Has Biden’s Afghan move put the mockers on the 2024 nomination? – politicalbetting.com
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Prof Adam Finn, a government vaccine adviser, says over-vaccinating people, when other parts of the world had none, is "a bit insane, it's not just inequitable, it's stupid".
The government are going to have to tell the JCVI to do one if they want a booster campaign aren't they.0 -
Merryn Somerset Webb
@MerrynSW
·20h
All those pushing for permanent #wfh might have a shock coming.
https://twitter.com/MerrynSW/status/1429464501397725192
No way anyone could have seen this coming...
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Railfreight has faced a massive issue over the last two decades: the death of coal. Hundreds of trains used to transport thousands of tonnes around the country between mine, port and power station. There are relatively few now. The rest of railfreight has had to increase just to compensate.Philip_Thompson said:
The idea rail provides capacity in this nation instead of roads is an ignorant fiction.
https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1257/freight-rail-usage-2018-19-quarter-4.pdf
But I also think your statement is wrong. According to (1), each train takes 76 lorries off the road; although I don't know how they get that figure.
If you were to replace all freight trains with lorries, there would be massive capacity issues. So whilst rail is not the major player in the freight game, it provides a useful addition for certain loads.
(1): https://www.railengineer.co.uk/felixstowe-branch-line-capacity-enhancement-goes-live/0 -
Separate infrastructure doesn't count. And I'm not just being facetious.Sandpit said:
The easiest way to get a large scale SDV system working, is going to be to build a new Milton Keynes (Or, more likely, Dubai or Jeddah), and have separate roads for SD and regular vehicles.Pulpstar said:
It might be solved for motorways in the forseeable future, but the more rural roads of Devon, Cornwall, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire to pick a few counties - doubt it.Alistair said:
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.JosiasJessop said:
On AI and autonomous driving:moonshine said:
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.Philip_Thompson said:
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.MattW said:
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issueMaxPB said:
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.tlg86 said:
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).MaxPB said:
It's still a stupid decision.tlg86 said:
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.MaxPB said:Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
If you have to separate the humans and the robots then they are not self driving as self driving covers having to interact with humans.1 -
He should be sacked from the committee and the committee needs to be told that international politics is not their concern.FrancisUrquhart said:Prof Adam Finn, a government vaccine adviser, says over-vaccinating people, when other parts of the world had none, is "a bit insane, it's not just inequitable, it's stupid".
The government are going to have to tell the JCVI to do one if they want a booster campaign aren't they.0 -
.
Was that entirely true, though ?Leon said:
The same stuff was said about trains and cars in the 19th century. ‘Wait til they kill someone then they will be abandoned’. And for good reason, they WERE more dangerous, by orders of magnitude, than people riding horses. How many millions have died, since then, in car crashes? How many run over?Casino_Royale said:
It's a political question not a technological one.Philip_Thompson said:
I completely disagree that its at the same level of self-driving now than thirty years ago.Alistair said:
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.JosiasJessop said:
On AI and autonomous driving:moonshine said:
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.Philip_Thompson said:
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.MattW said:
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issueMaxPB said:
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.tlg86 said:
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).MaxPB said:
It's still a stupid decision.tlg86 said:
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.MaxPB said:Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
There's two different philosophies between self-driving. One is to get self-driving cars in one giant leap, which is nowhere near getting live and isn't going to be for an eternity, its vaporware.
The other philosophy is to do it incrementally. Driver assisted removing elements of driving until there's little left then closing the last gap. That has come along in leaps and bounds in recent decades and is still getting closer every year.
Self-parking, adaptive cruise control, lane assist etc, etc, etc are coming along every year nowadays. This is the real way we will ultimately arrive at self-driving if we ever do, in steps not a single leap.
People will accept (heartless as it is) a human driver occasionally killing someone as a "mistake", or hold them accountable for it in the dock.
Their tolerance for a machine making a mistake is precisely zero, so the first person that gets killed due to an AI conflict, system shutdown, bug etc. and they'll all be pulled off the road.
...
Road traffic deaths were a significant cause of mortality in Victorian London:
https://www.ft.com/content/5cd7eaee-5327-11df-813e-00144feab49a
And there were insufficient cars on the road for deaths by motor vehicle to figure very prominently in the national statistics until after WWII.
Though of course far more people died of infections (usually TB) than anything else.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/causesofdeathover100years/2017-09-180 -
A massive part of that is the death of trainload coal...Philip_Thompson said:
"We have a capacity issue on our rails for goods"
Yes, the capacity issue is that people don't want to move goods by rail. 89% of freight is moved by roads for a reason, but sure "adding a new high speed route will add more than a motorway". *Bullshit!*1 -
Trains are very good for hub-to-hub transit of bulk heavy goods en-masse. This could include aggregates, ore or shipping containers from Southampton or Felixstowe to the Midlands/Scotland.JosiasJessop said:
Railfreight has faced a massive issue over the last two decades: the death of coal. Hundreds of trains used to transport thousands of tonnes around the country between mine, port and power station. There are relatively few now. The rest of railfreight has had to increase just to compensate.Philip_Thompson said:
The idea rail provides capacity in this nation instead of roads is an ignorant fiction.
https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1257/freight-rail-usage-2018-19-quarter-4.pdf
But I also think your statement is wrong. According to (1), each train takes 76 lorries off the road; although I don't know how they get that figure.
If you were to replace all freight trains with lorries, there would be massive capacity issues. So whilst rail is not the major player in the freight game, it provides a useful addition for certain loads.
(1): https://www.railengineer.co.uk/felixstowe-branch-line-capacity-enhancement-goes-live/
It's because they have a low coefficient of friction. Trying to do it in dozens and dozens of lorries with rubber wheels on bitumen is a huge waste of energy and manpower.2 -
All the "we need more data" dragging heels should be seen with the above statement in mind.....they are acting like a child who wants sugary cereal in the supermarket and been told no, so they become as an absolute pain to shift.Philip_Thompson said:
He should be sacked from the committee and the committee needs to be told that international politics is not their concern.FrancisUrquhart said:Prof Adam Finn, a government vaccine adviser, says over-vaccinating people, when other parts of the world had none, is "a bit insane, it's not just inequitable, it's stupid".
The government are going to have to tell the JCVI to do one if they want a booster campaign aren't they.
The concrete data on boosters won't be available until its too late.0 -
Self driving cars will really happen when legal and insurance systems allow that not to be the case.Casino_Royale said:
I think your post makes my point for me on the politics: human drivers will never be outlawed on public roads as people find driving a form of self-expression, and part of their freedom and independence.moonshine said:
Depends doesn’t it. Computer driven cars will have different kinds of accident to human driven ones. But if the frequency of those accidents are a fraction of the human ones then it’s easy to see the point where human drivers are outlawed on public roads. It’s certainly false to say tolerance is zero. There have been quite a few deaths caused by computer enhanced driving systems and they’re still operational.Casino_Royale said:
It's a political question not a technological one.Philip_Thompson said:
I completely disagree that its at the same level of self-driving now than thirty years ago.Alistair said:
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.JosiasJessop said:
On AI and autonomous driving:moonshine said:
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.Philip_Thompson said:
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.MattW said:
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issueMaxPB said:
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.tlg86 said:
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).MaxPB said:
It's still a stupid decision.tlg86 said:
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.MaxPB said:Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
There's two different philosophies between self-driving. One is to get self-driving cars in one giant leap, which is nowhere near getting live and isn't going to be for an eternity, its vaporware.
The other philosophy is to do it incrementally. Driver assisted removing elements of driving until there's little left then closing the last gap. That has come along in leaps and bounds in recent decades and is still getting closer every year.
Self-parking, adaptive cruise control, lane assist etc, etc, etc are coming along every year nowadays. This is the real way we will ultimately arrive at self-driving if we ever do, in steps not a single leap.
People will accept (heartless as it is) a human driver occasionally killing someone as a "mistake", or hold them accountable for it in the dock.
Their tolerance for a machine making a mistake is precisely zero, so the first person that gets killed due to an AI conflict, system shutdown, bug etc. and they'll all be pulled off the road.
I don't think your final point holds as there's always a driver at the moment - they're always ultimately accountable for the car.1 -
The JCVI have gone completely out of their remit recently, worrying about how the rest of the world might or might not be vaccinated. It's in a bizarre place duplicating the competencies of the MHRA wrt 12 - 15 vaccination too.FrancisUrquhart said:Prof Adam Finn, a government vaccine adviser, says over-vaccinating people, when other parts of the world had none, is "a bit insane, it's not just inequitable, it's stupid".
The government are going to have to tell the JCVI to do one if they want a booster campaign aren't they.
0 -
Until somewhere like Singapore bans human drivers.Alistair said:
Separate infrastructure doesn't count. And I'm not just being facetious.Sandpit said:
The easiest way to get a large scale SDV system working, is going to be to build a new Milton Keynes (Or, more likely, Dubai or Jeddah), and have separate roads for SD and regular vehicles.Pulpstar said:
It might be solved for motorways in the forseeable future, but the more rural roads of Devon, Cornwall, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire to pick a few counties - doubt it.Alistair said:
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.JosiasJessop said:
On AI and autonomous driving:moonshine said:
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.Philip_Thompson said:
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.MattW said:
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issueMaxPB said:
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.tlg86 said:
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).MaxPB said:
It's still a stupid decision.tlg86 said:
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.MaxPB said:Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
If you have to separate the humans and the robots then they are not self driving as self driving covers having to interact with humans.
Which is probably not all that far off.0 -
Javid is going to just going to take the decision.....Pulpstar said:
The JCVI have gone completely out of their remit recently, worrying about how the rest of the world might or might not be vaccinated. It's in a bizarre place duplicating the competencies of the MHRA wrt 12 - 15 vaccination too.FrancisUrquhart said:Prof Adam Finn, a government vaccine adviser, says over-vaccinating people, when other parts of the world had none, is "a bit insane, it's not just inequitable, it's stupid".
The government are going to have to tell the JCVI to do one if they want a booster campaign aren't they.0 -
Though of course there's more than 76 lorries on the road.JosiasJessop said:
Railfreight has faced a massive issue over the last two decades: the death of coal. Hundreds of trains used to transport thousands of tonnes around the country between mine, port and power station. There are relatively few now. The rest of railfreight has had to increase just to compensate.Philip_Thompson said:
The idea rail provides capacity in this nation instead of roads is an ignorant fiction.
https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1257/freight-rail-usage-2018-19-quarter-4.pdf
But I also think your statement is wrong. According to (1), each train takes 76 lorries off the road; although I don't know how they get that figure.
If you were to replace all freight trains with lorries, there would be massive capacity issues. So whilst rail is not the major player in the freight game, it provides a useful addition for certain loads.
(1): https://www.railengineer.co.uk/felixstowe-branch-line-capacity-enhancement-goes-live/
The problem with rail enthusiasts is they use dodgy maths, like Independent SAGE doing exponential numbers to infinity.
If you contrast each rail being full and consider it equivalent to lorries then of course trains are quite efficient, but the problem is relatively few businesses want to move full train loads and those that do don't want to move them exactly from one train station, to another train station.
Rail was fantastic for coal. Bulky, needed in huge volumes, could have a train station at the power plant and another train station at the mine. Incredible technology for when you want to move something like that.
But when you're dealing with smaller niche commodities that don't need to be at a train station but need to be all over the country at shops, bars, manufacturers etc then rail isn't especially good for that.0 -
Also, if you want to get ahead and get the promotions... be in the office. No doubt we will have moaning about that soon.rottenborough said:
Merryn Somerset Webb
@MerrynSW
·20h
All those pushing for permanent #wfh might have a shock coming.
https://twitter.com/MerrynSW/status/1429464501397725192
No way anyone could have seen this coming...0 -
Interesting. So when you strip out coal non-coal has gone up slightly.JosiasJessop said:
A massive part of that is the death of trainload coal...Philip_Thompson said:
"We have a capacity issue on our rails for goods"
Yes, the capacity issue is that people don't want to move goods by rail. 89% of freight is moved by roads for a reason, but sure "adding a new high speed route will add more than a motorway". *Bullshit!*0 -
That was my point, and trainload coal isn't getting replaced with anything else. Because unlike coal most other goods don't need to be moved by the trainload.JosiasJessop said:
A massive part of that is the death of trainload coal...Philip_Thompson said:
"We have a capacity issue on our rails for goods"
Yes, the capacity issue is that people don't want to move goods by rail. 89% of freight is moved by roads for a reason, but sure "adding a new high speed route will add more than a motorway". *Bullshit!*0 -
Yes, inevitable. If you can smugly WFH all week right now, there’s a 50% chance you won’t be working anywhere, soonrottenborough said:
Merryn Somerset Webb
@MerrynSW
·20h
All those pushing for permanent #wfh might have a shock coming.
https://twitter.com/MerrynSW/status/1429464501397725192
No way anyone could have seen this coming...
Then GPT7 will do it all for free, and even the Latvians won’t have jobs0 -
It's not "unique", about a million other Citroen A series cars like the Dyane and Arcadian used exactly the same transmission.Leon said:
2CVs are really great cars to drive, drunk. They go so slow you’re barely a danger to anyone, even after three bottles of Bandol, and even if you do hit something - say, a mouflon - the 2CV is so tinny you just get another dent and the mouflon walks away, unharmedCarnyx said:
Also stand up through the roof and see if the archaeological site you are seeking is over the hedge. A friend and I ticked off a lot of Wessex megaliths that way (and pubs, but those were the days when pubs closed for the morning and the afternoon in England).TOPPING said:
Absolutely. And as far as I'm aware there is no F1 car in production which can hold a pig in the boot, four people, with the driver wearing a top hat, and be able to drive over a ploughed field with a box of eggs in the back without breaking them.Dura_Ace said:
Other way round. Toyota had active suspension on the Soarer in 1986 before F1 had it. (Citroen had semi-active suspension that wasn't electronically controlled decades before that.) BMW and Mercedes both had traction control on road cars in the mid 80s before F1.Sandpit said:
Not to mention vehicle designs themselves, features such as traction control and active suspension saw their first automotive applications in F1, now every car has them.
Eh? Eh?
Plus, whenever you change gear with that unique gear box, you can make an amusing ‘trombone’ sound, to accompany the movement
Plenty of other cars use a similar dash mounted lever too. Eg Renault 4.0 -
Isn't it time the advertising boards at test matches were made out of foam ?
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/aug/23/england-depleted-mark-wood-out-third-test-india-joe-root-cricket0 -
Last week, I read a few trashy books, including Robert Harris' V2. I had wanted to read Perdido Street Station, as recommended on here but it arrived too late and I was too mean to buy it again on kindle.
V2 was imo an okayish book, pretty mediocre but dealing with an interesting subject, in particular Wernher von Braun, whom I have subsequently wikied.
Now _there_ is an interesting life. I am looking forward to reading a biog - any recommendations?
(After obvs, I have read PSS.)0 -
Gravity's Rainbow is the only book you need to read about Vergeltungswaffen. Eschew all others.TOPPING said:Last week, I read a few trashy books, including Robert Harris' V2. I had wanted to read Perdido Street Station, as recommended on here but it arrived too late and I was too mean to buy it again on kindle.
V2 was imo an okayish book, pretty mediocre but dealing with an interesting subject, in particular Wernher von Braun, whom I have subsequently wikied.
Now _there_ is an interesting life. I am looking forward to reading a biog - any recommendations?
(After obvs, I have read PSS.)0 -
Casino_Royale said:
Trains are very good for hub-to-hub transit of bulk heavy goods en-masse. This could include aggregates, ore or shipping containers from Southampton or Felixstowe to the Midlands/Scotland.JosiasJessop said:
Railfreight has faced a massive issue over the last two decades: the death of coal. Hundreds of trains used to transport thousands of tonnes around the country between mine, port and power station. There are relatively few now. The rest of railfreight has had to increase just to compensate.Philip_Thompson said:
The idea rail provides capacity in this nation instead of roads is an ignorant fiction.
https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1257/freight-rail-usage-2018-19-quarter-4.pdf
But I also think your statement is wrong. According to (1), each train takes 76 lorries off the road; although I don't know how they get that figure.
If you were to replace all freight trains with lorries, there would be massive capacity issues. So whilst rail is not the major player in the freight game, it provides a useful addition for certain loads.
(1): https://www.railengineer.co.uk/felixstowe-branch-line-capacity-enhancement-goes-live/
It's because they have a low coefficient of friction. Trying to do it in dozens and dozens of lorries with rubber wheels on bitumen is a huge waste of energy and manpower.
And the point is... horses for courses. It's really tempting to use cars and lorries each driven by a single driver for end-to-end journeys all the time. You don't have to do as much planning and a single vehicle can do everything tolerably efficiently and tolerably well.Casino_Royale said:
Trains are very good for hub-to-hub transit of bulk heavy goods en-masse. This could include aggregates, ore or shipping containers from Southampton or Felixstowe to the Midlands/Scotland.JosiasJessop said:
Railfreight has faced a massive issue over the last two decades: the death of coal. Hundreds of trains used to transport thousands of tonnes around the country between mine, port and power station. There are relatively few now. The rest of railfreight has had to increase just to compensate.Philip_Thompson said:
The idea rail provides capacity in this nation instead of roads is an ignorant fiction.
https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1257/freight-rail-usage-2018-19-quarter-4.pdf
But I also think your statement is wrong. According to (1), each train takes 76 lorries off the road; although I don't know how they get that figure.
If you were to replace all freight trains with lorries, there would be massive capacity issues. So whilst rail is not the major player in the freight game, it provides a useful addition for certain loads.
(1): https://www.railengineer.co.uk/felixstowe-branch-line-capacity-enhancement-goes-live/
It's because they have a low coefficient of friction. Trying to do it in dozens and dozens of lorries with rubber wheels on bitumen is a huge waste of energy and manpower.
It requires more thought to take shipping containers part of the way by train and then do the last few miles by road. But it's almost certainly a better use of land, energy and drivers.
Productive use of resources and workers, that's the way forward.2 -
Why are you being rude and talking about freight? I was talking about passengers.Philip_Thompson said:
[Citation Needed] I call bullshit on that. Its just not true.moonshine said:
You can quibble with the occupancy assumptions in the cars and trains but one new high speed rail line running fewer than 20 trains an hour (at 400m length) provides more capacity than a new 6 lane motorway, with a smaller footprint. Some suggest even double the capacity.Philip_Thompson said:
We are a small country. Quite frankly besides relatively a few things moved in bulk, overwhelmingly trains don't provide capacity, vehicles on roads do.moonshine said:
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.Philip_Thompson said:
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.MattW said:
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issueMaxPB said:
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.tlg86 said:
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).MaxPB said:
It's still a stupid decision.tlg86 said:
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.MaxPB said:Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
Its not just that the overwhelming majority of commuters move via roads - the overwhelming majority of goods transit quite rightly happens the same way too. And the idea that goods transit should instead happen via trains instead is overwhelmingly a farcical suggestion that fails in the face of actual experience which is why it doesn't happen. We aren't looking typically to move train loads of goods thousands of miles, because our country isn't thousands of miles long.
Since the main work you’re doing in a vehicle is moving air out of the way, a long slim vehicle like a train will also always be more energy efficient than equivalent number of cars spaced out on a motorway with appropriate stopping distances.
Only 5% of goods in the UK are moved by rail. Volume of freight on roads massively exceeds the volume of freight on rails.
The problem with that fiction is we don't need to move trainloads at a time many miles since most businesses in the UK are moving relatively few goods from A to B. That's why they use roads, the vehicles can get exactly what is needed from exactly where it needs to be, to exactly where it needs to go to.
Trains can't do that. Actually the volume of freight moved by train has collapsed in the past decade because the primary thing we needed trains to move in the past, large volumes of coal in to power our power plants, is no longer required anymore.0 -
It's completely weird. On one side we have the VTF/DoH hailing the purchase of 35m gen 2 Pfizer doses for 2022 and on the other side we've got scientists saying they aren't necessary and a third set of scientists producing data from the current Israeli booster scheme saying they are because they cut the risk of infection by 75% vs two doses bringing infection risk down from about 40% to about 10% and the resulting reductions in hospitalisations.Pulpstar said:
The JCVI have gone completely out of their remit recently, worrying about how the rest of the world might or might not be vaccinated. It's in a bizarre place duplicating the competencies of the MHRA wrt 12 - 15 vaccination too.FrancisUrquhart said:Prof Adam Finn, a government vaccine adviser, says over-vaccinating people, when other parts of the world had none, is "a bit insane, it's not just inequitable, it's stupid".
The government are going to have to tell the JCVI to do one if they want a booster campaign aren't they.
It feels like a slam dunk decision based on today's data from Israel and Javid is just going to have to overrule them if they continue to prevaricate.1 -
Don’t disagree, but if you’re waiting for a proper self-driving system then it’s going to be a long wait.Alistair said:
Separate infrastructure doesn't count. And I'm not just being facetious.Sandpit said:
The easiest way to get a large scale SDV system working, is going to be to build a new Milton Keynes (Or, more likely, Dubai or Jeddah), and have separate roads for SD and regular vehicles.Pulpstar said:
It might be solved for motorways in the forseeable future, but the more rural roads of Devon, Cornwall, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire to pick a few counties - doubt it.Alistair said:
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.JosiasJessop said:
On AI and autonomous driving:moonshine said:
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.Philip_Thompson said:
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.MattW said:
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issueMaxPB said:
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.tlg86 said:
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).MaxPB said:
It's still a stupid decision.tlg86 said:
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.MaxPB said:Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. Weshould have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
If you have to separate the humans and the robots then they are not self driving as self driving covers having to interact with humans.
The best chance of one in the medium term is going to be to build a town around them.
If the human needs to be in charge, then he needs to be paying proper attention - anything that can dump on him half a second before the accident isn’t fit for purpose. The whole point of a self-driving car is that you can treat it like your own personal chauffeur.0 -
Yes, quite. A self drive car is not going to reel out of a pub, blind drunk, climb in the Jag, then mow down a troop of school kids. It’s not going to drive wildly across an island on Xanax, then speed across a vineyard, crushing grapes. Fun as that is.Nigelb said:
Until somewhere like Singapore bans human drivers.Alistair said:
Separate infrastructure doesn't count. And I'm not just being facetious.Sandpit said:
The easiest way to get a large scale SDV system working, is going to be to build a new Milton Keynes (Or, more likely, Dubai or Jeddah), and have separate roads for SD and regular vehicles.Pulpstar said:
It might be solved for motorways in the forseeable future, but the more rural roads of Devon, Cornwall, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire to pick a few counties - doubt it.Alistair said:
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.JosiasJessop said:
On AI and autonomous driving:moonshine said:
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.Philip_Thompson said:
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.MattW said:
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issueMaxPB said:
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.tlg86 said:
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).MaxPB said:
It's still a stupid decision.tlg86 said:
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.MaxPB said:Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
If you have to separate the humans and the robots then they are not self driving as self driving covers having to interact with humans.
Which is probably not all that far off.
As soon as self drive cars are shown to be a lot safer (and they surely will be) human driving will be slowly but inexorably prohibited0 -
Rail freight works when it is port to terminal.Philip_Thompson said:
Though of course there's more than 76 lorries on the road.JosiasJessop said:
Railfreight has faced a massive issue over the last two decades: the death of coal. Hundreds of trains used to transport thousands of tonnes around the country between mine, port and power station. There are relatively few now. The rest of railfreight has had to increase just to compensate.Philip_Thompson said:
The idea rail provides capacity in this nation instead of roads is an ignorant fiction.
https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1257/freight-rail-usage-2018-19-quarter-4.pdf
But I also think your statement is wrong. According to (1), each train takes 76 lorries off the road; although I don't know how they get that figure.
If you were to replace all freight trains with lorries, there would be massive capacity issues. So whilst rail is not the major player in the freight game, it provides a useful addition for certain loads.
(1): https://www.railengineer.co.uk/felixstowe-branch-line-capacity-enhancement-goes-live/
The problem with rail enthusiasts is they use dodgy maths, like Independent SAGE doing exponential numbers to infinity.
If you contrast each rail being full and consider it equivalent to lorries then of course trains are quite efficient, but the problem is relatively few businesses want to move full train loads and those that do don't want to move them exactly from one train station, to another train station.
Rail was fantastic for coal. Bulky, needed in huge volumes, could have a train station at the power plant and another train station at the mine. Incredible technology for when you want to move something like that.
But when you're dealing with smaller niche commodities that don't need to be at a train station but need to be all over the country at shops, bars, manufacturers etc then rail isn't especially good for that.
So a shipload arrives at Felixstowe. A proportion of the containers on that shipload will be ultimately headed for the North West. So you fill up a trainload with containers and run those containers to Trafford Park. The goods are then distributed from there, thereby taking 76 lorries off the A14 and the M6 and the M62. A train is more efficient than 76 lorries. And you run another trainload to whatever Trafford Park's equivalent is in Scotland, in the West Midlands, in the North East, etc.
It doesn't work particularly well when Scrogg's Spoons inc. in Scunthorpe wants to distribute its spoons across the UK. But it doesn't need to - we just need it to have the capacity to do what it can do well.
You can do the same process in reverse too, though less of that goes on.3 -
It's believed von Braun (a bit of an all round shagger) had an affair and child with the female test pilot Hanna Reitsch. Again hers is an interesting life, though partly no doubt down to living in interesting times.TOPPING said:Last week, I read a few trashy books, including Robert Harris' V2. I had wanted to read Perdido Street Station, as recommended on here but it arrived too late and I was too mean to buy it again on kindle.
V2 was imo an okayish book, pretty mediocre but dealing with an interesting subject, in particular Wernher von Braun, whom I have subsequently wikied.
Now _there_ is an interesting life. I am looking forward to reading a biog - any recommendations?
(After obvs, I have read PSS.)0 -
Oh god does this mean I'm going to have to read Mason & Dixon first as it has been on my shelves now, unread, for coming up to a decade.Dura_Ace said:
Gravity's Rainbow is the only book you need to read about Vergeltungswaffen. Eschew all others.TOPPING said:Last week, I read a few trashy books, including Robert Harris' V2. I had wanted to read Perdido Street Station, as recommended on here but it arrived too late and I was too mean to buy it again on kindle.
V2 was imo an okayish book, pretty mediocre but dealing with an interesting subject, in particular Wernher von Braun, whom I have subsequently wikied.
Now _there_ is an interesting life. I am looking forward to reading a biog - any recommendations?
(After obvs, I have read PSS.)
It had better be worth it.0 -
Interesting comment last night on the news that a booster brings its own issues from an anti-vax perspective - ie if two jabs aren't good enough, when we were told they would be, why would a third be any more effective...MaxPB said:
It's completely weird. On one side we have the VTF/DoH hailing the purchase of 35m gen 2 Pfizer doses for 2022 and on the other side we've got scientists saying they aren't necessary and a third set of scientists producing data from the current Israeli booster scheme saying they are because they cut the risk of infection by 75% vs two doses bringing infection risk down from about 40% to about 10% and the resulting reductions in hospitalisations.Pulpstar said:
The JCVI have gone completely out of their remit recently, worrying about how the rest of the world might or might not be vaccinated. It's in a bizarre place duplicating the competencies of the MHRA wrt 12 - 15 vaccination too.FrancisUrquhart said:Prof Adam Finn, a government vaccine adviser, says over-vaccinating people, when other parts of the world had none, is "a bit insane, it's not just inequitable, it's stupid".
The government are going to have to tell the JCVI to do one if they want a booster campaign aren't they.
It feels like a slam dunk decision based on today's data from Israel and Javid is just going to have to overrule them if they continue to prevaricate.0 -
“Me”, the autobiography by Elton JohnTOPPING said:Last week, I read a few trashy books, including Robert Harris' V2. I had wanted to read Perdido Street Station, as recommended on here but it arrived too late and I was too mean to buy it again on kindle.
V2 was imo an okayish book, pretty mediocre but dealing with an interesting subject, in particular Wernher von Braun, whom I have subsequently wikied.
Now _there_ is an interesting life. I am looking forward to reading a biog - any recommendations?
(After obvs, I have read PSS.)
I’m totally serious. It’s extraordinary. Brilliantly funny, outrageously gossipy and candid (and he’s met everyone), plus he led a ridiculously libertine yet successful life. I never realised the scale of his success until I read this. He was the biggest selling musician in the world for several years running.
It gets slightly less interesting in the final third when he sobers up (after heroic years of cocaine abuse) but even then it’s extremely readable.
It’s a genius book. The best biography or autobiography I have ever read about a ‘rock star’0 -
I suppose in the anti-vax world viruses don't mutate.TOPPING said:
Interesting comment last night on the news that a booster brings its own issues from an anti-vax perspective - ie if two jabs aren't good enough, when we were told they would be, why would a third be any more effective...MaxPB said:
It's completely weird. On one side we have the VTF/DoH hailing the purchase of 35m gen 2 Pfizer doses for 2022 and on the other side we've got scientists saying they aren't necessary and a third set of scientists producing data from the current Israeli booster scheme saying they are because they cut the risk of infection by 75% vs two doses bringing infection risk down from about 40% to about 10% and the resulting reductions in hospitalisations.Pulpstar said:
The JCVI have gone completely out of their remit recently, worrying about how the rest of the world might or might not be vaccinated. It's in a bizarre place duplicating the competencies of the MHRA wrt 12 - 15 vaccination too.FrancisUrquhart said:Prof Adam Finn, a government vaccine adviser, says over-vaccinating people, when other parts of the world had none, is "a bit insane, it's not just inequitable, it's stupid".
The government are going to have to tell the JCVI to do one if they want a booster campaign aren't they.
It feels like a slam dunk decision based on today's data from Israel and Javid is just going to have to overrule them if they continue to prevaricate.0 -
LOL - I meant a biog about von Braun.Leon said:
“Me”, the autobiography by Elton JohnTOPPING said:Last week, I read a few trashy books, including Robert Harris' V2. I had wanted to read Perdido Street Station, as recommended on here but it arrived too late and I was too mean to buy it again on kindle.
V2 was imo an okayish book, pretty mediocre but dealing with an interesting subject, in particular Wernher von Braun, whom I have subsequently wikied.
Now _there_ is an interesting life. I am looking forward to reading a biog - any recommendations?
(After obvs, I have read PSS.)
I’m totally serious. It’s extraordinary. Brilliantly funny, outrageously gossipy and candid (and he’s met everyone), plus he led a ridiculously libertine yet successful life. I never realised the scale of his success until I read this. He was the biggest selling musician in the world for several years running.
It gets slightly less interesting in the final third when he sobers up (after heroic years of cocaine abuse) but even then it’s extremely readable.
It’s a genius book. The best biography or autobiography I have ever read about a ‘rock star’
Rocketman was a fantastic film and I see no reason to explore the subject further.0 -
Shocked at the absence of von Braun related Rocketman puns.TOPPING said:
LOL - I meant a biog about von Braun.Leon said:
“Me”, the autobiography by Elton JohnTOPPING said:Last week, I read a few trashy books, including Robert Harris' V2. I had wanted to read Perdido Street Station, as recommended on here but it arrived too late and I was too mean to buy it again on kindle.
V2 was imo an okayish book, pretty mediocre but dealing with an interesting subject, in particular Wernher von Braun, whom I have subsequently wikied.
Now _there_ is an interesting life. I am looking forward to reading a biog - any recommendations?
(After obvs, I have read PSS.)
I’m totally serious. It’s extraordinary. Brilliantly funny, outrageously gossipy and candid (and he’s met everyone), plus he led a ridiculously libertine yet successful life. I never realised the scale of his success until I read this. He was the biggest selling musician in the world for several years running.
It gets slightly less interesting in the final third when he sobers up (after heroic years of cocaine abuse) but even then it’s extremely readable.
It’s a genius book. The best biography or autobiography I have ever read about a ‘rock star’
Rocketman was a fantastic film and I see no reason to explore the subject further.1 -
No, please, read the book. Rocketman is fun but the book is peerless. It’s snortingly laugh-out-loud funny for the first 100 pages, most of the rest is jaw-dropping WTF ‘he really did that’??TOPPING said:
LOL - I meant a biog about von Braun.Leon said:
“Me”, the autobiography by Elton JohnTOPPING said:Last week, I read a few trashy books, including Robert Harris' V2. I had wanted to read Perdido Street Station, as recommended on here but it arrived too late and I was too mean to buy it again on kindle.
V2 was imo an okayish book, pretty mediocre but dealing with an interesting subject, in particular Wernher von Braun, whom I have subsequently wikied.
Now _there_ is an interesting life. I am looking forward to reading a biog - any recommendations?
(After obvs, I have read PSS.)
I’m totally serious. It’s extraordinary. Brilliantly funny, outrageously gossipy and candid (and he’s met everyone), plus he led a ridiculously libertine yet successful life. I never realised the scale of his success until I read this. He was the biggest selling musician in the world for several years running.
It gets slightly less interesting in the final third when he sobers up (after heroic years of cocaine abuse) but even then it’s extremely readable.
It’s a genius book. The best biography or autobiography I have ever read about a ‘rock star’
Rocketman was a fantastic film and I see no reason to explore the subject further.
It is, by the by, a very candid insight into the British Royal Family, who are, it seems, much more hedonistic and entertaining than one might suspect0 -
Just finished Tim Bouverie's "Appeasing Hitler; Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War" after finishing Robert Harris' "Munich". Like you I quite enjoyed V2 but thought the ending a bit rushed.TOPPING said:Last week, I read a few trashy books, including Robert Harris' V2. I had wanted to read Perdido Street Station, as recommended on here but it arrived too late and I was too mean to buy it again on kindle.
V2 was imo an okayish book, pretty mediocre but dealing with an interesting subject, in particular Wernher von Braun, whom I have subsequently wikied.
Now _there_ is an interesting life. I am looking forward to reading a biog - any recommendations?
(After obvs, I have read PSS.)
Last bio I read was Adam Zamoyski's "Napoleon The Man Behind the Myth" which treads a persuasive path between (often French) hagiography and (frequently British) demonisation.
Currently reading "Kate" - about Katherine Hepburn's greatest and longest running acting role - the creation of her public persona.0 -
Would it be unkind to speculate that you came across it when checking if anyone had already nabbed the title ?Leon said:
“Me”, the autobiography by Elton JohnTOPPING said:Last week, I read a few trashy books, including Robert Harris' V2. I had wanted to read Perdido Street Station, as recommended on here but it arrived too late and I was too mean to buy it again on kindle.
V2 was imo an okayish book, pretty mediocre but dealing with an interesting subject, in particular Wernher von Braun, whom I have subsequently wikied.
Now _there_ is an interesting life. I am looking forward to reading a biog - any recommendations?
(After obvs, I have read PSS.)
I’m totally serious. It’s extraordinary. Brilliantly funny, outrageously gossipy and candid (and he’s met everyone), plus he led a ridiculously libertine yet successful life. I never realised the scale of his success until I read this. He was the biggest selling musician in the world for several years running.
It gets slightly less interesting in the final third when he sobers up (after heroic years of cocaine abuse) but even then it’s extremely readable.
It’s a genius book. The best biography or autobiography I have ever read about a ‘rock star’
(I shall order it.)0 -
LOL d'oh! Not on my game today - arrived back late yesterday, slightly delayed on the tarmac in Greece and flew through customs in the UK but still a late night after a week of boozing.Theuniondivvie said:
Shocked at the absence of von Braun related Rocketman puns.TOPPING said:
LOL - I meant a biog about von Braun.Leon said:
“Me”, the autobiography by Elton JohnTOPPING said:Last week, I read a few trashy books, including Robert Harris' V2. I had wanted to read Perdido Street Station, as recommended on here but it arrived too late and I was too mean to buy it again on kindle.
V2 was imo an okayish book, pretty mediocre but dealing with an interesting subject, in particular Wernher von Braun, whom I have subsequently wikied.
Now _there_ is an interesting life. I am looking forward to reading a biog - any recommendations?
(After obvs, I have read PSS.)
I’m totally serious. It’s extraordinary. Brilliantly funny, outrageously gossipy and candid (and he’s met everyone), plus he led a ridiculously libertine yet successful life. I never realised the scale of his success until I read this. He was the biggest selling musician in the world for several years running.
It gets slightly less interesting in the final third when he sobers up (after heroic years of cocaine abuse) but even then it’s extremely readable.
It’s a genius book. The best biography or autobiography I have ever read about a ‘rock star’
Rocketman was a fantastic film and I see no reason to explore the subject further.
But yes what a shocker missing that one.0 -
I primarily write for non-UK firms.
It cuts both ways.
Incidentally, I'm available for freelance writing gigs/proofreading, if anyone's interested. [I normally wouldn't plug that but it is relevant in this instance].0 -
Targetting Marseilles players seems to be a trend now - Monpellier fans did the same recentlytlg86 said:I see it all kicked off at the Nice v Marseille game last night:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-9917275/Marseilles-clash-Nice-ABANDONED-home-fans-storm-pitch-ATTACK-players.html0 -
Yes agree about the ending - I was expecting/looking forward to a detailed explanation of how they finally corrected for the lack of accuracy in their calcs, etc but none came. Which is fine because that was the reality of it but it didn't sit well with the tone of the rest of the book.CarlottaVance said:
Just finished Tim Bouverie's "Appeasing Hitler; Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War" after finishing Robert Harris' "Munich". Like you I quite enjoyed V2 but thought the ending a bit rushed.TOPPING said:Last week, I read a few trashy books, including Robert Harris' V2. I had wanted to read Perdido Street Station, as recommended on here but it arrived too late and I was too mean to buy it again on kindle.
V2 was imo an okayish book, pretty mediocre but dealing with an interesting subject, in particular Wernher von Braun, whom I have subsequently wikied.
Now _there_ is an interesting life. I am looking forward to reading a biog - any recommendations?
(After obvs, I have read PSS.)
Last bio I read was Adam Zamoyski's "Napoleon The Man Behind the Myth" which treads a persuasive path between (often French) hagiography and (frequently British) demonisation.
Currently reading "Kate" - about Katherine Hepburn's greatest and longest running acting role - the creation of her public persona.
Boiled down, it was just a brief and bare bones description of some of the milestones of the V2 programme and the UK's response. The rest (75%) was made up who cares which added nothing to the whole.0 -
It’s quite long and not all relevant but it’s worth watching Tesla’s presentation from last week, particularly when set against the one they did 2 years ago to see the progress. Clearly they were far more bullish then than they were entitled to be and it’s possible or perhaps probable the same is true now. But it’s not a horizon problem that will always stay the same distance from reach. It will be solved sooner or later. Possibly much sooner than many expect.Sandpit said:
Don’t disagree, but if you’re waiting for a proper self-driving system then it’s going to be a long wait.Alistair said:
Separate infrastructure doesn't count. And I'm not just being facetious.Sandpit said:
The easiest way to get a large scale SDV system working, is going to be to build a new Milton Keynes (Or, more likely, Dubai or Jeddah), and have separate roads for SD and regular vehicles.Pulpstar said:
It might be solved for motorways in the forseeable future, but the more rural roads of Devon, Cornwall, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire to pick a few counties - doubt it.Alistair said:
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.JosiasJessop said:
On AI and autonomous driving:moonshine said:
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.Philip_Thompson said:
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.MattW said:
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issueMaxPB said:
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.tlg86 said:
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).MaxPB said:
It's still a stupid decision.tlg86 said:
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.MaxPB said:Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. Weshould have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
If you have to separate the humans and the robots then they are not self driving as self driving covers having to interact with humans.
The best chance of one in the medium term is going to be to build a town around them.
If the human needs to be in charge, then he needs to be paying proper attention - anything that can dump on him half a second before the accident isn’t fit for purpose. The whole point of a self-driving car is that you can treat it like your own personal chauffeur.0 -
Mind game. If someone could be resurrected to write their autobiography, who would you choose?
You’re allowed three candidates. They have to be proven historical personae (so no Jesus) and they don’t have to be dead
I’d go for
Hitler. It would probably be turgid self-justification but what if he turns out to have a crackling wit and a conscience?
Alexander the Great. Imagine the pace of the narrative. ‘On Tuesday I overran Thrace’
Shakespeare. He met everyone and the prose-style would be fascinating
0 -
The 1970s Ford Zephyr had the gear lever on the dash. Also it had no individual seats, just a bench front and back. I have few childhood memories – it’s like I was born when I left home – but one of them is the 6 of us in this old tank of a family car, caravan on tow, my dad puffing away and filling the interior with sweet tangy cigar smoke, my mum on map reading duties, no thanks when she got it right (cos it’s easy compared to the man’s work of driving) but raised voices and tears when she got it wrong. Just a little bit of everyday patriarchy there.Dura_Ace said:
It's not "unique", about a million other Citroen A series cars like the Dyane and Arcadian used exactly the same transmission.Leon said:
2CVs are really great cars to drive, drunk. They go so slow you’re barely a danger to anyone, even after three bottles of Bandol, and even if you do hit something - say, a mouflon - the 2CV is so tinny you just get another dent and the mouflon walks away, unharmedCarnyx said:
Also stand up through the roof and see if the archaeological site you are seeking is over the hedge. A friend and I ticked off a lot of Wessex megaliths that way (and pubs, but those were the days when pubs closed for the morning and the afternoon in England).TOPPING said:
Absolutely. And as far as I'm aware there is no F1 car in production which can hold a pig in the boot, four people, with the driver wearing a top hat, and be able to drive over a ploughed field with a box of eggs in the back without breaking them.Dura_Ace said:
Other way round. Toyota had active suspension on the Soarer in 1986 before F1 had it. (Citroen had semi-active suspension that wasn't electronically controlled decades before that.) BMW and Mercedes both had traction control on road cars in the mid 80s before F1.Sandpit said:
Not to mention vehicle designs themselves, features such as traction control and active suspension saw their first automotive applications in F1, now every car has them.
Eh? Eh?
Plus, whenever you change gear with that unique gear box, you can make an amusing ‘trombone’ sound, to accompany the movement
Plenty of other cars use a similar dash mounted lever too. Eg Renault 4.0 -
Yes but how many childhood memories do you have?kinabalu said:
The old 1970s Ford Zephyr had the gear lever on the dash. Also it had no individual seats, just a bench both front and back. I have few childhood memories – it’s like I was born when I left home – but one of them is the 6 of us in this old tank of a family car, caravan on tow, my dad puffing away and filling the interior with sweet tangy cigar smoke, my mum on map reading duties, no thanks when she got it right (cos it’s easy compared to the man’s work of driving) but raised voices and tears when she got it wrong. Just a little bit of everyday patriarchy there.Dura_Ace said:
It's not "unique", about a million other Citroen A series cars like the Dyane and Arcadian used exactly the same transmission.Leon said:
2CVs are really great cars to drive, drunk. They go so slow you’re barely a danger to anyone, even after three bottles of Bandol, and even if you do hit something - say, a mouflon - the 2CV is so tinny you just get another dent and the mouflon walks away, unharmedCarnyx said:
Also stand up through the roof and see if the archaeological site you are seeking is over the hedge. A friend and I ticked off a lot of Wessex megaliths that way (and pubs, but those were the days when pubs closed for the morning and the afternoon in England).TOPPING said:
Absolutely. And as far as I'm aware there is no F1 car in production which can hold a pig in the boot, four people, with the driver wearing a top hat, and be able to drive over a ploughed field with a box of eggs in the back without breaking them.Dura_Ace said:
Other way round. Toyota had active suspension on the Soarer in 1986 before F1 had it. (Citroen had semi-active suspension that wasn't electronically controlled decades before that.) BMW and Mercedes both had traction control on road cars in the mid 80s before F1.Sandpit said:
Not to mention vehicle designs themselves, features such as traction control and active suspension saw their first automotive applications in F1, now every car has them.
Eh? Eh?
Plus, whenever you change gear with that unique gear box, you can make an amusing ‘trombone’ sound, to accompany the movement
Plenty of other cars use a similar dash mounted lever too. Eg Renault 4.0 -
Mr. Leon, that's a very good question.
Hannibal would definitely be on my list.
Perhaps Aethelstan.
And Polybius, so he could also fill in the blanks.
Edited extra bit: although Alexander would be very good.
"I drunkenly slew Cleitus after he provoked me; and I flung a javelin that transfixed him in the chest."0 -
Richard III after a truth serum.Leon said:Mind game. If someone could be resurrected to write their autobiography, who would you choose?
You’re allowed three candidates. They have to be proven historical personae (so no Jesus) and they don’t have to be dead
I’d go for
Hitler. It would probably be turgid self-justification but what if he turns out to have a crackling wit and a conscience?
Alexander the Great. Imagine the pace of the narrative. ‘On Tuesday I overran Thrace’
Shakespeare. He met everyone and the prose-style would be fascinating0 -
Norman WillisLeon said:Mind game. If someone could be resurrected to write their autobiography, who would you choose?
You’re allowed three candidates. They have to be proven historical personae (so no Jesus) and they don’t have to be dead
I’d go for
Hitler. It would probably be turgid self-justification but what if he turns out to have a crackling wit and a conscience?
Alexander the Great. Imagine the pace of the narrative. ‘On Tuesday I overran Thrace’
Shakespeare. He met everyone and the prose-style would be fascinating0 -
Now why would I check titles? Tsk!Nigelb said:
Would it be unkind to speculate that you came across it when checking if anyone had already nabbed the title ?Leon said:
“Me”, the autobiography by Elton JohnTOPPING said:Last week, I read a few trashy books, including Robert Harris' V2. I had wanted to read Perdido Street Station, as recommended on here but it arrived too late and I was too mean to buy it again on kindle.
V2 was imo an okayish book, pretty mediocre but dealing with an interesting subject, in particular Wernher von Braun, whom I have subsequently wikied.
Now _there_ is an interesting life. I am looking forward to reading a biog - any recommendations?
(After obvs, I have read PSS.)
I’m totally serious. It’s extraordinary. Brilliantly funny, outrageously gossipy and candid (and he’s met everyone), plus he led a ridiculously libertine yet successful life. I never realised the scale of his success until I read this. He was the biggest selling musician in the world for several years running.
It gets slightly less interesting in the final third when he sobers up (after heroic years of cocaine abuse) but even then it’s extremely readable.
It’s a genius book. The best biography or autobiography I have ever read about a ‘rock star’
(I shall order it.)
No, I read it because so many people kept saying ‘read it’. I was skeptical, they were right
Check the Amazon ratings. 4.7 out of 5. 17,000 reviews. About as good as it gets
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Me-Elton-John-Official-Autobiography/dp/1509853316/ref=nodl_0 -
Doing a quick tot up now. Think it's going to be in the high 2 digits.TOPPING said:
Yes but how many childhood memories do you have?kinabalu said:
The old 1970s Ford Zephyr had the gear lever on the dash. Also it had no individual seats, just a bench both front and back. I have few childhood memories – it’s like I was born when I left home – but one of them is the 6 of us in this old tank of a family car, caravan on tow, my dad puffing away and filling the interior with sweet tangy cigar smoke, my mum on map reading duties, no thanks when she got it right (cos it’s easy compared to the man’s work of driving) but raised voices and tears when she got it wrong. Just a little bit of everyday patriarchy there.Dura_Ace said:
It's not "unique", about a million other Citroen A series cars like the Dyane and Arcadian used exactly the same transmission.Leon said:
2CVs are really great cars to drive, drunk. They go so slow you’re barely a danger to anyone, even after three bottles of Bandol, and even if you do hit something - say, a mouflon - the 2CV is so tinny you just get another dent and the mouflon walks away, unharmedCarnyx said:
Also stand up through the roof and see if the archaeological site you are seeking is over the hedge. A friend and I ticked off a lot of Wessex megaliths that way (and pubs, but those were the days when pubs closed for the morning and the afternoon in England).TOPPING said:
Absolutely. And as far as I'm aware there is no F1 car in production which can hold a pig in the boot, four people, with the driver wearing a top hat, and be able to drive over a ploughed field with a box of eggs in the back without breaking them.Dura_Ace said:
Other way round. Toyota had active suspension on the Soarer in 1986 before F1 had it. (Citroen had semi-active suspension that wasn't electronically controlled decades before that.) BMW and Mercedes both had traction control on road cars in the mid 80s before F1.Sandpit said:
Not to mention vehicle designs themselves, features such as traction control and active suspension saw their first automotive applications in F1, now every car has them.
Eh? Eh?
Plus, whenever you change gear with that unique gear box, you can make an amusing ‘trombone’ sound, to accompany the movement
Plenty of other cars use a similar dash mounted lever too. Eg Renault 4.0 -
Hannibal. Good choice!Morris_Dancer said:Mr. Leon, that's a very good question.
Hannibal would definitely be on my list.
Perhaps Aethelstan.
And Polybius, so he could also fill in the blanks.
Edited extra bit: although Alexander would be very good.
"I drunkenly slew Cleitus after he provoked me; and I flung a javelin that transfixed him in the chest."
From the same Roman era, Spartacus would be a bloody good narrative. Or Mark Antony?
0 -
You didn't say that and replied to a post saying "goods". You never said passengers.moonshine said:
Why are you being rude and talking about freight? I was talking about passengers.Philip_Thompson said:
[Citation Needed] I call bullshit on that. Its just not true.moonshine said:
You can quibble with the occupancy assumptions in the cars and trains but one new high speed rail line running fewer than 20 trains an hour (at 400m length) provides more capacity than a new 6 lane motorway, with a smaller footprint. Some suggest even double the capacity.Philip_Thompson said:
We are a small country. Quite frankly besides relatively a few things moved in bulk, overwhelmingly trains don't provide capacity, vehicles on roads do.moonshine said:
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.Philip_Thompson said:
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.MattW said:
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issueMaxPB said:
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.tlg86 said:
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).MaxPB said:
It's still a stupid decision.tlg86 said:
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.MaxPB said:Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. We should have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
Its not just that the overwhelming majority of commuters move via roads - the overwhelming majority of goods transit quite rightly happens the same way too. And the idea that goods transit should instead happen via trains instead is overwhelmingly a farcical suggestion that fails in the face of actual experience which is why it doesn't happen. We aren't looking typically to move train loads of goods thousands of miles, because our country isn't thousands of miles long.
Since the main work you’re doing in a vehicle is moving air out of the way, a long slim vehicle like a train will also always be more energy efficient than equivalent number of cars spaced out on a motorway with appropriate stopping distances.
Only 5% of goods in the UK are moved by rail. Volume of freight on roads massively exceeds the volume of freight on rails.
The problem with that fiction is we don't need to move trainloads at a time many miles since most businesses in the UK are moving relatively few goods from A to B. That's why they use roads, the vehicles can get exactly what is needed from exactly where it needs to be, to exactly where it needs to go to.
Trains can't do that. Actually the volume of freight moved by train has collapsed in the past decade because the primary thing we needed trains to move in the past, large volumes of coal in to power our power plants, is no longer required anymore.
Still passengers overwhelmingly don't travel by rail. The overwhelming majority of passengers travel by road and again for good reason. Road again takes you from A to B which is why people use it.0 -
Writing from the perspective of now, finding out what happened to their legacy?Leon said:Mind game. If someone could be resurrected to write their autobiography, who would you choose?
You’re allowed three candidates. They have to be proven historical personae (so no Jesus) and they don’t have to be dead
I’d go for
Hitler. It would probably be turgid self-justification but what if he turns out to have a crackling wit and a conscience?
Alexander the Great. Imagine the pace of the narrative. ‘On Tuesday I overran Thrace’
Shakespeare. He met everyone and the prose-style would be fascinating
If so, General Franco would be fascinating- convinced that he had Spain securely where he wanted it in 1975, and yet virtually the whole country shrugged and wandered out of the cage he had created the moment he was dead.0 -
Yes, I think they have to be resurrected now, and allowed to look back at their legacy.Stuartinromford said:
Writing from the perspective of now, finding out what happened to their legacy?Leon said:Mind game. If someone could be resurrected to write their autobiography, who would you choose?
You’re allowed three candidates. They have to be proven historical personae (so no Jesus) and they don’t have to be dead
I’d go for
Hitler. It would probably be turgid self-justification but what if he turns out to have a crackling wit and a conscience?
Alexander the Great. Imagine the pace of the narrative. ‘On Tuesday I overran Thrace’
Shakespeare. He met everyone and the prose-style would be fascinating
If so, General Franco would be fascinating- convinced that he had Spain securely where he wanted it in 1975, and yet virtually the whole country shrugged and wandered out of the cage he had created the moment he was dead.
That’s maybe part of the reason Elton John’s book is so good, he basically died of booze and drugs (literally and metaphorically) then he got clean so he’s able to look back with a real sense of perspective. Plus he’s fucking hilarious about ‘growing up in Pinner’1 -
You ideally want new narratives written by history’s losers. If English history is your thing, Harold Godwinson perhaps. Or Boudicca.Leon said:
Hannibal. Good choice!Morris_Dancer said:Mr. Leon, that's a very good question.
Hannibal would definitely be on my list.
Perhaps Aethelstan.
And Polybius, so he could also fill in the blanks.
Edited extra bit: although Alexander would be very good.
"I drunkenly slew Cleitus after he provoked me; and I flung a javelin that transfixed him in the chest."
From the same Roman era, Spartacus would be a bloody good narrative. Or Mark Antony?
Then it would be good to fill in some of the gaps in human civilisation’s collective amnesia. More or less anyone that lived 15,000 years ago.0 -
Boudicca! Omg. The drama. As the Romans rape her daughters. The thirst for revenge. Castrating the romanized brits by the Thames! And then the crushing defeat, the dying fall..moonshine said:
You ideally want new narratives written by history’s losers. If English history is your thing, Harold Godwinson perhaps. Or Boudicca.Leon said:
Hannibal. Good choice!Morris_Dancer said:Mr. Leon, that's a very good question.
Hannibal would definitely be on my list.
Perhaps Aethelstan.
And Polybius, so he could also fill in the blanks.
Edited extra bit: although Alexander would be very good.
"I drunkenly slew Cleitus after he provoked me; and I flung a javelin that transfixed him in the chest."
From the same Roman era, Spartacus would be a bloody good narrative. Or Mark Antony?
Then it would be good to fill in some of the gaps in human civilisation’s collective amnesia. More or less anyone that lived 15,000 years ago.
I reckon she could get £2m for her memoirs. She’s stupid not to reincarnate as herself.
Who’d get the most? Has to be Hitler. ‘Controversial, candid and utterly compelling, the tale of an ordinary kid from Linz who made it to the pinnacle of global politics, and never lost his love for dogs’ - the Guardian, Book of the Week
Hitler could get £100m for his memoirs?0 -
Resurrecting someone to look back at progress since they died, then perhaps a Da Vinci, Plato or Newton. You could pick any dictator to write about the futility of their struggle when seen in the context of history but the shadenfreude aspect would get tired quickly.Leon said:
Yes, I think they have to be resurrected now, and allowed to look back at their legacy.Stuartinromford said:
Writing from the perspective of now, finding out what happened to their legacy?Leon said:Mind game. If someone could be resurrected to write their autobiography, who would you choose?
You’re allowed three candidates. They have to be proven historical personae (so no Jesus) and they don’t have to be dead
I’d go for
Hitler. It would probably be turgid self-justification but what if he turns out to have a crackling wit and a conscience?
Alexander the Great. Imagine the pace of the narrative. ‘On Tuesday I overran Thrace’
Shakespeare. He met everyone and the prose-style would be fascinating
If so, General Franco would be fascinating- convinced that he had Spain securely where he wanted it in 1975, and yet virtually the whole country shrugged and wandered out of the cage he had created the moment he was dead.
That’s maybe part of the reason Elton John’s book is so good, he basically died of booze and drugs (literally and metaphorically) then he got clean so he’s able to look back with a real sense of perspective. Plus he’s fucking hilarious about ‘growing up in Pinner’0 -
I never bothered with it but I gather his first effort was a bore.Leon said:
Boudicca! Omg. The drama. As the Romans rape her daughters. The thirst for revenge. Castrating the romanized brits by the Thames! And then the crushing defeat, the dying fall..moonshine said:
You ideally want new narratives written by history’s losers. If English history is your thing, Harold Godwinson perhaps. Or Boudicca.Leon said:
Hannibal. Good choice!Morris_Dancer said:Mr. Leon, that's a very good question.
Hannibal would definitely be on my list.
Perhaps Aethelstan.
And Polybius, so he could also fill in the blanks.
Edited extra bit: although Alexander would be very good.
"I drunkenly slew Cleitus after he provoked me; and I flung a javelin that transfixed him in the chest."
From the same Roman era, Spartacus would be a bloody good narrative. Or Mark Antony?
Then it would be good to fill in some of the gaps in human civilisation’s collective amnesia. More or less anyone that lived 15,000 years ago.
I reckon she could get £2m for her memoirs. She’s stupid not to reincarnate as herself.
Who’d get the most? Has to be Hitler. ‘Controversial, candid and utterly compelling, the tale of an ordinary kid from Linz who made it to the pinnacle of global politics, and never lost his love for dogs’ - the Guardian, Book of the Week
Hitler could get £100m for his memoirs?0 -
well for sure aviation is ignored, sure they will have fiddled it as they do with everything else this bunch of crooks handle.RobD said:
Which part of the statistics has been falsified in this manner?malcolmg said:
Britain just does not count things with emissions and hey presto we get magic reductionsPhilip_Thompson said:Extinction Rebellion really are thick as pigshit aren't they.
Sky just interviewing a spokeswoman from that saying that British people are being lied to and told that we can't do anything about climate change, or that its about China, when we can tackle this - and that in recent years there's been a 60% increase in emissions.
Actually there's been close to a 60% decrease in British emissions. Where is the 60% increase coming from?0 -
Well indeed that is useful for a tiny fraction of goods and that already happens which is why ~5% of movement is done by rail.Cookie said:
Rail freight works when it is port to terminal.Philip_Thompson said:
Though of course there's more than 76 lorries on the road.JosiasJessop said:
Railfreight has faced a massive issue over the last two decades: the death of coal. Hundreds of trains used to transport thousands of tonnes around the country between mine, port and power station. There are relatively few now. The rest of railfreight has had to increase just to compensate.Philip_Thompson said:
The idea rail provides capacity in this nation instead of roads is an ignorant fiction.
https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1257/freight-rail-usage-2018-19-quarter-4.pdf
But I also think your statement is wrong. According to (1), each train takes 76 lorries off the road; although I don't know how they get that figure.
If you were to replace all freight trains with lorries, there would be massive capacity issues. So whilst rail is not the major player in the freight game, it provides a useful addition for certain loads.
(1): https://www.railengineer.co.uk/felixstowe-branch-line-capacity-enhancement-goes-live/
The problem with rail enthusiasts is they use dodgy maths, like Independent SAGE doing exponential numbers to infinity.
If you contrast each rail being full and consider it equivalent to lorries then of course trains are quite efficient, but the problem is relatively few businesses want to move full train loads and those that do don't want to move them exactly from one train station, to another train station.
Rail was fantastic for coal. Bulky, needed in huge volumes, could have a train station at the power plant and another train station at the mine. Incredible technology for when you want to move something like that.
But when you're dealing with smaller niche commodities that don't need to be at a train station but need to be all over the country at shops, bars, manufacturers etc then rail isn't especially good for that.
So a shipload arrives at Felixstowe. A proportion of the containers on that shipload will be ultimately headed for the North West. So you fill up a trainload with containers and run those containers to Trafford Park. The goods are then distributed from there, thereby taking 76 lorries off the A14 and the M6 and the M62. A train is more efficient than 76 lorries. And you run another trainload to whatever Trafford Park's equivalent is in Scotland, in the West Midlands, in the North East, etc.
It doesn't work particularly well when Scrogg's Spoons inc. in Scunthorpe wants to distribute its spoons across the UK. But it doesn't need to - we just need it to have the capacity to do what it can do well.
You can do the same process in reverse too, though less of that goes on.
However while a tiny fraction of goods can go from Felixstowe to Trafford Park by rail, even more goods including anything domestically shipped as well as consumers, employees and more can get to Trafford Park by the M62 etc
Considering 5% of movement happens by rail and we're talking over £100bn on just one rail line then economically we should be investing about £1.8 trillion into our road network considering ~89% of movement happens by road.
I'm not holding my breath on that happening.0 -
It evidently is, as it was a massive part of railfreight, and railfreight hasn't gone down anywhere near that much.Philip_Thompson said:
That was my point, and trainload coal isn't getting replaced with anything else. Because unlike coal most other goods don't need to be moved by the trainload.JosiasJessop said:
A massive part of that is the death of trainload coal...Philip_Thompson said:
"We have a capacity issue on our rails for goods"
Yes, the capacity issue is that people don't want to move goods by rail. 89% of freight is moved by roads for a reason, but sure "adding a new high speed route will add more than a motorway". *Bullshit!*0 -
Pretty sure it will for buildings, I certainly would not risk leaving it to someone else if I was renting out my house. They burn it to the ground and you get zilch and still have a mortgage.TOPPING said:
Maybe it's one of those free drinks in first class things. The rent reflects and includes a cost for insurance.malcolmg said:
You certainly need buildings insurance as minimum here if you are letting a property and have a mortgage, contents not so sure but adding the minimum is peanuts.TimT said:
In the US if there is a mortgage on the property, it is the landlord that is required to have "renter's insurance".TOPPING said:
Doesn't your landlord require you to have insurance? Interesting. And it is entirely understandable not to have it, although many people find it extremely reassuring to have such insurance although we do appreciate Nick that you are somewhat of an odd fish.NickPalmer said:
Don't know about kinabalu but as a tenant I certainly don't insure the house, and using his reasoning I also don't insure the contents - I can afford to replace some or all of them if necessary, and would rather not pay extortionate premiums to cover the off-chance that the place burns to a cinder. Health insurance is trickier since, as you say, you can pay a lot for one-off treatment of moderate complexity. If you have a crisis like a road accident the insurer will shovel you into the NHS anyway, though, so I don't insure for that either, and will basically go with the NHS flow.TOPPING said:
So no house insurance? Bold call.kinabalu said:
Yes. Insurance generally - travel, health, car, house, life, all of it - is a bet with the odds skewed heavily to the House. The only rational reason to do it is to get protection against something which if it happened would really screw you (or your dependents) up financially. And even then you need to look carefully at the probability of it happening. The only insurance I have is basic motor and that's because it's the law.another_richard said:
Thanks, that's very helpful.Foxy said:
Look carefully at the cover. Most policies require a GP referral to cover payment, and there are significant excesses and exclusions. Many policies will refuse cover for chronic conditions (lasting greater than 6 weeks) or those where NHS is available on a reasonable timescale. Every month I have a Private patient who is annoyed at their refusal of cover by the insurance company that they were relying on.another_richard said:Few things are less cherry at the start of a week than reading about GP mistakes.
So given covid backlogs to medical treatment is private medical insurance ** now worth it ?
Or would paying for private consultancy or treatment if required be a better ?
** Affordable but more than double the cost of home and car insurance combined.
That said, waiting lists have mushroomed for elective procedures and even for outpatient appointments. In my dept we are now booking routine referrals to outpatients from Dec 2020.
Self funding private care is a reasonable option, and putting those premiums into a savings pot instead of an insurance company gives you control and flexibility. You get to keep the money too if unused.
A lot depends on your own financial resources and existing health status and risks.
The self-funding if necessary option looks the best for me.
Also, on health, as mentioned earlier, I bust up my hand (you should have seen the other guy) a couple of years ago and the NHS said I had to wait five weeks to see a consultant. By which time of course the bones would have healed. I was at a private consultant the following day.
But I like your carefree, hair in the wind, freewheeling attitude.
And as for your road accident the insurer won't "shovel you into the NHS" because from the scene you will in the first instance go to the NHS. It's after that when it might get trickier if you have, as in my example, some broken bones or another condition which needs investigation and/or is more complex but yes people can survive (!) on the NHS wholly albeit they will need to sharpen their elbows dramatically.
Correction: it is the landlord who is required to insure the building which is not renters insurance.0 -
https://www.ft.com/content/1f650e41-f318-4d2a-afa9-70dd88536359
The Roaring Twenties, nah. We are dead.0 -
Are you thinking of doing something akin to the Robert Harris - Tiro / Cicero Trilogy? If so, there’s a sweet spot when picking your subject. Enough source material to make the historicity of it rich enough but not so much it takes a lifetime to research it.moonshine said:
Resurrecting someone to look back at progress since they died, then perhaps a Da Vinci, Plato or Newton. You could pick any dictator to write about the futility of their struggle when seen in the context of history but the shadenfreude aspect would get tired quickly.Leon said:
Yes, I think they have to be resurrected now, and allowed to look back at their legacy.Stuartinromford said:
Writing from the perspective of now, finding out what happened to their legacy?Leon said:Mind game. If someone could be resurrected to write their autobiography, who would you choose?
You’re allowed three candidates. They have to be proven historical personae (so no Jesus) and they don’t have to be dead
I’d go for
Hitler. It would probably be turgid self-justification but what if he turns out to have a crackling wit and a conscience?
Alexander the Great. Imagine the pace of the narrative. ‘On Tuesday I overran Thrace’
Shakespeare. He met everyone and the prose-style would be fascinating
If so, General Franco would be fascinating- convinced that he had Spain securely where he wanted it in 1975, and yet virtually the whole country shrugged and wandered out of the cage he had created the moment he was dead.
That’s maybe part of the reason Elton John’s book is so good, he basically died of booze and drugs (literally and metaphorically) then he got clean so he’s able to look back with a real sense of perspective. Plus he’s fucking hilarious about ‘growing up in Pinner’0 -
Actually yes railfreight has gone down tremendously. The coal freight has not been replaced by other freight.JosiasJessop said:
It evidently is, as it was a massive part of railfreight, and railfreight hasn't gone down anywhere near that much.Philip_Thompson said:
That was my point, and trainload coal isn't getting replaced with anything else. Because unlike coal most other goods don't need to be moved by the trainload.JosiasJessop said:
A massive part of that is the death of trainload coal...Philip_Thompson said:
"We have a capacity issue on our rails for goods"
Yes, the capacity issue is that people don't want to move goods by rail. 89% of freight is moved by roads for a reason, but sure "adding a new high speed route will add more than a motorway". *Bullshit!*
Besides, railfreight is 5% of all freight, so being a massive part of railfreight does not make it a massive part of overall freight.0 -
You seem to have missed my point entirely, which was they had been successful in publicity and that has probably gone as far as it can. That has had an effect in the amount of talking about it, which is not nothing, but I dont see what they can add further precisely because it's not them doing it.Philip_Thompson said:
Councils and governments were already dealing with these issues before XR came about.kle4 said:
I said successful at raising the profile, not that they created the bandwagon or preexisting actions.Philip_Thompson said:
I don't know if XR even have been successful in recent years, or if they've just jumped on a pre-existing bandwagon and been louder and shriller than anyone else.kle4 said:
XR have been extraordinarily successful in recent years in raising the profile of these issues and pushing for action, which is something to be proud of, but I do have the worry that, as an umbrella group, they have taken it as far as they are able.Philip_Thompson said:Extinction Rebellion really are thick as pigshit aren't they.
Sky just interviewing a spokeswoman from that saying that British people are being lied to and told that we can't do anything about climate change, or that its about China, when we can tackle this - and that in recent years there's been a 60% increase in emissions.
Actually there's been close to a 60% decrease in British emissions. Where is the 60% increase coming from?
The passion is still there, and there are people who would mouth platitudes but do very little unless pressed by campaigners, but XR are perfectly capable of being just plain wrong, and when that happens religious fervour is a hindrance as you look like a fool, and the 'it's never enough' messaging works to make people see the problem, but doesn't exactly encourage people and governments who are on board. Even governing bodies need a pat on the head from time to time, not just constating berating.
Quite frankly governments, scientists etc have been dealing with this for much longer than XR have been around. The UK from 2010 to 2020 had gone from overwhelmingly coal powered electricity to switching off and demolishing coal power plants, with wind farms increasingly everwhere long before XR even where a blip on the landscape.
Fact is being louder and shriller has worked. Councils and others across the land badgered by XR (or XR types) and a big increase in press coverage of that sort of pressurising, has seen a response, it is more in the everyday consciousness than it was even 4 years ago. Everybody on earth has probably heard of Greta bloody Thuberg by now.
My point was that being louder and shriller has achieved that profile raising, but I tihnk it is maximised, and actually achieving things is not helped much by them now. In fact, it can be counter productive.
Everybody has heard of Greta, but what has she actually changed in the UK? What can you point to and say "that is happening because of Greta/XR" which wouldn't have happened anyway?
The simple reality is we were already dealing with climate change, technology will be the solution and that's been invested in for decades now. But that's not good news for XR.0 -
Sold quite well thomoonshine said:
I never bothered with it but I gather his first effort was a bore.Leon said:
Boudicca! Omg. The drama. As the Romans rape her daughters. The thirst for revenge. Castrating the romanized brits by the Thames! And then the crushing defeat, the dying fall..moonshine said:
You ideally want new narratives written by history’s losers. If English history is your thing, Harold Godwinson perhaps. Or Boudicca.Leon said:
Hannibal. Good choice!Morris_Dancer said:Mr. Leon, that's a very good question.
Hannibal would definitely be on my list.
Perhaps Aethelstan.
And Polybius, so he could also fill in the blanks.
Edited extra bit: although Alexander would be very good.
"I drunkenly slew Cleitus after he provoked me; and I flung a javelin that transfixed him in the chest."
From the same Roman era, Spartacus would be a bloody good narrative. Or Mark Antony?
Then it would be good to fill in some of the gaps in human civilisation’s collective amnesia. More or less anyone that lived 15,000 years ago.
I reckon she could get £2m for her memoirs. She’s stupid not to reincarnate as herself.
Who’d get the most? Has to be Hitler. ‘Controversial, candid and utterly compelling, the tale of an ordinary kid from Linz who made it to the pinnacle of global politics, and never lost his love for dogs’ - the Guardian, Book of the Week
Hitler could get £100m for his memoirs?
Holocaust, Schmolocaust, the Hitler Memoirs
‘With his impish prose style, seasoned with wry humour, and an endearing sense of self-deprecation, Hitler draws us into his thinking, and laces the darker material with amusing vignettes of daily Nazi life. The slapstick scenes of him playing drunken ‘office volleyball’ with Herman Goering, knocking Karl Donitz of the window, are rip-roaringly funny, and serve to humanize these otherwise unapproachable characters’ - the New Statesman2 -
Oh absolutely it seems we're talking cross purposes. As self-publicists they've been good.kle4 said:
You seem to have missed my point entirely, which was they had been successful in publicity and that has probably gone as far as it can. That has had an effect in the amount of talking about it, which is not nothing, but I dont see what they can add further precisely because it's not them doing it.Philip_Thompson said:
Councils and governments were already dealing with these issues before XR came about.kle4 said:
I said successful at raising the profile, not that they created the bandwagon or preexisting actions.Philip_Thompson said:
I don't know if XR even have been successful in recent years, or if they've just jumped on a pre-existing bandwagon and been louder and shriller than anyone else.kle4 said:
XR have been extraordinarily successful in recent years in raising the profile of these issues and pushing for action, which is something to be proud of, but I do have the worry that, as an umbrella group, they have taken it as far as they are able.Philip_Thompson said:Extinction Rebellion really are thick as pigshit aren't they.
Sky just interviewing a spokeswoman from that saying that British people are being lied to and told that we can't do anything about climate change, or that its about China, when we can tackle this - and that in recent years there's been a 60% increase in emissions.
Actually there's been close to a 60% decrease in British emissions. Where is the 60% increase coming from?
The passion is still there, and there are people who would mouth platitudes but do very little unless pressed by campaigners, but XR are perfectly capable of being just plain wrong, and when that happens religious fervour is a hindrance as you look like a fool, and the 'it's never enough' messaging works to make people see the problem, but doesn't exactly encourage people and governments who are on board. Even governing bodies need a pat on the head from time to time, not just constating berating.
Quite frankly governments, scientists etc have been dealing with this for much longer than XR have been around. The UK from 2010 to 2020 had gone from overwhelmingly coal powered electricity to switching off and demolishing coal power plants, with wind farms increasingly everwhere long before XR even where a blip on the landscape.
Fact is being louder and shriller has worked. Councils and others across the land badgered by XR (or XR types) and a big increase in press coverage of that sort of pressurising, has seen a response, it is more in the everyday consciousness than it was even 4 years ago. Everybody on earth has probably heard of Greta bloody Thuberg by now.
My point was that being louder and shriller has achieved that profile raising, but I tihnk it is maximised, and actually achieving things is not helped much by them now. In fact, it can be counter productive.
Everybody has heard of Greta, but what has she actually changed in the UK? What can you point to and say "that is happening because of Greta/XR" which wouldn't have happened anyway?
The simple reality is we were already dealing with climate change, technology will be the solution and that's been invested in for decades now. But that's not good news for XR.
But for changing the agenda, addressing climate change, getting policy changes, achieving something it seems to be a big fat zero.0 -
JosiasJessop said:
It evidently is, as it was a massive part of railfreight, and railfreight hasn't gone down anywhere near that much.Philip_Thompson said:
That was my point, and trainload coal isn't getting replaced with anything else. Because unlike coal most other goods don't need to be moved by the trainload.JosiasJessop said:
A massive part of that is the death of trainload coal...Philip_Thompson said:
"We have a capacity issue on our rails for goods"
Yes, the capacity issue is that people don't want to move goods by rail. 89% of freight is moved by roads for a reason, but sure "adding a new high speed route will add more than a motorway". *Bullshit!*
Total Railfreight has plummetted from over 30m tonnes, to 19 million tonnes.
How are you seeing coal being replaced by other goods? That's a massive decrease in my eyes.
From 2014 onwards when coal movement collapsed, the other goods movement has basically flatlined. Its not gone up to replace the coal that is no longer being shipped.
Because rail doesn't work for most goods.
While rail is moving 19 million tonnes, HGVs move billions of tonnes.0 -
Philip_Thompson said:
Actually yes railfreight has gone down tremendously. The coal freight has not been replaced by other freight.JosiasJessop said:
It evidently is, as it was a massive part of railfreight, and railfreight hasn't gone down anywhere near that much.Philip_Thompson said:
That was my point, and trainload coal isn't getting replaced with anything else. Because unlike coal most other goods don't need to be moved by the trainload.JosiasJessop said:
A massive part of that is the death of trainload coal...Philip_Thompson said:
"We have a capacity issue on our rails for goods"
Yes, the capacity issue is that people don't want to move goods by rail. 89% of freight is moved by roads for a reason, but sure "adding a new high speed route will add more than a motorway". *Bullshit!*
Besides, railfreight is 5% of all freight, so being a massive part of railfreight does not make it a massive part of overall freight.
Bin Laden going for a kebab before going up the Arsenal. Shagging his way round the student bars in Oxford. Basic training and his adventures against the Soviets. His cave dwelling antics. Then his retirement as a serious collector of digital pornography.Leon said:
Sold quite well thomoonshine said:
I never bothered with it but I gather his first effort was a bore.Leon said:
Boudicca! Omg. The drama. As the Romans rape her daughters. The thirst for revenge. Castrating the romanized brits by the Thames! And then the crushing defeat, the dying fall..moonshine said:
You ideally want new narratives written by history’s losers. If English history is your thing, Harold Godwinson perhaps. Or Boudicca.Leon said:
Hannibal. Good choice!Morris_Dancer said:Mr. Leon, that's a very good question.
Hannibal would definitely be on my list.
Perhaps Aethelstan.
And Polybius, so he could also fill in the blanks.
Edited extra bit: although Alexander would be very good.
"I drunkenly slew Cleitus after he provoked me; and I flung a javelin that transfixed him in the chest."
From the same Roman era, Spartacus would be a bloody good narrative. Or Mark Antony?
Then it would be good to fill in some of the gaps in human civilisation’s collective amnesia. More or less anyone that lived 15,000 years ago.
I reckon she could get £2m for her memoirs. She’s stupid not to reincarnate as herself.
Who’d get the most? Has to be Hitler. ‘Controversial, candid and utterly compelling, the tale of an ordinary kid from Linz who made it to the pinnacle of global politics, and never lost his love for dogs’ - the Guardian, Book of the Week
Hitler could get £100m for his memoirs?
Holocaust, Schmolocaust, the Hitler Memoirs
‘With his impish prose style, seasoned with wry humour, and an endearing sense of self-deprecation, Hitler draws us into his thinking, and laces the darker material with amusing vignettes of daily Nazi life. The slapstick scenes of him playing drunken ‘office volleyball’ with Herman Goering, knocking Karl Donitz of the window, are rip-roaringly funny, and serve to humanize these otherwise unapproachable characters’ - the New Statesman0 -
Good one.Leon said:Mind game. If someone could be resurrected to write their autobiography, who would you choose?
You’re allowed three candidates. They have to be proven historical personae (so no Jesus) and they don’t have to be dead
I’d go for
Hitler. It would probably be turgid self-justification but what if he turns out to have a crackling wit and a conscience?
Alexander the Great. Imagine the pace of the narrative. ‘On Tuesday I overran Thrace’
Shakespeare. He met everyone and the prose-style would be fascinating
From the 'witness to history' side, Moctezuma II or Atahualpa.
As I'm scottish and work in the construction industry, Thomas Telford - I'd love to know the story behind all those landmark projects.
And maybe as a pointer to our times, Francis Walsingham.
0 -
Which is exactly why we need HS2 - to free capacity on the main lines for an expansion of rail freight. Current freight volumes are in most cases capacity-limited, as opposed to demand-limited. The last couple of decades have seen a large increase in passenger traffic, at the expense of freight.Philip_Thompson said:
Actually yes railfreight has gone down tremendously. The coal freight has not been replaced by other freight.JosiasJessop said:
It evidently is, as it was a massive part of railfreight, and railfreight hasn't gone down anywhere near that much.Philip_Thompson said:
That was my point, and trainload coal isn't getting replaced with anything else. Because unlike coal most other goods don't need to be moved by the trainload.JosiasJessop said:
A massive part of that is the death of trainload coal...Philip_Thompson said:
"We have a capacity issue on our rails for goods"
Yes, the capacity issue is that people don't want to move goods by rail. 89% of freight is moved by roads for a reason, but sure "adding a new high speed route will add more than a motorway". *Bullshit!*
Besides, railfreight is 5% of all freight, so being a massive part of railfreight does not make it a massive part of overall freight.0 -
Owain Glyndwr: where I really ended up!sarissa said:
Good one.Leon said:Mind game. If someone could be resurrected to write their autobiography, who would you choose?
You’re allowed three candidates. They have to be proven historical personae (so no Jesus) and they don’t have to be dead
I’d go for
Hitler. It would probably be turgid self-justification but what if he turns out to have a crackling wit and a conscience?
Alexander the Great. Imagine the pace of the narrative. ‘On Tuesday I overran Thrace’
Shakespeare. He met everyone and the prose-style would be fascinating
From the 'witness to history' side, Moctezuma II or Atahualpa.
As I'm scottish and work in the construction industry, Thomas Telford - I'd love to know the story behind all those landmark projects.
And maybe as a pointer to our times, Francis Walsingham.0 -
That's bullshit as well. There is a well established system for counting both emissions and their reductions as set out by the IPCC in Annex II of each of their reports. Britain has made a point of sticking to that standard (unlike some other countries) and their reductions are all made and measured within that framework. To check they are complying all details are submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which is tasked, under the Paris Agreement, with ensuring countries are being honest in their claims.malcolmg said:
Britain just does not count things with emissions and hey presto we get magic reductionsPhilip_Thompson said:Extinction Rebellion really are thick as pigshit aren't they.
Sky just interviewing a spokeswoman from that saying that British people are being lied to and told that we can't do anything about climate change, or that its about China, when we can tackle this - and that in recent years there's been a 60% increase in emissions.
Actually there's been close to a 60% decrease in British emissions. Where is the 60% increase coming from?
You should stop listening to ill educated school kids for getting your climate news.0 -
A talented young London writer - living through the Black Death. There must have been one. Why isn’t there a good Black Death memoir?
Serious question. I know it was fairly horrible and probably quite distracting - and no one wants to read about plague - but still. The material!2 -
After a Wikipedia wander, I now want to read a real autobiographysarissa said:
Good one.Leon said:Mind game. If someone could be resurrected to write their autobiography, who would you choose?
You’re allowed three candidates. They have to be proven historical personae (so no Jesus) and they don’t have to be dead
I’d go for
Hitler. It would probably be turgid self-justification but what if he turns out to have a crackling wit and a conscience?
Alexander the Great. Imagine the pace of the narrative. ‘On Tuesday I overran Thrace’
Shakespeare. He met everyone and the prose-style would be fascinating
From the 'witness to history' side, Moctezuma II or Atahualpa.
As I'm scottish and work in the construction industry, Thomas Telford - I'd love to know the story behind all those landmark projects.
And maybe as a pointer to our times, Francis Walsingham.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Drummond#Har_Zion1 -
Is it necessary to point out that rail routes from coalfields to power stations probably aren't much use for other freight flows, because they're in the wrong place? And before anyone asks, the same would be true of roads.Sandpit said:
Which is exactly why we need HS2 - to free capacity on the main lines for an expansion of rail freight. Current freight volumes are in most cases capacity-limited, as opposed to demand-limited. The last couple of decades have seen a large increase in passenger traffic, at the expense of freight.Philip_Thompson said:
Actually yes railfreight has gone down tremendously. The coal freight has not been replaced by other freight.JosiasJessop said:
It evidently is, as it was a massive part of railfreight, and railfreight hasn't gone down anywhere near that much.Philip_Thompson said:
That was my point, and trainload coal isn't getting replaced with anything else. Because unlike coal most other goods don't need to be moved by the trainload.JosiasJessop said:
A massive part of that is the death of trainload coal...Philip_Thompson said:
"We have a capacity issue on our rails for goods"
Yes, the capacity issue is that people don't want to move goods by rail. 89% of freight is moved by roads for a reason, but sure "adding a new high speed route will add more than a motorway". *Bullshit!*
Besides, railfreight is 5% of all freight, so being a massive part of railfreight does not make it a massive part of overall freight.0 -
It’ll happen just after commercial nuclear fusion.moonshine said:
It’s quite long and not all relevant but it’s worth watching Tesla’s presentation from last week, particularly when set against the one they did 2 years ago to see the progress. Clearly they were far more bullish then than they were entitled to be and it’s possible or perhaps probable the same is true now. But it’s not a horizon problem that will always stay the same distance from reach. It will be solved sooner or later. Possibly much sooner than many expect.Sandpit said:
Don’t disagree, but if you’re waiting for a proper self-driving system then it’s going to be a long wait.Alistair said:
Separate infrastructure doesn't count. And I'm not just being facetious.Sandpit said:
The easiest way to get a large scale SDV system working, is going to be to build a new Milton Keynes (Or, more likely, Dubai or Jeddah), and have separate roads for SD and regular vehicles.Pulpstar said:
It might be solved for motorways in the forseeable future, but the more rural roads of Devon, Cornwall, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire to pick a few counties - doubt it.Alistair said:
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.JosiasJessop said:
On AI and autonomous driving:moonshine said:
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.Philip_Thompson said:
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.MattW said:
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issueMaxPB said:
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.tlg86 said:
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).MaxPB said:
It's still a stupid decision.tlg86 said:
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.MaxPB said:Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. Weshould have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
If you have to separate the humans and the robots then they are not self driving as self driving covers having to interact with humans.
The best chance of one in the medium term is going to be to build a town around them.
If the human needs to be in charge, then he needs to be paying proper attention - anything that can dump on him half a second before the accident isn’t fit for purpose. The whole point of a self-driving car is that you can treat it like your own personal chauffeur.0 -
Wouldn’t it all be tiresome 14th century religious piety? For the 17th century version, then there was Pepys of course.Leon said:A talented young London writer - living through the Black Death. There must have been one. Why isn’t there a good Black Death memoir?
Serious question. I know it was fairly horrible and probably quite distracting - and no one wants to read about plague - but still. The material!0 -
Mr. Leon, there may have been one.
It was in the reigns of Edward III and Henry IV that English supplanted French as the main language.
Also, the death rate was massive. That's rather obvious but also would've affected things a lot.0 -
I don’t know enough about the remaining engineering challenges of fusion commercialisation to say. I’m pretty confident autonomous driving will be here soon however. I have a long standing bet it would be launched somewhere in the world by the qatar World Cup (Dec 2022). I’ll lose that bet, but not by too much I don’t think.Sandpit said:
It’ll happen just after commercial nuclear fusion.moonshine said:
It’s quite long and not all relevant but it’s worth watching Tesla’s presentation from last week, particularly when set against the one they did 2 years ago to see the progress. Clearly they were far more bullish then than they were entitled to be and it’s possible or perhaps probable the same is true now. But it’s not a horizon problem that will always stay the same distance from reach. It will be solved sooner or later. Possibly much sooner than many expect.Sandpit said:
Don’t disagree, but if you’re waiting for a proper self-driving system then it’s going to be a long wait.Alistair said:
Separate infrastructure doesn't count. And I'm not just being facetious.Sandpit said:
The easiest way to get a large scale SDV system working, is going to be to build a new Milton Keynes (Or, more likely, Dubai or Jeddah), and have separate roads for SD and regular vehicles.Pulpstar said:
It might be solved for motorways in the forseeable future, but the more rural roads of Devon, Cornwall, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire to pick a few counties - doubt it.Alistair said:
Self driving will happen just not in the ludicrously short time scales that people moot.JosiasJessop said:
On AI and autonomous driving:moonshine said:
It would for sure allow a more broadly felt improvement if directed locally. But it still wouldn’t fix the problem that we have insufficient transport capacity along and across the spine of the country.Philip_Thompson said:
Where public transport has been invested in it is indeed used. By a teeny tiny fraction of northerners.MattW said:
Wow. Agree with Max on a public spending issueMaxPB said:
No that's just a lack of ambition. We should be planning that branch to go all the way up to Edinburgh at some point. If we're going to spend £100bn on this bullshit then we should at least do it properly.tlg86 said:
I don't think so. I'm not sure about the merits of London-Birmingham-Manchester/Liverpool, but there's certainly a much stronger case for that than Birmingham-Toton-Sheffield-Leeds. What the government ought to do is say that they'll electrify the MML. I'd look at reopening Nuneaton-Burton and Northampton-Market Harborough as a way to cascade capacity from the WCML to the East Midlands, which would also increase journey options (e.g. Milton Keynes to the East Mids).MaxPB said:
It's still a stupid decision.tlg86 said:
It's just the Leeds bit that's being ditched/put on indefinite hold. The Manchester bit is happening.MaxPB said:Very poor decision making from this government if they cancel the northern part of HS2. The London to Birmingham bit is the least useful part. Weshould have started the other way around from Sheffield and Manchester down to Birmingham and then done the Birmingham to London bit afterwards.
I still think it's a gigantic waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere or not at all. Without the northern half of it we're not only at gigantic waste of money, we're back to "cutting 10 mins off the current journey time" again. Fuck those idiots who keep banging on about this mythical capacity issue, it's not worth £50bn.
HS2 is about a 21C transport system, and the further benefits of HS2 are getting people out of aeroplanes, and creating capacity to move freight off roads. Which puts it at the heart of the core green agenda of this Govt.
@theProle earlier has the wrong end of the stick. People in the North travel in cars because the public transport is shitty, not ubiquitous, and there are too many 4th hand cattle-trucks from 1970/80s London forced on them.
Where PT has been invested in - perhaps mainly metropolitan area systems and light rail / trams - it is used.
If it is true that the EM and NE are being knifed in the back on levelling up, after multiple billions have been p*ssed away on unnecessary tunnels and similar to placate Nimbys, then there should be hell to pay.
They are also washing away some of the foundations of their appeal.
The overwhelming majority of northerners (like the overwhelming majority of the country full stop) drive - and the climate excuse to be anti-car has been eliminated by Tesla etc
£100bn invested into the road network would do far more for the country than £100bn on a train set.
Not as shiny and pretty for people who make these decisions though. But the roads actually work and are actually what is used by the overwhelming majority of the country. £100bn of new motorways (and by-passes and other road upgrades etc) would do massively more than a new train set to play with.
My personal hunch is that by 2035 we will need:
- more and better local roads…underground bypasses below village and town centre bottle necks, with more double and triple laning of trunk routes.
-Continued investment in high density city centre public transport.
- Fewer local trains, which will go out of fashion in a big way. And more and faster long distance trains, which I don’t think will.
But I’m not going to say why I think all that because the usual crowd will tell me I know nothing about AI.
I also expect with new hybrid working trends, we’ll not need the likes of CR2 anymore, which was really a commuter relief project.
Many moons ago, I had a discussion on here with everyone's favourite emergency airport loopaper creator (SeanT) about lorries. He claimed that within ten years nobody would be driving lorries - and he told me that I knew nothing about AI (at least I hope he meant Artificial Intelligence and not Artificial Insemination via perfectly-knapped flint objects...)
Eight or nine years on, and we have a national shortage of lorry drivers, and virtually no AI-driven trucks (have the schemes promise back in 2017 even started yet?).
Musk promised a coast-to-coast drive by Tesla in 2016, for 2017. It has yet to happen.
We cannot plan infrastructure for tech that may not happen. My bet is that level-5 autonomous driving in anything other than narrow geofenced areas won't happen. But I hope I'm wrong.
What self drive proponents often miss is that we have basically been at the same level of self driving for the last 30 years despite the computing power upgrade.
A South Korean dude got a self driving car going all over Korea in 1993 with an Intel 386 powering the whole thing. The first "reliable enough to go on public roads" self driving car was in the 1980s.
But the complexity about self driving is all in the details not in the basic "there's an object, don't hit it" and no system is close to getting all the details correct. But raw brute force processing power will eventually conquer all on this.
If you have to separate the humans and the robots then they are not self driving as self driving covers having to interact with humans.
The best chance of one in the medium term is going to be to build a town around them.
If the human needs to be in charge, then he needs to be paying proper attention - anything that can dump on him half a second before the accident isn’t fit for purpose. The whole point of a self-driving car is that you can treat it like your own personal chauffeur.0 -
I'm no expert but there really isn't that much literature from the 1340's is there? Lots of written evidence such as lists of clergy, some with huge numbers of changes as they presumably died. Realistically novels only started after printing (some suggest that Don Quixote is the first modern novel - Wikipedia).moonshine said:
Wouldn’t it all be tiresome 14th century religious piety? For the 17th century version, then there was Pepys of course.Leon said:A talented young London writer - living through the Black Death. There must have been one. Why isn’t there a good Black Death memoir?
Serious question. I know it was fairly horrible and probably quite distracting - and no one wants to read about plague - but still. The material!0 -
Shakespeare was likely too self effacing to want to write a good autobiography, and Hitler, we know, was an awful bore as a writer.Leon said:Mind game. If someone could be resurrected to write their autobiography, who would you choose?
You’re allowed three candidates. They have to be proven historical personae (so no Jesus) and they don’t have to be dead
I’d go for
Hitler. It would probably be turgid self-justification but what if he turns out to have a crackling wit and a conscience?
Alexander the Great. Imagine the pace of the narrative. ‘On Tuesday I overran Thrace’
Shakespeare. He met everyone and the prose-style would be fascinating
Alexander - or indeed any other historical figure cut off in their prime (see Hannibal) - a much better choice.
Thomas Cromwell....1 -
WOW, that’s amazingsarissa said:
After a Wikipedia wander, I now want to read a real autobiographysarissa said:
Good one.Leon said:Mind game. If someone could be resurrected to write their autobiography, who would you choose?
You’re allowed three candidates. They have to be proven historical personae (so no Jesus) and they don’t have to be dead
I’d go for
Hitler. It would probably be turgid self-justification but what if he turns out to have a crackling wit and a conscience?
Alexander the Great. Imagine the pace of the narrative. ‘On Tuesday I overran Thrace’
Shakespeare. He met everyone and the prose-style would be fascinating
From the 'witness to history' side, Moctezuma II or Atahualpa.
As I'm scottish and work in the construction industry, Thomas Telford - I'd love to know the story behind all those landmark projects.
And maybe as a pointer to our times, Francis Walsingham.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Drummond#Har_Zion0 -
FPT normally I agree with almost everything you write Sandpit but I couldn't disagree with you more here.Sandpit said:
Which is exactly why we need HS2 - to free capacity on the main lines for an expansion of rail freight. Current freight volumes are in most cases capacity-limited, as opposed to demand-limited. The last couple of decades have seen a large increase in passenger traffic, at the expense of freight.Philip_Thompson said:
Actually yes railfreight has gone down tremendously. The coal freight has not been replaced by other freight.JosiasJessop said:
It evidently is, as it was a massive part of railfreight, and railfreight hasn't gone down anywhere near that much.Philip_Thompson said:
That was my point, and trainload coal isn't getting replaced with anything else. Because unlike coal most other goods don't need to be moved by the trainload.JosiasJessop said:
A massive part of that is the death of trainload coal...Philip_Thompson said:
"We have a capacity issue on our rails for goods"
Yes, the capacity issue is that people don't want to move goods by rail. 89% of freight is moved by roads for a reason, but sure "adding a new high speed route will add more than a motorway". *Bullshit!*
Besides, railfreight is 5% of all freight, so being a massive part of railfreight does not make it a massive part of overall freight.
What evidence do you have that its not demand limited? Demand for rail freight nationwide has collapsed in recent years due to the collapse in coal-rail which has seen rail freight collapse from over 30 million tonnes to 19 million tonnes. What evidence is there for unmet demand here?
Besides what sort of increase in capacity are we talking about if we build HS2 for over £100bn? Are we talking millions of tonnes? Tens of millions?
Meanwhile the road network transports billions of tonnes of freight. Not a few million.
Rail is like the Fishing industry. Its obsessed over because people like the idea of it, more than the economics of it. That and the almost religious dislike of cars and HGVs.0 -
Pfizer vaccine receives full FDA approval.0
-
HS2 isn't just about freight capacity; it's about passenger capacity as well. Looking at just one and not the other as well rather distorts the view ...Philip_Thompson said:
FPT normally I agree with almost everything you write Sandpit but I couldn't disagree with you more here.Sandpit said:
Which is exactly why we need HS2 - to free capacity on the main lines for an expansion of rail freight. Current freight volumes are in most cases capacity-limited, as opposed to demand-limited. The last couple of decades have seen a large increase in passenger traffic, at the expense of freight.Philip_Thompson said:
Actually yes railfreight has gone down tremendously. The coal freight has not been replaced by other freight.JosiasJessop said:
It evidently is, as it was a massive part of railfreight, and railfreight hasn't gone down anywhere near that much.Philip_Thompson said:
That was my point, and trainload coal isn't getting replaced with anything else. Because unlike coal most other goods don't need to be moved by the trainload.JosiasJessop said:
A massive part of that is the death of trainload coal...Philip_Thompson said:
"We have a capacity issue on our rails for goods"
Yes, the capacity issue is that people don't want to move goods by rail. 89% of freight is moved by roads for a reason, but sure "adding a new high speed route will add more than a motorway". *Bullshit!*
Besides, railfreight is 5% of all freight, so being a massive part of railfreight does not make it a massive part of overall freight.
What evidence do you have that its not demand limited? Demand for rail freight nationwide has collapsed in recent years due to the collapse in coal-rail which has seen rail freight collapse from over 30 million tonnes to 19 million tonnes. What evidence is there for unmet demand here?
Besides what sort of increase in capacity are we talking about if we build HS2 for over £100bn? Are we talking millions of tonnes? Tens of millions?
Meanwhile the road network transports billions of tonnes of freight. Not a few million.
Rail is like the Fishing industry. Its obsessed over because people like the idea of it, more than the economics of it. That and the almost religious dislike of cars and HGVs.
As for demand: one problem is that there are few paths. Passenger trains pay well for those paths (especially as they cost less as freight trains pay more as they are heavier and cause more wear to the infrastructure). At the moment the authorities have to balance out the demand over the limited resource, and freight pays a great deal more. Increase the number of paths, and that problem eases. Then demand goes up.0
This discussion has been closed.