Yesterday, the former president of the USA reversed his earlier statements, and confirmed that American military has encountered advanced technology it cannot explain...
Please provide cite. From what I saw he said it had observed phenomena it couldn't explain. Not the same thing.
He's actually quite hesitant and inarticulate - for Obama
I think my interpretation of his garbled words is fair. But you are free to demur
"we can't explain how they move, their trajectory, they did not have an easily explainable pattern"
Yes, that's the link you posted yesterday, which is what I was referring to. You are massively over interpreting.
I observed something I couldn't account for yesterday, when my computer crashed. It could have been alien technology, but I think there are simpler explanations.
The brief comments from Obama mean nothing in isolation. But they need to be seen in context with what’s been said by two ex CIA Directors, one ex NID, one ex Senate Majority Leader and an Intelligence Committee Chair. As well as the ramping in leaks of video followed by swift DoD confirmation of veracity, the various military figure testimonies, the Congressional process and the sudden change in media narrative from across the political spectrum.
It is all very odd and you need to contort logic to come up with a prosaic or uninteresting explanation.
And more so to conclude that it's aliens.
From the various statements, we are being conclusively told we are not looking at data collection glitches (at least not in every case). The behaviour exhibits extraordinary capability. Transmedium high performance. Breaking the sound barrier without a sonic boom. Speeds and Gs beyond the capability of material science. No visual or infrared inductor of propulsion.
So it’s American, another country or something else.
If it’s American, then it’s a weird approach to take for a top secret programme. Buzzing your own carrier groups and then leaking the videos of it to the media and then starting a highly public congressional investigation into what it is.
If it’s another country, then it’s the most severe failure of intelligence of all time (human, satellite, digital etc...). To the point of implausibility.
Which leaves “something else”. Aliens. Sub oceanic intelligence. Inter dimensional or temporal visitors. Who knows.
There is also the possibility that we are being lied to by an extraordinary coalition of intelligence, political and military figures and the whole thing is mundane bad data. Why?
One entertaining aspect of this Flap is the way it is coaxing out some brilliant first hand accounts of UAPs. I am sure 99% of them are invented or delusional, but what if 1% are true? What are they seeing? What have people been seeing for decades?
I"n late summer of 1982 I saw a #UFO or #UAP on I-90, around 2-3AM while driving from Seattle to Minneapolis. It looked like a giant metal eye, maybe 500-feet across, and hovered around 100-200 feet above the ground tracking 1000 feet in front of us as we drove (65mph)."
"I had a passenger, a guy I met on a ride share board, we were driving his van. After a couple pregnant moments I asked him: "Uh, did you see that?". He said "Yeah...." And I about threw up. We were both too afraid to say anything while it was happening, to know it was real. #UFO"
"I don't know what it was, but it looked a lot like what the Navy and Air Force are showing. If it was real, this tech/phenomena has been around for a very long time. #UFO #UAP"
"I'm not a "conspiracy" guy, I've always thought maybe it was a weird reflection on the windshield or something else, anything else. So I've just avoided that little story. I don't tell many people. But now that the gov is admitting and showing videos, I feel more comfortable."
Why are they almost always Americans, and very often Americans from parts of America where even most Americans aren’t interested to go?
Is a very good point. Just like Elon Musk asking "why are all the photos so crap" - when everyone now has a superb camera to hand. Makes no sense
Maybe Americans are more credulous. Or maybe it is China and/or Russia observing the enemy (but for 70 years with hypersonic tech?). Maybe the aliens are understandably most interested in the most powerful and advanced country. Maybe it is a mass delusion like dragons, but Americans see spacecraft, because Merika
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
Point of order: It is perfectly possible to have a summer holiday in the UK.
Speaking as someone whose July holiday is booked for Cornwall, I am certain one can have a holiday in the U.K. However the jury is still out on whether the U.K. is ever going to have a summer this year, so “summer holiday” might be pushing it.
Phil Thompson's vision of the future really is quite chilling - England as a high-density housing estate where everyone has to live on imported frozen kangaroo burgers.
England already is a high density housing estate.
Just some people want nice spacious detached homes surrounded by countryside while the plebs are piled high in tower blocks in the city even if they can afford to buy land in elsewhere.
It is not an unreasonable aspiration to own a nice home.
Agreed.
So why do NIMBYs wish to deny that aspiration to others?
Its when green belt is taken that problems arise. There is any amount of brownfield sites to be developed. The requisite infrastructure promised by developers surgery etc schools etc rarely happens so the existing infrastructure is overwhelmed.
There aren't any number of brownfield sites. That's the problem.
Population has increased by a sixth in recent years but housing hasn't and there aren't brownfield sites to cover the gap. Because whatever was on a brownfield site has a tendency to be replaced.
If more infrastructure is needed then construct that too. On greenfield too.
And if you don't want fields being developed then what is stopping you from buying the fields then refusing permission to build on them? Since you own them, you decide.
Why has population increased when the UK birthrate is only 1.68 ie below replacement level? Immigration.
So if the government reduce immigration via the new points system then the demand for new housing should fall too anyway
The biggest impact is smaller household units - divorces, delays in partnering up, children moving out sooner etc
The writer is a serious dude. Knows his military onions. Tom Rogan:
"Tom Rogan is a foreign policy/national security writer for the Washington Examiner. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in war studies from King's College London, a Master of Science in Middle East politics from SOAS, and a Graduate Diploma in Law from the University of Law, London. Among others, he has previously written for The Washington Post, The Independent, The Atlantic, National Review, the Telegraph, and the Guardian. Tom is a U.S. citizen with a British accent."
He happily writes THIS:
"Consider what I believe should be the second factor in the report. Namely, that the most compelling UFOs, those UFOs which lack conventional alternative explanation after exhaustive investigation, give credible indication of being highly advanced, intelligently controlled vehicles. The government's confidence that these most compelling UFOs are vehicles versus amorphous "things" takes root in data returns from multiple sensor platforms. These platforms include satellite, sonar, radar, full-spectrum electromagnetic, and trained military observer witness reports (such as Air Force and Navy ground and flight crews).
"Third factor: based on the same evidence, the assessment that some of these UFOs have performance capabilities beyond the understood technical capacity of any Earth nation. This sounds extraordinary, and it is."
An awful lot of highly intelligent people in America are risking their whole reputations. Truly odd
In this case nonsense. Rogan is a policy wonk, and a journalist. he does not have a physics/SETI/engineering/video analyst reputation to put on the line. If journalists put their reputation on the line every time they said something silly or contradicted themselves there would be none left.
Bollocks
Saying "Biden is a dork" or even "Trump is sane" is orders of magnitude more acceptable than saying "I am a foreign policy wonk and a military expert and I believe advanced non-human technology is interacting with US Forces"
He's risking his career by saying crazy stuff like this. They all are. That's what's so BIZARRE
I'm still going to wait for the physicists and engineers to produce some peer reviewed papers on the actual data.
Sad as it is, I can't see how this story damages the PM. If the revelation was that she was quitting because he'd been shagging her then even then I doubt it would do him much damage.
People know he lies, betrays, cocks up and cocks about. They don't care. If he was ANY other politician they would care. But Brand Boris is the political sensation of this century so far - an entirely fictional concoction that seems to mesmerise by the million.
Hes rather like Trump in that manner. But Boris is far more popular.
Absolute lols, based on their own breakdown Tether bought 1% of all US Commercial Paper available in the last month. They allegedly own 3% of all Commercial Paper outstanding.
What an absolute pile of scam.
Can you elaborate on why that makes it a scam? I have no clue.
If a single entity bought up 1% of the entire commercial paper market in a month people would know about it (and they claim they were mostly buying a-2 or above). That would be huge.
They quite obviously haven't. They do not control 3% of the USA's short term corporate debt.
It is transparent nonsense.
I mean, they have a documented history of lying, rgisbos just one more blatant lie in a cavalcade of lies for them.
Incidentally Bitcoin's price is absolutely tumbling at the moment and totally coincidentally exchanges are going off line including big players like CoinDesk.
Anyone want to be the big crypto exchanges have been buying into the hype themselves and setting up to maximise their return on ever rising prices? And so, now that prices are falling, they are in the shit.
The scam works like this
Tether ltd creates Tethers. Tether gives them to exchanges and gets an IOU (so it is 'fully backed') The exchanges buy Bitcoin with the Tether Buy pressure makes graph go up. Some amount of actual money is extracted from the system by selling Bitcoin for real money.
Keep that going until the flow of real money from suckers runs out.
A major Tether related figure was recently jailed for a cool half billion in money laundering in China.
Add some pump and dump and a big differential in the time it takes to get your money out vs the time that it takes for the scammers get theirs out....
Bitcoin is crashing because the Chinese Communist Party are having a real crack at it.
Why? because crypto undermines their ability to control the lives of their citizens. It gives Chinese citizens a sort of private property, away from confiscation, monitoring and taxation, that the government wants to deny them.
Phil Thompson's vision of the future really is quite chilling - England as a high-density housing estate where everyone has to live on imported frozen kangaroo burgers.
England already is a high density housing estate.
Just some people want nice spacious detached homes surrounded by countryside while the plebs are piled high in tower blocks in the city even if they can afford to buy land in elsewhere.
It is not an unreasonable aspiration to own a nice home.
Agreed.
So why do NIMBYs wish to deny that aspiration to others?
They don't, they just want them to fulfil that aspiration by buying a home on a brownfield site, not in a field near their house spoiling their view, reducing green spaces and reducing their house value
And some people want an invisible punk unicorn. 🦄
There isn't the brown space to build on, green spaces are needed, so be realistic. If you can't realistically identify which green spaces should be built on then don't complain when others decide for you.
Besides in a free market they have a way of stopping the field from being developed: buy the field.
PS reducing house prices is a feature not a bug of construction. Losing value so others can buy a home is a good thing. So shed your crocodile tears about living in a home rent-free that loses some value elsewhere when others are breaking their backs to pay rent.
For most people, most of the time, the value of a house is meaningless
It only matters when (a) you are buying a house which is larger than they house you are selling to fund it* and (b) you are selling a house to move into a smaller property/release capital
Absolute lols, based on their own breakdown Tether bought 1% of all US Commercial Paper available in the last month. They allegedly own 3% of all Commercial Paper outstanding.
What an absolute pile of scam.
Can you elaborate on why that makes it a scam? I have no clue.
If a single entity bought up 1% of the entire commercial paper market in a month people would know about it (and they claim they were mostly buying a-2 or above). That would be huge.
They quite obviously haven't. They do not control 3% of the USA's short term corporate debt.
It is transparent nonsense.
I mean, they have a documented history of lying, rgisbos just one more blatant lie in a cavalcade of lies for them.
Incidentally Bitcoin's price is absolutely tumbling at the moment and totally coincidentally exchanges are going off line including big players like CoinDesk.
Anyone want to be the big crypto exchanges have been buying into the hype themselves and setting up to maximise their return on ever rising prices? And so, now that prices are falling, they are in the shit.
The scam works like this
Tether ltd creates Tethers. Tether gives them to exchanges and gets an IOU (so it is 'fully backed') The exchanges buy Bitcoin with the Tether Buy pressure makes graph go up. Some amount of actual money is extracted from the system by selling Bitcoin for real money.
Keep that going until the flow of real money from suckers runs out.
A major Tether related figure was recently jailed for a cool half billion in money laundering in China.
As I understand it, the key point is that Tether is meant to be "tethered" to USD. The mechanism for this is that, every time someone buys a unit of Tether with USD, $1 gets put into a bank account somewhere. Every time someone sells a unit of Tether for USD, $1 gets paid out from that bank account.
The scam bit is that the bank account (allegedly) doesn't exist, and the Tether owners just print coins whenever they need to in order to keep buying Bitcoin and pushing the price ever up.
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
Point of order: It is perfectly possible to have a summer holiday in the UK.
Speaking as someone whose July holiday is booked for Cornwall, I am certain one can have a holiday in the U.K. However the jury is still out on whether the U.K. is ever going to have a summer this year, so “summer holiday” might be pushing it.
Not this weather nonsense again.
The weather now has zero impact on the weather in July. None.
Also, the weather is going to improve next week.
You have been reading too many of Leon's thrilling posts about it raining now outside his window in Camden Town!
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
Point of order: It is perfectly possible to have a summer holiday in the UK.
Speaking as someone whose July holiday is booked for Cornwall, I am certain one can have a holiday in the U.K. However the jury is still out on whether the U.K. is ever going to have a summer this year, so “summer holiday” might be pushing it.
Not this weather nonsense again.
The weather now has zero impact on the weather in July. None.
Also, the weather is going to improve next week.
You have been reading too many of Leon's thrilling posts about it raining now outside his window in Camden Town!
Nah, I’m just depressed because my tulips haven’t emerged.
I observed something I couldn't account for yesterday, when my computer crashed. It could have been alien technology, but I think there are simpler explanations.
Idiotic comparison. You may not know why it crashed. but a suitably skilled person could trace through the memory dump generated when your computer crashed and figure out why it happened.
Nobody appears to know what the heck is going on with these UAPs, and their behaviour appears to suggest our understanding of physics is much more limited than we thought.
That the UAPs aren't doing what people think they are, and it's faked video, an optical illusion or similar, is far more plausible than that the laws of physics aren't being obeyed.
Not that there’s any point trying to persuade you but the ultra performance is explainable within the bounds of our physics even if requires magic from an engineering perspective.
It would require a gravity well to be formed around the craft, bending spacetime. While moving at speeds closer to light requires ever more inordinate and unrealistic amounts of energy the closer you get to c, there’s actually nothing in our understanding of physics that says that spacetime cannot expand faster than light. In fact we think in many places it is doing so.
This would explain several features, notably the transmedium performance, the lack of obvious propulsion means, the acceleration capabilities without causing sonic booms or combustion of atmospheric N2. And the strange visual blurring reported by military eye witnesses, that might also explain why the photos are never crystal clear. It would also presumably mean the time dilation effects from very fast speeds would not occur.
This is without delving into our physics being utterly incomplete. The lack of compatibility between the Standard Model of QM and Relativity, even though both have excellent empirical support. Matter making up only 5% of the gravitational effects we can measure, with 27% dark matter and dark energy the rest. What is dark matter and where is it? We dunno. What is dark energy? We know less about that than dark matter.
No doubt Philip Thompson can explain it all and hence tell us why the US defense and intelligence establishment is totally wrong with what now appears to be its leading hypothesis for these phenomena.
I have a feeling a ninety foot tall genderfluid sex alien could approach Philip from behind, yank down his Cross of St George Boxer shorts, and rape him with an intergalactic love-bassoon, and he'd say it was "an optical illusion"
With respect, that’s a fucking horrible post.
Be decent, or fuck off.
Oh give over. Philip can look after himself. Indeed, I admire his resilience
You’re making RAPE jokes.
Do you realise how that comes across?
You do know there's a whole subculture of UFO sightings dedicated to aliens raping humans with anal probes?
On the other hand, if Boris Johnson came up behind Philip and did said act and told Philip he was actually a lizard person, Philip would find that perfectly believable
Phil Thompson's vision of the future really is quite chilling - England as a high-density housing estate where everyone has to live on imported frozen kangaroo burgers.
England already is a high density housing estate.
Just some people want nice spacious detached homes surrounded by countryside while the plebs are piled high in tower blocks in the city even if they can afford to buy land in elsewhere.
It is not an unreasonable aspiration to own a nice home.
Agreed.
So why do NIMBYs wish to deny that aspiration to others?
Its when green belt is taken that problems arise. There is any amount of brownfield sites to be developed. The requisite infrastructure promised by developers surgery etc schools etc rarely happens so the existing infrastructure is overwhelmed.
There aren't any number of brownfield sites. That's the problem.
Population has increased by a sixth in recent years but housing hasn't and there aren't brownfield sites to cover the gap. Because whatever was on a brownfield site has a tendency to be replaced.
If more infrastructure is needed then construct that too. On greenfield too.
And if you don't want fields being developed then what is stopping you from buying the fields then refusing permission to build on them? Since you own them, you decide.
Why has population increased when the UK birthrate is only 1.68 ie below replacement level? Immigration.
So if the government reduce immigration via the new points system then the demand for new housing should fall too anyway
The biggest impact is smaller household units - divorces, delays in partnering up, children moving out sooner etc
If a population lives in 40 million houses and the occupancy changed from 2.1 to 2.0 you need nearly a million more houses for a reason which is invisible to the naked eye.
And as you need most of them where pressure is already high and the NIMBYs most active it is a political and practical problem.
Absolute lols, based on their own breakdown Tether bought 1% of all US Commercial Paper available in the last month. They allegedly own 3% of all Commercial Paper outstanding.
What an absolute pile of scam.
Can you elaborate on why that makes it a scam? I have no clue.
If a single entity bought up 1% of the entire commercial paper market in a month people would know about it (and they claim they were mostly buying a-2 or above). That would be huge.
They quite obviously haven't. They do not control 3% of the USA's short term corporate debt.
It is transparent nonsense.
I mean, they have a documented history of lying, rgisbos just one more blatant lie in a cavalcade of lies for them.
Incidentally Bitcoin's price is absolutely tumbling at the moment and totally coincidentally exchanges are going off line including big players like CoinDesk.
Anyone want to be the big crypto exchanges have been buying into the hype themselves and setting up to maximise their return on ever rising prices? And so, now that prices are falling, they are in the shit.
The scam works like this
Tether ltd creates Tethers. Tether gives them to exchanges and gets an IOU (so it is 'fully backed') The exchanges buy Bitcoin with the Tether Buy pressure makes graph go up. Some amount of actual money is extracted from the system by selling Bitcoin for real money.
Keep that going until the flow of real money from suckers runs out.
A major Tether related figure was recently jailed for a cool half billion in money laundering in China.
Add some pump and dump and a big differential in the time it takes to get your money out vs the time that it takes for the scammers get theirs out....
Bitcoin is crashing because the Chinese Communist Party are having a real crack at it.
Why? because crypto undermines their ability to control the lives of their citizens. It gives Chinese citizens a sort of private property, away from confiscation, monitoring and taxation, that the government wants to deny them.
Someone has given the secret 'Sell' signal to the aliens.
He was Chairman of the 1922 Committee but he resigned iirc to fight for the Leadership.. so to get rid of him from what?
He retook the Chair in 2020. He is, unless you can prove me incorrect, still the 1922 Committee Chair.
The whole story is that each new session the chair has to be re-elected. Normally it is just nodded through unopposed, but
"I’m told former minister Robert Goodwill is sounding out colleagues, some of who have been told Brady is not seeking re-election. I’m reliably told however that Brady will be standing. This could be a bit of a battle. No date for election set yet..."
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
The traffic light system will work fine, so long as amber is jettisoned.
Starmer seems to be betting the farm on there being thousands of deaths over the next few months. And he’s certainly making it easier for Johnson to resist extending restrictions on June 21st (by increasing the political downsides)
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
Point of order: It is perfectly possible to have a summer holiday in the UK.
Speaking as someone whose July holiday is booked for Cornwall, I am certain one can have a holiday in the U.K. However the jury is still out on whether the U.K. is ever going to have a summer this year, so “summer holiday” might be pushing it.
Not this weather nonsense again.
The weather now has zero impact on the weather in July. None.
Also, the weather is going to improve next week.
You have been reading too many of Leon's thrilling posts about it raining now outside his window in Camden Town!
You've been telling us "the weather is going to improve next week"... for weeks. It still hasn't, and I fear the forecast next week is much the same. Cool, wet, mediocre at best. It looks like the rest of May is set in stone, and the highest temperature of all of Spring 2021 will be those brief sunny days of ~24C back in late March. Which is extremely unusual.
It's a record breaking run of cold. Right across northern Europe. There are tentative signs early June will be better - it MUST get better - but who knows. We're four weeks from the turn of the year, when the nights grow longer
Phil Thompson's vision of the future really is quite chilling - England as a high-density housing estate where everyone has to live on imported frozen kangaroo burgers.
England already is a high density housing estate.
Just some people want nice spacious detached homes surrounded by countryside while the plebs are piled high in tower blocks in the city even if they can afford to buy land in elsewhere.
It is not an unreasonable aspiration to own a nice home.
Agreed.
So why do NIMBYs wish to deny that aspiration to others?
They don't, they just want them to fulfil that aspiration by buying a home on a brownfield site, not in a field near their house spoiling their view, reducing green spaces and reducing their house value
And some people want an invisible punk unicorn. 🦄
There isn't the brown space to build on, green spaces are needed, so be realistic. If you can't realistically identify which green spaces should be built on then don't complain when others decide for you.
Besides in a free market they have a way of stopping the field from being developed: buy the field.
PS reducing house prices is a feature not a bug of construction. Losing value so others can buy a home is a good thing. So shed your crocodile tears about living in a home rent-free that loses some value elsewhere when others are breaking their backs to pay rent.
For most people, most of the time, the value of a house is meaningless
It only matters when (a) you are buying a house which is larger than they house you are selling to fund it* and (b) you are selling a house to move into a smaller property/release capital
At no other point does it matter
* if any
You say that, and it seems totally reasonable in theory. However, the Daily Mail have shifted half a trillion copies based largely on the notion that you're completely wrong in practice.
Phil Thompson's vision of the future really is quite chilling - England as a high-density housing estate where everyone has to live on imported frozen kangaroo burgers.
England already is a high density housing estate.
Just some people want nice spacious detached homes surrounded by countryside while the plebs are piled high in tower blocks in the city even if they can afford to buy land in elsewhere.
It is not an unreasonable aspiration to own a nice home.
Agreed.
So why do NIMBYs wish to deny that aspiration to others?
They don't, they just want them to fulfil that aspiration by buying a home on a brownfield site, not in a field near their house spoiling their view, reducing green spaces and reducing their house value
And some people want an invisible punk unicorn. 🦄
There isn't the brown space to build on, green spaces are needed, so be realistic. If you can't realistically identify which green spaces should be built on then don't complain when others decide for you.
Besides in a free market they have a way of stopping the field from being developed: buy the field.
PS reducing house prices is a feature not a bug of construction. Losing value so others can buy a home is a good thing. So shed your crocodile tears about living in a home rent-free that loses some value elsewhere when others are breaking their backs to pay rent.
For most people, most of the time, the value of a house is meaningless
It only matters when (a) you are buying a house which is larger than they house you are selling to fund it* and (b) you are selling a house to move into a smaller property/release capital
At no other point does it matter
* if any
General point is true, but it (notional value) also matters for remortgaging. Our first mortgage (five year deal) came to an end. On remortgaging, our loan to value ratio had dropped hugely, much more through the notional increase in value of the house than what we had paid off. So we became lower risk and got a cheaper rate. We feel richer and we are in fact richer either now (pay less/month) or later (pay the same/month, as we are, to pay less later).
Of course, if we want to move to a bigger house, we discover we are in fact poorer as the gap between value of our house and cost of bigger house has got bigger than it was five years ago (if both increased by same %). Reverse if we downsize (as you are of course pointing out).
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
Point of order: It is perfectly possible to have a summer holiday in the UK.
Speaking as someone whose July holiday is booked for Cornwall, I am certain one can have a holiday in the U.K. However the jury is still out on whether the U.K. is ever going to have a summer this year, so “summer holiday” might be pushing it.
Not this weather nonsense again.
The weather now has zero impact on the weather in July. None.
Also, the weather is going to improve next week.
You have been reading too many of Leon's thrilling posts about it raining now outside his window in Camden Town!
You've been telling us "the weather is going to improve next week"... for weeks. It still hasn't, and I fear the forecast next week is much the same. Cool, wet, mediocre at best. It looks like the rest of May is set in stone, and the highest temperature of all of Spring 2021 will be those brief sunny days of ~24C back in late March. Which is extremely unusual.
It's a record breaking run of cold. Right across northern Europe. There are tentative signs early June will be better - it MUST get better - but who knows. We're four weeks from the turn of the year, when the nights grow longer
WRONG
I have said there has been a signal for a pattern change around 26 May, for a while now.
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
Point of order: It is perfectly possible to have a summer holiday in the UK.
Speaking as someone whose July holiday is booked for Cornwall, I am certain one can have a holiday in the U.K. However the jury is still out on whether the U.K. is ever going to have a summer this year, so “summer holiday” might be pushing it.
Not this weather nonsense again.
The weather now has zero impact on the weather in July. None.
Also, the weather is going to improve next week.
You have been reading too many of Leon's thrilling posts about it raining now outside his window in Camden Town!
You've been telling us "the weather is going to improve next week"... for weeks. It still hasn't, and I fear the forecast next week is much the same. Cool, wet, mediocre at best. It looks like the rest of May is set in stone, and the highest temperature of all of Spring 2021 will be those brief sunny days of ~24C back in late March. Which is extremely unusual.
It's a record breaking run of cold. Right across northern Europe. There are tentative signs early June will be better - it MUST get better - but who knows. We're four weeks from the turn of the year, when the nights grow longer
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
Finally, a Labour leader calling for tough border controls.......but in all the wrong ways. Tsk.
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
The traffic light system will work fine, so long as amber is jettisoned.
Starmer seems to be betting the farm on there being thousands of deaths over the next few months. And he’s certainly making it easier for Johnson to resist extending restrictions on June 21st (by increasing the political downsides)
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
Point of order: It is perfectly possible to have a summer holiday in the UK.
Speaking as someone whose July holiday is booked for Cornwall, I am certain one can have a holiday in the U.K. However the jury is still out on whether the U.K. is ever going to have a summer this year, so “summer holiday” might be pushing it.
Not this weather nonsense again.
The weather now has zero impact on the weather in July. None.
Also, the weather is going to improve next week.
You have been reading too many of Leon's thrilling posts about it raining now outside his window in Camden Town!
You've been telling us "the weather is going to improve next week"... for weeks. It still hasn't, and I fear the forecast next week is much the same. Cool, wet, mediocre at best. It looks like the rest of May is set in stone, and the highest temperature of all of Spring 2021 will be those brief sunny days of ~24C back in late March. Which is extremely unusual.
It's a record breaking run of cold. Right across northern Europe. There are tentative signs early June will be better - it MUST get better - but who knows. We're four weeks from the turn of the year, when the nights grow longer
WRONG
I have said there has been a signal for a pattern change around 26 May, for a while now.
Guess what, I'm right. There is a signal.
I'm happy to have a fistfight over ALIENS. But not the drizzle. Let's hope you're right, I want WARMTH. It feels like we've been trapped in a fucking grey tupperware box, in a leaky old fridge, since last September
FWIW there does seem to be a real push from elements of the US to say that there are things out there doing stuff that we can't explain (from a former US President down), and moreover this has noticeably increased in intensity over the past 12 months.
The question is why.
Is it some sort of push to increase defence spending?
Unlikely - there's no pushback to do so even without this.
I observed something I couldn't account for yesterday, when my computer crashed. It could have been alien technology, but I think there are simpler explanations.
Idiotic comparison. You may not know why it crashed. but a suitably skilled person could trace through the memory dump generated when your computer crashed and figure out why it happened.
Nobody appears to know what the heck is going on with these UAPs, and their behaviour appears to suggest our understanding of physics is much more limited than we thought.
That the UAPs aren't doing what people think they are, and it's faked video, an optical illusion or similar, is far more plausible than that the laws of physics aren't being obeyed.
Not that there’s any point trying to persuade you but the ultra performance is explainable within the bounds of our physics even if requires magic from an engineering perspective.
It would require a gravity well to be formed around the craft, bending spacetime. While moving at speeds closer to light requires ever more inordinate and unrealistic amounts of energy the closer you get to c, there’s actually nothing in our understanding of physics that says that spacetime cannot expand faster than light. In fact we think in many places it is doing so.
This would explain several features, notably the transmedium performance, the lack of obvious propulsion means, the acceleration capabilities without causing sonic booms or combustion of atmospheric N2. And the strange visual blurring reported by military eye witnesses, that might also explain why the photos are never crystal clear. It would also presumably mean the time dilation effects from very fast speeds would not occur.
This is without delving into our physics being utterly incomplete. The lack of compatibility between the Standard Model of QM and Relativity, even though both have excellent empirical support. Matter making up only 5% of the gravitational effects we can measure, with 27% dark matter and dark energy the rest. What is dark matter and where is it? We dunno. What is dark energy? We know less about that than dark matter.
No doubt Philip Thompson can explain it all and hence tell us why the US defense and intelligence establishment is totally wrong with what now appears to be its leading hypothesis for these phenomena.
I have a feeling a ninety foot tall genderfluid sex alien could approach Philip from behind, yank down his Cross of St George Boxer shorts, and rape him with an intergalactic love-bassoon, and he'd say it was "an optical illusion"
What the actual fuck!? 😲👽🍆😱😂
Made me laugh out loud Leon, I wasn't expecting that!
FWIW there does seem to be a real push from elements of the US to say that there are things out there doing stuff that we can't explain (from a former US President down), and moreover this has noticeably increased in intensity over the past 12 months.
The question is why.
Is it some sort of push to increase defence spending?
Unlikely - there's no pushback to do so even without this.
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
Point of order: It is perfectly possible to have a summer holiday in the UK.
Speaking as someone whose July holiday is booked for Cornwall, I am certain one can have a holiday in the U.K. However the jury is still out on whether the U.K. is ever going to have a summer this year, so “summer holiday” might be pushing it.
Not this weather nonsense again.
The weather now has zero impact on the weather in July. None.
Also, the weather is going to improve next week.
You have been reading too many of Leon's thrilling posts about it raining now outside his window in Camden Town!
You've been telling us "the weather is going to improve next week"... for weeks. It still hasn't, and I fear the forecast next week is much the same. Cool, wet, mediocre at best. It looks like the rest of May is set in stone, and the highest temperature of all of Spring 2021 will be those brief sunny days of ~24C back in late March. Which is extremely unusual.
It's a record breaking run of cold. Right across northern Europe. There are tentative signs early June will be better - it MUST get better - but who knows. We're four weeks from the turn of the year, when the nights grow longer
WRONG
I have said there has been a signal for a pattern change around 26 May, for a while now.
Guess what, I'm right. There is a signal.
I'm happy to have a fistfight over ALIENS. But not the drizzle. Let's hope you're right, I want WARMTH. It feels like we've been trapped in a fucking grey tupperware box, in a leaky old fridge, since last September
Its gloriously warm and sunny right now up here in the frigid wastelands of the north that you mock so much.
Someone asked a question regarding the Indian variant earlier today and when I think about it I think the initial increase in cases is coming from the travellers returning home and infecting their immediate (multi-generation) family but it's not going to get much further as outside the house most people are both vaccinated and at a slight distance (so are less likely to catch it anyway).
Hence the Indian variant is really a last hurrah before Covid moves on to be just one of those things people catch at times (like flu).
Phil Thompson's vision of the future really is quite chilling - England as a high-density housing estate where everyone has to live on imported frozen kangaroo burgers.
England already is a high density housing estate.
Just some people want nice spacious detached homes surrounded by countryside while the plebs are piled high in tower blocks in the city even if they can afford to buy land in elsewhere.
It is not an unreasonable aspiration to own a nice home.
Agreed.
So why do NIMBYs wish to deny that aspiration to others?
Its when green belt is taken that problems arise. There is any amount of brownfield sites to be developed. The requisite infrastructure promised by developers surgery etc schools etc rarely happens so the existing infrastructure is overwhelmed.
There aren't any number of brownfield sites. That's the problem.
Population has increased by a sixth in recent years but housing hasn't and there aren't brownfield sites to cover the gap. Because whatever was on a brownfield site has a tendency to be replaced.
If more infrastructure is needed then construct that too. On greenfield too.
And if you don't want fields being developed then what is stopping you from buying the fields then refusing permission to build on them? Since you own them, you decide.
Why has population increased when the UK birthrate is only 1.68 ie below replacement level? Immigration.
So if the government reduce immigration via the new points system then the demand for new housing should fall too anyway
The biggest impact is smaller household units - divorces, delays in partnering up, children moving out sooner etc
If a population lives in 40 million houses and the occupancy changed from 2.1 to 2.0 you need nearly a million more houses for a reason which is invisible to the naked eye.
And as you need most of them where pressure is already high and the NIMBYs most active it is a political and practical problem.
Yes, lots of us have, over the past 30 years, vastly increased the amount of square footage of house we occupy - largely through the process described above. A family of four who bought their house in the 90s and lived in it perfectly happily is now a retired couple of two, living in the same house, plus two children each living in a small two bed flat. This process has happened over and over and over again. The result has been that those least able to afford a house are now sleeping on their Mum's sofa in her one bed flat.
This has been the result of nothing more malign than demographic change.
I was manning a consultation relating to a large greenfield housing development a couple of years back. Lots and lots and lots of people angry that their bit of countryside was going to be built on and that their roads would be busier. In amongst which, a cleaner at the community centre came to have a look. "Please," she said to me under her breath, "just build them. I don't care what they look like. I don't care about newts. I've got two grown up sons living in my living room because they can't get a house. Just build them." But, I suspect she didn't fill in the response form, while the middle-class* hordes who lived adjacent to the green belt in question did.
*I don't use this pejoratively. I'm middle classs. It's a good thing to be. But we need to recognise that our views aren't necessarily those of everyone.
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
Point of order: It is perfectly possible to have a summer holiday in the UK.
Speaking as someone whose July holiday is booked for Cornwall, I am certain one can have a holiday in the U.K. However the jury is still out on whether the U.K. is ever going to have a summer this year, so “summer holiday” might be pushing it.
Not this weather nonsense again.
The weather now has zero impact on the weather in July. None.
Also, the weather is going to improve next week.
You have been reading too many of Leon's thrilling posts about it raining now outside his window in Camden Town!
You've been telling us "the weather is going to improve next week"... for weeks. It still hasn't, and I fear the forecast next week is much the same. Cool, wet, mediocre at best. It looks like the rest of May is set in stone, and the highest temperature of all of Spring 2021 will be those brief sunny days of ~24C back in late March. Which is extremely unusual.
It's a record breaking run of cold. Right across northern Europe. There are tentative signs early June will be better - it MUST get better - but who knows. We're four weeks from the turn of the year, when the nights grow longer
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
Point of order: It is perfectly possible to have a summer holiday in the UK.
Speaking as someone whose July holiday is booked for Cornwall, I am certain one can have a holiday in the U.K. However the jury is still out on whether the U.K. is ever going to have a summer this year, so “summer holiday” might be pushing it.
Not this weather nonsense again.
The weather now has zero impact on the weather in July. None.
Also, the weather is going to improve next week.
You have been reading too many of Leon's thrilling posts about it raining now outside his window in Camden Town!
You've been telling us "the weather is going to improve next week"... for weeks. It still hasn't, and I fear the forecast next week is much the same. Cool, wet, mediocre at best. It looks like the rest of May is set in stone, and the highest temperature of all of Spring 2021 will be those brief sunny days of ~24C back in late March. Which is extremely unusual.
It's a record breaking run of cold. Right across northern Europe. There are tentative signs early June will be better - it MUST get better - but who knows. We're four weeks from the turn of the year, when the nights grow longer
WRONG
I have said there has been a signal for a pattern change around 26 May, for a while now.
Guess what, I'm right. There is a signal.
I'm happy to have a fistfight over ALIENS. But not the drizzle. Let's hope you're right, I want WARMTH. It feels like we've been trapped in a fucking grey tupperware box, in a leaky old fridge, since last September
Its gloriously warm and sunny right now up here in the frigid wastelands of the north that you mock so much.
Just back from walking the hound and it was gorgeous out there. Finally a beautiful May day in southern England. BBQ tonight to look forward to. And aliens about to be announced... maybe they are here for the Euros?
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
Point of order: It is perfectly possible to have a summer holiday in the UK.
Speaking as someone whose July holiday is booked for Cornwall, I am certain one can have a holiday in the U.K. However the jury is still out on whether the U.K. is ever going to have a summer this year, so “summer holiday” might be pushing it.
Not this weather nonsense again.
The weather now has zero impact on the weather in July. None.
Also, the weather is going to improve next week.
You have been reading too many of Leon's thrilling posts about it raining now outside his window in Camden Town!
You've been telling us "the weather is going to improve next week"... for weeks. It still hasn't, and I fear the forecast next week is much the same. Cool, wet, mediocre at best. It looks like the rest of May is set in stone, and the highest temperature of all of Spring 2021 will be those brief sunny days of ~24C back in late March. Which is extremely unusual.
It's a record breaking run of cold. Right across northern Europe. There are tentative signs early June will be better - it MUST get better - but who knows. We're four weeks from the turn of the year, when the nights grow longer
WRONG
I have said there has been a signal for a pattern change around 26 May, for a while now.
Guess what, I'm right. There is a signal.
I'm happy to have a fistfight over ALIENS. But not the drizzle. Let's hope you're right, I want WARMTH. It feels like we've been trapped in a fucking grey tupperware box, in a leaky old fridge, since last September
Oh I agree, but as a gardener you have to take what you can get while you can. My garden is finally growing – the lawn shoots are popping up after a cold, bone dry April where nothing grew. There's now a slow road to warmth starting in a week.
3 deaths reported today. 7 day average now well into single figures. Hospitalisations down again, to 86. 7 day average tickling 100. Positive tests 2696, which is a tiny, tiny drop from this time next week. But the yellow on the map is creeping across England. OTOH, Bolton still going up - hopefully less steeply now but can't be sure. Picture broadly positive but I'll be happier once Bolton starts trending downwards.
Someone asked a question regarding the Indian variant earlier today and when I think about it I think the initial increase in cases is coming from the travellers returning home and infecting their immediate (multi-generation) family but it's not going to get much further as outside the house most people are both vaccinated and at a slight distance (so are less likely to catch it anyway).
Hence the Indian variant is really a last hurrah before Covid moves on to be just one of those things people catch at times (like flu).
The thing is there’s no hiding this. When the U.K. variant was spreading through the U.K. and then Europe, there was in some places a false confidence because the growth in U.K. variant from a small base was being masked by a general overall downwards trend. Whereas the U.K. base numbers are so low, it really should be feeding into the headline numbers pretty rapidly if it is as transmissible as some are claiming. (without even considering whether this should actually be a concern if few are getting ill)
I think some areas have it but others still a way to go – be interesting to see the tone of the 1700hrs conference. Boris sounded pretty upbeat in the Commons earlier, suggests he's getting promising reports.
One might note that it's a remarkable coincidence that just as the tools to create footage at home that's indistinguishable from movies becomes easily available, and just as thousands of tutorials of how to do this appear on YouTube, that there's a raft of grainy home movies with UFOs in them.
(Yes, this is different from pilots in the Air Force.)
Phil Thompson's vision of the future really is quite chilling - England as a high-density housing estate where everyone has to live on imported frozen kangaroo burgers.
England already is a high density housing estate.
Just some people want nice spacious detached homes surrounded by countryside while the plebs are piled high in tower blocks in the city even if they can afford to buy land in elsewhere.
It is not an unreasonable aspiration to own a nice home.
Agreed.
So why do NIMBYs wish to deny that aspiration to others?
Its when green belt is taken that problems arise. There is any amount of brownfield sites to be developed. The requisite infrastructure promised by developers surgery etc schools etc rarely happens so the existing infrastructure is overwhelmed.
There aren't any number of brownfield sites. That's the problem.
Population has increased by a sixth in recent years but housing hasn't and there aren't brownfield sites to cover the gap. Because whatever was on a brownfield site has a tendency to be replaced.
If more infrastructure is needed then construct that too. On greenfield too.
And if you don't want fields being developed then what is stopping you from buying the fields then refusing permission to build on them? Since you own them, you decide.
Why has population increased when the UK birthrate is only 1.68 ie below replacement level? Immigration.
So if the government reduce immigration via the new points system then the demand for new housing should fall too anyway
The biggest impact is smaller household units - divorces, delays in partnering up, children moving out sooner etc
If a population lives in 40 million houses and the occupancy changed from 2.1 to 2.0 you need nearly a million more houses for a reason which is invisible to the naked eye.
And as you need most of them where pressure is already high and the NIMBYs most active it is a political and practical problem.
Yes, lots of us have, over the past 30 years, vastly increased the amount of square footage of house we occupy - largely through the process described above. A family of four who bought their house in the 90s and lived in it perfectly happily is now a retired couple of two, living in the same house, plus two children each living in a small two bed flat. This process has happened over and over and over again. The result has been that those least able to afford a house are now sleeping on their Mum's sofa in her one bed flat.
This has been the result of nothing more malign than demographic change.
I was manning a consultation relating to a large greenfield housing development a couple of years back. Lots and lots and lots of people angry that their bit of countryside was going to be built on and that their roads would be busier. In amongst which, a cleaner at the community centre came to have a look. "Please," she said to me under her breath, "just build them. I don't care what they look like. I don't care about newts. I've got two grown up sons living in my living room because they can't get a house. Just build them." But, I suspect she didn't fill in the response form, while the middle-class* hordes who lived adjacent to the green belt in question did.
*I don't use this pejoratively. I'm middle classs. It's a good thing to be. But we need to recognise that our views aren't necessarily those of everyone.
Great post
It’s a fundamental problem. People aren’t moving out of their family homes when their children grow up - and we’re not building anywhere near enough new family homes.
FWIW there does seem to be a real push from elements of the US to say that there are things out there doing stuff that we can't explain (from a former US President down), and moreover this has noticeably increased in intensity over the past 12 months.
The question is why.
Is it some sort of push to increase defence spending?
Unlikely - there's no pushback to do so even without this.
So why?
Comedy value.
Probably.
However if the US had discovered (say) a radio signal or some other strong indicator of ET then I imagine they'd be really concerned as to how it might play. In that circumstance perhaps they'd roll out some weak (old and non genuine) stuff just to test the water. I have any such thing as a very low probability indeed, but it sort of fits the pattern, and one day (although perhaps not for many thousands of years) something will be found.
Slightly more likely is that they want to spend more on space, and having some sort of unspecified threat allows some militarisation which would be completely unacceptable if the threat was only here on Earth.
Anyway the ET aspect is most likely zero, nut there is just perhaps a politcal aspect.
The daily reported cases number was high. However, I am now of the view that cases is no longer a good way to judge our situation. Hospitalisations continue their slow decline and deaths are now almost zero. Cases may go up in sporadic outbreaks particularly in communities with vaccine hesitancy. The numbers still look very good to me.
It is important given the ongoing effects of the pandemic that the Prime minister should not be distracted by all this UFO stuff. It would sensible to delegate it to either the Leader of the House, who is so out of touch with ordinary humans that he might get on better with aliens, or to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, whose appearance they might feel comfortable with.
3 deaths reported today. 7 day average now well into single figures. Hospitalisations down again, to 86. 7 day average tickling 100. Positive tests 2696, which is a tiny, tiny drop from this time next week. But the yellow on the map is creeping across England. OTOH, Bolton still going up - hopefully less steeply now but can't be sure. Picture broadly positive but I'll be happier once Bolton starts trending downwards.
Bedford's numbers look the scary ones to me: 75 people in a day is one in a thousand people.
One might note that it's a remarkable coincidence that just as the tools to create footage at home that's indistinguishable from movies becomes easily available, and just as thousands of tutorials of how to do this appear on YouTube, that there's a raft of grainy home movies with UFOs in them.
(Yes, this is different from pilots in the Air Force.)
One might also note that it's a remarkable coincidence that just as Planet Earth goes into spectacularly interesting convulsions - from new technology to AI to a deadly global plague - the supposedly fake aliens turn up mob-handed to have a peek. You can't blame Them
Current vaccination rate: 7% of adults a week getting one of their jabs, about 3.6m
3 week program of surge vaccination in, for e.g., Bolton would take Population: around 300k of which all adults: 225k, still waiting a dose, 160k. Give everyone their next dose -> 160k doses needed, but would have needed 35k doses for normal vaccination anyway. So, surge vaccinating Bolton over 3 weeks would require around 40k doses a week to be diverted towards Bolton.
Say, you wanted to divert 10% or so of the program towards surge vaccination, you could do 10 Boltons every 3 weeks....
The daily reported cases number was high. However, I am now of the view that cases is no longer a good way to judge our situation. Hospitalisations continue their slow decline and deaths are now almost zero. Cases may go up in sporadic outbreaks particularly in communities with vaccine hesitancy. The numbers still look very good to me.
Daily reported number was, I think, ever so slightly lower than last week. There is a weak 7 day pattern to reported positives. So we are still trending downwards. Slightly.
The daily reported cases number was high. However, I am now of the view that cases is no longer a good way to judge our situation. Hospitalisations continue their slow decline and deaths are now almost zero. Cases may go up in sporadic outbreaks particularly in communities with vaccine hesitancy. The numbers still look very good to me.
That's true, but w-o-w remains in the green (not sure it will for much longer).
Absolutely agree about hospitalisations and deaths.
FWIW there does seem to be a real push from elements of the US to say that there are things out there doing stuff that we can't explain (from a former US President down), and moreover this has noticeably increased in intensity over the past 12 months.
The question is why.
Is it some sort of push to increase defence spending?
Unlikely - there's no pushback to do so even without this.
So why?
Comedy value.
Probably.
However if the US had discovered (say) a radio signal or some other strong indicator of ET then I imagine they'd be really concerned as to how it might play. In that circumstance perhaps they'd roll out some weak (old and non genuine) stuff just to test the water. I have any such thing as a very low probability indeed, but it sort of fits the pattern, and one day (although perhaps not for many thousands of years) something will be found.
Slightly more likely is that they want to spend more on space, and having some sort of unspecified threat allows some militarisation which would be completely unacceptable if the threat was only here on Earth.
Anyway the ET aspect is most likely zero, nut there is just perhaps a politcal aspect.
You don't even begin to explain why the Yankee political, military and journalistic establishment is behaving like this. I do not believe for a moment they would hype up an extra-terrestrial "threat" so as to "get more money for militarised space research". That's lunatic behaviour. These people, including Obama, are not lunatics
As somebody who is always on the lookout for attack lines that will destroy Boris and the government, even I think the Jenny McGee story is a complete non-story.
Indeed. The rather comical desperation to find The Thing That Will Bring Boris Down This Week is proof of the lamentable political impotence of his opponents; politcal strength means creating your own opportunities if they don't exist already, a talent of which they seem completely devoid. But no, they keep hoping against hope as if they were listening to a 1960s Adam West cliffhanger:
'Is this the zero hour for the Dynamic Duo? Are the sands of time really running out for Batman and Robin? At long last have they met a gritty, granulated, inglorious end?'
'Can it be? The Dynamic Duo crushed to death by an eight ton meteorite??'
'Are our eyes deceiving us?? Has the giant clam really swallowed Robin??'
'Tune in next week – same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!'
Yes, very good. I used to watch that and it's exactly how it was. Viz, 'him', I'd actually settle for him just being slapped around for a while by Mr Freeze before the inevitable escape. Least that could be enjoyed on its own terms and in its own right.
But look, in all seriousness, what you are overtly celebrating is the complete severing of the link between popularity and merit in our politics. I know it's never been a super-strong positive correlation, it can never be like that in such a messy world filled with such messy people, but it's now gone entirely and is even turning negative. This, objectively, is a really bad development.
Not at all, and not just because I find Boris' merit to be extraordinary - like Adam West, he may occasionally dial the camp up to 11 and wear his underpants on the outside, but he always gets the bad guys in the end.
What I'm celebrating is the weakening of the link between political popularity and the petty, nonsensical smears that the media pushes in order to to inflate their own sense of self-importance. The day they realize that no one's listening to them anymore will be one of the greatest in our history.
In which case you would have felt the same joy as me at GE17 when Corbyn, having stuck two fingers up to the rabid Tory press, overperformed at the polls.
I find it interesting the way that this is being framed. What we are seeing now doesn't seem all that different to the kind of stuff that we have been seeing episodically for the last 50 years or so. The difference is the way it is being framed. Instead of little green men and War of the Worlds warm overs we are being told that it is a "security concern" because quite a lot of this activity is beside military bases. Post 9/11 no one would ever dare just laugh at a "security concern" so we (or at least the US) end up taking this far more seriously than ever before.
This latest flap is materially different to all the others. The accumulation of fairly persuasive evidence seems to have broken the dam.
The easiest explanation is to accept this at face value. The US Establishment sees a potential security threat from UAP exhibiting great technological prowess. It might be America spooking itself, it might be advanced Chinese or Russian stuff, it might be Something Else, even aliens, but it is so advanced it needs debate
My guess is that we will have forgotten all about it again in a year's time. Until the next time of course.
Yes very possible. It will remain beyond our understanding, so we won't really bother trying to understand it. We will just accept there is a huge mystery, and go to lunch
Unless, of course, the evidence continues to pile up, or They start speaking to us
Just to check in case I'm misreading you on all this - which I've been mainly skipping tbh - you are messing about right? Just seeing if anybody will bite, and if they do having an interior and slightly mean-spirited chortle?
Someone asked a question regarding the Indian variant earlier today and when I think about it I think the initial increase in cases is coming from the travellers returning home and infecting their immediate (multi-generation) family but it's not going to get much further as outside the house most people are both vaccinated and at a slight distance (so are less likely to catch it anyway).
Hence the Indian variant is really a last hurrah before Covid moves on to be just one of those things people catch at times (like flu).
The thing is there’s no hiding this. When the U.K. variant was spreading through the U.K. and then Europe, there was in some places a false confidence because the growth in U.K. variant from a small base was being masked by a general overall downwards trend. Whereas the U.K. base numbers are so low, it really should be feeding into the headline numbers pretty rapidly if it is as transmissible as some are claiming. (without even considering whether this should actually be a concern if few are getting ill)
The flip side is that the numbers are so low that the doom-mongers are extrapolating to death any even marginal rise in numbers, conveniently ignoring the vaccine wall standing in the way of anything other than relatively small rises in numbers.
The daily reported cases number was high. However, I am now of the view that cases is no longer a good way to judge our situation. Hospitalisations continue their slow decline and deaths are now almost zero. Cases may go up in sporadic outbreaks particularly in communities with vaccine hesitancy. The numbers still look very good to me.
Daily reported number was, I think, ever so slightly lower than last week. There is a weak 7 day pattern to reported positives. So we are still trending downwards. Slightly.
Bit down in the specimen day numbers from the peak on the 10th
Phil Thompson's vision of the future really is quite chilling - England as a high-density housing estate where everyone has to live on imported frozen kangaroo burgers.
England already is a high density housing estate.
Just some people want nice spacious detached homes surrounded by countryside while the plebs are piled high in tower blocks in the city even if they can afford to buy land in elsewhere.
It is not an unreasonable aspiration to own a nice home.
Agreed.
So why do NIMBYs wish to deny that aspiration to others?
Its when green belt is taken that problems arise. There is any amount of brownfield sites to be developed. The requisite infrastructure promised by developers surgery etc schools etc rarely happens so the existing infrastructure is overwhelmed.
There aren't any number of brownfield sites. That's the problem.
Population has increased by a sixth in recent years but housing hasn't and there aren't brownfield sites to cover the gap. Because whatever was on a brownfield site has a tendency to be replaced.
If more infrastructure is needed then construct that too. On greenfield too.
And if you don't want fields being developed then what is stopping you from buying the fields then refusing permission to build on them? Since you own them, you decide.
Why has population increased when the UK birthrate is only 1.68 ie below replacement level? Immigration.
So if the government reduce immigration via the new points system then the demand for new housing should fall too anyway
The biggest impact is smaller household units - divorces, delays in partnering up, children moving out sooner etc
If a population lives in 40 million houses and the occupancy changed from 2.1 to 2.0 you need nearly a million more houses for a reason which is invisible to the naked eye.
And as you need most of them where pressure is already high and the NIMBYs most active it is a political and practical problem.
Yes, lots of us have, over the past 30 years, vastly increased the amount of square footage of house we occupy - largely through the process described above. A family of four who bought their house in the 90s and lived in it perfectly happily is now a retired couple of two, living in the same house, plus two children each living in a small two bed flat. This process has happened over and over and over again. The result has been that those least able to afford a house are now sleeping on their Mum's sofa in her one bed flat.
This has been the result of nothing more malign than demographic change.
I was manning a consultation relating to a large greenfield housing development a couple of years back. Lots and lots and lots of people angry that their bit of countryside was going to be built on and that their roads would be busier. In amongst which, a cleaner at the community centre came to have a look. "Please," she said to me under her breath, "just build them. I don't care what they look like. I don't care about newts. I've got two grown up sons living in my living room because they can't get a house. Just build them." But, I suspect she didn't fill in the response form, while the middle-class* hordes who lived adjacent to the green belt in question did.
*I don't use this pejoratively. I'm middle classs. It's a good thing to be. But we need to recognise that our views aren't necessarily those of everyone.
Great post
It’s a fundamental problem. People aren’t moving out of their family homes when their children grow up - and we’re not building anywhere near enough new family homes.
Which is part of the reason we should implement policies which encourage people to live in houses of an appropriate size (ie encourage those boomer empty nesters to downsize). Which suggests abolition of Stamp Duty entirely and the implementation of an annual Land Tax of some form.
3 deaths reported today. 7 day average now well into single figures. Hospitalisations down again, to 86. 7 day average tickling 100. Positive tests 2696, which is a tiny, tiny drop from this time next week. But the yellow on the map is creeping across England. OTOH, Bolton still going up - hopefully less steeply now but can't be sure. Picture broadly positive but I'll be happier once Bolton starts trending downwards.
Bedford's numbers look the scary ones to me: 75 people in a day is one in a thousand people.
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
Point of order: It is perfectly possible to have a summer holiday in the UK.
Speaking as someone whose July holiday is booked for Cornwall, I am certain one can have a holiday in the U.K. However the jury is still out on whether the U.K. is ever going to have a summer this year, so “summer holiday” might be pushing it.
Not this weather nonsense again.
The weather now has zero impact on the weather in July. None.
Also, the weather is going to improve next week.
You have been reading too many of Leon's thrilling posts about it raining now outside his window in Camden Town!
You've been telling us "the weather is going to improve next week"... for weeks. It still hasn't, and I fear the forecast next week is much the same. Cool, wet, mediocre at best. It looks like the rest of May is set in stone, and the highest temperature of all of Spring 2021 will be those brief sunny days of ~24C back in late March. Which is extremely unusual.
It's a record breaking run of cold. Right across northern Europe. There are tentative signs early June will be better - it MUST get better - but who knows. We're four weeks from the turn of the year, when the nights grow longer
Phil Thompson's vision of the future really is quite chilling - England as a high-density housing estate where everyone has to live on imported frozen kangaroo burgers.
England already is a high density housing estate.
Just some people want nice spacious detached homes surrounded by countryside while the plebs are piled high in tower blocks in the city even if they can afford to buy land in elsewhere.
It is not an unreasonable aspiration to own a nice home.
Agreed.
So why do NIMBYs wish to deny that aspiration to others?
Its when green belt is taken that problems arise. There is any amount of brownfield sites to be developed. The requisite infrastructure promised by developers surgery etc schools etc rarely happens so the existing infrastructure is overwhelmed.
There aren't any number of brownfield sites. That's the problem.
Population has increased by a sixth in recent years but housing hasn't and there aren't brownfield sites to cover the gap. Because whatever was on a brownfield site has a tendency to be replaced.
If more infrastructure is needed then construct that too. On greenfield too.
And if you don't want fields being developed then what is stopping you from buying the fields then refusing permission to build on them? Since you own them, you decide.
Why has population increased when the UK birthrate is only 1.68 ie below replacement level? Immigration.
So if the government reduce immigration via the new points system then the demand for new housing should fall too anyway
The biggest impact is smaller household units - divorces, delays in partnering up, children moving out sooner etc
If a population lives in 40 million houses and the occupancy changed from 2.1 to 2.0 you need nearly a million more houses for a reason which is invisible to the naked eye.
And as you need most of them where pressure is already high and the NIMBYs most active it is a political and practical problem.
Yes, lots of us have, over the past 30 years, vastly increased the amount of square footage of house we occupy - largely through the process described above. A family of four who bought their house in the 90s and lived in it perfectly happily is now a retired couple of two, living in the same house, plus two children each living in a small two bed flat. This process has happened over and over and over again. The result has been that those least able to afford a house are now sleeping on their Mum's sofa in her one bed flat.
This has been the result of nothing more malign than demographic change.
I was manning a consultation relating to a large greenfield housing development a couple of years back. Lots and lots and lots of people angry that their bit of countryside was going to be built on and that their roads would be busier. In amongst which, a cleaner at the community centre came to have a look. "Please," she said to me under her breath, "just build them. I don't care what they look like. I don't care about newts. I've got two grown up sons living in my living room because they can't get a house. Just build them." But, I suspect she didn't fill in the response form, while the middle-class* hordes who lived adjacent to the green belt in question did.
*I don't use this pejoratively. I'm middle classs. It's a good thing to be. But we need to recognise that our views aren't necessarily those of everyone.
Great post
It’s a fundamental problem. People aren’t moving out of their family homes when their children grow up - and we’re not building anywhere near enough new family homes.
Which is part of the reason we should implement policies which encourage people to live in houses of an appropriate size (ie encourage those boomer empty nesters to downsize). Which suggests abolition of Stamp Duty entirely and the implementation of an annual Land Tax of some form.
I think a tax on having too many empty bedrooms might be very popular.
One might note that it's a remarkable coincidence that just as the tools to create footage at home that's indistinguishable from movies becomes easily available, and just as thousands of tutorials of how to do this appear on YouTube, that there's a raft of grainy home movies with UFOs in them.
(Yes, this is different from pilots in the Air Force.)
One might also note that it's a remarkable coincidence that just as Planet Earth goes into spectacularly interesting convulsions - from new technology to AI to a deadly global plague - the supposedly fake aliens turn up mob-handed to have a peek. You can't blame Them
Phil Thompson's vision of the future really is quite chilling - England as a high-density housing estate where everyone has to live on imported frozen kangaroo burgers.
England already is a high density housing estate.
Just some people want nice spacious detached homes surrounded by countryside while the plebs are piled high in tower blocks in the city even if they can afford to buy land in elsewhere.
Some people think a detached house in middle of nowhere sounds like hell on earth, and would much rather live in a flat within easy walking distance of nice bars and restaurants.
The world takes all sorts.
I'm one of those - though in a terraced house, rather than a flat.
I am within 15 minutes' walk of at least 50 bars, 50 restaurants and hundreds of shops of every description. The sheer joy of never having to worry about drinking and driving is heaven on earth to me.
I hate the idea of needing a car for going anywhere. Also not being able to see any other people or residences from my own. That would freak me out and make me feel rather uneasy.
Phil Thompson's vision of the future really is quite chilling - England as a high-density housing estate where everyone has to live on imported frozen kangaroo burgers.
England already is a high density housing estate.
Just some people want nice spacious detached homes surrounded by countryside while the plebs are piled high in tower blocks in the city even if they can afford to buy land in elsewhere.
It is not an unreasonable aspiration to own a nice home.
Agreed.
So why do NIMBYs wish to deny that aspiration to others?
Its when green belt is taken that problems arise. There is any amount of brownfield sites to be developed. The requisite infrastructure promised by developers surgery etc schools etc rarely happens so the existing infrastructure is overwhelmed.
There aren't any number of brownfield sites. That's the problem.
Population has increased by a sixth in recent years but housing hasn't and there aren't brownfield sites to cover the gap. Because whatever was on a brownfield site has a tendency to be replaced.
If more infrastructure is needed then construct that too. On greenfield too.
And if you don't want fields being developed then what is stopping you from buying the fields then refusing permission to build on them? Since you own them, you decide.
Why has population increased when the UK birthrate is only 1.68 ie below replacement level? Immigration.
So if the government reduce immigration via the new points system then the demand for new housing should fall too anyway
The biggest impact is smaller household units - divorces, delays in partnering up, children moving out sooner etc
If a population lives in 40 million houses and the occupancy changed from 2.1 to 2.0 you need nearly a million more houses for a reason which is invisible to the naked eye.
And as you need most of them where pressure is already high and the NIMBYs most active it is a political and practical problem.
Yes, lots of us have, over the past 30 years, vastly increased the amount of square footage of house we occupy - largely through the process described above. A family of four who bought their house in the 90s and lived in it perfectly happily is now a retired couple of two, living in the same house, plus two children each living in a small two bed flat. This process has happened over and over and over again. The result has been that those least able to afford a house are now sleeping on their Mum's sofa in her one bed flat.
This has been the result of nothing more malign than demographic change.
I was manning a consultation relating to a large greenfield housing development a couple of years back. Lots and lots and lots of people angry that their bit of countryside was going to be built on and that their roads would be busier. In amongst which, a cleaner at the community centre came to have a look. "Please," she said to me under her breath, "just build them. I don't care what they look like. I don't care about newts. I've got two grown up sons living in my living room because they can't get a house. Just build them." But, I suspect she didn't fill in the response form, while the middle-class* hordes who lived adjacent to the green belt in question did.
*I don't use this pejoratively. I'm middle classs. It's a good thing to be. But we need to recognise that our views aren't necessarily those of everyone.
Great post
It’s a fundamental problem. People aren’t moving out of their family homes when their children grow up - and we’re not building anywhere near enough new family homes.
Which is part of the reason we should implement policies which encourage people to live in houses of an appropriate size (ie encourage those boomer empty nesters to downsize). Which suggests abolition of Stamp Duty entirely and the implementation of an annual Land Tax of some form.
That would screw me. I live in a large house because I have a large family. But that doesn't make this the wrong thing to do.
Phil Thompson's vision of the future really is quite chilling - England as a high-density housing estate where everyone has to live on imported frozen kangaroo burgers.
England already is a high density housing estate.
Just some people want nice spacious detached homes surrounded by countryside while the plebs are piled high in tower blocks in the city even if they can afford to buy land in elsewhere.
It is not an unreasonable aspiration to own a nice home.
Agreed.
So why do NIMBYs wish to deny that aspiration to others?
Its when green belt is taken that problems arise. There is any amount of brownfield sites to be developed. The requisite infrastructure promised by developers surgery etc schools etc rarely happens so the existing infrastructure is overwhelmed.
There aren't any number of brownfield sites. That's the problem.
Population has increased by a sixth in recent years but housing hasn't and there aren't brownfield sites to cover the gap. Because whatever was on a brownfield site has a tendency to be replaced.
If more infrastructure is needed then construct that too. On greenfield too.
And if you don't want fields being developed then what is stopping you from buying the fields then refusing permission to build on them? Since you own them, you decide.
Why has population increased when the UK birthrate is only 1.68 ie below replacement level? Immigration.
So if the government reduce immigration via the new points system then the demand for new housing should fall too anyway
The biggest impact is smaller household units - divorces, delays in partnering up, children moving out sooner etc
If a population lives in 40 million houses and the occupancy changed from 2.1 to 2.0 you need nearly a million more houses for a reason which is invisible to the naked eye.
And as you need most of them where pressure is already high and the NIMBYs most active it is a political and practical problem.
Yes, lots of us have, over the past 30 years, vastly increased the amount of square footage of house we occupy - largely through the process described above. A family of four who bought their house in the 90s and lived in it perfectly happily is now a retired couple of two, living in the same house, plus two children each living in a small two bed flat. This process has happened over and over and over again. The result has been that those least able to afford a house are now sleeping on their Mum's sofa in her one bed flat.
This has been the result of nothing more malign than demographic change.
I was manning a consultation relating to a large greenfield housing development a couple of years back. Lots and lots and lots of people angry that their bit of countryside was going to be built on and that their roads would be busier. In amongst which, a cleaner at the community centre came to have a look. "Please," she said to me under her breath, "just build them. I don't care what they look like. I don't care about newts. I've got two grown up sons living in my living room because they can't get a house. Just build them." But, I suspect she didn't fill in the response form, while the middle-class* hordes who lived adjacent to the green belt in question did.
*I don't use this pejoratively. I'm middle classs. It's a good thing to be. But we need to recognise that our views aren't necessarily those of everyone.
Great post
It’s a fundamental problem. People aren’t moving out of their family homes when their children grow up - and we’re not building anywhere near enough new family homes.
Which is part of the reason we should implement policies which encourage people to live in houses of an appropriate size (ie encourage those boomer empty nesters to downsize). Which suggests abolition of Stamp Duty entirely and the implementation of an annual Land Tax of some form.
I think a tax on having too many empty bedrooms might be very popular.
What could we call it?
An under-occupation levy I believe is the suggested name...
This is the entire US political establishment, left to right, lining up behind the aliens hypothesis
Even if it is nonsense, something spectacularly strange is happening
"the entire US political establishment, left to right, lining up behind the aliens hypothesis"
Really? That statement is itself nonsense.
Just bring up the New York Times website on you computer. And search of a mention of the word "alien". Which yours truly just did. With ZERO results.
Of course could be that the aliens are suppressing the "fact" that the "entire US political establishment" is as obsessed with UFOs or whatever the kids are calling them these days, as you are PRETENDING to be?
Remember Leon critiquing CycleFree for being MUCH MUCH MUCH to long with her commentaries.
Yesterday, the former president of the USA reversed his earlier statements, and confirmed that American military has encountered advanced technology it cannot explain...
Please provide cite. From what I saw he said it had observed phenomena it couldn't explain. Not the same thing.
He's actually quite hesitant and inarticulate - for Obama
I think my interpretation of his garbled words is fair. But you are free to demur
"we can't explain how they move, their trajectory, they did not have an easily explainable pattern"
Yes, that's the link you posted yesterday, which is what I was referring to. You are massively over interpreting.
I observed something I couldn't account for yesterday, when my computer crashed. It could have been alien technology, but I think there are simpler explanations.
Thing is though, even the MOST prosaic explanations are insane.
1. The US is trying to deceive the entire world about its own technology, by pretending it has encountered aliens. And this plot involves several presidents. Er, OK
Or...
2. the Chinese have developed the ability to fly at 13,000 mph and they did this in the Noughties. or the 1950s. Really?!
Or
3. a weird mass hallucination is affecting hundreds of pilots across the world along with an unprecedented series of identical camera glitches and radar gremlins and infra-red frazzles and these delusional people have somehow convinced the US elite that they are sane and seeing unexplainable technology
Which one do you go for?
3. Every time.
Given pilots have reported plastic bags blowing in the wind as drones (when drones were the 'thing'), I wouldn't rely an any so-called observational skills. And I've yet to see any clear photographs or video. They are _always_ fuzzy, just like Nessie.
3 deaths reported today. 7 day average now well into single figures. Hospitalisations down again, to 86. 7 day average tickling 100. Positive tests 2696, which is a tiny, tiny drop from this time next week. But the yellow on the map is creeping across England. OTOH, Bolton still going up - hopefully less steeply now but can't be sure. Picture broadly positive but I'll be happier once Bolton starts trending downwards.
Bedford's numbers look the scary ones to me: 75 people in a day is one in a thousand people.
Maybe an artefact of surge testing - the daily run rate around that 75 is much lower, and the number of new cases reported today (49) also suggests there isn't a big up tick from that 75 to come afterwards.
This is the entire US political establishment, left to right, lining up behind the aliens hypothesis
Even if it is nonsense, something spectacularly strange is happening
"the entire US political establishment, left to right, lining up behind the aliens hypothesis"
Really? That statement is itself nonsense.
Just bring up the New York Times website on you computer. And search of a mention of the word "alien". Which yours truly just did. With ZERO results.
Of course could be that the aliens are suppressing the "fact" that the "entire US political establishment" is as obsessed with UFOs or whatever the kids are calling them these days, as you are PRETENDING to be?
Remember Leon critiquing CycleFree for being MUCH MUCH MUCH to long with her commentaries.
Talk bout the Alien calling the Earthling green!
You didn't google very hard. The NYTimes was actually the first huge media corp to approach this in a serious way, famously so, in 2017
Starmer wants government to drop the traffic light system and finally close the borders...i.e. if he had his way no summer hols....how unpopular does he want to become?
Point of order: It is perfectly possible to have a summer holiday in the UK.
Speaking as someone whose July holiday is booked for Cornwall, I am certain one can have a holiday in the U.K. However the jury is still out on whether the U.K. is ever going to have a summer this year, so “summer holiday” might be pushing it.
Not this weather nonsense again.
The weather now has zero impact on the weather in July. None.
Also, the weather is going to improve next week.
You have been reading too many of Leon's thrilling posts about it raining now outside his window in Camden Town!
You've been telling us "the weather is going to improve next week"... for weeks. It still hasn't, and I fear the forecast next week is much the same. Cool, wet, mediocre at best. It looks like the rest of May is set in stone, and the highest temperature of all of Spring 2021 will be those brief sunny days of ~24C back in late March. Which is extremely unusual.
It's a record breaking run of cold. Right across northern Europe. There are tentative signs early June will be better - it MUST get better - but who knows. We're four weeks from the turn of the year, when the nights grow longer
WRONG
I have said there has been a signal for a pattern change around 26 May, for a while now.
Guess what, I'm right. There is a signal.
Yep. June's looking like a scorcher. Wear a hat, use plenty of high factor lotion, and stay hydrated.
The daily reported cases number was high. However, I am now of the view that cases is no longer a good way to judge our situation. Hospitalisations continue their slow decline and deaths are now almost zero. Cases may go up in sporadic outbreaks particularly in communities with vaccine hesitancy. The numbers still look very good to me.
Daily reported number was, I think, ever so slightly lower than last week. There is a weak 7 day pattern to reported positives. So we are still trending downwards. Slightly.
Bit down in the specimen day numbers from the peak on the 10th
The increase in hotspot areas is basically being cancelled out by decreases elsewhere. Hopefully the targeted testing and vaccinations will keep localised outbreaks exactly that - localised.
How about killing two birds with one stone? Build new towns in Llanidloes and Crianlarich. The sheep farmers, whose land will no longer be needed for sheep, sell their farms to developers. Thousands of affordable houses away from NIMBYs. As the residents will be working from home, they won’t need to change jobs. Win win!
Mr. kinabalu, public sector employees do have their wages paid by the taxes gathered from private sector workers.
That's a mathematical fact.
When I worked in the public sector (executive agency of BEIS, or whatever it was then) we were self-funding. In fact, the profit levels were something of an embarassment and all kinds of ways were found to spend/minimise the profits, short of paying us more!
(We were a state-owned monopoly, to be fair)
If the private sector in a country pays for the public sector of that country - if this is the true essence of the situation rather a reductive misrepresentation of it - how could there have been such a huge public sector in the USSR?
There couldn't.
The USSR failed.
Another cutie reply. But not quite the point. They managed to have a huge public sector without a private sector to pay for it for a long long time.
We've actually done this one, you and I, about a year ago. You surprised me then by obliquely acknowledging the point and ceasing to argue it. It was you at your very best and therefore quite a moment. Guess that's why it's stuck in memory.
Phil Thompson's vision of the future really is quite chilling - England as a high-density housing estate where everyone has to live on imported frozen kangaroo burgers.
England already is a high density housing estate.
Just some people want nice spacious detached homes surrounded by countryside while the plebs are piled high in tower blocks in the city even if they can afford to buy land in elsewhere.
It is not an unreasonable aspiration to own a nice home.
Agreed.
So why do NIMBYs wish to deny that aspiration to others?
Its when green belt is taken that problems arise. There is any amount of brownfield sites to be developed. The requisite infrastructure promised by developers surgery etc schools etc rarely happens so the existing infrastructure is overwhelmed.
There aren't any number of brownfield sites. That's the problem.
Population has increased by a sixth in recent years but housing hasn't and there aren't brownfield sites to cover the gap. Because whatever was on a brownfield site has a tendency to be replaced.
If more infrastructure is needed then construct that too. On greenfield too.
And if you don't want fields being developed then what is stopping you from buying the fields then refusing permission to build on them? Since you own them, you decide.
Why has population increased when the UK birthrate is only 1.68 ie below replacement level? Immigration.
So if the government reduce immigration via the new points system then the demand for new housing should fall too anyway
The biggest impact is smaller household units - divorces, delays in partnering up, children moving out sooner etc
If a population lives in 40 million houses and the occupancy changed from 2.1 to 2.0 you need nearly a million more houses for a reason which is invisible to the naked eye.
And as you need most of them where pressure is already high and the NIMBYs most active it is a political and practical problem.
Yes, lots of us have, over the past 30 years, vastly increased the amount of square footage of house we occupy - largely through the process described above. A family of four who bought their house in the 90s and lived in it perfectly happily is now a retired couple of two, living in the same house, plus two children each living in a small two bed flat. This process has happened over and over and over again. The result has been that those least able to afford a house are now sleeping on their Mum's sofa in her one bed flat.
This has been the result of nothing more malign than demographic change.
I was manning a consultation relating to a large greenfield housing development a couple of years back. Lots and lots and lots of people angry that their bit of countryside was going to be built on and that their roads would be busier. In amongst which, a cleaner at the community centre came to have a look. "Please," she said to me under her breath, "just build them. I don't care what they look like. I don't care about newts. I've got two grown up sons living in my living room because they can't get a house. Just build them." But, I suspect she didn't fill in the response form, while the middle-class* hordes who lived adjacent to the green belt in question did.
*I don't use this pejoratively. I'm middle classs. It's a good thing to be. But we need to recognise that our views aren't necessarily those of everyone.
This is an incredibly insightful post, and also demonstrates one of the massive problems of stamp duty: it's a frickin' tax on trading down.
The tax system should encourage the efficient allocation of resources. Stamp duty does the opposite.
Comments
Zey are zee Moon Nazzzzzzis...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034314/
But Boris is far more popular.
Why? because crypto undermines their ability to control the lives of their citizens. It gives Chinese citizens a sort of private property, away from confiscation, monitoring and taxation, that the government wants to deny them.
The scam bit is that the bank account (allegedly) doesn't exist, and the Tether owners just print coins whenever they need to in order to keep buying Bitcoin and pushing the price ever up.
The weather now has zero impact on the weather in July. None.
Also, the weather is going to improve next week.
You have been reading too many of Leon's thrilling posts about it raining now outside his window in Camden Town!
I don't see wages rising without which all this inflating away debt is moot.
And as for the sectors, @nerys has noted how price levels and demand for materials in the construction sector have been very strong.
But as far as housing is concerned we don't have a supply problem were have an affordability problem.
Higher construction input prices and affordability problems does not square the circle.
And as you need most of them where pressure is already high and the NIMBYs most active it is a political and practical problem.
"I’m told former minister Robert Goodwill is sounding out colleagues, some of who have been told Brady is not seeking re-election. I’m reliably told however that Brady will be standing. This could be a bit of a battle. No date for election set yet..."
https://twitter.com/tomhfh/status/1395024303905808385?s=20
It's a record breaking run of cold. Right across northern Europe. There are tentative signs early June will be better - it MUST get better - but who knows. We're four weeks from the turn of the year, when the nights grow longer
Of course, if we want to move to a bigger house, we discover we are in fact poorer as the gap between value of our house and cost of bigger house has got bigger than it was five years ago (if both increased by same %). Reverse if we downsize (as you are of course pointing out).
I have said there has been a signal for a pattern change around 26 May, for a while now.
Guess what, I'm right. There is a signal.
Only 3 deaths reported today.
The question is why.
Is it some sort of push to increase defence spending?
Unlikely - there's no pushback to do so even without this.
So why?
Made me laugh out loud Leon, I wasn't expecting that!
Someone asked a question regarding the Indian variant earlier today and when I think about it I think the initial increase in cases is coming from the travellers returning home and infecting their immediate (multi-generation) family but it's not going to get much further as outside the house most people are both vaccinated and at a slight distance (so are less likely to catch it anyway).
Hence the Indian variant is really a last hurrah before Covid moves on to be just one of those things people catch at times (like flu).
This has been the result of nothing more malign than demographic change.
I was manning a consultation relating to a large greenfield housing development a couple of years back. Lots and lots and lots of people angry that their bit of countryside was going to be built on and that their roads would be busier. In amongst which, a cleaner at the community centre came to have a look. "Please," she said to me under her breath, "just build them. I don't care what they look like. I don't care about newts. I've got two grown up sons living in my living room because they can't get a house. Just build them."
But, I suspect she didn't fill in the response form, while the middle-class* hordes who lived adjacent to the green belt in question did.
*I don't use this pejoratively. I'm middle classs. It's a good thing to be. But we need to recognise that our views aren't necessarily those of everyone.
Hospitalisations down again, to 86. 7 day average tickling 100.
Positive tests 2696, which is a tiny, tiny drop from this time next week. But the yellow on the map is creeping across England. OTOH, Bolton still going up - hopefully less steeply now but can't be sure.
Picture broadly positive but I'll be happier once Bolton starts trending downwards.
Basically: "Yes, it really could be aliens"
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-conventional-wisdom-on-ufos-is-shifting/
This is the entire US political establishment, left to right, lining up behind the aliens hypothesis
Even if it is nonsense, something spectacularly strange is happening
I think some areas have it but others still a way to go – be interesting to see the tone of the 1700hrs conference. Boris sounded pretty upbeat in the Commons earlier, suggests he's getting promising reports.
(Yes, this is different from pilots in the Air Force.)
It’s a fundamental problem. People aren’t moving out of their family homes when their children grow up - and we’re not building anywhere near enough new family homes.
However if the US had discovered (say) a radio signal or some other strong indicator of ET then I imagine they'd be really concerned as to how it might play. In that circumstance perhaps they'd roll out some weak (old and non genuine) stuff just to test the water. I have any such thing as a very low probability indeed, but it sort of fits the pattern, and one day (although perhaps not for many thousands of years) something will be found.
Slightly more likely is that they want to spend more on space, and having some sort of unspecified threat allows some militarisation which would be completely unacceptable if the threat was only here on Earth.
Anyway the ET aspect is most likely zero, nut there is just perhaps a politcal aspect.
Most indicators are down. The rise in cases seems to be limited - pretty flat at the moment.
And it is happening among the unvaccinated groups -
Current vaccination rate: 7% of adults a week getting one of their jabs, about 3.6m
3 week program of surge vaccination in, for e.g., Bolton would take
Population: around 300k of which all adults: 225k, still waiting a dose, 160k.
Give everyone their next dose -> 160k doses needed, but would have needed 35k doses for normal vaccination anyway.
So, surge vaccinating Bolton over 3 weeks would require around 40k doses a week to be diverted towards Bolton.
Say, you wanted to divert 10% or so of the program towards surge vaccination, you could do 10 Boltons every 3 weeks....
Absolutely agree about hospitalisations and deaths.
https://twitter.com/RP131/status/1395040527280713728/photo/1
What could we call it?
popcorn
Really? That statement is itself nonsense.
Just bring up the New York Times website on you computer. And search of a mention of the word "alien". Which yours truly just did. With ZERO results.
Of course could be that the aliens are suppressing the "fact" that the "entire US political establishment" is as obsessed with UFOs or whatever the kids are calling them these days, as you are PRETENDING to be?
Remember Leon critiquing CycleFree for being MUCH MUCH MUCH to long with her commentaries.
Talk about the Alien calling the Earthling green!
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/insider/secret-pentagon-ufo-program.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/science/ufos-aliens-space-travel.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.html
We've actually done this one, you and I, about a year ago. You surprised me then by obliquely acknowledging the point and ceasing to argue it. It was you at your very best and therefore quite a moment. Guess that's why it's stuck in memory.
The tax system should encourage the efficient allocation of resources. Stamp duty does the opposite.