Not to mention vehicle designs themselves, features such as traction control and active suspension saw their first automotive applications in F1, now every car has them.
Other way round. Toyota had active suspension on the Soarer in 1986 before F1 had it. (Citroen had semi-active suspension that wasn't electronically controlled decades before that.) BMW and Mercedes both had traction control on road cars in the mid 80s before F1.
Rally cars. It is rally cars that drive the appearance of good shit for regular production cars.
Zero COVID idiots have completely ruined Australia and New Zealand. We had our wider team meeting this morning and one of the number is in Wellington. He's basically written off the whole summer and can't get back to Australia because the travel bridge is closed and there's no quarantine slots available.
It's shocking that two advanced countries like that have been captured by such a stupid idea like eradication of a global virus.
Jesus fucking christ that footage is shocking. I am getting plenty of posts from friends/family in Oz on FB (yes I'm that old) to the effect that people should stay the f*** at home. Dear god.
Every drip drip of this sort of covidiocy makes ever having a lockdown again, here, less likely.
Thank the lord for that!
That video presents as premium satire. It channels the most cutting work of Paul Verhoeven, Robocop, maybe even Starship Troopers.
It's quite scary. I don't understand how they let it get to this stage. They've had the same opportunity to vaccinate people as we have and yet they're at 20% fully vaccinated compared to 60% for the UK. What the fuck have they been doing?
Global vaccine production is limited, not all countries could get enough of it to have vaccinated 60% by now. Generally speaking the order it's happening in is a combination of wealth and desperation. Countries that mostly kept the virus out until delta didn't have the desperation, until delta.
Doesn't your landlord require you to have insurance? Interesting. And it is entirely understandable not to have it, although many people find it extremely reassuring to have such insurance although we do appreciate Nick that you are somewhat of an odd fish.
And as for your road accident the insurer won't "shovel you into the NHS" because from the scene you will in the first instance go to the NHS. It's after that when it might get trickier if you have, as in my example, some broken bones or another condition which needs investigation and/or is more complex but yes people can survive (!) on the NHS wholly albeit they will need to sharpen their elbows dramatically.
lol - maybe on your fishy point. No, my landlord has never shown the slightest interest in whether I insure my books, clothes, computer etc. - nor has any previous landlord, though some asked me to take insurance against the special issue of my damaging the property itself. I've never had a landlord who cared beyond that.
My rule of thumb is that it's worth considering insuring anything where the cost of replacing it would be more than 10% of your savings. If it's more like 5%, then the cost and hassle of insurance is almost certainly too much. I agree that health is different because the costs can escalate out of sight and you're not just replacing stuff but risking your quality of life.
Rather like taking out a maintenance contract. Generally pointless after the warranty period has expired.
The main surprise to me about the the current Afghanolypse is that despite the attempts of various hysterics to portray it as such, it is not a -lypse. So far (very much touchwood) the Taliban have not turned Kabul into 1975 Phnom Penh, and much of the horror show is so far down to the chaos overseen by ‘us’(the West). I realise it takes only one itchy trigger-fingered young Pashtun to blow it all up and no doubt what the Taliban are doing and will do is horrific, but in the context of Yemen or the Uighur or Boko Haram’s various activities does it really stand out?
Have the Taliban top trumps made a pragmatic decision that if they want to set up their quasi fascist state they have to let the West get out relatively unimpeded?
Yes, hope so. It would seem odd having just got rid of the Americans to do stuff that risks a return. I know some feel these mad mullah types don't do logical thinking but I reckon on this level they are probably up to it.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
Story about Mike Tagliere (An NFL analyst) is a bit worrying, looks 30sish, not overweight - double vaccinated and on a ventilator
I guess some people will just be unlucky
There will unfortunately be terrible cases like this, same as there will be 30 somethings that drop down dead with heart attacks, suffer terrible cancer etc.
We also have no idea about his medical history, he might have some underlying condition, and for whatever reason there will be people for whom the vaccine just doesn't work.
We have to hope that rapid improvement in treatment is made in the same way vaccines development was.
Not to mention vehicle designs themselves, features such as traction control and active suspension saw their first automotive applications in F1, now every car has them.
Other way round. Toyota had active suspension on the Soarer in 1986 before F1 had it. (Citroen had semi-active suspension that wasn't electronically controlled decades before that.) BMW and Mercedes both had traction control on road cars in the mid 80s before F1.
Absolutely. And as far as I'm aware there is no F1 car in production which can hold a pig in the boot, four people, with the driver wearing a top hat, and be able to drive over a ploughed field with a box of eggs in the back without breaking them.
Eh? Eh?
The 2CV is still pretty crap around Silverstone or Spa though!
It's also one of the most maintenance intensive cars ever made. If used daily in Northern European climate they need a complete nut-and-bolt restoration every fifteen years.
Labour shortages is a huge quandary facing this Brexit gov't.
Whole rationale for Hard Brexit was stopping FoM. If UK ends up effectively restoring it ONE WAY via broad exemptions, people may ask why they lost their FoM and what reasons remain for shunning the single market. ~AA
"The desperation for workers in the food supply sector is so great, some companies are trying to hire prisoners on day release to do paid work."
Is it beginning to dawn on gov't yet that Freedom of Movement was not a burden, but a blessing? ~AA
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
(snip) @theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them. (snip)
Are you sure? This is from 2016, but the age of passenger rolling stock appears to be a very mixed picture, and relatively little is from the 1970s, and not much from the 1980s, especially the early 1980s. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38450117
The removal from service of the Pacers, and most of the HSTs, will have improved this since. even if the replacements for the HSTs are generally worse.
I think that was a symbol of a general attitude !
Just making trains shiny and new doesn't make them better - if anything the trend is going the opposite way. I would far rather travel long distances in any of a BR Mk1/Mk2/Mk3 coach than endure a Vomiter or IEP, both of which have been "value engineered" with no consideration for the unfortunate passagers. The last reasonable new express stock in the UK was the Pendilios, which are now 20 years old (and are still not nearly as pleasant for the passengers as a MK3).
The IEP is developing into a particularly special farce, as it seems Hitachi has built large chunks of the bodyshells out of a totally unsuitable grade of aluminium, and its fairly obvious that they are going to be dogged by cracking issues for the rest of their (hopefully short) lives.
The thing with good railway rolling stock is it essentially lasts forever. Unfortunately its also really expensive. Therefore, its an asset which should be sweated - trains should be expected to last between 40 and 50 years in service. The problem with this is that the politicians where ever the old trains end up have taken to screaming about it. So now everyone has new trains, and we're scrapping units with useful life (particularly EMUs) left right and centre.
Someone will be paying for this (and it's not going to be rail users as most of them don't pay their way anyway).
(Snip). Give £5 billion one-off payments each to Stormont and Holyrood, drop the idiotic bridge nonsense, and watch transport infrastructure flourish in NI and Scotland. (/Snip)
Not really. Just one project - the much-needed duelling of the A9 between Perth and Inverness - is costing £3 billion. The new Queensferry Crossing cost £1.3 billion.
That's two projects that have swallowed up nearly all that money. Necessary projects; yes (though I still think the Queensferry Bridge should have had a walkway/cyclepath), but such money soon disappears.
They got nothing for the Queensferry bridge, usual Westminster thieving , they said it was not eligible and had to be paid locally.
Not to mention vehicle designs themselves, features such as traction control and active suspension saw their first automotive applications in F1, now every car has them.
Other way round. Toyota had active suspension on the Soarer in 1986 before F1 had it. (Citroen had semi-active suspension that wasn't electronically controlled decades before that.) BMW and Mercedes both had traction control on road cars in the mid 80s before F1.
Absolutely. And as far as I'm aware there is no F1 car in production which can hold a pig in the boot, four people, with the driver wearing a top hat, and be able to drive over a ploughed field with a box of eggs in the back without breaking them.
Eh? Eh?
Also stand up through the roof and see if the archaeological site you are seeking is over the hedge. A friend and I ticked off a lot of Wessex megaliths that way (and pubs, but those were the days when pubs closed for the morning and the afternoon in England).
Bruce Anderson in Reaction on Boris Johnson’s Commons speech: “it was all his own work and wholly in character: banal, shallow, tin-mouthed, devoid of sincerity, utterly unconvincing, an insult to the fallen and to those who loved them – an insult to Britain.” https://twitter.com/afneil/status/1429764078914920453
I see Oz is on the verge of being ejected from the liberty loving peoples of the Angelfolc. Thoughts and prayers with Hannan.
"Australian style" is going to have to be dropped as an all purpose indicator of something terrific and unEU like. It will leave quite a hole in the lexicon.
Not to mention vehicle designs themselves, features such as traction control and active suspension saw their first automotive applications in F1, now every car has them.
Other way round. Toyota had active suspension on the Soarer in 1986 before F1 had it. (Citroen had semi-active suspension that wasn't electronically controlled decades before that.) BMW and Mercedes both had traction control on road cars in the mid 80s before F1.
Rally cars. It is rally cars that drive the appearance of good shit for regular production cars.
Really, it's the Mercedes S-Class. For many years if you wanted to know what an average car would be like 20 years in the future you just had to look at an S-Class. Its predictive power has been somewhat disrupted by the BEV revolution but an EQS is a reasonable estimate of an average car in 2040.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
On AI and autonomous driving:
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
I see Oz is on the verge of being ejected from the liberty loving peoples of the Angelfolc. Thoughts and prayers with Hannan.
"Australian style" is going to have to be dropped as an all purpose indicator of something terrific and unEU like. It will leave quite a hole in the lexicon.
Same as following the sensible Swedes went out of fashion.....when they went for no lockdown approach to COVID.
Actually the Australians were world beaters in Stage 1 of COVID. I would suggest even better than NZ, given position in the world, population, demographics. As we know, the problem is they developed their own vaccine which worked, but had the side effect of producing false positives on an AIDs test. If that unfortunate drawback hadn't occurred, they would be still world beaters.
One thing about further rail development, car electrification renders most of the climatic (CO2) advantages moot in the long term I think. Tbh with all the infrastructure required I wouldn't be surprised if the CO2 cost/passenger is massive initially probably heading down to some long term smaller asymptote by 2100 or so.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
(snip) @theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them. (snip)
Are you sure? This is from 2016, but the age of passenger rolling stock appears to be a very mixed picture, and relatively little is from the 1970s, and not much from the 1980s, especially the early 1980s. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38450117
The removal from service of the Pacers, and most of the HSTs, will have improved this since. even if the replacements for the HSTs are generally worse.
I think that was a symbol of a general attitude !
Just making trains shiny and new doesn't make them better - if anything the trend is going the opposite way. I would far rather travel long distances in any of a BR Mk1/Mk2/Mk3 coach than endure a Vomiter or IEP, both of which have been "value engineered" with no consideration for the unfortunate passagers. The last reasonable new express stock in the UK was the Pendilios, which are now 20 years old (and are still not nearly as pleasant for the passengers as a MK3).
The IEP is developing into a particularly special farce, as it seems Hitachi has built large chunks of the bodyshells out of a totally unsuitable grade of aluminium, and its fairly obvious that they are going to be dogged by cracking issues for the rest of their (hopefully short) lives.
The thing with good railway rolling stock is it essentially lasts forever. Unfortunately its also really expensive. Therefore, its an asset which should be sweated - trains should be expected to last between 40 and 50 years in service. The problem with this is that the politicians where ever the old trains end up have taken to screaming about it. So now everyone has new trains, and we're scrapping units with useful life (particularly EMUs) left right and centre.
Someone will be paying for this (and it's not going to be rail users as most of them don't pay their way anyway).
I’d rather be in a crash in the new stock compared with the old stock. Obviously not that big a consideration as our railways are fairly safe, but it’s all part of the safety model.
UK orders 35 million more Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses
The UK government has signed a deal with Pfizer-BioNTech for 35 million more doses of its coronavirus vaccine, to be delivered from the second half of 2022.
I see Oz is on the verge of being ejected from the liberty loving peoples of the Angelfolc. Thoughts and prayers with Hannan.
"Australian style" is going to have to be dropped as an all purpose indicator of something terrific and unEU like. It will leave quite a hole in the lexicon.
And to be brutally honest, it wasn't a generous and eloquent lexicon in the first place.
Labour shortages is a huge quandary facing this Brexit gov't.
Whole rationale for Hard Brexit was stopping FoM. If UK ends up effectively restoring it ONE WAY via broad exemptions, people may ask why they lost their FoM and what reasons remain for shunning the single market. ~AA
"The desperation for workers in the food supply sector is so great, some companies are trying to hire prisoners on day release to do paid work."
Is it beginning to dawn on gov't yet that Freedom of Movement was not a burden, but a blessing? ~AA
Awesome news. Getting a job is the single best indicator of recidivism among prisoners. Those with jobs are way more likely to stay on the straight and narrow, than go back to their former ways.
Chap reported on the Beeb seeing how far he could get from London, by bus, in one day. Turns out it was Morecambe.
On, bbc.co.uk, 'London civil servant's bus odyssey sparks Twitter storm'.
When bus passes first were available to OAP's people we seeing how far they could get on one of those. You can do Lowestoft to Lands End, apparently, but not in one day.
Chap reported on the Beeb seeing how far he could get from London, by bus, in one day. Turns out it was Morecambe.
On, bbc.co.uk, 'London civil servant's bus odyssey sparks Twitter storm'.
When bus passes first were available to OAP's people we seeing how far they could get on one of those. You can do Lowestoft to Lands End, apparently, but not in one day.
Hence showing one aspect of the utter stupidity of the free OAP bus pass. It was a great electoral bribe, but terrible for bus services.
Extinction Rebellion really are thick as pigshit aren't they.
Sky just interviewing a spokeswoman from that saying that British people are being lied to and told that we can't do anything about climate change, or that its about China, when we can tackle this - and that in recent years there's been a 60% increase in emissions.
Actually there's been close to a 60% decrease in British emissions. Where is the 60% increase coming from?
Labour shortages is a huge quandary facing this Brexit gov't.
Whole rationale for Hard Brexit was stopping FoM. If UK ends up effectively restoring it ONE WAY via broad exemptions, people may ask why they lost their FoM and what reasons remain for shunning the single market. ~AA
"The desperation for workers in the food supply sector is so great, some companies are trying to hire prisoners on day release to do paid work."
Is it beginning to dawn on gov't yet that Freedom of Movement was not a burden, but a blessing? ~AA
Awesome news. Getting a job is the single best indicator of recidivism among prisoners. Those with jobs are way more likely to stay on the straight and narrow, than go back to their former ways.
The quote is bizarre, it comes across that they are aghast at the prospect of hiring ex-cons. Which no doubt happens all the time without much fanfare.
Extinction Rebellion really are thick as pigshit aren't they.
Sky just interviewing a spokeswoman from that saying that British people are being lied to and told that we can't do anything about climate change, or that its about China, when we can tackle this - and that in recent years there's been a 60% increase in emissions.
Actually there's been close to a 60% decrease in British emissions. Where is the 60% increase coming from?
I presume the Sky presenter was quick to correct his misinformation......or perhaps not.
Labour shortages is a huge quandary facing this Brexit gov't.
Whole rationale for Hard Brexit was stopping FoM. If UK ends up effectively restoring it ONE WAY via broad exemptions, people may ask why they lost their FoM and what reasons remain for shunning the single market. ~AA
"The desperation for workers in the food supply sector is so great, some companies are trying to hire prisoners on day release to do paid work."
Is it beginning to dawn on gov't yet that Freedom of Movement was not a burden, but a blessing? ~AA
Awesome news. Getting a job is the single best indicator of recidivism among prisoners. Those with jobs are way more likely to stay on the straight and narrow, than go back to their former ways.
The quote is bizarre, it comes across that they are aghast at the prospect of hiring ex-cons. Which no doubt happens all the time without much fanfare.
UK orders 35 million more Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses
The UK government has signed a deal with Pfizer-BioNTech for 35 million more doses of its coronavirus vaccine, to be delivered from the second half of 2022.
How on earth are we going to use another 35 million Pfizer doses if the JCVI constantly says "No" to further vaccination ?
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
(snip) @theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them. (snip)
Are you sure? This is from 2016, but the age of passenger rolling stock appears to be a very mixed picture, and relatively little is from the 1970s, and not much from the 1980s, especially the early 1980s. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38450117
The removal from service of the Pacers, and most of the HSTs, will have improved this since. even if the replacements for the HSTs are generally worse.
I think that was a symbol of a general attitude !
Just making trains shiny and new doesn't make them better - if anything the trend is going the opposite way. I would far rather travel long distances in any of a BR Mk1/Mk2/Mk3 coach than endure a Vomiter or IEP, both of which have been "value engineered" with no consideration for the unfortunate passagers. The last reasonable new express stock in the UK was the Pendilios, which are now 20 years old (and are still not nearly as pleasant for the passengers as a MK3).
The IEP is developing into a particularly special farce, as it seems Hitachi has built large chunks of the bodyshells out of a totally unsuitable grade of aluminium, and its fairly obvious that they are going to be dogged by cracking issues for the rest of their (hopefully short) lives.
The thing with good railway rolling stock is it essentially lasts forever. Unfortunately its also really expensive. Therefore, its an asset which should be sweated - trains should be expected to last between 40 and 50 years in service. The problem with this is that the politicians where ever the old trains end up have taken to screaming about it. So now everyone has new trains, and we're scrapping units with useful life (particularly EMUs) left right and centre.
Someone will be paying for this (and it's not going to be rail users as most of them don't pay their way anyway).
I’d rather be in a crash in the new stock compared with the old stock. Obviously not that big a consideration as our railways are fairly safe, but it’s all part of the safety model.
That was the shocking thing about last year's Stonehaven crash. The HST power car's cab absolutely disintegrated.
However, given it was not just a frontal impact, but also a fall, I would have concerns about how well any stock would have withstood it. But the HST did not fare well.
For read piece highlighting the lady in question has a long history of airing her consistently anti-Tory / anti-Brexit / left leaning views.
Strangely he doesn't get so excitable when the Guardian do the same over right learning appointments. And they absolutely do the same...dragging over everything somebody has ever done or said in the past and then writing piece after piece after piece about it.
We have a raging Tory at the top of the Beeb. It's impartiality is thus assured.
Indeed it is....if in any small way the left wing woke shittery of the BBC can be countered
Labour shortages is a huge quandary facing this Brexit gov't.
Whole rationale for Hard Brexit was stopping FoM. If UK ends up effectively restoring it ONE WAY via broad exemptions, people may ask why they lost their FoM and what reasons remain for shunning the single market. ~AA
"The desperation for workers in the food supply sector is so great, some companies are trying to hire prisoners on day release to do paid work."
Is it beginning to dawn on gov't yet that Freedom of Movement was not a burden, but a blessing? ~AA
Awesome news. Getting a job is the single best indicator of recidivism among prisoners. Those with jobs are way more likely to stay on the straight and narrow, than go back to their former ways.
I have no issue with Scott n Paste bring Tweets over from Twitter as part of engagement.
My issue with him is that he just spams Tweets here without actually engaging or bothering to read replies or anything like that.
This is about the fourth or fifth day in a row he's posted about prisoners being hired like its a bad thing. Every single time there's been an almost universal response from left to right across the spectrum saying that prisoners getting jobs is a good thing that prevents recidivism. From Nick Palmer, to Gallowgate, to you and me and dozens of others in between it seems across the spectrum this is one thing we can agree on whether left or right.
Yet @Scott_xP doesn't engage, doesn't read the replies, or doesn't respond to them. Tomorrow he'll be again scraping another Tweet from Twitter whinging about prisoners getting a job as if its a bad thing.
Bringing Tweets across to show news as part of engagement can be interesting. Doing so without engaging is just pure spam.
For read piece highlighting the lady in question has a long history of airing her consistently anti-Tory / anti-Brexit / left leaning views.
Strangely he doesn't get so excitable when the Guardian do the same over right learning appointments. And they absolutely do the same...dragging over everything somebody has ever done or said in the past and then writing piece after piece after piece about it.
We have a raging Tory at the top of the Beeb. It's impartiality is thus assured.
Indeed it is....if in any small way the left wing woke shittery of the BBC can be countered
Extinction Rebellion really are thick as pigshit aren't they.
Sky just interviewing a spokeswoman from that saying that British people are being lied to and told that we can't do anything about climate change, or that its about China, when we can tackle this - and that in recent years there's been a 60% increase in emissions.
Actually there's been close to a 60% decrease in British emissions. Where is the 60% increase coming from?
I presume the Sky presenter was quick to correct his misinformation......or perhaps not.
Not to mention vehicle designs themselves, features such as traction control and active suspension saw their first automotive applications in F1, now every car has them.
Other way round. Toyota had active suspension on the Soarer in 1986 before F1 had it. (Citroen had semi-active suspension that wasn't electronically controlled decades before that.) BMW and Mercedes both had traction control on road cars in the mid 80s before F1.
Absolutely. And as far as I'm aware there is no F1 car in production which can hold a pig in the boot, four people, with the driver wearing a top hat, and be able to drive over a ploughed field with a box of eggs in the back without breaking them.
Eh? Eh?
Also stand up through the roof and see if the archaeological site you are seeking is over the hedge. A friend and I ticked off a lot of Wessex megaliths that way (and pubs, but those were the days when pubs closed for the morning and the afternoon in England).
2CVs are really great cars to drive, drunk. They go so slow you’re barely a danger to anyone, even after three bottles of Bandol, and even if you do hit something - say, a mouflon - the 2CV is so tinny you just get another dent and the mouflon walks away, unharmed
Plus, whenever you change gear with that unique gear box, you can make an amusing ‘trombone’ sound, to accompany the movement
Extinction Rebellion really are thick as pigshit aren't they.
Sky just interviewing a spokeswoman from that saying that British people are being lied to and told that we can't do anything about climate change, or that its about China, when we can tackle this - and that in recent years there's been a 60% increase in emissions.
Actually there's been close to a 60% decrease in British emissions. Where is the 60% increase coming from?
XR have been extraordinarily successful in recent years in raising the profile of these issues and pushing for action, which is something to be proud of, but I do have the worry that, as an umbrella group, they have taken it as far as they are able.
The passion is still there, and there are people who would mouth platitudes but do very little unless pressed by campaigners, but XR are perfectly capable of being just plain wrong, and when that happens religious fervour is a hindrance as you look like a fool, and the 'it's never enough' messaging works to make people see the problem, but doesn't exactly encourage people and governments who are on board. Even governing bodies need a pat on the head from time to time, not just constating berating.
Labour shortages is a huge quandary facing this Brexit gov't.
Whole rationale for Hard Brexit was stopping FoM. If UK ends up effectively restoring it ONE WAY via broad exemptions, people may ask why they lost their FoM and what reasons remain for shunning the single market. ~AA
"The desperation for workers in the food supply sector is so great, some companies are trying to hire prisoners on day release to do paid work."
Is it beginning to dawn on gov't yet that Freedom of Movement was not a burden, but a blessing? ~AA
Awesome news. Getting a job is the single best indicator of recidivism among prisoners. Those with jobs are way more likely to stay on the straight and narrow, than go back to their former ways.
The quote is bizarre, it comes across that they are aghast at the prospect of hiring ex-cons. Which no doubt happens all the time without much fanfare.
Indeed. Ask companies like Timpson, who are well-known for hiring ex-cons and giving them another chance.
Far too many commentators, living in London and hating the government, seem to think that labour shortages at the bottom end of the market are a bad thing, that can only be solved by throwing a few hundred thousand minimum-wage workers from Bratislava or Bucharest at the ‘problem’.
Alternatively, we might start to see the UK’s terrible recent productivity figures start to improve, as businesses invest in capital to replace the unlimited supply of labour. Oh, and as Stuart Rose correctly identified, wages going up.
Labour shortages is a huge quandary facing this Brexit gov't.
Whole rationale for Hard Brexit was stopping FoM. If UK ends up effectively restoring it ONE WAY via broad exemptions, people may ask why they lost their FoM and what reasons remain for shunning the single market. ~AA
"The desperation for workers in the food supply sector is so great, some companies are trying to hire prisoners on day release to do paid work."
Is it beginning to dawn on gov't yet that Freedom of Movement was not a burden, but a blessing? ~AA
I am at work today, for the first time in almost a year and a half.
What was striking this morning was the huge gulf between mask usage on the commuter train and that on trains full of leisure travelers at the weekend. Then, well under half covered up. This morning it was 80-90%.
The train into Leeds was comparatively quiet. I had a double seat to myself, as did everyone else, whereas pre-Covid I might be able to grab one of the last vacant seats if I was lucky, with plenty standing after Shipley.
For read piece highlighting the lady in question has a long history of airing her consistently anti-Tory / anti-Brexit / left leaning views.
Strangely he doesn't get so excitable when the Guardian do the same over right learning appointments. And they absolutely do the same...dragging over everything somebody has ever done or said in the past and then writing piece after piece after piece about it.
We have a raging Tory at the top of the Beeb. It's impartiality is thus assured.
Indeed it is....if in any small way the left wing woke shittery of the BBC can be countered
You must watch a different BBC to me.
Indeed I do , I watch and listen a lot less than I did. In fact I rarely listen to the news on Radio or TV. I get my news from..the Times.
Labour shortages is a huge quandary facing this Brexit gov't.
Whole rationale for Hard Brexit was stopping FoM. If UK ends up effectively restoring it ONE WAY via broad exemptions, people may ask why they lost their FoM and what reasons remain for shunning the single market. ~AA
"The desperation for workers in the food supply sector is so great, some companies are trying to hire prisoners on day release to do paid work."
Is it beginning to dawn on gov't yet that Freedom of Movement was not a burden, but a blessing? ~AA
Awesome news. Getting a job is the single best indicator of recidivism among prisoners. Those with jobs are way more likely to stay on the straight and narrow, than go back to their former ways.
The quote is bizarre, it comes across that they are aghast at the prospect of hiring ex-cons. Which no doubt happens all the time without much fanfare.
It's a tactical misstep. The main point, that there is a desperation for workers and FoM was good and thus harder Brexits options were always a mistake etc, can gain traction, but the example chosen to illustrate the desperation is a poor one which invites the very counter Sandpit made, and the high ground is lost even if it was not meant to be aghast.
The quote is bizarre, it comes across that they are aghast at the prospect of hiring ex-cons. Which no doubt happens all the time without much fanfare.
Maybe you should read it.
What is being discussed is not hiring ex-cons (which would be great, Timpsons et al concur), it's about using current prisoners as cheap labour.
Modern day mail sacks.
That is probably also good for the lags, but misses completely the point of the story...
UK orders 35 million more Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses
The UK government has signed a deal with Pfizer-BioNTech for 35 million more doses of its coronavirus vaccine, to be delivered from the second half of 2022.
Extinction Rebellion really are thick as pigshit aren't they.
Sky just interviewing a spokeswoman from that saying that British people are being lied to and told that we can't do anything about climate change, or that its about China, when we can tackle this - and that in recent years there's been a 60% increase in emissions.
Actually there's been close to a 60% decrease in British emissions. Where is the 60% increase coming from?
XR have been extraordinarily successful in recent years in raising the profile of these issues and pushing for action, which is something to be proud of, but I do have the worry that, as an umbrella group, they have taken it as far as they are able.
The passion is still there, and there are people who would mouth platitudes but do very little unless pressed by campaigners, but XR are perfectly capable of being just plain wrong, and when that happens religious fervour is a hindrance as you look like a fool, and the 'it's never enough' messaging works to make people see the problem, but doesn't exactly encourage people and governments who are on board. Even governing bodies need a pat on the head from time to time, not just constating berating.
I don't know if XR even have been successful in recent years, or if they've just jumped on a pre-existing bandwagon and been louder and shriller than anyone else.
Quite frankly governments, scientists etc have been dealing with this for much longer than XR have been around. The UK from 2010 to 2020 had gone from overwhelmingly coal powered electricity to switching off and demolishing coal power plants, with wind farms increasingly everwhere long before XR even where a blip on the landscape.
The quote is bizarre, it comes across that they are aghast at the prospect of hiring ex-cons. Which no doubt happens all the time without much fanfare.
Maybe you should read it.
What is being discussed is not hiring ex-cons (which would be great, Timpsons et al concur), it's about using current prisoners as cheap labour.
Modern day mail sacks.
That is probably also good for the lags, but misses completely the point of the story...
I thought the whole point of prisoners going on day release was to try and get a job / trade, to prepare them for when they are finally released.
The quote is bizarre, it comes across that they are aghast at the prospect of hiring ex-cons. Which no doubt happens all the time without much fanfare.
Maybe you should read it.
What is being discussed is not hiring ex-cons (which would be great, Timpsons et al concur), it's about using current prisoners as cheap labour.
Modern day mail sacks.
That is probably also good for the lags, but misses completely the point of the story...
Getting current prisoners to work is absolutely 100% a good thing.
There is no point of the story. Prisoners working reduces recidivism. It aides them with rehabilitation, it reduces recidivism, it is an unmitigated good thing.
The quote is bizarre, it comes across that they are aghast at the prospect of hiring ex-cons. Which no doubt happens all the time without much fanfare.
Maybe you should read it.
What is being discussed is not hiring ex-cons (which would be great, Timpsons et al concur), it's about using current prisoners as cheap labour.
Modern day mail sacks.
That is probably also good for the lags, but misses completely the point of the story...
As opposed to the modern day slavery of imported farm workers, or minimum wage hospitality workers and cleaners in London, sleeping six to a room on bunk beds because they can’t afford to live where they work?
The quote is bizarre, it comes across that they are aghast at the prospect of hiring ex-cons. Which no doubt happens all the time without much fanfare.
Maybe you should read it.
What is being discussed is not hiring ex-cons (which would be great, Timpsons et al concur), it's about using current prisoners as cheap labour.
Modern day mail sacks.
That is probably also good for the lags, but misses completely the point of the story...
I don't think it is about using them as "cheap labour", since they will be paid the same wage as anyone else who applied for the position.
The quote is bizarre, it comes across that they are aghast at the prospect of hiring ex-cons. Which no doubt happens all the time without much fanfare.
Maybe you should read it.
What is being discussed is not hiring ex-cons (which would be great, Timpsons et al concur), it's about using current prisoners as cheap labour.
Modern day mail sacks.
That is probably also good for the lags, but misses completely the point of the story...
Opponents will always miss the point of a story as you well know. Why then has the summary of the story made that so much easier to do? Presentation matters. As RobD says it 'comes across' a certain way, ie it's been at the least communicated badly.
Say the matter was raised in that way in the Commons by Keir, Boris would have an easy out immediately because of the way it was presented to him.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
On AI and autonomous driving:
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
So the Brexiteer argument is that chain gangs are better than FoM.
Got it...
Prisoners working on day release isn't a chain gang and its absolutely a good thing.
And that's not the Brexiteer argument, its something anyone sentient agrees with. Its the entire point of day release, its part of rehabilitation and the evidence it reduces recidivism is overwhelming.
So good, glad you've got it. How long until you whinge about prisoners getting jobs again?
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
On AI and autonomous driving:
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
On the other side, I don’t think there’s anything too special about human perception. It can be artificially replicated, just a question of time and willpower. Musk could have done a coast to coast journey already if they gamed it with a preprogrammed route. But I think he figured what would be the point of that.
Seems to me the plan they’re progressing with is a sound one. I’m quite confident that 3D auto labelling (indeed 4D auto labelling) will get them over the line for proper autonomy in most use cases relatively soon. Would be interested if you spotted any big holes in their presentation last week.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
(snip) @theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them. (snip)
Are you sure? This is from 2016, but the age of passenger rolling stock appears to be a very mixed picture, and relatively little is from the 1970s, and not much from the 1980s, especially the early 1980s. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38450117
The removal from service of the Pacers, and most of the HSTs, will have improved this since. even if the replacements for the HSTs are generally worse.
I think that was a symbol of a general attitude !
Just making trains shiny and new doesn't make them better - if anything the trend is going the opposite way. I would far rather travel long distances in any of a BR Mk1/Mk2/Mk3 coach than endure a Vomiter or IEP, both of which have been "value engineered" with no consideration for the unfortunate passagers. The last reasonable new express stock in the UK was the Pendilios, which are now 20 years old (and are still not nearly as pleasant for the passengers as a MK3).
The IEP is developing into a particularly special farce, as it seems Hitachi has built large chunks of the bodyshells out of a totally unsuitable grade of aluminium, and its fairly obvious that they are going to be dogged by cracking issues for the rest of their (hopefully short) lives.
The thing with good railway rolling stock is it essentially lasts forever. Unfortunately its also really expensive. Therefore, its an asset which should be sweated - trains should be expected to last between 40 and 50 years in service. The problem with this is that the politicians where ever the old trains end up have taken to screaming about it. So now everyone has new trains, and we're scrapping units with useful life (particularly EMUs) left right and centre.
Someone will be paying for this (and it's not going to be rail users as most of them don't pay their way anyway).
I’d rather be in a crash in the new stock compared with the old stock. Obviously not that big a consideration as our railways are fairly safe, but it’s all part of the safety model.
Depends on what new stock vs what old stock. Obviously mk1s suffer badly from effectively having a separate underframe. The Mk3 shell has proven remarkably crashworthy on most of the occasions its had the misfortune to be tested.
The IEP that scattered itself over the countryside after the low speed bump at Neville Hill didn't make me feel inclined to trust its supposed crashworthyness at higher speeds. I'm aware of why that particular incident happened, but it reflects very poorly on its designers that there was a window of impact speed which caused this sort of behaviour - and left me wondering what else the designers had "forgotten" to notice.
Extinction Rebellion really are thick as pigshit aren't they.
Sky just interviewing a spokeswoman from that saying that British people are being lied to and told that we can't do anything about climate change, or that its about China, when we can tackle this - and that in recent years there's been a 60% increase in emissions.
Actually there's been close to a 60% decrease in British emissions. Where is the 60% increase coming from?
XR have been extraordinarily successful in recent years in raising the profile of these issues and pushing for action, which is something to be proud of, but I do have the worry that, as an umbrella group, they have taken it as far as they are able.
The passion is still there, and there are people who would mouth platitudes but do very little unless pressed by campaigners, but XR are perfectly capable of being just plain wrong, and when that happens religious fervour is a hindrance as you look like a fool, and the 'it's never enough' messaging works to make people see the problem, but doesn't exactly encourage people and governments who are on board. Even governing bodies need a pat on the head from time to time, not just constating berating.
I don't know if XR even have been successful in recent years, or if they've just jumped on a pre-existing bandwagon and been louder and shriller than anyone else.
Quite frankly governments, scientists etc have been dealing with this for much longer than XR have been around. The UK from 2010 to 2020 had gone from overwhelmingly coal powered electricity to switching off and demolishing coal power plants, with wind farms increasingly everwhere long before XR even where a blip on the landscape.
I said successful at raising the profile, not that they created the bandwagon or preexisting actions.
Fact is being louder and shriller has worked. Councils and others across the land badgered by XR (or XR types) and a big increase in press coverage of that sort of pressurising, has seen a response, it is more in the everyday consciousness than it was even 4 years ago. Everybody on earth has probably heard of Greta bloody Thuberg by now.
My point was that being louder and shriller has achieved that profile raising, but I tihnk it is maximised, and actually achieving things is not helped much by them now. In fact, it can be counter productive.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
On AI and autonomous driving:
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
It might be solved for motorways in the forseeable future, but the more rural roads of Devon, Cornwall, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire to pick a few counties - doubt it.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
On AI and autonomous driving:
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
I completely disagree that its at the same level of self-driving now than thirty years ago.
There's two different philosophies between self-driving. One is to get self-driving cars in one giant leap, which is nowhere near getting live and isn't going to be for an eternity, its vaporware.
The other philosophy is to do it incrementally. Driver assisted removing elements of driving until there's little left then closing the last gap. That has come along in leaps and bounds in recent decades and is still getting closer every year.
Self-parking, adaptive cruise control, lane assist etc, etc, etc are coming along every year nowadays. This is the real way we will ultimately arrive at self-driving if we ever do, in steps not a single leap.
I am at work today, for the first time in almost a year and a half.
What was striking this morning was the huge gulf between mask usage on the commuter train and that on trains full of leisure travelers at the weekend. Then, well under half covered up. This morning it was 80-90%.
The train into Leeds was comparatively quiet. I had a double seat to myself, as did everyone else, whereas pre-Covid I might be able to grab one of the last vacant seats if I was lucky, with plenty standing after Shipley.
For me one of the great things about COVID is that I can always find a parking space at the station. Before COVID you had to be there by 7.40am at the latest. Now the station car park is barely 50% full.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
On AI and autonomous driving:
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
It might be solved for motorways in the forseeable future, but the more rural roads of Devon, Cornwall, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire to pick a few counties - doubt it.
The easiest way to get a large scale SDV system working, is going to be to build a new Milton Keynes (Or, more likely, Dubai or Jeddah), and have separate roads for SD and regular vehicles.
The quote is bizarre, it comes across that they are aghast at the prospect of hiring ex-cons. Which no doubt happens all the time without much fanfare.
Maybe you should read it.
What is being discussed is not hiring ex-cons (which would be great, Timpsons et al concur), it's about using current prisoners as cheap labour.
Modern day mail sacks.
That is probably also good for the lags, but misses completely the point of the story...
As opposed to the modern day slavery of imported farm workers, or minimum wage hospitality workers and cleaners in London, sleeping six to a room on bunk beds because they can’t afford to live where they work?
Isn't the Sandpit dependent on exploited imported cheap labour living in bunkrooms?
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
We are a small country. Quite frankly besides relatively a few things moved in bulk, overwhelmingly trains don't provide capacity, vehicles on roads do.
Its not just that the overwhelming majority of commuters move via roads - the overwhelming majority of goods transit quite rightly happens the same way too. And the idea that goods transit should instead happen via trains instead is in general an illogical farcical suggestion that fails in the face of actual experience which is why it doesn't happen.
We aren't looking typically to move train loads of goods thousands of miles, because our country isn't thousands of miles long.
If you want to improve capacity, then improve the road networks.
Chap reported on the Beeb seeing how far he could get from London, by bus, in one day. Turns out it was Morecambe.
On, bbc.co.uk, 'London civil servant's bus odyssey sparks Twitter storm'.
When bus passes first were available to OAP's people we seeing how far they could get on one of those. You can do Lowestoft to Lands End, apparently, but not in one day.
Back in 2002, I got from Durness, in the far northwest of Scotland, to Cambridge in well under a day by public transport. A postbus (8 o'clock?) from Durness to Lairg, then a bus to Inverness, a train to Edinburgh, then one down to Stevenage, and then up to Cambridge. A taxi got me back to my front door in Fen Ditton by about ten o'clock.
I was surprised I managed it, and a couple of the connections were tight in Scotland. It's a shame the Postbuses no longer run.
Few things are less cherry at the start of a week than reading about GP mistakes.
So given covid backlogs to medical treatment is private medical insurance ** now worth it ?
Or would paying for private consultancy or treatment if required be a better ?
** Affordable but more than double the cost of home and car insurance combined.
Look carefully at the cover. Most policies require a GP referral to cover payment, and there are significant excesses and exclusions. Many policies will refuse cover for chronic conditions (lasting greater than 6 weeks) or those where NHS is available on a reasonable timescale. Every month I have a Private patient who is annoyed at their refusal of cover by the insurance company that they were relying on.
That said, waiting lists have mushroomed for elective procedures and even for outpatient appointments. In my dept we are now booking routine referrals to outpatients from Dec 2020.
Self funding private care is a reasonable option, and putting those premiums into a savings pot instead of an insurance company gives you control and flexibility. You get to keep the money too if unused.
A lot depends on your own financial resources and existing health status and risks.
Thanks, that's very helpful.
The self-funding if necessary option looks the best for me.
Yes. Insurance generally - travel, health, car, house, life, all of it - is a bet with the odds skewed heavily to the House. The only rational reason to do it is to get protection against something which if it happened would really screw you (or your dependents) up financially. And even then you need to look carefully at the probability of it happening. The only insurance I have is basic motor and that's because it's the law.
So no house insurance? Bold call.
Also, on health, as mentioned earlier, I bust up my hand (you should have seen the other guy) a couple of years ago and the NHS said I had to wait five weeks to see a consultant. By which time of course the bones would have healed. I was at a private consultant the following day.
But I like your carefree, hair in the wind, freewheeling attitude.
Don't know about kinabalu but as a tenant I certainly don't insure the house, and using his reasoning I also don't insure the contents - I can afford to replace some or all of them if necessary, and would rather not pay extortionate premiums to cover the off-chance that the place burns to a cinder. Health insurance is trickier since, as you say, you can pay a lot for one-off treatment of moderate complexity. If you have a crisis like a road accident the insurer will shovel you into the NHS anyway, though, so I don't insure for that either, and will basically go with the NHS flow.
Doesn't your landlord require you to have insurance? Interesting. And it is entirely understandable not to have it, although many people find it extremely reassuring to have such insurance although we do appreciate Nick that you are somewhat of an odd fish.
And as for your road accident the insurer won't "shovel you into the NHS" because from the scene you will in the first instance go to the NHS. It's after that when it might get trickier if you have, as in my example, some broken bones or another condition which needs investigation and/or is more complex but yes people can survive (!) on the NHS wholly albeit they will need to sharpen their elbows dramatically.
In the US if there is a mortgage on the property, it is the landlord that is required to have "renter's insurance".
Correction: it is the landlord who is required to insure the building which is not renters insurance.
Not to mention vehicle designs themselves, features such as traction control and active suspension saw their first automotive applications in F1, now every car has them.
Other way round. Toyota had active suspension on the Soarer in 1986 before F1 had it. (Citroen had semi-active suspension that wasn't electronically controlled decades before that.) BMW and Mercedes both had traction control on road cars in the mid 80s before F1.
Rally cars. It is rally cars that drive the appearance of good shit for regular production cars.
Really, it's the Mercedes S-Class. For many years if you wanted to know what an average car would be like 20 years in the future you just had to look at an S-Class. Its predictive power has been somewhat disrupted by the BEV revolution but an EQS is a reasonable estimate of an average car in 2040.
The quote is bizarre, it comes across that they are aghast at the prospect of hiring ex-cons. Which no doubt happens all the time without much fanfare.
Maybe you should read it.
What is being discussed is not hiring ex-cons (which would be great, Timpsons et al concur), it's about using current prisoners as cheap labour.
Modern day mail sacks.
That is probably also good for the lags, but misses completely the point of the story...
As opposed to the modern day slavery of imported farm workers, or minimum wage hospitality workers and cleaners in London, sleeping six to a room on bunk beds because they can’t afford to live where they work?
Isn't the Sandpit dependent on exploited imported cheap labour living in bunkrooms?
Very much so, and so many London liberals have written pages of rage against it - while happily tolerating the same situation among hundreds of thousands of European workers in their own city.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
On AI and autonomous driving:
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
I completely disagree that its at the same level of self-driving now than thirty years ago.
There's two different philosophies between self-driving. One is to get self-driving cars in one giant leap, which is nowhere near getting live and isn't going to be for an eternity, its vaporware.
The other philosophy is to do it incrementally. Driver assisted removing elements of driving until there's little left then closing the last gap. That has come along in leaps and bounds in recent decades and is still getting closer every year.
Self-parking, adaptive cruise control, lane assist etc, etc, etc are coming along every year nowadays. This is the real way we will ultimately arrive at self-driving if we ever do, in steps not a single leap.
I agree, but the two approaches converge, and the iterative approach may well run into the roadblocks (or if it's Tesla, emergency vehicles) that the giant leap approach has hit.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
(snip) @theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them. (snip)
Are you sure? This is from 2016, but the age of passenger rolling stock appears to be a very mixed picture, and relatively little is from the 1970s, and not much from the 1980s, especially the early 1980s. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38450117
The removal from service of the Pacers, and most of the HSTs, will have improved this since. even if the replacements for the HSTs are generally worse.
I think that was a symbol of a general attitude !
Just making trains shiny and new doesn't make them better - if anything the trend is going the opposite way. I would far rather travel long distances in any of a BR Mk1/Mk2/Mk3 coach than endure a Vomiter or IEP, both of which have been "value engineered" with no consideration for the unfortunate passagers. The last reasonable new express stock in the UK was the Pendilios, which are now 20 years old (and are still not nearly as pleasant for the passengers as a MK3).
The IEP is developing into a particularly special farce, as it seems Hitachi has built large chunks of the bodyshells out of a totally unsuitable grade of aluminium, and its fairly obvious that they are going to be dogged by cracking issues for the rest of their (hopefully short) lives.
The thing with good railway rolling stock is it essentially lasts forever. Unfortunately its also really expensive. Therefore, its an asset which should be sweated - trains should be expected to last between 40 and 50 years in service. The problem with this is that the politicians where ever the old trains end up have taken to screaming about it. So now everyone has new trains, and we're scrapping units with useful life (particularly EMUs) left right and centre.
Someone will be paying for this (and it's not going to be rail users as most of them don't pay their way anyway).
I’d rather be in a crash in the new stock compared with the old stock. Obviously not that big a consideration as our railways are fairly safe, but it’s all part of the safety model.
Depends on what new stock vs what old stock. Obviously mk1s suffer badly from effectively having a separate underframe...
Extinction Rebellion really are thick as pigshit aren't they.
Sky just interviewing a spokeswoman from that saying that British people are being lied to and told that we can't do anything about climate change, or that its about China, when we can tackle this - and that in recent years there's been a 60% increase in emissions.
Actually there's been close to a 60% decrease in British emissions. Where is the 60% increase coming from?
XR have been extraordinarily successful in recent years in raising the profile of these issues and pushing for action, which is something to be proud of, but I do have the worry that, as an umbrella group, they have taken it as far as they are able.
The passion is still there, and there are people who would mouth platitudes but do very little unless pressed by campaigners, but XR are perfectly capable of being just plain wrong, and when that happens religious fervour is a hindrance as you look like a fool, and the 'it's never enough' messaging works to make people see the problem, but doesn't exactly encourage people and governments who are on board. Even governing bodies need a pat on the head from time to time, not just constating berating.
I don't know if XR even have been successful in recent years, or if they've just jumped on a pre-existing bandwagon and been louder and shriller than anyone else.
Quite frankly governments, scientists etc have been dealing with this for much longer than XR have been around. The UK from 2010 to 2020 had gone from overwhelmingly coal powered electricity to switching off and demolishing coal power plants, with wind farms increasingly everwhere long before XR even where a blip on the landscape.
I said successful at raising the profile, not that they created the bandwagon or preexisting actions.
Fact is being louder and shriller has worked. Councils and others across the land badgered by XR (or XR types) and a big increase in press coverage of that sort of pressurising, has seen a response, it is more in the everyday consciousness than it was even 4 years ago. Everybody on earth has probably heard of Greta bloody Thuberg by now.
My point was that being louder and shriller has achieved that profile raising, but I tihnk it is maximised, and actually achieving things is not helped much by them now. In fact, it can be counter productive.
Councils and governments were already dealing with these issues before XR came about.
Everybody has heard of Greta, but what has she actually changed in the UK? What can you point to and say "that is happening because of Greta/XR" which wouldn't have happened anyway?
The simple reality is we were already dealing with climate change, technology will be the solution and that's been invested in for decades now. But that's not good news for XR.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
On AI and autonomous driving:
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
I completely disagree that its at the same level of self-driving now than thirty years ago.
There's two different philosophies between self-driving. One is to get self-driving cars in one giant leap, which is nowhere near getting live and isn't going to be for an eternity, its vaporware.
The other philosophy is to do it incrementally. Driver assisted removing elements of driving until there's little left then closing the last gap. That has come along in leaps and bounds in recent decades and is still getting closer every year.
Self-parking, adaptive cruise control, lane assist etc, etc, etc are coming along every year nowadays. This is the real way we will ultimately arrive at self-driving if we ever do, in steps not a single leap.
I agree, but the two approaches converge, and the iterative approach may well run into the roadblocks (or if it's Tesla, emergency vehicles) that the giant leap approach has hit.
You’d have thought that very high up on the list of things to train a self-driving vehicle, is what an ambulance looks like and how to avoid it? SDV 101.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
We are a small country. Quite frankly besides relatively a few things moved in bulk, overwhelmingly trains don't provide capacity, vehicles on roads do.
Its not just that the overwhelming majority of commuters move via roads - the overwhelming majority of goods transit quite rightly happens the same way too. And the idea that goods transit should instead happen via trains instead is overwhelmingly a farcical suggestion that fails in the face of actual experience which is why it doesn't happen. We aren't looking typically to move train loads of goods thousands of miles, because our country isn't thousands of miles long.
You can quibble with the occupancy assumptions in the cars and trains but one new high speed rail line running fewer than 20 trains an hour (at 400m length) provides more capacity than a new 6 lane motorway, with a smaller footprint. Some suggest even double the capacity.
Since the main work you’re doing in a vehicle is moving air out of the way, a long slim vehicle like a train will also always be more energy efficient than equivalent number of cars spaced out on a motorway with appropriate stopping distances.
Extinction Rebellion really are thick as pigshit aren't they.
Sky just interviewing a spokeswoman from that saying that British people are being lied to and told that we can't do anything about climate change, or that its about China, when we can tackle this - and that in recent years there's been a 60% increase in emissions.
Actually there's been close to a 60% decrease in British emissions. Where is the 60% increase coming from?
Britain just does not count things with emissions and hey presto we get magic reductions
The quote is bizarre, it comes across that they are aghast at the prospect of hiring ex-cons. Which no doubt happens all the time without much fanfare.
Maybe you should read it.
What is being discussed is not hiring ex-cons (which would be great, Timpsons et al concur), it's about using current prisoners as cheap labour.
Modern day mail sacks.
That is probably also good for the lags, but misses completely the point of the story...
As opposed to the modern day slavery of imported farm workers, or minimum wage hospitality workers and cleaners in London, sleeping six to a room on bunk beds because they can’t afford to live where they work?
Isn't the Sandpit dependent on exploited imported cheap labour living in bunkrooms?
Very much so, and so many London liberals have written pages of rage against it - while happily tolerating the same situation among hundreds of thousands of European workers in their own city.
They also happy to spend their winters there holidaying in the very accommodation built by the cheap labour.....
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
On AI and autonomous driving:
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
I completely disagree that its at the same level of self-driving now than thirty years ago.
There's two different philosophies between self-driving. One is to get self-driving cars in one giant leap, which is nowhere near getting live and isn't going to be for an eternity, its vaporware.
The other philosophy is to do it incrementally. Driver assisted removing elements of driving until there's little left then closing the last gap. That has come along in leaps and bounds in recent decades and is still getting closer every year.
Self-parking, adaptive cruise control, lane assist etc, etc, etc are coming along every year nowadays. This is the real way we will ultimately arrive at self-driving if we ever do, in steps not a single leap.
It's a political question not a technological one.
People will accept (heartless as it is) a human driver occasionally killing someone as a "mistake", or hold them accountable for it in the dock.
Their tolerance for a machine making a mistake is precisely zero, so the first person that gets killed due to an AI conflict, system shutdown, bug etc. and they'll all be pulled off the road.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
(snip) @theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them. (snip)
Are you sure? This is from 2016, but the age of passenger rolling stock appears to be a very mixed picture, and relatively little is from the 1970s, and not much from the 1980s, especially the early 1980s. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38450117
The removal from service of the Pacers, and most of the HSTs, will have improved this since. even if the replacements for the HSTs are generally worse.
I think that was a symbol of a general attitude !
Just making trains shiny and new doesn't make them better - if anything the trend is going the opposite way. I would far rather travel long distances in any of a BR Mk1/Mk2/Mk3 coach than endure a Vomiter or IEP, both of which have been "value engineered" with no consideration for the unfortunate passagers. The last reasonable new express stock in the UK was the Pendilios, which are now 20 years old (and are still not nearly as pleasant for the passengers as a MK3).
The IEP is developing into a particularly special farce, as it seems Hitachi has built large chunks of the bodyshells out of a totally unsuitable grade of aluminium, and its fairly obvious that they are going to be dogged by cracking issues for the rest of their (hopefully short) lives.
The thing with good railway rolling stock is it essentially lasts forever. Unfortunately its also really expensive. Therefore, its an asset which should be sweated - trains should be expected to last between 40 and 50 years in service. The problem with this is that the politicians where ever the old trains end up have taken to screaming about it. So now everyone has new trains, and we're scrapping units with useful life (particularly EMUs) left right and centre.
Someone will be paying for this (and it's not going to be rail users as most of them don't pay their way anyway).
I’d rather be in a crash in the new stock compared with the old stock. Obviously not that big a consideration as our railways are fairly safe, but it’s all part of the safety model.
Depends on what new stock vs what old stock. Obviously mk1s suffer badly from effectively having a separate underframe. The Mk3 shell has proven remarkably crashworthy on most of the occasions its had the misfortune to be tested.
The IEP that scattered itself over the countryside after the low speed bump at Neville Hill didn't make me feel inclined to trust its supposed crashworthyness at higher speeds. I'm aware of why that particular incident happened, but it reflects very poorly on its designers that there was a window of impact speed which caused this sort of behaviour - and left me wondering what else the designers had "forgotten" to notice.
First time I've seen "Neville Hill" and "countryside" in the same sentence.
New stock gets less and less comfortable. Ironing board seats, ffs. Like sitting on a concrete block.
Oh to be able to luxuriate in the deep sprung seats of a Mark 1. Windows open on a summer's day.
Extinction Rebellion really are thick as pigshit aren't they.
Sky just interviewing a spokeswoman from that saying that British people are being lied to and told that we can't do anything about climate change, or that its about China, when we can tackle this - and that in recent years there's been a 60% increase in emissions.
Actually there's been close to a 60% decrease in British emissions. Where is the 60% increase coming from?
XR have been extraordinarily successful in recent years in raising the profile of these issues and pushing for action, which is something to be proud of, but I do have the worry that, as an umbrella group, they have taken it as far as they are able.
The passion is still there, and there are people who would mouth platitudes but do very little unless pressed by campaigners, but XR are perfectly capable of being just plain wrong, and when that happens religious fervour is a hindrance as you look like a fool, and the 'it's never enough' messaging works to make people see the problem, but doesn't exactly encourage people and governments who are on board. Even governing bodies need a pat on the head from time to time, not just constating berating.
I don't know if XR even have been successful in recent years, or if they've just jumped on a pre-existing bandwagon and been louder and shriller than anyone else.
Quite frankly governments, scientists etc have been dealing with this for much longer than XR have been around. The UK from 2010 to 2020 had gone from overwhelmingly coal powered electricity to switching off and demolishing coal power plants, with wind farms increasingly everwhere long before XR even where a blip on the landscape.
I said successful at raising the profile, not that they created the bandwagon or preexisting actions.
Fact is being louder and shriller has worked. Councils and others across the land badgered by XR (or XR types) and a big increase in press coverage of that sort of pressurising, has seen a response, it is more in the everyday consciousness than it was even 4 years ago. Everybody on earth has probably heard of Greta bloody Thuberg by now.
My point was that being louder and shriller has achieved that profile raising, but I tihnk it is maximised, and actually achieving things is not helped much by them now. In fact, it can be counter productive.
Councils and governments were already dealing with these issues before XR came about.
Everybody has heard of Greta, but what has she actually changed in the UK? What can you point to and say "that is happening because of Greta/XR" which wouldn't have happened anyway?
The simple reality is we were already dealing with climate change, technology will be the solution and that's been invested in for decades now. But that's not good news for XR.
School absenteeism has been massively up the last couple years, which I think is what she was aiming for.
Extinction Rebellion really are thick as pigshit aren't they.
Sky just interviewing a spokeswoman from that saying that British people are being lied to and told that we can't do anything about climate change, or that its about China, when we can tackle this - and that in recent years there's been a 60% increase in emissions.
Actually there's been close to a 60% decrease in British emissions. Where is the 60% increase coming from?
Britain just does not count things with emissions and hey presto we get magic reductions
Which part of the statistics has been falsified in this manner?
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
On AI and autonomous driving:
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
On the other side, I don’t think there’s anything too special about human perception. It can be artificially replicated, just a question of time and willpower. Musk could have done a coast to coast journey already if they gamed it with a preprogrammed route. But I think he figured what would be the point of that.
Seems to me the plan they’re progressing with is a sound one. I’m quite confident that 3D auto labelling (indeed 4D auto labelling) will get them over the line for proper autonomy in most use cases relatively soon. Would be interested if you spotted any big holes in their presentation last week.
"I don’t think there’s anything too special about human perception. It can be artificially replicated"
Many experts disagree with you. Visual recognition of objects is an immensely difficult problem to solve. Hence all the problems we see with the facial recognition software that is in use.
A big issue is that there's billions of dollars floating about in the industry, and therefore lots of people keen to over-egg their progress. Of which Musk is just one example.
Totally off topic, I am having a hard time imagining 17" of rain falling in one day in Humphreys County, TN. The highest by far I have lived through is 8", which was truly extraordinary. But 17" ...
Few things are less cherry at the start of a week than reading about GP mistakes.
So given covid backlogs to medical treatment is private medical insurance ** now worth it ?
Or would paying for private consultancy or treatment if required be a better ?
** Affordable but more than double the cost of home and car insurance combined.
Look carefully at the cover. Most policies require a GP referral to cover payment, and there are significant excesses and exclusions. Many policies will refuse cover for chronic conditions (lasting greater than 6 weeks) or those where NHS is available on a reasonable timescale. Every month I have a Private patient who is annoyed at their refusal of cover by the insurance company that they were relying on.
That said, waiting lists have mushroomed for elective procedures and even for outpatient appointments. In my dept we are now booking routine referrals to outpatients from Dec 2020.
Self funding private care is a reasonable option, and putting those premiums into a savings pot instead of an insurance company gives you control and flexibility. You get to keep the money too if unused.
A lot depends on your own financial resources and existing health status and risks.
Thanks, that's very helpful.
The self-funding if necessary option looks the best for me.
Yes. Insurance generally - travel, health, car, house, life, all of it - is a bet with the odds skewed heavily to the House. The only rational reason to do it is to get protection against something which if it happened would really screw you (or your dependents) up financially. And even then you need to look carefully at the probability of it happening. The only insurance I have is basic motor and that's because it's the law.
So no house insurance? Bold call.
Also, on health, as mentioned earlier, I bust up my hand (you should have seen the other guy) a couple of years ago and the NHS said I had to wait five weeks to see a consultant. By which time of course the bones would have healed. I was at a private consultant the following day.
But I like your carefree, hair in the wind, freewheeling attitude.
Don't know about kinabalu but as a tenant I certainly don't insure the house, and using his reasoning I also don't insure the contents - I can afford to replace some or all of them if necessary, and would rather not pay extortionate premiums to cover the off-chance that the place burns to a cinder. Health insurance is trickier since, as you say, you can pay a lot for one-off treatment of moderate complexity. If you have a crisis like a road accident the insurer will shovel you into the NHS anyway, though, so I don't insure for that either, and will basically go with the NHS flow.
Doesn't your landlord require you to have insurance? Interesting. And it is entirely understandable not to have it, although many people find it extremely reassuring to have such insurance although we do appreciate Nick that you are somewhat of an odd fish.
And as for your road accident the insurer won't "shovel you into the NHS" because from the scene you will in the first instance go to the NHS. It's after that when it might get trickier if you have, as in my example, some broken bones or another condition which needs investigation and/or is more complex but yes people can survive (!) on the NHS wholly albeit they will need to sharpen their elbows dramatically.
In the US if there is a mortgage on the property, it is the landlord that is required to have "renter's insurance".
Correction: it is the landlord who is required to insure the building which is not renters insurance.
You certainly need buildings insurance as minimum here if you are letting a property and have a mortgage, contents not so sure but adding the minimum is peanuts.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
On AI and autonomous driving:
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
I completely disagree that its at the same level of self-driving now than thirty years ago.
There's two different philosophies between self-driving. One is to get self-driving cars in one giant leap, which is nowhere near getting live and isn't going to be for an eternity, its vaporware.
The other philosophy is to do it incrementally. Driver assisted removing elements of driving until there's little left then closing the last gap. That has come along in leaps and bounds in recent decades and is still getting closer every year.
Self-parking, adaptive cruise control, lane assist etc, etc, etc are coming along every year nowadays. This is the real way we will ultimately arrive at self-driving if we ever do, in steps not a single leap.
It's a political question not a technological one.
People will accept (heartless as it is) a human driver occasionally killing someone as a "mistake", or hold them accountable for it in the dock.
Their tolerance for a machine making a mistake is precisely zero, so the first person that gets killed due to an AI conflict, system shutdown, bug etc. and they'll all be pulled off the road.
Especially if said machine has a trillion-dollar company behind it, ripe for being sued for eight figures for every fatal accident.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
On AI and autonomous driving:
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
I completely disagree that its at the same level of self-driving now than thirty years ago.
There's two different philosophies between self-driving. One is to get self-driving cars in one giant leap, which is nowhere near getting live and isn't going to be for an eternity, its vaporware.
The other philosophy is to do it incrementally. Driver assisted removing elements of driving until there's little left then closing the last gap. That has come along in leaps and bounds in recent decades and is still getting closer every year.
Self-parking, adaptive cruise control, lane assist etc, etc, etc are coming along every year nowadays. This is the real way we will ultimately arrive at self-driving if we ever do, in steps not a single leap.
It's a political question not a technological one.
People will accept (heartless as it is) a human driver occasionally killing someone as a "mistake", or hold them accountable for it in the dock.
Their tolerance for a machine making a mistake is precisely zero, so the first person that gets killed due to an AI conflict, system shutdown, bug etc. and they'll all be pulled off the road.
Depends doesn’t it. Computer driven cars will have different kinds of accident to human driven ones. But if the frequency of those accidents are a fraction of the human ones then it’s easy to see the point where human drivers are outlawed on public roads. It’s certainly false to say tolerance is zero. There have been quite a few deaths caused by computer enhanced driving systems and they’re still operational.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
On AI and autonomous driving:
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
I completely disagree that its at the same level of self-driving now than thirty years ago.
There's two different philosophies between self-driving. One is to get self-driving cars in one giant leap, which is nowhere near getting live and isn't going to be for an eternity, its vaporware.
The other philosophy is to do it incrementally. Driver assisted removing elements of driving until there's little left then closing the last gap. That has come along in leaps and bounds in recent decades and is still getting closer every year.
Self-parking, adaptive cruise control, lane assist etc, etc, etc are coming along every year nowadays. This is the real way we will ultimately arrive at self-driving if we ever do, in steps not a single leap.
It's a political question not a technological one.
People will accept (heartless as it is) a human driver occasionally killing someone as a "mistake", or hold them accountable for it in the dock.
Their tolerance for a machine making a mistake is precisely zero, so the first person that gets killed due to an AI conflict, system shutdown, bug etc. and they'll all be pulled off the road.
Especially if said machine has a trillion-dollar company behind it, ripe for being sued for eight figures for every fatal accident.
At the moment they get around this by saying the driver should always be in control. If and when the flick is ever fully switched so that the liability falls on the designer of the system, it won’t be a $600bn company but a multi trillion dollar one. Society for certain will not let perfect be the enemy of good on this, these are trivial things to resolve once the technology is “good enough”.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
We are a small country. Quite frankly besides relatively a few things moved in bulk, overwhelmingly trains don't provide capacity, vehicles on roads do.
Its not just that the overwhelming majority of commuters move via roads - the overwhelming majority of goods transit quite rightly happens the same way too. And the idea that goods transit should instead happen via trains instead is overwhelmingly a farcical suggestion that fails in the face of actual experience which is why it doesn't happen. We aren't looking typically to move train loads of goods thousands of miles, because our country isn't thousands of miles long.
You can quibble with the occupancy assumptions in the cars and trains but one new high speed rail line running fewer than 20 trains an hour (at 400m length) provides more capacity than a new 6 lane motorway, with a smaller footprint. Some suggest even double the capacity.
Since the main work you’re doing in a vehicle is moving air out of the way, a long slim vehicle like a train will also always be more energy efficient than equivalent number of cars spaced out on a motorway with appropriate stopping distances.
[Citation Needed] I call bullshit on that. Its just not true.
Only 5% of goods in the UK are moved by rail. Volume of freight on roads massively exceeds the volume of freight on rails.
The problem with that fiction is we don't need to move trainloads at a time many miles since most businesses in the UK are moving relatively few goods from A to B. That's why they use roads, the vehicles can get exactly what is needed from exactly where it needs to be, to exactly where it needs to go to.
Trains can't do that. Actually the volume of freight moved by train has collapsed in the past decade because the primary thing we needed trains to move in the past, large volumes of coal in to power our power plants, is no longer required anymore.
Labour shortages is a huge quandary facing this Brexit gov't.
Whole rationale for Hard Brexit was stopping FoM. If UK ends up effectively restoring it ONE WAY via broad exemptions, people may ask why they lost their FoM and what reasons remain for shunning the single market. ~AA
"The desperation for workers in the food supply sector is so great, some companies are trying to hire prisoners on day release to do paid work."
Is it beginning to dawn on gov't yet that Freedom of Movement was not a burden, but a blessing? ~AA
Awesome news. Getting a job is the single best indicator of recidivism among prisoners. Those with jobs are way more likely to stay on the straight and narrow, than go back to their former ways.
While I agree, it's probably not entirely cause and effect, since those least likely to reoffend might be more likely to get jobs in the first place.
Few things are less cherry at the start of a week than reading about GP mistakes.
So given covid backlogs to medical treatment is private medical insurance ** now worth it ?
Or would paying for private consultancy or treatment if required be a better ?
** Affordable but more than double the cost of home and car insurance combined.
Look carefully at the cover. Most policies require a GP referral to cover payment, and there are significant excesses and exclusions. Many policies will refuse cover for chronic conditions (lasting greater than 6 weeks) or those where NHS is available on a reasonable timescale. Every month I have a Private patient who is annoyed at their refusal of cover by the insurance company that they were relying on.
That said, waiting lists have mushroomed for elective procedures and even for outpatient appointments. In my dept we are now booking routine referrals to outpatients from Dec 2020.
Self funding private care is a reasonable option, and putting those premiums into a savings pot instead of an insurance company gives you control and flexibility. You get to keep the money too if unused.
A lot depends on your own financial resources and existing health status and risks.
Thanks, that's very helpful.
The self-funding if necessary option looks the best for me.
Yes. Insurance generally - travel, health, car, house, life, all of it - is a bet with the odds skewed heavily to the House. The only rational reason to do it is to get protection against something which if it happened would really screw you (or your dependents) up financially. And even then you need to look carefully at the probability of it happening. The only insurance I have is basic motor and that's because it's the law.
So no house insurance? Bold call.
Also, on health, as mentioned earlier, I bust up my hand (you should have seen the other guy) a couple of years ago and the NHS said I had to wait five weeks to see a consultant. By which time of course the bones would have healed. I was at a private consultant the following day.
But I like your carefree, hair in the wind, freewheeling attitude.
Don't know about kinabalu but as a tenant I certainly don't insure the house, and using his reasoning I also don't insure the contents - I can afford to replace some or all of them if necessary, and would rather not pay extortionate premiums to cover the off-chance that the place burns to a cinder. Health insurance is trickier since, as you say, you can pay a lot for one-off treatment of moderate complexity. If you have a crisis like a road accident the insurer will shovel you into the NHS anyway, though, so I don't insure for that either, and will basically go with the NHS flow.
Doesn't your landlord require you to have insurance? Interesting. And it is entirely understandable not to have it, although many people find it extremely reassuring to have such insurance although we do appreciate Nick that you are somewhat of an odd fish.
And as for your road accident the insurer won't "shovel you into the NHS" because from the scene you will in the first instance go to the NHS. It's after that when it might get trickier if you have, as in my example, some broken bones or another condition which needs investigation and/or is more complex but yes people can survive (!) on the NHS wholly albeit they will need to sharpen their elbows dramatically.
In the US if there is a mortgage on the property, it is the landlord that is required to have "renter's insurance".
Correction: it is the landlord who is required to insure the building which is not renters insurance.
You certainly need buildings insurance as minimum here if you are letting a property and have a mortgage, contents not so sure but adding the minimum is peanuts.
Maybe it's one of those free drinks in first class things. The rent reflects and includes a cost for insurance.
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
On AI and autonomous driving:
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
I completely disagree that its at the same level of self-driving now than thirty years ago.
There's two different philosophies between self-driving. One is to get self-driving cars in one giant leap, which is nowhere near getting live and isn't going to be for an eternity, its vaporware.
The other philosophy is to do it incrementally. Driver assisted removing elements of driving until there's little left then closing the last gap. That has come along in leaps and bounds in recent decades and is still getting closer every year.
Self-parking, adaptive cruise control, lane assist etc, etc, etc are coming along every year nowadays. This is the real way we will ultimately arrive at self-driving if we ever do, in steps not a single leap.
It's a political question not a technological one.
People will accept (heartless as it is) a human driver occasionally killing someone as a "mistake", or hold them accountable for it in the dock.
Their tolerance for a machine making a mistake is precisely zero, so the first person that gets killed due to an AI conflict, system shutdown, bug etc. and they'll all be pulled off the road.
The same stuff was said about trains and cars in the 19th century. ‘Wait til they kill someone then they will be abandoned’. And for good reason, they WERE more dangerous, by orders of magnitude, than people riding horses. How many millions have died, since then, in car crashes? How many run over?
Yet we didn’t abandon cars, we eagerly embraced them. Because they made life so much better and easier
Same goes for any new transport tech. If self drive cars can be done, and they make life easier and better, we will embrace them
I know many on here disagree, but I believe self drive is coming, and we will welcome it
Also: pilotless drones in the air. They’re basically here NOW. Another revolution
Yes, the capacity issue is that people don't want to move goods by rail. 89% of freight is moved by roads for a reason, but sure "adding a new high speed route will add more than a motorway". *Bullshit!*
If Priti gets her finger out and gets a few more villains locked up we will have increased the size of the labour pool.
Brucie bonus!
How about locking up all those economic migrants trying to get across the Channel to work here. And then once we have them safely inside, giving them a job?
Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.
It's still a stupid decision.
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issue
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
On AI and autonomous driving:
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
I completely disagree that its at the same level of self-driving now than thirty years ago.
There's two different philosophies between self-driving. One is to get self-driving cars in one giant leap, which is nowhere near getting live and isn't going to be for an eternity, its vaporware.
The other philosophy is to do it incrementally. Driver assisted removing elements of driving until there's little left then closing the last gap. That has come along in leaps and bounds in recent decades and is still getting closer every year.
Self-parking, adaptive cruise control, lane assist etc, etc, etc are coming along every year nowadays. This is the real way we will ultimately arrive at self-driving if we ever do, in steps not a single leap.
It's a political question not a technological one.
People will accept (heartless as it is) a human driver occasionally killing someone as a "mistake", or hold them accountable for it in the dock.
Their tolerance for a machine making a mistake is precisely zero, so the first person that gets killed due to an AI conflict, system shutdown, bug etc. and they'll all be pulled off the road.
Depends doesn’t it. Computer driven cars will have different kinds of accident to human driven ones. But if the frequency of those accidents are a fraction of the human ones then it’s easy to see the point where human drivers are outlawed on public roads. It’s certainly false to say tolerance is zero. There have been quite a few deaths caused by computer enhanced driving systems and they’re still operational.
I think your post makes my point for me on the politics: human drivers will never be outlawed on public roads as people find driving a form of self-expression, and part of their freedom and independence.
I don't think your final point holds as there's always a driver at the moment - they're always ultimately accountable for the car.
Comments
I guess some people will just be unlucky
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
We also have no idea about his medical history, he might have some underlying condition, and for whatever reason there will be people for whom the vaccine just doesn't work.
We have to hope that rapid improvement in treatment is made in the same way vaccines development was.
I still love them though, but I keep mine SORNed.
Whole rationale for Hard Brexit was stopping FoM. If UK ends up effectively restoring it ONE WAY via broad exemptions, people may ask why they lost their FoM and what reasons remain for shunning the single market. ~AA
"The desperation for workers in the food supply sector is so great, some companies are trying to hire prisoners on day release to do paid work."
Is it beginning to dawn on gov't yet that Freedom of Movement was not a burden, but a blessing? ~AA
https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/hgv-lorry-driver-shortage-eu-workers-10000-visas-christmas-logistics-uk-1162285
The last reasonable new express stock in the UK was the Pendilios, which are now 20 years old (and are still not nearly as pleasant for the passengers as a MK3).
The IEP is developing into a particularly special farce, as it seems Hitachi has built large chunks of the bodyshells out of a totally unsuitable grade of aluminium, and its fairly obvious that they are going to be dogged by cracking issues for the rest of their (hopefully short) lives.
The thing with good railway rolling stock is it essentially lasts forever. Unfortunately its also really expensive. Therefore, its an asset which should be sweated - trains should be expected to last between 40 and 50 years in service.
The problem with this is that the politicians where ever the old trains end up have taken to screaming about it. So now everyone has new trains, and we're scrapping units with useful life (particularly EMUs) left right and centre.
Someone will be paying for this (and it's not going to be rail users as most of them don't pay their way anyway).
https://twitter.com/afneil/status/1429764078914920453
Hold on to that thought.
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
Actually the Australians were world beaters in Stage 1 of COVID. I would suggest even better than NZ, given position in the world, population, demographics. As we know, the problem is they developed their own vaccine which worked, but had the side effect of producing false positives on an AIDs test. If that unfortunate drawback hadn't occurred, they would be still world beaters.
Tbh with all the infrastructure required I wouldn't be surprised if the CO2 cost/passenger is massive initially probably heading down to some long term smaller asymptote by 2100 or so.
The Taliban have said that they will not extend the August 31 deadline for Nato forces to leave Afghanistan, jeopardising hopes of extending the evacuation of thousands of foreign nationals and vulnerable Afghans.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/taliban-reject-pleas-to-extend-evacuation-deadline-sdr327w99
The UK government has signed a deal with Pfizer-BioNTech for 35 million more doses of its coronavirus vaccine, to be delivered from the second half of 2022.
On, bbc.co.uk, 'London civil servant's bus odyssey sparks Twitter storm'.
When bus passes first were available to OAP's people we seeing how far they could get on one of those. You can do Lowestoft to Lands End, apparently, but not in one day.
Sky just interviewing a spokeswoman from that saying that British people are being lied to and told that we can't do anything about climate change, or that its about China, when we can tackle this - and that in recent years there's been a 60% increase in emissions.
Actually there's been close to a 60% decrease in British emissions. Where is the 60% increase coming from?
However, given it was not just a frontal impact, but also a fall, I would have concerns about how well any stock would have withstood it. But the HST did not fare well.
My issue with him is that he just spams Tweets here without actually engaging or bothering to read replies or anything like that.
This is about the fourth or fifth day in a row he's posted about prisoners being hired like its a bad thing. Every single time there's been an almost universal response from left to right across the spectrum saying that prisoners getting jobs is a good thing that prevents recidivism. From Nick Palmer, to Gallowgate, to you and me and dozens of others in between it seems across the spectrum this is one thing we can agree on whether left or right.
Yet @Scott_xP doesn't engage, doesn't read the replies, or doesn't respond to them. Tomorrow he'll be again scraping another Tweet from Twitter whinging about prisoners getting a job as if its a bad thing.
Bringing Tweets across to show news as part of engagement can be interesting. Doing so without engaging is just pure spam.
Plus, whenever you change gear with that unique gear box, you can make an amusing ‘trombone’ sound, to accompany the movement
The passion is still there, and there are people who would mouth platitudes but do very little unless pressed by campaigners, but XR are perfectly capable of being just plain wrong, and when that happens religious fervour is a hindrance as you look like a fool, and the 'it's never enough' messaging works to make people see the problem, but doesn't exactly encourage people and governments who are on board. Even governing bodies need a pat on the head from time to time, not just constating berating.
Far too many commentators, living in London and hating the government, seem to think that labour shortages at the bottom end of the market are a bad thing, that can only be solved by throwing a few hundred thousand minimum-wage workers from Bratislava or Bucharest at the ‘problem’.
Alternatively, we might start to see the UK’s terrible recent productivity figures start to improve, as businesses invest in capital to replace the unlimited supply of labour. Oh, and as Stuart Rose correctly identified, wages going up.
I am at work today, for the first time in almost a year and a half.
What was striking this morning was the huge gulf between mask usage on the commuter train and that on trains full of leisure travelers at the weekend. Then, well under half covered up. This morning it was 80-90%.
The train into Leeds was comparatively quiet. I had a double seat to myself, as did everyone else, whereas pre-Covid I might be able to grab one of the last vacant seats if I was lucky, with plenty standing after Shipley.
What is being discussed is not hiring ex-cons (which would be great, Timpsons et al concur), it's about using current prisoners as cheap labour.
Modern day mail sacks.
That is probably also good for the lags, but misses completely the point of the story...
Got it...
Quite frankly governments, scientists etc have been dealing with this for much longer than XR have been around. The UK from 2010 to 2020 had gone from overwhelmingly coal powered electricity to switching off and demolishing coal power plants, with wind farms increasingly everwhere long before XR even where a blip on the landscape.
There is no point of the story. Prisoners working reduces recidivism. It aides them with rehabilitation, it reduces recidivism, it is an unmitigated good thing.
Say the matter was raised in that way in the Commons by Keir, Boris would have an easy out immediately because of the way it was presented to him.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
And that's not the Brexiteer argument, its something anyone sentient agrees with. Its the entire point of day release, its part of rehabilitation and the evidence it reduces recidivism is overwhelming.
So good, glad you've got it. How long until you whinge about prisoners getting jobs again?
Seems to me the plan they’re progressing with is a sound one. I’m quite confident that 3D auto labelling (indeed 4D auto labelling) will get them over the line for proper autonomy in most use cases relatively soon. Would be interested if you spotted any big holes in their presentation last week.
Obviously mk1s suffer badly from effectively having a separate underframe.
The Mk3 shell has proven remarkably crashworthy on most of the occasions its had the misfortune to be tested.
The IEP that scattered itself over the countryside after the low speed bump at Neville Hill didn't make me feel inclined to trust its supposed crashworthyness at higher speeds. I'm aware of why that particular incident happened, but it reflects very poorly on its designers that there was a window of impact speed which caused this sort of behaviour - and left me wondering what else the designers had "forgotten" to notice.
Fact is being louder and shriller has worked. Councils and others across the land badgered by XR (or XR types) and a big increase in press coverage of that sort of pressurising, has seen a response, it is more in the everyday consciousness than it was even 4 years ago. Everybody on earth has probably heard of Greta bloody Thuberg by now.
My point was that being louder and shriller has achieved that profile raising, but I tihnk it is maximised, and actually achieving things is not helped much by them now. In fact, it can be counter productive.
There's two different philosophies between self-driving. One is to get self-driving cars in one giant leap, which is nowhere near getting live and isn't going to be for an eternity, its vaporware.
The other philosophy is to do it incrementally. Driver assisted removing elements of driving until there's little left then closing the last gap. That has come along in leaps and bounds in recent decades and is still getting closer every year.
Self-parking, adaptive cruise control, lane assist etc, etc, etc are coming along every year nowadays. This is the real way we will ultimately arrive at self-driving if we ever do, in steps not a single leap.
Brucie bonus!
Its not just that the overwhelming majority of commuters move via roads - the overwhelming majority of goods transit quite rightly happens the same way too. And the idea that goods transit should instead happen via trains instead is in general an illogical farcical suggestion that fails in the face of actual experience which is why it doesn't happen.
We aren't looking typically to move train loads of goods thousands of miles, because our country isn't thousands of miles long.
If you want to improve capacity, then improve the road networks.
I was surprised I managed it, and a couple of the connections were tight in Scotland. It's a shame the Postbuses no longer run.
Correction: it is the landlord who is required to insure the building which is not renters insurance.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/16/business/tesla-autopilot-federal-safety-probe/index.html
Everybody has heard of Greta, but what has she actually changed in the UK? What can you point to and say "that is happening because of Greta/XR" which wouldn't have happened anyway?
The simple reality is we were already dealing with climate change, technology will be the solution and that's been invested in for decades now. But that's not good news for XR.
Since the main work you’re doing in a vehicle is moving air out of the way, a long slim vehicle like a train will also always be more energy efficient than equivalent number of cars spaced out on a motorway with appropriate stopping distances.
People will accept (heartless as it is) a human driver occasionally killing someone as a "mistake", or hold them accountable for it in the dock.
Their tolerance for a machine making a mistake is precisely zero, so the first person that gets killed due to an AI conflict, system shutdown, bug etc. and they'll all be pulled off the road.
New stock gets less and less comfortable. Ironing board seats, ffs. Like sitting on a concrete block.
Oh to be able to luxuriate in the deep sprung seats of a Mark 1. Windows open on a summer's day.
Many experts disagree with you. Visual recognition of objects is an immensely difficult problem to solve. Hence all the problems we see with the facial recognition software that is in use.
A big issue is that there's billions of dollars floating about in the industry, and therefore lots of people keen to over-egg their progress. Of which Musk is just one example.
Only 5% of goods in the UK are moved by rail. Volume of freight on roads massively exceeds the volume of freight on rails.
The problem with that fiction is we don't need to move trainloads at a time many miles since most businesses in the UK are moving relatively few goods from A to B. That's why they use roads, the vehicles can get exactly what is needed from exactly where it needs to be, to exactly where it needs to go to.
Trains can't do that. Actually the volume of freight moved by train has collapsed in the past decade because the primary thing we needed trains to move in the past, large volumes of coal in to power our power plants, is no longer required anymore.
The idea rail provides capacity in this nation instead of roads is an ignorant fiction.
https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1257/freight-rail-usage-2018-19-quarter-4.pdf
Yet we didn’t abandon cars, we eagerly embraced them. Because they made life so much better and easier
Same goes for any new transport tech. If self drive cars can be done, and they make life easier and better, we will embrace them
I know many on here disagree, but I believe self drive is coming, and we will welcome it
Also: pilotless drones in the air. They’re basically here NOW. Another revolution
"We have a capacity issue on our rails for goods"
Yes, the capacity issue is that people don't want to move goods by rail. 89% of freight is moved by roads for a reason, but sure "adding a new high speed route will add more than a motorway". *Bullshit!*
£2,000 fine for Bernadette Malekou, 29, from Brixton, after she was caught at a gathering at someone else's home in February.
She tried to "plead the fifth", then ignored the court process.
https://twitter.com/kirkkorner/status/1429721354820014085?s=20
I don't think your final point holds as there's always a driver at the moment - they're always ultimately accountable for the car.