Bloody hell the cost of Hinckley Point C is now estimated to be between £41.5bn and £46.5bn, what a mess.
Can someone explain to me why we're ploughing ahead with Sizewell C?! Give RR the contract for 5 SMRs and get moving. Let's own the next generation of nuclear energy, not spend another £60bn and 15 years building a reactor that probably won't ever turn on.
We could give away four or five Chagos islands for that kind of money.
We apparently have 14 overseas territories, several of which are barren rocks or ice, so hopefully we'd have to pay less for giving up those.
Gibraltar apparently has the motto no 'enemy' shall expel us, which leaves too much of a loophole for me.
The 14 include BIOT, which is effectively the very last colony if you think of the way the resident population was treated, i.e. stripped of any regard for self determination and deported. I think the date that it goes could be regarded as the formal end of the British Empire, and not before time.
The remaining 13 all have ordinarily resident populations apart from South Georgia and the British Antarctic Territory. Most of those would be regarded as too small to function as independent states, although I believe that Bermuda has had two failed referendums on going it alone. Anguilla actually left and came back again under somewhat convoluted circumstances.
Bloody hell the cost of Hinckley Point C is now estimated to be between £41.5bn and £46.5bn, what a mess.
Can someone explain to me why we're ploughing ahead with Sizewell C?! Give RR the contract for 5 SMRs and get moving. Let's own the next generation of nuclear energy, not spend another £60bn and 15 years building a reactor that probably won't ever turn on.
The problem with cancelling big projects like HS2/nuclear is that industry is going to take this systemic political uncertainty and apply it to the cost of infrastructure across the UK.
I'm told (friend) that the nuclear subs projects are actually a lot cheaper than they would be otherwise, hard as that is to believe, simply because it's much less likely that the government cancels them compared with other stuff like frigates.
We need the political/legal process of cancelling projects to be at least as onerous as approving them.
so these homeschool clonetank claremont institute guys thought "grants" was just shit that went to the Woke University Basketweaving College For Dyed Hair Bisexuals Who Won't Fuck Me and not the way that, like, 90% of government programs worked, huh
Maybe it wouldn't matter too much in the winter, but in summer you'd certainly want rubbish to be collected more often than every 4 weeks.
It's precisely the sort of thing that corrodes public confidence in and respect for local government. It's blindingly obvious that it's nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with desperate penny pinching - which is understandable given the situation that councils find themselves in, but it makes Mr & Mrs Average wonder just what and who they are meant to be for..
Regular bin collections and well maintained roads are what most people expect first and foremost from the local authority, but the vast bulk of revenues now go on very expensive services for various kinds of disabled people, young and old, and scrabbling around to find housing for destitute families. That's not the bulk of the population. If you're not in the bracket needing this stuff then the council is just this malign entity that bleeds you white for the privilege of receiving an increasingly sparse list of deteriorating services. A useless organisation, presiding over a landscape of autistic kids being ferried around in hugely expensive taxis that bump and rattle over farm track grade roads. It is a sub-optimal situation to put it mildly.
Yes, and people didn't exactly like local government in the first place. And plonking a bunch of distant 'mayors' across swathes of barely connected rural England is not exactly going to help with that, but the bigger issues have been pushed back as it is not as politcally grabbing.
I still wonder what these blessed mayors are meant to do, except exist for their own sake and help themselves to a large salary. If the rural ones could at least restore the threadbare public transport system, that has been largely wound up by the councils so the money can be thrown into the bottomless social care pit, then that would be a start. But are they going to have the money to do it? If they're just going to get some redistributed council tax funds, so they do some of the same things as various abolished counties with the same amount of cash, then it's just going to amount to so much shuffling of deckchairs.
Bloody hell the cost of Hinckley Point C is now estimated to be between £41.5bn and £46.5bn, what a mess.
Can someone explain to me why we're ploughing ahead with Sizewell C?! Give RR the contract for 5 SMRs and get moving. Let's own the next generation of nuclear energy, not spend another £60bn and 15 years building a reactor that probably won't ever turn on.
I'd guess a) they don't actually exist outside PowerPoint b) they will take 3x longer than promised to build and c) they will cost 3x more than promised.
Pretty much.
That said, it's less a technology problem and more a problem of the British process state.
Bloody hell the cost of Hinckley Point C is now estimated to be between £41.5bn and £46.5bn, what a mess.
Can someone explain to me why we're ploughing ahead with Sizewell C?! Give RR the contract for 5 SMRs and get moving. Let's own the next generation of nuclear energy, not spend another £60bn and 15 years building a reactor that probably won't ever turn on.
Yes, I posted about that a week ago: rumours have been swirling for some time.
Now, worth remembering that the British government is not actually spending the money, but we are about to get an attempt to up the strike price on the electricity. We should avoid that at all cost.
For Rolls Royce, guarantee an output price for electricity from the SMR, and if RR can deliver them such that a private company would take a flyer, great. You could even bonus the strike price if said reactors can achieve a certain amount of uptime.
This just looks like bad management of something somewhere but if you look to the US there is a hint about why nuclear as a concept, perhaps in the form of SMR should be part of national strategy. Your big tech firms are chewing energy and its noticeable that some are putting investment into nuclear tech to support their data centres.
Bloody hell the cost of Hinckley Point C is now estimated to be between £41.5bn and £46.5bn, what a mess.
Can someone explain to me why we're ploughing ahead with Sizewell C?! Give RR the contract for 5 SMRs and get moving. Let's own the next generation of nuclear energy, not spend another £60bn and 15 years building a reactor that probably won't ever turn on.
The problem with cancelling big projects like HS2/nuclear is that industry is going to take this systemic political uncertainty and apply it to the cost of infrastructure across the UK.
I'm told (friend) that the nuclear subs projects are actually a lot cheaper than they would be otherwise, hard as that is to believe, simply because it's much less likely that the government cancels them compared with other stuff like frigates.
We need the political/legal process of cancelling projects to be at least as onerous as approving them.
The British government fucks around for years delaying, rescoping, judically reviewing, and layering on extra requirements to projects, only to then cancel or cut them back when the folly of its actions make them unaffordable.
NEWS: Trump White House expects up to 10% of federal employees to quit in a buyout program. A government-wide email going out soon on full-time work in office will say "deferred resignation program" begins today for all federal employees and ends Feb. 6.
"If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason)," the emails says.
Paying people for 8 months of not working doesn’t seem entirely like the best way to save money.
Bloody hell the cost of Hinckley Point C is now estimated to be between £41.5bn and £46.5bn, what a mess.
Can someone explain to me why we're ploughing ahead with Sizewell C?! Give RR the contract for 5 SMRs and get moving. Let's own the next generation of nuclear energy, not spend another £60bn and 15 years building a reactor that probably won't ever turn on.
I'd guess a) they don't actually exist outside PowerPoint b) they will take 3x longer than promised to build and c) they will cost 3x more than promised.
Which is fine because we'd still only be £15bn down and delivery by 2035ish if the contract gets awarded today. Plus the RR reactor design fundamentally works because it's already in operation on nuclear powered naval vessels. The jump from those to slightly bigger versions isn't insurmountable.
Bloody hell the cost of Hinckley Point C is now estimated to be between £41.5bn and £46.5bn, what a mess.
Can someone explain to me why we're ploughing ahead with Sizewell C?! Give RR the contract for 5 SMRs and get moving. Let's own the next generation of nuclear energy, not spend another £60bn and 15 years building a reactor that probably won't ever turn on.
Yes, I posted about that a week ago: rumours have been swirling for some time.
Now, worth remembering that the British government is not actually spending the money, but we are about to get an attempt to up the strike price on the electricity. We should avoid that at all cost.
For Rolls Royce, guarantee an output price for electricity from the SMR, and if RR can deliver them such that a private company would take a flyer, great. You could even bonus the strike price if said reactors can achieve a certain amount of uptime.
We are funding Sizewell C directly though. We couldn't trick EDF into taking full construction liability for another one after Hinckley. With RR, I say we give them matched funding of £5bn, order 3 reactors and give them until 2035 to deliver the first two and 2037 for all three. No guarantees on strike prices though, it locks us in to high energy pricing for 30+ years.
NEWS: Trump White House expects up to 10% of federal employees to quit in a buyout program. A government-wide email going out soon on full-time work in office will say "deferred resignation program" begins today for all federal employees and ends Feb. 6.
"If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason)," the emails says.
Paying people for 8 months of not working doesn’t seem entirely like the best way to save money.
I suppose they view it as a worthwhile incentive to encourage voluntary redundancy. IANAE but I believe that government employees have higher levels of unionisation and better protection against sharp employer practices than is generally the case in the US. It's presumably thought that bribing them to quit is easier, and more cost effective in the long run, than attempting mass sackings.
NEWS: Trump White House expects up to 10% of federal employees to quit in a buyout program. A government-wide email going out soon on full-time work in office will say "deferred resignation program" begins today for all federal employees and ends Feb. 6.
"If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason)," the emails says.
Paying people for 8 months of not working doesn’t seem entirely like the best way to save money.
Some US public sector employees have property rights to their job, so it sounds like they are effectively offering to buy them out. See this for example:
NEWS: Trump White House expects up to 10% of federal employees to quit in a buyout program. A government-wide email going out soon on full-time work in office will say "deferred resignation program" begins today for all federal employees and ends Feb. 6.
"If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason)," the emails says.
Paying people for 8 months of not working doesn’t seem entirely like the best way to save money.
I suppose they view it as a worthwhile incentive to encourage voluntary redundancy. IANAE but I believe that government employees have higher levels of unionisation and better protection against sharp employer practices than is generally the case in the US. It's presumably thought that bribing them to quit is easier, and more cost effective in the long run, than attempting mass sackings.
I think they have an ideological belief that they need to purge federal employees who haven’t sworn personal fealty to Trump/Project 2025, and may be paying over the odds to do so.
NEWS: Trump White House expects up to 10% of federal employees to quit in a buyout program. A government-wide email going out soon on full-time work in office will say "deferred resignation program" begins today for all federal employees and ends Feb. 6.
"If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason)," the emails says.
Paying people for 8 months of not working doesn’t seem entirely like the best way to save money.
Some US public sector employees have property rights to their job, so it sounds like they are effectively offering to buy them out. See this for example:
Certain public employees, however, enjoy a property interest/right to their employment and may be terminated only for cause.
Weirdly, in the US academic tenure often extends beyond where you would expect (university level research) to other educational posts... like elementary school teachers in New York.
It's not clear why you would want to extend those privileges. That said, elementary school teachers are not Federal employees. And I would be surprised if there are many Federal employees who "own" their job.
It will be interesting to see the consequences of letting go of 10% of the Federal workforce, while simultaneously freezing hiring.
It may be, for example, that there is little to no impact.
But it's also possible that the IRS loses a bunch of staff, and the US tax take drops more than the savings from fewer employees. It's also possible that -for example- there are issues with air traffic control. And in some areas -like Veterans Healthcare- it may be that costs to the Federal government increase because now they need to pay private hospitals to do what we previously done in house.
We shall see.
What is worth noting, though, is that there are actually fewer Federal employees, in absolute numbers, than there were 30 years ago. The big costs of the Federal government are Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and (to a lesser extent) the armed forces.
The evidence is clear: the shift to a screen-based childhood is having disastrous effects. We've tabled an amendment to ban phones from schools: I really hope this will get cross party support."
Hi Rob, ex user who was on here for about a decade here! You have (Vanilla Forums) mail re an admin matter - appreciate if you could take a look, cheers. Happy to email you instead if that's better.
In the third Harry Potter book, Hermione gets a time turner to enable her to do more subjects (and also so Harry can do the Petronas charm and fight off the Dementers.)
WHY DOES NO-ONE AT ANY POINT THINK: HMMMM.... THIS TIME TRAVEL LARK WOULD BE REALLY USEFUL IN THE FIGHT AGAINST VOLDEMORT???
It’s the standard fantasy fiction suspension of disbelief test. Even the good stuff (LOTR) had the ‘just send the fckng eagles to Mt Doom’ thing.
Always thought it would be virtually impossible for a fckng great big eagle to fly under the Sauron radar with a piece of jewellery that got heavier the closer it got to Mount Doom without being shot down or crashing. Just my ha’penny.
Weren’t the eagles capable of taking on a Nazgûl? In any case wasn’t Sauron’s radar only attuned to the putting on of the ring rather than it’s proximity to Barad-dûr?
Fair - but they were big ol’ birds, hard to miss with the naked eye, and there was significant peril from ground to air ordinance ie arrows. Huge risk to take. On balance I still think a ground insertion by irregular special forces was probably the sensible approach whatever the armchair elves say.
Indeed. I don't really know why that has become the goto example for 'why not do x?' when there are actually pretty decent reasons why doing it would not have worked. There are definitely better questions to ask, even if they would have different answers as to why they did not (why not send it to Valinor, or in the sea)
In the sea it would have been discovered one day, as it was in the great river.
And Valinor was not accessible
As I said there are answers to those questions, but they are more original, and at least one requires more than just common sense to come to - whereas 'people can see giant eagles coming' is a pretty obvious reason why not to send them even with no knowledge of the lore.
“there was significant peril from ground to air ordinance ie arrows”
A greater risk than letting hobbits, who look nothing like orcs, carry it in?
Those damn big eagles could fly out of range from the ground, and fast. With enough surprise, what could Sauron have done? He didn’t appear to have the entrance to the only thing that could destroy the ring fortified or guarded, so he wasn’t all that smart. The Eagles only needed to deposit an elite platoon of Elf Special Forces, the whole thing could have been over shortly into Book 2 of the Fellowship saving needless drama and countless lives. Where was the Fellowship going anyway - did they have a plan for sneaking into Mordor and getting to Mount Doom?
Also Valinor was accessible, it could have been taken there and destroyed. In retrospect the Council of Elrond was a huge failure.
In the third Harry Potter book, Hermione gets a time turner to enable her to do more subjects (and also so Harry can do the Petronas charm and fight off the Dementers.)
WHY DOES NO-ONE AT ANY POINT THINK: HMMMM.... THIS TIME TRAVEL LARK WOULD BE REALLY USEFUL IN THE FIGHT AGAINST VOLDEMORT???
It’s the standard fantasy fiction suspension of disbelief test. Even the good stuff (LOTR) had the ‘just send the fckng eagles to Mt Doom’ thing.
Always thought it would be virtually impossible for a fckng great big eagle to fly under the Sauron radar with a piece of jewellery that got heavier the closer it got to Mount Doom without being shot down or crashing. Just my ha’penny.
Weren’t the eagles capable of taking on a Nazgûl? In any case wasn’t Sauron’s radar only attuned to the putting on of the ring rather than it’s proximity to Barad-dûr?
Fair - but they were big ol’ birds, hard to miss with the naked eye, and there was significant peril from ground to air ordinance ie arrows. Huge risk to take. On balance I still think a ground insertion by irregular special forces was probably the sensible approach whatever the armchair elves say.
Indeed. I don't really know why that has become the goto example for 'why not do x?' when there are actually pretty decent reasons why doing it would not have worked. There are definitely better questions to ask, even if they would have different answers as to why they did not (why not send it to Valinor, or in the sea)
In the sea it would have been discovered one day, as it was in the great river.
And Valinor was not accessible
As I said there are answers to those questions, but they are more original, and at least one requires more than just common sense to come to - whereas 'people can see giant eagles coming' is a pretty obvious reason why not to send them even with no knowledge of the lore.
“there was significant peril from ground to air ordinance ie arrows”
A greater risk than letting hobbits, who look nothing like orcs, carry it in?
Those damn big eagles could fly out of range from the ground, and fast. With enough surprise, what could Sauron have done? He didn’t appear to have the entrance to the only thing that could destroy the ring fortified or guarded, so he wasn’t all that smart. The Eagles only needed to deposit an elite platoon of Elf Special Forces, the whole thing could have been over shortly into Book 2 of the Fellowship saving needless drama and countless lives. Where was the Fellowship going anyway - did they have a plan for sneaking into Mordor and getting to Mount Doom?
Also Valinor was accessible, it could have been taken there and destroyed. In retrospect the Council of Elrond was a huge failure.
Gandalf says the Valar would refuse to allow the Ring into Valinor. One can say they were being jerks, but they saw it as Middle Earth’s problem.
As to the eagles, Sauron is an archangel of immense power and ability, who to 99% of Middle Earth’s beings, might as well be a god. He’d spot them approaching with no difficulty. And of course, you’d face the same problem, that being could bring themselves to cast the Ring into the fire.
The only reason that the hobbits remained undetected (just about), was that Sauron’s attention was focused upon the war, and then we was shaken by Aragorn’s revelation that he was coming for him, and the death of the Witch King.
so these homeschool clonetank claremont institute guys thought "grants" was just shit that went to the Woke University Basketweaving College For Dyed Hair Bisexuals Who Won't Fuck Me and not the way that, like, 90% of government programs worked, huh
NIH stopped funding PhD student salaries as of last Monday
Republican legislators don't understand that their job involves making laws. And what that means.
Talked to a bunch of House Rs this AM in Doral about the WH move to freeze federal aid. Many are defending Trump — including the chairman of House Appropriations Committee, Tom Cole, who told me he doesn’t “have a problem” with the White House decision pause the aid.
“I think that’s probably what you ought to do when you’re coming in as a new administration,” he said.
When asked about the legality of the White House directing agencies not to spend money appropriated by Congress, Cole called it a “legitimate exercise of executive oversight” and noted that appropriations directed by Congress are “not a law.”
“I’m not a lawyer, I can’t pontificate on what’s legal but I suspect what’s happening is what most Republicans would be supportive of,” he said. “Appropriations is not a law, it’s the directive of Congress.”
“The lawyers disagree about what’s law and what’s not. Right know, I think it’s a legitimate exercise of executive oversight in areas they now control,” he added.
A couple of Rs are less certain, including swing-district Reps. David Valadao and Rep. Don Bacon, who said he hopes it is just “temporary” bc otherwise things could “shut down” in his district.
Never read any Harry Potter, and only watched the first film which I didn't like much. Don't understand the attraction.
It's nonetheless a huge phenomenon. As the ever-present tourist queue (consisting mostly of young adults) waiting to be photographed with half a luggage trolley embedded in a wall at Kings Cross station reveals.
NEWS: Trump White House expects up to 10% of federal employees to quit in a buyout program. A government-wide email going out soon on full-time work in office will say "deferred resignation program" begins today for all federal employees and ends Feb. 6.
"If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason)," the emails says.
Paying people for 8 months of not working doesn’t seem entirely like the best way to save money.
I suppose they view it as a worthwhile incentive to encourage voluntary redundancy. IANAE but I believe that government employees have higher levels of unionisation and better protection against sharp employer practices than is generally the case in the US. It's presumably thought that bribing them to quit is easier, and more cost effective in the long run, than attempting mass sackings.
I think they have an ideological belief that they need to purge federal employees who haven’t sworn personal fealty to Trump/Project 2025, and may be paying over the odds to do so.
I think it's more a straightforward belief that government bureaucracy = bad, therefore less = better. Obviously the administration wants it's placeholders in all the key positions, but they're hardly going to be worrying about basement level functionaries in the national park service or whatever.
The evidence is clear: the shift to a screen-based childhood is having disastrous effects. We've tabled an amendment to ban phones from schools: I really hope this will get cross party support."
The horse has bolted, escaped over the horizon and crossed the border into the next country on that one. The technology has turned a large fraction of the population, kids and adults alike, into digital crack addicts. Teachers will waste a lot of time trying to police this and the miserable child junkies will simply catch up on their worthless doom scrolling and brain rot anti-social media garbage when they get home.
Smartphones are so ubiquitous that I'm not even sure that trying to outlaw selling or giving them to children full stop would work. It would probably be unenforceable. Trying to suppress them in schools is almost tokenism.
Never read any Harry Potter, and only watched the first film which I didn't like much. Don't understand the attraction.
It's nonetheless a huge phenomenon. As the ever-present tourist queue (consisting mostly of young adults) waiting to be photographed with half a luggage trolley embedded in a wall at Kings Cross station reveals.
I think there are several aspects to the phenomenon. Firstly, although not brilliant prose, the books are well-written for the target audience, especially compared to some 'traditional' children's books. Secondly, the world-building is first-class, even if not particularly original. Thirdly, the characters are relatable, and many of the baddies interesting, and in some cases even redeemable. Fourthly, they grow up with the kids. Over the series, the books get longer, the world more complex, and the plots more intricate. Finally (for the moment...) IMV they reward the effort put into reading them - important for kids.
I don't like JKR's stance on certain matters, but she really knocked it out of the park with that series of books.
A little upset to hear from my friends on Teesside. Matt Vickers and Stockton Tories doing paid adverts on Facebook groups naming councillors who “voted against a national enquiry into grooming gangs”. A staged council vote to ambush them, where at best it’s symbolic as - shockingly enough - borough councillors can’t instigate or block national enquiries.
Councillors now with angry residents banging on their doors. Being called paedos on the Tory Facebook page comments.
The stupid thing is this. Tories trying to weaponise the Labour coverup. And thus highlighting the Tory coverup. Angry people who have had this weaponised to make them angry won’t vote Tory.
They’ll vote reform
Just how stupid and dangerous are these Tories?
There's a lot of very unserious people standing for office. The best councillors I've known are prefectly capable of being very political, but they knew when to give it a rest and were interested in the council level problems they had to focus on.
People who just want to posture and engage in tribalism rub the serious councillors the wrong way, even when (or especially) when they are technically on the same side.
Of course in america such people are now in Congress in large numbers, whereas here there are probably only a handful like that - though several ex-MPs are revealing themselves to have been of that tendency all along.
The evidence is clear: the shift to a screen-based childhood is having disastrous effects. We've tabled an amendment to ban phones from schools: I really hope this will get cross party support."
The horse has bolted, escaped over the horizon and crossed the border into the next country on that one. The technology has turned a large fraction of the population, kids and adults alike, into digital crack addicts. Teachers will waste a lot of time trying to police this and the miserable child junkies will simply catch up on their worthless doom scrolling and brain rot anti-social media garbage when they get home.
Smartphones are so ubiquitous that I'm not even sure that trying to outlaw selling or giving them to children full stop would work. It would probably be unenforceable. Trying to suppress them in schools is almost tokenism.
That's daft. Of course banning them in schools would be a big step forward. A blanket Government ban would help support schools who wanted to do this anyway - far better than guidelines or advice. I can't see any good reason for a child to have a smartphone in school.
A little upset to hear from my friends on Teesside. Matt Vickers and Stockton Tories doing paid adverts on Facebook groups naming councillors who “voted against a national enquiry into grooming gangs”. A staged council vote to ambush them, where at best it’s symbolic as - shockingly enough - borough councillors can’t instigate or block national enquiries.
Councillors now with angry residents banging on their doors. Being called paedos on the Tory Facebook page comments.
The stupid thing is this. Tories trying to weaponise the Labour coverup. And thus highlighting the Tory coverup. Angry people who have had this weaponised to make them angry won’t vote Tory.
They’ll vote reform
Just how stupid and dangerous are these Tories?
I notice the Glasgow gang rape gang elicited a surprisingly low level of PB comment. Fact is. CSA is everywhere. Always has been. The only way to avoid it is not to look for it. Which was the way for millenia.
Facebook took me surprise on that one. Lot's of sarcastic "DEPORT" and "Where's Tommeh now?" comments. The far-right are as vulnerable to ridicule as anyone else.
More vulnerable to ridicule, given that they are frequently ridiculous.
A little upset to hear from my friends on Teesside. Matt Vickers and Stockton Tories doing paid adverts on Facebook groups naming councillors who “voted against a national enquiry into grooming gangs”. A staged council vote to ambush them, where at best it’s symbolic as - shockingly enough - borough councillors can’t instigate or block national enquiries.
Councillors now with angry residents banging on their doors. Being called paedos on the Tory Facebook page comments.
The stupid thing is this. Tories trying to weaponise the Labour coverup. And thus highlighting the Tory coverup. Angry people who have had this weaponised to make them angry won’t vote Tory.
They’ll vote reform
Just how stupid and dangerous are these Tories?
There's a lot of very unserious people standing for office. The best councillors I've known are prefectly capable of being very political, but they knew when to give it a rest and were interested in the council level problems they had to focus on.
People who just want to posture and engage in tribalism rub the serious councillors the wrong way, even when (or especially) when they are technically on the same side.
Of course in america such people are now in Congress in large numbers, whereas here there are probably only a handful like that - though several ex-MPs are revealing themselves to have been of that tendency all along.
TLDR: it’s all down to the ‘like’ button, which explains Trump (and by extension Brexit)
It also contains this priceless observation: Even a small number of jerks were able to dominate discussion forums, Bor and Petersen found, because nonjerks are easily turned off from online discussions of politics
The evidence is clear: the shift to a screen-based childhood is having disastrous effects. We've tabled an amendment to ban phones from schools: I really hope this will get cross party support."
The horse has bolted, escaped over the horizon and crossed the border into the next country on that one. The technology has turned a large fraction of the population, kids and adults alike, into digital crack addicts. Teachers will waste a lot of time trying to police this and the miserable child junkies will simply catch up on their worthless doom scrolling and brain rot anti-social media garbage when they get home.
Smartphones are so ubiquitous that I'm not even sure that trying to outlaw selling or giving them to children full stop would work. It would probably be unenforceable. Trying to suppress them in schools is almost tokenism.
That's daft. Of course banning them in schools would be a big step forward. A blanket Government ban would help support schools who wanted to do this anyway - far better than guidelines or advice. I can't see any good reason for a child to have a smartphone in school.
Teenagers who travel via public transport to school and may well do various after-school activities or socialising before going home? Parents wants to be able to keep in touch with their children while giving some independence.
I had a phone in school around 20 years ago. In theory you were meant to hand it into the school office, but no one did it (and it would have been impossible to process it everyone did). Keeping it in your bag was the next best thing, which no one really did either.
The main difference I can see is the limit to phone usage back then was texting and playing snake. But the principle of why parents and children want to have them is the same, while the drawbacks are also similar.
Schools should focus on banning the use of phones in school. Confiscation until end of day. Or whatever other discipline to keep phones out of sight. Not try to win a battle they have been losing for 20 years.
NEWS: Trump White House expects up to 10% of federal employees to quit in a buyout program. A government-wide email going out soon on full-time work in office will say "deferred resignation program" begins today for all federal employees and ends Feb. 6.
"If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason)," the emails says.
Paying people for 8 months of not working doesn’t seem entirely like the best way to save money.
Some US public sector employees have property rights to their job, so it sounds like they are effectively offering to buy them out. See this for example:
Certain public employees, however, enjoy a property interest/right to their employment and may be terminated only for cause.
Weirdly, in the US academic tenure often extends beyond where you would expect (university level research) to other educational posts... like elementary school teachers in New York.
It's not clear why you would want to extend those privileges. That said, elementary school teachers are not Federal employees. And I would be surprised if there are many Federal employees who "own" their job.
It will be interesting to see the consequences of letting go of 10% of the Federal workforce, while simultaneously freezing hiring.
It may be, for example, that there is little to no impact.
But it's also possible that the IRS loses a bunch of staff, and the US tax take drops more than the savings from fewer employees. It's also possible that -for example- there are issues with air traffic control. And in some areas -like Veterans Healthcare- it may be that costs to the Federal government increase because now they need to pay private hospitals to do what we previously done in house.
We shall see.
What is worth noting, though, is that there are actually fewer Federal employees, in absolute numbers, than there were 30 years ago. The big costs of the Federal government are Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and (to a lesser extent) the armed forces.
And interest on debt.
Cutting 10% of the 2 million federal employees (I'm assuming this doesn't include people like uniformed military) isn't going to that big a dent in the deficit.
But many in the current Republican party don't believe in government at all, so if the effect is just to make government services shittier without saving any money at all it's still a win for them.
NEWS: Trump White House expects up to 10% of federal employees to quit in a buyout program. A government-wide email going out soon on full-time work in office will say "deferred resignation program" begins today for all federal employees and ends Feb. 6.
"If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason)," the emails says.
Paying people for 8 months of not working doesn’t seem entirely like the best way to save money.
Some US public sector employees have property rights to their job, so it sounds like they are effectively offering to buy them out. See this for example:
Certain public employees, however, enjoy a property interest/right to their employment and may be terminated only for cause.
Weirdly, in the US academic tenure often extends beyond where you would expect (university level research) to other educational posts... like elementary school teachers in New York.
It's not clear why you would want to extend those privileges. That said, elementary school teachers are not Federal employees. And I would be surprised if there are many Federal employees who "own" their job.
It will be interesting to see the consequences of letting go of 10% of the Federal workforce, while simultaneously freezing hiring.
It may be, for example, that there is little to no impact.
But it's also possible that the IRS loses a bunch of staff, and the US tax take drops more than the savings from fewer employees. It's also possible that -for example- there are issues with air traffic control. And in some areas -like Veterans Healthcare- it may be that costs to the Federal government increase because now they need to pay private hospitals to do what we previously done in house.
We shall see.
What is worth noting, though, is that there are actually fewer Federal employees, in absolute numbers, than there were 30 years ago. The big costs of the Federal government are Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and (to a lesser extent) the armed forces.
And interest on debt.
Cutting 10% of the 2 million federal employees (I'm assuming this doesn't include people like uniformed military) isn't going to that big a dent in the deficit.
But many in the current Republican party don't believe in government at all, so if the effect is just to make government services shittier without saving any money at all it's still a win for them.
If their biggest cost is interest on debt then the biggest saving opportunity would be not electing Trump (based on his record). In other news diktat by petty spite seems to be the plan for the next 4 years.
He went the full Rowling on day 1, when he issued EO "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government". She and he both hold the belief that it is impossible for a male to become a female and vice versa. She's been very clear about that since her first essay on the subject.
Comments
The remaining 13 all have ordinarily resident populations apart from South Georgia and the British Antarctic Territory. Most of those would be regarded as too small to function as independent states, although I believe that Bermuda has had two failed referendums on going it alone. Anguilla actually left and came back again under somewhat convoluted circumstances.
I'm told (friend) that the nuclear subs projects are actually a lot cheaper than they would be otherwise, hard as that is to believe, simply because it's much less likely that the government cancels them compared with other stuff like frigates.
We need the political/legal process of cancelling projects to be at least as onerous as approving them.
Mostly when people go on holiday, they have a more-or-less fixed budget and the only question is what they spend it on.
That said, it's less a technology problem and more a problem of the British process state.
That's one reason why so few invest in them.
Interesting ....
https://www.swflbusinessandipblog.com/2018/03/property-rights-in-continued-employment-for-public-employees-the-basics/
Certain public employees, however, enjoy a property interest/right to their employment and may be terminated only for cause.
It's not clear why you would want to extend those privileges. That said, elementary school teachers are not Federal employees. And I would be surprised if there are many Federal employees who "own" their job.
It will be interesting to see the consequences of letting go of 10% of the Federal workforce, while simultaneously freezing hiring.
It may be, for example, that there is little to no impact.
But it's also possible that the IRS loses a bunch of staff, and the US tax take drops more than the savings from fewer employees. It's also possible that -for example- there are issues with air traffic control. And in some areas -like Veterans Healthcare- it may be that costs to the Federal government increase because now they need to pay private hospitals to do what we previously done in house.
We shall see.
What is worth noting, though, is that there are actually fewer Federal employees, in absolute numbers, than there were 30 years ago. The big costs of the Federal government are Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and (to a lesser extent) the armed forces.
@NeilDotObrien
The evidence is clear: the shift to a screen-based childhood is having disastrous effects.
We've tabled an amendment to ban phones from schools: I really hope this will get cross party support."
https://x.com/NeilDotObrien/status/1884210224988631403
A greater risk than letting hobbits, who look nothing like orcs, carry it in?
Those damn big eagles could fly out of range from the ground, and fast. With enough surprise, what could Sauron have done? He didn’t appear to have the entrance to the only thing that could destroy the ring fortified or guarded, so he wasn’t all that smart. The Eagles only needed to deposit an elite platoon of Elf Special Forces, the whole thing could have been over shortly into Book 2 of the Fellowship saving needless drama and countless lives. Where was the Fellowship going anyway - did they have a plan for sneaking into Mordor and getting to Mount Doom?
Also Valinor was accessible, it could have been taken there and destroyed. In retrospect the Council of Elrond was a huge failure.
As to the eagles, Sauron is an archangel of immense power and ability, who to 99% of Middle Earth’s beings, might as well be a god. He’d spot them approaching with no difficulty. And of course, you’d face the same problem, that being could bring themselves to cast the Ring into the fire.
The only reason that the hobbits remained undetected (just about), was that Sauron’s attention was focused upon the war, and then we was shaken by Aragorn’s revelation that he was coming for him, and the death of the Witch King.
Talked to a bunch of House Rs this AM in Doral about the WH move to freeze federal aid. Many are defending Trump — including the chairman of House Appropriations Committee, Tom Cole, who told me he doesn’t “have a problem” with the White House decision pause the aid.
“I think that’s probably what you ought to do when you’re coming in as a new administration,” he said.
When asked about the legality of the White House directing agencies not to spend money appropriated by Congress, Cole called it a “legitimate exercise of executive oversight” and noted that appropriations directed by Congress are “not a law.”
“I’m not a lawyer, I can’t pontificate on what’s legal but I suspect what’s happening is what most Republicans would be supportive of,” he said. “Appropriations is not a law, it’s the directive of Congress.”
“The lawyers disagree about what’s law and what’s not. Right know, I think it’s a legitimate exercise of executive oversight in areas they now control,” he added.
A couple of Rs are less certain, including swing-district Reps. David Valadao and Rep. Don Bacon, who said he hopes it is just “temporary” bc otherwise things could “shut down” in his district.
Ds say it’s a flagrant violation of the law.
https://x.com/mkraju/status/1884273017980690826
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OgVKvqTItto
Smartphones are so ubiquitous that I'm not even sure that trying to outlaw selling or giving them to children full stop would work. It would probably be unenforceable. Trying to suppress them in schools is almost tokenism.
. a -b=0
# 4 x 0 = 2 x0
Simples
I don't like JKR's stance on certain matters, but she really knocked it out of the park with that series of books.
TLDR: it’s all down to the ‘like’ button, which explains Trump (and by extension Brexit)
NEW THREAD
I had a phone in school around 20 years ago. In theory you were meant to hand it into the school office, but no one did it (and it would have been impossible to process it everyone did). Keeping it in your bag was the next best thing, which no one really did either.
The main difference I can see is the limit to phone usage back then was texting and playing snake. But the principle of why parents and children want to have them is the same, while the drawbacks are also similar.
Schools should focus on banning the use of phones in school. Confiscation until end of day. Or whatever other discipline to keep phones out of sight. Not try to win a battle they have been losing for 20 years.
Cutting 10% of the 2 million federal employees (I'm assuming this doesn't include people like uniformed military) isn't going to that big a dent in the deficit.
But many in the current Republican party don't believe in government at all, so if the effect is just to make government services shittier without saving any money at all it's still a win for them.
In other news diktat by petty spite seems to be the plan for the next 4 years.