Fpt because it’s important people like @bondegezou and @EPG aren’t allowed to get away with brazen lies about Covid origins
****
Completely wrong. The Wuhan CDC - which also housed bats as part of the overall experimentation - is just 3 minutes from the market. I have posted the map a trillion times. I’m not allowed to post it again because of the rules. Ask @rcs1000 - he disputed this and I showed him.
Try this tweet
“One of the earliest papers on Covid-19 out of China pointed out the Wuhan CDC was 911 feet from the market and right across the street from the hospital where many healthcare workers fell ill”
The CDC was notoriously low level BSL2. It spent two years 2017-2019 moving to its new location right by the market. Ideal circs for a spillage
It kept bats
“The Wuhan CDC collected and housed many bats in collaboration with the WIV. It issued a contract for the disposal of 2 tons of hazardous medical waste generated in its labs in June 2019. This waste ‘has not been effectively treated from 1994 to 2019’, the announcement conceded.”
You’ve lost the argument. Its done. Yet you’re still trotting out these pathetic lies like no one can read or look at a map. It came from the lab
Unmmm... I don't think it was proved that the Wuhan CDC had hosted bats in the period prior to the leak. Indeed, I think they'd moved onto other things. The bat research was still in the same city, but was at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
I really struggle to not smell a rat re: WIV. A lab that had an extensive collection of coronaviruses, close to the epicentre of a pandemic 100s of miles away from where it's found naturally followed by China preventing the WHO from investigating fully, combined with previously documented concerns around containment?
We'll never know for certain, but anyone who says it's impossible it leaked from there are likely the most credulous of fools.
On Diane Abbot, I can respect her accomplishments and contribution whilst also disagreeing fundamentally with most of her views and thinking she shouldn’t have been let anywhere near the Home Office. If she is barred from standing I think it’s a sad end to her political career.
I would agree with that if she hadn't been racist. But she has. Bye bye.
On Diane Abbot, I can respect her accomplishments and contribution whilst also disagreeing fundamentally with most of her views and thinking she shouldn’t have been let anywhere near the Home Office. If she is barred from standing I think it’s a sad end to her political career.
Better than being expelled from the party after 50 years like some others.
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
Otherwise no. No one on earth now believes it came from the market. That includes the US government (democrats as well as republicans) who are now firmly gunning for Ecohealth and Peter Daszak who likely made the virus in the Wuhan lab with US money
I believe it came from the market.
It just probably came from the lab to the market. Perhaps some janitor on 50cents an hour grabbed some bats to sell at the wet market.
Or perhaps it was another animal in a container on the plane next to a bat that was being sent to Wuhan. The bat went to the Wuhan institute of virology, while the armadillo (or whatever) ended up at the wet market.
Or perhaps a lab worker got bit by a bat, developed a snuffle, and then did his evening's shopping at the market.
The idea that the two theories are mutually incompatible exists only in the mind of the mentally subnormal.
The market is a 40 minute drive and on the other side of a major river to the lab. Why did this janitor go all the way there, without transmitting the disease to anyone else along the way or to anyone else subsequently?
Generally samples were taken to the lab, not live animals. They weren't transported along side animals for the wet market. Armadillos are an American group: you're thinking of pangolins.
If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic.
All of your other scenarios add complications and coincidences. Occam's razor suggests they all fail against the simple theory of zoonosis via the market.
"If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic."
Here's why I hate the phrase "lab leak". Some will read it as "they were experimenting with gain of function viruses and one got loose", when that is only one of a gazillion ways that a virus can escape as a result of bat virus research.
I learn a lot from PB.
Turns out I can read loads of posts about the origins of covid-19 on here and learn precisely nothing.
(Not a dig at you in any way Robert, I just find the back and forth so amusingly opaque.)
I saw some posts this morning about the cost of electricity, and some people were trying to tell us that net zero was going to make electricity cheaper.
Co-incidentally, I spent a chunk of this afternoon trying to sort out the electricity contract for work this afternoon. Business electricity is not subject to price caps, so reflects the real costs (unlike domestic pricing). Our site uses about 92,000kwh a year. The electric unit price is similar to current domestic pricing - we're being offered day rates of about 23p/unit. However the standing charge for our site has gone from about £5/a day 5 years ago, and £20/day two years ago to £29/day now. By the time you add the various other charges (eg 11p/kva capacity per day), the full cost for our site is about 35p/unit.
Where is all this extra money going one might ask? Basically businesses like us are funding all the net zero infrastructure costs.
I did the rough sums, if we bought a big diesel generator, binned off our electric connection and went "off-grid", we would save about £5k a year. Generating electricity with a piston engined diesel generator is a terribly inefficient way of producing electricity - if that's cheaper than supplying fairly large amounts of it to one physical location via an existing grid connection, whoever's running the grid have got it very, very wrong.
Now it may be that net zero is worth this expense; that's a political question, although dumping the costs on industry in such a way as to destroy our industrial base seems a particularly dumb way to fund it. But anybody who tells you renewable energy is cheap (i.e. our whole political class) is lying to you. Whilst the sun and wind are free, unfortunately the infrastructure to collect this "free" energy is very expensive.
An excellent post, and one that @BartholomewRoberts should read carefully before claiming to be a supporter both of the current direction of travel in the energy market and of free market principles.
I don't even support Net Zero, but the scenario that @Pagan2 is highly unlikely to be true, because diesel generators come with a massive bunch of compromises.
Firstly, does the generator support the peak load? It's easy to get one that will support your average electricity usage (and that's how people calculate things). But your average load might well be 30% of your maximum load. So to get it working, you may need to spend a lot, lot more than you thought on a generator.
Secondly, at a basic efficiency level, diesel generators are - what - c. 35% efficient. But when under load, that can easily drop to 25%. And then there's maintenance. There's regular thermal expansion and contraction, and there's going to be a lot of wear and tear.
Thirdly, there's hassle. You need to get the diesel to you, and you need to store it. And that is going to cost you both time and money.
If you assume that your only costs are fuel, and that your generator runs at optimal efficiency all the time, you *might* get to £5k/annual saving. But even that is slightly bullshit, because domestic electricity prices lag wholesale ones, while the cost of diesel moves very quickly in line with the world market. And that's before capital cost and maintenance. And you don't even get hot water as a byproduct.
Anyone who thinks they are going to save money by going off grid with a diesel generator is incapable of basic mathematics.
I wasn't suggesting I would actually go and buy us a diesel generator; as you point out, there are various irritations like having to take it offline to service it, and also a bit of capex cost (although tbh, I could find one secondhand that would do our peak load for about £10k - servicing would be under £1k/year, so we'd be ahead by year 3). I sadly don't have any real use for several megawatts worth of hot water a year (you do get free heat out of a diesel, exactly the same as a gas engine, just stick a flat plate heat exchanger in the coolant return between the engine and the cooler group, and help yourself), if I did it would be quite economic!
My point was more that there should be massive economies of scale in generating electricity at grid level and supplying it to industry as required. Apart from anything else, powerstation gas turbines are a lot more efficient than relatively small diesel piston engines.
10 years ago, I'm fairly confident that running my own genset would have been significantly more expensive than a mains electric connection. The fact that it's now even remotely competitive is a massive red flag that our net zero policies are costing us an awful lot of money, mostly by slight of hand, and proof that all the politicians lining up to say that renewables are saving us money are lying to us.
But what you're mostly describing is the time lag between wholesale energy prices and retail:
The price of wholesale electricity has dropped massively since its peak, but because of government measures that suppressed the peak (i.e, the cap), the distribution companies are all still clawing back what they lost. That will change.
We're a business. No government cap for us, although fortunately we were in a 3 year contract across the worst of the madness. It does also mean that the prices are competitive now, it's a fairly free marketplace and a supplier that tried to claw back previous losses would just get wiped out by others undercutting it.
And the point people keep missing is that it's not the unit cost that's my bugbear - it's the standing charges which have gone mental (from < £2k to over £11k in five year for our business) - basically because the government is using that to fund all the net zero infrastructure.
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
Otherwise no. No one on earth now believes it came from the market. That includes the US government (democrats as well as republicans) who are now firmly gunning for Ecohealth and Peter Daszak who likely made the virus in the Wuhan lab with US money
I believe it came from the market.
It just probably came from the lab to the market. Perhaps some janitor on 50cents an hour grabbed some bats to sell at the wet market.
Or perhaps it was another animal in a container on the plane next to a bat that was being sent to Wuhan. The bat went to the Wuhan institute of virology, while the armadillo (or whatever) ended up at the wet market.
Or perhaps a lab worker got bit by a bat, developed a snuffle, and then did his evening's shopping at the market.
The idea that the two theories are mutually incompatible exists only in the mind of the mentally subnormal.
The market is a 40 minute drive and on the other side of a major river to the lab. Why did this janitor go all the way there, without transmitting the disease to anyone else along the way or to anyone else subsequently?
Generally samples were taken to the lab, not live animals. They weren't transported along side animals for the wet market. Armadillos are an American group: you're thinking of pangolins.
If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic.
All of your other scenarios add complications and coincidences. Occam's razor suggests they all fail against the simple theory of zoonosis via the market.
"If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic."
Here's why I hate the phrase "lab leak". Some will read it as "they were experimenting with gain of function viruses and one got loose", when that is only one of a gazillion ways that a virus can escape as a result of bat virus research.
There are lots of possible things, but where's the evidence? Russell's teapot applies.
An animal going to the market caught it from an animal collected for research, even though animals for a research institute and animals for a wet market are not transported together, and even though there was no record of this bat ever arriving at the research institute. It's not compelling.
I believe it's Occham's teapot. You're thinking of Russell's razor.
You sure it's not Berkeley's cat, or Schroedinger's tree?
It's not so much what he's doing. It's the way it's coming across that worries me. He seems to be rather confused and there's more than a whiff of conspiracy around both.
Does this matter in the case of Abbott or Russell Moyle? Probably not.
Does it leave question marks over Starmer's judgment? I would say it does.
Hopefully it will be nothing serious. But I'm also thinking a bit about that first crop of shadow ministers he appointed. That didn't display great judgement either.
And the first sign that Sunak wasn't all he was cracked up to be was his lousy cabinet appointments.
What judgment? Would you have preferred him to act earlier, not act at all? What is the issue, I am a bit baffled?
If he's sitting on a report for six months, only to come to a decision now, which he botches, that's not great, is it?
In the case of Lloyd Russell Moyle, yes I can see why this has happened but we now have somebody forced out of a job because of an allegation. I don't think you have to be an admirer of LRM to find that a bit worrying. There should have been workarounds otherwise it's an open invitation to vexatious complaints.
Remember, it's not how things look when they happen to people you dislike that's important - it's how they could be applied to anyone. Without wishing to be all Kantian about this, the implications of these sort of procedures applied across a governing party disturb me.
I believe in the case of Russel-Moyale, an allegation has been made and he's been suspended as a result. The same happened to a moderate MP in 2019. Personally I think it stinks - but the reality is that Labour has been doing this sort of factional behaviour for a while.
On Abbott, she should have been allowed to retire in peace and I am not totally clear why she hasn't been. But I do support her not being allowed to stand again because she is racist.
For Abbott to retire in peace, she'd need to agree to it. I suspect therein lies the reason why it's not happened.
Nobody seems to have considered whether a place in the HoL is\ even in accord with her principles.
It is possible to retire without a place in the HoL. I know, I've done it.
Lord Benpointer, 1st Baron Benpointer of Fatchance in the County of Puntshire
Fpt because it’s important people like @bondegezou and @EPG aren’t allowed to get away with brazen lies about Covid origins
****
Completely wrong. The Wuhan CDC - which also housed bats as part of the overall experimentation - is just 3 minutes from the market. I have posted the map a trillion times. I’m not allowed to post it again because of the rules. Ask @rcs1000 - he disputed this and I showed him.
Try this tweet
“One of the earliest papers on Covid-19 out of China pointed out the Wuhan CDC was 911 feet from the market and right across the street from the hospital where many healthcare workers fell ill”
The CDC was notoriously low level BSL2. It spent two years 2017-2019 moving to its new location right by the market. Ideal circs for a spillage
It kept bats
“The Wuhan CDC collected and housed many bats in collaboration with the WIV. It issued a contract for the disposal of 2 tons of hazardous medical waste generated in its labs in June 2019. This waste ‘has not been effectively treated from 1994 to 2019’, the announcement conceded.”
You’ve lost the argument. Its done. Yet you’re still trotting out these pathetic lies like no one can read or look at a map. It came from the lab
Unmmm... I don't think it was proved that the Wuhan CDC had hosted bats in the period prior to the leak. Indeed, I think they'd moved onto other things. The bat research was still in the same city, but was at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
I really struggle to not smell a rat re: WIV. A lab that had an extensive collection of coronaviruses, close to the epicentre of a pandemic 100s of miles away from where it's found naturally followed by China preventing the WHO from investigating fully, combined with previously documented concerns around containment?
We'll never know for certain, but anyone who says it's impossible it leaked from there are likely the most credulous of fools.
China, spooked by SARS, invested in lots and lots of coronavirus labs. They were all over. There was a reference to BSL-2 labs on the last thread. There are 1000s of BSL-2 labs in China.
We don't know what the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 is found naturally, so we can't say whether the WIV is 100s of miles away from it or not.
There is oodles of evidence for the wet market: see the article just posted.
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
Otherwise no. No one on earth now believes it came from the market. That includes the US government (democrats as well as republicans) who are now firmly gunning for Ecohealth and Peter Daszak who likely made the virus in the Wuhan lab with US money
I believe it came from the market.
It just probably came from the lab to the market. Perhaps some janitor on 50cents an hour grabbed some bats to sell at the wet market.
Or perhaps it was another animal in a container on the plane next to a bat that was being sent to Wuhan. The bat went to the Wuhan institute of virology, while the armadillo (or whatever) ended up at the wet market.
Or perhaps a lab worker got bit by a bat, developed a snuffle, and then did his evening's shopping at the market.
The idea that the two theories are mutually incompatible exists only in the mind of the mentally subnormal.
The market is a 40 minute drive and on the other side of a major river to the lab. Why did this janitor go all the way there, without transmitting the disease to anyone else along the way or to anyone else subsequently?
Generally samples were taken to the lab, not live animals. They weren't transported along side animals for the wet market. Armadillos are an American group: you're thinking of pangolins.
If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic.
All of your other scenarios add complications and coincidences. Occam's razor suggests they all fail against the simple theory of zoonosis via the market.
"If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic."
Here's why I hate the phrase "lab leak". Some will read it as "they were experimenting with gain of function viruses and one got loose", when that is only one of a gazillion ways that a virus can escape as a result of bat virus research.
I learn a lot from PB.
Turns out I can read loads of posts about the origins of covid-19 on here and learn precisely nothing.
(Not a dig at you in any way Robert, I just find the back and forth so amusingly opaque.)
Since it's very unlikely that either China bio-engineered an evil virus and leaked it into its own population, or that the market is a natural pool of non-local coronaviruses and one happened to evolve into Covid, the argument does tend toward probabilities rather than the bold colours of, say, a general election manifesto.
It's not so much what he's doing. It's the way it's coming across that worries me. He seems to be rather confused and there's more than a whiff of conspiracy around both.
Does this matter in the case of Abbott or Russell Moyle? Probably not.
Does it leave question marks over Starmer's judgment? I would say it does.
Hopefully it will be nothing serious. But I'm also thinking a bit about that first crop of shadow ministers he appointed. That didn't display great judgement either.
And the first sign that Sunak wasn't all he was cracked up to be was his lousy cabinet appointments.
What judgment? Would you have preferred him to act earlier, not act at all? What is the issue, I am a bit baffled?
If he's sitting on a report for six months, only to come to a decision now, which he botches, that's not great, is it?
In the case of Lloyd Russell Moyle, yes I can see why this has happened but we now have somebody forced out of a job because of an allegation. I don't think you have to be an admirer of LRM to find that a bit worrying. There should have been workarounds otherwise it's an open invitation to vexatious complaints.
Remember, it's not how things look when they happen to people you dislike that's important - it's how they could be applied to anyone. Without wishing to be all Kantian about this, the implications of these sort of procedures applied across a governing party disturb me.
I believe in the case of Russel-Moyale, an allegation has been made and he's been suspended as a result. The same happened to a moderate MP in 2019. Personally I think it stinks - but the reality is that Labour has been doing this sort of factional behaviour for a while.
On Abbott, she should have been allowed to retire in peace and I am not totally clear why she hasn't been. But I do support her not being allowed to stand again because she is racist.
'It has happened before' isn't a great defence. In fact, arguably it makes it worse because that should have been flagged up as an issue and procedures changed as a result.
I doubt if it will make the slightest political difference but like VAT on private school fees (which is also unlikely to make any difference) it does for me raise some questions that I'm not liking the possible answers to.
I am not defending it, I think it's just as wrong as it was to the moderate MP in 2019. It happens to be good for Labour that Russel-Moyle is going because he's a nutjob. But I agree it's wrong he is.
Was the "allegation" kept for 8 months for an opportune moment? And if so, by whom?
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
Otherwise no. No one on earth now believes it came from the market. That includes the US government (democrats as well as republicans) who are now firmly gunning for Ecohealth and Peter Daszak who likely made the virus in the Wuhan lab with US money
I believe it came from the market.
It just probably came from the lab to the market. Perhaps some janitor on 50cents an hour grabbed some bats to sell at the wet market.
Or perhaps it was another animal in a container on the plane next to a bat that was being sent to Wuhan. The bat went to the Wuhan institute of virology, while the armadillo (or whatever) ended up at the wet market.
Or perhaps a lab worker got bit by a bat, developed a snuffle, and then did his evening's shopping at the market.
The idea that the two theories are mutually incompatible exists only in the mind of the mentally subnormal.
The market is a 40 minute drive and on the other side of a major river to the lab. Why did this janitor go all the way there, without transmitting the disease to anyone else along the way or to anyone else subsequently?
Generally samples were taken to the lab, not live animals. They weren't transported along side animals for the wet market. Armadillos are an American group: you're thinking of pangolins.
If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic.
All of your other scenarios add complications and coincidences. Occam's razor suggests they all fail against the simple theory of zoonosis via the market.
"If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic."
Here's why I hate the phrase "lab leak". Some will read it as "they were experimenting with gain of function viruses and one got loose", when that is only one of a gazillion ways that a virus can escape as a result of bat virus research.
There are lots of possible things, but where's the evidence? Russell's teapot applies.
An animal going to the market caught it from an animal collected for research, even though animals for a research institute and animals for a wet market are not transported together, and even though there was no record of this bat ever arriving at the research institute. It's not compelling.
Surely it'd be lab with very poor containment protocols and a massive library of coronaviruses had their containment protocols fail hence the outbreak of a virus in an area where it was not previously extant.
Rather than animal that is not sold in a market is sold there after being captured hundreds of miles away before being transported the aforementioned hundreds of miles to be sold for a few handfuls of 10p portions of dinner.
I genuinely think I was one of the only Abbott fans on here, until I did a bit of reading into what she's said where I concluded she's a racist and/or quite possibly has dementia.
She is a diabetic who for various reasons has trouble controlling the condition leading to a number of episodes where she gets confused. That is not the same as dementia.
Of course she's a racist, and a hypocrite, and a horrible human being, but that isn't the point. The point is the whole affair has been bungled. It's ended up pissing off all sides, which is poor management.
I do not care about Diane Abbott, per se. I do care about whether my Prime Minister is a muppet. We've had three of those in the last five years and I was hoping for a change.
What current Guinness World Book of Records record, is Ed Davey most likely to break, in his quest for fame if not notoriety, during the coming weeks of the 2024 general election campaign?
I nominate shortest time of travel via motorized unicycle from Wick to Wantage.
It's not so much what he's doing. It's the way it's coming across that worries me. He seems to be rather confused and there's more than a whiff of conspiracy around both.
Does this matter in the case of Abbott or Russell Moyle? Probably not.
Does it leave question marks over Starmer's judgment? I would say it does.
Hopefully it will be nothing serious. But I'm also thinking a bit about that first crop of shadow ministers he appointed. That didn't display great judgement either.
And the first sign that Sunak wasn't all he was cracked up to be was his lousy cabinet appointments.
What judgment? Would you have preferred him to act earlier, not act at all? What is the issue, I am a bit baffled?
If he's sitting on a report for six months, only to come to a decision now, which he botches, that's not great, is it?
In the case of Lloyd Russell Moyle, yes I can see why this has happened but we now have somebody forced out of a job because of an allegation. I don't think you have to be an admirer of LRM to find that a bit worrying. There should have been workarounds otherwise it's an open invitation to vexatious complaints.
Remember, it's not how things look when they happen to people you dislike that's important - it's how they could be applied to anyone. Without wishing to be all Kantian about this, the implications of these sort of procedures applied across a governing party disturb me.
I believe in the case of Russel-Moyale, an allegation has been made and he's been suspended as a result. The same happened to a moderate MP in 2019. Personally I think it stinks - but the reality is that Labour has been doing this sort of factional behaviour for a while.
On Abbott, she should have been allowed to retire in peace and I am not totally clear why she hasn't been. But I do support her not being allowed to stand again because she is racist.
'It has happened before' isn't a great defence. In fact, arguably it makes it worse because that should have been flagged up as an issue and procedures changed as a result.
I doubt if it will make the slightest political difference but like VAT on private school fees (which is also unlikely to make any difference) it does for me raise some questions that I'm not liking the possible answers to.
I am not defending it, I think it's just as wrong as it was to the moderate MP in 2019. It happens to be good for Labour that Russel-Moyle is going because he's a nutjob. But I agree it's wrong he is.
Was the "allegation" kept for 8 months for an opportune moment? And if so, by whom?
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
Otherwise no. No one on earth now believes it came from the market. That includes the US government (democrats as well as republicans) who are now firmly gunning for Ecohealth and Peter Daszak who likely made the virus in the Wuhan lab with US money
I believe it came from the market.
It just probably came from the lab to the market. Perhaps some janitor on 50cents an hour grabbed some bats to sell at the wet market.
Or perhaps it was another animal in a container on the plane next to a bat that was being sent to Wuhan. The bat went to the Wuhan institute of virology, while the armadillo (or whatever) ended up at the wet market.
Or perhaps a lab worker got bit by a bat, developed a snuffle, and then did his evening's shopping at the market.
The idea that the two theories are mutually incompatible exists only in the mind of the mentally subnormal.
The market is a 40 minute drive and on the other side of a major river to the lab. Why did this janitor go all the way there, without transmitting the disease to anyone else along the way or to anyone else subsequently?
Generally samples were taken to the lab, not live animals. They weren't transported along side animals for the wet market. Armadillos are an American group: you're thinking of pangolins.
If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic.
All of your other scenarios add complications and coincidences. Occam's razor suggests they all fail against the simple theory of zoonosis via the market.
"If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic."
Here's why I hate the phrase "lab leak". Some will read it as "they were experimenting with gain of function viruses and one got loose", when that is only one of a gazillion ways that a virus can escape as a result of bat virus research.
I learn a lot from PB.
Turns out I can read loads of posts about the origins of covid-19 on here and learn precisely nothing.
(Not a dig at you in any way Robert, I just find the back and forth so amusingly opaque.)
Thanks, I did see that and appreciate the reposting. I've put it on a list to read.
However, the article falls into the category of low-quality info for me because: (a) it has come to me via two posters who are on one side of a debate and so may be being selective in what they post, (b) I've no idea who astral codex ten is/are and what if any skin they have in the game and (c) I don't spend enough time on substack to be able to discern what if any quality control exists for this article.
I genuinely think I was one of the only Abbott fans on here, until I did a bit of reading into what she's said where I concluded she's a racist and/or quite possibly has dementia.
She is a diabetic who for various reasons has trouble controlling the condition leading to a number of episodes where she gets confused. That is not the same as dementia.
Of course she's a racist, and a hypocrite, and a horrible human being, but that isn't the point. The point is the whole affair has been bungled. It's ended up pissing off all sides, which is poor management.
I do not care about Diane Abbott, per se. I do care about whether my Prime Minister is a muppet. We've had three of those in the last five years and I was hoping for a change.
I also found it odd in earlier footage that she appeared to be shuffled onto the stairs in front of the town hall by a supporter on either arm, who seemed to be holding on to her even while she was standing still, as if she was unsteady on her feet.
Under the Tories, water firms will be allowed to pump MORE sewage into the water. Per the Telegraph.
Even by the standards of their proposals this week, that's a shit idea.
(Seriously. One of the visible signs of how the country is rubbish is how many of its waterways aren't just full of water. And the governing party thinks the problem is that our rivers and seas aren't dirty enough? I can't believe that they actually are intending to throw the election- if so, can someone reasassure them that they don't need to worry? But how would a government trying to lose look different to this?)
Under the Tories, water firms will be allowed to pump MORE sewage into the water. Per the Telegraph.
Proposals by the regulator, not the Tories.
Ofwat is a child of "Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs". So yes, it is the Tories who are ultimately responsible.
It would be more correct to say it is the government who are responsible. Whoever is in power after the next election will have to decide whether to go ahead with them or not. Are there reports on whether either party agree with the proposal?
I genuinely think I was one of the only Abbott fans on here, until I did a bit of reading into what she's said where I concluded she's a racist and/or quite possibly has dementia.
She is a diabetic who for various reasons has trouble controlling the condition leading to a number of episodes where she gets confused. That is not the same as dementia.
Of course she's a racist, and a hypocrite, and a horrible human being, but that isn't the point. The point is the whole affair has been bungled. It's ended up pissing off all sides, which is poor management.
I do not care about Diane Abbott, per se. I do care about whether my Prime Minister is a muppet. We've had three of those in the last five years and I was hoping for a change.
I also found it odd in earlier footage that she appeared to be shuffled onto the stairs in front of the town hall by a supporter on either arm, who seemed to be holding on to her even while she was standing still, as if she was unsteady on her feet.
It’s clear that Diane is past her best, and ought to retire with some dignity. The imagery leads one to wonder if she is being used for other people’s purposes. Definitely clear that the entryists are not willing to go without a notional fight.
Under the Tories, water firms will be allowed to pump MORE sewage into the water. Per the Telegraph.
Proposals by the regulator, not the Tories.
Ofwat is a child of "Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs". So yes, it is the Tories who are ultimately responsible.
It would be more correct to say it is the government who are responsible. Whoever is in power after the next election will have to decide whether to go ahead with them or not. Are there reports on whether either party agree with the proposal?
Isn't it just due to an unplanned expansion of several millions in the population ?
Only 5 more weeks and a day of this bullshit to endure
#justkiddin'
5 weeks?
You will be out there for fifty-seven years. What will happen is, you drift right through the core systems, and it's really just blind luck that a deep salvage team finds you when they do. It's one in a thousand, really. I think you're damn lucky to be alive, Sunil. You could be floating out there forever.
Under the Tories, water firms will be allowed to pump MORE sewage into the water. Per the Telegraph.
Proposals by the regulator, not the Tories.
Ofwat is a child of "Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs". So yes, it is the Tories who are ultimately responsible.
It would be more correct to say it is the government who are responsible. Whoever is in power after the next election will have to decide whether to go ahead with them or not. Are there reports on whether either party agree with the proposal?
Isn't it just due to an unplanned expansion of several millions in the population ?
More the unplanned expansion of Thames Water’s debt.
"Labour is poised to suspend Chingford and Woodford Green election candidate Faiza Shaheem after concerns were raised that she was seeking to “inflame community tensions” over Gaza during her campaign in the North London seat."
"Labour is poised to suspend Chingford and Woodford Green election candidate Faiza Shaheem after concerns were raised that she was seeking to “inflame community tensions” over Gaza during her campaign in the North London seat."
Under the Tories, water firms will be allowed to pump MORE sewage into the water. Per the Telegraph.
Proposals by the regulator, not the Tories.
Ofwat is a child of "Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs". So yes, it is the Tories who are ultimately responsible.
It would be more correct to say it is the government who are responsible. Whoever is in power after the next election will have to decide whether to go ahead with them or not. Are there reports on whether either party agree with the proposal?
If we were a grown up country with grown up debate the questions would also be “do you believe in independent arms length regulation” and “if you disagree with the legislation and infrastructure leading to the current set of regulations, what changes would you make, what would they cost, and how would you pay for them”?
"Labour is poised to suspend Chingford and Woodford Green election candidate Faiza Shaheem after concerns were raised that she was seeking to “inflame community tensions” over Gaza during her campaign in the North London seat."
Under the Tories, water firms will be allowed to pump MORE sewage into the water. Per the Telegraph.
Proposals by the regulator, not the Tories.
Ofwat is a child of "Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs". So yes, it is the Tories who are ultimately responsible.
It would be more correct to say it is the government who are responsible. Whoever is in power after the next election will have to decide whether to go ahead with them or not. Are there reports on whether either party agree with the proposal?
Isn't it just due to an unplanned expansion of several millions in the population ?
More the unplanned expansion of Thames Water’s debt.
I do have to say that water privatisation was the silliest. There is no market and has been no real private investment we didn’t just end up paying for.
"Labour is poised to suspend Chingford and Woodford Green election candidate Faiza Shaheem after concerns were raised that she was seeking to “inflame community tensions” over Gaza during her campaign in the North London seat."
"Labour is poised to suspend Chingford and Woodford Green election candidate Faiza Shaheem after concerns were raised that she was seeking to “inflame community tensions” over Gaza during her campaign in the North London seat."
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
Otherwise no. No one on earth now believes it came from the market. That includes the US government (democrats as well as republicans) who are now firmly gunning for Ecohealth and Peter Daszak who likely made the virus in the Wuhan lab with US money
I believe it came from the market.
It just probably came from the lab to the market. Perhaps some janitor on 50cents an hour grabbed some bats to sell at the wet market.
Or perhaps it was another animal in a container on the plane next to a bat that was being sent to Wuhan. The bat went to the Wuhan institute of virology, while the armadillo (or whatever) ended up at the wet market.
Or perhaps a lab worker got bit by a bat, developed a snuffle, and then did his evening's shopping at the market.
The idea that the two theories are mutually incompatible exists only in the mind of the mentally subnormal.
The market is a 40 minute drive and on the other side of a major river to the lab. Why did this janitor go all the way there, without transmitting the disease to anyone else along the way or to anyone else subsequently?
Generally samples were taken to the lab, not live animals. They weren't transported along side animals for the wet market. Armadillos are an American group: you're thinking of pangolins.
If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic.
All of your other scenarios add complications and coincidences. Occam's razor suggests they all fail against the simple theory of zoonosis via the market.
"If the bat was being sent to the WIV and infected a pangolin, or whatever, then that's not a lab leak. That's a zoonotic event from a wild animal, as most scientists understand to be the cause of the pandemic."
Here's why I hate the phrase "lab leak". Some will read it as "they were experimenting with gain of function viruses and one got loose", when that is only one of a gazillion ways that a virus can escape as a result of bat virus research.
I learn a lot from PB.
Turns out I can read loads of posts about the origins of covid-19 on here and learn precisely nothing.
(Not a dig at you in any way Robert, I just find the back and forth so amusingly opaque.)
Thanks, I did see that and appreciate the reposting. I've put it on a list to read.
However, the article falls into the category of low-quality info for me because: (a) it has come to me via two posters who are on one side of a debate and so may be being selective in what they post, (b) I've no idea who astral codex ten is/are and what if any skin they have in the game and (c) I don't spend enough time on substack to be able to discern what if any quality control exists for this article.
Ho hum. Still, thanks for making the effort!
If you think participation in the discussion means offering "low-quality" material ipso facto, then of course you're not going to feel enlightened by it.
Under the Tories, water firms will be allowed to pump MORE sewage into the water. Per the Telegraph.
Proposals by the regulator, not the Tories.
Ofwat is a child of "Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs". So yes, it is the Tories who are ultimately responsible.
It would be more correct to say it is the government who are responsible. Whoever is in power after the next election will have to decide whether to go ahead with them or not. Are there reports on whether either party agree with the proposal?
If we were a grown up country with grown up debate the questions would also be “do you believe in independent arms length regulation” and “if you disagree with the legislation and infrastructure leading to the current set of regulations, what changes would you make, what would they cost, and how would you pay for them”?
But it is so much easier to pretend that you can lump billions of extra regulatory costs on water companies and only their shareholders will feel any pain.
Under the Tories, water firms will be allowed to pump MORE sewage into the water. Per the Telegraph.
Proposals by the regulator, not the Tories.
Ofwat is a child of "Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs". So yes, it is the Tories who are ultimately responsible.
But does the government exercise significant influence over the regulator's actions?
They are ultimately responsible for the state of the system as it is currently regulated, as they could have chosen other mechanisms, but with non-ministerial departments and other entities the separation that exists does insulate the government of the day to some extent, that's part of the reason for separation in the first place.
That would need acknowledging if for no other reason that to establish greater culpability in the event of a departmental screwup.
"Labour is poised to suspend Chingford and Woodford Green election candidate Faiza Shaheem after concerns were raised that she was seeking to “inflame community tensions” over Gaza during her campaign in the North London seat."
It just gets better and better for Starmer. So easy to send a signal to the rest of the country that he isn't controlled by the "woke mob".
Day by day it becomes clearer and clearer that he really means it. Assuming his winning candidates are in his image, the Labour Party in power is going to be utterly unrecognisable from the creature of 2019.
Love or loathe him, you have to say he’s been a lot more effective that’s many of us thought he could be on this stuff.
"Labour is poised to suspend Chingford and Woodford Green election candidate Faiza Shaheem after concerns were raised that she was seeking to “inflame community tensions” over Gaza during her campaign in the North London seat."
It just gets better and better for Starmer. So easy to send a signal to the rest of the country that he isn't controlled by the "woke mob".
Day by day it becomes clearer and clearer that he really means it. Assuming his winning candidates are in his image, the Labour Party in power is going to be utterly unrecognisable from the creature of 2019.
Love or loathe him, you have to say he’s been a lot more effective that’s many of us thought he could be on this stuff.
Under the Tories, water firms will be allowed to pump MORE sewage into the water. Per the Telegraph.
Proposals by the regulator, not the Tories.
Ofwat is a child of "Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs". So yes, it is the Tories who are ultimately responsible.
But does the government exercise significant influence over the regulator's actions?
They are ultimately responsible for the state of the system as it is currently regulated, as they could have chosen other mechanisms, but with non-ministerial departments and other entities the separation that exists does insulate the government of the day to some extent, that's part of the reason for separation in the first place.
That would need acknowledging ff for no other reason that to establish greater culpability in the event of a departmental screwup.
Yes, but shouldn’t we let the government actually respond to the proposals instead of pretending that they are responsible for them?
"Labour is poised to suspend Chingford and Woodford Green election candidate Faiza Shaheem after concerns were raised that she was seeking to “inflame community tensions” over Gaza during her campaign in the North London seat."
It just gets better and better for Starmer. So easy to send a signal to the rest of the country that he isn't controlled by the "woke mob".
Day by day it becomes clearer and clearer that he really means it. Assuming his winning candidates are in his image, the Labour Party in power is going to be utterly unrecognisable from the creature of 2019.
Love or loathe him, you have to say he’s been a lot more effective that’s many of us thought he could be on this stuff.
Somehow he garnered support immediately upon election. Maybe he was behind it and was just playing the long game?
From 2015 Keir Starmer, the former director of public prosecutions who was recently elected a Labour MP, appeared to rule himself out as a candidate for the party leadership on Sunday, disappointing campaigners who have sought to persuade him to stand.
Starmer, who was elected as MP for Holborn and St Pancras on 7 May, had been the subject of an online campaign to stand launched by a group of Labour activists disappointed at the current leadership contenders.
But the former barrister, who has been tipped as a potential leader, said he believed he lacked experience.
He tweeted: “V flattered by #keirforleader initiative and thanks for so many supportive messages but Labour needs s/one with more political experience.”
Fun point of law that the judge's instructions to the jury aren't available to them in writing.
NEW NOTE: The jury wants to re-hear the jury instructions. They don't have a physical copy. If they want to hear them all, that could take another 1.5 hours. Judge may ask if there are specific instructions they want to hear. https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1795907692474888598
Under the Tories, water firms will be allowed to pump MORE sewage into the water. Per the Telegraph.
Proposals by the regulator, not the Tories.
Ofwat is a child of "Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs". So yes, it is the Tories who are ultimately responsible.
It would be more correct to say it is the government who are responsible. Whoever is in power after the next election will have to decide whether to go ahead with them or not. Are there reports on whether either party agree with the proposal?
If we were a grown up country with grown up debate the questions would also be “do you believe in independent arms length regulation” and “if you disagree with the legislation and infrastructure leading to the current set of regulations, what changes would you make, what would they cost, and how would you pay for them”?
But it is so much easier to pretend that you can lump billions of extra regulatory costs on water companies and only their shareholders will feel any pain.
As ever with too big/too important to fail businesses, the profits have been privatised and the costs nationalised.
Water company shareholders were well aware of this and have been siphoning off dividends accordingly. Now, with loads of debt and no new infrastructure, the government takes up the reins.
Under the Tories, water firms will be allowed to pump MORE sewage into the water. Per the Telegraph.
Proposals by the regulator, not the Tories.
Ofwat is a child of "Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs". So yes, it is the Tories who are ultimately responsible.
It would be more correct to say it is the government who are responsible. Whoever is in power after the next election will have to decide whether to go ahead with them or not. Are there reports on whether either party agree with the proposal?
Isn't it just due to an unplanned expansion of several millions in the population ?
Seeing as water (and sewage) is generally paid for by the litre, shouldn't several million more people generate several million more quid in revenue for the government naturally ? & I assume metering is mandatory for a HOMO license...
Under the Tories, water firms will be allowed to pump MORE sewage into the water. Per the Telegraph.
Proposals by the regulator, not the Tories.
Ofwat is a child of "Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs". So yes, it is the Tories who are ultimately responsible.
It would be more correct to say it is the government who are responsible. Whoever is in power after the next election will have to decide whether to go ahead with them or not. Are there reports on whether either party agree with the proposal?
If we were a grown up country with grown up debate the questions would also be “do you believe in independent arms length regulation” and “if you disagree with the legislation and infrastructure leading to the current set of regulations, what changes would you make, what would they cost, and how would you pay for them”?
But it is so much easier to pretend that you can lump billions of extra regulatory costs on water companies and only their shareholders will feel any pain.
As ever with too big/too important to fail businesses, the profits have been privatised and the costs nationalised.
Water company shareholders were well aware of this and have been siphoning off dividends accordingly.
Labour will end up nationalising them. That and the railways.
Under the Tories, water firms will be allowed to pump MORE sewage into the water. Per the Telegraph.
Proposals by the regulator, not the Tories.
Ofwat is a child of "Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs". So yes, it is the Tories who are ultimately responsible.
It would be more correct to say it is the government who are responsible. Whoever is in power after the next election will have to decide whether to go ahead with them or not. Are there reports on whether either party agree with the proposal?
If we were a grown up country with grown up debate the questions would also be “do you believe in independent arms length regulation” and “if you disagree with the legislation and infrastructure leading to the current set of regulations, what changes would you make, what would they cost, and how would you pay for them”?
But it is so much easier to pretend that you can lump billions of extra regulatory costs on water companies and only their shareholders will feel any pain.
Whenever I see/hear/read about the water companies, I get a metal image of Damien Green saying "When I were a kid, we used to swim in shit all the time! People's expectations have changed!"
I saw some posts this morning about the cost of electricity, and some people were trying to tell us that net zero was going to make electricity cheaper.
Co-incidentally, I spent a chunk of this afternoon trying to sort out the electricity contract for work this afternoon. Business electricity is not subject to price caps, so reflects the real costs (unlike domestic pricing). Our site uses about 92,000kwh a year. The electric unit price is similar to current domestic pricing - we're being offered day rates of about 23p/unit. However the standing charge for our site has gone from about £5/a day 5 years ago, and £20/day two years ago to £29/day now. By the time you add the various other charges (eg 11p/kva capacity per day), the full cost for our site is about 35p/unit.
Where is all this extra money going one might ask? Basically businesses like us are funding all the net zero infrastructure costs.
I did the rough sums, if we bought a big diesel generator, binned off our electric connection and went "off-grid", we would save about £5k a year. Generating electricity with a piston engined diesel generator is a terribly inefficient way of producing electricity - if that's cheaper than supplying fairly large amounts of it to one physical location via an existing grid connection, whoever's running the grid have got it very, very wrong.
Now it may be that net zero is worth this expense; that's a political question, although dumping the costs on industry in such a way as to destroy our industrial base seems a particularly dumb way to fund it. But anybody who tells you renewable energy is cheap (i.e. our whole political class) is lying to you. Whilst the sun and wind are free, unfortunately the infrastructure to collect this "free" energy is very expensive.
An excellent post, and one that @BartholomewRoberts should read carefully before claiming to be a supporter both of the current direction of travel in the energy market and of free market principles.
I don't even support Net Zero, but the scenario that @Pagan2 is highly unlikely to be true, because diesel generators come with a massive bunch of compromises.
Firstly, does the generator support the peak load? It's easy to get one that will support your average electricity usage (and that's how people calculate things). But your average load might well be 30% of your maximum load. So to get it working, you may need to spend a lot, lot more than you thought on a generator.
Secondly, at a basic efficiency level, diesel generators are - what - c. 35% efficient. But when under load, that can easily drop to 25%. And then there's maintenance. There's regular thermal expansion and contraction, and there's going to be a lot of wear and tear.
Thirdly, there's hassle. You need to get the diesel to you, and you need to store it. And that is going to cost you both time and money.
If you assume that your only costs are fuel, and that your generator runs at optimal efficiency all the time, you *might* get to £5k/annual saving. But even that is slightly bullshit, because domestic electricity prices lag wholesale ones, while the cost of diesel moves very quickly in line with the world market. And that's before capital cost and maintenance. And you don't even get hot water as a byproduct.
Anyone who thinks they are going to save money by going off grid with a diesel generator is incapable of basic mathematics.
I wasn't suggesting I would actually go and buy us a diesel generator; as you point out, there are various irritations like having to take it offline to service it, and also a bit of capex cost (although tbh, I could find one secondhand that would do our peak load for about £10k - servicing would be under £1k/year, so we'd be ahead by year 3). I sadly don't have any real use for several megawatts worth of hot water a year (you do get free heat out of a diesel, exactly the same as a gas engine, just stick a flat plate heat exchanger in the coolant return between the engine and the cooler group, and help yourself), if I did it would be quite economic!
My point was more that there should be massive economies of scale in generating electricity at grid level and supplying it to industry as required. Apart from anything else, powerstation gas turbines are a lot more efficient than relatively small diesel piston engines.
10 years ago, I'm fairly confident that running my own genset would have been significantly more expensive than a mains electric connection. The fact that it's now even remotely competitive is a massive red flag that our net zero policies are costing us an awful lot of money, mostly by slight of hand, and proof that all the politicians lining up to say that renewables are saving us money are lying to us.
But what you're mostly describing is the time lag between wholesale energy prices and retail:
The price of wholesale electricity has dropped massively since its peak, but because of government measures that suppressed the peak (i.e, the cap), the distribution companies are all still clawing back what they lost. That will change.
We're a business. No government cap for us, although fortunately we were in a 3 year contract across the worst of the madness. It does also mean that the prices are competitive now, it's a fairly free marketplace and a supplier that tried to claw back previous losses would just get wiped out by others undercutting it.
And the point people keep missing is that it's not the unit cost that's my bugbear - it's the standing charges which have gone mental (from < £2k to over £11k in five year for our business) - basically because the government is using that to fund all the net zero infrastructure.
The standing charge covers A LOT of things, not just net zero.
Indeed, a large chunk of your current standing charge is paying back the bailouts of energy companies that went bust during the peak.
Another chunk is paid directly to fossil fuel power stations, in the form of capacity payments.
Another chunk is because there was (as has happened with Thames Water) serious underinvestment in the grid, and now they're playing catchup as they replace a whole bunch of transformers.
And yes, some is Net Zero related. But a lot less than you'd expect.
"Labour is poised to suspend Chingford and Woodford Green election candidate Faiza Shaheem after concerns were raised that she was seeking to “inflame community tensions” over Gaza during her campaign in the North London seat."
It just gets better and better for Starmer. So easy to send a signal to the rest of the country that he isn't controlled by the "woke mob".
That's only because he is controlled by the "woke blob".
I've (not) read Liz's book. So I know the true facts about... all the things. Especially the way the blob makes you hold a book upside down. Your own book, mind.
Fun point of law that the judge's instructions to the jury aren't available to them in writing.
NEW NOTE: The jury wants to re-hear the jury instructions. They don't have a physical copy. If they want to hear them all, that could take another 1.5 hours. Judge may ask if there are specific instructions they want to hear. https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1795907692474888598
Probably another weird quirk of New York - that they have to request to see specific evidence is another apparently, whereas in some jurisdictions they are just given it all.
The problem with this trap (and every presumptive Government gets caught in it) is that as soon as you say “I won’t raise tax X” you get asked “what about tax Y”? Go far enough down the alphabet and, not wanting to box yourself in, you demur. And then that’s the one the opposition come at you with. But you’re going to be the Government so you have to be responsible and you can’t rule them all out.
No idea what the answer is, every presumptive Government in my lifetime has been caught this way. Just like every Tory opposition gets caught with “what would you cut”?
Fpt because it’s important people like @bondegezou and @EPG aren’t allowed to get away with brazen lies about Covid origins
****
Completely wrong. The Wuhan CDC - which also housed bats as part of the overall experimentation - is just 3 minutes from the market. I have posted the map a trillion times. I’m not allowed to post it again because of the rules. Ask @rcs1000 - he disputed this and I showed him.
Try this tweet
“One of the earliest papers on Covid-19 out of China pointed out the Wuhan CDC was 911 feet from the market and right across the street from the hospital where many healthcare workers fell ill”
The CDC was notoriously low level BSL2. It spent two years 2017-2019 moving to its new location right by the market. Ideal circs for a spillage
It kept bats
“The Wuhan CDC collected and housed many bats in collaboration with the WIV. It issued a contract for the disposal of 2 tons of hazardous medical waste generated in its labs in June 2019. This waste ‘has not been effectively treated from 1994 to 2019’, the announcement conceded.”
You’ve lost the argument. Its done. Yet you’re still trotting out these pathetic lies like no one can read or look at a map. It came from the lab
Unmmm... I don't think it was proved that the Wuhan CDC had hosted bats in the period prior to the leak. Indeed, I think they'd moved onto other things. The bat research was still in the same city, but was at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
I really struggle to not smell a rat re: WIV. A lab that had an extensive collection of coronaviruses, close to the epicentre of a pandemic 100s of miles away from where it's found naturally followed by China preventing the WHO from investigating fully, combined with previously documented concerns around containment?
We'll never know for certain, but anyone who says it's impossible it leaked from there are likely the most credulous of fools.
I don't disagree. I'm talking about the CDC, not the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Fun point of law that the judge's instructions to the jury aren't available to them in writing.
NEW NOTE: The jury wants to re-hear the jury instructions. They don't have a physical copy. If they want to hear them all, that could take another 1.5 hours. Judge may ask if there are specific instructions they want to hear. https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1795907692474888598
I saw some posts this morning about the cost of electricity, and some people were trying to tell us that net zero was going to make electricity cheaper.
Co-incidentally, I spent a chunk of this afternoon trying to sort out the electricity contract for work this afternoon. Business electricity is not subject to price caps, so reflects the real costs (unlike domestic pricing). Our site uses about 92,000kwh a year. The electric unit price is similar to current domestic pricing - we're being offered day rates of about 23p/unit. However the standing charge for our site has gone from about £5/a day 5 years ago, and £20/day two years ago to £29/day now. By the time you add the various other charges (eg 11p/kva capacity per day), the full cost for our site is about 35p/unit.
Where is all this extra money going one might ask? Basically businesses like us are funding all the net zero infrastructure costs.
I did the rough sums, if we bought a big diesel generator, binned off our electric connection and went "off-grid", we would save about £5k a year. Generating electricity with a piston engined diesel generator is a terribly inefficient way of producing electricity - if that's cheaper than supplying fairly large amounts of it to one physical location via an existing grid connection, whoever's running the grid have got it very, very wrong.
Now it may be that net zero is worth this expense; that's a political question, although dumping the costs on industry in such a way as to destroy our industrial base seems a particularly dumb way to fund it. But anybody who tells you renewable energy is cheap (i.e. our whole political class) is lying to you. Whilst the sun and wind are free, unfortunately the infrastructure to collect this "free" energy is very expensive.
An excellent post, and one that @BartholomewRoberts should read carefully before claiming to be a supporter both of the current direction of travel in the energy market and of free market principles.
I don't even support Net Zero, but the scenario that @Pagan2 is highly unlikely to be true, because diesel generators come with a massive bunch of compromises.
Firstly, does the generator support the peak load? It's easy to get one that will support your average electricity usage (and that's how people calculate things). But your average load might well be 30% of your maximum load. So to get it working, you may need to spend a lot, lot more than you thought on a generator.
Secondly, at a basic efficiency level, diesel generators are - what - c. 35% efficient. But when under load, that can easily drop to 25%. And then there's maintenance. There's regular thermal expansion and contraction, and there's going to be a lot of wear and tear.
Thirdly, there's hassle. You need to get the diesel to you, and you need to store it. And that is going to cost you both time and money.
If you assume that your only costs are fuel, and that your generator runs at optimal efficiency all the time, you *might* get to £5k/annual saving. But even that is slightly bullshit, because domestic electricity prices lag wholesale ones, while the cost of diesel moves very quickly in line with the world market. And that's before capital cost and maintenance. And you don't even get hot water as a byproduct.
Anyone who thinks they are going to save money by going off grid with a diesel generator is incapable of basic mathematics.
I wasn't suggesting I would actually go and buy us a diesel generator; as you point out, there are various irritations like having to take it offline to service it, and also a bit of capex cost (although tbh, I could find one secondhand that would do our peak load for about £10k - servicing would be under £1k/year, so we'd be ahead by year 3). I sadly don't have any real use for several megawatts worth of hot water a year (you do get free heat out of a diesel, exactly the same as a gas engine, just stick a flat plate heat exchanger in the coolant return between the engine and the cooler group, and help yourself), if I did it would be quite economic!
My point was more that there should be massive economies of scale in generating electricity at grid level and supplying it to industry as required. Apart from anything else, powerstation gas turbines are a lot more efficient than relatively small diesel piston engines.
10 years ago, I'm fairly confident that running my own genset would have been significantly more expensive than a mains electric connection. The fact that it's now even remotely competitive is a massive red flag that our net zero policies are costing us an awful lot of money, mostly by slight of hand, and proof that all the politicians lining up to say that renewables are saving us money are lying to us.
The fact that its even remotely competitive is because gas prices have shot up and we're using gas so that's what you're paying for. Its got nothing to do with net zero policies.
Had we got a net zero power supply before this crisis began then our prices would have remained stable rather than shooting up when gas became expensive.
So explain to me, for I am clearly simple minded, why has the cost of actual electricity per unit (thus linked to gas prices) has merely doubled in five years, but the network costs (standing charge, capacity charges etc) become 6x what it was 5 years ago?
For our site at it's current usage, for every 23p we pay in unit costs for electricity, we pay another 12p in network costs.
It's the additional network cost that's crippling, rather than the increase in unit cost (unit cost is down from 30.9p, two and a half years ago however all the savings are swallowed by the increases in the standing charge) and that increased network cost is basically all thanks to net zero.
Incidentally, our business uses literally tons of LPG gas - the price of which has only gone up 50% since the energy crisis started, and maybe 60% over 5 years, unlike our electricity bill which is 300% up over 5 years.
There is something making UK electricity terribly expensive compared to other sources of energy, and it's not increases in the cost of fuel.
Because the network is straining in its capacity to the limit, which is why capacity charges have gone up. When things are running at capacity they get more expensive.
The grid needs major investment at boosting capacity. Unfortunately I'm not sure how much your capacity charges are going on actually boosting capacity rather than just milking the existing network for what its worth.
EDIT: And yes what others have said about the costs going to bailout those who went bust due to gas prices going up. Which again is an issue you can blame on the fact we were burning gas rather than net zero, those costs wouldn't have been an issue had we already decarbonised when this happened.
The problem with this trap (and every presumptive Government gets caught in it) is that as soon as you say “I won’t raise tax X” you get asked “what about tax Y”? Go far enough down the alphabet and, not wanting to box yourself in, you demur. And then that’s the one the opposition come at you with. But you’re going to be the Government so you have to be responsible and you can’t rule them all out.
No idea what the answer is, every presumptive Government in my lifetime has been caught this way. Just like every Tory opposition gets caught with “what would you cut”?
I think that’s actually an easy No increase.
Because Labour are likely to lower the threshold at which you start having to charge VAT to say £40,000 while potentially lowering the rate by a percentage or 2.
I saw some posts this morning about the cost of electricity, and some people were trying to tell us that net zero was going to make electricity cheaper.
Co-incidentally, I spent a chunk of this afternoon trying to sort out the electricity contract for work this afternoon. Business electricity is not subject to price caps, so reflects the real costs (unlike domestic pricing). Our site uses about 92,000kwh a year. The electric unit price is similar to current domestic pricing - we're being offered day rates of about 23p/unit. However the standing charge for our site has gone from about £5/a day 5 years ago, and £20/day two years ago to £29/day now. By the time you add the various other charges (eg 11p/kva capacity per day), the full cost for our site is about 35p/unit.
Where is all this extra money going one might ask? Basically businesses like us are funding all the net zero infrastructure costs.
I did the rough sums, if we bought a big diesel generator, binned off our electric connection and went "off-grid", we would save about £5k a year. Generating electricity with a piston engined diesel generator is a terribly inefficient way of producing electricity - if that's cheaper than supplying fairly large amounts of it to one physical location via an existing grid connection, whoever's running the grid have got it very, very wrong.
Now it may be that net zero is worth this expense; that's a political question, although dumping the costs on industry in such a way as to destroy our industrial base seems a particularly dumb way to fund it. But anybody who tells you renewable energy is cheap (i.e. our whole political class) is lying to you. Whilst the sun and wind are free, unfortunately the infrastructure to collect this "free" energy is very expensive.
An excellent post, and one that @BartholomewRoberts should read carefully before claiming to be a supporter both of the current direction of travel in the energy market and of free market principles.
I don't even support Net Zero, but the scenario that @Pagan2 is highly unlikely to be true, because diesel generators come with a massive bunch of compromises.
Firstly, does the generator support the peak load? It's easy to get one that will support your average electricity usage (and that's how people calculate things). But your average load might well be 30% of your maximum load. So to get it working, you may need to spend a lot, lot more than you thought on a generator.
Secondly, at a basic efficiency level, diesel generators are - what - c. 35% efficient. But when under load, that can easily drop to 25%. And then there's maintenance. There's regular thermal expansion and contraction, and there's going to be a lot of wear and tear.
Thirdly, there's hassle. You need to get the diesel to you, and you need to store it. And that is going to cost you both time and money.
If you assume that your only costs are fuel, and that your generator runs at optimal efficiency all the time, you *might* get to £5k/annual saving. But even that is slightly bullshit, because domestic electricity prices lag wholesale ones, while the cost of diesel moves very quickly in line with the world market. And that's before capital cost and maintenance. And you don't even get hot water as a byproduct.
Anyone who thinks they are going to save money by going off grid with a diesel generator is incapable of basic mathematics.
I wasn't suggesting I would actually go and buy us a diesel generator; as you point out, there are various irritations like having to take it offline to service it, and also a bit of capex cost (although tbh, I could find one secondhand that would do our peak load for about £10k - servicing would be under £1k/year, so we'd be ahead by year 3). I sadly don't have any real use for several megawatts worth of hot water a year (you do get free heat out of a diesel, exactly the same as a gas engine, just stick a flat plate heat exchanger in the coolant return between the engine and the cooler group, and help yourself), if I did it would be quite economic!
My point was more that there should be massive economies of scale in generating electricity at grid level and supplying it to industry as required. Apart from anything else, powerstation gas turbines are a lot more efficient than relatively small diesel piston engines.
10 years ago, I'm fairly confident that running my own genset would have been significantly more expensive than a mains electric connection. The fact that it's now even remotely competitive is a massive red flag that our net zero policies are costing us an awful lot of money, mostly by slight of hand, and proof that all the politicians lining up to say that renewables are saving us money are lying to us.
The fact that its even remotely competitive is because gas prices have shot up and we're using gas so that's what you're paying for. Its got nothing to do with net zero policies.
Had we got a net zero power supply before this crisis began then our prices would have remained stable rather than shooting up when gas became expensive.
So explain to me, for I am clearly simple minded, why has the cost of actual electricity per unit (thus linked to gas prices) has merely doubled in five years, but the network costs (standing charge, capacity charges etc) become 6x what it was 5 years ago?
For our site at it's current usage, for every 23p we pay in unit costs for electricity, we pay another 12p in network costs.
It's the additional network cost that's crippling, rather than the increase in unit cost (unit cost is down from 30.9p, two and a half years ago however all the savings are swallowed by the increases in the standing charge) and that increased network cost is basically all thanks to net zero.
Incidentally, our business uses literally tons of LPG gas - the price of which has only gone up 50% since the energy crisis started, and maybe 60% over 5 years, unlike our electricity bill which is 300% up over 5 years.
There is something making UK electricity terribly expensive compared to other sources of energy, and it's not increases in the cost of fuel.
Because the network is straining in its capacity to the limit, which is why capacity charges have gone up. When things are running at capacity they get more expensive.
The grid needs major investment at boosting capacity. Unfortunately I'm not sure how much your capacity charges are going on actually boosting capacity rather than just milking the existing network for what its worth.
EDIT: And yes what others have said about the costs going to bailout those who went bust due to gas prices going up. Which again is an issue you can blame on the fact we were burning gas rather than net zero, those costs wouldn't have been an issue had we already decarbonised when this happened.
By 'milking' I assume you mean 'returning shareholder value'? We plebs being externalities to such things
Comments
We'll never know for certain, but anyone who says it's impossible it leaked from there are likely the most credulous of fools.
And the point people keep missing is that it's not the unit cost that's my bugbear - it's the standing charges which have gone mental (from < £2k to over £11k in five year for our business) - basically because the government is using that to fund all the net zero infrastructure.
It's this thing I do...
Motto: Ego Complicare
We don't know what the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 is found naturally, so we can't say whether the WIV is 100s of miles away from it or not.
There is oodles of evidence for the wet market: see the article just posted.
Rather than animal that is not sold in a market is sold there after being captured hundreds of miles away before being transported the aforementioned hundreds of miles to be sold for a few handfuls of 10p portions of dinner.
Time to step down.
https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1795878337975386280
I nominate shortest time of travel via motorized unicycle from Wick to Wantage.
#justkiddin'
https://x.com/GeneralBoles/status/1795882465480908893
There has been a lot of this in recent years involving celebrities from various walks of life..
https://x.com/News_Letter/status/1795896773082292720
However, the article falls into the category of low-quality info for me because: (a) it has come to me via two posters who are on one side of a debate and so may be being selective in what they post, (b) I've no idea who astral codex ten is/are and what if any skin they have in the game and (c) I don't spend enough time on substack to be able to discern what if any quality control exists for this article.
Ho hum. Still, thanks for making the effort!
https://www.tomorrowspapers.co.uk/
Even they may struggle to pin that one on Starmer.
https://x.com/Channel4News/status/1795886151477125409
I also found it odd in earlier footage that she appeared to be shuffled onto the stairs in front of the town hall by a supporter on either arm, who seemed to be holding on to her even while she was standing still, as if she was unsteady on her feet.
Alan Partridge narrates the pre-titles sequence from The Spy Who Loved Me
(Seriously. One of the visible signs of how the country is rubbish is how many of its waterways aren't just full of water. And the governing party thinks the problem is that our rivers and seas aren't dirty enough? I can't believe that they actually are intending to throw the election- if so, can someone reasassure them that they don't need to worry? But how would a government trying to lose look different to this?)
You will be out there for fifty-seven years. What will happen is, you drift right through the core systems, and it's really just blind luck that a deep salvage team finds you when they do. It's one in a thousand, really. I think you're damn lucky to be alive, Sunil. You could be floating out there forever.
https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/labour-poised-to-suspend-chingford-corbynista-candidate-over-divisive-gaza-campaign
Newsnight is discussing this atm.
They are ultimately responsible for the state of the system as it is currently regulated, as they could have chosen other mechanisms, but with non-ministerial departments and other entities the separation that exists does insulate the government of the day to some extent, that's part of the reason for separation in the first place.
That would need acknowledging if for no other reason that to establish greater culpability in the event of a departmental screwup.
Love or loathe him, you have to say he’s been a lot more effective that’s many of us thought he could be on this stuff.
From 2015
Keir Starmer, the former director of public prosecutions who was recently elected a Labour MP, appeared to rule himself out as a candidate for the party leadership on Sunday, disappointing campaigners who have sought to persuade him to stand.
Starmer, who was elected as MP for Holborn and St Pancras on 7 May, had been the subject of an online campaign to stand launched by a group of Labour activists disappointed at the current leadership contenders.
But the former barrister, who has been tipped as a potential leader, said he believed he lacked experience.
He tweeted: “V flattered by #keirforleader initiative and thanks for so many supportive messages but Labour needs s/one with more political experience.”
On Thursday night campaigners had set up a Facebook page called Sir Keir Starmer QC KCB for Labour leader, which by Sunday had 1,275 members. They also launched a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #keirforleader to encourage senior figures in the party to back any bid.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/may/17/keir-starmer-rules-himself-out-labour-leadership-contest
https://x.com/durhamwasp/status/1795882163788812326
Andrew Neil: Why is it right to wear a Maoist t-shirt, but obviously wrong, because it is, to wear a Hitler t-shirt?
Diane Abbott: I suppose that some people would judge that on balance Mao did more good than harm...
NEW NOTE: The jury wants to re-hear the jury instructions. They don't have a physical copy. If they want to hear them all, that could take another 1.5 hours. Judge may ask if there are specific instructions they want to hear.
https://x.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1795907692474888598
Water company shareholders were well aware of this and have been siphoning off dividends accordingly. Now, with loads of debt and no new infrastructure, the government takes up the reins.
& I assume metering is mandatory for a HOMO license...
Funny old world.
Or somesuch.
Thing is, he's right.
The surprising thing is, he's surprised...
Indeed, a large chunk of your current standing charge is paying back the bailouts of energy companies that went bust during the peak.
Another chunk is paid directly to fossil fuel power stations, in the form of capacity payments.
Another chunk is because there was (as has happened with Thames Water) serious underinvestment in the grid, and now they're playing catchup as they replace a whole bunch of transformers.
And yes, some is Net Zero related. But a lot less than you'd expect.
I've (not) read Liz's book. So I know the true facts about... all the things. Especially the way the blob makes you hold a book upside down. Your own book, mind.
Commies, the lot of them.
No idea what the answer is, every presumptive Government in my lifetime has been caught this way. Just like every Tory opposition gets caught with “what would you cut”?
The grid needs major investment at boosting capacity. Unfortunately I'm not sure how much your capacity charges are going on actually boosting capacity rather than just milking the existing network for what its worth.
EDIT: And yes what others have said about the costs going to bailout those who went bust due to gas prices going up. Which again is an issue you can blame on the fact we were burning gas rather than net zero, those costs wouldn't have been an issue had we already decarbonised when this happened.
Because Labour are likely to lower the threshold at which you start having to charge VAT to say £40,000 while potentially lowering the rate by a percentage or 2.