On the supply-chain, truck-driver shortage thing, it’s certainly true that it’s a problem across the developed world. Here in the US we’re not just seeing a truck-driver shortage but a school bus-driver shortage too as in many states the licensing (sic) is compatible for at least smaller trucks and trucking is paying much better right now.
And of course the root cause of that is the pandemic, not Brexit. However, an advantage that US and the EU have is that we and they are operating on continental-scales for this sort of thing, which makes it easier to either deliberately or through the “invisible hand” manage the supply to match the demand overall. Cabotage within the EU means that a truck driver’s regular work can be a mixture of long-distance international jobs supplemented by local jobs within a particular country, not necessarily their own. And of course that’s even simpler in the US as a single country/economy (not sure if there is any cabotage for Mexican or Canadian truckers allowed under NAFTA/USMCA but I doubt it would be as significant as in the EU anyway).
With the UK’s hard Brexit from the CU/SM, it’s been cut off from those advantages. That is what it is, but as I’ve posted here before I feel that we have sleepwalked (across the world) into a world of highly-efficient, very interconnected supply chains that are also very brittle. The machine started to misfire with the pandemic, and instead of trying to oil it, the UK seems intent on poking a stick into the spokes.
Agreed. The message is clear. If you are disabled, you are worth less than a “normal” baby. Equalise the limit.
Doesn't really follow imo. Once born all are equal under the law. Eg the Texas limit now is 6 weeks, California is longer. Does this send a loud and clear message that a Californian child is worth less than a Texan one? Surely not. Or if a state has extensions for a pregnancy caused by rape, is the clear message there that children conceived in those circumstances are worth less than those who aren't? I don't think so. I find that a rather odd interpretation.
The “what happens if the wind doesn’t blow” question will at least partly be addressed in due course with battery storage, but we sometimes miss the big picture on renewables.
The reason we only have 1-2gw of wind power in calm anti cyclonic conditions is because we only have about 18gw of peak capacity. Build 10x as much, plus more solar (which often generates well during times there is little wind) and even in calm periods we have 10-20gw being generated. We have massive latency in traditional generation capacity. We need to get used to latency in renewables too. It’s already happening in parts of the US and China with solar. The infrastructure is cheap enough that it’s viable simply to build much more than you need and switch it off when there’s too much sun. (Or use the excess to smelt aluminium / make carbon fibre / isolate hydrogen).
We are now into autumn winds. In Sky Blue. Wind running at 10+GW now.
Plus (I think - this needs translating https://www.nationalgrid.com/incidents) the burnt down interconnector is about to come back on with 1GW capacity. And the Norway Interconnector comes on stream in the next month at 1.4GW.
TBH I think the supply issue is very close to fixed. I think it will all be very different in just a month or so.
Effectively artificially low prices have been subsidised or years by the capital of people who invested in companies with unsustainable business models. Who are now falling out.
Personally I hope that we stick with somewhat higher prices, and the current 'crisis' will persuade some people to improve the Energy Efficiency of their homes.
That's a tricky argument to take to renters.
Are rental properties advertised with EPCs? Do they have to be?
It's 7 years since I was last in the rental market, as tenant, so I'm out of touch. I know EPCs are pretty limited, but they do give some idea. When house-hunting (to buy) I do consider them at the filtering stage.
An addition to headline EPC to give an average monthly energy bill for that type of property with that kind of EPC rating would enable landlords with better insulated homes to put the case that renting from them was preferable to renting a less insulated home.
About ten years ago I lived in a total shocker of a flat, insulation-wise. Nice flat, nice block, nice location but the landlord had had no incentive to upgrade the origina 1970s standard (lack of) insulation. High bills, cold rooms.
You need to decide what your priority is. I have always lived in old properties with high ceilings because I appreciate their aesthetic value, and take the high bills as part of the cost. That's my perspective. The EPC is largely irrellevant. It was true both when renting and after buying.
Were I to upgrade my current building to get a better EPC I would need to do damaging works which would essentially amount to a form of vandalism; ie by ripping out the walls or ceiling, or the original single glazed windows.
I have some scepticism about EPC's based on the current encouragement of electrical storage heaters, which the government are currently funding for low income households, and which would presumably increase the EPC rating of a building. These are universally derided by builders and tradesmen; they rely on uneconomic economy 7 tariffs forcing you to accept higher electricity prices in the daytime, and they don't heat the house when you most need it; ie on very cold winter evenings, forcing you to use expensive temporary electric heaters or portable gas heaters instead.
Yes, there are plenty of other things to consider. I own a 1925 house and there are limits on what you can do (or, indeed, want to do). We could pay lower bills for a well-insulated rabbit hutch, but choose not to.
What I'm talking about is the renter considering my old flat from ten years ago or the neighbouring flat (had the owner been renting that out). Both were pleasantly decorated, large flats. Ours was slightly larger by the thickness of internal insulation on external walls (under 2sqm floor space difference on a quick calc). Internal room height identical. Our energy bills were ~30% higher than the neighbour's. If both had been up for rent on Rightmove or wherever, there would have been pretty much nothing to choose between them on the information and pictures commonly provided. An EPC would have provided the differentiation and perhaps enabled the better insulated flat to be rented at a higher price.
PS: You don't need to convince me on storage heaters - above mentioned flat had them.
SKS's essay seems to have vanished more or less without trace already. SFAICS it contains nothing except self evident general desires for a slightly better world. Has anyone spotted anything interesting in it?
I posted a point made by Stephen Bush earlier this morning - about what it did not contain. Somewhere down below, about 9 am-ish.
Yes, thanks. I noticed it at the time. What the excellent Stephen Bush didn't say was that the essay was brilliant, full of new ideas and made all the relevant calls about difficult choices so that we knew what SKS stood for.
The usual suspects - BBC, Guardian, Mirror, are not giving it great prominence.
Labour List manages this lapidary thought:
The central point of the pamphlet is that Britain faces a choice between a country led by a Labour leader committed to equality, security, responsibility and collective action – or incompetence, selfishness, atomisation, cronyism and free-market dogma under the Tories.
You don't say. Gosh.
I'm pleased they got "atomization" in there. It's a word I like and it perfectly describes something about how we're going that I dislike. One does have to careful not to slide into "old fart" or "guru of grim" territory with it though.
In other words, Starmer stands for dull decency. Which is a perfectly reasonable opposite to the current government. Mark D'Arcy vs. Daniel Cleaver.
Leads to two questions, though.
First is will the GBP decide that they'd quite like a few years of dull decency in 2023/4? Some think that's impossible, that we're so addled by celebrity culture that we will inevitably vote for the Big Man. I'm not so sure, though that may be wishful thinking. (If the way to win elections is to just find the biggest gob and put it on the biggest stick, we're stuffed as a nation.)
Second is that, if your USP is dull decency, how do you sell it? Hopefully Lefty Boris isn't needed (after all, that gets you Ken Livingstone or Derek Hatton) but a little bit of sparkly dust wouldn't go amiss.
Dull decency will do fine for me. But What is the dull decency plan for the next 10 years of Brexit, taxation, how much to spend on the NHS, solving social care, what do the dull decent do about tapering benefits, the NI/RoI border, membership of the single market, the customs union, paying off the debt, borrowing, the actuality of the painful bits of climate change policy when the rest of world is increasing emissions. Etc.
Anyone know where SKS stands on any or all of these?
SKS's essay seems to have vanished more or less without trace already. SFAICS it contains nothing except self evident general desires for a slightly better world. Has anyone spotted anything interesting in it?
I posted a point made by Stephen Bush earlier this morning - about what it did not contain. Somewhere down below, about 9 am-ish.
Yes, thanks. I noticed it at the time. What the excellent Stephen Bush didn't say was that the essay was brilliant, full of new ideas and made all the relevant calls about difficult choices so that we knew what SKS stood for.
The usual suspects - BBC, Guardian, Mirror, are not giving it great prominence.
Labour List manages this lapidary thought:
The central point of the pamphlet is that Britain faces a choice between a country led by a Labour leader committed to equality, security, responsibility and collective action – or incompetence, selfishness, atomisation, cronyism and free-market dogma under the Tories.
You don't say. Gosh.
I'm pleased they got "atomization" in there. It's a word I like and it perfectly describes something about how we're going that I dislike. One does have to careful not to slide into "old fart" or "guru of grim" territory with it though.
What is your understanding of atomisation? I agree that we are going through it - my understanding of it, at any rate - but it doesn't seem to be a party political issue; or, to the extent that either party has a position, the Conservatives occasionally rail against it half-heartedly and ineffectually, and Labour (up until now) and the Lib Dems say nothing at all.
My view of what atomisation is includes: - people see, and know, fewer other people - decline in participation in clubs and societies - decline in commonly held culture and cultural values (banal example: we don't all watch the same things at the same time any more) - decline in household size - increase in not-knowing-your-neighbours syndrome
These are not all inherently or wholly negative.
But humans are social creatures. Our health and wellbeing and happiness depends on having our 150 people to rub along with - in real life, with eye contact, laughter, nuance, and so forth - and in having an 'us' with whom we identify. People who we don't, or only to a limited extent, choose. Families, for example; but there are dozens of other examples: clubs, schools, churches, other children's parents. Even workplaces. (I am back in the office today for the first time since March 2020. For some reason, being with work colleagues - agreeable enough people, but not people I have personally selected on my journey through life - rather than with family, feels curiously life-affirming.)
There's something a bit paradoxical about this - I think the gist of my argument is that I want to be around people who I don't choose to be around.
Perhaps there's something to be said for hygge after all, though it sounds bloody awful.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, or what the solution is. I'm not even sure there is a solution, or at least not a top-down one. I could perhaps add in some in effective railing at big tech, who are - if not the villains of all this, at least the enablers - but I'm not sure to what end.
On the supply-chain, truck-driver shortage thing, it’s certainly true that it’s a problem across the developed world. Here in the US we’re not just seeing a truck-driver shortage but a school bus-driver shortage too as in many states the licensing (sic) is compatible for at least smaller trucks and trucking is paying much better right now.
And of course the root cause of that is the pandemic, not Brexit. However, an advantage that US and the EU have is that we and they are operating on continental-scales for this sort of thing, which makes it easier to either deliberately or through the “invisible hand” manage the supply to match the demand overall. Cabotage within the EU means that a truck driver’s regular work can be a mixture of long-distance international jobs supplemented by local jobs within a particular country, not necessarily their own. And of course that’s even simpler in the US as a single country/economy (not sure if there is any cabotage for Mexican or Canadian truckers allowed under NAFTA/USMCA but I doubt it would be as significant as in the EU anyway).
With the UK’s hard Brexit from the CU/SM, it’s been cut off from those advantages. That is what it is, but as I’ve posted here before I feel that we have sleepwalked (across the world) into a world of highly-efficient, very interconnected supply chains that are also very brittle. The machine started to misfire with the pandemic, and instead of trying to oil it, the UK seems intent on poking a stick into the spokes.
I agree with a lot of what you said but with a key divergence take the opposition position.
Yes you're right that this is a global issue and in other countries the "invisible hand" is fixing the issue. Which is precisely what I and others on the right of politics are advocating should happen here too.
The problem in this country is not Brexit but that its so easy for people to blame their issues on Brexit and so think someone else should solve them for them.
Earlier in this thread a discussion of timber came up and the eventual position seems to be that American companies are paying what they need to for timber, so buying up timber supplies. The invisible hand is working there because companies are just quietly getting on with it and paying whatever has to be paid.
People in this country need to do the same. Stop whinging excessively and blaming all your ills on Brexit, just Keep Calm And Carry On. Get on with the job, like is happening in the USA. The incessant moaning and seeking to use politics to solve your ills, rather than just paying what has to be paid and moving on, is the stick in the spokes.
I am confused by this narrative that freedom of movement of Labour is suggested to be so strongly linked to holding back the pay of the lower paid.
The Swiss have freedom of movement of Labour, they have 3 or 4 times the number of immigrants compared to the UK, yet the issues described about low wages being supressed, there being no career path etc. is not seemingly affecting the Swiss (and I would suggest many other EU countries).
What are the Swiss doing in their Labour market to mean that they are able to gain from the EU trading relationships yet are not hampered by the supposed negative impact of freedom of movement ?
Something does not seem right in this logic.
That’s because the logic is bolleaux. Essentially the “lump of labour” fallacy.
I keep pointing out that academic research shows very little evidence of wage suppression, and quite a bit for wage growth, but each time I do I get shouted down by some old white man who hasn’t worked since 1987 due to alcohol problems and blames the “eye-ties”.
No, it's because Switzerland has put up a lot, lot of NTBs on employment of migrants.
NTBs which have not, as the original poster noted, avoided very high volumes of immigration.
Yes, the biggest moaners about immigration in Switzerland are high end workers. My wife's uncle was bitching about German doctors coming and working in Switzerland a couple of years ago. We wish we had that problem.
Let me guess: they don't get called racist and stupid, do they?
On the supply-chain, truck-driver shortage thing, it’s certainly true that it’s a problem across the developed world. Here in the US we’re not just seeing a truck-driver shortage but a school bus-driver shortage too as in many states the licensing (sic) is compatible for at least smaller trucks and trucking is paying much better right now.
And of course the root cause of that is the pandemic, not Brexit. However, an advantage that US and the EU have is that we and they are operating on continental-scales for this sort of thing, which makes it easier to either deliberately or through the “invisible hand” manage the supply to match the demand overall. Cabotage within the EU means that a truck driver’s regular work can be a mixture of long-distance international jobs supplemented by local jobs within a particular country, not necessarily their own. And of course that’s even simpler in the US as a single country/economy (not sure if there is any cabotage for Mexican or Canadian truckers allowed under NAFTA/USMCA but I doubt it would be as significant as in the EU anyway).
With the UK’s hard Brexit from the CU/SM, it’s been cut off from those advantages. That is what it is, but as I’ve posted here before I feel that we have sleepwalked (across the world) into a world of highly-efficient, very interconnected supply chains that are also very brittle. The machine started to misfire with the pandemic, and instead of trying to oil it, the UK seems intent on poking a stick into the spokes.
I agree with a lot of what you said but with a key divergence take the opposition position.
Yes you're right that this is a global issue and in other countries the "invisible hand" is fixing the issue. Which is precisely what I and others on the right of politics are advocating should happen here too.
The problem in this country is not Brexit but that its so easy for people to blame their issues on Brexit and so think someone else should solve them for them.
Earlier in this thread a discussion of timber came up and the eventual position seems to be that American companies are paying what they need to for timber, so buying up timber supplies. The invisible hand is working there because companies are just quietly getting on with it and paying whatever has to be paid.
People in this country need to do the same. Stop whinging excessively and blaming all your ills on Brexit, just Keep Calm And Carry On. Get on with the job, like is happening in the USA. The incessant moaning and seeking to use politics to solve your ills, rather than just paying what has to be paid and moving on, is the stick in the spokes.
Which is fine but the government has approached the situation with its usual incompetence. People are unable to book HGV driving tests. That's mostly what this comes down to. Grant Shapps took the easy way out during COVID and halted tests and now we're all paying the price for that. Papering over the cracks with EU drivers won't change anything, in fact it will give the government a way out of the mess without fixing the bloody problem.
All of this has got at least a 6 month lead time and a year ago we knew we needed to drastically increase driving test capacity for HGV licencing, both to keep up with renewals of existing drivers and to get new ones licenced. In that time nothing has really been done and all we've had from Shapps are a few token changes to licence terms.
The system is bottlenecked by getting drivers licenced. The new salaries on offer are getting lots of people interested and then they get told, well you can train for 6 months but you won't get a test for 18 months so won't be earning that salary you read about for at least 2 years and they decide that working in Sainsbury's isn't so bad after all.
On the supply-chain, truck-driver shortage thing, it’s certainly true that it’s a problem across the developed world. Here in the US we’re not just seeing a truck-driver shortage but a school bus-driver shortage too as in many states the licensing (sic) is compatible for at least smaller trucks and trucking is paying much better right now.
And of course the root cause of that is the pandemic, not Brexit. However, an advantage that US and the EU have is that we and they are operating on continental-scales for this sort of thing, which makes it easier to either deliberately or through the “invisible hand” manage the supply to match the demand overall. Cabotage within the EU means that a truck driver’s regular work can be a mixture of long-distance international jobs supplemented by local jobs within a particular country, not necessarily their own. And of course that’s even simpler in the US as a single country/economy (not sure if there is any cabotage for Mexican or Canadian truckers allowed under NAFTA/USMCA but I doubt it would be as significant as in the EU anyway).
With the UK’s hard Brexit from the CU/SM, it’s been cut off from those advantages. That is what it is, but as I’ve posted here before I feel that we have sleepwalked (across the world) into a world of highly-efficient, very interconnected supply chains that are also very brittle. The machine started to misfire with the pandemic, and instead of trying to oil it, the UK seems intent on poking a stick into the spokes.
I agree with a lot of what you said but with a key divergence take the opposition position.
Yes you're right that this is a global issue and in other countries the "invisible hand" is fixing the issue. Which is precisely what I and others on the right of politics are advocating should happen here too.
The problem in this country is not Brexit but that its so easy for people to blame their issues on Brexit and so think someone else should solve them for them.
Earlier in this thread a discussion of timber came up and the eventual position seems to be that American companies are paying what they need to for timber, so buying up timber supplies. The invisible hand is working there because companies are just quietly getting on with it and paying whatever has to be paid.
People in this country need to do the same. Stop whinging excessively and blaming all your ills on Brexit, just Keep Calm And Carry On. Get on with the job, like is happening in the USA. The incessant moaning and seeking to use politics to solve your ills, rather than just paying what has to be paid and moving on, is the stick in the spokes.
On the timber point, I know numbers of self-builders who have either a) Delayed their projects, or are doing them in a different order (eg landscaping first), because their timber frame kits are 25-50% up from the quotes of 12-18 months ago, or b) Proceeding because they agreed to pay the premium for a fixed price or firm price contract back then.
Timber market is already starting to stabilise, but it will take time.
I get the arguments about violence and porn, but how do we explain away mainstream shows, including those like Game of Thrones, Spartacus, Tribes of Europa, and The Walking Dead that revel in showing extreme violence and sexual violence, which sells well and gives very high viewing figures?
Some of these shows had female directors and writers. I stopped watching GoT after The Red Wedding, which I found disturbing, but this is a bit more complex than just saying it's male chauvinism, I think.
SKS's essay seems to have vanished more or less without trace already. SFAICS it contains nothing except self evident general desires for a slightly better world. Has anyone spotted anything interesting in it?
I posted a point made by Stephen Bush earlier this morning - about what it did not contain. Somewhere down below, about 9 am-ish.
Yes, thanks. I noticed it at the time. What the excellent Stephen Bush didn't say was that the essay was brilliant, full of new ideas and made all the relevant calls about difficult choices so that we knew what SKS stood for.
The usual suspects - BBC, Guardian, Mirror, are not giving it great prominence.
Labour List manages this lapidary thought:
The central point of the pamphlet is that Britain faces a choice between a country led by a Labour leader committed to equality, security, responsibility and collective action – or incompetence, selfishness, atomisation, cronyism and free-market dogma under the Tories.
You don't say. Gosh.
I'm pleased they got "atomization" in there. It's a word I like and it perfectly describes something about how we're going that I dislike. One does have to careful not to slide into "old fart" or "guru of grim" territory with it though.
What is your understanding of atomisation? I agree that we are going through it - my understanding of it, at any rate - but it doesn't seem to be a party political issue; or, to the extent that either party has a position, the Conservatives occasionally rail against it half-heartedly and ineffectually, and Labour (up until now) and the Lib Dems say nothing at all.
My view of what atomisation is includes: - people see, and know, fewer other people - decline in participation in clubs and societies - decline in commonly held culture and cultural values (banal example: we don't all watch the same things at the same time any more) - decline in household size - increase in not-knowing-your-neighbours syndrome
These are not all inherently or wholly negative.
But humans are social creatures. Our health and wellbeing and happiness depends on having our 150 people to rub along with - in real life, with eye contact, laughter, nuance, and so forth - and in having an 'us' with whom we identify. People who we don't, or only to a limited extent, choose. Families, for example; but there are dozens of other examples: clubs, schools, churches, other children's parents. Even workplaces. (I am back in the office today for the first time since March 2020. For some reason, being with work colleagues - agreeable enough people, but not people I have personally selected on my journey through life - rather than with family, feels curiously life-affirming.)
There's something a bit paradoxical about this - I think the gist of my argument is that I want to be around people who I don't choose to be around.
Perhaps there's something to be said for hygge after all, though it sounds bloody awful.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, or what the solution is. I'm not even sure there is a solution, or at least not a top-down one. I could perhaps add in some in effective railing at big tech, who are - if not the villains of all this, at least the enablers - but I'm not sure to what end.
But atomisation is a process both of Thatcherite individualism, and of "state does everything" socialism. Because both mitigate against small-scale human communities.
And it is an observed phenomenon for at least 60 years.
Movements such as community-living from the 1960s / 1970s are a response . critique, plus eg it was an element of thinking of people such as E F Schumacher.
Or, as the Philosopher put it: "There is nothing new under the sun".
SKS's essay seems to have vanished more or less without trace already. SFAICS it contains nothing except self evident general desires for a slightly better world. Has anyone spotted anything interesting in it?
I posted a point made by Stephen Bush earlier this morning - about what it did not contain. Somewhere down below, about 9 am-ish.
Yes, thanks. I noticed it at the time. What the excellent Stephen Bush didn't say was that the essay was brilliant, full of new ideas and made all the relevant calls about difficult choices so that we knew what SKS stood for.
The usual suspects - BBC, Guardian, Mirror, are not giving it great prominence.
Labour List manages this lapidary thought:
The central point of the pamphlet is that Britain faces a choice between a country led by a Labour leader committed to equality, security, responsibility and collective action – or incompetence, selfishness, atomisation, cronyism and free-market dogma under the Tories.
You don't say. Gosh.
For a moment I interpreted "lapidary" as "like a rabbit".
Douglas Fraser @BBCDouglasF BP: “We're experiencing fuel supply issues at some UK retail sites and unfortunately have therefore seen handful temporarily close due to lack of unleaded and diesel grades: caused by supply chain delays, industry-wide driver shortages: working hard to address this issue"
The “what happens if the wind doesn’t blow” question will at least partly be addressed in due course with battery storage, but we sometimes miss the big picture on renewables.
The reason we only have 1-2gw of wind power in calm anti cyclonic conditions is because we only have about 18gw of peak capacity. Build 10x as much, plus more solar (which often generates well during times there is little wind) and even in calm periods we have 10-20gw being generated. We have massive latency in traditional generation capacity. We need to get used to latency in renewables too. It’s already happening in parts of the US and China with solar. The infrastructure is cheap enough that it’s viable simply to build much more than you need and switch it off when there’s too much sun. (Or use the excess to smelt aluminium / make carbon fibre / isolate hydrogen).
We are now into autumn winds. In Sky Blue. Wind running at 10+GW now.
Plus (I think - this needs translating https://www.nationalgrid.com/incidents) the burnt down interconnector is about to come back on with 1GW capacity. And the Norway Interconnector comes on stream in the next month at 1.4GW.
TBH I think the supply issue is very close to fixed. I think it will all be very different in just a month or so.
Effectively artificially low prices have been subsidised or years by the capital of people who invested in companies with unsustainable business models. Who are now falling out.
Personally I hope that we stick with somewhat higher prices, and the current 'crisis' will persuade some people to improve the Energy Efficiency of their homes.
That's a tricky argument to take to renters.
Are rental properties advertised with EPCs? Do they have to be?
It's 7 years since I was last in the rental market, as tenant, so I'm out of touch. I know EPCs are pretty limited, but they do give some idea. When house-hunting (to buy) I do consider them at the filtering stage.
An addition to headline EPC to give an average monthly energy bill for that type of property with that kind of EPC rating would enable landlords with better insulated homes to put the case that renting from them was preferable to renting a less insulated home.
About ten years ago I lived in a total shocker of a flat, insulation-wise. Nice flat, nice block, nice location but the landlord had had no incentive to upgrade the origina 1970s standard (lack of) insulation. High bills, cold rooms.
You need to decide what your priority is. I have always lived in old properties with high ceilings because I appreciate their aesthetic value, and take the high bills as part of the cost. That's my perspective. The EPC is largely irrellevant. It was true both when renting and after buying.
Were I to upgrade my current building to get a better EPC I would need to do damaging works which would essentially amount to a form of vandalism; ie by ripping out the walls or ceiling, or the original single glazed windows.
I have some scepticism about EPC's based on the current encouragement of electrical storage heaters, which the government are currently funding for low income households, and which would presumably increase the EPC rating of a building. These are universally derided by builders and tradesmen; they rely on uneconomic economy 7 tariffs forcing you to accept higher electricity prices in the daytime, and they don't heat the house when you most need it; ie on very cold winter evenings, forcing you to use expensive temporary electric heaters or portable gas heaters instead.
Yes, there are plenty of other things to consider. I own a 1925 house and there are limits on what you can do (or, indeed, want to do). We could pay lower bills for a well-insulated rabbit hutch, but choose not to.
What I'm talking about is the renter considering my old flat from ten years ago or the neighbouring flat (had the owner been renting that out). Both were pleasantly decorated, large flats. Ours was slightly larger by the thickness of internal insulation on external walls (under 2sqm floor space difference on a quick calc). Internal room height identical. Our energy bills were ~30% higher than the neighbour's. If both had been up for rent on Rightmove or wherever, there would have been pretty much nothing to choose between them on the information and pictures commonly provided. An EPC would have provided the differentiation and perhaps enabled the better insulated flat to be rented at a higher price.
PS: You don't need to convince me on storage heaters - above mentioned flat had them.
Agree that you both make good points.
It is interesting that the number of "all electric" houses are rapidly increasing. I will do that with mine in due course, when I take the gas boiler out at the end of its life, but I need the EPC to be up around A95 first, which needs a couple more things doing.
A possible approach for a person building a decent quality self-build now is to install ufh pipework in the slab just in case something is calculated wrong, then use a couple of immersion heaters to heat the slab on Economy 7, and have no heating upstairs except a couple of electric towel rails for the depth of winter.
The sooner the energy efficiency becomes a huge factor in the market value for rent or sale, the better. Presumably the difference in value should be the same as the amount of capital needed to buy an equivalent annuity.
One thing we need is for compulsion to do the fabric (eg insulation) before a heat pump, because if you sort the fabric properly you can have a heat pump half the size, which will probably save enough to pay for the insulation.
We saw this with solar panels when the FIT payments were limited to dwellings with higher EPC values. We need it now.
Mr. Royale, rumour has it the Netflix Tolkien series will ape Game of Thrones in that regard.
May work but I think a lot of fans will not be pleased. Tolkien's stuff was notable for its lack of such things.
Agreed, and it's not just on Netflix either: Industry (on BBC) had soft porn so hard it was almost censorable.
I'm not a prude, and I wouldn't ban it myself, but I think to blame male violence on porn either isn't correct or we have a much, much broader problem with the darker side of our human psyche right across society because some of the most prominent and mainstream examples of extreme porn are on our TVs.
I'm very sympathetic to the need to listen to women properly and treat them with respect. My line at work is that I'm anti-Woke and I like non-PC jokes, but I'm much more inclusive (in the proper sense of the word) of those from all sorts of different backgrounds than some of my publicly Woke colleagues, who are really performative narcissists.
Mr. Royale, rumour has it the Netflix Tolkien series will ape Game of Thrones in that regard.
May work but I think a lot of fans will not be pleased. Tolkien's stuff was notable for its lack of such things.
Who's going to get boffed in Tolkien?
Galadriel on Gandalf? Bifor and Bofur on Bombur if we are on the pronhub threesome incest dwarf-tossing version? Or perhaps we are going to see a graphic novel of Beren and Luthien?
Mr. Royale, rumour has it the Netflix Tolkien series will ape Game of Thrones in that regard.
May work but I think a lot of fans will not be pleased. Tolkien's stuff was notable for its lack of such things.
Indeed - I like both, but they have very different feels.
But then that was my reason with having a problem with Starfleet officers swearing at each other in Picard.
I'd say Star Trek: The Next Generation was the most "woke" TV series ever made, and that was before Woke ever became a thing. There's little violence, lots of protracted moral conundrums, they don't eat meat, they're inclusive and respectful of others, and the sex is pretty innocent too - mainly Riker flirting on shore leave.
And it's one of my favourites. The crucial thing is that all of that is incidental to the story; it isn't rubbed in your face by peacocking morons delivering a hectoring lecture.
Say what you like about Johnson, the guy's a genius communicator. He knows his fans will absolutely lap this franglais up and his haters will make sure his fans will hear all about it if they haven't already.
I definitely remember very similar observations being made about another populist with a complicated relationship with the truth. Fans of genius communicator Johnson never seem very keen on that comparison though.
Don't know whether this has already been covered, but it seems Keith Vaz is now officially a wrong 'un:
"Ex-Labour MP Keith Vaz should be ashamed of his behaviour towards a House of Commons staff member, a report on his conduct has said. ... The panel says the former Labour minister - who stood down as an MP in 2019 - should be banned for life from the Parliamentary estate."
Mr. Royale, rumour has it the Netflix Tolkien series will ape Game of Thrones in that regard.
May work but I think a lot of fans will not be pleased. Tolkien's stuff was notable for its lack of such things.
Indeed - I like both, but they have very different feels.
But then that was my reason with having a problem with Starfleet officers swearing at each other in Picard.
I'd say Star Trek: The Next Generation was the most "woke" TV series ever made, and that was before Woke ever became a thing. There's little violence, lots of protracted moral conundrums, they don't eat meat, they're inclusive and respectful of others, and the sex is pretty innocent too - mainly Riker flirting on shore leave.
And it's one of my favourites. The crucial thing is that all of that is incidental to the story; it isn't rubbed in your face by peacocking morons delivering a hectoring lecture.
TNS was quite PC. Had men in miniskirts as an option for the Star Fleet Uniform: "skorts".
(Though it may be an excuse for keeping miniskirts for women.)
Mr. kle4, aye. Felt no temptation to watch Picard.
If the idiots in charge had wanted something less straightforwardly hopeful then a continuation of the DS9 timeline with Worf/Martok struggling to hold the Klingons together and war-footing versus democrat types in the Federation arguing among themselves would've fit perfectly.
Mr. W, it's Second Age, so none of those (I imagine Gandalf might feature. I can't recall precisely when the Istari first appear).
It sounds like mindless copying "Game of Thrones did this and people like that" etc.
"But Captain Janeway, everyone else is wearing a uniform with trousers." "Shh. Just put on the skintight catsuit, don the high heels, and look pretty."
Say what you like about Johnson, the guy's a genius communicator. He knows his fans will absolutely lap this franglais up and his haters will make sure his fans will hear all about it if they haven't already.
I definitely remember very similar observations being made about another populist with a complicated relationship with the truth. Fans of genius communicator Johnson never seem very keen on that comparison though.
Yes, Salmond certainly has "the gift of the gab"!
Well, Alex certainly had 'certain parties' on PB convinced during the Holyrood enquiry.
Mr. kle4, aye. Felt no temptation to watch Picard.
If the idiots in charge had wanted something less straightforwardly hopeful then a continuation of the DS9 timeline with Worf/Martok struggling to hold the Klingons together and war-footing versus democrat types in the Federation arguing among themselves would've fit perfectly.
Mr. W, it's Second Age, so none of those (I imagine Gandalf might feature. I can't recall precisely when the Istari first appear).
It sounds like mindless copying "Game of Thrones did this and people like that" etc.
Galadriel ? And her flirtations with hobbits; don't tell Big Bad John.
OK. Elrond and Celebrian, Ar-Pharazon & Mrs somebody else on the swaying ship on the tidal wave from sunken Numenor.
Nick Tyrone @NicholasTyrone 22m I actually came up with a Brexit benefit today: it caused the DUP to self-destruct in the most spectacular way imaginable. That's one unreservedly good thing to come out of it all.
Mr. kle4, aye. Felt no temptation to watch Picard.
If the idiots in charge had wanted something less straightforwardly hopeful then a continuation of the DS9 timeline with Worf/Martok struggling to hold the Klingons together and war-footing versus democrat types in the Federation arguing among themselves would've fit perfectly.
Mr. W, it's Second Age, so none of those (I imagine Gandalf might feature. I can't recall precisely when the Istari first appear).
It sounds like mindless copying "Game of Thrones did this and people like that" etc.
No Gandalf, but Tolkien was not consistent on when the Blue Wizards of the Istari first appeared. In one place, he said they arrived with Saruman, Gandalf, and Radagast around 1000 of the Third Age (and were called Alatar and Pallando); later, he stated that they were sent with the re-embodied Glorfindel to help in the Second Age when things became very dangerous (around 1600 of the Second Age), and the Blue Wizards were then named Morinehtar and Romestamo.
So it all depends which they go with, but Gandalf shouldn't appear.
On the supply-chain, truck-driver shortage thing, it’s certainly true that it’s a problem across the developed world. Here in the US we’re not just seeing a truck-driver shortage but a school bus-driver shortage too as in many states the licensing (sic) is compatible for at least smaller trucks and trucking is paying much better right now.
And of course the root cause of that is the pandemic, not Brexit. However, an advantage that US and the EU have is that we and they are operating on continental-scales for this sort of thing, which makes it easier to either deliberately or through the “invisible hand” manage the supply to match the demand overall. Cabotage within the EU means that a truck driver’s regular work can be a mixture of long-distance international jobs supplemented by local jobs within a particular country, not necessarily their own. And of course that’s even simpler in the US as a single country/economy (not sure if there is any cabotage for Mexican or Canadian truckers allowed under NAFTA/USMCA but I doubt it would be as significant as in the EU anyway).
With the UK’s hard Brexit from the CU/SM, it’s been cut off from those advantages. That is what it is, but as I’ve posted here before I feel that we have sleepwalked (across the world) into a world of highly-efficient, very interconnected supply chains that are also very brittle. The machine started to misfire with the pandemic, and instead of trying to oil it, the UK seems intent on poking a stick into the spokes.
I agree with a lot of what you said but with a key divergence take the opposition position.
Yes you're right that this is a global issue and in other countries the "invisible hand" is fixing the issue. Which is precisely what I and others on the right of politics are advocating should happen here too.
The problem in this country is not Brexit but that its so easy for people to blame their issues on Brexit and so think someone else should solve them for them.
Earlier in this thread a discussion of timber came up and the eventual position seems to be that American companies are paying what they need to for timber, so buying up timber supplies. The invisible hand is working there because companies are just quietly getting on with it and paying whatever has to be paid.
People in this country need to do the same. Stop whinging excessively and blaming all your ills on Brexit, just Keep Calm And Carry On. Get on with the job, like is happening in the USA. The incessant moaning and seeking to use politics to solve your ills, rather than just paying what has to be paid and moving on, is the stick in the spokes.
Which is fine but the government has approached the situation with its usual incompetence. People are unable to book HGV driving tests. That's mostly what this comes down to. Grant Shapps took the easy way out during COVID and halted tests and now we're all paying the price for that. Papering over the cracks with EU drivers won't change anything, in fact it will give the government a way out of the mess without fixing the bloody problem.
All of this has got at least a 6 month lead time and a year ago we knew we needed to drastically increase driving test capacity for HGV licencing, both to keep up with renewals of existing drivers and to get new ones licenced. In that time nothing has really been done and all we've had from Shapps are a few token changes to licence terms.
The system is bottlenecked by getting drivers licenced. The new salaries on offer are getting lots of people interested and then they get told, well you can train for 6 months but you won't get a test for 18 months so won't be earning that salary you read about for at least 2 years and they decide that working in Sainsbury's isn't so bad after all.
Well that's a different issue with a different fix needed.
We've been debating this issue on this site for over six months now and all we hear generally is "Brits don't want to do the job" and "we need immigrants to do it". If people don't want to do the job, then there's a simple fix. Pay them a good wage and people will want to.
If the issue is government regulations and incompetence getting in the way of approving tests then that is something that should be fixed. Improving capacity so testing can be authorised should be a priority. If testing capacity had been doubled six months ago then how many could have been authorised by now?
That's a completely different matter and if the state is the issue then it needs to get out of the way.
"But Captain Janeway, everyone else is wearing a uniform with trousers." "Shh. Just put on the skintight catsuit, don the high heels, and look pretty."
The funny thing was she was central to the show from then on and was by far the best actor. But the teen boy in me didn't really notice so much at the time.
it isn't rubbed in your face by peacocking morons delivering a hectoring lecture.
(that's your job)
I don't do that. People like working with me because I'm fun, honest and treat everyone as an individual.
My view is you don't show off about yourself. You let others do that on your behalf, if they want to, and otherwise do a darn good job and let that speak for itself.
SpinningHugo @SpinningHugo "Our country is now at a crossroads. Down one path is the same old insecurity and lack of opportunity. But down the Labour one is something better"
Mr. Cooke, a fair point, things did change over his lifetime. But the Blue Wizards went to the East and I think the TV series will be focusing on Numenor. Could be wrong.
Mr. kle4, aye. Best looking, and she had a genuinely interesting character.
Say what you like about Johnson, the guy's a genius communicator. He knows his fans will absolutely lap this franglais up and his haters will make sure his fans will hear all about it if they haven't already.
I definitely remember very similar observations being made about another populist with a complicated relationship with the truth. Fans of genius communicator Johnson never seem very keen on that comparison though.
Yes, Salmond certainly has "the gift of the gab"!
I see he is a failed comedienne as well as a failed politician now, lucky he has clown to fall back on.
Mr. Cooke, a fair point, things did change over his lifetime. But the Blue Wizards went to the East and I think the TV series will be focusing on Numenor. Could be wrong.
Mr. kle4, aye. Best looking, and she had a genuinely interesting character.
I am all for promoting new talent but it’s a bit of a concern how little substance there is to the cv’s of the writers and director attached to season 1.
Comments
And of course the root cause of that is the pandemic, not Brexit. However, an advantage that US and the EU have is that we and they are operating on continental-scales for this sort of thing, which makes it easier to either deliberately or through the “invisible hand” manage the supply to match the demand overall. Cabotage within the EU means that a truck driver’s regular work can be a mixture of long-distance international jobs supplemented by local jobs within a particular country, not necessarily their own. And of course that’s even simpler in the US as a single country/economy (not sure if there is any cabotage for Mexican or Canadian truckers allowed under NAFTA/USMCA but I doubt it would be as significant as in the EU anyway).
With the UK’s hard Brexit from the CU/SM, it’s been cut off from those advantages. That is what it is, but as I’ve posted here before I feel that we have sleepwalked (across the world) into a world of highly-efficient, very interconnected supply chains that are also very brittle. The machine started to misfire with the pandemic, and instead of trying to oil it, the UK seems intent on poking a stick into the spokes.
What I'm talking about is the renter considering my old flat from ten years ago or the neighbouring flat (had the owner been renting that out). Both were pleasantly decorated, large flats. Ours was slightly larger by the thickness of internal insulation on external walls (under 2sqm floor space difference on a quick calc). Internal room height identical. Our energy bills were ~30% higher than the neighbour's. If both had been up for rent on Rightmove or wherever, there would have been pretty much nothing to choose between them on the information and pictures commonly provided. An EPC would have provided the differentiation and perhaps enabled the better insulated flat to be rented at a higher price.
PS: You don't need to convince me on storage heaters - above mentioned flat had them.
https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1440601477706178560
Filtering the comments by “best rated” & “worst rated” - DM readers are very much in favour of the court ruling.
Anyone know where SKS stands on any or all of these?
My view of what atomisation is includes:
- people see, and know, fewer other people
- decline in participation in clubs and societies
- decline in commonly held culture and cultural values (banal example: we don't all watch the same things at the same time any more)
- decline in household size
- increase in not-knowing-your-neighbours syndrome
These are not all inherently or wholly negative.
But humans are social creatures. Our health and wellbeing and happiness depends on having our 150 people to rub along with - in real life, with eye contact, laughter, nuance, and so forth - and in having an 'us' with whom we identify. People who we don't, or only to a limited extent, choose. Families, for example; but there are dozens of other examples: clubs, schools, churches, other children's parents. Even workplaces. (I am back in the office today for the first time since March 2020. For some reason, being with work colleagues - agreeable enough people, but not people I have personally selected on my journey through life - rather than with family, feels curiously life-affirming.)
There's something a bit paradoxical about this - I think the gist of my argument is that I want to be around people who I don't choose to be around.
Perhaps there's something to be said for hygge after all, though it sounds bloody awful.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, or what the solution is. I'm not even sure there is a solution, or at least not a top-down one. I could perhaps add in some in effective railing at big tech, who are - if not the villains of all this, at least the enablers - but I'm not sure to what end.
Yes you're right that this is a global issue and in other countries the "invisible hand" is fixing the issue. Which is precisely what I and others on the right of politics are advocating should happen here too.
The problem in this country is not Brexit but that its so easy for people to blame their issues on Brexit and so think someone else should solve them for them.
Earlier in this thread a discussion of timber came up and the eventual position seems to be that American companies are paying what they need to for timber, so buying up timber supplies. The invisible hand is working there because companies are just quietly getting on with it and paying whatever has to be paid.
People in this country need to do the same. Stop whinging excessively and blaming all your ills on Brexit, just Keep Calm And Carry On. Get on with the job, like is happening in the USA. The incessant moaning and seeking to use politics to solve your ills, rather than just paying what has to be paid and moving on, is the stick in the spokes.
All of this has got at least a 6 month lead time and a year ago we knew we needed to drastically increase driving test capacity for HGV licencing, both to keep up with renewals of existing drivers and to get new ones licenced. In that time nothing has really been done and all we've had from Shapps are a few token changes to licence terms.
The system is bottlenecked by getting drivers licenced. The new salaries on offer are getting lots of people interested and then they get told, well you can train for 6 months but you won't get a test for 18 months so won't be earning that salary you read about for at least 2 years and they decide that working in Sainsbury's isn't so bad after all.
Timber market is already starting to stabilise, but it will take time.
Some of these shows had female directors and writers. I stopped watching GoT after The Red Wedding, which I found disturbing, but this is a bit more complex than just saying it's male chauvinism, I think.
And it is an observed phenomenon for at least 60 years.
Movements such as community-living from the 1960s / 1970s are a response . critique, plus eg it was an element of thinking of people such as E F Schumacher.
Or, as the Philosopher put it: "There is nothing new under the sun".
May work but I think a lot of fans will not be pleased. Tolkien's stuff was notable for its lack of such things.
But then that was my reason with having a problem with Starfleet officers swearing at each other in Picard.
Douglas Fraser
@BBCDouglasF
BP: “We're experiencing fuel supply issues at some UK retail sites and unfortunately have therefore seen handful temporarily close due to lack of unleaded and diesel grades: caused by supply chain delays, industry-wide driver shortages: working hard to address this issue"
It is interesting that the number of "all electric" houses are rapidly increasing. I will do that with mine in due course, when I take the gas boiler out at the end of its life, but I need the EPC to be up around A95 first, which needs a couple more things doing.
A possible approach for a person building a decent quality self-build now is to install ufh pipework in the slab just in case something is calculated wrong, then use a couple of immersion heaters to heat the slab on Economy 7, and have no heating upstairs except a couple of electric towel rails for the depth of winter.
The sooner the energy efficiency becomes a huge factor in the market value for rent or sale, the better. Presumably the difference in value should be the same as the amount of capital needed to buy an equivalent annuity.
One thing we need is for compulsion to do the fabric (eg insulation) before a heat pump, because if you sort the fabric properly you can have a heat pump half the size, which will probably save enough to pay for the insulation.
We saw this with solar panels when the FIT payments were limited to dwellings with higher EPC values. We need it now.
I'm not a prude, and I wouldn't ban it myself, but I think to blame male violence on porn either isn't correct or we have a much, much broader problem with the darker side of our human psyche right across society because some of the most prominent and mainstream examples of extreme porn are on our TVs.
I'm very sympathetic to the need to listen to women properly and treat them with respect. My line at work is that I'm anti-Woke and I like non-PC jokes, but I'm much more inclusive (in the proper sense of the word) of those from all sorts of different backgrounds than some of my publicly Woke colleagues, who are really performative narcissists.
Galadriel on Gandalf? Bifor and Bofur on Bombur if we are on the pronhub threesome incest dwarf-tossing version?
Or perhaps we are going to see a graphic novel of Beren and Luthien?
The mind boggles.
And it's one of my favourites. The crucial thing is that all of that is incidental to the story; it isn't rubbed in your face by peacocking morons delivering a hectoring lecture.
(Though it may be an excuse for keeping miniskirts for women.)
At this point, I withdraw from the thread.
If the idiots in charge had wanted something less straightforwardly hopeful then a continuation of the DS9 timeline with Worf/Martok struggling to hold the Klingons together and war-footing versus democrat types in the Federation arguing among themselves would've fit perfectly.
Mr. W, it's Second Age, so none of those (I imagine Gandalf might feature. I can't recall precisely when the Istari first appear).
It sounds like mindless copying "Game of Thrones did this and people like that" etc.
I can just imagine the off-camera scene.
"But Captain Janeway, everyone else is wearing a uniform with trousers."
"Shh. Just put on the skintight catsuit, don the high heels, and look pretty."
OK. Elrond and Celebrian, Ar-Pharazon & Mrs somebody else on the swaying ship on the tidal wave from sunken Numenor.
Definitely leaving this thread now
Nick Tyrone
@NicholasTyrone
22m
I actually came up with a Brexit benefit today: it caused the DUP to self-destruct in the most spectacular way imaginable. That's one unreservedly good thing to come out of it all.
So it all depends which they go with, but Gandalf shouldn't appear.
We've been debating this issue on this site for over six months now and all we hear generally is "Brits don't want to do the job" and "we need immigrants to do it". If people don't want to do the job, then there's a simple fix. Pay them a good wage and people will want to.
If the issue is government regulations and incompetence getting in the way of approving tests then that is something that should be fixed. Improving capacity so testing can be authorised should be a priority. If testing capacity had been doubled six months ago then how many could have been authorised by now?
That's a completely different matter and if the state is the issue then it needs to get out of the way.
My view is you don't show off about yourself. You let others do that on your behalf, if they want to, and otherwise do a darn good job and let that speak for itself.
SpinningHugo
@SpinningHugo
"Our country is now at a crossroads. Down one path is the same old insecurity and lack of opportunity. But down the Labour one is something better"
That is a T junction.
Serious on topic question of the day:
Is it a good idea for the UK to join NAFTA II, aka United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement? How does it damage us?
Mr. kle4, aye. Best looking, and she had a genuinely interesting character.