I’d like to inform you all that town planning used to be an Olympic sport.
There were 146 medalists in the art competitions that were part of the Olympic Games from 1912 until 1948. These art competitions were considered an integral part of the movement by International Olympic Committee (IOC) founder Pierre de Coubertin and necessary to recapture the complete essence of the Ancient Olympic Games.
Their absence before the 1912 Summer Olympics, according to journalism professor Richard Stanton, stems from Coubertin "not wanting to fragment the focus of his new and fragile movement".[1] Art competitions were originally planned for inclusion in the 1908 Summer Olympics but were delayed after that edition's change in venue from Rome to London following the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
By the 1924 Summer Olympics they had grown to be considered internationally relevant and potentially "a milestone in advancing public awareness of art as a whole".
When the media publish photos of children who have died, do they have to get permission from the parents? Are they officially released via the police, or is it just grab any old photo off social media?
I am not really big on the police policing people saying hurty words on the t'interweb, but people don't seem to realise or learn that identifying suspect that can't be identified under the law might be errrh be problematic.
What if everyone knows because of t'net, anyway?
This is not with particular reference to Southport, but more generally. If a fact becomes universally known online, is there a juncture at which a polite fiction from the authorities becomes more ridiculous than it is worth?
A philosophical point more than a criminological point
I think of Princess Kate's cancer (God speed her recovery). In the end it became so obvious something was wrong, and the speculation online so wild, bizarre and corrosive, they had to drop the veil of secrecy. That is a sad thing, but it is the nature of modern life with social media
She said that in future all councils will be required to draw up such a plan, showing where they are going to put the houses to meet their annual target.
Those that refuse to do so will be effectively stripped of their planning powers and will have a housing plan imposed on them from Whitehall, she added.
Good step in the right direction! Councils should have no power over planning.
Just a thought... Who is going to find the qualified manpower to build the houses?
The construction sector employs 3.1 million people in this country.
Break the oligopoly of Barratt etc by saying anyone who wants to can build a home, rather than just those with "permission".
Also: the more houses you commit to building, the more people with skills you train. There isn't an upper limit on the number of housebuilders or those with any other skill. It takes time to bring people through of course - but years, not decades.
Guns are not evil. I used t love shooting at school, and have never aimed a gun at a living (or dead) creature.
Trap or target shooting is a sport; it is about precision, timing and skill. If table tennis is a sport, so is shooting.
Not going to get into the argument about whether shooting is a sport (ignoring my silly joke on another post), but I don't think you can equate table tennis with shooting with regard to whether it s a sport or not. Proper table tennis is absolutely knackering.
A sport is a competitive endeavour between individuals or teams.
The only ‘sport’ that really isn’t, is professional wrestling. Everything else we see, from chess and darts to F1 and the Americas Cup, is a sport.
Would you like to see e-sports in the Olympics? Or artistic competitions? Possibly the various academic Olympiads?
I think it would be great.
There used to be an artistic element to the Olympics but it died out after the war.
There even used to be a competition for town planning. We won gold in 1932 for a scheme in Liverpool.
When the media publish photos of children who have died, do they have to get permission from the parents? Are they officially released via the police, or is it just grab any old photo off social media?
Answered in the caption under the photo Photograph: Merseyside Police handout
Washington Post (via Seattle Times) - Vance tells donors Harris change was a ‘sucker punch,’ at odds with campaign
The Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), privately told donors that running against Vice President Harris instead of President Biden made the race more challenging — an admission at odds with the Donald Trump campaign’s public projections of confidence.
“All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch,” Vance said about Biden’s withdrawal on July 21, according to a recording of his remarks at a Saturday fundraiser in Golden Valley, Minn. “The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden, because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger. And Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did.”
Publicly, the Trump campaign has insisted that Harris replacing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket has not changed the race, arguing that she shares responsibility for public dissatisfaction with Biden’s leadership. Vance told reporters on July 22, a day after Biden dropped out of the race, that there was no difference in running against Harris vs. Biden.
“I don’t think the political calculus changes at all,” Vance said. . . .
Guns are not evil. I used t love shooting at school, and have never aimed a gun at a living (or dead) creature.
Trap or target shooting is a sport; it is about precision, timing and skill. If table tennis is a sport, so is shooting.
Not going to get into the argument about whether shooting is a sport (ignoring my silly joke on another post), but I don't think you can equate table tennis with shooting with regard to whether it s a sport or not. Proper table tennis is absolutely knackering.
A sport is a competitive endeavour between individuals or teams.
The only ‘sport’ that really isn’t, is professional wrestling. Everything else we see, from chess and darts to F1 and the Americas Cup, is a sport.
Would you like to see e-sports in the Olympics? Or artistic competitions? Possibly the various academic Olympiads?
I think it would be great.
There used to be an artistic element to the Olympics but it died out after the war.
Competitive watercoloring ? Ice sculpture at the Winter Olympics ?
She said that in future all councils will be required to draw up such a plan, showing where they are going to put the houses to meet their annual target.
Those that refuse to do so will be effectively stripped of their planning powers and will have a housing plan imposed on them from Whitehall, she added.
Good step in the right direction! Councils should have no power over planning.
LOL yes the man in an office 200 miles away who has never visited your town has a better feel for local conditions,
Woman, in this case. And either they get with the national building program - in which case they can draw up the plans. - or they surrender control.
At least you can't any longer claim Labour don't have any policies.
I can't remember who described the plan as "councils can determine what homes are built as long as sufficient homes are built", but that seems fair enough.
And while people identify different culprits, I doubt that anyone can really claim that the present setup is working. Not with a straight face.
I am not really big on the police policing people saying hurty words on the t'interweb, but people don't seem to realise or learn that identifying suspect that can't be identified under the law might be errrh be problematic.
It's only problematic if you're in the UK. And Plod's problem is that there’s a global interest in spree killers and terrorist attacks...
Charles Leclerc: The Formula One racing driver was a surprising inclusion on one bookmaker’s shortlist on Monday. He was once photographed with a cricket bat, to be fair, and is, no doubt, an excellent driver. But the England management are probably looking for a little more experience.
When the media publish photos of children who have died, do they have to get permission from the parents? Are they officially released via the police, or is it just grab any old photo off social media?
Answered in the caption under the photo Photograph: Merseyside Police handout
Thanks - I don't see that in the photos on the BBC website.
. . . yet another blatant example of the extreme anglophobia of the New York Times . . .
NYT - ‘Ready, Steady, Slow’: Championship Snail Racing at 0.006 M.P.H.
For the next few weeks, Paris will be home to many of the world’s impressive athletes, including some of the fastest human beings on the planet . . .
Earlier this month, the rural village of Congham, England, played host to a less likely group of athletes: dozens of garden snails. They had gathered to compete in the World Snail Racing Championships, where the world record time for completing the 13.5 inch course stands at 2 minutes flat. At that speed — roughly 0.006 miles per hour — it would take the snails more than six days to travel a mile.
Britain has a history of quirky competitions, such as bog snorkeling and worm charming, and the snail race in Congham dates back to the 1960s, Mr. Dickinson said. “Snail racing is just another one of those wonderful British traditions that, I guess, we feel almost a duty to maintain,” he said. “Because once they die out, I don’t think they’ll ever come back.” . . .
This year’s race took place on a gray, rainy day in early July. “It was a really awful British summer day,” Mr. Haynes said. But until the hail hit, at least, it was good gastropod weather; snails are sensitive to drying out and thrive in moist environments.
There were 85 snails, divided into eight heats, in contention for the title. The racecourse was laid out on a piece of damp fabric draped over a table. The snails began the race inside the smaller of two concentric circles in the center of the table; the winner was the first snail to traverse the 13.5-inch expanse and reach the outer circle.
Before each heat, Mr. Haynes gave the signal for race to begin: “Ready, steady, slow!” he said.
And they were off, sort of. Some snails appeared to lock in on the finish line, making steady, if not speedy, progress. Others were quick off the starting blocks before opting to travel in circles [SSI - True Tory snails?]. . . .
In the final, Jeff, a big bruiser of a snail, took an early lead and never relinquished it. “He just had his head out and was going for it,” Mr. Haynes said. After four minutes and five seconds, it was official: Jeff was the new world champion.
Jeff promptly left a slime trail across the base of his trainer’s trophy. Traditionally, the winning snail also receives a large head of lettuce [!], but this year, Mr. Dickinson had forgotten to buy any. “I will have to rectify that,” he said. “I could be accused of not fulfilling my snail master duties.” . . .
LOL, that will last until the first Labour councils get voted out by the NIMBYs.
Building sh!tloads more houses requires both a whole load of new primary legislation, and the repealing of a whole load more.
Completely wrong as always.
What building large numbers of new houses needs is full release of all landbanked sites for immediate development but that won't help.
We then need a nationally co-ordinated plan to build the houses which we won't get.
Finally, we need to ensure we have enough specialist trades to get the houses built - perhaps we vould get some skilled foreign labour in and let them bring their families as they are going to be here for a while. Should be popular.
By the by, we also need to ensure the infrastructure is in place to support the tens of thousands of new homes which are just going to appear out of nowhere at the whim of a Whitehall civil servant (apparently).
It would be nice one day to have a serious and informed discussion about housing but we aren't getting it on here.
I’d like to inform you all that town planning used to be an Olympic sport.
There were 146 medalists in the art competitions that were part of the Olympic Games from 1912 until 1948. These art competitions were considered an integral part of the movement by International Olympic Committee (IOC) founder Pierre de Coubertin and necessary to recapture the complete essence of the Ancient Olympic Games.
Their absence before the 1912 Summer Olympics, according to journalism professor Richard Stanton, stems from Coubertin "not wanting to fragment the focus of his new and fragile movement".[1] Art competitions were originally planned for inclusion in the 1908 Summer Olympics but were delayed after that edition's change in venue from Rome to London following the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
By the 1924 Summer Olympics they had grown to be considered internationally relevant and potentially "a milestone in advancing public awareness of art as a whole".
Do you want to get into the debate about whether Nepal have ever won a medal at the Olympics? Most tallies say not, but as the footnote on the Wikipedia page puts it:
Tejbir Bura was the first and only Nepalese person to receive an Olympic gold medal. During the 1924 Winter Olympic closing ceremony, the IOC awarded a gold medal in alpinism for the 1922 British Mount Everest expedition, which recognized 21 mountaineers, including the first athletes to be awarded medals posthumously, seven Indian sherpas who were killed in an avalanche on the third and last attempt to summit.
When the media publish photos of children who have died, do they have to get permission from the parents? Are they officially released via the police, or is it just grab any old photo off social media?
Answered in the caption under the photo Photograph: Merseyside Police handout
Thanks - I don't see that in the photos on the BBC website.
When the media publish photos of children who have died, do they have to get permission from the parents? Are they officially released via the police, or is it just grab any old photo off social media?
The main legal barrier would be copyright, which would rest with the photographer in the absence of licensing.
So, legally, if some random had a pic they could publish it with random's permission. But the PR would be horrendous if the family then complained, so I suspect they clear it with the family, probably through the police. You do see, for example after the Manchester Arena bombings, a big delay in pics of some of the victims sometimes, even when named.
Naming is a different thing - the deceased don't have many privacy rights. Privacy rights of the family could come in to play, but probably not for just publishing the name.
(That's a lot of random stuff, isn't it - I used to be in intellectual property law a long time ago and deal with privacy laws extensively in my day job)
When the media publish photos of children who have died, do they have to get permission from the parents? Are they officially released via the police, or is it just grab any old photo off social media?
The main legal barrier would be copyright, which would rest with the photographer in the absence of licensing.
So, legally, if some random had a pic they could publish it with random's permission. But the PR would be horrendous if the family then complained, so I suspect they clear it with the family, probably through the police. You do see, for example after the Manchester Arena bombings, a big delay in pics of some of the victims sometimes, even when named.
Naming is a different thing - the deceased don't have many privacy rights. Privacy rights of the family could come in to play, but probably not for just publishing the name.
(That's a lot of random stuff, isn't it - I used to be in intellectual property law a long time ago and deal with privacy laws extensively in my day job)
My impression is that the hack just gets it off Twatter or, in the old days or without social media, gets it off a neighbouir or relative who doesn't have a clue when the nice gent asks for the picture and if it is OK to have it, often lubricated with some cash. So if there is any argument the hack can blame the neighbour/relative and suggest they be sued.
With respect to housebuilding AND immigration, don't know how things are in Dear Old Blighty, but here in Seattle about 95% plus of workers engaged in basic construction these days are Latino.
Average White native-English speakers still dominate the skilled trades, but language on job sites during initial phases of construction is predominately Español. ¡Es verdad!
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
I was told on PB that this was ridiculous a while back. The addition of cheaper coupled battery storage - which is inevitable within a year or three - will increase take up massively.
The cheap mass battery storage always seems to be a year or three away, like Thorium Reactors and Fusion.
Cheap mass battery storage is here today, and its getting cheaper every year.
Yes but, to take our house as an example:
We generated c.4,200kWh in 2023 off our 4kW array. We used 2,700kWh of that and sent the other 1,500kWh to the grid. However we also imported 9,500kWh from the grid.
So our total use was 12,200kWh (we're all electric, no other heating).
If we tripled the size of our array (easily doable) we would generate all our annual needs but we would need about 10gWh (10,000kWh) of battery storage to store the summer electricity to meet our winter demand.
That's a lot of batteries - $500k at projected costs of $50k per kWh?
Storing from summer to winter is never going to be viable, or realistic.
Storing from day to night certainly can be.
Especially adding if you work away from home then night will be both when you use the electricity, run your washing machine/dryer etc, and plug in your car etc
Currently those who are away from home during the day don't gain much from solar EV, unless they can add a battery in which case it is transformative.
Never say never. There's no physics reason why it is not possible, we just haven't found it yet.
(In fact it's possible now ofc but not very efficiently. We could use the summer electricity to split water, then generate electricity from the hydrogen in the winter.)
Gravity storage, e.g. pumping water uphill, is known technology that works well. You can pump water uphill in the summer and use it to generate electricity in winter. We tend to use stored power like that on shorter cycles at present, but it can also work as long-term storage.
The problem is capital cost to benefit ratio for a setup used on slow cycles, and because there's maintenance etc.
If you need to store 10,000 kWh of energy in a reservoir for one house, you need a lorra-lorra water and a lorra-lorra gubbins for each house, eg It helps to happen to own a reservoir (techncially 2 reservoirs).
I'm too lazy to run the numbers on a day like this.
But roughly, consider an Olympic swimming pool 50m x 20m x 2m deep (this is Paris); that is 2000 cubic m of water. Put it 10m in the air, say on your roof.
Potential energy (Ug) = m.g.h
Here m = 2,000 tonnes. h = 10m, g = 9.8 m/s/s.
So potential energy = 196,000 kJ.
I make that 54kWh.
So unless I have a decimal point or something else wrong, which is very possible, I make it you need 10000/54 = 185 Olympic swimming pools of water raised through 10m.
Plenty of other factors apply - eg the round-trip efficiency will be ~2/3, you may not need the full storage number due to peak-trough (but I did not say you would).
But it is a lot of water to be moved around.
5-10 days' consumption storage would work perfectly well in an independent Scotland - we've lots of glens left
With respect to housebuilding AND immigration, don't know how things are in Dear Old Blighty, but here in Seattle about 95% plus of workers engaged in basic construction these days are Latino.
Average White native-English speakers still dominate the skilled trades, but language on job sites during initial phases of construction is predominately Español. ¡Es verdad!
Guns are not evil. I used t love shooting at school, and have never aimed a gun at a living (or dead) creature.
Trap or target shooting is a sport; it is about precision, timing and skill. If table tennis is a sport, so is shooting.
Not going to get into the argument about whether shooting is a sport (ignoring my silly joke on another post), but I don't think you can equate table tennis with shooting with regard to whether it s a sport or not. Proper table tennis is absolutely knackering.
A sport is a competitive endeavour between individuals or teams.
The only ‘sport’ that really isn’t, is professional wrestling. Everything else we see, from chess and darts to F1 and the Americas Cup, is a sport.
Would you like to see e-sports in the Olympics? Or artistic competitions? Possibly the various academic Olympiads?
I think it would be great.
There used to be an artistic element to the Olympics but it died out after the war.
There even used to be a competition for town planning. We won gold in 1932 for a scheme in Liverpool.
When the media publish photos of children who have died, do they have to get permission from the parents? Are they officially released via the police, or is it just grab any old photo off social media?
The main legal barrier would be copyright, which would rest with the photographer in the absence of licensing.
So, legally, if some random had a pic they could publish it with random's permission. But the PR would be horrendous if the family then complained, so I suspect they clear it with the family, probably through the police. You do see, for example after the Manchester Arena bombings, a big delay in pics of some of the victims sometimes, even when named.
Naming is a different thing - the deceased don't have many privacy rights. Privacy rights of the family could come in to play, but probably not for just publishing the name.
(That's a lot of random stuff, isn't it - I used to be in intellectual property law a long time ago and deal with privacy laws extensively in my day job)
My impression is that the hack just gets it off Twatter or, in the old days or without social media, gets it off a neighbouir or relative who doesn't have a clue when the nice gent asks for the picture and if it is OK to have it, often lubricated with some cash. So if there is any argument the hack can blame the neighbour/relative and suggest they be sued.
You'll often see, on Twitter, various journos asking for permission to use pics people have posted from news events. Which often seems to be given.
Families have other priorities anyway. A local newspaper printed a pic and inaccurate story when a friend's brother died in an accident at work. They apologised, printed an apology and a detailed obituary with the family's cooperation some days later. All the family cared about was getting the story corrected and the truth about what had happened into print.
With respect to housebuilding AND immigration, don't know how things are in Dear Old Blighty, but here in Seattle about 95% plus of workers engaged in basic construction these days are Latino.
Average White native-English speakers still dominate the skilled trades, but language on job sites during initial phases of construction is predominately Español. ¡Es verdad!
Quite a horrendous error from the Mirror here. Not only a crass and redundant sentiment, in the first place, but they CAN'T EVEN GET THE NAME OF THE TOWN RIGHT
The Mirror @DailyMirror · 19m The Stockport tragedy is a brutal reminder of the uncertainty of life
Quite a horrendous error from the Mirror here. Not only a crass and redundant sentiment, in the first place, but they CAN'T EVEN GET THE NAME OF THE TOWN RIGHT
The Mirror @DailyMirror · 19m The Stockport tragedy is a brutal reminder of the uncertainty of life
When the media publish photos of children who have died, do they have to get permission from the parents? Are they officially released via the police, or is it just grab any old photo off social media?
The main legal barrier would be copyright, which would rest with the photographer in the absence of licensing.
So, legally, if some random had a pic they could publish it with random's permission. But the PR would be horrendous if the family then complained, so I suspect they clear it with the family, probably through the police. You do see, for example after the Manchester Arena bombings, a big delay in pics of some of the victims sometimes, even when named.
Naming is a different thing - the deceased don't have many privacy rights. Privacy rights of the family could come in to play, but probably not for just publishing the name.
(That's a lot of random stuff, isn't it - I used to be in intellectual property law a long time ago and deal with privacy laws extensively in my day job)
My impression is that the hack just gets it off Twatter or, in the old days or without social media, gets it off a neighbouir or relative who doesn't have a clue when the nice gent asks for the picture and if it is OK to have it, often lubricated with some cash. So if there is any argument the hack can blame the neighbour/relative and suggest they be sued.
You'll often see, on Twitter, various journos asking for permission to use pics people have posted from news events. Which often seems to be given.
Families have other priorities anyway. A local newspaper printed a pic and inaccurate story when a friend's brother died in an accident at work. They apologised, printed an apology and a detailed obituary with the family's cooperation some days later. All the family cared about was getting the story corrected and the truth about what had happened into print.
Quite. I've seen journos from certain newspapers told where to put their request.
I have also seen people complaining bitterly that some newspaper - one seems to be particularly prone to it - stole their artwork or photos without permission, and doing so under the newspaper's own story on Twitter.
But Twitter is unusable now witrhout signing awayt one's life blood so I have no idea what the latest wheeze is.
Quite a horrendous error from the Mirror here. Not only a crass and redundant sentiment, in the first place, but they CAN'T EVEN GET THE NAME OF THE TOWN RIGHT
The Mirror @DailyMirror · 19m The Stockport tragedy is a brutal reminder of the uncertainty of life
OMG the pictures of the now-dead kids in Southport. With 5 more in critical condition
I click on the Guardian website to make sure we are still beating the Germans in the medal table, and there they are. Little girls. Unavoidable
This story has hit me more than many in years. That probably makes me a terrible person because Gaza is worse of course and so on and etc
But there it is. This story, it is the pits of hell. If my family and friends are anything to go by, I am not alone
Yes, I think that's right. The more you can imagine yourself in a situation, the greater the empathy. That's just the way empathy works. By the good grace of God I don't live in the Middle East and could never really imagine myself doing so. What's happening there is tragic, but much less relatable than what's happening to British parents living in a small middle class town outside a large North Western city, sending their kids happily off to holiday club.
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
I was told on PB that this was ridiculous a while back. The addition of cheaper coupled battery storage - which is inevitable within a year or three - will increase take up massively.
The cheap mass battery storage always seems to be a year or three away, like Thorium Reactors and Fusion.
Cheap mass battery storage is here today, and its getting cheaper every year.
Yes but, to take our house as an example:
We generated c.4,200kWh in 2023 off our 4kW array. We used 2,700kWh of that and sent the other 1,500kWh to the grid. However we also imported 9,500kWh from the grid.
So our total use was 12,200kWh (we're all electric, no other heating).
If we tripled the size of our array (easily doable) we would generate all our annual needs but we would need about 10gWh (10,000kWh) of battery storage to store the summer electricity to meet our winter demand.
That's a lot of batteries - $500k at projected costs of $50k per kWh?
Storing from summer to winter is never going to be viable, or realistic.
Storing from day to night certainly can be.
Especially adding if you work away from home then night will be both when you use the electricity, run your washing machine/dryer etc, and plug in your car etc
Currently those who are away from home during the day don't gain much from solar EV, unless they can add a battery in which case it is transformative.
Never say never. There's no physics reason why it is not possible, we just haven't found it yet.
(In fact it's possible now ofc but not very efficiently. We could use the summer electricity to split water, then generate electricity from the hydrogen in the winter.)
Gravity storage, e.g. pumping water uphill, is known technology that works well. You can pump water uphill in the summer and use it to generate electricity in winter. We tend to use stored power like that on shorter cycles at present, but it can also work as long-term storage.
The problem is capital cost to benefit ratio for a setup used on slow cycles, and because there's maintenance etc.
If you need to store 10,000 kWh of energy in a reservoir for one house, you need a lorra-lorra water and a lorra-lorra gubbins for each house, eg It helps to happen to own a reservoir (techncially 2 reservoirs).
I'm too lazy to run the numbers on a day like this.
But roughly, consider an Olympic swimming pool 50m x 20m x 2m deep (this is Paris); that is 2000 cubic m of water. Put it 10m in the air, say on your roof.
Potential energy (Ug) = m.g.h
Here m = 2,000 tonnes. h = 10m, g = 9.8 m/s/s.
So potential energy = 196,000 kJ.
I make that 54kWh.
So unless I have a decimal point or something else wrong, which is very possible, I make it you need 10000/54 = 185 Olympic swimming pools of water raised through 10m.
Plenty of other factors apply - eg the round-trip efficiency will be ~2/3, you may not need the full storage number due to peak-trough (but I did not say you would).
But it is a lot of water to be moved around.
5-10 days' consumption storage would work perfectly well in an independent Scotland - we've lots of glens left
Would you go for this ? It would be a fairly radical bit of landscaping.
Arizona Georgia Michigan Nevada N Carolina Pennsylvania Wisconsin
Which ONE state would be your best bet for Dems win and which ONE state for Rep win.
I'm playing with the EC maths.
So am I. Big spreadsheet with EMA (Exponential Moving Average) by swing state on Harris/Trump. Not enough data points yet.
To answer your question I think Wisconsin is currently the best bet for a Harris win (her lead over Trump goes -1,0,2,1,0,-1. Best bet for Trump win is Arizona. Trump lead goes 9,6,8,6,5,8,3.
Quite a horrendous error from the Mirror here. Not only a crass and redundant sentiment, in the first place, but they CAN'T EVEN GET THE NAME OF THE TOWN RIGHT
The Mirror @DailyMirror · 19m The Stockport tragedy is a brutal reminder of the uncertainty of life
Quite a horrendous error from the Mirror here. Not only a crass and redundant sentiment, in the first place, but they CAN'T EVEN GET THE NAME OF THE TOWN RIGHT
The Mirror @DailyMirror · 19m The Stockport tragedy is a brutal reminder of the uncertainty of life
There was a lot of bot activity that got the towns mixed up and was trying to stir up trouble. You would have to suspect Russians or similar.
Obviously someone at the Mirror has been reading too much Twitter/X.
That or their own AI has been reading too much Twitter/X.
Not only did they get the name of the town wrong, the whole attitude of the tweet is fantastically tin-eared and obnoxious
Imagine saying that to the grieving parents, or those still in the hospital praying their daughters survive, "Well this is a brutal reminder of the uncertainty of life"
JESUS F CHRIST
It's the kind of tired cliched drivel some idiot of a Radio 4 pundit might say a year after the event, and even then It would be cerebral dreck disguised as thought. At this stage it is actively offensive
OMG the pictures of the now-dead kids in Southport. With 5 more in critical condition
I click on the Guardian website to make sure we are still beating the Germans in the medal table, and there they are. Little girls. Unavoidable
This story has hit me more than many in years. That probably makes me a terrible person because Gaza is worse of course and so on and etc
But there it is. This story, it is the pits of hell. If my family and friends are anything to go by, I am not alone
It is totally understandable. It happened here and these kids were doing things our kids might do. For all the utter murderous horror of Gaza it is just not relatable in the same way. I never allow myself to engage with stories like this. It is too all-consumingly heartbreaking. So then imagine how their parents feel. It is simply the worst thing that can ever happen.
Got to ask who are the people who would protest at the Prime Minister visiting the scene
Keir Starmer placed his own floral tribute among hundreds of others at the police cordon on Hart Street, Southport.
But the brief visit, lasting barely two minutes, was marred by hostile shouts from some watching members of the public, the PA news agency reports.
It reminds me of Macron getting booed after the Nice truck attack, when he came to pay respects. Which was a turning point in French politics
I remember that shooting in West Cumbria in about July 2010. David Cameron visited the town. The BBC reported that some people were unhappy with this, saying that it had taken an event like this for him to visit the town and didn't care about it normally. At the time I just put this down to a mad BBC attempt to find balance i.e. always find an angle to criticise the PM - because he had been in office for about 3 weeks, and it must strike anyone sane that in normal circumstances a visit to Workington is an unlikely priority for a PM in his first 100 days. But maybe people genuinely do find PM's responsible in whatever situation they're in.
I'm no fan of SKS. But it's hard to find an angle by which he is responsible for this.
She said that in future all councils will be required to draw up such a plan, showing where they are going to put the houses to meet their annual target.
Those that refuse to do so will be effectively stripped of their planning powers and will have a housing plan imposed on them from Whitehall, she added.
Good step in the right direction! Councils should have no power over planning.
You won't be happy until every acre of England is covered with shitty, ugly, soul-less, tasteless, petit bourgeois Barratt home redbrick shoeboxes exactly like yours, with sufficient parking for two cars and a cellar space for frenzied wanking
It was the late Auberon Waugh who described small new builds as Masturbation Chambers.
Gloomy masturbation chambers these days as the windows are tiny to meet eco rules.
Building homes to rent them out feels, intuitively, like it ought to be a low risk no-brainer investment. And removing the current constraint that builders only build at the rate they can sell is probably part of getting completion rates up.
That doesn't have to be central government, or councils, but it probably needs someone working at that sort of scale.
OMG the pictures of the now-dead kids in Southport. With 5 more in critical condition
I click on the Guardian website to make sure we are still beating the Germans in the medal table, and there they are. Little girls. Unavoidable
This story has hit me more than many in years. That probably makes me a terrible person because Gaza is worse of course and so on and etc
But there it is. This story, it is the pits of hell. If my family and friends are anything to go by, I am not alone
It is totally understandable. It happened here and these kids were doing things our kids might do. For all the utter murderous horror of Gaza it is just not relatable in the same way. I never allow myself to engage with stories like this. It is too all-consumingly heartbreaking. So then imagine how their parents feel. It is simply the worst thing that can ever happen.
I find it surprising that you mention Gaza, and not Ukraine.
Quite a horrendous error from the Mirror here. Not only a crass and redundant sentiment, in the first place, but they CAN'T EVEN GET THE NAME OF THE TOWN RIGHT
The Mirror @DailyMirror · 19m The Stockport tragedy is a brutal reminder of the uncertainty of life
As someone from Stockport, that makes me instantly furious. It's not even as if I have anything against Southport. It's quite nice. It's just the distant contempt of the journalist. I can feel myself grabbing the journalist by the nose and seething "It's SOUTHport you southern fucking ponce."
OMG the pictures of the now-dead kids in Southport. With 5 more in critical condition
I click on the Guardian website to make sure we are still beating the Germans in the medal table, and there they are. Little girls. Unavoidable
This story has hit me more than many in years. That probably makes me a terrible person because Gaza is worse of course and so on and etc
But there it is. This story, it is the pits of hell. If my family and friends are anything to go by, I am not alone
It is totally understandable. It happened here and these kids were doing things our kids might do. For all the utter murderous horror of Gaza it is just not relatable in the same way. I never allow myself to engage with stories like this. It is too all-consumingly heartbreaking. So then imagine how their parents feel. It is simply the worst thing that can ever happen.
I find it surprising that you mention Gaza, and not Ukraine.
Because Gaza brings hideous pictures of many dead children, torn to shreds. Ukraine, for all its enormities, generally doesn't
She said that in future all councils will be required to draw up such a plan, showing where they are going to put the houses to meet their annual target.
Those that refuse to do so will be effectively stripped of their planning powers and will have a housing plan imposed on them from Whitehall, she added.
Good step in the right direction! Councils should have no power over planning.
You won't be happy until every acre of England is covered with shitty, ugly, soul-less, tasteless, petit bourgeois Barratt home redbrick shoeboxes exactly like yours, with sufficient parking for two cars and a cellar space for frenzied wanking
It was the late Auberon Waugh who described small new builds as Masturbation Chambers.
(Snip)
Given what you said the other week, your gaff must be the newest of new builds...
Guns are not evil. I used t love shooting at school, and have never aimed a gun at a living (or dead) creature.
Trap or target shooting is a sport; it is about precision, timing and skill. If table tennis is a sport, so is shooting.
Not going to get into the argument about whether shooting is a sport (ignoring my silly joke on another post), but I don't think you can equate table tennis with shooting with regard to whether it s a sport or not. Proper table tennis is absolutely knackering.
A sport is a competitive endeavour between individuals or teams.
The only ‘sport’ that really isn’t, is professional wrestling. Everything else we see, from chess and darts to F1 and the Americas Cup, is a sport.
Would you like to see e-sports in the Olympics? Or artistic competitions? Possibly the various academic Olympiads?
I think it would be great.
There used to be an artistic element to the Olympics but it died out after the war.
There even used to be a competition for town planning. We won gold in 1932 for a scheme in Liverpool.
Quite a horrendous error from the Mirror here. Not only a crass and redundant sentiment, in the first place, but they CAN'T EVEN GET THE NAME OF THE TOWN RIGHT
The Mirror @DailyMirror · 19m The Stockport tragedy is a brutal reminder of the uncertainty of life
There was a lot of bot activity that got the towns mixed up and was trying to stir up trouble. You would have to suspect Russians or similar.
Obviously someone at the Mirror has been reading too much Twitter/X.
That or their own AI has been reading too much Twitter/X.
Not only did they get the name of the town wrong, the whole attitude of the tweet is fantastically tin-eared and obnoxious
Imagine saying that to the grieving parents, or those still in the hospital praying their daughters survive, "Well this is a brutal reminder of the uncertainty of life"
JESUS F CHRIST
It's the kind of tired cliched drivel some idiot of a Radio 4 pundit might say a year after the event, and even then It would be cerebral dreck disguised as thought. At this stage it is actively offensive
That's why I wondered if it was the Mirror's own bot.
After all, the whole internet will soon be AIs regurgitating other AIs output in a massive online game of Chinese Whispers.
Got to ask who are the people who would protest at the Prime Minister visiting the scene
Keir Starmer placed his own floral tribute among hundreds of others at the police cordon on Hart Street, Southport.
But the brief visit, lasting barely two minutes, was marred by hostile shouts from some watching members of the public, the PA news agency reports.
It reminds me of Macron getting booed after the Nice truck attack, when he came to pay respects. Which was a turning point in French politics
I remember that shooting in West Cumbria in about July 2010. David Cameron visited the town. The BBC reported that some people were unhappy with this, saying that it had taken an event like this for him to visit the town and didn't care about it normally. At the time I just put this down to a mad BBC attempt to find balance i.e. always find an angle to criticise the PM - because he had been in office for about 3 weeks, and it must strike anyone sane that in normal circumstances a visit to Workington is an unlikely priority for a PM in his first 100 days. But maybe people genuinely do find PM's responsible in whatever situation they're in.
I'm no fan of SKS. But it's hard to find an angle by which he is responsible for this.
It’s because Starmer is the current embodiment of the Establishment - an establishment that demanded a monopoly on violence and, after taking that monopoly, failed to protect those children. Their anger at the Establishment is understandable and just.
OMG the pictures of the now-dead kids in Southport. With 5 more in critical condition
I click on the Guardian website to make sure we are still beating the Germans in the medal table, and there they are. Little girls. Unavoidable
This story has hit me more than many in years. That probably makes me a terrible person because Gaza is worse of course and so on and etc
But there it is. This story, it is the pits of hell. If my family and friends are anything to go by, I am not alone
It is totally understandable. It happened here and these kids were doing things our kids might do. For all the utter murderous horror of Gaza it is just not relatable in the same way. I never allow myself to engage with stories like this. It is too all-consumingly heartbreaking. So then imagine how their parents feel. It is simply the worst thing that can ever happen.
I find it surprising that you mention Gaza, and not Ukraine.
Quite a horrendous error from the Mirror here. Not only a crass and redundant sentiment, in the first place, but they CAN'T EVEN GET THE NAME OF THE TOWN RIGHT
The Mirror @DailyMirror · 19m The Stockport tragedy is a brutal reminder of the uncertainty of life
As someone from Stockport, that makes me instantly furious. It's not even as if I have anything against Southport. It's quite nice. It's just the distant contempt of the journalist. I can feel myself grabbing the journalist by the nose and seething "It's SOUTHport you southern fucking ponce."
Got to ask who are the people who would protest at the Prime Minister visiting the scene
Keir Starmer placed his own floral tribute among hundreds of others at the police cordon on Hart Street, Southport.
But the brief visit, lasting barely two minutes, was marred by hostile shouts from some watching members of the public, the PA news agency reports.
It reminds me of Macron getting booed after the Nice truck attack, when he came to pay respects. Which was a turning point in French politics
I remember that shooting in West Cumbria in about July 2010. David Cameron visited the town. The BBC reported that some people were unhappy with this, saying that it had taken an event like this for him to visit the town and didn't care about it normally. At the time I just put this down to a mad BBC attempt to find balance i.e. always find an angle to criticise the PM - because he had been in office for about 3 weeks, and it must strike anyone sane that in normal circumstances a visit to Workington is an unlikely priority for a PM in his first 100 days. But maybe people genuinely do find PM's responsible in whatever situation they're in.
I'm no fan of SKS. But it's hard to find an angle by which he is responsible for this.
Got to ask who are the people who would protest at the Prime Minister visiting the scene
Keir Starmer placed his own floral tribute among hundreds of others at the police cordon on Hart Street, Southport.
But the brief visit, lasting barely two minutes, was marred by hostile shouts from some watching members of the public, the PA news agency reports.
It reminds me of Macron getting booed after the Nice truck attack, when he came to pay respects. Which was a turning point in French politics
I remember that shooting in West Cumbria in about July 2010. David Cameron visited the town. The BBC reported that some people were unhappy with this, saying that it had taken an event like this for him to visit the town and didn't care about it normally. At the time I just put this down to a mad BBC attempt to find balance i.e. always find an angle to criticise the PM - because he had been in office for about 3 weeks, and it must strike anyone sane that in normal circumstances a visit to Workington is an unlikely priority for a PM in his first 100 days. But maybe people genuinely do find PM's responsible in whatever situation they're in.
I'm no fan of SKS. But it's hard to find an angle by which he is responsible for this.
Try impossible.
I can't work out whether you are being disingenuous, or dim. Probably the latter, I fear
Got to ask who are the people who would protest at the Prime Minister visiting the scene
Keir Starmer placed his own floral tribute among hundreds of others at the police cordon on Hart Street, Southport.
But the brief visit, lasting barely two minutes, was marred by hostile shouts from some watching members of the public, the PA news agency reports.
It reminds me of Macron getting booed after the Nice truck attack, when he came to pay respects. Which was a turning point in French politics
I remember that shooting in West Cumbria in about July 2010. David Cameron visited the town. The BBC reported that some people were unhappy with this, saying that it had taken an event like this for him to visit the town and didn't care about it normally. At the time I just put this down to a mad BBC attempt to find balance i.e. always find an angle to criticise the PM - because he had been in office for about 3 weeks, and it must strike anyone sane that in normal circumstances a visit to Workington is an unlikely priority for a PM in his first 100 days. But maybe people genuinely do find PM's responsible in whatever situation they're in.
I'm no fan of SKS. But it's hard to find an angle by which he is responsible for this.
It’s because Starmer is the current embodiment of the Establishment - an establishment that demanded a monopoly on violence and, after taking that monopoly, failed to protect those children. Their anger at the Establishment is understandable and just.
Why are you using this terrible event to post deranged drivel on a public forum?
She said that in future all councils will be required to draw up such a plan, showing where they are going to put the houses to meet their annual target.
Those that refuse to do so will be effectively stripped of their planning powers and will have a housing plan imposed on them from Whitehall, she added.
Good step in the right direction! Councils should have no power over planning.
Just a thought... Who is going to find the qualified manpower to build the houses?
The construction sector employs 3.1 million people in this country.
Break the oligopoly of Barratt etc by saying anyone who wants to can build a home, rather than just those with "permission".
Also: the more houses you commit to building, the more people with skills you train. There isn't an upper limit on the number of housebuilders or those with any other skill. It takes time to bring people through of course - but years, not decades.
Ug the Caveman : Hmmmm, if I had a sharpened flint.... Everyone else: There is a massive shortage of trained flint sharpeners. So you can't
Guns are not evil. I used t love shooting at school, and have never aimed a gun at a living (or dead) creature.
Trap or target shooting is a sport; it is about precision, timing and skill. If table tennis is a sport, so is shooting.
Not going to get into the argument about whether shooting is a sport (ignoring my silly joke on another post), but I don't think you can equate table tennis with shooting with regard to whether it s a sport or not. Proper table tennis is absolutely knackering.
A sport is a competitive endeavour between individuals or teams.
The only ‘sport’ that really isn’t, is professional wrestling. Everything else we see, from chess and darts to F1 and the Americas Cup, is a sport.
Would you like to see e-sports in the Olympics? Or artistic competitions? Possibly the various academic Olympiads?
I think it would be great.
There used to be an artistic element to the Olympics but it died out after the war.
Competitive watercoloring ? Ice sculpture at the Winter Olympics ?
Well, the Olympics were originally the military arts as a non-violent competition.
So when the British Army had a regiment called the Artist's Rifles.....
Got to ask who are the people who would protest at the Prime Minister visiting the scene
Keir Starmer placed his own floral tribute among hundreds of others at the police cordon on Hart Street, Southport.
But the brief visit, lasting barely two minutes, was marred by hostile shouts from some watching members of the public, the PA news agency reports.
It reminds me of Macron getting booed after the Nice truck attack, when he came to pay respects. Which was a turning point in French politics
I remember that shooting in West Cumbria in about July 2010. David Cameron visited the town. The BBC reported that some people were unhappy with this, saying that it had taken an event like this for him to visit the town and didn't care about it normally. At the time I just put this down to a mad BBC attempt to find balance i.e. always find an angle to criticise the PM - because he had been in office for about 3 weeks, and it must strike anyone sane that in normal circumstances a visit to Workington is an unlikely priority for a PM in his first 100 days. But maybe people genuinely do find PM's responsible in whatever situation they're in.
I'm no fan of SKS. But it's hard to find an angle by which he is responsible for this.
It’s because Starmer is the current embodiment of the Establishment - an establishment that demanded a monopoly on violence and, after taking that monopoly, failed to protect those children. Their anger at the Establishment is understandable and just.
Yes it’s much more to do with what he represents, but the PM is still deserving of some basic respect having cleared his diary to visit your town in a time of tragedy.
Got to ask who are the people who would protest at the Prime Minister visiting the scene
Keir Starmer placed his own floral tribute among hundreds of others at the police cordon on Hart Street, Southport.
But the brief visit, lasting barely two minutes, was marred by hostile shouts from some watching members of the public, the PA news agency reports.
It reminds me of Macron getting booed after the Nice truck attack, when he came to pay respects. Which was a turning point in French politics
I remember that shooting in West Cumbria in about July 2010. David Cameron visited the town. The BBC reported that some people were unhappy with this, saying that it had taken an event like this for him to visit the town and didn't care about it normally. At the time I just put this down to a mad BBC attempt to find balance i.e. always find an angle to criticise the PM - because he had been in office for about 3 weeks, and it must strike anyone sane that in normal circumstances a visit to Workington is an unlikely priority for a PM in his first 100 days. But maybe people genuinely do find PM's responsible in whatever situation they're in.
I'm no fan of SKS. But it's hard to find an angle by which he is responsible for this.
It’s because Starmer is the current embodiment of the Establishment - an establishment that demanded a monopoly on violence and, after taking that monopoly, failed to protect those children. Their anger at the Establishment is understandable and just.
Why are you using this terrible event to post deranged drivel on a public forum?
I asked the reasonable question of 'how can people find SKS responsible' - I think Foss posted a reasonable answer. I'd disagree with him on the last two words. But anger is an understandable reaction to pointless tragedy - we want someone to blame. We don't want to just shrug our shoulders and say 'ah, well, shit happens'.
This is Starmer's first real test as a PM: heckled by sobbing parents and angry locals at the scene of a hideous atrocity
And the job doesn't get any easier from here, Skyr
That wasn't just catcalling it was poingnant questions. It all feeds into the cancellation of Rwanda and Bibby Stockholm.
Pulling the plug on Winter Fuel Payments for a single pensioner with an income of £11,390 a year or a couple with joint income of £17,320 is at a time like this quite incendiary. Even Gideon Osborne wasn't stupid enough to do something like this.
Both of these issues have cut through hugely.
Honeymoon Over. Expect Polls to start shifting with Reform not Tories benefitting from Labour falls.
Within 18 months Labour are going to be utterly despised.
Got to ask who are the people who would protest at the Prime Minister visiting the scene
Keir Starmer placed his own floral tribute among hundreds of others at the police cordon on Hart Street, Southport.
But the brief visit, lasting barely two minutes, was marred by hostile shouts from some watching members of the public, the PA news agency reports.
It reminds me of Macron getting booed after the Nice truck attack, when he came to pay respects. Which was a turning point in French politics
I remember that shooting in West Cumbria in about July 2010. David Cameron visited the town. The BBC reported that some people were unhappy with this, saying that it had taken an event like this for him to visit the town and didn't care about it normally. At the time I just put this down to a mad BBC attempt to find balance i.e. always find an angle to criticise the PM - because he had been in office for about 3 weeks, and it must strike anyone sane that in normal circumstances a visit to Workington is an unlikely priority for a PM in his first 100 days. But maybe people genuinely do find PM's responsible in whatever situation they're in.
I'm no fan of SKS. But it's hard to find an angle by which he is responsible for this.
It’s because Starmer is the current embodiment of the Establishment - an establishment that demanded a monopoly on violence and, after taking that monopoly, failed to protect those children. Their anger at the Establishment is understandable and just.
Why are you using this terrible event to post deranged drivel on a public forum?
I asked the reasonable question of 'how can people find SKS responsible' - I think Foss posted a reasonable answer. I'd disagree with him on the last two words. But anger is an understandable reaction to pointless tragedy - we want someone to blame. We don't want to just shrug our shoulders and say 'ah, well, shit happens'.
"An establishment that demanded a monopoly on violence failed to protect ..."
Speaking of empathy, one of the greatest accounts of Empathy writ large - or perhaps just decent humanity - was in the writings of Mungo Park, intrepid British explorer of West Africa in general and the River Niger in particular at turn of 18th>19th centuries.
According to Park he had fled with just the clothes on his back, an district dominated by Muslim converts and/or slavers (significant cross-over back then) who viewed him with suspicion (to put it mildly). After wandering for some time, he stumbled (literally) into a small village. Where he promptly collapsed under a convenient palm tree.
A couple of locals spotted him, but (for some reason) kept their distance. Then an older woman came up to him, and he was able to communicate (he'd picked up some of local lingua franca) that he was a traveler and she could see for herself he was in need of traveler's aid.
So she summoned some villagers - turned out she was the village chief's mother - who helped carry the poor guy to her rather spacious hut. Where helped with other ladies to clean him up some, fed him, and gave him a place to crash for the night.
During which she staid awake, weaving with a group of local women who served as her chaperones, though MP was beyond much hanky-panky at that point.
As he drifted in and out of sleep, he could hear the women softly singing work songs, very soothing after what he'd been through. AND he knew just enough to understand the gist of the words they were singing. Which boiled down to something like this:
"Oh look at this poor White man! Tired and weary, beaten and bloody, hungry and thirsty, without possessions or provisions, far away from his home! Oh pity him sisters and brothers, and help him please God!
Direct quote from Mungo Park:
"whatever difference there is between the negro and European, in the conformation of the nose, and the colour of the skin, there is none in the genuine sympathies and characteristic feelings of our common nature."
Got to ask who are the people who would protest at the Prime Minister visiting the scene
Keir Starmer placed his own floral tribute among hundreds of others at the police cordon on Hart Street, Southport.
But the brief visit, lasting barely two minutes, was marred by hostile shouts from some watching members of the public, the PA news agency reports.
It reminds me of Macron getting booed after the Nice truck attack, when he came to pay respects. Which was a turning point in French politics
I remember that shooting in West Cumbria in about July 2010. David Cameron visited the town. The BBC reported that some people were unhappy with this, saying that it had taken an event like this for him to visit the town and didn't care about it normally. At the time I just put this down to a mad BBC attempt to find balance i.e. always find an angle to criticise the PM - because he had been in office for about 3 weeks, and it must strike anyone sane that in normal circumstances a visit to Workington is an unlikely priority for a PM in his first 100 days. But maybe people genuinely do find PM's responsible in whatever situation they're in.
I'm no fan of SKS. But it's hard to find an angle by which he is responsible for this.
He is not but he has just cancelled Rwanda and Bibby Stockholm so it is perceived in some quarters, rightly or wrongly, that he is soft on barbarians entering the country illegally, putting other children at risk.
This is Starmer's first real test as a PM: heckled by sobbing parents and angry locals at the scene of a hideous atrocity
And the job doesn't get any easier from here, Skyr
That wasn't just catcalling it was poingnant questions. It all feeds into the cancellation of Rwanda and Bibby Stockholm.
Pulling the plug on Winter Fuel Payments for a single pensioner with an income of £11,390 a year or a couple with joint income of £17,320 is at a time like this quite incendiary. Even Gideon Osborne wasn't stupid enough to do something like this.
Both of these issues have cut through hugely.
Honeymoon Over. Expect Polls to start shifting with Reform not Tories benefitting from Labour falls.
Within 18 months Labour are going to be utterly despised.
Less than a month and you're already writing the epitaph.
To be fair, thanks to Covid, it took three years for the last Conservative Government to be utterly despised and they basically remained like that for the rest of their sorry time in office.
Got to ask who are the people who would protest at the Prime Minister visiting the scene
Keir Starmer placed his own floral tribute among hundreds of others at the police cordon on Hart Street, Southport.
But the brief visit, lasting barely two minutes, was marred by hostile shouts from some watching members of the public, the PA news agency reports.
It reminds me of Macron getting booed after the Nice truck attack, when he came to pay respects. Which was a turning point in French politics
I remember that shooting in West Cumbria in about July 2010. David Cameron visited the town. The BBC reported that some people were unhappy with this, saying that it had taken an event like this for him to visit the town and didn't care about it normally. At the time I just put this down to a mad BBC attempt to find balance i.e. always find an angle to criticise the PM - because he had been in office for about 3 weeks, and it must strike anyone sane that in normal circumstances a visit to Workington is an unlikely priority for a PM in his first 100 days. But maybe people genuinely do find PM's responsible in whatever situation they're in.
I'm no fan of SKS. But it's hard to find an angle by which he is responsible for this.
Try impossible.
I can't work out whether you are being disingenuous, or dim. Probably the latter, I fear
Haven't multiple names been circulating? It would help if they clarified which one they mean.
From what I can see one of the names is obviously snd laughably wrong and another is probably right
I shall not trouble the mods by repeating either on here
Tho at some point the coppers may have to accept that speculation is actually worse than revelation: and confess the name
Many thousands already know it
At every point the coppers should follow the law.
The law forbids naming under-18s.
That will be a novel concept to many police here and even more in the us....following the law that is. Though at least we dont have the abomination of qualified immunity here
This is Starmer's first real test as a PM: heckled by sobbing parents and angry locals at the scene of a hideous atrocity
And the job doesn't get any easier from here, Skyr
That wasn't just catcalling it was poingnant questions. It all feeds into the cancellation of Rwanda and Bibby Stockholm.
Pulling the plug on Winter Fuel Payments for a single pensioner with an income of £11,390 a year or a couple with joint income of £17,320 is at a time like this quite incendiary. Even Gideon Osborne wasn't stupid enough to do something like this.
Both of these issues have cut through hugely.
Honeymoon Over. Expect Polls to start shifting with Reform not Tories benefitting from Labour falls.
Within 18 months Labour are going to be utterly despised.
Erm...
YouGov @YouGov · 45m Rachel Reeves has announced that winter fuel payments to pensioners in England and Wales will become means-tested, a move which the public supports by 47% to 38%
Presumably by people believing racist conspiracy theories they read on social media.
What do racist conspiracy theories have to do with it? Maintaining security is one of the main jobs of the state and they have clearly failed.
This government has been in power for a few weeks. It seems very harsh to blame them for some potential national failure to maintain security.
Even if they had been in power for 14 years, however, we know it's impossible to provide complete safety. You cannot eliminate events like this. If they were happening frequently (e.g., >1 mass shooting per day in the US), then complaint would be fair. Such events are not happening frequently in the UK. We don't know what was behind this event. It seems to me that the idea that there has been some significant failure to maintain security only comes from those with a simplistic theory of the world who see this as the fault of immigration (wrongly believing that immigrants are associated with higher crime) and/or erroneously think that was a terrorist attack.
The Venezuelan opposition worked the last 24 hours to collect 73% of the tally sheets, and those added up to 67% for Edmundo Gonzalez vs 27% for Nicolas Maduro. They are building a website to show these sheets. Now the CNE must show theirs. https://x.com/jlynnmccoy/status/1818067741229695151
I watched the full video with Dechambeau, he has shocking looking swing, but is surprisingly effective, especially for somebody who is nearly 80. I can believe he is competitive with the OAPs.
That's just incredible. OK, it's early afternoon on a sunny day in mid-July. But if you'd shown that stat to someone 30 years ago it would have seemed the stuff of fantasy. Even 10 years ago it would have been wildly improbable.
The even better thing is that we are nowhere close to the peak of what we could easily be generating with solar. The number of houses with solar panels is, what, about 10%? (Wildly unscientific survey based on a look out of the window). I salivate to think what this figure will be in a decade's time.
I was told on PB that this was ridiculous a while back. The addition of cheaper coupled battery storage - which is inevitable within a year or three - will increase take up massively.
The cheap mass battery storage always seems to be a year or three away, like Thorium Reactors and Fusion.
Cheap mass battery storage is here today, and its getting cheaper every year.
Yes but, to take our house as an example:
We generated c.4,200kWh in 2023 off our 4kW array. We used 2,700kWh of that and sent the other 1,500kWh to the grid. However we also imported 9,500kWh from the grid.
So our total use was 12,200kWh (we're all electric, no other heating).
If we tripled the size of our array (easily doable) we would generate all our annual needs but we would need about 10gWh (10,000kWh) of battery storage to store the summer electricity to meet our winter demand.
That's a lot of batteries - $500k at projected costs of $50k per kWh?
Storing from summer to winter is never going to be viable, or realistic.
Storing from day to night certainly can be.
Especially adding if you work away from home then night will be both when you use the electricity, run your washing machine/dryer etc, and plug in your car etc
Currently those who are away from home during the day don't gain much from solar EV, unless they can add a battery in which case it is transformative.
Never say never. There's no physics reason why it is not possible, we just haven't found it yet.
(In fact it's possible now ofc but not very efficiently. We could use the summer electricity to split water, then generate electricity from the hydrogen in the winter.)
Gravity storage, e.g. pumping water uphill, is known technology that works well. You can pump water uphill in the summer and use it to generate electricity in winter. We tend to use stored power like that on shorter cycles at present, but it can also work as long-term storage.
The problem is capital cost to benefit ratio for a setup used on slow cycles, and because there's maintenance etc.
If you need to store 10,000 kWh of energy in a reservoir for one house, you need a lorra-lorra water and a lorra-lorra gubbins for each house, eg It helps to happen to own a reservoir (techncially 2 reservoirs).
I'm too lazy to run the numbers on a day like this.
But roughly, consider an Olympic swimming pool 50m x 20m x 2m deep (this is Paris); that is 2000 cubic m of water. Put it 10m in the air, say on your roof.
Potential energy (Ug) = m.g.h
Here m = 2,000 tonnes. h = 10m, g = 9.8 m/s/s.
So potential energy = 196,000 kJ.
I make that 54kWh.
So unless I have a decimal point or something else wrong, which is very possible, I make it you need 10000/54 = 185 Olympic swimming pools of water raised through 10m.
Plenty of other factors apply - eg the round-trip efficiency will be ~2/3, you may not need the full storage number due to peak-trough (but I did not say you would).
But it is a lot of water to be moved around.
5-10 days' consumption storage would work perfectly well in an independent Scotland - we've lots of glens left
Would you go for this ? It would be a fairly radical bit of landscaping.
That's about eight and a half days worth of the UK's entire electricity generation.
While we are in fantasy land, if you dam the Blue Nile in several places, there are 50+ sites in Ehiopia alone where a 5TWh freshwater scheme is theoretically feasible.
This is Starmer's first real test as a PM: heckled by sobbing parents and angry locals at the scene of a hideous atrocity
And the job doesn't get any easier from here, Skyr
That wasn't just catcalling it was poingnant questions. It all feeds into the cancellation of Rwanda and Bibby Stockholm.
Pulling the plug on Winter Fuel Payments for a single pensioner with an income of £11,390 a year or a couple with joint income of £17,320 is at a time like this quite incendiary. Even Gideon Osborne wasn't stupid enough to do something like this.
Both of these issues have cut through hugely.
Honeymoon Over. Expect Polls to start shifting with Reform not Tories benefitting from Labour falls.
Within 18 months Labour are going to be utterly despised.
Less than a month and you're already writing the epitaph.
To be fair, thanks to Covid, it took three years for the last Conservative Government to be utterly despised and they basically remained like that for the rest of their sorry time in office.
This is Starmer's first real test as a PM: heckled by sobbing parents and angry locals at the scene of a hideous atrocity
And the job doesn't get any easier from here, Skyr
That wasn't just catcalling it was poingnant questions. It all feeds into the cancellation of Rwanda and Bibby Stockholm.
Pulling the plug on Winter Fuel Payments for a single pensioner with an income of £11,390 a year or a couple with joint income of £17,320 is at a time like this quite incendiary. Even Gideon Osborne wasn't stupid enough to do something like this.
Both of these issues have cut through hugely.
Honeymoon Over. Expect Polls to start shifting with Reform not Tories benefitting from Labour falls.
Within 18 months Labour are going to be utterly despised.
Erm...
YouGov @YouGov · 45m Rachel Reeves has announced that winter fuel payments to pensioners in England and Wales will become means-tested, a move which the public supports by 47% to 38%
That is because a good chunk of the 47% think it only affects wealthy pensioners, wheras the reality is that it hits a single pensioner with an income as low as £11,390 a year or a couple with joint income as low as £17,320.
Those who have worked it out are furious (as a casual look at local town facebook groups shows).
There have also been media reports wrongly stating that it dosen't apply to over 80s.
The Venezuelan opposition worked the last 24 hours to collect 73% of the tally sheets, and those added up to 67% for Edmundo Gonzalez vs 27% for Nicolas Maduro. They are building a website to show these sheets. Now the CNE must show theirs. https://x.com/jlynnmccoy/status/1818067741229695151
Presumably by people believing racist conspiracy theories they read on social media.
What do racist conspiracy theories have to do with it? Maintaining security is one of the main jobs of the state and they have clearly failed.
This government has been in power for a few weeks. It seems very harsh to blame them for some potential national failure to maintain security.
Even if they had been in power for 14 years, however, we know it's impossible to provide complete safety. You cannot eliminate events like this. If they were happening frequently (e.g., >1 mass shooting per day in the US), then complaint would be fair. Such events are not happening frequently in the UK. We don't know what was behind this event. It seems to me that the idea that there has been some significant failure to maintain security only comes from those with a simplistic theory of the world who see this as the fault of immigration (wrongly believing that immigrants are associated with higher crime) and/or erroneously think that was a terrorist attack.
The government of the day gets the blame for the events of the day.
This is often not rational or fair. It is what it is.
Comments
There were 146 medalists in the art competitions that were part of the Olympic Games from 1912 until 1948. These art competitions were considered an integral part of the movement by International Olympic Committee (IOC) founder Pierre de Coubertin and necessary to recapture the complete essence of the Ancient Olympic Games.
Their absence before the 1912 Summer Olympics, according to journalism professor Richard Stanton, stems from Coubertin "not wanting to fragment the focus of his new and fragile movement".[1] Art competitions were originally planned for inclusion in the 1908 Summer Olympics but were delayed after that edition's change in venue from Rome to London following the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
By the 1924 Summer Olympics they had grown to be considered internationally relevant and potentially "a milestone in advancing public awareness of art as a whole".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_medalists_in_art_competitions
Keir Starmer placed his own floral tribute among hundreds of others at the police cordon on Hart Street, Southport.
But the brief visit, lasting barely two minutes, was marred by hostile shouts from some watching members of the public, the PA news agency reports.
This is not with particular reference to Southport, but more generally. If a fact becomes universally known online, is there a juncture at which a polite fiction from the authorities becomes more ridiculous than it is worth?
A philosophical point more than a criminological point
I think of Princess Kate's cancer (God speed her recovery). In the end it became so obvious something was wrong, and the speculation online so wild, bizarre and corrosive, they had to drop the veil of secrecy. That is a sad thing, but it is the nature of modern life with social media
Which makes much of gymnastics 'not a sport'....
*Probably termed it a 'gasper'.
Ice sculpture at the Winter Olympics ?
And while people identify different culprits, I doubt that anyone can really claim that the present setup is working. Not with a straight face.
England White Ball Coach, Runners and Riders(£):
Charles Leclerc: The Formula One racing driver was a surprising inclusion on one bookmaker’s shortlist on Monday. He was once photographed with a cricket bat, to be fair, and is, no doubt, an excellent driver. But the England management are probably looking for a little more experience.
https://www.thecricketer.com/Topics/england-premium/candidates_englands_search_new_white_ball_coach_begins_.html?t=638579537196688313
NYT - ‘Ready, Steady, Slow’: Championship Snail Racing at 0.006 M.P.H.
For the next few weeks, Paris will be home to many of the world’s impressive athletes, including some of the fastest human beings on the planet . . .
Earlier this month, the rural village of Congham, England, played host to a less likely group of athletes: dozens of garden snails. They had gathered to compete in the World Snail Racing Championships, where the world record time for completing the 13.5 inch course stands at 2 minutes flat. At that speed — roughly 0.006 miles per hour — it would take the snails more than six days to travel a mile.
Britain has a history of quirky competitions, such as bog snorkeling and worm charming, and the snail race in Congham dates back to the 1960s, Mr. Dickinson said. “Snail racing is just another one of those wonderful British traditions that, I guess, we feel almost a duty to maintain,” he said. “Because once they die out, I don’t think they’ll ever come back.” . . .
This year’s race took place on a gray, rainy day in early July. “It was a really awful British summer day,” Mr. Haynes said. But until the hail hit, at least, it was good gastropod weather; snails are sensitive to drying out and thrive in moist environments.
There were 85 snails, divided into eight heats, in contention for the title. The racecourse was laid out on a piece of damp fabric draped over a table. The snails began the race inside the smaller of two concentric circles in the center of the table; the winner was the first snail to traverse the 13.5-inch expanse and reach the outer circle.
Before each heat, Mr. Haynes gave the signal for race to begin: “Ready, steady, slow!” he said.
And they were off, sort of. Some snails appeared to lock in on the finish line, making steady, if not speedy, progress. Others were quick off the starting blocks before opting to travel in circles [SSI - True Tory snails?]. . . .
In the final, Jeff, a big bruiser of a snail, took an early lead and never relinquished it. “He just had his head out and was going for it,” Mr. Haynes said. After four minutes and five seconds, it was official: Jeff was the new world champion.
Jeff promptly left a slime trail across the base of his trainer’s trophy. Traditionally, the winning snail also receives a large head of lettuce [!], but this year, Mr. Dickinson had forgotten to buy any. “I will have to rectify that,” he said. “I could be accused of not fulfilling my snail master duties.” . . .
Tejbir Bura was the first and only Nepalese person to receive an Olympic gold medal. During the 1924 Winter Olympic closing ceremony, the IOC awarded a gold medal in alpinism for the 1922 British Mount Everest expedition, which recognized 21 mountaineers, including the first athletes to be awarded medals posthumously, seven Indian sherpas who were killed in an avalanche on the third and last attempt to summit.
So, legally, if some random had a pic they could publish it with random's permission. But the PR would be horrendous if the family then complained, so I suspect they clear it with the family, probably through the police. You do see, for example after the Manchester Arena bombings, a big delay in pics of some of the victims sometimes, even when named.
Naming is a different thing - the deceased don't have many privacy rights. Privacy rights of the family could come in to play, but probably not for just publishing the name.
(That's a lot of random stuff, isn't it - I used to be in intellectual property law a long time ago and deal with privacy laws extensively in my day job)
But I think people have the impression that the marks in gymnastics are like those on Strictly, just subjective feelings. They're not: they are based on very detailed rules: see https://www.gymnastics.sport/publicdir/rules/files/en_ 2022-2024 MAG CoP.pdf There are, sort of, many very detailed metrics.
Average White native-English speakers still dominate the skilled trades, but language on job sites during initial phases of construction is predominately Español. ¡Es verdad!
Though preferably not limited to sports stadiums, which seem to have dominated the medals.
Families have other priorities anyway. A local newspaper printed a pic and inaccurate story when a friend's brother died in an accident at work. They apologised, printed an apology and a detailed obituary with the family's cooperation some days later. All the family cared about was getting the story corrected and the truth about what had happened into print.
The Mirror
@DailyMirror
·
19m
The Stockport tragedy is a brutal reminder of the uncertainty of life
https://x.com/DailyMirror/status/1818305876878614637
I have also seen people complaining bitterly that some newspaper - one seems to be particularly prone to it - stole their artwork or photos without permission, and doing so under the newspaper's own story on Twitter.
But Twitter is unusable now witrhout signing awayt one's life blood so I have no idea what the latest wheeze is.
Tho actually I don't think even I would do it in this hideous context
It would be a fairly radical bit of landscaping.
Strath Dearn has, apparently, a 6.8TWh potential.
https://euanmearns.com/the-seawater-pumped-hydro-potential-of-the-world/
That's about eight and a half days worth of the UK's entire electricity generation.
To answer your question I think Wisconsin is currently the best bet for a Harris win (her lead over Trump goes -1,0,2,1,0,-1.
Best bet for Trump win is Arizona. Trump lead goes 9,6,8,6,5,8,3.
Obviously someone at the Mirror has been reading too much Twitter/X.
That or their own AI has been reading too much Twitter/X.
https://x.com/globalgotting/status/1818298681977606316
Imagine saying that to the grieving parents, or those still in the hospital praying their daughters survive, "Well this is a brutal reminder of the uncertainty of life"
JESUS F CHRIST
It's the kind of tired cliched drivel some idiot of a Radio 4 pundit might say a year after the event, and even then It would be cerebral dreck disguised as thought. At this stage it is actively offensive
I'm no fan of SKS. But it's hard to find an angle by which he is responsible for this.
Gloomy masturbation chambers these days as the windows are tiny to meet eco rules.
That doesn't have to be central government, or councils, but it probably needs someone working at that sort of scale.
It's not even as if I have anything against Southport. It's quite nice. It's just the distant contempt of the journalist. I can feel myself grabbing the journalist by the nose and seething "It's SOUTHport you southern fucking ponce."
After all, the whole internet will soon be AIs regurgitating other AIs output in a massive online game of Chinese Whispers.
This video of Trump putting is extraordinary.
If he's had any form of coaching at all and he's still that rubbish, I'm amazed he bothers to play at all. What a dreadful technique.
https://youtube.com/shorts/H-nwOMC546s?si=R81hdxfBb_kG_2IV
And the job doesn't get any easier from here, Skyr
Everyone else: There is a massive shortage of trained flint sharpeners. So you can't
So when the British Army had a regiment called the Artist's Rifles.....
The encouraging commentary of the coach is slightly heartbreaking.
Here’s something cheerier. I took this photo two days ago - of dawn over the river Lot. From my “palace” in Espalion, l’Aveyron
Has anyone else got a better photo of the dawn?
It’s better than talking about…. That
Pulling the plug on Winter Fuel Payments for a single pensioner with an income of £11,390 a year or a couple with joint income of £17,320 is at a time like this quite incendiary. Even Gideon Osborne wasn't stupid enough to do something like this.
Both of these issues have cut through hugely.
Honeymoon Over. Expect Polls to start shifting with Reform not Tories benefitting from Labour falls.
Within 18 months Labour are going to be utterly despised.
That's your idea of reasonable?
According to Park he had fled with just the clothes on his back, an district dominated by Muslim converts and/or slavers (significant cross-over back then) who viewed him with suspicion (to put it mildly). After wandering for some time, he stumbled (literally) into a small village. Where he promptly collapsed under a convenient palm tree.
A couple of locals spotted him, but (for some reason) kept their distance. Then an older woman came up to him, and he was able to communicate (he'd picked up some of local lingua franca) that he was a traveler and she could see for herself he was in need of traveler's aid.
So she summoned some villagers - turned out she was the village chief's mother - who helped carry the poor guy to her rather spacious hut. Where helped with other ladies to clean him up some, fed him, and gave him a place to crash for the night.
During which she staid awake, weaving with a group of local women who served as her chaperones, though MP was beyond much hanky-panky at that point.
As he drifted in and out of sleep, he could hear the women softly singing work songs, very soothing after what he'd been through. AND he knew just enough to understand the gist of the words they were singing. Which boiled down to something like this:
"Oh look at this poor White man! Tired and weary, beaten and bloody, hungry and thirsty, without possessions or provisions, far away from his home! Oh pity him sisters and brothers, and help him please God!
Direct quote from Mungo Park:
"whatever difference there is between the negro and European, in the conformation of the nose, and the colour of the skin, there is none in the genuine sympathies and characteristic feelings of our common nature."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mungo_Park_(explorer)
To be fair, thanks to Covid, it took three years for the last Conservative Government to be utterly despised and they basically remained like that for the rest of their sorry time in office.
YouGov
@YouGov
·
45m
Rachel Reeves has announced that winter fuel payments to pensioners in England and Wales will become means-tested, a move which the public supports by 47% to 38%
Even if they had been in power for 14 years, however, we know it's impossible to provide complete safety. You cannot eliminate events like this. If they were happening frequently (e.g., >1 mass shooting per day in the US), then complaint would be fair. Such events are not happening frequently in the UK. We don't know what was behind this event. It seems to me that the idea that there has been some significant failure to maintain security only comes from those with a simplistic theory of the world who see this as the fault of immigration (wrongly believing that immigrants are associated with higher crime) and/or erroneously think that was a terrorist attack.
https://x.com/jlynnmccoy/status/1818067741229695151
Maduro’s exit inevitable, says Venezuela opposition leader, as election protests grow
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/30/venezuela-election-2024-maduro-maria-corina-machado-edmundo-gonzalez
I take it we approve of toppling statues of Chavez ?
Putting like that is hilarious and as for winning, he make his own rules doesn’t he ?
Those who have worked it out are furious (as a casual look at local town facebook groups shows).
There have also been media reports wrongly stating that it dosen't apply to over 80s.
The draft National Planning Policy Framework is out.
It's the most important housing (and infrastructure) policy document in England.
So what's changed?
https://x.com/Sam_Dumitriu/status/1818294137503818123
This is often not rational or fair. It is what it is.