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Stick another £10bn on that for final month of the year will result in £15bn blackhole.
rottenborough said:
Guess the Heathrow fire will block out the dire news for Reeves on public borrowing.
I said:
Absolutely horrendous. Over £10bn deficit in February alone and this unsustainable pumping in of excess demand is doing no more than keeping the economy flat lining with no growth in sight.
We are in a terrible mess. Debt has risen by £1trn over the last 5 years and for what? What do we actually get a return on from that unimaginably large sum of money? Many people who could afford it got help with their heating bills. Millions who could have worked got paid not to. Nothing of substance, no infrastructure, nothing that is going to generate future wealth. Bugger.
It's no surprise then than what he is doing is popular among Labour supporters, and deeply unpopular among right-wing supporters. Worth a reminder that Labour's favourability rating are dire not because they are unpopular amongst right-wing people (which is a given), but because lefties and centrist-dads are disappointed by their lethargy. Miliband is the exception.
*That doesn't mean he is getting it right.
" in 2024-25 we expect debt interest spending to total £104.9 billion. That would represent 8.2 per cent of total public spending and is equivalent to over 3.7 per cent of national income."
What it tells you is what we discussed months ago. Labour came into office with no plans and so ministers are left complaining about civil service inertia.
Ed Miliband walked into Whitehall with a plan and got on with it. Like him or not, and fwiw I blame him for costing Labour the 2015 election and possibly 2029 as well, but at least Miliband has actually done something.
You cannot really directly equate national finances with individual but we all know that if soneone is spending money they dont have just to keep their head above water its a very bad sign, so the temptation to equate is atrong.
And there's no easy or quick answer. Vague 'reform' is the new magic money tree, and cutting has consequences as the amount of dead wood is smaller than many think. And we aint getting growth any time soon.
Localised power generation and backup (whether eg solar and battery or gas generators) to critical infrastructure would have helped, but in most cases of critical infra that’s already in place. It seems odd LHR was dependent on one substation.
But sorry to hear your plans are disrupted - that's a bugger.
(I'd be interested to see the weighting details, but whatever they've done, labour list readers probably differ to non readers in not easily measurable ways).
Waiting list numbers for Jan 2025 came out last week and were down by another notch over December - that is 30k, which is something but Not a Lot.
https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-workforce/pressures/nhs-backlog-data-analysis
IMO it's still Strategy OK, Tactics Hmmm, Communications Missing.
We are entering the Japanese demographic debt spiral. We’re older, and more asset rich, so we work less, need more health and social care, save more and spend less. As do our asset sweating industries.
Government needs to bring back consumer booms and investment binges. Otherwise we face the fate of Japan.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades
https://x.com/exstrategist/status/1902976271211995302?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
Will start writing up the pre-race tosh in the late morning or early afternoon, so the betting markets are up and I can see if anything catches my eye.
I hope this kickstarts his season.
We have a welfare funded consumption economy.
Welfare includes furlough money, energy subsidies, triple lock pensions, working less from home and four day weeks for five days pay.
...He was then pressed further if he can rule out foul play, to which he responded:
I have no… There’s no suggestion that there is foul play.
Adding:
That is, I mean, the conversation I’ve had is with the National Grid, the chief executive of the National Grid, and certainly that’s what he said to me...
So sabotage not ruled out, then.
It's all published if you ask Google. Here's an example of where the latest batch of the £3bn is going - around £243m for the year 2024-2025,2 year period, under "Phase 3c Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme"
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/public-sector-decarbonisation-scheme-phase-3/phase-3c-public-sector-decarbonisation-scheme-grant-recipients
The £3bn is over an extended period, and it's a really effective way of doing energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction - slow, steady and strategic. It is based afaik on the most effective way of reducing carbon and energy use, rather than alighting on things we can see or particular technologies such as solar panels. I don't know why the Tories did not shout this from the housetops; instead they went the bottom-feeding, shit-shovelling route - they had a decent record.
For example from a previous time, my local hospital (Kings Mill, built in the 2000s) has a heating and cooling heat exchanger system in the 100 acre former reservoir across the road that gives it 5MW+ of both heating and cooling, which meets 90% of use. That saves 9,600 MWh of gas and electricity a year. That's the type of project that makes us world leading (unironically) in this area of energy use reduction. *
That's ~£400k per annum saved if it is gas, and ~£800k per annum if it is electricity. And we still have goons out there telling us not to do this stuff, and focus on pumping more oil and gas instead. The page says £200k per annum saved, but prices go up.
https://discoverashfield.co.uk/stories/kings-mill-reservoir-at-mill-waters
* Fucking Sky News should do a story about *this*.
I got up at 3.30am for the Australian Grand Prix last week. Getting up even earlier for a pretend race to gouge money is a step too far.
The country has never recovered from his mismanagement.
On a serious note, already wondering about the McLaren pole odds. They had the pace. Piastri was within a tenth and that was set with more fuel. If pace is met with skill, the race grid will be McLaren on the front row and Ferrari on the second.
Tax might.
A day lost will cost someone hundreds of millions - insurance company, power company, the airport or whoever.
International Airlines are down ~3.5% .
Relatively few landing in the UK, looks like Gatwick filled up almost immediately and the odd smattering have landed at Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow, and planes
being landed closer to where they are.
At least half a dozen in Shannon, one NY flight terminated at Reykjavik, a lot of Africa and Caribbean origin flights setting down in Madrid. The big airports, CDG, Amsterdam and Frankfurt taking a number of arrivals, with the odd Munich, Barcelona, Zurich.
A lot of post 6am arrivals from the US have turned back to US airports. Some SFers have got a trip to Washington, some Chicagans are enjoying Montreal.
Phew. I wouldn't have liked to have spent 24 hours in Geneva airport. Very hard seats and eye-watering expensive.
They are the demographic whose activities are most likely to persuade this Tory who currently votes Labour to stop doing so.
They are a demographic among the least likely to be interested and well informed about the relationship between wealth creation and being able to fund free stuff.
It's a group worth being able to identify in order to keep well out of their way (as in never enter a secondary school staff room) as they can be a bit boring, though very nice.
(The runway will never happen).
https://x.com/Roshan_Rinaldi/status/1902853709123469793
I predict that in a decade's time, "twelth" becomes the standard US spelling.
This makes me think there's something else that's gone bang or got damaged, as substations do require to be taken offline (though rarely) for maintenance, and they obviously use an alternative supply when that happens.
To be clear: I'm not saying that Letby is innocent. But I do have some doubts about her conviction that the "she is guilty!" people are not exactly assuaging...
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social
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52s
See also Tom Shugart and Mike Dahm's excellent paper. They write that the barges, plus other developments, "suggests the PLA may have significantly advanced its timetable to have sufficient capabilities to conduct a large-scale cross-strait operation" digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cmsi-notes/14/
https://bsky.app/profile/shashj.bsky.social/post/3lkutnpnv5c2j
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/11/milifan-prime-minister-ed-miliband
"I’ll always be a Milifan. Ed was the best prime minister we never had.
"The rightwing smear against Ed Miliband angered me. But his bravery and integrity in the face of it was an inspiration."
(Personally I'm just selfishly hoping they get everything fixed and running smoothly before Tuesday
One said 'We are LDs, but there are an awful lot of you now and we do know her so we voted for her. Is that all right' To which I replied 'Well not really '. Made her laugh.
Anecdotally, I know of several cases where this has happened. Including one case that destroyed three turbines at a power station after the external power supply failed. A very, very expensive failure.
These things are really hard to get right. But this whole conversation is making some assumptions, e.g. that there was a backup system...
And bloomin Rachel Reeves is in a never ending doom loop entirely of her own making. She needs to go
Granted it's hard to intentionally take part of the electrical grid down to see what happens.
This is true of IT and true elsewhere.
In the case of somewhere like Heathrow, you'd want multiple substations, a local grid distributing power for the airport (I presume there is one?) and multiple backups - batteries, generators. So the first line of backups is the excess capacity in the other substations. You regularly fire up the backup generators (was this done?). Which are very differently located to the substations. etc...
All this costs money, of course.