The pub that has just opened near me is cashless. Endgame for the pointless tokens and shards.
I have had £50 in cash in my wallet for 6 months... can't get rid of it.
My grandchildren's Saturday morning 'Grandma's helpers' would resolve that problem
Can't even give it to my friends kids, they all have apple pay on their phone / watched attached to accounts. They want to be cool and tap it like the adults.
I have to trudge to the bank if any relatives insist on posting (yes posting!) cash to my son for a gift. He cannot use it to buy the things he buys (online games for his PS5, electronics from online retailers), so it is just an entirely pointless chore that could have been avoided had they just transferred the money – which takes 60 seconds.
Inability to dispose of cash - say any sum under a couple of hundred pounds - within a reasonably short time displays an extraordinary lack of imagination. It can be done in minutes or even seconds by an expert. Can this really only be true in the small town rural north of England?
Really? Without receiving even more pointless "change" – or being that guy who asks whether he can pay some in cash and the rest with card?
Yes, Really. And small change can be got rid of in a multitude of ways including charity boxes/tins and in a slot near the door in any church, or at community coffee mornings etc. As to getting rid of £200 cash in minutes, stock up at Lidl on a quiet day (my preferred version of Fortnum and Mason) pop to the butcher, go to the petrol station, buy some fish and chips. 83p change to their charity box for the local hospice. Done and fun. And conversation with old friends as you do it will put you back in you are pressed for time.
Which planet are you from by the way?
Yes but what is the point of doing all of these things, given that all of them can be done more quickly and easily, and at less risk to both buyer and vendor, than using cash? There is literally no point to any of it – it's just a complete waste of time and materials to do exactly the same thing you could do with BACs/contactless/ApplePay.
I mean a couple of mates are doing Movember – I suppose I could have posted them some notes and change and had them spend it in Lidl before putting the digital money in their charity fund on my behalf, then somehow claiming the GiftAid via telegraph to the Taxman.
But what would be the point?
The point is freedom of choice
I would like to see you try to exercise such freedom of choice when a mate sends you a payment link for his Movember charity drive...
Your capacity to misunderstand must be deliberate. It can't be actual dimness. It is not suggested that cash is appropriate to all transactions, just that it should be an option for many day to day transactions.
Why?
It can be actual dimness.
What's the point of cash?
Got me a small discount on my takeout this evening
Mr. Anabob “How much for 2 fish suppers?” Chip shop staff “£25 or £20 for cash.”.Mr Anabob “Here’s my card. It’s worth £5 for the convenience of not using cash”.
And I’ll be calling the revenue in the morning as you are clearly offering to not pay VAT…
My sister-in-law used to work for Customs and Excise back when it was responsible for VAT. Office staff were often asked to go out on expenses to fast food outlets, offer to pay cash... and the restaurant's books would subsequently be checked to see if the meal appeared.
======
I suspect the contemporary problem is the opposite: hole-in-the-wall enterprises that seem to have few customers but bank thousands in cash every day. 'Turkish' barbers, 'Thai' massage parlours, nail bars, tattoo 'artists', vape shops...
NEWS: Two unnamed Nissan executives said the company has "12 to 14 months to survive."
Nissan cut more than 9,000 jobs earlier this month, while simultaneously slashing production by nearly 20%. Nissan's operating profit dropped 85% in Q3.
The new industrial revolution is very tough on legacy manufacturers like Vauxhall and Nissan.
VW are discussing cutting 10s of thousands of jobs in Germany - albeit from just under 300k to start with. On top of a desire to impose pay cuts of 10%.
They are stating that their factory costs are 25-50% too high.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
For comparison, during the Korean War, we were spending about 11% of our GDP on defence, falling to 7%, about Russia's level today, in 1959, and the 1950s were a time of growing prosperity here and in the US, which spent similar amounts. These levels are eminently affordable in the short and medium term, even if the usual caveats about Russian statistics apply. To get up to 40-50% you need to go back to the Second World War.
He may find it difficult to maintain the standard of living for the Russian masses, i.e. to have both guns and butter, but even there, the evidence is ambiguous, since working class Russians are benefiting hugely from high salaries in the military - if they survive - and booming wages due to a shortage of labour.
It won't be economic pressure, or sanctions, that break Putin's will - it will be Ukrainian men smashing his armies with Western weapons on the fields of Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhe. Which is why we need to supply as many powerful weapons as possible as soon as possible, or reconcile ourselves to a Russian victory, with all the consequent disasters for the free world.
750,000 dead or wounded Russians, when you consider how few there are of conscriptable age, is quite a lot though.
To put in context, there are only about 4.5 million Russian men aged between 18 and 24.
You're thinking about it as a civilised, humane Westerner, to whom every life is precious. Here a deliberate decision to crash a couple of jumbo jets every day would indeed be unacceptable.
But Putin doesn't give the slightest flying fuck about prisoners, foreigners, mercenaries or alcoholics from Russia's Asian or Muslim provinces. He no doubt thinks Russia is better off without most of those, especially now that its old professional army was destroyed in the first year of the invasion, or more likely he doesn't think about them at all. He thinks he is winning because his forces are gaining a few square miles in eastern Ukraine. The only thing he worries about is whether he can replace those losses. So far he can, and unlike in Ukraine, there's not much sign manpower is running out.
And don't expect the Russian people to revolt either - they put up with much worse economically in the 90s, and, as someone once observed, the greater the danger they're in, the more apathetic Russians become. They might of course revolt, but they have no real tradition of successful popular revolutions in Russia, and there are no signs of it yet.
Any focus on Russian weaknesses, and hope for Russian "implosion" (predicted dozens of times already) takes away from the vital task of providing the advanced weapons in the huge numbers the Ukrainians need to beat the Russians back. There is no other way to win the war, or even to tie it acceptably.
No race or country is completely immune to reality. Yes, I'm sure Russians can survive discomfort longer than Brits or Americans. But their capacity for hardship is not unlimited; hence the fact that Putin has conspicuously avoided drawing too many young men from Moscow or St Petersburg.
And there is a tipping point (as Tsar Nicholas discovered) when there is simply too much pain. Now maybe that tipping point is 2 million dead and wounded (almost half of all Russian men between 18 and 24), or maybe 3 million, but no country has an unlimited ability to wage war without constraints.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
I was in the Netherlands in October, they have streetside chargers.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
At some unspecified future point every public car park space will have an adjacent fast charger. If you need to, replenish your battery while shopping, commuting ... whatever. Petrol stations will be repurposed as convenience stores with maybe one rusty old pump for classic car enthusiasts.
The pub that has just opened near me is cashless. Endgame for the pointless tokens and shards.
I have had £50 in cash in my wallet for 6 months... can't get rid of it.
My grandchildren's Saturday morning 'Grandma's helpers' would resolve that problem
Can't even give it to my friends kids, they all have apple pay on their phone / watched attached to accounts. They want to be cool and tap it like the adults.
I have to trudge to the bank if any relatives insist on posting (yes posting!) cash to my son for a gift. He cannot use it to buy the things he buys (online games for his PS5, electronics from online retailers), so it is just an entirely pointless chore that could have been avoided had they just transferred the money – which takes 60 seconds.
Inability to dispose of cash - say any sum under a couple of hundred pounds - within a reasonably short time displays an extraordinary lack of imagination. It can be done in minutes or even seconds by an expert. Can this really only be true in the small town rural north of England?
Really? Without receiving even more pointless "change" – or being that guy who asks whether he can pay some in cash and the rest with card?
Assuming you don't live in murder central, why not encourage the little herbert to get some vitamin D and/or some mates and spend the money himself out of the house? Trudging to the bank on his behalf whilst cursing the cash givers under your breath smacks of the sort of obsessional fetishisation of 'the new way' that is actually very aging on you.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
Five years is a long time to sort out charging infrastructure (though I think they should have started several years ago). And, of course, in fine years the bay majority of cars on the road will still be fossil fuel cars, it's only the new ones that would have to be at least hybrids (only fossil fuel only cars are phased out in 2030).
But. There's no sign of the government getting their arse into gear to use these five years to put the charging infrastructure into place. It's incredibly frustrating. Everyone can see that it needs to be done. It's a clear example of a chicken/egg situation where the market is reluctant to install charging infrastructure before there are cars to use it, or for people to buy cars until there are the chargers to charge them with, and so a clear case for government intervention. And nothing appears to be happening.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
I was in the Netherlands in October, they have streetside chargers.
You need a lot of power to provide 7kw of power to a street lamp compared to the 100w an LED light requires nowadays. Especially when you need to provide power to 2 cars at every light
Have you ever noticed that Matt's characters frequently have two noses?
That's one of those things which once seen is slightly difficult to unsee. I remind myself he is still a genius, especially so as he is never unkind and never cruel, and best of all gives his genius away free online so you don't have to steal the DTel from WHSmiths before throwing it away.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
It's new cars only, so there will be a market for ICE second hand for maybe another 15 years after the deadline.
Like the home gas boiler deadline I think there would be slippage. There isn't really a second hand market there.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
I was in the Netherlands in October, they have streetside chargers.
Much fun for scroats, who are sadly prevalent in the kind of area that has only on street parking. In any case, do we think we have the capacity to for the size of infrastructure project required to make this work for everyone?
Fast charging is the only way. And even that needs a big infrastructure project.
Badenoch raised the petition? What on earth was she thinking
Strong and combative performance I thought, she's 2.7 on Betfair to make 2029 or later which must be an attractive punt for Badenoch fans but they seem to be either a bit shy or financially embarrassed at the moment. 50% return in 5 years or less if you were foolish enough to lay it.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
It's new cars only, so there will be a market for ICE second hand for maybe another 15 years after the deadline.
Like the home gas boiler deadline I think there would be slippage. There isn't really a second hand market there.
I suspect Labour bringing it back from 2035 to 2030 will find themselves having to re-reverse ferret, and will look silly while at the same time mucking up the car market. There must be millions of homes especially in older urban areas and flats land where the difficulties are going to mean many will resist early adoption.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
I was in the Netherlands in October, they have streetside chargers.
You need a lot of power to provide 7kw of power to a street lamp compared to the 100w an LED light requires nowadays. Especially when you need to provide power to 2 cars at every light
Cars only need charging every couple of weeks. They aren't being charged every night at every lamp post.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
At some unspecified future point every public car park space will have an adjacent fast charger. If you need to, replenish your battery while shopping, commuting ... whatever. Petrol stations will be repurposed as convenience stores with maybe one rusty old pump for classic car enthusiasts.
We kinda need to make that future point now, and put some effort in to achieve it. The chargers aren't simply going to sprout of their own volition.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
It's new cars only, so there will be a market for ICE second hand for maybe another 15 years after the deadline.
Like the home gas boiler deadline I think there would be slippage. There isn't really a second hand market there.
I suspect Labour bringing it back from 2035 to 2030 will find themselves having to re-reverse ferret, and will look silly while at the same time mucking up the car market. There must be millions of homes especially in older urban areas and flats land where the difficulties are going to mean many will resist early adoption.
Hybrids to 2035 though. I think these are 60% of new sales now.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
Communists are inspired by Cuba. You will be driving your ICE car for the rest of your life. Unfortunately it is not as stylish as a 50’s American car and the sun is not shining.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
At some unspecified future point every public car park space will have an adjacent fast charger. If you need to, replenish your battery while shopping, commuting ... whatever. Petrol stations will be repurposed as convenience stores with maybe one rusty old pump for classic car enthusiasts.
'Unspecified future points' is fine for politics but doesn't charge your car or persuade anyone to buy one.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
If you consider that the sale of ICE would end in 2030, and the average age of a car is 10 years, it would probably be the mid-to-late 2030s until you saw crossover between EV/ICE - later still if the government incentivised people hanging onto their ICEs for as long as possible. That lines up with when the UK will have over 60GW of offshore wind alone.
So there is still plenty of time to get proper infrastructure in - but that needs to start now. A lot of the hand-wringing over the 2030 target was about whether car manufacturers could achieve it, but the government have shot themselves in the foot because they haven't kept up with industry. You can pick up a new Dacia Spring for £15,000, so the tech has already permeated to the bottom of the market.
Telegraph David Lammy has said he would seek an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited the UK.
The Foreign Secretary said he would be obliged by law to go to the courts seeking permission for the arrest, saying he had no “discretion” over the issue.
The position is a stark contrast to France, which became the latest Western country to say it would not arrest the Israeli prime minister, leaving Britain isolated among its G7 allies.
Do Heads of Government and foreign ministers not travel with diplomatic immunity?
Can you even imagine the scenario where UK arrested Netanyahu on a visit to the UK ?
There is no point to an international court if signatories are selective about enacting its judgements.
I totally get the point that the mix on the road is still going to be heavily ICE for years to come after any 2030 nominal stop to new petrol/diesel sales. But assuming you don't just want the car market to skew towards second hand sales of ICE cars away from sales of new EVs because people don't want to or simply can't adopt, you still need a significant infrastructure boost over the next 5 years to get people to shift.
You don't need the whole thing, sure, but you need to make a reasonably sizeable dent in it.
Telegraph David Lammy has said he would seek an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited the UK.
The Foreign Secretary said he would be obliged by law to go to the courts seeking permission for the arrest, saying he had no “discretion” over the issue.
The position is a stark contrast to France, which became the latest Western country to say it would not arrest the Israeli prime minister, leaving Britain isolated among its G7 allies.
Do Heads of Government and foreign ministers not travel with diplomatic immunity?
Can you even imagine the scenario where UK arrested Netanyahu on a visit to the UK ?
There is no point to an international court if signatories are selective about enacting its judgements.
I suspect our Diplomats would warn Netanyahu from landing in UK jurisdiction.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
It's new cars only, so there will be a market for ICE second hand for maybe another 15 years after the deadline.
Like the home gas boiler deadline I think there would be slippage. There isn't really a second hand market there.
I suspect Labour bringing it back from 2035 to 2030 will find themselves having to re-reverse ferret, and will look silly while at the same time mucking up the car market. There must be millions of homes especially in older urban areas and flats land where the difficulties are going to mean many will resist early adoption.
Hybrids to 2035 though. I think these are 60% of new sales now.
Depends what kind of hybrids though. A "ban" which still allowed mild hybrids would be meaningless. And 60% of new sales aren't plug-in hybrids.
Telegraph David Lammy has said he would seek an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited the UK.
The Foreign Secretary said he would be obliged by law to go to the courts seeking permission for the arrest, saying he had no “discretion” over the issue.
The position is a stark contrast to France, which became the latest Western country to say it would not arrest the Israeli prime minister, leaving Britain isolated among its G7 allies.
Do Heads of Government and foreign ministers not travel with diplomatic immunity?
Can you even imagine the scenario where UK arrested Netanyahu on a visit to the UK ?
There is no point to an international court if signatories are selective about enacting its judgements.
The idea that courts, the police and rest of the justice system are not selective of which laws they enforce, and when, is interesting.
Interesting, as in going against all evidence, since the recorded history of laws began.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
It's new cars only, so there will be a market for ICE second hand for maybe another 15 years after the deadline.
Like the home gas boiler deadline I think there would be slippage. There isn't really a second hand market there.
I suspect Labour bringing it back from 2035 to 2030 will find themselves having to re-reverse ferret, and will look silly while at the same time mucking up the car market. There must be millions of homes especially in older urban areas and flats land where the difficulties are going to mean many will resist early adoption.
Hybrids to 2035 though. I think these are 60% of new sales now.
But how many of those are "mild hybrids"?
My car is a mild hybrid. It's basically a petrol car with a little bit of regenerative braking. It's not a very hybridy hybrid, if that makes sense, and the suspicion is it's just a nice way of being able to call it a hybrid when really it's still a petrol car.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
I was in the Netherlands in October, they have streetside chargers.
You need a lot of power to provide 7kw of power to a street lamp compared to the 100w an LED light requires nowadays. Especially when you need to provide power to 2 cars at every light
Cars only need charging every couple of weeks. They aren't being charged every night at every lamp post.
Street lamps in the U.K. were wired to 20 or 32 amps. Which does make you wonder if plugging electric ovens into a street lamp was a thing.
The supply and cabling will need some work - which is being done on a rolling basis, in many places.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
Five years is a long time to sort out charging infrastructure (though I think they should have started several years ago). And, of course, in fine years the bay majority of cars on the road will still be fossil fuel cars, it's only the new ones that would have to be at least hybrids (only fossil fuel only cars are phased out in 2030).
But. There's no sign of the government getting their arse into gear to use these five years to put the charging infrastructure into place. It's incredibly frustrating. Everyone can see that it needs to be done. It's a clear example of a chicken/egg situation where the market is reluctant to install charging infrastructure before there are cars to use it, or for people to buy cars until there are the chargers to charge them with, and so a clear case for government intervention. And nothing appears to be happening.
Unbelievable surely the Conservatives had started the necessary EV charging infrastructure project, why has Labour cancelled it? My local council got Chargy to put EV chargers on the lamp posts, only 4kW though.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
If you consider that the sale of ICE would end in 2030, and the average age of a car is 10 years, it would probably be the mid-to-late 2030s until you saw crossover between EV/ICE - later still if the government incentivised people hanging onto their ICEs for as long as possible. That lines up with when the UK will have over 60GW of offshore wind alone.
So there is still plenty of time to get proper infrastructure in - but that needs to start now. A lot of the hand-wringing over the 2030 target was about whether car manufacturers could achieve it, but the government have shot themselves in the foot because they haven't kept up with industry. You can pick up a new Dacia Spring for £15,000, so the tech has already permeated to the bottom of the market.
Friend has just traded in an 8 year old mini after 5 years for £2k less than he bought it for, it'll be on a forecourt priced higher than a 3 year old electric mini.
The pub that has just opened near me is cashless. Endgame for the pointless tokens and shards.
I have had £50 in cash in my wallet for 6 months... can't get rid of it.
My grandchildren's Saturday morning 'Grandma's helpers' would resolve that problem
Can't even give it to my friends kids, they all have apple pay on their phone / watched attached to accounts. They want to be cool and tap it like the adults.
I have to trudge to the bank if any relatives insist on posting (yes posting!) cash to my son for a gift. He cannot use it to buy the things he buys (online games for his PS5, electronics from online retailers), so it is just an entirely pointless chore that could have been avoided had they just transferred the money – which takes 60 seconds.
Inability to dispose of cash - say any sum under a couple of hundred pounds - within a reasonably short time displays an extraordinary lack of imagination. It can be done in minutes or even seconds by an expert. Can this really only be true in the small town rural north of England?
Really? Without receiving even more pointless "change" – or being that guy who asks whether he can pay some in cash and the rest with card?
Yes, Really. And small change can be got rid of in a multitude of ways including charity boxes/tins and in a slot near the door in any church, or at community coffee mornings etc. As to getting rid of £200 cash in minutes, stock up at Lidl on a quiet day (my preferred version of Fortnum and Mason) pop to the butcher, go to the petrol station, buy some fish and chips. 83p change to their charity box for the local hospice. Done and fun. And conversation with old friends as you do it will put you back in you are pressed for time.
Which planet are you from by the way?
Yes but what is the point of doing all of these things, given that all of them can be done more quickly and easily, and at less risk to both buyer and vendor, than using cash? There is literally no point to any of it – it's just a complete waste of time and materials to do exactly the same thing you could do with BACs/contactless/ApplePay.
I mean a couple of mates are doing Movember – I suppose I could have posted them some notes and change and had them spend it in Lidl before putting the digital money in their charity fund on my behalf, then somehow claiming the GiftAid via telegraph to the Taxman.
But what would be the point?
The point is freedom of choice
I would like to see you try to exercise such freedom of choice when a mate sends you a payment link for his Movember charity drive...
Your capacity to misunderstand must be deliberate. It can't be actual dimness. It is not suggested that cash is appropriate to all transactions, just that it should be an option for many day to day transactions.
Why?
It can be actual dimness.
What's the point of cash?
Got me a small discount on my takeout this evening
The pub that has just opened near me is cashless. Endgame for the pointless tokens and shards.
I have had £50 in cash in my wallet for 6 months... can't get rid of it.
My grandchildren's Saturday morning 'Grandma's helpers' would resolve that problem
Can't even give it to my friends kids, they all have apple pay on their phone / watched attached to accounts. They want to be cool and tap it like the adults.
I have to trudge to the bank if any relatives insist on posting (yes posting!) cash to my son for a gift. He cannot use it to buy the things he buys (online games for his PS5, electronics from online retailers), so it is just an entirely pointless chore that could have been avoided had they just transferred the money – which takes 60 seconds.
Inability to dispose of cash - say any sum under a couple of hundred pounds - within a reasonably short time displays an extraordinary lack of imagination. It can be done in minutes or even seconds by an expert. Can this really only be true in the small town rural north of England?
Really? Without receiving even more pointless "change" – or being that guy who asks whether he can pay some in cash and the rest with card?
Yes, Really. And small change can be got rid of in a multitude of ways including charity boxes/tins and in a slot near the door in any church, or at community coffee mornings etc. As to getting rid of £200 cash in minutes, stock up at Lidl on a quiet day (my preferred version of Fortnum and Mason) pop to the butcher, go to the petrol station, buy some fish and chips. 83p change to their charity box for the local hospice. Done and fun. And conversation with old friends as you do it will put you back in you are pressed for time.
Which planet are you from by the way?
Yes but what is the point of doing all of these things, given that all of them can be done more quickly and easily, and at less risk to both buyer and vendor, than using cash? There is literally no point to any of it – it's just a complete waste of time and materials to do exactly the same thing you could do with BACs/contactless/ApplePay.
I mean a couple of mates are doing Movember – I suppose I could have posted them some notes and change and had them spend it in Lidl before putting the digital money in their charity fund on my behalf, then somehow claiming the GiftAid via telegraph to the Taxman.
But what would be the point?
The point is freedom of choice
I would like to see you try to exercise such freedom of choice when a mate sends you a payment link for his Movember charity drive...
Your capacity to misunderstand must be deliberate. It can't be actual dimness. It is not suggested that cash is appropriate to all transactions, just that it should be an option for many day to day transactions.
Why?
It can be actual dimness.
What's the point of cash?
You can buy things with it.
You are unable to buy many things with it, these days.
Have you ever noticed that Matt's characters frequently have two noses?
That's one of those things which once seen is slightly difficult to unsee. I remind myself he is still a genius, especially so as he is never unkind and never cruel, and best of all gives his genius away free online so you don't have to steal the DTel from WHSmiths before throwing it away.
Agree with his lack of cruelty. Most newspapet cartoonists have cruelty but no humour. Also the second nose is a top lip, I think.
I am thinking of making the transition from my clapped out ICE to a brand new EV next year.
And if I can live with the transition for a lawnmower, I will be a step nearer to considering it for a car.
I have had my kia eniro over 4 years and it drives like new, and with the same range of 270 miles too (230 in winter).
EVs are at that point where ICE becomes the expensive option. It's like the transition from film to digital cameras. At some point it becomes the sensible and cheaper choice.
(I still use my OM1, but only 2 films per year, and they get scanned in so analogue is a bit of an analogue ferltish really)
Badenoch raised the petition? What on earth was she thinking
She also attacked a policy she herself had introduced! Baffling. The fact that she was entirely absent while a minister might explain it: she forgot/was unaware she introduced it?
For comparison, during the Korean War, we were spending about 11% of our GDP on defence, falling to 7%, about Russia's level today, in 1959, and the 1950s were a time of growing prosperity here and in the US, which spent similar amounts. These levels are eminently affordable in the short and medium term, even if the usual caveats about Russian statistics apply. To get up to 40-50% you need to go back to the Second World War.
He may find it difficult to maintain the standard of living for the Russian masses, i.e. to have both guns and butter, but even there, the evidence is ambiguous, since working class Russians are benefiting hugely from high salaries in the military - if they survive - and booming wages due to a shortage of labour.
It won't be economic pressure, or sanctions, that break Putin's will - it will be Ukrainian men smashing his armies with Western weapons on the fields of Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhe. Which is why we need to supply as many powerful weapons as possible as soon as possible, or reconcile ourselves to a Russian victory, with all the consequent disasters for the free world.
750,000 dead or wounded Russians, when you consider how few there are of conscriptable age, is quite a lot though.
To put in context, there are only about 4.5 million Russian men aged between 18 and 24.
You're thinking about it as a civilised, humane Westerner, to whom every life is precious. Here a deliberate decision to crash a couple of jumbo jets every day would indeed be unacceptable.
But Putin doesn't give the slightest flying fuck about prisoners, foreigners, mercenaries or alcoholics from Russia's Asian or Muslim provinces. He no doubt thinks Russia is better off without most of those, especially now that its old professional army was destroyed in the first year of the invasion, or more likely he doesn't think about them at all. He thinks he is winning because his forces are gaining a few square miles in eastern Ukraine. The only thing he worries about is whether he can replace those losses. So far he can, and unlike in Ukraine, there's not much sign manpower is running out.
And don't expect the Russian people to revolt either - they put up with much worse economically in the 90s, and, as someone once observed, the greater the danger they're in, the more apathetic Russians become. They might of course revolt, but they have no real tradition of successful popular revolutions in Russia, and there are no signs of it yet.
Any focus on Russian weaknesses, and hope for Russian "implosion" (predicted dozens of times already) takes away from the vital task of providing the advanced weapons in the huge numbers the Ukrainians need to beat the Russians back. There is no other way to win the war, or even to tie it acceptably.
No race or country is completely immune to reality. Yes, I'm sure Russians can survive discomfort longer than Brits or Americans. But their capacity for hardship is not unlimited; hence the fact that Putin has conspicuously avoided drawing too many young men from Moscow or St Petersburg.
And there is a tipping point (as Tsar Nicholas discovered) when there is simply too much pain. Now maybe that tipping point is 2 million dead and wounded (almost half of all Russian men between 18 and 24), or maybe 3 million, but no country has an unlimited ability to wage war without constraints.
There is a tipping point in Russia, but I see no evidence at all that it's there any time soon, and my worry is that the brave Ukrainians will reach their tipping point first, in which case it's entirely academic where Russia's tipping point is. A Russian tipping point of 3 million dead implies maybe a million dead Ukrainians - would even that heroic country accept that?
Russia may collapse internally and sue for peace tomorrow, or someone may kill Putin and they might get a better leader, but the fact is they've proved much more willing to absorb death and impoverishment than anyone thought, so it would be ridiculous to make any plans based on that.
To repeat, by far the surest way to get Russia out of eastern and southern Ukraine is to give the Ukrainians the means to blast them out. If nothing else, you can see that in what Putin says. He doesn't threaten nuclear war whenever we sanction a few more banks. He does it when we provide Ukraine with effective weapons systems. Everything else, especially general economic sanctions, is a distracting side-issue.
I am thinking of making the transition from my clapped out ICE to a brand new EV next year.
And if I can live with the transition for a lawnmower, I will be a step nearer to considering it for a car.
I have had my kia eniro over 4 years and it drives like new, and with the same range of 270 miles too (230 in winter).
EVs are at that point where ICE becomes the expensive option. It's like the transition from film to digital cameras. At some point it becomes the sensible and cheaper choice.
(I still use my OM1, but only 2 films per year, and they get scanned in so analogue is a bit of an analogue ferltish really)
Our family is a two car family. Both ICEs. We have a big VW Sharan that we can all fit in for most purposes and a knackered old Ford Focus for if someone else is driving the Sharan. At the point the Focus dies, we will get a snall electric car. My expectation is that we will do most of our trips in that, keeping the big ICE for long journeys or carrying a lot of luggage. That probably takes us through to 2035, by which time there might be an affordable electric equivalent of the Sharan and in any case the kids will probably have left home (*sob*).
I am thinking of making the transition from my clapped out ICE to a brand new EV next year.
And if I can live with the transition for a lawnmower, I will be a step nearer to considering it for a car.
I have had my kia eniro over 4 years and it drives like new, and with the same range of 270 miles too (230 in winter).
EVs are at that point where ICE becomes the expensive option. It's like the transition from film to digital cameras. At some point it becomes the sensible and cheaper choice.
(I still use my OM1, but only 2 films per year, and they get scanned in so analogue is a bit of an analogue ferltish really)
The film comparison is a good one. The strenuous attempts to justify hanging onto the old technology are quite similar.
For comparison, during the Korean War, we were spending about 11% of our GDP on defence, falling to 7%, about Russia's level today, in 1959, and the 1950s were a time of growing prosperity here and in the US, which spent similar amounts. These levels are eminently affordable in the short and medium term, even if the usual caveats about Russian statistics apply. To get up to 40-50% you need to go back to the Second World War.
He may find it difficult to maintain the standard of living for the Russian masses, i.e. to have both guns and butter, but even there, the evidence is ambiguous, since working class Russians are benefiting hugely from high salaries in the military - if they survive - and booming wages due to a shortage of labour.
It won't be economic pressure, or sanctions, that break Putin's will - it will be Ukrainian men smashing his armies with Western weapons on the fields of Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhe. Which is why we need to supply as many powerful weapons as possible as soon as possible, or reconcile ourselves to a Russian victory, with all the consequent disasters for the free world.
750,000 dead or wounded Russians, when you consider how few there are of conscriptable age, is quite a lot though.
To put in context, there are only about 4.5 million Russian men aged between 18 and 24.
You're thinking about it as a civilised, humane Westerner, to whom every life is precious. Here a deliberate decision to crash a couple of jumbo jets every day would indeed be unacceptable.
But Putin doesn't give the slightest flying fuck about prisoners, foreigners, mercenaries or alcoholics from Russia's Asian or Muslim provinces. He no doubt thinks Russia is better off without most of those, especially now that its old professional army was destroyed in the first year of the invasion, or more likely he doesn't think about them at all. He thinks he is winning because his forces are gaining a few square miles in eastern Ukraine. The only thing he worries about is whether he can replace those losses. So far he can, and unlike in Ukraine, there's not much sign manpower is running out.
And don't expect the Russian people to revolt either - they put up with much worse economically in the 90s, and, as someone once observed, the greater the danger they're in, the more apathetic Russians become. They might of course revolt, but they have no real tradition of successful popular revolutions in Russia, and there are no signs of it yet.
Any focus on Russian weaknesses, and hope for Russian "implosion" (predicted dozens of times already) takes away from the vital task of providing the advanced weapons in the huge numbers the Ukrainians need to beat the Russians back. There is no other way to win the war, or even to tie it acceptably.
No race or country is completely immune to reality. Yes, I'm sure Russians can survive discomfort longer than Brits or Americans. But their capacity for hardship is not unlimited; hence the fact that Putin has conspicuously avoided drawing too many young men from Moscow or St Petersburg.
And there is a tipping point (as Tsar Nicholas discovered) when there is simply too much pain. Now maybe that tipping point is 2 million dead and wounded (almost half of all Russian men between 18 and 24), or maybe 3 million, but no country has an unlimited ability to wage war without constraints.
There is a tipping point in Russia, but I see no evidence at all that it's there any time soon, and my worry is that the brave Ukrainians will reach their tipping point first, in which case it's entirely academic where Russia's tipping point is. A Russian tipping point of 3 million dead implies maybe a million dead Ukrainians - would even that heroic country accept that?
Russia may collapse internally and sue for peace tomorrow, or someone may kill Putin and they might get a better leader, but the fact is they've proved much more willing to absorb death and impoverishment than anyone thought, so it would be ridiculous to make any plans based on that.
To repeat, by far the surest way to get Russia out of eastern and southern Ukraine is to give the Ukrainians the means to blast them out. If nothing else, you can see that in what Putin says. He doesn't threaten nuclear war whenever we sanction a few more banks. He does it when we provide Ukraine with effective weapons systems. Everything else, especially general economic sanctions, is a distracting side-issue.
Without equipment it doesn't matter how numerous Russian manpower is.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
I was in the Netherlands in October, they have streetside chargers.
You need a lot of power to provide 7kw of power to a street lamp compared to the 100w an LED light requires nowadays. Especially when you need to provide power to 2 cars at every light
Cars only need charging every couple of weeks. They aren't being charged every night at every lamp post.
Street lamps in the U.K. were wired to 20 or 32 amps. Which does make you wonder if plugging electric ovens into a street lamp was a thing.
The supply and cabling will need some work - which is being done on a rolling basis, in many places.
As I understand the way this works (Elec Eng degree), streetlights used to have bulbs which would be High Pressure Sodium (the orange ones), or some form of incandescent. These would need maybe 200W of power, which would reduce by 60-80% when they were changed to LED (hence revenue savings).
There would be a high power circuit along the street supplying a lot of lamps (use ~30 as an illustrative number, so 200W each = 6kW power perhaps from a 7kW circuit to give headroom). Then each streetlamp would have smaller wires inside the lamp standard. They would be in parallel so when one goes pop it does not kill all 30 streetlamps.
When they drop to 50-60W required by the LED, that leaves 60-80% of the street cable capacity spare as the streetlamps are a smaller load now, or ~100-140W per streetlamp.
So that leaves capacity to install your 4kW charger one every 25 or 30 or however many streetlamps, or a 2.5kW charger more often, or whatever, wired as a new parallel load from the street cable.
It won't support a charger every streetlamp, but it may give a couple every street - which is enough to make a start on the infra, and is useful for top up charging, or if you use it for an afternoon or overnight once a week.
There could be other factors, such as the supply might be 3-phase (I think 4 or 6 wires inside the street cable), so that even if something goes pop in the street it would only take out 1/3 of lights not the whole lot.
Newer estates etc would have a somewhat different design of electricity infrastructure, as required.
A much smaller lead than the 174 Labour majority though, showing that a large number of Labour MPs will vote with most of the Tories, Farage, Independents and the DUP against assisted dying
A much smaller lead than the 174 Labour majority though, showing that a large number of Labour MPs will vote with most of the Tories, Farage and the DUP against assisted dying
Telegraph David Lammy has said he would seek an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited the UK.
The Foreign Secretary said he would be obliged by law to go to the courts seeking permission for the arrest, saying he had no “discretion” over the issue.
The position is a stark contrast to France, which became the latest Western country to say it would not arrest the Israeli prime minister, leaving Britain isolated among its G7 allies.
Do Heads of Government and foreign ministers not travel with diplomatic immunity?
Can you even imagine the scenario where UK arrested Netanyahu on a visit to the UK ?
There is no point to an international court if signatories are selective about enacting its judgements.
Isn't the point that it lets you look virtuous when you agree with it's decisions?
This is a fascinating thread for those with an interest in technology.
🧵 I was traveling this week, and I didn't have a chance to do a thread on ASML's Investor Day. In my opinion, this is one of the most impressive yearly updates given by any company, and they make all of the presentations public. It combines deep insight into the overall market, their finances, and the complex technical roadmap for their tools... https://x.com/lithos_graphein/status/1857890769669144872
I love the fact that their EUV light source is provided by an laser obliterating 50k drops of molten tin every second.
And they measure their mirror stability in picometers (1/200th the width of a silicon atom).
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
Five years is a long time to sort out charging infrastructure (though I think they should have started several years ago). And, of course, in fine years the bay majority of cars on the road will still be fossil fuel cars, it's only the new ones that would have to be at least hybrids (only fossil fuel only cars are phased out in 2030).
But. There's no sign of the government getting their arse into gear to use these five years to put the charging infrastructure into place. It's incredibly frustrating. Everyone can see that it needs to be done. It's a clear example of a chicken/egg situation where the market is reluctant to install charging infrastructure before there are cars to use it, or for people to buy cars until there are the chargers to charge them with, and so a clear case for government intervention. And nothing appears to be happening.
The problem is even where the charging infrastructure is in place, the cost means hybrids are far cheaper to buy and operate than EVs.
I got my car, new, for many thousands less than the cheapest EVs on the market. Its a self-charging hybrid.
Refilling, I'm averaging £1 = 10 miles. £40 tank of unleaded (~30L) gets me over 400 miles.
However to get an EV not only costs many thousands more, but it costs more to refuel using public chargers. My local petrol station that I'm refilling at has fast chargers for EVs but it costs 65p per kWh. EVs I believe are get 3.5 miles per kWh so for 400 miles it would cost £74 to buy the kWh required for that distance, nearly twice the fuel cost per mile over what you get for unleaded - and of course the unleaded price is almost all tax.
Its not only necessary to make EV charging widespread, but affordable too.
FWIW, a quick search found several used electric cars for less than 10K near me. (I live in a Seattle suburb.) The 10 Tesla fast-charging stations at a nearby Fred Meyer hypermarket usually have 8 or 9 cars in them during my recent visits, so charging would not be a great problem, even though I live in a small apartment building.
I expect the price of electric cars to fall considerably in the next ten years, because they are inherently simpler than hybrids or ICE cars.
(FWIW, in my experience, Tesla owners are more considerate of pedestrians than owners of most cars. A relative thinks BMW owners are the worst car drivers. Of course some of the worst drivers are in high-end pickups.)
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
Five years is a long time to sort out charging infrastructure (though I think they should have started several years ago). And, of course, in fine years the bay majority of cars on the road will still be fossil fuel cars, it's only the new ones that would have to be at least hybrids (only fossil fuel only cars are phased out in 2030).
But. There's no sign of the government getting their arse into gear to use these five years to put the charging infrastructure into place. It's incredibly frustrating. Everyone can see that it needs to be done. It's a clear example of a chicken/egg situation where the market is reluctant to install charging infrastructure before there are cars to use it, or for people to buy cars until there are the chargers to charge them with, and so a clear case for government intervention. And nothing appears to be happening.
The problem is even where the charging infrastructure is in place, the cost means hybrids are far cheaper to buy and operate than EVs.
I got my car, new, for many thousands less than the cheapest EVs on the market. Its a self-charging hybrid.
Refilling, I'm averaging £1 = 10 miles. £40 tank of unleaded (~30L) gets me over 400 miles.
However to get an EV not only costs many thousands more, but it costs more to refuel using public chargers. My local petrol station that I'm refilling at has fast chargers for EVs but it costs 65p per kWh. EVs I believe are get 3.5 miles per kWh so for 400 miles it would cost £74 to buy the kWh required for that distance, nearly twice the fuel cost per mile over what you get for unleaded - and of course the unleaded price is almost all tax.
Its not only necessary to make EV charging widespread, but affordable too.
Charging at home is great value. Beats a tank full any day, and 60% of car owners have their own drive.
Indeed the thing that holds up public charging infrastructure is that people don't need to use them*. In 4 years I have used them a handful of times. * though a common app and simple transparent payment would help.
I am thinking of making the transition from my clapped out ICE to a brand new EV next year.
And if I can live with the transition for a lawnmower, I will be a step nearer to considering it for a car.
I have had my kia eniro over 4 years and it drives like new, and with the same range of 270 miles too (230 in winter).
EVs are at that point where ICE becomes the expensive option. It's like the transition from film to digital cameras. At some point it becomes the sensible and cheaper choice.
(I still use my OM1, but only 2 films per year, and they get scanned in so analogue is a bit of an analogue ferltish really)
EVs are only at that point if you have a driveway at home.
If you rely on public chargers, it is not remotely the case.
Charging a hybrid is cheaper than charging an EV using public chargers - as well as being cheaper to buy the vehicle too.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
Five years is a long time to sort out charging infrastructure (though I think they should have started several years ago). And, of course, in fine years the bay majority of cars on the road will still be fossil fuel cars, it's only the new ones that would have to be at least hybrids (only fossil fuel only cars are phased out in 2030).
But. There's no sign of the government getting their arse into gear to use these five years to put the charging infrastructure into place. It's incredibly frustrating. Everyone can see that it needs to be done. It's a clear example of a chicken/egg situation where the market is reluctant to install charging infrastructure before there are cars to use it, or for people to buy cars until there are the chargers to charge them with, and so a clear case for government intervention. And nothing appears to be happening.
The problem is even where the charging infrastructure is in place, the cost means hybrids are far cheaper to buy and operate than EVs.
I got my car, new, for many thousands less than the cheapest EVs on the market. Its a self-charging hybrid.
Refilling, I'm averaging £1 = 10 miles. £40 tank of unleaded (~30L) gets me over 400 miles.
However to get an EV not only costs many thousands more, but it costs more to refuel using public chargers. My local petrol station that I'm refilling at has fast chargers for EVs but it costs 65p per kWh. EVs I believe are get 3.5 miles per kWh so for 400 miles it would cost £74 to buy the kWh required for that distance, nearly twice the fuel cost per mile over what you get for unleaded - and of course the unleaded price is almost all tax.
Its not only necessary to make EV charging widespread, but affordable too.
Charging at home is great value. Beats a tank full any day, and 60% of car owners have their own drive.
Indeed the thing that holds up public charging infrastructure is that people don't need to use them*. In 4 years I have used them a handful of times. * though a common app and simple transparent payment would help.
Great.
So for the 40% who don't have a drive . . . ? ? ?
We don't need an "I'm alright Jack" attitude from people who have a driveway when 40% of people don't. 40% of the population is equivalent of course to more than every single Labour voter in the country at the last election, its not nobody.
This is a fascinating thread for those with an interest in technology.
🧵 I was traveling this week, and I didn't have a chance to do a thread on ASML's Investor Day. In my opinion, this is one of the most impressive yearly updates given by any company, and they make all of the presentations public. It combines deep insight into the overall market, their finances, and the complex technical roadmap for their tools... https://x.com/lithos_graphein/status/1857890769669144872
I love the fact that their EUV light source is provided by an laser obliterating 50k drops of molten tin every second.
And they measure their mirror stability in picometers (1/200th the width of a silicon atom).
As someone who works with ebeam/nanotech.... let the thigh-rubbing commence!
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
I think the worry about EV infrastructure is only raised by ICE drivers. I don’t drive that much and I charge my Niro EV from a standard 13A socket at home whenever it needs it. I have done London to Manchester on a single charge. The only time I need a fast charge is when I do a long distance journey and then it’s just a matter of planning a food stop in advance that has a convenient charger nearby.
It may well be the Russian Central Bank is out of finance to support the ruble. The interest rate is already over 20% what are they going to do to, push it up further?
Its really been stuffed last few days after a long & massive effort to keep it below 100 to the US dollar and its taking a pasting against pretty much every other currency. Something is wrong there that we dont know yet because this drop is very sudden and rather rapid.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
Five years is a long time to sort out charging infrastructure (though I think they should have started several years ago). And, of course, in fine years the bay majority of cars on the road will still be fossil fuel cars, it's only the new ones that would have to be at least hybrids (only fossil fuel only cars are phased out in 2030).
But. There's no sign of the government getting their arse into gear to use these five years to put the charging infrastructure into place. It's incredibly frustrating. Everyone can see that it needs to be done. It's a clear example of a chicken/egg situation where the market is reluctant to install charging infrastructure before there are cars to use it, or for people to buy cars until there are the chargers to charge them with, and so a clear case for government intervention. And nothing appears to be happening.
The problem is even where the charging infrastructure is in place, the cost means hybrids are far cheaper to buy and operate than EVs.
I got my car, new, for many thousands less than the cheapest EVs on the market. Its a self-charging hybrid.
Refilling, I'm averaging £1 = 10 miles. £40 tank of unleaded (~30L) gets me over 400 miles.
However to get an EV not only costs many thousands more, but it costs more to refuel using public chargers. My local petrol station that I'm refilling at has fast chargers for EVs but it costs 65p per kWh. EVs I believe are get 3.5 miles per kWh so for 400 miles it would cost £74 to buy the kWh required for that distance, nearly twice the fuel cost per mile over what you get for unleaded - and of course the unleaded price is almost all tax.
Its not only necessary to make EV charging widespread, but affordable too.
Charging at home is great value. Beats a tank full any day, and 60% of car owners have their own drive.
Indeed the thing that holds up public charging infrastructure is that people don't need to use them*. In 4 years I have used them a handful of times. * though a common app and simple transparent payment would help.
Great.
So for the 40% who don't have a drive . . . ? ? ?
We don't need an "I'm alright Jack" attitude from people who have a driveway when 40% of people don't. 40% of the population is equivalent of course to more than every single Labour voter in the country at the last election, its not nobody.
They can use public chargers fairly readily. It's more expensive, but even the economics there are plrapidly improving.
My simple point is that the majority of car owners simply don't need to use charging infrastructure as they have their own.
I am thinking of making the transition from my clapped out ICE to a brand new EV next year.
And if I can live with the transition for a lawnmower, I will be a step nearer to considering it for a car.
I have had my kia eniro over 4 years and it drives like new, and with the same range of 270 miles too (230 in winter).
EVs are at that point where ICE becomes the expensive option. It's like the transition from film to digital cameras. At some point it becomes the sensible and cheaper choice.
(I still use my OM1, but only 2 films per year, and they get scanned in so analogue is a bit of an analogue ferltish really)
EVs are only at that point if you have a driveway at home.
If you rely on public chargers, it is not remotely the case.
Charging a hybrid is cheaper than charging an EV using public chargers - as well as being cheaper to buy the vehicle too.
The alleged UFO at Manc airport looks like the most pathetically sad party balloon in the rain. TBF
Like all UFOs.
UFOs were entertaining when the X-Files was running. That got cancelled decades ago now though.
Now its just sad.
And yet... the Houses of Congress in the USA have had the weirdest, most detailed hearings on UFOs in their history
That is the one thing that makes the contemporary flap stand out. And I have yet to hear a single convincing explanation for why so many serious American Establishment figures are taking this so seriously. I have heard multiple explanations from Mass Delusion to Pentagon/CIA psyops to actual UFOs and none really covers the bases
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
Five years is a long time to sort out charging infrastructure (though I think they should have started several years ago). And, of course, in fine years the bay majority of cars on the road will still be fossil fuel cars, it's only the new ones that would have to be at least hybrids (only fossil fuel only cars are phased out in 2030).
But. There's no sign of the government getting their arse into gear to use these five years to put the charging infrastructure into place. It's incredibly frustrating. Everyone can see that it needs to be done. It's a clear example of a chicken/egg situation where the market is reluctant to install charging infrastructure before there are cars to use it, or for people to buy cars until there are the chargers to charge them with, and so a clear case for government intervention. And nothing appears to be happening.
The problem is even where the charging infrastructure is in place, the cost means hybrids are far cheaper to buy and operate than EVs.
I got my car, new, for many thousands less than the cheapest EVs on the market. Its a self-charging hybrid.
Refilling, I'm averaging £1 = 10 miles. £40 tank of unleaded (~30L) gets me over 400 miles.
However to get an EV not only costs many thousands more, but it costs more to refuel using public chargers. My local petrol station that I'm refilling at has fast chargers for EVs but it costs 65p per kWh. EVs I believe are get 3.5 miles per kWh so for 400 miles it would cost £74 to buy the kWh required for that distance, nearly twice the fuel cost per mile over what you get for unleaded - and of course the unleaded price is almost all tax.
Its not only necessary to make EV charging widespread, but affordable too.
The high price for public chargers is likely a function of their relative rarity - people don't have much choice but to use the charger they find, and so the price charged is exorbitant. 65p per kWh is £650 per MWh, which compares to the average price of a MWh over the last year of £69.22. Obviously the cost of installation, maintenance, operation and a profit margin needs to be paid for, but a near tenfold markup on the wholesale price of electricity is hopefully only a temporary absurdity.
If, at some point in the future, the markup is a factor of two, then that makes the cost of your 400 miles about £8 - probably quite a bit cheaper than petrol, even if the petrol was untaxed. And, of course, the EV charger in the future will likely have a battery powering it, a battery charged using very cheap overnight electricity, and so you'd expect there to be a lot of scope for competition to drive the cost of EV charging even lower.
I am thinking of making the transition from my clapped out ICE to a brand new EV next year.
And if I can live with the transition for a lawnmower, I will be a step nearer to considering it for a car.
I have had my kia eniro over 4 years and it drives like new, and with the same range of 270 miles too (230 in winter).
EVs are at that point where ICE becomes the expensive option. It's like the transition from film to digital cameras. At some point it becomes the sensible and cheaper choice.
(I still use my OM1, but only 2 films per year, and they get scanned in so analogue is a bit of an analogue ferltish really)
EVs are only at that point if you have a driveway at home.
If you rely on public chargers, it is not remotely the case.
Charging a hybrid is cheaper than charging an EV using public chargers - as well as being cheaper to buy the vehicle too.
And hybrids will be sold until 2035.
What's going to change between now and then to bring the price of recharging publicly down by at least 50% in real terms from what it is today?
Its no good just having public charging available if its unaffordable - nor to have a "let them eat cake" attitude of "well just charge at home" when that isn't an option for millions of people.
Badenoch raised the petition? What on earth was she thinking
Starmer’s reply: “at this rate, In a couple of weeks time there will be a petition to have another election for Conservative Party leader. Totally childish Trumpian politics, don’t you agree? given next to no time to actually deliver.”
It highlights two problems for Kemi. PMQs isn’t just pressure on a PM, the UK system puts opposition leaders under much scrutiny too, where you need to be constructive in opposition. The whole political and electoral system UK is quite a lot different than the US - gimmicky but ineffective opposition under such scrutiny in Parliament, where you hold a senior Parliamentary role in our constitution, will get you nowhere but into trouble.
And as much as so many PBers think next election will be walk in park for Conservatives, what happens between GE days can so often be fools gold as to what actually happens on GE days - it’s a day that asks voters a completely different question than “what do you think of it so far”. to move GE votes Kemi needs to offer changed messaging and policies. It’s noticeable Kemi isn’t pushing the withdraw from ECHR very loudly, but tonight she did tie herself to the old governments Rwanda policy, on the basis it would act as a deterrent and smash the criminal gangs facilitating such high volume of Channel crossings.
Calling it a deterrent is where it so obviously fell apart the last few years. “How many sent to developing Africa never to return, at what cost to UK tax payer, before gang busting deterrent kicks in” was easy question utterly failed to be answered, despite having years and all government machinery to answer it.
It’s a balancing act to offer something fresh, but constructive and credible. I think it’s far too early to judge how Kemi is doing. But with 1500 days to play with, it would be better to wait for something fresh and constructive to be devised, rather than reach for failed policy and arguments right now.
I am thinking of making the transition from my clapped out ICE to a brand new EV next year.
And if I can live with the transition for a lawnmower, I will be a step nearer to considering it for a car.
I have had my kia eniro over 4 years and it drives like new, and with the same range of 270 miles too (230 in winter).
EVs are at that point where ICE becomes the expensive option. It's like the transition from film to digital cameras. At some point it becomes the sensible and cheaper choice.
(I still use my OM1, but only 2 films per year, and they get scanned in so analogue is a bit of an analogue ferltish really)
EVs are only at that point if you have a driveway at home.
If you rely on public chargers, it is not remotely the case.
Charging a hybrid is cheaper than charging an EV using public chargers - as well as being cheaper to buy the vehicle too.
And hybrids will be sold until 2035.
What's going to change between now and then to bring the price of recharging publicly down by at least 50% in real terms from what it is today?
Its no good just having public charging available if its unaffordable - nor to have a "let them eat cake" attitude of "well just charge at home" when that isn't an option for millions of people.
Come on Bart you know the answer to this, you've provided it often enough. Competition will drive the price of public charging down. Competition and improvements to technology. Just as those two have reduced the price of near enough everything since the dawn of capitalism.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
Five years is a long time to sort out charging infrastructure (though I think they should have started several years ago). And, of course, in fine years the bay majority of cars on the road will still be fossil fuel cars, it's only the new ones that would have to be at least hybrids (only fossil fuel only cars are phased out in 2030).
But. There's no sign of the government getting their arse into gear to use these five years to put the charging infrastructure into place. It's incredibly frustrating. Everyone can see that it needs to be done. It's a clear example of a chicken/egg situation where the market is reluctant to install charging infrastructure before there are cars to use it, or for people to buy cars until there are the chargers to charge them with, and so a clear case for government intervention. And nothing appears to be happening.
The problem is even where the charging infrastructure is in place, the cost means hybrids are far cheaper to buy and operate than EVs.
I got my car, new, for many thousands less than the cheapest EVs on the market. Its a self-charging hybrid.
Refilling, I'm averaging £1 = 10 miles. £40 tank of unleaded (~30L) gets me over 400 miles.
However to get an EV not only costs many thousands more, but it costs more to refuel using public chargers. My local petrol station that I'm refilling at has fast chargers for EVs but it costs 65p per kWh. EVs I believe are get 3.5 miles per kWh so for 400 miles it would cost £74 to buy the kWh required for that distance, nearly twice the fuel cost per mile over what you get for unleaded - and of course the unleaded price is almost all tax.
Its not only necessary to make EV charging widespread, but affordable too.
The high price for public chargers is likely a function of their relative rarity - people don't have much choice but to use the charger they find, and so the price charged is exorbitant. 65p per kWh is £650 per MWh, which compares to the average price of a MWh over the last year of £69.22. Obviously the cost of installation, maintenance, operation and a profit margin needs to be paid for, but a near tenfold markup on the wholesale price of electricity is hopefully only a temporary absurdity.
If, at some point in the future, the markup is a factor of two, then that makes the cost of your 400 miles about £8 - probably quite a bit cheaper than petrol, even if the petrol was untaxed. And, of course, the EV charger in the future will likely have a battery powering it, a battery charged using very cheap overnight electricity, and so you'd expect there to be a lot of scope for competition to drive the cost of EV charging even lower.
That's a good response, thank you.
I hope you're right though I'm more hopeful than expecting for such a dramatic reduction in markup. Hopefully it does happen, but bearing in mind the cost of real estate and infrastructure needs covering in the markup and not just the cost of the equipment then that can be a problem.
My local Marks and Spencer cafe has just become cashless. Disappointing. You also have to use big screens to order things, like in McDonalds or Burger King.
I am thinking of making the transition from my clapped out ICE to a brand new EV next year.
And if I can live with the transition for a lawnmower, I will be a step nearer to considering it for a car.
I have had my kia eniro over 4 years and it drives like new, and with the same range of 270 miles too (230 in winter).
EVs are at that point where ICE becomes the expensive option. It's like the transition from film to digital cameras. At some point it becomes the sensible and cheaper choice.
(I still use my OM1, but only 2 films per year, and they get scanned in so analogue is a bit of an analogue ferltish really)
EVs are only at that point if you have a driveway at home.
If you rely on public chargers, it is not remotely the case.
Charging a hybrid is cheaper than charging an EV using public chargers - as well as being cheaper to buy the vehicle too.
And hybrids will be sold until 2035.
What's going to change between now and then to bring the price of recharging publicly down by at least 50% in real terms from what it is today?
Its no good just having public charging available if its unaffordable - nor to have a "let them eat cake" attitude of "well just charge at home" when that isn't an option for millions of people.
The other issue is that you need the equivalent (I've heard it said) of two new nuclear power stations to recharge the full fleet of vehicles.
Good luck getting those built by 2030. Or even 2035.
Telegraph David Lammy has said he would seek an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited the UK.
The Foreign Secretary said he would be obliged by law to go to the courts seeking permission for the arrest, saying he had no “discretion” over the issue.
The position is a stark contrast to France, which became the latest Western country to say it would not arrest the Israeli prime minister, leaving Britain isolated among its G7 allies.
Do Heads of Government and foreign ministers not travel with diplomatic immunity?
Can you even imagine the scenario where UK arrested Netanyahu on a visit to the UK ?
I know some of you PB Tories believe Netanyah to be a great guy, but he really is not a nice man. Even Tory grandee Max Hastings believes him to be a very unpleasant chap.
The final opinion poll for the Irish election has been published. The results are pretty much inline with the last couple of polls. Fine Gael are down, Sinn Fein are up, the big three parties are near enough level, and there's no sign of any small party in particular having caught the public's imagination - none have polled higher than 6%. The scores from the Red C/Business Post poll are:
Fianna Fail 21% Fine Gael 20% Sinn Fein 20% Social Democrats 6% Labour 4% Greens 4% Aontu 4% Independent Ireland 4% People Before Profit-Solidarity 2% Other parties 1% Independents 14%
An exit poll is promised, though I don't know what its track record has been.
I am thinking of making the transition from my clapped out ICE to a brand new EV next year.
And if I can live with the transition for a lawnmower, I will be a step nearer to considering it for a car.
I have had my kia eniro over 4 years and it drives like new, and with the same range of 270 miles too (230 in winter).
EVs are at that point where ICE becomes the expensive option. It's like the transition from film to digital cameras. At some point it becomes the sensible and cheaper choice.
(I still use my OM1, but only 2 films per year, and they get scanned in so analogue is a bit of an analogue ferltish really)
EVs are only at that point if you have a driveway at home.
If you rely on public chargers, it is not remotely the case.
Charging a hybrid is cheaper than charging an EV using public chargers - as well as being cheaper to buy the vehicle too.
And hybrids will be sold until 2035.
What's going to change between now and then to bring the price of recharging publicly down by at least 50% in real terms from what it is today?
Its no good just having public charging available if its unaffordable - nor to have a "let them eat cake" attitude of "well just charge at home" when that isn't an option for millions of people.
The other issue is that you need the equivalent (I've heard it said) of two new nuclear power stations to recharge the full fleet of vehicles.
Good luck getting those built by 2030. Or even 2035.
Or you need many wind turbines and batteries. That's not the bit I'm worried about.
>My local Marks and Spencer cafe has just become cashless. Disappointing. You also have to use big screens to order things, like in McDonalds or Burger King.
A very wise move. Few customers use cash, there’s no point M&S persisting with it, given the cost, risk and labour involved in handling it. Many retailers are moving that way: the march of online shopping has rendered cash-handling a competitive disadvantage.
Interestingly, the new pub opening near me is cashless.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
Five years is a long time to sort out charging infrastructure (though I think they should have started several years ago). And, of course, in fine years the bay majority of cars on the road will still be fossil fuel cars, it's only the new ones that would have to be at least hybrids (only fossil fuel only cars are phased out in 2030).
But. There's no sign of the government getting their arse into gear to use these five years to put the charging infrastructure into place. It's incredibly frustrating. Everyone can see that it needs to be done. It's a clear example of a chicken/egg situation where the market is reluctant to install charging infrastructure before there are cars to use it, or for people to buy cars until there are the chargers to charge them with, and so a clear case for government intervention. And nothing appears to be happening.
The problem is even where the charging infrastructure is in place, the cost means hybrids are far cheaper to buy and operate than EVs.
I got my car, new, for many thousands less than the cheapest EVs on the market. Its a self-charging hybrid.
Refilling, I'm averaging £1 = 10 miles. £40 tank of unleaded (~30L) gets me over 400 miles.
However to get an EV not only costs many thousands more, but it costs more to refuel using public chargers. My local petrol station that I'm refilling at has fast chargers for EVs but it costs 65p per kWh. EVs I believe are get 3.5 miles per kWh so for 400 miles it would cost £74 to buy the kWh required for that distance, nearly twice the fuel cost per mile over what you get for unleaded - and of course the unleaded price is almost all tax.
Its not only necessary to make EV charging widespread, but affordable too.
The high price for public chargers is likely a function of their relative rarity - people don't have much choice but to use the charger they find, and so the price charged is exorbitant. 65p per kWh is £650 per MWh, which compares to the average price of a MWh over the last year of £69.22. Obviously the cost of installation, maintenance, operation and a profit margin needs to be paid for, but a near tenfold markup on the wholesale price of electricity is hopefully only a temporary absurdity.
If, at some point in the future, the markup is a factor of two, then that makes the cost of your 400 miles about £8 - probably quite a bit cheaper than petrol, even if the petrol was untaxed. And, of course, the EV charger in the future will likely have a battery powering it, a battery charged using very cheap overnight electricity, and so you'd expect there to be a lot of scope for competition to drive the cost of EV charging even lower.
This is already reflected in the cost of EVs in car clubs. It's currently 14p per mile, versus 29p per mile in the ICEs.
And car clubs are probably the most efficient way to increase car access in densely populated areas - we use it as our second car.
>My local Marks and Spencer cafe has just become cashless. Disappointing. You also have to use big screens to order things, like in McDonalds or Burger King.
A very wise move. Few customers use cash, there’s no point M&S persisting with it, given the cost, risk and labour involved in handling it. Many retailers are moving that way: the march of online shopping has rendered cash-handling a competitive disadvantage.
Interestingly, the new pub opening near me is cashless.
In the future having scraps paper and tin in your pocket will be as niche as having a chequebook is.
>My local Marks and Spencer cafe has just become cashless. Disappointing. You also have to use big screens to order things, like in McDonalds or Burger King.
A very wise move. Few customers use cash, there’s no point M&S persisting with it, given the cost, risk and labour involved in handling it. Many retailers are moving that way: the march of online shopping has rendered cash-handling a competitive disadvantage.
Interestingly, the new pub opening near me is cashless.
In the future having scraps paper and tin in your pocket will be as niche as having a chequebook is.
The future is already here for many firms.
I was surprised when my father-in-law had a new chequebook delivered recently. Apart from anything else, I would have expected him to use cash in preference to cheques.
Telegraph David Lammy has said he would seek an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited the UK.
The Foreign Secretary said he would be obliged by law to go to the courts seeking permission for the arrest, saying he had no “discretion” over the issue.
The position is a stark contrast to France, which became the latest Western country to say it would not arrest the Israeli prime minister, leaving Britain isolated among its G7 allies.
Do Heads of Government and foreign ministers not travel with diplomatic immunity?
Can you even imagine the scenario where UK arrested Netanyahu on a visit to the UK ?
I know some of you PB Tories believe Netanyah to be a great guy, but he really is not a nice man. Even Tory grandee Max Hastings believes him to be a very unpleasant chap.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
Five years is a long time to sort out charging infrastructure (though I think they should have started several years ago). And, of course, in fine years the bay majority of cars on the road will still be fossil fuel cars, it's only the new ones that would have to be at least hybrids (only fossil fuel only cars are phased out in 2030).
But. There's no sign of the government getting their arse into gear to use these five years to put the charging infrastructure into place. It's incredibly frustrating. Everyone can see that it needs to be done. It's a clear example of a chicken/egg situation where the market is reluctant to install charging infrastructure before there are cars to use it, or for people to buy cars until there are the chargers to charge them with, and so a clear case for government intervention. And nothing appears to be happening.
The problem is even where the charging infrastructure is in place, the cost means hybrids are far cheaper to buy and operate than EVs.
I got my car, new, for many thousands less than the cheapest EVs on the market. Its a self-charging hybrid.
Refilling, I'm averaging £1 = 10 miles. £40 tank of unleaded (~30L) gets me over 400 miles.
However to get an EV not only costs many thousands more, but it costs more to refuel using public chargers. My local petrol station that I'm refilling at has fast chargers for EVs but it costs 65p per kWh. EVs I believe are get 3.5 miles per kWh so for 400 miles it would cost £74 to buy the kWh required for that distance, nearly twice the fuel cost per mile over what you get for unleaded - and of course the unleaded price is almost all tax.
Its not only necessary to make EV charging widespread, but affordable too.
The high price for public chargers is likely a function of their relative rarity - people don't have much choice but to use the charger they find, and so the price charged is exorbitant. 65p per kWh is £650 per MWh, which compares to the average price of a MWh over the last year of £69.22. Obviously the cost of installation, maintenance, operation and a profit margin needs to be paid for, but a near tenfold markup on the wholesale price of electricity is hopefully only a temporary absurdity.
If, at some point in the future, the markup is a factor of two, then that makes the cost of your 400 miles about £8 - probably quite a bit cheaper than petrol, even if the petrol was untaxed. And, of course, the EV charger in the future will likely have a battery powering it, a battery charged using very cheap overnight electricity, and so you'd expect there to be a lot of scope for competition to drive the cost of EV charging even lower.
That's a good response, thank you.
I hope you're right though I'm more hopeful than expecting for such a dramatic reduction in markup. Hopefully it does happen, but bearing in mind the cost of real estate and infrastructure needs covering in the markup and not just the cost of the equipment then that can be a problem.
The other thing to bear in mind is it's service station pricing. You only use them when you are desperate, and in an EV you really have no other choice on a long journey. I doubt it's the cost of supply/infrastructure that sets the price.
It was absolute chaos at Tebay EV charging last time I was there. They could've probably charged a lot more.
It may well be the Russian Central Bank is out of finance to support the ruble. The interest rate is already over 20% what are they going to do to, push it up further?
Its really been stuffed last few days after a long & massive effort to keep it below 100 to the US dollar and its taking a pasting against pretty much every other currency. Something is wrong there that we dont know yet because this drop is very sudden and rather rapid.
“Something is wrong there that we dont know yet” would you like to give us your most informed type of guess?
I’ll have a go. Is it Putin’s health. Has he had a stroke or heart attack, or failed to keep lid on some bad health news?
>My local Marks and Spencer cafe has just become cashless. Disappointing. You also have to use big screens to order things, like in McDonalds or Burger King.
A very wise move. Few customers use cash, there’s no point M&S persisting with it, given the cost, risk and labour involved in handling it. Many retailers are moving that way: the march of online shopping has rendered cash-handling a competitive disadvantage.
Interestingly, the new pub opening near me is cashless.
In the future having scraps paper and tin in your pocket will be as niche as having a chequebook is.
The future is already here for many firms.
And indeed for many customers, who have come to realise that cash is pointless.
A much smaller lead than the 174 Labour majority though, showing that a large number of Labour MPs will vote with most of the Tories, Farage and the DUP against assisted dying
It's a free vote, not a confidence vote.
And with good reason, you can see how toxic it could have become if it was associated to a party.
>My local Marks and Spencer cafe has just become cashless. Disappointing. You also have to use big screens to order things, like in McDonalds or Burger King.
A very wise move. Few customers use cash, there’s no point M&S persisting with it, given the cost, risk and labour involved in handling it. Many retailers are moving that way: the march of online shopping has rendered cash-handling a competitive disadvantage.
Interestingly, the new pub opening near me is cashless.
In the future having scraps paper and tin in your pocket will be as niche as having a chequebook is.
The future is already here for many firms.
I was surprised when my father-in-law had a new chequebook delivered recently. Apart from anything else, I would have expected him to use cash in preference to cheques.
He’s a wise man. Cheques are superior to cash. Take a picture of a cheque in your app and the money goes straight into your bank account. Of course, he could just BACS the money - but cheques still have better functionality than cash.
The final opinion poll for the Irish election has been published. The results are pretty much inline with the last couple of polls. Fine Gael are down, Sinn Fein are up, the big three parties are near enough level, and there's no sign of any small party in particular having caught the public's imagination - none have polled higher than 6%. The scores from the Red C/Business Post poll are:
Fianna Fail 21% Fine Gael 20% Sinn Fein 20% Social Democrats 6% Labour 4% Greens 4% Aontu 4% Independent Ireland 4% People Before Profit-Solidarity 2% Other parties 1% Independents 14%
An exit poll is promised, though I don't know what its track record has been.
I suspect a big smirk on Michael Martin's face on election night as the fresh faced young Harris has seen his big lead collapse to nothing after his gaffe with a carer and his FG will now end up junior partner again to MM's FF.
Compared to the last Irish election in 2020 though SF are the biggest losers down 4%, FF down 1% and FG unchanged.
Of the minor parties the Greens down 3%, Labour and PBF unchanged and Aontu the biggest gainers up almost 3%
Telegraph David Lammy has said he would seek an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited the UK.
The Foreign Secretary said he would be obliged by law to go to the courts seeking permission for the arrest, saying he had no “discretion” over the issue.
The position is a stark contrast to France, which became the latest Western country to say it would not arrest the Israeli prime minister, leaving Britain isolated among its G7 allies.
Do Heads of Government and foreign ministers not travel with diplomatic immunity?
Can you even imagine the scenario where UK arrested Netanyahu on a visit to the UK ?
I know some of you PB Tories believe Netanyah to be a great guy, but he really is not a nice man. Even Tory grandee Max Hastings believes him to be a very unpleasant chap.
One thing to bear in mind with the Irish election is that Sinn Fein have been much more ambitious with their candidate selection this time. They have 71 candidates, while in 2020 they stood only 42, of which 37 were elected. If they had stood more candidates in 2020 it's generally thought that they would have had more TDs elected, so they could make quite a few gains even with roughly the same vote share split, which was 24.5% - 22.2% - 20.9% for SF - FF - FG last time.
A much smaller lead than the 174 Labour majority though, showing that a large number of Labour MPs will vote with most of the Tories, Farage and the DUP against assisted dying
It's a free vote, not a confidence vote.
I'd likely support the bill at 1st and 2nd reading, and reject at 3rd as it currently stands.
Since we are talking Nissan etc. EVs, and the plan to only sell EVs from 2030 with a total end to petrol and diesel sales. How feasible/believable do people find this target?
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
Five years is a long time to sort out charging infrastructure (though I think they should have started several years ago). And, of course, in fine years the bay majority of cars on the road will still be fossil fuel cars, it's only the new ones that would have to be at least hybrids (only fossil fuel only cars are phased out in 2030).
But. There's no sign of the government getting their arse into gear to use these five years to put the charging infrastructure into place. It's incredibly frustrating. Everyone can see that it needs to be done. It's a clear example of a chicken/egg situation where the market is reluctant to install charging infrastructure before there are cars to use it, or for people to buy cars until there are the chargers to charge them with, and so a clear case for government intervention. And nothing appears to be happening.
The problem is even where the charging infrastructure is in place, the cost means hybrids are far cheaper to buy and operate than EVs.
I got my car, new, for many thousands less than the cheapest EVs on the market. Its a self-charging hybrid.
Refilling, I'm averaging £1 = 10 miles. £40 tank of unleaded (~30L) gets me over 400 miles.
However to get an EV not only costs many thousands more, but it costs more to refuel using public chargers. My local petrol station that I'm refilling at has fast chargers for EVs but it costs 65p per kWh. EVs I believe are get 3.5 miles per kWh so for 400 miles it would cost £74 to buy the kWh required for that distance, nearly twice the fuel cost per mile over what you get for unleaded - and of course the unleaded price is almost all tax.
Its not only necessary to make EV charging widespread, but affordable too.
The high price for public chargers is likely a function of their relative rarity - people don't have much choice but to use the charger they find, and so the price charged is exorbitant. 65p per kWh is £650 per MWh, which compares to the average price of a MWh over the last year of £69.22. Obviously the cost of installation, maintenance, operation and a profit margin needs to be paid for, but a near tenfold markup on the wholesale price of electricity is hopefully only a temporary absurdity.
If, at some point in the future, the markup is a factor of two, then that makes the cost of your 400 miles about £8 - probably quite a bit cheaper than petrol, even if the petrol was untaxed. And, of course, the EV charger in the future will likely have a battery powering it, a battery charged using very cheap overnight electricity, and so you'd expect there to be a lot of scope for competition to drive the cost of EV charging even lower.
That's a good response, thank you.
I hope you're right though I'm more hopeful than expecting for such a dramatic reduction in markup. Hopefully it does happen, but bearing in mind the cost of real estate and infrastructure needs covering in the markup and not just the cost of the equipment then that can be a problem.
The other thing to bear in mind is it's service station pricing. You only use them when you are desperate, and in an EV you really have no other choice on a long journey. I doubt it's the cost of supply/infrastructure that sets the price.
It was absolute chaos at Tebay EV charging last time I was there. They could've probably charged a lot more.
"You only use them when desperate" - well where else do you charge?
One thing to bear in mind with the Irish election is that Sinn Fein have been much more ambitious with their candidate selection this time. They have 71 candidates, while in 2020 they stood only 42, of which 37 were elected. If they had stood more candidates in 2020 it's generally thought that they would have had more TDs elected, so they could make quite a few gains even with roughly the same vote share split, which was 24.5% - 22.2% - 20.9% for SF - FF - FG last time.
They may but have been leaking to Aontu, who as the most anti immigration and anti abortion of the Irish parties shows even Ireland is not immune to the western swing to the populist right
It may well be the Russian Central Bank is out of finance to support the ruble. The interest rate is already over 20% what are they going to do to, push it up further?
Its really been stuffed last few days after a long & massive effort to keep it below 100 to the US dollar and its taking a pasting against pretty much every other currency. Something is wrong there that we dont know yet because this drop is very sudden and rather rapid.
“Something is wrong there that we dont know yet” would you like to give us your most informed type of guess?
I’ll have a go. Is it Putin’s health. Has he had a stroke or heart attack, or failed to keep lid on some bad health news?
I don't know. Russia is running out of reserves with the national wealth fund being massively drawn down, its oil is worth less and less and possibly now selling below its extraction and delivery costs. its The ruble's rate of drop in the last lot of days though is really notable, its more than the Russian Central Bank reporting that things are difficult, everyone knows that, its broken two psycholoigcal levels in days.
I think that is a bit of fiction from the Daily Telegraph. Surely the vibe the Labour Party is putting out about the Chagos deal now is that it is not set in stone, and they have no intention to bring it to Parliament untill after Trump is sworn in.
The truth could be a far more interesting story than what the Telegraph has gone with. Starmer government happy for Trump to ride to their rescue and “own the killing” of the Chagos deal, so they won’t have to do it themselves. Any hit from losing this deal will only last days or hours.
Based on half hearted vibes and feet dragging now coming out of Labour on Chagos deal, I’m 100% convinced it’s not going to happen.
Comments
https://www.xe.com/en-gb/currencycharts/?from=RUB&to=USD&view=1Y
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I suspect the contemporary problem is the opposite: hole-in-the-wall enterprises that seem to have few customers but bank thousands in cash every day. 'Turkish' barbers, 'Thai' massage parlours, nail bars, tattoo 'artists', vape shops...
(blockquotes screwed up)
Being honest I cannot see for the life of me where the infrastructure for that is coming in the next 5 years to make it work.
And living in a town where I've no drive for my own charger and the charging points are a couple at the train station and a couple at the Tesco in the next town, I'm wondering how on earth that gets scaled up in time to make it feasible, unless super-fast charging is the miracle solution and all the petrol stations miraculously turn into charging stations pretty much overnight.
Maybe I'm missing the obvious though.
And there is a tipping point (as Tsar Nicholas discovered) when there is simply too much pain. Now maybe that tipping point is 2 million dead and wounded (almost half of all Russian men between 18 and 24), or maybe 3 million, but no country has an unlimited ability to wage war without constraints.
But. There's no sign of the government getting their arse into gear to use these five years to put the charging infrastructure into place. It's incredibly frustrating. Everyone can see that it needs to be done. It's a clear example of a chicken/egg situation where the market is reluctant to install charging infrastructure before there are cars to use it, or for people to buy cars until there are the chargers to charge them with, and so a clear case for government intervention. And nothing appears to be happening.
Like the home gas boiler deadline I think there would be slippage. There isn't really a second hand market there.
Fast charging is the only way. And even that needs a big infrastructure project.
50% return in 5 years or less if you were foolish enough to lay it.
So there is still plenty of time to get proper infrastructure in - but that needs to start now. A lot of the hand-wringing over the 2030 target was about whether car manufacturers could achieve it, but the government have shot themselves in the foot because they haven't kept up with industry. You can pick up a new Dacia Spring for £15,000, so the tech has already permeated to the bottom of the market.
You don't need the whole thing, sure, but you need to make a reasonably sizeable dent in it.
Interesting, as in going against all evidence, since the recorded history of laws began.
My car is a mild hybrid. It's basically a petrol car with a little bit of regenerative braking. It's not a very hybridy hybrid, if that makes sense, and the suspicion is it's just a nice way of being able to call it a hybrid when really it's still a petrol car.
EXCLUSIVE from my colleague
@MaxKendix
The campaign to legalise assisted dying has a clear lead among MPs, biggest survey yet finds
Survey covers **three quarters** of MPs in the Commons - 505 in total - based on public comments and contacting them directly
For 264
Against 215
Abstain 26
Unknown 145
The unknowns could swing it either way
But the majority of the Lab and Lib Dem unknowns are expected to vote in favour of the bill
https://x.com/Steven_Swinford/status/1861899831062774034
The supply and cabling will need some work - which is being done on a rolling basis, in many places.
My local council got Chargy to put EV chargers on the lamp posts, only 4kW though.
And if I can live with the transition for a lawnmower, I will be a step nearer to considering it for a car.
Also the second nose is a top lip, I think.
EVs are at that point where ICE becomes the expensive option. It's like the transition from film to digital cameras. At some point it becomes the sensible and cheaper choice.
(I still use my OM1, but only 2 films per year, and they get scanned in so analogue is a bit of an analogue ferltish really)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/11/27/starmer-attempting-to-rush-through-chagos-handover-before-t/
Europe’s bloated governments need his efficiency revolution much more than Washington does
Headshot for Janan Ganesh
Janan Ganesh"
https://www.ft.com/content/0c8207d7-dc08-42eb-a4dc-7402ae0f7385
https://archive.is/DUAeO#selection-1713.0-1727.12
Russia may collapse internally and sue for peace tomorrow, or someone may kill Putin and they might get a better leader, but the fact is they've proved much more willing to absorb death and impoverishment than anyone thought, so it would be ridiculous to make any plans based on that.
To repeat, by far the surest way to get Russia out of eastern and southern Ukraine is to give the Ukrainians the means to blast them out. If nothing else, you can see that in what Putin says. He doesn't threaten nuclear war whenever we sanction a few more banks. He does it when we provide Ukraine with effective weapons systems. Everything else, especially general economic sanctions, is a distracting side-issue.
At the point the Focus dies, we will get a snall electric car. My expectation is that we will do most of our trips in that, keeping the big ICE for long journeys or carrying a lot of luggage.
That probably takes us through to 2035, by which time there might be an affordable electric equivalent of the Sharan and in any case the kids will probably have left home (*sob*).
The strenuous attempts to justify hanging onto the old technology are quite similar.
There would be a high power circuit along the street supplying a lot of lamps (use ~30 as an illustrative number, so 200W each = 6kW power perhaps from a 7kW circuit to give headroom). Then each streetlamp would have smaller wires inside the lamp standard. They would be in parallel so when one goes pop it does not kill all 30 streetlamps.
When they drop to 50-60W required by the LED, that leaves 60-80% of the street cable capacity spare as the streetlamps are a smaller load now, or ~100-140W per streetlamp.
So that leaves capacity to install your 4kW charger one every 25 or 30 or however many streetlamps, or a 2.5kW charger more often, or whatever, wired as a new parallel load from the street cable.
It won't support a charger every streetlamp, but it may give a couple every street - which is enough to make a start on the infra, and is useful for top up charging, or if you use it for an afternoon or overnight once a week.
There could be other factors, such as the supply might be 3-phase (I think 4 or 6 wires inside the street cable), so that even if something goes pop in the street it would only take out 1/3 of lights not the whole lot.
Newer estates etc would have a somewhat different design of electricity infrastructure, as required.
That's my understanding. HTH.
But the inefficiency of the American health and legal systems are exceeded by little in Europe.
🧵 I was traveling this week, and I didn't have a chance to do a thread on ASML's Investor Day. In my opinion, this is one of the most impressive yearly updates given by any company, and they make all of the presentations public. It combines deep insight into the overall market, their finances, and the complex technical roadmap for their tools...
https://x.com/lithos_graphein/status/1857890769669144872
I love the fact that their EUV light source is provided by an laser obliterating 50k drops of molten tin every second.
And they measure their mirror stability in picometers (1/200th the width of a silicon atom).
I got my car, new, for many thousands less than the cheapest EVs on the market. Its a self-charging hybrid.
Refilling, I'm averaging £1 = 10 miles. £40 tank of unleaded (~30L) gets me over 400 miles.
However to get an EV not only costs many thousands more, but it costs more to refuel using public chargers. My local petrol station that I'm refilling at has fast chargers for EVs but it costs 65p per kWh. EVs I believe are get 3.5 miles per kWh so for 400 miles it would cost £74 to buy the kWh required for that distance, nearly twice the fuel cost per mile over what you get for unleaded - and of course the unleaded price is almost all tax.
Its not only necessary to make EV charging widespread, but affordable too.
I expect the price of electric cars to fall considerably in the next ten years, because they are inherently simpler than hybrids or ICE cars.
(FWIW, in my experience, Tesla owners are more considerate of pedestrians than owners of most cars. A relative thinks BMW owners are the worst car drivers. Of course some of the worst drivers are in high-end pickups.)
Indeed the thing that holds up public charging infrastructure is that people don't need to use them*. In 4 years I have used them a handful of times.
* though a common app and simple transparent payment would help.
If you rely on public chargers, it is not remotely the case.
Charging a hybrid is cheaper than charging an EV using public chargers - as well as being cheaper to buy the vehicle too.
So for the 40% who don't have a drive . . . ? ? ?
We don't need an "I'm alright Jack" attitude from people who have a driveway when 40% of people don't. 40% of the population is equivalent of course to more than every single Labour voter in the country at the last election, its not nobody.
UFOs were entertaining when the X-Files was running. That got cancelled decades ago now though.
Now its just sad.
Its really been stuffed last few days after a long & massive effort to keep it below 100 to the US dollar and its taking a pasting against pretty much every other currency. Something is wrong there that we dont know yet because this drop is very sudden and rather rapid.
My simple point is that the majority of car owners simply don't need to use charging infrastructure as they have their own.
That is the one thing that makes the contemporary flap stand out. And I have yet to hear a single convincing explanation for why so many serious American Establishment figures are taking this so seriously. I have heard multiple explanations from Mass Delusion to Pentagon/CIA psyops to actual UFOs and none really covers the bases
If, at some point in the future, the markup is a factor of two, then that makes the cost of your 400 miles about £8 - probably quite a bit cheaper than petrol, even if the petrol was untaxed. And, of course, the EV charger in the future will likely have a battery powering it, a battery charged using very cheap overnight electricity, and so you'd expect there to be a lot of scope for competition to drive the cost of EV charging even lower.
Its no good just having public charging available if its unaffordable - nor to have a "let them eat cake" attitude of "well just charge at home" when that isn't an option for millions of people.
It highlights two problems for Kemi. PMQs isn’t just pressure on a PM, the UK system puts opposition leaders under much scrutiny too, where you need to be constructive in opposition. The whole political and electoral system UK is quite a lot different than the US - gimmicky but ineffective opposition under such scrutiny in Parliament, where you hold a senior Parliamentary role in our constitution, will get you nowhere but into trouble.
And as much as so many PBers think next election will be walk in park for Conservatives, what happens between GE days can so often be fools gold as to what actually happens on GE days - it’s a day that asks voters a completely different question than “what do you think of it so far”. to move GE votes Kemi needs to offer changed messaging and policies. It’s noticeable Kemi isn’t pushing the withdraw from ECHR very loudly, but tonight she did tie herself to the old governments Rwanda policy, on the basis it would act as a deterrent and smash the criminal gangs facilitating such high volume of Channel crossings.
Calling it a deterrent is where it so obviously fell apart the last few years. “How many sent to developing Africa never to return, at what cost to UK tax payer, before gang busting deterrent kicks in” was easy question utterly failed to be answered, despite having years and all government machinery to answer it.
It’s a balancing act to offer something fresh, but constructive and credible. I think it’s far too early to judge how Kemi is doing. But with 1500 days to play with, it would be better to wait for something fresh and constructive to be devised, rather than reach for failed policy and arguments right now.
I hope you're right though I'm more hopeful than expecting for such a dramatic reduction in markup. Hopefully it does happen, but bearing in mind the cost of real estate and infrastructure needs covering in the markup and not just the cost of the equipment then that can be a problem.
Good luck getting those built by 2030. Or even 2035.
https://x.com/DalrympleWill/status/1721163356051288412?lang=en
Anyway move over over Jeremy Clarkson. Is this the PB Tories' newly minted Greatest Living Englishman?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr4ly6p2wxvo.amp
Fianna Fail 21%
Fine Gael 20%
Sinn Fein 20%
Social Democrats 6%
Labour 4%
Greens 4%
Aontu 4%
Independent Ireland 4%
People Before Profit-Solidarity 2%
Other parties 1%
Independents 14%
An exit poll is promised, though I don't know what its track record has been.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4GvN-pbS0M
Damn, Trump might do an enabaling act when in power.
Interestingly, the new pub opening near me is cashless.
And car clubs are probably the most efficient way to increase car access in densely populated areas - we use it as our second car.
The future is already here for many firms.
It was absolute chaos at Tebay EV charging last time I was there. They could've probably charged a lot more.
I’ll have a go. Is it Putin’s health. Has he had a stroke or heart attack, or failed to keep lid on some bad health news?
cash. Take a picture of a cheque in your app and the money goes straight into your bank account. Of course, he could just BACS the money - but cheques still have better functionality than cash.
Compared to the last Irish election in 2020 though SF are the biggest losers down 4%, FF down 1% and FG unchanged.
Of the minor parties the Greens down 3%, Labour and PBF unchanged and Aontu the biggest gainers up almost 3%
Please don't say "at home".
The truth could be a far more interesting story than what the Telegraph has gone with. Starmer government happy for Trump to ride to their rescue and “own the killing” of the Chagos deal, so they won’t have to do it themselves. Any hit from losing this deal will only last days or hours.
Based on half hearted vibes and feet dragging now coming out of Labour on Chagos deal, I’m 100% convinced it’s not going to happen.