I must have missed the queues for the ration books this morning. There is a vast amount of hyperbole here. I am sure there are problems, but its not the end of civilization is it? It will also correct eventually. No one thought that there would be no issues at all did they? Surely? If you believe in the market, the market will correct this. In the mean time there might be the odd bit of minor annoyance (e,g, going over to a different supermarket to get the flaked parmesan...)
Yes, the market will correct for this. The trouble with market fundamentalism is in assuming, as some do, that whatever is the new equilibrium is therefore ideal. It might be better to say the market will "adjust" rather than "correct".
Cynical hat says it will say - "Its even worse than before, we really mean it now, we are all doomed!".
I am fully signed up to net zero, protecting the environment, properly using resources - the whole green thing. But I find the increasingly shrill desperation and scare tactics from the climate scientist lobby, without a balance of proper skeptical science at times counter productive. The recent pandemic has revealed the limits of modelling in complex scenarios.
We need to reach a point where we no longer use fossil fuels and have a fully sustainable existence. We need to stop destroying habitats and making species go extinct. But to say we have to do this because the global temperature (whatever that even is) will rise by a degree or two, against a setting where the planet ranges from -50 to +50 deg C, and even in temperate UK from -19 to +38 deg C is nonsense. I am also surprised that the scientists now seem confident to link extreme weather events to climate change. One of the issues is we now have world wide reporting, so any extreme event gets reported, whereas even 20 years ago that was not the case. This adds to the feeling of doom everywhere, when in reality, for much of the world, extremes have always happened. Homes being flooded is far more because of where they have built their houses, not necessarily due to more rain.
I dont agree on the point about global temperature, but it is the case that as bad as things may be previous estimates feel like they were that things would be even worse.
Based on predictions of 80s videos we had to watch at school in the 90s I'm surprised theres any amazon rainforest left.
I'm not sure how one appropriately lists concern. If you don't set a date theres no urgency but if you then reach that date without widespread catastrophe it undermines future warnings, yet its also probably the case that by the time its obvious it's too late.
It does seem true that more people are more passionately concerned about these issues than just 5 years ago, but given its certain that lots things in any report stated as needing to happen will not happen, by that logic we're already doomed.
I'm happy to disagree - but what do you understand the global temperature to be? I think it is a stupid concept, but that might just be me.
I'm not a scientist and have not explored the issue so couldn't answer with any authority, I just don't see the idea of average global temperatures as inherently nonsense. If there are criticisms of such a thing I'd listen.
I used to work on the edge of this field (in some of the tech used, as a scientist, but not as a climate scientist per se - nonetheless I was surrounded by climate scientist, went to the seminars).
The global temperature is used because it's both easy as a concept and relatively easy to model (increased CO2 etc, plus/minus some albedo changes gives you an overall figure). It is limited becauce temperature is lumpy and effects are lumpy. Sea level change for example depends on temperature near the poles, which depends also on changing ocean currents etc. So if the heating was mostly near hte equator you'd have crises there but not countries disappearing due to rising sea levels. Unfortunately, many models have more extreme heating at the poles.
But if you want some overall target to explain it easily, you can see how keep it under 2 degrees is more public friendly than keep CO2 below 450ppm*.
*this specific figure plucked from my behind, I don't know the appropriate number.
I also have HUGE issues with the false precision that is implied by this. The climate system is far too complex to say this with any certainty.
The IPCC reports are full of uncertainty ranges, probabilities, etc.
Read them directly, rather than the nonsense media reports, and you might be much reassured that the scientists know what they're doing.
I must have missed the queues for the ration books this morning. There is a vast amount of hyperbole here. I am sure there are problems, but its not the end of civilization is it? It will also correct eventually. No one thought that there would be no issues at all did they? Surely? If you believe in the market, the market will correct this. In the mean time there might be the odd bit of minor annoyance (e,g, going over to a different supermarket to get the flaked parmesan...)
I have had a weekly delivery from Asda for the last four years and there are no shortages in our orders, in fact they are better than before, and when I do pop in for the odd thing the shelves are well stocked
The joys of the cloud. Let the boffins at Google, Amazon and Microsoft sweat the small stuff.
That in itself can be a problem.
The folks who have spent their entire career on the small stuff now need to reskill to a level of abstraction that obscures some things completely.
Indeed. Even Mrs @JosiasJessop's chips are pretty much a fiction, with many cores and several caches, but presenting an api that pretends to be 1980s-era hardware being programmed in C.
???
Ask the missus. Hardware has moved beyond the software model of it.
And your knowledge of what Mrs J does is ... ?
Based entirely on your account on this very thread.
Well, insinuating her work a 'fiction' shows you have very little knowledge about it!
Who said that? I'm talking about CPUs and do not think what I am saying is controversial. Processors are no longer single-core with flat address spaces. Hardware has moved on but they still present the earlier programming interface.
I was going to comment but https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/sense-mi does a way better job than anything I can say - it's built into every Ryzen chip and is designed to maximise performance by setting things up what it thinks the next few requests will be
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
As consumers we also need to accept that it will lead to higher prices. This will make the triple lock even more difficult to sustain.
There is (as Ed Milliband identified) a cost of living crisis. Everything costs lots but wages don't keep up. So higher prices for all due to cost inflation to the pay the wages of a few only makes the crisis worse.
An example of the problem. My client's company has a contract with DHL to deliver parcels. They offered the most competitive package of all the big companies. Like all of them they charge a premium for "Highlands and Islands" because costs, which in DHL's case starts in the western suburbs of Aberdeen just 10 miles from the depot.
What does this matter? Well DHL charge 2.5x the rate to deliver 10 miles from the depot in "Highlands and Islands" vs delivering 40 miles from the depot not in that zone. The driver is a contractor and gets a flat rate for delivery. DHL incur no additional cost but charge 2.5x more. And they aren't alone - all the parcel companies run the same scam.
Perhaps part of the cost of living crisis is profiteering by companies like DHL? If they passed on the premium charged to their sub-contractor then the money would circulate. Instead it stays in their pockets.
Are the delivery's the same flat rate though - I can't see many people willingly delivering parcels if they have to drive 20+ miles between each delivery for a fixed fee. So I do wonder if the per fee rate in the highlands may be higher than say central Newcastle.
I'm sure that if we were out in the highlands the fee to the driver would be more. What he told me was that we are counted as a local delivery to the depot - because we are. The company charges £ because "remote" and pays nothing extra in actual costs because not remote.
Cynical hat says it will say - "Its even worse than before, we really mean it now, we are all doomed!".
I am fully signed up to net zero, protecting the environment, properly using resources - the whole green thing. But I find the increasingly shrill desperation and scare tactics from the climate scientist lobby, without a balance of proper skeptical science at times counter productive. The recent pandemic has revealed the limits of modelling in complex scenarios.
We need to reach a point where we no longer use fossil fuels and have a fully sustainable existence. We need to stop destroying habitats and making species go extinct. But to say we have to do this because the global temperature (whatever that even is) will rise by a degree or two, against a setting where the planet ranges from -50 to +50 deg C, and even in temperate UK from -19 to +38 deg C is nonsense. I am also surprised that the scientists now seem confident to link extreme weather events to climate change. One of the issues is we now have world wide reporting, so any extreme event gets reported, whereas even 20 years ago that was not the case. This adds to the feeling of doom everywhere, when in reality, for much of the world, extremes have always happened. Homes being flooded is far more because of where they have built their houses, not necessarily due to more rain.
I dont agree on the point about global temperature, but it is the case that as bad as things may be previous estimates feel like they were that things would be even worse.
Based on predictions of 80s videos we had to watch at school in the 90s I'm surprised theres any amazon rainforest left.
I'm not sure how one appropriately lists concern. If you don't set a date theres no urgency but if you then reach that date without widespread catastrophe it undermines future warnings, yet its also probably the case that by the time its obvious it's too late.
It does seem true that more people are more passionately concerned about these issues than just 5 years ago, but given its certain that lots things in any report stated as needing to happen will not happen, by that logic we're already doomed.
I'm happy to disagree - but what do you understand the global temperature to be? I think it is a stupid concept, but that might just be me.
I'm not a scientist and have not explored the issue so couldn't answer with any authority, I just don't see the idea of average global temperatures as inherently nonsense. If there are criticisms of such a thing I'd listen.
I used to work on the edge of this field (in some of the tech used, as a scientist, but not as a climate scientist per se - nonetheless I was surrounded by climate scientist, went to the seminars).
The global temperature is used because it's both easy as a concept and relatively easy to model (increased CO2 etc, plus/minus some albedo changes gives you an overall figure). It is limited becauce temperature is lumpy and effects are lumpy. Sea level change for example depends on temperature near the poles, which depends also on changing ocean currents etc. So if the heating was mostly near hte equator you'd have crises there but not countries disappearing due to rising sea levels. Unfortunately, many models have more extreme heating at the poles.
But if you want some overall target to explain it easily, you can see how keep it under 2 degrees is more public friendly than keep CO2 below 450ppm*.
*this specific figure plucked from my behind, I don't know the appropriate number.
I also have HUGE issues with the false precision that is implied by this. The climate system is far too complex to say this with any certainty.
The relationship between global temperature and CO2 is a reasonably straightforward one. And CO2 has gone up a fair bit recently. Temperature will follow over a short geological but long human timescale.
Here it is in a couple of charts, it's not that complex.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
It's only half the issue - pay rises and poaching drivers doesn't solve the need to replacing retiring drivers, it just shunts the problem to another company.
Of course it does. If the pay rises high enough then drivers will be attracted to work in the sector.
There's plenty of people who know how to drive in this country. There's plenty of people who drive for a living in this country, but if HGV drivers are getting paid no better than Amazon Prime delivery drivers then people aren't exactly going to be attracted to driving a HGV instead of a van that is more attractive for other reasons.
If on the other hand HGV drivers are well paid, then yes that's going to attract people to do the six weeks or whatever it is training to get a HGV licence and work on that instead.
Some cracking lines and quotes, especially from Lord Mekon of Anglosphere.
'More recently, though, the man the Financial Times called “the brains behind Brexit,” Daniel Hannan, rejigged the tale so that it became about the English (who, he claimed, had brought freedom itself with them “from deep in the German woods”) bravely resisting foreign dictatorship. He tweeted on the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings in 2015: “England’s Nakba. Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king, fell in battle, opening the door to occupation and feudalism.”'
Cynical hat says it will say - "Its even worse than before, we really mean it now, we are all doomed!".
I am fully signed up to net zero, protecting the environment, properly using resources - the whole green thing. But I find the increasingly shrill desperation and scare tactics from the climate scientist lobby, without a balance of proper skeptical science at times counter productive. The recent pandemic has revealed the limits of modelling in complex scenarios.
We need to reach a point where we no longer use fossil fuels and have a fully sustainable existence. We need to stop destroying habitats and making species go extinct. But to say we have to do this because the global temperature (whatever that even is) will rise by a degree or two, against a setting where the planet ranges from -50 to +50 deg C, and even in temperate UK from -19 to +38 deg C is nonsense. I am also surprised that the scientists now seem confident to link extreme weather events to climate change. One of the issues is we now have world wide reporting, so any extreme event gets reported, whereas even 20 years ago that was not the case. This adds to the feeling of doom everywhere, when in reality, for much of the world, extremes have always happened. Homes being flooded is far more because of where they have built their houses, not necessarily due to more rain.
Agreed and well said.
I have some sympathy with Mr TT's last paragraph. I was brought up on Canvey Island which, were it not for the seawall (heightened and strengthened after the 1953 East Coast floods) would revert to what it was in the prior to the initial building of the wall in 1623; marshland on which sheep could be grazed except at spring tides. In my childhood the population was some 8-10,000; it's now over 40k. I have a fondness for my childhood home, but how on earth can (?should) it be sustained as the sea level rises?
It would be a shock if Tom Daley wasn’t nominated, but if he is, the BBC might feel the need to also add Tom Dean, James Guy and possibly Duncan Scott. So if the BBC were being tight on nominations and doing it on merit, Daley might miss out. But his sexuality probably gets him in.
I’d be surprised if any other Olympians get a look-in.
@DecrepiterJohnL - don’t rule out any cricketers or footballers just yet. James Anderson is a short price (though probably not much liquidity), but I think the one to watch is Joe Root. And given how hideously white the shortlist is looking, I can see Raheem Sterling getting nominated. Of course, Lewis Hamilton helps in that regard, and I think he could win the whole thing if he clinched the title again.
England (football) for Team of the Year perhaps?
Re Hideous Whiteness – yes, which is why I'd be surprised if the shortlist is not a good deal longer than most are suggesting. I'd expect a more diverse shortlist than five White blokes and Laura Kenny, all from England.
Can Lewis Hamilton win another title in time, though, or does SPotY fall before the end of the Formula One season?
Anthony Joshua is fighting no-one in particular (sorry, Oleksandr Usyk fans) in September but he probably needs to face (and beat) Tyson Fury to win SPotY. The AJ/Fury bout was planned but kyboshed by mandatory defences against other fighters.
That's a good point about the F1 season. I didn't realise that the final race isn't until the 12 December - the day of the vote. There's a race the previous Sunday, too. Normally the nominees are announced 10-14 days before the vote, though I see in 2018 the nominees were announced on the night of the vote. There has to be a good chance that Hamilton at least has a chance of the title with two rounds to go, so I think the BBC will nominate him.
I don't know much about boxing, but I see this guy is listed on Betfair for SPoTY @ 85-1:
Josh Taylor, the Scottish world champion boxer? Perhaps in a normal year but in 2021 I expect the two Olympic boxing gold medallists will be ahead in the queue. I may be wrong. The trouble is there are so many potential nominees which is why I'm not convinced Jason Kenny's name is already on the trophy.
But perhaps it is, and more candidates will just serve to splinter the vote so Jason wins SPotY as OGH tipped, and lots of deserving champions get between 2 or 3 per cent each.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
As consumers we also need to accept that it will lead to higher prices. This will make the triple lock even more difficult to sustain.
There is (as Ed Milliband identified) a cost of living crisis. Everything costs lots but wages don't keep up. So higher prices for all due to cost inflation to the pay the wages of a few only makes the crisis worse.
An example of the problem. My client's company has a contract with DHL to deliver parcels. They offered the most competitive package of all the big companies. Like all of them they charge a premium for "Highlands and Islands" because costs, which in DHL's case starts in the western suburbs of Aberdeen just 10 miles from the depot.
What does this matter? Well DHL charge 2.5x the rate to deliver 10 miles from the depot in "Highlands and Islands" vs delivering 40 miles from the depot not in that zone. The driver is a contractor and gets a flat rate for delivery. DHL incur no additional cost but charge 2.5x more. And they aren't alone - all the parcel companies run the same scam.
Perhaps part of the cost of living crisis is profiteering by companies like DHL? If they passed on the premium charged to their sub-contractor then the money would circulate. Instead it stays in their pockets.
Are the delivery's the same flat rate though - I can't see many people willingly delivering parcels if they have to drive 20+ miles between each delivery for a fixed fee. So I do wonder if the per fee rate in the highlands may be higher than say central Newcastle.
I'm sure that if we were out in the highlands the fee to the driver would be more. What he told me was that we are counted as a local delivery to the depot - because we are. The company charges £ because "remote" and pays nothing extra in actual costs because not remote.
Well it could have been Bifab in Methil had the Scottish government not been so incompetent.
There isn't anything else that could be adding to business uncertainty in Scotland is there?
Yes Jim, we feel the love.
I'm sure this picture makes a really important and powerful point and I'm just too stupid to figure out what it is
Dinnae fash yersel laddie. I’m just a huge Jim fan.
Which leaves me wondering what a 'huge Jim' is and whether I dare Google it!
Mr Jim Murphy. A tall, lanky gent famous for the fulfilment of his unintentionally Delphic [edit] prophecy not to lose a single SLAB seat in the relevant GE. One of the many leaders of SLAB receding into the distance of memory (I honestly can't put them in numerical order).
One of the weirder strands of the 2014 indy campaign was Stephen 'big boned' Daisley's literal infatuation with Murphy. Conjured up some very scarring images, Laurel & Hardy going at it hammer and tongs was the least of it.
Mr. Divvie, as a historical aside, Harold was the first (and, of course, last) Anglo-Saxon king of England who was not from the royal house of Wessex.
Furthermore, had Edward (the Confessor) not hated his father*, Godwin, so much then said king would likely have produced an heir.
Godwin first achieved his power under Canute, and then Canute's sons, and was briefly chased out of England by Edward before returning and resuming his role as power behind the throne.
I can strongly recommend Marc Morris' book on the Norman Conquest, which is excellent (and I got the paperback for just £3 in a sale).
Edited extra bit: by his father* I meant Harold's father, also Edward's father-in-law.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
It's only half the issue - pay rises and poaching drivers doesn't solve the need to replacing retiring drivers, it just shunts the problem to another company.
Of course it does. If the pay rises high enough then drivers will be attracted to work in the sector.
There's plenty of people who know how to drive in this country. There's plenty of people who drive for a living in this country, but if HGV drivers are getting paid no better than Amazon Prime delivery drivers then people aren't exactly going to be attracted to driving a HGV instead of a van that is more attractive for other reasons.
If on the other hand HGV drivers are well paid, then yes that's going to attract people to do the six weeks or whatever it is training to get a HGV licence and work on that instead.
Don't forget that HGV training was until recently, like all driver training, closed down for the Covid pandemic. Brexit, IR35 and the pandemic combined to restrict supply, but at the same time, demand was increased by Brexit and the increase in van deliveries.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
Mr. Divvie, as a historical aside, Harold was the first (and, of course, last) Anglo-Saxon king of England who was not from the royal house of Wessex.
Furthermore, had Edward (the Confessor) not hated his father*, Godwin, so much then said king would likely have produced an heir.
Godwin first achieved his power under Canute, and then Canute's sons, and was briefly chased out of England by Edward before returning and resuming his role as power behind the throne.
I can strongly recommend Marc Morris' book on the Norman Conquest, which is excellent (and I got the paperback for just £3 in a sale).
Edited extra bit: by his father* I meant Harold's father, also Edward's father-in-law.
Harold not from the metropolitean elite obvs, the bastard(s) got him in the end!
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
It's only half the issue - pay rises and poaching drivers doesn't solve the need to replacing retiring drivers, it just shunts the problem to another company.
Of course it does. If the pay rises high enough then drivers will be attracted to work in the sector.
There's plenty of people who know how to drive in this country. There's plenty of people who drive for a living in this country, but if HGV drivers are getting paid no better than Amazon Prime delivery drivers then people aren't exactly going to be attracted to driving a HGV instead of a van that is more attractive for other reasons.
If on the other hand HGV drivers are well paid, then yes that's going to attract people to do the six weeks or whatever it is training to get a HGV licence and work on that instead.
Its a solution in the long term. It isn't an immediate solution as people can't go "ooh that pays well" and start driving tomorrow. The industry says it will take 18 months to train up 80k+ drivers starting now.
Cynical hat says it will say - "Its even worse than before, we really mean it now, we are all doomed!".
I am fully signed up to net zero, protecting the environment, properly using resources - the whole green thing. But I find the increasingly shrill desperation and scare tactics from the climate scientist lobby, without a balance of proper skeptical science at times counter productive. The recent pandemic has revealed the limits of modelling in complex scenarios.
We need to reach a point where we no longer use fossil fuels and have a fully sustainable existence. We need to stop destroying habitats and making species go extinct. But to say we have to do this because the global temperature (whatever that even is) will rise by a degree or two, against a setting where the planet ranges from -50 to +50 deg C, and even in temperate UK from -19 to +38 deg C is nonsense. I am also surprised that the scientists now seem confident to link extreme weather events to climate change. One of the issues is we now have world wide reporting, so any extreme event gets reported, whereas even 20 years ago that was not the case. This adds to the feeling of doom everywhere, when in reality, for much of the world, extremes have always happened. Homes being flooded is far more because of where they have built their houses, not necessarily due to more rain.
I dont agree on the point about global temperature, but it is the case that as bad as things may be previous estimates feel like they were that things would be even worse.
Based on predictions of 80s videos we had to watch at school in the 90s I'm surprised theres any amazon rainforest left.
I'm not sure how one appropriately lists concern. If you don't set a date theres no urgency but if you then reach that date without widespread catastrophe it undermines future warnings, yet its also probably the case that by the time its obvious it's too late.
It does seem true that more people are more passionately concerned about these issues than just 5 years ago, but given its certain that lots things in any report stated as needing to happen will not happen, by that logic we're already doomed.
I'm happy to disagree - but what do you understand the global temperature to be? I think it is a stupid concept, but that might just be me.
I'm not a scientist and have not explored the issue so couldn't answer with any authority, I just don't see the idea of average global temperatures as inherently nonsense. If there are criticisms of such a thing I'd listen.
I used to work on the edge of this field (in some of the tech used, as a scientist, but not as a climate scientist per se - nonetheless I was surrounded by climate scientist, went to the seminars).
The global temperature is used because it's both easy as a concept and relatively easy to model (increased CO2 etc, plus/minus some albedo changes gives you an overall figure). It is limited becauce temperature is lumpy and effects are lumpy. Sea level change for example depends on temperature near the poles, which depends also on changing ocean currents etc. So if the heating was mostly near hte equator you'd have crises there but not countries disappearing due to rising sea levels. Unfortunately, many models have more extreme heating at the poles.
But if you want some overall target to explain it easily, you can see how keep it under 2 degrees is more public friendly than keep CO2 below 450ppm*.
*this specific figure plucked from my behind, I don't know the appropriate number.
I also have HUGE issues with the false precision that is implied by this. The climate system is far too complex to say this with any certainty.
The relationship between global temperature and CO2 is a reasonably straightforward one. And CO2 has gone up a fair bit recently. Temperature will follow over a short geological but long human timescale.
Here it is in a couple of charts, it's not that complex.
This said, I don't actually think climate change is overly worth worrying about, cars will be completely sorted in the next 50 years (A tiny amount of time) as electric is more efficient and energy will be attained via solar in the long (human)/medium (geological) term as we move off earth to stanford tori and bernal spheres.
The joys of the cloud. Let the boffins at Google, Amazon and Microsoft sweat the small stuff.
That in itself can be a problem.
The folks who have spent their entire career on the small stuff now need to reskill to a level of abstraction that obscures some things completely.
Indeed. Even Mrs @JosiasJessop's chips are pretty much a fiction, with many cores and several caches, but presenting an api that pretends to be 1980s-era hardware being programmed in C.
???
Ask the missus. Hardware has moved beyond the software model of it.
And your knowledge of what Mrs J does is ... ?
Based entirely on your account on this very thread.
Well, insinuating her work a 'fiction' shows you have very little knowledge about it!
Who said that? I'm talking about CPUs and do not think what I am saying is controversial. Processors are no longer single-core with flat address spaces. Hardware has moved on but they still present the earlier programming interface.
I might suggest you re-read your posts ...
Who said anything about single-core chips with flat address spaces? In fact, who said anything about any cores at all?
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
Mr. Divvie, as a historical aside, Harold was the first (and, of course, last) Anglo-Saxon king of England who was not from the royal house of Wessex.
Furthermore, had Edward (the Confessor) not hated his father*, Godwin, so much then said king would likely have produced an heir.
Godwin first achieved his power under Canute, and then Canute's sons, and was briefly chased out of England by Edward before returning and resuming his role as power behind the throne.
I can strongly recommend Marc Morris' book on the Norman Conquest, which is excellent (and I got the paperback for just £3 in a sale).
Edited extra bit: by his father* I meant Harold's father, also Edward's father-in-law.
Why did the fact that Edward of Wessex 'didn't get on' with Earl Godwin prevent him from having it away, productively, with his wife? Whether or not said wife was the daughter of Earl Godwin?
No surprise to see bitter, Boris hating remain voters plodding along with their grievances, trying to blame it all on Brexit whilst the firms involved say
“ Dairy giant Arla said in June: 'There is a real crunch this Summer because of Covid causing a backlog of new drivers passing their tests, changes to tax rules, some drivers from EU countries returning home, some others on furlough and other factors.”
“ the Road Haulage Association warned in late July that there was a shortage of 100,000 lorry drivers in the UK, which has been hampering deliveries of food from warehouses to supermarkets.
Thousands of prospective drivers are waiting for their HGV tests due to a backlog caused by lockdown, while many existing ones have left the UK after Brexit.
The problem has been exacerbated by Covid, with drivers having to go into self-isolation amid the so-called 'pingdemic'.”
Beats hoping for people to get Covid I guess, though
The winner will most probably be an Olympian but my idea of a wild card is Lewis Hamilton.
He is locked in a tight battle with Max Verstappen for the F1 title. It's the most compelling season for ages, generating big stories, and is likely to go to the wire. This means a climax late on in the year, just before Spoty happens. If Hamilton prevails he will be breaking an iconic record (Schumacher's 7 titles) and the drama and achievement of it will be fresh in people's minds as they think about Spoty voting.
Hamilton is not just a sports star. He's a powerful brand. In 2014 he won Spoty when he really had no right to. In that year his Merc car was utterly dominant and he had only to beat his teammate, the far from great Nico Rosberg. Which he did, just. But the point was that it was a close battle, with personal animus, that caught the public's imagination, and it was settled just before Spoty. Similar vibe this year, except that this year the objective case for him is far stronger. He'd be beating another great (and much younger) driver in a different team, with the cars well matched. And, as I say, breaking that record with his 8th title.
In 2014 the red hot favourite was Rory McIlroy who'd won 2 of golf's 4 majors, including the Open Championship. He looked nailed on. Really should have been. But Hamilton's star power and greater exposure overrode the greater sporting achievement. I can see similar happening (except this time his achievement is arguably on a par with that of the favourites) and esp if the Olympic and cycling vote gets split. Hamilton ticks the box for social cause activism too, should that be any sort of factor. Ok, so he won last year, but Andy Murray won back to back, indeed 3 years in 4, so that is no insurmountable barrier.
Lewis can be backed at about 16. I think I'll throw a few quid at that.
How many decades have we been 10 years from disaster?
Well we aren't any longer, we are in it. The number of hottest years ever which are in the last 20 years, extent of Arctic ice loss, fires in Australia/California/Europe etc are not predictions.
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to give up all fossil fuel, stop flying, rid our homes of gas central heating, insulate every home in the UK, buy expensive electric cars that have poor ranges and nowhere near enough electricity capacity in the country and feel thoroughly guilty and selfish if we do not immediately agree to this, even though many countries will say of course they agree, then do absolutely nothing
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic
And by the way watching Messi sobbing about leaving Barcelona was just pathetic.
Barcelona have made him a multi millionaire and if it was so important to him he could have played a couple of years at a nominal 1 euro per year, rather than £650,000 per week PSG are offering him
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
It's only half the issue - pay rises and poaching drivers doesn't solve the need to replacing retiring drivers, it just shunts the problem to another company.
Of course it does. If the pay rises high enough then drivers will be attracted to work in the sector.
There's plenty of people who know how to drive in this country. There's plenty of people who drive for a living in this country, but if HGV drivers are getting paid no better than Amazon Prime delivery drivers then people aren't exactly going to be attracted to driving a HGV instead of a van that is more attractive for other reasons.
If on the other hand HGV drivers are well paid, then yes that's going to attract people to do the six weeks or whatever it is training to get a HGV licence and work on that instead.
Its a solution in the long term. It isn't an immediate solution as people can't go "ooh that pays well" and start driving tomorrow. The industry says it will take 18 months to train up 80k+ drivers starting now.
You're right, they can only say "ooh that pays well" and start driving in six weeks time approximately.
The industry has a vested interest in shortchanging its drivers, but we've been discussing this issue for much longer now than the six weeks approximately it takes to train drivers.
And Edward wanted to screw over Godwin so he refused to give Godwin's blood the throne and promised it to William (he was friendly with the Dukes of Normandy who had sheltered him when he'd had to flee England).
I have some sympathy with Mr TT's last paragraph. I was brought up on Canvey Island which, were it not for the seawall (heightened and strengthened after the 1953 East Coast floods) would revert to what it was in the prior to the initial building of the wall in 1623; marshland on which sheep could be grazed except at spring tides. In my childhood the population was some 8-10,000; it's now over 40k. I have a fondness for my childhood home, but how on earth can (?should) it be sustained as the sea level rises?
Maybe somebody more knowledgeable can say but having seen some of the Tohoku sea defences it doesn't feel like a particularly hard case? Wiki says there's 3.2 km of walls, so that's less than 0.1 meter per person. Maybe there's now more that needs to be protected, so call it 0.2 meters per person that needs to be a meter or two higher. That seems doable, doesn't it? Once you get that cycle going politicians prints money, printed money goes to construction companies, construction companies kick back a bit to politicians, it seems to be able to sustain itself for quite a long time.
* Edited to fix my moderna-addled maths and add another factor of 10 in the direction of my argument
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
It's only half the issue - pay rises and poaching drivers doesn't solve the need to replacing retiring drivers, it just shunts the problem to another company.
Of course it does. If the pay rises high enough then drivers will be attracted to work in the sector.
There's plenty of people who know how to drive in this country. There's plenty of people who drive for a living in this country, but if HGV drivers are getting paid no better than Amazon Prime delivery drivers then people aren't exactly going to be attracted to driving a HGV instead of a van that is more attractive for other reasons.
If on the other hand HGV drivers are well paid, then yes that's going to attract people to do the six weeks or whatever it is training to get a HGV licence and work on that instead.
Don't forget that HGV training was until recently, like all driver training, closed down for the Covid pandemic. Brexit, IR35 and the pandemic combined to restrict supply, but at the same time, demand was increased by Brexit and the increase in van deliveries.
The other day in Cannock I went past two HGV training vehicles, in queue of traffic.
There is a driver training centre here, so it's not uncommon to see one, but two at once is a bit unusual. Suggests there is plenty of demand.
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
Odd comment.
It's either scientifically right or wrong. If it's right it really doesn't matter how much you'd like it to be wrong.
To say something is "idiotic" just because you don't want it to be true is puerile.
The joys of the cloud. Let the boffins at Google, Amazon and Microsoft sweat the small stuff.
That in itself can be a problem.
The folks who have spent their entire career on the small stuff now need to reskill to a level of abstraction that obscures some things completely.
Indeed. Even Mrs @JosiasJessop's chips are pretty much a fiction, with many cores and several caches, but presenting an api that pretends to be 1980s-era hardware being programmed in C.
???
Ask the missus. Hardware has moved beyond the software model of it.
And your knowledge of what Mrs J does is ... ?
Based entirely on your account on this very thread.
Well, insinuating her work a 'fiction' shows you have very little knowledge about it!
Who said that? I'm talking about CPUs and do not think what I am saying is controversial. Processors are no longer single-core with flat address spaces. Hardware has moved on but they still present the earlier programming interface.
I might suggest you re-read your posts ...
Who said anything about single-core chips with flat address spaces? In fact, who said anything about any cores at all?
Apple are obsessed with cores, especially since Microsoft pipped them to the word processing.
The winner will most probably be an Olympian but my idea of a wild card is Lewis Hamilton.
He is locked in a tight battle with Max Verstappen for the F1 title. It's the most compelling season for ages, generating big stories, and is likely to go to the wire. This means a climax late on in the year, just before Spoty happens. If Hamilton prevails he will be breaking an iconic record (Schumacher's 7 titles) and the drama and achievement of it will be fresh in people's minds as they think about Spoty voting.
Hamilton is not just a sports star. He's a powerful brand. In 2014 he won Spoty when he really had no right to. In that year his Merc car was utterly dominant and he had only to beat his teammate, the far from great Nico Rosberg. Which he did, just. But the point was that it was a close battle, with personal animus, that caught the public's imagination, and it was settled just before Spoty. Similar vibe this year, except that this year the objective case for him is far stronger. He'd be beating another great (and much younger) driver in a different team, with the cars well matched. And, as I say, breaking that record with his 8th title.
In 2014 the red hot favourite was Rory McIlroy who'd won 2 of golf's 4 majors, including the Open Championship. He looked nailed on. Really should have been. But Hamilton's star power and greater exposure overrode the greater sporting achievement. I can see similar happening (except this time his achievement is arguably on a par with that of the favourites) and esp if the Olympic and cycling vote gets split. Hamilton ticks the box for social cause activism too, should that be any sort of factor. Ok, so he won last year, but Andy Murray won back to back, indeed 3 years in 4, so that is no insurmountable barrier.
Lewis can be backed at about 16. I think I'll throw a few quid at that.
All well argued. The only obvious thing counting against him, is that he won the award last year. Possibly the first candidate who is a value back.
You can pretty much get evens on him or MV winning the championship, so a bet on the Dutchmen is your hedge.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
It's only half the issue - pay rises and poaching drivers doesn't solve the need to replacing retiring drivers, it just shunts the problem to another company.
Of course it does. If the pay rises high enough then drivers will be attracted to work in the sector.
There's plenty of people who know how to drive in this country. There's plenty of people who drive for a living in this country, but if HGV drivers are getting paid no better than Amazon Prime delivery drivers then people aren't exactly going to be attracted to driving a HGV instead of a van that is more attractive for other reasons.
If on the other hand HGV drivers are well paid, then yes that's going to attract people to do the six weeks or whatever it is training to get a HGV licence and work on that instead.
You hint at a difference between delivery drivers and HGV drivers ("more attractive for other reasons") without spelling it out.
Assuming HGV drivers means long-distance, staying-away-from-home drivers, then there may be a natural cap on the number willing, or able, to do that regardless of the wages (unless the wages were hugely attractive). People have family obligations, or even desires, which means that they simply don't want to, or can't be, away from home on a regular basis. This doesn't apply to local delivery drivers. Even free markets have constraints.
And anyway, being an HGV driver would severely restrict one's ability to post on PB all day - far too dangerous.
I have some sympathy with Mr TT's last paragraph. I was brought up on Canvey Island which, were it not for the seawall (heightened and strengthened after the 1953 East Coast floods) would revert to what it was in the prior to the initial building of the wall in 1623; marshland on which sheep could be grazed except at spring tides. In my childhood the population was some 8-10,000; it's now over 40k. I have a fondness for my childhood home, but how on earth can (?should) it be sustained as the sea level rises?
Maybe somebody more knowledgeable can say but having seen some of the Tohoku sea defences it doesn't feel like a particularly hard case? Wiki says there's 3.2 km of walls, so that's less than 0.1 meter per person. Maybe there's now more that needs to be protected, so call it 0.2 meters per person that needs to be a meter or two higher. That seems doable, doesn't it? Once you get that cycle going politicians prints money, printed money goes to construction companies, construction companies kick back a bit to politicians, it seems to be able to sustain itself for quite a long time.
* Edited to add another factor of 10 in the direction of my argument
I don't know where Wiki's got the 3.2km from, but I'm sure it's longer than that. Wiki also gives the area as 18.4 sq km and that would give a perimeter of a great deal more than 3.2km
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
Odd comment.
It's either scientifically right or wrong. If it's right it really doesn't matter how much you'd like it to be wrong.
To say something is "idiotic" just because you don't want it to be true is puerile.
If you think mankind is going to be extinct by 2040 then I am sorry for you
And scientist argue and disagree all the time, and covid has proven that point beyond doubt
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
What I frankly do not understand about these climate change targets is why we haven't been doing that, and also solar panels as standard, on all new builds for the last 15 years. That would have made a very considerable difference by now.
If I were feeling cynical I would say because the building trade lobbied hard to make sure it didn't happen and they had the right contacts to whom they were very close to get their way.
If I were feeling realistic, I would say everything in that sentence up to 'and.'
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to give up all fossil fuel, stop flying, rid our homes of gas central heating, insulate every home in the UK, buy expensive electric cars that have poor ranges and nowhere near enough electricity capacity in the country and feel thoroughly guilty and selfish if we do not immediately agree to this, even though many countries will say of course they agree, then do absolutely nothing
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic
And by the way watching Messi sobbing about leaving Barcelona was just pathetic.
Barcelona have made him a multi millionaire and if it was so important to him he could have played a couple of years at a nominal 1 euro per year, rather than £650,000 per week PSG are offering him
Agree about Messi.
On climate change, sadly the sacrosanct nature of the comfortable Western lifestyle is not a physical constant. If the situation is that your ship needs to jettison all its cargo or sink, that's the situation. You cannot bargain with the weather to jettison some of the lower value stuff over a period of days, nor point out to it that other ships are not doing as much as you are.
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
Odd comment.
It's either scientifically right or wrong. If it's right it really doesn't matter how much you'd like it to be wrong.
To say something is "idiotic" just because you don't want it to be true is puerile.
If you think mankind is going to be extinct by 2040 then I am sorry for you
And scientist ague and disagree all the time, and covid has proven that point beyond doubt
I thought frequently over the last few years that mankind would get extinct in the next few hours.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
Odd comment.
It's either scientifically right or wrong. If it's right it really doesn't matter how much you'd like it to be wrong.
To say something is "idiotic" just because you don't want it to be true is puerile.
If you think mankind is going to be extinct by 2040 then I am sorry for you
And scientist ague and disagree all the time, and covid has proven that point beyond doubt
Covid has also proven beyond doubt the point that if you don't take action to restrict its spread in a timely manner, it's already too late. Crossing your fingers and hoping doesn't work.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
It's only half the issue - pay rises and poaching drivers doesn't solve the need to replacing retiring drivers, it just shunts the problem to another company.
Of course it does. If the pay rises high enough then drivers will be attracted to work in the sector.
There's plenty of people who know how to drive in this country. There's plenty of people who drive for a living in this country, but if HGV drivers are getting paid no better than Amazon Prime delivery drivers then people aren't exactly going to be attracted to driving a HGV instead of a van that is more attractive for other reasons.
If on the other hand HGV drivers are well paid, then yes that's going to attract people to do the six weeks or whatever it is training to get a HGV licence and work on that instead.
You hint at a difference between delivery drivers and HGV drivers ("more attractive for other reasons") without spelling it out.
Assuming HGV drivers means long-distance, staying-away-from-home drivers, then there may be a natural cap on the number willing, or able, to do that regardless of the wages (unless the wages were hugely attractive). People have family obligations, or even desires, which means that they simply don't want to, or can't be, away from home on a regular basis. This doesn't apply to local delivery drivers. Even free markets have constraints.
And anyway, being an HGV driver would severely restrict one's ability to post on PB all day - far too dangerous.
A useful statistic to know, would be how many drivers are currently driving a vehicle smaller than the largest one they’re qualified to drive?
All those contractors who quit when IR35 rules changed, must still be out there somewhere and be able to be enticed back in the short term by better pay and conditions?
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
In my view the short-term disruption of replacing all our fossil fuel technology with alternative technology is worth it to avoid the greater disruption that will be caused by having to rebuild all our port infrastructure, a number of low-lying large cities, disruption to agriculture.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
It's only half the issue - pay rises and poaching drivers doesn't solve the need to replacing retiring drivers, it just shunts the problem to another company.
Of course it does. If the pay rises high enough then drivers will be attracted to work in the sector.
There's plenty of people who know how to drive in this country. There's plenty of people who drive for a living in this country, but if HGV drivers are getting paid no better than Amazon Prime delivery drivers then people aren't exactly going to be attracted to driving a HGV instead of a van that is more attractive for other reasons.
If on the other hand HGV drivers are well paid, then yes that's going to attract people to do the six weeks or whatever it is training to get a HGV licence and work on that instead.
You need to train new comers into the industry - my point was (although I did not explicit state it) that a lot of firms simply don't do that.
We see a lot of that in IT, many firms will poach a decent consultant by paying £10k above the odds but won't spend the time (and money) required to train the newbies up themselves..
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
Odd comment.
It's either scientifically right or wrong. If it's right it really doesn't matter how much you'd like it to be wrong.
To say something is "idiotic" just because you don't want it to be true is puerile.
I would just add that I will be extinct anyway in that time frame !!!!!!!!
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
Odd comment.
It's either scientifically right or wrong. If it's right it really doesn't matter how much you'd like it to be wrong.
To say something is "idiotic" just because you don't want it to be true is puerile.
If you think mankind is going to be extinct by 2040 then I am sorry for you
And scientist ague and disagree all the time, and covid has proven that point beyond doubt
I thought frequently over the last few years that mankind would get extinct in the next few hours.
Fortunately Trump was less drunk than he seemed.
He doesn't drink alcohol IIRC. Just large quantities of Coca-Cola
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Okay, IANAE, but I don't see generation capacity as much of a problem wrt electric cars. In fact, if they manage to use them as remote batteries for the grid, then it may help even out renewables.
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
Odd comment.
It's either scientifically right or wrong. If it's right it really doesn't matter how much you'd like it to be wrong.
To say something is "idiotic" just because you don't want it to be true is puerile.
If you think mankind is going to be extinct by 2040 then I am sorry for you
And scientist ague and disagree all the time, and covid has proven that point beyond doubt
I thought frequently over the last few years that mankind would get extinct in the next few hours.
Fortunately Trump was less drunk than he seemed.
He doesn't drink alcohol IIRC. Just large quantities of Coca-Cola
Well, whatever he was drinking, fortunately he drank less of it than his pronouncements led us to think.
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
Odd comment.
It's either scientifically right or wrong. If it's right it really doesn't matter how much you'd like it to be wrong.
To say something is "idiotic" just because you don't want it to be true is puerile.
If you think mankind is going to be extinct by 2040 then I am sorry for you
I really don't want to be rude, especially considering how easily you've taken offence in the past, but really -
if your understanding of my comment is that I "think mankind is going to be extinct by 2040" then I can only marvel!
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
Odd comment.
It's either scientifically right or wrong. If it's right it really doesn't matter how much you'd like it to be wrong.
To say something is "idiotic" just because you don't want it to be true is puerile.
If you think mankind is going to be extinct by 2040 then I am sorry for you
And scientist ague and disagree all the time, and covid has proven that point beyond doubt
Straw man, the 2040 thing. Calcutta uninhabitable by 2050 is actually predicted by Sir David King, though, which might have more knock-on effects than you perhaps expect.
I don't think there has been much serious *scientific* disagreement surrounding covid, it's been moral, behavioural and economic. It's highly contagious, and if you get it you might die esp if you are old but vaccines help a lot seems fairly uncontested.
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
Odd comment.
It's either scientifically right or wrong. If it's right it really doesn't matter how much you'd like it to be wrong.
To say something is "idiotic" just because you don't want it to be true is puerile.
If you think mankind is going to be extinct by 2040 then I am sorry for you
And scientist ague and disagree all the time, and covid has proven that point beyond doubt
I thought frequently over the last few years that mankind would get extinct in the next few hours.
Fortunately Trump was less drunk than he seemed.
He doesn't drink alcohol IIRC. Just large quantities of Coca-Cola
Is he as much of a 'coke addict' as Rishi? Could explain some of the tweets...
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
What I frankly do not understand about these climate change targets is why we haven't been doing that, and also solar panels as standard, on all new builds for the last 15 years. That would have made a very considerable difference by now.
If I were feeling cynical I would say because the building trade lobbied hard to make sure it didn't happen and they had the right contacts to whom they were very close to get their way.
If I were feeling realistic, I would say everything in that sentence up to 'and.'
Solar panels are the wrong answer for the UK, they're almost but not quite virtue signalling nonsense in the UK.
In states like California or countries like Australia where electricity demand peaks in the summer sun when air conditioning comes on then solar panels are a complete no brainer.
But in the UK we're a cold, wet, grey island that sees energy demand peak in the winter when we put our heating on - and as we switch from gas to electric heaters that's only going to increase.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
Odd comment.
It's either scientifically right or wrong. If it's right it really doesn't matter how much you'd like it to be wrong.
To say something is "idiotic" just because you don't want it to be true is puerile.
If you think mankind is going to be extinct by 2040 then I am sorry for you
And scientist ague and disagree all the time, and covid has proven that point beyond doubt
Straw man, the 2040 thing. Calcutta uninhabitable by 2050 is actually predicted by Sir David King, though, which might have more knock-on effects than you perhaps expect.
I don't think there has been much serious *scientific* disagreement surrounding covid, it's been moral, behavioural and economic. It's highly contagious, and if you get it you might die esp if you are old but vaccines help a lot seems fairly uncontested.
Is this the same David King of iSage predicting 100,000 daily infections by now
I have some sympathy with Mr TT's last paragraph. I was brought up on Canvey Island which, were it not for the seawall (heightened and strengthened after the 1953 East Coast floods) would revert to what it was in the prior to the initial building of the wall in 1623; marshland on which sheep could be grazed except at spring tides. In my childhood the population was some 8-10,000; it's now over 40k. I have a fondness for my childhood home, but how on earth can (?should) it be sustained as the sea level rises?
Maybe somebody more knowledgeable can say but having seen some of the Tohoku sea defences it doesn't feel like a particularly hard case? Wiki says there's 3.2 km of walls, so that's less than 0.1 meter per person. Maybe there's now more that needs to be protected, so call it 0.2 meters per person that needs to be a meter or two higher. That seems doable, doesn't it? Once you get that cycle going politicians prints money, printed money goes to construction companies, construction companies kick back a bit to politicians, it seems to be able to sustain itself for quite a long time.
* Edited to add another factor of 10 in the direction of my argument
I don't know where Wiki's got the 3.2km from, but I'm sure it's longer than that. Wiki also gives the area as 18.4 sq km and that would give a perimeter of a great deal more than 3.2km
Just found a better measurement, again from Wikipedia, which is IMHO much more realistic: 'The extensive sea wall, completed in 1982, is 15 miles (24 km) long and surrounds 75% of the island's perimeter terminating with flood barriers spanning Benfleet Creek to the north and East Haven Creek in the west.'
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
I have some sympathy with Mr TT's last paragraph. I was brought up on Canvey Island which, were it not for the seawall (heightened and strengthened after the 1953 East Coast floods) would revert to what it was in the prior to the initial building of the wall in 1623; marshland on which sheep could be grazed except at spring tides. In my childhood the population was some 8-10,000; it's now over 40k. I have a fondness for my childhood home, but how on earth can (?should) it be sustained as the sea level rises?
Maybe somebody more knowledgeable can say but having seen some of the Tohoku sea defences it doesn't feel like a particularly hard case? Wiki says there's 3.2 km of walls, so that's less than 0.1 meter per person. Maybe there's now more that needs to be protected, so call it 0.2 meters per person that needs to be a meter or two higher. That seems doable, doesn't it? Once you get that cycle going politicians prints money, printed money goes to construction companies, construction companies kick back a bit to politicians, it seems to be able to sustain itself for quite a long time.
* Edited to add another factor of 10 in the direction of my argument
I don't know where Wiki's got the 3.2km from, but I'm sure it's longer than that. Wiki also gives the area as 18.4 sq km and that would give a perimeter of a great deal more than 3.2km
Fairy nuff but say you need to protect the entire thing with a big old 5km x 5km square, that's still only 20km between 40k residents, or 1km per 2k, 0.5 meters per head. If that ratio is *still* too unfavourable, add residents.
Edit to add: Perfect, I had a kilometre to spare... But let's call it 0.75 meters per head to cover the other 25% and then a bit extra for a nice park or something.
How many decades have we been 10 years from disaster?
Certainly since the 1970s.
Why are the people who were so wrong then, so right now?
+1
This is puerile. Sources, please, for the 10 years claim being made in the 70s, and each of the years thereafter.
And as a bonus question for extra points: of the 10 hottest years since 1880 the earliest was 2005. Who thinks this fact arises purely from random variation?
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to give up all fossil fuel, stop flying, rid our homes of gas central heating, insulate every home in the UK, buy expensive electric cars that have poor ranges and nowhere near enough electricity capacity in the country and feel thoroughly guilty and selfish if we do not immediately agree to this, even though many countries will say of course they agree, then do absolutely nothing
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic
And by the way watching Messi sobbing about leaving Barcelona was just pathetic.
Barcelona have made him a multi millionaire and if it was so important to him he could have played a couple of years at a nominal 1 euro per year, rather than £650,000 per week PSG are offering him
Agree about Messi.
On climate change, sadly the sacrosanct nature of the comfortable Western lifestyle is not a physical constant. If the situation is that your ship needs to jettison all its cargo or sink, that's the situation. You cannot bargain with the weather to jettison some of the lower value stuff over a period of days, nor point out to it that other ships are not doing as much as you are.
That lazy analogy does not stand up.
We could jettison all our cargo and still sink because the theory of climate change is that the sea conditions are actually determined by the boats collectively. One boat dumping its cargo makes no difference. And the fact is that many boats are taking on cargo. Hundreds of new coal fired power stations are planned in places like Indonesia, Vietnam and of course China.
What we are doing is more like the suicide squad at the end of Life of Brian collectively committing suicide as a gesture of solidarity instead of actually taking saving Brian from being crucified.
We laughed at them. And soon, the rest of the world will be laughing at us.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
It's only half the issue - pay rises and poaching drivers doesn't solve the need to replacing retiring drivers, it just shunts the problem to another company.
Of course it does. If the pay rises high enough then drivers will be attracted to work in the sector.
There's plenty of people who know how to drive in this country. There's plenty of people who drive for a living in this country, but if HGV drivers are getting paid no better than Amazon Prime delivery drivers then people aren't exactly going to be attracted to driving a HGV instead of a van that is more attractive for other reasons.
If on the other hand HGV drivers are well paid, then yes that's going to attract people to do the six weeks or whatever it is training to get a HGV licence and work on that instead.
You need to train new comers into the industry - my point was (although I did not explicit state it) that a lot of firms simply don't do that.
We see a lot of that in IT, many firms will poach a decent consultant by paying £10k above the odds but won't spend the time (and money) required to train the newbies up themselves..
Oh absolutely that's 100% the case. There's ways for the market to deal with that though, which is why there isn't a complete market failure with nobody being trained in IT.
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to give up all fossil fuel, stop flying, rid our homes of gas central heating, insulate every home in the UK, buy expensive electric cars that have poor ranges and nowhere near enough electricity capacity in the country and feel thoroughly guilty and selfish if we do not immediately agree to this, even though many countries will say of course they agree, then do absolutely nothing
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic
And by the way watching Messi sobbing about leaving Barcelona was just pathetic.
Barcelona have made him a multi millionaire and if it was so important to him he could have played a couple of years at a nominal 1 euro per year, rather than £650,000 per week PSG are offering him
I started to listed to the NASA report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listen and I accept there’s an asteroid headed for us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to urgently divert spending to knocking this asteroid off course now. And if we don’t it’s going to hit us no matter what we do when we have cheaper rockets with better range.
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
Odd comment.
It's either scientifically right or wrong. If it's right it really doesn't matter how much you'd like it to be wrong.
To say something is "idiotic" just because you don't want it to be true is puerile.
If you think mankind is going to be extinct by 2040 then I am sorry for you
I really don't want to be rude, especially considering how easily you've taken offence in the past, but really -
if your understanding of my comment is that I "think mankind is going to be extinct by 2040" then I can only marvel!
I actually do not disagree with action to mitigate climate change but my disagreement is with the lack of recognition that these changes are so fundamentally extreme to the way people live their lives, that the only way it can be achieved is a sensible and gradual approach and take people along
And to be fair it is very unlikely I will be on this wonderful planet of ours by 2040
I think @kinabalu makes a good case for Lewis Hamilton. Just to play devil's advocate, Hamilton's only other genuinely close title win was in 2008 and he was beaten into second place in SPoTY by triple Olympic champion Chris Hoy. Perhaps Hoy was a more clear-cut Olympic choice than what we have this year, but it's worth remembering that double Olympic Rebecca Adlington - who came third in SPoTY - was also in the mix.
I also wonder if the public gave it to Lewis in 2014 because they thought it was his turn. McIlroy's achievements that year should have got him over the line, but I think F1 trumps golf by a considerable margin in terms of what the public care about.
Supermarket update: Almost no frozen food at Sainsbury's this morning. Some dry goods looking pretty bare. Got the last two packets of my favourite ginger biscuits for example.
How many decades have we been 10 years from disaster?
Certainly since the 1970s.
Why are the people who were so wrong then, so right now?
+1
This is puerile. Sources, please, for the 10 years claim being made in the 70s, and each of the years thereafter.
And as a bonus question for extra points: of the 10 hottest years since 1880 the earliest was 2005. Who thinks this fact arises purely from random variation?
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
What I frankly do not understand about these climate change targets is why we haven't been doing that, and also solar panels as standard, on all new builds for the last 15 years. That would have made a very considerable difference by now.
If I were feeling cynical I would say because the building trade lobbied hard to make sure it didn't happen and they had the right contacts to whom they were very close to get their way.
If I were feeling realistic, I would say everything in that sentence up to 'and.'
Solar panels are the wrong answer for the UK, they're almost but not quite virtue signalling nonsense in the UK.
In states like California or countries like Australia where electricity demand peaks in the summer sun when air conditioning comes on then solar panels are a complete no brainer.
But in the UK we're a cold, wet, grey island that sees energy demand peak in the winter when we put our heating on - and as we switch from gas to electric heaters that's only going to increase.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Wind works well for the UK in the winter.** Tidal lagoon solutions and nuclear* are low carbon options too
* Well in theory anyway, Lord knows what's going on with Hinkley point ** Except winter highs
Lots of people determined to keep their heads firmly buried in the sand this morning. Of course it's more comfortable to pretend this isn't happening and switch over to the sports instead, but the recklessness of what we have been doing for the last 30 years, mainly so that very rich people and companies can continue to make a fast buck is the by far the worst crime of my lifetime. Nothing else even comes close.
And those fanatic worshippers of the profit-motive cult continue to spout their bollocks despite all the evidence, it's hard to imagine any evidence that could possibly change their minds at this point. It's the worst religious cult of all - and some of its adherents even pretend to be against religion!
How many decades have we been 10 years from disaster?
Certainly since the 1970s.
Why are the people who were so wrong then, so right now?
+1
This is puerile. Sources, please, for the 10 years claim being made in the 70s, and each of the years thereafter.
And as a bonus question for extra points: of the 10 hottest years since 1880 the earliest was 2005. Who thinks this fact arises purely from random variation?
I don't think its random variation.
I also don't think its a reason to change the path we're already on for de-carbonisation.
I also don't think its due to UK carbon emissions. "Fun" fact: China in the past 20 months have produced more steel than the UK has in all time even from the beginning of the industrial revolution to today.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
What I frankly do not understand about these climate change targets is why we haven't been doing that, and also solar panels as standard, on all new builds for the last 15 years. That would have made a very considerable difference by now.
If I were feeling cynical I would say because the building trade lobbied hard to make sure it didn't happen and they had the right contacts to whom they were very close to get their way.
If I were feeling realistic, I would say everything in that sentence up to 'and.'
Solar panels are the wrong answer for the UK, they're almost but not quite virtue signalling nonsense in the UK.
In states like California or countries like Australia where electricity demand peaks in the summer sun when air conditioning comes on then solar panels are a complete no brainer.
But in the UK we're a cold, wet, grey island that sees energy demand peak in the winter when we put our heating on - and as we switch from gas to electric heaters that's only going to increase.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Actually I have had solar panels for 6 years and they are one of the best investments I have made
Indeed this last quarter has produced the highest generation for that period since I installed them, even though it does not appear to be as good a period of weather than last year
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to give up all fossil fuel, stop flying, rid our homes of gas central heating, insulate every home in the UK, buy expensive electric cars that have poor ranges and nowhere near enough electricity capacity in the country and feel thoroughly guilty and selfish if we do not immediately agree to this, even though many countries will say of course they agree, then do absolutely nothing
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic
And by the way watching Messi sobbing about leaving Barcelona was just pathetic.
Barcelona have made him a multi millionaire and if it was so important to him he could have played a couple of years at a nominal 1 euro per year, rather than £650,000 per week PSG are offering him
Agree about Messi.
On climate change, sadly the sacrosanct nature of the comfortable Western lifestyle is not a physical constant. If the situation is that your ship needs to jettison all its cargo or sink, that's the situation. You cannot bargain with the weather to jettison some of the lower value stuff over a period of days, nor point out to it that other ships are not doing as much as you are.
That lazy analogy does not stand up.
We could jettison all our cargo and still sink because the theory of climate change is that the sea conditions are actually determined by the boats collectively. One boat dumping its cargo makes no difference. And the fact is that many boats are taking on cargo. Hundreds of new coal fired power stations are planned in places like Indonesia, Vietnam and of course China.
What we are doing is more like the suicide squad at the end of Life of Brian collectively committing suicide as a gesture of solidarity instead of actually taking saving Brian from being crucified.
We laughed at them. And soon, the rest of the world will be laughing at us.
No, the analogy holds perfecrctly as far as the ineluctability of physical forces is concerned.
On the collective effort point, someone has to move first (and actually it is not as if it's just plucky little GB vs ROW again: other countries are actually coming to COP26, even if just for the look of the thing) and to speak with moral authority backed up by personal example. It's more likely we will be belatedly copied, than laughed at. And anyway, I thought contrarianism was rather your thing?
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
What I frankly do not understand about these climate change targets is why we haven't been doing that, and also solar panels as standard, on all new builds for the last 15 years. That would have made a very considerable difference by now.
If I were feeling cynical I would say because the building trade lobbied hard to make sure it didn't happen and they had the right contacts to whom they were very close to get their way.
If I were feeling realistic, I would say everything in that sentence up to 'and.'
Solar panels are the wrong answer for the UK, they're almost but not quite virtue signalling nonsense in the UK.
In states like California or countries like Australia where electricity demand peaks in the summer sun when air conditioning comes on then solar panels are a complete no brainer.
But in the UK we're a cold, wet, grey island that sees energy demand peak in the winter when we put our heating on - and as we switch from gas to electric heaters that's only going to increase.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Wind works well for the UK in the winter.** Tidal lagoon solutions and nuclear* are low carbon options too
* Well in theory anyway, Lord knows what's going on with Hinkley point ** Except winter highs
Yes I think wind and tidal are much smarter solutions.
Wind + "batteries" + hydrogen electrolysis + tidal is the smart solution for the UK in my view. Solar panels I suspect are just a gimmick.
Lots of people determined to keep their heads firmly buried in the sand this morning. Of course it's more comfortable to pretend this isn't happening and switch over to the sports instead, but the recklessness of what we have been doing for the last 30 years, mainly so that very rich people and companies can continue to make a fast buck is the by far the worst crime of my lifetime. Nothing else even comes close.
And those fanatic worshippers of the profit-motive cult continue to spout their bollocks despite all the evidence, it's hard to imagine any evidence that could possibly change their minds at this point. It's the worst religious cult of all - and some of its adherents even pretend to be against religion!
Lots of people determined to keep their heads firmly buried in the sand this morning. Of course it's more comfortable to pretend this isn't happening and switch over to the sports instead, but the recklessness of what we have been doing for the last 30 years, mainly so that very rich people and companies can continue to make a fast buck is the by far the worst crime of my lifetime. Nothing else even comes close.
And those fanatic worshippers of the profit-motive cult continue to spout their bollocks despite all the evidence, it's hard to imagine any evidence that could possibly change their minds at this point. It's the worst religious cult of all - and some of its adherents even pretend to be against religion!
Our government is the worst of all. We’re reaching the point when they’re going to have to start applying heavy levers to reduce unnecessary travel for climate purposes. And yet all they care about is getting the commuter rat race and teletext holidays going again.
No surprise to see bitter, Boris hating remain voters plodding along with their grievances, trying to blame it all on Brexit whilst the firms involved say
“ Dairy giant Arla said in June: 'There is a real crunch this Summer because of Covid causing a backlog of new drivers passing their tests, changes to tax rules, some drivers from EU countries returning home, some others on furlough and other factors.”
“ the Road Haulage Association warned in late July that there was a shortage of 100,000 lorry drivers in the UK, which has been hampering deliveries of food from warehouses to supermarkets.
Thousands of prospective drivers are waiting for their HGV tests due to a backlog caused by lockdown, while many existing ones have left the UK after Brexit.
The problem has been exacerbated by Covid, with drivers having to go into self-isolation amid the so-called 'pingdemic'.”
Beats hoping for people to get Covid I guess, though
Who suggested that the shortage of drivers was solely down to Brexit? That is part of it, but so is IR35 and Covid. The issue is that we cannot have a solution because of Brexit. The free market is not allowed to fill the vacancies with available drivers because EU drivers aren't wanted. So we have to wait until sufficient new drivers are recruited and trained to fill both the current hole and those drivers due to retire which will take 18 months at least.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
What I frankly do not understand about these climate change targets is why we haven't been doing that, and also solar panels as standard, on all new builds for the last 15 years. That would have made a very considerable difference by now.
If I were feeling cynical I would say because the building trade lobbied hard to make sure it didn't happen and they had the right contacts to whom they were very close to get their way.
If I were feeling realistic, I would say everything in that sentence up to 'and.'
Solar panels are the wrong answer for the UK, they're almost but not quite virtue signalling nonsense in the UK.
In states like California or countries like Australia where electricity demand peaks in the summer sun when air conditioning comes on then solar panels are a complete no brainer.
But in the UK we're a cold, wet, grey island that sees energy demand peak in the winter when we put our heating on - and as we switch from gas to electric heaters that's only going to increase.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Actually I have had solar panels for 6 years and they are one of the best investments I have made
Indeed this last quarter has produced the highest generation for that period since I installed them, even though it does not appear to be as good a period of weather than last year
They may be a reasonable investment but they're not an answer for zero carbon.
This past quarter is spring/summer when electricity demand dips in the country. It peaks in midwinter. How much was it generating in December or January etc when you had your central heating on? Now imagine your central heating is electricity powered which is meant to be the future, how much is solar helping with that?
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
As consumers we also need to accept that it will lead to higher prices. This will make the triple lock even more difficult to sustain.
There is (as Ed Milliband identified) a cost of living crisis. Everything costs lots but wages don't keep up. So higher prices for all due to cost inflation to the pay the wages of a few only makes the crisis worse.
An example of the problem. My client's company has a contract with DHL to deliver parcels. They offered the most competitive package of all the big companies. Like all of them they charge a premium for "Highlands and Islands" because costs, which in DHL's case starts in the western suburbs of Aberdeen just 10 miles from the depot.
What does this matter? Well DHL charge 2.5x the rate to deliver 10 miles from the depot in "Highlands and Islands" vs delivering 40 miles from the depot not in that zone. The driver is a contractor and gets a flat rate for delivery. DHL incur no additional cost but charge 2.5x more. And they aren't alone - all the parcel companies run the same scam.
Perhaps part of the cost of living crisis is profiteering by companies like DHL? If they passed on the premium charged to their sub-contractor then the money would circulate. Instead it stays in their pockets.
Are the delivery's the same flat rate though - I can't see many people willingly delivering parcels if they have to drive 20+ miles between each delivery for a fixed fee. So I do wonder if the per fee rate in the highlands may be higher than say central Newcastle.
I'm sure that if we were out in the highlands the fee to the driver would be more. What he told me was that we are counted as a local delivery to the depot - because we are. The company charges £ because "remote" and pays nothing extra in actual costs because not remote.
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to give up all fossil fuel, stop flying, rid our homes of gas central heating, insulate every home in the UK, buy expensive electric cars that have poor ranges and nowhere near enough electricity capacity in the country and feel thoroughly guilty and selfish if we do not immediately agree to this, even though many countries will say of course they agree, then do absolutely nothing
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic
And by the way watching Messi sobbing about leaving Barcelona was just pathetic.
Barcelona have made him a multi millionaire and if it was so important to him he could have played a couple of years at a nominal 1 euro per year, rather than £650,000 per week PSG are offering him
Agree about Messi.
On climate change, sadly the sacrosanct nature of the comfortable Western lifestyle is not a physical constant. If the situation is that your ship needs to jettison all its cargo or sink, that's the situation. You cannot bargain with the weather to jettison some of the lower value stuff over a period of days, nor point out to it that other ships are not doing as much as you are.
That lazy analogy does not stand up.
We could jettison all our cargo and still sink because the theory of climate change is that the sea conditions are actually determined by the boats collectively. One boat dumping its cargo makes no difference. And the fact is that many boats are taking on cargo. Hundreds of new coal fired power stations are planned in places like Indonesia, Vietnam and of course China.
What we are doing is more like the suicide squad at the end of Life of Brian collectively committing suicide as a gesture of solidarity instead of actually taking saving Brian from being crucified.
We laughed at them. And soon, the rest of the world will be laughing at us.
No, the analogy holds perfecrctly as far as the ineluctability of physical forces is concerned.
On the collective effort point, someone has to move first (and actually it is not as if it's just plucky little GB vs ROW again: other countries are actually coming to COP26, even if just for the look of the thing) and to speak with moral authority backed up by personal example. It's more likely we will be belatedly copied, than laughed at. And anyway, I thought contrarianism was rather your thing?
Yes I take the point but if our vast experiment were to fail by, say, destroying the economic prosperity of the country concerned then it becomes a lesson in not what to do rather than what to do.
Lots of people determined to keep their heads firmly buried in the sand this morning. Of course it's more comfortable to pretend this isn't happening and switch over to the sports instead, but the recklessness of what we have been doing for the last 30 years, mainly so that very rich people and companies can continue to make a fast buck is the by far the worst crime of my lifetime. Nothing else even comes close.
And those fanatic worshippers of the profit-motive cult continue to spout their bollocks despite all the evidence, it's hard to imagine any evidence that could possibly change their minds at this point. It's the worst religious cult of all - and some of its adherents even pretend to be against religion!
Why were the predictions of the past so wrong?
Instrument failure?
If you are of the view that climate change isn’t a thing and isn’t already causing awful economic and human damage, you’re not looking very hard (or travelling very far).
It would be defensible to say “I don’t really care because I live in a rich island nation that won’t suffer as much as most”. But it just makes you look silly to pretend it all away.
How many decades have we been 10 years from disaster?
Certainly since the 1970s.
Why are the people who were so wrong then, so right now?
+1
This is puerile. Sources, please, for the 10 years claim being made in the 70s, and each of the years thereafter.
And as a bonus question for extra points: of the 10 hottest years since 1880 the earliest was 2005. Who thinks this fact arises purely from random variation?
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
What I frankly do not understand about these climate change targets is why we haven't been doing that, and also solar panels as standard, on all new builds for the last 15 years. That would have made a very considerable difference by now.
If I were feeling cynical I would say because the building trade lobbied hard to make sure it didn't happen and they had the right contacts to whom they were very close to get their way.
If I were feeling realistic, I would say everything in that sentence up to 'and.'
Solar panels are the wrong answer for the UK, they're almost but not quite virtue signalling nonsense in the UK.
In states like California or countries like Australia where electricity demand peaks in the summer sun when air conditioning comes on then solar panels are a complete no brainer.
But in the UK we're a cold, wet, grey island that sees energy demand peak in the winter when we put our heating on - and as we switch from gas to electric heaters that's only going to increase.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
If I had £10k to spend on solar panels today it would maker more sense to put those panels closer to the equator, but ultimately they will be useful for the UK because we have much less wind energy during the summer and solar naturally complements that to provide year round energy with the two combined.
No surprise to see bitter, Boris hating remain voters plodding along with their grievances, trying to blame it all on Brexit whilst the firms involved say
“ Dairy giant Arla said in June: 'There is a real crunch this Summer because of Covid causing a backlog of new drivers passing their tests, changes to tax rules, some drivers from EU countries returning home, some others on furlough and other factors.”
“ the Road Haulage Association warned in late July that there was a shortage of 100,000 lorry drivers in the UK, which has been hampering deliveries of food from warehouses to supermarkets.
Thousands of prospective drivers are waiting for their HGV tests due to a backlog caused by lockdown, while many existing ones have left the UK after Brexit.
The problem has been exacerbated by Covid, with drivers having to go into self-isolation amid the so-called 'pingdemic'.”
Beats hoping for people to get Covid I guess, though
Who suggested that the shortage of drivers was solely down to Brexit? That is part of it, but so is IR35 and Covid. The issue is that we cannot have a solution because of Brexit. The free market is not allowed to fill the vacancies with available drivers because EU drivers aren't wanted. So we have to wait until sufficient new drivers are recruited and trained to fill both the current hole and those drivers due to retire which will take 18 months at least.
Why will it take 18 months when it takes six weeks to train a driver?
We've been debating this for six months now, not six weeks. Had pay rises been forthcoming six months ago then people could have been trained four times over already.
Is Climate change real and driven by people ? Yes. Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
What I frankly do not understand about these climate change targets is why we haven't been doing that, and also solar panels as standard, on all new builds for the last 15 years. That would have made a very considerable difference by now.
If I were feeling cynical I would say because the building trade lobbied hard to make sure it didn't happen and they had the right contacts to whom they were very close to get their way.
If I were feeling realistic, I would say everything in that sentence up to 'and.'
Solar panels are the wrong answer for the UK, they're almost but not quite virtue signalling nonsense in the UK.
In states like California or countries like Australia where electricity demand peaks in the summer sun when air conditioning comes on then solar panels are a complete no brainer.
But in the UK we're a cold, wet, grey island that sees energy demand peak in the winter when we put our heating on - and as we switch from gas to electric heaters that's only going to increase.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
Actually I have had solar panels for 6 years and they are one of the best investments I have made
Indeed this last quarter has produced the highest generation for that period since I installed them, even though it does not appear to be as good a period of weather than last year
But you aren't consuming the electricity yourself and Philip's argument isn't personal, it's regional.
Solar is great in areas where the sun is consistent and where you will consume the electricity immediately. So it's great where you need air conditioning, not so great if your main requirement of power is keeping you warm when the sun is on the other side of the globe.
One topic that Musk and co are having problems trying to fix, is how do you provide power when you site on the moon is in darkness not for a few hours a night but for 14 straight days.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
Nothing at all - there has been a race to the bottom over the last decade and more for truck drivers and a whole load of other industries.
My points are simple: they will drive costs and thus inflation, and it does not solve the driver crisis in the short to medium term. "Pay the drivers more" is not a solution for tens of thousands of vacancies you cannot fill. It is a strategy for 3 years hence which is fine, but needs to go hand in hand with a solution to the crisis - which has to be imported drivers.
And then the solution of get some cheap immigrants for the 'temporary crisis' becomes the permanent strategy.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
This is newly brexited Britain. We don't have to give migrant truck drivers a long term right to work here. The industry needs 18 months, so grant that long a work visa. Great opportunity for Romanian truck drivers to come over, make a bomb, then move on to the next gig.
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
The only time this will become salient is when and if it becomes obvious to the public
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
Because Amazon are willing to pay what it needs to pay in order to attract drivers they require. That is the free market solution.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
Does the free market stop at Dover, Phil?
Yes.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
You are a libertarian. You should surely want anyone to be an HGV driver here who decides they want to be an HGV driver here. Whether from Rotherham or Romania.
So the 'food shortages' turn out to be Waitrose not paying its drivers enough.
Not really Leningrad during the siege is it.
Still good for a bit of schadenfreude among those whose custom Waitrose doesn't want.
Now if you want a story which might damage Boris then try the new baby - he looks like one of those feckless fathers on poverty porn programs.
Not a good look when you're going to preach about environmental sustainability.
How have you reached that conclusion? There are tens of thousands fewer drivers than are required, with more retiring every month than are being replaced. So we now have some desperate companies like Tesco offering big dollah to entice drivers to defect, but that doesn't fix the problem either - the industry would be better served by Tesco spending the money on driver training.
What's wrong with pay rates rising for skilled workers ?
It's only half the issue - pay rises and poaching drivers doesn't solve the need to replacing retiring drivers, it just shunts the problem to another company.
Of course it does. If the pay rises high enough then drivers will be attracted to work in the sector.
There's plenty of people who know how to drive in this country. There's plenty of people who drive for a living in this country, but if HGV drivers are getting paid no better than Amazon Prime delivery drivers then people aren't exactly going to be attracted to driving a HGV instead of a van that is more attractive for other reasons.
If on the other hand HGV drivers are well paid, then yes that's going to attract people to do the six weeks or whatever it is training to get a HGV licence and work on that instead.
Its a solution in the long term. It isn't an immediate solution as people can't go "ooh that pays well" and start driving tomorrow. The industry says it will take 18 months to train up 80k+ drivers starting now.
You're right, they can only say "ooh that pays well" and start driving in six weeks time approximately.
The industry has a vested interest in shortchanging its drivers, but we've been discussing this issue for much longer now than the six weeks approximately it takes to train drivers.
And as you are right as always, and the time needed to fill these vacancies is 6 weeks, that is why the crisis has gone away and why there isn't a plan to use the army.
I started to listed to the IPCC report this morning and it was so boring and badly presented that I moved on to sports news quite quickly
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to give up all fossil fuel, stop flying, rid our homes of gas central heating, insulate every home in the UK, buy expensive electric cars that have poor ranges and nowhere near enough electricity capacity in the country and feel thoroughly guilty and selfish if we do not immediately agree to this, even though many countries will say of course they agree, then do absolutely nothing
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic
And by the way watching Messi sobbing about leaving Barcelona was just pathetic.
Barcelona have made him a multi millionaire and if it was so important to him he could have played a couple of years at a nominal 1 euro per year, rather than £650,000 per week PSG are offering him
Agree about Messi.
On climate change, sadly the sacrosanct nature of the comfortable Western lifestyle is not a physical constant. If the situation is that your ship needs to jettison all its cargo or sink, that's the situation. You cannot bargain with the weather to jettison some of the lower value stuff over a period of days, nor point out to it that other ships are not doing as much as you are.
That lazy analogy does not stand up.
We could jettison all our cargo and still sink because the theory of climate change is that the sea conditions are actually determined by the boats collectively. One boat dumping its cargo makes no difference. And the fact is that many boats are taking on cargo. Hundreds of new coal fired power stations are planned in places like Indonesia, Vietnam and of course China.
What we are doing is more like the suicide squad at the end of Life of Brian collectively committing suicide as a gesture of solidarity instead of actually taking saving Brian from being crucified.
We laughed at them. And soon, the rest of the world will be laughing at us.
No, the analogy holds perfecrctly as far as the ineluctability of physical forces is concerned.
On the collective effort point, someone has to move first (and actually it is not as if it's just plucky little GB vs ROW again: other countries are actually coming to COP26, even if just for the look of the thing) and to speak with moral authority backed up by personal example. It's more likely we will be belatedly copied, than laughed at. And anyway, I thought contrarianism was rather your thing?
Yes I take the point but if our vast experiment were to fail by, say, destroying the economic prosperity of the country concerned then it becomes a lesson in not what to do rather than what to do.
Would you like to take a guess at which country is the largest producer of renewable electricity in absolute terms in the world? It is also the largest producer of solar panels, and the largest producer and consumer of electric vehicles. It’s gdp growth is quite a bit higher than the UK’s too.
Lots of people determined to keep their heads firmly buried in the sand this morning. Of course it's more comfortable to pretend this isn't happening and switch over to the sports instead, but the recklessness of what we have been doing for the last 30 years, mainly so that very rich people and companies can continue to make a fast buck is the by far the worst crime of my lifetime. Nothing else even comes close.
And those fanatic worshippers of the profit-motive cult continue to spout their bollocks despite all the evidence, it's hard to imagine any evidence that could possibly change their minds at this point. It's the worst religious cult of all - and some of its adherents even pretend to be against religion!
Why were the predictions of the past so wrong?
Instrument failure?
If you are of the view that climate change isn’t a thing and isn’t already causing awful economic and human damage, you’re not looking very hard (or travelling very far).
It would be defensible to say “I don’t really care because I live in a rich island nation that won’t suffer as much as most”. But it just makes you look silly to pretend it all away.
In the Maldives they are now building hotels on land that was predicted to be metres under water by now.
No surprise to see bitter, Boris hating remain voters plodding along with their grievances, trying to blame it all on Brexit whilst the firms involved say
“ Dairy giant Arla said in June: 'There is a real crunch this Summer because of Covid causing a backlog of new drivers passing their tests, changes to tax rules, some drivers from EU countries returning home, some others on furlough and other factors.”
“ the Road Haulage Association warned in late July that there was a shortage of 100,000 lorry drivers in the UK, which has been hampering deliveries of food from warehouses to supermarkets.
Thousands of prospective drivers are waiting for their HGV tests due to a backlog caused by lockdown, while many existing ones have left the UK after Brexit.
The problem has been exacerbated by Covid, with drivers having to go into self-isolation amid the so-called 'pingdemic'.”
Beats hoping for people to get Covid I guess, though
Who suggested that the shortage of drivers was solely down to Brexit? That is part of it, but so is IR35 and Covid. The issue is that we cannot have a solution because of Brexit. The free market is not allowed to fill the vacancies with available drivers because EU drivers aren't wanted. So we have to wait until sufficient new drivers are recruited and trained to fill both the current hole and those drivers due to retire which will take 18 months at least.
Why will it take 18 months when it takes six weeks to train a driver?
We've been debating this for six months now, not six weeks. Had pay rises been forthcoming six months ago then people could have been trained four times over already.
It's the number of drivers required and the capacity to train them.
If you can only train 10,000 a time and it takes 6 weeks to train a driver, how long does it take to train 100,000 drivers?
Comments
Read them directly, rather than the nonsense media reports, and you might be much reassured that the scientists know what they're doing.
And CO2 has gone up a fair bit recently. Temperature will follow over a short geological but long human timescale.
Here it is in a couple of charts, it's not that complex.
Charts won't upload
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global-warming/temperature-change
https://ourworldindata.org/atmospheric-concentrations
There's plenty of people who know how to drive in this country. There's plenty of people who drive for a living in this country, but if HGV drivers are getting paid no better than Amazon Prime delivery drivers then people aren't exactly going to be attracted to driving a HGV instead of a van that is more attractive for other reasons.
If on the other hand HGV drivers are well paid, then yes that's going to attract people to do the six weeks or whatever it is training to get a HGV licence and work on that instead.
'The England delusion
Regularly falling to foreign takeovers and perennially divided, England is a nation that never was. No wonder we’re fracturing'
https://tinyurl.com/uz7m8rc4
Some cracking lines and quotes, especially from Lord Mekon of Anglosphere.
'More recently, though, the man the Financial Times called “the brains behind Brexit,” Daniel Hannan, rejigged the tale so that it became about the English (who, he claimed, had brought freedom itself with them “from deep in the German woods”) bravely resisting foreign dictatorship. He tweeted on the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings in 2015: “England’s Nakba. Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king, fell in battle, opening the door to occupation and feudalism.”'
In my childhood the population was some 8-10,000; it's now over 40k.
I have a fondness for my childhood home, but how on earth can (?should) it be sustained as the sea level rises?
But perhaps it is, and more candidates will just serve to splinter the vote so Jason wins SPotY as OGH tipped, and lots of deserving champions get between 2 or 3 per cent each.
Furthermore, had Edward (the Confessor) not hated his father*, Godwin, so much then said king would likely have produced an heir.
Godwin first achieved his power under Canute, and then Canute's sons, and was briefly chased out of England by Edward before returning and resuming his role as power behind the throne.
I can strongly recommend Marc Morris' book on the Norman Conquest, which is excellent (and I got the paperback for just £3 in a sale).
Edited extra bit: by his father* I meant Harold's father, also Edward's father-in-law.
There will never be any train more or pay more it will ALWAYS be get some cheap immigrants.
Who said anything about single-core chips with flat address spaces? In fact, who said anything about any cores at all?
The free market solution to a shortage of truck drivers is hire more truck drivers. It is only Brexit stubbornness preventing us from doing so.
Together with the full supermarkets it makes me a little sceptical of claims of delivery problems.
Or at least wonder if its another London and south-east cost of living problem.
“ Dairy giant Arla said in June: 'There is a real crunch this Summer because of Covid causing a backlog of new drivers passing their tests, changes to tax rules, some drivers from EU countries returning home, some others on furlough and other factors.”
“ the Road Haulage Association warned in late July that there was a shortage of 100,000 lorry drivers in the UK, which has been hampering deliveries of food from warehouses to supermarkets.
Thousands of prospective drivers are waiting for their HGV tests due to a backlog caused by lockdown, while many existing ones have left the UK after Brexit.
The problem has been exacerbated by Covid, with drivers having to go into self-isolation amid the so-called 'pingdemic'.”
Beats hoping for people to get Covid I guess, though
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9873763/Army-standby-stock-Britains-shelves-2-000-HGV-drivers-Royal-Logistics-Corps.html
The winner will most probably be an Olympian but my idea of a wild card is Lewis Hamilton.
He is locked in a tight battle with Max Verstappen for the F1 title. It's the most compelling season for ages, generating big stories, and is likely to go to the wire. This means a climax late on in the year, just before Spoty happens. If Hamilton prevails he will be breaking an iconic record (Schumacher's 7 titles) and the drama and achievement of it will be fresh in people's minds as they think about Spoty voting.
Hamilton is not just a sports star. He's a powerful brand. In 2014 he won Spoty when he really had no right to. In that year his Merc car was utterly dominant and he had only to beat his teammate, the far from great Nico Rosberg. Which he did, just. But the point was that it was a close battle, with personal animus, that caught the public's imagination, and it was settled just before Spoty. Similar vibe this year, except that this year the objective case for him is far stronger. He'd be beating another great (and much younger) driver in a different team, with the cars well matched. And, as I say, breaking that record with his 8th title.
In 2014 the red hot favourite was Rory McIlroy who'd won 2 of golf's 4 majors, including the Open Championship. He looked nailed on. Really should have been. But Hamilton's star power and greater exposure overrode the greater sporting achievement. I can see similar happening (except this time his achievement is arguably on a par with that of the favourites) and esp if the Olympic and cycling vote gets split. Hamilton ticks the box for social cause activism too, should that be any sort of factor. Ok, so he won last year, but Andy Murray won back to back, indeed 3 years in 4, so that is no insurmountable barrier.
Lewis can be backed at about 16. I think I'll throw a few quid at that.
I was prepared to listed and I accept climate change is with us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to give up all fossil fuel, stop flying, rid our homes of gas central heating, insulate every home in the UK, buy expensive electric cars that have poor ranges and nowhere near enough electricity capacity in the country and feel thoroughly guilty and selfish if we do not immediately agree to this, even though many countries will say of course they agree, then do absolutely nothing
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic
And by the way watching Messi sobbing about leaving Barcelona was just pathetic.
Barcelona have made him a multi millionaire and if it was so important to him he could have played a couple of years at a nominal 1 euro per year, rather than £650,000 per week PSG are offering him
The industry has a vested interest in shortchanging its drivers, but we've been discussing this issue for much longer now than the six weeks approximately it takes to train drivers.
And Edward wanted to screw over Godwin so he refused to give Godwin's blood the throne and promised it to William (he was friendly with the Dukes of Normandy who had sheltered him when he'd had to flee England).
* Edited to fix my moderna-addled maths and add another factor of 10 in the direction of my argument
Right now I do not know anyone who is not receiving their orders either by food home delivery or through Amazon and other delivery companies
There is a driver training centre here, so it's not uncommon to see one, but two at once is a bit unusual. Suggests there is plenty of demand.
It's either scientifically right or wrong. If it's right it really doesn't matter how much you'd like it to be wrong.
To say something is "idiotic" just because you don't want it to be true is puerile.
You can pretty much get evens on him or MV winning the championship, so a bet on the Dutchmen is your hedge.
Do we need to ditch our gas central heating overnight ? No.
Simply building new homes with a heat pump "originally designed" into the system will replace the housing stock over the next couple of hundred years or so will be sufficient in my view (As will allowing electric to come on tap naturally). This is a marathon, not a sprint.
One thing about going for electric cars, do we have the generation capacity ?
Assuming HGV drivers means long-distance, staying-away-from-home drivers, then there may be a natural cap on the number willing, or able, to do that regardless of the wages (unless the wages were hugely attractive). People have family obligations, or even desires, which means that they simply don't want to, or can't be, away from home on a regular basis. This doesn't apply to local delivery drivers. Even free markets have constraints.
And anyway, being an HGV driver would severely restrict one's ability to post on PB all day - far too dangerous.
And scientist argue and disagree all the time, and covid has proven that point beyond doubt
If I were feeling cynical I would say because the building trade lobbied hard to make sure it didn't happen and they had the right contacts to whom they were very close to get their way.
If I were feeling realistic, I would say everything in that sentence up to 'and.'
On climate change, sadly the sacrosanct nature of the comfortable Western lifestyle is not a physical constant. If the situation is that your ship needs to jettison all its cargo or sink, that's the situation. You cannot bargain with the weather to jettison some of the lower value stuff over a period of days, nor point out to it that other ships are not doing as much as you are.
Fortunately Trump was less drunk than he seemed.
Other companies whinging that there aren't enough drivers is a bit odd when so many people work on the roads in this country. There's no shortage of people willing to drive for a living, if they're not paying enough to attract drivers to work for them then there's a solution to that.
All those contractors who quit when IR35 rules changed, must still be out there somewhere and be able to be enticed back in the short term by better pay and conditions?
But, yes, that's a choice.
We see a lot of that in IT, many firms will poach a decent consultant by paying £10k above the odds but won't spend the time (and money) required to train the newbies up themselves..
What is a problem is charging them for the average person, especially people who have to park on the roadside. I'm a bit sceptical about Qualcomm's electric roads (Halo) project - as were they, because they sold it off. But such a technology might be rather useful for charging parked cars without cluttering up pavements with charging pods and/or trailing cables.
if your understanding of my comment is that I "think mankind is going to be extinct by 2040" then I can only marvel!
I don't think there has been much serious *scientific* disagreement surrounding covid, it's been moral, behavioural and economic. It's highly contagious, and if you get it you might die esp if you are old but vaccines help a lot seems fairly uncontested.
In states like California or countries like Australia where electricity demand peaks in the summer sun when air conditioning comes on then solar panels are a complete no brainer.
But in the UK we're a cold, wet, grey island that sees energy demand peak in the winter when we put our heating on - and as we switch from gas to electric heaters that's only going to increase.
And when are solar panels rather useless? In the winter, when heating is needed. Solar panels cease to work well just when our demand peaks. They're a great alternative to coal but if you want year-round zero carbon they're completely nonsensical.
'The extensive sea wall, completed in 1982, is 15 miles (24 km) long and surrounds 75% of the island's perimeter terminating with flood barriers spanning Benfleet Creek to the north and East Haven Creek in the west.'
Edit to add: Perfect, I had a kilometre to spare... But let's call it 0.75 meters per head to cover the other 25% and then a bit extra for a nice park or something.
And as a bonus question for extra points: of the 10 hottest years since 1880 the earliest was 2005. Who thinks this fact arises purely from random variation?
We could jettison all our cargo and still sink because the theory of climate change is that the sea conditions are actually determined by the boats collectively. One boat dumping its cargo makes no difference. And the fact is that many boats are taking on cargo. Hundreds of new coal fired power stations are planned in places like Indonesia, Vietnam and of course China.
What we are doing is more like the suicide squad at the end of Life of Brian collectively committing suicide as a gesture of solidarity instead of actually taking saving Brian from being crucified.
We laughed at them. And soon, the rest of the world will be laughing at us.
I was prepared to listen and I accept there’s an asteroid headed for us but the idea that between 2021(yes this year) and 2040 we are all doomed is frankly idiotic.
As I understand it we have to urgently divert spending to knocking this asteroid off course now. And if we don’t it’s going to hit us no matter what we do when we have cheaper rockets with better range.
It has to be a gradual process over many years and anything else is frankly totally unrealistic.
Past Dover there's no free movement of people, so if you want people to work for you then you need to either pay enough to get someone in the UK working for you - or pay enough that you can sponsor somebody for a visa.
And to be fair it is very unlikely I will be on this wonderful planet of ours by 2040
I also wonder if the public gave it to Lewis in 2014 because they thought it was his turn. McIlroy's achievements that year should have got him over the line, but I think F1 trumps golf by a considerable margin in terms of what the public care about.
Lidl looking ok.
No you are correct its not since the 1970s.
Its actually since the 1960s.
See the prediction of meltdown by....er.....1975 from this eminent Stanford 'expert'
Tidal lagoon solutions and nuclear* are low carbon options too
* Well in theory anyway, Lord knows what's going on with Hinkley point
** Except winter highs
Of course it's more comfortable to pretend this isn't happening and switch over to the sports instead, but the recklessness of what we have been doing for the last 30 years, mainly so that very rich people and companies can continue to make a fast buck is the by far the worst crime of my lifetime. Nothing else even comes close.
And those fanatic worshippers of the profit-motive cult continue to spout their bollocks despite all the evidence, it's hard to imagine any evidence that could possibly change their minds at this point. It's the worst religious cult of all - and some of its adherents even pretend to be against religion!
I also don't think its a reason to change the path we're already on for de-carbonisation.
I also don't think its due to UK carbon emissions. "Fun" fact: China in the past 20 months have produced more steel than the UK has in all time even from the beginning of the industrial revolution to today.
Indeed this last quarter has produced the highest generation for that period since I installed them, even though it does not appear to be as good a period of weather than last year
On the collective effort point, someone has to move first (and actually it is not as if it's just plucky little GB vs ROW again: other countries are actually coming to COP26, even if just for the look of the thing) and to speak with moral authority backed up by personal example. It's more likely we will be belatedly copied, than laughed at. And anyway, I thought contrarianism was rather your thing?
Wind + "batteries" + hydrogen electrolysis + tidal is the smart solution for the UK in my view. Solar panels I suspect are just a gimmick.
Instrument failure?
This past quarter is spring/summer when electricity demand dips in the country. It peaks in midwinter. How much was it generating in December or January etc when you had your central heating on? Now imagine your central heating is electricity powered which is meant to be the future, how much is solar helping with that?
It would be defensible to say “I don’t really care because I live in a rich island nation that won’t suffer as much as most”. But it just makes you look silly to pretend it all away.
We've been debating this for six months now, not six weeks. Had pay rises been forthcoming six months ago then people could have been trained four times over already.
Solar is great in areas where the sun is consistent and where you will consume the electricity immediately. So it's great where you need air conditioning, not so great if your main requirement of power is keeping you warm when the sun is on the other side of the globe.
One topic that Musk and co are having problems trying to fix, is how do you provide power when you site on the moon is in darkness not for a few hours a night but for 14 straight days.
If you can only train 10,000 a time and it takes 6 weeks to train a driver, how long does it take to train 100,000 drivers?