If energy prices soar then the underlying issue will be around a quarter of households literally won't be able to pay their energy bills. Once enough people stop paying that will snowball into a payment strike and the energy firms themselves won't be able to purchase enough energy to keep supply going.
I am generally very much against the "something needs to be done" line of thinking but energy prices at 2022 levels is rightly in that category. There are lots of different approaches but all come with political risks and costs. Those who think it can be left to a "free" market here are deluded.
Subsiding energy prices is a really inefficient way to do it though, for two reasons:
1) Energy consumption correlates closely with income. The richest households burn much more gas and petrol/diesel than poorer ones. The exception is electricity, as a percentage of household income, though that will change with EVs rolling out. It's a fiscal transfer from poor, working households in small flats to rich, non-working households in large detached houses.
2) The incentives are all wrong. By protecting consumers from these hikes we are sending a signal that they don't need to switch away from fossil fuels, or make their homes more efficient. Over the long term it actually increases our exposure to these crises.
So, I'd suggest a temporary uplift to the standard allowance of UC and to Pension Credit, if anything.
‘Temporary’.
The WFA was temporary. The ‘windfall tax’ was temporary
It will be temporary in name only.
The last temporary uplift to UC during COVID was, actually, temporary. That's part of the reason I suggested it.
If energy prices soar then the underlying issue will be around a quarter of households literally won't be able to pay their energy bills. Once enough people stop paying that will snowball into a payment strike and the energy firms themselves won't be able to purchase enough energy to keep supply going.
I am generally very much against the "something needs to be done" line of thinking but energy prices at 2022 levels is rightly in that category. There are lots of different approaches but all come with political risks and costs. Those who think it can be left to a "free" market here are deluded.
It will be summer soon. I have already had one day when the central heating didn't come on. The idea you might be able to economise seems to escape some people. Eat salads and cold food. Decommission the big freezer. Turn lights off. If the heating is still on, turn it off when you go out. Turn it off at night, that's what bedclothes are for. Reduce driving - go shopping on foot, replace leisure activities with those close to home, tell the teenagers to walk home. As rcs1000 says, prices are sending us a message.
All this is true, but it doesnt change the chain of events that will happen if prices went to 2022 levels (as others have pointed out, nowhere near them presently) without govt support:
Significant proportion of households can't pay. Others will stop paying. Suppliers hit cash flow problems and can't afford to buy energy. Government forced to step in anyway.
The logical thing to do would be to give money to those who are struggling rather than artificially reduce energy prices. That would stop people from freezing but still provide an incentive to reduce energy use.
Define struggling, please?
I'd do it just as Eabhal suggests. Temporarily raise UC and Pension Credit.
Edit: Or it might be better politically to call it some sort of fuel allowance, but there'd be no requirement to spend it on fuel.
Link benefits to short term inflation, then?
Call it Short Term Inflation Indexing?
You could link the standard allowance to an index that represents the typical basket of goods consumed by UC/PC claimants (excluding housing, because that is covered seperately). I remember some pop star making the point food was going up way faster than luxury shoes etc etc.
It would also have to be adjusted rapidly because the allowance significantly lags CPI at the moment.
Several struggling, modest lawyers would make the case that fashion shoes are a necessity.
I'm thinking of having a week - maybe a month - with no exposure to the news at all. I am a news junky so it is going to be bloody difficult. Will miss you guys.
So.. the economy is stalled.. Eds running round like a headless chicken saying he's going to stop oil companies profiting from higher prices.. without the faintest idea how to do so. Starmer's in deep deep shit over Mandelson where an apology won't cut it , the Defence sec is useless despite being suggested as an alternative to Starmer. Its all going so well...
Weak weak weak.
Reports that in the 100,000 documents to be released, including whats app messages, some senior labour mps will be embarrasingly compromised
It's staggering to think the Conservatives won 6,000 votes in Aigburth, in May 1979, compared with 8, yesterday. That year they won 2 Parliamentary seats in Liverpool, and a year later, 21 seats on the local council. Now, they are simply irrelevant in the city, as in Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield. In fact, the candidate who stood has written a Doctoral Thesis on the disappearance of the Liverpool Conservatives.
If energy prices soar then the underlying issue will be around a quarter of households literally won't be able to pay their energy bills. Once enough people stop paying that will snowball into a payment strike and the energy firms themselves won't be able to purchase enough energy to keep supply going.
I am generally very much against the "something needs to be done" line of thinking but energy prices at 2022 levels is rightly in that category. There are lots of different approaches but all come with political risks and costs. Those who think it can be left to a "free" market here are deluded.
It will be summer soon. I have already had one day when the central heating didn't come on. The idea you might be able to economise seems to escape some people. Eat salads and cold food. Decommission the big freezer. Turn lights off. If the heating is still on, turn it off when you go out. Turn it off at night, that's what bedclothes are for. Reduce driving - go shopping on foot, replace leisure activities with those close to home, tell the teenagers to walk home. As rcs1000 says, prices are sending us a message.
All this is true, but it doesnt change the chain of events that will happen if prices went to 2022 levels (as others have pointed out, nowhere near them presently) without govt support:
Significant proportion of households can't pay. Others will stop paying. Suppliers hit cash flow problems and can't afford to buy energy. Government forced to step in anyway.
The logical thing to do would be to give money to those who are struggling rather than artificially reduce energy prices. That would stop people from freezing but still provide an incentive to reduce energy use.
Define struggling, please?
I'd do it just as Eabhal suggests. Temporarily raise UC and Pension Credit.
Edit: Or it might be better politically to call it some sort of fuel allowance, but there'd be no requirement to spend it on fuel.
Link benefits to short term inflation, then?
Call it Short Term Inflation Indexing?
You could link the standard allowance to an index that represents the typical basket of goods consumed by UC/PC claimants (excluding housing, because that is covered seperately). I remember some pop star making the point food was going up way faster than luxury shoes etc etc.
It would also have to be adjusted rapidly because the allowance significantly lags CPI at the moment.
Several economics think tank type places generate inflation numbers on a weekly basis.
In the internet age, the government could have daily, rolling average inflation number, for not much effort.
Terrible, terrible development. Israel began striking Lebanese state infrastructure. This infrastructure is used not just by Hezbollah, but also by Lebanese civilians, most of whom oppose Hezbollah.
Collective punishment is wrong; it also helps Hezbollah, which is more isolated than ever domestically in Lebanon, facing unprecedented popular fury even inside the Shia sect, for dragging Lebanon into war. Collectively punishing the Lebanese may push more of them toward supporting "resistance" in the face of indiscriminate aggression.
The genocidal cnut has no brake, no off buttom, its genicide of Arabs, full stop.
He'll use the tired old "weeding out the terrorists" to carpet / blanket bomb anything that stands up. Just look at Gaza.
They won't let anyone in and they wil quite happilly build a massive buffer zone around Israel.
The time has to come when he is hunted down, taken out and until he is, Israel must be sanctioned and ostracised in the same way as Russia. He is no better than Putin, in many ways he is far worse than Putin.
"as bad as Pol Pot" . . . "far worse than Putin"
Your moral compass is completely broken.
The Cambodian genocide by Pol Pot, were skulls were literally piled high led to between 2 - 3 million deaths and a quarter to a third of the population wiped out.
Putin invaded a free, democratic country that was neither threatening nor attacking Russia in a pure unadulterated war of aggression.
Netanyahu's Israel has only fought against groups or countries that attacked Israel first.
You may not like the way the wars are fought, that is reasonable. But to suggest that it is as bad as Pol Pot, or worse than Putin, says you are either being completely ignorant of what the latter two did or you have a very broken moral compass.
You are apologising for a mass murderer.
No ifs no buts
His sole aim is to kill anyone who he deems a threat, even if 99.8% are not threats.
Until he is removed there will be no peace in the ME
Killing threats is legitimate just war, so long as you are proportionate in doing so.
Ukraine was never a threat to Russia, so there was absolutely no justification whatsoever for Russia to invade. Hamas and Hezbollah are threats to Israel as even you have to admit.
There will be peace when there are no more threats.
Regime change in Iran would go a long way to accomplishing that.
Killing 70,000 civilians is not a proportionate response to the undoubtedly threat posed by Hamas
You can't subsidise your way out of a supply shock.
World energy supply has fallen. World energy demand needs to drop to match supply.
That's what the price is: it's information that tells you that you need to reduce demand. If you (and everyone else) tries to subsidise their way out of the supply shock, then all you do is make the remaining producers of that energy rich, without solving the problem.
Now: there are ways you can ... ameliorate ... a short term supply issue caused by the closure of the Straits of Hormuz. Your country might, if it had any sense, have six months of natural gas demand in storage that could be run down at times like this.
But the better, longer-term, plan is simply to have more energy produced in ways that simply aren't susceptible to the a reduction of natural gas an oil supply. (For what it's worth, coal doesnt help much. Why? Because energy for power generation is pretty fungible. If natural gas gets more expensive, then coal fired power stations get used more. Prices are set at the margin, so the price of coal will rise until -on a per megawatt hour basis- it comes into line with natural gas. Hence why Newcastle Coal prices are now a staggering $130+/ton.)
And because of the way our electricity market works, the live UK price per MWh is £100 despite gas only accounting for 3.5gw of generation out of 38 on this windy, sunny day.
Is there a way to see if wind/solar is being curtailed ?
Because this energy mix & price looks ludicrous to me:
I think they have to keep some gas generation ticking over at all times for complicated technical reasons. And it's worth point out that while the spot price is high, our renewables are primarily generating on fixed price contracts so they are likely saving us lots of cash at the moment. Marginal cost != average cost.
There will be massive curtailment in Scotland at the moment though. It's super windy and there is nowhere for it to go.
OIl prices off their overnight highs with Saudi apparently putting 2 million barrels (a drop) into supply via the Red Sea.
WTI is currently at $95 with Brent around $100 per barrel. These are the kind of numbers which, if sustained, will push us (and a lot of other countries) into recession. Even strong performing economies will feel this kind of oil price "shock" if it continues for any length of time.
There still seems plenty of confusion over Hormuz and oil production in the Gulf States and a degree of clarity would be welcome. The Iranians, if the morning coverage is to be believed, are still capable of strikes but on a limited scale.
Last night's local council by-elections were again poor for both Labour and the Conservatives with both losing share - to be fair, the seven votes won by Labour in the Cotswolds were fractionally worse than the eight won by the Conservatives in Liverpool but both parties took a pounding in all the seats.
Something for Reform, Greens and the LDs in last night's results and you could predict where the changes would be based on areas of known strength and weakness.
I'm beginning to wonder how well the Greens will do in parts of Inner London in May - it will be fascinating to see the numbers of candidates they can put up in places like Lewisham. Last time, Labour won 55% and all 54 seats, the Greens got 20% and stood 44 candidates. I suspect a full slate of Green candidates this time and if they can get the big swings some of the local by-elections are suggesting, it could be a real shock for Labour.
I think there will be lots of surprised Green paper candidates who get elected!
There were a lot of 'surprised' Lib councillors in the mid sixties. Many of them didn't last, either as Libs or councillors.
I spoke to a paper LibDem candidate this morning and warned him to be careful! There's a lot of Labour seats that are going to fall and someone's got to win them.
Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.
There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...
The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.
Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.
The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.
Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.
did you read my post down-thread?
I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.
I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.
That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.
The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.
What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.
That has a slight element of "let's see how you get on with your own bank account first, then we'll see."
If energy prices soar then the underlying issue will be around a quarter of households literally won't be able to pay their energy bills. Once enough people stop paying that will snowball into a payment strike and the energy firms themselves won't be able to purchase enough energy to keep supply going.
I am generally very much against the "something needs to be done" line of thinking but energy prices at 2022 levels is rightly in that category. There are lots of different approaches but all come with political risks and costs. Those who think it can be left to a "free" market here are deluded.
Subsiding energy prices is a really inefficient way to do it though, for two reasons:
1) Energy consumption correlates closely with income. The richest households burn much more gas and petrol/diesel than poorer ones. The exception is electricity, as a percentage of household income, though that will change with EVs rolling out. It's a fiscal transfer from poor, working households in small flats to rich, non-working households in large detached houses.
2) The incentives are all wrong. By protecting consumers from these hikes we are sending a signal that they don't need to switch away from fossil fuels, or make their homes more efficient. Over the long term it actually increases our exposure to these crises.
So, I'd suggest a temporary uplift to the standard allowance of UC and to Pension Credit, if anything.
‘Temporary’.
The WFA was temporary. The ‘windfall tax’ was temporary
It will be temporary in name only.
Was WFA temporary? It ought to be redundant now that the core pension is quite a lot higher in real terms, but I don't remember that being put in place in that way.
(The Triple Lock really ought to have been temporary, and the failure to define the "Mission Accomplished" trigger was yet another of the failures of the 2010 coalition that nobody seemed to notice at the time.)
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
But if they'd planned for it, that would have flagged up the problem and made it less likely that Trump would give the green light, so it was important not to do any planning.
It's staggering to think the Conservatives won 6,000 votes in Aigburth, in May 1979, compared with 8, yesterday. That year they won 2 Parliamentary seats in Liverpool, and a year later, 21 seats on the local council. Now, they are simply irrelevant in the city, as in Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield. In fact, the candidate who stood has written a Doctoral Thesis on the disappearance of the Liverpool Conservatives.
More worrying for the Tories, since their extinction in those places has been a fact for a while, must be that in all five by elections yesterday, in very heterogeneous places across England, they were beaten by Reform from a standing start.
You can't subsidise your way out of a supply shock.
World energy supply has fallen. World energy demand needs to drop to match supply.
That's what the price is: it's information that tells you that you need to reduce demand. If you (and everyone else) tries to subsidise their way out of the supply shock, then all you do is make the remaining producers of that energy rich, without solving the problem.
Now: there are ways you can ... ameliorate ... a short term supply issue caused by the closure of the Straits of Hormuz. Your country might, if it had any sense, have six months of natural gas demand in storage that could be run down at times like this.
But the better, longer-term, plan is simply to have more energy produced in ways that simply aren't susceptible to the a reduction of natural gas an oil supply. (For what it's worth, coal doesnt help much. Why? Because energy for power generation is pretty fungible. If natural gas gets more expensive, then coal fired power stations get used more. Prices are set at the margin, so the price of coal will rise until -on a per megawatt hour basis- it comes into line with natural gas. Hence why Newcastle Coal prices are now a staggering $130+/ton.)
And because of the way our electricity market works, the live UK price per MWh is £100 despite gas only accounting for 3.5gw of generation out of 38 on this windy, sunny day.
Is there a way to see if wind/solar is being curtailed ?
Because this energy mix & price looks ludicrous to me:
I think it’s because generation is still below quite high demand (it’s a chilly weekday), so we’re still seeing the marginal price for gas.
Doesn’t look like a major curtailment situation to me, except perhaps in Scotland. Wind generation is near record output levels. See how much we’re still importing on interconnectors.
Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.
There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...
The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.
Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.
The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.
Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.
did you read my post down-thread?
I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.
I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.
That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.
The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.
What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.
Have you checked the UK zeitgeist lately for the normal expectations of the British public? If you haven’t, normal is expecting things to be a bit shit. At the risk of encouraging a pomposity from PB’s chief anecdotalist, what would be your recent examples of governments running things very well?
Eat out to help out was executed flawlessly by Sunak.
It's staggering to think the Conservatives won 6,000 votes in Aigburth, in May 1979, compared with 8, yesterday. That year they won 2 Parliamentary seats in Liverpool, and a year later, 21 seats on the local council. Now, they are simply irrelevant in the city, as in Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield. In fact, the candidate who stood has written a Doctoral Thesis on the disappearance of the Liverpool Conservatives.
The Tories are not irrelevant at all, since that that would still imply existence. The Tories are in fact extinct.
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
It seems they assumed the IRGC could respond to an existential regime change war with the same traditional measured responses they’d previously used after one off bombings.
It's staggering to think the Conservatives won 6,000 votes in Aigburth, in May 1979, compared with 8, yesterday. That year they won 2 Parliamentary seats in Liverpool, and a year later, 21 seats on the local council. Now, they are simply irrelevant in the city, as in Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield. In fact, the candidate who stood has written a Doctoral Thesis on the disappearance of the Liverpool Conservatives.
The Tories are not irrelevant at all, since that that would still imply existence. The Tories are in fact extinct.
Lol.
On latest opinion polls the LDs have gone from the 3rd party to the 5th despite decades of trying harder.
The Tories will be back, but probably not until a dose of Reform has been through the system.
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
I think they must have used Grok to wargame the Iranian response.
Or Trump had people with really low IQ working for him.
In other news, a moment of clarity from my wife the other day, who reflected that politically we're pretty much Tories now. But could never admit it as would be ostracised and despised by friends and neighbours alike...
Quite frankly if friends or neighbours will ostracise you for supporting a mainstream party they ain’t worth shit.
My Reform supporting mates don’t ostracise me for voting Labour or vice versa.
We disagree, vehemently over Braverman, but we have so much that unites us.
All our neighbours are Tories. A cross we have to bear.
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
With every hour that passes, the scale of the Trump screw up grows. Support for the war in the US is falling off a cliff, as it becomes clear how utterly inept Trump and his crew of fuckwits, fools and creeps truly are. Trump is maybe only a matter of weeks away from an irrecoverable political collapse.
In other news, a moment of clarity from my wife the other day, who reflected that politically we're pretty much Tories now. But could never admit it as would be ostracised and despised by friends and neighbours alike...
Quite frankly if friends or neighbours will ostracise you for supporting a mainstream party they ain’t worth shit.
My Reform supporting mates don’t ostracise me for voting Labour or vice versa.
We disagree, vehemently over Braverman, but we have so much that unites us.
All our neighbours are Tories. A cross we have to bear.
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
With every hour that passes, the scale of the Trump screw up grows. Support for the war in the US is falling off a cliff, as it becomes clear how utterly inept Trump and his crew of fuckwits, fools and creeps truly are. Trump is maybe only a matter of weeks away from an irrecoverable political collapse.
That will be fun.
Contrary opinion, based on discussions with several pals who have recently been in the States.
As long as there are no ground troops deployed, the public won't really notice the war. The idea of a 'political collapse' is entirely propagated by the chronically online.
Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.
There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...
The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.
Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.
The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.
Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.
did you read my post down-thread?
I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.
I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.
That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.
The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.
What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.
Have you checked the UK zeitgeist lately for the normal expectations of the British public? If you haven’t, normal is expecting things to be a bit shit. At the risk of encouraging a pomposity from PB’s chief anecdotalist, what would be your recent examples of governments running things very well?
I get lost at the point where you suggest that it is not, or should not be, a real aspiration of either the public or governments that state enterprises are run very well.
In my upcoming trans article (with discussant contributions from kyf_100 and Cyclefree, currently being pre-read by Taz and Andy_JS), another of the appendices (appendix 6) contains a list of comments prior to the article being written. In that discussion we see the following text...
This will be the most boring article ever published in the history of the Internet but I've come up with a snappy title to leaven the doughy misery of reading the fucking thing - "The Transgina Monologues".
As predicted.
No, @Dura_Ace is right, this sounds like the most monumentally boring thing in the Anthropocene Era, the only thing Dura got wrong is the name. It should be The Mangina Monologues, as that is funnier and it alliterates
It's staggering to think the Conservatives won 6,000 votes in Aigburth, in May 1979, compared with 8, yesterday. That year they won 2 Parliamentary seats in Liverpool, and a year later, 21 seats on the local council. Now, they are simply irrelevant in the city, as in Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield. In fact, the candidate who stood has written a Doctoral Thesis on the disappearance of the Liverpool Conservatives.
The Tories are not irrelevant at all, since that that would still imply existence. The Tories are in fact extinct.
Lol.
On latest opinion polls the LDs have gone from the 3rd party to the 5th despite decades of trying harder.
The Tories will be back, but probably not until a dose of Reform has been through the system.
Yet in latest seat estimates the Lib Dems are also often coming up as the official opposition.
Given the combined Labour-Green and Tory-Reform vote shares are similar to traditional Labour only and Tory only shares, the pecking order is even less correlated with parliamentary seat potential than usual.
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
I think they must have used Grok to wargame the Iranian response.
Or Trump had people with really low IQ working for him.
There was a board game I used to enjoy as a teenager, (sadly, I can't remember its name), which was set in a thinly-veiled version of the Middle East. And, blocking the equivalent of the Straits of Hormuz was one of the standard operations in that game.
I knew that Hegseth was a drunken idiot. I had not appreciated just how much of a drunken idiot.
Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.
There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...
The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.
Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.
The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.
Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.
did you read my post down-thread?
I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.
I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.
That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.
The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.
What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.
Have you checked the UK zeitgeist lately for the normal expectations of the British public? If you haven’t, normal is expecting things to be a bit shit. At the risk of encouraging a pomposity from PB’s chief anecdotalist, what would be your recent examples of governments running things very well?
The Passport Office. As we have discussed on here before (and now based in Scotland, so it should be a source of Caledonian pride)
Used to be terrible and janky, now it is a smooth model of quite remarkable efficiency. They can take an application for a replacement passport and turn it around in a few days, and it is briskly delivered to your door. They literally call you up to discuss your needs (with nice Scottish accents) and ask if there is anything else required
Lord knows why this is a weird outpost of technocratic excellence, but whoever is running the UKPO should be running the UKG
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
I think they must have used Grok to wargame the Iranian response.
Or Trump had people with really low IQ working for him.
There was a board game I used to enjoy as a teenager, (sadly, I can't remember its name), which was set in a thinly-veiled version of the Middle East. And, blocking the equivalent of the Straits of Hormuz was one of the standard operations in that game.
I knew that Hegseth was a drunken idiot. I had not appreciated just how much of a drunken idiot.
There are some very intelligent people who become idiots when they become drunk, sober or drunk, Hesgeth’s an idiot (at best)
In my upcoming trans article (with discussant contributions from kyf_100 and Cyclefree, currently being pre-read by Taz and Andy_JS), another of the appendices (appendix 6) contains a list of comments prior to the article being written. In that discussion we see the following text...
This will be the most boring article ever published in the history of the Internet but I've come up with a snappy title to leaven the doughy misery of reading the fucking thing - "The Transgina Monologues".
As predicted.
No, @Dura_Ace is right, this sounds like the most monumentally boring thing in the Anthropocene Era, the only thing Dura got wrong is the name. It should be The Mangina Monologues, as that is funnier and it alliterates
Impressively, that manages to be both needlessly nasty and stratigraphically illiterate. Strictly speaking, we’re in the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period, not the ‘Anthropocene Era’.
If energy prices soar then the underlying issue will be around a quarter of households literally won't be able to pay their energy bills. Once enough people stop paying that will snowball into a payment strike and the energy firms themselves won't be able to purchase enough energy to keep supply going.
I am generally very much against the "something needs to be done" line of thinking but energy prices at 2022 levels is rightly in that category. There are lots of different approaches but all come with political risks and costs. Those who think it can be left to a "free" market here are deluded.
Subsiding energy prices is a really inefficient way to do it though, for two reasons:
1) Energy consumption correlates closely with income. The richest households burn much more gas and petrol/diesel than poorer ones. The exception is electricity, as a percentage of household income, though that will change with EVs rolling out. It's a fiscal transfer from poor, working households in small flats to rich, non-working households in large detached houses.
2) The incentives are all wrong. By protecting consumers from these hikes we are sending a signal that they don't need to switch away from fossil fuels, or make their homes more efficient. Over the long term it actually increases our exposure to these crises.
So, I'd suggest a temporary uplift to the standard allowance of UC and to Pension Credit, if anything.
‘Temporary’.
The WFA was temporary. The ‘windfall tax’ was temporary
It will be temporary in name only.
The last temporary uplift to UC during COVID was, actually, temporary. That's part of the reason I suggested it.
An exception. This is not COVID. The whole economy has not ground to a halt.
I’ve give you my view. I stand by it. This is a govt that loves giving cash to the economically inactive or underutilised. They will not want to remove it.
It's staggering to think the Conservatives won 6,000 votes in Aigburth, in May 1979, compared with 8, yesterday. That year they won 2 Parliamentary seats in Liverpool, and a year later, 21 seats on the local council. Now, they are simply irrelevant in the city, as in Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield. In fact, the candidate who stood has written a Doctoral Thesis on the disappearance of the Liverpool Conservatives.
The Tories are not irrelevant at all, since that that would still imply existence. The Tories are in fact extinct.
Lol.
On latest opinion polls the LDs have gone from the 3rd party to the 5th despite decades of trying harder.
The Tories will be back, but probably not until a dose of Reform has been through the system.
Yet in latest seat estimates the Lib Dems are also often coming up as the official opposition.
Given the combined Labour-Green and Tory-Reform vote shares are similar to traditional Labour only and Tory only shares, the pecking order is even less correlated with parliamentary seat potential than usual.
In other news, a moment of clarity from my wife the other day, who reflected that politically we're pretty much Tories now. But could never admit it as would be ostracised and despised by friends and neighbours alike...
Quite frankly if friends or neighbours will ostracise you for supporting a mainstream party they ain’t worth shit.
My Reform supporting mates don’t ostracise me for voting Labour or vice versa.
We disagree, vehemently over Braverman, but we have so much that unites us.
All our neighbours are Tories. A cross we have to bear.
they make you bear a cross??? Båstards
If it was Reform, they'd probably make you burn a cross instead.
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
With every hour that passes, the scale of the Trump screw up grows. Support for the war in the US is falling off a cliff, as it becomes clear how utterly inept Trump and his crew of fuckwits, fools and creeps truly are. Trump is maybe only a matter of weeks away from an irrecoverable political collapse.
That will be fun.
Contrary opinion, based on discussions with several pals who have recently been in the States.
As long as there are no ground troops deployed, the public won't really notice the war. The idea of a 'political collapse' is entirely propagated by the chronically online.
They will notice the price of gas (petrol) going up - and that will cost the GOP some midterm votes and seats
In my upcoming trans article (with discussant contributions from kyf_100 and Cyclefree, currently being pre-read by Taz and Andy_JS), another of the appendices (appendix 6) contains a list of comments prior to the article being written. In that discussion we see the following text...
This will be the most boring article ever published in the history of the Internet but I've come up with a snappy title to leaven the doughy misery of reading the fucking thing - "The Transgina Monologues".
As predicted.
No, @Dura_Ace is right, this sounds like the most monumentally boring thing in the Anthropocene Era, the only thing Dura got wrong is the name. It should be The Mangina Monologues, as that is funnier and it alliterates
Impressively, that manages to be both needlessly nasty and stratigraphically illiterate. Strictly speaking, we’re in the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period, not the ‘Anthropocene Era’.
Impressively you manage to get your pompous correction completely and pompously incorrect
"What is the Anthropocene and why does it matter?"
"The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems."
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
With every hour that passes, the scale of the Trump screw up grows. Support for the war in the US is falling off a cliff, as it becomes clear how utterly inept Trump and his crew of fuckwits, fools and creeps truly are. Trump is maybe only a matter of weeks away from an irrecoverable political collapse.
That will be fun.
Has this actually be confirmed by genuine sources rather than idiots like Rupar and Krassenstein ?
I wouldn’t doubt it for one minute, and given the haphazard reaction from the Trumpdozer with his shooting off solutions it would indicate it but are there any proper sources for it other than partisan hacks ?
Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.
There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...
The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.
Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.
The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.
Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.
did you read my post down-thread?
I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.
I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.
I don't think it's unfair in the slightest to lay the blame for the state of the nation I live in at the feet of those that have been in power for the best part of 20 years. I'm not in politics, so I don't have to provide you with anything like a solid policy proposal or unionist manifesto. I can point out everything and anything that the SNP does is wrong.
I reject your framing of politics in Scotland through the divisive and self-serving nationalist lens. I reject your tribal loyalty to any party over state and good governance.
but still, if you feel better about it you can just lump me in with the rest of the right wing unionist scum and ignore me.
Salmond, in fairness, got it. He saw that an independent Scotland had to stand on its own feet, that its tax base must be grown to the point that existing or ideally improved public spending could be funded, that creating good quality jobs was important and that this required a functional education system. There was huge room for a consensus on these matters, even amongst those who did not wish his end game of independence.
Since Salmond we have have governance which seems quite oblivious to the economic implications of their actions, who have no interest in, indeed seem positively suspicious of, growth, profits and ambition. Instead we have had ever more growth of the bureaucratic state with more and more regulation making the provision of services, accommodation and goods more and more marginal with inevitable consequences for investment.
Like the rest of the UK, but arguably even to a greater extent, we have an ever growing public sector demanding an ever increasing share of the cake for providing less and less. Scotland is much further from being economically viable than it was in 2014. And neither the SNP or their little Green helpers seem to give a damn.
A reporter cites Hegseth as saying the US military has aerial and naval superiority over Iran - "yet you're not escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Why did you not plan for this?"
"We planned for it. We recognise it. Because ultimately we want to do... sequentially in a way that makes the most sense... and ensure we're sending the right signals to the world."
What on earth is he talking about. Looks like he hit the bottle early today !
In my upcoming trans article (with discussant contributions from kyf_100 and Cyclefree, currently being pre-read by Taz and Andy_JS), another of the appendices (appendix 6) contains a list of comments prior to the article being written. In that discussion we see the following text...
This will be the most boring article ever published in the history of the Internet but I've come up with a snappy title to leaven the doughy misery of reading the fucking thing - "The Transgina Monologues".
As predicted.
No, @Dura_Ace is right, this sounds like the most monumentally boring thing in the Anthropocene Era, the only thing Dura got wrong is the name. It should be The Mangina Monologues, as that is funnier and it alliterates
Ah yes. 'the loud laugh what speaks the vacant mind.'
When i hear this kind of deflection of the complicated and involved I recall another quote also - "...some man with a trench-coat and a cavalry moustache and a beta minus mind."
In other news, a moment of clarity from my wife the other day, who reflected that politically we're pretty much Tories now. But could never admit it as would be ostracised and despised by friends and neighbours alike...
Quite frankly if friends or neighbours will ostracise you for supporting a mainstream party they ain’t worth shit.
My Reform supporting mates don’t ostracise me for voting Labour or vice versa.
We disagree, vehemently over Braverman, but we have so much that unites us.
All our neighbours are Tories. A cross we have to bear.
I genuinely don’t know the politics of any of my neighbours. We’ve been here 25 years as have most of our neighbours and we always stop and chat.
In my upcoming trans article (with discussant contributions from kyf_100 and Cyclefree, currently being pre-read by Taz and Andy_JS), another of the appendices (appendix 6) contains a list of comments prior to the article being written. In that discussion we see the following text...
This will be the most boring article ever published in the history of the Internet but I've come up with a snappy title to leaven the doughy misery of reading the fucking thing - "The Transgina Monologues".
As predicted.
No, @Dura_Ace is right, this sounds like the most monumentally boring thing in the Anthropocene Era, the only thing Dura got wrong is the name. It should be The Mangina Monologues, as that is funnier and it alliterates
Impressively, that manages to be both needlessly nasty and stratigraphically illiterate. Strictly speaking, we’re in the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period, not the ‘Anthropocene Era’.
Impressively you manage to get your pompous correction completely and pompously incorrect
"What is the Anthropocene and why does it matter?"
"The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems."
Still digging, I see. Your original claim was “Anthropocene Era”, which is wrong. Even on the most generous reading, Anthropocene is only used informally as an unofficial epoch, not an era. Quietly changing the geological unit after the fact is correction by sleight of hand, not accuracy.
Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.
There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...
The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.
Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.
The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.
Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.
did you read my post down-thread?
I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.
I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.
That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.
The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.
What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.
Have you checked the UK zeitgeist lately for the normal expectations of the British public? If you haven’t, normal is expecting things to be a bit shit. At the risk of encouraging a pomposity from PB’s chief anecdotalist, what would be your recent examples of governments running things very well?
Eat out to help out was executed flawlessly by Sunak.
The vaccine roll out - including the impossible* training of pharmacists to give injections.
*impossible in the sense of not done in the U.K. Many other countries do vaccines etc at the pharmacy.
Huh? Pharmacists do do vaccinations in the UK. I had my covid and flu this year at the pharmacy. Are you talking about the specific covid roll out where a choice was made of how to do it (big, central venues?)
Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.
There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...
The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.
Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.
The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.
Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.
did you read my post down-thread?
I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.
I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.
That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.
The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.
What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.
Have you checked the UK zeitgeist lately for the normal expectations of the British public? If you haven’t, normal is expecting things to be a bit shit. At the risk of encouraging a pomposity from PB’s chief anecdotalist, what would be your recent examples of governments running things very well?
The Passport Office. As we have discussed on here before (and now based in Scotland, so it should be a source of Caledonian pride)
Used to be terrible and janky, now it is a smooth model of quite remarkable efficiency. They can take an application for a replacement passport and turn it around in a few days, and it is briskly delivered to your door. They literally call you up to discuss your needs (with nice Scottish accents) and ask if there is anything else required
Lord knows why this is a weird outpost of technocratic excellence, but whoever is running the UKPO should be running the UKG
Hegseth previously fired those who gave their assessment last year of the original “ mission accomplished “ regarding Irans nuclear capability.
They were fired for not reporting what the Dear Leader wanted to hear .
Also Politico reported Tuesday.
According to them, the staff of the Pentagon department responsible for developing, analyzing, and implementing methods for protecting civilians in military operations, which previously had about 200 employees, has been reduced by 90 percent. And only one out of ten employees remains in a similar department of the US Central Command (CENTCOM).
These units were supposed to investigate the circumstances of the recent attack on a girls' school in Iran.
According to Politico, the aforesaid staff cuts made to these units have significantly reduced the US ability to protect civilians during the largest airstrike in decades.
America is led by morons.
The mission won't be semi-accomplished until ground troops take the uranium, at the very least.
The mission won't be fully accomplished until there is regime change, which will also probably need ground troops.
That's not a reason to end the conflict, it is a reason to go much harder and do it properly. Which they're too frit to do. Incompetents.
It's not that America is too afraid, it's that a ground invasion is essentially impossible. If they were to do it, they'd have to do it properly - invading the country and occupying it so the regime would not reconstitute itself or the nuclear program. That involves invasion and occupation.
Firstly, America just doesn't have enough soldiers. The liberation of Iraq in 2003 needed 200,000, so America might need half a million for this. The American frontline army is only 452,000, on active duty and it would need at least twice as many for its other simultaneous tasks, R&R, etc. so it would have to introduce conscription. And training the new, unwilling recruits would take a year.
Secondly, how do you get the troops there? A ground invasion of a country of 92 million people - four times the population of Iraq in 2003 - with still-loyal armed forces would need hundreds of thousands of troops. America doesn't have the landing craft for an amphibious assault on that scale, which would be 5-10x the size of D-Day. Manufacturing them would take a decade as America's shipbuilding capacity has atrophied since the end of the Cold War.
So it would have to be a ground invasion. Where from? None of Iran's neighbours are remotely likely to host US, let alone Israeli, ground troops on the scale necessary for the year or so it would take to get ready, all the while being exposed to Iranian attacks. Israel would be delighted to host American troops for an invasion of Iran, but it's too far away.
Thirdly, invading a country of 92 million is one thing. Occupying it is something else entirely. As I've mentioned on here before, a rule of thumb is that you need one soldier for every 20 people to hold down an unwilling country. That's 4.6 million to occupy Iran for who knows how long? Again, where are they to come from?
Fourthly, America is still a flawed democracy, albeit a flawed one, Wars need political support, especially if conscription will be necessary, and there's not much for an air campaign. For a ground invasion and occupation there would be none whatsoever.
So America isn't too afraid - it's sensible.
While that's right, are you taking into account the common sense of the Commander-in-Chief, one DJ Trump? Clearly, of course, we don't know what advice he's being given by the professional military he has, presumably, around him he doesn't appear to be behaving logically.
He is not following advice of the professional military. We know from the WH spokesperson that the war was predicated on the advice of Kushner (and prompted by threatened Israeli action). We know they didn't plan for an attempted blockade other than the Hormuz straits. We have the nonsensical briefings of the Secretary of War, and his diatribes against woke rules of engagement.
The idea that a ground invasion of Iran has any realistic planning is complete nonsense. Any large scale effort would require at least a year's preparation, and even then the US doesn't really have the assets to carry it out.
Special forces raids are always a possibility, but what is that going to achieve ? (See alsoo one Jimmy Carter.)
It's staggering to think the Conservatives won 6,000 votes in Aigburth, in May 1979, compared with 8, yesterday. That year they won 2 Parliamentary seats in Liverpool, and a year later, 21 seats on the local council. Now, they are simply irrelevant in the city, as in Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield. In fact, the candidate who stood has written a Doctoral Thesis on the disappearance of the Liverpool Conservatives.
The Tories are not irrelevant at all, since that that would still imply existence. The Tories are in fact extinct.
Lol.
On latest opinion polls the LDs have gone from the 3rd party to the 5th despite decades of trying harder.
The Tories will be back, but probably not until a dose of Reform has been through the system.
Yet in latest seat estimates the Lib Dems are also often coming up as the official opposition.
Given the combined Labour-Green and Tory-Reform vote shares are similar to traditional Labour only and Tory only shares, the pecking order is even less correlated with parliamentary seat potential than usual.
Of the many contests the next GE will be, a stand out one will, I suggest, be Left of Centre v Right of Centre, these being in effect huge cultural blocs despite their many contradictions. There has been a gradual shift in composition, of which a significant one is the loss of some of the middle class from RoC to LoC, and the opposite for the working class.
The spoils will go to the bloc that is better motivated to be better organised.
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
With every hour that passes, the scale of the Trump screw up grows. Support for the war in the US is falling off a cliff, as it becomes clear how utterly inept Trump and his crew of fuckwits, fools and creeps truly are. Trump is maybe only a matter of weeks away from an irrecoverable political collapse.
That will be fun.
Contrary opinion, based on discussions with several pals who have recently been in the States.
As long as there are no ground troops deployed, the public won't really notice the war. The idea of a 'political collapse' is entirely propagated by the chronically online.
There cannot be a political collapse in the USA, even if the Mid Terms go badly, the new Congress won't be in this year. So 3 more years of Trump absolutism is on the cards.
Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.
There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...
The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.
Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.
The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.
Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.
did you read my post down-thread?
I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.
I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.
That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.
The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.
What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.
Have you checked the UK zeitgeist lately for the normal expectations of the British public? If you haven’t, normal is expecting things to be a bit shit. At the risk of encouraging a pomposity from PB’s chief anecdotalist, what would be your recent examples of governments running things very well?
The Passport Office. As we have discussed on here before (and now based in Scotland, so it should be a source of Caledonian pride)
Used to be terrible and janky, now it is a smooth model of quite remarkable efficiency. They can take an application for a replacement passport and turn it around in a few days, and it is briskly delivered to your door. They literally call you up to discuss your needs (with nice Scottish accents) and ask if there is anything else required
Lord knows why this is a weird outpost of technocratic excellence, but whoever is running the UKPO should be running the UKG
Process streamlining.
What they did was realise that manually handling *everything* is slow, expensive and prone to mistakes. The modern approach is to automate what you can, and devote your human resources to the edge cases. So a vast proportion of what the passport office does is to replacement passports. If you are sending a replacement to someone at the same address they have previously received a passport, little checking is needed. The process can be entirely automated. It's actually more secure to use software tools to look for patterns or anomalies in such work, than it is to get a bored human to read (well put the paper in front of their face) the application.
This meant they could speed up such applications massively. So people get their passports quicker. And they can devote more staff time to tricky problems and get them sorted out quicker.
The world is going to be seriously transformed within five years, and largely unrecognisable within 10-15
The idea there will be a live debate about "rejoining the EU" in, say, 2040 is touchingly quaint. It's like horse breeders discussing long term plans for more urban stables. In 1890
You can't subsidise your way out of a supply shock.
World energy supply has fallen. World energy demand needs to drop to match supply.
That's what the price is: it's information that tells you that you need to reduce demand. If you (and everyone else) tries to subsidise their way out of the supply shock, then all you do is make the remaining producers of that energy rich, without solving the problem.
Now: there are ways you can ... ameliorate ... a short term supply issue caused by the closure of the Straits of Hormuz. Your country might, if it had any sense, have six months of natural gas demand in storage that could be run down at times like this.
But the better, longer-term, plan is simply to have more energy produced in ways that simply aren't susceptible to the a reduction of natural gas an oil supply. (For what it's worth, coal doesnt help much. Why? Because energy for power generation is pretty fungible. If natural gas gets more expensive, then coal fired power stations get used more. Prices are set at the margin, so the price of coal will rise until -on a per megawatt hour basis- it comes into line with natural gas. Hence why Newcastle Coal prices are now a staggering $130+/ton.)
And because of the way our electricity market works, the live UK price per MWh is £100 despite gas only accounting for 3.5gw of generation out of 38 on this windy, sunny day.
Is there a way to see if wind/solar is being curtailed ?
Because this energy mix & price looks ludicrous to me:
For the Irish grid you can look at the difference between the forecast wind energy and the actual wind energy supplied to the grid, and that normally gives a good idea of how much wind energy is being lost due to insufficient demand.
Obviously the wind energy forecast isn't perfect, but when you also include the total grid demand you can normally see when wind energy is being turned off because the grid can't currently use 100% wind energy.
Today ses to be a day when the wind forecast is less accurate, so you don't see the obvious patterns on some other occasions, of the wind production rising to reach the forecast as demand increases.
Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.
There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...
The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.
Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.
The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.
Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.
did you read my post down-thread?
I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.
I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.
That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.
The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.
What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.
Have you checked the UK zeitgeist lately for the normal expectations of the British public? If you haven’t, normal is expecting things to be a bit shit. At the risk of encouraging a pomposity from PB’s chief anecdotalist, what would be your recent examples of governments running things very well?
I get lost at the point where you suggest that it is not, or should not be, a real aspiration of either the public or governments that state enterprises are run very well.
Can you quote where I suggested that ‘it is not, or should not be, a real aspiration of either the public or governments that state enterprises are run very well’? I just want to check whether I expressed myself badly or that you’re putting words in my mouth for the usual reasons.
It's staggering to think the Conservatives won 6,000 votes in Aigburth, in May 1979, compared with 8, yesterday. That year they won 2 Parliamentary seats in Liverpool, and a year later, 21 seats on the local council. Now, they are simply irrelevant in the city, as in Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield. In fact, the candidate who stood has written a Doctoral Thesis on the disappearance of the Liverpool Conservatives.
The Tories are not irrelevant at all, since that that would still imply existence. The Tories are in fact extinct.
Lol.
On latest opinion polls the LDs have gone from the 3rd party to the 5th despite decades of trying harder.
The Tories will be back, but probably not until a dose of Reform has been through the system.
Well, the polls may not be telling the whole story... True, the Lib Dems lost to the Greens in Liverpool, but won against them in Vale of the White Horse and held Cotswold and Penrith. So the running total is 21 net gains since last May, versus net losses of 25 for the Tories and 52 for Labour. Reform are up 67 over the same period, but it remains to be seen how sustainable that is- Lib Dems have boots on the ground in their strong regions and Reform are not doing so well where they unexpectedly won last year.
As we know, the polls are not as important as getting the votes in the boxes.
Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.
There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...
The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.
Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.
The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.
Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.
did you read my post down-thread?
I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.
I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.
That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.
The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.
What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.
Have you checked the UK zeitgeist lately for the normal expectations of the British public? If you haven’t, normal is expecting things to be a bit shit. At the risk of encouraging a pomposity from PB’s chief anecdotalist, what would be your recent examples of governments running things very well?
Eat out to help out was executed flawlessly by Sunak.
The vaccine roll out - including the impossible* training of pharmacists to give injections.
*impossible in the sense of not done in the U.K. Many other countries do vaccines etc at the pharmacy.
Huh? Pharmacists do do vaccinations in the UK. I had my covid and flu this year at the pharmacy. Are you talking about the specific covid roll out where a choice was made of how to do it (big, central venues?)
They do now.
Pre COVID, Pharmacists in the UK didn't do vaccinations. Part of the roll out was training people up to do vaccinations.
The world is going to be seriously transformed within five years, and largely unrecognisable within 10-15
The idea there will be a live debate about "rejoining the EU" in, say, 2040 is touchingly quaint. It's like horse breeders discussing long term plans for more urban stables. In 1890
From the man who spammed PB senseless about how what.three.words would change the world.
It's staggering to think the Conservatives won 6,000 votes in Aigburth, in May 1979, compared with 8, yesterday. That year they won 2 Parliamentary seats in Liverpool, and a year later, 21 seats on the local council. Now, they are simply irrelevant in the city, as in Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield. In fact, the candidate who stood has written a Doctoral Thesis on the disappearance of the Liverpool Conservatives.
The Tories are not irrelevant at all, since that that would still imply existence. The Tories are in fact extinct.
Lol.
On latest opinion polls the LDs have gone from the 3rd party to the 5th despite decades of trying harder.
The Tories will be back, but probably not until a dose of Reform has been through the system.
Yet in latest seat estimates the Lib Dems are also often coming up as the official opposition.
Given the combined Labour-Green and Tory-Reform vote shares are similar to traditional Labour only and Tory only shares, the pecking order is even less correlated with parliamentary seat potential than usual.
Of the many contests the next GE will be, a stand out one will, I suggest, be Left of Centre v Right of Centre, these being in effect huge cultural blocs despite their many contradictions. There has been a gradual shift in composition, of which a significant one is the loss of some of the middle class from RoC to LoC, and the opposite for the working class.
The spoils will go to the bloc that is better motivated to be better organised.
I think that under recognises the anti-establishment* vote that goes to both Reform and Green.
*a bit of a con trick for Reform to pitch as anti-establishment, but some people seem to buy it.
If energy prices soar then the underlying issue will be around a quarter of households literally won't be able to pay their energy bills. Once enough people stop paying that will snowball into a payment strike and the energy firms themselves won't be able to purchase enough energy to keep supply going.
I am generally very much against the "something needs to be done" line of thinking but energy prices at 2022 levels is rightly in that category. There are lots of different approaches but all come with political risks and costs. Those who think it can be left to a "free" market here are deluded.
It will be summer soon. I have already had one day when the central heating didn't come on. The idea you might be able to economise seems to escape some people. Eat salads and cold food. Decommission the big freezer. Turn lights off. If the heating is still on, turn it off when you go out. Turn it off at night, that's what bedclothes are for. Reduce driving - go shopping on foot, replace leisure activities with those close to home, tell the teenagers to walk home. As rcs1000 says, prices are sending us a message.
All this is true, but it doesnt change the chain of events that will happen if prices went to 2022 levels (as others have pointed out, nowhere near them presently) without govt support:
Significant proportion of households can't pay. Others will stop paying. Suppliers hit cash flow problems and can't afford to buy energy. Government forced to step in anyway.
The logical thing to do would be to give money to those who are struggling rather than artificially reduce energy prices. That would stop people from freezing but still provide an incentive to reduce energy use.
Define struggling, please?
I'd do it just as Eabhal suggests. Temporarily raise UC and Pension Credit.
Edit: Or it might be better politically to call it some sort of fuel allowance, but there'd be no requirement to spend it on fuel.
Link benefits to short term inflation, then?
Call it Short Term Inflation Indexing?
You could link the standard allowance to an index that represents the typical basket of goods consumed by UC/PC claimants (excluding housing, because that is covered seperately). I remember some pop star making the point food was going up way faster than luxury shoes etc etc.
It would also have to be adjusted rapidly because the allowance significantly lags CPI at the moment.
Several economics think tank type places generate inflation numbers on a weekly basis.
In the internet age, the government could have daily, rolling average inflation number, for not much effort.
The government makes cold weather payments based on a formula to do with number of days below a certain temperature.
If you wanted to provide a temporary fuel-price related uplift to UC on the basis of high electricity prices you could do something similar linked to the wholesale price of electricity.
But you're still writing a blank cheque that's going to have the effect of bidding up energy prices even higher.
If energy prices soar then the underlying issue will be around a quarter of households literally won't be able to pay their energy bills. Once enough people stop paying that will snowball into a payment strike and the energy firms themselves won't be able to purchase enough energy to keep supply going.
I am generally very much against the "something needs to be done" line of thinking but energy prices at 2022 levels is rightly in that category. There are lots of different approaches but all come with political risks and costs. Those who think it can be left to a "free" market here are deluded.
Subsiding energy prices is a really inefficient way to do it though, for two reasons:
1) Energy consumption correlates closely with income. The richest households burn much more gas and petrol/diesel than poorer ones. The exception is electricity, as a percentage of household income, though that will change with EVs rolling out. It's a fiscal transfer from poor, working households in small flats to rich, non-working households in large detached houses.
2) The incentives are all wrong. By protecting consumers from these hikes we are sending a signal that they don't need to switch away from fossil fuels, or make their homes more efficient. Over the long term it actually increases our exposure to these crises.
So, I'd suggest a temporary uplift to the standard allowance of UC and to Pension Credit, if anything.
‘Temporary’.
The WFA was temporary. The ‘windfall tax’ was temporary
It will be temporary in name only.
The last temporary uplift to UC during COVID was, actually, temporary. That's part of the reason I suggested it.
An exception. This is not COVID. The whole economy has not ground to a halt.
I’ve give you my view. I stand by it. This is a govt that loves giving cash to the economically inactive or underutilised. They will not want to remove it.
FWIW I don't actually think it's a good idea, just a better one than noneoftheabove's suggestion that we subsidise energy prices for everyone.
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
With every hour that passes, the scale of the Trump screw up grows. Support for the war in the US is falling off a cliff, as it becomes clear how utterly inept Trump and his crew of fuckwits, fools and creeps truly are. Trump is maybe only a matter of weeks away from an irrecoverable political collapse.
That will be fun.
Contrary opinion, based on discussions with several pals who have recently been in the States.
As long as there are no ground troops deployed, the public won't really notice the war. The idea of a 'political collapse' is entirely propagated by the chronically online.
There cannot be a political collapse in the USA, even if the Mid Terms go badly, the new Congress won't be in this year. So 3 more years of Trump absolutism is on the cards.
Screwing up a war is the one sure-fire way to trigger major political change.
I have a growing feeling that for whatever reason, Trump will not see out his term.
If energy prices soar then the underlying issue will be around a quarter of households literally won't be able to pay their energy bills. Once enough people stop paying that will snowball into a payment strike and the energy firms themselves won't be able to purchase enough energy to keep supply going.
I am generally very much against the "something needs to be done" line of thinking but energy prices at 2022 levels is rightly in that category. There are lots of different approaches but all come with political risks and costs. Those who think it can be left to a "free" market here are deluded.
It will be summer soon. I have already had one day when the central heating didn't come on. The idea you might be able to economise seems to escape some people. Eat salads and cold food. Decommission the big freezer. Turn lights off. If the heating is still on, turn it off when you go out. Turn it off at night, that's what bedclothes are for. Reduce driving - go shopping on foot, replace leisure activities with those close to home, tell the teenagers to walk home. As rcs1000 says, prices are sending us a message.
All this is true, but it doesnt change the chain of events that will happen if prices went to 2022 levels (as others have pointed out, nowhere near them presently) without govt support:
Significant proportion of households can't pay. Others will stop paying. Suppliers hit cash flow problems and can't afford to buy energy. Government forced to step in anyway.
The logical thing to do would be to give money to those who are struggling rather than artificially reduce energy prices. That would stop people from freezing but still provide an incentive to reduce energy use.
Define struggling, please?
I'd do it just as Eabhal suggests. Temporarily raise UC and Pension Credit.
Edit: Or it might be better politically to call it some sort of fuel allowance, but there'd be no requirement to spend it on fuel.
There is already a tried and tested mechanism which is to offer fuel vouchers (£50) to households that are struggling. Targeted but costs a lot in administration which is why they usually use charities with volunteers to do the work. There is a shedload of work done for free for HMG by volunteered crewed charities.
The main point is whether this 'offshoring' to yet more free/low cost labour should be restricted so that more productive ways of carrying out government functions should be found.
In my upcoming trans article (with discussant contributions from kyf_100 and Cyclefree, currently being pre-read by Taz and Andy_JS), another of the appendices (appendix 6) contains a list of comments prior to the article being written. In that discussion we see the following text...
This will be the most boring article ever published in the history of the Internet but I've come up with a snappy title to leaven the doughy misery of reading the fucking thing - "The Transgina Monologues".
As predicted.
No, @Dura_Ace is right, this sounds like the most monumentally boring thing in the Anthropocene Era, the only thing Dura got wrong is the name. It should be The Mangina Monologues, as that is funnier and it alliterates
Impressively, that manages to be both needlessly nasty and stratigraphically illiterate. Strictly speaking, we’re in the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period, not the ‘Anthropocene Era’.
Impressively you manage to get your pompous correction completely and pompously incorrect
"What is the Anthropocene and why does it matter?"
"The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems."
Still digging, I see. Your original claim was “Anthropocene Era”, which is wrong. Even on the most generous reading, Anthropocene is only used informally as an unofficial epoch, not an era. Quietly changing the geological unit after the fact is correction by sleight of hand, not accuracy.
WTF are you on about now? You denied that the concept of "the Anthropocene" even existed, I showed you it did, now you're quibbling about era versus epoch to hide your tiny shrivelled testicles of shame
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
With every hour that passes, the scale of the Trump screw up grows. Support for the war in the US is falling off a cliff, as it becomes clear how utterly inept Trump and his crew of fuckwits, fools and creeps truly are. Trump is maybe only a matter of weeks away from an irrecoverable political collapse.
That will be fun.
Contrary opinion, based on discussions with several pals who have recently been in the States.
As long as there are no ground troops deployed, the public won't really notice the war. The idea of a 'political collapse' is entirely propagated by the chronically online.
They will notice the price of gas (petrol) going up - and that will cost the GOP some midterm votes and seats
We'll find out if the "inflation theory of everything" holds.
You can't subsidise your way out of a supply shock.
World energy supply has fallen. World energy demand needs to drop to match supply.
That's what the price is: it's information that tells you that you need to reduce demand. If you (and everyone else) tries to subsidise their way out of the supply shock, then all you do is make the remaining producers of that energy rich, without solving the problem.
Now: there are ways you can ... ameliorate ... a short term supply issue caused by the closure of the Straits of Hormuz. Your country might, if it had any sense, have six months of natural gas demand in storage that could be run down at times like this.
But the better, longer-term, plan is simply to have more energy produced in ways that simply aren't susceptible to the a reduction of natural gas an oil supply. (For what it's worth, coal doesnt help much. Why? Because energy for power generation is pretty fungible. If natural gas gets more expensive, then coal fired power stations get used more. Prices are set at the margin, so the price of coal will rise until -on a per megawatt hour basis- it comes into line with natural gas. Hence why Newcastle Coal prices are now a staggering $130+/ton.)
And because of the way our electricity market works, the live UK price per MWh is £100 despite gas only accounting for 3.5gw of generation out of 38 on this windy, sunny day.
Is there a way to see if wind/solar is being curtailed ?
Because this energy mix & price looks ludicrous to me:
I think they have to keep some gas generation ticking over at all times for complicated technical reasons. And it's worth point out that while the spot price is high, our renewables are primarily generating on fixed price contracts so they are likely saving us lots of cash at the moment. Marginal cost != average cost.
There will be massive curtailment in Scotland at the moment though. It's super windy and there is nowhere for it to go.
I think the issue is that there isn't enough battery storage yet for it to take over the job of balancing the grid against variations in demand and supply. But that will change in time.
The world is going to be seriously transformed within five years, and largely unrecognisable within 10-15
The idea there will be a live debate about "rejoining the EU" in, say, 2040 is touchingly quaint. It's like horse breeders discussing long term plans for more urban stables. In 1890
From the man who spammed PB senseless about how what.three.words would change the world.
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
With every hour that passes, the scale of the Trump screw up grows. Support for the war in the US is falling off a cliff, as it becomes clear how utterly inept Trump and his crew of fuckwits, fools and creeps truly are. Trump is maybe only a matter of weeks away from an irrecoverable political collapse.
That will be fun.
Contrary opinion, based on discussions with several pals who have recently been in the States.
As long as there are no ground troops deployed, the public won't really notice the war. The idea of a 'political collapse' is entirely propagated by the chronically online.
They will notice the price of gas (petrol) going up - and that will cost the GOP some midterm votes and seats
We'll find out if the "inflation theory of everything" holds.
Unless this price shock is very short, it will do what price shocks to fuel have always done. Kick off recessions.
Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.
There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...
The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.
Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.
The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.
Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.
did you read my post down-thread?
I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.
I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.
That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.
The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.
What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.
Have you checked the UK zeitgeist lately for the normal expectations of the British public? If you haven’t, normal is expecting things to be a bit shit. At the risk of encouraging a pomposity from PB’s chief anecdotalist, what would be your recent examples of governments running things very well?
The Passport Office. As we have discussed on here before (and now based in Scotland, so it should be a source of Caledonian pride)
Used to be terrible and janky, now it is a smooth model of quite remarkable efficiency. They can take an application for a replacement passport and turn it around in a few days, and it is briskly delivered to your door. They literally call you up to discuss your needs (with nice Scottish accents) and ask if there is anything else required
Lord knows why this is a weird outpost of technocratic excellence, but whoever is running the UKPO should be running the UKG
Process streamlining.
What they did was realise that manually handling *everything* is slow, expensive and prone to mistakes. The modern approach is to automate what you can, and devote your human resources to the edge cases. So a vast proportion of what the passport office does is to replacement passports. If you are sending a replacement to someone at the same address they have previously received a passport, little checking is needed. The process can be entirely automated. It's actually more secure to use software tools to look for patterns or anomalies in such work, than it is to get a bored human to read (well put the paper in front of their face) the application.
This meant they could speed up such applications massively. So people get their passports quicker. And they can devote more staff time to tricky problems and get them sorted out quicker.
Win win win. Classic OR productivity work.
Interesting, thankyou. And well done them
Why can't we just copy and paste this to every other govt dept?
If energy prices soar then the underlying issue will be around a quarter of households literally won't be able to pay their energy bills. Once enough people stop paying that will snowball into a payment strike and the energy firms themselves won't be able to purchase enough energy to keep supply going.
I am generally very much against the "something needs to be done" line of thinking but energy prices at 2022 levels is rightly in that category. There are lots of different approaches but all come with political risks and costs. Those who think it can be left to a "free" market here are deluded.
Subsiding energy prices is a really inefficient way to do it though, for two reasons:
1) Energy consumption correlates closely with income. The richest households burn much more gas and petrol/diesel than poorer ones. The exception is electricity, as a percentage of household income, though that will change with EVs rolling out. It's a fiscal transfer from poor, working households in small flats to rich, non-working households in large detached houses.
2) The incentives are all wrong. By protecting consumers from these hikes we are sending a signal that they don't need to switch away from fossil fuels, or make their homes more efficient. Over the long term it actually increases our exposure to these crises.
So, I'd suggest a temporary uplift to the standard allowance of UC and to Pension Credit, if anything.
‘Temporary’.
The WFA was temporary. The ‘windfall tax’ was temporary
It will be temporary in name only.
The last temporary uplift to UC during COVID was, actually, temporary. That's part of the reason I suggested it.
An exception. This is not COVID. The whole economy has not ground to a halt.
I’ve give you my view. I stand by it. This is a govt that loves giving cash to the economically inactive or underutilised. They will not want to remove it.
FWIW I don't actually think it's a good idea, just a better one than noneoftheabove's suggestion that we subsidise energy prices for everyone.
Linking benefits to a rolling, rapidly updated, average for inflation would solve the problem, for now and the future.
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
With every hour that passes, the scale of the Trump screw up grows. Support for the war in the US is falling off a cliff, as it becomes clear how utterly inept Trump and his crew of fuckwits, fools and creeps truly are. Trump is maybe only a matter of weeks away from an irrecoverable political collapse.
That will be fun.
Can you link to evidence that support for the war in the US is falling off a cliff?
The last I saw it was split very strongly on partisan lines. 90% Democrats opposed, 85% Republicans support, 65% Independents oppose.
If there was evidence of support among Republicans starting to fall that would be very significant.
Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.
There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...
The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.
Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.
The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.
Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.
did you read my post down-thread?
I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.
I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.
That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.
The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.
What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.
Have you checked the UK zeitgeist lately for the normal expectations of the British public? If you haven’t, normal is expecting things to be a bit shit. At the risk of encouraging a pomposity from PB’s chief anecdotalist, what would be your recent examples of governments running things very well?
The Passport Office. As we have discussed on here before (and now based in Scotland, so it should be a source of Caledonian pride)
Used to be terrible and janky, now it is a smooth model of quite remarkable efficiency. They can take an application for a replacement passport and turn it around in a few days, and it is briskly delivered to your door. They literally call you up to discuss your needs (with nice Scottish accents) and ask if there is anything else required
Lord knows why this is a weird outpost of technocratic excellence, but whoever is running the UKPO should be running the UKG
Process streamlining.
What they did was realise that manually handling *everything* is slow, expensive and prone to mistakes. The modern approach is to automate what you can, and devote your human resources to the edge cases. So a vast proportion of what the passport office does is to replacement passports. If you are sending a replacement to someone at the same address they have previously received a passport, little checking is needed. The process can be entirely automated. It's actually more secure to use software tools to look for patterns or anomalies in such work, than it is to get a bored human to read (well put the paper in front of their face) the application.
This meant they could speed up such applications massively. So people get their passports quicker. And they can devote more staff time to tricky problems and get them sorted out quicker.
Win win win. Classic OR productivity work.
Interesting, thankyou. And well done them
Why can't we just copy and paste this to every other govt dept?
The passport office has a relatively simple, linear task. Give people passports. Very easy to conceptualise. Very easy to imagine giving people passports faster. Very hard to argue against.
This kind of thing requires smashing lots of rice bowls. Lots of little empires die. People who have done the same thing for 20 years find their job has gone. Much pain. Much fear. You often have to invest in the automation at the start and see a slow, gathering return over years.
Best not to do this, this side of the election, Minister.
In my upcoming trans article (with discussant contributions from kyf_100 and Cyclefree, currently being pre-read by Taz and Andy_JS), another of the appendices (appendix 6) contains a list of comments prior to the article being written. In that discussion we see the following text...
This will be the most boring article ever published in the history of the Internet but I've come up with a snappy title to leaven the doughy misery of reading the fucking thing - "The Transgina Monologues".
As predicted.
No, @Dura_Ace is right, this sounds like the most monumentally boring thing in the Anthropocene Era, the only thing Dura got wrong is the name. It should be The Mangina Monologues, as that is funnier and it alliterates
Impressively, that manages to be both needlessly nasty and stratigraphically illiterate. Strictly speaking, we’re in the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period, not the ‘Anthropocene Era’.
Impressively you manage to get your pompous correction completely and pompously incorrect
"What is the Anthropocene and why does it matter?"
"The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems."
Still digging, I see. Your original claim was “Anthropocene Era”, which is wrong. Even on the most generous reading, Anthropocene is only used informally as an unofficial epoch, not an era. Quietly changing the geological unit after the fact is correction by sleight of hand, not accuracy.
WTF are you on about now? You denied that the concept of "the Anthropocene" even existed, I showed you it did, now you're quibbling about era versus epoch to hide your tiny shrivelled testicles of shame
That last line actually made me spit out some tea and laugh out loud, bravo.
If I may continue pompously, I didn’t deny the existence of the Anthropocene, only that it isn't an era. However, I grant that I wrote it clumsily enough that your reading was a fair one.
What would PB be without a pinch of pomposity and a smidge of ambiguity?
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
With every hour that passes, the scale of the Trump screw up grows. Support for the war in the US is falling off a cliff, as it becomes clear how utterly inept Trump and his crew of fuckwits, fools and creeps truly are. Trump is maybe only a matter of weeks away from an irrecoverable political collapse.
That will be fun.
Contrary opinion, based on discussions with several pals who have recently been in the States.
As long as there are no ground troops deployed, the public won't really notice the war. The idea of a 'political collapse' is entirely propagated by the chronically online.
They will notice the price of gas (petrol) going up - and that will cost the GOP some midterm votes and seats
We'll find out if the "inflation theory of everything" holds.
Unless this price shock is very short, it will do what price shocks to fuel have always done. Kick off recessions.
Probably slightly less of a recession than randomly adding 2p on income tax would - thats £800 out of most peoples pockets or £65 a month, which would mean at least 1 less night out..
You can't subsidise your way out of a supply shock.
World energy supply has fallen. World energy demand needs to drop to match supply.
That's what the price is: it's information that tells you that you need to reduce demand. If you (and everyone else) tries to subsidise their way out of the supply shock, then all you do is make the remaining producers of that energy rich, without solving the problem.
Now: there are ways you can ... ameliorate ... a short term supply issue caused by the closure of the Straits of Hormuz. Your country might, if it had any sense, have six months of natural gas demand in storage that could be run down at times like this.
But the better, longer-term, plan is simply to have more energy produced in ways that simply aren't susceptible to the a reduction of natural gas an oil supply. (For what it's worth, coal doesnt help much. Why? Because energy for power generation is pretty fungible. If natural gas gets more expensive, then coal fired power stations get used more. Prices are set at the margin, so the price of coal will rise until -on a per megawatt hour basis- it comes into line with natural gas. Hence why Newcastle Coal prices are now a staggering $130+/ton.)
And because of the way our electricity market works, the live UK price per MWh is £100 despite gas only accounting for 3.5gw of generation out of 38 on this windy, sunny day.
Is there a way to see if wind/solar is being curtailed ?
Because this energy mix & price looks ludicrous to me:
I think they have to keep some gas generation ticking over at all times for complicated technical reasons. And it's worth point out that while the spot price is high, our renewables are primarily generating on fixed price contracts so they are likely saving us lots of cash at the moment. Marginal cost != average cost.
There will be massive curtailment in Scotland at the moment though. It's super windy and there is nowhere for it to go.
I think the issue is that there isn't enough battery storage yet for it to take over the job of balancing the grid against variations in demand and supply. But that will change in time.
When we get to the stage that solar comes (as standard with 12 hours of battery "time shift"... well, thats the game.
In my upcoming trans article (with discussant contributions from kyf_100 and Cyclefree, currently being pre-read by Taz and Andy_JS), another of the appendices (appendix 6) contains a list of comments prior to the article being written. In that discussion we see the following text...
This will be the most boring article ever published in the history of the Internet but I've come up with a snappy title to leaven the doughy misery of reading the fucking thing - "The Transgina Monologues".
As predicted.
No, @Dura_Ace is right, this sounds like the most monumentally boring thing in the Anthropocene Era, the only thing Dura got wrong is the name. It should be The Mangina Monologues, as that is funnier and it alliterates
Impressively, that manages to be both needlessly nasty and stratigraphically illiterate. Strictly speaking, we’re in the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period, not the ‘Anthropocene Era’.
Impressively you manage to get your pompous correction completely and pompously incorrect
"What is the Anthropocene and why does it matter?"
"The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems."
Still digging, I see. Your original claim was “Anthropocene Era”, which is wrong. Even on the most generous reading, Anthropocene is only used informally as an unofficial epoch, not an era. Quietly changing the geological unit after the fact is correction by sleight of hand, not accuracy.
WTF are you on about now? You denied that the concept of "the Anthropocene" even existed, I showed you it did, now you're quibbling about era versus epoch to hide your tiny shrivelled testicles of shame
Leon, if you're trying to out-pedant, you might at least quote your interlocutor accurately. ..not the ‘Anthropocene Era’.. is what was said. You're doing the whole sleight of hand nonsense again,
If you're just trying to be randomly and emptily insulting, go ahead; everyone's pretty well inured to it.
Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.
There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...
The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.
Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.
The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.
Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.
did you read my post down-thread?
I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.
I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.
That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.
The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.
What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.
Have you checked the UK zeitgeist lately for the normal expectations of the British public? If you haven’t, normal is expecting things to be a bit shit. At the risk of encouraging a pomposity from PB’s chief anecdotalist, what would be your recent examples of governments running things very well?
The Passport Office. As we have discussed on here before (and now based in Scotland, so it should be a source of Caledonian pride)
Used to be terrible and janky, now it is a smooth model of quite remarkable efficiency. They can take an application for a replacement passport and turn it around in a few days, and it is briskly delivered to your door. They literally call you up to discuss your needs (with nice Scottish accents) and ask if there is anything else required
Lord knows why this is a weird outpost of technocratic excellence, but whoever is running the UKPO should be running the UKG
Process streamlining.
What they did was realise that manually handling *everything* is slow, expensive and prone to mistakes. The modern approach is to automate what you can, and devote your human resources to the edge cases. So a vast proportion of what the passport office does is to replacement passports. If you are sending a replacement to someone at the same address they have previously received a passport, little checking is needed. The process can be entirely automated. It's actually more secure to use software tools to look for patterns or anomalies in such work, than it is to get a bored human to read (well put the paper in front of their face) the application.
This meant they could speed up such applications massively. So people get their passports quicker. And they can devote more staff time to tricky problems and get them sorted out quicker.
Win win win. Classic OR productivity work.
Interesting, thankyou. And well done them
Why can't we just copy and paste this to every other govt dept?
The passport office has a relatively simple, linear task. Give people passports. Very easy to conceptualise. Very easy to imagine giving people passports faster. Very hard to argue against.
This kind of thing requires smashing lots of rice bowls. Lots of little empires die. People who have done the same thing for 20 years find their job has gone. Much pain. Much fear. You often have to invest in the automation at the start and see a slow, gathering return over years.
Best not to do this, this side of the election, Minister.
Strange as it may seem, automation is actually starting to work as intended, at the Land Registry and Probate Registry. It took them five years to get there.
I am glad Labour is fully pro nuclear. Greens are appallingly opposed.
The problem with nuclear, the economics - I can't stress this enough - are bonkers. That's why hardly anyone has built any in the last fifty years.
As well as being expensive, nuclear is rather inflexible. Fine for world of nuclear base load and gas variable, but we're moving to a world of different intermittent supplies and storage.
Reform lead is not high enough to weather an election campaign IMHO.
Probably not. But, I do expect them to be the official Opposition, come 2029. They're likely to gain 1,000 + seats in May, reinforcing the narrative that a Conservative vote is a wasted vote.
I am glad Labour is fully pro nuclear. Greens are appallingly opposed.
The problem with nuclear, the economics - I can't stress this enough - are bonkers. That's why hardly anyone has built any in the last fifty years.
As well as being expensive, nuclear is rather inflexible. Fine for world of nuclear base load and gas variable, but we're moving to a world of different intermittent supplies and storage.
The economics point is largely fair for big new-build nuclear in the West: long lead times, eye-watering financing costs and a heroic tradition of delays.
But “hardly anyone has built any in the last fifty years” is nonsense. There are about 420 reactors operating worldwide and roughly 70 under construction, mostly outside the West.
And “inflexible” needs a bit of care too. Large nuclear is not the first choice for balancing a renewables-heavy grid, but it is perfectly capable of load-following. The real question is whether it earns its keep against storage, interconnection, demand response and gas, not whether it can move at all.
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
With every hour that passes, the scale of the Trump screw up grows. Support for the war in the US is falling off a cliff, as it becomes clear how utterly inept Trump and his crew of fuckwits, fools and creeps truly are. Trump is maybe only a matter of weeks away from an irrecoverable political collapse.
That will be fun.
Contrary opinion, based on discussions with several pals who have recently been in the States.
As long as there are no ground troops deployed, the public won't really notice the war. The idea of a 'political collapse' is entirely propagated by the chronically online.
They will notice the price of gas (petrol) going up - and that will cost the GOP some midterm votes and seats
We'll find out if the "inflation theory of everything" holds.
Unless this price shock is very short, it will do what price shocks to fuel have always done. Kick off recessions.
Probably slightly less of a recession than randomly adding 2p on income tax would - thats £800 out of most peoples pockets or £65 a month, which would mean at least 1 less night out..
That's so far. The effects if this carries on for weeks or months will be far, far greater.
Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources. Quite breathtaking.
With every hour that passes, the scale of the Trump screw up grows. Support for the war in the US is falling off a cliff, as it becomes clear how utterly inept Trump and his crew of fuckwits, fools and creeps truly are. Trump is maybe only a matter of weeks away from an irrecoverable political collapse.
That will be fun.
Contrary opinion, based on discussions with several pals who have recently been in the States.
As long as there are no ground troops deployed, the public won't really notice the war. The idea of a 'political collapse' is entirely propagated by the chronically online.
There cannot be a political collapse in the USA, even if the Mid Terms go badly, the new Congress won't be in this year. So 3 more years of Trump absolutism is on the cards.
Screwing up a war is the one sure-fire way to trigger major political change.
I have a growing feeling that for whatever reason, Trump will not see out his term.
I think the Grim Reaper calling is the only way that Trump doesn't complete his term. Even if Congress and Senate go Democrat there are not enough votes for a successful impeachment.
So grit your teeth. We have 3 years more Dementia Don to put up with.
Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.
There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...
The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.
Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.
The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.
Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.
did you read my post down-thread?
I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.
I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.
That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.
The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.
What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.
Have you checked the UK zeitgeist lately for the normal expectations of the British public? If you haven’t, normal is expecting things to be a bit shit. At the risk of encouraging a pomposity from PB’s chief anecdotalist, what would be your recent examples of governments running things very well?
The Passport Office. As we have discussed on here before (and now based in Scotland, so it should be a source of Caledonian pride)
Used to be terrible and janky, now it is a smooth model of quite remarkable efficiency. They can take an application for a replacement passport and turn it around in a few days, and it is briskly delivered to your door. They literally call you up to discuss your needs (with nice Scottish accents) and ask if there is anything else required
Lord knows why this is a weird outpost of technocratic excellence, but whoever is running the UKPO should be running the UKG
Process streamlining.
What they did was realise that manually handling *everything* is slow, expensive and prone to mistakes. The modern approach is to automate what you can, and devote your human resources to the edge cases. So a vast proportion of what the passport office does is to replacement passports. If you are sending a replacement to someone at the same address they have previously received a passport, little checking is needed. The process can be entirely automated. It's actually more secure to use software tools to look for patterns or anomalies in such work, than it is to get a bored human to read (well put the paper in front of their face) the application.
This meant they could speed up such applications massively. So people get their passports quicker. And they can devote more staff time to tricky problems and get them sorted out quicker.
Win win win. Classic OR productivity work.
Interesting, thankyou. And well done them
Why can't we just copy and paste this to every other govt dept?
The passport office has a relatively simple, linear task. Give people passports. Very easy to conceptualise. Very easy to imagine giving people passports faster. Very hard to argue against.
This kind of thing requires smashing lots of rice bowls. Lots of little empires die. People who have done the same thing for 20 years find their job has gone. Much pain. Much fear. You often have to invest in the automation at the start and see a slow, gathering return over years.
Best not to do this, this side of the election, Minister.
Strange as it may seem, automation is actually starting to work as intended, at the Land Registry and Probate Registry. It took them five years to get there.
The other thing is not doing Big Bang projects. Those never, ever work. Piecemeal replacement sounds wasteful and unsexy. Maybe it is. But it actually delivers.
Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.
There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...
The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.
Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.
The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.
Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.
did you read my post down-thread?
I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.
I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.
That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.
The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.
What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.
Have you checked the UK zeitgeist lately for the normal expectations of the British public? If you haven’t, normal is expecting things to be a bit shit. At the risk of encouraging a pomposity from PB’s chief anecdotalist, what would be your recent examples of governments running things very well?
The Passport Office. As we have discussed on here before (and now based in Scotland, so it should be a source of Caledonian pride)
Used to be terrible and janky, now it is a smooth model of quite remarkable efficiency. They can take an application for a replacement passport and turn it around in a few days, and it is briskly delivered to your door. They literally call you up to discuss your needs (with nice Scottish accents) and ask if there is anything else required
Lord knows why this is a weird outpost of technocratic excellence, but whoever is running the UKPO should be running the UKG
Process streamlining.
What they did was realise that manually handling *everything* is slow, expensive and prone to mistakes. The modern approach is to automate what you can, and devote your human resources to the edge cases. So a vast proportion of what the passport office does is to replacement passports. If you are sending a replacement to someone at the same address they have previously received a passport, little checking is needed. The process can be entirely automated. It's actually more secure to use software tools to look for patterns or anomalies in such work, than it is to get a bored human to read (well put the paper in front of their face) the application.
This meant they could speed up such applications massively. So people get their passports quicker. And they can devote more staff time to tricky problems and get them sorted out quicker.
Win win win. Classic OR productivity work.
Interesting, thankyou. And well done them
Why can't we just copy and paste this to every other govt dept?
Another example: getting your car tax used to involve an entire afternoon: finding all your relevant documents, taking them to the post office, filling in the form and getting your little disc. Now it takes ten minutes. Everything is joined up and smooth. Part of me misses the ceremony of it, but a much bigger part of me is glad never to have to the gnawing dread of whether my insurance and MOT certificate will be in the right folder.
Comments
Good luck.
In the internet age, the government could have daily, rolling average inflation number, for not much effort.
There will be massive curtailment in Scotland at the moment though. It's super windy and there is nowhere for it to go.
(The Triple Lock really ought to have been temporary, and the failure to define the "Mission Accomplished" trigger was yet another of the failures of the 2010 coalition that nobody seemed to notice at the time.)
He makes Chris Hope look like John Pilger.
Doesn’t look like a major curtailment situation to me, except perhaps in Scotland. Wind generation is near record output levels. See how much we’re still importing on interconnectors.
Hegseth: “The only thing prohibiting transit in [Hormuz] right now is Iran shooting at shipping.”
“It is open for transit should Iran not do that”
Double Oil Supplier windfall tax immediately and retail supplier.
Knock 10% off fuel duty tax immediately
Tax the crooks
Help the customer
On latest opinion polls the LDs have gone from the 3rd party to the 5th despite decades of trying harder.
The Tories will be back, but probably not until a dose of Reform has been through the system.
Or Trump had people with really low IQ working for him.
"Pete, if there are any flies on you, they're paying f+cking rent."
That will be fun.
As long as there are no ground troops deployed, the public won't really notice the war. The idea of a 'political collapse' is entirely propagated by the chronically online.
Given the combined Labour-Green and Tory-Reform vote shares are similar to traditional Labour only and Tory only shares, the pecking order is even less correlated with parliamentary seat potential than usual.
I knew that Hegseth was a drunken idiot. I had not appreciated just how much of a drunken idiot.
Used to be terrible and janky, now it is a smooth model of quite remarkable efficiency. They can take an application for a replacement passport and turn it around in a few days, and it is briskly delivered to your door. They literally call you up to discuss your needs (with nice Scottish accents) and ask if there is anything else required
Lord knows why this is a weird outpost of technocratic excellence, but whoever is running the UKPO should be running the UKG
Strictly speaking, we’re in the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period, not the ‘Anthropocene Era’.
I’ve give you my view. I stand by it. This is a govt that loves giving cash to the economically inactive or underutilised. They will not want to remove it.
"What is the Anthropocene and why does it matter?"
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-the-anthropocene.html?utm_source=google&utm_campaign=news&utm_medium=grants&gad_source=1
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/anthropocene/
"The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems."
I wouldn’t doubt it for one minute, and given the haphazard reaction from the Trumpdozer with his shooting off solutions it would indicate it but are there any proper sources for it other than partisan hacks ?
Since Salmond we have have governance which seems quite oblivious to the economic implications of their actions, who have no interest in, indeed seem positively suspicious of, growth, profits and ambition. Instead we have had ever more growth of the bureaucratic state with more and more regulation making the provision of services, accommodation and goods more and more marginal with inevitable consequences for investment.
Like the rest of the UK, but arguably even to a greater extent, we have an ever growing public sector demanding an ever increasing share of the cake for providing less and less. Scotland is much further from being economically viable than it was in 2014. And neither the SNP or their little Green helpers seem to give a damn.
High energy prices are a result of political choices.
Tax the crooks. Make the politicians pay.
"We planned for it. We recognise it. Because ultimately we want to do... sequentially in a way that makes the most sense... and ensure we're sending the right signals to the world."
What on earth is he talking about. Looks like he hit the bottle early today !
“ sequentially in a way….”
When i hear this kind of deflection of the complicated and involved I recall another quote also - "...some man with a trench-coat and a cavalry moustache and a beta minus mind."
Even on the most generous reading, Anthropocene is only used informally as an unofficial epoch, not an era.
Quietly changing the geological unit after the fact is correction by sleight of hand, not accuracy.
YMMV
We know from the WH spokesperson that the war was predicated on the advice of Kushner (and prompted by threatened Israeli action).
We know they didn't plan for an attempted blockade other than the Hormuz straits.
We have the nonsensical briefings of the Secretary of War, and his diatribes against woke rules of engagement.
The idea that a ground invasion of Iran has any realistic planning is complete nonsense.
Any large scale effort would require at least a year's preparation, and even then the US doesn't really have the assets to carry it out.
Special forces raids are always a possibility, but what is that going to achieve ?
(See alsoo one Jimmy Carter.)
The spoils will go to the bloc that is better motivated to be better organised.
What they did was realise that manually handling *everything* is slow, expensive and prone to mistakes. The modern approach is to automate what you can, and devote your human resources to the edge cases. So a vast proportion of what the passport office does is to replacement passports. If you are sending a replacement to someone at the same address they have previously received a passport, little checking is needed. The process can be entirely automated. It's actually more secure to use software tools to look for patterns or anomalies in such work, than it is to get a bored human to read (well put the paper in front of their face) the application.
This meant they could speed up such applications massively. So people get their passports quicker. And they can devote more staff time to tricky problems and get them sorted out quicker.
Win win win. Classic OR productivity work.
The world is going to be seriously transformed within five years, and largely unrecognisable within 10-15
The idea there will be a live debate about "rejoining the EU" in, say, 2040 is touchingly quaint. It's like horse breeders discussing long term plans for more urban stables. In 1890
Tax it either way.
Fine any retailer who puts pump price above set levels for diesel and petrol.
Same with heating oil
No government can dictate pricing, it can sure as hell fine the bollocks off spivs trying to screw customers
Obviously the wind energy forecast isn't perfect, but when you also include the total grid demand you can normally see when wind energy is being turned off because the grid can't currently use 100% wind energy.
Today ses to be a day when the wind forecast is less accurate, so you don't see the obvious patterns on some other occasions, of the wind production rising to reach the forecast as demand increases.
https://www.smartgriddashboard.com/roi/wind/?duration=day&compareData=demandactual
As we know, the polls are not as important as getting the votes in the boxes.
Pre COVID, Pharmacists in the UK didn't do vaccinations. Part of the roll out was training people up to do vaccinations.
*a bit of a con trick for Reform to pitch as anti-establishment, but some people seem to buy it.
If you wanted to provide a temporary fuel-price related uplift to UC on the basis of high electricity prices you could do something similar linked to the wholesale price of electricity.
But you're still writing a blank cheque that's going to have the effect of bidding up energy prices even higher.
I have a growing feeling that for whatever reason, Trump will not see out his term.
The main point is whether this 'offshoring' to yet more free/low cost labour should be restricted so that more productive ways of carrying out government functions should be found.
https://w3w.co/them.screaming.eagles
Why can't we just copy and paste this to every other govt dept?
The last I saw it was split very strongly on partisan lines. 90% Democrats opposed, 85% Republicans support, 65% Independents oppose.
If there was evidence of support among Republicans starting to fall that would be very significant.
This kind of thing requires smashing lots of rice bowls. Lots of little empires die. People who have done the same thing for 20 years find their job has gone. Much pain. Much fear. You often have to invest in the automation at the start and see a slow, gathering return over years.
Best not to do this, this side of the election, Minister.
If I may continue pompously, I didn’t deny the existence of the Anthropocene, only that it isn't an era. However, I grant that I wrote it clumsily enough that your reading was a fair one.
What would PB be without a pinch of pomposity and a smidge of ambiguity?
..not the ‘Anthropocene Era’.. is what was said. You're doing the whole sleight of hand nonsense again,
If you're just trying to be randomly and emptily insulting, go ahead; everyone's pretty well inured to it.
"I never thought it was going to go on forever... I don't feel particularly shocked, worried or upset.”
Emma Soames, the granddaughter of Winston Churchill, disagrees that it is “wokery” that the wartime Prime Minister will not feature on new £5 notes.
https://x.com/BBCNewsnight/status/2032183920263860492
As well as being expensive, nuclear is rather inflexible. Fine for world of nuclear base load and gas variable, but we're moving to a world of different intermittent supplies and storage.
He could do so again.
Reborn have weakened in recent months, but there's still the potential for a Reform landslide.
https://bsky.app/profile/mgerrydoyle.bsky.social/post/3mgwy5brlos2w
But “hardly anyone has built any in the last fifty years” is nonsense. There are about 420 reactors operating worldwide and roughly 70 under construction, mostly outside the West.
And “inflexible” needs a bit of care too. Large nuclear is not the first choice for balancing a renewables-heavy grid, but it is perfectly capable of load-following. The real question is whether it earns its keep against storage, interconnection, demand response and gas, not whether it can move at all.
So grit your teeth. We have 3 years more Dementia Don to put up with.