Once again, Nigel is a pro surrounded by nasty idiots. The question of why Nigel is surrounded by nasty idiots is left as an exercise for the reader.
Simon Dudley said “everyone dies in the end” and “fires happen”.
So at 5pm, Farage will be resolving the issue by burning him at the stake...
Whoops!
He has half a point about reactions to single incidents leading to a load of bad law or regulation, but one needs to be a little more careful about one’s language when referring to a fire in which dozens of people actually died.
Of course, as we have discussed here many times before, the required mountain of paperwork to certify Grenfell Tower’s cladding as fireproof was all in place. It was perfect, except for the fact that the tower’s cladding wasn’t actually fireproof.
He wasn’t wrong with his point about regulation leading to bad outcomes.
I'm with Eabhal on this. Universal subsidy is nuts. Targeted support, uncoupled from fuel/energy consumption, maybe (everything will be getting more expensive and will hit poorer households hardest anyway).
Otherwise we just hide what should be another clear signal to those who can afford them that there are benefits to EVs over ICEVs.
ETA: I've defined myself as a liberal for a long time and I feel further and further away from the lib Dems - it used to be I'd lend my vote to other parties, now my vote is looking for a home
I understand. I'm a Lib Dem primarily because they are (or purport to be) environmentalists, but without the Green desire to smash capitalism. This sort of unprincipled political opportunism really puts me off them. I'm not sure it's going to win them any more votes than it loses them, and I wish they wouldn't do it.
🚨 WATCH: Nigel Farage formally commits to the state pension triple lock if Reform UK win the next election
"The people to whom pensions are being paid, certainly compared to a younger generation today, are those who have actually worked and paid into a system"
I'm with Eabhal on this. Universal subsidy is nuts. Targeted support, uncoupled from fuel/energy consumption, maybe (everything will be getting more expensive and will hit poorer households hardest anyway).
Otherwise we just hide what should be another clear signal to those who can afford them that there are benefits to EVs over ICEVs.
ETA: I've defined myself as a liberal for a long time and I feel further and further away from the lib Dems - it used to be I'd lend my vote to other parties, now my vote is looking for a home
I’m also with Eabhal on this.
I cannot see why everyone should get a bail out simply because shit happens.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
🚨 WATCH: Nigel Farage formally commits to the state pension triple lock if Reform UK win the next election
"The people to whom pensions are being paid, certainly compared to a younger generation today, are those who have actually worked and paid into a system"
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
I'm sorry, it is not bollocks.
Here is David Turver's chart again - and before anyone says that RCS 'debunked' this - he didn't. He offered a mild reproach at how the gas MWH price was simplified. He gave no objections to the broad figures, and if he wishes to do so, let him do so now.
The table is obviously out of date, ChatGPT's current estimate for gas generation is £120–140 per MWh, including £15–25/MWh of carbon offsetting costs.
That makes solar under CFD the only renewable source that is competitive with gas, even at its current Hormuz-related spike. The rest are all costing us considerably more.
🚨 WATCH: Nigel Farage formally commits to the state pension triple lock if Reform UK win the next election
"The people to whom pensions are being paid, certainly compared to a younger generation today, are those who have actually worked and paid into a system"
That link about autism not being a spectrum is interesting. I laugh because it’s a symptom of this country’s inability to say no.
I have a question. I have been told by a few people that they think I am autistic. I have a degree from Oxford (I know!), have a job (albeit in the public sector) etc. I had no SEN help as a child. I just got on with it. So, the question is, are the people saying this to me simply wrong and falling into the trap of thinking autism is a spectrum. Or, could they be right and some children with autism don’t need help.
For those unsure about what challenges those with autism might face, it's worth reading a bit about (or possibly visiting) a school like The Treehouse School in north London: https://treehouseschool.org.uk/.
I was a governor there for a few years. It was awe-inspiring to see some of the skills shown by both teachers and parents to support e.g. those who were entirely non-verbal at the age of 14, or who slept only one hour per night.
What society does to support these children, and what choices we make with limited resources, are very thorny questions.
Perhaps I'm ill-informed but it seems to me that arguing that autism is a spectrum seems very different from arguing that it does not exist.
I see that the transcript of a live chat from a utility company that just came thought purges the names of agents who were identified in the chat itself.)
I see that the transcript of a live chat from a utility company that just came thought purges the names of agents who were identified in the chat itself.)
Once again, Nigel is a pro surrounded by nasty idiots. The question of why Nigel is surrounded by nasty idiots is left as an exercise for the reader.
Simon Dudley said “everyone dies in the end” and “fires happen”.
So at 5pm, Farage will be resolving the issue by burning him at the stake...
Whoops!
He has half a point about reactions to single incidents leading to a load of bad law or regulation, but one needs to be a little more careful about one’s language when referring to a fire in which dozens of people actually died.
Of course, as we have discussed here many times before, the required mountain of paperwork to certify Grenfell Tower’s cladding as fireproof was all in place. It was perfect, except for the fact that the tower’s cladding wasn’t actually fireproof.
He wasn’t wrong with his point about regulation leading to bad outcomes.
I’ve not looked into it in too much detail, but it does appear to now be prohibitively expensive to build blocks of apartments, even in London. AIUI prices are now falling because banks are reluctant to mortgage apartment properties not up to the current fire code, leading to reduced demand.
That link about autism not being a spectrum is interesting. I laugh because it’s a symptom of this country’s inability to say no.
I have a question. I have been told by a few people that they think I am autistic. I have a degree from Oxford (I know!), have a job (albeit in the public sector) etc. I had no SEN help as a child. I just got on with it. So, the question is, are the people saying this to me simply wrong and falling into the trap of thinking autism is a spectrum. Or, could they be right and some children with autism don’t need help.
For those unsure about what challenges those with autism might face, it's worth reading a bit about (or possibly visiting) a school like The Treehouse School in north London: https://treehouseschool.org.uk/.
I was a governor there for a few years. It was awe-inspiring to see some of the skills shown by both teachers and parents to support e.g. those who were entirely non-verbal at the age of 14, or who slept only one hour per night.
What society does to support these children, and what choices we make with limited resources, are very thorny questions.
Perhaps I'm ill-informed but it seems to me that arguing that autism is a spectrum seems very different from arguing that it does not exist.
The context of my criticism is this comment:
ASD used to be seen as a kind of discreet… so it used to be described as “autism”, it used to be seen as a kind of… ‘you have it or you don’t have it’ condition. It is now really widely recognised that it is a spectrum condition and so it’s not susceptible to a kind of ‘yes or no’ diagnostic process. It’s much more susceptible to an understanding that there is a range responses that you will see in the normal distribution of the population”
First of all, that isn't actually correct. It's always been considered a spectrum condition, and there are degrees of it. I think she was confusing it with Asperger's.
Secondly, this was in terms of arguing that it is not possible or meaningful to diagnose autism, as part of her evidence on the process to reduce SEND budgets. That is asinine and seems to me to be denial of it. If it wasn't intended that way, she's such an idiot she shouldn't be managing an automated bus stop (which, given her track record elsewhere, may also be true).
That link about autism not being a spectrum is interesting. I laugh because it’s a symptom of this country’s inability to say no.
I have a question. I have been told by a few people that they think I am autistic. I have a degree from Oxford (I know!), have a job (albeit in the public sector) etc. I had no SEN help as a child. I just got on with it. So, the question is, are the people saying this to me simply wrong and falling into the trap of thinking autism is a spectrum. Or, could they be right and some children with autism don’t need help.
For those unsure about what challenges those with autism might face, it's worth reading a bit about (or possibly visiting) a school like The Treehouse School in north London: https://treehouseschool.org.uk/.
I was a governor there for a few years. It was awe-inspiring to see some of the skills shown by both teachers and parents to support e.g. those who were entirely non-verbal at the age of 14, or who slept only one hour per night.
What society does to support these children, and what choices we make with limited resources, are very thorny questions.
Perhaps I'm ill-informed but it seems to me that arguing that autism is a spectrum seems very different from arguing that it does not exist.
It clearly exists
Too often in my generation 60s child, I now believe kids I knew were either passed off as eccentric or difficult.
The issue now think happens is that the spectrum is too wide. I've no proof of that, it's just a gut feel
So we've gone from no help to over diagnosis in 2 generations
Either way those who need and deserve help, aren't always getting the help they need.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
I'm sorry, it is not bollocks.
Here is David Turver's chart again - and before anyone says that RCS 'debunked' this - he didn't. He offered a mild reproach at how the gas MWH price was simplified. He gave no objections to the broad figures, and if he wishes to do so, let him do so now.
The table is obviously out of date, ChatGPT's current estimate for gas generation is £120–140 per MWh, including £15–25/MWh of carbon offsetting costs.
That makes solar under CFD the only renewable source that is competitive with gas, even at its current Hormuz-related spike. The rest are all costing us considerably more.
The fundamental flaw with that table is it compares the marginal cost of gas with the total cost of renewables. A like-for-like comparison would be to drop (almost) all the CfD costs from renewables, given almost all of them are incurred from the initial investment. This is why LCOE is the better measure - particularly looking into the future, with the cost of non-wind renewables and batteries dropping so quickly.
There are also huge costs associated with uncertainty and lack of energy security. A fixed price CfD contract which Iran, Putin and Trump can't fuck up is worth additional £10s of billions to the UK economy, even if the LCOE is actually higher than it is for gas (which it isn't).
Leave the Lib Dems alone they are against Labour's student loan tax. As soon as they are in Government they will remove it and not increase fees by the power of three.
That link about autism not being a spectrum is interesting. I laugh because it’s a symptom of this country’s inability to say no.
I have a question. I have been told by a few people that they think I am autistic. I have a degree from Oxford (I know!), have a job (albeit in the public sector) etc. I had no SEN help as a child. I just got on with it. So, the question is, are the people saying this to me simply wrong and falling into the trap of thinking autism is a spectrum. Or, could they be right and some children with autism don’t need help.
For those unsure about what challenges those with autism might face, it's worth reading a bit about (or possibly visiting) a school like The Treehouse School in north London: https://treehouseschool.org.uk/.
I was a governor there for a few years. It was awe-inspiring to see some of the skills shown by both teachers and parents to support e.g. those who were entirely non-verbal at the age of 14, or who slept only one hour per night.
What society does to support these children, and what choices we make with limited resources, are very thorny questions.
Perhaps I'm ill-informed but it seems to me that arguing that autism is a spectrum seems very different from arguing that it does not exist.
The context of my criticism is this comment:
ASD used to be seen as a kind of discreet… so it used to be described as “autism”, it used to be seen as a kind of… ‘you have it or you don’t have it’ condition. It is now really widely recognised that it is a spectrum condition and so it’s not susceptible to a kind of ‘yes or no’ diagnostic process. It’s much more susceptible to an understanding that there is a range responses that you will see in the normal distribution of the population”
First of all, that isn't actually correct. It's always been considered a spectrum condition, and there are degrees of it. I think she was confusing it with Asperger's.
Secondly, this was in terms of arguing that it is not possible or meaningful to diagnose autism, as part of her evidence on the process to reduce SEND budgets. That is asinine and seems to me to be denial of it. If it wasn't intended that way, she's such an idiot she shouldn't be managing an automated bus stop (which, given her track record elsewhere, may also be true).
The problem with autism isn't autism. Autism is normal. Autism is old. It's a modern society which has grown both increasingly regulated and constantly monitoring which is the problem.
Let us be who we are, how we are, and there's not a big problem. I like this, you like that. I do this, you do that. I think like this, you think like that. But impose order and norms based around one strict definition of how and why and what, and people struggle to squeeze their square pegs into your round holes.
I'm with Eabhal on this. Universal subsidy is nuts. Targeted support, uncoupled from fuel/energy consumption, maybe (everything will be getting more expensive and will hit poorer households hardest anyway).
Otherwise we just hide what should be another clear signal to those who can afford them that there are benefits to EVs over ICEVs.
ETA: I've defined myself as a liberal for a long time and I feel further and further away from the lib Dems - it used to be I'd lend my vote to other parties, now my vote is looking for a home
I’m also with Eabhal on this.
I cannot see why everyone should get a bail out simply because shit happens.
We have a welfare state for a reason - if things go wrong then it's there to help out. There are deep flaws in it (all the benefits that aren't UC, and the fact that having any savings disqualifies you is very stupid), but it's far better than these kind of one-off tax breaks and payments that help everyone except those who have invested in protecting themselves from these kind of economic shocks.
The only kind of policy that I could support is a low-interest government loan that helps people and businesses survive the initial shock - e.g. the sudden increase in cost of heating oil or diesel. Or a targeted universal payment, that goes to all rural households not on the gas-grid rather than just those consuming heating oil. Stuff like that.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
I'm sorry, it is not bollocks.
Here is David Turver's chart again - and before anyone says that RCS 'debunked' this - he didn't. He offered a mild reproach at how the gas MWH price was simplified. He gave no objections to the broad figures, and if he wishes to do so, let him do so now.
The table is obviously out of date, ChatGPT's current estimate for gas generation is £120–140 per MWh, including £15–25/MWh of carbon offsetting costs.
That makes solar under CFD the only renewable source that is competitive with gas, even at its current Hormuz-related spike. The rest are all costing us considerably more.
The fundamental flaw with that table is it compares the marginal cost of gas with the total cost of renewables. A like-for-like comparison would be to drop (almost) all the CfD costs from renewables, given almost all of them are incurred from the initial investment. This is why LCOE is the better measure - particularly looking into the future, with the cost of non-wind renewables and batteries dropping so quickly.
There are also huge costs associated with uncertainty and lack of energy security. A fixed price CfD contract which Iran, Putin and Trump can't fuck up is worth additional £10s of billions to the UK economy, even if the LCOE is actually higher than it is for gas (which it isn't).
That chart reminds me of one that used to claim that EVs generated more C02 than ICE - by assuming all electricity was generated from brown coal and using the full “well-to-wheels” for EVs and only the C02 from actually burning the petrol for ICE.
It makes sense because that is covered by the uptick in VAT as a result of the retail price hikes.
And because it’s eye catching enough to get some media attention, sensible or otherwise.
And (superficially) it doesn't really matter what the Lib Dems say, because they're not in government.
At a deeper level, it matters quite a lot. Every time an opposition party proposes something that sounds good but probably isn't[1], it makes life harder for whoever is in government. It was hard enough when there were two opposition parties both throwing rotten fruit from roughly the same side. Not there are four, flinging fruit from all sorts of directions.
[1] Any policy that doesn't include the observation that there are going to be less hydrocarbons around, at least for a while, and we need to roll with that, probably isn't a good policy.
My meme for the last couple of years is that we pay more and more for less and less. We have seen this with the Navy recently and this seems another good example. As @ydoethur points out how on earth do we spend £13.6bn a year (in England ) and fail so many kids? Where does the money go and how do we get more of it at the sharp end with speech and language therapists, physiotherapists, educational psychologists etc rather than administration?
From what I have read elsewhere and what @ydoethur says, I am not confident that Phillipson has an answer that is even vaguely credible.
A vaguely similar thought occurred to me when I heard a pilot discussing the difficulties of shooting down a relatively low speed drone in a fast jet. There seems to be a lot of very expensive tech being used to counter $40k drones.
‘There's a real irony that one of the worst aircraft of WWII would be ideal for shooting down Shahed drones today. The Boulton-Paul Defiant was 90 years ahead of its time’
Bit unfair on the Defiant. There were lots of worse aircraft.
The Shahed drones fly at 100kts, it’s really difficult to shoot them down with a fast jet which doesn’t like anything below about 300kts.
The Ukranians are doing things like flying around in light aircraft with a shotgun hanging out of the window, chasing them with helicopters, or shooting at them from the ground with guns. The best option so far appears to be small $2,000 quadcoptor drones, a fast version of a hobby DJI-type with a small explosive charge.
The Vietnam-era Bronco can be fitted with shotgun/machine-gun pods, can loiter from several hours, and can take off and land from a Queen-Elizabeth class aircraft carrier without arrestor gear/catapult
That link about autism not being a spectrum is interesting. I laugh because it’s a symptom of this country’s inability to say no.
I have a question. I have been told by a few people that they think I am autistic. I have a degree from Oxford (I know!), have a job (albeit in the public sector) etc. I had no SEN help as a child. I just got on with it. So, the question is, are the people saying this to me simply wrong and falling into the trap of thinking autism is a spectrum. Or, could they be right and some children with autism don’t need help.
For those unsure about what challenges those with autism might face, it's worth reading a bit about (or possibly visiting) a school like The Treehouse School in north London: https://treehouseschool.org.uk/.
I was a governor there for a few years. It was awe-inspiring to see some of the skills shown by both teachers and parents to support e.g. those who were entirely non-verbal at the age of 14, or who slept only one hour per night.
What society does to support these children, and what choices we make with limited resources, are very thorny questions.
Perhaps I'm ill-informed but it seems to me that arguing that autism is a spectrum seems very different from arguing that it does not exist.
The context of my criticism is this comment:
ASD used to be seen as a kind of discreet… so it used to be described as “autism”, it used to be seen as a kind of… ‘you have it or you don’t have it’ condition. It is now really widely recognised that it is a spectrum condition and so it’s not susceptible to a kind of ‘yes or no’ diagnostic process. It’s much more susceptible to an understanding that there is a range responses that you will see in the normal distribution of the population”
First of all, that isn't actually correct. It's always been considered a spectrum condition, and there are degrees of it. I think she was confusing it with Asperger's.
Secondly, this was in terms of arguing that it is not possible or meaningful to diagnose autism, as part of her evidence on the process to reduce SEND budgets. That is asinine and seems to me to be denial of it. If it wasn't intended that way, she's such an idiot she shouldn't be managing an automated bus stop (which, given her track record elsewhere, may also be true).
The problem with autism isn't autism. Autism is normal. Autism is old. It's a modern society which has grown both increasingly regulated and constantly monitoring which is the problem.
Let us be who we are, how we are, and there's not a big problem. I like this, you like that. I do this, you do that. I think like this, you think like that. But impose order and norms based around one strict definition of how and why and what, and people struggle to squeeze their square pegs into your round holes.
And we are back to the non-linearity of the universe.
And the attempt to impose linear rule sets on. Because some people love Order above all - by which they mean everyone thinking and acting in the same way.
Once again, Nigel is a pro surrounded by nasty idiots. The question of why Nigel is surrounded by nasty idiots is left as an exercise for the reader.
Simon Dudley said “everyone dies in the end” and “fires happen”.
So at 5pm, Farage will be resolving the issue by burning him at the stake...
Whoops!
He has half a point about reactions to single incidents leading to a load of bad law or regulation, but one needs to be a little more careful about one’s language when referring to a fire in which dozens of people actually died.
Of course, as we have discussed here many times before, the required mountain of paperwork to certify Grenfell Tower’s cladding as fireproof was all in place. It was perfect, except for the fact that the tower’s cladding wasn’t actually fireproof.
He wasn’t wrong with his point about regulation leading to bad outcomes.
I’ve not looked into it in too much detail, but it does appear to now be prohibitively expensive to build blocks of apartments, even in London. AIUI prices are now falling because banks are reluctant to mortgage apartment properties not up to the current fire code, leading to reduced demand.
The seller of the flat needs to find a buyer before the bank gets involved and a lot of people take one look at the service charges and run a mile.
There are an awful lot of flats where the service charge can be shown to be impacting the price - the Rightmove history of a lot of flats hitting auction houses are horror histories
Things briefed to journalists and MPs about Karl Turner included “he’s mad” and “he’s nuts”. This was whilst whips and Labour officials were aware he was receiving mental wellbeing support from the House of Commons authorities.
My meme for the last couple of years is that we pay more and more for less and less. We have seen this with the Navy recently and this seems another good example. As @ydoethur points out how on earth do we spend £13.6bn a year (in England ) and fail so many kids? Where does the money go and how do we get more of it at the sharp end with speech and language therapists, physiotherapists, educational psychologists etc rather than administration?
From what I have read elsewhere and what @ydoethur says, I am not confident that Phillipson has an answer that is even vaguely credible.
How? Scrap the marketisation of education? As with the NHS we spend so much cash creating and staffing vast layers of management and structures that simply need not exist.
My meme for the last couple of years is that we pay more and more for less and less. We have seen this with the Navy recently and this seems another good example. As @ydoethur points out how on earth do we spend £13.6bn a year (in England ) and fail so many kids? Where does the money go and how do we get more of it at the sharp end with speech and language therapists, physiotherapists, educational psychologists etc rather than administration?
From what I have read elsewhere and what @ydoethur says, I am not confident that Phillipson has an answer that is even vaguely credible.
Trouble is, that's where those of us who thought that the Conservatives were onto something in 2010 ought to look awkwardly at our shoes for a bit. LEAs could be really annoying and often low quality. But the LEA system was surely a more efficient system of administration, a better use of management experience and less vulnerable to salesmen than what has replaced them.
My meme for the last couple of years is that we pay more and more for less and less. We have seen this with the Navy recently and this seems another good example. As @ydoethur points out how on earth do we spend £13.6bn a year (in England ) and fail so many kids? Where does the money go and how do we get more of it at the sharp end with speech and language therapists, physiotherapists, educational psychologists etc rather than administration?
From what I have read elsewhere and what @ydoethur says, I am not confident that Phillipson has an answer that is even vaguely credible.
A part of it is “professionalisation”
The British Museum doesn’t have a catalogue of everything in the basement. So stuff was stolen without being noticed.
In fact most museums and collections around the world have huge piles of badly (or un-) catalogued stuff in the basement.
A little while ago, I suggested here that what should be done is what I did as a volunteer job years back in a smaller museum. And what a relative is doing with early Georgian documents.
That is - volunteers and domain expert researchers should take some digital pics of the items. Put them in nice boxes, with a bar/QR code that goes in the database. Work through slowly, over years
But, to several people here, the idea of doing it without a Proper Project, lots of management, a logo, a building etc is laughable.
So estimates of £100 million for creating a catalogue are How It Is. And there is no catalogue.
A vaguely similar thought occurred to me when I heard a pilot discussing the difficulties of shooting down a relatively low speed drone in a fast jet. There seems to be a lot of very expensive tech being used to counter $40k drones.
‘There's a real irony that one of the worst aircraft of WWII would be ideal for shooting down Shahed drones today. The Boulton-Paul Defiant was 90 years ahead of its time’
Bit unfair on the Defiant. There were lots of worse aircraft.
The Shahed drones fly at 100kts, it’s really difficult to shoot them down with a fast jet which doesn’t like anything below about 300kts.
The Ukranians are doing things like flying around in light aircraft with a shotgun hanging out of the window, chasing them with helicopters, or shooting at them from the ground with guns. The best option so far appears to be small $2,000 quadcoptor drones, a fast version of a hobby DJI-type with a small explosive charge.
The Vietnam-era Bronco can be fitted with shotgun/machine-gun pods, can loiter from several hours, and can take off and land from a Queen-Elizabeth class aircraft carrier without arrestor gear/catapult
That link about autism not being a spectrum is interesting. I laugh because it’s a symptom of this country’s inability to say no.
I have a question. I have been told by a few people that they think I am autistic. I have a degree from Oxford (I know!), have a job (albeit in the public sector) etc. I had no SEN help as a child. I just got on with it. So, the question is, are the people saying this to me simply wrong and falling into the trap of thinking autism is a spectrum. Or, could they be right and some children with autism don’t need help.
You could well be on the spectrum but high functioning. Academically speaking you probably wouldn't need any help and therefore trouble SEND professionals.
My son's biggest issue is social interaction. He is polite but can inadvertently say something offensive. He has a limited filter. He did struggle at school but he has a 2:1 in computer engineering and is going to do his MSc in September having held down a job on the line at Sony for a year or so. The condition does detrimentally affect how he operates in life. He is a loner and not by choice. He would be the sort of character Donald Trump would ridicule for being "dumb". As Trump did with "President Newscum".
I would suggest you would know if you needed intervention, but you could still be on the spectrum.
Trump on TV every day Lots of opportunity for insider trading Not much discussion about 13 year olds girls and Epstein Own the libs, especially the namby pamby, foreign NATO ones
It makes sense because that is covered by the uptick in VAT as a result of the retail price hikes.
And because it’s eye catching enough to get some media attention, sensible or otherwise.
And (superficially) it doesn't really matter what the Lib Dems say, because they're not in government.
At a deeper level, it matters quite a lot. Every time an opposition party proposes something that sounds good but probably isn't[1], it makes life harder for whoever is in government. It was hard enough when there were two opposition parties both throwing rotten fruit from roughly the same side. Not there are four, flinging fruit from all sorts of directions.
[1] Any policy that doesn't include the observation that there are going to be less hydrocarbons around, at least for a while, and we need to roll with that, probably isn't a good policy.
A consequence of today’s multi-party politics is that there is a whole stack of opposition parties competing for media attention, and sadly, boring, sensible, worthy policies coming from a party not in power rarely make the headlines, or even the bylines.
Once again, Nigel is a pro surrounded by nasty idiots. The question of why Nigel is surrounded by nasty idiots is left as an exercise for the reader.
He’s neither nasty or an idiot.
He’s right. It may be clumsy the point he made but it’s right.
How far do you go with regulation to prevent harms ?
Our regulation on building homes here is a problem. He’s right to highlight it.
The discussion is worth having. His choice of wording means we won't have those discussions as he made it emotionally toxic. Idiot is too strong, but it doesn't suggest the capability (that should be) required of a housing secretary either.
My meme for the last couple of years is that we pay more and more for less and less. We have seen this with the Navy recently and this seems another good example. As @ydoethur points out how on earth do we spend £13.6bn a year (in England ) and fail so many kids? Where does the money go and how do we get more of it at the sharp end with speech and language therapists, physiotherapists, educational psychologists etc rather than administration?
From what I have read elsewhere and what @ydoethur says, I am not confident that Phillipson has an answer that is even vaguely credible.
A part of it is “professionalisation”
The British Museum doesn’t have a catalogue of everything in the basement. So stuff was stolen without being noticed.
In fact most museums and collections around the world have huge piles of badly (or un-) catalogued stuff in the basement.
A little while ago, I suggested here that what should be done is what I did as a volunteer job years back in a smaller museum. And what a relative is doing with early Georgian documents.
That is - volunteers and domain expert researchers should take some digital pics of the items. Put them in nice boxes, with a bar/QR code that goes in the database. Work through slowly, over years
But, to several people here, the idea of doing it without a Proper Project, lots of management, a logo, a building etc is laughable.
So estimates of £100 million for creating a catalogue are How It Is. And there is no catalogue.
The British Museum has over 500 volunteers and they already help with cataloguing objects: see https://www.britishmuseum.org/support-us/volunteer So, maybe, it isn’t an example that supports your argument.
Given Reform is now committed to the triple lock, the most revolutionary and distinctive thing Kemi and the Conservatives can do is forget about winning votes and begins that rarest of things; a party that does what it believes in rather than a quick fix to keep voters onside
My meme for the last couple of years is that we pay more and more for less and less. We have seen this with the Navy recently and this seems another good example. As @ydoethur points out how on earth do we spend £13.6bn a year (in England ) and fail so many kids? Where does the money go and how do we get more of it at the sharp end with speech and language therapists, physiotherapists, educational psychologists etc rather than administration?
From what I have read elsewhere and what @ydoethur says, I am not confident that Phillipson has an answer that is even vaguely credible.
Trouble is, that's where those of us who thought that the Conservatives were onto something in 2010 ought to look awkwardly at our shoes for a bit. LEAs could be really annoying and often low quality. But the LEA system was surely a more efficient system of administration, a better use of management experience and less vulnerable to salesmen than what has replaced them.
Yep when I was a School Governor, the local authority was very good and remarkably cheap.
The Diocese (which was a forerunner of academy chains) were completely beyond useless.
Once again, Nigel is a pro surrounded by nasty idiots. The question of why Nigel is surrounded by nasty idiots is left as an exercise for the reader.
Simon Dudley said “everyone dies in the end” and “fires happen”.
So at 5pm, Farage will be resolving the issue by burning him at the stake...
Whoops!
He has half a point about reactions to single incidents leading to a load of bad law or regulation, but one needs to be a little more careful about one’s language when referring to a fire in which dozens of people actually died.
Of course, as we have discussed here many times before, the required mountain of paperwork to certify Grenfell Tower’s cladding as fireproof was all in place. It was perfect, except for the fact that the tower’s cladding wasn’t actually fireproof.
He wasn’t wrong with his point about regulation leading to bad outcomes.
I’ve not looked into it in too much detail, but it does appear to now be prohibitively expensive to build blocks of apartments, even in London. AIUI prices are now falling because banks are reluctant to mortgage apartment properties not up to the current fire code, leading to reduced demand.
The seller of the flat needs to find a buyer before the bank gets involved and a lot of people take one look at the service charges and run a mile.
There are an awful lot of flats where the service charge can be shown to be impacting the price - the Rightmove history of a lot of flats hitting auction houses are horror histories
That makes sense too.
Friend of mine got caught out a few years back by service charges, he bought off-plan and didn’t make the link at the time between the “luxury” amenities (24h concierge desk, gym, sauna etc) in the sales brochure, and the cost of running all these lovely amenities on a day-to-day basis. The SCs were up there with some of the retirement home horror shows, close to five figures per year when he was already stretched to afford the mortgage.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
I'm sorry, it is not bollocks.
Here is David Turver's chart again - and before anyone says that RCS 'debunked' this - he didn't. He offered a mild reproach at how the gas MWH price was simplified. He gave no objections to the broad figures, and if he wishes to do so, let him do so now.
The table is obviously out of date, ChatGPT's current estimate for gas generation is £120–140 per MWh, including £15–25/MWh of carbon offsetting costs.
That makes solar under CFD the only renewable source that is competitive with gas, even at its current Hormuz-related spike. The rest are all costing us considerably more.
The fundamental flaw with that table is it compares the marginal cost of gas with the total cost of renewables. A like-for-like comparison would be to drop (almost) all the CfD costs from renewables, given almost all of them are incurred from the initial investment. This is why LCOE is the better measure - particularly looking into the future, with the cost of non-wind renewables and batteries dropping so quickly.
There are also huge costs associated with uncertainty and lack of energy security. A fixed price CfD contract which Iran, Putin and Trump can't fuck up is worth additional £10s of billions to the UK economy, even if the LCOE is actually higher than it is for gas (which it isn't).
This *is* a like-for-like comparison. Why would you strip away a CFD cost in the way you describe when it's an ongoing cost?
And how is a secure fixed price contract that Iran cannot fuck with (but God can, by not sending any wind for a few days) worth additional tens of billions, when the uncertainty of the gas price is already automatically factored in to this calculation?
The answer is it isn't. You're essentially complaining that the figures are not obscured and weighted in favour of renewables when they usually are.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
Scotland being the glaring odd one out , shedloads of renewables and highest prices. All the downsides and none of teh upsides for us being a colony.
A vaguely similar thought occurred to me when I heard a pilot discussing the difficulties of shooting down a relatively low speed drone in a fast jet. There seems to be a lot of very expensive tech being used to counter $40k drones.
‘There's a real irony that one of the worst aircraft of WWII would be ideal for shooting down Shahed drones today. The Boulton-Paul Defiant was 90 years ahead of its time’
Bit unfair on the Defiant. There were lots of worse aircraft.
The Shahed drones fly at 100kts, it’s really difficult to shoot them down with a fast jet which doesn’t like anything below about 300kts.
The Ukranians are doing things like flying around in light aircraft with a shotgun hanging out of the window, chasing them with helicopters, or shooting at them from the ground with guns. The best option so far appears to be small $2,000 quadcoptor drones, a fast version of a hobby DJI-type with a small explosive charge.
The Vietnam-era Bronco can be fitted with shotgun/machine-gun pods, can loiter from several hours, and can take off and land from a Queen-Elizabeth class aircraft carrier without arrestor gear/catapult
This contemporary obsession with drone/counter-drone warfare is a textbook example of fighting-the-last-war.
Crashing F-16s trying to shoot down Gerans as the Ukrainians have done obviously isn't ideal but neither is embarking on a procurement effort for a system that is nothing but a finely tuned instrument for shooting down Gerans.
Multi domain flexibility of equipment and doctrine should be the objective. Narrowly focused solutions are catastrophically inefficient. This is why the A-10 is an expensive waste of time that the USAF can't wait to get rid of. It has one niche usage case: non time critical CAS in uncontested airspace. Is it worth having a platform just for that? No.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
I'm sorry, it is not bollocks.
Here is David Turver's chart again - and before anyone says that RCS 'debunked' this - he didn't. He offered a mild reproach at how the gas MWH price was simplified. He gave no objections to the broad figures, and if he wishes to do so, let him do so now.
The table is obviously out of date, ChatGPT's current estimate for gas generation is £120–140 per MWh, including £15–25/MWh of carbon offsetting costs.
That makes solar under CFD the only renewable source that is competitive with gas, even at its current Hormuz-related spike. The rest are all costing us considerably more.
The fundamental flaw with that table is it compares the marginal cost of gas with the total cost of renewables. A like-for-like comparison would be to drop (almost) all the CfD costs from renewables, given almost all of them are incurred from the initial investment. This is why LCOE is the better measure - particularly looking into the future, with the cost of non-wind renewables and batteries dropping so quickly.
There are also huge costs associated with uncertainty and lack of energy security. A fixed price CfD contract which Iran, Putin and Trump can't fuck up is worth additional £10s of billions to the UK economy, even if the LCOE is actually higher than it is for gas (which it isn't).
That chart reminds me of one that used to claim that EVs generated more C02 than ICE - by assuming all electricity was generated from brown coal and using the full “well-to-wheels” for EVs and only the C02 from actually burning the petrol for ICE.
So it's wrong because 'it reminds you of something'. That's the shittest argument against it yet.
🚨 WATCH: Nigel Farage formally commits to the state pension triple lock if Reform UK win the next election
"The people to whom pensions are being paid, certainly compared to a younger generation today, are those who have actually worked and paid into a system"
Given Reform is now committed to the triple lock, the most revolutionary and distinctive thing Kemi and the Conservatives can do is forget about winning votes and begins that rarest of things; a party that does what it believes in rather than a quick fix to keep voters onside
My meme for the last couple of years is that we pay more and more for less and less. We have seen this with the Navy recently and this seems another good example. As @ydoethur points out how on earth do we spend £13.6bn a year (in England ) and fail so many kids? Where does the money go and how do we get more of it at the sharp end with speech and language therapists, physiotherapists, educational psychologists etc rather than administration?
From what I have read elsewhere and what @ydoethur says, I am not confident that Phillipson has an answer that is even vaguely credible.
A part of it is “professionalisation”
The British Museum doesn’t have a catalogue of everything in the basement. So stuff was stolen without being noticed.
In fact most museums and collections around the world have huge piles of badly (or un-) catalogued stuff in the basement.
A little while ago, I suggested here that what should be done is what I did as a volunteer job years back in a smaller museum. And what a relative is doing with early Georgian documents.
That is - volunteers and domain expert researchers should take some digital pics of the items. Put them in nice boxes, with a bar/QR code that goes in the database. Work through slowly, over years
But, to several people here, the idea of doing it without a Proper Project, lots of management, a logo, a building etc is laughable.
So estimates of £100 million for creating a catalogue are How It Is. And there is no catalogue.
The British Museum has over 500 volunteers and they already help with cataloguing objects: see https://www.britishmuseum.org/support-us/volunteer So, maybe, it isn’t an example that supports your argument.
Once again, Nigel is a pro surrounded by nasty idiots. The question of why Nigel is surrounded by nasty idiots is left as an exercise for the reader.
He’s neither nasty or an idiot.
He’s right. It may be clumsy the point he made but it’s right.
How far do you go with regulation to prevent harms ?
Our regulation on building homes here is a problem. He’s right to highlight it.
The discussion is worth having. His choice of wording means we won't have those discussions as he made it emotionally toxic. Idiot is too strong, but it doesn't suggest the capability (that should be) required of a housing secretary either.
This is the tragedy of it. Your second sentence. Debate is now nullified.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
My meme for the last couple of years is that we pay more and more for less and less. We have seen this with the Navy recently and this seems another good example. As @ydoethur points out how on earth do we spend £13.6bn a year (in England ) and fail so many kids? Where does the money go and how do we get more of it at the sharp end with speech and language therapists, physiotherapists, educational psychologists etc rather than administration?
From what I have read elsewhere and what @ydoethur says, I am not confident that Phillipson has an answer that is even vaguely credible.
Trouble is, that's where those of us who thought that the Conservatives were onto something in 2010 ought to look awkwardly at our shoes for a bit. LEAs could be really annoying and often low quality. But the LEA system was surely a more efficient system of administration, a better use of management experience and less vulnerable to salesmen than what has replaced them.
There are fantastic career opportunities and six figure salaries if one can get onto the board of an academy group (no teaching experience necessary). The salary for a CEO of an academy group is loads better than that of a County Council Chief Education Officer, and there are two or three tiers below that can warrant a six figure salary. Luvvly Jubbly! I call that progress
Once again, Nigel is a pro surrounded by nasty idiots. The question of why Nigel is surrounded by nasty idiots is left as an exercise for the reader.
He’s neither nasty or an idiot.
He’s right. It may be clumsy the point he made but it’s right.
How far do you go with regulation to prevent harms ?
Our regulation on building homes here is a problem. He’s right to highlight it.
The discussion is worth having. His choice of wording means we won't have those discussions as he made it emotionally toxic. Idiot is too strong, but it doesn't suggest the capability (that should be) required of a housing secretary either.
This is the tragedy of it. Your second sentence. Debate is now nullified.
I don't disagree and personally I don't actually have a problem with his words. However, the job of a politician seeking to persuade inevitably and obviously includes careful use of words.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
I'm sorry, it is not bollocks.
Here is David Turver's chart again - and before anyone says that RCS 'debunked' this - he didn't. He offered a mild reproach at how the gas MWH price was simplified. He gave no objections to the broad figures, and if he wishes to do so, let him do so now.
The table is obviously out of date, ChatGPT's current estimate for gas generation is £120–140 per MWh, including £15–25/MWh of carbon offsetting costs.
That makes solar under CFD the only renewable source that is competitive with gas, even at its current Hormuz-related spike. The rest are all costing us considerably more.
The fundamental flaw with that table is it compares the marginal cost of gas with the total cost of renewables. A like-for-like comparison would be to drop (almost) all the CfD costs from renewables, given almost all of them are incurred from the initial investment. This is why LCOE is the better measure - particularly looking into the future, with the cost of non-wind renewables and batteries dropping so quickly.
There are also huge costs associated with uncertainty and lack of energy security. A fixed price CfD contract which Iran, Putin and Trump can't fuck up is worth additional £10s of billions to the UK economy, even if the LCOE is actually higher than it is for gas (which it isn't).
That chart reminds me of one that used to claim that EVs generated more C02 than ICE - by assuming all electricity was generated from brown coal and using the full “well-to-wheels” for EVs and only the C02 from actually burning the petrol for ICE.
So it's wrong because 'it reminds you of something'. That's the shittest argument against it yet.
For anyone who wishes to read the full post (obviously if you prefer to dismiss the facts because they remind you of something ydy), it is here:
My meme for the last couple of years is that we pay more and more for less and less. We have seen this with the Navy recently and this seems another good example. As @ydoethur points out how on earth do we spend £13.6bn a year (in England ) and fail so many kids? Where does the money go and how do we get more of it at the sharp end with speech and language therapists, physiotherapists, educational psychologists etc rather than administration?
From what I have read elsewhere and what @ydoethur says, I am not confident that Phillipson has an answer that is even vaguely credible.
A part of it is “professionalisation”
The British Museum doesn’t have a catalogue of everything in the basement. So stuff was stolen without being noticed.
In fact most museums and collections around the world have huge piles of badly (or un-) catalogued stuff in the basement.
A little while ago, I suggested here that what should be done is what I did as a volunteer job years back in a smaller museum. And what a relative is doing with early Georgian documents.
That is - volunteers and domain expert researchers should take some digital pics of the items. Put them in nice boxes, with a bar/QR code that goes in the database. Work through slowly, over years
But, to several people here, the idea of doing it without a Proper Project, lots of management, a logo, a building etc is laughable.
So estimates of £100 million for creating a catalogue are How It Is. And there is no catalogue.
Isn't the British Museum the world's largest stolen goods warehouse?
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Once again, Nigel is a pro surrounded by nasty idiots. The question of why Nigel is surrounded by nasty idiots is left as an exercise for the reader.
Simon Dudley said “everyone dies in the end” and “fires happen”.
So at 5pm, Farage will be resolving the issue by burning him at the stake...
Whoops!
He has half a point about reactions to single incidents leading to a load of bad law or regulation, but one needs to be a little more careful about one’s language when referring to a fire in which dozens of people actually died.
Of course, as we have discussed here many times before, the required mountain of paperwork to certify Grenfell Tower’s cladding as fireproof was all in place. It was perfect, except for the fact that the tower’s cladding wasn’t actually fireproof.
He wasn’t wrong with his point about regulation leading to bad outcomes.
I’ve not looked into it in too much detail, but it does appear to now be prohibitively expensive to build blocks of apartments, even in London. AIUI prices are now falling because banks are reluctant to mortgage apartment properties not up to the current fire code, leading to reduced demand.
The seller of the flat needs to find a buyer before the bank gets involved and a lot of people take one look at the service charges and run a mile.
There are an awful lot of flats where the service charge can be shown to be impacting the price - the Rightmove history of a lot of flats hitting auction houses are horror histories
Lots of examples of flat prices falling in London and service charges impacting prices. Mainly newer builds.
I follow this feed.
Flats in this block have a service charge of £6,801. I’ve seen some at £10,000.
People would be nuts to take on an uncapped liability like this.
🚨 WATCH: Nigel Farage formally commits to the state pension triple lock if Reform UK win the next election
"The people to whom pensions are being paid, certainly compared to a younger generation today, are those who have actually worked and paid into a system"
🚨 WATCH: Nigel Farage formally commits to the state pension triple lock if Reform UK win the next election
"The people to whom pensions are being paid, certainly compared to a younger generation today, are those who have actually worked and paid into a system"
The art of being a reactionary shock jock is knowing who you can offend and exactly how much.
Mmm. There were 3 million unemployed for years and years in the Eighties. Many of those are now drawing State pensions.
How many are drawing the full state pension ?
and if they got their contributing years in, in spite of a period of time on the dole, then big deal.
The 3 million was not a fixed figure, people will be moving in and out of employment.
And today's young people aren't doing exactly the same? Because that's what Farage is saying.
If you are unemployed and receive benefit you get credited with the NI for the 'stamps' for state pension.
as well as free housing , council tax , and others with no income tax at all, kerching.
Indeed and if the Labour rebels like St Ange, Emily Thornberry and Lucy Powell get their way the Boriswave will very quickly become entitled to access the benefits system too. Proposing pushing it back 5 years is a good thing. But you know what some Labour politicians are like. Love giving our money to the economically burdensome.
A vaguely similar thought occurred to me when I heard a pilot discussing the difficulties of shooting down a relatively low speed drone in a fast jet. There seems to be a lot of very expensive tech being used to counter $40k drones.
‘There's a real irony that one of the worst aircraft of WWII would be ideal for shooting down Shahed drones today. The Boulton-Paul Defiant was 90 years ahead of its time’
Bit unfair on the Defiant. There were lots of worse aircraft.
The Shahed drones fly at 100kts, it’s really difficult to shoot them down with a fast jet which doesn’t like anything below about 300kts.
The Ukranians are doing things like flying around in light aircraft with a shotgun hanging out of the window, chasing them with helicopters, or shooting at them from the ground with guns. The best option so far appears to be small $2,000 quadcoptor drones, a fast version of a hobby DJI-type with a small explosive charge.
The Vietnam-era Bronco can be fitted with shotgun/machine-gun pods, can loiter from several hours, and can take off and land from a Queen-Elizabeth class aircraft carrier without arrestor gear/catapult
This contemporary obsession with drone/counter-drone warfare is a textbook example of fighting-the-last-war.
Crashing F-16s trying to shoot down Gerans as the Ukrainians have done obviously isn't ideal but neither is embarking on a procurement effort for a system that is nothing but a finely tuned instrument for shooting down Gerans.
Multi domain flexibility of equipment and doctrine should be the objective. Narrowly focused solutions are catastrophically inefficient. This is why the A-10 is an expensive waste of time that the USAF can't wait to get rid of. It has one niche usage case: non time critical CAS in uncontested airspace. Is it worth having a platform just for that? No.
Except that one of the A-10’s specialities is strafing small enemy boats, which is about to come in useful.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
Scotland being the glaring odd one out , shedloads of renewables and highest prices. All the downsides and none of teh upsides for us being a colony.
What's mad is that even accepting most of our energy will be exported south of the border, something like 40% in the Highlands was lost to curtailment. We are turning turbines off even while the crofter shivering below them has the highest energy costs anywhere in the UK - and that's why you have people in Moray/Aberdeenshire putting up solar panels despite the neighbouring hills being covered in them.
I'm glad that the UK Government is going to trial free electricity in that scenario. That this isn't already the case is a scandal. I'm big on renewables but frankly we shouldn't build another wind farm in Scotland until we have fully nodal pricing that means they are built where they are needed, or that businesses and households get it for free when supply outstrips demand.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
Scotland being the glaring odd one out , shedloads of renewables and highest prices. All the downsides and none of teh upsides for us being a colony.
What's mad is that even accepting most of our energy will be exported south of the border, something like 40% in the Highlands was lost to curtailment. We are turning turbines off even while the crofter shivering below them has the highest energy costs anywhere in the UK - and that's why you have people in Moray/Aberdeenshire putting up solar panels despite the neighbouring hills being covered in them.
I'm glad that the UK Government is going to trial free electricity in that scenario. That this isn't already the case is a scandal. I'm big on renewables but frankly we shouldn't build another wind farm in Scotland until we have fully nodal pricing that means they are built where they are needed, or that businesses and households get it for free when supply outstrips demand.
That isn't a bug it's a feature. The farms were built deliberately in areas of poor connectivity to farm constraint payments.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
I'm sorry, it is not bollocks.
Here is David Turver's chart again - and before anyone says that RCS 'debunked' this - he didn't. He offered a mild reproach at how the gas MWH price was simplified. He gave no objections to the broad figures, and if he wishes to do so, let him do so now.
The table is obviously out of date, ChatGPT's current estimate for gas generation is £120–140 per MWh, including £15–25/MWh of carbon offsetting costs.
That makes solar under CFD the only renewable source that is competitive with gas, even at its current Hormuz-related spike. The rest are all costing us considerably more.
The fundamental flaw with that table is it compares the marginal cost of gas with the total cost of renewables. A like-for-like comparison would be to drop (almost) all the CfD costs from renewables, given almost all of them are incurred from the initial investment. This is why LCOE is the better measure - particularly looking into the future, with the cost of non-wind renewables and batteries dropping so quickly.
There are also huge costs associated with uncertainty and lack of energy security. A fixed price CfD contract which Iran, Putin and Trump can't fuck up is worth additional £10s of billions to the UK economy, even if the LCOE is actually higher than it is for gas (which it isn't).
That chart reminds me of one that used to claim that EVs generated more C02 than ICE - by assuming all electricity was generated from brown coal and using the full “well-to-wheels” for EVs and only the C02 from actually burning the petrol for ICE.
So it's wrong because 'it reminds you of something'. That's the shittest argument against it yet.
It reminds me, because it uses the same kind of bad faith arguments and bad comparisons.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
I'm with Eabhal on this. Universal subsidy is nuts. Targeted support, uncoupled from fuel/energy consumption, maybe (everything will be getting more expensive and will hit poorer households hardest anyway).
Otherwise we just hide what should be another clear signal to those who can afford them that there are benefits to EVs over ICEVs.
ETA: I've defined myself as a liberal for a long time and I feel further and further away from the lib Dems - it used to be I'd lend my vote to other parties, now my vote is looking for a home
I’m also with Eabhal on this.
I cannot see why everyone should get a bail out simply because shit happens.
It's worse than that, it's tantamount to burning money.
Prices are high because supply is constrained. If you cut the tax you will increase demand. With no more supply then prices will simply increase.
Now the new equilibrium will be at a slightly lower price, because the higher demand will have increased prices in other countries, and decreased demand there, but it's really the most wasteful intervention I can think of.
Trump on TV every day Lots of opportunity for insider trading Not much discussion about 13 year olds girls and Epstein Own the libs, especially the namby pamby, foreign NATO ones
Seems to be going pretty well.
And saying things like "bomb them back to the stone ages".
Which as it happens would still leave them several evolutionary steps ahead of Donald Trump and his Maga-world goons.
Once again, Nigel is a pro surrounded by nasty idiots. The question of why Nigel is surrounded by nasty idiots is left as an exercise for the reader.
Simon Dudley said “everyone dies in the end” and “fires happen”.
So at 5pm, Farage will be resolving the issue by burning him at the stake...
Whoops!
He has half a point about reactions to single incidents leading to a load of bad law or regulation, but one needs to be a little more careful about one’s language when referring to a fire in which dozens of people actually died.
Of course, as we have discussed here many times before, the required mountain of paperwork to certify Grenfell Tower’s cladding as fireproof was all in place. It was perfect, except for the fact that the tower’s cladding wasn’t actually fireproof.
He wasn’t wrong with his point about regulation leading to bad outcomes.
I’ve not looked into it in too much detail, but it does appear to now be prohibitively expensive to build blocks of apartments, even in London. AIUI prices are now falling because banks are reluctant to mortgage apartment properties not up to the current fire code, leading to reduced demand.
The seller of the flat needs to find a buyer before the bank gets involved and a lot of people take one look at the service charges and run a mile.
There are an awful lot of flats where the service charge can be shown to be impacting the price - the Rightmove history of a lot of flats hitting auction houses are horror histories
Lots of examples of flat prices falling in London and service charges impacting prices. Mainly newer builds.
I follow this feed.
Flats in this block have a service charge of £6,801. I’ve seen some at £10,000.
People would be nuts to take on an uncapped liability like this.
That link about autism not being a spectrum is interesting. I laugh because it’s a symptom of this country’s inability to say no.
I have a question. I have been told by a few people that they think I am autistic. I have a degree from Oxford (I know!), have a job (albeit in the public sector) etc. I had no SEN help as a child. I just got on with it. So, the question is, are the people saying this to me simply wrong and falling into the trap of thinking autism is a spectrum. Or, could they be right and some children with autism don’t need help.
You could well be on the spectrum but high functioning. Academically speaking you probably wouldn't need any help and therefore trouble SEND professionals.
My son's biggest issue is social interaction. He is polite but can inadvertently say something offensive. He has a limited filter. He did struggle at school but he has a 2:1 in computer engineering and is going to do his MSc in September having held down a job on the line at Sony for a year or so. The condition does detrimentally affect how he operates in life. He is a loner and not by choice. He would be the sort of character Donald Trump would ridicule for being "dumb". As Trump did with "President Newscum".
I would suggest you would know if you needed intervention, but you could still be on the spectrum.
🚨 WATCH: Nigel Farage formally commits to the state pension triple lock if Reform UK win the next election
"The people to whom pensions are being paid, certainly compared to a younger generation today, are those who have actually worked and paid into a system"
The art of being a reactionary shock jock is knowing who you can offend and exactly how much.
Mmm. There were 3 million unemployed for years and years in the Eighties. Many of those are now drawing State pensions.
How many are drawing the full state pension ?
and if they got their contributing years in, in spite of a period of time on the dole, then big deal.
The 3 million was not a fixed figure, people will be moving in and out of employment.
And today's young people aren't doing exactly the same? Because that's what Farage is saying.
If you are unemployed and receive benefit you get credited with the NI for the 'stamps' for state pension.
as well as free housing , council tax , and others with no income tax at all, kerching.
Indeed and if the Labour rebels like St Ange, Emily Thornberry and Lucy Powell get their way the Boriswave will very quickly become entitled to access the benefits system too. Proposing pushing it back 5 years is a good thing. But you know what some Labour politicians are like. Love giving our money to the economically burdensome.
For sure sorting that out and getting tough on tax evaders rather than hiding /ignoring them would be even bigger benefit.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
Scotland being the glaring odd one out , shedloads of renewables and highest prices. All the downsides and none of teh upsides for us being a colony.
What's mad is that even accepting most of our energy will be exported south of the border, something like 40% in the Highlands was lost to curtailment. We are turning turbines off even while the crofter shivering below them has the highest energy costs anywhere in the UK - and that's why you have people in Moray/Aberdeenshire putting up solar panels despite the neighbouring hills being covered in them.
I'm glad that the UK Government is going to trial free electricity in that scenario. That this isn't already the case is a scandal. I'm big on renewables but frankly we shouldn't build another wind farm in Scotland until we have fully nodal pricing that means they are built where they are needed, or that businesses and households get it for free when supply outstrips demand.
That isn't a bug it's a feature. The farms were built deliberately in areas of poor connectivity to farm constraint payments.
I think it's a legitimate criticism (amid a load of nonsense) - if you're going to pile in on renewables this is certainly the way to do it.
You opposed regional/nodal pricing when it looked like Miliband was considering it. Have you changed your tuned now he's opposed it?
I do not need or deserve money off my energy bills.
If it’s a public service like transport then I can more so see the logic but ultimately costs have gone up. The government can’t subsidise things every time something happens, otherwise where do you stop?
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
Scotland being the glaring odd one out , shedloads of renewables and highest prices. All the downsides and none of teh upsides for us being a colony.
What's mad is that even accepting most of our energy will be exported south of the border, something like 40% in the Highlands was lost to curtailment. We are turning turbines off even while the crofter shivering below them has the highest energy costs anywhere in the UK - and that's why you have people in Moray/Aberdeenshire putting up solar panels despite the neighbouring hills being covered in them.
I'm glad that the UK Government is going to trial free electricity in that scenario. That this isn't already the case is a scandal. I'm big on renewables but frankly we shouldn't build another wind farm in Scotland until we have fully nodal pricing that means they are built where they are needed, or that businesses and households get it for free when supply outstrips demand.
I heard in the independence debate about Scotland's disadvantages re: currency but long term energy is king which I thought the pro indy side made relatively little noise on tbh
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
I'm sorry, it is not bollocks.
Here is David Turver's chart again - and before anyone says that RCS 'debunked' this - he didn't. He offered a mild reproach at how the gas MWH price was simplified. He gave no objections to the broad figures, and if he wishes to do so, let him do so now.
The table is obviously out of date, ChatGPT's current estimate for gas generation is £120–140 per MWh, including £15–25/MWh of carbon offsetting costs.
That makes solar under CFD the only renewable source that is competitive with gas, even at its current Hormuz-related spike. The rest are all costing us considerably more.
The fundamental flaw with that table is it compares the marginal cost of gas with the total cost of renewables. A like-for-like comparison would be to drop (almost) all the CfD costs from renewables, given almost all of them are incurred from the initial investment. This is why LCOE is the better measure - particularly looking into the future, with the cost of non-wind renewables and batteries dropping so quickly.
There are also huge costs associated with uncertainty and lack of energy security. A fixed price CfD contract which Iran, Putin and Trump can't fuck up is worth additional £10s of billions to the UK economy, even if the LCOE is actually higher than it is for gas (which it isn't).
That chart reminds me of one that used to claim that EVs generated more C02 than ICE - by assuming all electricity was generated from brown coal and using the full “well-to-wheels” for EVs and only the C02 from actually burning the petrol for ICE.
So it's wrong because 'it reminds you of something'. That's the shittest argument against it yet.
For anyone who wishes to read the full post (obviously if you prefer to dismiss the facts because they remind you of something ydy), it is here:
One of the problems for someone who wishes to engage with this argument from a relatively low knowledge base is that someone like David Turver is quoted as a reliable source.
It is clear from a gently perusal of his substack that his views on renewables and net zero were formed long before that table was.
I don't wish to play the man and not the ball, but the problem I find is that a long article full of facts can do as much to obscure as it can to illuminate.
On the other side many repeat unquestionably the claim that renewables are now cheaper than gas but inflated by the way we price electricity.
As with many things it is hard to know what to believe. It would be nice if fewer people were disingenuous in their substack or.podcast pronouncements...doesn't seem an unreasonable thing to wish for.
I do not need or deserve money off my energy bills.
If it’s a public service like transport then I can more so see the logic but ultimately costs have gone up. The government can’t subsidise things every time something happens, otherwise where do you stop?
The reason the last energy subsidy was universal was down to keeping the suppliers viable not whether consumers deserved it or not. Off current prices that is unlikely to be the case this time but if we returned to 2022 prices then we will do similar again, whoever is in charge or what they currently think best.
A vaguely similar thought occurred to me when I heard a pilot discussing the difficulties of shooting down a relatively low speed drone in a fast jet. There seems to be a lot of very expensive tech being used to counter $40k drones.
‘There's a real irony that one of the worst aircraft of WWII would be ideal for shooting down Shahed drones today. The Boulton-Paul Defiant was 90 years ahead of its time’
Bit unfair on the Defiant. There were lots of worse aircraft.
The Shahed drones fly at 100kts, it’s really difficult to shoot them down with a fast jet which doesn’t like anything below about 300kts.
The Ukranians are doing things like flying around in light aircraft with a shotgun hanging out of the window, chasing them with helicopters, or shooting at them from the ground with guns. The best option so far appears to be small $2,000 quadcoptor drones, a fast version of a hobby DJI-type with a small explosive charge.
The Vietnam-era Bronco can be fitted with shotgun/machine-gun pods, can loiter from several hours, and can take off and land from a Queen-Elizabeth class aircraft carrier without arrestor gear/catapult
There’s apparently only a dozen of them left serviceable, will be very expensive per hour and really bad news to lose any to the war.
Build new ones. They are rugged, uncomplicated and very servicable. Provided the contractor is beaten heavily with a stick it shouldn't be too difficult nor too expensive.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
I'm sorry, it is not bollocks.
Here is David Turver's chart again - and before anyone says that RCS 'debunked' this - he didn't. He offered a mild reproach at how the gas MWH price was simplified. He gave no objections to the broad figures, and if he wishes to do so, let him do so now.
The table is obviously out of date, ChatGPT's current estimate for gas generation is £120–140 per MWh, including £15–25/MWh of carbon offsetting costs.
That makes solar under CFD the only renewable source that is competitive with gas, even at its current Hormuz-related spike. The rest are all costing us considerably more.
The fundamental flaw with that table is it compares the marginal cost of gas with the total cost of renewables. A like-for-like comparison would be to drop (almost) all the CfD costs from renewables, given almost all of them are incurred from the initial investment. This is why LCOE is the better measure - particularly looking into the future, with the cost of non-wind renewables and batteries dropping so quickly.
There are also huge costs associated with uncertainty and lack of energy security. A fixed price CfD contract which Iran, Putin and Trump can't fuck up is worth additional £10s of billions to the UK economy, even if the LCOE is actually higher than it is for gas (which it isn't).
That chart reminds me of one that used to claim that EVs generated more C02 than ICE - by assuming all electricity was generated from brown coal and using the full “well-to-wheels” for EVs and only the C02 from actually burning the petrol for ICE.
So it's wrong because 'it reminds you of something'. That's the shittest argument against it yet.
It reminds me, because it uses the same kind of bad faith arguments and bad comparisons.
I think the bad faith lies in dismissing something out of hand on the basis of zero evidence. You've shown yourself to be utterly intellectually incurious.
A vaguely similar thought occurred to me when I heard a pilot discussing the difficulties of shooting down a relatively low speed drone in a fast jet. There seems to be a lot of very expensive tech being used to counter $40k drones.
‘There's a real irony that one of the worst aircraft of WWII would be ideal for shooting down Shahed drones today. The Boulton-Paul Defiant was 90 years ahead of its time’
Bit unfair on the Defiant. There were lots of worse aircraft.
The Shahed drones fly at 100kts, it’s really difficult to shoot them down with a fast jet which doesn’t like anything below about 300kts.
The Ukranians are doing things like flying around in light aircraft with a shotgun hanging out of the window, chasing them with helicopters, or shooting at them from the ground with guns. The best option so far appears to be small $2,000 quadcoptor drones, a fast version of a hobby DJI-type with a small explosive charge.
The Vietnam-era Bronco can be fitted with shotgun/machine-gun pods, can loiter from several hours, and can take off and land from a Queen-Elizabeth class aircraft carrier without arrestor gear/catapult
There’s apparently only a dozen of them left serviceable, will be very expensive per hour and really bad news to lose any to the war.
Build new ones. They are rugged, uncomplicated and very servicable. Provided the contractor is beaten heavily with a stick it shouldn't be too difficult nor too expensive.
It you want a cheap-to-run turboprop for low end military operations, there are plenty around. Some in current production.
Even if we drill all the North Sea oil it’s eventually going to run out. So we’re going to have to use something else.
Surely we should produce and use as much of our own energy as possible?
Yes, and this is why a blended energy plan should have been obvious: Make extracting remaining oil & gas as tax-efficient as possible Continued investment into renewables and the grid Investment into SMR nuclear
Problem is that zealots insist one is Bad and should stop immediately.
To return to the topic of this thread , I am saddened by the Education Secretary's doctrinal attitude to private schools for special needs pupils. She would do better to ask why parents are sending their children to these schools. When I lived in north Hampshire, two parents with special needs children (One was deaf, the other had hemiplegia) sent their child to a private school because the private school had a positive attitude whereas the head teachers in the state sector were either indifferent or hostile. My son has hemiplegia and when we tried to explain his disability to the head of the local primary school, she just dismissed our comments by saying: "But some of the pupils here come from a house with no books. That's a disability."
I belong to a parents' support group and I have heard some heart-breaking stories where was was the teacher who was the main bully of the disabled pupil. You can put all the systems in place but if a teacher is hostile, it won't work.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
I'm sorry, it is not bollocks.
Here is David Turver's chart again - and before anyone says that RCS 'debunked' this - he didn't. He offered a mild reproach at how the gas MWH price was simplified. He gave no objections to the broad figures, and if he wishes to do so, let him do so now.
The table is obviously out of date, ChatGPT's current estimate for gas generation is £120–140 per MWh, including £15–25/MWh of carbon offsetting costs.
That makes solar under CFD the only renewable source that is competitive with gas, even at its current Hormuz-related spike. The rest are all costing us considerably more.
The fundamental flaw with that table is it compares the marginal cost of gas with the total cost of renewables. A like-for-like comparison would be to drop (almost) all the CfD costs from renewables, given almost all of them are incurred from the initial investment. This is why LCOE is the better measure - particularly looking into the future, with the cost of non-wind renewables and batteries dropping so quickly.
There are also huge costs associated with uncertainty and lack of energy security. A fixed price CfD contract which Iran, Putin and Trump can't fuck up is worth additional £10s of billions to the UK economy, even if the LCOE is actually higher than it is for gas (which it isn't).
That chart reminds me of one that used to claim that EVs generated more C02 than ICE - by assuming all electricity was generated from brown coal and using the full “well-to-wheels” for EVs and only the C02 from actually burning the petrol for ICE.
So it's wrong because 'it reminds you of something'. That's the shittest argument against it yet.
It reminds me, because it uses the same kind of bad faith arguments and bad comparisons.
I think the bad faith lies in dismissing something out of hand on the basis of zero evidence. You've shown yourself to be utterly intellectually incurious.
The flaw has been explained to you, calmly and clearly, repeatedly.
It is dishonest to contrast the full cost of one (including capital outlay) with the marginal cost of the other.
Either compare full cost with full cost, or marginal cost with marginal cost.
If you had sight of Trump's speech in advance, you could have largely predicted that.
The subtext was "this shit-show has at least 2-3 weeks more to run. And may end with Iran's infrastructure in ruins. And consequently, that of the Gulf states too."
Brent was up about 6% by the time he had sat down.
Even if we drill all the North Sea oil it’s eventually going to run out. So we’re going to have to use something else.
Surely we should produce and use as much of our own energy as possible?
Yes, and this is why a blended energy plan should have been obvious: Make extracting remaining oil & gas as tax-efficient as possible Continued investment into renewables and the grid Investment into SMR nuclear
Problem is that zealots insist one is Bad and should stop immediately.
Trouble is that we all disagree on which one is Bad.
(FWIW, my take is that SMR isn't so much Bad, as overtaken by events. Renewables plus batteries is better on cost for 90-95% of the year, and it doesn't seem to make much sense to run nuclear for the remaining 5%, when gas can cover that more cheaply. For now, Net 0.05 looks close enough to Net Zero to be a sort-of-solved problem, albeit one that needs returning to.)
Once again, Nigel is a pro surrounded by nasty idiots. The question of why Nigel is surrounded by nasty idiots is left as an exercise for the reader.
Simon Dudley said “everyone dies in the end” and “fires happen”.
So at 5pm, Farage will be resolving the issue by burning him at the stake...
Whoops!
He has half a point about reactions to single incidents leading to a load of bad law or regulation, but one needs to be a little more careful about one’s language when referring to a fire in which dozens of people actually died.
Of course, as we have discussed here many times before, the required mountain of paperwork to certify Grenfell Tower’s cladding as fireproof was all in place. It was perfect, except for the fact that the tower’s cladding wasn’t actually fireproof.
He wasn’t wrong with his point about regulation leading to bad outcomes.
I’ve not looked into it in too much detail, but it does appear to now be prohibitively expensive to build blocks of apartments, even in London. AIUI prices are now falling because banks are reluctant to mortgage apartment properties not up to the current fire code, leading to reduced demand.
The seller of the flat needs to find a buyer before the bank gets involved and a lot of people take one look at the service charges and run a mile.
There are an awful lot of flats where the service charge can be shown to be impacting the price - the Rightmove history of a lot of flats hitting auction houses are horror histories
Lots of examples of flat prices falling in London and service charges impacting prices. Mainly newer builds.
I follow this feed.
Flats in this block have a service charge of £6,801. I’ve seen some at £10,000.
People would be nuts to take on an uncapped liability like this.
I do not need or deserve money off my energy bills.
If it’s a public service like transport then I can more so see the logic but ultimately costs have gone up. The government can’t subsidise things every time something happens, otherwise where do you stop?
The reason the last energy subsidy was universal was down to keeping the suppliers viable not whether consumers deserved it or not. Off current prices that is unlikely to be the case this time but if we returned to 2022 prices then we will do similar again, whoever is in charge or what they currently think best.
Stupid idea.
If the suppliers go bust they should go bust. Assets and shareholders wiped out and continuity of operations via bankruptcy proceedings, including a newco if need be that could be privatised in the future.
A vaguely similar thought occurred to me when I heard a pilot discussing the difficulties of shooting down a relatively low speed drone in a fast jet. There seems to be a lot of very expensive tech being used to counter $40k drones.
‘There's a real irony that one of the worst aircraft of WWII would be ideal for shooting down Shahed drones today. The Boulton-Paul Defiant was 90 years ahead of its time’
Bit unfair on the Defiant. There were lots of worse aircraft.
The Shahed drones fly at 100kts, it’s really difficult to shoot them down with a fast jet which doesn’t like anything below about 300kts.
The Ukranians are doing things like flying around in light aircraft with a shotgun hanging out of the window, chasing them with helicopters, or shooting at them from the ground with guns. The best option so far appears to be small $2,000 quadcoptor drones, a fast version of a hobby DJI-type with a small explosive charge.
The Vietnam-era Bronco can be fitted with shotgun/machine-gun pods, can loiter from several hours, and can take off and land from a Queen-Elizabeth class aircraft carrier without arrestor gear/catapult
There’s apparently only a dozen of them left serviceable, will be very expensive per hour and really bad news to lose any to the war.
Build new ones. They are rugged, uncomplicated and very servicable. Provided the contractor is beaten heavily with a stick it shouldn't be too difficult nor too expensive.
It you want a cheap-to-run turboprop for low end military operations, there are plenty around. Some in current production.
Look at COIN aircraft.
I believe the US still has OV-1 Mohawks in service.
Comments
Shashank Joshi
@shashj
Three days ago Rubio omitted nuclear capabilities from the list of war aims. Now they are back on. Every day is an adventure.
https://x.com/shashj/status/2039601233573405000
Farage should have stuck with him.
He is not the problem. Issues like these are :-
https://x.com/scp_hughes/status/2039301676855624154?s=61
He’s right. It may be clumsy the point he made but it’s right.
How far do you go with regulation to prevent harms ?
Our regulation on building homes here is a problem. He’s right to highlight it.
and if they got their contributing years in, in spite of a period of time on the dole, then big deal.
The 3 million was not a fixed figure, people will be moving in and out of employment.
I cannot see why everyone should get a bail out simply because shit happens.
https://www.northerngasandpower.energymarketprice.com/dailymarketinsight/client/
Because that's what Farage is saying.
Here is David Turver's chart again - and before anyone says that RCS 'debunked' this - he didn't. He offered a mild reproach at how the gas MWH price was simplified. He gave no objections to the broad figures, and if he wishes to do so, let him do so now.
The table is obviously out of date, ChatGPT's current estimate for gas generation is £120–140 per MWh, including £15–25/MWh of carbon offsetting costs.
That makes solar under CFD the only renewable source that is competitive with gas, even at its current Hormuz-related spike. The rest are all costing us considerably more.
I was a governor there for a few years. It was awe-inspiring to see some of the skills shown by both teachers and parents to support e.g. those who were entirely non-verbal at the age of 14, or who slept only one hour per night.
What society does to support these children, and what choices we make with limited resources, are very thorny questions.
Perhaps I'm ill-informed but it seems to me that arguing that autism is a spectrum seems very different from arguing that it does not exist.
(Dons cynical hat)
I see that the transcript of a live chat from a utility company that just came thought purges the names of agents who were identified in the chat itself.)
ASD used to be seen as a kind of discreet… so it used to be described as “autism”, it used to be seen as a kind of… ‘you have it or you don’t have it’ condition. It is now really widely recognised that it is a spectrum condition and so it’s not susceptible to a kind of ‘yes or no’ diagnostic process. It’s much more susceptible to an understanding that there is a range responses that you will see in the normal distribution of the population”
First of all, that isn't actually correct. It's always been considered a spectrum condition, and there are degrees of it. I think she was confusing it with Asperger's.
Secondly, this was in terms of arguing that it is not possible or meaningful to diagnose autism, as part of her evidence on the process to reduce SEND budgets. That is asinine and seems to me to be denial of it. If it wasn't intended that way, she's such an idiot she shouldn't be managing an automated bus stop (which, given her track record elsewhere, may also be true).
More commentary here, if you know this website:
https://www.specialneedsjungle.com/commons-committee-education-hook-scrutiny-instead/
Too often in my generation 60s child, I now believe kids I knew were either passed off as eccentric or difficult.
The issue now think happens is that the spectrum is too wide. I've no proof of that, it's just a gut feel
So we've gone from no help to over diagnosis in 2 generations
Either way those who need and deserve help, aren't always getting the help they need.
There are also huge costs associated with uncertainty and lack of energy security. A fixed price CfD contract which Iran, Putin and Trump can't fuck up is worth additional £10s of billions to the UK economy, even if the LCOE is actually higher than it is for gas (which it isn't).
Let us be who we are, how we are, and there's not a big problem. I like this, you like that. I do this, you do that. I think like this, you think like that. But impose order and norms based around one strict definition of how and why and what, and people struggle to squeeze their square pegs into your round holes.
The only kind of policy that I could support is a low-interest government loan that helps people and businesses survive the initial shock - e.g. the sudden increase in cost of heating oil or diesel. Or a targeted universal payment, that goes to all rural households not on the gas-grid rather than just those consuming heating oil. Stuff like that.
At a deeper level, it matters quite a lot. Every time an opposition party proposes something that sounds good but probably isn't[1], it makes life harder for whoever is in government. It was hard enough when there were two opposition parties both throwing rotten fruit from roughly the same side. Not there are four, flinging fruit from all sorts of directions.
[1] Any policy that doesn't include the observation that there are going to be less hydrocarbons around, at least for a while, and we need to roll with that, probably isn't a good policy.
From what I have read elsewhere and what @ydoethur says, I am not confident that Phillipson has an answer that is even vaguely credible.
Just saying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Rockwell_OV-10_Bronco
And the attempt to impose linear rule sets on. Because some people love Order above all - by which they mean everyone thinking and acting in the same way.
There are an awful lot of flats where the service charge can be shown to be impacting the price - the Rightmove history of a lot of flats hitting auction houses are horror histories
https://x.com/dpjhodges/status/2039653618651935113?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
The British Museum doesn’t have a catalogue of everything in the basement. So stuff was stolen without being noticed.
In fact most museums and collections around the world have huge piles of badly (or un-) catalogued stuff in the basement.
A little while ago, I suggested here that what should be done is what I did as a volunteer job years back in a smaller museum. And what a relative is doing with early Georgian documents.
That is - volunteers and domain expert researchers should take some digital pics of the items. Put them in nice boxes, with a bar/QR code that goes in the database. Work through slowly, over years
But, to several people here, the idea of doing it without a Proper Project, lots of management, a logo, a building etc is laughable.
So estimates of £100 million for creating a catalogue are How It Is. And there is no catalogue.
My son's biggest issue is social interaction. He is polite but can inadvertently say something offensive. He has a limited filter. He did struggle at school but he has a 2:1 in computer engineering and is going to do his MSc in September having held down a job on the line at Sony for a year or so. The condition does detrimentally affect how he operates in life. He is a loner and not by choice. He would be the sort of character Donald Trump would ridicule for being "dumb". As Trump did with "President Newscum".
I would suggest you would know if you needed intervention, but you could still be on the spectrum.
Trump on TV every day
Lots of opportunity for insider trading
Not much discussion about 13 year olds girls and Epstein
Own the libs, especially the namby pamby, foreign NATO ones
Seems to be going pretty well.
The Diocese (which was a forerunner of academy chains) were completely beyond useless.
Friend of mine got caught out a few years back by service charges, he bought off-plan and didn’t make the link at the time between the “luxury” amenities (24h concierge desk, gym, sauna etc) in the sales brochure, and the cost of running all these lovely amenities on a day-to-day basis. The SCs were up there with some of the retirement home horror shows, close to five figures per year when he was already stretched to afford the mortgage.
And how is a secure fixed price contract that Iran cannot fuck with (but God can, by not sending any wind for a few days) worth additional tens of billions, when the uncertainty of the gas price is already automatically factored in to this calculation?
The answer is it isn't. You're essentially complaining that the figures are not obscured and weighted in favour of renewables when they usually are.
Crashing F-16s trying to shoot down Gerans as the Ukrainians have done obviously isn't ideal but neither is embarking on a procurement effort for a system that is nothing but a finely tuned instrument for shooting down Gerans.
Multi domain flexibility of equipment and doctrine should be the objective. Narrowly focused solutions are catastrophically inefficient. This is why the A-10 is an expensive waste of time that the USAF can't wait to get rid of. It has one niche usage case: non time critical CAS in uncontested airspace. Is it worth having a platform just for that? No.
They are still paying, accruing the years for the contribution based benefit, current tense.
PB auto correct is the weirdest thing.
Because of the argument for professionalisation
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/renewables-are-more-expensive-than-gas
I follow this feed.
Flats in this block have a service charge of £6,801. I’ve seen some at £10,000.
People would be nuts to take on an uncapped liability like this.
Same goes with caravans on holiday parks.
https://x.com/londonpricedrop/status/2039451755109347650?s=61
This time it’s a re-useable quadcoptor drone with a shotgun on the front, taking out an enemy drone.
https://x.com/igorsushko/status/2039665774621819038
I'm glad that the UK Government is going to trial free electricity in that scenario. That this isn't already the case is a scandal. I'm big on renewables but frankly we shouldn't build another wind farm in Scotland until we have fully nodal pricing that means they are built where they are needed, or that businesses and households get it for free when supply outstrips demand.
Prices are high because supply is constrained. If you cut the tax you will increase demand. With no more supply then prices will simply increase.
Now the new equilibrium will be at a slightly lower price, because the higher demand will have increased prices in other countries, and decreased demand there, but it's really the most wasteful intervention I can think of.
Which as it happens would still leave them several evolutionary steps ahead of Donald Trump and his Maga-world goons.
You opposed regional/nodal pricing when it looked like Miliband was considering it. Have you changed your tuned now he's opposed it?
If it’s a public service like transport then I can more so see the logic but ultimately costs have gone up. The government can’t subsidise things every time something happens, otherwise where do you stop?
It is clear from a gently perusal of his substack that his views on renewables and net zero were formed long before that table was.
I don't wish to play the man and not the ball, but the problem I find is that a long article full of facts can do as much to obscure as it can to illuminate.
On the other side many repeat unquestionably the claim that renewables are now cheaper than gas but inflated by the way we price electricity.
As with many things it is hard to know what to believe. It would be nice if fewer people were disingenuous in their substack or.podcast pronouncements...doesn't seem an unreasonable thing to wish for.
Even if we drill all the North Sea oil it’s eventually going to run out. So we’re going to have to use something else.
Surely we should produce and use as much of our own energy as possible?
Look at COIN aircraft.
Make extracting remaining oil & gas as tax-efficient as possible
Continued investment into renewables and the grid
Investment into SMR nuclear
Problem is that zealots insist one is Bad and should stop immediately.
I belong to a parents' support group and I have heard some heart-breaking stories where was was the teacher who was the main bully of the disabled pupil. You can put all the systems in place but if a teacher is hostile, it won't work.
It is dishonest to contrast the full cost of one (including capital outlay) with the marginal cost of the other.
Either compare full cost with full cost, or marginal cost with marginal cost.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Am-German-Autistic-Germans-Autistics/dp/B0GJRZXHGK
The subtext was "this shit-show has at least 2-3 weeks more to run. And may end with Iran's infrastructure in ruins. And consequently, that of the Gulf states too."
Brent was up about 6% by the time he had sat down.
Invest in renewables AND extract our oil and gas.
It is not either/or.
Delusional Dementia Don keeps acting as if that has already occured and is not willing to take the steps necessary.
(FWIW, my take is that SMR isn't so much Bad, as overtaken by events. Renewables plus batteries is better on cost for 90-95% of the year, and it doesn't seem to make much sense to run nuclear for the remaining 5%, when gas can cover that more cheaply. For now, Net 0.05 looks close enough to Net Zero to be a sort-of-solved problem, albeit one that needs returning to.)
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/king-charles-might-be-muslim-says-former-new-york-mayor-rudy-giuliani
Meanwhile there is shared ownership, this story is typical
https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/money/property-and-mortgages/trapped-paying-shared-ownership-flat-sell-4320999
If the suppliers go bust they should go bust. Assets and shareholders wiped out and continuity of operations via bankruptcy proceedings, including a newco if need be that could be privatised in the future.
Private companies should not be bailed out.
Wot?