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.
Well he's probably correct that current dumb AI is sufficient to transform an awful lot of the world, without any further massive breakthroughs. The only thing really required for that is an order of magnitude (at least) reduction in cost overhead, which is highly likely given predictable semiconductor development, and a bit of time. At least one of the big players will probably run out of money before that happens, but that's normal.
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.
It seems to me that the small reactors that RR and others are planning have a lot of advantages. Amongst which is a similarity with what NASA mentioned the other day in that on these big projects with big gaps between them the experience drains away so you finish up almost starting from scratch every time. If you're building ten a year, every year with constant improvements its likely to be much better. (Although there is an issue that with so many one will one day go bang)
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.
Yes, basically the strangler pattern. Less glamorous than “digital transformation”, but rather more compatible with reality.
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.
It seems to me that the small reactors that RR and others are planning have a lot of advantages. Amongst which is a similarity with what NASA mentioned the other day in that on these big projects with big gaps between them the experience drains away so you finish up almost starting from scratch every time. If you're building ten a year, every year with constant improvements its likely to be much better. (Although there is an issue that with so many one will one day go bang)
Yes, that’s the SMR pitch in a nutshell: standardise, serialise, keep the workforce warm, and stop relearning nuclear construction from scratch. The problem is that the gains only arrive if you actually get a production line, not a boutique reactor with artisanal cost overruns.
And “one will go bang” is too glib. The real issue is whether modern designs, regulation and fleet learning reduce risk enough to make a multi-unit programme viable, not some fatalistic assumption that more reactors automatically means one explodes.
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.
It seems to me that the small reactors that RR and others are planning have a lot of advantages. Amongst which is a similarity with what NASA mentioned the other day in that on these big projects with big gaps between them the experience drains away so you finish up almost starting from scratch every time. If you're building ten a year, every year with constant improvements its likely to be much better..
That, of course, is what China is doing with conventional nuclear power stations. The west could be doing something quite similar, but the UK in particular takes an approach that's the diametric opposite - building new nuclear that has a completely unique set of requirements which result in a unique, and very expensive, and very, very slow to deliver bit of kit.
The SMR 'production line' thing is particularly convincing in the UK only because we're so bad at building large scale nuclear.
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.
To be fair, prices are always set at the margin. If demand is 100GW, then it is the marginal cost of that 100th GW that sets the price.
There is a partial exception to this. The UK has around 33GW of wind and 21GW of solar. Around 10GW of this is on fixed price contracts that work via Contracts for Difference. This means that the wind farm receives the market rate for the electricity they generate. And if the market price is above the fixed price, then they pay money back, and if it is below, they receive a top-up. These payments are passed directly to and from consumers via a levy on electricity bills. So when electricity prices spiked in 2022, CfD generators were paying back the difference, and that actually reduced electricity bills. (Yes: your bill was lower because of wind in 2022.)
My solution (if you want to go down the subsidy route) would be this: every family in Britain receives a tax free payment equivalent to the average increase in energy bills. If they want to spend it on their gas and electricity, they could, and they would be no worse off. But the incentive to reduce energy consumption would still exist; the price would be doing its information job.
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.
It seems to me that the small reactors that RR and others are planning have a lot of advantages. Amongst which is a similarity with what NASA mentioned the other day in that on these big projects with big gaps between them the experience drains away so you finish up almost starting from scratch every time. If you're building ten a year, every year with constant improvements its likely to be much better. (Although there is an issue that with so many one will one day go bang)
Yes, that’s the SMR pitch in a nutshell: standardise, serialise, keep the workforce warm, and stop relearning nuclear construction from scratch. The problem is that the gains only arrive if you actually get a production line, not a boutique reactor with artisanal cost overruns.
And “one will go bang” is too glib. The real issue is whether modern designs, regulation and fleet learning reduce risk enough to make a multi-unit programme viable, not some fatalistic assumption that more reactors automatically means one explodes.
Also, the designs are based on western naval nuclear reactors. Modified for higher output - as the Americans did for the reactors used for their carriers. Which is one reason that Westinghouse etc are a bit upset with Rolls Royce - because of sharing agreements, RR got to see the design for aircraft carrier reactors. Which were considered for the new carriers in the UK.
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.
It seems to me that the small reactors that RR and others are planning have a lot of advantages. Amongst which is a similarity with what NASA mentioned the other day in that on these big projects with big gaps between them the experience drains away so you finish up almost starting from scratch every time. If you're building ten a year, every year with constant improvements its likely to be much better. (Although there is an issue that with so many one will one day go bang)
Yes, that’s the SMR pitch in a nutshell: standardise, serialise, keep the workforce warm, and stop relearning nuclear construction from scratch. The problem is that the gains only arrive if you actually get a production line, not a boutique reactor with artisanal cost overruns.
And “one will go bang” is too glib. The real issue is whether modern designs, regulation and fleet learning reduce risk enough to make a multi-unit programme viable, not some fatalistic assumption that more reactors automatically means one explodes.
Yeah I didn't quite mean my bang point like that - it's just that if you have many things then its more likely that there will be faults. But of course a small reactor going wrong is a correspondingly smaller problem, and because of the more consistent and wider experience the actual total peril rate over a long period would likely be less too.
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.
Well he's probably correct that current dumb AI is sufficient to transform an awful lot of the world, without any further massive breakthroughs. The only thing really required for that is an order of magnitude (at least) reduction in cost overhead, which is highly likely given predictable semiconductor development, and a bit of time. At least one of the big players will probably run out of money before that happens, but that's normal.
It's not AI as such that is leading the modern automation charge. More like joined up thinking - it's not AI that turbo charged the Passport Office.
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..
The labour together proposal is also reducing benefits increase to 2% as well.
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.
It seems to me that the small reactors that RR and others are planning have a lot of advantages. Amongst which is a similarity with what NASA mentioned the other day in that on these big projects with big gaps between them the experience drains away so you finish up almost starting from scratch every time. If you're building ten a year, every year with constant improvements its likely to be much better..
That, of course, is what China is doing with conventional nuclear power stations. The west could be doing something quite similar, but the UK in particular takes an approach that's the diametric opposite - building new nuclear that has a completely unique set of requirements which result in a unique, and very expensive, and very, very slow to deliver bit of kit.
The SMR 'production line' thing is particularly convincing in the UK only because we're so bad at building large scale nuclear.
It's also because a single factory production line is much harder to get your requirements into, from the point of view of a generalist who is sticking their oar in to appear relevant. Though they do try - see the revelations of the attempts to kill SMR with bullshit requirements, recently.
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.
It seems to me that the small reactors that RR and others are planning have a lot of advantages. Amongst which is a similarity with what NASA mentioned the other day in that on these big projects with big gaps between them the experience drains away so you finish up almost starting from scratch every time. If you're building ten a year, every year with constant improvements its likely to be much better. (Although there is an issue that with so many one will one day go bang)
Yes, that’s the SMR pitch in a nutshell: standardise, serialise, keep the workforce warm, and stop relearning nuclear construction from scratch. The problem is that the gains only arrive if you actually get a production line, not a boutique reactor with artisanal cost overruns.
And “one will go bang” is too glib. The real issue is whether modern designs, regulation and fleet learning reduce risk enough to make a multi-unit programme viable, not some fatalistic assumption that more reactors automatically means one explodes.
Yeah I didn't quite mean my bang point like that - it's just that if you have many things then its more likely that there will be faults. But of course a small reactor going wrong is a correspondingly smaller problem, and because of the more consistent and wider experience the actual total peril rate over a long period would likely be less too.
It’s a bit like modern CI/CD. Pushing small, frequent, well-tested changes to main usually reduces risk compared with hoarding months of work and then attempting one heroic release. The number of deployments goes up, but the size of each change, the blast radius, and the difficulty of diagnosing problems all go down.
That is essentially the argument for serialised SMR build-out as against rare, bespoke mega-projects: repetition improves process, preserves skills, exposes faults earlier, and avoids having to relearn everything from scratch each time.
CI/CD works because of automation, test discipline, observability, rollback, and standardisation. Serial nuclear build only gets the same benefit if it also has the equivalent of those things: repeatable design, strong regulation, quality control, operational feedback, and a real production cadence
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?
Ah, good. I'm glad you've taken my slight against your testicles in good spirit. This is what makes PB special, we can insult each other's genitals and laugh about it later
BTW I do wish @viewcode well in his Trans Trilogy, the Ring Cycle of Misgendering, or whatever it is he (they?) is planning, but it is not surprising that some of us view a "20,000 word article" on this subject with less-than-eager anticipation
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
Of course predictions are laughable. So what? The clue is in the title: Political Betting. However, your PB prediction that the world is 'largely unrecognisable' within 10-15 years is itself, though vague nonetheless a prediction and may be laughably wrong. That is, if it is precise enough to count as a prediction, with actual criteria for verification or falsification.
Meanwhile, speaking of laughable predictions, L'homme Presse e/w very long shot for the Gold Cup. It at least has a falsification criterion.
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.
Yes but given the cost of nuclear power is almost entirely capital cost (plus decommissioning, which isn't properly accounted for), new-build is what we're talking about. It's sensible to keep existing plants going for as long as possible.
Because nuclear in practice can't be turned off, it has the effect of making other sources in the energy mix even more "intermittent", requiring greater redundancy and increasing curtailment, so indirectly making other energy sources more expensive. That wouldn't be a problem if nuclear was cheap, but it's one of the most expensive sources.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
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.
The LibDems will likely be fairly stable until such time as we have a hung psrliament and they have to make a choice. At which point their support falls off a cliff.
The problems with small modular nucelar reactors are:
1. We have no idea what the levelised cost of energy is. Capital cost is going to be substantial, especially for the first ones. The hope is that by making them standard, we will over time get really good at making them cheaply. But how long will it take to reach this point? It's entirely possible that by that time, solar + batteries (yes, even in the UK) could be much cheaper.
2. Uptime is a constant problem with nuclear power plants. Some plants have worse uptime rates than offshore wind. If unscheduled maintenance can be avoided (a big if), then the modular design allows rolling maintenance and refuelling schedules that avoid many of the issues. At the same time though, if a design flaw is identified at some point, that could be really painful.
3. Nuclear power plants -even small modular ones- are mostly designed to run constantly. Which would have been amazing in the old world, before intermittant power. But it's a bit of a pain if there's lots of wind and solar, because when the sun is shining and the the wind is blowingm then it's entirely possible that th demand for nuclear/gas is zero. Now -of course- if there's lots of grid connected battery storage, this is less of a problem. But if there isn't, then these aren't going to be built without a Hinkley Point C type fixed price contract.
4. Small nuclear reactors still produce waste that needs to be dealt with, and will need to be eventually decomissioned. This isn't the end of the world, of course, but it does mean that you have meaningful tail costs that need to be properly account for.
---
My gut is that small modular reactors would have been a great idea if we'd started on them 20 years ago. But now they're probably still at least half a decade away from reality (and probably more like ten years), by which point there's going to be an awful lot more solar and wind generation in the mix.
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?
Ah, good. I'm glad you've taken my slight against your testicles in good spirit. This is what makes PB special, we can insult each other's genitals and laugh about it later
BTW I do wish @viewcode well in his Trans Trilogy, the Ring Cycle of Misgendering, or whatever it is he (they?) is planning, but it is not surprising that some of us view a "20,000 word article" on this subject with less-than-eager anticipation
Quite. PB remains one of the few places where a man’s testicles can be traduced at 1pm and his argument fairly assessed by 2pm.
On the article, I think “20,000 words” is less an invitation than a warning label, whatever the topic.
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.
Yes but given the cost of nuclear power is almost entirely capital cost (plus decommissioning, which isn't properly accounted for), new-build is what we're talking about. It's sensible to keep existing plants going for as long as possible.
Because nuclear in practice can't be turned off, it has the effect of making other sources in the energy mix even more "intermittent", requiring greater redundancy and increasing curtailment, so indirectly making other energy sources more expensive. That wouldn't be a problem if nuclear was cheap, but it's one of the most expensive sources.
That's not really true: nuclear plants have high operating and maintenance costs, but low fuel costs.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
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?
Ah, good. I'm glad you've taken my slight against your testicles in good spirit. This is what makes PB special, we can insult each other's genitals and laugh about it later
BTW I do wish @viewcode well in his Trans Trilogy, the Ring Cycle of Misgendering, or whatever it is he (they?) is planning, but it is not surprising that some of us view a "20,000 word article" on this subject with less-than-eager anticipation
I sat through five hours of Tristan and Isolde in Edinburgh on Wednesday, and while it was great, just occasionally you felt that a five minute executive summary and three crisp bullet point conclusions wouldn't come amiss.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
This is the worst time to be led by populist demagogues like Starmer, Reeves and Miliband.
The problems with small modular nucelar reactors are:
1. We have no idea what the levelised cost of energy is. Capital cost is going to be substantial, especially for the first ones. The hope is that by making them standard, we will over time get really good at making them cheaply. But how long will it take to reach this point? It's entirely possible that by that time, solar + batteries (yes, even in the UK) could be much cheaper.
2. Uptime is a constant problem with nuclear power plants. Some plants have worse uptime rates than offshore wind. If unscheduled maintenance can be avoided (a big if), then the modular design allows rolling maintenance and refuelling schedules that avoid many of the issues. At the same time though, if a design flaw is identified at some point, that could be really painful.
3. Nuclear power plants -even small modular ones- are mostly designed to run constantly. Which would have been amazing in the old world, before intermittant power. But it's a bit of a pain if there's lots of wind and solar, because when the sun is shining and the the wind is blowingm then it's entirely possible that th demand for nuclear/gas is zero. Now -of course- if there's lots of grid connected battery storage, this is less of a problem. But if there isn't, then these aren't going to be built without a Hinkley Point C type fixed price contract.
4. Small nuclear reactors still produce waste that needs to be dealt with, and will need to be eventually decomissioned. This isn't the end of the world, of course, but it does mean that you have meaningful tail costs that need to be properly account for.
---
My gut is that small modular reactors would have been a great idea if we'd started on them 20 years ago. But now they're probably still at least half a decade away from reality (and probably more like ten years), by which point there's going to be an awful lot more solar and wind generation in the mix.
That’s a fair summary. SMRs are basically a bet that repeatable production can do for nuclear what repetition does for every other engineered system: keep skills warm, find faults earlier and stop relearning the trade from scratch every 15 years.
The snag is that they only become attractive if you get a real production run before wind, solar and storage get there first. Otherwise you just end up with a very expensive boutique reactor and a fresh set of PowerPoint promises.
I’d also be a bit careful with “nuclear can’t be turned off”. It can load-follow; the problem is less physics than economics. In a renewables-heavy system, the question is whether nuclear earns its keep once you price in curtailment, storage, interconnection and flexible demand.
SMRs may be a good idea in principle, but principles do not generate electricity. If the cost curve only improves after a decade of serial build, they may find that renewables plus storage have already eaten their lunch.
Which is all a bit of a longwinded (pompous, Leon?) way of saying I agree with you.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
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.
Well he's probably correct that current dumb AI is sufficient to transform an awful lot of the world, without any further massive breakthroughs. The only thing really required for that is an order of magnitude (at least) reduction in cost overhead, which is highly likely given predictable semiconductor development, and a bit of time. At least one of the big players will probably run out of money before that happens, but that's normal.
It's not AI as such that is leading the modern automation charge. More like joined up thinking - it's not AI that turbo charged the Passport Office.
+1 it’s spending some money on identifying processes and automating as much of them as possible.
In the case of passport renewals the only manual bit is a human verification of the old passport - user then presses a button and the new passport is sent to be printed
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.
Yes but given the cost of nuclear power is almost entirely capital cost (plus decommissioning, which isn't properly accounted for), new-build is what we're talking about. It's sensible to keep existing plants going for as long as possible.
Because nuclear in practice can't be turned off, it has the effect of making other sources in the energy mix even more "intermittent", requiring greater redundancy and increasing curtailment, so indirectly making other energy sources more expensive. That wouldn't be a problem if nuclear was cheap, but it's one of the most expensive sources.
That's not really true: nuclear plants have high operating and maintenance costs, but low fuel costs.
It's seven years out of date (and solar costs have collapsed since then), but most of it remains spot on.
Which only reinforces my point about nuclear being an economically uncompetitive energy source.
In nuclear's favour you can scale those capital and maintenance costs across a very large energy generation by making the plant bigger. Which argues against SMR, although I think people will point to serial production to mitigate that.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
The problems with small modular nucelar reactors are:
1. We have no idea what the levelised cost of energy is. Capital cost is going to be substantial, especially for the first ones. The hope is that by making them standard, we will over time get really good at making them cheaply. But how long will it take to reach this point? It's entirely possible that by that time, solar + batteries (yes, even in the UK) could be much cheaper.
2. Uptime is a constant problem with nuclear power plants. Some plants have worse uptime rates than offshore wind. If unscheduled maintenance can be avoided (a big if), then the modular design allows rolling maintenance and refuelling schedules that avoid many of the issues. At the same time though, if a design flaw is identified at some point, that could be really painful.
3. Nuclear power plants -even small modular ones- are mostly designed to run constantly. Which would have been amazing in the old world, before intermittant power. But it's a bit of a pain if there's lots of wind and solar, because when the sun is shining and the the wind is blowingm then it's entirely possible that th demand for nuclear/gas is zero. Now -of course- if there's lots of grid connected battery storage, this is less of a problem. But if there isn't, then these aren't going to be built without a Hinkley Point C type fixed price contract.
4. Small nuclear reactors still produce waste that needs to be dealt with, and will need to be eventually decomissioned. This isn't the end of the world, of course, but it does mean that you have meaningful tail costs that need to be properly account for.
---
My gut is that small modular reactors would have been a great idea if we'd started on them 20 years ago. But now they're probably still at least half a decade away from reality (and probably more like ten years), by which point there's going to be an awful lot more solar and wind generation in the mix.
That’s a fair summary. SMRs are basically a bet that repeatable production can do for nuclear what repetition does for every other engineered system: keep skills warm, find faults earlier and stop relearning the trade from scratch every 15 years.
The snag is that they only become attractive if you get a real production run before wind, solar and storage get there first. Otherwise you just end up with a very expensive boutique reactor and a fresh set of PowerPoint promises.
I’d also be a bit careful with “nuclear can’t be turned off”. It can load-follow; the problem is less physics than economics. In a renewables-heavy system, the question is whether nuclear earns its keep once you price in curtailment, storage, interconnection and flexible demand.
SMRs may be a good idea in principle, but principles do not generate electricity. If the cost curve only improves after a decade of serial build, they may find that renewables plus storage have already eaten their lunch.
Which is all a bit of a longwinded (pompous, Leon?) way of saying I agree with you.
Nuclear can load follow in the same way that coal can load follow.
But here's the thing: thermal cycles (the expansion and contraction of metal as it heats and cools) introduces fatigue and reduces lifespan. The length of time your SMR will operate for is mostly going to be measured in terms of those cycles; if it's being cycled twice (or three times) a day, then its going to last a fraction of the time it would manage if it was being cycled once every two months.
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?
Ah, good. I'm glad you've taken my slight against your testicles in good spirit. This is what makes PB special, we can insult each other's genitals and laugh about it later
BTW I do wish @viewcode well in his Trans Trilogy, the Ring Cycle of Misgendering, or whatever it is he (they?) is planning, but it is not surprising that some of us view a "20,000 word article" on this subject with less-than-eager anticipation
I sat through five hours of Tristan and Isolde in Edinburgh on Wednesday, and while it was great, just occasionally you felt that a five minute executive summary and three crisp bullet point conclusions wouldn't come amiss.
"Wagner has his moments, but he also has his half hours"
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
People who abuse retail staff are barely a step up from the shit posters on Twatter who want to burn migrant hotels.
Back in the day, Greenpeace lying about the Brent Spar inspired one moron to carry out a bomb attack on a petrol station in Germany.
Not long after the Greenpeace ship rocked up at a harbour where Shell was the sole marine fuelling option. Their bunkers were basically empty.
Some advocated for not selling them oil. I suggested selling to them with 4,000% special one-off tariff.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Wow! What inflammatory language? By whom? When? Why?
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
People who abuse retail staff are barely a step up from the shit posters on Twatter who want to burn migrant hotels.
Back in the day, Greenpeace lying about the Brent Spar inspired one moron to carry out a bomb attack on a petrol station in Germany.
Not long after the Greenpeace ship rocked up at a harbour where Shell was the sole marine fuelling option. Their bunkers were basically empty.
Some advocated for not selling them oil. I suggested selling to them with 4,000% special one-off tariff.
The problems with small modular nucelar reactors are:
1. We have no idea what the levelised cost of energy is. Capital cost is going to be substantial, especially for the first ones. The hope is that by making them standard, we will over time get really good at making them cheaply. But how long will it take to reach this point? It's entirely possible that by that time, solar + batteries (yes, even in the UK) could be much cheaper.
2. Uptime is a constant problem with nuclear power plants. Some plants have worse uptime rates than offshore wind. If unscheduled maintenance can be avoided (a big if), then the modular design allows rolling maintenance and refuelling schedules that avoid many of the issues. At the same time though, if a design flaw is identified at some point, that could be really painful.
3. Nuclear power plants -even small modular ones- are mostly designed to run constantly. Which would have been amazing in the old world, before intermittant power. But it's a bit of a pain if there's lots of wind and solar, because when the sun is shining and the the wind is blowingm then it's entirely possible that th demand for nuclear/gas is zero. Now -of course- if there's lots of grid connected battery storage, this is less of a problem. But if there isn't, then these aren't going to be built without a Hinkley Point C type fixed price contract.
4. Small nuclear reactors still produce waste that needs to be dealt with, and will need to be eventually decomissioned. This isn't the end of the world, of course, but it does mean that you have meaningful tail costs that need to be properly account for.
---
My gut is that small modular reactors would have been a great idea if we'd started on them 20 years ago. But now they're probably still at least half a decade away from reality (and probably more like ten years), by which point there's going to be an awful lot more solar and wind generation in the mix.
That’s a fair summary. SMRs are basically a bet that repeatable production can do for nuclear what repetition does for every other engineered system: keep skills warm, find faults earlier and stop relearning the trade from scratch every 15 years.
The snag is that they only become attractive if you get a real production run before wind, solar and storage get there first. Otherwise you just end up with a very expensive boutique reactor and a fresh set of PowerPoint promises.
I’d also be a bit careful with “nuclear can’t be turned off”. It can load-follow; the problem is less physics than economics. In a renewables-heavy system, the question is whether nuclear earns its keep once you price in curtailment, storage, interconnection and flexible demand.
SMRs may be a good idea in principle, but principles do not generate electricity. If the cost curve only improves after a decade of serial build, they may find that renewables plus storage have already eaten their lunch.
Which is all a bit of a longwinded (pompous, Leon?) way of saying I agree with you.
Nuclear can load follow in the same way that coal can load follow.
But here's the thing: thermal cycles (the expansion and contraction of metal as it heats and cools) introduces fatigue and reduces lifespan. The length of time your SMR will operate for is mostly going to be measured in terms of those cycles; if it's being cycled twice (or three times) a day, then its going to last a fraction of the time it would manage if it was being cycled once every two months.
The lifespan of naval nuclear reactors suggest that it's not as hard and fast as that. Among other things, high enriched fuel reactors can change their output rapidly and without so much thermal shock problems. Having a core you could fit in a large bucket* helps with that.
*You may find lifting the bucket a bit of a challenge.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
People who abuse retail staff are barely a step up from the shit posters on Twatter who want to burn migrant hotels.
Back in the day, Greenpeace lying about the Brent Spar inspired one moron to carry out a bomb attack on a petrol station in Germany.
Not long after the Greenpeace ship rocked up at a harbour where Shell was the sole marine fuelling option. Their bunkers were basically empty.
Some advocated for not selling them oil. I suggested selling to them with 4,000% special one-off tariff.
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?
Ah, good. I'm glad you've taken my slight against your testicles in good spirit. This is what makes PB special, we can insult each other's genitals and laugh about it later
BTW I do wish @viewcode well in his Trans Trilogy, the Ring Cycle of Misgendering, or whatever it is he (they?) is planning, but it is not surprising that some of us view a "20,000 word article" on this subject with less-than-eager anticipation
I sat through five hours of Tristan and Isolde in Edinburgh on Wednesday, and while it was great, just occasionally you felt that a five minute executive summary and three crisp bullet point conclusions wouldn't come amiss.
A friends of ours, who died three years ago, had a mission in life to convert everyone to a love of Wagner. In his memory we bought a DVD of Tristan and Isolde. We watched the 1st Act, which was looong. My husband and I decided to leave it a couple of years before we watched the 2nd Act but haven't yet found the will to go back.
Are there any Wagner enthusiasts who can recommend one of his works which is more accessible (and shorter)?
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?
Ah, good. I'm glad you've taken my slight against your testicles in good spirit. This is what makes PB special, we can insult each other's genitals and laugh about it later
BTW I do wish @viewcode well in his Trans Trilogy, the Ring Cycle of Misgendering, or whatever it is he (they?) is planning, but it is not surprising that some of us view a "20,000 word article" on this subject with less-than-eager anticipation
I sat through five hours of Tristan and Isolde in Edinburgh on Wednesday, and while it was great, just occasionally you felt that a five minute executive summary and three crisp bullet point conclusions wouldn't come amiss.
"Wagner has his moments, but he also has his half hours"
Tantric music, innit? Failing to resolve a chord until 5 hours have passed.
The problems with small modular nucelar reactors are:
1. We have no idea what the levelised cost of energy is. Capital cost is going to be substantial, especially for the first ones. The hope is that by making them standard, we will over time get really good at making them cheaply. But how long will it take to reach this point? It's entirely possible that by that time, solar + batteries (yes, even in the UK) could be much cheaper.
2. Uptime is a constant problem with nuclear power plants. Some plants have worse uptime rates than offshore wind. If unscheduled maintenance can be avoided (a big if), then the modular design allows rolling maintenance and refuelling schedules that avoid many of the issues. At the same time though, if a design flaw is identified at some point, that could be really painful.
3. Nuclear power plants -even small modular ones- are mostly designed to run constantly. Which would have been amazing in the old world, before intermittant power. But it's a bit of a pain if there's lots of wind and solar, because when the sun is shining and the the wind is blowingm then it's entirely possible that th demand for nuclear/gas is zero. Now -of course- if there's lots of grid connected battery storage, this is less of a problem. But if there isn't, then these aren't going to be built without a Hinkley Point C type fixed price contract.
4. Small nuclear reactors still produce waste that needs to be dealt with, and will need to be eventually decomissioned. This isn't the end of the world, of course, but it does mean that you have meaningful tail costs that need to be properly account for.
---
My gut is that small modular reactors would have been a great idea if we'd started on them 20 years ago. But now they're probably still at least half a decade away from reality (and probably more like ten years), by which point there's going to be an awful lot more solar and wind generation in the mix.
5 They're not that "small", a friend was given a PR presentation by a Sizewell bod, SMRs came up in the Q and A, "I think people might be a bit upset when they find out they're the same size as a Magnox"
On 4, Bradwell was the lead Magnox for decommissioning, it's now in the 100 year "care and maintenance" phase, this means they've removed the easy, uncontaminated parts, wrapped it in a bigger box and are leaving it for 100 years. It last produced electricity in 2002. So since it last produced anything, that is 23 years of decommissioning team costs, now another 100 years of a smaller monitoring team costs, then the expensive decommissioning begins. Will the value of the electricity it produced even register in the final accounts? They haven't even put solar panels on the "care and maintenance" boxes
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.
To be fair, prices are always set at the margin. If demand is 100GW, then it is the marginal cost of that 100th GW that sets the price.
There is a partial exception to this. The UK has around 33GW of wind and 21GW of solar. Around 10GW of this is on fixed price contracts that work via Contracts for Difference. This means that the wind farm receives the market rate for the electricity they generate. And if the market price is above the fixed price, then they pay money back, and if it is below, they receive a top-up. These payments are passed directly to and from consumers via a levy on electricity bills. So when electricity prices spiked in 2022, CfD generators were paying back the difference, and that actually reduced electricity bills. (Yes: your bill was lower because of wind in 2022.)
My solution (if you want to go down the subsidy route) would be this: every family in Britain receives a tax free payment equivalent to the average increase in energy bills. If they want to spend it on their gas and electricity, they could, and they would be no worse off. But the incentive to reduce energy consumption would still exist; the price would be doing its information job.
I'd missed that so little current wind generation is CfD. That's going to increase quickly in the next few years but for now only about 1/3rd.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Wow! What inflammatory language? By whom? When? Why?
They’ve gone straight in with two feet against the fuel industry:
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?
Ah, good. I'm glad you've taken my slight against your testicles in good spirit. This is what makes PB special, we can insult each other's genitals and laugh about it later
BTW I do wish @viewcode well in his Trans Trilogy, the Ring Cycle of Misgendering, or whatever it is he (they?) is planning, but it is not surprising that some of us view a "20,000 word article" on this subject with less-than-eager anticipation
I sat through five hours of Tristan and Isolde in Edinburgh on Wednesday, and while it was great, just occasionally you felt that a five minute executive summary and three crisp bullet point conclusions wouldn't come amiss.
A friends of ours, who died three years ago, had a mission in life to convert everyone to a love of Wagner. In his memory we bought a DVD of Tristan and Isolde. We watched the 1st Act, which was looong. My husband and I decided to leave it a couple of years before we watched the 2nd Act but haven't yet found the will to go back.
Are there any Wagner enthusiasts who can recommend one of his works which is more accessible (and shorter)?
There are orchestral pieces, such as Siegfried Idyll, parts of which found their way into the Ring.
But not really. Wagner-light is missing the point. Ring Cycle or bust.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
People who abuse retail staff are barely a step up from the shit posters on Twatter who want to burn migrant hotels.
Back in the day, Greenpeace lying about the Brent Spar inspired one moron to carry out a bomb attack on a petrol station in Germany.
Not long after the Greenpeace ship rocked up at a harbour where Shell was the sole marine fuelling option. Their bunkers were basically empty.
Some advocated for not selling them oil. I suggested selling to them with 4,000% special one-off tariff.
I agree but where is the evidence.
The fact is the retailers hide behind the staff
It would appear that the retail body did not wish to be questioned by the media.
The media that start every news bulletin with scare stories about the petrol prices and slag off the government for doing nothing.
Reeves has got them off the golf course on a Friday afternoon
She wants the media there to see and report that she means business?
The retailers bottle it...
Hopefully she will give them a bollocking and a firm warning.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Wow! What inflammatory language? By whom? When? Why?
They’ve gone straight in with two feet against the fuel industry:
The problems with small modular nucelar reactors are:
1. We have no idea what the levelised cost of energy is. Capital cost is going to be substantial, especially for the first ones. The hope is that by making them standard, we will over time get really good at making them cheaply. But how long will it take to reach this point? It's entirely possible that by that time, solar + batteries (yes, even in the UK) could be much cheaper.
2. Uptime is a constant problem with nuclear power plants. Some plants have worse uptime rates than offshore wind. If unscheduled maintenance can be avoided (a big if), then the modular design allows rolling maintenance and refuelling schedules that avoid many of the issues. At the same time though, if a design flaw is identified at some point, that could be really painful.
3. Nuclear power plants -even small modular ones- are mostly designed to run constantly. Which would have been amazing in the old world, before intermittant power. But it's a bit of a pain if there's lots of wind and solar, because when the sun is shining and the the wind is blowingm then it's entirely possible that th demand for nuclear/gas is zero. Now -of course- if there's lots of grid connected battery storage, this is less of a problem. But if there isn't, then these aren't going to be built without a Hinkley Point C type fixed price contract.
4. Small nuclear reactors still produce waste that needs to be dealt with, and will need to be eventually decomissioned. This isn't the end of the world, of course, but it does mean that you have meaningful tail costs that need to be properly account for.
---
My gut is that small modular reactors would have been a great idea if we'd started on them 20 years ago. But now they're probably still at least half a decade away from reality (and probably more like ten years), by which point there's going to be an awful lot more solar and wind generation in the mix.
5 They're not that "small", a friend was given a PR presentation by a Sizewell bod, SMRs came up in the Q and A, "I think people might be a bit upset when they find out they're the same size as a Magnox"
On 4, Bradwell was the lead Magnox for decommissioning, it's now in the 100 year "care and maintenance" phase, this means they've removed the easy, uncontaminated parts, wrapped it in a bigger box and are leaving it for 100 years. It last produced electricity in 2002. So since it last produced anything, that is 23 years of decommissioning team costs, now another 100 years of a smaller monitoring team costs, then the expensive decommissioning begins. Will the value of the electricity it produced even register in the final accounts? They haven't even put solar panels on the "care and maintenance" boxes
The actual nuclear bit is small - the rest of it isn't. Why contain to the expensive and inefficient layouts to fit in a ship, when you have space?
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.
The LibDems will likely be fairly stable until such time as we have a hung psrliament and they have to make a choice. At which point their support falls off a cliff.
The change is the Conservatives are now in the same position. We know there's broad support out there but on the basis of "if only they could win". That's essentially where the Alliance was in the mid-80s - they regularly polled mid-40s IF the question said they had a chance of winning.
In Greenwich, at the 1987 by-election, the Conservative vote collapsed once it became clear only the Alliance could beat Labour but the Labour vote also fell as some Labour voters recognised their anti-Conservative vote wasn't necessary and they could vote against Labour without any fear of letting the Conservatives in.
Outside of areas of strength, surrounded by oceans of weakness, the Conservatives are nowhere in the face of Reform.
I'm told she will say nothing and I believe it but the big questions for Badenoch as the election approaches are a) the Conservative relationship with Reform in the event of no party winning a majority. Would the Conservatives offer confidence & supply (or more) to a minority Reform Government and b) if a minority Labour Government (with LD and Green confidence & supply and I wouldn't assume either) has more seats but the Conservatives (with Reform) could vote down a King's Speech and trigger a second election, would they do that or would they abstain?
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
I assume from that comment that you are one of those wankers who abuse minimum wage staff because you don't like what their corporate bosses are doing.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Wow! What inflammatory language? By whom? When? Why?
They’ve gone straight in with two feet against the fuel industry:
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?
Ah, good. I'm glad you've taken my slight against your testicles in good spirit. This is what makes PB special, we can insult each other's genitals and laugh about it later
BTW I do wish @viewcode well in his Trans Trilogy, the Ring Cycle of Misgendering, or whatever it is he (they?) is planning, but it is not surprising that some of us view a "20,000 word article" on this subject with less-than-eager anticipation
I sat through five hours of Tristan and Isolde in Edinburgh on Wednesday, and while it was great, just occasionally you felt that a five minute executive summary and three crisp bullet point conclusions wouldn't come amiss.
A friends of ours, who died three years ago, had a mission in life to convert everyone to a love of Wagner. In his memory we bought a DVD of Tristan and Isolde. We watched the 1st Act, which was looong. My husband and I decided to leave it a couple of years before we watched the 2nd Act but haven't yet found the will to go back.
Are there any Wagner enthusiasts who can recommend one of his works which is more accessible (and shorter)?
Flying Dutchman is somewhat more accessible.
Should say you kind of have to go for the full experience. Wagner really suffers from a lack of editing. A lot of the Ring is for example Wotan moaning about everyone else, but if you like Opera no-one else reaches the heights Wagner does.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
People who abuse retail staff are barely a step up from the shit posters on Twatter who want to burn migrant hotels.
Back in the day, Greenpeace lying about the Brent Spar inspired one moron to carry out a bomb attack on a petrol station in Germany.
Not long after the Greenpeace ship rocked up at a harbour where Shell was the sole marine fuelling option. Their bunkers were basically empty.
Some advocated for not selling them oil. I suggested selling to them with 4,000% special one-off tariff.
I agree but where is the evidence.
The fact is the retailers hide behind the staff
It would appear that the retail body did not wish to be questioned by the media.
The media that start every news bulletin with scare stories about the petrol prices and slag off the government for doing nothing.
Reeves has got them off the golf course on a Friday afternoon
She wants the media there to see and report that she means business?
The retailers bottle it...
Hopefully she will give them a bollocking and a firm warning.
You seem incapable of understanding that retail staff will be abused if the government generate hostility to petrol retailers
A sensible government would meet the industry to discuss solutions
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?
Ah, good. I'm glad you've taken my slight against your testicles in good spirit. This is what makes PB special, we can insult each other's genitals and laugh about it later
BTW I do wish @viewcode well in his Trans Trilogy, the Ring Cycle of Misgendering, or whatever it is he (they?) is planning, but it is not surprising that some of us view a "20,000 word article" on this subject with less-than-eager anticipation
I sat through five hours of Tristan and Isolde in Edinburgh on Wednesday, and while it was great, just occasionally you felt that a five minute executive summary and three crisp bullet point conclusions wouldn't come amiss.
A friends of ours, who died three years ago, had a mission in life to convert everyone to a love of Wagner. In his memory we bought a DVD of Tristan and Isolde. We watched the 1st Act, which was looong. My husband and I decided to leave it a couple of years before we watched the 2nd Act but haven't yet found the will to go back.
Are there any Wagner enthusiasts who can recommend one of his works which is more accessible (and shorter)?
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
People who abuse retail staff are barely a step up from the shit posters on Twatter who want to burn migrant hotels.
Back in the day, Greenpeace lying about the Brent Spar inspired one moron to carry out a bomb attack on a petrol station in Germany.
Not long after the Greenpeace ship rocked up at a harbour where Shell was the sole marine fuelling option. Their bunkers were basically empty.
Some advocated for not selling them oil. I suggested selling to them with 4,000% special one-off tariff.
Your life story features many such waspish interventions, it seems to me.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
You happy with retail staff being abused ?
No as I've daid
Are you always happy to take any view to attack the government?
The retailers will raise prices and screw us all
The retailers will raise the prices even if governments reduce tax
The public suffer.
You are a complete hypocrite. Yelling at Government for doing nothing, shouting minute Tories say they might do something, yet because it's Labour moan moan moan.
Your precious Kemi wants Labour to call off a tax rise that doesn't come in for 24 weeks
What utter bullcrap.
Labour acting now at speed you moan
Same old Tories Same old Lies
Probably worried Retailers will cut funding to Tory Party.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
I assume from that comment that you are one of those wankers who abuse minimum wage staff because you don't like what their corporate bosses are doing.
As the news reporter said language matters as this is an emotional subject, and all those ordinary staff behind the counters do not deserve abuse, they are just doing their job
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
The petrol currently in the pumps and in storage wasn't bought at $100 per barrel but the petrol at my local Tesco's has gone up 12p since all this began.
The alternative is to face down the Government and the public when the petrol which has been purchased on the futures market at $100 a barrel comes to the filling stations and the price shoots up and everyone gets silly.
About half (a bit more with VAT) of the cost of every litre of fuel goes to the Treasury. That adds up to £25 billion or about 2% of all the money the Government gets in so it's not insignificant.
It's the old argument - if you want to cut taxes, fine, I get that, but how do you make up the shortfall or in other words, from where are the £25 billion in cuts going to come and if you answer, "welfare", let's be more specific, whose benefits will be cut and by how much?
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
You happy with retail staff being abused ?
No as I've daid
Are you always happy to take any view to attack the government?
The retailers will raise prices and screw us all
The retailers will raise the prices even if governments reduce tax
The public suffer.
You are a complete hypocrite. Yelling at Government for doing nothing, shouting minute Tories say they might do something, yet because it's Labour moan moan moan.
Your precious Kemi wants Labour to call off a tax rise that doesn't come in for 24 weeks
What utter bullcrap.
Labour acting now at speed you moan
Same old Tories Same old Lies
Probably worried Retailers will cut funding to Tory Party.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
People who abuse retail staff are barely a step up from the shit posters on Twatter who want to burn migrant hotels.
Back in the day, Greenpeace lying about the Brent Spar inspired one moron to carry out a bomb attack on a petrol station in Germany.
Not long after the Greenpeace ship rocked up at a harbour where Shell was the sole marine fuelling option. Their bunkers were basically empty.
Some advocated for not selling them oil. I suggested selling to them with 4,000% special one-off tariff.
Your life story features many such waspish interventions, it seems to me.
Well, we had the actual staff in Germany being worried about it. So I thought sarcasm was the obviously play.
Vercotti: Doug (takes a drink) Well, I was terrified. Everyone was terrified of Doug. I've seen grown men pull their own heads off rather than see Doug. Even Dinsdale was frightened of Doug.
2nd Interviewer: What did he do?
Vercotti: He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
The petrol currently in the pumps and in storage wasn't bought at $100 per barrel but the petrol at my local Tesco's has gone up 12p since all this began.
The alternative is to face down the Government and the public when the petrol which has been purchased on the futures market at $100 a barrel comes to the filling stations and the price shoots up and everyone gets silly.
About half (a bit more with VAT) of the cost of every litre of fuel goes to the Treasury. That adds up to £25 billion or about 2% of all the money the Government gets in so it's not insignificant.
It's the old argument - if you want to cut taxes, fine, I get that, but how do you make up the shortfall or in other words, from where are the £25 billion in cuts going to come and if you answer, "welfare", let's be more specific, whose benefits will be cut and by how much?
If a petrol station is making 12p a litre on the fuel it sells and the cost to replace that fuel goes up by more than 12p (assuming they have absolutely no other overheads at all whch of course they do) how do they pay for replacing it?
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
People who abuse retail staff are barely a step up from the shit posters on Twatter who want to burn migrant hotels.
Back in the day, Greenpeace lying about the Brent Spar inspired one moron to carry out a bomb attack on a petrol station in Germany.
Not long after the Greenpeace ship rocked up at a harbour where Shell was the sole marine fuelling option. Their bunkers were basically empty.
Some advocated for not selling them oil. I suggested selling to them with 4,000% special one-off tariff.
I agree but where is the evidence.
The fact is the retailers hide behind the staff
It would appear that the retail body did not wish to be questioned by the media.
The media that start every news bulletin with scare stories about the petrol prices and slag off the government for doing nothing.
Reeves has got them off the golf course on a Friday afternoon
She wants the media there to see and report that she means business?
The retailers bottle it...
Hopefully she will give them a bollocking and a firm warning.
You seem incapable of understanding that retail staff will be abused if the government generate hostility to petrol retailers
A sensible government would meet the industry to discuss solutions
It's the PRA that have withdrawn from the meeting with the Government.
What started the hostility to staff? The alleged price-gouging was reported before the Government asked the retailers not to price gouge. It's the PRA members taking advantage who've put their staff at risk of abuse.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
So would you sell a property you owned at the market rate if the value had doubled since you bought it or would you sell it with a small mark up, as you don’t want to screw purchasers.
Politicians cause these problems and blames businesses.
Demand has stayed the same. Supply,has decreased. If only we had other sources of supply to replace the loss.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
You happy with retail staff being abused ?
No as I've daid
Are you always happy to take any view to attack the government?
The retailers will raise prices and screw us all
The retailers will raise the prices even if governments reduce tax
The public suffer.
You are a complete hypocrite. Yelling at Government for doing nothing, shouting minute Tories say they might do something, yet because it's Labour moan moan moan.
Your precious Kemi wants Labour to call off a tax rise that doesn't come in for 24 weeks
What utter bullcrap.
Labour acting now at speed you moan
Same old Tories Same old Lies
Probably worried Retailers will cut funding to Tory Party.
Same old Tories Same old Lies
You are resorting to your usual hysteria
Unlike you I provide sources for breaking news which in this case was Sky news not me
Your attempts to close down any negative story about the government through unfounded accusations and whataboutery does you no credit
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
The petrol currently in the pumps and in storage wasn't bought at $100 per barrel but the petrol at my local Tesco's has gone up 12p since all this began.
The alternative is to face down the Government and the public when the petrol which has been purchased on the futures market at $100 a barrel comes to the filling stations and the price shoots up and everyone gets silly.
About half (a bit more with VAT) of the cost of every litre of fuel goes to the Treasury. That adds up to £25 billion or about 2% of all the money the Government gets in so it's not insignificant.
It's the old argument - if you want to cut taxes, fine, I get that, but how do you make up the shortfall or in other words, from where are the £25 billion in cuts going to come and if you answer, "welfare", let's be more specific, whose benefits will be cut and by how much?
and we are back to the "stock profits" comedy.
The refiners need to buy oil to refine, today. They pay today's price. So they charge downstream of them, today's price. So while the oil takes a while to go through from well to wheels, the price goes up to day.
Each and every price shock the same thing happens -
1) The politicians start talking about rip offs 2) Then about "stock profits" 3) Then they demand an enquiry. 4) Which turns up the fact that prices come down as fast as they go up 5) so the politicians gulp and go "look, another squirrel".
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?
Ah, good. I'm glad you've taken my slight against your testicles in good spirit. This is what makes PB special, we can insult each other's genitals and laugh about it later
BTW I do wish @viewcode well in his Trans Trilogy, the Ring Cycle of Misgendering, or whatever it is he (they?) is planning, but it is not surprising that some of us view a "20,000 word article" on this subject with less-than-eager anticipation
I sat through five hours of Tristan and Isolde in Edinburgh on Wednesday, and while it was great, just occasionally you felt that a five minute executive summary and three crisp bullet point conclusions wouldn't come amiss.
A friends of ours, who died three years ago, had a mission in life to convert everyone to a love of Wagner. In his memory we bought a DVD of Tristan and Isolde. We watched the 1st Act, which was looong. My husband and I decided to leave it a couple of years before we watched the 2nd Act but haven't yet found the will to go back.
Are there any Wagner enthusiasts who can recommend one of his works which is more accessible (and shorter)?
Wagner is fantastic on heroin
I had a classical music friend who got free tickets to the Royal Opera House in his job. Also he was into heroin, like me
We smoked a ten bag each then went to see Tristan - all 109 hours or whatever - and it was glorious. At times I nodded out for an hour or two but it didn’t matter. I woke to find the same people shrieking the same beautiful music. And it went on and on
It was genuinely sublime. I appreciate “take heroin if you’re going to see a Wagner opera” is not massively practical advice. But maybe you’ve got a good dealer
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
You happy with retail staff being abused ?
No as I've daid
Are you always happy to take any view to attack the government?
The retailers will raise prices and screw us all
The retailers will raise the prices even if governments reduce tax
The public suffer.
You are a complete hypocrite. Yelling at Government for doing nothing, shouting minute Tories say they might do something, yet because it's Labour moan moan moan.
Your precious Kemi wants Labour to call off a tax rise that doesn't come in for 24 weeks
What utter bullcrap.
Labour acting now at speed you moan
Same old Tories Same old Lies
Probably worried Retailers will cut funding to Tory Party.
Same old Tories Same old Lies
You are resorting to your usual hysteria
Unlike you I provide sources for breaking news which in this case was Sky news not me
Your attempts to close down any negative story about the govrnment through unfounded accusations and whataboutery does you no credit
It's very indifferent whataboutery, as well.
I was born in Norther Ireland, where "Never mind my car bomb that killed 20 people, what about the price of cheese?" was bog standard 1pm new stuff.
The problems with small modular nucelar reactors are:
1. We have no idea what the levelised cost of energy is. Capital cost is going to be substantial, especially for the first ones. The hope is that by making them standard, we will over time get really good at making them cheaply. But how long will it take to reach this point? It's entirely possible that by that time, solar + batteries (yes, even in the UK) could be much cheaper.
2. Uptime is a constant problem with nuclear power plants. Some plants have worse uptime rates than offshore wind. If unscheduled maintenance can be avoided (a big if), then the modular design allows rolling maintenance and refuelling schedules that avoid many of the issues. At the same time though, if a design flaw is identified at some point, that could be really painful.
3. Nuclear power plants -even small modular ones- are mostly designed to run constantly. Which would have been amazing in the old world, before intermittant power. But it's a bit of a pain if there's lots of wind and solar, because when the sun is shining and the the wind is blowingm then it's entirely possible that th demand for nuclear/gas is zero. Now -of course- if there's lots of grid connected battery storage, this is less of a problem. But if there isn't, then these aren't going to be built without a Hinkley Point C type fixed price contract.
4. Small nuclear reactors still produce waste that needs to be dealt with, and will need to be eventually decomissioned. This isn't the end of the world, of course, but it does mean that you have meaningful tail costs that need to be properly account for.
---
My gut is that small modular reactors would have been a great idea if we'd started on them 20 years ago. But now they're probably still at least half a decade away from reality (and probably more like ten years), by which point there's going to be an awful lot more solar and wind generation in the mix.
5 They're not that "small", a friend was given a PR presentation by a Sizewell bod, SMRs came up in the Q and A, "I think people might be a bit upset when they find out they're the same size as a Magnox"
On 4, Bradwell was the lead Magnox for decommissioning, it's now in the 100 year "care and maintenance" phase, this means they've removed the easy, uncontaminated parts, wrapped it in a bigger box and are leaving it for 100 years. It last produced electricity in 2002. So since it last produced anything, that is 23 years of decommissioning team costs, now another 100 years of a smaller monitoring team costs, then the expensive decommissioning begins. Will the value of the electricity it produced even register in the final accounts? They haven't even put solar panels on the "care and maintenance" boxes
The actual nuclear bit is small - the rest of it isn't. Why contain to the expensive and inefficient layouts to fit in a ship, when you have space?
+1 - design for easy of manufacturing and support taking all the space required...
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
People who abuse retail staff are barely a step up from the shit posters on Twatter who want to burn migrant hotels.
Back in the day, Greenpeace lying about the Brent Spar inspired one moron to carry out a bomb attack on a petrol station in Germany.
Not long after the Greenpeace ship rocked up at a harbour where Shell was the sole marine fuelling option. Their bunkers were basically empty.
Some advocated for not selling them oil. I suggested selling to them with 4,000% special one-off tariff.
I agree but where is the evidence.
The fact is the retailers hide behind the staff
It would appear that the retail body did not wish to be questioned by the media.
The media that start every news bulletin with scare stories about the petrol prices and slag off the government for doing nothing.
Reeves has got them off the golf course on a Friday afternoon
She wants the media there to see and report that she means business?
The retailers bottle it...
Hopefully she will give them a bollocking and a firm warning.
You seem incapable of understanding that retail staff will be abused if the government generate hostility to petrol retailers
A sensible government would meet the industry to discuss solutions
It's the PRA that have withdrawn from the meeting with the Government.
What started the hostility to staff? The alleged price-gouging was reported before the Government asked the retailers not to price gouge. It's the PRA members taking advantage who've put their staff at risk of abuse.
What proof do you have of the PRA members are taking advantage of the situation ?
I have long had an app that provides the location and prices at the pumps which means I can buy the cheapest fuel available anyway
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
You happy with retail staff being abused ?
As long as it deflects any blame from the politicians whose decisions have brought us to this, I’m sure plenty of political hacks would. Especially as they could blame the industry again.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
The petrol currently in the pumps and in storage wasn't bought at $100 per barrel but the petrol at my local Tesco's has gone up 12p since all this began.
The alternative is to face down the Government and the public when the petrol which has been purchased on the futures market at $100 a barrel comes to the filling stations and the price shoots up and everyone gets silly.
About half (a bit more with VAT) of the cost of every litre of fuel goes to the Treasury. That adds up to £25 billion or about 2% of all the money the Government gets in so it's not insignificant.
It's the old argument - if you want to cut taxes, fine, I get that, but how do you make up the shortfall or in other words, from where are the £25 billion in cuts going to come and if you answer, "welfare", let's be more specific, whose benefits will be cut and by how much?
If a petrol station is making 12p a litre on the fuel it sells and the cost to replace that fuel goes up by more than 12p (assuming they have absolutely no other overheads at all whch of course they do) how do they pay for replacing it?
As I predicted, the Stock Profits crap has started.
It will be Murder Tuesday for months, all over again.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
You happy with retail staff being abused ?
This is a very weak argument. The responsibility for being abusive to retail staff lies solely with the abuser, not with the government, the retailer, the oil companies, anyone else. You're effectively excusing that behaviour by making such a point.
The retailers just log the reg and ban them from every forecourt in the country. I was a serial banner of customers when I worked in retail because my teenage/student staff were worth more to the shop than one ridiculous entitled ****. Don't give them an inch.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
People who abuse retail staff are barely a step up from the shit posters on Twatter who want to burn migrant hotels.
Back in the day, Greenpeace lying about the Brent Spar inspired one moron to carry out a bomb attack on a petrol station in Germany.
Not long after the Greenpeace ship rocked up at a harbour where Shell was the sole marine fuelling option. Their bunkers were basically empty.
Some advocated for not selling them oil. I suggested selling to them with 4,000% special one-off tariff.
I agree but where is the evidence.
The fact is the retailers hide behind the staff
It would appear that the retail body did not wish to be questioned by the media.
The media that start every news bulletin with scare stories about the petrol prices and slag off the government for doing nothing.
Reeves has got them off the golf course on a Friday afternoon
She wants the media there to see and report that she means business?
The retailers bottle it...
Hopefully she will give them a bollocking and a firm warning.
You seem incapable of understanding that retail staff will be abused if the government generate hostility to petrol retailers
A sensible government would meet the industry to discuss solutions
It's the PRA that have withdrawn from the meeting with the Government.
What started the hostility to staff? The alleged price-gouging was reported before the Government asked the retailers not to price gouge. It's the PRA members taking advantage who've put their staff at risk of abuse.
What proof do you have of the PRA members are taking advantage of the situation ?
I have long had an app that provides the location and prices at the pumps which means I can buy the cheapest fuel available anyway
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.
The LibDems will likely be fairly stable until such time as we have a hung psrliament and they have to make a choice. At which point their support falls off a cliff.
But that’s not uniquely a problem for the LibDems. What happens to Reform when they go into coalition with the Tories? What happens to the Greens or Plaid Cymru when they go into coalition with Labour? Indeed, what happens to the Tories when they go into coalition with Reform?
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?
Ah, good. I'm glad you've taken my slight against your testicles in good spirit. This is what makes PB special, we can insult each other's genitals and laugh about it later
BTW I do wish @viewcode well in his Trans Trilogy, the Ring Cycle of Misgendering, or whatever it is he (they?) is planning, but it is not surprising that some of us view a "20,000 word article" on this subject with less-than-eager anticipation
Quite. PB remains one of the few places where a man’s testicles can be traduced at 1pm and his argument fairly assessed by 2pm.
On the article, I think “20,000 words” is less an invitation than a warning label, whatever the topic.
I recall, and think I'll always recall, a furious spat between Nigel Foremain and IshmaelZ that ran for three days and by the end was basically the two of them taking turns to denigrate the size of the other's penis. PB at its most raw.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
You happy with retail staff being abused ?
This is a very weak argument. The responsibility for being abusive to retail staff lies solely with the abuser, not with the government, the retailer, the oil companies, anyone else. You're effectively excusing that behaviour by making such a point.
That depends though. If people incite the act, then they surely bear some responsibility.
Like that idiot who wanted people to burn migrant hotels.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
The petrol currently in the pumps and in storage wasn't bought at $100 per barrel but the petrol at my local Tesco's has gone up 12p since all this began.
The alternative is to face down the Government and the public when the petrol which has been purchased on the futures market at $100 a barrel comes to the filling stations and the price shoots up and everyone gets silly.
About half (a bit more with VAT) of the cost of every litre of fuel goes to the Treasury. That adds up to £25 billion or about 2% of all the money the Government gets in so it's not insignificant.
It's the old argument - if you want to cut taxes, fine, I get that, but how do you make up the shortfall or in other words, from where are the £25 billion in cuts going to come and if you answer, "welfare", let's be more specific, whose benefits will be cut and by how much?
If a petrol station is making 12p a litre on the fuel it sells and the cost to replace that fuel goes up by more than 12p (assuming they have absolutely no other overheads at all whch of course they do) how do they pay for replacing it?
As I predicted, the Stock Profits crap has started.
It will be Murder Tuesday for months, all over again.
Sorry Malmesbury I genuinely don't understand that comment.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
You happy with retail staff being abused ?
This is a very weak argument. The responsibility for being abusive to retail staff lies solely with the abuser, not with the government, the retailer, the oil companies, anyone else. You're effectively excusing that behaviour by making such a point.
The retailers just log the reg and ban them from every forecourt in the country. I was a serial banner of customers when I worked in retail because my teenage/student staff were worth more to the shop than one ridiculous entitled ****. Don't give them an inch.
I simply do not agree with you
As has just been said in the media, language matters and it is that the PRA are complaining about as their staff see increaesd levels of abuse
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
People who abuse retail staff are barely a step up from the shit posters on Twatter who want to burn migrant hotels.
Back in the day, Greenpeace lying about the Brent Spar inspired one moron to carry out a bomb attack on a petrol station in Germany.
Not long after the Greenpeace ship rocked up at a harbour where Shell was the sole marine fuelling option. Their bunkers were basically empty.
Some advocated for not selling them oil. I suggested selling to them with 4,000% special one-off tariff.
I agree but where is the evidence.
The fact is the retailers hide behind the staff
It would appear that the retail body did not wish to be questioned by the media.
The media that start every news bulletin with scare stories about the petrol prices and slag off the government for doing nothing.
Reeves has got them off the golf course on a Friday afternoon
She wants the media there to see and report that she means business?
The retailers bottle it...
Hopefully she will give them a bollocking and a firm warning.
You seem incapable of understanding that retail staff will be abused if the government generate hostility to petrol retailers
A sensible government would meet the industry to discuss solutions
It's the PRA that have withdrawn from the meeting with the Government.
What started the hostility to staff? The alleged price-gouging was reported before the Government asked the retailers not to price gouge. It's the PRA members taking advantage who've put their staff at risk of abuse.
I don't think government rhetoric on fuel companies ripping people off was appropriate (or politically wise as it links high fuel costs to government actions, rather than something outside their control). They should just have announced the meeting.
But it was the Petrol Retailers Association who made probably spurious claims about staff being intimidated because of it ,and so doing inflamed the situation. They now seem to have rowed back and deleted their tweets.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
You happy with retail staff being abused ?
This is a very weak argument. The responsibility for being abusive to retail staff lies solely with the abuser, not with the government, the retailer, the oil companies, anyone else. You're effectively excusing that behaviour by making such a point.
That depends though. If people incite the act, then they surely bear some responsibility.
Like that idiot who wanted people to burn migrant hotels.
The government has not asked people to abuse retail workers, FFS. And that's a pretty dark logic - you wouldn't want to extend that to the Iran war, for example.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
People who abuse retail staff are barely a step up from the shit posters on Twatter who want to burn migrant hotels.
Back in the day, Greenpeace lying about the Brent Spar inspired one moron to carry out a bomb attack on a petrol station in Germany.
Not long after the Greenpeace ship rocked up at a harbour where Shell was the sole marine fuelling option. Their bunkers were basically empty.
Some advocated for not selling them oil. I suggested selling to them with 4,000% special one-off tariff.
I agree but where is the evidence.
The fact is the retailers hide behind the staff
It would appear that the retail body did not wish to be questioned by the media.
The media that start every news bulletin with scare stories about the petrol prices and slag off the government for doing nothing.
Reeves has got them off the golf course on a Friday afternoon
She wants the media there to see and report that she means business?
The retailers bottle it...
Hopefully she will give them a bollocking and a firm warning.
You seem incapable of understanding that retail staff will be abused if the government generate hostility to petrol retailers
A sensible government would meet the industry to discuss solutions
It's the PRA that have withdrawn from the meeting with the Government.
What started the hostility to staff? The alleged price-gouging was reported before the Government asked the retailers not to price gouge. It's the PRA members taking advantage who've put their staff at risk of abuse.
What proof do you have of the PRA members are taking advantage of the situation ?
I have long had an app that provides the location and prices at the pumps which means I can buy the cheapest fuel available anyway
It’s like that Brass Eye episode.
There is no evidence, but it’s a fact.
All mob mentality stuff and govt blame avoiding.
None, that's why I said "alleged", the media have been sensationally reporting high prices and Badenoch and others have jumped on it to demand tax freezes or cuts to save consumers from high prices.
I've no idea if petrol prices have gone up and don't care if they have.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
Snowflakes
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
You happy with retail staff being abused ?
This is a very weak argument. The responsibility for being abusive to retail staff lies solely with the abuser, not with the government, the retailer, the oil companies, anyone else. You're effectively excusing that behaviour by making such a point.
That depends though. If people incite the act, then they surely bear some responsibility.
Like that idiot who wanted people to burn migrant hotels.
The government has not asked people to abuse retail workers, FFS. And that's a pretty dark logic - you wouldn't want to extend that to the Iran war, for example.
If you shout fire in a crowded cinema are you responsible for the subsequent crush that kills people?
Comments
At least one of the big players will probably run out of money before that happens, but that's normal.
Poor old Scotty seemed a bit flustered afterwards.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was abruptly pulled from a live interview after being told “the President wants you right away.”
After returning, his voice was noticeably shaken.
https://x.com/clashreport/status/2032369138778378416?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
The problem is that the gains only arrive if you actually get a production line, not a boutique reactor with artisanal cost overruns.
And “one will go bang” is too glib. The real issue is whether modern designs, regulation and fleet learning reduce risk enough to make a multi-unit programme viable, not some fatalistic assumption that more reactors automatically means one explodes.
The west could be doing something quite similar, but the UK in particular takes an approach that's the diametric opposite - building new nuclear that has a completely unique set of requirements which result in a unique, and very expensive, and very, very slow to deliver bit of kit.
The SMR 'production line' thing is particularly convincing in the UK only because we're so bad at building large scale nuclear.
There is a partial exception to this. The UK has around 33GW of wind and 21GW of solar. Around 10GW of this is on fixed price contracts that work via Contracts for Difference. This means that the wind farm receives the market rate for the electricity they generate. And if the market price is above the fixed price, then they pay money back, and if it is below, they receive a top-up. These payments are passed directly to and from consumers via a levy on electricity bills. So when electricity prices spiked in 2022, CfD generators were paying back the difference, and that actually reduced electricity bills. (Yes: your bill was lower because of wind in 2022.)
My solution (if you want to go down the subsidy route) would be this: every family in Britain receives a tax free payment equivalent to the average increase in energy bills. If they want to spend it on their gas and electricity, they could, and they would be no worse off. But the incentive to reduce energy consumption would still exist; the price would be doing its information job.
The trope is an American one.
🚨 PICTURED: The first known photo of Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor sitting together
https://x.com/politlcsuk/status/2032438784730563018?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
Pushing small, frequent, well-tested changes to main usually reduces risk compared with hoarding months of work and then attempting one heroic release.
The number of deployments goes up, but the size of each change, the blast radius, and the difficulty of diagnosing problems all go down.
That is essentially the argument for serialised SMR build-out as against rare, bespoke mega-projects: repetition improves process, preserves skills, exposes faults earlier, and avoids having to relearn everything from scratch each time.
CI/CD works because of automation, test discipline, observability, rollback, and standardisation.
Serial nuclear build only gets the same benefit if it also has the equivalent of those things: repeatable design, strong regulation, quality control, operational feedback, and a real production cadence
BTW I do wish @viewcode well in his Trans Trilogy, the Ring Cycle of Misgendering, or whatever it is he (they?) is planning, but it is not surprising that some of us view a "20,000 word article" on this subject with less-than-eager anticipation
Meanwhile, speaking of laughable predictions, L'homme Presse e/w very long shot for the Gold Cup. It at least has a falsification criterion.
Because nuclear in practice can't be turned off, it has the effect of making other sources in the energy mix even more "intermittent", requiring greater redundancy and increasing curtailment, so indirectly making other energy sources more expensive. That wouldn't be a problem if nuclear was cheap, but it's one of the most expensive sources.
Petrol Retailers Association, looking at short term measures, have withdrawn from a meeting with Reeves due to inflammatory language used by government minister's which has led to incidents of retail staff bring abused by the public
1. We have no idea what the levelised cost of energy is. Capital cost is going to be substantial, especially for the first ones. The hope is that by making them standard, we will over time get really good at making them cheaply. But how long will it take to reach this point? It's entirely possible that by that time, solar + batteries (yes, even in the UK) could be much cheaper.
2. Uptime is a constant problem with nuclear power plants. Some plants have worse uptime rates than offshore wind. If unscheduled maintenance can be avoided (a big if), then the modular design allows rolling maintenance and refuelling schedules that avoid many of the issues. At the same time though, if a design flaw is identified at some point, that could be really painful.
3. Nuclear power plants -even small modular ones- are mostly designed to run constantly. Which would have been amazing in the old world, before intermittant power. But it's a bit of a pain if there's lots of wind and solar, because when the sun is shining and the the wind is blowingm then it's entirely possible that th demand for nuclear/gas is zero. Now -of course- if there's lots of grid connected battery storage, this is less of a problem. But if there isn't, then these aren't going to be built without a Hinkley Point C type fixed price contract.
4. Small nuclear reactors still produce waste that needs to be dealt with, and will need to be eventually decomissioned. This isn't the end of the world, of course, but it does mean that you have meaningful tail costs that need to be properly account for.
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My gut is that small modular reactors would have been a great idea if we'd started on them 20 years ago. But now they're probably still at least half a decade away from reality (and probably more like ten years), by which point there's going to be an awful lot more solar and wind generation in the mix.
On the article, I think “20,000 words” is less an invitation than a warning label, whatever the topic.
Here's my essential video primer on electricity generation: https://youtu.be/E3G70uXf0s4?si=7eAPkEek4yMWJ3YR
It's seven years out of date (and solar costs have collapsed since then), but most of it remains spot on.
Happy to screw all motorists but can't stand being told to play fair
The snag is that they only become attractive if you get a real production run before wind, solar and storage get there first. Otherwise you just end up with a very expensive boutique reactor and a fresh set of PowerPoint promises.
I’d also be a bit careful with “nuclear can’t be turned off”. It can load-follow; the problem is less physics than economics. In a renewables-heavy system, the question is whether nuclear earns its keep once you price in curtailment, storage, interconnection and flexible demand.
SMRs may be a good idea in principle, but principles do not generate electricity. If the cost curve only improves after a decade of serial build, they may find that renewables plus storage have already eaten their lunch.
Which is all a bit of a longwinded (pompous, Leon?) way of saying I agree with you.
In the case of passport renewals the only manual bit is a human verification of the old passport - user then presses a button and the new passport is sent to be printed
In nuclear's favour you can scale those capital and maintenance costs across a very large energy generation by making the plant bigger. Which argues against SMR, although I think people will point to serial production to mitigate that.
But here's the thing: thermal cycles (the expansion and contraction of metal as it heats and cools) introduces fatigue and reduces lifespan. The length of time your SMR will operate for is mostly going to be measured in terms of those cycles; if it's being cycled twice (or three times) a day, then its going to last a fraction of the time it would manage if it was being cycled once every two months.
Back in the day, Greenpeace lying about the Brent Spar inspired one moron to carry out a bomb attack on a petrol station in Germany.
Not long after the Greenpeace ship rocked up at a harbour where Shell was the sole marine fuelling option. Their bunkers were basically empty.
Some advocated for not selling them oil. I suggested selling to them with 4,000% special one-off tariff.
*You may find lifting the bucket a bit of a challenge.
Seems it was to do with media access
No cameras to be allowed at the meeting
Are there any Wagner enthusiasts who can recommend one of his works which is more accessible (and shorter)?
On 4, Bradwell was the lead Magnox for decommissioning, it's now in the 100 year "care and maintenance" phase, this means they've removed the easy, uncontaminated parts, wrapped it in a bigger box and are leaving it for 100 years. It last produced electricity in 2002. So since it last produced anything, that is 23 years of decommissioning team costs, now another 100 years of a smaller monitoring team costs, then the expensive decommissioning begins. Will the value of the electricity it produced even register in the final accounts?
They haven't even put solar panels on the "care and maintenance" boxes
https://x.com/keir_starmer/status/2032453824607035528
But not really. Wagner-light is missing the point. Ring Cycle or bust.
The fact is the retailers hide behind the staff
It would appear that the retail body did not wish to be questioned by the media.
The media that start every news bulletin with scare stories about the petrol prices and slag off the government for doing nothing.
Reeves has got them off the golf course on a Friday afternoon
She wants the media there to see and report that she means business?
The retailers bottle it...
Hopefully she will give them a bollocking and a firm warning.
No messing.
They know that if they reduce duty the robbing parasites will still put prices up.
Public call for action, they can't say the Government hadn't acted.
In Greenwich, at the 1987 by-election, the Conservative vote collapsed once it became clear only the Alliance could beat Labour but the Labour vote also fell as some Labour voters recognised their anti-Conservative vote wasn't necessary and they could vote against Labour without any fear of letting the Conservatives in.
Outside of areas of strength, surrounded by oceans of weakness, the Conservatives are nowhere in the face of Reform.
I'm told she will say nothing and I believe it but the big questions for Badenoch as the election approaches are a) the Conservative relationship with Reform in the event of no party winning a majority. Would the Conservatives offer confidence & supply (or more) to a minority Reform Government and b) if a minority Labour Government (with LD and Green confidence & supply and I wouldn't assume either) has more seats but the Conservatives (with Reform) could vote down a King's Speech and trigger a second election, would they do that or would they abstain?
So the fact they haven't attended is clearly because they do intend to rip off consumers, and don't want to he questioned about it.
If they didn't intend to rip anyone off, it would all be sweetness and light
Should say you kind of have to go for the full experience. Wagner really suffers from a lack of editing. A lot of the Ring is for example Wotan moaning about everyone else, but if you like Opera no-one else reaches the heights Wagner does.
A sensible government would meet the industry to discuss solutions
https://youtu.be/JJ4Ox454zMs?si=frSoc1Fpm999RF7j&t=60 - this is how you distribute cutlery.
Are you always happy to take any view to attack the government?
The retailers will raise prices and screw us all
The retailers will raise the prices even if governments reduce tax
The public suffer.
You are a complete hypocrite. Yelling at Government for doing nothing, shouting minute Tories say they might do something, yet because it's Labour moan moan moan.
Your precious Kemi wants Labour to call off a tax rise that doesn't come in for 24 weeks
What utter bullcrap.
Labour acting now at speed you moan
Same old Tories
Same old Lies
Probably worried Retailers will cut funding to Tory Party.
Same old Tories
Same old Lies
The alternative is to face down the Government and the public when the petrol which has been purchased on the futures market at $100 a barrel comes to the filling stations and the price shoots up and everyone gets silly.
About half (a bit more with VAT) of the cost of every litre of fuel goes to the Treasury. That adds up to £25 billion or about 2% of all the money the Government gets in so it's not insignificant.
It's the old argument - if you want to cut taxes, fine, I get that, but how do you make up the shortfall or in other words, from where are the £25 billion in cuts going to come and if you answer, "welfare", let's be more specific, whose benefits will be cut and by how much?
Wholesale cost 33%
Biofuel content 7%
Retailer profit 8%
Delivery costs 1%
Fuel duty 35%
VAT 17%
So the Government slagging off the retailers for their 8% whilst taking 52% themselves is a bit fucking rich.
Vercotti: Doug (takes a drink) Well, I was terrified. Everyone was terrified of Doug. I've seen grown men pull their own heads off rather than see Doug. Even Dinsdale was frightened of Doug.
2nd Interviewer: What did he do?
Vercotti: He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious.
What started the hostility to staff? The alleged price-gouging was reported before the Government asked the retailers not to price gouge. It's the PRA members taking advantage who've put their staff at risk of abuse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv7G92F2sqs
Politicians cause these problems and blames businesses.
Demand has stayed the same. Supply,has decreased. If only we had other sources of supply to replace the loss.
Unlike you I provide sources for breaking news which in this case was Sky news not me
Your attempts to close down any negative story about the government through unfounded accusations and whataboutery does you no credit
The refiners need to buy oil to refine, today. They pay today's price. So they charge downstream of them, today's price. So while the oil takes a while to go through from well to wheels, the price goes up to day.
Each and every price shock the same thing happens -
1) The politicians start talking about rip offs
2) Then about "stock profits"
3) Then they demand an enquiry.
4) Which turns up the fact that prices come down as fast as they go up
5) so the politicians gulp and go "look, another squirrel".
Same Shit, Different Aseholes.
I had a classical music friend who got free tickets to the Royal Opera House in his job. Also he was into heroin, like me
We smoked a ten bag each then went to see Tristan - all 109 hours or whatever - and it was glorious. At times I nodded out for an hour or two but it didn’t matter. I woke to find the same people shrieking the same beautiful music. And it went on and on
It was genuinely sublime. I appreciate “take heroin if you’re going to see a Wagner opera” is not massively practical advice. But maybe you’ve got a good dealer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZTE9MDoaLs
I was born in Norther Ireland, where "Never mind my car bomb that killed 20 people, what about the price of cheese?" was bog standard 1pm new stuff.
I have long had an app that provides the location and prices at the pumps which means I can buy the cheapest fuel available anyway
It will be Murder Tuesday for months, all over again.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/british-expats-dubai-gulf-tax-hmrc-iran-war-b1274679.html#comments-area
The retailers just log the reg and ban them from every forecourt in the country. I was a serial banner of customers when I worked in retail because my teenage/student staff were worth more to the shop than one ridiculous entitled ****. Don't give them an inch.
There is no evidence, but it’s a fact.
All mob mentality stuff and govt blame avoiding.
To a parts recycler who will be charging way more than I did for them...
Pay the increased fuel price or walk, cycle, bus, car share or stay at home.
There is nothing the UK govt can do about Trump and Netanyahu setting fire to the Middle East and it needs the tax revenue.
Like that idiot who wanted people to burn migrant hotels.
As has just been said in the media, language matters and it is that the PRA are complaining about as their staff see increaesd levels of abuse
But it was the Petrol Retailers Association who made probably spurious claims about staff being intimidated because of it ,and so doing inflamed the situation. They now seem to have rowed back and deleted their tweets.
High prices solve high prices. Demand destruction and bringing on new supply, with time being a constraint on that.
The govt needs the tax. As you say.
I've no idea if petrol prices have gone up and don't care if they have.
I presume they are a bit more sophisticated than the Seagate or WD ones I use for my MP4 back ups.