Will this damage the Greens in England & Wales? – politicalbetting.com
Will this damage the Greens in England & Wales? – politicalbetting.com
EXCLUSIVE: Zack Polanski has backed Scottish and Welsh independence, The National can reveal?? 'We should be empowering our neighbours to be able to have everything that we want for ourselves, and that we want for them' pic.twitter.com/x0dpzWc3SE
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If they can spark a controversy over it and get more coverage as a result, then I guess that would be a plus. But this is reported in the National, so not much chance of that unless it's picked up elsewhere.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/real-british-values
https://x.com/waymo/status/1978386765699313689?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
Bloody hell they have some utter crap in The Spectator don't they.
In Wales I do not see it making any impact because it is very much Plaid v Reform and there is little sign that will change
Did they back Brexit?
In all seriousness, if I was a Unionist in Wales, I would go hard with the line that ReformUK and Plaid are two cheeks of the same nationalist a**e.
Quite a vote of confidence in their own technology. If they can work in London they can work almost everywhere
I’ve now used them half a dozen times. They are totally safe. Clearly superior to driven cabs. Self drive is finally here and it works
papermagazineblog.Because at the moment the humans can’t understand the cacophony of signs at certain junctions.
Councils also need to be very clear that every yellow box junction infringement and bus lane infringement and LTN infringement will accumulate exponentially increasing fines on the operators.
Make that £100 infringement for the 10th time today, and your last fine is £51,200, to be paid within a fortnight otherwise they all double.
I dearly hope it's fine; any collision will go viral and the more myopic of the cycling lobby will do what they can to ban them despite the long term improvements they will surely bring.
Unfortunate phrasing ... but in any case all still to be determined. "Over the coming months, we’ll lay the groundwork for our service in collaboration with our fleet operations partner Moove, and continue to engage with local and national leaders to secure the necessary permissions for our commercial ride-hailing service in London. "
https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/hello-london-your-waymo-ride-is-arriving
Does Reform count as a Unionist party? I’d love it if they turn up their abolish the devolved parliaments stuff, though as with everything else they won’t have the balls to be honest about it.
The regulatory issues here are a huge potential problem. “If you’re killed in accident involving car BOW123 then you can sue BOW123 Ltd for damages”, that company has standard car insurance.
If the cars are run by *GOOGLE*, then you need to be able to sue the arse off Google.
Will be interesting to see where the edge of Waymo London is on day one. But even central London is a statement of intent.
There's no real sense of what the actual challenges are (including the environmental ones) and the best structures for dealing with them. Do we really get closer to a more sustainable energy grid across the UK by chopping ourselves up into independent units? Probably not, but all that stuff is outt of the window with Polanski, in favour of adolescent posturing.
Hopefully the ONS will start to track these insurance premiums; they should give us a real word indication of safety verses other forms of spot hire vehicle.
I noticed in LA that this terror is persistent in some. I met several Angelenos who refused to use them - “dangerous, don’t trust them”. But these people are like Edwardians who mistrusted escalators
Data shows that waymos are so vastly preferable people will wait longer and pay more for them despite the drawbacks (won’t take freeways, can’t stop exactly where you want etc)
Why would someone not at fault be fined?
We already have a car insurance system that can work out who is at fault, no need to fully reinvent the wheel.
BOW123 Ltd could fail to file accounts and a judgement against them become totally unenforceable, especially if their car got written off several months ago thanks to your accident, and they have no assets because they leased the car.
If the cars are being run by Google, you need to be able to sue Google, especially if there’s a class action covering several accidents for the same known fault.
They should win one in Brecon/Neath and Swansea East but weakness in the latter may be a problem and maybe one in Ceredigion/Pembrokeshire (again the latter is the problem).
They have a little strength in Montgomery but its paired with Dwyfor where they'll get buttons (ditto Tories here)
https://waymo.com/waymo-in-uk
Not commercial yet - this is a trial only.
The reason for "no fault" is that most of us drive more carefully around pedestrians, cyclists, drunk people because we anticipate that they could make a horrible mistake and end up dead - even if that's not our fault.
We'd want Waymos algorithm to reflect basic human instincts. Roughly speaking a human life is worth £2 million and setting that value would see Waymos operate in a socially optimal way.
I appreciate you don't have the same instincts but I and others certainly do.
Failure to be safer around hazards can lead to being at fault too.
But if someone is safer, slows down, but something terrible happens that is demonstrably NOT the vehicles fault then liability should lie with the one that was at fault.
Would you sue a train driver for hitting someone that jumps out in front of them? Or fine a driverless train for the same thing?
I saw people doing this to my waymo when I was inside and then I did it myself when I was the pedestrian
They shouldn't be speeding and doing 40 in a 30.
https://x.com/DoggyDog1208/status/1978222377482756419
"If Zhu Rongji* dies without a Nobel Prize in economics, the committee should just disband..."
“As a practitioner, Zhu Rongji understood, in ways academic Nobel laureates cannot, that there was only one economic policy that truly mattered. Zhu knew in his bones that corruption was a cancer that cannot be tolerated:
My only hope is that after I leave public service, the Chinese people will think of me in one way: that he was a clean official, not a corrupt one. I will be immensely satisfied with that judgment alone. But if they are feeling particularly generous and say that Zhu Rongji got some real things done while in office, then I’ll thank heaven and earth.”
*former premier at the turn of the century.
The Great Unemployment is about to kick off
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ross_(blogger)
I do not want to share the road with millions of BartholomewRoberts.
If its safe and legal to do 30, there's no reason whatsoever to disincentivise doing 30.
Especially given how quickly vehicles can slow down now, if required.
Our roads have never been safer, no reason to be cutting our speed limit from the already low number it is at.
Pippa would like us to believe the deputy NSA chats to his mates about the details of a national security and court matter but not the PM, ministers or Johnny Powell
For central London Black cabs and minicabs - maybe.
In outer London, the driverless cab will not be much use to the elderly and disabled who need a wheelchair putting in the boot, or someone to take their arm on the way to their front door. That's a sizeable part of the customer base for traditional minicab firms.
In aggregate, it seems to me that almost everyone drives at the speed limit if the road is clear, as they should, if its safe and legal to do so.
We value a human life at £2 million. Set that as an automatic fine for a fatality and you'll find Waymo behaviour reflects the risk:reward of speed.
But I can easily see Waymo taking 50%+ of the london taxi market (if the tech works in The Smoke), and pretty quickly
That’s 60,000 jobs gone
So no, I don't think my idea of safe is quite different to others.
Even if you take an absurd zero tolerance to risk and want to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator, without any evidence.
Foolish.
Especially if there is no link between fault and penalty, it reduces the liability from being at fault.
To be fined the same for driving dangerously and killing an innocent person, or driving safely and someone committing suicide?
That is a perverse and backwards incentive.
We should be penalising being at fault heftily, but only if at fault. That way there is a financial incentive not to be involved in an at-fault collision, which is all anyone can or should be seeking.
So London is perhaps the ultimate test. All those tiny medieval streets in the City
Perhaps that’s why Google have chosen The Smoke. It’s a top tier, busy, chaotic world city but with narrow ancient streets in places (unlike NYC)
It’s meant to be exemplary. If they can get it to work in London it can work anywhere
Otherwise all that cost lands on the taxpayer as hundreds of tourists are whacked when they look the wrong way and end up in hospital. Indeed, in the City it should probably be £10 million to take account of lost earnings.
Perhaps these are the same friends who told us Angela Rayner had ironcast legal advice from 3 people about her SDLT?
Do you expect that number to be going up or down going forwards, if we maintain at fault reasonings and why?
There is surely a case to be made for giving select committees more formal subpoena power?
I know that the US system has tremendous problems right now, but if this had blown up across the pond we’d have had days of witness evidence on this stuff by now.
I can readily see how a great many American cities are compatible with self drive, whilst London would be the ultimate test. (Well, maybe Milton Keynes beats it but who wants to go there?)
I can drive down the High Street at 1am and see lots of idiots tottering about and unable to walk in a straight line. At this point I will slow right down (and check the doors are locked).
I can drive down the same high street at 2pm and see the same number of people walking around, but in straight lines along the pavement. I may slow down a little but not as much.
If one of the totterers falls into the road in front of me it would technically be their fault, but there would be an awful lot of paperwork. Best avoided.
If you're proposing abolishing speed limits, then I'm OK with that. Our roads are far safer today than they were in the past so we should be increasing speed limits, on motorways and in towns if not cities. 40 today is as safe or safer than 30 was decade ago, so we should be making 40 the default speed limit in developed areas instead of 30.
If you're not proposing increasing or removing speed limits, then how exactly would speeds increase significantly?
So you are saying that you want something beyond obeying all the traffic laws, the Highway Code, demonstrating competence at operating a vehicle (see driving test equivalent) and having Hire & Reward insurance?
https://x.com/flightradar24/status/1978504999748436347
It’s flying at 10,000ft, which is indicative of a pressuration problem.
They’ve been using a number of these 757 for diplomats and journalists over the past few days.
https://x.com/AbujomaaGaza/status/1977938982714392869
Nothing says strength like hushing up who your number two is in case someone notices
A separate Welsh Green party has been an issue of debate in the party on and off over the years I believe.
..he describes allegations of persecution of Uyghurs in China as “farcical” and a “total lie.”..
The Chinese premier is a more interesting figure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhu_Rongji
We all do this instinctively - if we see a child on the pavement we slow right down, even though a potential collision would not be our fault. We need Waymos to do the same.
Self-driving cars allows us to reach something much closer to optimal speed. Other factors like injuries, noise pollution etc should also be factored in too.