The scene looks like a Ryanair flight from Cardiff to Dublin (or vice versa) after a stag weekend.
Without the fatality and casualties one hopes! 18 “hospitalised” a further 12 “being treated at hospital”.
I was commenting on the standard of the floor as demonstrated by your video as opposed to the sad casualty figure. I have been on a Cardiff to Belfast flight where we had a terminal medical emergency. Due to health issues as opposed to anything more exuberant pre-flight activity.
An even more dramatic outcome was the Aloha Airlines incident due to corrosion.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
In order to understand the present, one must pierce the veil of the dominant discourse. When Yousaf and his former Green allies talk of avoiding “toxic culture wars”, they mean silencing opposition to the radical changes in language and behaviour they plan to enforce on society. The underlying premise is that they are advancing the inexorable course of history.
In America, a part of the progressive movement decided that they didn’t need votes. The voters were not moving fast enough and moving them by argument was a bit of a bore.
Since the law was progressive, all they need was the Supreme Court. So all that needed doing was to construct a castle of legislative law and get it blessed by the Court.
One small flaw with this plan was that the other side noticed. The Loony Tunes right then spent decades getting judges of their view into all the lower benches. Who gradually worked their way up. So more and more candidates for the higher courts were from that pool. Trump was just the last act in the story.
The other small flaw was not getting buy in from the electorate. In a modern democracy, the voters have been told they are sovereign. Every man/woman a prince(ess). And No is not a word that princes like (or Must).
Importing this stupidity is a very bad idea. Yes, it may move things.. forward. For a bit. But ultimately it breaks the system.
We need politicians to articulate the change they want, build a consensus behind it and put it through Parliament.
I think this is an ahistorical analysis. The right's focus on filling judicial posts instead of persuading the electorate came first.
Why does it matter "who came first" if whatever it is is a bad idea?
It's simply wrong, though.
Roe v Wade, for example, was a bipartisan decision by a majority Republican appointed court. That one of Eisenhower's appointments turned out a leading liberal on the court reinforces the point.
Nevertheless it was an example of legal activism. Lawyers sought out the case with the intention of changing the law.
That's a meaningless term as far as useful analysis is concerned. You might say the same of 1st Amendment rights. What they actually mean has changed dramatically in the last hundred years as a result of judicial decisions - and yet that is almost entirely uncontroversial, and hardly anyone calls it 'legal activism'.
Yet it was. The problem is the abandonment of legislative action to go with judicial action. With the result that the Supreme Court is now the highest legislative chamber.
That's pretty well always been the case - see the gutting of the 14th Amendment by the court (not just legislative action, but supermajority legislative action) in the late nineteenth century. Or the Taney Court before it.
The problem is rather that the current court is as unmoored from principled jurisprudence as were those predecessors.
One of the rarely talked about aspects of cost of going to university now is not the fees, its the accommodation cost, both in terms of the weekly rent and the length / conditions of the contracts. In return for some upgrades like an ensuite bathroom (well a cupboard in the corner of the room with a shower / toilet), the total cost of a years student accommodation has massively outstripped inflation, driven mostly by the fact it is private providers who build, own, operate large proportion of the student accommodation market now.
Let the universites go bust and turn the luxury student accommodation into council flats.
Let the Tories get kicked out of office, and come up with better ideas.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Re Cars, not only have they got more reliable, cost of repairs (both parts / labour) mean that a large number get scraped rather than repaired. There is no margin for dealers in cars less than £3-4k nowadays, so when people trade them in, they often get stripped for parts. They are only looking to turn around ones that need minimal work, and dealerships sell a lot of the trade-ins as job lots to independent dealers who will select only the decent ones to resell.
Where as in the past, there was profit in trying to get the thing running at least well enough for a punter to get it far enough away from the forecourt that the second hand car salesman can claim nought to do with me that your engine blew up.
Also, most people lease or buy cars via finance that allows them to change the car every 3 years. So again, they aren't keeping them for a long as people used to.
IMF relatively positive for the UK today with room for up to 3 rate cuts this year and reasonable growth projection against our partners. Getting to the point now that this is much more helpful to an incoming government than Sunaks electoral prospects, but it may help stymie their losses a bit
Good afternoon
I think the economy will really perform well to the next election but not because of Sunak so much, but investors seeing a 5 year period, at least, of stability under Starmer
How much it effects the polls I have no idea but it will not prevent a Starmer government with a good majority especially in view of the likely collapse of the SNP
It could prevent the election of a Starmer government. You, or anyone can’t state for certain as you just done.
Many elections with late swing show it’s just hours from opinion polls pointing to one thing, the actual result another, political perceptions can change and polls move dramatically in days and weeks, it doesn’t need months for big movement. Evidence needed? 50 days of Truss she started about 4% behind Labour, finished about 40% behind.
Besides Labour have made a HUGE political mistake. They blamed all the financial woe and voter pain on Truss, and left Rishi free to the acclaim of complete reversion the Truss mess and making UKs economic woes history with his plan. inflation and growth in a fantastic place, and interest rates and mortgages on precipice of drop too. the plan is obviously working, Reeves and Starmer will be laughed at and shred their credibility, if they try to claim the governments plan is not working or that they’ve got a better one, won’t they?
That's some epic straw-clutching at work.
Labour are 20 points or more ahead and somehow a couple of months of "good news" is going to wipe that out - seriously? In 1997, the economy was foing very well as I recall but it didn't save the Conservatives from a heavy defeat - why should it now?
I don't quite know what has led to this damascene conversion to being a fan of Rishi Sunak and as for this "conservatism" you were going on about the other day, where is it in the current incarnation of the Conservative Party? Where will it be IF they get re-elected?
The other problem for the Tories is that they have royally pissed off the group of traditionally swing voters who stand to gain when the economy picks up, especially if it's primarily services led - i.e. well educated middle-class working age voters.
The 'left behind' places are still left behind and require more than an economic uptick to feel like they're doing OK - they need major long-term investment. However, the Tories have spent the last decade insulting those who in the past might have been persuaded to vote Tory in the belief it would be good for their wallet even if their heart was sympathetic to Labour. There's no easy solution to that until the Tories leave power and refresh and rebrand themselves again.
As a result, the Tories are fishing in a relatively small pool of retired and better off blue collar workers. Sunak had the chance to change that when he arrived on the scene, but inexplicably kept up the 'pwn the libs' strategy despite the backlash against it, even in former Tory heartlands already being obvious. To the extent that he's largely destroyed the personal brand he built up as Chancellor.
One of the rarely talked about aspects of cost of going to university now is not the fees, its the accommodation cost, both in terms of the weekly rent and the length / conditions of the contracts. In return for some upgrades like an ensuite bathroom (well a cupboard in the corner of the room with a shower / toilet), the total cost of a years student accommodation has massively outstripped inflation, driven mostly by the fact it is private providers who build, own, operate large proportion of the student accommodation market now.
Let the universites go bust and turn the luxury student accommodation into council flats.
Did Venice really think that charging €5 to get into the old city at the weekend in the summer, was going to put much of a dent in the numbers visiting?
I suspect their price is out by a factor of at least ten.
The problem in the future will be developing a system which doesn't simply exclude everyone apart from the wealthy. Maybe a lottery is the answer.
I hate Venice with a passion. The whole place is a monument to wealth and greed - all the best churches are fuck off statements by the merchant family sponsoring them and all the frescos have been incompetently restored and fucked up. Harry's bar is a ripoff though a masterpiece of understatement. I think making the place exclusive to the wealthy paying 100 euro a day, and under 30s with student travel cards, is the way forward
Venice is the most beautiful city on earth - by a distance. It’s a dreamscape. I adore it
But it has become insufferable in summer: the crush is horrific. Pricing is the only way out
Have you ever been in winter? It’s magical then. I recommend early December or late January. The crowds have largely gone and you can actually be alone in some distant corners
And the sense of melancholy decaying beauty is overwhelming. The most wonderfully tragic place on earth. I give it a very very rare noom factor 9. Almost off the dial
Been early March
You have to go once because of Death in Venice and Don't look Now and Byron and Hemingway and Pound and Brideshead revisited and and and. But once is enough
At 18 million tourists a year, Venice can accommodate about 15% of all the people in the world who turn 30 every year.
Even if you restricted everyone to a single lifetime visit, the global growth in tourism means it's impossible for everyone to go.
We have to, somehow, let go of this idea that there's a list of places that everyone has to go to see.
How about you have to choose between Venice and Mecca?
Angela Rayner has announced that sites for new "towns of the future" will be unveiled by the end of a Labour government's first year in power.
Labour's deputy leader and shadow housing secretary said creating new towns was a key part of her party's plan to build 1.5 million homes over five years.
Forwards: Jude Bellingham (Real Madrid), Jarrod Bowen (West Ham), Eberechi Eze (Crystal Palace), Phil Foden (Manchester City), Jack Grealish (Manchester City), Anthony Gordon (Newcastle), Harry Kane (Bayern Munich), James Maddison (Tottenham), Cole Palmer (Chelsea), Bukayo Saka (Arsenal), Ivan Toney (Brentford), Ollie Watkins (Aston Villa).
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
This is a really interesting thread. Raisi was a very nasty man, but he was also very effective in pursuing a realignment of Iran's regional and foreign policy. Not to our benefit.
After Raisi's death I began to look back on articles I wrote about his role in transforming Iran. I found that I had articles going back to before he was president. A few takeaways from the articles https://x.com/sfrantzman/status/1792509183780155607
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
Forwards: Jude Bellingham (Real Madrid), Jarrod Bowen (West Ham), Eberechi Eze (Crystal Palace), Phil Foden (Manchester City), Jack Grealish (Manchester City), Anthony Gordon (Newcastle), Harry Kane (Bayern Munich), James Maddison (Tottenham), Cole Palmer (Chelsea), Bukayo Saka (Arsenal), Ivan Toney (Brentford), Ollie Watkins (Aston Villa).
Trafford Quansah Dunk or Konsa Wharton Toney 2 from Maddison, Eze, Grealish and Gordon
Well chosen squad. LB and GK our only weak positions (Pickford good on pens possibly makes up for his all round game in tournament football).
I think Toney goes just because he is the closest player to Harry Kane and great on the penalties. Grealish will go because he has been dependable for England links up well with Shaw.
CB and LB is weak. Stones gets a niggle (as he often does) and Harry Maguire isn't exactly quick, it starts to look very thin. Could they have included Dier, he has limitations, but he is steady eddie both on and off the pitch and vastly experienced (plus being playing regularly for Bayern Munich).
One of the rarely talked about aspects of cost of going to university now is not the fees, its the accommodation cost, both in terms of the weekly rent and the length / conditions of the contracts. In return for some upgrades like an ensuite bathroom (well a cupboard in the corner of the room with a shower / toilet), the total cost of a years student accommodation has massively outstripped inflation, driven mostly by the fact it is private providers who build, own, operate large proportion of the student accommodation market now.
Let the universites go bust and turn the luxury student accommodation into council flats.
How do you fill the £44b f*** business blackhole you have just created? Or can we fast track Tory friends and families into pole position to buy the accommodation and a knock down price?
David Cameron has written to Rishi Sunak warning that universities will face job losses and even closure if he pushes ahead with curbs to graduate visas
Sunak is weighing up measures to ensure only ‘best and brightest’ come to U.K.
Cameron: ‘One of the consequences of any restrictions on graduate visas is that universities will experience further financial difficulties — leading to job losses, closures and a reduction in research’
He highlights the ‘significant economic contribution’ that international students make to the economy
He also warns that it could damage Britain’s ‘soft power’
He joins a coalition of ministers opposed to hardline curbs on graduate visas including Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor and James Cleverly, the home secretary
Ally of Sunak pushes back: ‘Ultimately ministers get lobbied and make a case for their equities but the PM has to take the right position for the country’
Apart from "must make number go down" monomania, what the flip does Rishi think he's playing at?
He wants to be able to frame the next election as a choice between low immigration under the Tories or high immigration under Labour. So he has to force Labour to oppose policies which aim to reduce immigration.
It's one of his best remaining chances to close the gap.
If that is Rishi's plan, to contrast high immigration Labour with low immigration Conservatives, then it runs smack bang into the reality of record immigration under this government.
The reason it has not moved the polls is Rishi is constantly reminding voters of his own government's failure.
I don't disagree - but it's still his best chance.
Forwards: Jude Bellingham (Real Madrid), Jarrod Bowen (West Ham), Eberechi Eze (Crystal Palace), Phil Foden (Manchester City), Jack Grealish (Manchester City), Anthony Gordon (Newcastle), Harry Kane (Bayern Munich), James Maddison (Tottenham), Cole Palmer (Chelsea), Bukayo Saka (Arsenal), Ivan Toney (Brentford), Ollie Watkins (Aston Villa).
Trafford Quansah Dunk or Konsa Wharton Toney 2 from Maddison, Eze, Grealish and Gordon
Well chosen squad. LB and GK our only weak positions (Pickford good on pens possibly makes up for his all round game in tournament football).
I think Toney goes just because he is the closest player to Harry Kane and great on the penalties.
I'd pick him for the pens alone, but don't think Southgate will. Don't think we should lose any more defenders of midfielders from the squad so would mean 3 from Maddison, Eze, Grealish and Gordon missing out, maybe Bowen in that group too.
Forwards: Jude Bellingham (Real Madrid), Jarrod Bowen (West Ham), Eberechi Eze (Crystal Palace), Phil Foden (Manchester City), Jack Grealish (Manchester City), Anthony Gordon (Newcastle), Harry Kane (Bayern Munich), James Maddison (Tottenham), Cole Palmer (Chelsea), Bukayo Saka (Arsenal), Ivan Toney (Brentford), Ollie Watkins (Aston Villa).
Trafford Quansah Dunk or Konsa Wharton Toney 2 from Maddison, Eze, Grealish and Gordon
Well chosen squad. LB and GK our only weak positions (Pickford good on pens possibly makes up for his all round game in tournament football).
I think Toney goes just because he is the closest player to Harry Kane and great on the penalties.
I'd pick him for the pens alone, but don't think Southgate will. Don't think we should lose any more defenders of midfielders from the squad so would mean 3 from Maddison, Eze, Grealish and Gordon missing out, maybe Bowen in that group too.
Grealish will definitely go. Remember Southgate regularly has chosen him above Foden, no matter how well Foden has been playing. I think people like Bowen and Maddison are the sort of players who don't make it, as they don't offer anything different from that Palmer, Foden, Saka, Bellingham etc. Where Grealish is very good, you need to run the clock down, you give it to him, he picks up a foul. Rinse and Repeat. Also he meshes with Shaw very well.
"Yet this was not the only example of creeping authoritarianism. In a separate incident, the former Greek finance minister, left-wing political theorist and pro-Palestine speaker Yanis Varoufakis was prohibited from entering German territory and connecting with public meetings in Germany by video link. Throughout these episodes, the EU was silent."
Under what grounds was he banned? I disagree with pretty much everything he says, but I am not sure I have heard him say anything that you would think would get him close to prohibiting him speaking i.e. he isn't advocating people take up terrorism.
He shouldn't have been banned. But I'm also struggling to think of who at the EU was supposed to have opined on this.
Some years ago I was on a flight from London to Calgary which hit bad turbulence. It was well-advertised, the captain warned us that planes in front of us had reported us, that it was very bad and that we should all - including crew - get strapped in right now while he tried to avoid the worst of it. The first drop was bad, but we all breathed a sigh of relief, and then the second one was really, really bad. I can't exactly recall the figures later given from the flight deck, but it was definitely multiple thousand feet. I lifted against the seatbelt, and would definitely have been on the ceiling if I wasn't strapped in. No one was injured but there were loose tablets, magazines, drinks flying everywhere. We had several minutes of repeated drops like that. There were a few screams, but oddly that wasn't so bad, it was the large numbers of people weeping and moaning that got me, because other than that the plane was essentially silent. And the creaking of the plane - every part of the aircaft seemed to be under incredible stress during and after each drops. I'm sure most of us at one time or another have been on a flight where there's applause on landing, but that was certainly the most heartfelt applause I've ever been part of.
Planes are remarkably sturdy. The number that break up due to turbulance is as close to zero as makes no difference.
Doesn't make it any less scary for the passengers, though.
My wife hates turbulence when flying: she gets very stressed. And - weirdly - my reiteration of the statistics seems to do nothing to calm her. I am going to try and keep her away from the BBC news story, but I fear she will see it nonetheless.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
OMG that looks harrowing. The guy in the last photo covered with blood
Imagine the intensity of the fear. There is something about planes which still induces existential dread. Something about being stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet up in the air. And then suddenly just 24,000 feet....
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
Did Venice really think that charging €5 to get into the old city at the weekend in the summer, was going to put much of a dent in the numbers visiting?
I suspect their price is out by a factor of at least ten.
The problem in the future will be developing a system which doesn't simply exclude everyone apart from the wealthy. Maybe a lottery is the answer.
I hate Venice with a passion. The whole place is a monument to wealth and greed - all the best churches are fuck off statements by the merchant family sponsoring them and all the frescos have been incompetently restored and fucked up. Harry's bar is a ripoff though a masterpiece of understatement. I think making the place exclusive to the wealthy paying 100 euro a day, and under 30s with student travel cards, is the way forward
Venice is the most beautiful city on earth - by a distance. It’s a dreamscape. I adore it
But it has become insufferable in summer: the crush is horrific. Pricing is the only way out
Have you ever been in winter? It’s magical then. I recommend early December or late January. The crowds have largely gone and you can actually be alone in some distant corners
And the sense of melancholy decaying beauty is overwhelming. The most wonderfully tragic place on earth. I give it a very very rare noom factor 9. Almost off the dial
Been early March
You have to go once because of Death in Venice and Don't look Now and Byron and Hemingway and Pound and Brideshead revisited and and and. But once is enough
At 18 million tourists a year, Venice can accommodate about 15% of all the people in the world who turn 30 every year.
Even if you restricted everyone to a single lifetime visit, the global growth in tourism means it's impossible for everyone to go.
We have to, somehow, let go of this idea that there's a list of places that everyone has to go to see.
You have to submit a 15000 word thesis on some aspect of Venice to get your visa. It's vivaed to frustrate the AIs
It won't be long before a deepfake on Zoom will be indistinguishable from a real person.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
I remember as a kid in the 70s...
Hmm.
lol
Are you doubting that 1. I was once a child, or 2. That i possess a memory, or 3. That the 1970s existed?
Did Venice really think that charging €5 to get into the old city at the weekend in the summer, was going to put much of a dent in the numbers visiting?
I suspect their price is out by a factor of at least ten.
The problem in the future will be developing a system which doesn't simply exclude everyone apart from the wealthy. Maybe a lottery is the answer.
I hate Venice with a passion. The whole place is a monument to wealth and greed - all the best churches are fuck off statements by the merchant family sponsoring them and all the frescos have been incompetently restored and fucked up. Harry's bar is a ripoff though a masterpiece of understatement. I think making the place exclusive to the wealthy paying 100 euro a day, and under 30s with student travel cards, is the way forward
Venice is the most beautiful city on earth - by a distance. It’s a dreamscape. I adore it
But it has become insufferable in summer: the crush is horrific. Pricing is the only way out
Have you ever been in winter? It’s magical then. I recommend early December or late January. The crowds have largely gone and you can actually be alone in some distant corners
And the sense of melancholy decaying beauty is overwhelming. The most wonderfully tragic place on earth. I give it a very very rare noom factor 9. Almost off the dial
Been early March
You have to go once because of Death in Venice and Don't look Now and Byron and Hemingway and Pound and Brideshead revisited and and and. But once is enough
At 18 million tourists a year, Venice can accommodate about 15% of all the people in the world who turn 30 every year.
Even if you restricted everyone to a single lifetime visit, the global growth in tourism means it's impossible for everyone to go.
We have to, somehow, let go of this idea that there's a list of places that everyone has to go to see.
You have to submit a 15000 word thesis on some aspect of Venice to get your visa. It's vivaed to frustrate the AIs
It won't be long before a deepfake on Zoom will be indistinguishable from a real person.
IMF relatively positive for the UK today with room for up to 3 rate cuts this year and reasonable growth projection against our partners. Getting to the point now that this is much more helpful to an incoming government than Sunaks electoral prospects, but it may help stymie their losses a bit
Good afternoon
I think the economy will really perform well to the next election but not because of Sunak so much, but investors seeing a 5 year period, at least, of stability under Starmer
How much it effects the polls I have no idea but it will not prevent a Starmer government with a good majority especially in view of the likely collapse of the SNP
It could prevent the election of a Starmer government. You, or anyone can’t state for certain as you just done.
Many elections with late swing show it’s just hours from opinion polls pointing to one thing, the actual result another, political perceptions can change and polls move dramatically in days and weeks, it doesn’t need months for big movement. Evidence needed? 50 days of Truss she started about 4% behind Labour, finished about 40% behind.
Besides Labour have made a HUGE political mistake. They blamed all the financial woe and voter pain on Truss, and left Rishi free to the acclaim of complete reversion the Truss mess and making UKs economic woes history with his plan. inflation and growth in a fantastic place, and interest rates and mortgages on precipice of drop too. the plan is obviously working, Reeves and Starmer will be laughed at and shred their credibility, if they try to claim the governments plan is not working or that they’ve got a better one, won’t they?
That's some epic straw-clutching at work.
Labour are 20 points or more ahead and somehow a couple of months of "good news" is going to wipe that out - seriously? In 1997, the economy was foing very well as I recall but it didn't save the Conservatives from a heavy defeat - why should it now?
I don't quite know what has led to this damascene conversion to being a fan of Rishi Sunak and as for this "conservatism" you were going on about the other day, where is it in the current incarnation of the Conservative Party? Where will it be IF they get re-elected?
The other problem for the Tories is that they have royally pissed off the group of traditionally swing voters who stand to gain when the economy picks up, especially if it's primarily services led - i.e. well educated middle-class working age voters.
The 'left behind' places are still left behind and require more than an economic uptick to feel like they're doing OK - they need major long-term investment. However, the Tories have spent the last decade insulting those who in the past might have been persuaded to vote Tory in the belief it would be good for their wallet even if their heart was sympathetic to Labour. There's no easy solution to that until the Tories leave power and refresh and rebrand themselves again.
As a result, the Tories are fishing in a relatively small pool of retired and better off blue collar workers. Sunak had the chance to change that when he arrived on the scene, but inexplicably kept up the 'pwn the libs' strategy despite the backlash against it, even in former Tory heartlands already being obvious. To the extent that he's largely destroyed the personal brand he built up as Chancellor.
His "personal brand" was based on paying people to stay in bed and give them half price meals out. Not a sustainable strategy.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Did Venice really think that charging €5 to get into the old city at the weekend in the summer, was going to put much of a dent in the numbers visiting?
I suspect their price is out by a factor of at least ten.
The problem in the future will be developing a system which doesn't simply exclude everyone apart from the wealthy. Maybe a lottery is the answer.
I hate Venice with a passion. The whole place is a monument to wealth and greed - all the best churches are fuck off statements by the merchant family sponsoring them and all the frescos have been incompetently restored and fucked up. Harry's bar is a ripoff though a masterpiece of understatement. I think making the place exclusive to the wealthy paying 100 euro a day, and under 30s with student travel cards, is the way forward
Venice is the most beautiful city on earth - by a distance. It’s a dreamscape. I adore it
But it has become insufferable in summer: the crush is horrific. Pricing is the only way out
Have you ever been in winter? It’s magical then. I recommend early December or late January. The crowds have largely gone and you can actually be alone in some distant corners
And the sense of melancholy decaying beauty is overwhelming. The most wonderfully tragic place on earth. I give it a very very rare noom factor 9. Almost off the dial
Been early March
You have to go once because of Death in Venice and Don't look Now and Byron and Hemingway and Pound and Brideshead revisited and and and. But once is enough
At 18 million tourists a year, Venice can accommodate about 15% of all the people in the world who turn 30 every year.
Even if you restricted everyone to a single lifetime visit, the global growth in tourism means it's impossible for everyone to go.
We have to, somehow, let go of this idea that there's a list of places that everyone has to go to see.
You have to submit a 15000 word thesis on some aspect of Venice to get your visa. It's vivaed to frustrate the AIs
It won't be long before a deepfake on Zoom will be indistinguishable from a real person.
Angela Rayner has announced that sites for new "towns of the future" will be unveiled by the end of a Labour government's first year in power.
Labour's deputy leader and shadow housing secretary said creating new towns was a key part of her party's plan to build 1.5 million homes over five years.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
I remember as a kid in the 70s...
Hmm.
lol
Are you doubting that 1. I was once a child, or 2. That i possess a memory, or 3. That the 1970s existed?
I don't doubt 1, 2, or 3.
I mean according to the UN the legal definition of a child is 18 so I suppose there is some wiggle room.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
5 Grandchildren who went to court after being left a small amount in the Grandads will as he was disappointed they rarely visited have lost and been left with a large bill.
Has to be the right outcome overall, although there is an indication in the judge's closing remarks that the "favoured" children were deliberately provocative by holding a gothic novel-style grand reading of the will to which others were invited on a somewhat misleading basis. There's no requirement for that in the UK, and it was pretty clearly designed to humiliate. Nevertheless, the cut-out grandchildren obviously ought to have taken the high road at that point, rather than pursuing a hopeless (and ultimately perhaps ruinous) legal case.
I recall a case I sat in the public gallery on many years ago at the Royal Courts of Justice. A wealthy farming family with twin sons in their 50s or 60s and a daughter of similar age. Their parents had died and split the estate three ways BUT the sons' inheritances were to be held on trust by the daughter, essentially on the basis that she was sensible and they were wastrels and spendthifts. The fact they brought an expensive, pointless and and meritless legal challenge essentially proved their parents right. And the eyewatering costs that inevitably resulted all came from their share of the estate. I'll never forget the white haired old rogues listening to the judge explain that they'd be well advised not to appeal as it was hopeless and would only further reduce their already severely diminished inheritance. They listened politely, then said that is exactly what they planned to do, while their sister sat further back just rolled her eyes.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Did Venice really think that charging €5 to get into the old city at the weekend in the summer, was going to put much of a dent in the numbers visiting?
I suspect their price is out by a factor of at least ten.
The problem in the future will be developing a system which doesn't simply exclude everyone apart from the wealthy. Maybe a lottery is the answer.
I hate Venice with a passion. The whole place is a monument to wealth and greed - all the best churches are fuck off statements by the merchant family sponsoring them and all the frescos have been incompetently restored and fucked up. Harry's bar is a ripoff though a masterpiece of understatement. I think making the place exclusive to the wealthy paying 100 euro a day, and under 30s with student travel cards, is the way forward
Venice is the most beautiful city on earth - by a distance. It’s a dreamscape. I adore it
But it has become insufferable in summer: the crush is horrific. Pricing is the only way out
Have you ever been in winter? It’s magical then. I recommend early December or late January. The crowds have largely gone and you can actually be alone in some distant corners
And the sense of melancholy decaying beauty is overwhelming. The most wonderfully tragic place on earth. I give it a very very rare noom factor 9. Almost off the dial
Yes I'd go in winter and try for some of that Don't Look Now atmosphere. Not this coming winter though. Tenerife beckons again. Same hotel and maybe 10 nights this time.
I've been to Venice twice. Once was in about 2005, in, let's say, September. Got there about 2pm, left about 10pm. It was a bit of a queue to get in, but nothing overwhelming. And you instantly got an impression of crowds - but as soon as you are out of St. Mark's Square, it felt like we had the place to ourselves. Down an alleyway, through a square, over a little bridge, past a forgotten church - it felt like being in a fairytale. So few people about, and beauty everywhere you look. And then down another alleyway, and gosh! there's every tourist in Italy all in one place. And then dive back into the warren again. The second was in about 2012, in June, with two kids under four in tow, in weather ranging from heavy drizzle to absolutely biblical downpour. A bit of a challenge doing it all with buggies! But again, magical, and not really overcrowded once away from St. Mark's Square. I happily concede it may have got busier in the intervening period. But I'd agree it's possibly the most amazing place I've ever been. And noomy, yes. You look across the lagoon and you can almost hear the approaching visigoths or the shout of fourteenth century traders. It's entirely there for the tourists nowadays, of course. But that must have been true for at least a century, possibly much longer, and tourist traps of that venerability somehow eschew inauthenticity.
It has got vastly worse in the last decade. Why? China
500 million Chinese have got quite rich in recent times, certainly rich enough to travel, and they have passports. They also have a pent-up desire to see the world after a century of poverty and imprisonment
China is now the world's largest "source" of tourists. And of course they all want to go the same places: Venice, Paris, London, Bangkok, New York; or Provence, Tuscany, the Alps, Mount Fuji, etc
What's more, another 500 million Indian tourists are coming down the line, as India follows the Chinese economic trajectory. And they too want to see Venice
Venice cannot handle this amount of people. Rationing by price or lottery is the only answer, and price makes the most sense as it can reimburse the businesses who lose out on custom as numbers are forced down
This was all predicted in the Spectator eight years ago
"By the end of my autumnal travels, it occurred to me that there is one solution: the Bhutanese example. You ration travel, by time and money: you start to make people pay simply to get into cities, regions, nations."
Did Venice really think that charging €5 to get into the old city at the weekend in the summer, was going to put much of a dent in the numbers visiting?
I suspect their price is out by a factor of at least ten.
The problem in the future will be developing a system which doesn't simply exclude everyone apart from the wealthy. Maybe a lottery is the answer.
I hate Venice with a passion. The whole place is a monument to wealth and greed - all the best churches are fuck off statements by the merchant family sponsoring them and all the frescos have been incompetently restored and fucked up. Harry's bar is a ripoff though a masterpiece of understatement. I think making the place exclusive to the wealthy paying 100 euro a day, and under 30s with student travel cards, is the way forward
Venice is the most beautiful city on earth - by a distance. It’s a dreamscape. I adore it
But it has become insufferable in summer: the crush is horrific. Pricing is the only way out
Have you ever been in winter? It’s magical then. I recommend early December or late January. The crowds have largely gone and you can actually be alone in some distant corners
And the sense of melancholy decaying beauty is overwhelming. The most wonderfully tragic place on earth. I give it a very very rare noom factor 9. Almost off the dial
Yes I'd go in winter and try for some of that Don't Look Now atmosphere. Not this coming winter though. Tenerife beckons again. Same hotel and maybe 10 nights this time.
I've been to Venice twice. Once was in about 2005, in, let's say, September. Got there about 2pm, left about 10pm. It was a bit of a queue to get in, but nothing overwhelming. And you instantly got an impression of crowds - but as soon as you are out of St. Mark's Square, it felt like we had the place to ourselves. Down an alleyway, through a square, over a little bridge, past a forgotten church - it felt like being in a fairytale. So few people about, and beauty everywhere you look. And then down another alleyway, and gosh! there's every tourist in Italy all in one place. And then dive back into the warren again. The second was in about 2012, in June, with two kids under four in tow, in weather ranging from heavy drizzle to absolutely biblical downpour. A bit of a challenge doing it all with buggies! But again, magical, and not really overcrowded once away from St. Mark's Square. I happily concede it may have got busier in the intervening period. But I'd agree it's possibly the most amazing place I've ever been. And noomy, yes. You look across the lagoon and you can almost hear the approaching visigoths or the shout of fourteenth century traders. It's entirely there for the tourists nowadays, of course. But that must have been true for at least a century, possibly much longer, and tourist traps of that venerability somehow eschew inauthenticity.
It has got vastly worse in the last decade. Why? China
500 million Chinese have got quite rich in recent times, certainly rich enough to travel, and they have passports. They also have a pent-up desire to see the world after a century of poverty and imprisonment
China is now the world's largest "source" of tourists. And of course they all want to go the same places: Venice, Paris, London, Bangkok, New York; or Provence, Tuscany, the Alps, Mount Fuji, etc
What's more, another 500 million Indian tourists are coming down the line, as India follows the Chinese economic trajectory. And they too want to see Venice
Venice cannot handle this amount of people. Rationing by price or lottery is the only answer, and price makes the most sense as it can reimburse the businesses who lose out on custom as numbers are forced down
This was all predicted in the Spectator eight years ago
"By the end of my autumnal travels, it occurred to me that there is one solution: the Bhutanese example. You ration travel, by time and money: you start to make people pay simply to get into cities, regions, nations."
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
It took us two years to figure out how to change the clock in our car. But I've forgotten again now.
Some years ago I was on a flight from London to Calgary which hit bad turbulence. It was well-advertised, the captain warned us that planes in front of us had reported us, that it was very bad and that we should all - including crew - get strapped in right now while he tried to avoid the worst of it. The first drop was bad, but we all breathed a sigh of relief, and then the second one was really, really bad. I can't exactly recall the figures later given from the flight deck, but it was definitely multiple thousand feet. I lifted against the seatbelt, and would definitely have been on the ceiling if I wasn't strapped in. No one was injured but there were loose tablets, magazines, drinks flying everywhere. We had several minutes of repeated drops like that. There were a few screams, but oddly that wasn't so bad, it was the large numbers of people weeping and moaning that got me, because other than that the plane was essentially silent. And the creaking of the plane - every part of the aircaft seemed to be under incredible stress during and after each drops. I'm sure most of us at one time or another have been on a flight where there's applause on landing, but that was certainly the most heartfelt applause I've ever been part of.
Planes are remarkably sturdy. The number that break up due to turbulance is as close to zero as makes no difference.
Doesn't make it any less scary for the passengers, though.
My wife hates turbulence when flying: she gets very stressed. And - weirdly - my reiteration of the statistics seems to do nothing to calm her. I am going to try and keep her away from the BBC news story, but I fear she will see it nonetheless.
Yes, afterwards it occurred to me that the fabric of the plane creaking was a good thing - it was the sound of it flexing. If the creaking had stopped, that would have been bad...
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
I remember as a kid in the 70s...
Hmm.
lol
Are you doubting that 1. I was once a child, or 2. That i possess a memory, or 3. That the 1970s existed?
I don't doubt 1, 2, or 3.
I mean according to the UN the legal definition of a child is 18 so I suppose there is some wiggle room.
You seem to think I am five years older than I am. It's bad enough being the age I am - an old git, frankly - without adding another half decade!
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
I was driving along in my hire car the other day to discover I didn't have any wing mirrors. It seemed I had pressed a button to fold them without realising. I had to find the button so I could unfold them again.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
5 Grandchildren who went to court after being left a small amount in the Grandads will as he was disappointed they rarely visited have lost and been left with a large bill.
Inheritance battles must run close to divorces in both their ability to poison family relationships and enrich lawyers. I have an uncle who nobody talks to anymore after he got my grandmother to sign everything over to him two weeks before her death. On the plus side, though, I'm still on friendly terms with my siblings after dealing with the estates of our parents, though that had its moments too.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
David Cameron has written to Rishi Sunak warning that universities will face job losses and even closure if he pushes ahead with curbs to graduate visas
Sunak is weighing up measures to ensure only ‘best and brightest’ come to U.K.
Cameron: ‘One of the consequences of any restrictions on graduate visas is that universities will experience further financial difficulties — leading to job losses, closures and a reduction in research’
He highlights the ‘significant economic contribution’ that international students make to the economy
He also warns that it could damage Britain’s ‘soft power’
He joins a coalition of ministers opposed to hardline curbs on graduate visas including Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor and James Cleverly, the home secretary
Ally of Sunak pushes back: ‘Ultimately ministers get lobbied and make a case for their equities but the PM has to take the right position for the country’
Apart from "must make number go down" monomania, what the flip does Rishi think he's playing at?
He wants to be able to frame the next election as a choice between low immigration under the Tories or high immigration under Labour. So he has to force Labour to oppose policies which aim to reduce immigration.
It's one of his best remaining chances to close the gap.
If that is Rishi's plan, to contrast high immigration Labour with low immigration Conservatives, then it runs smack bang into the reality of record immigration under this government.
The reason it has not moved the polls is Rishi is constantly reminding voters of his own government's failure.
The governments record is not the decision in front of voters though. If they don’t like it so far, voters have to decide if it will be worse or better under Labour.
You are, of course, correct, but the evidence of the opinion polls is that decisions have already been made. So what is Rishi's master plan on immigration? I'd suggest we look past the small boats and Rwanda and instead look at student visas, which is where this sub-thread started. The trouble is, I'm not sure the voter on the Clapham omnibus is too exercised about foreign students.
Are you thinking what I'm thinking? I'm thinking CCHQ's expensive Australian experts are leading Rishi down the same rabbit hole that meant Michael Howard underperformed even IDS.
Round me, people have made a direct link between students and the housing crisis. A very large proportion of all new apartments are student accommodation (AKA Scandi prison cells).
This only really effects Uni cities though. The election will be won in the suburbs/towns.
Hm - I think it's a bit more complex than that. Surely building new purpose-built student accommodation, in, to give a local example, Manchester City Centre, frees up family housing in Fallowfield and Withington? Purpose built student accommodation may be unromantic, but it strikes me as a reasonably efficient way of increasing the housing supply.
EDIT: other cities'c omparisons are available, of course. I could have substituted Newcastle/Leeds/Liverpool/Sheffield City Centre for Manchester City Centre and Jesmond/Headingley/Broomhill/Mossley Hill for Fallowfield and Withington.
Depends what your reference timescale is, and how fast the student population is growing.
Edinburgh is building accommodation incredibly fast - every patch of former industrial ground between Princes Street and the Shore. But that construction is to accommodate the student letting industry, not to provide homes to local people who are competing for the existing tenements. There is an opportunity cost for each patch of land.
I don't think many PBers understand what is going on in the cities, which is where the housing crisis exists. Supply is one thing - but it's a supply of rental and short term lets for landlords.
David Cameron has written to Rishi Sunak warning that universities will face job losses and even closure if he pushes ahead with curbs to graduate visas
Sunak is weighing up measures to ensure only ‘best and brightest’ come to U.K.
Cameron: ‘One of the consequences of any restrictions on graduate visas is that universities will experience further financial difficulties — leading to job losses, closures and a reduction in research’
He highlights the ‘significant economic contribution’ that international students make to the economy
He also warns that it could damage Britain’s ‘soft power’
He joins a coalition of ministers opposed to hardline curbs on graduate visas including Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor and James Cleverly, the home secretary
Ally of Sunak pushes back: ‘Ultimately ministers get lobbied and make a case for their equities but the PM has to take the right position for the country’
Apart from "must make number go down" monomania, what the flip does Rishi think he's playing at?
He wants to be able to frame the next election as a choice between low immigration under the Tories or high immigration under Labour. So he has to force Labour to oppose policies which aim to reduce immigration.
It's one of his best remaining chances to close the gap.
If that is Rishi's plan, to contrast high immigration Labour with low immigration Conservatives, then it runs smack bang into the reality of record immigration under this government.
The reason it has not moved the polls is Rishi is constantly reminding voters of his own government's failure.
The governments record is not the decision in front of voters though. If they don’t like it so far, voters have to decide if it will be worse or better under Labour.
You are, of course, correct, but the evidence of the opinion polls is that decisions have already been made. So what is Rishi's master plan on immigration? I'd suggest we look past the small boats and Rwanda and instead look at student visas, which is where this sub-thread started. The trouble is, I'm not sure the voter on the Clapham omnibus is too exercised about foreign students.
Are you thinking what I'm thinking? I'm thinking CCHQ's expensive Australian experts are leading Rishi down the same rabbit hole that meant Michael Howard underperformed even IDS.
Round me, people have made a direct link between students and the housing crisis. A very large proportion of all new apartments are student accommodation (AKA Scandi prison cells).
This only really effects Uni cities though. The election will be won in the suburbs/towns.
Hm - I think it's a bit more complex than that. Surely building new purpose-built student accommodation, in, to give a local example, Manchester City Centre, frees up family housing in Fallowfield and Withington? Purpose built student accommodation may be unromantic, but it strikes me as a reasonably efficient way of increasing the housing supply.
EDIT: other cities'c omparisons are available, of course. I could have substituted Newcastle/Leeds/Liverpool/Sheffield City Centre for Manchester City Centre and Jesmond/Headingley/Broomhill/Mossley Hill for Fallowfield and Withington.
Depends what your reference timescale is, and how fast the student population is growing.
Edinburgh is building accommodation incredibly fast - every patch of former industrial ground between Princes Street and the Shore. But that construction is to accommodate the student letting industry, not to provide homes to local people who are competing for the existing tenements. There is an opportunity cost for each patch of land.
I don't think many PBers understand what is going on in the cities, which is where the housing crisis exists. Supply is one thing - but it's a supply of rental and short term lets for landlords.
Yes, but the buildings you put up for students, you're presumably accommodating far more people per square metre than you would be for families? That's certainly what's happening in Manchester (and Sheffield).
5 Grandchildren who went to court after being left a small amount in the Grandads will as he was disappointed they rarely visited have lost and been left with a large bill.
Inheritance battles must run close to divorces in both their ability to poison family relationships and enrich lawyers. I have an uncle who nobody talks to anymore after he got my grandmother to sign everything over to him two weeks before her death. On the plus side, though, I'm still on friendly terms with my siblings after dealing with the estates of our parents, though that had its moments too.
In France children are entitled to a minimum part of their deceased parent's estate
Some years ago I was on a flight from London to Calgary which hit bad turbulence. It was well-advertised, the captain warned us that planes in front of us had reported us, that it was very bad and that we should all - including crew - get strapped in right now while he tried to avoid the worst of it. The first drop was bad, but we all breathed a sigh of relief, and then the second one was really, really bad. I can't exactly recall the figures later given from the flight deck, but it was definitely multiple thousand feet. I lifted against the seatbelt, and would definitely have been on the ceiling if I wasn't strapped in. No one was injured but there were loose tablets, magazines, drinks flying everywhere. We had several minutes of repeated drops like that. There were a few screams, but oddly that wasn't so bad, it was the large numbers of people weeping and moaning that got me, because other than that the plane was essentially silent. And the creaking of the plane - every part of the aircaft seemed to be under incredible stress during and after each drops. I'm sure most of us at one time or another have been on a flight where there's applause on landing, but that was certainly the most heartfelt applause I've ever been part of.
Planes are remarkably sturdy. The number that break up due to turbulance is as close to zero as makes no difference.
Doesn't make it any less scary for the passengers, though.
My wife hates turbulence when flying: she gets very stressed. And - weirdly - my reiteration of the statistics seems to do nothing to calm her. I am going to try and keep her away from the BBC news story, but I fear she will see it nonetheless.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
I was driving along in my hire car the other day to discover I didn't have any wing mirrors. It seemed I had pressed a button to fold them without realising. I had to find the button so I could unfold them again.
Yes! Complicated hire cars are the worst! I just had one. A MG ZS or something - I didn't realise MG is big in Italy? Anyway they are and the car was fast, spacious, quite sleek - but the controls were insanely fiddly and stupily obscure. eg weird lever-buttons you had to press up or down in a non-intutive way to change the temperature
At one point I knocked the hazard switch on without realising then every other car presumed I was in trouble and slowed down and I couldn't find the switch I knocked - it was in some dark obscure place, so I was veering all over the road as I urgently tried to turn it off and this was on a fast puglian road with nowhere to pull over. Wanker designers - could have killed me
It reminds me of that HELLISH period from about 2005-2020 when shower units got more and more complex until you needed a degree in shower unit ergonomics to work out how to simply turn it on and get a nice flow of hot water from above, and not in your face or squirting into your perineum
However I've noted since 2020 that designers seem to have realised this. Most modern showers are now automatically set to 38C and are quite intutiive to use. Maybe the same good sense will be applied to cars
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
OMG that looks harrowing. The guy in the last photo covered with blood
Imagine the intensity of the fear. There is something about planes which still induces existential dread. Something about being stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet up in the air. And then suddenly just 24,000 feet....
If I was one of the surviving passengers I would now be getting drunker than I have ever been in my life and then some on top.
The pilot managed a clam voice. That is quite something.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
I was driving along in my hire car the other day to discover I didn't have any wing mirrors. It seemed I had pressed a button to fold them without realising. I had to find the button so I could unfold them again.
Yes! Complicated hire cars are the worst! I just had one. A MG ZS or something - I didn't realise MG is big in Italy? Anyway they are and the car was fast, spacious, quite sleek - but the controls were insanely fiddly and stupily obscure. eg weird lever-buttons you had to press up or down in a non-intutive way to change the temperature
At one point I knocked the hazard switch on without realising then every other car presumed I was in trouble and slowed down and I couldn't find the switch I knocked - it was in some dark obscure place, so I was veering all over the road as I urgently tried to turn it off and this was on a fast puglian road with nowhere to pull over. Wanker designers - could have killed me
It reminds me of that HELLISH period from about 2005-2020 when shower units got more and more complex until you needed a degree in shower unit ergonomics to work out how to simply turn it on and get a nice flow of hot water from above, and not in your face or squirting into your perineum
However I've noted since 2020 that designers seem to have realised this. Most modern showers are now automatically set to 38C and are quite intutiive to use. Maybe the same good sense will be applied to cars
MG are chinese state owned company and so part of the push by the Chinese government to flood the market with their cheap cars.
Don't know is my answer. It used to be the case that it was much easier to take away medals and Orders and Knighthoods than peerages. Is it still?
From my shallow reading Ken Clarke wasn't any more responsible than Margaret Thatcher and was possibly doing what he was told. But Thatcher in this instance has the fortune to be dead while Clarke is still alive.
Clarke claims both ignorance of what was going on, and certainty that he couldn't have done any better. That is untenable.
...both Lord Glenarthur and Lord Patten genuinely endeavoured to assist the Inquiry. By contrast, Lord Clarke was combative: he described his natural style as seeking to challenge, and that extended to his questioning why he should have been asked to give any evidence at all to the Inquiry.450 He claimed that unless someone pointed out to him that something was going on, he had nothing to do with blood transfusion or products and that “The campaigners attributed everything to me because I later became a well-known figure.”451 He was at pains to point out his lack of involvement and lack of responsibility. He seemed to argue that any failure on the part of government did not have any effect on anybody’s health, even though he was obviously not in a position to know whether that was the case (indeed he did not even appear to be aware that people were infected with AIDS from the British blood supply, as well as that which was imported, and wondered whether Factor 8 was a pill to be taken at home).452 He thought it was “daft” that he be asked detailed questions “about events 40 years ago in a busy Government Department where this was a tiny, tiny proportion of my activity.”453 He was firmly of the view that if you stopped giving Factor 8 “you were killing some haemophiliacs” and postulated that had the decision to stop imports been taken, whilst lives would have been saved, “we” (the Government) would “have continued to this day to be reviled for condemning haemophiliacs to going back to the kind of life they’d enjoyed before this wonder treatment was devised*.”454 He did not think that there was anything the DHSS did wrong and asserted that if the Inquiry came to the conclusion that the introduction of HIV screening took too long “I would reject the conclusion.”..
*His assertion is actually untrue.
I think people conflate two different accusations against Clarke.
One is he doesn't see the point of the inquiry and why he should be answerable for the dreadful treatment of blood transfusion patients. He lacks any introspection or empathy for the victims. On that point guilty as charged in my view.
The other point is whether Clarke has particular responsibility for not protecting blood transfusion patients in the first place and for preventing them getting justice and compensation after they were infected. And because of this he should be called out. I am not so sure about this. The first would lie more with NHS processes. Several other healthcare systems allowed contaminated blood. It looks like Margaret Thatcher was the main obstacle to the victims getting justice and compensation, not Clarke, her junior health minister. But I haven't read enough to be sure.
I am shocked, shocked, that PB Tories are holding Ed Davey and Ken Clarke to different standards.
Costello continues to be a pretty disastrous witness for the defence.
Costello says that he didn't tell Cohen about his closeness with Giuliani at the first meeting, but Hoffinger shows him his email in which he wrote "I told you my relationship with Rudy"—meaning, "I told you before."...
Costello denies again, so Hoffinger shows another email (512B) 04/2018 Costello to Citron, abt Giuliani joining Trump's legal team: "all the more reason for Cohen to hire me...as I mentioned to him in our meeting."
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
It's also stupid AND technically passe
We now have machines that will respond superbly to voice commands, they can hear and understand everything with astonishing fidelity and cleverness. You could grunt "Ugh, gggngng, bbbpppff, too bloody cold uggghh change it" and they can understand that completely, and they can change the temperature, make it hotter here or colder there
Why aren't car manufacturers installing this life-saving tech in their cars? Talking to your car, with your eyes on the road, is infinitely safer than lurching around trying to touch part of an iPad three feet to your left, so you must look away from the traffic
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
I remember as a kid in the 70s...
Hmm.
lol
Are you doubting that 1. I was once a child, or 2. That i possess a memory, or 3. That the 1970s existed?
I don't doubt 1, 2, or 3.
I mean according to the UN the legal definition of a child is 18 so I suppose there is some wiggle room.
You seem to think I am five years older than I am. It's bad enough being the age I am - an old git, frankly - without adding another half decade!
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
I remember as a kid in the 70s...
Hmm.
lol
Are you doubting that 1. I was once a child, or 2. That i possess a memory, or 3. That the 1970s existed?
I don't doubt 1, 2, or 3.
I mean according to the UN the legal definition of a child is 18 so I suppose there is some wiggle room.
You seem to think I am five years older than I am. It's bad enough being the age I am - an old git, frankly - without adding another half decade!
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Did Venice really think that charging €5 to get into the old city at the weekend in the summer, was going to put much of a dent in the numbers visiting?
I suspect their price is out by a factor of at least ten.
The problem in the future will be developing a system which doesn't simply exclude everyone apart from the wealthy. Maybe a lottery is the answer.
I hate Venice with a passion. The whole place is a monument to wealth and greed - all the best churches are fuck off statements by the merchant family sponsoring them and all the frescos have been incompetently restored and fucked up. Harry's bar is a ripoff though a masterpiece of understatement. I think making the place exclusive to the wealthy paying 100 euro a day, and under 30s with student travel cards, is the way forward
Venice is the most beautiful city on earth - by a distance. It’s a dreamscape. I adore it
But it has become insufferable in summer: the crush is horrific. Pricing is the only way out
Have you ever been in winter? It’s magical then. I recommend early December or late January. The crowds have largely gone and you can actually be alone in some distant corners
And the sense of melancholy decaying beauty is overwhelming. The most wonderfully tragic place on earth. I give it a very very rare noom factor 9. Almost off the dial
Been early March
You have to go once because of Death in Venice and Don't look Now and Byron and Hemingway and Pound and Brideshead revisited and and and. But once is enough
At 18 million tourists a year, Venice can accommodate about 15% of all the people in the world who turn 30 every year.
Even if you restricted everyone to a single lifetime visit, the global growth in tourism means it's impossible for everyone to go.
We have to, somehow, let go of this idea that there's a list of places that everyone has to go to see.
You have to submit a 15000 word thesis on some aspect of Venice to get your visa. It's vivaed to frustrate the AIs
It won't be long before a deepfake on Zoom will be indistinguishable from a real person.
True
And 10 years after that in the flesh will be no good either because you can't tell whether the flesh is running neuralink. Then what? Identity and ownership will become meaningless.
Angela Rayner has announced that sites for new "towns of the future" will be unveiled by the end of a Labour government's first year in power.
Labour's deputy leader and shadow housing secretary said creating new towns was a key part of her party's plan to build 1.5 million homes over five years.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
I was driving along in my hire car the other day to discover I didn't have any wing mirrors. It seemed I had pressed a button to fold them without realising. I had to find the button so I could unfold them again.
Yes! Complicated hire cars are the worst! I just had one. A MG ZS or something - I didn't realise MG is big in Italy? Anyway they are and the car was fast, spacious, quite sleek - but the controls were insanely fiddly and stupily obscure. eg weird lever-buttons you had to press up or down in a non-intutive way to change the temperature
At one point I knocked the hazard switch on without realising then every other car presumed I was in trouble and slowed down and I couldn't find the switch I knocked - it was in some dark obscure place, so I was veering all over the road as I urgently tried to turn it off and this was on a fast puglian road with nowhere to pull over. Wanker designers - could have killed me
It reminds me of that HELLISH period from about 2005-2020 when shower units got more and more complex until you needed a degree in shower unit ergonomics to work out how to simply turn it on and get a nice flow of hot water from above, and not in your face or squirting into your perineum
However I've noted since 2020 that designers seem to have realised this. Most modern showers are now automatically set to 38C and are quite intutiive to use. Maybe the same good sense will be applied to cars
MG are chinese state owned company and so part of the push by the Chinese government to flood the market with their cheap cars.
Yep, the Chinese bought the brand for pennies, and are now attaching the name to Chinese-built cars. There’s not really any terrible cars any more, and they’re good enough for most people while being cheaper then the Korean competition.
Can’t imagine it will be too easy to find spares for them a few years down the road, they’ll quickly depreciate to nothing and be cannibalised for parts if that happens.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
OMG that looks harrowing. The guy in the last photo covered with blood
Imagine the intensity of the fear. There is something about planes which still induces existential dread. Something about being stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet up in the air. And then suddenly just 24,000 feet....
If I was one of the surviving passengers I would now be getting drunker than I have ever been in my life and then some on top.
The pilot managed a clam voice. That is quite something.
Would you ever fly again? I like to think I am quite resilient, indeed I AM quite resilient, but wow, after that, I'd be wary
Costello continues to be a pretty disastrous witness for the defence.
Costello says that he didn't tell Cohen about his closeness with Giuliani at the first meeting, but Hoffinger shows him his email in which he wrote "I told you my relationship with Rudy"—meaning, "I told you before."...
Costello denies again, so Hoffinger shows another email (512B) 04/2018 Costello to Citron, abt Giuliani joining Trump's legal team: "all the more reason for Cohen to hire me...as I mentioned to him in our meeting."
Costello continues to be a pretty disastrous witness for the defence.
Costello says that he didn't tell Cohen about his closeness with Giuliani at the first meeting, but Hoffinger shows him his email in which he wrote "I told you my relationship with Rudy"—meaning, "I told you before."...
Costello denies again, so Hoffinger shows another email (512B) 04/2018 Costello to Citron, abt Giuliani joining Trump's legal team: "all the more reason for Cohen to hire me...as I mentioned to him in our meeting."
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Also, see my prior comment. We don't even NEED touchscreens. It is yesterday's tech. We now have machines that respond to voice commands, with great skill. Vastly safer
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
I was driving along in my hire car the other day to discover I didn't have any wing mirrors. It seemed I had pressed a button to fold them without realising. I had to find the button so I could unfold them again.
Yes! Complicated hire cars are the worst! I just had one. A MG ZS or something - I didn't realise MG is big in Italy? Anyway they are and the car was fast, spacious, quite sleek - but the controls were insanely fiddly and stupily obscure. eg weird lever-buttons you had to press up or down in a non-intutive way to change the temperature
At one point I knocked the hazard switch on without realising then every other car presumed I was in trouble and slowed down and I couldn't find the switch I knocked - it was in some dark obscure place, so I was veering all over the road as I urgently tried to turn it off and this was on a fast puglian road with nowhere to pull over. Wanker designers - could have killed me
It reminds me of that HELLISH period from about 2005-2020 when shower units got more and more complex until you needed a degree in shower unit ergonomics to work out how to simply turn it on and get a nice flow of hot water from above, and not in your face or squirting into your perineum
However I've noted since 2020 that designers seem to have realised this. Most modern showers are now automatically set to 38C and are quite intutiive to use. Maybe the same good sense will be applied to cars
I was wondering how you were travelling round Italy since you hadn't mentioned it. I guess it was stupid to think it might have been public transport in the south of the country.
Some years ago I was on a flight from London to Calgary which hit bad turbulence. It was well-advertised, the captain warned us that planes in front of us had reported us, that it was very bad and that we should all - including crew - get strapped in right now while he tried to avoid the worst of it. The first drop was bad, but we all breathed a sigh of relief, and then the second one was really, really bad. I can't exactly recall the figures later given from the flight deck, but it was definitely multiple thousand feet. I lifted against the seatbelt, and would definitely have been on the ceiling if I wasn't strapped in. No one was injured but there were loose tablets, magazines, drinks flying everywhere. We had several minutes of repeated drops like that. There were a few screams, but oddly that wasn't so bad, it was the large numbers of people weeping and moaning that got me, because other than that the plane was essentially silent. And the creaking of the plane - every part of the aircaft seemed to be under incredible stress during and after each drops. I'm sure most of us at one time or another have been on a flight where there's applause on landing, but that was certainly the most heartfelt applause I've ever been part of.
Planes are remarkably sturdy. The number that break up due to turbulance is as close to zero as makes no difference.
Doesn't make it any less scary for the passengers, though.
My wife hates turbulence when flying: she gets very stressed. And - weirdly - my reiteration of the statistics seems to do nothing to calm her. I am going to try and keep her away from the BBC news story, but I fear she will see it nonetheless.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
It's bodywork/rust repairs that kill cars not computers or electronics which are relatively easy to diagnose and replace.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
It's also stupid AND technically passe
We now have machines that will respond superbly to voice commands, they can hear and understand everything with astonishing fidelity and cleverness. You could grunt "Ugh, gggngng, bbbpppff, too bloody cold uggghh change it" and they can understand that completely, and they can change the temperature, make it hotter here or colder there
Why aren't car manufacturers installing this life-saving tech in their cars? Talking to your car, with your eyes on the road, is infinitely safer than lurching around trying to touch part of an iPad three feet to your left, so you must look away from the traffic
I wouldn't trust a car that runs on "Open" AI.
You ask it to start, and it will probably say "sorry, as a large language motor vehicle designed in Silicon Valley, cars are bad for the environment and your journey would be better taken on a cycle. It's important to note that cycling is good for your health, as well as the environment. Is there anything else I can "help" you with today?"
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
It's also stupid AND technically passe
We now have machines that will respond superbly to voice commands, they can hear and understand everything with astonishing fidelity and cleverness. You could grunt "Ugh, gggngng, bbbpppff, too bloody cold uggghh change it" and they can understand that completely, and they can change the temperature, make it hotter here or colder there
Why aren't car manufacturers installing this life-saving tech in their cars? Talking to your car, with your eyes on the road, is infinitely safer than lurching around trying to touch part of an iPad three feet to your left, so you must look away from the traffic
I wouldn't trust a car that runs on "Open" AI.
You ask it to start, and it will probably say "sorry, as a large language motor vehicle designed in Silicon Valley, cars are bad for the environment and your journey would be better taken on a cycle. It's important to note that cycling is good for your health, as well as the environment. Is there anything else I can "help" you with today?"
Definitely if it was Google AI.....it told me off when I asked it to produce a picture of an alien on the moon taking a selfie of a crashed space craft....apparently aliens (it was thinking about illegal immigrants in US) are a minority that shouldn't be mocked and so refused to create such a picture.
It occurs to me that PB should form the next government
We'd get everything fixed in about 3 months, from the flaws in car design to the proper ownwership of utilities to the best national anthems and the correct way to dunk biscuits. Also we'd manage foreign policy better because I've been everywhere. Sunil can run the trains . Kinabalu, with his love of toe tapping live bands in the al fresco bars of Tenerife, should be culture minister
Dura Ace should be Defence Secretary AND Head of Sitcoms at ITV
Also, see my prior comment. We don't even NEED touchscreens. It is yesterday's tech. We now have machines that respond to voice commands, with great skill. Vastly safer
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
It's also stupid AND technically passe
We now have machines that will respond superbly to voice commands, they can hear and understand everything with astonishing fidelity and cleverness. You could grunt "Ugh, gggngng, bbbpppff, too bloody cold uggghh change it" and they can understand that completely, and they can change the temperature, make it hotter here or colder there
Why aren't car manufacturers installing this life-saving tech in their cars? Talking to your car, with your eyes on the road, is infinitely safer than lurching around trying to touch part of an iPad three feet to your left, so you must look away from the traffic
I wouldn't trust a car that runs on "Open" AI.
You ask it to start, and it will probably say "sorry, as a large language motor vehicle designed in Silicon Valley, cars are bad for the environment and your journey would be better taken on a cycle. It's important to note that cycling is good for your health, as well as the environment. Is there anything else I can "help" you with today?"
Also, ISTR an article recently about Volkswagen's Ts & Cs for letting your car talk to your phone in which it gave itself permission to search through your emails and texts and draw its own conclusions about your sexual preferences. Though I can't remember why. I'd say that's too intimate a relationship to have with my car. (I don't let my car talk to my phone, not because I read the Ts and Cs, but partly because 'why would you want to' and partly because I would have to work out how to do so and I've always managed perfectly well without.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
It's also stupid AND technically passe
We now have machines that will respond superbly to voice commands, they can hear and understand everything with astonishing fidelity and cleverness. You could grunt "Ugh, gggngng, bbbpppff, too bloody cold uggghh change it" and they can understand that completely, and they can change the temperature, make it hotter here or colder there
Why aren't car manufacturers installing this life-saving tech in their cars? Talking to your car, with your eyes on the road, is infinitely safer than lurching around trying to touch part of an iPad three feet to your left, so you must look away from the traffic
I wouldn't trust a car that runs on "Open" AI.
You ask it to start, and it will probably say "sorry, as a large language motor vehicle designed in Silicon Valley, cars are bad for the environment and your journey would be better taken on a cycle. It's important to note that cycling is good for your health, as well as the environment. Is there anything else I can "help" you with today?"
Definitely if it was Google AI.....it told me off when I asked it to produce a picture of an alien on the moon taking a selfie of a crashed space craft....apparently aliens (it was thinking about illegal immigrants in US) are a minority that shouldn't be mocked and so refused to create such a picture.
I think it was Charlotte, NC, where I once queued up for US immigration and there were two lines, signed “Americans” and “Aliens”. Before 9/11 and the TSA madness.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
OMG that looks harrowing. The guy in the last photo covered with blood
Imagine the intensity of the fear. There is something about planes which still induces existential dread. Something about being stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet up in the air. And then suddenly just 24,000 feet....
If I was one of the surviving passengers I would now be getting drunker than I have ever been in my life and then some on top.
The pilot managed a clam voice. That is quite something.
Even a calm voice would be quite something. A clam voice is mindboggling.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
It's also stupid AND technically passe
We now have machines that will respond superbly to voice commands, they can hear and understand everything with astonishing fidelity and cleverness. You could grunt "Ugh, gggngng, bbbpppff, too bloody cold uggghh change it" and they can understand that completely, and they can change the temperature, make it hotter here or colder there
Why aren't car manufacturers installing this life-saving tech in their cars? Talking to your car, with your eyes on the road, is infinitely safer than lurching around trying to touch part of an iPad three feet to your left, so you must look away from the traffic
I wouldn't trust a car that runs on "Open" AI.
You ask it to start, and it will probably say "sorry, as a large language motor vehicle designed in Silicon Valley, cars are bad for the environment and your journey would be better taken on a cycle. It's important to note that cycling is good for your health, as well as the environment. Is there anything else I can "help" you with today?"
Also, ISTR an article recently about Volkswagen's Ts & Cs for letting your car talk to your phone in which it gave itself permission to search through your emails and texts and draw its own conclusions about your sexual preferences. Though I can't remember why. I'd say that's too intimate a relationship to have with my car. (I don't let my car talk to my phone, not because I read the Ts and Cs, but partly because 'why would you want to' and partly because I would have to work out how to do so and I've always managed perfectly well without.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
It's also stupid AND technically passe
We now have machines that will respond superbly to voice commands, they can hear and understand everything with astonishing fidelity and cleverness. You could grunt "Ugh, gggngng, bbbpppff, too bloody cold uggghh change it" and they can understand that completely, and they can change the temperature, make it hotter here or colder there
Why aren't car manufacturers installing this life-saving tech in their cars? Talking to your car, with your eyes on the road, is infinitely safer than lurching around trying to touch part of an iPad three feet to your left, so you must look away from the traffic
I wouldn't trust a car that runs on "Open" AI.
You ask it to start, and it will probably say "sorry, as a large language motor vehicle designed in Silicon Valley, cars are bad for the environment and your journey would be better taken on a cycle. It's important to note that cycling is good for your health, as well as the environment. Is there anything else I can "help" you with today?"
Definitely if it was Google AI.....it told me off when I asked it to produce a picture of an alien on the moon taking a selfie of a crashed space craft....apparently aliens (it was thinking about illegal immigrants in US) are a minority that shouldn't be mocked and so refused to create such a picture.
I used something called Claude the other day. I asked it for a recipe for hard cider made from a carton of apple juice, just to see what it said. I got some nice home made wine recipes so wanted to get a twist on the old prison hooch.
It told me I shouldn’t make cider that way.
So after I replied with “I asked you for a recipe, it is not for you to tell me what I should or should not do” it rather cravenly apologised (you’re right, it is not my place to tell you that etc etc….) and gave me a recipe.
It occurs to me that PB should form the next government
We'd get everything fixed in about 3 months, from the flaws in car design to the proper ownwership of utilities to the best national anthems and the correct way to dunk biscuits. Also we'd manage foreign policy better because I've been everywhere. Sunil can run the trains . Kinabalu, with his love of toe tapping live bands in the al fresco bars of Tenerife, should be culture minister
Dura Ace should be Defence Secretary AND Head of Sitcoms at ITV
I wouldn't put Dura in charge of the armed forces; he'd probably stage a revolution.
If you're going to be minister for blue-sky thinking, you'll have to do better than that.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Touchscreens are a double whammy. You need to look at them, unlike buttons or dials, and since most drivers are right-handed, the screen is on the wrong side.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
OMG that looks harrowing. The guy in the last photo covered with blood
Imagine the intensity of the fear. There is something about planes which still induces existential dread. Something about being stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet up in the air. And then suddenly just 24,000 feet....
If I was one of the surviving passengers I would now be getting drunker than I have ever been in my life and then some on top.
The pilot managed a clam voice. That is quite something.
Even a calm voice would be quite something. A clam voice is mindboggling.
I'd always prefer to be flown by a pilot with a clam voice but then maybe I'm just being shellfish.
Talking of cars, Mrs Al received a letter this morning from the Met with a speeding fine for doing 24mph on a 20mph road in Croydon, at 8.00 on a Sunday morning. Is it normal practice to be so tough? Seemed very harsh to us, as on local 20mph roads the average speed seems to be around 25-30 mph. Guess we just have to suck it up, though.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
OMG that looks harrowing. The guy in the last photo covered with blood
Imagine the intensity of the fear. There is something about planes which still induces existential dread. Something about being stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet up in the air. And then suddenly just 24,000 feet....
If I was one of the surviving passengers I would now be getting drunker than I have ever been in my life and then some on top.
The pilot managed a clam voice. That is quite something.
Even a calm voice would be quite something. A clam voice is mindboggling.
I'd always prefer to be flown by a pilot with a clam voice but then maybe I'm just being shellfish.
Talking of cars, Mrs Al received a letter this morning from the Met with a speeding fine for doing 24mph on a 20mph road in Croydon, at 8.00 on a Sunday morning. Is it normal practice to be so tough? Seemed very harsh to us, as on local 20mph roads the average speed seems to be around 25-30 mph. Guess we just have to suck it up, though.
They have tighter standards for machine intelligences ?
It occurs to me that PB should form the next government
We'd get everything fixed in about 3 months, from the flaws in car design to the proper ownwership of utilities to the best national anthems and the correct way to dunk biscuits. Also we'd manage foreign policy better because I've been everywhere. Sunil can run the trains . Kinabalu, with his love of toe tapping live bands in the al fresco bars of Tenerife, should be culture minister
Dura Ace should be Defence Secretary AND Head of Sitcoms at ITV
I wouldn't put Dura in charge of the armed forces; he'd probably stage a revolution.
If you're going to be minister for blue-sky thinking, you'll have to do better than that.
I don't want to be in charge of anything. I am not a very good leader and am an even worse administrator.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
It's also stupid AND technically passe
We now have machines that will respond superbly to voice commands, they can hear and understand everything with astonishing fidelity and cleverness. You could grunt "Ugh, gggngng, bbbpppff, too bloody cold uggghh change it" and they can understand that completely, and they can change the temperature, make it hotter here or colder there
Why aren't car manufacturers installing this life-saving tech in their cars? Talking to your car, with your eyes on the road, is infinitely safer than lurching around trying to touch part of an iPad three feet to your left, so you must look away from the traffic
I wouldn't trust a car that runs on "Open" AI.
You ask it to start, and it will probably say "sorry, as a large language motor vehicle designed in Silicon Valley, cars are bad for the environment and your journey would be better taken on a cycle. It's important to note that cycling is good for your health, as well as the environment. Is there anything else I can "help" you with today?"
Definitely if it was Google AI.....it told me off when I asked it to produce a picture of an alien on the moon taking a selfie of a crashed space craft....apparently aliens (it was thinking about illegal immigrants in US) are a minority that shouldn't be mocked and so refused to create such a picture.
That is why (or because) Americans talk about space aliens, which to us sounds tautologous.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
It's also stupid AND technically passe
We now have machines that will respond superbly to voice commands, they can hear and understand everything with astonishing fidelity and cleverness. You could grunt "Ugh, gggngng, bbbpppff, too bloody cold uggghh change it" and they can understand that completely, and they can change the temperature, make it hotter here or colder there
Why aren't car manufacturers installing this life-saving tech in their cars? Talking to your car, with your eyes on the road, is infinitely safer than lurching around trying to touch part of an iPad three feet to your left, so you must look away from the traffic
I wouldn't trust a car that runs on "Open" AI.
You ask it to start, and it will probably say "sorry, as a large language motor vehicle designed in Silicon Valley, cars are bad for the environment and your journey would be better taken on a cycle. It's important to note that cycling is good for your health, as well as the environment. Is there anything else I can "help" you with today?"
Also, ISTR an article recently about Volkswagen's Ts & Cs for letting your car talk to your phone in which it gave itself permission to search through your emails and texts and draw its own conclusions about your sexual preferences. Though I can't remember why. I'd say that's too intimate a relationship to have with my car. (I don't let my car talk to my phone, not because I read the Ts and Cs, but partly because 'why would you want to' and partly because I would have to work out how to do so and I've always managed perfectly well without.
What can I say? We are truly living in a cyberpunk dystopia now. Demolition Man will look like a documentary in the next decade.
If a car is tracking my sexual preferences, I hope at least it's an Escort.
That was the story, if not the article. I was surprised it didn't receive more traction than it did. I suppose people just din't really give a shit about this sort of thing any more. "Yeah, my car knows my sexual preferences better than my wife *shrugs*"
It occurs to me that PB should form the next government
We'd get everything fixed in about 3 months, from the flaws in car design to the proper ownwership of utilities to the best national anthems and the correct way to dunk biscuits. Also we'd manage foreign policy better because I've been everywhere. Sunil can run the trains . Kinabalu, with his love of toe tapping live bands in the al fresco bars of Tenerife, should be culture minister
Dura Ace should be Defence Secretary AND Head of Sitcoms at ITV
I wouldn't put Dura in charge of the armed forces; he'd probably stage a revolution.
If you're going to be minister for blue-sky thinking, you'll have to do better than that.
I don't want to be in charge of anything. I am not a very good leader and am an even worse administrator.
So you wouldn't be actively worse than recent Def Secs ?
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
OMG that looks harrowing. The guy in the last photo covered with blood
Imagine the intensity of the fear. There is something about planes which still induces existential dread. Something about being stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet up in the air. And then suddenly just 24,000 feet....
If I was one of the surviving passengers I would now be getting drunker than I have ever been in my life and then some on top.
The pilot managed a clam voice. That is quite something.
Even a calm voice would be quite something. A clam voice is mindboggling.
I'd always prefer to be flown by a pilot with a clam voice but then maybe I'm just being shellfish.
I have a clam voice when I am driving my mussel car. I use it sparingly though, it's hard to winkle a word out of me.
An attempt by the government to widen police powers over protests has been ruled unlawful by the High Court. Legislation introduced last year under ex-home secretary Suella Braverman gave officers more leeway to stop disruption. But now two judges have ruled it did not have a proper legal basis, and the Home Office failed to consult properly on it.
Back to all the eco-fascists disrupting the traffic every day.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Which of course doesn't protect you from the flying bodies of non-belters.
On the upside, we express alarm at this news report because it is so vanishingly rare
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
Obviously you don't drive a Land Rover.
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
It's bonkers that you can get 6 points for phone use but all new cars (except Mazdas, I think) have a giant iPad in them.
So...
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Buttons. Actual buttons is what you want. I think I almost killed myself last year in a newish hire car, looking for the touch-point to change the radio station.
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Oh don't get me started on unnecessarily complicated climate control. Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these. It is perfect. Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact. And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
The 2024 version will be worse still. It will have no buttons at all, with all the HVAC controls on a massive ipad-looking screen in the middle, that you can’t possibly adjust while keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
What amazes me is that car designs must be focus grouped to death, here we have a small but probably representative sample of "people old enough and rich enough to be buying new cars every 3-5 years" and the universal consensus is a hatred of touch screens.
Unfortunately for the consumer, the screens save a fortune in manufacturing costs, not just by removing the switches, but also miles of cabling and usually a serious consolidation in the number of control modules around the car.
It occurs to me that PB should form the next government
We'd get everything fixed in about 3 months, from the flaws in car design to the proper ownwership of utilities to the best national anthems and the correct way to dunk biscuits. Also we'd manage foreign policy better because I've been everywhere. Sunil can run the trains . Kinabalu, with his love of toe tapping live bands in the al fresco bars of Tenerife, should be culture minister
Dura Ace should be Defence Secretary AND Head of Sitcoms at ITV
I wouldn't put Dura in charge of the armed forces; he'd probably stage a revolution.
If you're going to be minister for blue-sky thinking, you'll have to do better than that.
I don't want to be in charge of anything. I am not a very good leader and am an even worse administrator.
So you wouldn't be actively worse than recent Def Secs ?
Armed forces experience should instantly disqualify anybody from the role because they go native too easily and won't force tough decisions. See Baldy Ben.
Spreadsheet Phil was OK, I suppose, for very low values of OK. At least he understood the job is about getting a massive and slightly corrupt bureaucracy to exhibit slightly lower levels of dysfunction rather than getting caught up in posturing bollocks.
Talking of cars, Mrs Al received a letter this morning from the Met with a speeding fine for doing 24mph on a 20mph road in Croydon, at 8.00 on a Sunday morning. Is it normal practice to be so tough? Seemed very harsh to us, as on local 20mph roads the average speed seems to be around 25-30 mph. Guess we just have to suck it up, though.
Over the years Pa Woolie has been caught three times by the same (30 mph) camera no more than a half mile from Base Station Woolie doing mid thirties, ironically on each occasion running a mercy errand for a family member. When Mum was with us she would remind him of it at least once a week as an example of his Woolie foolishness, but he quite correctly assessed the most proportionate response was to not help anybody with anything, ever.
Of his established back four of Kyle Walker, John Stones, Harry Maguire and Kieran Trippier, Trippier has only played three games since March - something like 27 minutes. Maguire hasn't played the last four games for Manchester United and Stones has had only one start since the FA Cup semi-final. So only Walker out of the probable back four that will start that opening game on 16 June against Serbia has been playing regularly.
Don't want to hear any excuses of players being tired.
Suggestions of “dozens” injured on that Singapore flight which got caught in turbulence. 30 ambulances met the plane as it landed in Bangkok. Sounds utterly horrific for passengers and crew. Plane was a 777-300ER, 219 pax and 18 crew on board. (2/3 full).
Jesus Christ
To make it worse that must have been totally unexpected, otherwise everyone woukd have been strapped in, anticipating turbulence. That many injuries - even deaths - suggests there was no warning at all. Kinell
And that's why you wear your seatbelt unless you're actively moving around the cabin.
Seriously, though, to have such severe turbulence someone dies. Wow. That must have been horrific.
One way it can happen is if the plane suddenly plunges you can be hurled UPWARDS from your seat, breaking your neck on the overhead cabins. Jeez!
Or - as I said - people have been killed by runaway trolleys, smashing into them
Yep, always wear your seatbelt, even when sleeping. Maybe especially when sleeping
Footage here showing the captain’s diversion announcement and a dented ceiling panel. Also claims now two dead but uncorroborated:
OMG that looks harrowing. The guy in the last photo covered with blood
Imagine the intensity of the fear. There is something about planes which still induces existential dread. Something about being stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet up in the air. And then suddenly just 24,000 feet....
If I was one of the surviving passengers I would now be getting drunker than I have ever been in my life and then some on top.
The pilot managed a clam voice. That is quite something.
Would you ever fly again? I like to think I am quite resilient, indeed I AM quite resilient, but wow, after that, I'd be wary
There'd be no choice here as you'd still need to get back home. Straight back on is probably the best way. The longer you leave it the more chance you have to get spooked.
Comments
An even more dramatic outcome was the Aloha Airlines incident due to corrosion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243
I remember as a kid in the 70s plane crashes were weekly events, or so it seemed. God knows what it was like in the 1930s. I also remember our family car regularly breaking down - it was expected. The AA man was a constant necessity
We forget how much things have improved. How many planes fly every day? Tens of thousands? How many crash? Almost none? As for cars, I can't remember when I last drove a car which broke down, unless it was my own fault and I was doing something RIDIC
The problem is rather that the current court is as unmoored from principled jurisprudence as
were those predecessors.
Where as in the past, there was profit in trying to get the thing running at least well enough for a punter to get it far enough away from the forecourt that the second hand car salesman can claim nought to do with me that your engine blew up.
Also, most people lease or buy cars via finance that allows them to change the car every 3 years. So again, they aren't keeping them for a long as people used to.
The 'left behind' places are still left behind and require more than an economic uptick to feel like they're doing OK - they need major long-term investment. However, the Tories have spent the last decade insulting those who in the past might have been persuaded to vote Tory in the belief it would be good for their wallet even if their heart was sympathetic to Labour. There's no easy solution to that until the Tories leave power and refresh and rebrand themselves again.
As a result, the Tories are fishing in a relatively small pool of retired and better off blue collar workers. Sunak had the chance to change that when he arrived on the scene, but inexplicably kept up the 'pwn the libs' strategy despite the backlash against it, even in former Tory heartlands already being obvious. To the extent that he's largely destroyed the personal brand he built up as Chancellor.
Labour's deputy leader and shadow housing secretary said creating new towns was a key part of her party's plan to build 1.5 million homes over five years.
Ms Rayner hopes the private sector will be persuaded to fund the new towns, which will have to include 40% affordable housing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c900pgjlvx8o
Trafford
Quansah
Dunk or Konsa
Wharton
Toney
2 from Maddison, Eze, Grealish and Gordon
Well chosen squad. LB and GK our only weak positions (Pickford good on pens possibly makes up for his all round game in tournament football).
I had a succession of crap cars, all of them German - BMW, Merc, etc, that would just break constantly. Rarely engine failure but more often something else - windscreen wiper motors giving out, starter motors packing in etc. Plus huge mark ups on parts.
I then bought a second hand Toyota that I flogged to death without a single incident in five years. Sailed through every MOT first time. When it finally gives up on me I'll buy another.
But I do worry about today's generation of over-engineered cars that are pretty much just computers on wheels. My crappy Corolla will still be driveable (and user serviceable) in 25 years time, doubt the same could be said for any car that's being made today.
And touchscreens. Who actually wants endless touchscreens and menus when driving? When the, uh, tactile feel of a knob is far superior...
Raisi was a very nasty man, but he was also very effective in pursuing a realignment of Iran's regional and foreign policy.
Not to our benefit.
After Raisi's death I began to look back on articles I wrote about his role in transforming Iran. I found that I had articles going back to before he was president. A few takeaways from the articles
https://x.com/sfrantzman/status/1792509183780155607
https://x.com/stillgray/status/1792905807488864715?
CB and LB is weak. Stones gets a niggle (as he often does) and Harry Maguire isn't exactly quick, it starts to look very thin. Could they have included Dier, he has limitations, but he is steady eddie both on and off the pitch and vastly experienced (plus being playing regularly for Bayern Munich).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8889d7x8j4o
Doesn't make it any less scary for the passengers, though.
My wife hates turbulence when flying: she gets very stressed. And - weirdly - my reiteration of the statistics seems to do nothing to calm her. I am going to try and keep her away from the BBC news story, but I fear she will see it nonetheless.
Imagine the intensity of the fear. There is something about planes which still induces existential dread. Something about being stuck in a metal tube 30,000 feet up in the air. And then suddenly just 24,000 feet....
Are you doubting that 1. I was once a child, or 2. That i possess a memory, or 3. That the 1970s existed?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/17/uk-engineering-arup-deepfake-scam-hong-kong-ai-video
As a man with a telematics auto insurance company, I can tell you that the smaller your phone, the more dangerous using it is.
That said: having the center console so far from the centerline of your vehicle isn't very good for safety either.
Hopefully will die a death like the eco-towns that were proposed some years ago.
I mean according to the UN the legal definition of a child is 18 so I suppose there is some wiggle room.
I recall a case I sat in the public gallery on many years ago at the Royal Courts of Justice. A wealthy farming family with twin sons in their 50s or 60s and a daughter of similar age. Their parents had died and split the estate three ways BUT the sons' inheritances were to be held on trust by the daughter, essentially on the basis that she was sensible and they were wastrels and spendthifts. The fact they brought an expensive, pointless and and meritless legal challenge essentially proved their parents right. And the eyewatering costs that inevitably resulted all came from their share of the estate. I'll never forget the white haired old rogues listening to the judge explain that they'd be well advised not to appeal as it was hopeless and would only further reduce their already severely diminished inheritance. They listened politely, then said that is exactly what they planned to do, while their sister sat further back just rolled her eyes.
Check out the climate control in a recent bmw https://www.bmwblog.com/2021/11/05/video-how-to-use-bmws-new-intelligent-climate-control/
My knackered Toyota has two buttons, pressing up raises temp 0.5c, pressing down lowers it 0.5c. Simples. And there's no danger of it also being the go-to place to push to change radio station, etc. I sometimes rent a modern, touchscreeny car, and am always happy when I get back into my 13 year old shitbox with actual buttons.
I also wonder how these new cars are going to age. I suspect they have a 3-5 year lifespan then will just get stripped for parts, as mentioned below. Planned obsolescence.
Our 2009 Ford Focus has one button for air conditioning which turns it on or off, and three dials - one which coldens or hottens the air, one which blows harder or softer or not at all, and one which points the air at the windscreen or the driver or the drivers feet or some mixture of these.
It is perfect.
Our 2019 volkswagen, on the other hand - well, I still don't understand it. It has an array of controls and buttons some of which appear to override or contradict each other. And they're necessarily so small that I can't see what they do without my reading glasses, which obviously I can't use to drive. And they don't appear to heat or cool the car any more efficiently - much less so, in fact.
And as you say - buttons. Anything you can't do with a button isn't worth doing.
https://www.1001crash.com/stats/graph/accrate_en.gif
I do accept Edinburgh is a special case though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587
OTOH, if an aircraft did disintegrate mid ocean, we might never know the cause.
At one point I knocked the hazard switch on without realising then every other car presumed I was in trouble and slowed down and I couldn't find the switch I knocked - it was in some dark obscure place, so I was veering all over the road as I urgently tried to turn it off and this was on a fast puglian road with nowhere to pull over. Wanker designers - could have killed me
It reminds me of that HELLISH period from about 2005-2020 when shower units got more and more complex until you needed a degree in shower unit ergonomics to work out how to simply turn it on and get a nice flow of hot water from above, and not in your face or squirting into your perineum
However I've noted since 2020 that designers seem to have realised this. Most modern showers are now automatically set to 38C and are quite intutiive to use. Maybe the same good sense will be applied to cars
The pilot managed a clam voice. That is quite something.
https://brc.it/nl/dettaglio-news/mg-motor-record-di-vendite-in-italia/80620
Costello says that he didn't tell Cohen about his closeness with Giuliani at the first meeting, but Hoffinger shows him his email in which he wrote "I told you my relationship with Rudy"—meaning, "I told you before."...
Costello denies again, so Hoffinger shows another email (512B) 04/2018 Costello to Citron, abt Giuliani joining Trump's legal team: "all the more reason for Cohen to hire me...as I mentioned to him in our meeting."
These emails could not more perfectly refute Costello's answers...
https://x.com/TylerMcBrien/status/1792913350726123947
Demonstrably lying on the stand tends not to go down well with juries.
We now have machines that will respond superbly to voice commands, they can hear and understand everything with astonishing fidelity and cleverness. You could grunt "Ugh, gggngng, bbbpppff, too bloody cold uggghh change it" and they can understand that completely, and they can change the temperature, make it hotter here or colder there
Why aren't car manufacturers installing this life-saving tech in their cars? Talking to your car, with your eyes on the road, is infinitely safer than lurching around trying to touch part of an iPad three feet to your left, so you must look away from the traffic
See also random peeps on Reddit with the exact same complaints https://www.reddit.com/r/CarTalkUK/comments/1btwopy/who_the_hell_thought_touch_screens_in_cars_were_a/
And a recent article that reckons 9 out of 10 car drivers want a return to buttons and switches
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-13217963/Car-makers-distracting-touchscreens-REVEALED.html
https://x.com/ToddZywicki/status/1792191368229708036
And 10 years after that in the flesh will be no good either because you can't tell whether the flesh is running neuralink. Then what? Identity and ownership will become meaningless.
Can’t imagine it will be too easy to find spares for them a few years down the road, they’ll quickly depreciate to nothing and be cannibalised for parts if that happens.
Still likely a hung jury. At which point He walks.
Damn.
You ask it to start, and it will probably say "sorry, as a large language motor vehicle designed in Silicon Valley, cars are bad for the environment and your journey would be better taken on a cycle. It's important to note that cycling is good for your health, as well as the environment. Is there anything else I can "help" you with today?"
We'd get everything fixed in about 3 months, from the flaws in car design to the proper ownwership of utilities to the best national anthems and the correct way to dunk biscuits. Also we'd manage foreign policy better because I've been everywhere. Sunil can run the trains . Kinabalu, with his love of toe tapping live bands in the al fresco bars of Tenerife, should be culture minister
Dura Ace should be Defence Secretary AND Head of Sitcoms at ITV
"Open the doors"
"Dave, I can't do that..."
(I don't let my car talk to my phone, not because I read the Ts and Cs, but partly because 'why would you want to' and partly because I would have to work out how to do so and I've always managed perfectly well without.
A quick Google brought this up - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12490771/Is-car-tracking-SEX-LIFE-Popular-brands-including-Nissan-Kia-collect-deeply-personal-data-including-sexual-activity-weight-study-finds.html
Which may be the article you were thinking of.
What can I say? We are truly living in a cyberpunk dystopia now. Demolition Man will look like a documentary in the next decade.
If a car is tracking my sexual preferences, I hope at least it's an Escort.
It told me I shouldn’t make cider that way.
So after I replied with “I asked you for a recipe, it is not for you to tell me what I should or should not do” it rather cravenly apologised (you’re right, it is not my place to tell you that etc etc….) and gave me a recipe.
I found that a little odd.
If you're going to be minister for blue-sky thinking, you'll have to do better than that.
Seemed very harsh to us, as on local 20mph roads the average speed seems to be around 25-30 mph. Guess we just have to suck it up, though.
David Lammy is today unveiling blueprint, which includes rewards of up to £250,000 to whistleblowers who identify sanctions breaches
https://x.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1792806843959656528
Is that enough to tempt ?
TSE ?
The great wuss.
Alina Habba says one of the biggest frustrations Trump has is a witness can something about him and he can’t say anything back
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1792612657805275152
The defence has rested, and the court is to adjourn until next week for closing arguments, so that's pretty well it for now.
Back to all the eco-fascists disrupting the traffic every day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCnE5vymcqg
Spreadsheet Phil was OK, I suppose, for very low values of OK. At least he understood the job is about getting a massive and slightly corrupt bureaucracy to exhibit slightly lower levels of dysfunction rather than getting caught up in posturing bollocks.
Don't want to hear any excuses of players being tired.