How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
Brexit is a success.
We got out of the UK, reclaimed our laws and aren't paying billions into the EU anymore. Exactly as promised.
The only thing that didn't happen, was the supposed recession if we voted to leave. No, we had a recession like the whole world did due to Covid, but no Brexit one.
Job done. What's not to like?
The £ collapsed against the € and never recovered.
Making our exports more competitive, no big deal.
Anyway, it 'collapsed' back to where it was only a few years prior. In 2010 it was at some stages below €1.10, while today it is €1.15, higher than it was then. So no big deal.
Bart channelling Harold Wilson's pound in your pocket speech there.
In 2010, the £ was low because of the global financial crash in 2008. It was much higher prior to that. So, if you're saying Brexit was as bad for us as the global financial crash, sure, I can go along with that.
I have always been in favour of a freely floating exchange rate.
A high exchange rate is not a good thing in itself, nor is a low one a bad thing.
However your data is simply wrong. In 2007-10 the £ was much lower than it has been post-Brexit. At one point in the GFC we nearly had parity, €1.02, something that never came close happening post-Brexit.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
Brexit is a success.
We got out of the UK, reclaimed our laws and aren't paying billions into the EU anymore. Exactly as promised.
The only thing that didn't happen, was the supposed recession if we voted to leave. No, we had a recession like the whole world did due to Covid, but no Brexit one.
Job done. What's not to like?
The £ collapsed against the € and never recovered.
For which all those in wealth creation are thankful.
If you want a higher exchange rate then Britain needs to:
1) Live within its means 2) Increase its savings rate 3) Increase its productivity
Without that then a falling exchange rate is both necessary and good.
For all those of us with salary and savings in GBP, it does have some disadvantages
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
Sensitive, toi?
Not at all. Just woke up from a good night’s sleep
What’s really on my mind is the sad state of Soho last night. Ok it was a little showery and it was Monday
But it’s summer. The evening was mild. This is London’s “entertainment” district. Yet it was so quiet
Soho Square was mainly full of Deliveroo bikers. I saw a few homeless. Lots of shuttered shops. On the way out of the Groucho (also v quiet) the manager said to me “please put your phone away, they get snatched right here”
She wasn’t being officious she really meant it
I fear that the combo of Reeves horrible taxes and london’s crime and cultural changes is killing the capital. Certainly Soho
I was in Soho last year and found it incredibly tamed compared to the 1990's and early 2000's. There's still a certain frisson from the dimensions of the narrow streets at such a central location, but a certain excitement seems a bit quietened. Il
In the 1990's Sohio felt like a laboratory for the new London - strip clubs rubbing shoulders with record shops and film suites, and new businesses. Many worlds seemed to be merging witb each other. You could see the process of dilapidation and seedinrss , to a sort of ultra-trendy fever of youth culture, to a quieter gentrification, happening in real time. I don't know if the Berwick Steeet market, with its mixture of working-class stallholders and raver record shop buyers, is still going.
I kind of feel the same but lets be honest about it, this is a site full of middle aged and older people moaning that things have changed from their youth. A very natural state of affairs, it was ever thus and probably will be for as long as humanity prevails.
So we just ignore the fact that Soho is objectively less interesting than it used to be?
Objectively less interesting to fifty and sixty somethings who rarely go there anymore? Sure.
Your 22 year old instagram gym going teetotaller is probably not wanting the same things as I did when I was their age drinking far too much but having fun my way.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
Brexit is a success.
We got out of the UK, reclaimed our laws and aren't paying billions into the EU anymore. Exactly as promised.
The only thing that didn't happen, was the supposed recession if we voted to leave. No, we had a recession like the whole world did due to Covid, but no Brexit one.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
Sensitive, toi?
Not at all. Just woke up from a good night’s sleep
What’s really on my mind is the sad state of Soho last night. Ok it was a little showery and it was Monday
But it’s summer. The evening was mild. This is London’s “entertainment” district. Yet it was so quiet
Soho Square was mainly full of Deliveroo bikers. I saw a few homeless. Lots of shuttered shops. On the way out of the Groucho (also v quiet) the manager said to me “please put your phone away, they get snatched right here”
She wasn’t being officious she really meant it
I fear that the combo of Reeves horrible taxes and london’s crime and cultural changes is killing the capital. Certainly Soho
I was in Soho last year and found it incredibly tamed compared to the 1990's and early 2000's. There's still a certain frisson from the dimensions of the narrow streets at such a central location, but a certain excitement seems a bit quietened. Il
In the 1990's Sohio felt like a laboratory for the new London - strip clubs rubbing shoulders with record shops and film suites, and new businesses. Many worlds seemed to be merging witb each other. You could see the process of dilapidation and seedinrss , to a sort of ultra-trendy fever of youth culture, to a quieter gentrification, happening in real time. I don't know if the Berwick Steeet market, with its mixture of working-class stallholders and raver record shop buyers, is still going.
I kind of feel the same but lets be honest about it, this is a site full of middle aged and older people moaning that things have changed from their youth. A very natural state of affairs, it was ever thus and probably will be for as long as humanity prevails.
I think the centre of gravity in London seems to have shifted. I still sense more of this atmosphere to the north-east and south of London. Soho seems too near the ever-more plutocratic centre to retaim some of unpredictability of 1990s Lomdon, now.
Yes. This may be a “central London thing”
I got the tube back from Soho to Camden at about 10.30pm and Camden was five times as lively - full of people, bars open and doing roaring trade, noise and life everywhere
Camden is an awful lot cheaper for businesses AND customers and seems better at attracting kids
It would have been the reverse 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Camden relatively quiet, Soho rocking
To be fair to Camden council they have done some good things around the Tube. Pedestrianising the high street was clever
You’re never gonna rid Camden of its edge - the grit and graffiti, the grot and the drugs, but it throbs with energy. Perhaps they are linked
20 years ago Soho still had that slight edge to it - now it’s all corporate / tourist ville
Horrible, and totally avoidable if people only read the warning signs and understand.
I use NMR (essentially the same as MRI) and both use superconducting magnets (essentially permanent magnets, as long as the coils are kept to around 2 degrees K. The idea that you can 'turn it off' makes me laugh (a bit unfairly). One of our old technical team never believed me when I told him that the NMR magnet wasn't being powered by the cables that run from it (they go to the console/computer to do the experiments). He only finally understood when we changed the console to another manufacturer - everything was removed from the magnet, no more cables ran to it and it was still a magnet (as shown by a compass). He was gob smacked.
Surely you'd need power to run the cooling system for the magnets though?
No - they are superconducting so have ZERO electrical resistance. ZERO. The only issue is keeping them cold (with liquid helium and then nitrogen boil off to keep the helium cold). If they go above the superconducting temperature you get a magnet quench - the coils suddenly become resistive and heat the gases, causing rapid boil off. Uncontrolled quenches are rare - a magnet will normally only quench during filling with cryogen (if a mistake is made) or when energising or de-energising with electricity.
Yes, I know what superconductivity is. The bit is was wondering about was how they'd be kept cool without power to the cooling system to pump liquid helium around, etc. If you disconnected everything from the machine, then sooner or later the temperature of the magnets would rise sufficiently to stop them being superconducting.
You don't pump helium around - the coils sit in a bath of liquid helium.
Which would have to be kept cool somehow.
Yes by adding more liquid helium (which we do every few months). The helium can is surrounded by a vacuum chamber then a liquid nitrogen can then another vacuum chamber. The boil off of nitrogen helps keep the helium cold and is topped up each week.
Some newer magnets use gas compression to capture and re-liquify the helium (its getting very expensive and for use in remote locations where filling is a challenge).
But more NMR magnets do not have cables running to them to do anything other than run the radio waves for the experiment plus small electromagnets for gradient fields and shimming of samples.
Please trust me on this - I've been doing this for 30 years. Happy to show you if you are in Bath and at a loose end.
Horrible, and totally avoidable if people only read the warning signs and understand.
I use NMR (essentially the same as MRI) and both use superconducting magnets (essentially permanent magnets, as long as the coils are kept to around 2 degrees K. The idea that you can 'turn it off' makes me laugh (a bit unfairly). One of our old technical team never believed me when I told him that the NMR magnet wasn't being powered by the cables that run from it (they go to the console/computer to do the experiments). He only finally understood when we changed the console to another manufacturer - everything was removed from the magnet, no more cables ran to it and it was still a magnet (as shown by a compass). He was gob smacked.
Surely you'd need power to run the cooling system for the magnets though?
No - they are superconducting so have ZERO electrical resistance. ZERO. The only issue is keeping them cold (with liquid helium and then nitrogen boil off to keep the helium cold). If they go above the superconducting temperature you get a magnet quench - the coils suddenly become resistive and heat the gases, causing rapid boil off. Uncontrolled quenches are rare - a magnet will normally only quench during filling with cryogen (if a mistake is made) or when energising or de-energising with electricity.
Yes, I know what superconductivity is. The bit is was wondering about was how they'd be kept cool without power to the cooling system to pump liquid helium around, etc. If you disconnected everything from the machine, then sooner or later the temperature of the magnets would rise sufficiently to stop them being superconducting.
You don't pump helium around - the coils sit in a bath of liquid helium.
Which would have to be kept cool somehow.
Edit: I'm not trying to be snide; I'm just curious. I know very little about the engineering of MRI machines, but just from a purely thermodynamic point of view, you'd need power at some point in order to maintain the low temperature of the magnets.
Just seen your edit (I've already replied). Essentially the thermodynamics is done elsewhere for almost all NMRs - we buy in liquid helium and liquid nitrogen.
Reasonable article but definitely of the glass half full type, re-iterating all the bogus London reasons to allow them to keep milking us and ignoring any of the positives , ie biggest one is how on earth could we be worse off than we are under the English parliament. Lots of small countries doing much better than the basket case UK and they have little or no resources compared to Scotland. We will just see the usual "London" responses here from bigoted people with no clue about Scotland other than it is a nice piggy bank that has lots of collateral to back up their loans.
I might misremember but perhaps some of our Indian contributors would like to comment. Apparently India was 10% of the world GDP before the Raj and 1% during it as wealth was extracted. An independent India (or Ireland) is now climbing up the ranks.
Or perhaps there are other reasons for the comparative growth / decline in a nations fortunes - but why not give everyone a chance. Especially since the Welsh, Irish and Scots are all 'spongers'
Quite a bit of that wasn't exactly wealth extraction, though. World GDP grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution - and the British control of India meant they were unable to shield their (very large) domestic textile industry from mechanised competition, so it collapsed as a result.
Pre-Industrial Revolution, a State’s share of world GDP tended to match its share of world population, with most people growing food as peasants, in villages. Maximum GDP per head was about $2,000. The lives of the elite were simply unimaginable to such people.
I was reading one economic article about the Roman Empire, which estimated Senatorial incomes at an average £9m, in 150, and knightly incomes at £720,000. The rest were on about £800 a year, per capita.
That all changed after 1800.
I get the impression that some people are bitter that Britain industrialised first, perhaps even than Britain industrialised at all.
Not a bit of it; it's something which provided us with a century or so of prosperity, for which I'm grateful.
That it also had a pretty disastrous effect on the economy of the Indian subcontinent, as a fairly direct result of our being the colonial power at the same time as we industrialised, isn't particularly controversial.
Indeed.
But there are people who do resent the industrial revolution happening here as they think one of:
1) It allowed 'wicked' Britain to 'exploit' the rest of the world.
2) It ended some rural pastoral idyll.
3) It messed up some wonderful Jane Austen style social system.
It’s funny. The Bennetts are “poor”, but they still own a village. Even minor nobility, in a pre-industrial world, live lives of incredible opulence, compared to the vast majority.
Its interesting that in P&P the two unpleasant people - Wickham and Collins - both had jobs, respectable middle class jobs as an army officer and clergyman, but still jobs.
Mrs Bennett, the daughter of a lawyer, is a silly, vulgar women.
And Mrs Bennett's brother is looked down on for being 'in trade'.
The one inescapable reality about independence in a peaceful democracy like the UK is that if it is the settled will of an identifiable nation as a whole - and Scotland for all sorts of geographical and historical reasons is that - that they shall be independent then the force is unstoppable.
Scotland is nowhere near that position. To get to that position is 100% in the hands of its people. (I can see Scotland from where I live in England, family members live and work in Scotland, and personally I support the union).
Correct. Legalities are secondary to the will of the people on this scale. If a large majority of Scots wanted separation (say 80% or more) and this level of support was maintained over a long period, then independence would happen one way or another. The UK government would be in the position of having to accept the inevitable and work out some kind of deal for an orderly breakup.
But, as you say, that point has not been reached and there is no sign it will be in the foreseeable future. Brexit did not do it, contrary to the dreams of nationalists, and I doubt even PM Farage would. There are lots of Scots who's businesses or jobs depend on trade with the rest of the UK, who have family there, or just see themselves as fundamentally of British identity. Pushing those people to point where they flipped to supporting separation would require some kind of extreme event, and without them the majority required to make independence the settled will of the people is not happening.
Stating that there needs to a sustained level of 80%+ support for indy before it can even be considered is a weird kind of Scottish exceptionalism. Meanwhile we have to accept the ongoing and apparently immutable settled will of 52% of the (mainly English & Welsh) people regarding the EU.
80% may be a bit on the high side, but it makes the point that structural change requires support. We should learn two things from the 2016 disaster. Firstly that voting in the dark with no plan is useless. Brexit could have meant anything from EEA/EFTA membership (which I support) to joining a political union with North Korea. No-one had authority to guide us, as the government of the day to their shame closed its eyes to the needs.
Secondly there should have been a higher bar to Brexit, with a level of support from the nations making up the union required, and UK wide better than a majority of one.
Horrible, and totally avoidable if people only read the warning signs and understand.
I use NMR (essentially the same as MRI) and both use superconducting magnets (essentially permanent magnets, as long as the coils are kept to around 2 degrees K. The idea that you can 'turn it off' makes me laugh (a bit unfairly). One of our old technical team never believed me when I told him that the NMR magnet wasn't being powered by the cables that run from it (they go to the console/computer to do the experiments). He only finally understood when we changed the console to another manufacturer - everything was removed from the magnet, no more cables ran to it and it was still a magnet (as shown by a compass). He was gob smacked.
Surely you'd need power to run the cooling system for the magnets though?
No - they are superconducting so have ZERO electrical resistance. ZERO. The only issue is keeping them cold (with liquid helium and then nitrogen boil off to keep the helium cold). If they go above the superconducting temperature you get a magnet quench - the coils suddenly become resistive and heat the gases, causing rapid boil off. Uncontrolled quenches are rare - a magnet will normally only quench during filling with cryogen (if a mistake is made) or when energising or de-energising with electricity.
Yes, I know what superconductivity is. The bit is was wondering about was how they'd be kept cool without power to the cooling system to pump liquid helium around, etc. If you disconnected everything from the machine, then sooner or later the temperature of the magnets would rise sufficiently to stop them being superconducting.
You don't pump helium around - the coils sit in a bath of liquid helium.
Which would have to be kept cool somehow.
Yes by adding more liquid helium (which we do every few months). The helium can is surrounded by a vacuum chamber then a liquid nitrogen can then another vacuum chamber. The boil off of nitrogen helps keep the helium cold and is topped up each week.
Some newer magnets use gas compression to capture and re-liquify the helium (its getting very expensive and for use in remote locations where filling is a challenge).
But more NMR magnets do not have cables running to them to do anything other than run the radio waves for the experiment plus small electromagnets for gradient fields and shimming of samples.
Please trust me on this - I've been doing this for 30 years. Happy to show you if you are in Bath and at a loose end.
Thanks, that's really interesting. I'm impressed that it is possible to insulate the magnets so well that occasional topups of liquid helium and nitrogen are suffient to maintain their temperature. I'd assumed you'd need constant active refrigeration. I've learned something there!
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
I was utterly bemused by Reform's attack on renewable energy and the subsidies that it supposedly takes with a preference for nuclear instead. The strike price for nuclear is already nearly twice the renewable rate and they are heading in opposite directions. The one universal and unbreakable rule since the 1950s has always been that nuclear energy is the most expensive option. Always. And it is going to remain so.
Trouble is that almost all our energy options are bad.
Solar has got very cheap to install but doesn't work in winter at our latitude, which is our peak demand.
Wind has stopped getting significantly cheaper, and the strike prices we are having to offer are above the current grid price - i.e. we're locking in higher prices for the next 30 years with the wind we're building now. And our electricity is already extraordinarily expensive.
Nuclear should be the answer, but because we've decided to do it as a JV with the French rather than buying Korean designs off the peg it makes even wind look cheap.
Coal is by far the cheapest source of power, but we don't like it because it's not clean and have just destroyed all our coal fired infrastructure.
Gas is fairly expensive compared to coal, and much harder to store, we refuse to frack for the massive reserves we appear to sat on (fracking is what's driven the US energy price so low, and thus caused their whole economy to pull away from Europe). Very vulnerable to global price shocks.
Tidal has potential, but suffers from big project syndrome (see also Nuclear) and the planning/environmental lobby, hence we've never built any.
There are lots of ways it could be fixed, but it all of them require slaying at least one sacred cow, most of them several. And in exactly none of the options for fixing it is wind the right answer - so obviously that's what we've bet the farm on.
Stop shouting at each other about Brexit. When we're into alternative facts what is the point?
What Brexit has done is killed Scottish Independence. People now want actual practical solutions for their myriad issues. Throwing ourselves off the cliff in the dark doesn't have the same appeal as it once had - and last time it was offered in 2014 the vote was No.
This is what drives the SNP hardcore mad. And explains FOR SCOTLAND last year. Why are all these voters so blind as to not want independence when it's so obviously better?
Which in turn explains the purported bridge between Reform and the SNP. Reform think everything is TSE's fault, the SNP think everything is my fault. To step from one brand of jingoism to another is pretty simple when you think about it.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
Reasonable article but definitely of the glass half full type, re-iterating all the bogus London reasons to allow them to keep milking us and ignoring any of the positives , ie biggest one is how on earth could we be worse off than we are under the English parliament. Lots of small countries doing much better than the basket case UK and they have little or no resources compared to Scotland. We will just see the usual "London" responses here from bigoted people with no clue about Scotland other than it is a nice piggy bank that has lots of collateral to back up their loans.
I might misremember but perhaps some of our Indian contributors would like to comment. Apparently India was 10% of the world GDP before the Raj and 1% during it as wealth was extracted. An independent India (or Ireland) is now climbing up the ranks.
Or perhaps there are other reasons for the comparative growth / decline in a nations fortunes - but why not give everyone a chance. Especially since the Welsh, Irish and Scots are all 'spongers'
Quite a bit of that wasn't exactly wealth extraction, though. World GDP grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution - and the British control of India meant they were unable to shield their (very large) domestic textile industry from mechanised competition, so it collapsed as a result.
Pre-Industrial Revolution, a State’s share of world GDP tended to match its share of world population, with most people growing food as peasants, in villages. Maximum GDP per head was about $2,000. The lives of the elite were simply unimaginable to such people.
I was reading one economic article about the Roman Empire, which estimated Senatorial incomes at an average £9m, in 150, and knightly incomes at £720,000. The rest were on about £800 a year, per capita.
That all changed after 1800.
I get the impression that some people are bitter that Britain industrialised first, perhaps even than Britain industrialised at all.
Not a bit of it; it's something which provided us with a century or so of prosperity, for which I'm grateful.
That it also had a pretty disastrous effect on the economy of the Indian subcontinent, as a fairly direct result of our being the colonial power at the same time as we industrialised, isn't particularly controversial.
Indeed.
But there are people who do resent the industrial revolution happening here as they think one of:
1) It allowed 'wicked' Britain to 'exploit' the rest of the world.
2) It ended some rural pastoral idyll.
3) It messed up some wonderful Jane Austen style social system.
It’s funny. The Bennetts are “poor”, but they still own a village. Even minor nobility, in a pre-industrial world, live lives of incredible opulence, compared to the vast majority.
Its interesting that in P&P the two unpleasant people - Wickham and Collins - both had jobs, respectable middle class jobs as an army officer and clergyman, but still jobs.
Mrs Bennett, the daughter of a lawyer, is a silly, vulgar women.
And Mrs Bennett's brother is looked down on for being 'in trade'.
Not quite. P and P shows that the Gardiners (Mrs Bennett's brother and sister in law) are a hero and heroine of the book and types of a coming class who are themselves classless and tolerant in their affections and affiliations. The ending of P and P is worth attention WRT the Gardiners.
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
I was utterly bemused by Reform's attack on renewable energy and the subsidies that it supposedly takes with a preference for nuclear instead. The strike price for nuclear is already nearly twice the renewable rate and they are heading in opposite directions. The one universal and unbreakable rule since the 1950s has always been that nuclear energy is the most expensive option. Always. And it is going to remain so.
The problem they have is that the idea that renewables are expensive and the problem has become an article of faith for them, bordering on religious. Just listen to @Luckyguy1983
Such pesky little realities as strike prices, costs, facts or figures don't play into people who are operating on faith.
Extremist zealots on the other extreme don't help their case either to be fair.
Also, you have to be pretty close to the action to be aware of how cheap solar and wind have got, and how quickly.
Now, we're just left with the issues that the cost of renewables is mostly capital and the cost of fossil fuels is mostly revenue, and that building things makes busybodies cross.
And those problems sum up the British Condition.
If new wind is so cheap, why are people currently getting strike prices over the current grid price to build it?
There was a very good twitter thread posted on here a couple of days ago which showed that the cost of solar was plummeting (but that doesn't help us much in a British winter) but the cost of wind is basically static - and the author made the point that this means we're doomed to very expensive energy unless something changes.
Personally, I'd order half a dozen off the peg Korean nukes to go on existing nuclear sites, and pass an act of parliament basically taking them out of planning and almost all regulation to prevent them becoming more Hinckley Point fiascos.
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
I was utterly bemused by Reform's attack on renewable energy and the subsidies that it supposedly takes with a preference for nuclear instead. The strike price for nuclear is already nearly twice the renewable rate and they are heading in opposite directions. The one universal and unbreakable rule since the 1950s has always been that nuclear energy is the most expensive option. Always. And it is going to remain so.
Trouble is that almost all our energy options are bad.
Solar has got very cheap to install but doesn't work in winter at our latitude, which is our peak demand.
Wind has stopped getting significantly cheaper, and the strike prices we are having to offer are above the current grid price - i.e. we're locking in higher prices for the next 30 years with the wind we're building now. And our electricity is already extraordinarily expensive.
Nuclear should be the answer, but because we've decided to do it as a JV with the French rather than buying Korean designs off the peg it makes even wind look cheap.
Coal is by far the cheapest source of power, but we don't like it because it's not clean and have just destroyed all our coal fired infrastructure.
Gas is fairly expensive compared to coal, and much harder to store, we refuse to frack for the massive reserves we appear to sat on (fracking is what's driven the US energy price so low, and thus caused their whole economy to pull away from Europe). Very vulnerable to global price shocks.
Tidal has potential, but suffers from big project syndrome (see also Nuclear) and the planning/environmental lobby, hence we've never built any.
There are lots of ways it could be fixed, but it all of them require slaying at least one sacred cow, most of them several. And in exactly none of the options for fixing it is wind the right answer - so obviously that's what we've bet the farm on.
Point is, there isn't a single right answer, because everything has certain downsides.
Solar plus batteries is cheap, but you need an awful lot of it in winter. (Not quite it doesn't work, it's never completely dark, but it doesn't work well enough.)
Wind is fine.
Nuclear is never that cheap, and only looks as cheap as it does if you ignore the waste storage thing.
Coal doesn't really make sense at all.
I suspect the current optimum is as much solar as you can get away with, as much wind as you can get away with, lots more National Grid to get energy where it's needed from different places at different times, with gas plants in reserve for those dull grey weeks we get a few of each year.
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
I was utterly bemused by Reform's attack on renewable energy and the subsidies that it supposedly takes with a preference for nuclear instead. The strike price for nuclear is already nearly twice the renewable rate and they are heading in opposite directions. The one universal and unbreakable rule since the 1950s has always been that nuclear energy is the most expensive option. Always. And it is going to remain so.
Trouble is that almost all our energy options are bad.
Solar has got very cheap to install but doesn't work in winter at our latitude, which is our peak demand.
Wind has stopped getting significantly cheaper, and the strike prices we are having to offer are above the current grid price - i.e. we're locking in higher prices for the next 30 years with the wind we're building now. And our electricity is already extraordinarily expensive.
Nuclear should be the answer, but because we've decided to do it as a JV with the French rather than buying Korean designs off the peg it makes even wind look cheap.
Coal is by far the cheapest source of power, but we don't like it because it's not clean and have just destroyed all our coal fired infrastructure.
Gas is fairly expensive compared to coal, and much harder to store, we refuse to frack for the massive reserves we appear to sat on (fracking is what's driven the US energy price so low, and thus caused their whole economy to pull away from Europe). Very vulnerable to global price shocks.
Tidal has potential, but suffers from big project syndrome (see also Nuclear) and the planning/environmental lobby, hence we've never built any.
There are lots of ways it could be fixed, but it all of them require slaying at least one sacred cow, most of them several. And in exactly none of the options for fixing it is wind the right answer - so obviously that's what we've bet the farm on.
The chat I had with the local fUKers on Sunday was interesting. Their objections to Net Zero were primarily: SSEN building ugly pylons to take clean energy to England Spending £lots to have turbines not running due lack of said pylons to take the energy to England
Their view was that UK energy is sky high cos of paying to have turbines switched off. Not because we're pegged to import gas prices we largely don't import. And their solution is RR small nukes which are definitely available to generate cheap power tomorrow.
Of all their policies it's the most baffling. I pointed out that in practice all their options leave us on the hook to foreigners as opposed to making our own power here. They disagreed - because nobody wants these ugly turbines here. And don't worry about foreigners.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I blame the people who voted not just for this government but also Truss and Boris too.
Note the presenter uses the American term ‘curb cut’ so probably the whole list originated over there.
The "Curb-Cut Effect" is a common & recognised term in the USA, including in academic literature - for what she describes, that is how adaptations for disabled are general improvements so they help everyone (including - implicitly - YOU). And she is trying to embed that they are a good thing.
The vid came up on my feed yesterday, and I was not familiar with social media influencer "Chronically_Jenni". It's got a lot of attention, and fair play for that it will help make people think, which is her aim - 100s of k of views at least. She may be using the USA term because of her audience mix. Some of them may well start pointing out missing dropped kerbs as a result, which is one thing we need.
At a more considered level, imo she's a little off on the history, and is not quite clear about what she describes - eg distinguishing "kerb cuts" for disabled (Kalamazoo 1940s) from driveway accesses (at least 20-30 years earlier). And there's a bit of "everything was invented in the USA" syndrome (we had them for prams in the 1930s). But on a 3 minute SM vid that's not a huge thing.
It's also an American, transactional, way of arguing - "do this because it helps you too" is what we (generally, in Europe) would call a "medical view" of disability - disabled people are "them" whom "we" do things to help, here because "it helps you too". IMO that's a negative argument, which gives the option of saying "no, we don't need to help you - because there's nothing in it for us".
A positive argument would be based on what is termed a "social view" of disability. That is, disabled people are "us", so we design our society to work for all its members. "No" is then not an option as an answer. That's why our Building Regs require all new houses to be accessible, even if the person building it is fully mobile. Disabled adaptations are inherent and necessary, not requiring permission from someone else or some societal "Lady Bountiful". It moves the debate point from "do we do this or not" to "how on earth can you justify not doing this routine thing?" That's an important shift, and the challenge becomes implementation not justification.
Stop shouting at each other about Brexit. When we're into alternative facts what is the point?
What Brexit has done is killed Scottish Independence. People now want actual practical solutions for their myriad issues. Throwing ourselves off the cliff in the dark doesn't have the same appeal as it once had - and last time it was offered in 2014 the vote was No.
This is what drives the SNP hardcore mad. And explains FOR SCOTLAND last year. Why are all these voters so blind as to not want independence when it's so obviously better?
Which in turn explains the purported bridge between Reform and the SNP. Reform think everything is TSE's fault, the SNP think everything is my fault. To step from one brand of jingoism to another is pretty simple when you think about it.
Tbh I'm not sure you figure highly in anyone's blame game.
Horrible, and totally avoidable if people only read the warning signs and understand.
I use NMR (essentially the same as MRI) and both use superconducting magnets (essentially permanent magnets, as long as the coils are kept to around 2 degrees K. The idea that you can 'turn it off' makes me laugh (a bit unfairly). One of our old technical team never believed me when I told him that the NMR magnet wasn't being powered by the cables that run from it (they go to the console/computer to do the experiments). He only finally understood when we changed the console to another manufacturer - everything was removed from the magnet, no more cables ran to it and it was still a magnet (as shown by a compass). He was gob smacked.
Surely you'd need power to run the cooling system for the magnets though?
No - they are superconducting so have ZERO electrical resistance. ZERO. The only issue is keeping them cold (with liquid helium and then nitrogen boil off to keep the helium cold). If they go above the superconducting temperature you get a magnet quench - the coils suddenly become resistive and heat the gases, causing rapid boil off. Uncontrolled quenches are rare - a magnet will normally only quench during filling with cryogen (if a mistake is made) or when energising or de-energising with electricity.
Yes, I know what superconductivity is. The bit is was wondering about was how they'd be kept cool without power to the cooling system to pump liquid helium around, etc. If you disconnected everything from the machine, then sooner or later the temperature of the magnets would rise sufficiently to stop them being superconducting.
You don't pump helium around - the coils sit in a bath of liquid helium.
Which would have to be kept cool somehow.
Yes by adding more liquid helium (which we do every few months). The helium can is surrounded by a vacuum chamber then a liquid nitrogen can then another vacuum chamber. The boil off of nitrogen helps keep the helium cold and is topped up each week.
Some newer magnets use gas compression to capture and re-liquify the helium (its getting very expensive and for use in remote locations where filling is a challenge).
But more NMR magnets do not have cables running to them to do anything other than run the radio waves for the experiment plus small electromagnets for gradient fields and shimming of samples.
Please trust me on this - I've been doing this for 30 years. Happy to show you if you are in Bath and at a loose end.
As a third party observer of this discussion (physicist by training, but with no specific knowledge of MMR/NMR machines) this is really interesting, thank you.
Like FeersumEnjineeya, I would have assumed there was a power source for active cooling. The fact it can be done in the way you describe is fascinating.
In specious connections news I learn Alexander the Great was only 5 ft tall, so small can be great. There’s also an Alexandria in Scotland, case closed.
Apparently Napoleon was a behemoth. Far taller than people think.
In specious connections news I learn Alexander the Great was only 5 ft tall, so small can be great. There’s also an Alexandria in Scotland, case closed.
Apparently Napoleon was a behemoth. Far taller than people think.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
It does trigger him somewhat.
Perhaps a lie down on a darkened room is the order of the day
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
I was utterly bemused by Reform's attack on renewable energy and the subsidies that it supposedly takes with a preference for nuclear instead. The strike price for nuclear is already nearly twice the renewable rate and they are heading in opposite directions. The one universal and unbreakable rule since the 1950s has always been that nuclear energy is the most expensive option. Always. And it is going to remain so.
Trouble is that almost all our energy options are bad.
Solar has got very cheap to install but doesn't work in winter at our latitude, which is our peak demand.
Wind has stopped getting significantly cheaper, and the strike prices we are having to offer are above the current grid price - i.e. we're locking in higher prices for the next 30 years with the wind we're building now. And our electricity is already extraordinarily expensive.
Nuclear should be the answer, but because we've decided to do it as a JV with the French rather than buying Korean designs off the peg it makes even wind look cheap.
Coal is by far the cheapest source of power, but we don't like it because it's not clean and have just destroyed all our coal fired infrastructure.
Gas is fairly expensive compared to coal, and much harder to store, we refuse to frack for the massive reserves we appear to sat on (fracking is what's driven the US energy price so low, and thus caused their whole economy to pull away from Europe). Very vulnerable to global price shocks.
Tidal has potential, but suffers from big project syndrome (see also Nuclear) and the planning/environmental lobby, hence we've never built any.
There are lots of ways it could be fixed, but it all of them require slaying at least one sacred cow, most of them several. And in exactly none of the options for fixing it is wind the right answer - so obviously that's what we've bet the farm on.
The chat I had with the local fUKers on Sunday was interesting. Their objections to Net Zero were primarily: SSEN building ugly pylons to take clean energy to England Spending £lots to have turbines not running due lack of said pylons to take the energy to England
Their view was that UK energy is sky high cos of paying to have turbines switched off. Not because we're pegged to import gas prices we largely don't import. And their solution is RR small nukes which are definitely available to generate cheap power tomorrow.
Of all their policies it's the most baffling. I pointed out that in practice all their options leave us on the hook to foreigners as opposed to making our own power here. They disagreed - because nobody wants these ugly turbines here. And don't worry about foreigners.
Riiiiiight.
If you are comfortable enough (and one part of the Reform coalition is financially very comfortable, thank you) then the cost of energy is less of an issue than dislike of turbines and pylons.
Besides, if green energy has been an expensive luxury for all of your lifetime, changing your mind about that (even if the facts have changed) is one of the most expensive things of all to do.
In specious connections news I learn Alexander the Great was only 5 ft tall, so small can be great. There’s also an Alexandria in Scotland, case closed.
Apparently Napoleon was a behemoth. Far taller than people think.
In specious connections news I learn Alexander the Great was only 5 ft tall, so small can be great. There’s also an Alexandria in Scotland, case closed.
Apparently Napoleon was a behemoth. Far taller than people think.
In specious connections news I learn Alexander the Great was only 5 ft tall, so small can be great. There’s also an Alexandria in Scotland, case closed.
Apparently Napoleon was a behemoth. Far taller than people think.
But he would have been dwarfed by his Imperial Guards, who had to be (I believe) 6 foot 4 to join - then topped with a bearskin.
In specious connections news I learn Alexander the Great was only 5 ft tall, so small can be great. There’s also an Alexandria in Scotland, case closed.
Apparently Napoleon was a behemoth. Far taller than people think.
He was average for the time.
He was average for the time FOR A CORSICAN PEASANT (with a dash of noble blood)
French Aristocrats - like aristos in England or elsewhere - were several inches taller due to better health, meatier diet
So the image of short arse Bonaparte surrounded by his lofty posh generals is still correct
What are the chances of PR being introduced before the next election?
For the general election - zilch even though it’s essential given our now 4/5 party system
It's no more essential now than it was in 1983 or 2015.
Both those times, the centripetal forces on the 2.5 party system won out. There is less sign of that happening this time, which says something (probably quite bad) about us as a nation. We're a bit more "I want exactly what I want or nothing at all".
But yeah, we're two psychotic results (silly numbers where MPs don't really reflect votes and the numbers of MPs don't let anyone form a credible government) away from PR;
Reasonable article but definitely of the glass half full type, re-iterating all the bogus London reasons to allow them to keep milking us and ignoring any of the positives , ie biggest one is how on earth could we be worse off than we are under the English parliament. Lots of small countries doing much better than the basket case UK and they have little or no resources compared to Scotland. We will just see the usual "London" responses here from bigoted people with no clue about Scotland other than it is a nice piggy bank that has lots of collateral to back up their loans.
I might misremember but perhaps some of our Indian contributors would like to comment. Apparently India was 10% of the world GDP before the Raj and 1% during it as wealth was extracted. An independent India (or Ireland) is now climbing up the ranks.
Or perhaps there are other reasons for the comparative growth / decline in a nations fortunes - but why not give everyone a chance. Especially since the Welsh, Irish and Scots are all 'spongers'
Quite a bit of that wasn't exactly wealth extraction, though. World GDP grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution - and the British control of India meant they were unable to shield their (very large) domestic textile industry from mechanised competition, so it collapsed as a result.
Pre-Industrial Revolution, a State’s share of world GDP tended to match its share of world population, with most people growing food as peasants, in villages. Maximum GDP per head was about $2,000. The lives of the elite were simply unimaginable to such people.
I was reading one economic article about the Roman Empire, which estimated Senatorial incomes at an average £9m, in 150, and knightly incomes at £720,000. The rest were on about £800 a year, per capita.
That all changed after 1800.
I get the impression that some people are bitter that Britain industrialised first, perhaps even than Britain industrialised at all.
Not a bit of it; it's something which provided us with a century or so of prosperity, for which I'm grateful.
That it also had a pretty disastrous effect on the economy of the Indian subcontinent, as a fairly direct result of our being the colonial power at the same time as we industrialised, isn't particularly controversial.
Indeed.
But there are people who do resent the industrial revolution happening here as they think one of:
1) It allowed 'wicked' Britain to 'exploit' the rest of the world.
2) It ended some rural pastoral idyll.
3) It messed up some wonderful Jane Austen style social system.
It’s funny. The Bennetts are “poor”, but they still own a village. Even minor nobility, in a pre-industrial world, live lives of incredible opulence, compared to the vast majority.
The Bennetts were reasonably well off in the present moment (I don't think we are told Mr Bennett's income) but would lose everything on the death of Mr Bennett on account of the estate being entailed in the male line, and having no sons and five daughters.
The questions of daughters of or close to well off families but without independent fortune is a staple of 19th century fiction. Trollope was obsessed by it. The options are so stark; good marriage to money, poor marriage, then utter dependence of no marriage and no money when you have been brought up amonmg gentlefolk.
BTW Bennett's are not 'nobility'. They are leading commoners in their patch. The social gulf always remains. There is a fascinating subject, perhaps a bit underexplored to this day of 'commoner' but ancient families - no titles but a landed presence in an area for hundreds of years. Like the Thornes of Ullathorne in Trollope. There are still quite a few quietly around.
IIRC, Mrs. Bennett and her daughters would inherit £5,000 after Mr. Bennett's death, which is a big reduction from the capital sum that Mr. Bennett had the use of us, but is not nothing. The problem is that it would be disgraceful for any of the daughters to have to earn a living through trade (where a capital sum of a few hundred pounds would be very valuable**), and that kind of sum will only make them attractive as marriage partners to a member of the middle classes.
By way of comparison, Mr. Bingely has an income of £4,000 and Mr. Darcy one of £10,000.
The Bennetts, Bingleys, and Darcy are all untitled, but that's a feature of England ennobling so few people.. All would rank as nobility in most of Europe, or the Roman Empire.
**Brown, in The Happy Return, gets awarded the lower deck's portion of prize money, for capturing a ship with Hornblower and Bush. That is £800, enough for him to buy a pub, a blacksmith's or many other businesses, and live very well for the rest of his life. But, that would be a step up for him, rather than several steps down, for the Bennetts. Brown would not be humiliated, by having to earn a living through trade.
Putting it bluntly the SNP have run out of ideas. In the 2024 General Election their manifesto was FOR SCOTLAND - if you weren't for the SNP you were against Scotland. They actually deployed that line that aggressively on the doorstep!
Our problems north of the wall are practically the same as south of the wall - a broken country where the economy means jobs struggle to pay soaring bills, and services crumbling due to a lack of cash.
The SNP solution to not being able to see a dentist or no investment into roads or a lack of teachers? Independence! From what I saw last year punters have largely stopped listening to this guff - they want solutions that are little more tangible than Independence or being told you're a traitor to the flag.
My gut instinct is that they are going to struggle - a very tired incumbent party riven deeply on most issues presiding over a mess. It should be party time for challenging parties - oh yeah Labour are also a very tired incumbent party.
I think we're going to get a chaos result. SNP losing a stack of seats, Labour not gaining as many as they demand by right, Reform picking up scores, the Tories reduced back into redoubts, LD and Green and likely others doing decently well.
I look forward to giving you updates as a candidate.
The wall?
Isn't Hadrian's Wall entirely in England, and the Antonine Wall entirely in Scotland?
Yes. I live north of Hadrian’s Wall and there’s still about 100 miles of England north of me.
I once met an englishman at the Mull of Galloway who had moved south from England to live in Scotland. He had been living in Northumberland, and had moved to the Mull - south of his old home.
Also, Newcastle is further west than Southampton.
Yes, the Mull is as far south as Hartlepool
And here's a road where you can drive due South into Scotland (or vice versa, according to taste):
My favourite oddity is that to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific you travel east through the Panama Canal.
Reasonable article but definitely of the glass half full type, re-iterating all the bogus London reasons to allow them to keep milking us and ignoring any of the positives , ie biggest one is how on earth could we be worse off than we are under the English parliament. Lots of small countries doing much better than the basket case UK and they have little or no resources compared to Scotland. We will just see the usual "London" responses here from bigoted people with no clue about Scotland other than it is a nice piggy bank that has lots of collateral to back up their loans.
I might misremember but perhaps some of our Indian contributors would like to comment. Apparently India was 10% of the world GDP before the Raj and 1% during it as wealth was extracted. An independent India (or Ireland) is now climbing up the ranks.
Or perhaps there are other reasons for the comparative growth / decline in a nations fortunes - but why not give everyone a chance. Especially since the Welsh, Irish and Scots are all 'spongers'
Quite a bit of that wasn't exactly wealth extraction, though. World GDP grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution - and the British control of India meant they were unable to shield their (very large) domestic textile industry from mechanised competition, so it collapsed as a result.
Pre-Industrial Revolution, a State’s share of world GDP tended to match its share of world population, with most people growing food as peasants, in villages. Maximum GDP per head was about $2,000. The lives of the elite were simply unimaginable to such people.
I was reading one economic article about the Roman Empire, which estimated Senatorial incomes at an average £9m, in 150, and knightly incomes at £720,000. The rest were on about £800 a year, per capita.
That all changed after 1800.
I get the impression that some people are bitter that Britain industrialised first, perhaps even than Britain industrialised at all.
Not a bit of it; it's something which provided us with a century or so of prosperity, for which I'm grateful.
That it also had a pretty disastrous effect on the economy of the Indian subcontinent, as a fairly direct result of our being the colonial power at the same time as we industrialised, isn't particularly controversial.
Indeed.
But there are people who do resent the industrial revolution happening here as they think one of:
1) It allowed 'wicked' Britain to 'exploit' the rest of the world.
2) It ended some rural pastoral idyll.
3) It messed up some wonderful Jane Austen style social system.
It’s funny. The Bennetts are “poor”, but they still own a village. Even minor nobility, in a pre-industrial world, live lives of incredible opulence, compared to the vast majority.
Its interesting that in P&P the two unpleasant people - Wickham and Collins - both had jobs, respectable middle class jobs as an army officer and clergyman, but still jobs.
Mrs Bennett, the daughter of a lawyer, is a silly, vulgar women.
And Mrs Bennett's brother is looked down on for being 'in trade'.
Considering such social attitudes, it's easy grasp why the repeal of the Corn Laws, which threatened to allow foreign competition to strike a dagger into the heart of Britain's agricultural economy, was an issue which split apart the party which represented the wealthy landowners.
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
I was utterly bemused by Reform's attack on renewable energy and the subsidies that it supposedly takes with a preference for nuclear instead. The strike price for nuclear is already nearly twice the renewable rate and they are heading in opposite directions. The one universal and unbreakable rule since the 1950s has always been that nuclear energy is the most expensive option. Always. And it is going to remain so.
Trouble is that almost all our energy options are bad.
Solar has got very cheap to install but doesn't work in winter at our latitude, which is our peak demand.
Wind has stopped getting significantly cheaper, and the strike prices we are having to offer are above the current grid price - i.e. we're locking in higher prices for the next 30 years with the wind we're building now. And our electricity is already extraordinarily expensive.
Nuclear should be the answer, but because we've decided to do it as a JV with the French rather than buying Korean designs off the peg it makes even wind look cheap.
Coal is by far the cheapest source of power, but we don't like it because it's not clean and have just destroyed all our coal fired infrastructure.
Gas is fairly expensive compared to coal, and much harder to store, we refuse to frack for the massive reserves we appear to sat on (fracking is what's driven the US energy price so low, and thus caused their whole economy to pull away from Europe). Very vulnerable to global price shocks.
Tidal has potential, but suffers from big project syndrome (see also Nuclear) and the planning/environmental lobby, hence we've never built any.
There are lots of ways it could be fixed, but it all of them require slaying at least one sacred cow, most of them several. And in exactly none of the options for fixing it is wind the right answer - so obviously that's what we've bet the farm on.
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
I was utterly bemused by Reform's attack on renewable energy and the subsidies that it supposedly takes with a preference for nuclear instead. The strike price for nuclear is already nearly twice the renewable rate and they are heading in opposite directions. The one universal and unbreakable rule since the 1950s has always been that nuclear energy is the most expensive option. Always. And it is going to remain so.
Trouble is that almost all our energy options are bad.
Solar has got very cheap to install but doesn't work in winter at our latitude, which is our peak demand.
Wind has stopped getting significantly cheaper, and the strike prices we are having to offer are above the current grid price - i.e. we're locking in higher prices for the next 30 years with the wind we're building now. And our electricity is already extraordinarily expensive.
Nuclear should be the answer, but because we've decided to do it as a JV with the French rather than buying Korean designs off the peg it makes even wind look cheap.
Coal is by far the cheapest source of power, but we don't like it because it's not clean and have just destroyed all our coal fired infrastructure.
Gas is fairly expensive compared to coal, and much harder to store, we refuse to frack for the massive reserves we appear to sat on (fracking is what's driven the US energy price so low, and thus caused their whole economy to pull away from Europe). Very vulnerable to global price shocks.
Tidal has potential, but suffers from big project syndrome (see also Nuclear) and the planning/environmental lobby, hence we've never built any.
There are lots of ways it could be fixed, but it all of them require slaying at least one sacred cow, most of them several. And in exactly none of the options for fixing it is wind the right answer - so obviously that's what we've bet the farm on.
Wind does seem to be the sacred cow for Ed Miliband. Its interesting how much of a mix there is on the continent for different energy sources. The issues with wind are that its not easy to store for when it's not blowing (or blowing too hard) and you still need a back up. Solar works very well in summer, again if only it could be stored
More battery storage plants being proposed in south Scotland, will see if starts to take off
I don't understand why the government don't put their money behind larger projects and get someone else to run it when its built instead of getting global companies to bid or joint ventures with France, etc. Instead we have the government sitting around pontificating for years, assessing and surveying when they should be getting on with it.
Interesting Norway are still committed to supplying oil but 80% of their power comes from hydro. The Norwegian landscape is perfect for developing it
In specious connections news I learn Alexander the Great was only 5 ft tall, so small can be great. There’s also an Alexandria in Scotland, case closed.
Apparently Napoleon was a behemoth. Far taller than people think.
He was average for the time.
He was average for the time FOR A CORSICAN PEASANT (with a dash of noble blood)
French Aristocrats - like aristos in England or elsewhere - were several inches taller due to better health, meatier diet
So the image of short arse Bonaparte surrounded by his lofty posh generals is still correct
I've always been fascinated by the coincidence of Wellington and Napoleon being born in the same year, and to similar backgrounds. The Revolution, and subsequent wars, propelled so many minor nobility to high positions.
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
I was utterly bemused by Reform's attack on renewable energy and the subsidies that it supposedly takes with a preference for nuclear instead. The strike price for nuclear is already nearly twice the renewable rate and they are heading in opposite directions. The one universal and unbreakable rule since the 1950s has always been that nuclear energy is the most expensive option. Always. And it is going to remain so.
Trouble is that almost all our energy options are bad.
Solar has got very cheap to install but doesn't work in winter at our latitude, which is our peak demand.
Wind has stopped getting significantly cheaper, and the strike prices we are having to offer are above the current grid price - i.e. we're locking in higher prices for the next 30 years with the wind we're building now. And our electricity is already extraordinarily expensive.
Nuclear should be the answer, but because we've decided to do it as a JV with the French rather than buying Korean designs off the peg it makes even wind look cheap.
Coal is by far the cheapest source of power, but we don't like it because it's not clean and have just destroyed all our coal fired infrastructure.
Gas is fairly expensive compared to coal, and much harder to store, we refuse to frack for the massive reserves we appear to sat on (fracking is what's driven the US energy price so low, and thus caused their whole economy to pull away from Europe). Very vulnerable to global price shocks.
Tidal has potential, but suffers from big project syndrome (see also Nuclear) and the planning/environmental lobby, hence we've never built any.
There are lots of ways it could be fixed, but it all of them require slaying at least one sacred cow, most of them several. And in exactly none of the options for fixing it is wind the right answer - so obviously that's what we've bet the farm on.
The chat I had with the local fUKers on Sunday was interesting. Their objections to Net Zero were primarily: SSEN building ugly pylons to take clean energy to England Spending £lots to have turbines not running due lack of said pylons to take the energy to England
Their view was that UK energy is sky high cos of paying to have turbines switched off. Not because we're pegged to import gas prices we largely don't import. And their solution is RR small nukes which are definitely available to generate cheap power tomorrow.
Of all their policies it's the most baffling. I pointed out that in practice all their options leave us on the hook to foreigners as opposed to making our own power here. They disagreed - because nobody wants these ugly turbines here. And don't worry about foreigners.
Riiiiiight.
If you are comfortable enough (and one part of the Reform coalition is financially very comfortable, thank you) then the cost of energy is less of an issue than dislike of turbines and pylons.
Besides, if green energy has been an expensive luxury for all of your lifetime, changing your mind about that (even if the facts have changed) is one of the most expensive things of all to do.
Oh I think you are going far further there than reform actually does.
Reform seen very much to go for half baked but second step answers so they look to most people to be complete when they really aren’t.
As demonstrated by the above where the solutions are going to be fracking (may well not work in the uk due to geology) and mini nukes (coming but x years away).
In specious connections news I learn Alexander the Great was only 5 ft tall, so small can be great. There’s also an Alexandria in Scotland, case closed.
Apparently Napoleon was a behemoth. Far taller than people think.
He was average for the time.
He was average for the time FOR A CORSICAN PEASANT (with a dash of noble blood)
French Aristocrats - like aristos in England or elsewhere - were several inches taller due to better health, meatier diet
So the image of short arse Bonaparte surrounded by his lofty posh generals is still correct
It's primarily a victory of British cartoonists over a Corsican pig farmer/emperor.
Reasonable article but definitely of the glass half full type, re-iterating all the bogus London reasons to allow them to keep milking us and ignoring any of the positives , ie biggest one is how on earth could we be worse off than we are under the English parliament. Lots of small countries doing much better than the basket case UK and they have little or no resources compared to Scotland. We will just see the usual "London" responses here from bigoted people with no clue about Scotland other than it is a nice piggy bank that has lots of collateral to back up their loans.
I might misremember but perhaps some of our Indian contributors would like to comment. Apparently India was 10% of the world GDP before the Raj and 1% during it as wealth was extracted. An independent India (or Ireland) is now climbing up the ranks.
Or perhaps there are other reasons for the comparative growth / decline in a nations fortunes - but why not give everyone a chance. Especially since the Welsh, Irish and Scots are all 'spongers'
Quite a bit of that wasn't exactly wealth extraction, though. World GDP grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution - and the British control of India meant they were unable to shield their (very large) domestic textile industry from mechanised competition, so it collapsed as a result.
Pre-Industrial Revolution, a State’s share of world GDP tended to match its share of world population, with most people growing food as peasants, in villages. Maximum GDP per head was about $2,000. The lives of the elite were simply unimaginable to such people.
I was reading one economic article about the Roman Empire, which estimated Senatorial incomes at an average £9m, in 150, and knightly incomes at £720,000. The rest were on about £800 a year, per capita.
That all changed after 1800.
I get the impression that some people are bitter that Britain industrialised first, perhaps even than Britain industrialised at all.
Not a bit of it; it's something which provided us with a century or so of prosperity, for which I'm grateful.
That it also had a pretty disastrous effect on the economy of the Indian subcontinent, as a fairly direct result of our being the colonial power at the same time as we industrialised, isn't particularly controversial.
Indeed.
But there are people who do resent the industrial revolution happening here as they think one of:
1) It allowed 'wicked' Britain to 'exploit' the rest of the world.
2) It ended some rural pastoral idyll.
3) It messed up some wonderful Jane Austen style social system.
It’s funny. The Bennetts are “poor”, but they still own a village. Even minor nobility, in a pre-industrial world, live lives of incredible opulence, compared to the vast majority.
Its interesting that in P&P the two unpleasant people - Wickham and Collins - both had jobs, respectable middle class jobs as an army officer and clergyman, but still jobs.
Mrs Bennett, the daughter of a lawyer, is a silly, vulgar women.
And Mrs Bennett's brother is looked down on for being 'in trade'.
Considering such social attitudes, it's easy grasp why the repeal of the Corn Laws, which threatened to allow foreign competition to strike a dagger into the heart of Britain's agricultural economy, was an issue which split apart the party which represented the wealthy landowners.
It's a ridiculous affectation, given the way the landowning class would redefine so many activities, such as exploiting their lands for coal, iron, quarries etc. as "not trade."
One of the bits of A Song of Ice and Fire that amused is the way that Tywin Lannister is genuinely appalled that Robb Stark has married the granddaughter of a spice merchant, but he clearly does not consider that operating gold mines on his land, or collecting harbour dues from Lannisport is "trade."
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
I was utterly bemused by Reform's attack on renewable energy and the subsidies that it supposedly takes with a preference for nuclear instead. The strike price for nuclear is already nearly twice the renewable rate and they are heading in opposite directions. The one universal and unbreakable rule since the 1950s has always been that nuclear energy is the most expensive option. Always. And it is going to remain so.
Trouble is that almost all our energy options are bad.
Solar has got very cheap to install but doesn't work in winter at our latitude, which is our peak demand.
Wind has stopped getting significantly cheaper, and the strike prices we are having to offer are above the current grid price - i.e. we're locking in higher prices for the next 30 years with the wind we're building now. And our electricity is already extraordinarily expensive.
Nuclear should be the answer, but because we've decided to do it as a JV with the French rather than buying Korean designs off the peg it makes even wind look cheap.
Coal is by far the cheapest source of power, but we don't like it because it's not clean and have just destroyed all our coal fired infrastructure.
Gas is fairly expensive compared to coal, and much harder to store, we refuse to frack for the massive reserves we appear to sat on (fracking is what's driven the US energy price so low, and thus caused their whole economy to pull away from Europe). Very vulnerable to global price shocks.
Tidal has potential, but suffers from big project syndrome (see also Nuclear) and the planning/environmental lobby, hence we've never built any.
There are lots of ways it could be fixed, but it all of them require slaying at least one sacred cow, most of them several. And in exactly none of the options for fixing it is wind the right answer - so obviously that's what we've bet the farm on.
The chat I had with the local fUKers on Sunday was interesting. Their objections to Net Zero were primarily: SSEN building ugly pylons to take clean energy to England Spending £lots to have turbines not running due lack of said pylons to take the energy to England
Their view was that UK energy is sky high cos of paying to have turbines switched off. Not because we're pegged to import gas prices we largely don't import. And their solution is RR small nukes which are definitely available to generate cheap power tomorrow.
Of all their policies it's the most baffling. I pointed out that in practice all their options leave us on the hook to foreigners as opposed to making our own power here. They disagreed - because nobody wants these ugly turbines here. And don't worry about foreigners.
Riiiiiight.
There's also the complicating argument over regional pricing of electricity, but you're quite right in saying that opposing grid upgrades is entirely antithetical to Scotland's economic interests.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
Can't believe another large infrastructure project is overbudget again.
That’s the case of us not
1) picking a standard design and reusing it 2) trusting someone else’s paperwork. I suspect we could get 3 South Korean plants for the same money but that would require us accepting someone else’s standards
In specious connections news I learn Alexander the Great was only 5 ft tall, so small can be great. There’s also an Alexandria in Scotland, case closed.
Apparently Napoleon was a behemoth. Far taller than people think.
He was average for the time.
Probably roughly the same as Nelson, Wellington not much taller.
Reasonable article but definitely of the glass half full type, re-iterating all the bogus London reasons to allow them to keep milking us and ignoring any of the positives , ie biggest one is how on earth could we be worse off than we are under the English parliament. Lots of small countries doing much better than the basket case UK and they have little or no resources compared to Scotland. We will just see the usual "London" responses here from bigoted people with no clue about Scotland other than it is a nice piggy bank that has lots of collateral to back up their loans.
I might misremember but perhaps some of our Indian contributors would like to comment. Apparently India was 10% of the world GDP before the Raj and 1% during it as wealth was extracted. An independent India (or Ireland) is now climbing up the ranks.
Or perhaps there are other reasons for the comparative growth / decline in a nations fortunes - but why not give everyone a chance. Especially since the Welsh, Irish and Scots are all 'spongers'
Quite a bit of that wasn't exactly wealth extraction, though. World GDP grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution - and the British control of India meant they were unable to shield their (very large) domestic textile industry from mechanised competition, so it collapsed as a result.
Pre-Industrial Revolution, a State’s share of world GDP tended to match its share of world population, with most people growing food as peasants, in villages. Maximum GDP per head was about $2,000. The lives of the elite were simply unimaginable to such people.
I was reading one economic article about the Roman Empire, which estimated Senatorial incomes at an average £9m, in 150, and knightly incomes at £720,000. The rest were on about £800 a year, per capita.
That all changed after 1800.
I get the impression that some people are bitter that Britain industrialised first, perhaps even than Britain industrialised at all.
Not a bit of it; it's something which provided us with a century or so of prosperity, for which I'm grateful.
That it also had a pretty disastrous effect on the economy of the Indian subcontinent, as a fairly direct result of our being the colonial power at the same time as we industrialised, isn't particularly controversial.
Indeed.
But there are people who do resent the industrial revolution happening here as they think one of:
1) It allowed 'wicked' Britain to 'exploit' the rest of the world.
2) It ended some rural pastoral idyll.
3) It messed up some wonderful Jane Austen style social system.
It’s funny. The Bennetts are “poor”, but they still own a village. Even minor nobility, in a pre-industrial world, live lives of incredible opulence, compared to the vast majority.
Its interesting that in P&P the two unpleasant people - Wickham and Collins - both had jobs, respectable middle class jobs as an army officer and clergyman, but still jobs.
Mrs Bennett, the daughter of a lawyer, is a silly, vulgar women.
And Mrs Bennett's brother is looked down on for being 'in trade'.
Considering such social attitudes, it's easy grasp why the repeal of the Corn Laws, which threatened to allow foreign competition to strike a dagger into the heart of Britain's agricultural economy, was an issue which split apart the party which represented the wealthy landowners.
It's a ridiculous affectation, given the way the landowning class would redefine so many activities, such as exploiting their lands for coal, iron, quarries etc. as "not trade."
One of the bits of A Song of Ice and Fire that amused is the way that Tywin Lannister is genuinely appalled that Robb Stark has married the granddaughter of a spice merchant, but he clearly does not consider that operating gold mines on his land, or collecting harbour dues from Lannisport is "trade."
I think it is a question of how many people are between you and the source of the money. If there the person doing the work reported to you that’s too close for comfort - 2 “management” layers between you and the real work and you could pretend it had not to to do with you
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
I was utterly bemused by Reform's attack on renewable energy and the subsidies that it supposedly takes with a preference for nuclear instead. The strike price for nuclear is already nearly twice the renewable rate and they are heading in opposite directions. The one universal and unbreakable rule since the 1950s has always been that nuclear energy is the most expensive option. Always. And it is going to remain so.
Trouble is that almost all our energy options are bad.
Solar has got very cheap to install but doesn't work in winter at our latitude, which is our peak demand.
Wind has stopped getting significantly cheaper, and the strike prices we are having to offer are above the current grid price - i.e. we're locking in higher prices for the next 30 years with the wind we're building now. And our electricity is already extraordinarily expensive.
Nuclear should be the answer, but because we've decided to do it as a JV with the French rather than buying Korean designs off the peg it makes even wind look cheap.
Coal is by far the cheapest source of power, but we don't like it because it's not clean and have just destroyed all our coal fired infrastructure.
Gas is fairly expensive compared to coal, and much harder to store, we refuse to frack for the massive reserves we appear to sat on (fracking is what's driven the US energy price so low, and thus caused their whole economy to pull away from Europe). Very vulnerable to global price shocks.
Tidal has potential, but suffers from big project syndrome (see also Nuclear) and the planning/environmental lobby, hence we've never built any.
There are lots of ways it could be fixed, but it all of them require slaying at least one sacred cow, most of them several. And in exactly none of the options for fixing it is wind the right answer - so obviously that's what we've bet the farm on.
The chat I had with the local fUKers on Sunday was interesting. Their objections to Net Zero were primarily: SSEN building ugly pylons to take clean energy to England Spending £lots to have turbines not running due lack of said pylons to take the energy to England
Their view was that UK energy is sky high cos of paying to have turbines switched off. Not because we're pegged to import gas prices we largely don't import. And their solution is RR small nukes which are definitely available to generate cheap power tomorrow.
Of all their policies it's the most baffling. I pointed out that in practice all their options leave us on the hook to foreigners as opposed to making our own power here. They disagreed - because nobody wants these ugly turbines here. And don't worry about foreigners.
Riiiiiight.
The pylons are a blight for the areas concerned, however as the UK energy network capacity is becoming imbalanced from the areas it is being created in (rural Scotland etc) and its vital, approval will be rammed through. No point in objecting.
Not sure how much constraints payments are but would be good to see total cost per MWh for offshore wind/nuclear/gas. I think the strike price did lift significantly around 2022?
The bottom line with the whole thing is the UK is rubbish at generating its own energy supply and relies far too much on foreign companies, neighbours like France etc when the government should be investing in generation directly. Hence the row over Chinese influence between Mr Miliband and Claire Coutinho.
What is the point of GB energy if it is not going to generate any electricity itself?
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
Sensitive, toi?
Not at all. Just woke up from a good night’s sleep
What’s really on my mind is the sad state of Soho last night. Ok it was a little showery and it was Monday
But it’s summer. The evening was mild. This is London’s “entertainment” district. Yet it was so quiet
Soho Square was mainly full of Deliveroo bikers. I saw a few homeless. Lots of shuttered shops. On the way out of the Groucho (also v quiet) the manager said to me “please put your phone away, they get snatched right here”
She wasn’t being officious she really meant it
I fear that the combo of Reeves horrible taxes and london’s crime and cultural changes is killing the capital. Certainly Soho
In the days when I had a pied-à-terre in Canonbury I'd walk back from the West End after the theatre, stopping for a nightcap at the Museum Tavern and another at the King's Head. Now both places close unconscionably early. That great moment of liberation - 24-hour drinking - is just a sad memory. Not enough 24-hour drinkers to make it work.
It’s more that the late licenses are being withdrawn. What Is happening in Soho is that every time a license comes up for renewal, post midnight is basically impossible to get.
This in turn is because the council takes any objections by residents as a blocker.
Khan appointed an utterly useless Nightlife Czar who did zero.
Stop shouting at each other about Brexit. When we're into alternative facts what is the point?
What Brexit has done is killed Scottish Independence. People now want actual practical solutions for their myriad issues. Throwing ourselves off the cliff in the dark doesn't have the same appeal as it once had - and last time it was offered in 2014 the vote was No.
This is what drives the SNP hardcore mad. And explains FOR SCOTLAND last year. Why are all these voters so blind as to not want independence when it's so obviously better?
Which in turn explains the purported bridge between Reform and the SNP. Reform think everything is TSE's fault, the SNP think everything is my fault. To step from one brand of jingoism to another is pretty simple when you think about it.
Tbh I'm not sure you figure highly in anyone's blame game.
Everything bad in Scotland is the fault of the English I'm English Why don't I fuck off out of their country
As I have been told repeatedly. With additional fruity banhammer language added for good measure and once shouted in my face in my own garden.
The whole premise of FOR SCOTLAND was that unless you support Indy you are a traitor. And when you challenge the daft spending fiascos of Holyrood they always blame Westminster. By which they mean England.
Reasonable article but definitely of the glass half full type, re-iterating all the bogus London reasons to allow them to keep milking us and ignoring any of the positives , ie biggest one is how on earth could we be worse off than we are under the English parliament. Lots of small countries doing much better than the basket case UK and they have little or no resources compared to Scotland. We will just see the usual "London" responses here from bigoted people with no clue about Scotland other than it is a nice piggy bank that has lots of collateral to back up their loans.
I might misremember but perhaps some of our Indian contributors would like to comment. Apparently India was 10% of the world GDP before the Raj and 1% during it as wealth was extracted. An independent India (or Ireland) is now climbing up the ranks.
Or perhaps there are other reasons for the comparative growth / decline in a nations fortunes - but why not give everyone a chance. Especially since the Welsh, Irish and Scots are all 'spongers'
Quite a bit of that wasn't exactly wealth extraction, though. World GDP grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution - and the British control of India meant they were unable to shield their (very large) domestic textile industry from mechanised competition, so it collapsed as a result.
Pre-Industrial Revolution, a State’s share of world GDP tended to match its share of world population, with most people growing food as peasants, in villages. Maximum GDP per head was about $2,000. The lives of the elite were simply unimaginable to such people.
I was reading one economic article about the Roman Empire, which estimated Senatorial incomes at an average £9m, in 150, and knightly incomes at £720,000. The rest were on about £800 a year, per capita.
That all changed after 1800.
I get the impression that some people are bitter that Britain industrialised first, perhaps even than Britain industrialised at all.
Not a bit of it; it's something which provided us with a century or so of prosperity, for which I'm grateful.
That it also had a pretty disastrous effect on the economy of the Indian subcontinent, as a fairly direct result of our being the colonial power at the same time as we industrialised, isn't particularly controversial.
Indeed.
But there are people who do resent the industrial revolution happening here as they think one of:
1) It allowed 'wicked' Britain to 'exploit' the rest of the world.
2) It ended some rural pastoral idyll.
3) It messed up some wonderful Jane Austen style social system.
It’s funny. The Bennetts are “poor”, but they still own a village. Even minor nobility, in a pre-industrial world, live lives of incredible opulence, compared to the vast majority.
Its interesting that in P&P the two unpleasant people - Wickham and Collins - both had jobs, respectable middle class jobs as an army officer and clergyman, but still jobs.
Mrs Bennett, the daughter of a lawyer, is a silly, vulgar women.
And Mrs Bennett's brother is looked down on for being 'in trade'.
Considering such social attitudes, it's easy grasp why the repeal of the Corn Laws, which threatened to allow foreign competition to strike a dagger into the heart of Britain's agricultural economy, was an issue which split apart the party which represented the wealthy landowners.
It's a ridiculous affectation, given the way the landowning class would redefine so many activities, such as exploiting their lands for coal, iron, quarries etc. as "not trade."
One of the bits of A Song of Ice and Fire that amused is the way that Tywin Lannister is genuinely appalled that Robb Stark has married the granddaughter of a spice merchant, but he clearly does not consider that operating gold mines on his land, or collecting harbour dues from Lannisport is "trade."
This still happens today with the concept of "new money".
For example, a person who's made it through founding a successful building firm or estate agent who then sends their children to private school, and expects to mix socially with the other parents in professional jobs or who own property.
Stating that there needs to a sustained level of 80%+ support for indy before it can even be considered is a weird kind of Scottish exceptionalism. Meanwhile we have to accept the ongoing and apparently immutable settled will of 52% of the (mainly English & Welsh) people regarding the EU.
52% is enough to win a referendum, but in the current political climate isn't enough to force gov.uk to actually grant one. 80% and over is the point where the concerns of the people opposed to separation don't really matter any more, it would inevitably happen irregardless of a formal referendum.
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
I was utterly bemused by Reform's attack on renewable energy and the subsidies that it supposedly takes with a preference for nuclear instead. The strike price for nuclear is already nearly twice the renewable rate and they are heading in opposite directions. The one universal and unbreakable rule since the 1950s has always been that nuclear energy is the most expensive option. Always. And it is going to remain so.
Trouble is that almost all our energy options are bad.
Solar has got very cheap to install but doesn't work in winter at our latitude, which is our peak demand.
Wind has stopped getting significantly cheaper, and the strike prices we are having to offer are above the current grid price - i.e. we're locking in higher prices for the next 30 years with the wind we're building now. And our electricity is already extraordinarily expensive.
Nuclear should be the answer, but because we've decided to do it as a JV with the French rather than buying Korean designs off the peg it makes even wind look cheap.
Coal is by far the cheapest source of power, but we don't like it because it's not clean and have just destroyed all our coal fired infrastructure.
Gas is fairly expensive compared to coal, and much harder to store, we refuse to frack for the massive reserves we appear to sat on (fracking is what's driven the US energy price so low, and thus caused their whole economy to pull away from Europe). Very vulnerable to global price shocks.
Tidal has potential, but suffers from big project syndrome (see also Nuclear) and the planning/environmental lobby, hence we've never built any.
There are lots of ways it could be fixed, but it all of them require slaying at least one sacred cow, most of them several. And in exactly none of the options for fixing it is wind the right answer - so obviously that's what we've bet the farm on.
The chat I had with the local fUKers on Sunday was interesting. Their objections to Net Zero were primarily: SSEN building ugly pylons to take clean energy to England Spending £lots to have turbines not running due lack of said pylons to take the energy to England
Their view was that UK energy is sky high cos of paying to have turbines switched off. Not because we're pegged to import gas prices we largely don't import. And their solution is RR small nukes which are definitely available to generate cheap power tomorrow.
Of all their policies it's the most baffling. I pointed out that in practice all their options leave us on the hook to foreigners as opposed to making our own power here. They disagreed - because nobody wants these ugly turbines here. And don't worry about foreigners.
Riiiiiight.
There's also the complicating argument over regional pricing of electricity, but you're quite right in saying that opposing grid upgrades is entirely antithetical to Scotland's economic interests.
Much wind goodness is brewed out at sea, with cables laid on the ocean floor. Surely the obvious plan is to connect cables into landside hubs and then dahn sarf with another ocean floor interconnector. Which removes said pylons and gives more jobs to our offshore services industry. Win Win.
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
Does the cost of anything ever go down compared to what was expected?
Information
You used to have to spend major money and time to get information. Now you can get all the facts in the visible universe from your phone at a cost of pennies, and the speed and delivery of this info is only improving
It’s a revolution and the impacts are yet to be truly felt
Many countries have tourist taxes and this doesn’t affect their visitor numbers . People aren’t going to avoid a destination because it has a small tourist tax .
The biggest issue for the hospitality industry is the lack of workers which might be helped if the EU UK mobility scheme ever sees the light of day .
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
Does the cost of anything ever go down compared to what was expected?
Information
You used to have to spend major money and time to get information. Now you can get all the facts in the visible universe from your phone at a cost of pennies, and the speed and delivery of this info is only improving
It’s a revolution and the impacts are yet to be truly felt
So the budgeting for HS2 was largely carried out using Google? Of course, from available evidence you could be right, but why did the consultants charge the public purse so much for details they got off Instagram?
Many countries have tourist taxes and this doesn’t affect their visitor numbers . People aren’t going to avoid a destination because it has a small tourist tax .
The biggest issue for the hospitality industry is the lack of workers which might be helped if the EU UK mobility scheme ever sees the light of day .
Yes, they're absolutely the norm across Europe now. The Italians seem to particularly enjoy changing you them - the gleefully bureaucratic and self-important part of the national character enjoys then very much.
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
I was utterly bemused by Reform's attack on renewable energy and the subsidies that it supposedly takes with a preference for nuclear instead. The strike price for nuclear is already nearly twice the renewable rate and they are heading in opposite directions. The one universal and unbreakable rule since the 1950s has always been that nuclear energy is the most expensive option. Always. And it is going to remain so.
Trouble is that almost all our energy options are bad.
Solar has got very cheap to install but doesn't work in winter at our latitude, which is our peak demand.
Wind has stopped getting significantly cheaper, and the strike prices we are having to offer are above the current grid price - i.e. we're locking in higher prices for the next 30 years with the wind we're building now. And our electricity is already extraordinarily expensive.
Nuclear should be the answer, but because we've decided to do it as a JV with the French rather than buying Korean designs off the peg it makes even wind look cheap.
Coal is by far the cheapest source of power, but we don't like it because it's not clean and have just destroyed all our coal fired infrastructure.
Gas is fairly expensive compared to coal, and much harder to store, we refuse to frack for the massive reserves we appear to sat on (fracking is what's driven the US energy price so low, and thus caused their whole economy to pull away from Europe). Very vulnerable to global price shocks.
Tidal has potential, but suffers from big project syndrome (see also Nuclear) and the planning/environmental lobby, hence we've never built any.
There are lots of ways it could be fixed, but it all of them require slaying at least one sacred cow, most of them several. And in exactly none of the options for fixing it is wind the right answer - so obviously that's what we've bet the farm on.
The chat I had with the local fUKers on Sunday was interesting. Their objections to Net Zero were primarily: SSEN building ugly pylons to take clean energy to England Spending £lots to have turbines not running due lack of said pylons to take the energy to England
Their view was that UK energy is sky high cos of paying to have turbines switched off. Not because we're pegged to import gas prices we largely don't import. And their solution is RR small nukes which are definitely available to generate cheap power tomorrow.
Of all their policies it's the most baffling. I pointed out that in practice all their options leave us on the hook to foreigners as opposed to making our own power here. They disagreed - because nobody wants these ugly turbines here. And don't worry about foreigners.
Riiiiiight.
There's also the complicating argument over regional pricing of electricity, but you're quite right in saying that opposing grid upgrades is entirely antithetical to Scotland's economic interests.
Much wind goodness is brewed out at sea, with cables laid on the ocean floor. Surely the obvious plan is to connect cables into landside hubs and then dahn sarf with another ocean floor interconnector. Which removes said pylons and gives more jobs to our offshore services industry. Win Win.
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
I was utterly bemused by Reform's attack on renewable energy and the subsidies that it supposedly takes with a preference for nuclear instead. The strike price for nuclear is already nearly twice the renewable rate and they are heading in opposite directions. The one universal and unbreakable rule since the 1950s has always been that nuclear energy is the most expensive option. Always. And it is going to remain so.
Trouble is that almost all our energy options are bad.
Solar has got very cheap to install but doesn't work in winter at our latitude, which is our peak demand.
Wind has stopped getting significantly cheaper, and the strike prices we are having to offer are above the current grid price - i.e. we're locking in higher prices for the next 30 years with the wind we're building now. And our electricity is already extraordinarily expensive.
Nuclear should be the answer, but because we've decided to do it as a JV with the French rather than buying Korean designs off the peg it makes even wind look cheap.
Coal is by far the cheapest source of power, but we don't like it because it's not clean and have just destroyed all our coal fired infrastructure.
Gas is fairly expensive compared to coal, and much harder to store, we refuse to frack for the massive reserves we appear to sat on (fracking is what's driven the US energy price so low, and thus caused their whole economy to pull away from Europe). Very vulnerable to global price shocks.
Tidal has potential, but suffers from big project syndrome (see also Nuclear) and the planning/environmental lobby, hence we've never built any.
There are lots of ways it could be fixed, but it all of them require slaying at least one sacred cow, most of them several. And in exactly none of the options for fixing it is wind the right answer - so obviously that's what we've bet the farm on.
The chat I had with the local fUKers on Sunday was interesting. Their objections to Net Zero were primarily: SSEN building ugly pylons to take clean energy to England Spending £lots to have turbines not running due lack of said pylons to take the energy to England
Their view was that UK energy is sky high cos of paying to have turbines switched off. Not because we're pegged to import gas prices we largely don't import. And their solution is RR small nukes which are definitely available to generate cheap power tomorrow.
Of all their policies it's the most baffling. I pointed out that in practice all their options leave us on the hook to foreigners as opposed to making our own power here. They disagreed - because nobody wants these ugly turbines here. And don't worry about foreigners.
Riiiiiight.
There's also the complicating argument over regional pricing of electricity, but you're quite right in saying that opposing grid upgrades is entirely antithetical to Scotland's economic interests.
Much wind goodness is brewed out at sea, with cables laid on the ocean floor. Surely the obvious plan is to connect cables into landside hubs and then dahn sarf with another ocean floor interconnector. Which removes said pylons and gives more jobs to our offshore services industry. Win Win.
Pylons will prob be cheaper, also harder for Russians to hack down
Stop shouting at each other about Brexit. When we're into alternative facts what is the point?
What Brexit has done is killed Scottish Independence. People now want actual practical solutions for their myriad issues. Throwing ourselves off the cliff in the dark doesn't have the same appeal as it once had - and last time it was offered in 2014 the vote was No.
This is what drives the SNP hardcore mad. And explains FOR SCOTLAND last year. Why are all these voters so blind as to not want independence when it's so obviously better?
Which in turn explains the purported bridge between Reform and the SNP. Reform think everything is TSE's fault, the SNP think everything is my fault. To step from one brand of jingoism to another is pretty simple when you think about it.
Tbh I'm not sure you figure highly in anyone's blame game.
Everything bad in Scotland is the fault of the English I'm English Why don't I fuck off out of their country
As I have been told repeatedly. With additional fruity banhammer language added for good measure and once shouted in my face in my own garden.
The whole premise of FOR SCOTLAND was that unless you support Indy you are a traitor. And when you challenge the daft spending fiascos of Holyrood they always blame Westminster. By which they mean England.
So yeah. Ferries fiasco? My fault. Obviously.
I missed "FOR SCOTLAND", but isn't that a bit derivative of James Bond as a slogan.
Which 007 film had "For England"? Or is it all of them?
Many countries have tourist taxes and this doesn’t affect their visitor numbers . People aren’t going to avoid a destination because it has a small tourist tax .
The biggest issue for the hospitality industry is the lack of workers which might be helped if the EU UK mobility scheme ever sees the light of day .
Indeed, I paid a (small) visitor tax when I stayed in Germany last year. However it is levied by the local authority, I suspect the rationale is that you are making use of local services but haven't paid their equivalent of council tax.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
Does the cost of anything ever go down compared to what was expected?
Information
You used to have to spend major money and time to get information. Now you can get all the facts in the visible universe from your phone at a cost of pennies, and the speed and delivery of this info is only improving
It’s a revolution and the impacts are yet to be truly felt
You could get almost any information from a large library before, but that would have taken a lot more time for most people, and time is money as they say.
Reasonable article but definitely of the glass half full type, re-iterating all the bogus London reasons to allow them to keep milking us and ignoring any of the positives , ie biggest one is how on earth could we be worse off than we are under the English parliament. Lots of small countries doing much better than the basket case UK and they have little or no resources compared to Scotland. We will just see the usual "London" responses here from bigoted people with no clue about Scotland other than it is a nice piggy bank that has lots of collateral to back up their loans.
I might misremember but perhaps some of our Indian contributors would like to comment. Apparently India was 10% of the world GDP before the Raj and 1% during it as wealth was extracted. An independent India (or Ireland) is now climbing up the ranks.
Or perhaps there are other reasons for the comparative growth / decline in a nations fortunes - but why not give everyone a chance. Especially since the Welsh, Irish and Scots are all 'spongers'
Quite a bit of that wasn't exactly wealth extraction, though. World GDP grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution - and the British control of India meant they were unable to shield their (very large) domestic textile industry from mechanised competition, so it collapsed as a result.
Pre-Industrial Revolution, a State’s share of world GDP tended to match its share of world population, with most people growing food as peasants, in villages. Maximum GDP per head was about $2,000. The lives of the elite were simply unimaginable to such people.
I was reading one economic article about the Roman Empire, which estimated Senatorial incomes at an average £9m, in 150, and knightly incomes at £720,000. The rest were on about £800 a year, per capita.
That all changed after 1800.
I get the impression that some people are bitter that Britain industrialised first, perhaps even than Britain industrialised at all.
Not a bit of it; it's something which provided us with a century or so of prosperity, for which I'm grateful.
That it also had a pretty disastrous effect on the economy of the Indian subcontinent, as a fairly direct result of our being the colonial power at the same time as we industrialised, isn't particularly controversial.
Indeed.
But there are people who do resent the industrial revolution happening here as they think one of:
1) It allowed 'wicked' Britain to 'exploit' the rest of the world.
2) It ended some rural pastoral idyll.
3) It messed up some wonderful Jane Austen style social system.
It’s funny. The Bennetts are “poor”, but they still own a village. Even minor nobility, in a pre-industrial world, live lives of incredible opulence, compared to the vast majority.
Its interesting that in P&P the two unpleasant people - Wickham and Collins - both had jobs, respectable middle class jobs as an army officer and clergyman, but still jobs.
Mrs Bennett, the daughter of a lawyer, is a silly, vulgar women.
And Mrs Bennett's brother is looked down on for being 'in trade'.
For the sons of nobility and gentry who did not inherit the estate there were respectable jobs like the clergy, the law or being a military officer or an MP but never trade. Daughters were just expected to marry well.
Only the industrial revolution started to make trade more acceptable socially and daughters of the titles would often marry new money factory owners, managers and merchants and financiers to bring new income in
Listening to this song at the moment. Forty five years old, but I can imagine being a left winger who dislikes Reform and the Tories still finding it quite passionate. That said, I think Reform types would too
Set The House Ablaze by The Jam
I was in the pub last night A mutual friend of ours said he'd seen you in the uniform Yeah the leather belt looks manly The black boots butch But oh what a bastard to get off Promises, promises They offer real solutions But hatred has never won for long But something you said set the house ablaze You was so open minded But by someone blinded And now your sign says closed Promises, promises They offer real solutions But hatred has never won for long I think we've lost our perception I think we've lost sight of the goals we should Be working for I think we've lost our reason We stumble blindly and that vision must be restored I wish that there was something I could do about it I wish that there was some way I could try to fight it Scream and shout it But something you said set the house ablaze It is called indoctrination And it happens on all levels But it has nothing to do with equality It has nothing to do with democracy And though it professes to It has nothing to do with humanity It is cold, hard and mechanical
ON topic, the Economist is claiming that Xiaomi phones are now basically as good as iPhones, and much cheaper - and therefore about to conquer the world
I’ve just checked the prices of Xiaomi on Amazon. They are indeed ludicrously cheap (compared to Apple and Samsung etc)
Are they genuinely good? Has anyone got one?
I can say with authority that I am now using Chinese made earbuds to listen to music and at £25 a set they are probably as good as Apple’s which cost £150
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
I hope you have noticed, but this morning aside I have been posting much less frequently, and I have only politely responded today after my initial impudence was called out.
Reasonable article but definitely of the glass half full type, re-iterating all the bogus London reasons to allow them to keep milking us and ignoring any of the positives , ie biggest one is how on earth could we be worse off than we are under the English parliament. Lots of small countries doing much better than the basket case UK and they have little or no resources compared to Scotland. We will just see the usual "London" responses here from bigoted people with no clue about Scotland other than it is a nice piggy bank that has lots of collateral to back up their loans.
I might misremember but perhaps some of our Indian contributors would like to comment. Apparently India was 10% of the world GDP before the Raj and 1% during it as wealth was extracted. An independent India (or Ireland) is now climbing up the ranks.
Or perhaps there are other reasons for the comparative growth / decline in a nations fortunes - but why not give everyone a chance. Especially since the Welsh, Irish and Scots are all 'spongers'
Quite a bit of that wasn't exactly wealth extraction, though. World GDP grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution - and the British control of India meant they were unable to shield their (very large) domestic textile industry from mechanised competition, so it collapsed as a result.
Pre-Industrial Revolution, a State’s share of world GDP tended to match its share of world population, with most people growing food as peasants, in villages. Maximum GDP per head was about $2,000. The lives of the elite were simply unimaginable to such people.
I was reading one economic article about the Roman Empire, which estimated Senatorial incomes at an average £9m, in 150, and knightly incomes at £720,000. The rest were on about £800 a year, per capita.
That all changed after 1800.
I get the impression that some people are bitter that Britain industrialised first, perhaps even than Britain industrialised at all.
Not a bit of it; it's something which provided us with a century or so of prosperity, for which I'm grateful.
That it also had a pretty disastrous effect on the economy of the Indian subcontinent, as a fairly direct result of our being the colonial power at the same time as we industrialised, isn't particularly controversial.
Indeed.
But there are people who do resent the industrial revolution happening here as they think one of:
1) It allowed 'wicked' Britain to 'exploit' the rest of the world.
2) It ended some rural pastoral idyll.
3) It messed up some wonderful Jane Austen style social system.
It’s funny. The Bennetts are “poor”, but they still own a village. Even minor nobility, in a pre-industrial world, live lives of incredible opulence, compared to the vast majority.
Its interesting that in P&P the two unpleasant people - Wickham and Collins - both had jobs, respectable middle class jobs as an army officer and clergyman, but still jobs.
Mrs Bennett, the daughter of a lawyer, is a silly, vulgar women.
And Mrs Bennett's brother is looked down on for being 'in trade'.
For the sons of nobility and gentry who did not inherit the estate there were respectable jobs like the clergy, the law or being a military officer or an MP but never trade. Daughters were just expected to marry well.
Only the industrial revolution started to make trade more acceptable socially and daughters of the titles would often marry new money factory owners, managers and merchants and financiers to bring new income in
Being an MP was not much use as a career until they started being paid just before WW1, required a private income of some sort.
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
Does the cost of anything ever go down compared to what was expected?
Information
You used to have to spend major money and time to get information. Now you can get all the facts in the visible universe from your phone at a cost of pennies, and the speed and delivery of this info is only improving
It’s a revolution and the impacts are yet to be truly felt
Bit of a mixed blessing, though.
Information isn't quite the same as knowledge, and certainly isn't the same as wisdom. Part of our problem as humans in the 21st century is that the flow of information into our eyes, ears and minds is way more intense and relentless than it was even a few decades ago.
I suspect that is part of what is driving us all loopy- we're still cavemen in suits, except now we're also sitting at laptops. (And whatever AI's potential, I don't see people using it to make meaning faster than they make slop.)
And the other problem is the management one. It used to be accepted that organisations of more than a few hundred people were damn hard to manage well, so most people didn't try. Now, you can feed a boss a pile of auto-compiled information, and they think they can manage with it. That doesn't work because management is also about what's not in that information. Besides, huge scale and anonymity is what makes it easier to get away with shady behaviour.
Ed Miliband admits Sizewell C cost has almost doubled to £38bn
I was utterly bemused by Reform's attack on renewable energy and the subsidies that it supposedly takes with a preference for nuclear instead. The strike price for nuclear is already nearly twice the renewable rate and they are heading in opposite directions. The one universal and unbreakable rule since the 1950s has always been that nuclear energy is the most expensive option. Always. And it is going to remain so.
Trouble is that almost all our energy options are bad.
Solar has got very cheap to install but doesn't work in winter at our latitude, which is our peak demand.
Wind has stopped getting significantly cheaper, and the strike prices we are having to offer are above the current grid price - i.e. we're locking in higher prices for the next 30 years with the wind we're building now. And our electricity is already extraordinarily expensive.
Nuclear should be the answer, but because we've decided to do it as a JV with the French rather than buying Korean designs off the peg it makes even wind look cheap.
Coal is by far the cheapest source of power, but we don't like it because it's not clean and have just destroyed all our coal fired infrastructure.
Gas is fairly expensive compared to coal, and much harder to store, we refuse to frack for the massive reserves we appear to sat on (fracking is what's driven the US energy price so low, and thus caused their whole economy to pull away from Europe). Very vulnerable to global price shocks.
Tidal has potential, but suffers from big project syndrome (see also Nuclear) and the planning/environmental lobby, hence we've never built any.
There are lots of ways it could be fixed, but it all of them require slaying at least one sacred cow, most of them several. And in exactly none of the options for fixing it is wind the right answer - so obviously that's what we've bet the farm on.
The chat I had with the local fUKers on Sunday was interesting. Their objections to Net Zero were primarily: SSEN building ugly pylons to take clean energy to England Spending £lots to have turbines not running due lack of said pylons to take the energy to England
Their view was that UK energy is sky high cos of paying to have turbines switched off. Not because we're pegged to import gas prices we largely don't import. And their solution is RR small nukes which are definitely available to generate cheap power tomorrow.
Of all their policies it's the most baffling. I pointed out that in practice all their options leave us on the hook to foreigners as opposed to making our own power here. They disagreed - because nobody wants these ugly turbines here. And don't worry about foreigners.
Riiiiiight.
There's also the complicating argument over regional pricing of electricity, but you're quite right in saying that opposing grid upgrades is entirely antithetical to Scotland's economic interests.
Much wind goodness is brewed out at sea, with cables laid on the ocean floor. Surely the obvious plan is to connect cables into landside hubs and then dahn sarf with another ocean floor interconnector. Which removes said pylons and gives more jobs to our offshore services industry. Win Win.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
I hope you have noticed, but this morning aside I have been posting much less frequently, and I have only politely responded today after my initial impudence was called out.
Why do you have this strange persecution complex that anyone is asking you to post less frequently? We all can post as often as we like, largely about what we like, we just have to accept others will take issue with our posts sometimes.
ON topic, the Economist is claiming that Xiaomi phones are now basically as good as iPhones, and much cheaper - and therefore about to conquer the world
I’ve just checked the prices of Xiaomi on Amazon. They are indeed ludicrously cheap (compared to Apple and Samsung etc)
Are they genuinely good? Has anyone got one?
I can say with authority that I am now using Chinese made earbuds to listen to music and at £25 a set they are probably as good as Apple’s which cost £150
Not earbuds but a phone.
Redmi Note 13, a couple of years old now and only 4g. I had one before that too. No cable-free charging, but perfectly adequate otherwise, and the Chinese Red Army know my every step.
A woman killed her husband with a samurai sword "stabbing and slicing him" more than 50 times before replacing the sword in its sheath on a stand, a court heard.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
I don't believe I have defended the Government, they have certainly disappointed on many levels, although they are yet to plumb the depths of Brexit, Johnson and Truss.
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
You would do your sanity a massive favour if you went and picked random previous threads on PB from during probably any of the years of Tory government. You would see the grief the government got, deserved and undeserved.
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
I hope you have noticed, but this morning aside I have been posting much less frequently, and I have only politely responded today after my initial impudence was called out.
Why do you have this strange persecution complex that anyone is asking you to post less frequently? We all can post as often as we like, largely about what we like, we just have to accept others will take issue with our posts sometimes.
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
He is coping. Mechanism of choice being to point out the deluge of brainless drivel from right wingers (and one or two others who risibly claim to be unaligned) on here.
It's an honourable course. Much easier to de-engage or 'go light' (ie do only the non politics chitchat that PB is always good for, regardless of clashing world views and brain chemistries).
How very PB, a header on the SNP & Indy turns into a reflexive regurgitation of Brexit was good anctually and Remoaners smell.
Obsessive, toi?
Complete with a laboured, bitter, unfunny whine from your good self. So, yes: tick tick tick
"Leavers are, for obvious reasons, reflexively defensive these days."
QED
It is remarkable that a handful of Brexiteers have the audacity to spam the site each day with a million posts decrying current government fiscal travails, whilst still quietly considering Brexit is a success and "Boris Johnson got all the big calls right".
How sad that on a politics site, people should have views that conflict with your own.
Well I seem to recall the beasting of Scott for his anti-Brexit posting. "Scott,n' paste" etc. And the same people complaining about that are doing exactly the same but on a topic that cheers them.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Oh do stop bleating. The Labour Party is now in power. The government of the day ALWAYS gets a kicking on PB and its opponents are thereby energised. Cope
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
He is coping. Mechanism of choice being to point out the deluge of brainless drivel from right wingers (and one or two others who risibly claim to be unaligned) on here.
It's an honourable course. Much easier to de-engage or 'go light' (ie do only the non politics chitchat that PB is always good for, regardless of clashing world views and brain chemistries).
Reasonable article but definitely of the glass half full type, re-iterating all the bogus London reasons to allow them to keep milking us and ignoring any of the positives , ie biggest one is how on earth could we be worse off than we are under the English parliament. Lots of small countries doing much better than the basket case UK and they have little or no resources compared to Scotland. We will just see the usual "London" responses here from bigoted people with no clue about Scotland other than it is a nice piggy bank that has lots of collateral to back up their loans.
I might misremember but perhaps some of our Indian contributors would like to comment. Apparently India was 10% of the world GDP before the Raj and 1% during it as wealth was extracted. An independent India (or Ireland) is now climbing up the ranks.
Or perhaps there are other reasons for the comparative growth / decline in a nations fortunes - but why not give everyone a chance. Especially since the Welsh, Irish and Scots are all 'spongers'
Quite a bit of that wasn't exactly wealth extraction, though. World GDP grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution - and the British control of India meant they were unable to shield their (very large) domestic textile industry from mechanised competition, so it collapsed as a result.
Pre-Industrial Revolution, a State’s share of world GDP tended to match its share of world population, with most people growing food as peasants, in villages. Maximum GDP per head was about $2,000. The lives of the elite were simply unimaginable to such people.
I was reading one economic article about the Roman Empire, which estimated Senatorial incomes at an average £9m, in 150, and knightly incomes at £720,000. The rest were on about £800 a year, per capita.
That all changed after 1800.
I get the impression that some people are bitter that Britain industrialised first, perhaps even than Britain industrialised at all.
Not a bit of it; it's something which provided us with a century or so of prosperity, for which I'm grateful.
That it also had a pretty disastrous effect on the economy of the Indian subcontinent, as a fairly direct result of our being the colonial power at the same time as we industrialised, isn't particularly controversial.
Indeed.
But there are people who do resent the industrial revolution happening here as they think one of:
1) It allowed 'wicked' Britain to 'exploit' the rest of the world.
2) It ended some rural pastoral idyll.
3) It messed up some wonderful Jane Austen style social system.
It’s funny. The Bennetts are “poor”, but they still own a village. Even minor nobility, in a pre-industrial world, live lives of incredible opulence, compared to the vast majority.
Comments
A high exchange rate is not a good thing in itself, nor is a low one a bad thing.
However your data is simply wrong. In 2007-10 the £ was much lower than it has been post-Brexit. At one point in the GFC we nearly had parity, €1.02, something that never came close happening post-Brexit.
It's your entitlement to spam the site with your point of view (TBF, your posts are very measured, legitimate and very readable some, other posters on the other hand are just particularly dreary). Their posts do not add to, but diminish the debate.
PB is such a fantastic resource. It was at its best during US election 2020 as exceptional posters counted down Donald Trump's defeat with data, when it looked from the early count like he might have won.
A number of my favourite (like minded) posters seem recently to have thrown in the towel. If we want the site to be a pro- Tory/ Reform echo chamber let's crack on regardless.
Your 22 year old instagram gym going teetotaller is probably not wanting the same things as I did when I was their age drinking far too much but having fun my way.
Some newer magnets use gas compression to capture and re-liquify the helium (its getting very expensive and for use in remote locations where filling is a challenge).
But more NMR magnets do not have cables running to them to do anything other than run the radio waves for the experiment plus small electromagnets for gradient fields and shimming of samples.
Please trust me on this - I've been doing this for 30 years. Happy to show you if you are in Bath and at a loose end.
Mrs Bennett, the daughter of a lawyer, is a silly, vulgar women.
And Mrs Bennett's brother is looked down on for being 'in trade'.
Secondly there should have been a higher bar to Brexit, with a level of support from the nations making up the union required, and UK wide better than a majority of one.
Solar has got very cheap to install but doesn't work in winter at our latitude, which is our peak demand.
Wind has stopped getting significantly cheaper, and the strike prices we are having to offer are above the current grid price - i.e. we're locking in higher prices for the next 30 years with the wind we're building now. And our electricity is already extraordinarily expensive.
Nuclear should be the answer, but because we've decided to do it as a JV with the French rather than buying Korean designs off the peg it makes even wind look cheap.
Coal is by far the cheapest source of power, but we don't like it because it's not clean and have just destroyed all our coal fired infrastructure.
Gas is fairly expensive compared to coal, and much harder to store, we refuse to frack for the massive reserves we appear to sat on (fracking is what's driven the US energy price so low, and thus caused their whole economy to pull away from Europe). Very vulnerable to global price shocks.
Tidal has potential, but suffers from big project syndrome (see also Nuclear) and the planning/environmental lobby, hence we've never built any.
There are lots of ways it could be fixed, but it all of them require slaying at least one sacred cow, most of them several. And in exactly none of the options for fixing it is wind the right answer - so obviously that's what we've bet the farm on.
What Brexit has done is killed Scottish Independence. People now want actual practical solutions for their myriad issues. Throwing ourselves off the cliff in the dark doesn't have the same appeal as it once had - and last time it was offered in 2014 the vote was No.
This is what drives the SNP hardcore mad. And explains FOR SCOTLAND last year. Why are all these voters so blind as to not want independence when it's so obviously better?
Which in turn explains the purported bridge between Reform and the SNP. Reform think everything is TSE's fault, the SNP think everything is my fault. To step from one brand of jingoism to another is pretty simple when you think about it.
And of course this government is excruciatingly bad (see the polls) and led by a loathsome failure (see the polls) so it will get particularly and severely drubbed. Cope
There was a very good twitter thread posted on here a couple of days ago which showed that the cost of solar was plummeting (but that doesn't help us much in a British winter) but the cost of wind is basically static - and the author made the point that this means we're doomed to very expensive energy unless something changes.
Personally, I'd order half a dozen off the peg Korean nukes to go on existing nuclear sites, and pass an act of parliament basically taking them out of planning and almost all regulation to prevent them becoming more Hinckley Point fiascos.
Solar plus batteries is cheap, but you need an awful lot of it in winter. (Not quite it doesn't work, it's never completely dark, but it doesn't work well enough.)
Wind is fine.
Nuclear is never that cheap, and only looks as cheap as it does if you ignore the waste storage thing.
Coal doesn't really make sense at all.
I suspect the current optimum is as much solar as you can get away with, as much wind as you can get away with, lots more National Grid to get energy where it's needed from different places at different times, with gas plants in reserve for those dull grey weeks we get a few of each year.
No, not net zero (yet), but net 0.1 or so.
SSEN building ugly pylons to take clean energy to England
Spending £lots to have turbines not running due lack of said pylons to take the energy to England
Their view was that UK energy is sky high cos of paying to have turbines switched off. Not because we're pegged to import gas prices we largely don't import. And their solution is RR small nukes which are definitely available to generate cheap power tomorrow.
Of all their policies it's the most baffling. I pointed out that in practice all their options leave us on the hook to foreigners as opposed to making our own power here. They disagreed - because nobody wants these ugly turbines here. And don't worry about foreigners.
Riiiiiight.
The vid came up on my feed yesterday, and I was not familiar with social media influencer "Chronically_Jenni". It's got a lot of attention, and fair play for that it will help make people think, which is her aim - 100s of k of views at least. She may be using the USA term because of her audience mix. Some of them may well start pointing out missing dropped kerbs as a result, which is one thing we need.
At a more considered level, imo she's a little off on the history, and is not quite clear about what she describes - eg distinguishing "kerb cuts" for disabled (Kalamazoo 1940s) from driveway accesses (at least 20-30 years earlier). And there's a bit of "everything was invented in the USA" syndrome (we had them for prams in the 1930s). But on a 3 minute SM vid that's not a huge thing.
It's also an American, transactional, way of arguing - "do this because it helps you too" is what we (generally, in Europe) would call a "medical view" of disability - disabled people are "them" whom "we" do things to help, here because "it helps you too". IMO that's a negative argument, which gives the option of saying "no, we don't need to help you - because there's nothing in it for us".
A positive argument would be based on what is termed a "social view" of disability. That is, disabled people are "us", so we design our society to work for all its members. "No" is then not an option as an answer. That's why our Building Regs require all new houses to be accessible, even if the person building it is fully mobile. Disabled adaptations are inherent and necessary, not requiring permission from someone else or some societal "Lady Bountiful". It moves the debate point from "do we do this or not" to "how on earth can you justify not doing this routine thing?" That's an important shift, and the challenge becomes implementation not justification.
But overall, it's a great vid to do.
Like FeersumEnjineeya, I would have assumed there was a power source for active cooling. The fact it can be done in the way you describe is fascinating.
There's always a (genuine) expert on PB.
Perhaps a lie down on a darkened room is the order of the day
Besides, if green energy has been an expensive luxury for all of your lifetime, changing your mind about that (even if the facts have changed) is one of the most expensive things of all to do.
It’s a very bad idea.
Reeves and SKS are smart enough to know this.
https://x.com/danneidle/status/1947569883878654071?s=61
French Aristocrats - like aristos in England or elsewhere - were several inches taller due to better health, meatier diet
So the image of short arse Bonaparte surrounded by his lofty posh generals is still correct
But yeah, we're two psychotic results (silly numbers where MPs don't really reflect votes and the numbers of MPs don't let anyone form a credible government) away from PR;
https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/post/an-introduction-to-the-lectern-series
By way of comparison, Mr. Bingely has an income of £4,000 and Mr. Darcy one of £10,000.
The Bennetts, Bingleys, and Darcy are all untitled, but that's a feature of England ennobling so few people.. All would rank as nobility in most of Europe, or the Roman Empire.
**Brown, in The Happy Return, gets awarded the lower deck's portion of prize money, for capturing a ship with Hornblower and Bush. That is £800, enough for him to buy a pub, a blacksmith's or many other businesses, and live very well for the rest of his life. But, that would be a step up for him, rather than several steps down, for the Bennetts. Brown would not be humiliated, by having to earn a living through trade.
They'd happily wave the rich off at Heathrow. (More likely though Biggin Hill or Farnborough, as they would be getting out on PJ's...)
More battery storage plants being proposed in south Scotland, will see if starts to take off
I don't understand why the government don't put their money behind larger projects and get someone else to run it when its built instead of getting global companies to bid or joint ventures with France, etc. Instead we have the government sitting around pontificating for years, assessing and surveying when they should be getting on with it.
Interesting Norway are still committed to supplying oil but 80% of their power comes from hydro. The Norwegian landscape is perfect for developing it
Reform seen very much to go for half baked but second step answers so they look to most people to be complete when they really aren’t.
As demonstrated by the above where the solutions are going to be fracking (may well not work in the uk due to geology) and mini nukes (coming but x years away).
One of the bits of A Song of Ice and Fire that amused is the way that Tywin Lannister is genuinely appalled that Robb Stark has married the granddaughter of a spice merchant, but he clearly does not consider that operating gold mines on his land, or collecting harbour dues from Lannisport is "trade."
I believe a rational debate on their shortcomings is fine. There is enough real failure to discuss without posters with Starmer/ Reeves derangement syndrome quoting ten consecutive posts of Daily Telegraph unhinged stories. "Starmer will give up the Isle of Man"."Starmer will have to call in the IMF". " If only the Tories had won, none of this would have happened". Also their enthusiasm for the Sultanas is reminiscent of their excitement at paying three quid to vote Corbyn as Labour leader, their smiles were wiped off their faces when he nearly won in 2017. And to think I have been accused of Brexit/ Johnson/ Farage/ Trump derangement.
Anyway this board will only be perfect when all the centrist dads have pissed off to ConHome for a more balanced debate.
No it isn't.
Yes it is.
No it isn't.
Yes it is.
*Repeat to the end of time*
1) picking a standard design and reusing it
2) trusting someone else’s paperwork. I suspect we could get 3 South Korean plants for the same money but that would require us accepting someone else’s standards
"Scattered energy".
Top quality stuff.
Edgy too.
https://x.com/paulbranditv/status/1947567996878127180?s=61
Not sure how much constraints payments are but would be good to see total cost per MWh for offshore wind/nuclear/gas. I think the strike price did lift significantly around 2022?
The bottom line with the whole thing is the UK is rubbish at generating its own energy supply and relies far too much on foreign companies, neighbours like France etc when the government should be investing in generation directly. Hence the row over Chinese influence between Mr Miliband and Claire Coutinho.
What is the point of GB energy if it is not going to generate any electricity itself?
This in turn is because the council takes any objections by residents as a blocker.
Khan appointed an utterly useless Nightlife Czar who did zero.
I'm English
Why don't I fuck off out of their country
As I have been told repeatedly. With additional fruity banhammer language added for good measure and once shouted in my face in my own garden.
The whole premise of FOR SCOTLAND was that unless you support Indy you are a traitor. And when you challenge the daft spending fiascos of Holyrood they always blame Westminster. By which they mean England.
So yeah. Ferries fiasco? My fault. Obviously.
For example, a person who's made it through founding a successful building firm or estate agent who then sends their children to private school, and expects to mix socially with the other parents in professional jobs or who own property.
You used to have to spend major money and time to get information. Now you can get all the facts in the visible universe from your phone at a cost of pennies, and the speed and delivery of this info is only improving
It’s a revolution and the impacts are yet to be truly felt
The biggest issue for the hospitality industry is the lack of workers which might be helped if the EU UK mobility scheme ever sees the light of day .
Electric 'superhighway' approved between Scotland and England
Which 007 film had "For England"? Or is it all of them?
New Farage popularity/unpopularity figures from YouGov
Popularity 37% (+1)
Disliked 40% (-9)
Neutral 12% (-7)
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/explore/public_figure/Nigel_Farage
https://web.archive.org/web/20250619141710/https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/explore/public_figure/Nigel_Farage
Criticisms worthy and unworthy of each Tory Leader, for every one of your “Starmer will give away the Isle of Man” piss takes was something laid at the door of Sunak, Boris, May. Think of the crap thrown at Truss about her alleged sexual proclivities.
I have private messages I sent to a PBer who was getting very angry and perhaps overwrought with the pile ons by left leaning posters in the months leading to the last election. Posters who were extremely vocal as their side surged to a massive majority are quiet now, not because some mysterious cabal of right wing voters scaring them off but because there is very little to enthuse them about “their team”.
Those of us trying to defend the Tories over a year ago, like the doomed defenders at Dien Bien Phu, are feeling a bit of pep and “told you so” grim amusement whilst those who slammed the Tories and pumped Labour are feeling probably a little embarrassment.
You do seem to suffer some odd persecution complex on behalf of centre left posters who are still around despite your cries lamenting them being scared off by the right wing mongol hoards.
Easier for your happiness if you just accept that Labour and the left are getting grief because they are doing a bad job and not a conspiracy.
Only the industrial revolution started to make trade more acceptable socially and daughters of the titles would often marry new money factory owners, managers and merchants and financiers to bring new income in
Set The House Ablaze by The Jam
I was in the pub last night
A mutual friend of ours said
he'd seen you in the uniform
Yeah the leather belt looks manly
The black boots butch
But oh what a bastard to get off
Promises, promises
They offer real solutions
But hatred has never won for long
But something you said set the house ablaze
You was so open minded
But by someone blinded
And now your sign says closed
Promises, promises
They offer real solutions
But hatred has never won for long
I think we've lost our perception
I think we've lost sight of the goals we should
Be working for
I think we've lost our reason
We stumble blindly and that vision must be restored
I wish that there was something
I could do about it
I wish that there was some way
I could try to fight it
Scream and shout it
But something you said set the house ablaze
It is called indoctrination
And it happens on all levels
But it has nothing to do with equality
It has nothing to do with democracy
And though it professes to
It has nothing to do with humanity
It is cold, hard and mechanical
I’ve just checked the prices of Xiaomi on Amazon. They are indeed ludicrously cheap (compared to Apple and Samsung etc)
Are they genuinely good? Has anyone got one?
I can say with authority that I am now using Chinese made earbuds to listen to music and at £25 a set they are probably as good as Apple’s which cost £150
Information isn't quite the same as knowledge, and certainly isn't the same as wisdom. Part of our problem as humans in the 21st century is that the flow of information into our eyes, ears and minds is way more intense and relentless than it was even a few decades ago.
I suspect that is part of what is driving us all loopy- we're still cavemen in suits, except now we're also sitting at laptops. (And whatever AI's potential, I don't see people using it to make meaning faster than they make slop.)
And the other problem is the management one. It used to be accepted that organisations of more than a few hundred people were damn hard to manage well, so most people didn't try. Now, you can feed a boss a pile of auto-compiled information, and they think they can manage with it. That doesn't work because management is also about what's not in that information. Besides, huge scale and anonymity is what makes it easier to get away with shady behaviour.
Redmi Note 13, a couple of years old now and only 4g. I had one before that too. No cable-free charging, but perfectly adequate otherwise, and the Chinese Red Army know my every step.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy5w6rw33yro
A woman killed her husband with a samurai sword "stabbing and slicing him" more than 50 times before replacing the sword in its sheath on a stand, a court heard.
It's an honourable course. Much easier to de-engage or 'go light' (ie do only the non politics chitchat that PB is always good for, regardless of clashing world views and brain chemistries).