And oi, I never got offered my $10 voucher, do only American customers count Crowdstrike?
How does this work? If it fails, it removes a bit of money from all shareholders as Crowdstrike will need to pay out lawyers. If it succeeds, then essentially it "pinches" money from all shareholders and gives it to shareholders that are part of this action, with a cut taken by lawyers. So all shareholders should logically join this action. Which means that money is taken from shareholders, some of it is taken by lawyers, and then it is given back to the shareholders.
What am I missing?
Anyway it's fine by me. As I recommended to y'all at the time, and unusually for me, I'm short CRWD...
I am assuming they have two aims:
1. Change of management, not just a figurehead or a scapegoat but the whole damn lot of them. 2. A detailed public airing of what exactly happened internally and why, something that might be avoided if 1. above were to happen first.
3. A redesign of the release methodology as the current big bang approach was simply not fit for purpose nor best practice (and hasn't been for over 10 years).
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
That's what they were already doing in many cases, hence the low recruitment and retention rates in the health service and teaching. That said, you will struggle to run an an army, navy and air force via the private sector. Policing is probably best not done for profit either.
Looks like Reeves will have to discover another big black hole.
Giving out a 22% pay increase was never going to go unnoticed by the rest of the public sector. Expect a lot of strikes over the next year and 10%+ pay settlements becoming the norm. The private sector is going to be hollowed out over the next 5 years until our economy looks like France.
Hopefully it won't go unnoticed by either the public or private sector.
We have full employment need a good few years of high wage inflation.
Let those who are not working and have major assets pay higher fees to those who are working if they want a service doing. Whether that be a public or private service, people who are working need to be paid for what they're doing.
The solution to public overspending is to cut employment of people whose job doesn't need doing, and cut the unnecessary entitlements those out of work get, not cut remuneration for those who are working a job that is actually important to do.
If we're not going to have a 70-80% cut in house prices the only way to get things affordable again is a good few years of high wage-led inflation.
Public sector pay increases will be paid for by higher taxation on private sector productivity or borrowing which is a tax on future productivity. We already have a bloated public sector, the government needs to plan to cut employment in the public sector by 1m people, not make it more attractive to work in it.
We're heading for an IMF bailout in 2028 at this rate. Our spending is out of control and taxes can't go up any more than this.
Other options are available.
Merge Income Tax and National Insurance so that pensioners make the same contribution as the private sector and taxes would go up without costing those who are working or their firms a single penny.
If wealthy pensioners want a doctor for themselves, or a teacher for their grandchildren, why shouldn't they pay the same taxes as the private sector?
We need a transfer of earnings from those who aren't working to those who are - that requires pay rises for those who are working.
do we mug kids for their pocket money ?
That's almost exactly what our economy is doing at the minute by underpaying workers and overtaxing them.
We need to rebalance to say that those who are working are paid for what they're doing - and get to keep more of what they earn too. That means that those who can afford to, who aren't working, pay their own way for those who are working.
But they are being paid for what theyre doing. Just dictating pay rises doesnt work We are living substantially beyond our means and have a government who appears to want to buy off its mates.
If we are going to pay people more in the productive part of the economy we need to train them , increase productivity and cut the load of the state sector while at the same time getting back to a growth rate of 3%.
Increasingly it appears this government will not do this. While we could laugh when Sunak said he had a plan, at least he did. I can see no plan from Reeves, but maybe she'll surprise me in October.
Rishi didn't have a plan - if he had offered any plan he may have won a few more seats...
Being blunt I think the last Government with a plan for Growth was in 2004...
It might have been a wek plam, but at least he had one, Reeves is just making it up as she goes along.
Sure.
She's come up with this simple change in a month, which the Tories failed to do for a decade.
You're entitled to come to a judgment in due course, but pretending you know the outcome of Labour's policies a few weeks into government is just the expression of prejudices.
Chortle.
You dont half fall for spin.
This is all hot ai,r all of this has to go through planning and appeal which will take ages. They cant build data centres in London because there isnt enough electricity, the renewables plan is presided over by Miliband so no chance, prisons lol, and the only labs will be drug labs.
Meanwhile all that money which could funs this is going to bribe the public sector, who will of course be back for mor as the realise this government will crack on pay and Agella Rayer bless her has just raised the number of houses she is going to build from a target she will struggle to hit to one where she has no chance.
And as for prejudice, try experience I ve seen it all before.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
I remain of the view that Rishi had simply had enough and went into the campaign demob happy, which explains how grossly incompetent he was especially in the beginning of it.
I think you're right, or a possible other explanation is thinking of it a a bit like if I went to a vegan tee totaller barbequeue. I'd do my best to get on and have a laugh and a joke but I think fairly quickly it would become clear to me that, as polite as people were being, they were rather I wasn't there. At that point the right thing to do is politely leave early, not bang on about eating meat in the hope of changing people's minds untill the party is finished. Sorry that was a crap analogy. All I'm saying is that this may genuinely have been his last act of public service as PM - recognise he was finished and people wanted him gone. So let them have it.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Between the awful judging and (5 - ARD) men competing in the women's division much as I like to watch it, boxing probably needs a break from the 2028 games to sort itself out.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
Many already have and are being paid then by the public sector at locum rates because the job still needs doing. So you're just increasing our tax bill doing that.
Its not either/or, its both public and private sector wages that need to go up. Funded by those who aren't working getting a lower share of what those who are working are working for.
Ban consultants and locums in the public sector, or limit them to a percentage of spend. Suddenly the choice is between unemployment in the private sector and a reasonable salary in the state sector.
Looks like Reeves will have to discover another big black hole.
Giving out a 22% pay increase was never going to go unnoticed by the rest of the public sector. Expect a lot of strikes over the next year and 10%+ pay settlements becoming the norm. The private sector is going to be hollowed out over the next 5 years until our economy looks like France.
Hopefully it won't go unnoticed by either the public or private sector.
We have full employment need a good few years of high wage inflation.
Let those who are not working and have major assets pay higher fees to those who are working if they want a service doing. Whether that be a public or private service, people who are working need to be paid for what they're doing.
The solution to public overspending is to cut employment of people whose job doesn't need doing, and cut the unnecessary entitlements those out of work get, not cut remuneration for those who are working a job that is actually important to do.
If we're not going to have a 70-80% cut in house prices the only way to get things affordable again is a good few years of high wage-led inflation.
Public sector pay increases will be paid for by higher taxation on private sector productivity or borrowing which is a tax on future productivity. We already have a bloated public sector, the government needs to plan to cut employment in the public sector by 1m people, not make it more attractive to work in it.
We're heading for an IMF bailout in 2028 at this rate. Our spending is out of control and taxes can't go up any more than this.
Other options are available.
Merge Income Tax and National Insurance so that pensioners make the same contribution as the private sector and taxes would go up without costing those who are working or their firms a single penny.
If wealthy pensioners want a doctor for themselves, or a teacher for their grandchildren, why shouldn't they pay the same taxes as the private sector?
We need a transfer of earnings from those who aren't working to those who are - that requires pay rises for those who are working.
do we mug kids for their pocket money ?
That's almost exactly what our economy is doing at the minute by underpaying workers and overtaxing them.
We need to rebalance to say that those who are working are paid for what they're doing - and get to keep more of what they earn too. That means that those who can afford to, who aren't working, pay their own way for those who are working.
But they are being paid for what theyre doing. Just dictating pay rises doesnt work We are living substantially beyond our means and have a government who appears to want to buy off its mates.
If we are going to pay people more in the productive part of the economy we need to train them , increase productivity and cut the load of the state sector while at the same time getting back to a growth rate of 3%.
Increasingly it appears this government will not do this. While we could laugh when Sunak said he had a plan, at least he did. I can see no plan from Reeves, but maybe she'll surprise me in October.
Rishi didn't have a plan - if he had offered any plan he may have won a few more seats...
Being blunt I think the last Government with a plan for Growth was in 2004...
It might have been a wek plam, but at least he had one, Reeves is just making it up as she goes along.
Sure.
She's come up with this simple change in a month, which the Tories failed to do for a decade.
You're entitled to come to a judgment in due course, but pretending you know the outcome of Labour's policies a few weeks into government is just the expression of prejudices.
Chortle.
You dont half fall for spin.
This is all hot ai,r all of this has to go through planning and appeal which will take ages. They cant build data centres in London because there isnt enough electricity, the renewables plan is presided over by Miliband so no chance, prisons lol, and the only labs will be drug labs.
Meanwhile all that money which could funs this is going to bribe the public sector, who will of course be back for mor as the realise this government will crack on pay and Agella Rayer bless her has just raised the number of houses she is going to build from a target she will struggle to hit to one where she has no chance.
And as for prejudice, try experience I ve seen it all before.
Roll on October
Well the data centres will be built anywhere where power is available, start looking at those mini nuke power stations because you can plonk them next to a data centre and job is 90% done...
The locating of data centres in London was at a time when network latency was everything, with more software located within the data centre that isn't the problem it used to be...
Prisons is a temporary issue but it seems we need to build 10,000 places (or 5-10 large prisons) in short order which granted has nowt to do with efficiency but has everything to do with the last Government not looking more than 15 minutes ahead.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because the state is too large and does too much. We need to cut the size of the state and having people leave voluntarily is probably the best way to achieve it.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because the state is too large and does too much. We need to cut the size of the state and having people leave voluntarily is probably the best way to achieve it.
Again - what does it do that can be outsourced to the private sector efficiently. And remember the maxim for the past 14 years has been to drive costs down anyway you can..
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because this a basic management issue. You dont let your best people leave and hang on to the weak performers. You get rid of the weak performers, give a pay rise to the better ones and keep some in your pocket as productivity. Something you appear to be against.
26% reduction in road casualities 23% in killed / seriously injured 55% drop in people killed 27% drop in slight injuries
And insurance claims down 20%.
The thing that convinced me that this speed reduction policy was a good idea was the stat that vehicles are getting heavier.
Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.
That is patently false and not represented by the data whatsoever.
Decades of technological and safety improvements, including crash test designs and iterations, mean you are far, far, far less likely to die today than decades ago. Which includes pedestrians.
That is true, but does not contradict the above point that "Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.".
Perhaps rather than having a speed limit we should have a momentum limit?
It does contradict it.
A lot of arguments being made still rely upon old data. Most claims made by "road safety campaigners" who want speed limits cut use obsolete data from the 1970s or 1990s to back up their claims . . . because the data today does not.
In 2004 there were 53.6 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average. In 2022 there were 26.5 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average.
Pedestrians, not drivers, are twice as safe as they were previously.
No it doesn't. Your point about cars being safer is about their ability to quickly decelerate. But TSE's point remains true - if you get hit at 20mph in a heavy car you will be worse off than if you get hit at 30mph in a light one. That's just physics.
Physics requires exact numbers. It depends on "heavy" versus "light". The damage depends on kinetic energy, which equals one half of the mass times the velocity squared.
So for a car hitting you at 20 mph, it would need to be 2.25 times (30/20 * 30/20) as heavy as a car hitting you at 30 mph to do the same damage?
You may have to get the units right, so convert to m/s rather than mph, but it's lunchtime and I can't think it through.
Ratios should mean it doesn't matter, right? The 30mph/20mph * 30mph/20mph has no units.
Did we ever get the accident (etc) rates for Wales which were alleged to suggest that pedestrians were safer with 20mph?
Hot off the press: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cydvr2rnm4ro 23% drop in KSI, apparently. The numbers are not huge anyway, so the confidence intervals could be quite wide. But I'd be surprised on those figures if it's not a significant finding.
"The figures, external show there were 377 casualties of all severities in January to March, compared to 510 in the first quarter of 2023."
If we use a Poisson confidence interval, that's 377 (340-417) compared to 510 (467-556). So, very significant.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
The only two reasons I can think of.
1. Sir Graham had got virtually the required number of letters to trigger yet another leadership contest.
2. He was "advised" to do so by the Palace because of the Kings health.
They are the only two reasons I can can think of why they went in July and not October/November?
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
Many already have and are being paid then by the public sector at locum rates because the job still needs doing. So you're just increasing our tax bill doing that.
Its not either/or, its both public and private sector wages that need to go up. Funded by those who aren't working getting a lower share of what those who are working are working for.
Ban consultants and locums in the public sector, or limit them to a percentage of spend. Suddenly the choice is between unemployment in the private sector and a reasonable salary in the state sector.
Or the choice is that vacancies don't get filled in which case what do you do with eg classrooms of pupils who don't have any teachers to teach them? Or operating theatres without the appropriate staff so those who are employed can't act as they're missing a required colleague?
If the job doesn't need doing, abolish it. If it does need doing, it needs paying for, at whatever rate supply and demand sets - and supply and demand currently says pay needs to rise considerably to fill vacancies.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because this a basic management issue. You dont let your best people leave and hang on to the weak performers. You get rid of the weak performers, give a pay rise to the better ones and keep some in your pocket as productivity. Something you appear to be against.
It's the public sector - the decent performers have already left so you have a situation almost everywhere where you have senior management, a few experienced people in the middle and some junior staff members..
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because the state is too large and does too much. We need to cut the size of the state and having people leave voluntarily is probably the best way to achieve it.
No, abolishing job roles that we don't need doing altogether is the best way to achieve it.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because the state is too large and does too much. We need to cut the size of the state and having people leave voluntarily is probably the best way to achieve it.
Again - what does it do that can be outsourced to the private sector efficiently. And remember the maxim for the past 14 years has been to drive costs down anyway you can..
Oh dear. were back to nothing in the public sector can be cut. And yet Reeves will be forced to do so.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because the state is too large and does too much. We need to cut the size of the state and having people leave voluntarily is probably the best way to achieve it.
Again - what does it do that can be outsourced to the private sector efficiently. And remember the maxim for the past 14 years has been to drive costs down anyway you can..
Make private health insurance an allowable expense. Millions of people will stop using the NHS for basic treatment and electives cutting waiting times. Increase private provision for education so that more kids go to private school not less allowing for the state to do better with the resources rather than be spread so thinly.
Cut 50% of non front line jobs in the NHS and 50% of all civil servants overnight, see what happens, it's highly likely that people won't notice.
Between the awful judging and (5 - ARD) men competing in the women's division much as I like to watch it, boxing probably needs a break from the 2028 games to sort itself out.
If it goes it will never return because another sport will take it's place.
Looks like Reeves will have to discover another big black hole.
Giving out a 22% pay increase was never going to go unnoticed by the rest of the public sector. Expect a lot of strikes over the next year and 10%+ pay settlements becoming the norm. The private sector is going to be hollowed out over the next 5 years until our economy looks like France.
Hopefully it won't go unnoticed by either the public or private sector.
We have full employment need a good few years of high wage inflation.
Let those who are not working and have major assets pay higher fees to those who are working if they want a service doing. Whether that be a public or private service, people who are working need to be paid for what they're doing.
The solution to public overspending is to cut employment of people whose job doesn't need doing, and cut the unnecessary entitlements those out of work get, not cut remuneration for those who are working a job that is actually important to do.
If we're not going to have a 70-80% cut in house prices the only way to get things affordable again is a good few years of high wage-led inflation.
Public sector pay increases will be paid for by higher taxation on private sector productivity or borrowing which is a tax on future productivity. We already have a bloated public sector, the government needs to plan to cut employment in the public sector by 1m people, not make it more attractive to work in it.
We're heading for an IMF bailout in 2028 at this rate. Our spending is out of control and taxes can't go up any more than this.
Please tell me which million staff you would cut. Perhaps we should abolish the armed forces or the Police - sack all the teachers?
In terms of local Government, roughly 1.2 million people worked in local Government in 2022 - that was more than a third down on 2012 (that's austerity for you).
Are you going to propose firing everyone in local Government?
On taxation, increasing the basic rate to 23% would take us back to 1997 rates which I don't recall were considered onerous in extremis. I also recall back then we were running a budget surplus.
I would, yes.
1: Abolish Local Councils and elections. Get rid of the whole bureaucratic and pointless mess. 2: Abolish anyone involved in planning. Have a law on what is permitted then let anyone do whatever the hell they want with their own land and tell noisy neighbours to mind their own business.
Okay, as a believer in a centralised State in extremis, let's walk this.
Presumably all contracts between private sector companies and Councils would become contracts with central Government so presumably central Government would need to expand its contract management provision?
Who would monitor these cointracts to ensure the rubbish collection in Aldershot or Batley or Cambridge or wherever is meeting the agreed standard of the local contract?
How would citizens complain or to whom could they speak regarding issues in the vicinity - the local MP would be swamped by the casework this would generate. Should we have more MPs - perhaps 1500 - with smaller areas to cover all these issues?
One of the hardy perennials is potholes - would we have a Minister for Potholes (Cabinet rank) who would tackle the issue of road repairs and maintenance?
Here's another thing - school appeals - to whom would parents go if they object to the choice of school for their child? Which Government department would deal with the tens of thousands of cases?
Abolishing local Councils doesn't mean getting rid of the staff - it means they would work for central Government. You could get rid of a few thousand councillors but that's all you would achieve. Presumably in your utopia, the Government runs elections as well - nothing sinister or dangerous about that then...or should we contract out the democratic process to one of the companies who makes donations to the Conservative Party?
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because this a basic management issue. You dont let your best people leave and hang on to the weak performers. You get rid of the weak performers, give a pay rise to the better ones and keep some in your pocket as productivity. Something you appear to be against.
Coming back to this - the fix for keeping your best people is that you pay them enough so they don't leave.
But the public sector has fixed pay grades so how do you achieve that (I'm asking because I've seen multiple attempts over the last 2 decades and none worked for reasons that becomes obvious shortly after implementation).
Between the awful judging and (5 - ARD) men competing in the women's division much as I like to watch it, boxing probably needs a break from the 2028 games to sort itself out.
If it goes it will never return because another sport will take it's place.
They should probably have thought about that before allowing men in the women's category.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because the state is too large and does too much. We need to cut the size of the state and having people leave voluntarily is probably the best way to achieve it.
Again - what does it do that can be outsourced to the private sector efficiently. And remember the maxim for the past 14 years has been to drive costs down anyway you can..
Planning.
Abolish every busybody trying to second-guess and authorise what anyone builds on their land and have a free for all where anyone who wants to build anything on their own damned land can.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because this a basic management issue. You dont let your best people leave and hang on to the weak performers. You get rid of the weak performers, give a pay rise to the better ones and keep some in your pocket as productivity. Something you appear to be against.
It's the public sector - the decent performers have already left so you have a situation almost everywhere where you have senior management, a few experienced people in the middle and some junior staff members..
If youre saying theyre all shit sack the lot. You can replace them with a phone line saying " we are experiencing extraordinary demand so there will be a wait". After an hour waiting people will give up anyway and do it for themselves.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because this a basic management issue. You dont let your best people leave and hang on to the weak performers. You get rid of the weak performers, give a pay rise to the better ones and keep some in your pocket as productivity. Something you appear to be against.
Coming back to this - the fix for keeping your best people is that you pay them enough so they don't leave.
But the public sector has fixed pay grades so how do you achieve that (I'm asking because I've seen multiple attempts over the last 2 decades and none worked for reasons that becomes obvious shortly after implementation).
Good people need good working conditions, not just good pay.
Between the awful judging and (5 - ARD) men competing in the women's division much as I like to watch it, boxing probably needs a break from the 2028 games to sort itself out.
If it goes it will never return because another sport will take it's place.
They should probably have thought about that before allowing men in the women's category.
it doesn't help that there's no recognised governing body for 2028 either. if that doesn't change then there's no chance of Boxing returning for 2028.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
The only two reasons I can think of.
1. Sir Graham had got virtually the required number of letters to trigger yet another leadership contest.
2. He was "advised" to do so by the Palace because of the Kings health.
They are the only two reasons I can can think of why they went in July and not October/November?
I don’t think it’s 2. He’s just been able to do a full state opening and return to public engagements. Although I know people with cancer can decline quickly there’s nothing I can see which suggests they are aware that would be imminent. But then of course we don’t know.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because the state is too large and does too much. We need to cut the size of the state and having people leave voluntarily is probably the best way to achieve it.
Again - what does it do that can be outsourced to the private sector efficiently. And remember the maxim for the past 14 years has been to drive costs down anyway you can..
Planning.
Abolish every busybody trying to second-guess and authorise what anyone builds on their land and have a free for all where anyone who wants to build anything on their own damned land can.
There we go - jobs abolished.
You know my wife is a town planner? Every post you make tells me you haven't got a clue what they actually do...
Looks like Reeves will have to discover another big black hole.
Giving out a 22% pay increase was never going to go unnoticed by the rest of the public sector. Expect a lot of strikes over the next year and 10%+ pay settlements becoming the norm. The private sector is going to be hollowed out over the next 5 years until our economy looks like France.
Hopefully it won't go unnoticed by either the public or private sector.
We have full employment need a good few years of high wage inflation.
Let those who are not working and have major assets pay higher fees to those who are working if they want a service doing. Whether that be a public or private service, people who are working need to be paid for what they're doing.
The solution to public overspending is to cut employment of people whose job doesn't need doing, and cut the unnecessary entitlements those out of work get, not cut remuneration for those who are working a job that is actually important to do.
If we're not going to have a 70-80% cut in house prices the only way to get things affordable again is a good few years of high wage-led inflation.
Public sector pay increases will be paid for by higher taxation on private sector productivity or borrowing which is a tax on future productivity. We already have a bloated public sector, the government needs to plan to cut employment in the public sector by 1m people, not make it more attractive to work in it.
We're heading for an IMF bailout in 2028 at this rate. Our spending is out of control and taxes can't go up any more than this.
Please tell me which million staff you would cut. Perhaps we should abolish the armed forces or the Police - sack all the teachers?
In terms of local Government, roughly 1.2 million people worked in local Government in 2022 - that was more than a third down on 2012 (that's austerity for you).
Are you going to propose firing everyone in local Government?
On taxation, increasing the basic rate to 23% would take us back to 1997 rates which I don't recall were considered onerous in extremis. I also recall back then we were running a budget surplus.
I would, yes.
1: Abolish Local Councils and elections. Get rid of the whole bureaucratic and pointless mess. 2: Abolish anyone involved in planning. Have a law on what is permitted then let anyone do whatever the hell they want with their own land and tell noisy neighbours to mind their own business.
Okay, as a believer in a centralised State in extremis, let's walk this.
Presumably all contracts between private sector companies and Councils would become contracts with central Government so presumably central Government would need to expand its contract management provision?
Who would monitor these cointracts to ensure the rubbish collection in Aldershot or Batley or Cambridge or wherever is meeting the agreed standard of the local contract?
How would citizens complain or to whom could they speak regarding issues in the vicinity - the local MP would be swamped by the casework this would generate. Should we have more MPs - perhaps 1500 - with smaller areas to cover all these issues?
One of the hardy perennials is potholes - would we have a Minister for Potholes (Cabinet rank) who would tackle the issue of road repairs and maintenance?
Here's another thing - school appeals - to whom would parents go if they object to the choice of school for their child? Which Government department would deal with the tens of thousands of cases?
Abolishing local Councils doesn't mean getting rid of the staff - it means they would work for central Government. You could get rid of a few thousand councillors but that's all you would achieve. Presumably in your utopia, the Government runs elections as well - nothing sinister or dangerous about that then...or should we contract out the democratic process to one of the companies who makes donations to the Conservative Party?
26% reduction in road casualities 23% in killed / seriously injured 55% drop in people killed 27% drop in slight injuries
And insurance claims down 20%.
The thing that convinced me that this speed reduction policy was a good idea was the stat that vehicles are getting heavier.
Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.
That is patently false and not represented by the data whatsoever.
Decades of technological and safety improvements, including crash test designs and iterations, mean you are far, far, far less likely to die today than decades ago. Which includes pedestrians.
That is true, but does not contradict the above point that "Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.".
Perhaps rather than having a speed limit we should have a momentum limit?
It does contradict it.
A lot of arguments being made still rely upon old data. Most claims made by "road safety campaigners" who want speed limits cut use obsolete data from the 1970s or 1990s to back up their claims . . . because the data today does not.
In 2004 there were 53.6 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average. In 2022 there were 26.5 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average.
Pedestrians, not drivers, are twice as safe as they were previously.
No it doesn't. Your point about cars being safer is about their ability to quickly decelerate. But TSE's point remains true - if you get hit at 20mph in a heavy car you will be worse off than if you get hit at 30mph in a light one. That's just physics.
Hang on.
If it was a square block running into a square block dead on, then that might well be true.
But the energy is not all dissipated in that way. In particular, a pedestrian is (typically) thrown up and onto the car. 30mph crashes are incredibly dangerous compared to 20mph one because you don't have time to get thrown upwards and the damage to your lower body - including severing of the spinal column - is extreme.
The construction of the car is more important than the mass. A modern car (a saloon car, not what the Americans call a light truck) will deform extensively in the bumper and bonnet when involved in a pedestrian impact - whereas an older one is designed much more for car-car collisions, and the pedestrian has his legs broken by the metal bumper and his head broken by the top of the engine underneath the bonnet.
As an aside on "Light Trucks" ie Tonka Tanks, they are simply exempt from many of the safety regs that apply to cars in the USA. That's been a scandal for a very long time, and manufacturers have used their influence to prevent suitable regulations being applied.
Indeed, this is something you and I can completely agree on. You are 100% correct.
This is something I would not want to see US rules introduced on, and they're not happening here.
Any use of US data instead instead of UK data is showing dishonesty or a lack of comprehension on this by the person doing so.
The popularity of SUVs vs cars is safety problem though, cars having lower bonnets, the pedestrian was more likely to be go over the bonnet than under it. Stats demonstrate that 20mph is safer than 30mph, no need to go into any physics and the relevance of the theoretical stopping distance is considerably reduced versus reckless or distracted driving, as demonstrated by the vehicular war on stationary objects such as lamposts.
UK SUVs are cars. They are not American
Look at the Nissan Qashqai or the Kia Sportage, they are popular UK SUVs and they have all the safety features of modern cars, including modern, safer bonnets.
Contrast with the Ford F150 which to the best of my knowledge is not sold in this country.
Softer but higher bonnets. Personal example, a 3 series edged out in front of me when I was on my bike, slammed the brakes on but came to a stop against the bumper having reprofiled his bonnet with the left drop. Completely oblivious to my having hit him and being in front of his car, he set off, thankfully I separated from the bike and ended up on the bonnet, the bike ended up underneath. All witnessed by the off-duty PC in a car behind me luckily. Even if it was a Qashqai I'd have gone under the car and been run over. Normal car, unharmed, SUV likely serious injuries. Stopping distance irrelevant as the car was initially stationary, all down to driver incompetence only mitigated by my being above rather than level with the bonnet.
This is established - SUVs in use in Europe are much more dangerous for others than a normal vehicle. For example, a study published a couple of years ago.
IMO we need to heavily disincentivise, and perhaps totally exclude some of the larger ones. Starting with removing the tax loopholes for the larger categories of crewcab pickups, which I think make them more attractive for financial reasons than the smaller, safer ones.
Otherwise it's the current arms race to putting other people's lives at risk.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
Many already have and are being paid then by the public sector at locum rates because the job still needs doing. So you're just increasing our tax bill doing that.
Its not either/or, its both public and private sector wages that need to go up. Funded by those who aren't working getting a lower share of what those who are working are working for.
Ban consultants and locums in the public sector, or limit them to a percentage of spend. Suddenly the choice is between unemployment in the private sector and a reasonable salary in the state sector.
This is a statist solution to the problem of supply and demand. But it wouldn't work. 'Consultants/locums' would just re-emerge another way, ie through service companies (ie the 'private sector')
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because the state is too large and does too much. We need to cut the size of the state and having people leave voluntarily is probably the best way to achieve it.
Leaving aside the point that, if market economics is right, people leaving for better pay will tend towards being the better ones...
People working in the public sector aren't interchangable, any more than they are at your bank.
I wouldn't be much good in an operating theatre, I suspect many surgeons would struggle to teach Year 9 physics. (More because of Year 9 than physics.)
If someone wants to identify areas of activity that the state should no longer do (and if that includes teaching Year 9, I'm cool with that), great. Otherwise- you're expecting the state to deliver stuff and sulking at the bill. Which doesn't work.
Picking up "lidos with views of cathedrals", it's a bit of a challenge as cathedrals tend to be urban. Wild swimming with views may be a better option. The best option may be the seaside in the South, or pleasant churches which are not cathedrals next to rivers.
I can do you a castle, at St Andrews, and a tidal pool. But that's the North sea off Scotland, so it will freeze your balls off (1). Lots more castles (2). Hathersage Lido may have views of Peak District hills - @TSE can advise.
For cathedrals - Salisbury and the Avon, perhaps? Or use of Cathedral Schools pools in the summer - Salisbury school has an outdoor one.
The best would be the Minster Pool at Lichfield - they are running "Lichfield Beach" this summer, so that's a surprise. Local authority missed a trick.
I really can't see why urban open water swimming is so restricted.
My favourite would be Melbourne Poole, Derbyshire, near one of the top Norman Churches in the country, with Sheela-na-Gig. But Melbourne is a very Nimby sort of place; also the only place I have *ever* been asked not to inject insulin in a restaurant.
As things stand, try the Anchor Church, on the Rover Trent nr Ingleby. My photo for the day:
For more, I think there is a fighting chance that access legislation in England may get overhauled now the Landowners' Party are out, and that may include a universal-with-limitations right to navigate rivers as Scotland, including lake / reservoir access. Re-regulation of water companies may help.
THe sort of access right the Landowners' Party tried to extinguish completely on land and water in Scotland rather than allow the codification of the open access enjoyed immemorial?
That's a very interesting suggestion - good luck down there.
I hope there's been a sea change. Nulab did a lot, but got quite bogged down.
One notorious move was around the Right to Claim Rights of Way due to historic usage, where an agreement had been reached between NFU type bodies and Ramblers type bodies, and Theresa Coffey the Minister threw it out and just abolished it on her own say so at 5 days notice.
That was later reversed, but it's indicative of the basic assumptions - which have now changed to at least some degree. I'm not sure how far it goes.
But Theresa Coffey and friends are now largely reduced to a tinny wibbling noise emerging from the dustbin of history. That is, a sunk cost - and we start from here.
One thing we do have are that creating and upgrading footpaths etc are now in Sustainable Farming Payments, which is an opportunity. That is a Boris Johnson thing worked through this spring - so credit to the Tories for that. I'd like to see Ukraine style field margins with a national network of active travel routes through them.
Well, NuLab was responsible for the 2003 Scottish legislation, at least in being the major component of the governing coalition, though one would need to do some deep diving to be sure how far the LDs, their partner, drove or hindered the legislation (I suspect the former, if anything). But of course the original legal background was different, even if the landowners tried to argue that that should mean no presumption of legal access at all (ie no rights of way system).
26% reduction in road casualities 23% in killed / seriously injured 55% drop in people killed 27% drop in slight injuries
And insurance claims down 20%.
The thing that convinced me that this speed reduction policy was a good idea was the stat that vehicles are getting heavier.
Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.
That is patently false and not represented by the data whatsoever.
Decades of technological and safety improvements, including crash test designs and iterations, mean you are far, far, far less likely to die today than decades ago. Which includes pedestrians.
That is true, but does not contradict the above point that "Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.".
Perhaps rather than having a speed limit we should have a momentum limit?
It does contradict it.
A lot of arguments being made still rely upon old data. Most claims made by "road safety campaigners" who want speed limits cut use obsolete data from the 1970s or 1990s to back up their claims . . . because the data today does not.
In 2004 there were 53.6 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average. In 2022 there were 26.5 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average.
Pedestrians, not drivers, are twice as safe as they were previously.
No it doesn't. Your point about cars being safer is about their ability to quickly decelerate. But TSE's point remains true - if you get hit at 20mph in a heavy car you will be worse off than if you get hit at 30mph in a light one. That's just physics.
Hang on.
If it was a square block running into a square block dead on, then that might well be true.
But the energy is not all dissipated in that way. In particular, a pedestrian is (typically) thrown up and onto the car. 30mph crashes are incredibly dangerous compared to 20mph one because you don't have time to get thrown upwards and the damage to your lower body - including severing of the spinal column - is extreme.
The construction of the car is more important than the mass. A modern car (a saloon car, not what the Americans call a light truck) will deform extensively in the bumper and bonnet when involved in a pedestrian impact - whereas an older one is designed much more for car-car collisions, and the pedestrian has his legs broken by the metal bumper and his head broken by the top of the engine underneath the bonnet.
As an aside on "Light Trucks" ie Tonka Tanks, they are simply exempt from many of the safety regs that apply to cars in the USA. That's been a scandal for a very long time, and manufacturers have used their influence to prevent suitable regulations being applied.
Indeed, this is something you and I can completely agree on. You are 100% correct.
This is something I would not want to see US rules introduced on, and they're not happening here.
Any use of US data instead instead of UK data is showing dishonesty or a lack of comprehension on this by the person doing so.
The popularity of SUVs vs cars is safety problem though, cars having lower bonnets, the pedestrian was more likely to be go over the bonnet than under it. Stats demonstrate that 20mph is safer than 30mph, no need to go into any physics and the relevance of the theoretical stopping distance is considerably reduced versus reckless or distracted driving, as demonstrated by the vehicular war on stationary objects such as lamposts.
UK SUVs are cars. They are not American
Look at the Nissan Qashqai or the Kia Sportage, they are popular UK SUVs and they have all the safety features of modern cars, including modern, safer bonnets.
Contrast with the Ford F150 which to the best of my knowledge is not sold in this country.
Softer but higher bonnets. Personal example, a 3 series edged out in front of me when I was on my bike, slammed the brakes on but came to a stop against the bumper having reprofiled his bonnet with the left drop. Completely oblivious to my having hit him and being in front of his car, he set off, thankfully I separated from the bike and ended up on the bonnet, the bike ended up underneath. All witnessed by the off-duty PC in a car behind me luckily. Even if it was a Qashqai I'd have gone under the car and been run over. Normal car, unharmed, SUV likely serious injuries. Stopping distance irrelevant as the car was initially stationary, all down to driver incompetence only mitigated by my being above rather than level with the bonnet.
This is established - SUVs in use in Europe are much more dangerous than a normal vehicle. For example, a study published a couple of years ago.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because this a basic management issue. You dont let your best people leave and hang on to the weak performers. You get rid of the weak performers, give a pay rise to the better ones and keep some in your pocket as productivity. Something you appear to be against.
Coming back to this - the fix for keeping your best people is that you pay them enough so they don't leave.
But the public sector has fixed pay grades so how do you achieve that (I'm asking because I've seen multiple attempts over the last 2 decades and none worked for reasons that becomes obvious shortly after implementation).
You do away with fixed pay scales as an anachronism from another centrury.
And while were at it if people are WFH they shouldnt be getting a London allowance, like rich pensioners they dont need it.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because the state is too large and does too much. We need to cut the size of the state and having people leave voluntarily is probably the best way to achieve it.
Again - what does it do that can be outsourced to the private sector efficiently. And remember the maxim for the past 14 years has been to drive costs down anyway you can..
Planning.
Abolish every busybody trying to second-guess and authorise what anyone builds on their land and have a free for all where anyone who wants to build anything on their own damned land can.
There we go - jobs abolished.
You know my wife is a town planner? Every post you make tells me you haven't got a clue what they actually do...
Far too much that they shouldn't is what they do. And I'd have no objection if your wife were made redundant.
No planner should have any input into whether or not a house is built, that should be upto the would-be homeowner and the private market.
If you want to plan new town or improved functions that the town intends to build on the town's own land, then that's something a town planner can and should be doing, but no need to review other people's plans of what they intend to be doing on their land.
And oi, I never got offered my $10 voucher, do only American customers count Crowdstrike?
How does this work? If it fails, it removes a bit of money from all shareholders as Crowdstrike will need to pay out lawyers. If it succeeds, then essentially it "pinches" money from all shareholders and gives it to shareholders that are part of this action, with a cut taken by lawyers. So all shareholders should logically join this action. Which means that money is taken from shareholders, some of it is taken by lawyers, and then it is given back to the shareholders.
What am I missing?
Anyway it's fine by me. As I recommended to y'all at the time, and unusually for me, I'm short CRWD...
I am assuming they have two aims:
1. Change of management, not just a figurehead or a scapegoat but the whole damn lot of them. 2. A detailed public airing of what exactly happened internally and why, something that might be avoided if 1. above were to happen first.
3. A redesign of the release methodology as the current big bang approach was simply not fit for purpose nor best practice (and hasn't been for over 10 years).
Yes, actually fixing the problem that led to this almighty fcukup in the first place!
By total co-incidence, I’ve now had introductory offers from Trend Micro and SentinelOne.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
The only two reasons I can think of.
1. Sir Graham had got virtually the required number of letters to trigger yet another leadership contest.
2. He was "advised" to do so by the Palace because of the Kings health.
They are the only two reasons I can can think of why they went in July and not October/November?
I don’t think it’s 2. He’s just been able to do a full state opening and return to public engagements. Although I know people with cancer can decline quickly there’s nothing I can see which suggests they are aware that would be imminent. But then of course we don’t know.
I'm sure the true story for why we had a 4th July election will be told one day.
Picking up "lidos with views of cathedrals", it's a bit of a challenge as cathedrals tend to be urban. Wild swimming with views may be a better option. The best option may be the seaside in the South, or pleasant churches which are not cathedrals next to rivers.
I can do you a castle, at St Andrews, and a tidal pool. But that's the North sea off Scotland, so it will freeze your balls off (1). Lots more castles (2). Hathersage Lido may have views of Peak District hills - @TSE can advise.
For cathedrals - Salisbury and the Avon, perhaps? Or use of Cathedral Schools pools in the summer - Salisbury school has an outdoor one.
The best would be the Minster Pool at Lichfield - they are running "Lichfield Beach" this summer, so that's a surprise. Local authority missed a trick.
I really can't see why urban open water swimming is so restricted.
My favourite would be Melbourne Poole, Derbyshire, near one of the top Norman Churches in the country, with Sheela-na-Gig. But Melbourne is a very Nimby sort of place; also the only place I have *ever* been asked not to inject insulin in a restaurant.
As things stand, try the Anchor Church, on the Rover Trent nr Ingleby. My photo for the day:
For more, I think there is a fighting chance that access legislation in England may get overhauled now the Landowners' Party are out, and that may include a universal-with-limitations right to navigate rivers as Scotland, including lake / reservoir access. Re-regulation of water companies may help.
THe sort of access right the Landowners' Party tried to extinguish completely on land and water in Scotland rather than allow the codification of the open access enjoyed immemorial?
That's a very interesting suggestion - good luck down there.
I hope there's been a sea change. Nulab did a lot, but got quite bogged down.
One notorious move was around the Right to Claim Rights of Way due to historic usage, where an agreement had been reached between NFU type bodies and Ramblers type bodies, and Theresa Coffey the Minister threw it out and just abolished it on her own say so at 5 days notice.
That was later reversed, but it's indicative of the basic assumptions - which have now changed to at least some degree. I'm not sure how far it goes.
But Theresa Coffey and friends are now largely reduced to a tinny wibbling noise emerging from the dustbin of history. That is, a sunk cost - and we start from here.
One thing we do have are that creating and upgrading footpaths etc are now in Sustainable Farming Payments, which is an opportunity. That is a Boris Johnson thing worked through this spring - so credit to the Tories for that. I'd like to see Ukraine style field margins with a national network of active travel routes through them.
Well, NuLab was responsible for the 2003 Scottish legislation, at least in being the major component of the governing coalition, though one would need to do some deep diving to be sure how far the LDs, their partner, drove or hindered the legislation (I suspect the former, if anything). But of course the original legal background was different, even if the landowners tried to argue that that should mean no presumption of legal access at all (ie no rights of way system).
26% reduction in road casualities 23% in killed / seriously injured 55% drop in people killed 27% drop in slight injuries
And insurance claims down 20%.
The thing that convinced me that this speed reduction policy was a good idea was the stat that vehicles are getting heavier.
Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.
That is patently false and not represented by the data whatsoever.
Decades of technological and safety improvements, including crash test designs and iterations, mean you are far, far, far less likely to die today than decades ago. Which includes pedestrians.
That is true, but does not contradict the above point that "Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.".
Perhaps rather than having a speed limit we should have a momentum limit?
It does contradict it.
A lot of arguments being made still rely upon old data. Most claims made by "road safety campaigners" who want speed limits cut use obsolete data from the 1970s or 1990s to back up their claims . . . because the data today does not.
In 2004 there were 53.6 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average. In 2022 there were 26.5 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average.
Pedestrians, not drivers, are twice as safe as they were previously.
No it doesn't. Your point about cars being safer is about their ability to quickly decelerate. But TSE's point remains true - if you get hit at 20mph in a heavy car you will be worse off than if you get hit at 30mph in a light one. That's just physics.
Hang on.
If it was a square block running into a square block dead on, then that might well be true.
But the energy is not all dissipated in that way. In particular, a pedestrian is (typically) thrown up and onto the car. 30mph crashes are incredibly dangerous compared to 20mph one because you don't have time to get thrown upwards and the damage to your lower body - including severing of the spinal column - is extreme.
The construction of the car is more important than the mass. A modern car (a saloon car, not what the Americans call a light truck) will deform extensively in the bumper and bonnet when involved in a pedestrian impact - whereas an older one is designed much more for car-car collisions, and the pedestrian has his legs broken by the metal bumper and his head broken by the top of the engine underneath the bonnet.
As an aside on "Light Trucks" ie Tonka Tanks, they are simply exempt from many of the safety regs that apply to cars in the USA. That's been a scandal for a very long time, and manufacturers have used their influence to prevent suitable regulations being applied.
Indeed, this is something you and I can completely agree on. You are 100% correct.
This is something I would not want to see US rules introduced on, and they're not happening here.
Any use of US data instead instead of UK data is showing dishonesty or a lack of comprehension on this by the person doing so.
The popularity of SUVs vs cars is safety problem though, cars having lower bonnets, the pedestrian was more likely to be go over the bonnet than under it. Stats demonstrate that 20mph is safer than 30mph, no need to go into any physics and the relevance of the theoretical stopping distance is considerably reduced versus reckless or distracted driving, as demonstrated by the vehicular war on stationary objects such as lamposts.
UK SUVs are cars. They are not American
Look at the Nissan Qashqai or the Kia Sportage, they are popular UK SUVs and they have all the safety features of modern cars, including modern, safer bonnets.
Contrast with the Ford F150 which to the best of my knowledge is not sold in this country.
Softer but higher bonnets. Personal example, a 3 series edged out in front of me when I was on my bike, slammed the brakes on but came to a stop against the bumper having reprofiled his bonnet with the left drop. Completely oblivious to my having hit him and being in front of his car, he set off, thankfully I separated from the bike and ended up on the bonnet, the bike ended up underneath. All witnessed by the off-duty PC in a car behind me luckily. Even if it was a Qashqai I'd have gone under the car and been run over. Normal car, unharmed, SUV likely serious injuries. Stopping distance irrelevant as the car was initially stationary, all down to driver incompetence only mitigated by my being above rather than level with the bonnet.
This is established - SUVs in use in Europe are much more dangerous than a normal vehicle. For example, a study published a couple of years ago.
We need to heavily disincentivise, and perhaps totally exclude some of the larger ones.
Tax based on the 4th power of weight.
I don't think the annoyances of roads not being fixed and potholes everywhere are entirely due to lack of maintenance.
Weight of BMW X5 -> c 2500kg Weight of Ford Focus -> c 1500kg
The BMW causes nearly 8 times the road wear of the Focus.
The trend to heavier cars must be having an effect.
I'd point out the effect on pavements, when the f*ckers park them there.
But I quite like the French pigou tax, too - which sounds to be in the right kind of range, and easy to enforce. If we get maintenance tradesman returning to smaller or medium size vans and estate cars, so much the better.
And RR does need the cash:
France is cracking down on heavy and polluting vehicles as it pushes people towards electric cars and public transport.
On 1 January, France tightened the rules for taxes paid when buying a new car.
The weight threshold for heavy vehicles was decreased from 1.8 tonnes to 1.6 tonnes meaning this extra charge will be applied to most SUVs or 4x4s. It costs €10 per kilogram for vehicles up to 2.1 tonnes and €30 per kg for vehicles heavier than 2.1 tonnes.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
The only two reasons I can think of.
1. Sir Graham had got virtually the required number of letters to trigger yet another leadership contest.
2. He was "advised" to do so by the Palace because of the Kings health.
They are the only two reasons I can can think of why they went in July and not October/November?
I don’t think it’s 2. He’s just been able to do a full state opening and return to public engagements. Although I know people with cancer can decline quickly there’s nothing I can see which suggests they are aware that would be imminent. But then of course we don’t know.
I'm sure the true story for why we had a 4th July election will be told one day.
The Americans are having theirs on 5th November, so 4th July just kinda seemed appropriate.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because this a basic management issue. You dont let your best people leave and hang on to the weak performers. You get rid of the weak performers, give a pay rise to the better ones and keep some in your pocket as productivity. Something you appear to be against.
Coming back to this - the fix for keeping your best people is that you pay them enough so they don't leave.
But the public sector has fixed pay grades so how do you achieve that (I'm asking because I've seen multiple attempts over the last 2 decades and none worked for reasons that becomes obvious shortly after implementation).
You do away with fixed pay scales as an anachronism from another centrury.
And while were at it if people are WFH they shouldnt be getting a London allowance, like rich pensioners they dont need it.
Hello 4 million equal pay claims at employment tribunals...
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
The only two reasons I can think of.
1. Sir Graham had got virtually the required number of letters to trigger yet another leadership contest.
2. He was "advised" to do so by the Palace because of the Kings health.
They are the only two reasons I can can think of why they went in July and not October/November?
I don’t think it’s 2. He’s just been able to do a full state opening and return to public engagements. Although I know people with cancer can decline quickly there’s nothing I can see which suggests they are aware that would be imminent. But then of course we don’t know.
I'm sure the true story for why we had a 4th July election will be told one day.
The Americans are having theirs on 5th November, so 4th July just kinda seemed appropriate.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because this a basic management issue. You dont let your best people leave and hang on to the weak performers. You get rid of the weak performers, give a pay rise to the better ones and keep some in your pocket as productivity. Something you appear to be against.
Coming back to this - the fix for keeping your best people is that you pay them enough so they don't leave.
But the public sector has fixed pay grades so how do you achieve that (I'm asking because I've seen multiple attempts over the last 2 decades and none worked for reasons that becomes obvious shortly after implementation).
You do away with fixed pay scales as an anachronism from another centrury.
And while were at it if people are WFH they shouldnt be getting a London allowance, like rich pensioners they dont need it.
Hello 4 million equal pay claims at employment tribunals...
Ah yes afraid of lawyers. It's why you think nothing is possible.
Picking up "lidos with views of cathedrals", it's a bit of a challenge as cathedrals tend to be urban. Wild swimming with views may be a better option. The best option may be the seaside in the South, or pleasant churches which are not cathedrals next to rivers.
I can do you a castle, at St Andrews, and a tidal pool. But that's the North sea off Scotland, so it will freeze your balls off (1). Lots more castles (2). Hathersage Lido may have views of Peak District hills - @TSE can advise.
For cathedrals - Salisbury and the Avon, perhaps? Or use of Cathedral Schools pools in the summer - Salisbury school has an outdoor one.
The best would be the Minster Pool at Lichfield - they are running "Lichfield Beach" this summer, so that's a surprise. Local authority missed a trick.
I really can't see why urban open water swimming is so restricted.
My favourite would be Melbourne Poole, Derbyshire, near one of the top Norman Churches in the country, with Sheela-na-Gig. But Melbourne is a very Nimby sort of place; also the only place I have *ever* been asked not to inject insulin in a restaurant.
As things stand, try the Anchor Church, on the Rover Trent nr Ingleby. My photo for the day:
For more, I think there is a fighting chance that access legislation in England may get overhauled now the Landowners' Party are out, and that may include a universal-with-limitations right to navigate rivers as Scotland, including lake / reservoir access. Re-regulation of water companies may help.
THe sort of access right the Landowners' Party tried to extinguish completely on land and water in Scotland rather than allow the codification of the open access enjoyed immemorial?
That's a very interesting suggestion - good luck down there.
I hope there's been a sea change. Nulab did a lot, but got quite bogged down.
One notorious move was around the Right to Claim Rights of Way due to historic usage, where an agreement had been reached between NFU type bodies and Ramblers type bodies, and Theresa Coffey the Minister threw it out and just abolished it on her own say so at 5 days notice.
That was later reversed, but it's indicative of the basic assumptions - which have now changed to at least some degree. I'm not sure how far it goes.
But Theresa Coffey and friends are now largely reduced to a tinny wibbling noise emerging from the dustbin of history. That is, a sunk cost - and we start from here.
One thing we do have are that creating and upgrading footpaths etc are now in Sustainable Farming Payments, which is an opportunity. That is a Boris Johnson thing worked through this spring - so credit to the Tories for that. I'd like to see Ukraine style field margins with a national network of active travel routes through them.
Well, NuLab was responsible for the 2003 Scottish legislation, at least in being the major component of the governing coalition, though one would need to do some deep diving to be sure how far the LDs, their partner, drove or hindered the legislation (I suspect the former, if anything). But of course the original legal background was different, even if the landowners tried to argue that that should mean no presumption of legal access at all (ie no rights of way system).
26% reduction in road casualities 23% in killed / seriously injured 55% drop in people killed 27% drop in slight injuries
And insurance claims down 20%.
The thing that convinced me that this speed reduction policy was a good idea was the stat that vehicles are getting heavier.
Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.
That is patently false and not represented by the data whatsoever.
Decades of technological and safety improvements, including crash test designs and iterations, mean you are far, far, far less likely to die today than decades ago. Which includes pedestrians.
That is true, but does not contradict the above point that "Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.".
Perhaps rather than having a speed limit we should have a momentum limit?
It does contradict it.
A lot of arguments being made still rely upon old data. Most claims made by "road safety campaigners" who want speed limits cut use obsolete data from the 1970s or 1990s to back up their claims . . . because the data today does not.
In 2004 there were 53.6 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average. In 2022 there were 26.5 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average.
Pedestrians, not drivers, are twice as safe as they were previously.
No it doesn't. Your point about cars being safer is about their ability to quickly decelerate. But TSE's point remains true - if you get hit at 20mph in a heavy car you will be worse off than if you get hit at 30mph in a light one. That's just physics.
Hang on.
If it was a square block running into a square block dead on, then that might well be true.
But the energy is not all dissipated in that way. In particular, a pedestrian is (typically) thrown up and onto the car. 30mph crashes are incredibly dangerous compared to 20mph one because you don't have time to get thrown upwards and the damage to your lower body - including severing of the spinal column - is extreme.
The construction of the car is more important than the mass. A modern car (a saloon car, not what the Americans call a light truck) will deform extensively in the bumper and bonnet when involved in a pedestrian impact - whereas an older one is designed much more for car-car collisions, and the pedestrian has his legs broken by the metal bumper and his head broken by the top of the engine underneath the bonnet.
As an aside on "Light Trucks" ie Tonka Tanks, they are simply exempt from many of the safety regs that apply to cars in the USA. That's been a scandal for a very long time, and manufacturers have used their influence to prevent suitable regulations being applied.
Indeed, this is something you and I can completely agree on. You are 100% correct.
This is something I would not want to see US rules introduced on, and they're not happening here.
Any use of US data instead instead of UK data is showing dishonesty or a lack of comprehension on this by the person doing so.
The popularity of SUVs vs cars is safety problem though, cars having lower bonnets, the pedestrian was more likely to be go over the bonnet than under it. Stats demonstrate that 20mph is safer than 30mph, no need to go into any physics and the relevance of the theoretical stopping distance is considerably reduced versus reckless or distracted driving, as demonstrated by the vehicular war on stationary objects such as lamposts.
UK SUVs are cars. They are not American
Look at the Nissan Qashqai or the Kia Sportage, they are popular UK SUVs and they have all the safety features of modern cars, including modern, safer bonnets.
Contrast with the Ford F150 which to the best of my knowledge is not sold in this country.
Softer but higher bonnets. Personal example, a 3 series edged out in front of me when I was on my bike, slammed the brakes on but came to a stop against the bumper having reprofiled his bonnet with the left drop. Completely oblivious to my having hit him and being in front of his car, he set off, thankfully I separated from the bike and ended up on the bonnet, the bike ended up underneath. All witnessed by the off-duty PC in a car behind me luckily. Even if it was a Qashqai I'd have gone under the car and been run over. Normal car, unharmed, SUV likely serious injuries. Stopping distance irrelevant as the car was initially stationary, all down to driver incompetence only mitigated by my being above rather than level with the bonnet.
This is established - SUVs in use in Europe are much more dangerous than a normal vehicle. For example, a study published a couple of years ago.
We need to heavily disincentivise, and perhaps totally exclude some of the larger ones.
Tax based on the 4th power of weight.
I don't think the annoyances of roads not being fixed and potholes everywhere are entirely due to lack of maintenance.
Weight of BMW X5 -> c 2500kg Weight of Ford Focus -> c 1500kg
The BMW causes nearly 8 times the road wear of the Focus.
The trend to heavier cars must be having an effect.
I'd point out the effect on pavements, when the f*ckers park them there.
But I quite like the French pigou tax, too - which sounds to be in the right kind of range, and easy to enforce. If we get maintenance tradesman returning to smaller or medium size vans and estate cars, so much the better.
And RR does need the cash:
France is cracking down on heavy and polluting vehicles as it pushes people towards electric cars and public transport.
On 1 January, France tightened the rules for taxes paid when buying a new car.
The weight threshold for heavy vehicles was decreased from 1.8 tonnes to 1.6 tonnes meaning this extra charge will be applied to most SUVs or 4x4s. It costs €10 per kilogram for vehicles up to 2.1 tonnes and €30 per kg for vehicles heavier than 2.1 tonnes.
26% reduction in road casualities 23% in killed / seriously injured 55% drop in people killed 27% drop in slight injuries
And insurance claims down 20%.
The thing that convinced me that this speed reduction policy was a good idea was the stat that vehicles are getting heavier.
Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.
That is patently false and not represented by the data whatsoever.
Decades of technological and safety improvements, including crash test designs and iterations, mean you are far, far, far less likely to die today than decades ago. Which includes pedestrians.
That is true, but does not contradict the above point that "Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.".
Perhaps rather than having a speed limit we should have a momentum limit?
It does contradict it.
A lot of arguments being made still rely upon old data. Most claims made by "road safety campaigners" who want speed limits cut use obsolete data from the 1970s or 1990s to back up their claims . . . because the data today does not.
In 2004 there were 53.6 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average. In 2022 there were 26.5 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average.
Pedestrians, not drivers, are twice as safe as they were previously.
No it doesn't. Your point about cars being safer is about their ability to quickly decelerate. But TSE's point remains true - if you get hit at 20mph in a heavy car you will be worse off than if you get hit at 30mph in a light one. That's just physics.
Physics requires exact numbers. It depends on "heavy" versus "light". The damage depends on kinetic energy, which equals one half of the mass times the velocity squared.
So for a car hitting you at 20 mph, it would need to be 2.25 times (30/20 * 30/20) as heavy as a car hitting you at 30 mph to do the same damage?
You may have to get the units right, so convert to m/s rather than mph, but it's lunchtime and I can't think it through.
Ratios should mean it doesn't matter, right? The 30mph/20mph * 30mph/20mph has no units.
Did we ever get the accident (etc) rates for Wales which were alleged to suggest that pedestrians were safer with 20mph?
Hot off the press: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cydvr2rnm4ro 23% drop in KSI, apparently. The numbers are not huge anyway, so the confidence intervals could be quite wide. But I'd be surprised on those figures if it's not a significant finding.
Broadly this seems like good news, although I am always extremely wary of stats being deployed (vested interests and all that). As an example if a death occurs on a stretch of road and the speed limit is then lowered, and no death occurs in the following year(s) - did the lowering of the speed limit save lives, or statistically would there have been likely to have any more deaths on that stretch of road?
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because this a basic management issue. You dont let your best people leave and hang on to the weak performers. You get rid of the weak performers, give a pay rise to the better ones and keep some in your pocket as productivity. Something you appear to be against.
Coming back to this - the fix for keeping your best people is that you pay them enough so they don't leave.
But the public sector has fixed pay grades so how do you achieve that (I'm asking because I've seen multiple attempts over the last 2 decades and none worked for reasons that becomes obvious shortly after implementation).
You do away with fixed pay scales as an anachronism from another centrury.
And while were at it if people are WFH they shouldnt be getting a London allowance, like rich pensioners they dont need it.
Hello 4 million equal pay claims at employment tribunals...
Ah yes afraid of lawyers. It's why you think nothing is possible.
Nope afraid of the consequences - see Birmingham for what happens if you don't deal with the issue quickly...
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because this a basic management issue. You dont let your best people leave and hang on to the weak performers. You get rid of the weak performers, give a pay rise to the better ones and keep some in your pocket as productivity. Something you appear to be against.
Coming back to this - the fix for keeping your best people is that you pay them enough so they don't leave.
But the public sector has fixed pay grades so how do you achieve that (I'm asking because I've seen multiple attempts over the last 2 decades and none worked for reasons that becomes obvious shortly after implementation).
You do away with fixed pay scales as an anachronism from another centrury.
And while were at it if people are WFH they shouldnt be getting a London allowance, like rich pensioners they dont need it.
Hello 4 million equal pay claims at employment tribunals...
Abolish equal pay laws.
Let supply and demand find the right pay rate for each job.
The sexist anachronism of viewing some jobs as "men's jobs" or "women's jobs" or similar belongs in the 1950s. Let anyone apply for any job and have no discrimination.
If supply and demand means bin collectors working in the rain need to paid more than cleaners working indoors, then pay more to the collectors not across the board.
Surprised they named him as a 17 year old. Never heard of anyone with this first name apart from the character from the Jules Verne book.
AIUI from reports in the last couple of days, after charging under 18 year olds can be named. Not below 16, I think.
But what does it tell us that we didn't know? We knew he was of Rwandan heritage, but born in the UK. It tells us nothing about WHY. The whole thing is just too depressing.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because this a basic management issue. You dont let your best people leave and hang on to the weak performers. You get rid of the weak performers, give a pay rise to the better ones and keep some in your pocket as productivity. Something you appear to be against.
Coming back to this - the fix for keeping your best people is that you pay them enough so they don't leave.
But the public sector has fixed pay grades so how do you achieve that (I'm asking because I've seen multiple attempts over the last 2 decades and none worked for reasons that becomes obvious shortly after implementation).
You do away with fixed pay scales as an anachronism from another centrury.
And while were at it if people are WFH they shouldnt be getting a London allowance, like rich pensioners they dont need it.
Hello 4 million equal pay claims at employment tribunals...
Ah yes afraid of lawyers. It's why you think nothing is possible.
Nope afraid of the consequences - see Birmingham for what happens if you don't deal with the issue quickly...
Birmingham was a tremendous Labour fk up. It makes the point for not passing laws just for the sake of it.
But laws can be repealed and changed, and T&Cs can be adapted. So do away with fixed pay scales and if you arent working in London you lose the allowance.
26% reduction in road casualities 23% in killed / seriously injured 55% drop in people killed 27% drop in slight injuries
And insurance claims down 20%.
The thing that convinced me that this speed reduction policy was a good idea was the stat that vehicles are getting heavier.
Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.
That is patently false and not represented by the data whatsoever.
Decades of technological and safety improvements, including crash test designs and iterations, mean you are far, far, far less likely to die today than decades ago. Which includes pedestrians.
That is true, but does not contradict the above point that "Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.".
Perhaps rather than having a speed limit we should have a momentum limit?
It does contradict it.
A lot of arguments being made still rely upon old data. Most claims made by "road safety campaigners" who want speed limits cut use obsolete data from the 1970s or 1990s to back up their claims . . . because the data today does not.
In 2004 there were 53.6 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average. In 2022 there were 26.5 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average.
Pedestrians, not drivers, are twice as safe as they were previously.
No it doesn't. Your point about cars being safer is about their ability to quickly decelerate. But TSE's point remains true - if you get hit at 20mph in a heavy car you will be worse off than if you get hit at 30mph in a light one. That's just physics.
Physics requires exact numbers. It depends on "heavy" versus "light". The damage depends on kinetic energy, which equals one half of the mass times the velocity squared.
So for a car hitting you at 20 mph, it would need to be 2.25 times (30/20 * 30/20) as heavy as a car hitting you at 30 mph to do the same damage?
You may have to get the units right, so convert to m/s rather than mph, but it's lunchtime and I can't think it through.
Ratios should mean it doesn't matter, right? The 30mph/20mph * 30mph/20mph has no units.
Did we ever get the accident (etc) rates for Wales which were alleged to suggest that pedestrians were safer with 20mph?
Hot off the press: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cydvr2rnm4ro 23% drop in KSI, apparently. The numbers are not huge anyway, so the confidence intervals could be quite wide. But I'd be surprised on those figures if it's not a significant finding.
"The figures, external show there were 377 casualties of all severities in January to March, compared to 510 in the first quarter of 2023."
If we use a Poisson confidence interval, that's 377 (340-417) compared to 510 (467-556). So, very significant.
It shouldn't matter but it also passes the 'sniff test' - what would be a reasonable expectation to happen?
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because this a basic management issue. You dont let your best people leave and hang on to the weak performers. You get rid of the weak performers, give a pay rise to the better ones and keep some in your pocket as productivity. Something you appear to be against.
Coming back to this - the fix for keeping your best people is that you pay them enough so they don't leave.
But the public sector has fixed pay grades so how do you achieve that (I'm asking because I've seen multiple attempts over the last 2 decades and none worked for reasons that becomes obvious shortly after implementation).
You do away with fixed pay scales as an anachronism from another centrury.
And while were at it if people are WFH they shouldnt be getting a London allowance, like rich pensioners they dont need it.
Hello 4 million equal pay claims at employment tribunals...
Ah yes afraid of lawyers. It's why you think nothing is possible.
Nope afraid of the consequences - see Birmingham for what happens if you don't deal with the issue quickly...
Or the consequences of bad/ill-thought out laws.
If hypothetically its harder to get a Police Officer to patrol Moss Side than Altrincham it should be possible to pay more to those patrolling Moss Side and less to those in Altrincham, even if they are doing the "same job".
Let the market solve the vacancies, and if people want to transfer to get a higher wage then the vacancies are filled and prices can adjust again.
Surprised they named him as a 17 year old. Never heard of anyone with this first name apart from the character from the Jules Verne book.
AIUI from reports in the last couple of days, after charging under 18 year olds can be named. Not below 16, I think.
But what does it tell us that we didn't know? We knew he was of Rwandan heritage, but born in the UK. It tells us nothing about WHY. The whole thing is just too depressing.
Judge has named him because he is 18 next week. And it's your age now that matters not your age at the time of the alleged offence.
No, it doesn't make any difference. Who the person is doesn't really matter. What the police need to tell us is what they're thinking is re motive.
Picking up "lidos with views of cathedrals", it's a bit of a challenge as cathedrals tend to be urban. Wild swimming with views may be a better option. The best option may be the seaside in the South, or pleasant churches which are not cathedrals next to rivers.
I can do you a castle, at St Andrews, and a tidal pool. But that's the North sea off Scotland, so it will freeze your balls off (1). Lots more castles (2). Hathersage Lido may have views of Peak District hills - @TSE can advise.
For cathedrals - Salisbury and the Avon, perhaps? Or use of Cathedral Schools pools in the summer - Salisbury school has an outdoor one.
The best would be the Minster Pool at Lichfield - they are running "Lichfield Beach" this summer, so that's a surprise. Local authority missed a trick.
I really can't see why urban open water swimming is so restricted.
My favourite would be Melbourne Poole, Derbyshire, near one of the top Norman Churches in the country, with Sheela-na-Gig. But Melbourne is a very Nimby sort of place; also the only place I have *ever* been asked not to inject insulin in a restaurant.
As things stand, try the Anchor Church, on the Rover Trent nr Ingleby. My photo for the day:
For more, I think there is a fighting chance that access legislation in England may get overhauled now the Landowners' Party are out, and that may include a universal-with-limitations right to navigate rivers as Scotland, including lake / reservoir access. Re-regulation of water companies may help.
THe sort of access right the Landowners' Party tried to extinguish completely on land and water in Scotland rather than allow the codification of the open access enjoyed immemorial?
That's a very interesting suggestion - good luck down there.
I hope there's been a sea change. Nulab did a lot, but got quite bogged down.
One notorious move was around the Right to Claim Rights of Way due to historic usage, where an agreement had been reached between NFU type bodies and Ramblers type bodies, and Theresa Coffey the Minister threw it out and just abolished it on her own say so at 5 days notice.
That was later reversed, but it's indicative of the basic assumptions - which have now changed to at least some degree. I'm not sure how far it goes.
But Theresa Coffey and friends are now largely reduced to a tinny wibbling noise emerging from the dustbin of history. That is, a sunk cost - and we start from here.
One thing we do have are that creating and upgrading footpaths etc are now in Sustainable Farming Payments, which is an opportunity. That is a Boris Johnson thing worked through this spring - so credit to the Tories for that. I'd like to see Ukraine style field margins with a national network of active travel routes through them.
Well, NuLab was responsible for the 2003 Scottish legislation, at least in being the major component of the governing coalition, though one would need to do some deep diving to be sure how far the LDs, their partner, drove or hindered the legislation (I suspect the former, if anything). But of course the original legal background was different, even if the landowners tried to argue that that should mean no presumption of legal access at all (ie no rights of way system).
26% reduction in road casualities 23% in killed / seriously injured 55% drop in people killed 27% drop in slight injuries
And insurance claims down 20%.
The thing that convinced me that this speed reduction policy was a good idea was the stat that vehicles are getting heavier.
Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.
That is patently false and not represented by the data whatsoever.
Decades of technological and safety improvements, including crash test designs and iterations, mean you are far, far, far less likely to die today than decades ago. Which includes pedestrians.
That is true, but does not contradict the above point that "Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.".
Perhaps rather than having a speed limit we should have a momentum limit?
It does contradict it.
A lot of arguments being made still rely upon old data. Most claims made by "road safety campaigners" who want speed limits cut use obsolete data from the 1970s or 1990s to back up their claims . . . because the data today does not.
In 2004 there were 53.6 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average. In 2022 there were 26.5 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average.
Pedestrians, not drivers, are twice as safe as they were previously.
No it doesn't. Your point about cars being safer is about their ability to quickly decelerate. But TSE's point remains true - if you get hit at 20mph in a heavy car you will be worse off than if you get hit at 30mph in a light one. That's just physics.
Hang on.
If it was a square block running into a square block dead on, then that might well be true.
But the energy is not all dissipated in that way. In particular, a pedestrian is (typically) thrown up and onto the car. 30mph crashes are incredibly dangerous compared to 20mph one because you don't have time to get thrown upwards and the damage to your lower body - including severing of the spinal column - is extreme.
The construction of the car is more important than the mass. A modern car (a saloon car, not what the Americans call a light truck) will deform extensively in the bumper and bonnet when involved in a pedestrian impact - whereas an older one is designed much more for car-car collisions, and the pedestrian has his legs broken by the metal bumper and his head broken by the top of the engine underneath the bonnet.
As an aside on "Light Trucks" ie Tonka Tanks, they are simply exempt from many of the safety regs that apply to cars in the USA. That's been a scandal for a very long time, and manufacturers have used their influence to prevent suitable regulations being applied.
Indeed, this is something you and I can completely agree on. You are 100% correct.
This is something I would not want to see US rules introduced on, and they're not happening here.
Any use of US data instead instead of UK data is showing dishonesty or a lack of comprehension on this by the person doing so.
The popularity of SUVs vs cars is safety problem though, cars having lower bonnets, the pedestrian was more likely to be go over the bonnet than under it. Stats demonstrate that 20mph is safer than 30mph, no need to go into any physics and the relevance of the theoretical stopping distance is considerably reduced versus reckless or distracted driving, as demonstrated by the vehicular war on stationary objects such as lamposts.
UK SUVs are cars. They are not American
Look at the Nissan Qashqai or the Kia Sportage, they are popular UK SUVs and they have all the safety features of modern cars, including modern, safer bonnets.
Contrast with the Ford F150 which to the best of my knowledge is not sold in this country.
Softer but higher bonnets. Personal example, a 3 series edged out in front of me when I was on my bike, slammed the brakes on but came to a stop against the bumper having reprofiled his bonnet with the left drop. Completely oblivious to my having hit him and being in front of his car, he set off, thankfully I separated from the bike and ended up on the bonnet, the bike ended up underneath. All witnessed by the off-duty PC in a car behind me luckily. Even if it was a Qashqai I'd have gone under the car and been run over. Normal car, unharmed, SUV likely serious injuries. Stopping distance irrelevant as the car was initially stationary, all down to driver incompetence only mitigated by my being above rather than level with the bonnet.
This is established - SUVs in use in Europe are much more dangerous than a normal vehicle. For example, a study published a couple of years ago.
We need to heavily disincentivise, and perhaps totally exclude some of the larger ones.
Tax based on the 4th power of weight.
I don't think the annoyances of roads not being fixed and potholes everywhere are entirely due to lack of maintenance.
Weight of BMW X5 -> c 2500kg Weight of Ford Focus -> c 1500kg
The BMW causes nearly 8 times the road wear of the Focus.
The trend to heavier cars must be having an effect.
I'd point out the effect on pavements, when the f*ckers park them there.
But I quite like the French pigou tax, too - which sounds to be in the right kind of range, and easy to enforce. If we get maintenance tradesman returning to smaller or medium size vans and estate cars, so much the better.
And RR does need the cash:
France is cracking down on heavy and polluting vehicles as it pushes people towards electric cars and public transport.
On 1 January, France tightened the rules for taxes paid when buying a new car.
The weight threshold for heavy vehicles was decreased from 1.8 tonnes to 1.6 tonnes meaning this extra charge will be applied to most SUVs or 4x4s. It costs €10 per kilogram for vehicles up to 2.1 tonnes and €30 per kg for vehicles heavier than 2.1 tonnes.
The boxing match definitely feels like a moment in the Olympics for women's sport.
Men's sport as it turns out, the winner is a bloke.
Well quite Hopefully it'll lead to more sports going down the World Aquatics route when it comes to men competing with women. Absolutely mad that boxing allowed this given it's an inherently risky sport, it's not like a trans chess player competing in a women's only event !!
Surprised they named him as a 17 year old. Never heard of anyone with this first name apart from the character from the Jules Verne book.
He’s 18 on 7 August. The law applies to them now rather than when they committed the alleged offence. Judge said it was pointless not naming him now.
There also the fact that his name was readily available on Twitter (I came across it without even trying to look for it).
Why the authorities didn't come out and say in words of one syllable "He's not a Muslim" the moment the riots started kicking off I've no idea - I'd kind of presumed he must be, given the fact they didn't.
Instead of which we got a load of preachy "not everything you read on twitter is true", despite the fact that Twitter had got to the correct name in a matter of hours, despite the best efforts of somebody (I assume the Russians) to put a false name about.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because this a basic management issue. You dont let your best people leave and hang on to the weak performers. You get rid of the weak performers, give a pay rise to the better ones and keep some in your pocket as productivity. Something you appear to be against.
Coming back to this - the fix for keeping your best people is that you pay them enough so they don't leave.
But the public sector has fixed pay grades so how do you achieve that (I'm asking because I've seen multiple attempts over the last 2 decades and none worked for reasons that becomes obvious shortly after implementation).
You do away with fixed pay scales as an anachronism from another centrury.
And while were at it if people are WFH they shouldnt be getting a London allowance, like rich pensioners they dont need it.
Hello 4 million equal pay claims at employment tribunals...
Ah yes afraid of lawyers. It's why you think nothing is possible.
Nope afraid of the consequences - see Birmingham for what happens if you don't deal with the issue quickly...
This is where the DEI/equalities co-ordinator hires provide value. It is really not a non job.
They are there to ensure compliance and minimise risk. They can save a business or organisation alot of cash
Surprised they named him as a 17 year old. Never heard of anyone with this first name apart from the character from the Jules Verne book.
AIUI from reports in the last couple of days, after charging under 18 year olds can be named. Not below 16, I think.
But what does it tell us that we didn't know? We knew he was of Rwandan heritage, but born in the UK. It tells us nothing about WHY. The whole thing is just too depressing.
Judge has named him because he is 18 next week. And it's your age now that matters not your age at the time of the alleged offence.
No, it doesn't make any difference. Who the person is doesn't really matter. What the police need to tell us is what they're thinking is re motive.
Why do they need to tell us now? There is a due process to follow.
If people are spreading lies on social media, do something about people spreading lies on social media.
The boxing match definitely feels like a moment in the Olympics for women's sport.
Men's sport as it turns out, the winner is a bloke.
Well quite Hopefully it'll lead to more sports going down the World Aquatics route when it comes to men competing with women. Absolutely mad that boxing allowed this given it's an inherently risky sport, it's not like a trans chess player competing in a women's only event !!
We could of course go the other way.
Men allowed to compete in rhythmic gymnastics - with ribbons and hoops etc.
The boxing match definitely feels like a moment in the Olympics for women's sport.
Men's sport as it turns out, the winner is a bloke.
Well quite Hopefully it'll lead to more sports going down the World Aquatics route when it comes to men competing with women. Absolutely mad that boxing allowed this given it's an inherently risky sport, it's not like a trans chess player competing in a women's only event !!
We could of course go the other way.
Men allowed to compete in rhythmic gymnastics - with ribbons and hoops etc.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because this a basic management issue. You dont let your best people leave and hang on to the weak performers. You get rid of the weak performers, give a pay rise to the better ones and keep some in your pocket as productivity. Something you appear to be against.
Coming back to this - the fix for keeping your best people is that you pay them enough so they don't leave.
But the public sector has fixed pay grades so how do you achieve that (I'm asking because I've seen multiple attempts over the last 2 decades and none worked for reasons that becomes obvious shortly after implementation).
You do away with fixed pay scales as an anachronism from another centrury.
And while were at it if people are WFH they shouldnt be getting a London allowance, like rich pensioners they dont need it.
Hello 4 million equal pay claims at employment tribunals...
Ah yes afraid of lawyers. It's why you think nothing is possible.
Nope afraid of the consequences - see Birmingham for what happens if you don't deal with the issue quickly...
This is where the DEI/equalities co-ordinator hires provide value. It is really not a non job.
They are there to ensure compliance and minimise risk. They can save a business or organisation alot of cash
The Birmingham decision did - at least to my mind - stretch the equalities act. I think they were unlucky personally as the prevailing think of the legal profession has trended to legal interpretation that simply would not have been the case when they were making these pay decisions.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because this a basic management issue. You dont let your best people leave and hang on to the weak performers. You get rid of the weak performers, give a pay rise to the better ones and keep some in your pocket as productivity. Something you appear to be against.
Coming back to this - the fix for keeping your best people is that you pay them enough so they don't leave.
But the public sector has fixed pay grades so how do you achieve that (I'm asking because I've seen multiple attempts over the last 2 decades and none worked for reasons that becomes obvious shortly after implementation).
You do away with fixed pay scales as an anachronism from another centrury.
And while were at it if people are WFH they shouldnt be getting a London allowance, like rich pensioners they dont need it.
Hello 4 million equal pay claims at employment tribunals...
Ah yes afraid of lawyers. It's why you think nothing is possible.
Nope afraid of the consequences - see Birmingham for what happens if you don't deal with the issue quickly...
The fix for that is abolishing the ridiculously flimsy grounds for equal pay claims which the Birmingham decisions came from.
People doing the same job - fine, they should be paid the same. People doing different jobs - it shouldn't be possible for a court to decide that the jobs are equivalent, and so should be paid the same.
That said, the way in which Birmingham managed to fall into the same trap twice is proof positive that the public sector tends to be run by the idiots, and alas there is no known cure for stupidity.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because the state is too large and does too much. We need to cut the size of the state and having people leave voluntarily is probably the best way to achieve it.
Leaving aside the point that, if market economics is right, people leaving for better pay will tend towards being the better ones...
People working in the public sector aren't interchangable, any more than they are at your bank.
I wouldn't be much good in an operating theatre, I suspect many surgeons would struggle to teach Year 9 physics. (More because of Year 9 than physics.)
If someone wants to identify areas of activity that the state should no longer do (and if that includes teaching Year 9, I'm cool with that), great. Otherwise- you're expecting the state to deliver stuff and sulking at the bill. Which doesn't work.
Are you sure you know about business?
If there's a shortage of people to teach Physics to Year 9's (and there is!) but an oversupply of people willing to teach PE, then does it really make sense to pay an experienced PE teacher more than ten grand a year more than a newly qualified physics teacher?
This is the problem with equal pay regulations, you end up either overpaying some, or underpaying others, or worse you do both so you both have an overspend and staffing shortage.
On topic - Trump has a certain number of voters. There is zero evidence that he can increase that number. The irony is that virtually any other Republican candidate would have walked 2020 and would be walking 2024 (with the possible exceptions of Sens Vance and Cruz). Trump is so toxic that he does half the oppo's turnout work for them.
I suspect Haley was right when she said the first party to dump its old man would win.
It's not as though Russia haas a shortage of assassins, and it costs us to house the specimens.
Indications of an imminent exchange of Russian spies & assassins for Western hostages held in Russia. Parties: US, Germany, Russia, Belarus. Candidates: Evan Gershkovich (US), Paul Whelan (US), Rico Krieger (Germany) Vladimir Kara-Murza (UK), others. https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1818727950826836178
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because the state is too large and does too much. We need to cut the size of the state and having people leave voluntarily is probably the best way to achieve it.
Again - what does it do that can be outsourced to the private sector efficiently. And remember the maxim for the past 14 years has been to drive costs down anyway you can..
Planning.
Abolish every busybody trying to second-guess and authorise what anyone builds on their land and have a free for all where anyone who wants to build anything on their own damned land can.
There we go - jobs abolished.
You know my wife is a town planner? Every post you make tells me you haven't got a clue what they actually do...
Far too much that they shouldn't is what they do. And I'd have no objection if your wife were made redundant.
No planner should have any input into whether or not a house is built, that should be upto the would-be homeowner and the private market.
If you want to plan new town or improved functions that the town intends to build on the town's own land, then that's something a town planner can and should be doing, but no need to review other people's plans of what they intend to be doing on their land.
Are you suggesting that local authorities should compulsory purchase (very cheaply of course) all land that could be developed?
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
Oliver Dowden showed Sunak the numbers coming off fixed term mortgages between now and November.
That made going in July logical.
Without knowing the context of the age profile that seems like a huge leap of logic. People coming off shorter fixed rate mortgages are going to be younger and have a lower propensity to vote Tory anyway. It seems like poor reasoning to me anyway. The upsides to waiting were much larger.
As I've been pointing out all week the only rational reason I have seen for pulling the election forward is the public sector pay awards which firstly removed any chance of more tax cuts and secondly may have triggered an issue when it becomes obvious that the figures no longer added up.
Not really, the government could have just ignored it on the grounds of affordability or something. 5.5% is high, 3.5% higher than inflation. Limit it to those earning less than £35k or something and everyone else gets 2.1% or whatever CPI is.
At a time of mass vacancies and full employment?
If you don't want to pay the required wage then abolish the job and save all the money not some of it, but if the job needs doing it needs paying for.
Then let them leave for the private sector.
But enough of them are leaving for it to be a problem. Or they're not signing up in the first place.
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
Because the state is too large and does too much. We need to cut the size of the state and having people leave voluntarily is probably the best way to achieve it.
Again - what does it do that can be outsourced to the private sector efficiently. And remember the maxim for the past 14 years has been to drive costs down anyway you can..
Planning.
Abolish every busybody trying to second-guess and authorise what anyone builds on their land and have a free for all where anyone who wants to build anything on their own damned land can.
There we go - jobs abolished.
You know my wife is a town planner? Every post you make tells me you haven't got a clue what they actually do...
Far too much that they shouldn't is what they do. And I'd have no objection if your wife were made redundant.
No planner should have any input into whether or not a house is built, that should be upto the would-be homeowner and the private market.
If you want to plan new town or improved functions that the town intends to build on the town's own land, then that's something a town planner can and should be doing, but no need to review other people's plans of what they intend to be doing on their land.
Are you suggesting that local authorities should compulsory purchase (very cheaply of course) all land that could be developed?
He's not, of course, but I think this is absolutely anticipated in Labour's new town plans, I think (though almost certainly not ALL land to be developed). It's the only way they'll be able to afford the build of all the associated infrastructure. And it would absolutely be a positive both for local authority finance, and GDP growth.
Surprised they named him as a 17 year old. Never heard of anyone with this first name apart from the character from the Jules Verne book.
AIUI from reports in the last couple of days, after charging under 18 year olds can be named. Not below 16, I think.
But what does it tell us that we didn't know? We knew he was of Rwandan heritage, but born in the UK. It tells us nothing about WHY. The whole thing is just too depressing.
Judge has named him because he is 18 next week. And it's your age now that matters not your age at the time of the alleged offence.
No, it doesn't make any difference. Who the person is doesn't really matter. What the police need to tell us is what they're thinking is re motive.
Motive is part of the case they'll be putting together and it takes time to do it properly. Can we not wait for the wheels of justice to turn? They have the guy.
I still don't understand why Rishi didn't wait until November. We're about to get another 0.6% growth in Q2, Q3 has started very positively and we'd have had another rate cut by then. If it was a late November election we could have been at 4.75% interest rates and 1.7% YTD growth and another year of above inflation wage rises.
The July election has got to be one of the biggest missteps in the history of the Tory party.
He was getting booted (it was rumoured and I believe). He carried out his threat to go to the people if they moved against him. Rather destroy the Tories than lose the leadership.
26% reduction in road casualities 23% in killed / seriously injured 55% drop in people killed 27% drop in slight injuries
And insurance claims down 20%.
The thing that convinced me that this speed reduction policy was a good idea was the stat that vehicles are getting heavier.
Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.
That is patently false and not represented by the data whatsoever.
Decades of technological and safety improvements, including crash test designs and iterations, mean you are far, far, far less likely to die today than decades ago. Which includes pedestrians.
That is true, but does not contradict the above point that "Getting hit at 20mph now is likely to be worse than being hit at 30mph some twenty/thirty years ago.".
Perhaps rather than having a speed limit we should have a momentum limit?
It does contradict it.
A lot of arguments being made still rely upon old data. Most claims made by "road safety campaigners" who want speed limits cut use obsolete data from the 1970s or 1990s to back up their claims . . . because the data today does not.
In 2004 there were 53.6 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average. In 2022 there were 26.5 pedestrian casualties per billion miles walked on average.
Pedestrians, not drivers, are twice as safe as they were previously.
No it doesn't. Your point about cars being safer is about their ability to quickly decelerate. But TSE's point remains true - if you get hit at 20mph in a heavy car you will be worse off than if you get hit at 30mph in a light one. That's just physics.
?
The damage is done by the kinetic energy. That goes as the square of the velocity and linearly by mass.
A one tonne car doing 30 mph gives 90kJ A one-and-a-half tonne car doing 20 mph gives 60 kJ
The one-and-a-half tonne car is considerably less. The one tonne car doing 30mph has half again as much kinetic energy.
Looking at the actual numbers for car mass as far as I can find, in the eighties, we were looking at cars averaging about 1.1 tonnes and now averaging 1.6 tonnes.
With the actual numbers plugged in, that's 100 kJ for a 1980s car doing 30mph and 64kJ for a 2023 car doing 20mph.
Comments
You dont half fall for spin.
This is all hot ai,r all of this has to go through planning and appeal which will take ages. They cant build data centres in London because there isnt enough electricity, the renewables plan is presided over by Miliband so no chance, prisons lol, and the only labs will be drug labs.
Meanwhile all that money which could funs this is going to bribe the public sector, who will of course be back for mor as the realise this government will crack on pay and Agella Rayer bless her has just raised the number of houses she is going to build from a target she will struggle to hit to one where she has no chance.
And as for prejudice, try experience I ve seen it all before.
Roll on October
You're smart. You've had enough people point this out to you. You supposedly know how money works.
Apart from not liking the obvious consequence, why do you find this so hard to accept?
The locating of data centres in London was at a time when network latency was everything, with more software located within the data centre that isn't the problem it used to be...
Prisons is a temporary issue but it seems we need to build 10,000 places (or 5-10 large prisons) in short order which granted has nowt to do with efficiency but has everything to do with the last Government not looking more than 15 minutes ahead.
If we use a Poisson confidence interval, that's 377 (340-417) compared to 510 (467-556). So, very significant.
1. Sir Graham had got virtually the required number of letters to trigger yet another leadership contest.
2. He was "advised" to do so by the Palace because of the Kings health.
They are the only two reasons I can can think of why they went in July and not October/November?
If the job doesn't need doing, abolish it. If it does need doing, it needs paying for, at whatever rate supply and demand sets - and supply and demand currently says pay needs to rise considerably to fill vacancies.
Not simply saying "OK you have no teacher today."
Cut 50% of non front line jobs in the NHS and 50% of all civil servants overnight, see what happens, it's highly likely that people won't notice.
Presumably all contracts between private sector companies and Councils would become contracts with central Government so presumably central Government would need to expand its contract management provision?
Who would monitor these cointracts to ensure the rubbish collection in Aldershot or Batley or Cambridge or wherever is meeting the agreed standard of the local contract?
How would citizens complain or to whom could they speak regarding issues in the vicinity - the local MP would be swamped by the casework this would generate. Should we have more MPs - perhaps 1500 - with smaller areas to cover all these issues?
One of the hardy perennials is potholes - would we have a Minister for Potholes (Cabinet rank) who would tackle the issue of road repairs and maintenance?
Here's another thing - school appeals - to whom would parents go if they object to the choice of school for their child? Which Government department would deal with the tens of thousands of cases?
Abolishing local Councils doesn't mean getting rid of the staff - it means they would work for central Government. You could get rid of a few thousand councillors but that's all you would achieve. Presumably in your utopia, the Government runs elections as well - nothing sinister or dangerous about that then...or should we contract out the democratic process to one of the companies who makes donations to the Conservative Party?
The National
@ScotNational
🗣️ 'We must stand firm against fascists and show the far-right they're not welcome here'
Glaswegians have reacted after far-right figures announced they would be holding a 'pro-UK rally' in the city centre
https://x.com/ScotNational/status/1818968943412891990
But the public sector has fixed pay grades so how do you achieve that (I'm asking because I've seen multiple attempts over the last 2 decades and none worked for reasons that becomes obvious shortly after implementation).
Abolish every busybody trying to second-guess and authorise what anyone builds on their land and have a free for all where anyone who wants to build anything on their own damned land can.
There we go - jobs abolished.
https://etsc.eu/suvs-and-pickups-make-the-roads-less-safe-for-car-occupants-pedestrians-and-cyclists-belgian-study/
IMO we need to heavily disincentivise, and perhaps totally exclude some of the larger ones. Starting with removing the tax loopholes for the larger categories of crewcab pickups, which I think make them more attractive for financial reasons than the smaller, safer ones.
Otherwise it's the current arms race to putting other people's lives at risk.
People working in the public sector aren't interchangable, any more than they are at your bank.
I wouldn't be much good in an operating theatre, I suspect many surgeons would struggle to teach Year 9 physics. (More because of Year 9 than physics.)
If someone wants to identify areas of activity that the state should no longer do (and if that includes teaching Year 9, I'm cool with that), great. Otherwise- you're expecting the state to deliver stuff and sulking at the bill. Which doesn't work.
Are you sure you know about business?
I don't think the annoyances of roads not being fixed and potholes everywhere are entirely due to lack of maintenance.
Weight of BMW X5 -> c 2500kg
Weight of Ford Focus -> c 1500kg
The BMW causes nearly 8 times the road wear of the Focus.
The trend to heavier cars must be having an effect.
And while were at it if people are WFH they shouldnt be getting a London allowance, like rich pensioners they dont need it.
No planner should have any input into whether or not a house is built, that should be upto the would-be homeowner and the private market.
If you want to plan new town or improved functions that the town intends to build on the town's own land, then that's something a town planner can and should be doing, but no need to review other people's plans of what they intend to be doing on their land.
By total co-incidence, I’ve now had introductory offers from Trend Micro and SentinelOne.
But I quite like the French pigou tax, too - which sounds to be in the right kind of range, and easy to enforce. If we get maintenance tradesman returning to smaller or medium size vans and estate cars, so much the better.
And RR does need the cash:
France is cracking down on heavy and polluting vehicles as it pushes people towards electric cars and public transport.
On 1 January, France tightened the rules for taxes paid when buying a new car.
The weight threshold for heavy vehicles was decreased from 1.8 tonnes to 1.6 tonnes meaning this extra charge will be applied to most SUVs or 4x4s. It costs €10 per kilogram for vehicles up to 2.1 tonnes and €30 per kg for vehicles heavier than 2.1 tonnes.
For most medium-sized SUVs, that could mean around €16,000 added to the upfront cost.
https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/01/17/higher-taxes-and-more-expensive-parking-how-is-france-cracking-down-on-suvs
Let supply and demand find the right pay rate for each job.
The sexist anachronism of viewing some jobs as "men's jobs" or "women's jobs" or similar belongs in the 1950s. Let anyone apply for any job and have no discrimination.
If supply and demand means bin collectors working in the rain need to paid more than cleaners working indoors, then pay more to the collectors not across the board.
But what does it tell us that we didn't know? We knew he was of Rwandan heritage, but born in the UK. It tells us nothing about WHY. The whole thing is just too depressing.
But laws can be repealed and changed, and T&Cs can be adapted. So do away with fixed pay scales and if you arent working in London you lose the allowance.
If hypothetically its harder to get a Police Officer to patrol Moss Side than Altrincham it should be possible to pay more to those patrolling Moss Side and less to those in Altrincham, even if they are doing the "same job".
Let the market solve the vacancies, and if people want to transfer to get a higher wage then the vacancies are filled and prices can adjust again.
No, it doesn't make any difference. Who the person is doesn't really matter. What the police need to tell us is what they're thinking is re motive.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/04king.html
Why the authorities didn't come out and say in words of one syllable "He's not a Muslim" the moment the riots started kicking off I've no idea - I'd kind of presumed he must be, given the fact they didn't.
Instead of which we got a load of preachy "not everything you read on twitter is true", despite the fact that Twitter had got to the correct name in a matter of hours, despite the best efforts of somebody (I assume the Russians) to put a false name about.
They are there to ensure compliance and minimise risk. They can save a business or organisation alot of cash
If people are spreading lies on social media, do something about people spreading lies on social media.
Men allowed to compete in rhythmic gymnastics - with ribbons and hoops etc.
People doing the same job - fine, they should be paid the same. People doing different jobs - it shouldn't be possible for a court to decide that the jobs are equivalent, and so should be paid the same.
That said, the way in which Birmingham managed to fall into the same trap twice is proof positive that the public sector tends to be run by the idiots, and alas there is no known cure for stupidity.
This is the problem with equal pay regulations, you end up either overpaying some, or underpaying others, or worse you do both so you both have an overspend and staffing shortage.
I suspect Haley was right when she said the first party to dump its old man would win.
NEW THREAD
It's not as though Russia haas a shortage of assassins, and it costs us to house the specimens.
Indications of an imminent exchange of Russian spies & assassins for Western hostages held in Russia.
Parties: US, Germany, Russia, Belarus.
Candidates: Evan Gershkovich (US), Paul Whelan (US), Rico Krieger (Germany)
Vladimir Kara-Murza (UK), others.
https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1818727950826836178
It's the only way they'll be able to afford the build of all the associated infrastructure. And it would absolutely be a positive both for local authority finance, and GDP growth.
If they think Jenrick is the answer then god help the party.
I'll retire to Bedlam.
The damage is done by the kinetic energy. That goes as the square of the velocity and linearly by mass.
A one tonne car doing 30 mph gives 90kJ
A one-and-a-half tonne car doing 20 mph gives 60 kJ
The one-and-a-half tonne car is considerably less. The one tonne car doing 30mph has half again as much kinetic energy.
Looking at the actual numbers for car mass as far as I can find, in the eighties, we were looking at cars averaging about 1.1 tonnes and now averaging 1.6 tonnes.
With the actual numbers plugged in, that's 100 kJ for a 1980s car doing 30mph and 64kJ for a 2023 car doing 20mph.
The slower and heavier car is less damaging.