It’s going to be all culture war, all the time from now till the election isn’t it?
Who knew building a railway to Manchester would promote CRT and self ID, and cause white characters in Charles Dickens novels to get race swapped in film and tv?
Next we’ll find there are EU companies and migrant workers involved in the contracting process.
Police officers are accused of mishandling body-worn video in more than 150 incidents, including switching off cameras and sharing footage on WhatsApp, a BBC investigation has found.
Body-worn video is widely used by police in England and Wales but cases released under freedom of information detail a catalogue of misuse.
While the footage is intended to benefit the public and the police, officers are accused of switching off cameras during incidents and failing to disclose inconvenient evidence they record.
In some incidents where cameras were switched off officers faced no sanctions, with one force saying an officer may have been “confused”, the BBC reported.
Misuse of footage appears to be widespread. The BBC uncovered cases in seven forces where officers shared footage with colleagues or friends, either in person or using social media. In one instance, images of a naked person were shared between officers on email, according to the BBC.
In some instances video was lost, deleted or not marked as evidence.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council’s lead for body-worn video, Jim Colwell, an acting chief constable, said the NPCC would be updating its guidance for body-worn video next month and it would be “more strongly worded to recommend that forces need to take action towards officers who are not using BWV correctly”.
He said the technology was “an important policing tool which helps to provide greater transparency and scrutiny of police powers”.
How have we got ourselves into a situation where individual officers are responsible for handling the footage from their own cameras?
It should be being being sent automatically to a central site, with access strictly controlled. The access logs should be available for review, the integrity of the system should be regularly tested, and any attempt to tamper or interfere with the data should be treated as a crime.
This is really, really basic stuff.
Next you’ll be suggesting that police officers shouldn’t re-write their notebooks after the fact.
That's the point though, isn't it? We know that that sort of thing goes on.
So why, when introducing a new system like BWV, did we set it up to be vulnerable to exactly the same class of problem? And now that it works that way, the police federation will fight tooth and nail against any changes...
Well they've let themselves down bigtime. "Train station", ffs.
Also arguable when the first proper railway station emerged. Didn't the Stockton and Darlington just sell tickets in the local pub, like any self-respecting stagecoach firm?
My understanding from my time in the North East is that the station currently called Darlington North Road was the first railway station. What people at Stockton did, I don't know. Maybe passengers were just dumped in a skip upon termination.
EDIT: Hm. Wikipedia has it that Darlington NR station building was opened in 1842. Which postdates Liverpool Road Manchester and Crown Street Liverpool (1830) by a good 12 years.
Well they've let themselves down bigtime. "Train station", ffs.
Also arguable when the first proper railway station emerged. Didn't the Stockton and Darlington just sell tickets in the local pub, like any self-respecting stagecoach firm?
My understanding from my time in the North East is that the station currently called Darlington North Road was the first railway station. What people at Stockton did, I don't know. Maybe passengers were just dumped in a skip upon termination.
The tweeter seems to be equating railway station with station building for passengers. But that was an optional extra (still is today, unless you count a bus shelter as a proper building). I'll let our NR railway experts opine!
Well they've let themselves down bigtime. "Train station", ffs.
Also arguable when the first proper railway station emerged. Didn't the Stockton and Darlington just sell tickets in the local pub, like any self-respecting stagecoach firm?
My understanding from my time in the North East is that the station currently called Darlington North Road was the first railway station. What people at Stockton did, I don't know. Maybe passengers were just dumped in a skip upon termination.
The tweeter seems to be equating railway station with station building for passengers. But that was an optional extra (still is today, unless you count a bus shelter as a proper building). I'll let our NR railway experts opine!
A railway station is a location where the railway company is stationed. Passenger facilities are not essential for this.
Every analysis of work and why people stay in jobs, comes to the conclusion that salary is just a part of it. A big part, but not the deciding factor, for many.
NHS employment practises and organisation resembles those of the 1970s U.K. car industry. Incompetent and pointless strife everywhere.
When other car companies came to the U.K. in the 80s, they achieved harmony, productivity and a satisfied workforce. All the while, in the legacy industry, the same old nonsense staggered on. And this was with the same pool of workers and management - most of the people working in the new industry were from the old.
An organisation is a machine to help humans achieve things en masse. Ergonomics, anyone?
I'd agree. In the case of doctors, it probably starts from admitting the wrong medical students. Any bright 16-18 year-old on the science side will see medicine as the holy grail, or at least a route to £100,000 a year, whether suited to it (whatever that means, which we do not know) or not. And retention seems to have got worse since the personal statement was needed to get into medical school, which is counter-intuitive but if it is not working, scrap it.
In the case of GPs in particular, we are 950 full-time GPs short, apparently, which likely creates a vicious circle making the work more stressful for those remaining, so GPs and trainee GPs are more likely to drop out, which... and so on.
We know from recent allegations that life for trainees, and especially female ones, can be fraught owing to sexualised banter or worse.
We can see from fly-on-the-wall documentaries that the first problem on a new job is finding out where everything is because no-one in the NHS has thought to label the cupboards, let alone bought windowed doors like your granny had for her saucers in 1956.
And whisper this, sometimes lady doctors want time off for babies.
Foundation years training has to be committed to long in advance, which ought to be unnecessary now we have computers.
Surgical training requires trainees to badger their seniors to be allowed into theatre. This could easily be arranged in advance.
And so on. There are lots of these "small" irritations that could easily be removed but aren't because ministers are more interested in top-down revolutions every five to ten years.
It sounds like Sunak's pre-conference local media round went about as well as it did for Truss last year.
I get that he's nervous, and that he's determined to stick to his talking points - but he really needs to do better when faced with this sort of questioning. His answers are what you might expect from a candidate for a council by-election, not someone with his hands on the levers of power.
I think we need to recognise that Labour's lead has slipped a few points. Nothing too worrying yet, but if the Tories have a good conference we could see that sub-10% point, which in turn may affect the by-election betting.
I think we'd need to see this consistently in more polls to be sure it's not just statistical variation.
Yes, perhaps - the YouGov 5-point bounce for Labour seems to suggest a return to as we were. I think there were enough polls last week to suggest an initial positive impact to Sunak's anti-green stuff, but it may have been quite transient. More polls needed as usual...
There is a remarkable lack of analysis of the latest YouGov poll, in stark contrast to that a few days earlier.
I can't put my finger on why.
Funny old world.
So I am on the YouGov panel and have been working my way up to the 50 quid payment for a while. As I've got closer to the points needed, I seem to get asked less and less. I don't think they want to pay me... Anyone else experience this?
"The ex-partner of a man who suffocated their three-month-old daughter said she feels "let down" and scared to learn of his imminent release.
Simon Smith killed baby Lauren in 1994 in Staffordshire. An investigation led to the grim discovery he had also murdered his two other children.
He was convicted of all three murders and jailed for life in 1996.
Lauren's mother Rachel Playfair said the public would be horrified to know a triple murderer was being released.
The Parole Board confirmed it had directed the release of Smith on licence following a hearing."
Unless we lock 'em up and throw away the key, we shall continue to hear these stories whenever a murderer is released or paroled. Some will say life should mean life, or even death.
For these type of cases it would now be a whole life term if sentenced in the present day.
Since the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act was passed by this Conservative government last year, premeditated murder of a child means judges must give an automatic whole life term order
The issue people should consider more this is the cost of 'throwing away the key'. If you aren't going to execute the prisoner, you have to accept that they have some rights, IE the right not to be murdered or assaulted by another inmate. They need to be fed etc. The cost is I believe about £47,000 per prisoner per year in the UK, but higher in very high security prisons. Even if you got rid of human rights and have poor conditions with jails like in the USA, the cost does not reduce that much (it is something like $40,000 per prisoner per year at federal level).
Maybe we should send them all to private school instead?
On which point, it seems Starmer may agree with me and you:
"Labour drops plan to strip public schools of charitable status"
Let's all agree that Labour has adopted a sensible compromise that raises money to fund education for the majority without being unnecessarily punitive on this persecuted minority.
Good morning
Our son works in this sector and it is clear that the likes of Eton and other elite schools will see little effect as the wealthy will pay it, but there are many more less elite schools who are at risk of losing so many students they may well close with the loss of many jobs, a problem for local state schools having to admit more students, and the loss to the community of a facility that provides bursaries to the poorest and charitable work to and in the community
I do not want to argue over this, but I am seeing it first hand and it is going to affect those fairly normal families who sacrifice considerably to provide their children with the education they want them to have
Furthermore, it will not raise anything like the expected income and is likely to face legal challenges from the sector
So no, I do not accept labour have adopted a sensible compromise as the 20% VAT charge and possibly the cancellation of gift aid will have a detrimental effect on the sector as I have outlined and an adverse effect for their communities and add to the numbers moving to state schools
The IFS have run the numbers and say it will raise a material amount of money, which will help to improve things for the 93% of children who attend state schools. If we're going to trade personal anecdotes, my three children are all at state schools - our local primary, our local secondary and a Sixth form college - and they are crying out for more money, while the party you support so loyally is cutting real terms funding per pupil - so thanks for harming their life chances every day with your support for the Tories.
You need to see what is happening to our grandchildren education here in Wales which is the responsibility of Welsh Labour government, and I simply do not accept for the reasons I have stated the net income to Labour will be anywhere near the figures quoted and may be negative
As an example of the support the school provides to the community they allow him all the time he needs to fulfil his duties as RNLI crew including attending shouts, extensive time in training and indeed for the three days he has been away in Poole this week at RNLI training headquarters
Both my children had an excellent education in a state sector comprehensive here in Wales. Both went on to graduate with 2:1s which is better than my Desmond (post grammar school).
I have no problem with you sending your offspring to a Headmasters Conference School or one of those Mickey Mouse local private schools, normally prefixed with "St." It's your money, spend as you see fit, but I don't want my taxes supplementing other people's social climbing plans, when that money could be used to fill my potholes or replace the WRAAC in my local hospital or fund teaching assistants for my local state primary school.
And that highlights an interesting issue: the quality of state schools can be just as spotty and varied as that of (say) GP services. One school in a town can be excellent; another poor, despite being only a couple of miles apart.
There's a significant chance that some increased funding goes to the 'excellent' school; perhaps because results matter, or the parents, PTA and staff are much more inclined to fight for the funding.
I don't expect Labour to improve education much where it matters: at the bottom end of attainment, because the problems are really difficult and much depends on parenting. I don't expect the Conservatives or Lib Dems to do much there, either.
Funding following pupils sounds great but means unpopular schools decline in a vicious circle. Maintaining funding would mean staff/student ratios in unpopular schools will improve, which will organically improve both their standards and their standing. Both parties' obsession with faux-marketisation of public services needs to end.
It’s going to be all culture war, all the time from now till the election isn’t it?
Who knew building a railway to Manchester would promote CRT and self ID, and cause white characters in Charles Dickens novels to get race swapped in film and tv?
Exporting weird ideas to the provinces from that there London. If they do stage 2, before you know it Manchester will be voting Labour and considering congestion/pollution charges
Every analysis of work and why people stay in jobs, comes to the conclusion that salary is just a part of it. A big part, but not the deciding factor, for many.
NHS employment practises and organisation resembles those of the 1970s U.K. car industry. Incompetent and pointless strife everywhere.
When other car companies came to the U.K. in the 80s, they achieved harmony, productivity and a satisfied workforce. All the while, in the legacy industry, the same old nonsense staggered on. And this was with the same pool of workers and management - most of the people working in the new industry were from the old.
An organisation is a machine to help humans achieve things en masse. Ergonomics, anyone?
I'd agree. In the case of doctors, it probably starts from admitting the wrong medical students. Any bright 16-18 year-old on the science side will see medicine as the holy grail, or at least a route to £100,000 a year, whether suited to it (whatever that means, which we do not know) or not. And retention seems to have got worse since the personal statement was needed to get into medical school, which is counter-intuitive but if it is not working, scrap it.
In the case of GPs in particular, we are 950 full-time GPs short, apparently, which likely creates a vicious circle making the work more stressful for those remaining, so GPs and trainee GPs are more likely to drop out, which... and so on.
We know from recent allegations that life for trainees, and especially female ones, can be fraught owing to sexualised banter or worse.
We can see from fly-on-the-wall documentaries that the first problem on a new job is finding out where everything is because no-one in the NHS has thought to label the cupboards, let alone bought windowed doors like your granny had for her saucers in 1956.
And whisper this, sometimes lady doctors want time off for babies.
Foundation years training has to be committed to long in advance, which ought to be unnecessary now we have computers.
Surgical training requires trainees to badger their seniors to be allowed into theatre. This could easily be arranged in advance.
And so on. There are lots of these "small" irritations that could easily be removed but aren't because ministers are more interested in top-down revolutions every five to ten years.
BIB. Don't whisper this, shout it from the rooftops. Its a feature, not a bug.
Healthcare is increasingly feminised. Arguably nursing always was, but now Pharmacy is trending more and more female too. I just met my new first year tutees (7 of them). It was a shock that 5 were male, as the cohort overall will skew heavily female.
It is an issue to be dealt with that women will have babies and when they do, many of them decide that part time work or even stopping for a few years is what they want. This shouldn't be a surprise, but we should plan for it.
My wife is in her ninth month of maternity leave and will be going back in the new year to a 60% role, rather than 100%. Having babies changes people. Its up to those who plan workforces to understand that and deal with it.
The tree at Sycamore Gap on Hadrian's Wall has been cut down overnight.
Publicity stunt by a popular clothing retailer, to have the place renamed simply as 'Gap'
Seriously though, that's really sad. Whywould anyone do that? I do like the 'we have reason to believe it has been deliberately felled' from the police - given the cut marks it would require extreme carelessness with a chainsaw to have done it by accident!
If this is true then it is an absolute tragedy. Such a beautiful location. What makes people do things like this? This is like what they did to the Crooked House pub.
Absolutely disgusted to hear about Sycamore Gap this morning & that someone has chainsawed down this beautiful tree. I literally cannot understand why someone would do something like that.
Well they've let themselves down bigtime. "Train station", ffs.
Also arguable when the first proper railway station emerged. Didn't the Stockton and Darlington just sell tickets in the local pub, like any self-respecting stagecoach firm?
My understanding from my time in the North East is that the station currently called Darlington North Road was the first railway station. What people at Stockton did, I don't know. Maybe passengers were just dumped in a skip upon termination.
The tweeter seems to be equating railway station with station building for passengers. But that was an optional extra (still is today, unless you count a bus shelter as a proper building). I'll let our NR railway experts opine!
It's yet another definitional issue - like what was the first 'railway'. was it the S&D, or the L&M a few years later? Arguments can be made for either.
But in other news, I rejoice at the work that has been at North Wingfield to preserve it from its derelict state. A very early railway station - 1839 - which is also in a fairly original condition.
The tree at Sycamore Gap on Hadrian's Wall has been cut down overnight.
I'd be open to having a one-off death penalty sentence for the low life that did this if it was done deliberately. If it was done by accident, then I'll accept whole of life jail time.
Every analysis of work and why people stay in jobs, comes to the conclusion that salary is just a part of it. A big part, but not the deciding factor, for many.
NHS employment practises and organisation resembles those of the 1970s U.K. car industry. Incompetent and pointless strife everywhere.
When other car companies came to the U.K. in the 80s, they achieved harmony, productivity and a satisfied workforce. All the while, in the legacy industry, the same old nonsense staggered on. And this was with the same pool of workers and management - most of the people working in the new industry were from the old.
An organisation is a machine to help humans achieve things en masse. Ergonomics, anyone?
I'd agree. In the case of doctors, it probably starts from admitting the wrong medical students. Any bright 16-18 year-old on the science side will see medicine as the holy grail, or at least a route to £100,000 a year, whether suited to it (whatever that means, which we do not know) or not. And retention seems to have got worse since the personal statement was needed to get into medical school, which is counter-intuitive but if it is not working, scrap it.
In the case of GPs in particular, we are 950 full-time GPs short, apparently, which likely creates a vicious circle making the work more stressful for those remaining, so GPs and trainee GPs are more likely to drop out, which... and so on.
We know from recent allegations that life for trainees, and especially female ones, can be fraught owing to sexualised banter or worse.
We can see from fly-on-the-wall documentaries that the first problem on a new job is finding out where everything is because no-one in the NHS has thought to label the cupboards, let alone bought windowed doors like your granny had for her saucers in 1956.
And whisper this, sometimes lady doctors want time off for babies.
Foundation years training has to be committed to long in advance, which ought to be unnecessary now we have computers.
Surgical training requires trainees to badger their seniors to be allowed into theatre. This could easily be arranged in advance.
And so on. There are lots of these "small" irritations that could easily be removed but aren't because ministers are more interested in top-down revolutions every five to ten years.
BIB. Don't whisper this, shout it from the rooftops. Its a feature, not a bug.
Healthcare is increasingly feminised. Arguably nursing always was, but not Pharmacy is trending more and more female too. I just met my new first year tutees (7 of them). It was a shock that 5 were male, as the cohort overall will skew heavily female.
It is an issue to be dealt with that women will have babies and when they do, many of them decide that part time work or even stopping for a few years is what they want. This shouldn't be a surprise, but we should plan for it.
My wife is in her ninth month of maternity leave and will be going back in the new year to a 60% role, rather than 100%. Having babies changes people. Its up to those who plan workforces to understand that and deal with it.
Agree entirely, with both of you.
We need more clinical staff. If women (in particular) are leaving, then we need to find ways to make it more attractive to stay (probably not pay, but more conditions/flexibility at least for docs). The implication from some, apparently, that we should instead focus on recruiting more male medics is... interesting. Halving the recruitment pool doesn't seem smart when you want to increase recruitment overall (and also retention, but we need to recruit more, whatever).
If this is true then it is an absolute tragedy. Such a beautiful location. What makes people do things like this? This is like what they did to the Crooked House pub.
Absolutely disgusted to hear about Sycamore Gap this morning & that someone has chainsawed down this beautiful tree. I literally cannot understand why someone would do something like that.
The tree at Sycamore Gap on Hadrian's Wall has been cut down overnight.
I'd be open to having a one-off death penalty sentence for the low life that did this if it was done deliberately. If it was done by accident, then I'll accept whole of life jail time.
Most death penalty sentences are one off, aren't they? As apparently famously said, most recipients of the death penalty don't reoffend
I wouldn't go so far as to hang the person from the tree (wouldn't work well now, anyway) but would be up for hanging the tree from the person, preferably a delicate area, if male.
If this is true then it is an absolute tragedy. Such a beautiful location. What makes people do things like this? This is like what they did to the Crooked House pub.
Absolutely disgusted to hear about Sycamore Gap this morning & that someone has chainsawed down this beautiful tree. I literally cannot understand why someone would do something like that.
A geoengineering proposal to address global warming. Looks pretty good to me.
https://nephewjonathan.substack.com/p/diy-geoengineering-the-whitepaper ...Global warming, though not ocean acidification, is quickly and cheaply reversed by ejecting calcite nanoparticles (with an average radius in the ~90nm range) into the stratosphere, using a propeller-based system to prevent particle clumping. The particles should be carried up by hydrogen balloons, and very preferably released over the tropics. The total amount needed will be on the order of several hundred kilotons yearly, and the total cost should be somewhere between $1B and $5B yearly.
Let's go through this piece by piece...
Even if the cost is out by an order of magnitude, it could easily be funded by (for instance) the EU on its own.
If it goes wrong, how easily can it be reversed? And who is to judge whether or not it works?
It's OK, you do it over the tropics so if anything goes wrong it's not us who will be affected. Genius!
Can you suggest what there is to "go wrong" ?
Point is that if it works, it works. If it doesn't, it's just a lot of non toxic dust in the atmosphere for a fairly short time. Which happens every time a wind blows across the Sahara.
The reason did doing it in the tropics is that that's where the effect (as we've seen with what happened with the marine diesel sulphur ban) is most pronounced.
What can possibly go wrong with reducing the amount of sunlight reaching areas of the world where people rely on it to grow food and are already often food-insecure... Hmm let me think.
We've already done much the same experiment (unwittingly) while freight shipping was pumping sulphur dioxide aerosol into the atmosphere. Setting aside the ocean acidification resulting (which isn't a thing with this idea) there weren't such effects.
And in any event, the effects of excessive temperatures on crop growth will be far greater than anything resulting from a small increase in solar energy being reflected back into space.
If there are possible objections to the experiment, I think this one is pretty feeble.
Seems a bit risky to me. Why not just decarbonise our economy instead of creating additional potential risks for the poorest people in the world, who have played almost no role in creating this problem.
You're comparing a controlled, measured process with a massive volcanic eruption ?
Sounds a bit bollocks to me.
And not 'instead'; as well as. We need both, since decarbonisation will take too long to prevent serious consequences for precisely those 'poorest people in the world'.
Human meddling has screwed up the planet.
What do we need? More human meddling!
Fecking genius.
I think it sounds something that should be considered, particularly as hoping that the West, let alone China and India, going to all start wearing hair shirts as many green activists would like is just not going to happen. However, in answer to the question "what could go wrong", I would suggest that as the Earth has so many variables then it could result in an extreme "correction" which could, in extremis, lead to rapid cooling. IMHO an ice age would be even less palatable than global warming. Proceed with extreme caution might be sensible.
To be fair, mitigation of the temperature rise through reduced insolation (as proposed here) is less likely to result in an overcorrection than most of the other large-scale geoengineering schemes that have been suggested (such as enhanced weathering).
The big problem is that it would do nothing to stop ocean acidification, so only solves part of the problem.
It's the sort of thing we might want to test on a limited basis, but keep full-scale deployment in reserve to be used only in an emergency situation.
There's some analysis that blames sulphate emissions from North America for an increase in Sahel region drought - which hasn't been so bad since sulphate emissions were reduced. The mechanism is that changing patterns of solar insolation changes patterns of rainfall. Put most simply, less sunlight, leads to less evaporation, leads to less rainfall. But also the large-scale weather patterns are fundamentally created by heating at the tropics and cooling at the poles, and you change that, you change the winds, you move rainfall around.
So my big worry with something like this is that you would mess with rainfall patterns. When you do that you create droughts in some areas and floods in others and, given the immature economies in many countries, famine then follows. No. Just no.
We have the technology to replace all use of fossil fuels. It's simply a matter of investment to replace one set of technology with the other, and that is happening. We could argue about policies that would speed this up a bit, or make it slower, but I'm struggling to see how there could be much significant fossil fuel combustion in the last few decades of this century.
Any temptation to engage in solar geoengineering would be better directed to CO2 sequestration, or speeding up the now inevitable phasing out of fossil fuels.
If this is true then it is an absolute tragedy. Such a beautiful location. What makes people do things like this? This is like what they did to the Crooked House pub.
Absolutely disgusted to hear about Sycamore Gap this morning & that someone has chainsawed down this beautiful tree. I literally cannot understand why someone would do something like that.
That was on my list. I'll never get to shoot that now.
That really is upsetting. Mrs C and I had soem days in a farm near the wall about 25 years ago to explore it and the Gap was a highlight. We were discussing the tree only a few days ago.
A geoengineering proposal to address global warming. Looks pretty good to me.
https://nephewjonathan.substack.com/p/diy-geoengineering-the-whitepaper ...Global warming, though not ocean acidification, is quickly and cheaply reversed by ejecting calcite nanoparticles (with an average radius in the ~90nm range) into the stratosphere, using a propeller-based system to prevent particle clumping. The particles should be carried up by hydrogen balloons, and very preferably released over the tropics. The total amount needed will be on the order of several hundred kilotons yearly, and the total cost should be somewhere between $1B and $5B yearly.
Let's go through this piece by piece...
Even if the cost is out by an order of magnitude, it could easily be funded by (for instance) the EU on its own.
If it goes wrong, how easily can it be reversed? And who is to judge whether or not it works?
It's OK, you do it over the tropics so if anything goes wrong it's not us who will be affected. Genius!
Can you suggest what there is to "go wrong" ?
Point is that if it works, it works. If it doesn't, it's just a lot of non toxic dust in the atmosphere for a fairly short time. Which happens every time a wind blows across the Sahara.
The reason did doing it in the tropics is that that's where the effect (as we've seen with what happened with the marine diesel sulphur ban) is most pronounced.
What can possibly go wrong with reducing the amount of sunlight reaching areas of the world where people rely on it to grow food and are already often food-insecure... Hmm let me think.
We've already done much the same experiment (unwittingly) while freight shipping was pumping sulphur dioxide aerosol into the atmosphere. Setting aside the ocean acidification resulting (which isn't a thing with this idea) there weren't such effects.
And in any event, the effects of excessive temperatures on crop growth will be far greater than anything resulting from a small increase in solar energy being reflected back into space.
If there are possible objections to the experiment, I think this one is pretty feeble.
Seems a bit risky to me. Why not just decarbonise our economy instead of creating additional potential risks for the poorest people in the world, who have played almost no role in creating this problem.
You're comparing a controlled, measured process with a massive volcanic eruption ?
Sounds a bit bollocks to me.
And not 'instead'; as well as. We need both, since decarbonisation will take too long to prevent serious consequences for precisely those 'poorest people in the world'.
Human meddling has screwed up the planet.
What do we need? More human meddling!
Fecking genius.
I think it sounds something that should be considered, particularly as hoping that the West, let alone China and India, going to all start wearing hair shirts as many green activists would like is just not going to happen. However, in answer to the question "what could go wrong", I would suggest that as the Earth has so many variables then it could result in an extreme "correction" which could, in extremis, lead to rapid cooling. IMHO an ice age would be even less palatable than global warming. Proceed with extreme caution might be sensible.
To be fair, mitigation of the temperature rise through reduced insolation (as proposed here) is less likely to result in an overcorrection than most of the other large-scale geoengineering schemes that have been suggested (such as enhanced weathering).
The big problem is that it would do nothing to stop ocean acidification, so only solves part of the problem.
It's the sort of thing we might want to test on a limited basis, but keep full-scale deployment in reserve to be used only in an emergency situation.
There's some analysis that blames sulphate emissions from North America for an increase in Sahel region drought - which hasn't been so bad since sulphate emissions were reduced. The mechanism is that changing patterns of solar insolation changes patterns of rainfall. Put most simply, less sunlight, leads to less evaporation, leads to less rainfall. But also the large-scale weather patterns are fundamentally created by heating at the tropics and cooling at the poles, and you change that, you change the winds, you move rainfall around.
So my big worry with something like this is that you would mess with rainfall patterns. When you do that you create droughts in some areas and floods in others and, given the immature economies in many countries, famine then follows. No. Just no.
We have the technology to replace all use of fossil fuels. It's simply a matter of investment to replace one set of technology with the other, and that is happening. We could argue about policies that would speed this up a bit, or make it slower, but I'm struggling to see how there could be much significant fossil fuel combustion in the last few decades of this century.
Any temptation to engage in solar geoengineering would be better directed to CO2 sequestration, or speeding up the now inevitable phasing out of fossil fuels.
My big worry is that humans have a reputation and track record of trying to fix one problem and making other things worse. Cane toads spring to mind.
I do not necessarily think that something like this would or could happen with this, but you don't know our luck...
I also take issue a bit with the idea that the planet's temperature was "correct" in the pre-industrial age, and that we should return to it, or at least stop where we are. Generally in UK terms more people die of cold than heat (by a long way).
There are global impacts of climate change and we should do everything we can to help countries affected, but we also need to understand that natural disasters have always happened. The best approach is to build better homes in places that won't be flooded out.
The arguments that crops will suffer in hotter weather doesn't really match food production graphs for the last 100 years.
But I still cycle back to - what should the best temperature for the world be?
When our eldest was a youngster he sowed acorns in our front garden and from them we have a greatly admired oak tree which we maintain each year with a tree surgeon
It has been in our garden for 47 years and is very much cherished
There is a remarkable lack of analysis of the latest YouGov poll, in stark contrast to that a few days earlier.
I can't put my finger on why.
Funny old world.
So I am on the YouGov panel and have been working my way up to the 50 quid payment for a while. As I've got closer to the points needed, I seem to get asked less and less. I don't think they want to pay me... Anyone else experience this?
Me too, but I don't think it stinginess, more that they want to use a variety of their pool for surveys, and that seems a good policy.
Palmyra? Buddhas of Bamiyan? Not as important as those, but in terms of the emotional harm and outrage it is going to cause, particularly in the north. It doesn't help that it kind of fits in with the prevailing anti-green narrative.
It’s going to be all culture war, all the time from now till the election isn’t it?
Why not? It gets both sides nicely mobilised.
See how the ULEZ discussion has become warped into love/hate it. The sane approach is that we need a better congestion/pollution charging scheme. There are plenty around the world.
Palmyra? Buddhas of Bamiyan? Not as important as those, but in terms of the emotional harm and outrage it is going to cause, particularly in the north. It doesn't help that it kind of fits in with the prevailing anti-green narrative.
We do not agree very often, but on this we are unified in our horror and condemnation for such an act of vandalism and evil
I have no idea what goes through a mind as sick as this to do this and it must have been planned
I have just showed my wife the photos and she literally burst into tears
Who goes out at night to the middle of nowhere armed with a chainsaw to topple an iconic tree? This, the crooked house pub and similar incidents make me absolutely furious. I never got to see it but it was on my "Want to go" list.
Edit: Noticed that someone must have changed the name in Google already
A geoengineering proposal to address global warming. Looks pretty good to me.
https://nephewjonathan.substack.com/p/diy-geoengineering-the-whitepaper ...Global warming, though not ocean acidification, is quickly and cheaply reversed by ejecting calcite nanoparticles (with an average radius in the ~90nm range) into the stratosphere, using a propeller-based system to prevent particle clumping. The particles should be carried up by hydrogen balloons, and very preferably released over the tropics. The total amount needed will be on the order of several hundred kilotons yearly, and the total cost should be somewhere between $1B and $5B yearly.
Let's go through this piece by piece...
Even if the cost is out by an order of magnitude, it could easily be funded by (for instance) the EU on its own.
If it goes wrong, how easily can it be reversed? And who is to judge whether or not it works?
It's OK, you do it over the tropics so if anything goes wrong it's not us who will be affected. Genius!
Can you suggest what there is to "go wrong" ?
Point is that if it works, it works. If it doesn't, it's just a lot of non toxic dust in the atmosphere for a fairly short time. Which happens every time a wind blows across the Sahara.
The reason did doing it in the tropics is that that's where the effect (as we've seen with what happened with the marine diesel sulphur ban) is most pronounced.
What can possibly go wrong with reducing the amount of sunlight reaching areas of the world where people rely on it to grow food and are already often food-insecure... Hmm let me think.
We've already done much the same experiment (unwittingly) while freight shipping was pumping sulphur dioxide aerosol into the atmosphere. Setting aside the ocean acidification resulting (which isn't a thing with this idea) there weren't such effects.
And in any event, the effects of excessive temperatures on crop growth will be far greater than anything resulting from a small increase in solar energy being reflected back into space.
If there are possible objections to the experiment, I think this one is pretty feeble.
Seems a bit risky to me. Why not just decarbonise our economy instead of creating additional potential risks for the poorest people in the world, who have played almost no role in creating this problem.
You're comparing a controlled, measured process with a massive volcanic eruption ?
Sounds a bit bollocks to me.
And not 'instead'; as well as. We need both, since decarbonisation will take too long to prevent serious consequences for precisely those 'poorest people in the world'.
Human meddling has screwed up the planet.
What do we need? More human meddling!
Fecking genius.
I think it sounds something that should be considered, particularly as hoping that the West, let alone China and India, going to all start wearing hair shirts as many green activists would like is just not going to happen. However, in answer to the question "what could go wrong", I would suggest that as the Earth has so many variables then it could result in an extreme "correction" which could, in extremis, lead to rapid cooling. IMHO an ice age would be even less palatable than global warming. Proceed with extreme caution might be sensible.
To be fair, mitigation of the temperature rise through reduced insolation (as proposed here) is less likely to result in an overcorrection than most of the other large-scale geoengineering schemes that have been suggested (such as enhanced weathering).
The big problem is that it would do nothing to stop ocean acidification, so only solves part of the problem.
It's the sort of thing we might want to test on a limited basis, but keep full-scale deployment in reserve to be used only in an emergency situation.
There's some analysis that blames sulphate emissions from North America for an increase in Sahel region drought - which hasn't been so bad since sulphate emissions were reduced. The mechanism is that changing patterns of solar insolation changes patterns of rainfall. Put most simply, less sunlight, leads to less evaporation, leads to less rainfall. But also the large-scale weather patterns are fundamentally created by heating at the tropics and cooling at the poles, and you change that, you change the winds, you move rainfall around.
So my big worry with something like this is that you would mess with rainfall patterns. When you do that you create droughts in some areas and floods in others and, given the immature economies in many countries, famine then follows. No. Just no.
We have the technology to replace all use of fossil fuels. It's simply a matter of investment to replace one set of technology with the other, and that is happening. We could argue about policies that would speed this up a bit, or make it slower, but I'm struggling to see how there could be much significant fossil fuel combustion in the last few decades of this century.
Any temptation to engage in solar geoengineering would be better directed to CO2 sequestration, or speeding up the now inevitable phasing out of fossil fuels.
My big worry is that humans have a reputation and track record of trying to fix one problem and making other things worse. Cane toads spring to mind.
I do not necessarily think that something like this would or could happen with this, but you don't know our luck...
I also take issue a bit with the idea that the planet's temperature was "correct" in the pre-industrial age, and that we should return to it, or at least stop where we are. Generally in UK terms more people die of cold than heat (by a long way).
There are global impacts of climate change and we should do everything we can to help countries affected, but we also need to understand that natural disasters have always happened. The best approach is to build better homes in places that won't be flooded out.
The arguments that crops will suffer in hotter weather doesn't really match food production graphs for the last 100 years.
But I still cycle back to - what should the best temperature for the world be?
Two points I would make.
1. Change itself is disruptive. You might be able to argue that a different temperature was more optimal, in an abstract way but generally our agriculture, infrastructure and societies have grown up in a way adapted to the current temperature, and adapting to a different temperature would be massively disruptive and a lot of people would suffer during the transition.
It feels like a very Stalinist approach to people to argue that purposefully changing global temperature, with all its knock-on effects will be more optimal for society as a whole. Eventually.
2. Almost all the time it's not temperature itself that is directly the biggest problem, but the impact the change in temperature has on water.
Increase the temperature and you melt ice, you expand the oceans and so then you flood coastal infrastructure and immensely agriculturally important river deltas.
Increase the temperature, see ice melts at the poles, reduce the temperature gradient between the tropics and the poles and you change wind (and therefore rainfall) patterns everywhere. Why do we grow the crops we grow where we grow them? Mainly due to water availability. Mess with that and you potentially wreck our ability to grow enough food to feed everyone.
The felling of the tree is mind-bendingly despicable. Whoever did it needs to be thrown in the cold North Sea, on a stormy night. From a high cliff. Tied in barbed wire
But why? What is the possible motive? Drive a long long way at midnight to carefully fell a tree with a heavy chainsaw. Why??
During our cycle tour across northern England a few weeks ago. My girlfriend gave it a hug.
Saw it just last week. For the far north of England it is probably the single most memorable tree there is. Or was.
I think I'll have to visit the Major Oak next week just in case.
Sycamore will coppice unless someone treats the stump but it is going to look pretty miserable for a good 30-50 years and the shape will never be quite as photogenic.
I have been there but any photographs are probably on slides...
During our cycle tour across northern England a few weeks ago. My girlfriend gave it a hug.
Saw it just last week. For the far north of England it is probably the single most memorable tree there is. Or was.
I think I'll have to visit the Major Oak next week just in case.
Sycamore will coppice unless someone treats the stump but it is going to look pretty miserable for a good 30-50 years and the shape will never be quite as photogenic.
I have been there but any photographs are probably on slides...
I don’t know enough about trees but can’t they replant a fairly mature one? At least give it a head start
The anger about this is off the dial on X. Possibly worse than The Crooked Pub. At least there you could see a hideous, venal motivation
How does the Sun know? They haven't even got any trains yet, never mind run them in rainbow colour schemes.
I believe this all stems from @Leon's journalist friend writing a piece about HS2's woke policies in the Spectator - not the first time I've seen this referred to online, so a bit of a scoop for him I think. Suffice it to say they're extremely woke.
The felling of the tree is mind-bendingly despicable. Whoever did it needs to be thrown in the cold North Sea, on a stormy night. From a high cliff. Tied in barbed wire
But why? What is the possible motive? Drive a long long way at midnight to carefully fell a tree with a heavy chainsaw. Why??
It must have been one of the most iconic and photogenic trees in this country, if not the world.
To cheer me up, what are the others in the UK and further afield? Anyone have any suggestions?
During our cycle tour across northern England a few weeks ago. My girlfriend gave it a hug.
Saw it just last week. For the far north of England it is probably the single most memorable tree there is. Or was.
I think I'll have to visit the Major Oak next week just in case.
Sycamore will coppice unless someone treats the stump but it is going to look pretty miserable for a good 30-50 years and the shape will never be quite as photogenic.
I have been there but any photographs are probably on slides...
I don’t know enough about trees but can’t they replant a fairly mature one? At least give it a head start
The anger about this is off the dial on X. Possibly worse than The Crooked Pub. At least there you could see a hideous, venal motivation
People were tying themselves to trees in Sheffield.
If you had come across them approaching the Sycamore with a chainsaw, what would you have done?
The felling of the tree is mind-bendingly despicable. Whoever did it needs to be thrown in the cold North Sea, on a stormy night. From a high cliff. Tied in barbed wire
But why? What is the possible motive? Drive a long long way at midnight to carefully fell a tree with a heavy chainsaw. Why??
It's not that far from the road. Though you'd need final pedestrian access unless with a quad bike or similar.
The felling of the tree is mind-bendingly despicable. Whoever did it needs to be thrown in the cold North Sea, on a stormy night. From a high cliff. Tied in barbed wire
But why? What is the possible motive? Drive a long long way at midnight to carefully fell a tree with a heavy chainsaw. Why??
It could be trolling.
I've never understood what motivates trolls, but perhaps someone has decided they needed to troll more people in a more dramatic way.
A geoengineering proposal to address global warming. Looks pretty good to me.
https://nephewjonathan.substack.com/p/diy-geoengineering-the-whitepaper ...Global warming, though not ocean acidification, is quickly and cheaply reversed by ejecting calcite nanoparticles (with an average radius in the ~90nm range) into the stratosphere, using a propeller-based system to prevent particle clumping. The particles should be carried up by hydrogen balloons, and very preferably released over the tropics. The total amount needed will be on the order of several hundred kilotons yearly, and the total cost should be somewhere between $1B and $5B yearly.
Let's go through this piece by piece...
Even if the cost is out by an order of magnitude, it could easily be funded by (for instance) the EU on its own.
If it goes wrong, how easily can it be reversed? And who is to judge whether or not it works?
It's OK, you do it over the tropics so if anything goes wrong it's not us who will be affected. Genius!
Can you suggest what there is to "go wrong" ?
Point is that if it works, it works. If it doesn't, it's just a lot of non toxic dust in the atmosphere for a fairly short time. Which happens every time a wind blows across the Sahara.
The reason did doing it in the tropics is that that's where the effect (as we've seen with what happened with the marine diesel sulphur ban) is most pronounced.
What can possibly go wrong with reducing the amount of sunlight reaching areas of the world where people rely on it to grow food and are already often food-insecure... Hmm let me think.
We've already done much the same experiment (unwittingly) while freight shipping was pumping sulphur dioxide aerosol into the atmosphere. Setting aside the ocean acidification resulting (which isn't a thing with this idea) there weren't such effects.
And in any event, the effects of excessive temperatures on crop growth will be far greater than anything resulting from a small increase in solar energy being reflected back into space.
If there are possible objections to the experiment, I think this one is pretty feeble.
Seems a bit risky to me. Why not just decarbonise our economy instead of creating additional potential risks for the poorest people in the world, who have played almost no role in creating this problem.
You're comparing a controlled, measured process with a massive volcanic eruption ?
Sounds a bit bollocks to me.
And not 'instead'; as well as. We need both, since decarbonisation will take too long to prevent serious consequences for precisely those 'poorest people in the world'.
Human meddling has screwed up the planet.
What do we need? More human meddling!
Fecking genius.
I think it sounds something that should be considered, particularly as hoping that the West, let alone China and India, going to all start wearing hair shirts as many green activists would like is just not going to happen. However, in answer to the question "what could go wrong", I would suggest that as the Earth has so many variables then it could result in an extreme "correction" which could, in extremis, lead to rapid cooling. IMHO an ice age would be even less palatable than global warming. Proceed with extreme caution might be sensible.
To be fair, mitigation of the temperature rise through reduced insolation (as proposed here) is less likely to result in an overcorrection than most of the other large-scale geoengineering schemes that have been suggested (such as enhanced weathering).
The big problem is that it would do nothing to stop ocean acidification, so only solves part of the problem.
It's the sort of thing we might want to test on a limited basis, but keep full-scale deployment in reserve to be used only in an emergency situation.
There's some analysis that blames sulphate emissions from North America for an increase in Sahel region drought - which hasn't been so bad since sulphate emissions were reduced. The mechanism is that changing patterns of solar insolation changes patterns of rainfall. Put most simply, less sunlight, leads to less evaporation, leads to less rainfall. But also the large-scale weather patterns are fundamentally created by heating at the tropics and cooling at the poles, and you change that, you change the winds, you move rainfall around.
So my big worry with something like this is that you would mess with rainfall patterns. When you do that you create droughts in some areas and floods in others and, given the immature economies in many countries, famine then follows. No. Just no.
We have the technology to replace all use of fossil fuels. It's simply a matter of investment to replace one set of technology with the other, and that is happening. We could argue about policies that would speed this up a bit, or make it slower, but I'm struggling to see how there could be much significant fossil fuel combustion in the last few decades of this century.
Any temptation to engage in solar geoengineering would be better directed to CO2 sequestration, or speeding up the now inevitable phasing out of fossil fuels.
"We have the technology to replace all use of fossil fuels. It's simply a matter of investment to replace one set of technology with the other, and that is happening."
The real challenge will be to geniunely *replace* the use of fossil fuels. There will be massive pressure to make use of sustainable energy sources AND to use the fossil fuels as well. As sustainable energy gets cheaper and more practical so too will the price of oil and coal.* Our appetite for energy is almost limitless.
*I remember a comment on PB that this won't happen because it will become unprofitable to extract. This can only happen on a very long term effect if left to the free market, as once a few "extractors" give up bringing coal/oil to market, the supply decreases and so the price will hold up.
During our cycle tour across northern England a few weeks ago. My girlfriend gave it a hug.
Saw it just last week. For the far north of England it is probably the single most memorable tree there is. Or was.
I think I'll have to visit the Major Oak next week just in case.
Sycamore will coppice unless someone treats the stump but it is going to look pretty miserable for a good 30-50 years and the shape will never be quite as photogenic.
I have been there but any photographs are probably on slides...
I don’t know enough about trees but can’t they replant a fairly mature one? At least give it a head start
The anger about this is off the dial on X. Possibly worse than The Crooked Pub. At least there you could see a hideous, venal motivation
They should make a stake from the remains of the tree, stick it in the ruins of the Crooked Pub and allow people to come and lob bricks from the ruins at the culprit. Any other mindless vandals can then receive the same fate.
I cannot work out any reason for cutting it down, it doesn’t block a right of way, or block a sea view from a new sandbanks type house - not that they are justifiable but that happens. Just plain disgraceful.
Every analysis of work and why people stay in jobs, comes to the conclusion that salary is just a part of it. A big part, but not the deciding factor, for many.
NHS employment practises and organisation resembles those of the 1970s U.K. car industry. Incompetent and pointless strife everywhere.
When other car companies came to the U.K. in the 80s, they achieved harmony, productivity and a satisfied workforce. All the while, in the legacy industry, the same old nonsense staggered on. And this was with the same pool of workers and management - most of the people working in the new industry were from the old.
An organisation is a machine to help humans achieve things en masse. Ergonomics, anyone?
I'd agree. In the case of doctors, it probably starts from admitting the wrong medical students. Any bright 16-18 year-old on the science side will see medicine as the holy grail, or at least a route to £100,000 a year, whether suited to it (whatever that means, which we do not know) or not. And retention seems to have got worse since the personal statement was needed to get into medical school, which is counter-intuitive but if it is not working, scrap it.
In the case of GPs in particular, we are 950 full-time GPs short, apparently, which likely creates a vicious circle making the work more stressful for those remaining, so GPs and trainee GPs are more likely to drop out, which... and so on.
We know from recent allegations that life for trainees, and especially female ones, can be fraught owing to sexualised banter or worse.
We can see from fly-on-the-wall documentaries that the first problem on a new job is finding out where everything is because no-one in the NHS has thought to label the cupboards, let alone bought windowed doors like your granny had for her saucers in 1956.
And whisper this, sometimes lady doctors want time off for babies.
Foundation years training has to be committed to long in advance, which ought to be unnecessary now we have computers.
Surgical training requires trainees to badger their seniors to be allowed into theatre. This could easily be arranged in advance.
And so on. There are lots of these "small" irritations that could easily be removed but aren't because ministers are more interested in top-down revolutions every five to ten years.
BIB. Don't whisper this, shout it from the rooftops. Its a feature, not a bug.
Healthcare is increasingly feminised. Arguably nursing always was, but now Pharmacy is trending more and more female too. I just met my new first year tutees (7 of them). It was a shock that 5 were male, as the cohort overall will skew heavily female.
It is an issue to be dealt with that women will have babies and when they do, many of them decide that part time work or even stopping for a few years is what they want. This shouldn't be a surprise, but we should plan for it.
My wife is in her ninth month of maternity leave and will be going back in the new year to a 60% role, rather than 100%. Having babies changes people. Its up to those who plan workforces to understand that and deal with it.
I suppose the question this poses is whether it is acceptable to say that a) women are more likely than men to go in to part time working (assuming this is actually true?), and b) that it may be desirable to find ways of getting more men to train as doctors.
The one thing I would observe though is that medicine doesn't seem to be a particularly financially lucrative career, it seems to be highly stressed, particularly given that things will go wrong and it is literally a matter of life or death. There are much easier ways of earning the same amount of money if you are highly skilled. I am aware of some male doctors that I knew at University (20 years ago) dropping out for this reason.
The felling of the tree is mind-bendingly despicable. Whoever did it needs to be thrown in the cold North Sea, on a stormy night. From a high cliff. Tied in barbed wire
But why? What is the possible motive? Drive a long long way at midnight to carefully fell a tree with a heavy chainsaw. Why??
It must have been one of the most iconic and photogenic trees in this country, if not the world.
To cheer me up, what are the others in the UK and further afield? Anyone have any suggestions?
Elizabeth’s oak at Hatfield. Not remotely as photogenic, but in a beautiful place with that gorgeous history…
The giant sequoias in California - obviously. They are so impressive they made me cry
The famous banyan tree growing out of the temple at Angkor Wat. Fabulous
The felling of the tree is mind-bendingly despicable. Whoever did it needs to be thrown in the cold North Sea, on a stormy night. From a high cliff. Tied in barbed wire
But why? What is the possible motive? Drive a long long way at midnight to carefully fell a tree with a heavy chainsaw. Why??
It could be trolling.
I've never understood what motivates trolls, but perhaps someone has decided they needed to troll more people in a more dramatic way.
But how many people would be able to chop a tree down like that without injuring or killing themselves in the process? That's the odd bit about it.
During our cycle tour across northern England a few weeks ago. My girlfriend gave it a hug.
Saw it just last week. For the far north of England it is probably the single most memorable tree there is. Or was.
I think I'll have to visit the Major Oak next week just in case.
Sycamore will coppice unless someone treats the stump but it is going to look pretty miserable for a good 30-50 years and the shape will never be quite as photogenic.
I have been there but any photographs are probably on slides...
I don’t know enough about trees but can’t they replant a fairly mature one? At least give it a head start
The anger about this is off the dial on X. Possibly worse than The Crooked Pub. At least there you could see a hideous, venal motivation
They won't need to replant it. It will sprout like mad unless it is also poisoned.
In the very long term this will actually prolong the life of the tree but I don't think that was the intention.
There's no way to plant a large tree without it blowing down - you just can't get the roots in properly, particularly in the sort of ground available there.
Perhaps it was the Russians in revenge for Sevastopol...but I'd guess at local planning issues.
The felling of the tree is mind-bendingly despicable. Whoever did it needs to be thrown in the cold North Sea, on a stormy night. From a high cliff. Tied in barbed wire
But why? What is the possible motive? Drive a long long way at midnight to carefully fell a tree with a heavy chainsaw. Why??
It must have been one of the most iconic and photogenic trees in this country, if not the world.
To cheer me up, what are the others in the UK and further afield? Anyone have any suggestions?
Elizabeth’s oak at Hatfield. Not remotely as photogenic, but in a beautiful place with that gorgeous history…
The giant sequoias in California - obviously. They are so impressive they made me cry
The famous banyan tree growing out of the temple at Angkor Wat. Fabulous
I’ll try and think of more…
The Oxford Plane. Not at its best here, but I remember visiting and being woken up by my host to go and see it early on a sunny Sunday morning before the traffic came.
How does the Sun know? They haven't even got any trains yet, never mind run them in rainbow colour schemes.
I believe this all stems from @Leon's journalist friend writing a piece about HS2's woke policies in the Spectator - not the first time I've seen this referred to online, so a bit of a scoop for him I think. Suffice it to say they're extremely woke.
I know someone - a gay woman - who used to work for HS2. If being seen as a gay-friendly employer helped them to hire good people, I don't really see why that is such a bad thing. As an explanation for being six times over budget, "woke" doesn't strike me as a plausible candidate, not gonna lie.
The felling of the tree is mind-bendingly despicable. Whoever did it needs to be thrown in the cold North Sea, on a stormy night. From a high cliff. Tied in barbed wire
But why? What is the possible motive? Drive a long long way at midnight to carefully fell a tree with a heavy chainsaw. Why??
It could be trolling.
I've never understood what motivates trolls, but perhaps someone has decided they needed to troll more people in a more dramatic way.
But how many people would be able to chop a tree down like that without injuring or killing themselves in the process? That's the odd bit about it.
During our cycle tour across northern England a few weeks ago. My girlfriend gave it a hug.
Saw it just last week. For the far north of England it is probably the single most memorable tree there is. Or was.
I think I'll have to visit the Major Oak next week just in case.
Sycamore will coppice unless someone treats the stump but it is going to look pretty miserable for a good 30-50 years and the shape will never be quite as photogenic.
I have been there but any photographs are probably on slides...
I don’t know enough about trees but can’t they replant a fairly mature one? At least give it a head start
The anger about this is off the dial on X. Possibly worse than The Crooked Pub. At least there you could see a hideous, venal motivation
They won't need to replant it. It will sprout like mad unless it is also poisoned.
In the very long term this will actually prolong the life of the tree but I don't think that was the intention.
There's no way to plant a large tree without it blowing down - you just can't get the roots in properly, particularly in the sort of ground available there.
Perhaps it was the Russians in revenge for Sevastopol...but I'd guess at local planning issues.
Weirdly I hope there is a motive, and we find the evil villain
The idea it is mindless sociopathic vandalism is even bleaker. But I struggle to see any planning issues all the way up there?!
A geoengineering proposal to address global warming. Looks pretty good to me.
https://nephewjonathan.substack.com/p/diy-geoengineering-the-whitepaper ...Global warming, though not ocean acidification, is quickly and cheaply reversed by ejecting calcite nanoparticles (with an average radius in the ~90nm range) into the stratosphere, using a propeller-based system to prevent particle clumping. The particles should be carried up by hydrogen balloons, and very preferably released over the tropics. The total amount needed will be on the order of several hundred kilotons yearly, and the total cost should be somewhere between $1B and $5B yearly.
Let's go through this piece by piece...
Even if the cost is out by an order of magnitude, it could easily be funded by (for instance) the EU on its own.
If it goes wrong, how easily can it be reversed? And who is to judge whether or not it works?
It's OK, you do it over the tropics so if anything goes wrong it's not us who will be affected. Genius!
Can you suggest what there is to "go wrong" ?
Point is that if it works, it works. If it doesn't, it's just a lot of non toxic dust in the atmosphere for a fairly short time. Which happens every time a wind blows across the Sahara.
The reason did doing it in the tropics is that that's where the effect (as we've seen with what happened with the marine diesel sulphur ban) is most pronounced.
What can possibly go wrong with reducing the amount of sunlight reaching areas of the world where people rely on it to grow food and are already often food-insecure... Hmm let me think.
We've already done much the same experiment (unwittingly) while freight shipping was pumping sulphur dioxide aerosol into the atmosphere. Setting aside the ocean acidification resulting (which isn't a thing with this idea) there weren't such effects.
And in any event, the effects of excessive temperatures on crop growth will be far greater than anything resulting from a small increase in solar energy being reflected back into space.
If there are possible objections to the experiment, I think this one is pretty feeble.
Seems a bit risky to me. Why not just decarbonise our economy instead of creating additional potential risks for the poorest people in the world, who have played almost no role in creating this problem.
You're comparing a controlled, measured process with a massive volcanic eruption ?
Sounds a bit bollocks to me.
And not 'instead'; as well as. We need both, since decarbonisation will take too long to prevent serious consequences for precisely those 'poorest people in the world'.
Human meddling has screwed up the planet.
What do we need? More human meddling!
Fecking genius.
I think it sounds something that should be considered, particularly as hoping that the West, let alone China and India, going to all start wearing hair shirts as many green activists would like is just not going to happen. However, in answer to the question "what could go wrong", I would suggest that as the Earth has so many variables then it could result in an extreme "correction" which could, in extremis, lead to rapid cooling. IMHO an ice age would be even less palatable than global warming. Proceed with extreme caution might be sensible.
To be fair, mitigation of the temperature rise through reduced insolation (as proposed here) is less likely to result in an overcorrection than most of the other large-scale geoengineering schemes that have been suggested (such as enhanced weathering).
The big problem is that it would do nothing to stop ocean acidification, so only solves part of the problem.
It's the sort of thing we might want to test on a limited basis, but keep full-scale deployment in reserve to be used only in an emergency situation.
There's some analysis that blames sulphate emissions from North America for an increase in Sahel region drought - which hasn't been so bad since sulphate emissions were reduced. The mechanism is that changing patterns of solar insolation changes patterns of rainfall. Put most simply, less sunlight, leads to less evaporation, leads to less rainfall. But also the large-scale weather patterns are fundamentally created by heating at the tropics and cooling at the poles, and you change that, you change the winds, you move rainfall around.
So my big worry with something like this is that you would mess with rainfall patterns. When you do that you create droughts in some areas and floods in others and, given the immature economies in many countries, famine then follows. No. Just no.
We have the technology to replace all use of fossil fuels. It's simply a matter of investment to replace one set of technology with the other, and that is happening. We could argue about policies that would speed this up a bit, or make it slower, but I'm struggling to see how there could be much significant fossil fuel combustion in the last few decades of this century.
Any temptation to engage in solar geoengineering would be better directed to CO2 sequestration, or speeding up the now inevitable phasing out of fossil fuels.
"We have the technology to replace all use of fossil fuels. It's simply a matter of investment to replace one set of technology with the other, and that is happening."
The real challenge will be to geniunely *replace* the use of fossil fuels. There will be massive pressure to make use of sustainable energy sources AND to use the fossil fuels as well. As sustainable energy gets cheaper and more practical so too will the price of oil and coal.* Our appetite for energy is almost limitless.
*I remember a comment on PB that this won't happen because it will become unprofitable to extract. This can only happen on a very long term effect if left to the free market, as once a few "extractors" give up bringing coal/oil to market, the supply decreases and so the price will hold up.
In the US, the remaining coal companies are in trouble. Building solar and wind is a better investment for power generation in many states - Texas! - than coal fired power stations.
This has the interesting effect that the coal lobby in politics is shrinking as the money goes away.
Big Wind (ha!!) and Big Solar lobbies are forming…
How does the Sun know? They haven't even got any trains yet, never mind run them in rainbow colour schemes.
I believe this all stems from @Leon's journalist friend writing a piece about HS2's woke policies in the Spectator - not the first time I've seen this referred to online, so a bit of a scoop for him I think. Suffice it to say they're extremely woke.
I know someone - a gay woman - who used to work for HS2. If being seen as a gay-friendly employer helped them to hire good people, I don't really see why that is such a bad thing. As an explanation for being six times over budget, "woke" doesn't strike me as a plausible candidate, not gonna lie.
You need to read the original source article in the Spectator. The Sun has clearly lifted its article from there; likewise the Mail
The felling of the tree is mind-bendingly despicable. Whoever did it needs to be thrown in the cold North Sea, on a stormy night. From a high cliff. Tied in barbed wire
But why? What is the possible motive? Drive a long long way at midnight to carefully fell a tree with a heavy chainsaw. Why??
It could be trolling.
I've never understood what motivates trolls, but perhaps someone has decided they needed to troll more people in a more dramatic way.
But how many people would be able to chop a tree down like that without injuring or killing themselves in the process? That's the odd bit about it.
In the dark too and in windy weather ...
It is a very professional job. That's not something a random troll off the street could do.
The felling of the tree is mind-bendingly despicable. Whoever did it needs to be thrown in the cold North Sea, on a stormy night. From a high cliff. Tied in barbed wire
But why? What is the possible motive? Drive a long long way at midnight to carefully fell a tree with a heavy chainsaw. Why??
It could be trolling.
I've never understood what motivates trolls, but perhaps someone has decided they needed to troll more people in a more dramatic way.
But how many people would be able to chop a tree down like that without injuring or killing themselves in the process? That's the odd bit about it.
In the dark too and in windy weather ...
It is a very professional job. That's not something a random troll off the street could do.
If they do find the person, that person will have to emigrate. It’s that bad
The felling of the tree is mind-bendingly despicable. Whoever did it needs to be thrown in the cold North Sea, on a stormy night. From a high cliff. Tied in barbed wire
But why? What is the possible motive? Drive a long long way at midnight to carefully fell a tree with a heavy chainsaw. Why??
It must have been one of the most iconic and photogenic trees in this country, if not the world.
To cheer me up, what are the others in the UK and further afield? Anyone have any suggestions?
Elizabeth’s oak at Hatfield. Not remotely as photogenic, but in a beautiful place with that gorgeous history…
The giant sequoias in California - obviously. They are so impressive they made me cry
The famous banyan tree growing out of the temple at Angkor Wat. Fabulous
I’ll try and think of more…
There's the The Oak of Honor in Honor Oak Park.
OK, it's south London, but you can't have everything.
What kind of sicko goes to the trouble cutting down a tree like that?
Oh, and Collingwood's Oaks. There was a man with the right attitude. Annoy a Frenchman, plant a tree.
Every analysis of work and why people stay in jobs, comes to the conclusion that salary is just a part of it. A big part, but not the deciding factor, for many.
NHS employment practises and organisation resembles those of the 1970s U.K. car industry. Incompetent and pointless strife everywhere.
When other car companies came to the U.K. in the 80s, they achieved harmony, productivity and a satisfied workforce. All the while, in the legacy industry, the same old nonsense staggered on. And this was with the same pool of workers and management - most of the people working in the new industry were from the old.
An organisation is a machine to help humans achieve things en masse. Ergonomics, anyone?
I'd agree. In the case of doctors, it probably starts from admitting the wrong medical students. Any bright 16-18 year-old on the science side will see medicine as the holy grail, or at least a route to £100,000 a year, whether suited to it (whatever that means, which we do not know) or not. And retention seems to have got worse since the personal statement was needed to get into medical school, which is counter-intuitive but if it is not working, scrap it.
In the case of GPs in particular, we are 950 full-time GPs short, apparently, which likely creates a vicious circle making the work more stressful for those remaining, so GPs and trainee GPs are more likely to drop out, which... and so on.
We know from recent allegations that life for trainees, and especially female ones, can be fraught owing to sexualised banter or worse.
We can see from fly-on-the-wall documentaries that the first problem on a new job is finding out where everything is because no-one in the NHS has thought to label the cupboards, let alone bought windowed doors like your granny had for her saucers in 1956.
And whisper this, sometimes lady doctors want time off for babies.
Foundation years training has to be committed to long in advance, which ought to be unnecessary now we have computers.
Surgical training requires trainees to badger their seniors to be allowed into theatre. This could easily be arranged in advance.
And so on. There are lots of these "small" irritations that could easily be removed but aren't because ministers are more interested in top-down revolutions every five to ten years.
BIB. Don't whisper this, shout it from the rooftops. Its a feature, not a bug.
Healthcare is increasingly feminised. Arguably nursing always was, but now Pharmacy is trending more and more female too. I just met my new first year tutees (7 of them). It was a shock that 5 were male, as the cohort overall will skew heavily female.
It is an issue to be dealt with that women will have babies and when they do, many of them decide that part time work or even stopping for a few years is what they want. This shouldn't be a surprise, but we should plan for it.
My wife is in her ninth month of maternity leave and will be going back in the new year to a 60% role, rather than 100%. Having babies changes people. Its up to those who plan workforces to understand that and deal with it.
I suppose the question this poses is whether it is acceptable to say that a) women are more likely than men to go in to part time working (assuming this is actually true?), and b) that it may be desirable to find ways of getting more men to train as doctors.
The one thing I would observe though is that medicine doesn't seem to be a particularly financially lucrative career, it seems to be highly stressed, particularly given that things will go wrong and it is literally a matter of life or death. There are much easier ways of earning the same amount of money if you are highly skilled. I am aware of some male doctors that I knew at University (20 years ago) dropping out for this reason.
We should encourage men to play an equal role in parenting. If mother's and father's are, on average, taking the same amount of parental leave then there's no temptation to introduce discriminatory hiring processes.
The felling of the tree is mind-bendingly despicable. Whoever did it needs to be thrown in the cold North Sea, on a stormy night. From a high cliff. Tied in barbed wire
But why? What is the possible motive? Drive a long long way at midnight to carefully fell a tree with a heavy chainsaw. Why??
It could be trolling.
I've never understood what motivates trolls, but perhaps someone has decided they needed to troll more people in a more dramatic way.
Yes, some people don't care how much damage they do; for them it's all worth it if it upsets the right people.
Every analysis of work and why people stay in jobs, comes to the conclusion that salary is just a part of it. A big part, but not the deciding factor, for many.
NHS employment practises and organisation resembles those of the 1970s U.K. car industry. Incompetent and pointless strife everywhere.
When other car companies came to the U.K. in the 80s, they achieved harmony, productivity and a satisfied workforce. All the while, in the legacy industry, the same old nonsense staggered on. And this was with the same pool of workers and management - most of the people working in the new industry were from the old.
An organisation is a machine to help humans achieve things en masse. Ergonomics, anyone?
I'd agree. In the case of doctors, it probably starts from admitting the wrong medical students. Any bright 16-18 year-old on the science side will see medicine as the holy grail, or at least a route to £100,000 a year, whether suited to it (whatever that means, which we do not know) or not. And retention seems to have got worse since the personal statement was needed to get into medical school, which is counter-intuitive but if it is not working, scrap it.
In the case of GPs in particular, we are 950 full-time GPs short, apparently, which likely creates a vicious circle making the work more stressful for those remaining, so GPs and trainee GPs are more likely to drop out, which... and so on.
We know from recent allegations that life for trainees, and especially female ones, can be fraught owing to sexualised banter or worse.
We can see from fly-on-the-wall documentaries that the first problem on a new job is finding out where everything is because no-one in the NHS has thought to label the cupboards, let alone bought windowed doors like your granny had for her saucers in 1956.
And whisper this, sometimes lady doctors want time off for babies.
Foundation years training has to be committed to long in advance, which ought to be unnecessary now we have computers.
Surgical training requires trainees to badger their seniors to be allowed into theatre. This could easily be arranged in advance.
And so on. There are lots of these "small" irritations that could easily be removed but aren't because ministers are more interested in top-down revolutions every five to ten years.
BIB. Don't whisper this, shout it from the rooftops. Its a feature, not a bug.
Healthcare is increasingly feminised. Arguably nursing always was, but now Pharmacy is trending more and more female too. I just met my new first year tutees (7 of them). It was a shock that 5 were male, as the cohort overall will skew heavily female.
It is an issue to be dealt with that women will have babies and when they do, many of them decide that part time work or even stopping for a few years is what they want. This shouldn't be a surprise, but we should plan for it.
My wife is in her ninth month of maternity leave and will be going back in the new year to a 60% role, rather than 100%. Having babies changes people. Its up to those who plan workforces to understand that and deal with it.
I suppose the question this poses is whether it is acceptable to say that a) women are more likely than men to go in to part time working (assuming this is actually true?), and b) that it may be desirable to find ways of getting more men to train as doctors.
The one thing I would observe though is that medicine doesn't seem to be a particularly financially lucrative career, it seems to be highly stressed, particularly given that things will go wrong and it is literally a matter of life or death. There are much easier ways of earning the same amount of money if you are highly skilled. I am aware of some male doctors that I knew at University (20 years ago) dropping out for this reason.
On the subject of pay, maybe junior doctors' salaries need to be bumped up more aggressively to avoid young doctors being quite so envious that their old school chums who went into management consultancy, law or finance are so far ahead of them in their careers.
The tree is making me sick at heart. Perhaps we are over-reacting to a tree? Nonetheless it strikes something deep in me. At times like this only poetry can solace. Beauty from destruction
Binsey Poplars - felled 1879
By GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, All felled, felled, are all felled; Of a fresh and following folded rank Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sank On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew — Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender To touch, her being só slender, That, like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all, Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc unselve The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene.
There's a wild hedge near me. Most of it's still there but a few years ago some newcomers who bought adjacent houses hacked it back and, in places, destroyed it entirely (which is technically illegal, I believe). The hedge is reckoned to be 200 years old or so going by the variety of species.
It was there long before those jesters arrived. Hopefully it'll be there long after they go.
The felling of that tree will unite almost everyone against it.
During our cycle tour across northern England a few weeks ago. My girlfriend gave it a hug.
Saw it just last week. For the far north of England it is probably the single most memorable tree there is. Or was.
I think I'll have to visit the Major Oak next week just in case.
Sycamore will coppice unless someone treats the stump but it is going to look pretty miserable for a good 30-50 years and the shape will never be quite as photogenic.
I have been there but any photographs are probably on slides...
I don’t know enough about trees but can’t they replant a fairly mature one? At least give it a head start
The anger about this is off the dial on X. Possibly worse than The Crooked Pub. At least there you could see a hideous, venal motivation
They won't need to replant it. It will sprout like mad unless it is also poisoned.
In the very long term this will actually prolong the life of the tree but I don't think that was the intention.
There's no way to plant a large tree without it blowing down - you just can't get the roots in properly, particularly in the sort of ground available there.
Perhaps it was the Russians in revenge for Sevastopol...but I'd guess at local planning issues.
Weirdly I hope there is a motive, and we find the evil villain
The idea it is mindless sociopathic vandalism is even bleaker. But I struggle to see any planning issues all the way up there?!
The only possible motive would be if a time travelling Roman came forward in time and wanted to rebuild Hadrian's wall and this tree was in the way. Barring that it is pure, mindless vandalism.
Every analysis of work and why people stay in jobs, comes to the conclusion that salary is just a part of it. A big part, but not the deciding factor, for many.
NHS employment practises and organisation resembles those of the 1970s U.K. car industry. Incompetent and pointless strife everywhere.
When other car companies came to the U.K. in the 80s, they achieved harmony, productivity and a satisfied workforce. All the while, in the legacy industry, the same old nonsense staggered on. And this was with the same pool of workers and management - most of the people working in the new industry were from the old.
An organisation is a machine to help humans achieve things en masse. Ergonomics, anyone?
I'd agree. In the case of doctors, it probably starts from admitting the wrong medical students. Any bright 16-18 year-old on the science side will see medicine as the holy grail, or at least a route to £100,000 a year, whether suited to it (whatever that means, which we do not know) or not. And retention seems to have got worse since the personal statement was needed to get into medical school, which is counter-intuitive but if it is not working, scrap it.
In the case of GPs in particular, we are 950 full-time GPs short, apparently, which likely creates a vicious circle making the work more stressful for those remaining, so GPs and trainee GPs are more likely to drop out, which... and so on.
We know from recent allegations that life for trainees, and especially female ones, can be fraught owing to sexualised banter or worse.
We can see from fly-on-the-wall documentaries that the first problem on a new job is finding out where everything is because no-one in the NHS has thought to label the cupboards, let alone bought windowed doors like your granny had for her saucers in 1956.
And whisper this, sometimes lady doctors want time off for babies.
Foundation years training has to be committed to long in advance, which ought to be unnecessary now we have computers.
Surgical training requires trainees to badger their seniors to be allowed into theatre. This could easily be arranged in advance.
And so on. There are lots of these "small" irritations that could easily be removed but aren't because ministers are more interested in top-down revolutions every five to ten years.
BIB. Don't whisper this, shout it from the rooftops. Its a feature, not a bug.
Healthcare is increasingly feminised. Arguably nursing always was, but now Pharmacy is trending more and more female too. I just met my new first year tutees (7 of them). It was a shock that 5 were male, as the cohort overall will skew heavily female.
It is an issue to be dealt with that women will have babies and when they do, many of them decide that part time work or even stopping for a few years is what they want. This shouldn't be a surprise, but we should plan for it.
My wife is in her ninth month of maternity leave and will be going back in the new year to a 60% role, rather than 100%. Having babies changes people. Its up to those who plan workforces to understand that and deal with it.
I suppose the question this poses is whether it is acceptable to say that a) women are more likely than men to go in to part time working (assuming this is actually true?), and b) that it may be desirable to find ways of getting more men to train as doctors.
The one thing I would observe though is that medicine doesn't seem to be a particularly financially lucrative career, it seems to be highly stressed, particularly given that things will go wrong and it is literally a matter of life or death. There are much easier ways of earning the same amount of money if you are highly skilled. I am aware of some male doctors that I knew at University (20 years ago) dropping out for this reason.
We should encourage men to play an equal role in parenting. If mother's and father's are, on average, taking the same amount of parental leave then there's no temptation to introduce discriminatory hiring processes.
There's an argument for making it mandatory for both parents to take time off work when they have a baby. A rather tricky argument, admittedly, but something along those lines.
Mr. Password, you can encourage men and women to have equal leave but men won't take it in the same numbers. It's a good thing to have that equal possibility, but for the most part men are career-focused and women are family-focused.
Little girls are allowed to own toy guns. And yet it's little boys who have them on their Christmas list.
Every analysis of work and why people stay in jobs, comes to the conclusion that salary is just a part of it. A big part, but not the deciding factor, for many.
NHS employment practises and organisation resembles those of the 1970s U.K. car industry. Incompetent and pointless strife everywhere.
When other car companies came to the U.K. in the 80s, they achieved harmony, productivity and a satisfied workforce. All the while, in the legacy industry, the same old nonsense staggered on. And this was with the same pool of workers and management - most of the people working in the new industry were from the old.
An organisation is a machine to help humans achieve things en masse. Ergonomics, anyone?
I'd agree. In the case of doctors, it probably starts from admitting the wrong medical students. Any bright 16-18 year-old on the science side will see medicine as the holy grail, or at least a route to £100,000 a year, whether suited to it (whatever that means, which we do not know) or not. And retention seems to have got worse since the personal statement was needed to get into medical school, which is counter-intuitive but if it is not working, scrap it.
In the case of GPs in particular, we are 950 full-time GPs short, apparently, which likely creates a vicious circle making the work more stressful for those remaining, so GPs and trainee GPs are more likely to drop out, which... and so on.
We know from recent allegations that life for trainees, and especially female ones, can be fraught owing to sexualised banter or worse.
We can see from fly-on-the-wall documentaries that the first problem on a new job is finding out where everything is because no-one in the NHS has thought to label the cupboards, let alone bought windowed doors like your granny had for her saucers in 1956.
And whisper this, sometimes lady doctors want time off for babies.
Foundation years training has to be committed to long in advance, which ought to be unnecessary now we have computers.
Surgical training requires trainees to badger their seniors to be allowed into theatre. This could easily be arranged in advance.
And so on. There are lots of these "small" irritations that could easily be removed but aren't because ministers are more interested in top-down revolutions every five to ten years.
BIB. Don't whisper this, shout it from the rooftops. Its a feature, not a bug.
Healthcare is increasingly feminised. Arguably nursing always was, but now Pharmacy is trending more and more female too. I just met my new first year tutees (7 of them). It was a shock that 5 were male, as the cohort overall will skew heavily female.
It is an issue to be dealt with that women will have babies and when they do, many of them decide that part time work or even stopping for a few years is what they want. This shouldn't be a surprise, but we should plan for it.
My wife is in her ninth month of maternity leave and will be going back in the new year to a 60% role, rather than 100%. Having babies changes people. Its up to those who plan workforces to understand that and deal with it.
I suppose the question this poses is whether it is acceptable to say that a) women are more likely than men to go in to part time working (assuming this is actually true?), and b) that it may be desirable to find ways of getting more men to train as doctors.
The one thing I would observe though is that medicine doesn't seem to be a particularly financially lucrative career, it seems to be highly stressed, particularly given that things will go wrong and it is literally a matter of life or death. There are much easier ways of earning the same amount of money if you are highly skilled. I am aware of some male doctors that I knew at University (20 years ago) dropping out for this reason.
We should encourage men to play an equal role in parenting. If mother's and father's are, on average, taking the same amount of parental leave then there's no temptation to introduce discriminatory hiring processes.
There's an argument for making it mandatory for both parents to take time off work when they have a baby. A rather tricky argument, admittedly, but something along those lines.
Every analysis of work and why people stay in jobs, comes to the conclusion that salary is just a part of it. A big part, but not the deciding factor, for many.
NHS employment practises and organisation resembles those of the 1970s U.K. car industry. Incompetent and pointless strife everywhere.
When other car companies came to the U.K. in the 80s, they achieved harmony, productivity and a satisfied workforce. All the while, in the legacy industry, the same old nonsense staggered on. And this was with the same pool of workers and management - most of the people working in the new industry were from the old.
An organisation is a machine to help humans achieve things en masse. Ergonomics, anyone?
I'd agree. In the case of doctors, it probably starts from admitting the wrong medical students. Any bright 16-18 year-old on the science side will see medicine as the holy grail, or at least a route to £100,000 a year, whether suited to it (whatever that means, which we do not know) or not. And retention seems to have got worse since the personal statement was needed to get into medical school, which is counter-intuitive but if it is not working, scrap it.
In the case of GPs in particular, we are 950 full-time GPs short, apparently, which likely creates a vicious circle making the work more stressful for those remaining, so GPs and trainee GPs are more likely to drop out, which... and so on.
We know from recent allegations that life for trainees, and especially female ones, can be fraught owing to sexualised banter or worse.
We can see from fly-on-the-wall documentaries that the first problem on a new job is finding out where everything is because no-one in the NHS has thought to label the cupboards, let alone bought windowed doors like your granny had for her saucers in 1956.
And whisper this, sometimes lady doctors want time off for babies.
Foundation years training has to be committed to long in advance, which ought to be unnecessary now we have computers.
Surgical training requires trainees to badger their seniors to be allowed into theatre. This could easily be arranged in advance.
And so on. There are lots of these "small" irritations that could easily be removed but aren't because ministers are more interested in top-down revolutions every five to ten years.
BIB. Don't whisper this, shout it from the rooftops. Its a feature, not a bug.
Healthcare is increasingly feminised. Arguably nursing always was, but now Pharmacy is trending more and more female too. I just met my new first year tutees (7 of them). It was a shock that 5 were male, as the cohort overall will skew heavily female.
It is an issue to be dealt with that women will have babies and when they do, many of them decide that part time work or even stopping for a few years is what they want. This shouldn't be a surprise, but we should plan for it.
My wife is in her ninth month of maternity leave and will be going back in the new year to a 60% role, rather than 100%. Having babies changes people. Its up to those who plan workforces to understand that and deal with it.
I suppose the question this poses is whether it is acceptable to say that a) women are more likely than men to go in to part time working (assuming this is actually true?), and b) that it may be desirable to find ways of getting more men to train as doctors.
The one thing I would observe though is that medicine doesn't seem to be a particularly financially lucrative career, it seems to be highly stressed, particularly given that things will go wrong and it is literally a matter of life or death. There are much easier ways of earning the same amount of money if you are highly skilled. I am aware of some male doctors that I knew at University (20 years ago) dropping out for this reason.
On the subject of pay, maybe junior doctors' salaries need to be bumped up more aggressively to avoid young doctors being quite so envious that their old school chums who went into management consultancy, law or finance are so far ahead of them in their careers.
The big news in Melbourne is them training up all the UK cops that are coming over. Over 1,000 apparently.
DA has been warning us about the number of submariners moving over here too.
Every analysis of work and why people stay in jobs, comes to the conclusion that salary is just a part of it. A big part, but not the deciding factor, for many.
NHS employment practises and organisation resembles those of the 1970s U.K. car industry. Incompetent and pointless strife everywhere.
When other car companies came to the U.K. in the 80s, they achieved harmony, productivity and a satisfied workforce. All the while, in the legacy industry, the same old nonsense staggered on. And this was with the same pool of workers and management - most of the people working in the new industry were from the old.
An organisation is a machine to help humans achieve things en masse. Ergonomics, anyone?
I'd agree. In the case of doctors, it probably starts from admitting the wrong medical students. Any bright 16-18 year-old on the science side will see medicine as the holy grail, or at least a route to £100,000 a year, whether suited to it (whatever that means, which we do not know) or not. And retention seems to have got worse since the personal statement was needed to get into medical school, which is counter-intuitive but if it is not working, scrap it.
In the case of GPs in particular, we are 950 full-time GPs short, apparently, which likely creates a vicious circle making the work more stressful for those remaining, so GPs and trainee GPs are more likely to drop out, which... and so on.
We know from recent allegations that life for trainees, and especially female ones, can be fraught owing to sexualised banter or worse.
We can see from fly-on-the-wall documentaries that the first problem on a new job is finding out where everything is because no-one in the NHS has thought to label the cupboards, let alone bought windowed doors like your granny had for her saucers in 1956.
And whisper this, sometimes lady doctors want time off for babies.
Foundation years training has to be committed to long in advance, which ought to be unnecessary now we have computers.
Surgical training requires trainees to badger their seniors to be allowed into theatre. This could easily be arranged in advance.
And so on. There are lots of these "small" irritations that could easily be removed but aren't because ministers are more interested in top-down revolutions every five to ten years.
BIB. Don't whisper this, shout it from the rooftops. Its a feature, not a bug.
Healthcare is increasingly feminised. Arguably nursing always was, but now Pharmacy is trending more and more female too. I just met my new first year tutees (7 of them). It was a shock that 5 were male, as the cohort overall will skew heavily female.
It is an issue to be dealt with that women will have babies and when they do, many of them decide that part time work or even stopping for a few years is what they want. This shouldn't be a surprise, but we should plan for it.
My wife is in her ninth month of maternity leave and will be going back in the new year to a 60% role, rather than 100%. Having babies changes people. Its up to those who plan workforces to understand that and deal with it.
I suppose the question this poses is whether it is acceptable to say that a) women are more likely than men to go in to part time working (assuming this is actually true?), and b) that it may be desirable to find ways of getting more men to train as doctors.
The one thing I would observe though is that medicine doesn't seem to be a particularly financially lucrative career, it seems to be highly stressed, particularly given that things will go wrong and it is literally a matter of life or death. There are much easier ways of earning the same amount of money if you are highly skilled. I am aware of some male doctors that I knew at University (20 years ago) dropping out for this reason.
We should encourage men to play an equal role in parenting. If mother's and father's are, on average, taking the same amount of parental leave then there's no temptation to introduce discriminatory hiring processes.
There still seems, although hopefully fading, a cultural bias to women doing an unequal share.
I used to get immensely fucked off when my Head of Operations would come and tell me she needed to leave or take time off suddenly due to a sick child. It was never her husband, always her, and it was something I couldn’t force them to change and I would likely have got into some sort of trouble if I had said to her “ X, you are head of ops in a bank, you earn several times what your husband does (I knew him for years and his job and approximate earnings) and your job pays the mortgage and most of your lifestyle - perhaps it would be more appropriate that Y takes the time off and disrupts his business he works for as if it led to one of you losing your job then it makes sense it’s him not you”.
How does the Sun know? They haven't even got any trains yet, never mind run them in rainbow colour schemes.
I believe this all stems from @Leon's journalist friend writing a piece about HS2's woke policies in the Spectator - not the first time I've seen this referred to online, so a bit of a scoop for him I think. Suffice it to say they're extremely woke.
I know someone - a gay woman - who used to work for HS2. If being seen as a gay-friendly employer helped them to hire good people, I don't really see why that is such a bad thing. As an explanation for being six times over budget, "woke" doesn't strike me as a plausible candidate, not gonna lie.
Yeah, it just seems like a bog standard set of modern HR policies. You'd expect a relatively young organisation, like HS2, to be a bit more progressive than the average, but none of the stuff complained about feels excessive or unusual to me. If other large employers aren't yet doing similar, it just means that they haven't had a full policy review in the last decade.
Like it or not, this is the sort of thing you need to do to attract and retain quality staff. It may not be particularly sincere, but then what HR policy is?
The tree is making me sick at heart. Perhaps we are over-reacting to a tree? Nonetheless it strikes something deep in me. At times like this only poetry can solace. Beauty from destruction
Binsey Poplars - felled 1879
By GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, All felled, felled, are all felled; Of a fresh and following folded rank Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sank On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew — Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender To touch, her being só slender, That, like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all, Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc unselve The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene.
Cowper:
The Poplars are fell’d, farewell to the shade And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade, The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves, Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.
Twelve years have elapsed since I last took a view Of my favourite field and the bank where they grew, And now in the grass behold they are laid, And the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade.
The black-bird has fled to another retreat Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat, And the scene where his melody charm’d me before, Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more.
My fugitive years are all hasting away, And I must e’er long lie as lowly as they, With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head E’er another such grove shall arise in its stead.
’Tis a sight to engage me if any thing can To muse on the perishing pleasures of Man; Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see, Have a Being less durable even than he.
How does the Sun know? They haven't even got any trains yet, never mind run them in rainbow colour schemes.
I believe this all stems from @Leon's journalist friend writing a piece about HS2's woke policies in the Spectator - not the first time I've seen this referred to online, so a bit of a scoop for him I think. Suffice it to say they're extremely woke.
I know someone - a gay woman - who used to work for HS2. If being seen as a gay-friendly employer helped them to hire good people, I don't really see why that is such a bad thing. As an explanation for being six times over budget, "woke" doesn't strike me as a plausible candidate, not gonna lie.
Yeah, it just seems like a bog standard set of modern HR policies. You'd expect a relatively young organisation, like HS2, to be a bit more progressive than the average, but none of the stuff complained about feels excessive or unusual to me. If other large employers aren't yet doing similar, it just means that they haven't had a full policy review in the last decade.
Like it or not, this is the sort of thing you need to do to attract and retain quality staff. It may not be particularly sincere, but then what HR policy is?
The author of that Spectator article seems to think that the length of the reports published represents the proportion of funds that are going on each area.
I'd much rather the HR team were busy writing reports than doing any tunneling. That could go badly wrong.
There is a remarkable lack of analysis of the latest YouGov poll, in stark contrast to that a few days earlier.
I can't put my finger on why.
Funny old world.
So I am on the YouGov panel and have been working my way up to the 50 quid payment for a while. As I've got closer to the points needed, I seem to get asked less and less. I don't think they want to pay me... Anyone else experience this?
Mr. Password, you can encourage men and women to have equal leave but men won't take it in the same numbers. It's a good thing to have that equal possibility, but for the most part men are career-focused and women are family-focused.
Little girls are allowed to own toy guns. And yet it's little boys who have them on their Christmas list.
I don't agree that these differences are fixed and innate and unchangeable. I saw such a large difference in my daughter after she went to school (trains* -> horses) that the social effects seem pretty obvious and large.
* Though she's now started working for Network Rail.
There is a remarkable lack of analysis of the latest YouGov poll, in stark contrast to that a few days earlier.
I can't put my finger on why.
Funny old world.
So I am on the YouGov panel and have been working my way up to the 50 quid payment for a while. As I've got closer to the points needed, I seem to get asked less and less. I don't think they want to pay me... Anyone else experience this?
Yes!
Speaking of YouGov. Got this on a question for them today. I'd love to know how many people select any of the options except "Watched TV"?
Every analysis of work and why people stay in jobs, comes to the conclusion that salary is just a part of it. A big part, but not the deciding factor, for many.
NHS employment practises and organisation resembles those of the 1970s U.K. car industry. Incompetent and pointless strife everywhere.
When other car companies came to the U.K. in the 80s, they achieved harmony, productivity and a satisfied workforce. All the while, in the legacy industry, the same old nonsense staggered on. And this was with the same pool of workers and management - most of the people working in the new industry were from the old.
An organisation is a machine to help humans achieve things en masse. Ergonomics, anyone?
I'd agree. In the case of doctors, it probably starts from admitting the wrong medical students. Any bright 16-18 year-old on the science side will see medicine as the holy grail, or at least a route to £100,000 a year, whether suited to it (whatever that means, which we do not know) or not. And retention seems to have got worse since the personal statement was needed to get into medical school, which is counter-intuitive but if it is not working, scrap it.
In the case of GPs in particular, we are 950 full-time GPs short, apparently, which likely creates a vicious circle making the work more stressful for those remaining, so GPs and trainee GPs are more likely to drop out, which... and so on.
We know from recent allegations that life for trainees, and especially female ones, can be fraught owing to sexualised banter or worse.
We can see from fly-on-the-wall documentaries that the first problem on a new job is finding out where everything is because no-one in the NHS has thought to label the cupboards, let alone bought windowed doors like your granny had for her saucers in 1956.
And whisper this, sometimes lady doctors want time off for babies.
Foundation years training has to be committed to long in advance, which ought to be unnecessary now we have computers.
Surgical training requires trainees to badger their seniors to be allowed into theatre. This could easily be arranged in advance.
And so on. There are lots of these "small" irritations that could easily be removed but aren't because ministers are more interested in top-down revolutions every five to ten years.
BIB. Don't whisper this, shout it from the rooftops. Its a feature, not a bug.
Healthcare is increasingly feminised. Arguably nursing always was, but now Pharmacy is trending more and more female too. I just met my new first year tutees (7 of them). It was a shock that 5 were male, as the cohort overall will skew heavily female.
It is an issue to be dealt with that women will have babies and when they do, many of them decide that part time work or even stopping for a few years is what they want. This shouldn't be a surprise, but we should plan for it.
My wife is in her ninth month of maternity leave and will be going back in the new year to a 60% role, rather than 100%. Having babies changes people. Its up to those who plan workforces to understand that and deal with it.
I suppose the question this poses is whether it is acceptable to say that a) women are more likely than men to go in to part time working (assuming this is actually true?), and b) that it may be desirable to find ways of getting more men to train as doctors.
The one thing I would observe though is that medicine doesn't seem to be a particularly financially lucrative career, it seems to be highly stressed, particularly given that things will go wrong and it is literally a matter of life or death. There are much easier ways of earning the same amount of money if you are highly skilled. I am aware of some male doctors that I knew at University (20 years ago) dropping out for this reason.
We should encourage men to play an equal role in parenting. If mother's and father's are, on average, taking the same amount of parental leave then there's no temptation to introduce discriminatory hiring processes.
There still seems, although hopefully fading, a cultural bias to women doing an unequal share.
I used to get immensely fucked off when my Head of Operations would come and tell me she needed to leave or take time off suddenly due to a sick child. It was never her husband, always her, and it was something I couldn’t force them to change and I would likely have got into some sort of trouble if I had said to her “ X, you are head of ops in a bank, you earn several times what your husband does (I knew him for years and his job and approximate earnings) and your job pays the mortgage and most of your lifestyle - perhaps it would be more appropriate that Y takes the time off and disrupts his business he works for as if it led to one of you losing your job then it makes sense it’s him not you”.
Yes, it's a similar story at my missus's workplace. She's a clinical scientist - a well-paid job - and most of her colleagues are female. Yet whenever a child is sick or some other family emergency occurs, there always seems to be some reason why their typically less well-paid other halves can't possibly take time off work right now. She also finds it rather irritating to say the least.
The tree is making me sick at heart. Perhaps we are over-reacting to a tree? Nonetheless it strikes something deep in me. At times like this only poetry can solace. Beauty from destruction
Binsey Poplars - felled 1879
By GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, All felled, felled, are all felled; Of a fresh and following folded rank Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sank On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew — Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender To touch, her being só slender, That, like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all, Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc unselve The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene.
Cowper:
The Poplars are fell’d, farewell to the shade And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade, The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves, Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.
Twelve years have elapsed since I last took a view Of my favourite field and the bank where they grew, And now in the grass behold they are laid, And the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade.
The black-bird has fled to another retreat Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat, And the scene where his melody charm’d me before, Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more.
My fugitive years are all hasting away, And I must e’er long lie as lowly as they, With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head E’er another such grove shall arise in its stead.
’Tis a sight to engage me if any thing can To muse on the perishing pleasures of Man; Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see, Have a Being less durable even than he.
Every analysis of work and why people stay in jobs, comes to the conclusion that salary is just a part of it. A big part, but not the deciding factor, for many.
NHS employment practises and organisation resembles those of the 1970s U.K. car industry. Incompetent and pointless strife everywhere.
When other car companies came to the U.K. in the 80s, they achieved harmony, productivity and a satisfied workforce. All the while, in the legacy industry, the same old nonsense staggered on. And this was with the same pool of workers and management - most of the people working in the new industry were from the old.
An organisation is a machine to help humans achieve things en masse. Ergonomics, anyone?
I'd agree. In the case of doctors, it probably starts from admitting the wrong medical students. Any bright 16-18 year-old on the science side will see medicine as the holy grail, or at least a route to £100,000 a year, whether suited to it (whatever that means, which we do not know) or not. And retention seems to have got worse since the personal statement was needed to get into medical school, which is counter-intuitive but if it is not working, scrap it.
In the case of GPs in particular, we are 950 full-time GPs short, apparently, which likely creates a vicious circle making the work more stressful for those remaining, so GPs and trainee GPs are more likely to drop out, which... and so on.
We know from recent allegations that life for trainees, and especially female ones, can be fraught owing to sexualised banter or worse.
We can see from fly-on-the-wall documentaries that the first problem on a new job is finding out where everything is because no-one in the NHS has thought to label the cupboards, let alone bought windowed doors like your granny had for her saucers in 1956.
And whisper this, sometimes lady doctors want time off for babies.
Foundation years training has to be committed to long in advance, which ought to be unnecessary now we have computers.
Surgical training requires trainees to badger their seniors to be allowed into theatre. This could easily be arranged in advance.
And so on. There are lots of these "small" irritations that could easily be removed but aren't because ministers are more interested in top-down revolutions every five to ten years.
BIB. Don't whisper this, shout it from the rooftops. Its a feature, not a bug.
Healthcare is increasingly feminised. Arguably nursing always was, but now Pharmacy is trending more and more female too. I just met my new first year tutees (7 of them). It was a shock that 5 were male, as the cohort overall will skew heavily female.
It is an issue to be dealt with that women will have babies and when they do, many of them decide that part time work or even stopping for a few years is what they want. This shouldn't be a surprise, but we should plan for it.
My wife is in her ninth month of maternity leave and will be going back in the new year to a 60% role, rather than 100%. Having babies changes people. Its up to those who plan workforces to understand that and deal with it.
I suppose the question this poses is whether it is acceptable to say that a) women are more likely than men to go in to part time working (assuming this is actually true?), and b) that it may be desirable to find ways of getting more men to train as doctors.
The one thing I would observe though is that medicine doesn't seem to be a particularly financially lucrative career, it seems to be highly stressed, particularly given that things will go wrong and it is literally a matter of life or death. There are much easier ways of earning the same amount of money if you are highly skilled. I am aware of some male doctors that I knew at University (20 years ago) dropping out for this reason.
We should encourage men to play an equal role in parenting. If mother's and father's are, on average, taking the same amount of parental leave then there's no temptation to introduce discriminatory hiring processes.
There still seems, although hopefully fading, a cultural bias to women doing an unequal share.
I used to get immensely fucked off when my Head of Operations would come and tell me she needed to leave or take time off suddenly due to a sick child. It was never her husband, always her, and it was something I couldn’t force them to change and I would likely have got into some sort of trouble if I had said to her “ X, you are head of ops in a bank, you earn several times what your husband does (I knew him for years and his job and approximate earnings) and your job pays the mortgage and most of your lifestyle - perhaps it would be more appropriate that Y takes the time off and disrupts his business he works for as if it led to one of you losing your job then it makes sense it’s him not you”.
Yes, it's a similar story at my missus's workplace. She's a clinical scientist - a well-paid job - and most of her colleagues are female. Yet whenever a child is sick or some other family emergency occurs, there always seems to be some reason why their typically less well-paid other halves can't possibly take time off work right now. She also finds it rather irritating to say the least.
I'm WFH at the moment as daughter had impetigo (Got her back in the nursery this morning ). My other half earns slightly less than me but the 'gap' is not particularly dramatic. OH works 12 AM - 7 AM (Asia/Aus legal matters) and NEEDS to sleep when our daughter is in nursery in the mornings so it's me that always makes arrangements with work when needed. She did however have 6 months maternity and I did 3 weeks as mine was statutory. (Her employer is vastly bigger than mine)
How does the Sun know? They haven't even got any trains yet, never mind run them in rainbow colour schemes.
I believe this all stems from @Leon's journalist friend writing a piece about HS2's woke policies in the Spectator - not the first time I've seen this referred to online, so a bit of a scoop for him I think. Suffice it to say they're extremely woke.
I know someone - a gay woman - who used to work for HS2. If being seen as a gay-friendly employer helped them to hire good people, I don't really see why that is such a bad thing. As an explanation for being six times over budget, "woke" doesn't strike me as a plausible candidate, not gonna lie.
You need to read the original source article in the Spectator. The Sun has clearly lifted its article from there; likewise the Mail
Comments
So why, when introducing a new system like BWV, did we set it up to be vulnerable to exactly the same class of problem? And now that it works that way, the police federation will fight tooth and nail against any changes...
Very zen.
EDIT: Hm. Wikipedia has it that Darlington NR station building was opened in 1842. Which postdates Liverpool Road Manchester and Crown Street Liverpool (1830) by a good 12 years.
I can't put my finger on why.
Funny old world.
In the case of GPs in particular, we are 950 full-time GPs short, apparently, which likely creates a vicious circle making the work more stressful for those remaining, so GPs and trainee GPs are more likely to drop out, which... and so on.
We know from recent allegations that life for trainees, and especially female ones, can be fraught owing to sexualised banter or worse.
We can see from fly-on-the-wall documentaries that the first problem on a new job is finding out where everything is because no-one in the NHS has thought to label the cupboards, let alone bought windowed doors like your granny had for her saucers in 1956.
And whisper this, sometimes lady doctors want time off for babies.
Foundation years training has to be committed to long in advance, which ought to be unnecessary now we have computers.
Surgical training requires trainees to badger their seniors to be allowed into theatre. This could easily be arranged in advance.
And so on. There are lots of these "small" irritations that could easily be removed but aren't because ministers are more interested in top-down revolutions every five to ten years.
It sounds like Sunak's pre-conference local media round went about as well as it did for Truss last year.
I get that he's nervous, and that he's determined to stick to his talking points - but he really needs to do better when faced with this sort of questioning. His answers are what you might expect from a candidate for a council by-election, not someone with his hands on the levers of power.
Healthcare is increasingly feminised. Arguably nursing always was, but now Pharmacy is trending more and more female too. I just met my new first year tutees (7 of them). It was a shock that 5 were male, as the cohort overall will skew heavily female.
It is an issue to be dealt with that women will have babies and when they do, many of them decide that part time work or even stopping for a few years is what they want. This shouldn't be a surprise, but we should plan for it.
My wife is in her ninth month of maternity leave and will be going back in the new year to a 60% role, rather than 100%. Having babies changes people. Its up to those who plan workforces to understand that and deal with it.
Seriously though, that's really sad. Whywould anyone do that? I do like the 'we have reason to believe it has been deliberately felled' from the police - given the cut marks it would require extreme carelessness with a chainsaw to have done it by accident!
Absolutely disgusted to hear about Sycamore Gap this morning & that someone has chainsawed down this beautiful tree. I literally cannot understand why someone would do something like that.
At least I'll have the memory of shooting the Milky Way here, one cold January night.
https://x.com/stumeech/status/1707330571003662808?s=20
https://twitter.com/TwiceBrewedCo/status/1707325696064766325?t=hBziXHXYplKVPTwxFFAIkA&s=19
But in other news, I rejoice at the work that has been at North Wingfield to preserve it from its derelict state. A very early railway station - 1839 - which is also in a fairly original condition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6n8_cb7sy4
We need more clinical staff. If women (in particular) are leaving, then we need to find ways to make it more attractive to stay (probably not pay, but more conditions/flexibility at least for docs). The implication from some, apparently, that we should instead focus on recruiting more male medics is... interesting. Halving the recruitment pool doesn't seem smart when you want to increase recruitment overall (and also retention, but we need to recruit more, whatever).
Seriously, though, I wonder what lead to such an act of vandalism. Has there been a local dispute? Land access problems?
It was a big tree and it looks like someone did a professional job of cutting it so this wasn't just some random idiot.
I wouldn't go so far as to hang the person from the tree (wouldn't work well now, anyway) but would be up for hanging the tree from the person, preferably a delicate area, if male.
So my big worry with something like this is that you would mess with rainfall patterns. When you do that you create droughts in some areas and floods in others and, given the immature economies in many countries, famine then follows. No. Just no.
We have the technology to replace all use of fossil fuels. It's simply a matter of investment to replace one set of technology with the other, and that is happening. We could argue about policies that would speed this up a bit, or make it slower, but I'm struggling to see how there could be much significant fossil fuel combustion in the last few decades of this century.
Any temptation to engage in solar geoengineering would be better directed to CO2 sequestration, or speeding up the now inevitable phasing out of fossil fuels.
I do not necessarily think that something like this would or could happen with this, but you don't know our luck...
I also take issue a bit with the idea that the planet's temperature was "correct" in the pre-industrial age, and that we should return to it, or at least stop where we are. Generally in UK terms more people die of cold than heat (by a long way).
There are global impacts of climate change and we should do everything we can to help countries affected, but we also need to understand that natural disasters have always happened. The best approach is to build better homes in places that won't be flooded out.
The arguments that crops will suffer in hotter weather doesn't really match food production graphs for the last 100 years.
But I still cycle back to - what should the best temperature for the world be?
When our eldest was a youngster he sowed acorns in our front garden and from them we have a greatly admired oak tree which we maintain each year with a tree surgeon
It has been in our garden for 47 years and is very much cherished
Palmyra? Buddhas of Bamiyan? Not as important as those, but in terms of the emotional harm and outrage it is going to cause, particularly in the north. It doesn't help that it kind of fits in with the prevailing anti-green narrative.
See how the ULEZ discussion has become warped into love/hate it. The sane approach is that we need a better congestion/pollution charging scheme. There are plenty around the world.
I have no idea what goes through a mind as sick as this to do this and it must have been planned
I have just showed my wife the photos and she literally burst into tears
Shame on the culprits
Edit: Noticed that someone must have changed the name in Google already
1. Change itself is disruptive. You might be able to argue that a different temperature was more optimal, in an abstract way but generally our agriculture, infrastructure and societies have grown up in a way adapted to the current temperature, and adapting to a different temperature would be massively disruptive and a lot of people would suffer during the transition.
It feels like a very Stalinist approach to people to argue that purposefully changing global temperature, with all its knock-on effects will be more optimal for society as a whole. Eventually.
2. Almost all the time it's not temperature itself that is directly the biggest problem, but the impact the change in temperature has on water.
Increase the temperature and you melt ice, you expand the oceans and so then you flood coastal infrastructure and immensely agriculturally important river deltas.
Increase the temperature, see ice melts at the poles, reduce the temperature gradient between the tropics and the poles and you change wind (and therefore rainfall) patterns everywhere. Why do we grow the crops we grow where we grow them? Mainly due to water availability. Mess with that and you potentially wreck our ability to grow enough food to feed everyone.
But why? What is the possible motive? Drive a long long way at midnight to carefully fell a tree with a heavy chainsaw. Why??
Sycamore will coppice unless someone treats the stump but it is going to look pretty miserable for a good 30-50 years and the shape will never be quite as photogenic.
I have been there but any photographs are probably on slides...
The anger about this is off the dial on X. Possibly worse than The Crooked Pub. At least there you could see a hideous, venal motivation
I was getting 5 a day for Russell Brand.
To cheer me up, what are the others in the UK and further afield? Anyone have any suggestions?
If you had come across them approaching the Sycamore with a chainsaw, what would you have done?
Another point: the choice of a stormy night.
I've never understood what motivates trolls, but perhaps someone has decided they needed to troll more people in a more dramatic way.
The real challenge will be to geniunely *replace* the use of fossil fuels. There will be massive pressure to make use of sustainable energy sources AND to use the fossil fuels as well. As sustainable energy gets cheaper and more practical so too will the price of oil and coal.* Our appetite for energy is almost limitless.
*I remember a comment on PB that this won't happen because it will become unprofitable to extract. This can only happen on a very long term effect if left to the free market, as once a few "extractors" give up bringing coal/oil to market, the supply decreases and so the price will hold up.
I cannot work out any reason for cutting it down, it doesn’t block a right of way, or block a sea view from a new sandbanks type house - not that they are justifiable but that happens. Just plain disgraceful.
The one thing I would observe though is that medicine doesn't seem to be a particularly financially lucrative career, it seems to be highly stressed, particularly given that things will go wrong and it is literally a matter of life or death. There are much easier ways of earning the same amount of money if you are highly skilled. I am aware of some male doctors that I knew at University (20 years ago) dropping out for this reason.
The giant sequoias in California - obviously. They are so impressive they made me cry
The famous banyan tree growing out of the temple at Angkor Wat. Fabulous
I’ll try and think of more…
They won't need to replant it. It will sprout like mad unless it is also poisoned.
In the very long term this will actually prolong the life of the tree but I don't think that was the intention.
There's no way to plant a large tree without it blowing down - you just can't get the roots in properly, particularly in the sort of ground available there.
Perhaps it was the Russians in revenge for Sevastopol...but I'd guess at local planning issues.
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.7527553,-1.251459,3a,75y,295.21h,85.9t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s5IwAtoK5Qi2ZLafQLcvG6Q!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu
Edit: it fits so superbly into the curve of the High Street, and has for many. many decades.
Weirdly I hope there is a motive, and we find the evil villain
The idea it is mindless sociopathic vandalism is even bleaker. But I struggle to see any planning issues all the way up there?!
This has the interesting effect that the coal lobby in politics is shrinking as the money goes away.
Big Wind (ha!!) and Big Solar lobbies are forming…
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-deep-absurdity-of-hs2-diversitys-agenda/
OK, it's south London, but you can't have everything.
What kind of sicko goes to the trouble cutting down a tree like that?
Oh, and Collingwood's Oaks. There was a man with the right attitude. Annoy a Frenchman, plant a tree.
Today's episode: Getting Past Northern Irish Immigration
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV9XZxmJFDM
Binsey Poplars - felled 1879
By GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew —
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.
It was there long before those jesters arrived. Hopefully it'll be there long after they go.
The felling of that tree will unite almost everyone against it.
Caroline Nokes calls for Ofcom to shut down the channel after it suspended Dan Wootton and Laurence Fox over a misogyny scandal"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/28/caroline-nokes-gb-news-laurence-fox-ava-evans-dan-wootton/
Little girls are allowed to own toy guns. And yet it's little boys who have them on their Christmas list.
DA has been warning us about the number of submariners moving over here too.
I used to get immensely fucked off when my Head of Operations would come and tell me she needed to leave or take time off suddenly due to a sick child. It was never her husband, always her, and it was something I couldn’t force them to change and I would likely have got into some sort of trouble if I had said to her “ X, you are head of ops in a bank, you earn several times what your husband does (I knew him for years and his job and approximate earnings) and your job pays the mortgage and most of your lifestyle - perhaps it would be more appropriate that Y takes the time off and disrupts his business he works for as if it led to one of you losing your job then it makes sense it’s him not you”.
Like it or not, this is the sort of thing you need to do to attract and retain quality staff. It may not be particularly sincere, but then what HR policy is?
Just saying.
But, asides from that
Cowper:
The Poplars are fell’d, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade,
The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves,
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.
Twelve years have elapsed since I last took a view
Of my favourite field and the bank where they grew,
And now in the grass behold they are laid,
And the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade.
The black-bird has fled to another retreat
Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat,
And the scene where his melody charm’d me before,
Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more.
My fugitive years are all hasting away,
And I must e’er long lie as lowly as they,
With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head
E’er another such grove shall arise in its stead.
’Tis a sight to engage me if any thing can
To muse on the perishing pleasures of Man;
Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see,
Have a Being less durable even than he.
I'd much rather the HR team were busy writing reports than doing any tunneling. That could go badly wrong.
* Though she's now started working for Network Rail.
😢
Is no more.
RIP Michael Gambon.