% or so were able to stay in education past the age of 18 - with only 4% going to university. Now that number is just under 40%. The young today have far more opportunity to study than granny and grandad ever did.
Grannie and grandad allegedly would do anything for the grandkids so we’re told. They clearly ignored their wishes and decided to limit the horizons and freedoms of their grandkids. Perhaps they’ll think twice when there’s no care worker to wipe their arse!
Still blubbering about your beloved EU? Sad idiot.
I’m perfectly happy thanks . I still have my freedom of movement ! It’s a shame most younger people have now lost that .
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
That doesn't seem to be the case with the Met Police, Andrew Tate or the whole Incel culture. If it was a few old unreconstructed dinosaurs misogyny would be much less of an issue.
I hope Tate ends up being the prison bxtch and can cry into his pillow as he’s banged mercilessly! His alleged masculinity on steroids might take a hit after that!
I am not willing to wish rape or sexual assault on anyone. The idea that "they deserve it" is part of the problem, seeing penetrative sex as an expression of male power and domination.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
That doesn't seem to be the case with the Met Police, Andrew Tate or the whole Incel culture. If it was a few old unreconstructed dinosaurs misogyny would be much less of an issue.
Ask an older women, say one in her 70s, and you will find that as a young woman she had to fend off just about every male she came across.
If it is down to incels and weirdos nowadays, that is progress.
The younger generation have been royally screwed .
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
Another idiotic comment. Granny and Grandad grew up in an age when only 10% or so were able to stay in education past the age of 18 - with only 4% going to university. Now that number is just under 40%. The young today have far more opportunity to study than granny and grandad ever did.
Grannie and grandad allegedly would do anything for the grandkids so we’re told. They clearly ignored their wishes and decided to limit the horizons and freedoms of their grandkids. Perhaps they’ll think twice when there’s no care worker to wipe their arse!
Still blubbering about your beloved EU? Sad idiot.
I’m perfectly happy thanks . I still have my freedom of movement ! It’s a shame most younger people have now lost that .
Simply a return to the way it was when those Grannies and Grandads you so despise and blame for all these ills were young.
Boris has the front page dedicated to his plea to give Ukraine everything they need:
It pleases me incredibly that the British right is so antifascist.
Whereas *some* on the left... I cannot describe the post an ex-colleague of mine put on FB last night about Ukraine. Many supporters of the Ukrainians are Nazis, the Russians were forced into the war, and "NATO has always been a violent force".
He is very much a leftist and Corbynite, although now a green due to Corbyn being chucked out of Labour.
The younger generation have been royally screwed .
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
Another idiotic comment. Granny and Grandad grew up in an age when only 10% or so were able to stay in education past the age of 18 - with only 4% going to university. Now that number is just under 40%. The young today have far more opportunity to study than granny and grandad ever did.
Grannie and grandad allegedly would do anything for the grandkids so we’re told. They clearly ignored their wishes and decided to limit the horizons and freedoms of their grandkids. Perhaps they’ll think twice when there’s no care worker to wipe their arse!
Still blubbering about your beloved EU? Sad idiot.
I’m perfectly happy thanks . I still have my freedom of movement ! It’s a shame most younger people have now lost that .
Simply a return to the way it was when those Grannies and Grandads you so despise and blame for all these ills were young.
Which is part of why the age cohort who voted for it so disproportionately is so resented by the young who voted against it. Why would the young not blame them for that ?
Boris has the front page dedicated to his plea to give Ukraine everything they need:
It pleases me incredibly that the British right is so antifascist.
Whereas *some* on the left... I cannot describe the post an ex-colleague of mine put on FB last night about Ukraine. Many supporters of the Ukrainians are Nazis, the Russians were forced into the war, and "NATO has always been a violent force".
He is very much a leftist and Corbynite, although now a green due to Corbyn being chucked out of Labour.
The horse-shoe theory of political beliefs in action. The far left and the far right both seem to be big fans of Russia - the other 90% of us in the middle, not so much.
I know I keep saying it, but whatever one might think of Boris Johnson, he’s always been right about Ukraine, and everyone needs to up their game and win this war. Yes, Herr Scholz, that includes you. Get the tanks rolling East.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
That doesn't seem to be the case with the Met Police, Andrew Tate or the whole Incel culture. If it was a few old unreconstructed dinosaurs misogyny would be much less of an issue.
Ask an older women, say one in her 70s, and you will find that as a young woman she had to fend off just about every male she came across.
If it is down to incels and weirdos nowadays, that is progress.
Either there are a very large number of those about, or that’s an inaccurate generalisation.
I don’t disagree that society has changes massively in this respect, but look for example at the Republican party in the US. That’s an entire social movement, with widespread support, in the other direction.
during fiscal 2020/2021, more than half the population got more in benefits than they paid in tax
Which would be the year when the Covid pandemic was at its peak, when vaccines were only available to a lucky few, and much of the country was shut down.
We don't have more recent data. We certainly don't *know* that more than half the population are still that way.
With the way things have gone frankly I think locking down was the wrong decision. All old people do is tell young people we're feckless and claim benefits. I think fuck them, I put my life on hold for these arseholes and for what?
Quite possibly. The debate about Sweden continues. The latest analysis I saw suggests that, while its covid deaths were higher than elsewhere during the period when it took probably the loosest attitude to restrictions in Europe, now that you can factor in the lower rate of suicides there during the height of the pandemic, and the higher rate of cancer deaths in lockdown countries arising from too-late diagnosis, the overall excess mortality rate in Sweden during that period looks relatively good.
Have you got any numbers for the "lower rate of suicides there during the height of the pandemic"?
It's a tricky one, and the sort of thing our politicians should really seek to achieve a cross-party consensus on to take the heat out of it.
Retiring at 68 would be fine for most of the well-heeled contributors to PB. But for low-paid manual workers with gruelling jobs, it's a stretch. I can't help but think that a more radical solution may be needed.
Office workers should retire at 70. Manual workers should retire at 65. Alternatively, nobody should be allowed to retire until they have worked for 50 years. Went into an apprenticeship at 16? Retire at 66. Went to university and stayed on for a PhD? Retire at 75.
Bloody oldies, hanging on to all the cushy, well-paid white collar professional jobs so young'uns can't get promoted.
The younger generation have been royally screwed .
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
Perhaps the young people who cared about freedom of movement should have turned out to vote?
I doubt if the grandparents had life as easy as you think.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Yes, that is part of it, and recently sociopathy has become celebrated, for example Donald Trump, Kanye West or Andrew Tate. It has become a lifestyle to desire for many men.
I think now that 15% of teenage girls identify as bisexuality or lesbian, and I understand why. A lot of men are bastards. Increasingly too the Trans community is not M to F, but F to M at young ages. That is a bit more alien to me, but does speak of how difficult being female can be.
That second paragraph seems like confusing correlation with causation to me. You could just as well say it’s the increased exposure of the young to phthalates and similar endocrine disrupters. We really don’t know.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
That doesn't seem to be the case with the Met Police, Andrew Tate or the whole Incel culture. If it was a few old unreconstructed dinosaurs misogyny would be much less of an issue.
Ask an older women, say one in her 70s, and you will find that as a young woman she had to fend off just about every male she came across.
If it is down to incels and weirdos nowadays, that is progress.
Either there are a very large number of those about, or that’s an inaccurate generalisation.
I don’t disagree that society has changes massively in this respect, but look for example at the Republican party in the US. That’s an entire social movement, with widespread support, in the other direction.
The incels and weirdos seem far nastier today than their counterparts in the past.
Seems we are being invited to reduce our peak energy use as the windfarms are becalmed by the cold weather
And yet the demand is for even more windfarms when we really need nuclear and tidal to guarantee constant energy supply if we end gas usage
It could be a very long time until we can dispense with gas
We obviously can't dispense with gas, or coal for that matter. The idea is to vastly reduce it during windy and sunny times, or even storing gas/coal for intermittent use. And yes, developing Nuclear as well. It's called a mixed system. We should never put all our eggs in one basket. Obviously there is a demand for more wind farms, like all other sources!
I am in favour of additional wind generation but it does depend on 'wind' and often in very cold weather the wind is not at all reliable as we are seeing just now
Storage when there is wind?
I would assume storage has a role to play
Interestingly under today’s calm cold conditions we are currently generating 5.3gw of wind power, which is greater than our nuclear generation.
Whilst more wind power doesn’t eliminate the problem of intermittency it certainly reduces it. With 4x the current capacity (perfectly feasible especially with new larger turbines coming on) we’d be generating half of our electricity from wind even on a still, high demand night like tonight.
We need more wind (much much more), more solar with built in battery storage, more nuclear, further progress on energy efficiency, more cross border interconnecters to balance European supply and demand, more grid scale storage of various types, and backup gas generation until such time as it’s no longer needed.
I'm sorry but this post is utter rubbish - both according to basic logic, and current real life. All these wind providers must be paid. They get paid to shut off when their power is too much for the grid - currently hundreds of millions a year. The capacity increase you're proposing would propel constraint payments into the stratosphere, all only for half of electricity supply on a low wind night? It's power generation for the severely numerically-challenged. Your barmy theories are why UK energy production is in its pitiful state.
I’m proud to know that my PB posts have had such a profound and important impact on our power system.
We’ve gone over the subsidy and constraint payment canard dozens of times on here before yet you always end up stating the same assumptions.
Constraint payments are a feature of regional imbalances, not national surplus, and insufficient grid carriage capacity largely because sometimes more wind power is generated in the North and Scotland than the grid capacity able to carry it South. Until recently it had to make its way down the equivalent of narrow b roads. The issue is being actively addressed by investment from national grid. Ie they are building big cables to carry the power to where it’s needed.
A lot of anti wind rhetoric seems to take one little issue (take your pick: planning eyesore birds being hit by blades, what about when it’s calm, constraint payments etc) and conclude the answer is therefore to stop wind power and spend our money on old fossil fuel technologies instead. This ignores the problems with them (climate change aside there is air pollution, geopolitical risk, planning etc) and also ignores the fact that in most case there are solutions to the original issue.
It is not a canard, and my recollection of previous discussions is that when people have dismissed the cost of constraint and subsidy, they have moved on from the discussion pretty quickly after the true figures were brought to the table.
I am aware that in many cases, local grid deficiencies mean wind farms have to constrain - that's why they build them in those locations. The grid can be made more robust, but it will never be a bottomless pit, and the overcapacity you're talking about would result in vastly more problems both locally, and, on windy days, nationally. The UK billpayer would be on the hook for every kw produced, and not produced.
The answer is not to 'stop' wind power, or even 'stop' subsidies (which would have the same effect), but to reorganise the subsidy regime to prevent the worst abuses, and incentivise storage and reselling of power amongst wind providers. Meanwhile, invest in reliable, non-intermittent renewables like tidal, and domestic fossil fuel production to clamp down on imported coal, gas and timber, which add even more carbon to the atmosphere. Not increase the issue four-fold ffs.
I didn’t spot that in the previous thread. Much of it is sensible and I don’t disagree. Until the last couple of sentences.
Domestic fossil fuel resources are almost all not financially viable and will become less so. The one exception being existing North Sea oil and gas fields some of which are still viable, and probably have a few years of production left. And as a result they continue to be exploited.
Multiplying wind power, our biggest natural energy resource, remains the cheapest way to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and if there is infrastructure investment needed to tackle constraint issues (as there already has been, as well as improved grid balancing) and ramp up storage then great, get on with investing. Every growing technology comes up against constraints: when cars multiplied we got congestion so built motorways, when industry took off we got pollution so introduced environmental regulations, indeed the national grid and its vast arrays of pylons were put in place to ensure the country could balance supply and demand.
Adding more wind now, without the storage options in place, is an inefficient use of financial resources. The current mix has too much wind, which is why we had to see (thankfully voluntary) domestic power rationing yesterday when it was cold and calm.
Investment in storage needs to be the priority, alongside more reliable baseline power such as SMR and tidal. Then more wind can be added, including export connector options for the windy days.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
That doesn't seem to be the case with the Met Police, Andrew Tate or the whole Incel culture. If it was a few old unreconstructed dinosaurs misogyny would be much less of an issue.
Ask an older women, say one in her 70s, and you will find that as a young woman she had to fend off just about every male she came across.
If it is down to incels and weirdos nowadays, that is progress.
Either there are a very large number of those about, or that’s an inaccurate generalisation.
I don’t disagree that society has changes massively in this respect, but look for example at the Republican party in the US. That’s an entire social movement, with widespread support, in the other direction.
The incels and weirdos seem far nastier today than their counterparts in the past.
Hopefully that’s simply a result of internet culture giving the appearance of nastiness. However, it’s something that governments need to watch really carefully - having a large group of disaffected young men, who feel they don’t belong in society, rarely ends well.
Fed exam questions from GCSE to degree level, ChatGPT gets the right answer for the wrong reason, the wrong answer for the right reason, and that's enough spoilers.
Fed exam questions from GCSE to degree level, ChatGPT gets the right answer for the wrong reason, the wrong answer for the right reason, and that's enough spoilers.
Progressive taxation under Labour the Tories: FYI, a couple of interesting (🤓) tables on income #tax from #HMRC (basically showing 'the rich' *are* paying more tax)...
1. the % shares of total income tax paid by different income groups (the shares paid by the top 10%, 5% and 1% have all risen over the last decade... (1/2)
2. the percentage shares of total income for each percentile group (these haven't changed much over the last decade, meaning that higher earners are paying more #tax on roughly the same share of income). (2/2) https://twitter.com/julianhjessop/status/1617601327856586752
I’m 31 in a few weeks and I personally don’t really care about the retirement age being raised. From my mid-teens I’ve never expected to receive a state pension, and touch wood hopefully I don’t need it.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Yes, that is part of it, and recently sociopathy has become celebrated, for example Donald Trump, Kanye West or Andrew Tate. It has become a lifestyle to desire for many men.
I think now that 15% of teenage girls identify as bisexuality or lesbian, and I understand why. A lot of men are bastards. Increasingly too the Trans community is not M to F, but F to M at young ages. That is a bit more alien to me, but does speak of how difficult being female can be.
That second paragraph seems like confusing correlation with causation to me. You could just as well say it’s the increased exposure of the young to phthalates and similar endocrine disrupters. We really don’t know.
Doesn’t the limited evidence we have suggest social media contagion as a highly likely contributory factor - with previous examples like the explosion of bulimia among young females in Hong Kong after a well publicised death there being an early example?
Fed exam questions from GCSE to degree level, ChatGPT gets the right answer for the wrong reason, the wrong answer for the right reason, and that's enough spoilers.
That's interesting. The physics video shows why ChatGPT would be less helpful, which is GCSE and A-level physics exams are stuffed full of diagrams and graphs to be interpreted (oh, and it gets the answers wrong).
To bring this thread back on topic, since continuous assessment is said to favour girls, and exams boys, then if ChatGPT provokes limits on the former, or just allows boys to bridge the gap, then both ChatGPT and crude countermeasures might be seen as misogynistic. The devil will be in the detail.
Fed exam questions from GCSE to degree level, ChatGPT gets the right answer for the wrong reason, the wrong answer for the right reason, and that's enough spoilers.
The anti-plagarism tools can also be faulty. One thing I'd advise my son to do, when/if he gets to that sort of stage of academia, is to keep all his drafts. Show how his work, and his thinking, evolved as he went. Also keep copious notes on sources.
Then again, by the time he reaches that age, the world will have changed again.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
It would be nice to think so, but I think there's a tendency for the younger hardcore male misogynists to hide away at home on the internet. Also misogynist men are more likely to bias their interactions with women to ignore women older than them.
Fed exam questions from GCSE to degree level, ChatGPT gets the right answer for the wrong reason, the wrong answer for the right reason, and that's enough spoilers.
The anti-plagarism tools can also be faulty. One thing I'd advise my son to do, when/if he gets to that sort of stage of academia, is to keep all his drafts. Show how his work, and his thinking, evolved as he went. Also keep copious notes on sources.
Then again, by the time he reaches that age, the world will have changed again.
Yes, I do wonder what the false-positive case rate is for these ‘anti-plagiarism tools’, especially if they start looking for general style rather than actual strings of words from elsewhere? Much more subjective.
Seems we are being invited to reduce our peak energy use as the windfarms are becalmed by the cold weather
And yet the demand is for even more windfarms when we really need nuclear and tidal to guarantee constant energy supply if we end gas usage
It could be a very long time until we can dispense with gas
We obviously can't dispense with gas, or coal for that matter. The idea is to vastly reduce it during windy and sunny times, or even storing gas/coal for intermittent use. And yes, developing Nuclear as well. It's called a mixed system. We should never put all our eggs in one basket. Obviously there is a demand for more wind farms, like all other sources!
I am in favour of additional wind generation but it does depend on 'wind' and often in very cold weather the wind is not at all reliable as we are seeing just now
Storage when there is wind?
I would assume storage has a role to play
Interestingly under today’s calm cold conditions we are currently generating 5.3gw of wind power, which is greater than our nuclear generation.
Whilst more wind power doesn’t eliminate the problem of intermittency it certainly reduces it. With 4x the current capacity (perfectly feasible especially with new larger turbines coming on) we’d be generating half of our electricity from wind even on a still, high demand night like tonight.
We need more wind (much much more), more solar with built in battery storage, more nuclear, further progress on energy efficiency, more cross border interconnecters to balance European supply and demand, more grid scale storage of various types, and backup gas generation until such time as it’s no longer needed.
I'm sorry but this post is utter rubbish - both according to basic logic, and current real life. All these wind providers must be paid. They get paid to shut off when their power is too much for the grid - currently hundreds of millions a year. The capacity increase you're proposing would propel constraint payments into the stratosphere, all only for half of electricity supply on a low wind night? It's power generation for the severely numerically-challenged. Your barmy theories are why UK energy production is in its pitiful state.
I’m proud to know that my PB posts have had such a profound and important impact on our power system.
We’ve gone over the subsidy and constraint payment canard dozens of times on here before yet you always end up stating the same assumptions.
Constraint payments are a feature of regional imbalances, not national surplus, and insufficient grid carriage capacity largely because sometimes more wind power is generated in the North and Scotland than the grid capacity able to carry it South. Until recently it had to make its way down the equivalent of narrow b roads. The issue is being actively addressed by investment from national grid. Ie they are building big cables to carry the power to where it’s needed.
A lot of anti wind rhetoric seems to take one little issue (take your pick: planning eyesore birds being hit by blades, what about when it’s calm, constraint payments etc) and conclude the answer is therefore to stop wind power and spend our money on old fossil fuel technologies instead. This ignores the problems with them (climate change aside there is air pollution, geopolitical risk, planning etc) and also ignores the fact that in most case there are solutions to the original issue.
It is not a canard, and my recollection of previous discussions is that when people have dismissed the cost of constraint and subsidy, they have moved on from the discussion pretty quickly after the true figures were brought to the table.
I am aware that in many cases, local grid deficiencies mean wind farms have to constrain - that's why they build them in those locations. The grid can be made more robust, but it will never be a bottomless pit, and the overcapacity you're talking about would result in vastly more problems both locally, and, on windy days, nationally. The UK billpayer would be on the hook for every kw produced, and not produced.
The answer is not to 'stop' wind power, or even 'stop' subsidies (which would have the same effect), but to reorganise the subsidy regime to prevent the worst abuses, and incentivise storage and reselling of power amongst wind providers. Meanwhile, invest in reliable, non-intermittent renewables like tidal, and domestic fossil fuel production to clamp down on imported coal, gas and timber, which add even more carbon to the atmosphere. Not increase the issue four-fold ffs.
I didn’t spot that in the previous thread. Much of it is sensible and I don’t disagree. Until the last couple of sentences.
Domestic fossil fuel resources are almost all not financially viable and will become less so. The one exception being existing North Sea oil and gas fields some of which are still viable, and probably have a few years of production left. And as a result they continue to be exploited.
Multiplying wind power, our biggest natural energy resource, remains the cheapest way to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and if there is infrastructure investment needed to tackle constraint issues (as there already has been, as well as improved grid balancing) and ramp up storage then great, get on with investing. Every growing technology comes up against constraints: when cars multiplied we got congestion so built motorways, when industry took off we got pollution so introduced environmental regulations, indeed the national grid and its vast arrays of pylons were put in place to ensure the country could balance supply and demand.
Adding more wind now, without the storage options in place, is an inefficient use of financial resources. The current mix has too much wind, which is why we had to see (thankfully voluntary) domestic power rationing yesterday when it was cold and calm.
Investment in storage needs to be the priority, alongside more reliable baseline power such as SMR and tidal. Then more wind can be added, including export connector options for the windy days.
You're making the mistake of trying to plan the energy market from a standpoint of maximising efficiency of kWh used, and neglecting the economics.
The more wind you add to the grid the greater the economic incentive to add storage, because you will have a larger surplus of wind energy more often. Trying to do it the other way round is a recipe for the people installing energy storage to lose money.
41 likes to 1.1 million views = a 0.004% like rate. I have no idea what calculation lies behind the continuing silence and inaction from the Labour leadership here, but presumably not this one.
In fairness it’s now 45 likes…..and 1.3 million views…and Labour’s spin doctor has been caught in a lie:
Rosie Duffield, an ex-assistant teacher, single mother and survivor of domestic abuse, won @UKLabour a seat they thought was unwinnable. Post-Corbyn, she was returned to parliament with an increased majority.
This is rumbling on. Couple of inaccurate comments from this chap (unsure how he thinks he knows so much about my constituency as no Labour leader has been there since I became an MP?). Also, no, I haven't been in to see Keir Starmer 'a number of times', once - in September 2021.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
It would be nice to think so, but I think there's a tendency for the younger hardcore male misogynists to hide away at home on the internet. Also misogynist men are more likely to bias their interactions with women to ignore women older than them.
We need to see more online people who can be positive role models for this disaffected youth. They need to be following more people like Dr Jordan Peterson, and fewer people like Andrew Tate.
Banning the negative influences from social media doesn’t work though, the likes of Tate and Alex Jones treat being banned as a badge of honour, and their following becomes more hardcore and underground as a result. Thankfully, Tate appears to have gone well over the line in real life, and is likely to end up spending a lot more time in a Romanian jail than he has already.
Kind of a nonsensical comment. By the time they retire they will be old people.
Moreover when the pension was introduced in 1925 to be paid at age 65, average life expectancy was 58. When the payment of pension was linked to retirement in 1948 average life expectancy was 67. Today average life expectancy is 81.
So it hardly seems unreasonable to expect people to work longer for their pension given average life expectancy has moved from 7 years before pension age to 16 years after it.
But they need to raise the pension age now not in 13 years when all of their voters have already retired at the lower age. 68 for men and 70 for women, adjusted every 5 years so that only 10-12 years of retirement is state funded.
I’m 31 in a few weeks and I personally don’t really care about the retirement age being raised. From my mid-teens I’ve never expected to receive a state pension, and touch wood hopefully I don’t need it.
I am 57 - and currently will reach official retirement age at 67. And I have always thought exactly the same. I always thought that by the time I retired the state pension would be a thing of the past. Now as I get closer it surprises me to find it probably will still be around. Mind you I have no intention of simply stopping because I reached a certain age.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
That doesn't seem to be the case with the Met Police, Andrew Tate or the whole Incel culture. If it was a few old unreconstructed dinosaurs misogyny would be much less of an issue.
Ask an older women, say one in her 70s, and you will find that as a young woman she had to fend off just about every male she came across.
If it is down to incels and weirdos nowadays, that is progress.
Either there are a very large number of those about, or that’s an inaccurate generalisation.
I don’t disagree that society has changes massively in this respect, but look for example at the Republican party in the US. That’s an entire social movement, with widespread support, in the other direction.
The incels and weirdos seem far nastier today than their counterparts in the past.
Very much on topic.
The Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial is set to resume. Dominic PEZZOLA is asking the judge to prevent prosecutors from introducing a, 11-page Proud Boys rulebook that was seized from his home, which includes gems like this.. https://mobile.twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1617521931351216128
The younger generation have been royally screwed .
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
Another idiotic comment. Granny and Grandad grew up in an age when only 10% or so were able to stay in education past the age of 18 - with only 4% going to university. Now that number is just under 40%. The young today have far more opportunity to study than granny and grandad ever did.
Grannie and grandad allegedly would do anything for the grandkids so we’re told. They clearly ignored their wishes and decided to limit the horizons and freedoms of their grandkids. Perhaps they’ll think twice when there’s no care worker to wipe their arse!
Still blubbering about your beloved EU? Sad idiot.
I’m perfectly happy thanks . I still have my freedom of movement ! It’s a shame most younger people have now lost that .
Simply a return to the way it was when those Grannies and Grandads you so despise and blame for all these ills were young.
Which is part of why the age cohort who voted for it so disproportionately is so resented by the young who voted against it. Why would the young not blame them for that ?
Because it is a pointless and ill informed attitude. It is, quite literally, the ignorance of youth.
I’m 31 in a few weeks and I personally don’t really care about the retirement age being raised. From my mid-teens I’ve never expected to receive a state pension, and touch wood hopefully I don’t need it.
As a 34 year old, my baseline assumption is a state retirement age of 70. And I wouldn't be surprised or upset if it was higher still - it should be rising at least as quickly as people are living longer.
I do think politicians should set a pace of increase in advance that is quick enough and relatively stable such that people can plan accordingly in advance.
Kind of a nonsensical comment. By the time they retire they will be old people.
Moreover when the pension was introduced in 1925 to be paid at age 65, average life expectancy was 58. When the payment of pension was linked to retirement in 1948 average life expectancy was 67. Today average life expectancy is 81.
So it hardly seems unreasonable to expect people to work longer for their pension given average life expectancy has moved from 7 years before pension age to 16 years after it.
But they need to raise the pension age now not in 13 years when all of their voters have already retired at the lower age. 68 for men and 70 for women, adjusted every 5 years so that only 10-12 years of retirement is state funded.
I agree generally. Though there is an upper limit to how far you can go with that. Healthy life expectancy has not gone up as quickly as overall life expectancy so simply tracking the latter upwards is impractical.
Seems we are being invited to reduce our peak energy use as the windfarms are becalmed by the cold weather
And yet the demand is for even more windfarms when we really need nuclear and tidal to guarantee constant energy supply if we end gas usage
It could be a very long time until we can dispense with gas
We obviously can't dispense with gas, or coal for that matter. The idea is to vastly reduce it during windy and sunny times, or even storing gas/coal for intermittent use. And yes, developing Nuclear as well. It's called a mixed system. We should never put all our eggs in one basket. Obviously there is a demand for more wind farms, like all other sources!
I am in favour of additional wind generation but it does depend on 'wind' and often in very cold weather the wind is not at all reliable as we are seeing just now
Storage when there is wind?
I would assume storage has a role to play
Interestingly under today’s calm cold conditions we are currently generating 5.3gw of wind power, which is greater than our nuclear generation.
Whilst more wind power doesn’t eliminate the problem of intermittency it certainly reduces it. With 4x the current capacity (perfectly feasible especially with new larger turbines coming on) we’d be generating half of our electricity from wind even on a still, high demand night like tonight.
We need more wind (much much more), more solar with built in battery storage, more nuclear, further progress on energy efficiency, more cross border interconnecters to balance European supply and demand, more grid scale storage of various types, and backup gas generation until such time as it’s no longer needed.
I'm sorry but this post is utter rubbish - both according to basic logic, and current real life. All these wind providers must be paid. They get paid to shut off when their power is too much for the grid - currently hundreds of millions a year. The capacity increase you're proposing would propel constraint payments into the stratosphere, all only for half of electricity supply on a low wind night? It's power generation for the severely numerically-challenged. Your barmy theories are why UK energy production is in its pitiful state.
I’m proud to know that my PB posts have had such a profound and important impact on our power system.
We’ve gone over the subsidy and constraint payment canard dozens of times on here before yet you always end up stating the same assumptions.
Constraint payments are a feature of regional imbalances, not national surplus, and insufficient grid carriage capacity largely because sometimes more wind power is generated in the North and Scotland than the grid capacity able to carry it South. Until recently it had to make its way down the equivalent of narrow b roads. The issue is being actively addressed by investment from national grid. Ie they are building big cables to carry the power to where it’s needed.
A lot of anti wind rhetoric seems to take one little issue (take your pick: planning eyesore birds being hit by blades, what about when it’s calm, constraint payments etc) and conclude the answer is therefore to stop wind power and spend our money on old fossil fuel technologies instead. This ignores the problems with them (climate change aside there is air pollution, geopolitical risk, planning etc) and also ignores the fact that in most case there are solutions to the original issue.
It is not a canard, and my recollection of previous discussions is that when people have dismissed the cost of constraint and subsidy, they have moved on from the discussion pretty quickly after the true figures were brought to the table.
I am aware that in many cases, local grid deficiencies mean wind farms have to constrain - that's why they build them in those locations. The grid can be made more robust, but it will never be a bottomless pit, and the overcapacity you're talking about would result in vastly more problems both locally, and, on windy days, nationally. The UK billpayer would be on the hook for every kw produced, and not produced.
The answer is not to 'stop' wind power, or even 'stop' subsidies (which would have the same effect), but to reorganise the subsidy regime to prevent the worst abuses, and incentivise storage and reselling of power amongst wind providers. Meanwhile, invest in reliable, non-intermittent renewables like tidal, and domestic fossil fuel production to clamp down on imported coal, gas and timber, which add even more carbon to the atmosphere. Not increase the issue four-fold ffs.
I didn’t spot that in the previous thread. Much of it is sensible and I don’t disagree. Until the last couple of sentences.
Domestic fossil fuel resources are almost all not financially viable and will become less so. The one exception being existing North Sea oil and gas fields some of which are still viable, and probably have a few years of production left. And as a result they continue to be exploited.
Multiplying wind power, our biggest natural energy resource, remains the cheapest way to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and if there is infrastructure investment needed to tackle constraint issues (as there already has been, as well as improved grid balancing) and ramp up storage then great, get on with investing. Every growing technology comes up against constraints: when cars multiplied we got congestion so built motorways, when industry took off we got pollution so introduced environmental regulations, indeed the national grid and its vast arrays of pylons were put in place to ensure the country could balance supply and demand.
Adding more wind now, without the storage options in place, is an inefficient use of financial resources. The current mix has too much wind, which is why we had to see (thankfully voluntary) domestic power rationing yesterday when it was cold and calm.
Investment in storage needs to be the priority, alongside more reliable baseline power such as SMR and tidal. Then more wind can be added, including export connector options for the windy days.
You're making the mistake of trying to plan the energy market from a standpoint of maximising efficiency of kWh used, and neglecting the economics.
The more wind you add to the grid the greater the economic incentive to add storage, because you will have a larger surplus of wind energy more often. Trying to do it the other way round is a recipe for the people installing energy storage to lose money.
Also ignores the very different lead times for building wind power, tidal, and large scale storage.
Miss Vance, culturally bound 'fashions' of mental illness have been around for a while, though. Anorexia is one example, from the superthin models of the 1990s.
That's not to say social media can't replicate that effect or make it worse, of course.
On pensions: governments will never have a higher age for women than men.
The younger generation have been royally screwed .
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
Another idiotic comment. Granny and Grandad grew up in an age when only 10% or so were able to stay in education past the age of 18 - with only 4% going to university. Now that number is just under 40%. The young today have far more opportunity to study than granny and grandad ever did.
Grannie and grandad allegedly would do anything for the grandkids so we’re told. They clearly ignored their wishes and decided to limit the horizons and freedoms of their grandkids. Perhaps they’ll think twice when there’s no care worker to wipe their arse!
Still blubbering about your beloved EU? Sad idiot.
I’m perfectly happy thanks . I still have my freedom of movement ! It’s a shame most younger people have now lost that .
Simply a return to the way it was when those Grannies and Grandads you so despise and blame for all these ills were young.
Which is part of why the age cohort who voted for it so disproportionately is so resented by the young who voted against it. Why would the young not blame them for that ?
Because it is a pointless and ill informed attitude. It is, quite literally, the ignorance of youth.
Pointless, perhaps; the rest, not so much.
You could say much the same, just as fairly, for most of the older cohort who voted for Brexit. The ignorance and entrenched prejudice of old age.
The only difference is that the young have not left the problems for the old to someday solve.
Kind of a nonsensical comment. By the time they retire they will be old people.
Moreover when the pension was introduced in 1925 to be paid at age 65, average life expectancy was 58. When the payment of pension was linked to retirement in 1948 average life expectancy was 67. Today average life expectancy is 81.
So it hardly seems unreasonable to expect people to work longer for their pension given average life expectancy has moved from 7 years before pension age to 16 years after it.
But they need to raise the pension age now not in 13 years when all of their voters have already retired at the lower age. 68 for men and 70 for women, adjusted every 5 years so that only 10-12 years of retirement is state funded.
I agree generally. Though there is an upper limit to how far you can go with that. Healthy life expectancy has not gone up as quickly as overall life expectancy so simply tracking the latter upwards is impractical.
Given a lot of people work part time in their sixties, why not phase the state pension in?
Maybe 20% at 64, 50% at 66, 80% at 68, 100% at 70?
Seems we are being invited to reduce our peak energy use as the windfarms are becalmed by the cold weather
And yet the demand is for even more windfarms when we really need nuclear and tidal to guarantee constant energy supply if we end gas usage
It could be a very long time until we can dispense with gas
We obviously can't dispense with gas, or coal for that matter. The idea is to vastly reduce it during windy and sunny times, or even storing gas/coal for intermittent use. And yes, developing Nuclear as well. It's called a mixed system. We should never put all our eggs in one basket. Obviously there is a demand for more wind farms, like all other sources!
I am in favour of additional wind generation but it does depend on 'wind' and often in very cold weather the wind is not at all reliable as we are seeing just now
Storage when there is wind?
I would assume storage has a role to play
Interestingly under today’s calm cold conditions we are currently generating 5.3gw of wind power, which is greater than our nuclear generation.
Whilst more wind power doesn’t eliminate the problem of intermittency it certainly reduces it. With 4x the current capacity (perfectly feasible especially with new larger turbines coming on) we’d be generating half of our electricity from wind even on a still, high demand night like tonight.
We need more wind (much much more), more solar with built in battery storage, more nuclear, further progress on energy efficiency, more cross border interconnecters to balance European supply and demand, more grid scale storage of various types, and backup gas generation until such time as it’s no longer needed.
I'm sorry but this post is utter rubbish - both according to basic logic, and current real life. All these wind providers must be paid. They get paid to shut off when their power is too much for the grid - currently hundreds of millions a year. The capacity increase you're proposing would propel constraint payments into the stratosphere, all only for half of electricity supply on a low wind night? It's power generation for the severely numerically-challenged. Your barmy theories are why UK energy production is in its pitiful state.
I’m proud to know that my PB posts have had such a profound and important impact on our power system.
We’ve gone over the subsidy and constraint payment canard dozens of times on here before yet you always end up stating the same assumptions.
Constraint payments are a feature of regional imbalances, not national surplus, and insufficient grid carriage capacity largely because sometimes more wind power is generated in the North and Scotland than the grid capacity able to carry it South. Until recently it had to make its way down the equivalent of narrow b roads. The issue is being actively addressed by investment from national grid. Ie they are building big cables to carry the power to where it’s needed.
A lot of anti wind rhetoric seems to take one little issue (take your pick: planning eyesore birds being hit by blades, what about when it’s calm, constraint payments etc) and conclude the answer is therefore to stop wind power and spend our money on old fossil fuel technologies instead. This ignores the problems with them (climate change aside there is air pollution, geopolitical risk, planning etc) and also ignores the fact that in most case there are solutions to the original issue.
It is not a canard, and my recollection of previous discussions is that when people have dismissed the cost of constraint and subsidy, they have moved on from the discussion pretty quickly after the true figures were brought to the table.
I am aware that in many cases, local grid deficiencies mean wind farms have to constrain - that's why they build them in those locations. The grid can be made more robust, but it will never be a bottomless pit, and the overcapacity you're talking about would result in vastly more problems both locally, and, on windy days, nationally. The UK billpayer would be on the hook for every kw produced, and not produced.
The answer is not to 'stop' wind power, or even 'stop' subsidies (which would have the same effect), but to reorganise the subsidy regime to prevent the worst abuses, and incentivise storage and reselling of power amongst wind providers. Meanwhile, invest in reliable, non-intermittent renewables like tidal, and domestic fossil fuel production to clamp down on imported coal, gas and timber, which add even more carbon to the atmosphere. Not increase the issue four-fold ffs.
I didn’t spot that in the previous thread. Much of it is sensible and I don’t disagree. Until the last couple of sentences.
Domestic fossil fuel resources are almost all not financially viable and will become less so. The one exception being existing North Sea oil and gas fields some of which are still viable, and probably have a few years of production left. And as a result they continue to be exploited.
Multiplying wind power, our biggest natural energy resource, remains the cheapest way to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and if there is infrastructure investment needed to tackle constraint issues (as there already has been, as well as improved grid balancing) and ramp up storage then great, get on with investing. Every growing technology comes up against constraints: when cars multiplied we got congestion so built motorways, when industry took off we got pollution so introduced environmental regulations, indeed the national grid and its vast arrays of pylons were put in place to ensure the country could balance supply and demand.
Adding more wind now, without the storage options in place, is an inefficient use of financial resources. The current mix has too much wind, which is why we had to see (thankfully voluntary) domestic power rationing yesterday when it was cold and calm.
Investment in storage needs to be the priority, alongside more reliable baseline power such as SMR and tidal. Then more wind can be added, including export connector options for the windy days.
And if we had no wind power then yesterday would have given us rolling blackouts. If we had 4x as much wind capacity there would have been no rationing yesterday. The more wind turbines we install the lower the impact of intermittency. More power = good.
The younger generation have been royally screwed .
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
Another idiotic comment. Granny and Grandad grew up in an age when only 10% or so were able to stay in education past the age of 18 - with only 4% going to university. Now that number is just under 40%. The young today have far more opportunity to study than granny and grandad ever did.
Grannie and grandad allegedly would do anything for the grandkids so we’re told. They clearly ignored their wishes and decided to limit the horizons and freedoms of their grandkids. Perhaps they’ll think twice when there’s no care worker to wipe their arse!
Still blubbering about your beloved EU? Sad idiot.
I’m perfectly happy thanks . I still have my freedom of movement ! It’s a shame most younger people have now lost that .
Simply a return to the way it was when those Grannies and Grandads you so despise and blame for all these ills were young.
Which is part of why the age cohort who voted for it so disproportionately is so resented by the young who voted against it. Why would the young not blame them for that ?
Because it is a pointless and ill informed attitude. It is, quite literally, the ignorance of youth.
Pointless, perhaps; the rest, not so much.
You could say much the same, just as fairly, for most of the older cohort who voted for Brexit. The ignorance and entrenched prejudice of old age.
The only difference is that the young have not left the problems for the old to someday solve.
It is particularly problematic when the long term trajectory of the country is so divided on age lines. No wonder the young feel so alienated from politics.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
It would be nice to think so, but I think there's a tendency for the younger hardcore male misogynists to hide away at home on the internet. Also misogynist men are more likely to bias their interactions with women to ignore women older than them.
We need to see more online people who can be positive role models for this disaffected youth. They need to be following more people like Dr Jordan Peterson, and fewer people like Andrew Tate.
Banning the negative influences from social media doesn’t work though, the likes of Tate and Alex Jones treat being banned as a badge of honour, and their following becomes more hardcore and underground as a result. Thankfully, Tate appears to have gone well over the line in real life, and is likely to end up spending a lot more time in a Romanian jail than he has already.
Dr Jordan Peterson comes across to me as a bit of an @sshat - though I can see why people like him.
One problem with t'Internet is that people give their views and not information; or if they do give information, they give only the information that fits their views. PB is good because of the wide range of views, and the generally healthy debate that surrounds it.
As an aside, a couple of years ago I listened to a podcast series about Napoleon, someone I did not know much about. The hosts were two uber-fans of Napoleon and, as you can imagine, the series was very biased. They had no counter-voices, and when they did touch on criticism of Napoleon, they hand-waved it away. At the end of the series, I felt like I did not really know Napoleon at all; all I knew was a fanboi interpretation of him.
One of the problems with the Internet is exactly that: little rooms where people agree all the time. One of the reasons I still keep inn touch on FB with the person I mentioned earlier is so that I can hear his views, however outrageous and nasty I think they are. It helps that I also quite like him...
I’m 31 in a few weeks and I personally don’t really care about the retirement age being raised. From my mid-teens I’ve never expected to receive a state pension, and touch wood hopefully I don’t need it.
As a 34 year old, my baseline assumption is a state retirement age of 70. And I wouldn't be surprised or upset if it was higher still - it should be rising at least as quickly as people are living longer.
I do think politicians should set a pace of increase in advance that is quick enough and relatively stable such that people can plan accordingly in advance.
I’m 45, and have always thought 70 was where we were heading.
I’ve also lived abroad for a decade, and have been paying extra NI contributions. It’s quite likely that the NI contribution years required for a full pension will rise over time, mostly because it’s a ‘stealth’ change that won’t be noticed, but saves quite a bit of money.
I’m also married to a foreigner who has never lived in the UK, which presents further difficulties. In short, I’m not expecting much, and am planning accordingly.
Kind of a nonsensical comment. By the time they retire they will be old people.
Moreover when the pension was introduced in 1925 to be paid at age 65, average life expectancy was 58. When the payment of pension was linked to retirement in 1948 average life expectancy was 67. Today average life expectancy is 81.
So it hardly seems unreasonable to expect people to work longer for their pension given average life expectancy has moved from 7 years before pension age to 16 years after it.
But they need to raise the pension age now not in 13 years when all of their voters have already retired at the lower age. 68 for men and 70 for women, adjusted every 5 years so that only 10-12 years of retirement is state funded.
I agree generally. Though there is an upper limit to how far you can go with that. Healthy life expectancy has not gone up as quickly as overall life expectancy so simply tracking the latter upwards is impractical.
Given a lot of people work part time in their sixties, why not phase the state pension in?
Maybe 20% at 64, 50% at 66, 80% at 68, 100% at 70?
It varies with who works part time. Much easier for some jobs than others, in particular easier for white collar jobs where you can work from home.
Kind of a nonsensical comment. By the time they retire they will be old people.
Moreover when the pension was introduced in 1925 to be paid at age 65, average life expectancy was 58. When the payment of pension was linked to retirement in 1948 average life expectancy was 67. Today average life expectancy is 81.
So it hardly seems unreasonable to expect people to work longer for their pension given average life expectancy has moved from 7 years before pension age to 16 years after it.
But they need to raise the pension age now not in 13 years when all of their voters have already retired at the lower age. 68 for men and 70 for women, adjusted every 5 years so that only 10-12 years of retirement is state funded.
I agree generally. Though there is an upper limit to how far you can go with that. Healthy life expectancy has not gone up as quickly as overall life expectancy so simply tracking the latter upwards is impractical.
Given a lot of people work part time in their sixties, why not phase the state pension in?
Maybe 20% at 64, 50% at 66, 80% at 68, 100% at 70?
It varies with who works part time. Much easier for some jobs than others, in particular easier for white collar jobs where you can work from home.
A pretty broad range of people work part time in their sixties, not just white collar jobs.
during fiscal 2020/2021, more than half the population got more in benefits than they paid in tax
Which would be the year when the Covid pandemic was at its peak, when vaccines were only available to a lucky few, and much of the country was shut down.
We don't have more recent data. We certainly don't *know* that more than half the population are still that way.
It’s also fundamentally flawed as analysis
It’s well known that income and expenses change of time. Of course when you are working you will make more of a fiscal contribution than when you are in education or are retired
The analysis should be on a lifetime contribution basis to be meaningful
during fiscal 2020/2021, more than half the population got more in benefits than they paid in tax
Which would be the year when the Covid pandemic was at its peak, when vaccines were only available to a lucky few, and much of the country was shut down.
We don't have more recent data. We certainly don't *know* that more than half the population are still that way.
With the way things have gone frankly I think locking down was the wrong decision. All old people do is tell young people we're feckless and claim benefits. I think fuck them, I put my life on hold for these arseholes and for what?
Society is about a contribution to the greater good not about the individual
Lockdown 1 was justified by the unknown. Lockdown 2 more difficult to justify. With hindsight lockdown 3 was probably wrong
But your hero was calling for harder and earlier lockdowns on every occasion
The reason misogynistic stuff is hard to root out is very simple and PB is as good an example as any other place. Put up a thread about womens' issues and you get discussion about nuclear reactors and football.
And why not? Men never directly experience women's lives because they are men, not women. So womens' issues hold as much interest for them as football and nuclear reactors do for most women.
It is not that men are evil or are trying to keep women down (outside of the Middle East), they just find it hard to be interested in stuff that bores most of them to distraction.
And Cyclefree's choice of a trans-woman with a history of violence against men was an inspired choice for advancing her cause. Not.
My apologies for raising the football without reading the header.
Quite simply, men aren't interested in addressing misogyny. We make excuses instead, or raise the football (sorry again). Or worse still deflect the subject away to "woke" fear about trans men being a way for men to go invading changing rooms and toilets. Because if we're ranting on about this new danger of men dressing up as women to attack women, we don't need to recognise that almost all of these assaults are men dressed as men attacking women, and they don't need to do a frock to go into toilets or whatever and assault / rape / murder women.
Frankly there is a class and intelligence issue. There are plenty of men who are horrified by what they see. There are others who don't know any better, take examples from their parents / uncles, and get this pig ignorance fuelled by tabloid and magazine writers who want to embed the "phwoar" mentality.
We won't fix this in the short term - needs education and peer pressure. But we could start off with some non-twatty blokes leading the way on misogyny the same way others have led the way on mental health. Its now perfectly normal for men to express their feelings - its ok not to be ok - in a way that would have been inconceivable not very long ago. We need to do the same thing but towards women. Call out the behaviour in others when we see it. Make it not ok to be a predatory / handsy / derogatory bloke.
during fiscal 2020/2021, more than half the population got more in benefits than they paid in tax
Which would be the year when the Covid pandemic was at its peak, when vaccines were only available to a lucky few, and much of the country was shut down.
We don't have more recent data. We certainly don't *know* that more than half the population are still that way.
It’s also fundamentally flawed as analysis
It’s well known that income and expenses change of time. Of course when you are working you will make more of a fiscal contribution than when you are in education or are retired
The analysis should be on a lifetime contribution basis to be meaningful
Was it meant to be a meaningful analysis, or a calculation that led to a plausible shock horror headline? One of the authors has a piece in the Times today.
Commenting on the thread header (it’s time someone did), men are used to being in power. Women are threatening this, and some men are unable to accept it. It’s vital that those of us who do accept it ensure that misogyny is called out and rooted out. The SNP example is slightly different, in that it is a political elite who are feeling vulnerable, and are hitting out against all perceived opposition.
Most of the men with women problems that I come across are older than me. Men my age or younger are OK and I rarely experience problems.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
It would be nice to think so, but I think there's a tendency for the younger hardcore male misogynists to hide away at home on the internet. Also misogynist men are more likely to bias their interactions with women to ignore women older than them.
We need to see more online people who can be positive role models for this disaffected youth. They need to be following more people like Dr Jordan Peterson, and fewer people like Andrew Tate.
Banning the negative influences from social media doesn’t work though, the likes of Tate and Alex Jones treat being banned as a badge of honour, and their following becomes more hardcore and underground as a result. Thankfully, Tate appears to have gone well over the line in real life, and is likely to end up spending a lot more time in a Romanian jail than he has already.
Dr Jordan Peterson comes across to me as a bit of an @sshat - though I can see why people like him.
He's very pro Putin. I think he went even more mental and/or became an FSB asset during those mysterious months he spent in a coma on Moscow. He reckons the SMO is justified to prevent the proliferation of gay bars in Russia.
Add that to being a benzo addicted climate change denier who advocates a 100% beef diet and your looking at a fucking crackpot operating in a total moral void. Alex Jones with 15 points less BMI and a post-graduate education.
Seems we are being invited to reduce our peak energy use as the windfarms are becalmed by the cold weather
And yet the demand is for even more windfarms when we really need nuclear and tidal to guarantee constant energy supply if we end gas usage
It could be a very long time until we can dispense with gas
We obviously can't dispense with gas, or coal for that matter. The idea is to vastly reduce it during windy and sunny times, or even storing gas/coal for intermittent use. And yes, developing Nuclear as well. It's called a mixed system. We should never put all our eggs in one basket. Obviously there is a demand for more wind farms, like all other sources!
I am in favour of additional wind generation but it does depend on 'wind' and often in very cold weather the wind is not at all reliable as we are seeing just now
Storage when there is wind?
I would assume storage has a role to play
Interestingly under today’s calm cold conditions we are currently generating 5.3gw of wind power, which is greater than our nuclear generation.
Whilst more wind power doesn’t eliminate the problem of intermittency it certainly reduces it. With 4x the current capacity (perfectly feasible especially with new larger turbines coming on) we’d be generating half of our electricity from wind even on a still, high demand night like tonight.
We need more wind (much much more), more solar with built in battery storage, more nuclear, further progress on energy efficiency, more cross border interconnecters to balance European supply and demand, more grid scale storage of various types, and backup gas generation until such time as it’s no longer needed.
I'm sorry but this post is utter rubbish - both according to basic logic, and current real life. All these wind providers must be paid. They get paid to shut off when their power is too much for the grid - currently hundreds of millions a year. The capacity increase you're proposing would propel constraint payments into the stratosphere, all only for half of electricity supply on a low wind night? It's power generation for the severely numerically-challenged. Your barmy theories are why UK energy production is in its pitiful state.
I’m proud to know that my PB posts have had such a profound and important impact on our power system.
We’ve gone over the subsidy and constraint payment canard dozens of times on here before yet you always end up stating the same assumptions.
Constraint payments are a feature of regional imbalances, not national surplus, and insufficient grid carriage capacity largely because sometimes more wind power is generated in the North and Scotland than the grid capacity able to carry it South. Until recently it had to make its way down the equivalent of narrow b roads. The issue is being actively addressed by investment from national grid. Ie they are building big cables to carry the power to where it’s needed.
A lot of anti wind rhetoric seems to take one little issue (take your pick: planning eyesore birds being hit by blades, what about when it’s calm, constraint payments etc) and conclude the answer is therefore to stop wind power and spend our money on old fossil fuel technologies instead. This ignores the problems with them (climate change aside there is air pollution, geopolitical risk, planning etc) and also ignores the fact that in most case there are solutions to the original issue.
It is not a canard, and my recollection of previous discussions is that when people have dismissed the cost of constraint and subsidy, they have moved on from the discussion pretty quickly after the true figures were brought to the table.
I am aware that in many cases, local grid deficiencies mean wind farms have to constrain - that's why they build them in those locations. The grid can be made more robust, but it will never be a bottomless pit, and the overcapacity you're talking about would result in vastly more problems both locally, and, on windy days, nationally. The UK billpayer would be on the hook for every kw produced, and not produced.
The answer is not to 'stop' wind power, or even 'stop' subsidies (which would have the same effect), but to reorganise the subsidy regime to prevent the worst abuses, and incentivise storage and reselling of power amongst wind providers. Meanwhile, invest in reliable, non-intermittent renewables like tidal, and domestic fossil fuel production to clamp down on imported coal, gas and timber, which add even more carbon to the atmosphere. Not increase the issue four-fold ffs.
I didn’t spot that in the previous thread. Much of it is sensible and I don’t disagree. Until the last couple of sentences.
Domestic fossil fuel resources are almost all not financially viable and will become less so. The one exception being existing North Sea oil and gas fields some of which are still viable, and probably have a few years of production left. And as a result they continue to be exploited.
Multiplying wind power, our biggest natural energy resource, remains the cheapest way to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and if there is infrastructure investment needed to tackle constraint issues (as there already has been, as well as improved grid balancing) and ramp up storage then great, get on with investing. Every growing technology comes up against constraints: when cars multiplied we got congestion so built motorways, when industry took off we got pollution so introduced environmental regulations, indeed the national grid and its vast arrays of pylons were put in place to ensure the country could balance supply and demand.
Adding more wind now, without the storage options in place, is an inefficient use of financial resources. The current mix has too much wind, which is why we had to see (thankfully voluntary) domestic power rationing yesterday when it was cold and calm.
Investment in storage needs to be the priority, alongside more reliable baseline power such as SMR and tidal. Then more wind can be added, including export connector options for the windy days.
And if we had no wind power then yesterday would have given us rolling blackouts. If we had 4x as much wind capacity there would have been no rationing yesterday. The more wind turbines we install the lower the impact of intermittency. More power = good.
Also, we're planning to add a huge amount of electricity demand to the grid, with about 300 billion vehicle miles to be converted to electricity. At around a third of a kWh per mile that's 100 billion kWh of extra demand, or 100 TWh.
This compares to total grid demand of 334 TWh in 2021, so an increase of 30% is required to satisfy electric car use. And then more, a lot more, for electrifying home heating and various industrial processes.
Wind energy produced about 74 TWh in 2022, so we need to more than double wind energy production to keep up with increased demand, let alone displace more fossil fuel generation.
The idea that we should slow down wind power installations now is completely bonkers.
On topic, this is a good and genuinely thought-provoking question that defies easy or glib answers. I suppose perhaps there are two separate questions - why does misogyny exist in the first place, and why do those who see it and know it is wrong not do more to bring it to an end. On the first, it is worth noting that misogyny or at least asigning men and women different roles with women getting inferior roles has been the norm over recorded history so it's probably quite deep rooted in us as a species, like a lot of bad stuff. My observation is that in general women care more about other people than mend do (not all women or men just a generalisation) which perhaps is an evolutionary trait. Maybe this is one reason why a lot of the most antisocial behaviour is carried out by men. The second question is easier to answer - people are cowards. And the people with the worst kinds of behaviour are often the scariest people to stand up to.
Comments
We deserved to lose. Playing in red, ffs.
Government won’t hand over the next tranche, which RR needs, until the design gets Office of Nuclear Regulation approval.
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/fears-over-potential-delay-to-small-nuclear-reactor-rollout-09-01-2023/
A quango under the auspices of … the DWP ?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_for_Nuclear_Regulation
Tbf, new nuclear designs obviously require regulation, but a quick scan of their website does suggest a distinct lack of unrgency.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-64380066
Revealed: UK government helped sanctioned Putin ally sue British journalist
UK Treasury, then under Rishi Sunak’s control, let Yevgeny Prigozhin circumvent sanctions to target Eliot Higgins
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/prigozhin-government-russia-ukraine-hack-libel-slapp/
"No one has the right to humiliate the saints," said Mr Erdogan in his televised remarks on Monday.
"When we say something, we say it honestly, and when someone dishonours us, we put them in their place."
Defence Minister Hulusi Akar said Turkey cancelled a visit by his Swedish counterpart Pal Jonson after "observing that no measures were taken over the... disgusting protests".
Labour line no longer turning down so much - it's now almost bang flat since early December.
The trend lines are usually over sensitive to the latest polls and always get revised when new polls come out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
Moreover when the pension was introduced in 1925 to be paid at age 65, average life expectancy was 58.
When the payment of pension was linked to retirement in 1948 average life expectancy was 67.
Today average life expectancy is 81.
So it hardly seems unreasonable to expect people to work longer for their pension given average life expectancy has moved from 7 years before pension age to 16 years after it.
I think now that 15% of teenage girls identify as bisexuality or lesbian, and I understand why. A lot of men are bastards. Increasingly too the Trans community is not M to F, but F to M at young ages. That is a bit more alien to me, but does speak of how difficult being female can be.
Student debt , unaffordable homes , extortionate rents . Meanwhile grannie and grandad were able to study , afford a home and retire at 60 and 65 . Grannie and grandad then decided to stick the knife in by robbing their grand children of freedom of movement.
The bunch of pensioner Leavers should be ashamed !
I am in no rush to retire. I recently saw a farmer, 86 years old with a serious life threatening condition. I tinkered with his medication and asked to see him in February. He asked if it would be OK to leave it until March, as in February he will be busy lambing. He said to me "I would rather wear out than rust out" , so I agreed. I feel the same and won't call it a day until I feel that I am not doing a decent job, even if I do cut my hours back.
And why not? Men never directly experience women's lives because they are men, not women. So womens' issues hold as much interest for them as football and nuclear reactors do for most women.
It is not that men are evil or are trying to keep women down (outside of the Middle East), they just find it hard to be interested in stuff that bores most of them to distraction.
And Cyclefree's choice of a trans-woman with a history of violence against men was an inspired choice for advancing her cause. Not.
Generalising always creates a queue of "what-aboutery" on PB but I would say that the old fashioned type of misogynistic SOB is generally over 70 and rapidly becoming extinct.
If it is down to incels and weirdos nowadays, that is progress.
"Spare a thought for the phoneless
People without smartphones are one of the few minority groups it’s acceptable to discriminate against
Daniel Raven"
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/23/spare-a-thought-for-the-phoneless/
He is very much a leftist and Corbynite, although now a green due to Corbyn being chucked out of Labour.
Why would the young not blame them for that ?
I know I keep saying it, but whatever one might think of Boris Johnson, he’s always been right about Ukraine, and everyone needs to up their game and win this war. Yes, Herr Scholz, that includes you. Get the tanks rolling East.
I don’t disagree that society has changes massively in this respect, but look for example at the Republican party in the US. That’s an entire social movement, with widespread support, in the other direction.
I doubt if the grandparents had life as easy as you think.
You could just as well say it’s the increased exposure of the young to phthalates and similar endocrine disrupters.
We really don’t know.
Investment in storage needs to be the priority, alongside more reliable baseline power such as SMR and tidal. Then more wind can be added, including export connector options for the windy days.
Can ChatGPT do physics?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBtfwa-Fexc
Fed exam questions from GCSE to degree level, ChatGPT gets the right answer for the wrong reason, the wrong answer for the right reason, and that's enough spoilers.
17% of Stanford students admit to using ChatGPT or similar bots, in assessed work.
https://stanforddaily.com/2023/01/22/scores-of-stanford-students-used-chatgpt-on-final-exams-survey-suggests/
Anti-plagarism software TurnItIn to develop tools for universities to detect AI writing in submitted essays and exams.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/23/turnitin_chatgpt_detector/
FYI, a couple of interesting (🤓) tables on income #tax from #HMRC (basically showing 'the rich' *are* paying more tax)...
1. the % shares of total income tax paid by different income groups (the shares paid by the top 10%, 5% and 1% have all risen over the last decade... (1/2)
2. the percentage shares of total income for each percentile group (these haven't changed much over the last decade, meaning that higher earners are paying more #tax on roughly the same share of income). (2/2)
https://twitter.com/julianhjessop/status/1617601327856586752
There is meta analysis into this too:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.641919/full
And from your first link, things are not quite as bad as they seem:-
Of those 17%, a majority reported using the AI only for brainstorming and outlining. Only about 5% reported having submitted written material directly from ChatGPT with little to no edits, according to the poll.
https://stanforddaily.com/2023/01/22/scores-of-stanford-students-used-chatgpt-on-final-exams-survey-suggests/
To bring this thread back on topic, since continuous assessment is said to favour girls, and exams boys, then if ChatGPT provokes limits on the former, or just allows boys to bridge the gap, then both ChatGPT and crude countermeasures might be seen as misogynistic. The devil will be in the detail.
Then again, by the time he reaches that age, the world will have changed again.
The more wind you add to the grid the greater the economic incentive to add storage, because you will have a larger surplus of wind energy more often. Trying to do it the other way round is a recipe for the people installing energy storage to lose money.
41 likes to 1.1 million views = a 0.004% like rate. I have no idea what calculation lies behind the continuing silence and inaction from the Labour leadership here, but presumably not this one.
https://twitter.com/LucyHunterB/status/1617697774442786816
In fairness it’s now 45 likes…..and 1.3 million views…and Labour’s spin doctor has been caught in a lie:
Rosie Duffield, an ex-assistant teacher, single mother and survivor of domestic abuse, won @UKLabour a seat they thought was unwinnable. Post-Corbyn, she was returned to parliament with an increased majority.
This is how Labour repays her.
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1617586725030592520?
This is rumbling on. Couple of inaccurate comments from this chap (unsure how he thinks he knows so much about my constituency as no Labour leader has been there since I became an MP?). Also, no, I haven't been in to see Keir Starmer 'a number of times', once - in September 2021.
https://twitter.com/RosieDuffield1/status/1617499864241426432
https://www.channel5.com/show/stock-aitken-waterman-legends-of-pop/season-1/stock-aitken-waterman
Banning the negative influences from social media doesn’t work though, the likes of Tate and Alex Jones treat being banned as a badge of honour, and their following becomes more hardcore and underground as a result. Thankfully, Tate appears to have gone well over the line in real life, and is likely to end up spending a lot more time in a Romanian jail than he has already.
The Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial is set to resume. Dominic PEZZOLA is asking the judge to prevent prosecutors from introducing a, 11-page Proud Boys rulebook that was seized from his home, which includes gems like this..
https://mobile.twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1617521931351216128
Former minister: “he’s toast”
Former cabinet minister: “I’… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1617769589018087426
I do think politicians should set a pace of increase in advance that is quick enough and relatively stable such that people can plan accordingly in advance.
Miss Vance, culturally bound 'fashions' of mental illness have been around for a while, though. Anorexia is one example, from the superthin models of the 1990s.
That's not to say social media can't replicate that effect or make it worse, of course.
On pensions: governments will never have a higher age for women than men.
You could say much the same, just as fairly, for most of the older cohort who voted for Brexit.
The ignorance and entrenched prejudice of old age.
The only difference is that the young have not left the problems for the old to someday solve.
Maybe 20% at 64, 50% at 66, 80% at 68, 100% at 70?
One problem with t'Internet is that people give their views and not information; or if they do give information, they give only the information that fits their views. PB is good because of the wide range of views, and the generally healthy debate that surrounds it.
As an aside, a couple of years ago I listened to a podcast series about Napoleon, someone I did not know much about. The hosts were two uber-fans of Napoleon and, as you can imagine, the series was very biased. They had no counter-voices, and when they did touch on criticism of Napoleon, they hand-waved it away. At the end of the series, I felt like I did not really know Napoleon at all; all I knew was a fanboi interpretation of him.
One of the problems with the Internet is exactly that: little rooms where people agree all the time. One of the reasons I still keep inn touch on FB with the person I mentioned earlier is so that I can hear his views, however outrageous and nasty I think they are. It helps that I also quite like him...
I’ve also lived abroad for a decade, and have been paying extra NI contributions. It’s quite likely that the NI contribution years required for a full pension will rise over time, mostly because it’s a ‘stealth’ change that won’t be noticed, but saves quite a bit of money.
I’m also married to a foreigner who has never lived in the UK, which presents further difficulties. In short, I’m not expecting much, and am planning accordingly.
It’s well known that income and expenses change of time. Of course when you are working you will make more of a fiscal contribution than when you are in education or are retired
The analysis should be on a lifetime contribution basis to be meaningful
Lockdown 1 was justified by the unknown. Lockdown 2 more difficult to justify. With hindsight lockdown 3 was probably wrong
But your hero was calling for harder and earlier lockdowns on every occasion
Quite simply, men aren't interested in addressing misogyny. We make excuses instead, or raise the football (sorry again). Or worse still deflect the subject away to "woke" fear about trans men being a way for men to go invading changing rooms and toilets. Because if we're ranting on about this new danger of men dressing up as women to attack women, we don't need to recognise that almost all of these assaults are men dressed as men attacking women, and they don't need to do a frock to go into toilets or whatever and assault / rape / murder women.
Frankly there is a class and intelligence issue. There are plenty of men who are horrified by what they see. There are others who don't know any better, take examples from their parents / uncles, and get this pig ignorance fuelled by tabloid and magazine writers who want to embed the "phwoar" mentality.
We won't fix this in the short term - needs education and peer pressure. But we could start off with some non-twatty blokes leading the way on misogyny the same way others have led the way on mental health. Its now perfectly normal for men to express their feelings - its ok not to be ok - in a way that would have been inconceivable not very long ago. We need to do the same thing but towards women. Call out the behaviour in others when we see it. Make it not ok to be a predatory / handsy / derogatory bloke.
Add that to being a benzo addicted climate change denier who advocates a 100% beef diet and your looking at a fucking crackpot operating in a total moral void. Alex Jones with 15 points less BMI and a post-graduate education.
This compares to total grid demand of 334 TWh in 2021, so an increase of 30% is required to satisfy electric car use. And then more, a lot more, for electrifying home heating and various industrial processes.
Wind energy produced about 74 TWh in 2022, so we need to more than double wind energy production to keep up with increased demand, let alone displace more fossil fuel generation.
The idea that we should slow down wind power installations now is completely bonkers.
The second question is easier to answer - people are cowards. And the people with the worst kinds of behaviour are often the scariest people to stand up to.