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It’ll be hard for Sunak to hang on unless this changes – politicalbetting.com
It’ll be hard for Sunak to hang on unless this changes – politicalbetting.com
We need to remind ourselves that the general election is getting closer by the day and the amount of time that Sunak has to play with is getting smaller. The rate rises are going to hit a huge proportion of the population and many families will likely feel poorer as a result.
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The Instagram thing was definitely what did for Threads. My Instagram persona (well the two of them, the vineyard and the French barn conversion) are completely separate from my 2 Twitter personas or indeed my Linkedin or PB ones. My vineyard twitter is a different style and voice to my vineyard Insta. Zuckerberg should have understand that people adopt different selves for different platforms.
So Twitter ("X") it is, or maybe just nothing.
Talking of different personas today I experienced the intriguing cultural borderland that is the white peak / dark peak dividing line in Derbyshire. We travelled West from the post-Brexit olde-England land of pies and crown green bowling that is the Derwent Valley into the White Peak heartland of Ashbourne, Thorpe and Dovedale. Still rural yet a different world. The pub we went to contained staff with nose rings and served things like brisket and gin-cured salmon. They even had kimchi. The fonts on the menus weren't in comic sans. A couple of old stone barns we passed had big black framed glass frontages.
And in Dovedale itself, a true sociological oddity. Not sure if anyone's recently been to Dovedale (beautiful little valley owned by the National trust) but by some quirk of recent history it seems to have become a massive pilgrimage site for Muslim families, presumably from Manchester and Birmingham. Inspired I assume by "the Dovedale hike" which is an annual event run by a popular Islamic cleric who walks people through the valley while teaching and meditating on the Koran, or something along those lines. There is a sign at the front forbidding not only barbecues and camp fires, but also "shisha pipes". This makes for one of the most evocative evening walks imaginable. Ambling along by the babbling river in the early evening and passing large groups of picnicking families, women in hijabs and niqabs, men strolling confidently or overseeing the picnics with notably long beards on display, small boys and girls scrabbling up the limestone and dirtying their Shalwar Kameez, it was like being transported into some craggy sunlit pass in the Northwest Frontier or the Hindu Kush. I half expected to encounter Rory Stewart breezily strolling along with his dog. For a fascinating little insight into British Muslim culture on a day off I heartily recommend a trip to Dovedale.
We could have a massive increase in cycling journeys with very little impact on total kilometres. If you want to reduce total kilometres, we are talking trains, buses etc.
That's why for me at least, cycling is not so much of a carbon emissions issue. It's a congestion and other stuff issue.
Why swap Musk for Zuckerberg? Both are evil tossers who enable hate speech on their platforms to get clicks.
Boosting aviation fuel efficiency is a first step before you reach zero fuel.
Currently I believe [correct me if I'm wrong] we levy a fixed fee per traveller as taxation, regardless of fuel efficiency of the flight, and regardless of the number of the seats on the flight.
Thus a hypothetical flight that flies transatlantic 100 people emitting 2000 kg of CO2 pays half the taxation of a tranatlantic flight that carries 200 people while emitting 500kg of CO2.
Despite the fact that the former emits 8x the CO2 per passenger of the latter.
If you want to tackle an externality, you tax the externality, not something unrelated to the externality.
If an airline upgrades its fleet to more fuel efficient vehicles, it should see a reduction in its taxes, just as a fleet of vehicles being upgraded to emit fewer emissions does.
This will encourage iterations of more efficient vehicles, combined with ultimately an encouragement to reach zero emissions. Iteration works, R&D works, with the right incentives.
Air & noise pollution - electric vehicles resolve these, just as much as emissions.
The idea electric vehicles cause air pollution is a lie spread by climate change denialists who want to preserve ICE technology.
Electric cars are so quiet they have a deliberately added noise in order to maintain road safety, so you don't get the revving loud noises of ICE technology.
Pedestrian deaths need to be, and are, improved by better road safety awareness. Both for pedestrians and for drivers.
Congestion is a matter of population demand exceeding capacity. Increasing capacity fixes this.
If population growth occurs, demand goes up, so capacity supply needs to go up accordingly.
Thought so.
I think pedestrian safety is closely related to the speed and weight of cars - physics, innit.
Congestion - this is the one where you really struggle to understand concepts like *space* and *demand*.
For cycling - I missed out reducing obesity and then the most obvious- it's so cheap! That's more money for beer. Or the saving pot for the Tesla.
It is demand that needs to be cut, not UK production.
Travelling 200 miles on the motorway in a car - especially a modern one, and if there's a couple of you in the vehicle - is pretty efficient. (On a CO2 per person per mile basis.)
Travelling half a mile to the store to buy a pint of milk, with all the associated parking hassles and idling at the lights, probably doesn't look so great on a CO2 per person per mile basis.
Not all car journeys have the same CO2 per mile per passenger.
By which I mean there’s a segment of society that would like British towns and cities to be more like some utopian vision of Northern Europe. Pedestrian streets, bikes, trams, svelte young townspeople pottering along the cycle lane with philosophy books in their baskets.
And there is another segment that dreams of a Britain more like Florida or Texas. Wide open freeways, people cruising in big wide sedans and pulling up at the barbecue joint for two pounds of ribs and a bud light.
These are aesthetic choices but they get dressed up in moral codes.
Not that I don't sympathise, but that's Johnny Foreigner for you.
The Balkans. Jesus Christ.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkans
In order to be reaching Net Zero, we are going to need zero emissions vehicles. Which we have invented. If those vehicles are powered by zero emissions electricity, then we have net zero emissions.
200 * 0 = 0
0.5 * 0 also = 0
If we need to reach net zero on the 200 mile journeys, then we also must by definition reach net zero on the half mile journeys too. QED.
https://twitter.com/JamaicaLivenews/status/1686946531843145728?t=N8XZgtRN7Tu3XGhqVMRGgQ&s=19
It is choice, not moral codes.
I am pro-choice. I respect others rights to make their choices, I just ask that they respect my choice to make mine.
In Ethiopia there's children who stand by the road shouting Eylan! Eylan! as you drive past. Turns out this means Highland which is the local bottled water brand, and they are asking you to throw empty plastic water bottles out to them. And these are roads where you can drive all day and not see another vehicle. So these kids are investing a whole (potentially school, if there were any) day in the chance of an empty water bottle.
But whatever, you do the whole private vs first class commercial thing.
I shall found a new social media site, "PB Social Truth", where I guarantee that everybody will be allowed to say Y because of free speech, and prevented from saying Z because of hate speech, whilst setting Y and Z to whatever the fashionable nostrums of the day are. Everybody will love me and say I am wise, while I stab my own hand with a fork and smile at the baying mob.
NY Times
To have that Northern European utopia you need to impinge on motorists’ rights to drive anywhere they want anytime. To have the American automotive dream you need to encroach on space for pedestrians and cyclists.
Or you need extremely wide boulevards, which we don’t really do in Britain.
This is what makes the topic so toxic. Same as nimbys vs house builders: the right to a nice view vs the right to afford a house. Etc
Once electricity is zero emissions, there's no reason not to use it.
And of course charging cars will help tremendously with the transition to zero emissions electricity.
One problem with renewable electricity such as wind, or tidal, or solar, or even nuclear, is that it does not scale to demand (reaching the peaks of demand) and it works when it suits the source regardless of time of day even in the troughs of demand (eg overnight for wind).
To offset that, we are going to need some sort of battery or similar storage to offset demand and supply. And there is no greater distributed form of storage than our cars and the associated batteries they are going to have. That is many TJ of storage, distributed across the nation.
Far from cars being the enemy of a zero carbon future, cars are an invaluable part of the solution. They will absorb the overnight wind power generated, making it viable to scale up renewable generation for the daytime too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro
so what point are you making?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakı
for that matter. Enjoy x
Everybody is allowed to say what they think about pineapple because of free speech, and prevented from saying the truth about radiohead because of hate speech
All you need to do is build wide enough to have sufficient road capacity, and sufficient parking capacity, for your population.
In towns all over our country, that is exactly what is done. 👍
That you don't want that, does not make it impossible.
Cyclists can cycle, drivers can drive, pedestrians can walk, and everyone has their choice respected.
That it wasn't done in the past in Britain is not a reason it can't be done in the future. Indeed it increasingly is done.
Combine new wider roads, with new houses, and new towns, and you solve both our housing problem, and our transportation problems. Everybody wins.
We shall let the electorate decide.
Why is so much of PB is in thrall to the Silver Bullet Fallacy?
(Or, to put it another way, you used to be able to say that about kids by the side of the street in much of Asia. But now they all have smart phones.)
- Trump must not violate federal or state law.
- Trump must appear in court as directed and must sign an appearance bond.
- Trump must not communicate with anyone he knows to be a witness, except through his lawyers or in the presence of his lawyers.
BTW, I am not denying that battery storage is part of the solution, including car batteries. Use your car to boil the kettle when you get home from work, and all that.
What I object to is people in cities wanting their solutions imposed across the entire country. Including towns like mine. Politicians or campaigners who are anti-car, nationwide.
If people who want compact city living riding a bike live in cities, and people who want distributed suburban driving live in towns, and we all get our way, then that is completely fine.
The problem is trying to force one way of living on others. I am pro-choice. I respect others rights to make other choices.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am the sole judge of the accuracy of any statement with regards to Radiohead and their music.
'Asked if they would vote for Trump if he were "currently serving time in prison," 52% of Republicans said they would not, compared to 28% who said they would.'
https://www.reuters.com/legal/about-half-us-republicans-could-spurn-trump-if-he-is-convicted-reutersipsos-poll-2023-08-03/
Cars in the car lane, cycles in the cycle lane. Cyclists are safe, cars are safe, nobody loses.
And just as a car driving majority shouldn't deny cyclists the right to ride in safety, nor should cyclists deny drivers the right to drive. Choice is about personal choice, not the tyranny of a majority.
I don't like the electorate imposing choices on anyone. That is deeply illiberal. The state should facilitate all choices, and let the individual, not the electorate, decide.
The R4 report on the Trump indictment was utterly risible.
For many [not all] existing towns, building bypasses etc to reduce demand on the High Street road, can enable narrower high streets and allow segregated cycle lanes with narrower driving lanes. If there is sufficient space to do that.
" This Mortal Coil - "Song to the Siren" - live "
Watching Close Encounter on BBC4. I thought one of the characters said "the train was just puffing out" but the subtitles said "pulling out". Checked the transcript on the internet and it says that it is indeed "puffing out". Why can't the people writing the subtitles make sure they get it right? Took me about 10 seconds to check it.
https://transcripts.foreverdreaming.org/viewtopic.php?f=955&t=42100
🚨BREAKING🚨 Donald Trump has hired Wayne Rooney to play all the parts of his defence team.
That won’t change this side of the next GE.
While the Bank is not expecting a recession and today upgraded its economic growth forecasts for this year, it also cut them for 2024 and 2025, when it anticipates more feeble growth (Ben Martin writes).
It now expects gross domestic product to expand by 0.5 per cent in 2023, up from its May forecast of 0.25 per cent.
Next year GDP is forecast to grow by 0.5 per cent, down from the Bank’s previous forecast of 0.75 per cent. In 2025 growth is forecast to slow to 0.25 per cent, compared with the 0.75 per cent expected in May.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dbedcf08-31c9-11ee-b04c-88a034803f06?shareToken=dd6925d3bb86d6c6135b350517d5db69
They're not enough to run a "Britain is booming/Don't let Labour blow it" campaign, are they?
For the benefit of doubt I have real work to do tomorrow so....
The answer to the cricket trivia question is that 23rd December 1981 was the day when Geoff Boycott became number one in the list of most test match runs, overtaking Garfield Sobers.
But whatever you do, don't post it. Because that would lead me to the conclusion that you are an idiot.
I am biting my lip with frustration at the fact that we are jumping into options like heat pumps and hydrogen without any thoughts to the expense and logistics, even when those logistics have obvious difficulties and the expenses are obviously large.
Dr. Foxy said: "Countries need to be helped to skip the polluting phase of growth. Indeed many less developed counties are ideal for solar power."
I agree with that -- which is why I was so disturbed by the conclusions in this WaPo article: "About 4,000 solar mini-grids have been installed in India, of which 3,300 are government financed and owned, according to information collected early this year by Smart Power India, a subsidiary of the Rockefeller Foundation, and provided to The Washington Post. Only 5 percent of the government grids are operational, the group found.
. . .
A team of Dutch researchers reported in 2017 that in a sample of 29 solar systems in sub-Saharan Africa, only three were fully working. “The reasons cited for failure always point to the same challenges: an absence of local maintenance expertise and a lack of acceptance,” researchers said in an article published by the Conversation.
An Indian solar expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share closed-door conversations, said that the Ugandan government is seeking international help because 80 percent of its 12,000 local solar connections in health-care centers are out of service. Journalistic reports from Nigeria depict a similar situation."
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/31/india-solar-energy/
I am enough of an optimist to believe these problems should be solved -- and can be in many less developed countries, but I think we -- and they -- are going to have to look harder at what happens before and after the installations.
The Doncaster Cup run the day before is older still although technically not a classic.
I got buzzed by an independent 'live feed' drone last time out and followed it to the launch point on a bit of rough ground nearby. It was a 10k professional job, so obviously the 2 seconds that they get ahead of the official TV coverage is worth their while somehow. Not entirely sure the operator had filled in the required risk assessment...
The policy proposition is that puberty suppressing hormones are not recommended to be available as a routine commissioning option for the treatment of children and adolescents who have gender incongruence or dysphoria.
https://www.engage.england.nhs.uk/consultation/puberty-suppressing-hormones/
*actually I don't know how services are in Japan.
What's your beef with them?
That sounds awful.
Hydrogen is terrible for storage - leaks like crazy. Though it improves quite a bit if you add some carbon atoms. One for every 4 hydrogen atoms is quite nifty.
Separated personas gets in the way of that.
Seems like a bad market to be in if you aren't one of the insiders.
I'm not in that game but you can normally judge quite a lot standing by the stalls at the start of a race. I'm surprised more don't do it.
In general
- i) they're too expensive
- ii) they're not suitable in existing leasehold properties and/or flats, especially for those above the ground floor
- iii) I don't like the element of compulsion
Other people advanced arguments saying they were inefficient/inadequate: I agree with those arguments but they do not constitute my beef.A friend of mine makes a modest living from it without the aid of a drone. He has to compensate with superior race-reading skills.