The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
Boris thinks the market will sort it out. You are looking to a higher authority
Also, talking of the latter, I think can we please add to the commonly used on PB namely bible references eg Deuteronomy 28:12 the equally authoritative as per my post above eg: R4 08:13.
How can the market sort it out? There's a price cap. The whole market is broken.
The market would be broken even without the cap right now because certain businesses were selling fixed price contracts below the cap and buying energy at spot prices without fixing their costs or having a hedge in place.
Selling fixed and buying variable without a hedge is a broken business model whenever the variable gets too far varied.
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
The fact AEP is writing about it is the sole reason why I don't actually think this is going to be a long term problem.
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
The fact AEP is writing about it is the sole reason why I don't actually think this is going to be a long term problem.
Can someone get Peston to write about it just to guarantee it won't be ...
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
Dinorwic is enormous and well worth a visit
Not as worth it as it once was.. From wiki
"The power station was also promoted as a tourist attraction, with visitors able to take a minibus trip from "Electric Mountain" - the name of its nearby visitor centre - to see the workings inside the power station; 132,000 people visited the attraction in 2015. However, the centre is now closed with no prospect of reopening."
Also from wiki..
" The project – begun in 1974 and taking ten years to complete at a cost of £425 million – was the largest civil engineering contract ever awarded by the UK government at the time. .... The scheme paid for itself within two years.[citation needed]"
I went through it years ago and I must admit I did not know tours had ended
The reason it paid for itself, was as a reliable backstop to the grid, IIRC
Not as energy storage as such - but having power rapidly available independently of the other generation methods.
Yes, ISTR that Dinorwig can go from 0 to full output in a matter of seconds, but obviously can't keep it up for long. Ideal for those kettle moments during ad breaks in popular programmes, i.e. peak flattening.
As regards renewable intermittency, there is surely still plenty of scope for demand management. We need to get used to paying large consumers to cut their electricity consumption when demand outstrips supply as well as making use of all those car batteries that'll be sitting outside people's homes soon.
IIRC loads for restarting other power stations was also a factor - it was expensive and not as reliable to keep extra capacity on standby.
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
Boris thinks the market will sort it out. You are looking to a higher authority
Also, talking of the latter, I think can we please add to the commonly used on PB namely bible references eg Deuteronomy 28:12 the equally authoritative as per my post above eg: R4 08:13.
How can the market sort it out? There's a price cap. The whole market is broken.
The market would be broken even without the cap right now because certain businesses were selling fixed price contracts below the cap and buying energy at spot prices without fixing their costs or having a hedge in place.
Selling fixed and buying variable without a hedge is a broken business model whenever the variable gets too far varied.
Well part of that was the price cap. Why offer a variable rate contract when you can just fix to the regulated price cap?
It's also completely destroyed any investment incentive within the private sector and the state energy strategy is a complete mess.
The price cap is the ultimate reason we're in the shit here, predictably, it has resulted in years of underinvestment by private corporations in energy generation capacity to protect margins.
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
How international is bullying at school. Oh Nick, bless. And not in the US/American schools?
Perhaps start with Marty McFly and ask him then work your way around every other school on the planet*.
With the obvious exception of the ones you were at.
Lol, it's a retelling of the whole thing from the EU/France perspective with multiple quotes from the French side and nothing from either the US, UK or Australians.
France are being asked whether they're happy to be hamstrung by German foreign policy objectives. So far they haven't answered, it's something that will take time for them to answer. The UK out of the EU has said we won't be beholden to Germany wanting to sell BMWs to China. France will need to take that step, either by convincing Germany to come along or, as Barnier has been suggesting, working outside of EU shared sovereignty.
Hardly 'lol' to get a view from their angle. It's an integral part of the 360. But, ok, tbf, when I saw the version "leaked from Downing St" explaining how Boris Johnson's role in things was akin to Captain Marvel and we were now at the very heart of a great new Anglo alliance that would rock the world to its core, I did succumb to a little chuckle. So touche, I suppose.
The point is that the Americans have also said it was the UK side that wanted to turn this into the "Anglo alliance" rather than just a submarine deal. The NYT, usually scathing about Boris, Brexit and the UK, admitted he played a blinder and they aren't exactly going to parrot lines from Downing Street.
If it was just Downing Street saying Boris did it then I'd agree, it would just be Boris bigging up some minor involvement, I have no love for the guy and would like to see him replaced ASAP. The fact that two liberal American newspapers of note (NYT and WaPo) both say the same as what Downing Street are saying and the Australians have confirmed that they initially approached the UK about a submarine deal which the UK helped to convince the US to turn into an anti-China Anglo alliance means that it probably was Boris. What is more convincing is that it speaks to everything Boris likes to do, a big shiny thing he can put his name on. It's the military alliance version of Boris Bikes.
That it has turned into Suez mk.II for France is probably not what was intended. I actually think that none of the three nations set out to burn France as badly as this and eventually France will be invited into an associate membership where they have decision making input over fleet deployments etc... but aren't party to the tech sharing aspects.
They've rather burned that boat by making the deal poaching foundational for the new alliance. I don't have much problem with either of the two things individually, but linking them in this manner seems a large miscalculation.
Australia had good commercial and technical reasons to cancel the French contract; they should have done so independently of this deal. The two were linked for the benefit of domestic political theatre.
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
Certainly bullying was much less prevalent in my Canadian High School than in England. Cliques weren't though. Literally everyone had a list of who could and couldn't be seen with or spoken too. Very Breakfast Club. I never got my head around it. So I didn't co-operate and was just considered a wierd foreigner.And tolerated.
Prince Andrew has another grandchild as Princes Beatrice has given birth to a daughter, though she will be only 11th in the line of succession now behind Charles, William, George, Charlotte, Louis, Harry, Archie, Lilibet and Andrew himself and her mother
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
Dinorwic is enormous and well worth a visit
Not as worth it as it once was.. From wiki
"The power station was also promoted as a tourist attraction, with visitors able to take a minibus trip from "Electric Mountain" - the name of its nearby visitor centre - to see the workings inside the power station; 132,000 people visited the attraction in 2015. However, the centre is now closed with no prospect of reopening."
Also from wiki..
" The project – begun in 1974 and taking ten years to complete at a cost of £425 million – was the largest civil engineering contract ever awarded by the UK government at the time. .... The scheme paid for itself within two years.[citation needed]"
I went through it years ago and I must admit I did not know tours had ended
The reason it paid for itself, was as a reliable backstop to the grid, IIRC
Not as energy storage as such - but having power rapidly available independently of the other generation methods.
Yes, ISTR that Dinorwig can go from 0 to full output in a matter of seconds, but obviously can't keep it up for long. Ideal for those kettle moments during ad breaks in popular programmes, i.e. peak flattening.
As regards renewable intermittency, there is surely still plenty of scope for demand management. We need to get used to paying large consumers to cut their electricity consumption when demand outstrips supply as well as making use of all those car batteries that'll be sitting outside people's homes soon.
IIRC loads for restarting other power stations was also a factor - it was expensive and not as reliable to keep extra capacity on standby.
Long term we will probably end up using end of life electric car batteries for peak flattening - but that isn't an immediate solution..
Separately even though the visitors centre is closed Caffi`r Ffowntan Cafe is nice and very cheap.
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
Can we use the hole to Australia that Mons. Macron is digging for himself to give a fall of 6,000 km?
A straight hole to Austrailia would of course allow you to get there in 42 mins just by jumping in*.
(*Assuming you can find a way to keep it evacuated of air and, er, molten magma for the duration.)
I don't think you do actually, unless you have taken account of gravity reversing half way, and assume a perfect vaccuum with no air pressure, or friction.
But since the water would be going to the centre of the earth and back, it would actually be gaining potential energy, *and* we cold put a steam turbine on it on the way back.
Prince Andrew has another grandchild as Princes Beatrice has given birth to a daughter, though she will be only 11th in the line of succession now behind Charles, William, George, Charlotte, Louis, Harry, Archie, Lilibet and Andrew himself and her mother
Well in the unlikely event of a terrorist attack or dreadful accident that wiped out the future King Charles, the Cambridges, the Sussexes and their children and also killed Prince Andrew too, then Beatrice would become Queen and the new arrival would be heiress to the throne.
Obviously we hope that does not happen but there is still a more than 0% chance this new baby could be our future Queen
Prince Andrew has another grandchild as Princes Beatrice has given birth to a daughter, though she will be only 11th in the line of succession now behind Charles, William, George, Charlotte, Louis, Harry, Archie, Lilibet and Andrew himself and her mother
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
The energy crisis started in the late 80s when the sector was deregulated. We've mentioned the dash for gas - not only did it help burn off our North Sea reserves it also bust the market for coal.
What did that mean? We went from digging coal from profitable pits a short distance from the power station to shutting the pits and importing coal from Venezuela and Brazil. Once you start importing its easy to keep doing it - suddenly imported coal is expensive so both imports and CCS are off the table and coal generation goes.
But its alright as we have all these gas power stations. Except that the gas is increasingly imported. But its alright as we have nuclear. Yeah right, we can't build new ones. But its alright as we have these interconnectors and the energy market is regulated. Until an interconnector burns out and we quit the regulated market.
Whilst there have been errors piled on errors this lot have been in government for 11 years. How will they blame someone else or what they have done - and haven't done - in that time?
There are those who are demanding Cambo is stopped and the Cumbria coal mine planning refused then complain over energy supply crisis
I really fear that we are all, not just here in the UK, but across the globe going to experience the clash between climate change demands (COP26) and the reality that most everyone wants to deal with it but then cannot accept an abrupt and sudden spike in energy prices which underpins all economic activity
The eco warriors on the M25 have infuriated drivers and it would appear 59/25 oppose the demonstrations again indicating that you have to take the public with you and their wallets
The Cumbrian mine is irrelevant now - we needed to not shut the pits and then not shut the power stations.
Yes, viable green energy is a global issue. The explosive price increase in the UK and only the UK is not a global issue. We can't blame the EU or remoaners or stoppy French idiots for this. Quitting the EU regulated energy market left us wide open to this but as usual we thought it was crap as its the EU and didn't need replacing.
Whoops.
I have been listening to the various contributors on Sky this morning and it is fiendishly complex and is not a Brexit issue
Indeed it seems that Ed Miliband's energy price cap enacted by Therese May is a factor in the crisis
Its certainly complex, but are we really going to insist that our departure from the regulated market has nothing to do with the vast increase only in UK prices?
I've not got a detailed understanding about this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but... isn't the main driver of the difference in UK/non-UK prices rises due to an interconnector fire in Kent? That is, we're stuck having to generate more of our own electricity. That could have happened just as easily with us within the EU, right?
It was that which is used to smooth supply plus...a huge flood in demand for energy globally; Russia is being unhelpful and restricting demand as per the AEP article; maintenance on gas platforms in the North Sea; we have had some nuclear outage; and the wind hasn't been blowing in the past few weeks.
According to R4 this morning (08.13).
I drove past several large wind farms on my way to Stirling this morning. They were all still. In late September this is positively weird. When I looked this morning we were generating twice as much electricity from solar than wind. On 20th September.
My suspicion is that this cannot last and the wind will return taking the sting out of this. The fact AEP states that disaster is now inevitable boosts my confidence considerably.
Boris thinks the market will sort it out. You are looking to a higher authority
Also, talking of the latter, I think can we please add to the commonly used on PB namely bible references eg Deuteronomy 28:12 the equally authoritative as per my post above eg: R4 08:13.
How can the market sort it out? There's a price cap. The whole market is broken.
The market would be broken even without the cap right now because certain businesses were selling fixed price contracts below the cap and buying energy at spot prices without fixing their costs or having a hedge in place.
Selling fixed and buying variable without a hedge is a broken business model whenever the variable gets too far varied.
Judging by the comment on WATO, the proposed remedy is backing to the companies taking on customer bases from bust suppliers.
Which avoids giving benefit to those running businesses in a reckless manner.
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
What's that (poker) saying? If you look around your school and you can't spot the bully, well.... it's you?
Prince Andrew has another grandchild as Princes Beatrice has given birth to a daughter, though she will be only 11th in the line of succession now behind Charles, William, George, Charlotte, Louis, Harry, Archie, Lilibet and Andrew himself and her mother
Well in the unlikely event of a terrorist attack or dreadful accident that wiped out a future King Charles, the Cambridges, the Sussexes and their children and also killed Prince Andrew too, then Beatrice would become Queen and the new arrival would be heiress to the throne.
Obviously we hope that does not happen but there is still a more than 0% chance this new baby could be our future Queen
You will not like this but I have been a republican most of my life but have grown to greatly respect the Queen but after her the best option is William and Kate, at least they are young and not tainted with scandal
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
Can we use the hole to Australia that Mons. Macron is digging for himself to give a fall of 6,000 km?
A straight hole to Austrailia would of course allow you to get there in 42 mins just by jumping in*.
(*Assuming you can find a way to keep it evacuated of air and, er, molten magma for the duration.)
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
How international is bullying at school. Oh Nick, bless. And not in the US/American schools?
There was no bullying at my Washington DC school that I can remember. At my English boarding school bullying was practically the school sport; even the teachers joined in. I was a second tier bully more given to mockery, impersonation and derogatory nicknames rather than outright violence.
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
Dinorwic is enormous and well worth a visit
Not as worth it as it once was.. From wiki
"The power station was also promoted as a tourist attraction, with visitors able to take a minibus trip from "Electric Mountain" - the name of its nearby visitor centre - to see the workings inside the power station; 132,000 people visited the attraction in 2015. However, the centre is now closed with no prospect of reopening."
Also from wiki..
" The project – begun in 1974 and taking ten years to complete at a cost of £425 million – was the largest civil engineering contract ever awarded by the UK government at the time. .... The scheme paid for itself within two years.[citation needed]"
I went through it years ago and I must admit I did not know tours had ended
The reason it paid for itself, was as a reliable backstop to the grid, IIRC
Not as energy storage as such - but having power rapidly available independently of the other generation methods.
Visited it once when working for National Grid and much later with my family as a tourist. The facility was, and presumably still is, almost constantly running depending on the cost of electricity at any moment. Either pumping up or running as a generator.
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
How international is bullying at school. Oh Nick, bless. And not in the US/American schools?
There was no bullying at my Washington DC school that I can remember. At my English boarding school bullying was practically the school sport; even the teachers joined in. I was a second tier bully more given to mockery, impersonation and derogatory nicknames rather than outright violence.
Didn't you hoist a kid you didn't like up a flagpole by his y-fronts?
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
How international is bullying at school. Oh Nick, bless. And not in the US/American schools?
There was no bullying at my Washington DC school that I can remember. At my English boarding school bullying was practically the school sport; even the teachers joined in. I was a second tier bully more given to mockery, impersonation and derogatory nicknames rather than outright violence.
You have obviously blocked it out as being too painful for conscious recollection. Plus from no bullying whatsoever to you being a (2nd tier) bully? Why?
Plus you are negating a whole generation of US coming of age films here - tread carefully.
Prince Andrew has another grandchild as Princes Beatrice has given birth to a daughter, though she will be only 11th in the line of succession now behind Charles, William, George, Charlotte, Louis, Harry, Archie, Lilibet and Andrew himself and her mother
Well in the unlikely event of a terrorist attack or dreadful accident that wiped out a future King Charles, the Cambridges, the Sussexes and their children and also killed Prince Andrew too, then Beatrice would become Queen and the new arrival would be heiress to the throne.
Obviously we hope that does not happen but there is still a more than 0% chance this new baby could be our future Queen
You will not like this but I have been a republican most of my life but have grown to greatly respect the Queen but after her the best option is William and Kate, at least they are young and not tainted with scandal
No, Charles deserves his chance, there will be plenty of time for William to reign after him and half the point of constitutional monarchy is it is hereditary not based on popularity of the monarch of the time, we leave needing to be popular to elected politicians. Charles has done a great deal for young people with the Princes Trust etc.
In this highly unlikely scenario anyway sadly Charles and William and their families will have been assassinated or killed in a dreadful accident along with the Sussexes and Andrew, leaving the way clear for Queen Beatrice the 1st and her new daughter to succeed the Queen
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
How international is bullying at school. Oh Nick, bless. And not in the US/American schools?
There was no bullying at my Washington DC school that I can remember. At my English boarding school bullying was practically the school sport; even the teachers joined in. I was a second tier bully more given to mockery, impersonation and derogatory nicknames rather than outright violence.
You have obviously blocked it out as being too painful for conscious recollection. Plus from no bullying whatsoever to you being a (2nd tier) bully? Why?
Plus you are negating a whole generation of US coming of age films here - tread carefully.
US TV and films have taught me that American high schools are vicious dens of near murderous bullying, absurdly separated cliques, and all teenagers knock back glasses of whiskey every afternoon, whilst also getting up at 6am for shenanigans looking like a stunning 20 year old.
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
Dinorwic is enormous and well worth a visit
Not as worth it as it once was.. From wiki
"The power station was also promoted as a tourist attraction, with visitors able to take a minibus trip from "Electric Mountain" - the name of its nearby visitor centre - to see the workings inside the power station; 132,000 people visited the attraction in 2015. However, the centre is now closed with no prospect of reopening."
Also from wiki..
" The project – begun in 1974 and taking ten years to complete at a cost of £425 million – was the largest civil engineering contract ever awarded by the UK government at the time. .... The scheme paid for itself within two years.[citation needed]"
I went through it years ago and I must admit I did not know tours had ended
The reason it paid for itself, was as a reliable backstop to the grid, IIRC
Not as energy storage as such - but having power rapidly available independently of the other generation methods.
Visited it once when working for National Grid and much later with my family as a tourist. The facility was, and presumably still is, almost constantly running depending on the cost of electricity at any moment. Either pumping up or running as a generator.
It was my understanding that the daily usage was an extra benefit to the grid backstop thing - and that running it continually ensured that it was fit for emergencies.
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
This is the result of the ONS infection survey, so it shouldn't be sensitive to that.
Apart from the lessons of Northern Rock's "borrow short, lend long" collapse for domestic gas suppliers.
And all other lessons.
What I don’t get is why is the government talk about bailing out the small companies with crappy business models. They took a risk and their equity should be wiped out
Transfer the customers and agree a subsidy between the current rate and the average spot rate over the next 6-9 months. You can’t ask a company to buy into a loss making contract without support
The energy space is far too 'busy' imo. Tons of separate players all milling around and falling over each other being "creative" (ie misleading customers in trying to make themselves look different) and "entrepreneurial" (ie reckless in pursuit of a buck) when what they're supplying is essentially the same bread & butter necessity.
The core requirement, the only requirement, is a safe and reliable power supply at a stable uniform price affordable by all. But no, this wouldn't be exciting enough, so instead we have a smorgasbord of arcanary; caps and collars, fixed v floating rates, short deals and long deals, salary incentives, bonuses, share options, boardroom games, shareholder angst and pressure, the bosses troughing and posturing, golden hellos, golden goodbyes, customer discounts for switching contracts, people paying wildly different tariffs, savvy types tracking their options 24/7 online and making savings, others who need the money more stuck on bad deals, or not understanding the deal they're on, paying over the odds, etc, the whole thing is ridiculous.
Competition = good is a mantra which really does need to be challenged. Often, as here, and as per another example, banking, it leads to valueless, truth-obscuring complexity in how things are done and the public end up being ill-served. With such sectors I get a strong sense of something that's really a public utility, which would be better and logically run that way.
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
But Andy's infections data are from the ONS, based on their random surveys?
The ONS might miss some cases as they don't do university halls etc, which might be high incidence (I think - not sure whether their model then corrects for this). But if that's the case then the lines on Andy's graph overstate the closeness of hospitalisations and infections, not the other way round.
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
This is the result of the ONS infection survey, so it shouldn't be sensitive to that.
I tend to agree, but the data is confused. The positive cases data suggest that vastly fewer are going to hospital and dying, the REACT study positive test vs hospitalisation suggests otherwise.
I was wondering how much Chinese real estate debt was held overseas, and found this guesstimate.
https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/business-news-will-evergrande-woes-bring-great-fall-of-china/395131 ...According to UBS, currently, the Chinese offshore bond market has total debt outstanding of $209 billion out of which 70% are high-yielding bonds. Based on UBS estimates the total liability of the Chinese property sector is close to $4.7 trillion, the offshore bond market, therefore, accounts for only 4.5% of total financing for the sector.
UBS noted that with a total outstanding of $19 billion of offshore bonds, Evergrande has 9% exposure to the total offshore bond market and 12% of the high-yielding offshore bond market.
Marquee international investors like BlackRock- the world’s largest asset manager, Paris-based Amundi- Europe’s largest asset manager, UBS Asset Management, Ashmore Group, HSBC Holdings, Fidelity, PIMCO, Goldman Sachs Asset Management are the few large bondholders of Evergrande...
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
How international is bullying at school. Oh Nick, bless. And not in the US/American schools?
There was no bullying at my Washington DC school that I can remember. At my English boarding school bullying was practically the school sport; even the teachers joined in. I was a second tier bully more given to mockery, impersonation and derogatory nicknames rather than outright violence.
Didn't you hoist a kid you didn't like up a flagpole by his y-fronts?
No, but I stole somebody's trousers and stuck them up a chimney. He burst into the maths class clad from the waist down in a towel and said in a piping querulous voice, "Sir! Sir! Dura Ace has my trousers!"
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
Dinorwic is enormous and well worth a visit
Not as worth it as it once was.. From wiki
"The power station was also promoted as a tourist attraction, with visitors able to take a minibus trip from "Electric Mountain" - the name of its nearby visitor centre - to see the workings inside the power station; 132,000 people visited the attraction in 2015. However, the centre is now closed with no prospect of reopening."
Also from wiki..
" The project – begun in 1974 and taking ten years to complete at a cost of £425 million – was the largest civil engineering contract ever awarded by the UK government at the time. .... The scheme paid for itself within two years.[citation needed]"
I went through it years ago and I must admit I did not know tours had ended
The reason it paid for itself, was as a reliable backstop to the grid, IIRC
Not as energy storage as such - but having power rapidly available independently of the other generation methods.
Visited it once when working for National Grid and much later with my family as a tourist. The facility was, and presumably still is, almost constantly running depending on the cost of electricity at any moment. Either pumping up or running as a generator.
It was my understanding that the daily usage was an extra benefit to the grid backstop thing - and that running it continually ensured that it was fit for emergencies.
I thought it was used to iron out the peaks and troughs of the UK demand, as base load is reasonably constant throughout day/night. Anything generated surplus at night is used to pump water up, storing the energy as Potential Energy. Peak demand during the day can therefore be satiated by the stored energy from the night before.
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
This is the result of the ONS infection survey, so it shouldn't be sensitive to that.
I tend to agree, but the data is confused. The positive cases data suggest that vastly fewer are going to hospital and dying, the REACT study positive test vs hospitalisation suggests otherwise.
I genuinely don't know the answer.
No, the ONS infection incidence data suggests the same as the positive cases data - that the proportion of those infected who go on to be hospitalised or die has reduced a long way.
Prince Andrew has another grandchild as Princes Beatrice has given birth to a daughter, though she will be only 11th in the line of succession now behind Charles, William, George, Charlotte, Louis, Harry, Archie, Lilibet and Andrew himself and her mother
Apart from the lessons of Northern Rock's "borrow short, lend long" collapse for domestic gas suppliers.
And all other lessons.
What I don’t get is why is the government talk about bailing out the small companies with crappy business models. They took a risk and their equity should be wiped out
Transfer the customers and agree a subsidy between the current rate and the average spot rate over the next 6-9 months. You can’t ask a company to buy into a loss making contract without support
The energy space is far too 'busy' imo. Tons of separate players all milling around and falling over each other being "creative" (ie misleading customers in trying to make themselves look different) and "entrepreneurial" (ie reckless in pursuit of a buck) when what they're supplying is essentially the same bread & butter necessity.
The core requirement, the only requirement, is a safe and reliable power supply at a stable uniform price affordable by all. But no, this wouldn't be exciting enough, so instead we have a smorgasbord of arcanary; caps and collars, fixed v floating rates, short deals and long deals, salary incentives, bonuses, share options, boardroom games, shareholder angst and pressure, the bosses troughing and posturing, golden hellos, golden goodbyes, customer discounts for switching contracts, people paying wildly different tariffs, savvy types tracking their options 24/7 online and making savings, others who need the money more stuck on bad deals, or not understanding the deal they're on, paying over the odds, etc, the whole thing is ridiculous.
Competition = good is a mantra which really does need to be challenged. Often, as here, and as per another example, banking, it leads to valueless, truth-obscuring complexity in how things are done and the public end up being ill-served. With such sectors I get a strong sense of something that's really a public utility, which would be better and logically run that way.
Except that competition works.
Yes it has issues. But the customer is better placed with a competitive environment than one where a monopoly public sector behemoth ends up running poorly with no challenge.
And if companies fail that shouldn't be considered a market failure but the market working as intended. Bad business models fail, good ones thrive.
"The UK has slashed its strategic gas storage to barely 1.7pc of annual demand by closing the Rough facility off the Yorkshire coast, subcontracting the costly task of storage to Germany and the Netherlands."
Telegraph
Sounds like Business Sec could be in real shit here this winter.
Massive shit. As @Morris_Dancer pointed out this has been brewing for a long time. We've been making strategically stupid decisions in energy since the "dash for gas" days. You can only rely on North Sea Gas as your energy reserve if you haven't let the privatised utilities burn through it already.
For all of the bluster the UK has been increasingly and heavily reliant on exports for decades. Too much focus on prices and competition and profiteering, not enough on where the energy is coming from and what drives the prices.
So here we are. Reliant on imported gas with fuck all storage, reliant on imported electricity with no membership of the regulated European energy market (and nothing to replace it). A unique to Britain massive price spike in electricity threatening business ruin food shortages and blackouts.
We may avoid it. But why the fuck has Johnson let us slide out here to the edge? Global Britain who can't keep the lights on? Watch him spin our power crisis as some kind of environmental statement for COP26.
Headlines that have aged well, part 471
"Sturgeon told ‘find new customer’ for independent Scotland's energy as UK would cut ties"
Aged 14, I went to school for a year in Hampshire. This was the early 90s.
The school bully sized me up on my first day. “‘Ere, are you ‘ard?”
I had no idea what he was talking about, as “hardness” is not a term in NZ English.
So, I looked deliberately down at my crotch, then back at him. “Not right now, no.”
He did not bother me again.
Reminds me a little of Stephen Fry's The Liar.
The protagonist, Adrian, gets threatened with a beating by two other (hard!) boys at school. He warns them not to.
They say, "Yeah, what ya gonna do about it?"
He replies,
"I shall sustain a massive erection, that’s what, and I shan’t be answerable for the consequences. Some kind of ejaculation is almost bound to ensue and if either of you were to become pregnant I should never forgive myself.”
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
But Andy's infections data are from the ONS, based on their random surveys?
The ONS might miss some cases as they don't do university halls etc, which might be high incidence (I think - not sure whether their model then corrects for this). But if that's the case then the lines on Andy's graph overstate the closeness of hospitalisations and infections, not the other way round.
Edit: Ah, RobD said it already.
There seems to be a serious discrepancy between what is presented in the REACT study based on ONS figures and what's been posted on here. For what its worth the data on here pass the sniff test better than the REACT study posted by chris, but I can't easily explain why the REACT study is wrong.
Prince Andrew has another grandchild as Princes Beatrice has given birth to a daughter, though she will be only 11th in the line of succession now behind Charles, William, George, Charlotte, Louis, Harry, Archie, Lilibet and Andrew himself and her mother
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
This is the result of the ONS infection survey, so it shouldn't be sensitive to that.
I tend to agree, but the data is confused. The positive cases data suggest that vastly fewer are going to hospital and dying, the REACT study positive test vs hospitalisation suggests otherwise.
I genuinely don't know the answer.
No, the ONS infection incidence data suggests the same as the positive cases data - that the proportion of those infected who go on to be hospitalised or die has reduced a long way.
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
This is the result of the ONS infection survey, so it shouldn't be sensitive to that.
I tend to agree, but the data is confused. The positive cases data suggest that vastly fewer are going to hospital and dying, the REACT study positive test vs hospitalisation suggests otherwise.
I genuinely don't know the answer.
No, the ONS infection incidence data suggests the same as the positive cases data - that the proportion of those infected who go on to be hospitalised or die has reduced a long way.
(from a maximum of over 6% of those infected back in October being hospitalised to around 1.2% of those infected now, and a maximum of 1.7% of those infected dying to 0.17% now)
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
This is the result of the ONS infection survey, so it shouldn't be sensitive to that.
I tend to agree, but the data is confused. The positive cases data suggest that vastly fewer are going to hospital and dying, the REACT study positive test vs hospitalisation suggests otherwise.
I genuinely don't know the answer.
No, the ONS infection incidence data suggests the same as the positive cases data - that the proportion of those infected who go on to be hospitalised or die has reduced a long way.
ONS is much, much more likely to be the accurate picture for the cases - the self selecting nature of the PCR tests means they are very likely to subject to all kinds of factors.
Apart from the lessons of Northern Rock's "borrow short, lend long" collapse for domestic gas suppliers.
And all other lessons.
What I don’t get is why is the government talk about bailing out the small companies with crappy business models. They took a risk and their equity should be wiped out
Transfer the customers and agree a subsidy between the current rate and the average spot rate over the next 6-9 months. You can’t ask a company to buy into a loss making contract without support
The energy space is far too 'busy' imo. Tons of separate players all milling around and falling over each other being "creative" (ie misleading customers in trying to make themselves look different) and "entrepreneurial" (ie reckless in pursuit of a buck) when what they're supplying is essentially the same bread & butter necessity.
The core requirement, the only requirement, is a safe and reliable power supply at a stable uniform price affordable by all. But no, this wouldn't be exciting enough, so instead we have a smorgasbord of arcanary; caps and collars, fixed v floating rates, short deals and long deals, salary incentives, bonuses, share options, boardroom games, shareholder angst and pressure, the bosses troughing and posturing, golden hellos, golden goodbyes, customer discounts for switching contracts, people paying wildly different tariffs, savvy types tracking their options 24/7 online and making savings, others who need the money more stuck on bad deals, or not understanding the deal they're on, paying over the odds, etc, the whole thing is ridiculous.
Competition = good is a mantra which really does need to be challenged. Often, as here, and as per another example, banking, it leads to valueless, truth-obscuring complexity in how things are done and the public end up being ill-served. With such sectors I get a strong sense of something that's really a public utility, which would be better and logically run that way.
Except that competition works.
Yes it has issues. But the customer is better placed with a competitive environment than one where a monopoly public sector behemoth ends up running poorly with no challenge.
And if companies fail that shouldn't be considered a market failure but the market working as intended. Bad business models fail, good ones thrive.
The problem is, the price of gas has gone sky high and the government is in a damned if they do/damned if they don't situation. Yes absolutely let the "last mile" providers go bust, wipe out the equity holders, move on.
But the problem remains that someone has to pay - either the govt, or the consumers. ie indirectly or directly.
Not sure how they spin/policy announce their way out of that.
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
This is the result of the ONS infection survey, so it shouldn't be sensitive to that.
I tend to agree, but the data is confused. The positive cases data suggest that vastly fewer are going to hospital and dying, the REACT study positive test vs hospitalisation suggests otherwise.
I genuinely don't know the answer.
No, the ONS infection incidence data suggests the same as the positive cases data - that the proportion of those infected who go on to be hospitalised or die has reduced a long way.
But not in the study posted?
That's the REACT study, and is a single study outcome which could have been incorrectly interpreted by Chris (bearing in mind that Imperial certainly didn't lead on this or even emphasise it in summaries, which one would expect if it was a shocking outcome).
In comparison, the PHE and NHS data suggests very differently, as do all studies of vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation and death, as do the cases figures, and as do the ONS infection incidence figures.
Given all of that, looking at the single outlier is far more sensible than assuming all the other data is wrong.
Prince Andrew has another grandchild as Princes Beatrice has given birth to a daughter, though she will be only 11th in the line of succession now behind Charles, William, George, Charlotte, Louis, Harry, Archie, Lilibet and Andrew himself and her mother
"The UK has slashed its strategic gas storage to barely 1.7pc of annual demand by closing the Rough facility off the Yorkshire coast, subcontracting the costly task of storage to Germany and the Netherlands."
Telegraph
Sounds like Business Sec could be in real shit here this winter.
Massive shit. As @Morris_Dancer pointed out this has been brewing for a long time. We've been making strategically stupid decisions in energy since the "dash for gas" days. You can only rely on North Sea Gas as your energy reserve if you haven't let the privatised utilities burn through it already.
For all of the bluster the UK has been increasingly and heavily reliant on exports for decades. Too much focus on prices and competition and profiteering, not enough on where the energy is coming from and what drives the prices.
So here we are. Reliant on imported gas with fuck all storage, reliant on imported electricity with no membership of the regulated European energy market (and nothing to replace it). A unique to Britain massive price spike in electricity threatening business ruin food shortages and blackouts.
We may avoid it. But why the fuck has Johnson let us slide out here to the edge? Global Britain who can't keep the lights on? Watch him spin our power crisis as some kind of environmental statement for COP26.
Headlines that have aged well, part 471
"Sturgeon told ‘find new customer’ for independent Scotland's energy as UK would cut ties"
I thought you were going to link to Nicola opposing the deveulopment of North Sea oil fields so as to reduce our imports.
‘Our’ imports? I assume after Indy your huffy old rump Unionists won’t be wanting Scottish oil anyway, best get used to it now.
If there was ever indy the rUK government would of course play hardball and ensure that as much North Sea Oil as possible stayed in the rUK, especially given BP has played a big role in extracting it and has its HQ in London
Prince Andrew has another grandchild as Princes Beatrice has given birth to a daughter, though she will be only 11th in the line of succession now behind Charles, William, George, Charlotte, Louis, Harry, Archie, Lilibet and Andrew himself and her mother
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
Can we use the hole to Australia that Mons. Macron is digging for himself to give a fall of 6,000 km?
A straight hole to Austrailia would of course allow you to get there in 42 mins just by jumping in*.
(*Assuming you can find a way to keep it evacuated of air and, er, molten magma for the duration.)
My 6000km is only half way
After a while the large masses would end up piled up at the centre of the earth. (nerd alert)
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
How international is bullying at school. Oh Nick, bless. And not in the US/American schools?
There was no bullying at my Washington DC school that I can remember. At my English boarding school bullying was practically the school sport; even the teachers joined in. I was a second tier bully more given to mockery, impersonation and derogatory nicknames rather than outright violence.
Didn't you hoist a kid you didn't like up a flagpole by his y-fronts?
No, but I stole somebody's trousers and stuck them up a chimney. He burst into the maths class clad from the waist down in a towel and said in a piping querulous voice, "Sir! Sir! Dura Ace has my trousers!"
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
How international is bullying at school. Oh Nick, bless. And not in the US/American schools?
There was no bullying at my Washington DC school that I can remember. At my English boarding school bullying was practically the school sport; even the teachers joined in. I was a second tier bully more given to mockery, impersonation and derogatory nicknames rather than outright violence.
Didn't you hoist a kid you didn't like up a flagpole by his y-fronts?
No, but I stole somebody's trousers and stuck them up a chimney. He burst into the maths class clad from the waist down in a towel and said in a piping querulous voice, "Sir! Sir! Dura Ace has my trousers!"
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
Dinorwic is enormous and well worth a visit
Not as worth it as it once was.. From wiki
"The power station was also promoted as a tourist attraction, with visitors able to take a minibus trip from "Electric Mountain" - the name of its nearby visitor centre - to see the workings inside the power station; 132,000 people visited the attraction in 2015. However, the centre is now closed with no prospect of reopening."
Also from wiki..
" The project – begun in 1974 and taking ten years to complete at a cost of £425 million – was the largest civil engineering contract ever awarded by the UK government at the time. .... The scheme paid for itself within two years.[citation needed]"
I went through it years ago and I must admit I did not know tours had ended
The reason it paid for itself, was as a reliable backstop to the grid, IIRC
Not as energy storage as such - but having power rapidly available independently of the other generation methods.
Yes, ISTR that Dinorwig can go from 0 to full output in a matter of seconds, but obviously can't keep it up for long. Ideal for those kettle moments during ad breaks in popular programmes, i.e. peak flattening.
As regards renewable intermittency, there is surely still plenty of scope for demand management. We need to get used to paying large consumers to cut their electricity consumption when demand outstrips supply as well as making use of all those car batteries that'll be sitting outside people's homes soon.
The most dramatic example of Dinorwig playing that role was when the St Jude's Day storm knocked Sizewell instantly off the grid with no notice and Dinorwig took up the slack.
Demand management sounds like a euphemism for brownouts and the like. It's the best way to manage a failure to be able to satisfy demand, but it should be a last resort rather than a standard part of the system.
Apart from the lessons of Northern Rock's "borrow short, lend long" collapse for domestic gas suppliers.
And all other lessons.
What I don’t get is why is the government talk about bailing out the small companies with crappy business models. They took a risk and their equity should be wiped out
Transfer the customers and agree a subsidy between the current rate and the average spot rate over the next 6-9 months. You can’t ask a company to buy into a loss making contract without support
The energy space is far too 'busy' imo. Tons of separate players all milling around and falling over each other being "creative" (ie misleading customers in trying to make themselves look different) and "entrepreneurial" (ie reckless in pursuit of a buck) when what they're supplying is essentially the same bread & butter necessity.
The core requirement, the only requirement, is a safe and reliable power supply at a stable uniform price affordable by all. But no, this wouldn't be exciting enough, so instead we have a smorgasbord of arcanary; caps and collars, fixed v floating rates, short deals and long deals, salary incentives, bonuses, share options, boardroom games, shareholder angst and pressure, the bosses troughing and posturing, golden hellos, golden goodbyes, customer discounts for switching contracts, people paying wildly different tariffs, savvy types tracking their options 24/7 online and making savings, others who need the money more stuck on bad deals, or not understanding the deal they're on, paying over the odds, etc, the whole thing is ridiculous.
Competition = good is a mantra which really does need to be challenged. Often, as here, and as per another example, banking, it leads to valueless, truth-obscuring complexity in how things are done and the public end up being ill-served. With such sectors I get a strong sense of something that's really a public utility, which would be better and logically run that way.
Except that competition works.
Yes it has issues. But the customer is better placed with a competitive environment than one where a monopoly public sector behemoth ends up running poorly with no challenge.
And if companies fail that shouldn't be considered a market failure but the market working as intended. Bad business models fail, good ones thrive.
Sometimes, sometimes not. It's wrong to assume either way. You need to look at it case by case.
Is the product essentially the same? Is the product a necessity of life?
If the answer is "Yes" to both of the above, it means Provision is more important than Choice, and public ownership should be considered.
Nice quote from Mrs T in 1988 on that thread. For those who might have missed it:
"Just think for a moment what a prospect that is. A single market without barriers - visible or invisible - giving you direct and unhindered access to the purchasing power of the world's wealthiest and most prosperous people. Bigger than Japan. Bigger than the United States. On your doorstep. It's not a dream. It's not a vision. It's not some bureaucrat's plan. It's for real.
"You might say: weren't we supposed to have a common market already? Wasn't that the reason we joined Europe in the first place? Weren't we promised all this in 1973?
"Europe wasn't open for business. Underneath the rhetoric, the old barriers remained. Not just against the outside world, but between the European countries. Not the classic barriers of tariffs, but the insidious ones of differing national standards, various restrictions on the provision of services, exclusion of foreign firms from public contracts. Now that's going to change. Britain has given the lead."
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
How international is bullying at school. Oh Nick, bless. And not in the US/American schools?
There was no bullying at my Washington DC school that I can remember. At my English boarding school bullying was practically the school sport; even the teachers joined in. I was a second tier bully more given to mockery, impersonation and derogatory nicknames rather than outright violence.
Didn't you hoist a kid you didn't like up a flagpole by his y-fronts?
No, but I stole somebody's trousers and stuck them up a chimney. He burst into the maths class clad from the waist down in a towel and said in a piping querulous voice, "Sir! Sir! Dura Ace has my trousers!"
I remember a documaentary on TV many years ago about his father. It showed a clip of the young JRM (11yrs I think) reading a copy of the FT (I think it was pink). He also opined ona few issues. He was a supercilious Git then as he is now.
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
This is the result of the ONS infection survey, so it shouldn't be sensitive to that.
I tend to agree, but the data is confused. The positive cases data suggest that vastly fewer are going to hospital and dying, the REACT study positive test vs hospitalisation suggests otherwise.
I genuinely don't know the answer.
No, the ONS infection incidence data suggests the same as the positive cases data - that the proportion of those infected who go on to be hospitalised or die has reduced a long way.
But not in the study posted?
Then the study posted was wrong because it fails to match the objective quantifiable data we have before us. Or other studies.
But it suits Chris's agenda so he'll keep quoting it. No different to Indy Sage.
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
But Andy's infections data are from the ONS, based on their random surveys?
The ONS might miss some cases as they don't do university halls etc, which might be high incidence (I think - not sure whether their model then corrects for this). But if that's the case then the lines on Andy's graph overstate the closeness of hospitalisations and infections, not the other way round.
Edit: Ah, RobD said it already.
There seems to be a serious discrepancy between what is presented in the REACT study based on ONS figures and what's been posted on here. For what its worth the data on here pass the sniff test better than the REACT study posted by chris, but I can't easily explain why the REACT study is wrong.
I've only skimmed the pre-print, but they seem to be using the REACT testing, not ONS? Possible differences there (haven't looked recently, but wasn't ONS based on address sampling, but REACT based on NHS primary care lists etc - some differences possible - and were ONS paying participants, could also give a more complete sample...). They also present their graphs on a log scale and seem to use a different multiplier to align infections and hospitalisations (or deaths) in each graph, rather than a constant multiplier as in the ones posted by Andy. That makes it harder to compare visually.
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
How international is bullying at school. Oh Nick, bless. And not in the US/American schools?
There was no bullying at my Washington DC school that I can remember. At my English boarding school bullying was practically the school sport; even the teachers joined in. I was a second tier bully more given to mockery, impersonation and derogatory nicknames rather than outright violence.
Didn't you hoist a kid you didn't like up a flagpole by his y-fronts?
No, but I stole somebody's trousers and stuck them up a chimney. He burst into the maths class clad from the waist down in a towel and said in a piping querulous voice, "Sir! Sir! Dura Ace has my trousers!"
The stolen trousers kid was a different weirdo that we always called "Doctor White" for some reason. His parents were in their 60s when we were teenagers so his very existence was a miracle of reproduction.
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
This is the result of the ONS infection survey, so it shouldn't be sensitive to that.
I tend to agree, but the data is confused. The positive cases data suggest that vastly fewer are going to hospital and dying, the REACT study positive test vs hospitalisation suggests otherwise.
I genuinely don't know the answer.
No, the ONS infection incidence data suggests the same as the positive cases data - that the proportion of those infected who go on to be hospitalised or die has reduced a long way.
But not in the study posted?
Then the study posted was wrong because it fails to match the objective quantifiable data we have before us. Or other studies.
But it suits Chris's agenda so he'll keep quoting it. No different to Indy Sage.
If you really want to annoy Chris, point out that cherry-picking a single study or stat and treating it as established truth is similar to what Toby Young does on his propaganda site.
"The UK has slashed its strategic gas storage to barely 1.7pc of annual demand by closing the Rough facility off the Yorkshire coast, subcontracting the costly task of storage to Germany and the Netherlands."
Telegraph
Sounds like Business Sec could be in real shit here this winter.
Massive shit. As @Morris_Dancer pointed out this has been brewing for a long time. We've been making strategically stupid decisions in energy since the "dash for gas" days. You can only rely on North Sea Gas as your energy reserve if you haven't let the privatised utilities burn through it already.
For all of the bluster the UK has been increasingly and heavily reliant on exports for decades. Too much focus on prices and competition and profiteering, not enough on where the energy is coming from and what drives the prices.
So here we are. Reliant on imported gas with fuck all storage, reliant on imported electricity with no membership of the regulated European energy market (and nothing to replace it). A unique to Britain massive price spike in electricity threatening business ruin food shortages and blackouts.
We may avoid it. But why the fuck has Johnson let us slide out here to the edge? Global Britain who can't keep the lights on? Watch him spin our power crisis as some kind of environmental statement for COP26.
Headlines that have aged well, part 471
"Sturgeon told ‘find new customer’ for independent Scotland's energy as UK would cut ties"
I thought you were going to link to Nicola opposing the deveulopment of North Sea oil fields so as to reduce our imports.
‘Our’ imports? I assume after Indy your huffy old rump Unionists won’t be wanting Scottish oil anyway, best get used to it now.
If there was ever indy the rUK government would of course play hardball and ensure that as much North Sea Oil as possible stayed in the rUK, especially given BP has played a big role in extracting it and has its HQ in London
"Who gets what" would be governed by international law and while there might be arguing at the edges there's not a lot of room for "hard ball" by anyone.
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
This is the result of the ONS infection survey, so it shouldn't be sensitive to that.
I tend to agree, but the data is confused. The positive cases data suggest that vastly fewer are going to hospital and dying, the REACT study positive test vs hospitalisation suggests otherwise.
I genuinely don't know the answer.
No, the ONS infection incidence data suggests the same as the positive cases data - that the proportion of those infected who go on to be hospitalised or die has reduced a long way.
But not in the study posted?
Then the study posted was wrong because it fails to match the objective quantifiable data we have before us. Or other studies.
But it suits Chris's agenda so he'll keep quoting it. No different to Indy Sage.
If you really want to annoy Chris, point out that cherry-picking a single study or stat and treating it as established truth is similar to what Toby Young does on his propaganda site.
Is Toby still grinding away at that? I haven't seen him around my laptop screen now for quite some time.
"The UK has slashed its strategic gas storage to barely 1.7pc of annual demand by closing the Rough facility off the Yorkshire coast, subcontracting the costly task of storage to Germany and the Netherlands."
Telegraph
Sounds like Business Sec could be in real shit here this winter.
Massive shit. As @Morris_Dancer pointed out this has been brewing for a long time. We've been making strategically stupid decisions in energy since the "dash for gas" days. You can only rely on North Sea Gas as your energy reserve if you haven't let the privatised utilities burn through it already.
For all of the bluster the UK has been increasingly and heavily reliant on exports for decades. Too much focus on prices and competition and profiteering, not enough on where the energy is coming from and what drives the prices.
So here we are. Reliant on imported gas with fuck all storage, reliant on imported electricity with no membership of the regulated European energy market (and nothing to replace it). A unique to Britain massive price spike in electricity threatening business ruin food shortages and blackouts.
We may avoid it. But why the fuck has Johnson let us slide out here to the edge? Global Britain who can't keep the lights on? Watch him spin our power crisis as some kind of environmental statement for COP26.
Headlines that have aged well, part 471
"Sturgeon told ‘find new customer’ for independent Scotland's energy as UK would cut ties"
I thought you were going to link to Nicola opposing the deveulopment of North Sea oil fields so as to reduce our imports.
‘Our’ imports? I assume after Indy your huffy old rump Unionists won’t be wanting Scottish oil anyway, best get used to it now.
If there was ever indy the rUK government would of course play hardball and ensure that as much North Sea Oil as possible stayed in the rUK, especially given BP has played a big role in extracting it and has its HQ in London
"Who gets what" would be governed by international law and while there might be arguing at the edges there's not a lot of room for "hard ball" by anyone.
Ultimately as Westminster is sovereign and can make its own laws regardless of what international law says even if it tends to abide by it and Scotland would be a new state with international laws previously covering the UK which is a sovereign state which Scotland is not yet where the boundary for North Sea oil went would be up for negotiation. Certainly Scotland would not be getting all of it, even if they got most of it England and Wales and NI would want its share too
"The UK has slashed its strategic gas storage to barely 1.7pc of annual demand by closing the Rough facility off the Yorkshire coast, subcontracting the costly task of storage to Germany and the Netherlands."
Telegraph
Sounds like Business Sec could be in real shit here this winter.
Massive shit. As @Morris_Dancer pointed out this has been brewing for a long time. We've been making strategically stupid decisions in energy since the "dash for gas" days. You can only rely on North Sea Gas as your energy reserve if you haven't let the privatised utilities burn through it already.
For all of the bluster the UK has been increasingly and heavily reliant on exports for decades. Too much focus on prices and competition and profiteering, not enough on where the energy is coming from and what drives the prices.
So here we are. Reliant on imported gas with fuck all storage, reliant on imported electricity with no membership of the regulated European energy market (and nothing to replace it). A unique to Britain massive price spike in electricity threatening business ruin food shortages and blackouts.
We may avoid it. But why the fuck has Johnson let us slide out here to the edge? Global Britain who can't keep the lights on? Watch him spin our power crisis as some kind of environmental statement for COP26.
Headlines that have aged well, part 471
"Sturgeon told ‘find new customer’ for independent Scotland's energy as UK would cut ties"
I thought you were going to link to Nicola opposing the deveulopment of North Sea oil fields so as to reduce our imports.
‘Our’ imports? I assume after Indy your huffy old rump Unionists won’t be wanting Scottish oil anyway, best get used to it now.
Maybe Shetland, Orkney and Aberdeenshire could remain part of the UK, along with the borders? They don't seem to swallow the nationalism shit. I am sure you wouldn't want to deny them their democratic rights?
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
That's odd considering a Hollywood staple is the weedy high-school bespectacled kid forever getting duffed by up the lumbering jack-ass (eg. Back to the Future) or the smarmy jock (everything else). Is all that just a figment of script-writers' imagination?
"The UK has slashed its strategic gas storage to barely 1.7pc of annual demand by closing the Rough facility off the Yorkshire coast, subcontracting the costly task of storage to Germany and the Netherlands."
Telegraph
Sounds like Business Sec could be in real shit here this winter.
Massive shit. As @Morris_Dancer pointed out this has been brewing for a long time. We've been making strategically stupid decisions in energy since the "dash for gas" days. You can only rely on North Sea Gas as your energy reserve if you haven't let the privatised utilities burn through it already.
For all of the bluster the UK has been increasingly and heavily reliant on exports for decades. Too much focus on prices and competition and profiteering, not enough on where the energy is coming from and what drives the prices.
So here we are. Reliant on imported gas with fuck all storage, reliant on imported electricity with no membership of the regulated European energy market (and nothing to replace it). A unique to Britain massive price spike in electricity threatening business ruin food shortages and blackouts.
We may avoid it. But why the fuck has Johnson let us slide out here to the edge? Global Britain who can't keep the lights on? Watch him spin our power crisis as some kind of environmental statement for COP26.
Headlines that have aged well, part 471
"Sturgeon told ‘find new customer’ for independent Scotland's energy as UK would cut ties"
I thought you were going to link to Nicola opposing the deveulopment of North Sea oil fields so as to reduce our imports.
‘Our’ imports? I assume after Indy your huffy old rump Unionists won’t be wanting Scottish oil anyway, best get used to it now.
If there was ever indy the rUK government would of course play hardball and ensure that as much North Sea Oil as possible stayed in the rUK, especially given BP has played a big role in extracting it and has its HQ in London
"Who gets what" would be governed by international law and while there might be arguing at the edges there's not a lot of room for "hard ball" by anyone.
Ultimately as Westminster is sovereign and can make its own laws regardless of what international law says even if it tends to abide by it and Scotland would be a new state with international laws previously covering the UK which is a sovereign state which Scotland is not yet where the boundary for North Sea oil went would be up for negotiation. Certainly Scotland would not be getting all of it, even if they got most of it England and Wales and NI would want its share too
You can have no idea, nor can any of us, over these matters as indyref2 is years away and sources of energy are changing
"The UK has slashed its strategic gas storage to barely 1.7pc of annual demand by closing the Rough facility off the Yorkshire coast, subcontracting the costly task of storage to Germany and the Netherlands."
Telegraph
Sounds like Business Sec could be in real shit here this winter.
Massive shit. As @Morris_Dancer pointed out this has been brewing for a long time. We've been making strategically stupid decisions in energy since the "dash for gas" days. You can only rely on North Sea Gas as your energy reserve if you haven't let the privatised utilities burn through it already.
For all of the bluster the UK has been increasingly and heavily reliant on exports for decades. Too much focus on prices and competition and profiteering, not enough on where the energy is coming from and what drives the prices.
So here we are. Reliant on imported gas with fuck all storage, reliant on imported electricity with no membership of the regulated European energy market (and nothing to replace it). A unique to Britain massive price spike in electricity threatening business ruin food shortages and blackouts.
We may avoid it. But why the fuck has Johnson let us slide out here to the edge? Global Britain who can't keep the lights on? Watch him spin our power crisis as some kind of environmental statement for COP26.
Headlines that have aged well, part 471
"Sturgeon told ‘find new customer’ for independent Scotland's energy as UK would cut ties"
I thought you were going to link to Nicola opposing the deveulopment of North Sea oil fields so as to reduce our imports.
‘Our’ imports? I assume after Indy your huffy old rump Unionists won’t be wanting Scottish oil anyway, best get used to it now.
Maybe Shetland, Orkney and Aberdeenshire could remain part of the UK, along with the borders? They don't seem to swallow the nationalism shit. I am sure you wouldn't want to deny them their democratic rights?
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
This is the result of the ONS infection survey, so it shouldn't be sensitive to that.
I tend to agree, but the data is confused. The positive cases data suggest that vastly fewer are going to hospital and dying, the REACT study positive test vs hospitalisation suggests otherwise.
I genuinely don't know the answer.
No, the ONS infection incidence data suggests the same as the positive cases data - that the proportion of those infected who go on to be hospitalised or die has reduced a long way.
But not in the study posted?
Then the study posted was wrong because it fails to match the objective quantifiable data we have before us. Or other studies.
But it suits Chris's agenda so he'll keep quoting it. No different to Indy Sage.
If you really want to annoy Chris, point out that cherry-picking a single study or stat and treating it as established truth is similar to what Toby Young does on his propaganda site.
Is Toby still grinding away at that? I haven't seen him around my laptop screen now for quite some time.
'Fraid so. He's pretty much full-on antivaxxer now. Because that's where his market has shifted to.
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
That's odd considering a Hollywood staple is the weedy high-school bespectacled kid forever getting duffed by up the lumbering jack-ass (eg. Back to the Future) or the smarmy jock (everything else). Is all that just a figment of script-writers' imagination?
It happens, but only to those kids who go on to become scriptwriters.
Nice quote from Mrs T in 1988 on that thread. For those who might have missed it:
"Just think for a moment what a prospect that is. A single market without barriers - visible or invisible - giving you direct and unhindered access to the purchasing power of the world's wealthiest and most prosperous people. Bigger than Japan. Bigger than the United States. On your doorstep. It's not a dream. It's not a vision. It's not some bureaucrat's plan. It's for real.
"You might say: weren't we supposed to have a common market already? Wasn't that the reason we joined Europe in the first place? Weren't we promised all this in 1973?
"Europe wasn't open for business. Underneath the rhetoric, the old barriers remained. Not just against the outside world, but between the European countries. Not the classic barriers of tariffs, but the insidious ones of differing national standards, various restrictions on the provision of services, exclusion of foreign firms from public contracts. Now that's going to change. Britain has given the lead."
Interesting aside in that quote that demonstrates just how much the EU has failed in the decades since. At the time the late, great MrsT said that the EEC was indeed I believe bigger than the USA like she said. Despite only being 12 nations at the time.
However by 2016 Europe had collapsed as a share of the world's economy. The Europe of the world's wealthiest and most prosperous people that Thatcher spoke about no longer exists.
The world's wealthiest and most prosperous people now are throughout the globe and despite the EU now having 27 not 12 nations, it's collective GDP is now down to barely 70% of the USA's as opposed to greater even than the USA anymore.
That's why it's time to stop being parochial about our continent and to embrace the globe.
I’m not aware of research, but I’d take the view that haters will hate.
If the fat girl / asthmatic boy isn’t beaten up for same sex parents they will be beaten up for something else. Kids can be vile.
How international is this? I never experienced bullying in any form except for a brief period when I was at a school for English expats in Vienna, where it was common (and the teachers still smacked kids, to little effect). I mentioned casually to my parents that someone had tried to push a kid out of the moving school bus and they said WHAT! and whipped me out of there and into the American counterpart overnight. I was quite upset not to say goodbye to friends, but I never encountered a single bit of bullying in the next 7 years at American-led international schools.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
How international is bullying at school. Oh Nick, bless. And not in the US/American schools?
There was no bullying at my Washington DC school that I can remember. At my English boarding school bullying was practically the school sport; even the teachers joined in. I was a second tier bully more given to mockery, impersonation and derogatory nicknames rather than outright violence.
Didn't you hoist a kid you didn't like up a flagpole by his y-fronts?
No, but I stole somebody's trousers and stuck them up a chimney. He burst into the maths class clad from the waist down in a towel and said in a piping querulous voice, "Sir! Sir! Dura Ace has my trousers!"
I remember a documaentary on TV many years ago about his father. It showed a clip of the young JRM (11yrs I think) reading a copy of the FT (I think it was pink). He also opined ona few issues. He was a supercilious Git then as he is now.
It may have been The Times he was reading. After all, his father was its Editor. That probably explains quite a lot about JRM.
Do we have any water systems that could be turned into a significant pumped storage battery in the UK ? Could we create one, or do we need to go Lithium ion for storage here ?
There have been experiments with raising/lowering weights as a form of storage. Could be of use in areas with lots of disused deep mine shafts. My hazy scientific grasp is that a substance denser than water e.g. stone or metal would be more efficient than raising/lowering water.
It's a great idea until you start to consider the scale required to be useful. Dinorwic gives you 1.8GW for about 5 hours run flat out from full. To do so it takes around 390 tones of water falling 100m per second. That's 3,900 tons falling 10m a second, or 39,000 tons at 1m/second. If we dig a hole for our 40k ton weight to go down 1km deep, it will equal Dinorwic for 17 minutes. That's before you start looking at the engineering problem posed by dangling 40k tons down a 1km mineshaft on a rope.
Nice idea, but it just doesn't scale big enough sensibly.
And which is why pumped storage isn't any easy answer - you still need alot of Dinorwic's to deal with intermittency from renewables such as solar and wind.
One interesting idea I came across was using compressed air storage - beating the problem of energy loss on expansion to cooling, by using the cooling to manufacture liquid gases for free..... Making that add up would be an interesting one, though.
Dinorwic is enormous and well worth a visit
Not as worth it as it once was.. From wiki
"The power station was also promoted as a tourist attraction, with visitors able to take a minibus trip from "Electric Mountain" - the name of its nearby visitor centre - to see the workings inside the power station; 132,000 people visited the attraction in 2015. However, the centre is now closed with no prospect of reopening."
Also from wiki..
" The project – begun in 1974 and taking ten years to complete at a cost of £425 million – was the largest civil engineering contract ever awarded by the UK government at the time. .... The scheme paid for itself within two years.[citation needed]"
I went through it years ago and I must admit I did not know tours had ended
I wonder if that's because no one wants to go any more, or if it's because the counter-terrorism lot suggested that running tours of strategic targets was a little bit foolish.
As a kid, I went on a tour of a Magnox nuclear power station, including wandering round in the control room whilst it was online - can't imagine that being allowed now.
Welsh Labour’s party conference in November has been cancelled due to high cases of covid and pressure on the NHS. expected at that time of year does that mean other large scale events could be in jeopardy come the winter months?
No, just Drakeford is a wet blanket, hospitalisations still low due to the vaccinations
Follow the link below, and look at the blue line in Figure 5. And then read this: ... in our more recent data (since mid-April 2021), infections and hospitalisations began to re-converge, potentially reflecting the increased prevalence and severity of Delta compared with Alpha [25], a changing age mix of severe cases, and possible waning of protection [19,26]. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf
In short, the increased severity of the Delta variant has essentially cancelled out the benefit from vaccination, as far as the rate of hospitalisation per infection is concerned.
That doesn't mean there is no longer any benefit from vaccination, because vaccination still has a big benefit in lowering the risk of being infected in the first place - and thereby the risk of being hospitalised.
But people really need to stop parroting the old mantra about vaccination reducing the percentage of those infected who go to hospital. It doesn't.
Yes, it does. As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
One factor may be that we are finding a far higher percentage of infected people than before through widespread asymptomatic testing (schools and workplaces).
This is the result of the ONS infection survey, so it shouldn't be sensitive to that.
I tend to agree, but the data is confused. The positive cases data suggest that vastly fewer are going to hospital and dying, the REACT study positive test vs hospitalisation suggests otherwise.
I genuinely don't know the answer.
No, the ONS infection incidence data suggests the same as the positive cases data - that the proportion of those infected who go on to be hospitalised or die has reduced a long way.
But not in the study posted?
Then the study posted was wrong because it fails to match the objective quantifiable data we have before us. Or other studies.
But it suits Chris's agenda so he'll keep quoting it. No different to Indy Sage.
There's a reason why I often refer to him as @Chris (tina Pagel)
"The UK has slashed its strategic gas storage to barely 1.7pc of annual demand by closing the Rough facility off the Yorkshire coast, subcontracting the costly task of storage to Germany and the Netherlands."
Telegraph
Sounds like Business Sec could be in real shit here this winter.
Massive shit. As @Morris_Dancer pointed out this has been brewing for a long time. We've been making strategically stupid decisions in energy since the "dash for gas" days. You can only rely on North Sea Gas as your energy reserve if you haven't let the privatised utilities burn through it already.
For all of the bluster the UK has been increasingly and heavily reliant on exports for decades. Too much focus on prices and competition and profiteering, not enough on where the energy is coming from and what drives the prices.
So here we are. Reliant on imported gas with fuck all storage, reliant on imported electricity with no membership of the regulated European energy market (and nothing to replace it). A unique to Britain massive price spike in electricity threatening business ruin food shortages and blackouts.
We may avoid it. But why the fuck has Johnson let us slide out here to the edge? Global Britain who can't keep the lights on? Watch him spin our power crisis as some kind of environmental statement for COP26.
Headlines that have aged well, part 471
"Sturgeon told ‘find new customer’ for independent Scotland's energy as UK would cut ties"
I thought you were going to link to Nicola opposing the deveulopment of North Sea oil fields so as to reduce our imports.
‘Our’ imports? I assume after Indy your huffy old rump Unionists won’t be wanting Scottish oil anyway, best get used to it now.
If there was ever indy the rUK government would of course play hardball and ensure that as much North Sea Oil as possible stayed in the rUK, especially given BP has played a big role in extracting it and has its HQ in London
There likely wouldn't be very much oil. SNP and Green allies are doing their best to close the entire industry down.
"The UK has slashed its strategic gas storage to barely 1.7pc of annual demand by closing the Rough facility off the Yorkshire coast, subcontracting the costly task of storage to Germany and the Netherlands."
Telegraph
Sounds like Business Sec could be in real shit here this winter.
Massive shit. As @Morris_Dancer pointed out this has been brewing for a long time. We've been making strategically stupid decisions in energy since the "dash for gas" days. You can only rely on North Sea Gas as your energy reserve if you haven't let the privatised utilities burn through it already.
For all of the bluster the UK has been increasingly and heavily reliant on exports for decades. Too much focus on prices and competition and profiteering, not enough on where the energy is coming from and what drives the prices.
So here we are. Reliant on imported gas with fuck all storage, reliant on imported electricity with no membership of the regulated European energy market (and nothing to replace it). A unique to Britain massive price spike in electricity threatening business ruin food shortages and blackouts.
We may avoid it. But why the fuck has Johnson let us slide out here to the edge? Global Britain who can't keep the lights on? Watch him spin our power crisis as some kind of environmental statement for COP26.
Headlines that have aged well, part 471
"Sturgeon told ‘find new customer’ for independent Scotland's energy as UK would cut ties"
I thought you were going to link to Nicola opposing the deveulopment of North Sea oil fields so as to reduce our imports.
‘Our’ imports? I assume after Indy your huffy old rump Unionists won’t be wanting Scottish oil anyway, best get used to it now.
Maybe Shetland, Orkney and Aberdeenshire could remain part of the UK, along with the borders? They don't seem to swallow the nationalism shit. I am sure you wouldn't want to deny them their democratic rights?
Not only that, the Scots do not want independence
It is an interesting thought though isn't it? The geographical area in Scotland that voted in favour of "independence" is tiny, and yet the loony English haters would have you believe everyone across Scotland is in favour. I was in the Highlands a few weeks ago, and it is pretty obvious that genuine Highlanders have more in common with the rural folk of the Yorkshire Dales, or Cornishmen on Bodmin than they do with the clean living folk of Glasgow.
Comments
Selling fixed and buying variable without a hedge is a broken business model whenever the variable gets too far varied.
It's also completely destroyed any investment incentive within the private sector and the state energy strategy is a complete mess.
The price cap is the ultimate reason we're in the shit here, predictably, it has resulted in years of underinvestment by private corporations in energy generation capacity to protect margins.
I've heard of it in Denmark and Germany ("mobbing"). Are US schools generally better at handling it? Or was it just a biased sample, as the international schools are full of kids of diplomamts and businesspeople? But in that case, why was the English one so much worse?
Perhaps start with Marty McFly and ask him then work your way around every other school on the planet*.
With the obvious exception of the ones you were at.
Australia had good commercial and technical reasons to cancel the French contract; they should have done so independently of this deal. The two were linked for the benefit of domestic political theatre.
Cliques weren't though. Literally everyone had a list of who could and couldn't be seen with or spoken too.
Very Breakfast Club.
I never got my head around it. So I didn't co-operate and was just considered a wierd foreigner.And tolerated.
Separately even though the visitors centre is closed Caffi`r Ffowntan Cafe is nice and very cheap.
But since the water would be going to the centre of the earth and back, it would actually be gaining potential energy, *and* we cold put a steam turbine on it on the way back.
What's not to like?
Elon .... oh ... Elllooooooooonnnn !!!
Obviously we hope that does not happen but there is still a more than 0% chance this new baby could be our future Queen
It really is as if it is over
Plenty and I mean plenty of people care.
As well as all the studies showing the protection against severe infection (which is invariably far higher than the protection against any level of breakthrough infection, making it arithmetically inescapable that vaccination reduces the percentage of those infected who go to hospital), the ratio between infections (measured by the ONS) in England and hospitalisations and deaths is considerably lower now than before.
(Use of the daily infection incidence numbers in the ONS survey for England, against the hospitalisations figure lagged by 20 days (as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 20 to normalise close to an equal-sized peak at its worst (and implying an average of 5% IHR at worst), and deaths lagged by 27 days (also as suggested in the REACT study) and multiplied by 75 for similar normalisation of the relative peaks.
You're going to have to explain the consistently lower red and black lines in the recent wave - especially in the face of data suggesting that Delta is twice as likely to hospitalise people than Alpha (so the line should be twice as high as the blue peak).
Which avoids giving benefit to those running businesses in a reckless manner.
Whole new side to you, Nick
Plus you are negating a whole generation of US coming of age films here - tread carefully.
In this highly unlikely scenario anyway sadly Charles and William and their families will have been assassinated or killed in a dreadful accident along with the Sussexes and Andrew, leaving the way clear for Queen Beatrice the 1st and her new daughter to succeed the Queen
If you can't identify the bully/mug chances are it's you.
Edit: LOL Selebian beat me to it. 😂
https://twitter.com/BBCJonSopel/status/1439944604338491396?s=20
The school bully sized me up on my first day.
“‘Ere, are you ‘ard?”
I had no idea what he was talking about, as “hardness” is not a term in NZ English.
So, I looked deliberately down at my crotch, then back at him.
“Not right now, no.”
He did not bother me again.
The core requirement, the only requirement, is a safe and reliable power supply at a stable uniform price affordable by all. But no, this wouldn't be exciting enough, so instead we have a smorgasbord of arcanary; caps and collars, fixed v floating rates, short deals and long deals, salary incentives, bonuses, share options, boardroom games, shareholder angst and pressure, the bosses troughing and posturing, golden hellos, golden goodbyes, customer discounts for switching contracts, people paying wildly different tariffs, savvy types tracking their options 24/7 online and making savings, others who need the money more stuck on bad deals, or not understanding the deal they're on, paying over the odds, etc, the whole thing is ridiculous.
Competition = good is a mantra which really does need to be challenged. Often, as here, and as per another example, banking, it leads to valueless, truth-obscuring complexity in how things are done and the public end up being ill-served. With such sectors I get a strong sense of something that's really a public utility, which would be better and logically run that way.
The ONS might miss some cases as they don't do university halls etc, which might be high incidence (I think - not sure whether their model then corrects for this). But if that's the case then the lines on Andy's graph overstate the closeness of hospitalisations and infections, not the other way round.
Edit: Ah, RobD said it already.
I genuinely don't know the answer.
https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/business-news-will-evergrande-woes-bring-great-fall-of-china/395131
...According to UBS, currently, the Chinese offshore bond market has total debt outstanding of $209 billion out of which 70% are high-yielding bonds. Based on UBS estimates the total liability of the Chinese property sector is close to $4.7 trillion, the offshore bond market, therefore, accounts for only 4.5% of total financing for the sector.
UBS noted that with a total outstanding of $19 billion of offshore bonds, Evergrande has 9% exposure to the total offshore bond market and 12% of the high-yielding offshore bond market.
Marquee international investors like BlackRock- the world’s largest asset manager, Paris-based Amundi- Europe’s largest asset manager, UBS Asset Management, Ashmore Group, HSBC Holdings, Fidelity, PIMCO, Goldman Sachs Asset Management are the few large bondholders of Evergrande...
Before the end of 2021
The UK Prime Minister, speaking on the record to lobby journalists, is still not regarded as a trusted source. https://twitter.com/kitty_donaldson/status/1439923046903599108
Yes it has issues. But the customer is better placed with a competitive environment than one where a monopoly public sector behemoth ends up running poorly with no challenge.
And if companies fail that shouldn't be considered a market failure but the market working as intended. Bad business models fail, good ones thrive.
I assume after Indy your huffy old rump Unionists won’t be wanting Scottish oil anyway, best get used to it now.
The protagonist, Adrian, gets threatened with a beating by two other (hard!) boys at school. He warns them not to.
They say, "Yeah, what ya gonna do about it?"
He replies,
"I shall sustain a massive erection, that’s what, and I shan’t be answerable for the consequences. Some kind of ejaculation is almost bound to ensue and if either of you were to become pregnant I should never forgive myself.”
I can now go to New York on a reccy trip before the move proper early next year.
But the problem remains that someone has to pay - either the govt, or the consumers. ie indirectly or directly.
Not sure how they spin/policy announce their way out of that.
In comparison, the PHE and NHS data suggests very differently, as do all studies of vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation and death, as do the cases figures, and as do the ONS infection incidence figures.
Given all of that, looking at the single outlier is far more sensible than assuming all the other data is wrong.
"Labour will scrap the private equity carried interest loophole – a loophole that leaves fund managers with a tax break of up to £170,000 a year".
"Haha. If JRM wasn't savagely bullied then his classmates need to ask themselves some serious questions. There was a very similar kid at my boarding school. We used to call him "Timpax" and haul him up the flagpole."
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/2194852/#Comment_2194852
Demand management sounds like a euphemism for brownouts and the like. It's the best way to manage a failure to be able to satisfy demand, but it should be a last resort rather than a standard part of the system.
Is the product essentially the same?
Is the product a necessity of life?
If the answer is "Yes" to both of the above, it means Provision is more important than Choice, and public ownership should be considered.
If he was on your team, you’d fire him.
"Just think for a moment what a prospect that is. A single market without barriers - visible or invisible - giving you direct and unhindered access to the purchasing power of the world's wealthiest and most prosperous people. Bigger than Japan. Bigger than the United States. On your doorstep. It's not a dream. It's not a vision. It's not some bureaucrat's plan. It's for real.
"You might say: weren't we supposed to have a common market already? Wasn't that the reason we joined Europe in the first place? Weren't we promised all this in 1973?
"Europe wasn't open for business. Underneath the rhetoric, the old barriers remained. Not just against the outside world, but between the European countries. Not the classic barriers of tariffs, but the insidious ones of differing national standards, various restrictions on the provision of services, exclusion of foreign firms from public contracts. Now that's going to change. Britain has given the lead."
But it suits Chris's agenda so he'll keep quoting it. No different to Indy Sage.
SPD lead down from 5% to 3% over the Union.
The main difference between Kennedy and 99% of Classic FM listeners (and probably Radio 3 listeners)? Kennedy is actually a musician.
However by 2016 Europe had collapsed as a share of the world's economy. The Europe of the world's wealthiest and most prosperous people that Thatcher spoke about no longer exists.
The world's wealthiest and most prosperous people now are throughout the globe and despite the EU now having 27 not 12 nations, it's collective GDP is now down to barely 70% of the USA's as opposed to greater even than the USA anymore.
That's why it's time to stop being parochial about our continent and to embrace the globe.
Incredible story...
https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/evergrande-gave-workers-a-choice-loan-us-cash-or-lose-your-bonus-121092000049_1.html
Shit hitting fan shortly.
As a kid, I went on a tour of a Magnox nuclear power station, including wandering round in the control room whilst it was online - can't imagine that being allowed now.
I presume, since he is one of the leading contra-indicators de nos jours, he’s on the same page as Ambrose Pritchard Evans in the Telegraph.