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I can't even

The reason there was no new blog entry earlier this week is the same reason I've been unable to write (or edit) all week: my brain tends to freeze when the wrong kind of history is happening.

And it is now very clear that the wrong kind of history is happening in the UK. Seriously, I had no idea it was possible to crash a G7 economy in less than a week! But it looks like only a Bank of England intervention in the gilts market averted a run—followed by the collapse of the nation's largest pension funds. 40% of mortgage products have been withdrawn by banks and lending institutions, the housing market is expected to fall 10% in the next six months, Sterling is heading below US dollar parity for the first time ever, the BoE is inevitably going to have to raise the base rate (crashing the finances of a huge proportion of the mortgage-holding public) ... it beggars belief.

Truss and Kwarteng appear to be taking policy advice solely from the Institute for Economic Affairs, a hardcore libertarian pressure group with famously opaque finances operating out of 55 Tufton Street—and if you don't know what that is, I strongly suggest you read that wikipedia article and follow the links to the articles about their other pressure groups like the Taxpayers' Alliance, Leave Means Leave, and the Global Warming Policy Foundation, it's a real eye-opener (complete with footnotes). For added fun the cabinet appear to have numerous connections to dominionist Christian churches, as we've seen lately in Australia (see also: Hillsong Church) and The Fellowship (in the USA).

Fuck Around and Find Out time: as of Monday, Labour were polling 17 points ahead of the Conservative (per YouGov). That was bad enough, but by Thursday 29th, a new poll gave Labour a stunning 33 point lead in the polls as Conservative voter support imploded. It seems that tanking the currency, the pension system, the housing market, and the national debt in just one week is slightly unpopular. Who could possibly have seen that coming?

Anyway ... what next?

Speculation: the Conservative Party conference begins on Monday 3rd, and is going to be an epic drama. Either the party will double down and drink the poisoned Kool-Aid or (I think this is more likely) they will go backstabby on La Trussterfuck, possibly lining up behind Rishi Sunak, who is currently pulling no punches (and who was absolutely right when he warned about the effects of her policies on the economy before he lost the leadership election). Boris Johnson will attempt to ride in to save the day, and may well get a hearing. But one thing is for sure: if Truss doesn't get the party to back her next week, the 1922 Committee will change the rules to permit a no confidence vote before mid-October and she will go down hard, setting a new record for the shortest tenure of Prime Minister in British history, like, forever.

If the next PMUK is Boris (again), there is a faint prospect that he will gamble on a snap election, aiming to win on public relief at getting rid of La Trussterfuck before everyone remembers why they hate him. He might even be right. If it's anyone else though, there is not a hope in hell of an early general election before they run down the clock in November 2024.

If Truss somehow survives, we're fucking doomed. When someone tells you who they are, you should generally believe them, and Truss has been shouting through a megaphone that she's a deeply stupid Thatcher cosplayer in the pocket of dogmatic libertarian ideologues who I assume were hired to felate billionaire oligarchs like Crispin Odey or Christopher Chandler who seem to think they are entitled to own the rental income on the UK paid by its citizens without actually bothering to maintain the property: facts don't matter, real people don't matter, we're just useless degenerate second-handers (per Ayn Rand) who are along for the ride as they destroy what's left of the UK's social fabric in pursuit of short-term profit-taking. Worse: the Screaming Jeezus People account for an unholy proportion of the European Research Group membership: the same dominionist agenda seems to be at work behind the scenes in the UK as in the US Republican party (added twist—the UK is majority no-religion/atheist, so it's less visible). The anti-trans witch hunt and escalating culture wars hysteria are symptomatic of the intent behind this: a lot of US Christian lobbying money seems to find its way into funding stuff like anti-abortion protest groups in the UK and moves to criminalize homosexuality in African nations. Expect more, and harder, as the Tory party sinks below the waves.

Another likely option is a complete fragmentation. The Tories were traditionally the party of rentier landowners, and they have always had a ruthless pragmatic streak about maintaining control: they were the ruling party, and this recent excursion into FAFO territory is distinctly atypical. Most of the traditional "moderate" (by which I mean pragmatic) Conservative MPs were selected out after the Brexit referendum, but there is almost certainly still a rump of realists and they can be expected to be horrified by what's going on. It is possible that they'll try to regain control and be forced out, like the SDP in 1980 during Labour's internal bloodletting: or it could happen the other way around. In either case, though, this is the sort of situation that splits parties, and it is not impossible that the Conservative Party will fracture—either now or after catastrophically losing a snap election.

What other options are there? Who knows. But I think we can say for certain that the crisis is not over, there is scope for it to get much worse ... and this is the sort of thing that breaks political parties, breaks nations, and if the UK was a developing world country I'd be getting worried about a military coup round about now.

1560 Comments

1:

Well, that's a really clear explanation of a completely bollocks up situation. I didn't know the Happy Clappers had infiltrated your politics as well 😕 It must be so hard to try to write fiction when this is reality.

2:

I just sent the checked copy-edits on Season of Skulls, the third New Management book, off to Tor.com's production editor this week before the shitstorm broke, and I am really glad I decided to set most of it in 1816 because there is no sane way to satirise what is currently happening in British politics, even through the medium of a looking-glass world where the nation is ruled by an Ancient Evil rather than a human politician.

3:

I think that, in the medium term, this is brilliant stuff. Truss and Kwartengs call handed attempt to impose extreme libertarian batshit economics with no mandate is going as well as you might expect. Their policies are the logical end point of their strain of political ideology. This will discredit low tax, destroy the state ideologies for ever in the eyes of the British public.

As a bonus the Tory party faces annihilation.

4:

If the next UK PM tries -- and maybe succeeds -- in having Charles executed for Crimes Against Diana as a distraction it wouldn't surprise me at this point, and it really should.

Eventually, "military coup" is going to start looking like "murder billionaires".

None of the billionaires are going to stop, any politicians are constrained by this from doing anything structurally helpful, and if we don't get structural change, all of us are dead of uncivilized causes. (The point to civilization is that you, by and large and in the main, die of something other than preventable disease, exposure, starvation, or violence.) The Dominionist billionaires have more offensive agendas in the short term, but in the medium term we're all dead. This is no longer entirely a theoretical concern. It sounds like it's increasingly an immediate concern in the UK.

5:

As a bonus the Tory party faces annihilation.

I would welcome this but during the process our lives, investments and incomes will also face annihilation. Thousands, if not tens of thousands will die this winter due to hunger and cold because they won't be able to pay their bills, and will have to chose one over the other, or their children. All of this is on top of that reality.

6:

I think that, in the medium term, this is brilliant stuff. Truss and Kwartengs call handed attempt to impose extreme libertarian batshit economics with no mandate is going as well as you might expect. Their policies are the logical end point of their strain of political ideology. This will discredit low tax, destroy the state ideologies for ever in the eyes of the British public.

I'd be happy if people not in the UK took notice of this.

One of our right-wing parties (Kokoomus, the National Coalition Party), in opposition currently, did present their shadow budget proposal a couple of weeks ago... and it had basically the 'take loans to fund tax breaks for the rich' idea. Which I don't approve.

7:

There have been stories about demons (or the devil) saying they just can't keep up with humans in the evil stakes. Frankly, the Conservative party members have a good point - Bozo is by a far better choice than Trash or Sumach. I think that your predictions are right, though I can't help feeling that Trash would be replaced by someone even worse - e.g. Mad Nad, with Grease-Smug as chancellor.

Regrettably, this isn't going to go away even if there is a snap election and Starmer wins. My prediction then is that he will fail to resolve the mess, be replaced as Labour leader by someone just vaguely socialist, we will then have a rerun of the 2019 election, and if we are lucky get Bozo back again. If we are unlucky, Gawd 'elp us all!

No, I am not expecting the British public to stop taking their views from our mass media, let alone wake up and take any actions to create a radical government that puts the country first.

8:

I would welcome this but

You really shouldn't.

History tells us that when a major political faction is eliminated it leaves a power vacuum behind. In the case of the Tories, that power vacuum would be on the hard right.

If we lucked out, it would simply mean that Labour (or maybe the LibDems) would colonise that part of the political map and be slightly kinder, softer Tories for the first generation.

But it's equally likely that something really horrible would emerge from the wreckage, like an unholy alliance of the worst bits of the ERG as the suit-wearing front end for Britain First or National Action or some other overtly fascist party.

9:

As a bonus the Tory party faces annihilation.

I commend to your attention the Canadian example; after the Mulroney government was voted out of office, there were two (2) sitting conservative MPs.

It didn't matter. Funding pressure moved around to secure mammonite goals; the Liberal Party has never recovered from this (having lost its essential internal faction balance) and the current conservative party just elected a post-fascist mammonite as leader.

It's easy to miss, since one is some mix of cold, hungry, or scared, but the billionaires are frightened. It's obvious the world is changing. Their response -- more money, since money is the material love of god and creates security -- is inherently futile since money only has value inside the society which produced it, and if you break society money becomes worthless.

This doesn't mean they can imagine any other response or will do something different. They'd have to imagine that maybe god doesn't love them to do that.

10:

One estimate, using the latest YouGov voting intentions data, gives Labour a 450-seat majority if a snap election were to be held... https://twitter.com/ballotboxmedia/status/1575534002781331456

The problem with the pragmatic Tories is that the ones with experience, principles and backbone were culled by Clownshoes the first time they stood up to him. The ones who are left are pragmatic in terms of saving their own political skins but that does not translate into actually managing the country well. I suspect that a) Starmer and various bank CEOs will be having emergency conferences with the fascist newspaper owners - Blair was elected with the support of Murdoch - and b) the national front groups will be knocking on the doors of the Red/Blue Wall MPs both as we speak.

11:

Anaplia
Exactly - it's following the playbook in "Britannia Unhinged" ... err .. Unchained - pure US-Rethuglican lunacy - some details in a post of mine in the previoous thread.
Trumpss needs to be asked, straight out, if she still wants to follow what her ( & Kamikwasi-Karteng's ) book wanted? Could be amusing for certain values of ...

Hakan
PROBLEM - the next GE can be held off until late autumn 2024, by which time they will have stripped our economy bare - which is the point.

Charlie @ 8
As seems to have happened in Italy?
Euw.

Meanwhile, Putin is threatening everyone with his annexation of the SudetenlandE-Ukraine

12:

Re: 'Britain First or National Action or some other overtly fascist party'

If by 'Britain' you mean that Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland will be vacating the UK as fast as they can (to join the EU?) - agree.

Any insights into connections across/between the various fascist parties that have been springing up all over Europe?

13:

Given Russia's current flailing around, I wonder if some of those advising the current government might not have the UK's best interests at heart.

14:

This will discredit low tax, destroy the state ideologies for ever in the eyes of the British public.

That strikes me as stunning example of naïveté. The media pushing those ideologies are solidly funded and supported by billionaires. They aren't going to stop pushing their propaganda, so at the very least a large chunk of the electorate are going to continue buying into them.

Just like any other committed cultist, the hard-core Tory supporters will effortlessly swallow whatever their media tells them, and then go on believing the exact same ideologies. There'll barely even need to be a show-trial of Truss, maybe a two-minute hate on her and then everything is back to the usual.

See also Graydon's comment about exactly how little difference it made in Canada. Speaking as an Aussie, I can tell you exactly how much difference the electoral slaughter of our Tories made. Hint: It rhymes with Tweet Truck Tall. The allegedly 'leftist' party, despite really clear and obvious messaging from the electorate, have rushed to continue 90% of the Tory policies, whilst also stating they are a gentler and kinder government than the previous lot.

For all of you stuck in the rapidly disintegrating hell-hole that is the current 'United' Kingdom, I worry and fear for you all.

My sympathies for those in Finland, Canada, Italy especially and everywhere else that's drowning under this bullshit. It's deeply fucked up.

15:

Something I realised in the 2019 bushfires was just how quickly it can all go wrong and you're suddenly fighting to stay alive. It can be just a couple of minutes from being annoyed that the mobile data has suddenly gone down so you can't listen to tunes in the car, to pushing over small trees as you bash your way through the growth on the median strip so you can turn and run from the fire.

There's no background music to let you know what you're supposed to be feeling in real life.

17:

@JayDzed said: The allegedly 'leftist' party, despite really clear and obvious messaging from the electorate, have rushed to continue 90% of the Tory policies

They're worse.

The new guy is an evil monster.

18:

Not gonna argue with you on that one, not after he spent so much time talking about how rough it was growing up as the kid of a single mum on welfare and then proceeded to tighten the screws on the poor and disadvantaged as gleefully as ScottNoFriends did.

Or the announcement of an Anti-Corruption Commission that received praise from one of the folks that should be first in line for said commission. The greatest worry now is that this lot are just less blatantly incompetent than the fuckwits they replaced.

19:

If by 'Britain' you mean

You misread, I was talking about Britain First, an actual-existing fascist party.

20:

The media pushing those ideologies are solidly funded and supported by billionaires. They aren't going to stop pushing their propaganda, so at the very least a large chunk of the electorate are going to continue buying into them.

Sounds like those pushing the "Trump won in 2020" lie here in the U.S. Sad... :-(

21:

The allegedly 'leftist' party, despite really clear and obvious messaging from the electorate, have rushed to continue 90% of the Tory policies, whilst also stating they are a gentler and kinder government than the previous lot.

Democrats in the U.S. seem to have this problem too, at least to some degree. They can't seem to ditch some of Trump's nasty policies...

22:

All I know about Keir Starmer is that he's the Labour leader that came in when Jeremy Corbyn was too much of an actual pro-labour-union Socialist for the Blairites and occasionally gets mentioned in articles about the Tories' latest disaster.

Does he have a chance of getting Labour behind him after the Tories collapse? Or of being vaguely competent (at least enough to handle the pre-Truss or pre-BoJo level of mess, if not the current one)?

23:

2 - You're the novelist, but I'm not even sure there's an insane way to satirise this!

7 - Look, I said back in the Spring that Larry the cat would be a better PM than any of Bozo the Clown, the Iron Weathervane and Rishi Rich.

12 - s/UK/Ingurlundshire.

24:

No, the hard core Tory supporters will move only from Conservative to National Front. It's the unthinking masses that do what the media tell them - "It's the Sun wot won it" had a lot of truth in it. I remember when the UK was better in that respect, though the tribalism was worse, and realised that our political system was fundamentally broken then (1960s). What is nominally a representative democracy has become a demagogocracy, and you need to either change the demagogues or get the people to stop following their instructions.

The countries I can think of that have significantly improved in a short period have all had popular and usually bloodless revolutions - violent ones and those led by a clique rarely improve things. Attlee's government worked because the people wanted real improvement - there was some of that in Thatcher's early period, but I don't remember another UK example. The causes of and solutions to this debacle lie with the population as a whole, not with party labels.

25:

The image of SuperCthulhu is deeply amusing... "disgused in daily life as the shoggoth Cl'rk'nt."

26:

You could have The New Management overthrown by something which is deeply worse... maybe Yog Sothoth shows up and kicks Nyarly's ass!

27:

What a mess. One serious question: How long will it take Scotland to cut itself free from this?

Please take good notes, so we'll have a better idea of how this iteration of the Dictator's billionaire's playbook works. Hopefully you'll be able to satirize them in a year or two. Three at the most.

I'm actually serious: this is part of the Jon Stewart/Al Franken school of turning satire into effective leftist politics, and we kind of need it. Sometimes, the most effective satire on radioactive bullshit masquerading as politics is the unvarnished truth. Properly presented, of course.

28:

I'm going to remind all of you UK types that I have a spare room, and my email is my nym (at) the_usual_search_engine's email. If you must flee we can probably accommodate you.

29:

gasdive
The phrase is, IIRC: *Gradually, then suddenly ... *
Whether we are at the "suddenly" point is the current debate?

Bill Stewart
Corbyn (J) might have stood a chance, if he'd actually learnt anything between 1975 & 2019 - I mean, the world & it's politics changed quite a bit in that period, didn't it?
NOT to be confused with Corbyn (P) whom I've had the unfortunate experience of meeting, a long time ago { 1982? } - he was clearly awa' wi' the fairies, even then, & appears to have gone even more bonkers, since.

EC
Edward Heath tried, he really tried, actually.

Charlie
Bad as it all is, there's another bit that really scares me - the link-up to christian dominionism ... { And all the christofascist prejudices & hate }

30:

Something I realised in the 2019 bushfires was just how quickly it can all go wrong and you're suddenly fighting to stay alive.

Learned that one in a grassfire as a teenager.

Of course, the big lesson from my Cold War teenaged years is that it's highly likely that the decisions that end my life will be taken by men in comfort half a world away, who have the best chances of survival. Seems like not much has changed. :-(

Depressing thoughts, but then it's Truth and Reconciliation Day here. Always depressing to realize what a supposedly civilized* society is capable of**.


*"Supposedly because I can't fit "genocidal" and "civilized" in the same mental space, and the genocide happened.

**And likely still capable of. I've heard a disturbingly large number of complaints to the tune of "We've said we're sorry, why don't they just get over it?" Followed by complaints about the local band building on their own land, because it will spoil the view, or holding a ceremony because it might add a couple of minutes to a five minute drive.

31:

It's easy to miss, since one is some mix of cold, hungry, or scared, but the billionaires are frightened. It's obvious the world is changing. Their response -- more money, since money is the material love of god and creates security -- is inherently futile since money only has value inside the society which produced it, and if you break society money becomes worthless.

I'd say that the billionaires are scared, but that's not how they're responding, at least the ones who created their fortunes.

It's a three level response.

On the bottom level it's fleece the flock: get back to normal, travel, fix up your home, and above all, spend money in our companies. We want you to waste your money in ways that enrich us.

On the second level it's about amassing control and trying to destroy anything that will keep them in check. Remember that, while their fortunes dominate the economies of small island countries, they're pitiful compared with a place like the US or even the UK. So these countries need to be made unable to control them. Hence the right wing politics, which in part is an outgrowth of the financial manager strategies originally developed to subvert island economies and turn them into offshore financial havens. Words like lawfare and financial weapons of mass destruction are appropriate here.

On the top level, at least some of them are building redoubts of various types for when it all crashes. There's been an industry for years selling bunkers to the super rich (my real estate agent loved to gossip about how sleazy it all was). The smarter ones have bought up large working ranches and are taking other steps I'm not aware of (likely trying to corner resource markets). I'm not saying that they're being smart about it or not, because I don't know. However, this appears to be their answer to how wealth will cushion them from climate change: strip everyone else of as much wealth as they can, protect that wealth from anything (like the US or UK governments) which could take it, and hide with a cadre of loyal vassal/minions while everyone outside their system dies.

Getting back to England, if there are big, reasonably sane, estate owners out there (the Windsors?), try to see if they're basically preparing to institute a manorial system to deal with the breakdown. And also watch where the money goes in the meantime.

32:

No, the hard core Tory supporters will move only from Conservative to National Front.

Please try to keep up?

The National Front was 1960s-early 80s. They splintered and aren't really a thing any more. They were mostly replaced by the British National Party, aka BNP, who were slightly successful at a local level but made a fatal marketing error and were sued into bankruptcy for libel by Marmite (prop. Unilever).

The BNP's suits then joined UKIP and/or BXP (the Brexit Party -- now defunct) before migrating into the Conservative Party, which they are alarmingly close to owning these days, while their headbangers turned into the English Defense League (EDL), which also featured a fake sock puppet called the Scottish Defense League (SDL), all of whose members turn up to marches aboard buses with English registration plates and carry Cross of St George (English) flags (a bit of a dead giveaway -- fascists are thick). EDL is, however, not doing well and has lately lost ground to Britain First and further right fringe groups -- National Action (who were declared a terrorist organization and criminalized), aka Scottish Dawn, NS131, System Resistance Network, TripleK Mafia ... and of course the smarter ones joined the 55 Tufton Street wing of the Conservative Party and currently run the cabinet.

33:
...there is almost certainly still a rump of realists and they can be expected to be horrified by what's going on. It is possible that they'll try to regain control and be forced out, ...

That's essentially what happened to the Republican Party in the USA. May you be spared!

34:

They can't seem to ditch some of Trump's nasty policies...

I'm reminded of the scene in Shakespeare in Love where Will is beginning rehearsals and asks the non-actor who he is, and on hearing "I'm the money" answers "You can stay".

Policies in America tend to get enacted based on how much money is behind them, not how many voters. I doubt the other 'western democracies' are very different, although some are less blatant about it.

35:

I'm going to remind all of you UK types that I have a spare room, and my email is my nym (at) theusualsearch_engine's email. If you must flee we can probably accommodate you.

Likewise.

36:

It was a JOKE! The point is that many of those hard-core Tory supporters haven't moved on since that era.

37:

Yes, Heath tried his best. But he wasn't the ruthless strategist that Thatcher was, and didn't have the same support.

38:

I was going to add that I have a garden, but I don't really because I have a brown thumb. I have a yard that could be a garden, if a social/climate refugee felt so inclined.

39:

I'm going to remind all of you UK types that I have a spare room, and my email is my nym (at) the_usual_search_engine's email. If you must flee we can probably accommodate you.

Likewise.

Although you might want to wait until after the November elections to see if the MAGAtry is going to try to nuke our politics as well.

40:

“ there is no sane way to satirise what is currently happening in British politics, even through the medium of a looking-glass world where the nation is ruled by an Ancient Evil rather than a human politician.”

The big problem is that your ancient evils look utopian compared to what the real politicians come up with.

41:

The impending Conservative Conference...

There's every prospect of a complete shitshow, and I am laying-in stocks of popcorn in anticipation.

However, the most likely outcome is an eerie stage-managed enthusiasm with moderately-convincing 'spontaneous' applause with subtle amplification, and stirring renditions of 'Rule Britannia' that owe more to electronic assistance than the lusty voices of septuagenarian Party delegates with a touch of Covid.

Things to watch:

  • The mob's enthusiasm for genuinely nasty policies: exterminative racism presented as 'Get Tough!' on refugees, sinister 'Desi-Himmler' legislation directed against transgender women and the Roma, and flat-out 'Starve the begging scum!' cuts to the welfare State dressed-up as 'Reforms'.
  • The Fringe meetings - lobby groups and corporations demonstrating loyalty and sponsorship of factions and individual MPs, rare public glimpses of lobbyists and PR forms, and all the panels and cheese-and-wine parties run by think tanks. Look carefully at who's 'In', as a lot of the business of the party is done here.
  • The dissident view will be expressed wherever the press aren't; and, at times, in coded terms that sound like loyalty, wherever the press actually are, and contenders for the next Cabinet 'just happen' to be. A key performance venue for this will be the ERG: watch who's 'In' and who is 'Out' at their policy and social events.
  • A particular reason to watch the ERG's clique: see if they're able to influence the Party's future in the most important way of all - if there's no-one at any ERG event, who has a safe seat, then they will cease to be an force in the party after 2024.
  • If, at any social or 'policy forum' event, you see anyone under forty who is subsequently handed a prized and precious billet in any of the 'Safe' constituencies... You're looking at a future Prime Minister, and you were watching the most important faction in the next decade of the English Conservative Party. If, indeed, anyone under 40 actually does get that: it's not a given that the party still has an effective patronage network.
  • Watch Boris Johnson. (I know: its sometimes amusing but mostly loathsome). Who's chatting to him, who's parties and fringe groups he attends, who wants to be seen with him? He's running an undeclared leadership bid, here: watch closely!
  • Likewise, Rishi Sunak, the only one left with any economic credibility: who chooses to risk the wrath of the ERG by associating with the candidate they rejected?
Things to not watch... BBC Coverage.

And don't bother listening to whatever Thick Lizzie actually says, unless you're seeing it live and unedited: everything reported and broadcast on the news is going to tidied-up, so as to make her look confident and coherent. Or edited as a hit-piece for the Lulz.

Stock market and currency fluctuations in response to the key speeches: the real action's in the Gilt markets.

42:

I think it’s that you can write the evil, but you just can’t get your head around that much stupid.

43:

Just read the articles from Toby@16 and Charlie@19 - nightmare scary!

If a bunch of independent journalists were able to uncover illicit political funding why didn't their gov'ts act? I have a hard time believing that all civil servants (the people that actually run the daily gov't) are corrupt. At the very least I'd think that some civil servants would jump at the chance to collect taxes. (For the US, $10,000 and up needs paper work.)

44:

The New Management has been rationalized and is now reporting to Azathoth, the blind idiot god.

45:

From the point of me and you (and the commentariat here), yes, it is deeply stupid.

From the point of the 0.1%, this is exactly the kind of shit that they want. They are probably annoyed that Truss is going too fast. Slow steps down to hell work just fine, as we can see just by looking around.

Things have gotten worse for most people in the last 40 years. More debt, higher cost of services (that used to be free / low cost), longer waits for health care, housing priced out of reach. It's just that these things all happened slowly, and are easy to miss with our monkeybrain cognitive blind spots.

Jumping off the cliff straight down to Avernus? People notice this.

46:

Scene: Charles III is being coronated. Cathedral full of crowds, TV crews, etc. They are just about to put the shiny hat on him. Suddenly, there is a power cut: central London goes dark; only the TV gear keeps running, from the generators in the trucks. Whoever is holding the crown about to put it on Charles's head stumbles, and drops it on his foot instead. Charles goes "Aaargh", and hops around a bit.

Then he is heard to mutter "right, I've had it up to here with this", rolls his coronation speech notes into a megaphone, and addresses the crowd thus: "My mother was Queen of a great country. I do not want to be King of a shithole. Raise your voices if you agree. Who will join me in the Suoirolg Revolution?" Roars from the crowd. "Right! Parliament is dissolved from this moment on the grounds of mindbendingly destructive levels of incompetence. We can have a new one once we've worked out how to elect people who have better ideas for keeping warm than burning your own house down. And those who have forced us down to this point are hereby declared guilty of treason, to suffer the traditional penalty and their bodies to be left on the lamp-posts as a reminder..."

47:

Can someone email Him this?

48:

“ And those who have forced us down to this point are hereby declared guilty of treason, to suffer the traditional penalty and their bodies to be left on the lamp-posts as a reminder...” Hope that includes Murdochs as well as parliamentarians.

49:

Likewise, Rishi Sunak, the only one left with any economic credibility: who chooses to risk the wrath of the ERG by associating with the candidate they rejected? I understand that Dishy Rishi has already made it clear that he is not going. Nor is Mel Stride, the Treasury Committee chair (and his campaign manager.) But it's quite feasible that they are going to be plotting the coup elsewhere.

For me, the most interesting aside right now is that the Freeport plans, which the Tufton Street gang were pinning their hopes on, are running into the buffers as well as people realise that giving ten (or more) year blank cheques to all-and-sundry with no exit clauses if the government changes is just not going to fly, and certainly not proposing 40 of them all at once.

I mean, the rest of it is catastrophic as well, and there's every chance that the 'budget' legislation will actually get voted down, or amended to nonsense. But the Freeport stuff was flying under the radar until everything went pear-shaped this week.

50:

Another psephological forecast based on the 33% poll claims that if the swing was evenly spread the Tories would end up with three seats. Which, as someone entertainingly added, would leave the SNP as the loyal opposition. (Won't actually happen like that ofc, but a man can dream.)

51:

The Tufton Street mafia are the morons who bought us Brexit. Safest heuristic is to assume anything they propose will be evil and unconnected to actual reality.

52:

H
So these countries need to be made unable to control them. Hence the right wing politics....
Yes, but{1}: - This leads to the Rethuglican US mantra of: Shrink the government, until it's small enough to drown it in a bathtub ... Which leads to But{2}: You now have, by definition NO government - a state formally defined as: Anarchy.
Which is totally unstable & usually results in extremely nasty authoritarianism.
Do they realise this, & do they care, or not?
- This ties in, maybe, to my earlier point re. christian-dominionism & prompts a question.
- "Is a theocracy even worse than anarchy?" - I would say "yes" because its a dictatorship that's doing it to you for your own good { As they see it of course!}
Um.

Re. England, well, the Devonshires will be trying to cushion things ... by the standards of various past times, they had a reputation as "good landlords" - paying higher wages, & better conditions, if only because they made better profits that way, with less hassle.

EC @ 36
Joke or not, you are, um, wrong for the right reasons, maybe.
It's quite clear that the Britannia Unhinged group want to take us back to 1906, in the same way that the US nutters want to go back to the Gilded Age.
Why 1906(?) - for other readers - before Lloyd George & the start of state pensions (here) & no rights for women or anyone perceived to be "different "& all the removal of any workers or working rights at all, right?

Nile
"the Mob" - euw, but true / "dissidence" - I don't think they will be able to keep it quiet, fights will break out { I hope} / ERG - watch them through a scope-sight, surely? / "BJ" - problem - there is still a Parliamentary Enquiry in process, that could get him ejected. "Glowing in the dark" time, so to speak?

Pigeon
Good try, would be nice, wouldn't it?

Scurra
Actually, "No exit clause" is fucking irrelevant, if a new government decides otherwise.
No government can be bound by a previous one, so:
A one-line Act of parliament stating: "All "freeports" established since 01/10/2022 are hereby abolished & the normal laws of the land will apply."

54:

How difficult is it to stage a military coup? Asking for a friend...

55:

As I asked before, "Is there no-one the country might rally behind? Anyone? Leaders of vision and courage are now needed - are there any who might emerge?"

Put it another way, can anyone think of any group, any faction, who are compassionate and competent and might plausibly take the lead at this time?

56:

Only the science-fiction writers - they're paid to think about the future!

57:

This week's mess is like Dobbs or the Brexit vote: get what you want too early, and you have nothing left to use for campaign/fundraising fodder.

wg

58:

So these countries need to be made unable to control them. Hence the right wing politics.... Yes, but{1}: - This leads to the Rethuglican US mantra of: Shrink the government, until it's small enough to drown it in a bathtub ... Which leads to But{2}: You now have, by definition NO government - a state formally defined as: Anarchy. Which is totally unstable & usually results extremely nasty authoritarianism. Do they realise this, & do they care, or not?

You may be mistaking the bullshit distractions for the politics.

What I think they have been doing is making financial centers (Cayman Islands, only bigger), whose laws are being rebuilt to protect their property rights and keep them in control, whether they are citizens of that polity or not. The rest of it is mostly dead catting, catering to addictions, and paying off allies, otherwise known as psyops and distractions from what they care about.

One of the problems they face is that a few (fair number?) of them have actually sampled their warez and got addicted to those memes.

In general, what seems to terrify them the most is that they're going to die, and that their heirs will waste The Precious fortunes they've built (allusions to The One Ring are deliberate). As with so many other ginned-up existential terrors, in many of their minds (apparently), the precariousness of their wealth makes them part of a persecuted minority, and this in turn justifies anything and everything they do to the rest of us to protect their Preciousssses.

But getting back to rebuilding government, I'm glad they've got Liz Truss as their champion and paragon, because of the...unique...way she's hurrying to accomplish their agenda. While I hate what it's doing to the UK, it's hard to think of anything else that will frack their system as rapidly, at least at this time. Unfortunately, shoring up the rot with competent governance is going to take some real genius, and I'm still not sure who has that genius at the moment.

Incidentally, I'm not smug at all about this. We're under attack by their allies in the US as you read this.

59:

One note: the Dominionists, for those who don't know, not only believe the End Times are coming, but ->it's their duty to help bring them.<-

60:

Re: From the 'Tufton' article

Ahh yes, a fine example of trickle down economics.

'As a result of the tax measures outlined on Friday, the Government is effectively handing £1 billion to just 2,500 people, each of whom have an income in excess of £3.5 million. People earning £1 million a year will benefit by £55,000 a year – twice the average UK salary.

Households in London and the south-east are set to gain three times as much on average (£1,600) as those living in Wales, the north-east of England and Yorkshire (£500) next year. And a 50-year-old earning £1 million a year will have a lower marginal tax rate than a 28-year-old earning £50,000 (largely due to the latter’s student loan repayments).'

61:

50 - Er, during the time when Cor Bin was "leader" of the Liebour Party, members of the Con government up to and including Cabinet level were describing the SNP as "Her Majesty's loyal opposition".

54 - How many serving members of the nation's military will support the leaders of the coup?

62:

I was going to add that I have a garden, but I don't really because I have a brown thumb. I have a yard that could be a garden, if a social/climate refugee felt so inclined.

My sister in law and husband were visiting for a few days last week from Oregon. He commented that our yard would make a nice garden. I said it would require trucking in too much dirt. He got a puzzled look. I said if you look below the (not planned just what grows) green things you'll notice it's all read clay.

Ohhhhh. He said.

63:

Private communication from elsewhere says something, too: “The Conservatives never quite got over the Liberal Revolution in 1909 /10 when they introduced the modern welfare state based on what Prussia / Germany had done.
It is also said that failures in African and other wars had convinced the establishment that they had to improve the diet and conditions of the poor if they were to provide fodder for their various slaughters. A combination of necessity and enlightened views led the way until the late 1930/40's when Labour began to emerge and started implementing Keynes.
This was again of necessity and enlightened ideas.”

David L
I assume "red clay is a particularly infertile soil that also compacts horribly & is difficult to break up, or improve?

64:

I assume "red clay is a particularly infertile soil that also compacts horribly & is difficult to break up, or improve?

Some geologist friends call it rotten granite.

With lots of interesting rocks spread throughout. (Not fully rotted.)

My go to joke is we can light a fire and cut out bricks. They sort of do that a bit further south in Georgia.

If you want to grow things you buy potting soil at absurd prices at stores or buy loam from reputable landscape suppliers by the truckload. Then till it in a bit so it doesn't wash down hill at the first rain.

It's also sticky and somewhat rubbery.

Took 3 of us 2 hours to extract a 1' diameter gas powered auger after it went down 2' and stopped.

Anyone dropping a big tree within 700' will shake the house. A remodel next door was tearing up a concrete patio and we got to rock and roll for a day or two.

But green stuff will grow. Evolution is nice that way. But usually not the things you are TRYING to grow.

Now back to how we're all electing wonderful governments.

65:

This week's mess is like Dobbs or the Brexit vote

Absolutely!

(We may also be getting a preview of the kind of chaos the USA can expect if the current Supreme Court get to rule on contraception, interracial marriage, divorce ...)

66:

Perhaps relevantly, the US National Academies just released this. Prudently, they didn't address the election of nutters to lead nations, but you can see how they could have.

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/download/26698

Anticipating Rare Events of Major Significance
Proceedings of a Workshop

The Intelligence Community Studies Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a 2-day virtual workshop on December 17 and 21, 2021, to explore insights from world-class experts and technologists familiar with the extensive range of issues associated with anticipating rare events—those characterized by a very low probability of occurring—of major significance. Over the course of the 2-day workshop, the speakers discussed analytical methods, computational advances, data sources, and risk assessment approaches for anticipating rare events, including natural disasters, pandemics, anthropogenic threats, and widespread technological change. This proceedings is a factual summary of the presentations and discussion of the workshop.

67:

Peter F. Hamilton wrote a trilogy ("Mindstar Rising", etc) which was set in a post-climate change UK (orange groves in London public parks) which had just emerged from a quasi-civil war 10 years earlier needed to oust a communist-fascist-clueless dictatorship

at the time, amusing reading... now?

====

I hope civilization in US lasts till 15 OCT since I got a cavity in dire need of repair

====

for mega-scale investors watching the UK pound approach 1-2-1 with US dollar is likely the craziest shitshow since UK & US both left the gold standard as basis for currency... starving peasants and freeing middle class being routine status quo ante...

====

after watching Florida coverage... my question is whether Ron DeSantis will blame trans-gen kids for the 100+ fatalities or illegal immigrants? ...not likely do classical scapegoating of blaming the Jews immediately prior to an election cycle...

====

and now back to my day drinking

68:

The allegedly 'leftist' party, despite really clear and obvious messaging from the electorate, have rushed to continue 90% of the Tory policies, whilst also stating they are a gentler and kinder government

It worked really well in Aotearoa, the charismatic leader who manages to get a few obvious things right during a catastrophe has fairly successfully covered a multitude of sins. In that sense other countries are lucky to have generic white men as (alternative) leaders, it makes the bullshit harder to hide. Saint Ardern has completely flubbed her major pre-existing challenges (inequality, climate change, transparency) but managed the pandemic death toll well... while making inequality much worse.

Their response to the economic effects of the pandemic was to give rich people more money. That was politically and personally easier than giving money to poor people, and the multiplier effect of house price rises meant a given amount of government money went a lot further than if they'd "just" helped poor people survive. Of course the fall in house prices now has the opposite effect, but rents continue to climb so the rich aren't exactly suffering. Suffering is reserved for "those people" and it is very much "those people" to them, they're mostly nice white middle class property investors who have done very well out of the house price and rent increases they created. But it's done in a caring, sympathetic way by people who really feel your pain.

Similar effect in Queensland IIRC, Labour there had the nice lady saying "we won't privatise absolutely everything" and everyone was so happy about that that they ignored most of the other problems.

69:

Not going to happen but if Truss manages to hold on and keep crashing the country, wouldn't be interesting maybe good old King Charles decided to throw his hat in the ring and make a play to actually run the country. That could add a nice constitutional crisis on top of everything else, even with any pro-royalist sentiment from his mother's passing he's not going to be popular enough to pull it off, but who knows could be crazy enough to think he had a chance or a birthright to do so...

Imagine Charles going full-on for a British version of MAGA, with the whole born-to-rule layer on top of it, and trying to ride an anti-politician Brexit, return to our glory days sentiment...

70:

"We've said we're sorry, why don't they just get over it?"

What shocked me the other day is someone in Aotearoa blithely saying "if we become a republic we can dump the treaty". And not understanding at all when it was pointed out that the Treaty of Waitangi is important to a great many New Zealanders, and also was a major factor in stopping the wars (war of invasion / civil war depending on your viewpoint).

It's not a majority viewpoint, but it is popular in the "blame the other" section of society.

Australia is current discussing the "Voice to Parliament" which will be a purely advisory body with no guaranteed budget or autonomy. The current less-right government is making a big fuss about it as a grand gesture to follow Kevin Rudd officially saying "sorry". But it's very carefully created without any power so that even actual fascists can support it. I'm not saying Albanese is a fascist, just that he is very keen to have a productive working relationship with fascists.

71:
Suffering is reserved for "those people" and it is very much "those people" to them, they're mostly nice white middle class property investors who have done very well out of the house price and rent increases they created.

Of course... Truss and Kwarteng just screwed those people. Bedrock Tory voters. Oops. They even screwed the retired well-off who are the immovable bedrock by nearly wrecking the pension system. It's now getting hard to find traditional Tory voters (and MPs) who aren't furious with them.

Conference will be interesting...

72:

Thanks for the sensible breakout, Charlie.

Your mention of the National Front reminded me of the following. (h/t a shipmate, roommate, once cellmate from Liverpool -- Mick, hope you're all right mate)

TRB: The Winter of '79

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6nrb1qWLI4

All you kids that just sit and whine

You should have been there back in '79

You say we're giving you a real hard time

You boys are really breaking my heart

Spurs beat Arsenal, what a game

The blood was running in the drains

Intercity took the trains

And really took the place apart

That was the year Nan Harris died

And Charlie Jones committed suicide

The world we knew busted open wide

In the winter of '79

I'd been working on and off

A pint of beer was still ten bob

My brand new Bonneville got ripped off

I more or less give up trying

They stopped the Social in the spring

And quite a few communists got run in

And National Service come back in

In the winter of '79

When Marco's caff went up in flames

The Vambo boys took the blame

The SAS come and took our names

In the winter of '79

It was us poor bastards took the chop

When the tubes gone up and the buses stopped

Top folks still come out on top

The government never resigned

The Carib Club got petrol bombed

The National Front was getting awful strong

They done in Dave and Dagenham Ron

In the winter of '79

When all the gay geezers got put inside

And coloured kids was getting crucified

A few fought back and a few folks died

In the winter of '79

73:

Peter F. Hamilton wrote a trilogy ("Mindstar Rising", etc) which was set in a post-climate change UK (orange groves in London public parks) which had just emerged from a quasi-civil war 10 years earlier needed to oust a communist-fascist-clueless dictatorship

Definitely a left-wing dictatorship, as the revolution was led by a corporation with off-shore assets and one of the consequences was things like private policing (ie. if you can't afford the police, they won't investigate your murder etc.).

I quite liked it, but the politics felt very Campbellian.

74:

Imagine Charles going full-on for a British version of MAGA

Not going to happen, for reasons too numerous and tedious to list here.

75:

This is really annoying. Every time something like that is posted I think "no, of course not, there's only one reason: OGH has good taste" and then I realise there's another Charles in an important position now and the comment is probably about him.

This is needlessly confusing. I think we need to fix this by making these collisions less likely. Since we don't know who might become well-known, and different subgroups of humanity have different well-known people, this reduces to a strict limit: all names should be globally, spatiotemporally unique! Yes they might be a bit hard to remember and harder to abbreviate but that's a price we'll just have to pay.

Yrs, the bpfh now known as 2f7d19f6-fa87-4a4d-863c-42f25d4e2070

76:

Charlie/Nic @ 74/5
What outsiders really don't seem to grok is that Royalty ( In the UK ) is often happier with Labour/real Liberal gvumints & PM's is that the tories, for all their flag-waving, actually believe that they should rule EVERYTHING, without the nasty little/large actual Head of State "getting in the way"
See also: Geo V in 1926 - "I want to be King of ALL my people"

Nic
Easy.
Charlie is Charlie / OGH
Our new monarch is CIII { Also "Speaker-to-vegetables" } - who actually turned out to be right, all along, oops.

77:

Charlie Stross @ 8:

History tells us that when a major political faction is eliminated it leaves a power vacuum behind. In the case of the Tories, that power vacuum would be on the hard right.

If we lucked out, it would simply mean that Labour (or maybe the LibDems) would colonise that part of the political map and be slightly kinder, softer Tories for the first generation.

So what's it going to take to get a government by a party that represents the non-billionaire part of the U.K.; one that benefits MOST people?

78:

Income and asset caps so there aren't any rich people.

If money creates security you get a feedback where the only way to be safe is to have all the money. Almost everyone's lives are worse than they needed to be in consequence.

If you can't get rich, your security is necessarily collective, social, and collaborative, which in reality it was anyway but it's much easier to do if you aren't trying to save whatever you have left from an extremely rich person who does not find themself rich enough.

It's rather starkly an either-or-choice about what kind of world there is to live in.

79:

SFReader @ 12:

Any insights into connections across/between the various fascist parties that have been springing up all over Europe?

You should look to the activities of Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort & Roger Stone and who is funding them? Bannon has been very active stirring up the reich wing in Europe; especially eastern & southern Europe. Manafort was an "advisor" to Viktor Yanukovych before Yanukovych fled to Russia after the Euromaiden protests in Ukraine. Stone got his start in politics as one of Nixon's CREEP dirty-tricksters.

80:

Pigeon @ 46:

It's a nice fantasy, and I think it will happen right after Trumpolini announces on Truth Social that he was only kidding, Biden DID WIN the election.

81:

Scurra @ 49:

Got a link to an explanation of these "Freeport plans"? Google doesn't help much over here on the farside of the Atlantic.

All I get are "plans" from the city council in "Freeport" any U.S. state ... and there seem to be quite a few of them, I think maybe at least 50. After that there's a Freeport in the Bahamas & one in Africa ...

82:

Pers @ 54:

How difficult is it to stage a military coup? Asking for a friend...

Not difficult enough.

83:

Households in London might ‘gain’ £1600, but my rough calculation is we will be paying £8000 more on our mortgage next year, so the regional inequalities work in both directions.

(Unless you are lucky enough to own a home outright, but it that case you are very likely being screwed by prices rising faster than pension)

85:

Greg Tingey @ 63:

David L
I assume "red clay is a particularly infertile soil that also compacts horribly & is difficult to break up, or improve?

Red clay "soil". About the only thing that grows well in it is Kudzu.

86:

There are coups from above, and coups from below.....

Watch this half hour video and be prepared to be scared for American democracy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YjY00Cd_MI

87:

Whether its American MAGA or British Brexit, it is all driven by fear of being overwhelmed by non-white immigrants.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukzROkKRLEY

88:

Although you might want to wait until after the November elections to see if the MAGAtry is going to try to nuke our politics as well.

I am rather more hopeful about November than I was six months ago. Events which give me hope:

  • Supreme Court negated Roe vs Wade
  • Kansas(!) decisively voted to keep abortion legal
  • Lindsey Graham introduced a nationwide ban on abortions
  • Every Democratic candidate in November is going to run on those. Won't matter to MAGA-hats of course, but matters a great deal to independents. Especially those of XX presuasion.

    89:

    scared for American democracy.

    It does amaze me that the USA is so keen have its elections run by partisan, elected officials. Especially the bit where some officials have to directly run and certify the election for their successor. I suspect that anywhere else the USA would take that as evidence of corruption and wrongdoing. The video kind of circles around this problem, taking it as an unchangeable fact of the system. But it seems that the only immediate response is to do the same thing, starting later and with less funding.

    I kind of dislike the "here's a problem. The end" pieces.

    As mentioned before, the Australian Electoral Commission can be hired to run any election in a free and fair manner.

    90:

    This week's mess is like Dobbs or the Brexit vote: get what you want too early, and you have nothing left to use for campaign/fundraising fodder.

    Yes, that thought makes the pounding hail of fundraising messages based on them bearable. You're absolutely right.

    91:

    I am rather more hopeful about November than I was six months ago.

    I'm considerably more hopeful too. Now, if only the MAGAtry would stop trying to do bad Putin skits by saying they'll nuke budget negotiations if they get in power, they...

    ...Well, it's nice for them to take the censors off and tell us what sewer their conscience is growing in. So that's me being optimistic again.

    92:

    I'm kinda of puzzling through one of those "combine several bad ideas and get something good" chains. Loosely:

    • petitions to government that have popular support but not political support
    • government initiated referendums, like the one that gave us Brexit
    • citizen initiated referendums, like the one that crippled California
    • citizen's juries, like the one that liberalised abortion in Ireland
    • 'advisory votes' like the Australian same-sex marriage plebeshite
    • court vetos on popular measures, like the US abortion disaster

    I'm mulling over the idea of binding referendums that come from petitions via citizen's juries.

    The idea is that if you get a certain level of popular support (5% of voters in 50% of states/provinces?) a citizen's jury must be established and funded, with similar powers to a commission of inquiry (including the right to compel witnesses who thereby gain immunity). That jury must establish the wording for a referendum, including the actual text of the legislation. Referendum then goes to the public and if passed becomes law. Highest court can declare that the proposed law is invalid, must explain why, and the jury has to fix it. After three attempts it goes to the people anyway, if necessary as a constitutional amendment.

    93:

    The Democratic Party is what the Republican Party used to be fifty years ago. As writer Chris Hedges explained it: the Democratic Party went conservative and the Republicans insane.

    Really, both parties are really grifts pretending to be political parties and where the job is getting as much bribes as possible while pretending to run the country. The goal is to loot as much as they can for as long as they can and the social issues is smokescreen. The only real difference is that one party will kill you more quickly than the other.

    When it comes to abortion, guns, or trans rights it’s all a smoke screen.

    Mention the collapsing healthcare system? Abortion! Baby killers! Women haters!

    The collapsing school system and the unaffordability of college? Police brutality? Extensive hunger and homelessness? Guns! Trans rights! Child molesters! Crime! Racism!!

    It does not matter what anyone’s views are. It only matters to distract from the increasing government dysfunction and corruption, hunger, homelessness, lack of healthcare, real jobs, Covid, etc.

    94:

    It does amaze me that the USA is so keen have its elections run by partisan, elected officials.

    It has worked for a very very long time. The problem is that everyone mostly played by the rules. Until... Trump came along and told a large number of idiots that the reason they were not in charge is that the "others" were lying and cheating. Unspoken was that said idiots would have to lie and cheat to win. So the idiots started tossing out the ration folks ON THEIR SIDE and working to get liars and cheaters into office so the rightful winners would win.

    BTW - This entire debate on elected vs appointed vs non-partisan is a red herring. At the end of the day if the wrong guy gets to appoint, you wind up with the bad guys doing their thing.

    95:

    Well there's an idea -- let's piss off the, from memory, the only native people to ever force the British to a treaty. What could possibly go wrong... Do they not understand WHY there was a treaty??

    96:

    citizen initiated referendums, like the one that crippled California

    I think you're falling for Republican propaganda, since they're the ones who defend Proposition 13 as a sacred gift. There have been a bunch of workarounds (Mello-Roos, for example).

    I do remember when my parents voted for Prop 13, and at that point, the California legislature was really out of control with tax increases, and they were worried about keeping our house. I've heard an analysis from someone who knows that the problem with Proposition 13 was that they set the tax increase rate slightly too low, and its defenders won't reopen it for fine-tuning.

    Anyway, California started the citizen's initiative process when they were justifiably worried about massive corruption in the state legislature. While it's clunky and expensive, I don't think it's quite so stupid as it's made out to be. I've been involved in a couple of them locally, and they're useful for killing bad developments when the developer's bought the deciding body.

    97:

    You missed you should’ve called his post “Anarchy in the UK.”

    98:

    This entire debate on elected vs appointed vs non-partisan is a red herring

    Let's try a different example: the referendums recently held to decide how some Russian territories should be aligned. The partisan process for running the referendums seemed odd to me, but you presumably think it was acceptable? If not, why is the USA special in that regard? Where's the line that magically makes the elected government choosing who wins the election acceptable?

    99:

    Do they not understand WHY there was a treaty??

    I think they assume that what we have now is an unquestionable base from which to build. Maori are peaceful now, therefore Maori will always be peaceful.

    In a way they're right, looking around the world at governments that are actively ... violating the rights of... even quite large chunks of their subjects, and there's fuck all active rebellion. Often not even much in the way of active opposition, let alone a popular opposition movement.

    Comparing the US, UK, Iran and Russia it seems that the line is somewhere between widespread use of arbitrary arrest and detention, and actively killing off unwanted sub-groups. Merely forcing most of the population into poverty isn't enough, nor is ignoring problems that will obviously be disasters in the future but right now are survivable.

    100:

    87 - For values of "non-white" that mean being one or more of "not IC-1", "not from Europe or North America" or "not a rich bar steward".

    92 - Moz, (2) and (5) on your list are potentially identical, as in the case of WrecksIt, where Scamoron self-described his referendumb as "advisory", right up until Ingurlundshire voted slimly for WrecksIt.

    101:

    (We may also be getting a preview of the kind of chaos the USA can expect if the current Supreme Court get to rule on contraception, interracial marriage, divorce ...)

    Or if the Supreme Court steps in to decide the winner of the 2024 Presidential Election, as it did in 2000...

    102:

    Generally speaking here in Canada, referenda are used to kill an idea to which a government does not want to be too closely attached.

    Referenda are also often used by various random groups to attack the current government, regardless of the actual content of the question.

    On top of that, very few people bother to vote in referenda. They have the advantage of an appearance of democracy, while mostly being a place for the excessively passionate axe grinders to holler. On paper they look great, but they often end up killing good policies, or (worse) forcing through awful policies (see Brexit).

    Any solution to ongoing issues is going to have to find a way to account for the 30% of the population that are either dangerously stupid, actively destructive or willing to exploit the first two.

    The last few years have been a decisive rebuttal of the notion that if we just give the people the best information we have, they will support and participate in making the right choices about life and policies.

    103:

    The idea of a citizen's jury, and it seems to work in practice, is that small groups of people are more pro-social than larger ones. Even the sort of person who actively wants to vote for fascists is rarely capable of making a good argument for fascism to a small-ish group of focused people. Experience suggests that swaying a citizen's jury is mostly done by limiting their access to information and/or convincing them that their deliberations mean nothing, the decision has already been made.

    104:

    On present form, overnight, before the headbangerstory conference, it looks like they are going to try doubling down & bulling through, whilst trying to hide internal "don't do it!" reports {OBR}.
    Whether they will get away with it, remains to be seen between now & Monday.

    Dramlin
    I have an interest here .... Some NZ/Aotearoa fuckwits are trying to negate "Waitangi" ??

    105:

    Prop. 13 was written by Paul Gann to protect LA landlords from tax increases.

    106:

    So, you seem to be saying that the only way to ensure that elections are free and fair is to have them controlled by people who are not elected? What does that say about the value of elections?

    107:

    So what's it going to take to get a government by a party that represents the non-billionaire part of the U.K.; one that benefits MOST people?

    The somewhat chilling conclusion I get when I ask this question is that we will only get a party of the non-billionaires when there are no more billionaires.

    Other societies have dealt with this same problem. France, for example, in 1789, had it: only rather than identifying the parasitic elite purely by wealth they did so by class (the aristocracy, many of whom were as impoverished as everyone else). And they chose the most drastic way of downsizing their problematic group.

    We can in principle do better -- a progressive wealth tax or asset tax could work over a period of decades without the need for heads on pikes or radical expropriation. But as long as we have a politics that is bought and sold on their behalf the political will to do better is missing. So things will get worse until we reach the inevitable point of explosion.

    108:

    Dramlin & NecroMoz
    It's worse, because, AIUI, the Treaty of Waitangi { Te tiriti o Waitangi } is the FOUNDING DOCUMENT of "New Zealand" - isn't it?

    109:

    What do you mean here? The actual conduct of UK elections led by civil servants is something like 99.9999% (significant figures used actually are significant) despite the Con Party's claims that there is a need for better voter identification at the polls.

    110:

    Charlie: We can in principle do better [than the French Revolution] -- a progressive wealth tax or asset tax could work over a period of decades without the need for heads on pikes or radical expropriation.

    There is in fact a very good precedent for that. The people who used to be the landed aristocracy in the UK (think Downton Abbey) lost their land and power over a period of about 50 years thanks mostly to inheritance taxes, which peaked at 80% (eliding details) in 1969. Having to pay over half of your estate's value in cash every 30 years or so meant that most of the great houses were made over to the National Trust and the rented-out farms that funded them were sold off, along with quite a lot of great art.

    In theory we still have substantial death duties. The problem today is that Moneyland treats taxation as damage and routes around it. This is an international problem rather than a national one, and it needs an international solution. That agreement about a minimum 15% corporation tax is a start, but we need a lot more.

    111:

    Some day "tax haven" and "pariah state" are mainstream synonyms, but we all live surrounded by an ideological bubble that makes seeing them as synonyms appear niche.

    112:

    TRB: The Winter of '79 [lyrics elided]

    Also from the 1970s:

    Sling another chair leg on the fire, Mother by Pan Ayres. Its simultaneously nostalgic and prophetic right now. I won't post the full version because copyright, but here's a link, and if that goes down try just googling the title.

    If you haven't encountered Pam Ayres before, give her a try. "They should have asked my husband" is lovely and barbed: I often wonder what it must be like to be so strong, Infallible, articulate, self-confident and wrong. Its a warning too.

    113:

    Similar effect in Queensland IIRC, Labour there had the nice lady saying "we won't privatise absolutely everything"

    Well as much as the ALP formed out of the Queensland shearers' strikes of the 1890s, in Queensland it's been tied up with the coal mining unions for most of the time since. Nonetheless Queensland has just committed to quitting coal for power generation by 2035.

    114:

    France, for example, in 1789

    It does seem that solution isn't available today, for both good and bad reasons. I think a current nation state technically could enact it via covert operations, but a new revolutionary one probably could not.

    115:

    "We can in principle do better -- a progressive wealth tax or asset tax could work over a period of decades without the need for heads on pikes or radical expropriation. But as long as we have a politics that is bought and sold on their behalf the political will to do better is missing. So things will get worse until we reach the inevitable point of explosion."

    History shows both results, the outcome depends on the wisdom of the ruler in charge.

    From Will Durant's "Lessons of History":

    VIII. Economics and History

    "Since practical ability differs from person to person, the majority of such abilities, in nearly all societies, is gathered in a minority of men. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and the laws."

    "In the Athens of 594 B.C., according to Plutarch, "the disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances . . . seemed possible but despotic power." 35 The poor, finding their status worsened with each year the government in the hands of their masters, and the corrupt courts deciding every issue against them-began to talk of violent revolt. The rich, angry at the challenge to their property, prepared to defend themselves by force. Good sense prevailed; moderate elements secured the election of Solon, a businessman of aristocratic lineage, to the supreme archonship. He devaluated the currency, thereby easing the burden of all debtors (though he himself was a creditor); he reduced all personal debts, and ended imprisonment for debt; he canceled arrears for taxes and mortgage interest; he established a graduated income tax that made the rich pay at a rate twelve times that required of the poor; he reorganized the courts on a more popular basis; and he arranged that the sons of those who had died in war for Athens should be brought up and educated at the government's expense. The rich protested that his measures were outright confiscation; the radicals complained that he had not redivided the land; but within a generation almost all agreed that his reforms had saved Athens from revolution."

    "The Roman Senate, so famous for its wisdom, adopted an uncompromising course when the concentration of wealth approached an explosive point in Italy; the result was a hundred years of class and civil war. Tiberius Gracchus, an aristocrat elected as tribune of the people, proposed to redistribute land by limiting ownership to 333 acres per person, and alloting surplus land to the restive proletariat of the capital. The Senate rejected his proposals as confiscatory. He appealed to the people, telling them, "You fight and die to give wealth and luxury to others; you are called the masters of the world, but there is not a foot of ground that you can call your own." 37 Contrary to Roman law, he campaigned for re-election as tribune; in an election-day riot he was slain (133 B.C.). His brother Caius, taking up his cause, failed to prevent a renewal of violence, and ordered his servant to kill him; the slave obeyed, and then killed himself (121 B.C.); three thousand of Caius' followers were put to death by Senatorial decree."

    "In one aspect the Reformation was a redistribution of this wealth by the reduction of German and English payments to the Roman Church, and by the secular appropriation of ecclesiastical property and revenues. The French Revolution attempted a violent redistribution of wealth by Jacqueries in the countryside and massacres in the cities, but the chief result was a transfer of property and privilege from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. The government of the United States, in 1933-52 and 1960-65, followed Solon's peaceful methods, and accomplished a moderate and pacifying redistribution; perhaps someone had studied history. The upper classes in America cursed, complied, and resumed the concentration of wealth."

    "We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."

    Two lessons to draw from history:

  • The rich and powerful will never stop opposing laws that restrict their accumulation of wealth and power, and if such laws are passed they won't rest until these laws are gelded or overturned completely (see history of the republican and Tory parties).

  • Sensible and moderate rulers that achieve peaceful redistribution of wealth, rulers like Solon and FDR, are very rare. Wealth concentration and subsequent redistribution are more or less inevitable (unless the wealth and powerful create a police state to protect their wealth and power - which only delays the inevitable and makes the explosion bigger when it happens). For the most part, wealth redistribution occurs violently.

  • 116:

    EC @ 24:

    No, the hard core Tory supporters will move only from Conservative to National Front. It's the unthinking masses that do what the media tell them - "It's the Sun wot won it" had a lot of truth in it.

    Be careful there, "unthinking masses" is a pretty close synonym for "sheeple". Simply writing off people who disagree with you as the puppets of propaganda is a dangerous attitude; when people who believe that get into power the results are never good. This comes back to my favourite irregular verb: I know the facts, you have opinions, he's biased, they've been brainwashed.

    As for the newspapers, how much do they really matter today? Newspaper circulation has been in steady decline ever since the Internet began, with no real prospect of a recovery. Murdoch's survival strategy hinges on creating a tax on Google and Facebook to be given to him. And newspaper journalists have also been sinking pretty low in public estimation. My parents regarded the Daily Mail as a more reliable source of news than the BBC. That is clearly not a majority view today. Not to mention the increasing number of people who get their news from social media.

    I remember when the UK was better in that respect, though the tribalism was worse, and realised that our political system was fundamentally broken then (1960s). What is nominally a representative democracy has become a demagogocracy, and you need to either change the demagogues or get the people to stop following their instructions.

    I think its always been a demagogocracy. In fact I find it difficult to imagine any political system which doesn't reward demagoguery to some extent. Ultimately all politicians have to appeal to people who don't have the time and energy to be political policy wonks, and that means short-circuiting the complicated bits.

    The countries I can think of that have significantly improved in a short period have all had popular and usually bloodless revolutions - violent ones and those led by a clique rarely improve things. Attlee's government worked because the people wanted real improvement - there was some of that in Thatcher's early period, but I don't remember another UK example. The causes of and solutions to this debacle lie with the population as a whole, not with party labels.

    As a habitual optimist (unusual round here, I admit) I'm hoping that this will be another of those occasions. Thatcherism was a necessary antidote to the "British Disease" of the 60s and 70s, but it was clearly played out by about 2000. Subsequent attempts to be More Thatcher ran up against the fact that all the chronic money sinks in the UK economy had already been closed down or privatised, social spending had already been cut to the bone, and taxes couldn't be lowered any further without borrowing to cover the difference.

    Then we had the financial crash of 2007. The Labour government got the blame, only somewhat unfairly (they could have regulated banks better if they had wanted to, but it was an international crisis rather than just a UK one). And ever since then its been "austerity and borrowing because we have to grow the economy". But since then its become increasingly obvious that the economic boom of the 80s just isn't going to happen again because the economic policies that created it have been used up.

    Any proposal to go back to the 1970s was and is an electoral non-starter, something that both Tony Blair and Keir Starmer realise(d), but Corbyn didn't.

    So now we have an imploding Tory party and a resurgent, confident Labour party that actually aims to win. Starmer is plainly playing a long strategic game around the principle of "Don't lose the election", while the Tories are clearly doing everything possible to lose the election. So I see Starmer as PM after the next election, with a mandate to sort out the mess, increase taxes on the wealthy, cautiously increase social spending with careful controls, keep the unions on a tight rein, repair relations with the EU, start paying down the debt, and make real progress towards net zero CO2.

    Meantime the Tories are likely headed for the same kind of electoral wilderness as Labour after 1979. Their ideology has been exploded, but they don't have anything to put in its place. At the same time they have driven out all the pragmatic people who might actually be able to govern effectively. They will occupy much the same space that the Millitant Tendency did in the 80s: noisy, but politically irrelevant.

    117:

    Blaming it all on Trump is convenient but it memory-holes all the ghastly things Republicans have been working towards for decades. Donald just had the bad form to say it out loud repeatedly. But What If We Didn’t whistlestops the highlights.

    118:

    The somewhat chilling conclusion I get when I ask this question is that we will only get a party of the non-billionaires when there are no more billionaires.

    I differ on this, but think the fight-back on billionaires is already happening (read: Russia).

    The EU commission I think gets the issue - that eroding billionaires riches by tax (per Piketty) is essential, but a long fight. The crucial organisations in a position to do this are the EU and the US: billionaires already get to play lesser states off against each other. And the other side understands this: the EU and US must be destroyed. Hence Brexit and upcoming civil war/sesession in the US.

    Its a game neither side will admit to playing (yet).

    119:

    Paul
    The UK was certainly a demogogracy in the period 1919-39 - look at D Sayers' social descriptions in her novels as period pieces, & look at the total arseholes running the then "Mail "& "Express" - Rothermere & Beaverbrook, respectively.

    Amckinstry
    Yes ... it's absolutely certainly why the Brexshiteers wanted us out of the EU.
    As for the US, it looks as though the upcoming mid-terms are vital, more vital than 2024, because if the "R's" get control of the "House" this year, then we are completely fucked over.

    120:

    I'm just hoping that when labour do get into power, they don't fall into their usual trap of letting the perfect be the enemy of "good enough".

    Whilst labour under Starmer may be Tory-lite, I'm content to stomach that for the next decade when the alternative is what we have right now.

    I would also hold back on any hopes for really drastic policy changes, particularly around taxing billionaires. This week the UK economy was crashed on what looks like a fairly small change - reduce income tax for most people by 1%, reverse a 1.25% rise in national insurance, and eliminate the highest income tax rate, which is a reduction of 5% on earnings over £150k.

    Any serious attempts to tax billionaires will need to be ratcheted up gently over a long time period. For that to work, we need the conservatives to disappear for a generation or two.

    121:

    Actually, the converse is the problem with New Labour - i.e. not doing that actually tackles the real problems because they are politically controversial (*). Bugger details like taxing billionaires; the critical actions are to at least start remedying the UK's structural dysfunctions (political, economic and social). If that is not done, we shall simply see an even worse version of the current lot back again. And I don't see a hope in hell of it being done.

    (*) And that's ignoring the active harm that Blair did.

    122:

    JBS asks about UK freeports

    All I get are "plans" from the city council in "Freeport" any U.S. state ... and there seem to be quite a few of them, I think maybe at least 50. After that there's a Freeport in the Bahamas & one in Africa ...

    I can explain how Freeports in the UK used to work, by way of example: Tilbury (East London port/storage area near the M25, the circular motorway around London).

    One of my wine merchants had all their French wine stored at London City Bond (LCB) at Tilbury Docks -- including some that actually belonged to me. So I went there to pick it up. First, there is security to go through manned by ex-Gurkhas, who at least looked through the boot. Then I found the warehouse belonging to LCB -- actually quite a long way through what is essentially an industrial estate. Collected wine, and got checked over again by the Gurkhas.

    Now, what exactly is a Freeport, you ask? Well its effectively an area that acts as a designated bonded warehouse, and in which goods can be moved between different properties on the industrial estate without taxes or duty being paid for the transfers. For comparison when I get my wines out of a bonded store, I am required to pay Duty (at £26.78 per case of twelve bottles), and VAT (at 20%). Plus VAT on the Duty -- of course!

    Now VAT is like a sales tax to end users, but differs in that at each stage that an economic activity takes place a certain amount of tax is levied. This tax is paid by the buyer, but can be reclaimed in full when that buyer sells on.

    The Freeport thus eases this VAT payment/reclaim cycle reducing the amount of working capital a business requires. And in any decent world that's about it as far as the benefits of a freeport are concerned.

    But, a freeport offers far more interesting opportunities for the less honest. The most notorious involved -- yes -- LCB, and was called The Swerve. (Outline here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/4376555.stm ). In outline, you load up bonded goods into your van/lorry drive out of the gate and then sell the goods on, forgetting the obligation to pay VAT and Duty.

    In addition the new freeport proposals from our government include the ability to avoid all planning restrictions. So, for example, if you want to process dangerous chemicals you currently need to go through a planning process whereby the local council evaluates your proposal and checks that you are obeying all of the relevant rules on safe operation. This is what Truss really wants to get rid of. So Freeports will be able to do anything without planning control up to 75 miles from the actual Freeport. As you can imagine -- given Coventry is the town furthest from the sea in England at 75 miles -- this loop hole will permit unregulated ecological destruction without any political control.

    Does that help; at least a bit?

    123:

    That's taking things out of context. I was responding to @JayDzed's "Just like any other committed cultist, the hard-core Tory supporters will effortlessly swallow whatever their media tells them, and then go on believing the exact same ideologies." and pointing out that that group is actually NOT the hard-core Tory supporters (who are stuck in a mindset of 50 years back). Anyone who does what @JayDzed describes IS unthinking and, unfortunately, there ARE a lot of them.

    Also media does not mean just newspapers, and the electing public uses social media much less than the populace as a whole.

    Do you remember the 1960s? In the post-war years, political tribalism was worse than it is today, but there was VASTLY more variation in the media, and far more of the electorate were politically aware than today. That changed as people forgot the war years (and even rationing), and by deliberate action of Thatcher and her successors. No, the UK has not always been the demagogocracy that it is today.

    What most people miss is that representative democracies are unstable, and need ongoing, active efforts to stop them degenerating into demagogocracies or tribalist governments. They also tend to be tyrannical towards unpopular minorities. Other governmental systems have other failure modes.

    Yes, Starmer may prove to be a well-disguised radical, but that's not the smart way to bet.

    124:

    As for the newspapers, how much do they really matter today? Newspaper circulation has been in steady decline ever since the Internet began, with no real prospect of a recovery.

    In the US most of what is left of regular subscribers are the older folks. Who are set in their ways and don't like all the change around them.

    I'm fairly certain there's a high correlation of newspaper subscribers and those who still have a land line phone. And pay their bills via checks put in their personal mailbox with the flag up. (Then complain on Nextdoor about their checks being stolen.)

    125:

    Meantime the Tories are likely headed for the same kind of electoral wilderness as Labour after 1979. Their ideology has been exploded, but they don't have anything to put in its place. At the same time they have driven out all the pragmatic people who might actually be able to govern effectively.

    This sounds a lot like the current situation in the US. But here the R's mostly aren't going to vote for the D's no matter what. To them a bad candidate is so much better than an evil one. For you see, the D's are evil.

    126:

    Blaming it all on Trump is convenient but it memory-holes all the ghastly things Republicans have been working towards for decades. Donald just had the bad form to say it out loud repeatedly

    I was referring to a narrow point. Election running. Our partisan system of voting officials has been working well for a long time. Especially after modern media made things like Chicago's Daley machine harder to operate.

    But Trump has worked hard, and somewhat successfully, to destroy that aspect of US politics.

    Up to now the highly partisan and competitive state of NC has had statistically zero issues with counting votes. That may change in 2022 or 2024 as the Trump fanatics are hounding the good guys out of the process.

    127:

    Also media does not mean just newspapers, and the electing public uses social media much less than the populace as a whole.

    Yes. And no.

    The 1 in 10 or 20 older farts that hang out on FB or worse, spread the nonsense to their friends. So social media drives the messages. So much better than when people like my mother would sign up for the crazy magazines and newsletters and regal her friends with all kinds of nonsense.

    128:

    Let's try a different example:

    My point is all of these setups is open to being taken over by the "bad guys" who have no interest in playing by the rules. They just want to win.

    At some point those civil servants report to some elected official.

    Our local (below the state level) governments are mostly a manager type. There is a city or county council that is elected. They can pass ordinances (within some narrow boundaries set by the state) and hire in general 3 people. A lawyer, a secretary (which now can be a small staff), and a manager. The manager gets to hire and fire everyone else. (Well within some rules.) But it means the council can't fire the 3rd level dog catcher because he picked up the loose barking dog in a neighborhood that belonged to a friend. So as long as the manager doesn't piss off a majority of the council he gets free reign. But a majority of the council CAN pick a city manager who will do their bidding if they want and things can go down hill. Which happens every now and again.

    129:

    EC @ 123:

    Do you remember the 1960s?

    Not personally, I was busy being born. But I sort-of remember the 1970s. I've also read The Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham, which satirises the UK politics and media around 1960.

    In the post-war years, political tribalism was worse than it is today, but there was VASTLY more variation in the media, and far more of the electorate were politically aware than today.

    From what I remember the choice of demagogue to listen to was part of your tribal identity, along with the colour of scarf you wore on match days.

    What most people miss is that representative democracies are unstable, and need ongoing, active efforts to stop them degenerating into demagogocracies or tribalist governments. They also tend to be tyrannical towards unpopular minorities. Other governmental systems have other failure modes.

    I'm more optimistic (see above). Representative democracies may sometimes vote in demagogues, but their policies never live up to their grandiose policies, they get voted out, and that's it for another 20 or 30 years until the next time.

    Of course if the basic principle of representative democracy gets overthrown, and elections cease to be free and fair, then all bets are off. But (OP notwithstanding) I don't think we are any where near there yet. The 2024 election will happen as legally required, it will be free and fair, and unless they make some horrendous blunder Labour will very likely win.

    *Yes, Starmer may prove to be a well-disguised radical, but that's not the smart way to bet.

    I don't think he is a radical, and I don't think the policies I suggested are radical. For the most part they are what he has already said he is going to do. He is pitching himself as a safe pair of hands who can be trusted to manage the economy in a responsible way, unlike those feckless Tories.

    This in itself is a huge turnabout; in the past its been a standard claim of the Tories that Labour can't be trusted with the economy and that the Tories have always been the ones who care about spending responsibly not running up huge national debts. Truss and Krazy have just blown that reputation out of the water. The last time I remember the IMF getting involved in UK finances was the 1970s. One of Thatcher's big ideas was that the government should stop spending more than it could afford (remember she was a grocer's daughter: managing your cash flow was bred into her bones). The cargo-cult Thatcherism of the current government must have her spinning in her grave.

    If the Tories can't credibly claim to be the Safe Pair Of Hands, then Starmer looks like a much better bet. He presents as a non-radical safe pair of hands who isn't in hock to any extreme ideology of either Left or Right. As a result the coming General Election might be the first one in my life where I actually vote Labour. And I don't think I'll be the only one.

    130:

    The same logic applies to those who read newspapers, look at the internet, or watch television, all of which are more common among the elderly electorate. Also, the important factor is not just how it was spread, but how it was started, and social media rarely does that. There has been some research, and social media has very little political effect in the UK. The USA may be different.

    131:

    "This will discredit low tax, destroy the state ideologies for ever in the eyes of the British public. "

    If there's one thing that we've learned (yet again) is that destruction does not hurt the right. They can both flourish in rubble, and are good at blocking attempts to fix the damage while blaming the fixers.

    132:

    "Really, both parties are really grifts pretending to be political parties..."

    We really need less 'Nach Hitler, uns' and other 'both sides' sh*t.

    133:

    During the Tory party leadership election, when it came down to a choice between fairly competent evil and incompetent evil, I was conflicted over which would be worse. Shows how naive I was. When the party electorate decided that they didn't want the brown one, we got incompetent evil and haven't we seen the result. I see most conspiracy theories as being a comfortable fairy tale to make us feel better. OK, bad people are secretly running everything, but at least some one is running everything. The idea that Truss and Kwarteng meant to crash the pound, nearly crash most of the pension funds and spark a government bond sell off in order to further their nutter ideology would be nice, as it means they actually knew what they are doing. The reality is likely far far worse. OK, they have managed in a week to alienate almost all the groups who provide the majority of their votes, home owners and the retired, but the damage that is going to be caused before they can be replaced, either a Tory PM this side of Barking, or Keith Starmer's New New Labour, is immense. I'm sort of getting used to gauging how I respond to everything changes events. Brexit, COVID, etc. My initial response is bemusement, followed by fear, but I don't predict the impact, over months, let alone years accurately, so I can't really add a lot to the discussion on that front. 40 years ago, I was a teenager. Back then, there were Conservatives in power, the economy had tanked in to a major recession from their policies, very high inflation, loads of folk on strike and a nuclear war could break out at any moment and end it for everyone. 40 years later, there are Conservatives in power, the economy is tanking in to a major recession due to their policies, there is high inflation, loads of folk on strike and a nuclear war could break out at any moment and end it for everyone. Oh well. A lot of stuff in the intervening years was fun.

    134:

    What do you mean here?

    I was responding to some red herrings describing the US election system as magical thinking and comparing it to the recent fake referendums in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. They seemed to be missing the basic concept that since elections are a good way to secure popular control over government, they are also a good way to secure popular control over the elections process.

    The downside of the US electoral system has been widespread disenfranchisement and discriminatory voting regulations. The Voting Rights Act dismantled Jim Crow voting restrictions, but now the Voting Rights Act has been effectively neutralized and the new Jim Crow is being enacted. But the cure for electoral disfunction is the same as the disease. Vote the bastards out.

    135:

    Back then, there were also a lot of anti-war/anti-right-wing protest songs in the charts (and some bands did nothing else), and shows by comedians like Ben Elton and Rik Mayall taking the piss out of the Tories all the time for their excesses. Is there anything like that now? I'd not see it personally these days, but I'd still expect to hear of it at nth hand if it was a significant phenomenon. I haven't, and it seems to me that that itself is significant.

    136:

    "Seriously, I had no idea it was possible to crash a G7 economy in less than a week!"

    Somehow I missed this... The fundamental problem is the situation that makes it possible; not as in "the government are shite", but as in the situation being one where the phrase "to crash an economy" even means anything - the entire system being so overwhelmingly based on made-up fictions to the exclusion of reality that even though nothing has actually changed, there can nevertheless be an instant disaster just because somebody says something. Despite numerous historical demonstrations of the rather predictable consequences, the inherent daftness of such a system somehow persistently fails to be noticed.

    137:

    "Back then, there were also a lot of anti-war/anti-right-wing protest songs in the charts (and some bands did nothing else), and shows by comedians like Ben Elton and Rik Mayall taking the piss out of the Tories all the time for their excesses. Is there anything like that now? I'd not see it personally these days, but I'd still expect to hear of it at nth hand if it was a significant phenomenon. I haven't, and it seems to me that that itself is significant."

    It still exists, but not so much. Elton, Mayall and so on could have shows on the BBC then. That wouldn't happen now. The closest, was The Mash Report, which the BBC cancelled, after getting pressure from the unnatural party of government and is now on Dave, I believe.

    With music, I've now idea. I'm as out of it as a high court judge now. You'd need some one who wasn't around forty years ago for that.

    Social media is probably where it is at now, which didn't exist then. Small web sites, blogs too. Easily ignored by most people. You have to go looking for them.

    138:

    "the entire system being so overwhelmingly based on made-up fictions to the exclusion of reality that even though nothing has actually changed, there can nevertheless be an instant disaster just because somebody says something."

    The sort of markets that were affected were ones that deal in the longer term. Bonds, which look years ahead. The people who trade in them saw a commitment to huge borrowing, with no plan to pay it back and reacted accordingly. So they were having a go at predicting the effect of the new Chancellor's policy and didn't like what they saw. The currency devaluation was perhaps more short term. Lots of follow on effects. Bank of England having to buy loads of the bonds to prevent many of the pension funds going bust.

    So made up, yes, but people doing sums on the effects of policies that Truss and Kwarteng were basing on magical thinking and things proven not to work on multiple occasions elsewhere.

    139:

    Re: 'Representative democracies may sometimes vote in demagogues, ...'

    This starts at the local candidate selection level. If you're a member of a political party, it's your responsibility to go the local meetings, assess potential running candidates, etc.

    No idea whether your side of the pond ever gets 'parachute' candidates - not from the locality but the party hierarchy want them elected usu. in 'safe seats'. IMO - this is another way of throwing away your access and responsibility to the democratic process. This can also completely p*ss off the til-then staunchly loyal voters including card-carrying members.

    Duffy@84 Re: 'Lord Mountbatten '

    Interesting - thanks!

    Does Truss have the authority to ram such impactful changes through? And would the House of Lords rubber-stamp this as just another budget or are there enough newly minted Peers there that would at least question it?

    My impression is that most gov'ts tend to take their time when passing anything budget related. Given the consequences so far, I'm guessing Truss pre-sold this plan to her Cabinet as an 'emergency budget' otherwise they might have reined her in.

    https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/budgets

    'In some circumstances (such as following a general election or in a crisis) the government may wish to quickly announce changes to tax and spending instead of waiting until the next budget or spring statement. There is no specific parliamentary procedure that defines an ’emergency budget’ that differentiates it from routine budgets.'

    FYI - The above page was last updated May 2022 - hopefully the author will update it again soon.

    140:

    Something that's not made up; Canada's median age has decreased.

    Just a tick, in a year with high immigration. And we don't know what the life expectancy numbers are due to really delayed death reporting. In the US, it's dropping.

    Demographic swings have economic consequences.

    Social ones, too, and the parties of forced birth are going to plead necessity for getting exactly what they want.

    141:

    Don't follow. Surely the median age dropping in a year with high immigration is what you'd expect to see, because of older people being more set in their ways and less likely to be the ones who up sticks in search of greener grass elsewhere.

    142:

    "No idea whether your side of the pond ever gets 'parachute' candidates - not from the locality but the party hierarchy want them elected usu. in 'safe seats'. " All the time. The same name is even used. There can sometimes be a poor reaction, if the displaced local candidate was popular with their party, or the local electorate.

    "Does Truss have the authority to ram such impactful changes through? And would the House of Lords rubber-stamp this as just another budget or are there enough newly minted Peers there that would at least question it? " It isn't a full budget, more a mini budget. Perhaps better called a "Special Monetary Operation"! Full budgets are considered a confidence issue, so a government losing a vote on them could fall. If I remember correctly, the Lords can't vote against? As this is isn't a full budget, then the possibility of a rebellion by part of the 80 odd Conservative majority could defeat some, or all. Similarly, amendments, or defeats in the Lords could send it back to the Commons. Tory MPs have seen the latest polling figures, which would translate in to almost all of them being kicked out, if there was a general election now, so a rebellion is possible. Their party conference is over the next few days.

    Trouble is, the Commons are in recess till the 10th October while the party conferences happen, so no votes for over a week. Who knows what will happen between now and then.

    143:

    Surely the median age dropping in a year with high immigration is what you'd expect to see, because of older people being more set in their ways and less likely to be the ones who up sticks in search of greener grass elsewhere.

    Don't forget the effects of Covid-19. With deaths skewed toward the elderly, this could also drop the median age.

    144:

    "Does Truss have the authority to ram such impactful changes through?"

    jensnail has answered it, at least roughly. What Mountbatten missed is that there IS a plausible way to mount a coup in the UK - by our elected dictatorship. Say the next King's Speech contains a statement that the government will make the PM commander in chief, and give the PM powers to suspend elections in time of civil unrest. Charles might put his foot down but, if it is in the King's Speech, the Lords are partially hamstrung. Then all she has to do is organise that, and the Scottish referendum offers her plenty of opportunities for that.

    No, this isn't likely, but I wasn't expecting Trash to turn out to be an actual IEA sleeper. Possibly naive of me.

    145:

    Canada is currently having a high immigration rate because of the COVID pause, among other things.

    One of the many reasons for the shortage of labour in Canada is that we stopped bringing in new workers, but kept on dying and/or retiring while continuing not to procreate at replacement levels. Presumably the feds have noticed and are trying to make up for lost time.

    Also we have a long history of stripmining qualified persons from poorer countries (i.e. doctors, nurses, teachers). A fair percentage of my schoolteachers and other professional contacts (doctors) as a child during the 1970s were immigrants from the Phillipines and elsewhere, brought in to fill in huge gaps.

    One inversion effect of that was that the nonwhite persons in our town tended to be relatively wealthy - doctors, teachers, dentists. At least during the oilfield crash of the 80s. Excluding indigenous folks, of course, who were getting brutalized.

    146:

    As mentioned before, the Australian Electoral Commission can be hired to run any election in a free and fair manner.

    ISTR the Nigerians offered a while ago as well, too.

    147:

    let's piss off the, from memory, the only native people to ever force the British to a treaty

    Well, the British signed plenty of treaties in North America. One of the objections the colonists had to the crown was that they insisted that the treaties be kept be kept, rather than allowing squatting and land speculation.

    (Another objection was that those horrible frenchies up the coast were to be allowed their religion rather than being forcibly converted.)

    148:

    "One of Thatcher's big ideas was that the government should stop spending more than it could afford"

    Big selling points, certainly. It was all bollocks though. Paid for by selling off our stuff at knockdown prices and wasting the oil money on tax cutting to win elections. From todays Graun-

    "She learned the hard way that tax cuts for the wealthy merely shifted income to the ruling class without delivering growth dividends. For her neoliberal policies to deliver a semblance of growth, she had to throw into the vicious financial cycle pre-existing public wealth: council houses and public utilities (gas, electricity, water) in particular. In short, Thatcher’s policies boosted growth not because trickle-down worked, but because swathes of society’s common wealth was liquidated at cutdown prices and thrown into the City’s cauldron."

    149:

    jensnail
    it means they actually knew what they are doing. - unfortuantely, you are wrong - it's EXACTLY what they wanted. Trash it, then loot it.
    See my earlier reference to Britannia UnhingedUnchained LINK & look at who the authors were?

    EC
    I wasn't expecting Trash to turn out to be an actual IEA sleeper - again, see my reference above? I was frightened of this & her, from about half-way through the fake "selection" process, when she kept on escaping ....
    { Oh & see also Charlie's references to Tufton St? }

    150:

    I recently joked, that if the Torries continue their shit, London will quite soon look like this:

    http://www.modelwerkes.com/resources/london.JPG

    That was a month ago and the Torries managed to make that outlook look optimistic..

    151:

    One of the many reasons for the shortage of labour in Canada is that we stopped bringing in new workers, but kept on dying and/or retiring while continuing not to procreate at replacement levels.

    Another reason is that employers are unwilling to let the market determine wages, preferring a steady supply of minimum wage serfs too busy to realize that they are on a treadmill. Covid exacerbated that be forcibly pausing people, many of whom realized that a different job would be much better for them — typically by reducing cost of living/commuting.

    Seeing corporate profits and bosses bonuses has also had a ‘screw you’ effect.

    152:

    What I would expect Truss to do to get this through, is threaten to call an election if it is not backed. With present polling the MPs will probably think their chances could be better in some indeterminate future, as opposed to now and go along with it. Would be better if I was wrong, we will see.

    153:

    "No, this isn't likely, but I wasn't expecting Trash to turn out to be an actual IEA sleeper. Possibly naive of me."

    Perhaps a Labour sleeper? :) Just been activated after being in deep cover in the IEA and the Conservative Party. The oppositions finest asset at the moment. They really don't have to do anything. Just let her destroy the Tory's electorally for a generation, if not more. Shame about the country though.

    154:

    "jensnail it means they actually knew what they are doing. - unfortuantely, you are wrong - it's EXACTLY what they wanted. Trash it, then loot it. See my earlier reference to Britannia UnhingedUnchained LINK & look at who the authors were? "

    I'd prefer to live in my nice little world where Trash, Loot and Scarper isn't their plan, but it's getting hard to keep that illusion. I'll sit in the corner and rock back and forth, whimpering for a bit.

    155:

    Re: 'Commons are in recess till the 10th October while the party conferences happen, so no votes for over a week ...'

    Thanks for the info!

    Maybe Truss is betting that some other disaster will distract Brits from what her 'mini-budget' will do to them and the UK economy overall.

    I'm unable to access any reliable UK newspapers - paywalls everywhere. By now I'd expect slews of letters to the editor, editorials and various learned essays/opinion pieces (e.g., London School of Economics dons) on this mini-budget. Just wondering what the range of reactions, interpretations and leading diagnostics for total disaster are.

    156:

    Since Starmer and his backers are unlikely to leave the Tony Blair path, I would recommend Scotland to leave as soon as possible to put a national border between itself and Westminster. But NOT before helping Labour to vote out the parasite/gangster/oligarchy party. And not before helping Labour introduce a proportional voting system. . PS al Jazeera has dug into the ugly machinations inside the Labour party that undermined the former leadership. Unfortunately very few British watch it.

    157:

    But NOT before helping Labour to vote out the parasite/gangster/oligarchy party.

    That won't happen.

    Firstly, Labour are as strongly unionist (anti-independence) as the Conservatives.

    Secondly, Labour consider the SNP to be an existential threat -- which is fair, in Scotland the SNP took their niche as the centre-left party of government -- and instituted a policy of automatically opposing anything the SNP proposed to do, simply because it was the SNP.

    Upshot, there is zero chance of any cooperation between Labour and the SNP. (Indeed, Labour in Scotland is happy to form local coalitions with the Conservatives if it keeps the SNP out of running a local authority.)

    The other pro-independence party with any real political influence, the Scottish Greens, are regrettably relatively minor (although growing significantly in Scotland). And the less said about Alba the better.

    158:

    In other news, La Trussterfuck has pissed off the King so much he's briefing against her.

    And Kwasi Kwarteng, the Chancellor, apparently went from his budget speech to a champagne reception where hedge fund managers egged him on to commit to his plans (investors who stand to profit from it: yes, this is insider trading).

    Oh my. (Reaches for the popcorn.)

    159:

    Indeed. It's on the BBC Web site, too. While he will not attend, I wonder if Prince William will, in his stead :-)

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-63105522

    160:

    157 - Personal account. I had to move from the Western Isles (safe SNP seat) to the central belt (Liebour-SNP marginal) for health reasons in the run-up to the last Scottish Parliament election. I just had time to move my electoral registration to this seat. Liebour increased their majority here by ~2,000 votes, and the Con Party were more or less wiped out. Draw your own conclusions as to the reasons why, or if you can really be bothered you can investigage polling swings by ward.

    158 & 159 - Does the Iron Weathervane actually have the power to instruct the monarch to attend or not attend $event?

    161:

    Re: '... yes, this is insider trading'

    The EU came out with a bunch of new rules/definitions pre-Brexit [see below]. The UK info I've found so far has next to no detail. Insider trading is a 'criminal offense' in both but the penalty is a wrist slap in the UK.

    Anyways, I was just wondering how Kwarteng was going to dance around this to avoid getting labeled criminal - maybe the 2nd sentence?

    https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/de/MEMO_14_78

    'The Directive defines the offences: insider dealing, recommending or inducing another person to engage in insider dealing, unlawful disclosure and market manipulation, which should be regarded by Member States as criminal offences at least when they are serious and committed intentionally. In line with the scope of the Market Abuse Regulation, transactions for certain purposes are excluded from the scope: buy-backs and stabilisation programmes, if certain conditions and procedures are complied with, transactions, orders or behaviours carried out in the pursuit of monetary, exchange rate and debt management policy, as well as activities in the pursuit of the Union's Climate Policy, the Union's Common Agricultural and the Union's Common Fisheries Policies.'

    https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1993/36/part/V/crossheading/the-offence-of-insider-dealing?view=extent

    BTW - below your shared tweet about the champagne party saw another tweet that a petition against this mini-budget has more signatures than 'votes' that elected Truss. (Not an apples-to-apples situation exactly but thought UK folks here might be interested.)

    162:

    Does the Iron Weathervane actually have the power to instruct the monarch to attend or not attend $event?

    i think chuck has got the sense to know defying her wishes this early in his reign (and hers) would set an unfortunate tone

    163:

    Charlie @ 157
    Please update me?
    Are the Scottish "greens" STILL in favour of leaving NATO?
    And hence supporting Putin?
    Or have they decided to join the real world?

    Paws
    If { When } william goes, instead of C III, it will be with daddy's blessing & he can speak freely.
    Actually it makes Trumpss look even worse, I'm glad to say.

    164:

    Elderly Cynic is correct about the need for labour, should it get into power, to actually need to make major structural changes for the UK and importantly, it's population, to survive in decent shape. However the available evidence that the right wing of the party is in charge and happy to lie to people to get into/ stay in charge, is not promising that it will choose to fix much. Too much of the messaging is still oriented at keeping media editors onside and there is no will to build any democracy or mass participation. Some more sensible proposals at least are coming forward but if Starmer et al were of the sort to do what really needed to be done, they wouldn't be in their current positions. I mean we are talking about a party that is a plaything of Peter Mandelson, well known corrupt scumbag, for goodness sake.

    165:

    David L @ 94:

    I disagree with the bit about "Until... Trump came along". The GQP began it's descent into fascism in the mid-50s. Trump is the result of the idiocy, not the cause.

    W.C. Fields said, "You can't cheat an honest man." Trump came along, recognized there were no honest men left in the GQP and stole the party out from under the party leadership. He's just a more successful, brazen liar than they were.

    166:

    Government: How do you balance the needs of the undeserving poor against the desires of the undeserving rich?

    167:

    Redefine "undeserving" so that its relevance does not begin to kick in until somewhere above the level of universal requirements like adequate food, housing, medical care, security etc.

    168:

    "The GQP began its descent into fascism in the mid-50s. Trump is the result of the idiocy, not the cause."

    I agree. It's been a positive feed-back loop in which policy leads to electoral results that then reinforce the loop. Certainly it was looping by the mid-1950s, and I'd guess it was there even earlier.

    169:

    And this is why I prefer cats to people... I'm beginning to think "people" have just given up. Sure there are people who are trying to improve the world but they're facing so much opposition and so much disinformation and propaganda and a pandemic and active evil happening that it has all become overwhelming. While I can understand that it does make me despair somewhat.

    170:

    See Moz's comment @70 - I don't think it's official policy

    171:

    Greg Tingey @ 119:

    Yes ... it's absolutely certainly why the Brexshiteers wanted us out of the EU.
    As for the US, it looks as though the upcoming mid-terms are vital, more vital than 2024, because if the "R's" get control of the "House" this year, then we are completely fucked over.

    Here in the U.S. we may be screwed anyway no matter who controls the "House".

    Moore v. Harper

    The North Carolina Supreme Court concluded that the state legislature engaged in partisan gerrymandering, which violated the North Carolina Constitution, when it redrew the states’ congressional, state house, and state senate maps. It ordered the legislature to redraw the maps.

    The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause prevents the North Carolina Supreme Court from ordering the North Carolina legislature to redraw the congressional districts.

    Independent State Legislature Theory

    If the Alito wing of the Dobbs Court has its way, who votes and who counts the votes won't matter. Gerrymandering for political gain WILL BE the "law of the land", and the Constitution will be a dead letter.

    172:

    I'm not the right person to answer that -- while I grew up in NZ I came back to Australia in the early '80s and a lot of the strengthening of the Treaty seem to have happened since then. Hell when I left school Maori colleges were the only place that taught Te Reo Maori, although in my final year of school I could have done it by correspondence. You certainly didn't hear it being spoken much, if at all.

    173:

    Dave Lester @ 122:

    Yes, ... "at least a bit". It's another scheme to pervert the law for the benefit of the rich?

    174:

    voidampersand @ 134:

    I was responding to some red herrings describing the US election system as magical thinking and comparing it to the recent fake referendums in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory.

    Well, one difference is in the U.S. you don't have soldiers going door to door and demanding you vote and standing there with a gun to make sure you fill out the ballot "correctly" ... at least not yet.

    175:

    Well, one difference is in the U.S. you don't have soldiers going door to door and demanding you vote and standing there with a gun to make sure you fill out the ballot "correctly" ... at least not yet.

    Not yet, perhaps, but we're getting close. "The Republican Party has recruited more than 45,000 poll watchers and workers for battleground states across the country ahead of the midterms in November."

    Then there's this: "The District of Columbia and 11 states have laws explicitly banning guns at polling places. In states that do not restrict the open carrying of handguns, poll watchers could legally be armed..."

    Nothing like somebody openly carrying an AR-15 near a polling place to intimidate those people...

    https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-recruit-45000-poll-watchers-before-midterms-1742135

    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/can-poll-watchers-carry-guns-questions

    176:

    »In other news, La Trussterfuck has pissed off the King so much he's briefing against her.«

    Assume the "Conservative" party conference does not dispose of her (Can't they simply throw her out of the party ?)

    Would that let C3 get away with going off-script in the King's Speech to Parliament ?

    If he did, would his words have legal effect or is the King's Speech to Parliament just a non-binding statement of the governments intentions ?

    What other options does he have to get rid of her ?

    177:

    Would that let C3 get away with going off-script in the King's Speech to Parliament ?

    No. No way. Not under any circumstances.

    That would directly involve the crown in everyday politics. It doesn't matter how right or justified anyone thinks such an action would be, it would lead directly to the end of the monarchy.

    "All political careers end in failure". Once the crown becomes a political actor it is doomed to fail sooner or later. At some point Charles or a successor will nail their colours to the mast of a bad policy, and will be sunk along with it.

    For professional politicians that is just the name of the game. You retire and go write your memoirs. But the monarchy is playing the long game here; if Charles aims to pass the crown on to William and thence to George and his presumed future children then he can't afford to drop the ball.

    Charles is sailing close enough to the wind with his environmental activism. Fortunately for him an enthusiasm that used to look eccentric now looks prescient. Don't expect anything more than that.

    178:

    I think the Iron Weathervane has to "bring the Con Party into disrepute" (basically get herself suspended for cause; for example Bozo could have been suspended for "Partygate") or have a significant number of MPs lodge letters of no confidence against her.
    Don't know.
    Don't know.
    Don't know.
    None of these things have ever occurred before that I can remember.

    179:

    »it would lead directly to the end of the monarchy.«

    I'm not so certain.

    If a very large fraction of the country think things have gone of the rails, having royalty step in to bring it back could easily cement the monarchy in place, as "the failsafe for democracy".

    But it will require at least three quarters of the population agreeing that adult intervention was required.

    Tanking the economy in a matter of days and surviving the party conference would put that situation within sight.

    But my question was not about the wisdom, but about the ability: If he decided to do so, does he have a way to get rid of her, short of putting poison in her tea during an audience ?

    180:

    Well, the Iron Weathervane would have to get herself suspended for cause (examples being that Bozo could have been suspended for "Partygate", or the member could be suspended for an act of criminality), or have a number of letters of no confidence raised against her.
    Don't know
    Don't know.
    Don't know.
    None of these things have happened before that I can remember.

    181:

    John S
    Yes. Also & meanwhile - I wonder what the tankies make of this - from the Grauniad, incidentally.

    P H-K
    I don't think he { C III } is going to need to have to bother - I think this particular misgovernment will implode, quite soon.
    Remember what I've predicted about food riots before June 2023?
    Well, now: This
    &
    This, too - both from the Grauniad.

    182:

    Well so much for Charles being the climate King, that was the one good thing about him:

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/oct/01/king-charles-abandons-plans-to-attend-cop27-following-liz-trusss-advice

    King Charles abandons plans to attend Cop27 ‘following Liz Truss’s advice’ Prime minister reportedly raised objections to him going during personal audience at Buckingham Palace

    King Charles III has reportedly abandoned plans to attend and deliver a speech at the Cop27 climate change summit on the advice of Liz Truss.

    The monarch, a veteran campaigner on environmental issues, had been invited to the 27th UN climate change conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, next month.

    But the prime minister is understood to have raised objections during a personal audience at Buckingham Palace last month, according to the Sunday Times.

    Buckingham Palace has confirmed King Charles III will not attend the summit.

    183:

    nah chuck's playing a long game, truss may not be around for long

    184:

    Duffy + AS
    What's much more likely is that "Wills" will give C III's speech, instead, thus sidestepping the problem

    185:

    Per the newsrags today, the real issue was that Charles is very sensitive to the question of how to conduct his first overseas visit as monarch, which is what COP27 would have turned into (he was presumably invited long before his mum died, at which point it would just have been Prince Charles doing his environmentalist thing).

    186:

    Are the Scottish "greens" STILL in favour of leaving NATO?

    No idea, and anyway we're in party conference season: thanks to Vlad's February escapade everything relating to defense policy is an open question.

    On the other hand: chances of the Scottish Green Party having any influence on national defense in the immediate future? Zero. So it's a non-issue, like their policy on the second coming of Jesus or whether NASA faked the moon landings.

    187:

    would like to know what objections truss raised

    doubt we ever will tho

    189:

    EC: This article is quite good on the topic:

    https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/labour-keir-starmer-liz-truss-budget-b2189908.html

    Indeed. Thanks for posting it.

    Hint: to get around the paywall click "Inspect" in your web browser, search for "limited-access" and delete the "class" attribute that it's part of.

    190:

    King Charles has the power to dismiss a Prime Minister at will. If he gets it wrong (i.e. does not have the whole-hearted backing of Parliament and the public), that will probably mean the end of the monarchy, or at least its power.

    One of the reasons Trash and Kamikwasi are not putting forward a real budget is that losing the vote on one of those is a confidence matter, and he would be supported in dismissing her if she didn't resign.

    She has opportunity to fuck it up that overtly over the Scottish referendum, in several ways, which depend on how the Supremes vote and Sturgeon proceeds.

    There is a good chance that she will trigger serious civil unrest, and she has opportunities to fuck up the handing of that, too. He might dismiss her if that went really pear-shaped.

    But it's not likely he will. The 1922 committee will get to her first.

    Interesting times!

    191:

    It was noticeable that Charles spent a couple of days after his mother died and before the mourning period kicked off properly visiting the various parts of the Kingdom, including Northern Ireland. You could consider these to be "abroad" in their own way.

    192:

    Paul @ 189:

    Hint: to get around the paywall click "Inspect" in your web browser, search for "limited-access" and delete the "class" attribute that it's part of.

    The search returns "no match".

    193:

    Or just disable Javascript.

    194:

    EC / Paul
    For other reasons, I can read that, but ...
    WHAT "inspect" in my web browser? Where?

    EC
    Yes - C III is waiting for the inevitable total fuck-up the Trumpss makes - he can then dismiss "At will" when she loses a confidence vote - but he may not have to, of course, because the other tories will all stab her ... Problem solved.
    Correction: There is a good chancecertainty that she will trigger serious civil unrest

    195:

    "Correction: There is a good chancecertainty that she will trigger serious civil unrest"

    The police this year got a £1,900 pay rise in England and Wales, well below inflation for most of them. Armed forces at lower ranks got 3.75%. Not exactly an incentive to go breaking heads. Those of an authoritarian bent are often attracted to police work, so tend to follow orders, which will mitigate that some. The original Iron Lady gave huge pay rises to the police before using them to beat up strikers. The Travel Iron Lady is a cargo cult imitation.

    196:

    Re: 'This article is quite good on the topic:'

    I have a few questions to get a sense of how this party operates:

    Who are Labour's economists / economic think tanks?

    What are the up & coming new (growth, esp. employment) industries that Labour is likely to back? (How many of these have listed stocks?)

    Would Labour as part of cost-cutting reduce imports by encouraging made-in-the-UK substitutes?

    Re: Charles III

    Zoom/video conferences are commonplace these days - no reason why Charles couldn't do a quick live video appearance as part of the opening ceremony anytime before/during/after William's official longer and more detailed opening speech.

    Also Charles doesn't have to explicitly say anything about the mini-budget to signal his approval/disapproval. From my side of the pond, Brits communicate their emotions via significant pauses and direction of their gazes.

    Staying in the UK means Charles is on site and accessible in case enough MPs show up at his door beseeching him to end this Parliament session - right now! (No idea whether MPs can do this, but it's a thought.)

    197:

    Well, you may have been prescient, but you may also have misunderstood me. She was pretty obviously going to be strongly influenced by the IEA, but that wasn't my point. It was more serious than that.

    Her record before she became PM was to be a Thatcher cosplayer in dress and photo-ops only, say the first extreme thing that blew threw her head that might be popular in that context, say something incompatible in other contexts (hence the Iron Weathercock), and deliver on precisely nothing.

    Her record after becoming PM was to carry out what was clearly a well-designed plan, by someone with a lot more intelligence than she (or her inner circle) has ever shown and a good understanding of parliamentary procedure. That reeks of her being an actual sleeper, told to present one image up to becoming PM, and then to follow orders. I may be maligning her, but it's damn suspicious.

    If that is so, it's not quite a coup by the IEA, but is well along the road to being one. I am not entirely confident that something along the lines of what I said in #144 won't be attempted.

    198:

    Canada reports deaths, and thus excess deaths, slowly compared to other G-7 countries. With COVID, some provinces have effectively stopped reporting deaths since early this year. Some (Quebec) are managing to report as quickly as usual; some (Manitoba) are clearly trying to keep up. But others are not.

    The medical statisticians rely on the aggregated stats from Stats Can (who rely on the provincial reporting) to anchor their excess death estimates. Stats Can just released a bunch of information on schedule, and like everything else from StatsCan it's actuarily cautious. That's where both the "median age has ticked down just a bit" (from memory 41.7 to 41.1) and the "we have rather large error bars on the death statistics" come from. There have been a lot of raised eyebrows because that's too much median age movement for known conditions. The "it's been a big immigration year" is a "let me not make rash statements in public" consider-all-the-options response. The worry is that the drop is consistent with way more COVID death than is being reported.

    Since the estimates are now somewhere near reliable in terms of the "died quietly at home" numbers from people who succumb to acute COVID, that's got three pieces; long-term COVID damage, consequences of falling out of the workforce (since enough cold and hungry will kill you), and maybe increased risk from everything else due to COVID immune damage. (Like flu vaccine in reverse; not getting flu makes you less likely to get other things. Having had COVID may make you more likely to get other things.) Seeing clear signals for any of those statistically, at least in time for a policy response, needs accurate and timely excess deaths information.

    One thing I found concerning was that someone did a 10 year retrospective on SARS; there were about 800 cases in Canada, mostly among health care workers. Depending on whose count, between forty and fifty percent never returned to work. After ten years, no survivor reports improvement in their post-SARS symptoms.

    That's the most closely related virus to SARS-CoV-2 and thus the baseline expectation for COVID. One thing the medical statisticians want to look for is if that's happening with COVID; can we find improvement? Or is COVID damage permanent? This has a lot of policy implication, and the first thing you'd want to check is "does it get worse?" which is where the mortality statistics come into it.

    The other thing you'd want to check is the report out of Singapore, where they're able to track individual COVID case outcomes because they haven't got that many. All their excess deaths from non-COVID medical causes (as distinct from "squished in car accident", "fell off ladder", etc; heart disease, stroke, etc.) were people who had had COVID. It's a small sample -- about a hundred and fifty excess deaths, total -- but it's something else that should influence policy if it holds up in the stats.

    So -- is the median age dropping an odd little blip? Or a leading indication that we're going to see life expectancy drop generally, with the kind of political change demographic swings always cause?

    There isn't yet enough information to tell.

    199:

    The original Iron Lady gave huge pay rises to the police before using them to beat up strikers.

    Interestingly, Ford gave police and firefighters here big raises before clamping down on teachers, nurses and public servants. (Not that any of those are known for rioting in the streets.)

    I'd always assumed it was latent sexism — police and firefighting are male-dominated macho occupations, just like the construction workers touted in his 'Ontario business' ads. I doubt Ford is forward-thinking enough to plan for civil unrest, but some of his advisors are. Bribing the police sounds like a good start for the authorities.

    Of course, we saw how well the well-paid police responded to right-wing civil unrest during the occupation earlier this year, all across Canada. :-(

    200:

    If he received a Humble Address from a majority of Parliament requesting him to dismiss the PM and appoint another, certainly :-) A vote of No Confidence would force a change of government, and possibly dissolution of Parliament (I am not sure what the current situation is).

    201:

    Given the whole "special relationship" thing meaning the US can prop up the UK don't expect any big changes unless the US either gets really distracted somehow which for various reasons isn't that likely. That or the US somehow getting big changes of it's own are your hopes.

    Yeah, the US is trending isolationist but the UK is still one of the few countries DC will Care about.

    I wouldn't count on big internal changes in the US for deeply rooted reasons of geography and resources enabling various forms of stupidity to last longer than they would elsewhere

    202:

    Assume the "Conservative" party conference does not dispose of her (Can't they simply throw her out of the party ?)

    No, they can't do that.

    It takes a set number of letters expressing no confidence to be sent to the Chair of the 1922 Committee, which only meets while parliament is in session. (I think the figure is something in the range 50-70 letters.) This triggers an in-party vote of confidence, and if she fails to get 50%+1 support she ceases to be party leader and a new leader selection process kicks off.

    Currently there can be no more than one leadership challenge in 12 months, so she should be safe, but the 1922 Committee can change the rules more or less at will (by a vote of the sitting members of the committee) and I'm pretty sure this Trussterfuck would be seen as sufficient reason to permit an earlier challenge -- probably by changing it to "no more than one challenge per 12 months to any given leader", thereby resetting the clock as of the date she was elected rather than dating the clock to the vote that deposed Johnson.

    203:

    That would directly involve the crown in everyday politics.

    This did not end the monarchy in 1911-12, although TBF the monarch was working with the Prime Minister (against the House of Lords) rather than against the PM.

    If the PM is sufficiently unpopular and out of touch the King might get away with it.

    But it's a lot like a declaration of war: going in you (the King) have to be absolutely clear that you're betting your entire future on a roll of the dice, and you have to have a definite objective in mind and an exit strategy or you're toast. (This is where Putin fucked up in February: he didn't realize he was gambling and once he lost his dice roll he was left with no viable exit strategy.)

    204:

    "The "it's been a big immigration year" is a "let me not make rash statements in public" consider-all-the-options response."

    Thank you, that has resolved the apparent self-contradiction which was confusing me.

    205:

    Given the whole "special relationship" thing meaning the US can prop up the UK

    Except Truss burned the "special relationship" down and salted the ashes, over the Northern Ireland Protocol. (Biden was not happy with her.)

    206:

    It might happen if she lost a budget or King's Speech vote and refused to resign; those are supposed to indicate that she has lost the confidence of the house.

    207:

    Seriously? Uh oh. Looks like Britain IS going to get much more "interesting" politically fast than I thought. I figured the US would stop caring about the UK mid-century when it went majority nonwhite but blowing it ALREADY? Truss is uh special.

    Being an island nation severely alienating the country that keeps the global sea lanes safe when said country is in the middle of retrenching to caring about it's near abroad in the americas, japan and a couple other places in the pacific

    This seems... ill-advised on Truss's part. The "pissing off Biden" thing, not even bringing up the voodoo economics.

    208:

    jensnail
    She's certainly attracting lots of derogatory names! Iron Weathercock / Trumpss / Travel-Iron lady / Trash etc ...

    EC
    My own failing was in not spotting her as a threat, until the leadership contest was well underway, as she looked unlikely before that point.
    You are so right about her record, which is one reason I discounted her.
    was to carry out what was clearly a well-designed plan - as set out in "Britannia Unhinged", right - though I would dispute their "Intelligence"!
    Hmmm ... a "legal" coup? Don't think it would fly, but those arseholes { Tufton St } are tricksy bastards.
    "Laissez-Faire, we wants it Preciouss, gold (rings) for us precious"

    209:

    Greg Tingey @ 194: WHAT "inspect" in my web browser? Where?

    Sorry Greg, and others. More explanation follows.

    This applies to browsers running on a PC. It won't work on Android or (AFAIK) IOS.

    Details depend on the browser, but under Firefox and Chrome, right-click something on the web page, and look at the menu. Something like "Inspect" or "Inspect element" is what you want. Click it, and the page splits in two. One half has the page you were looking at, the other page has the HTML source code. This is (very roughly) a computer program sent by the server to tell your browser what to display and how to display it. Some of it is the actual text with markup to say stuff like "this bit in bold". Other bits are actual program code (in "Javascript", a programming language) to say things like "when the user clicks this button, run this bit of software".

    Some newspapers, the Independent included, actually send the full text of an article along with some formatting to say "Cover up everything after line 6 with this paywall". If you can find that bit of formatting and delete it, you can uncover the text. The Indy seems to make this unusually easy, because the relevant bit contains the string "limited-access" in a much longer and more complicated phrase that starts "class=". So find the "limited-access" and delete the whole bit from "class=" to the end of the quoted text after it. That should (with a bit of luck) remove the paywall and let you see the text. At least, it seemed to work for me the first time I tried it.

    If you move your mouse over the bits of program and HTML the browser will helpfully highlight the bit of the page where each thing is displayed (even if something else is displayed on top). This can help you zoom in on the bit you want.

    I'm not sure if disabling Javascript will work in this case because it doesn't (as far as I can tell) rely on Javascript to show the paywall; its being done in the CSS (don't ask), presumably because disabling Javascript is too easy.

    210:

    It does; the CSS rule tells it how to be a bastard, and the javascript tells it where to be a bastard. If you disable javascript, the offending entry never gets added to the class list in the first place.

    The pages with "independentpremium" as part of the URL, such as EC linked to in the previous thread, are different; they decide to be a bastard on the server. Instead of concealing the "missing" text, they just don't serve it, so it really is missing and there isn't a simple way to make it show up.

    211:

    Truss is uh special.

    TBF Brexit is what finally killed the "special relationship".

    The USA was into the UK (after 1975) mainly because the UK was a very useful lever within the EEC and then the EU -- spoke English, some degree of shared culture, willing to push for US interests in return for favours (unlike France or Germany).

    (Before 1975 it was the decaying remnants of the WW2 alliance, but 30-35 years later the folks involved in setting that up had mostly retired or died.)

    But Brexit reduced the UK's influence within the EU to zero, at which point the UK was much less useful to the US. Why take the side of an old imperial has-been with delusions of grandeur when you're really trying to make friends and influence people in an affluent first-world economic superpower (with nuclear weapons, natch -- see also France)?

    Finally there was the crap over the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Good Friday Agreement. Truss personally tried to slaughter one of Joe Biden's pet projects. That's never going to go down well.

    212:

    I've got a question about this, but I need to set it up: Shouldn't any national-level British politician should know better than the piss off the U.S., particularly over a triviality? I don't personally say this from a place of privilege, but because the relationship seems to work this way in terms of realpolitic.

    So what's going through Truss's head as she pisses off the President of the United States? Arrogance? Stupidity? Some delusional thinking involving the British Empire?* Is she getting bad/good intelligence? Is there some long-term plan I'm missing? Is it easier to loot the U.K. if you guys don't have a trade deal? Or maybe orders from Moscow? WTF is motivating her?

    • Gary Trudeau once said that Reagan was "only able to see backwards through a rose-colored mist."
    213:

    Being an island nation severely alienating the country that keeps the global sea lanes safe when said country is in the middle of retrenching to caring about it's near abroad in the americas, japan and a couple other places in the pacific

    Um... I think the US priority list is:

  • Russia and keeping the Ukrainian war from becoming a strategic nuclear conflagration.

  • China and keeping that from turning into a war (we don't want either side to think we're at parity, that's when the war starts)

  • Dealing with all the messes in our hemisphere in various and often contradictory ways, from hurricane relief to funding the unending narco-wars.

  • Keeping global sealanes open for trade and passage (cf South China Sea, Suez Canal, Panama Canal, etm).

  • Playing the Reflective Game within the US of trying to keep the billionaires from imposing a global plutocracy, given how well existing billionaires are running things. And dealing with said billionaires overseas.

  • I think the US-UK special relationship falls under 4 and 5, and I'm not sure why anyone thinks Truss will be able to destroy it beyond repair...

    214:

    But Brexit reduced the UK's influence within the EU to zero, at which point the UK was much less useful to the US. Why take the side of an old imperial has-been with delusions of grandeur when you're really trying to make friends and influence people in an affluent first-world economic superpower (with nuclear weapons, natch -- see also France)?

    France? Our biggest military bases are in Germany.

    I think the UK can play a similar role in American politics to what Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines do: archipelago with good naval ports.

    Beyond that, I'd not so tongue-in-cheek advise that UK artists should be making a huge case that if Truss blows the ballast tanks on the UK economy, arts are what y'all are going to be exporting to keep everybody fed. So start challenging Korea on K-POP and K-Dramas already, and get working on Attenborough's successor.

    After all, if Ireland could do it...

    215:

    Greg Tingey @ 194:

    EC / Paul
    For other reasons, I can read that, but ...
    WHAT "inspect" in my web browser? Where?

    For Windoze users (and Firefox?), you right click in the text and one of the context menu items is "Inspect (Q)" which opens another pane that lets you see all the HTML code that makes the page look like it does. I couldn't find "limited-access", so I couldn't "delete the "class" attribute that it's part of" ... but this evening, the "limited-access" has expired or something, so I was able to read the article.

    Don't know what it looks like on a Mac, because I still don't have the new one set up yet.

    216:

    Graydon @ 198:

    One thing I found concerning was that someone did a 10 year retrospective on SARS; there were about 800 cases in Canada, mostly among health care workers. Depending on whose count, between forty and fifty percent never returned to work. After ten years, no survivor reports improvement in their post-SARS symptoms.

    I know it's a completely different virus, but I wonder if looking back to the recovery of POLIO survivors could provide any useful information?

    217:

    Troutwaxer @ 212:

    So what's going through Truss's head as she pisses off the President of the United States? Arrogance? Stupidity? Some delusional thinking involving the British Empire?* Is she getting bad/good intelligence? Is there some long-term plan I'm missing? Is it easier to loot the U.K. if you guys don't have a trade deal? Or maybe orders from Moscow? WTF is motivating her?

    Just a SWAG from the other side of the Atlantic, but ...

    IIRC, Biden wasn't the POTUS at the time Brexit shit all over the "Northern Ireland Protocol and the Good Friday Agreement". And the way things were going at the time, I don't think anyone expected him to become POTUS.

    But like some U.S. politicians I could name, she seems to have ideological blinders that make her thinking impervious to anything other than her own self-righteous views.

    If the facts disagree, then the facts are wrong.

    218:

    I know it's a completely different virus, but I wonder if looking back to the recovery of POLIO survivors could provide any useful information?

    I really hope not; some equivalent of post-polio syndrome when the statistical-first-approximation entire population has had COVID would be highly sub-optimal.

    219:

    Heteromeles @ 214:

    But Brexit reduced the UK's influence within the EU to zero, at which point the UK was much less useful to the US. Why take the side of an old imperial has-been with delusions of grandeur when you're really trying to make friends and influence people in an affluent first-world economic superpower (with nuclear weapons, natch -- see also France)?

    France? Our biggest military bases are in Germany.

    Germany does not have nuclear weapons. France does.

    220:

    I wonder if part of the problem is simply cultural. Biden's a Catholic from a middle class background who went to a public university. Not too many people in the Democratic leadership who are WASP and went to an Ivy League school. For someone who comes from a world where only Oxbridge products get to be in charge, this might be confusing.

    221:

    Germany does not have nuclear weapons. France does.

    So? As long as the US has big bases in Germany and doesn't loathe France, Germany will never invade France, and Russia will have to go through us to get to France. So long as we're in the UK and don't loathe France, the UK will never be at war with France. I have a dim suspicion that the French might not like the kind of US friendship that comes with a long-term military presence, so...it looks like we're all good, no?

    Hopefully, with the Current Unpleasantness, the USDoD will see fit to employ more English workers at our bases. We shan't call it workfare, of course...

    On a less glib level, world civilization is currently maintained by international maritime trade, and the US has a big interest in maintaining that. Thus, I fail to see why we'd close a bunch of critical North Atlantic facilities because some leader is a lackwit. After all, you had to endure Trump pulling out of all those treaties...

    222:

    In #165 on October 2, 2022 at 00:45 JohnS wrote:

    I disagree with the bit about "Until... Trump came along". The GQP began it's descent into fascism in the mid-50s. Trump is the result of the idiocy, not the cause.

    Based on family Republican experience, I'd say the America Firsters of the later 30s/early 40s were Hitler's fellow travelers.

    We had what looked like a sane GOP in the Forties only because of the need for unity after Pearl Harbor. Ike was an aberration; he was courted by both parties, as he had no party affiliation, as serving officers were not political (with one MacArthur-sized exception), so provided some restraint in the Fifties to what would otherwise be a froth-at-the-mouth collection of raving loons, a la 'Tailgunner Joe' McCarthy.

    223:

    Heteromeles @ 221:

    Don't be more obtuse than you have to be. It's unbecoming and disingenuous.

    "trying to make friends and influence people in an affluent first-world economic superpower (with nuclear weapons, natch -- see also France"

    The only E.U. member with nuclear weapons is France (now that the U.K. is no longer a member of the E.U.).

    Plus, the "big bases" in Germany have been closed or are being closed.

    Closing U.S. bases in Germany is another legacy of Bush II's Iraqi misadventure. It was a cost cutting measure. U.S. forces supporting NATO have moved farther east into the territories of newer NATO members ... for logistics reasons & for reassurance - to put U.S. tripwire forces closer to the perceived threat.

    Stationing forces eastward reassures our NATO partners of our commitment to Article Five. But instead of building new bases in those NATO partners, the U.S. has forces co-located with host nation military forces.

    But they're no longer permanently based there. If it came to an all out war between NATO and Russia, U.S. forces would still stage through Germany, because that's where the ports & airfields & rail-heads are located, but they'd be moving east with all due speed.

    But France is the nuclear power in the E.U., Germany is not.

    224:

    kiloseven @ 222:

    In #165 on October 2, 2022 at 00:45 JohnS wrote:

    I disagree with the bit about "Until... Trump came along". The GQP began it's descent into fascism in the mid-50s. Trump is the result of the idiocy, not the cause.

    Based on family Republican experience, I'd say the America Firsters of the later 30s/early 40s were Hitler's fellow travelers.

    We had what looked like a sane GOP in the Forties only because of the need for unity after Pearl Harbor. Ike was an aberration; he was courted by both parties, as he had no party affiliation, as serving officers were not political (with one MacArthur-sized exception), so provided some restraint in the Fifties to what would otherwise be a froth-at-the-mouth collection of raving loons, a la 'Tailgunner Joe' McCarthy.

    As prominent as the "America Firsters" were in pre-WW2 Republican politics, they were not able to dominate it to the extent the right-wingnuts have managed to take over today's GQP. They didn't have the power to purge those who did not agree with them the way today's christo-fascists have purged the RepubliQan party. The current crop of "raving loons"

    As bug-fuck crazy as Tailgunner Joe' McCarthy was, his crazy was more opportunistic than it was based on any coherent political beliefs. For me the downfall of the RepubliQan party began when Eisenhower chose raving loon (& opportunist) Number One Richard Nixon as his running mate.

    I believe that was the first step onto the slippery slope ... sort of the same mistake Yeltsin later made selecting Putin.

    225:

    "Plus, the "big bases" in Germany have been closed or are being closed."

    Er, Ramstein and Spangdahlem ABs?

    226:

    For me the downfall of the RepubliQan party began when Eisenhower chose raving loon (& opportunist) Number One Richard Nixon as his running mate.

    Nixon was despicable for other reasons, but when you look at his actual proposed and implemented policies as president, he was somewhere on the left of today's Democratic party.

    227:

    Why take the side of an old imperial has-been with delusions of grandeur when you're really trying to make friends and influence people in an affluent first-world economic superpower (with nuclear weapons, natch -- see also France)?

    5 eyes.

    Google tells me that the UK's GDP is about 2.7 trillion and France's is about 2.6 trillion (2020 numbers for both).

    228:

    If I understand the comment correctly, what I said is "both sides do" and I shouldn't do that. If I under correctly, why should I not say this, if both sides actually do it? Yes, they are two different parties, with one extremely corrupt and conservative, while the other party is even more corrupt and just batty. The "better" party is just not as batty. Lead or arsenic? What a choice!

    From the little I understand of British politics, the UK has the same problem of corruption, incompetence, and fake policies that always, somehow, impoverish even more the already poor or suffering, and give barrels of money and sympathy to the already wealthy.

    The details between the British and American political systems are real enough, but the gist is the same; both major American parties need to be staked, beheaded, burned to ashes, doused with Holy Water with the cremains dumped into the nearest ocean;I assume the same for the top 2-4 British parties.

    229:
    So what's going through Truss's head as she pisses off the President of the United States? [...] WTF is motivating her?

    Bear in mind that I was not a contemporary of Truss' at Oxford, though I did get invited to parties and interact with a lot of proto-Conservative politicians such as Johnson, Gove and Cameron, the last of whom I had (student-political) dealings with at College. I can give you a better read-out on them than I can on Truss.

    What is fast becoming apparent is that she actually believes all the crap that comes out of 55 Tufton Street: Randian, Libertarian, Low Tax, minimalist state, etc, etc. It is not -- as many of us would have assumed -- an act.

    She has not yet joined the dots on all the decisions she's been making. Cutting taxes for the rich, paying for it by borrowing, and then expecting the "fwee market" to support her, for example. Apparently, she spent her time at Oxford arguing with her politics tutor on factually incorrect data, and refusing to be corrected.

    I think she has been influenced in this by Daniel Hannan and/or Dominic Cummings who were both leading lights of the OU Conservative Society in their time. It's the Dick Cheney: "If we believe in something, we can make it the truth" approach to politics.

    There's also a chance that she is playing for time in the hope that Trump or a more extreme replacement will come along to save her bacon before the next UK election is due.

    Now, what you need to know -- not withstanding Charlie's complaints about the English voters -- is that there is a strand of social democracy running through the country like a stick of rock. The reason people vote Conservative is that it is a class marker -- showing you are better than labour voters -- rather than because they believe in any deep political philosophy. So, it comes as something of a shock to these sorts of voters that anyone on less than £155,000 per annum is considered by the current government to be "not one of us".

    And one very interesting -- and salient -- observation is that despite the editorial line in The Mail remaining mostly pro-Truss, the reader comments in the on-line version have shown a complete reversal of opinion by the commentators. Combine this with the latest polling numbers and I think we can see a sea change in voting habits coming in to view.

    Just my more-or-less random opinions of course....

    230:

    Closing U.S. bases in Germany is another legacy of Bush II's Iraqi misadventure. It was a cost cutting measure.

    Based on the discussions with our relatives, friends, and those US military who were or are now stationed in Germany; the Germans are NOT UNHAPPY that we no longer have tank corps there. NATO bases OK. Well mostly. Tank Corps, nope.

    Iraq II was not so much the reason as the excuse for this bit of basing reduction.

    My wife's father was a Lt. C and full bird C in Heidelberg and Stuttgart in the 70s. Plus we have relations in the area to this day.

    If the Germans who visit here have more details or a different opinion, I'm open to learning more or being corrected.

    231:

    Until... Trump came along

    I first wrote this on this page. It wasn't about all the craziness of the GOP. It was specifically about partisan election officials. And our system of COUNTING votes worked since the 70s.

    Again, it is falling apart because Trump to the R's they were loosing because the D's were lying and cheating in the COUNTING. They were not. Neither were the R's. Next election should run mostly OK. After that I'm not so sure as the next election may bring into power a lot of folks who are of the mind, "We'll lie and cheat also to win since the others are doing it."

    As to the issue of who is ALLOWED to vote. That is NOT what I was talking about. And I have some strong opinions on that topic, not aligned with the GOP.

    232:

    »And our system of COUNTING votes worked since the 70s.«

    … until Florida 2000 ?

    233:

    Kardashev @ 225:

    "Plus, the "big bases" in Germany have been closed or are being closed."

    Er, Ramstein and Spangdahlem ABs?

    Two U.S. air bases left in Germany. Rhein-Main AFB (the BIG big airbase in Germany) closed in 2005. The Germans have been building a big cargo hub there, and it looks like maybe a new passenger terminal.

    Google Maps 50.030181000335915, 8.581885583191204

    The United States Army has 40 military installations in Germany, two of which are scheduled to close. Over 220 others have already been closed, mostly following the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. The rationale behind the large number of closures is that the strategic functions of the bases, designed to serve as forward posts in any war against the USSR, are no longer relevant since the end of the Cold War.

    Fifty-seven of those closures have come since 2006; i.e. post-Iraq. Another 119 closures date 1990 or later; i.e. post-Soviet Union.

    U.S. forces in Europe have moved east into the territory of new NATO allies, but instead of building new U.S. bases in those countries, U.S. forces are now located at host nation military installations.

    The U.S. still has four air-bases in Europe. Lakenheath in the U.K., Ramstein & Spangdahlem in Germany and Aviano in Italy. The USAF can still use another dozen bases in Europe & the U.K., but those bases are under the control of the host nations. The USAF is a guest at those installations.

    234:

    … until Florida 2000 ?

    There certainly were games played with ballots prior to that, but I think in general the process of vote counting was and is trustworthy, despite its partisan nature.

    That said, the Republican Party has been testing what they can norms they can get away with breaking over the last decade. One of those norms was how much of US government relied on people putting duty and professionalism above personal gain. They've done their damnedest to replace that with people who go in to exploit the system.

    My favorite example of doing one's duty is one of my least favorite people: Dick Cheney on 9/11. He was the one in charge of the White House when the planes attacked. At first he followed protocol and went into the bunker. However, when he reportedly realized that he couldn't properly command the response if the bunker door was closed, so he left it open and did what he could, knowing that a plane was inbound and targeting the White House (Flight 94, saved by the passengers). Vulture capitalist that he is, he chose to do his public duty when it mattered, just as his daughter is doing on the Jan 6th committee.

    Again, I don't support the Cheneys, but I can't imagine any of the predicted GQP candidates for 2024 showing even as much character as Dick Cheney. And that's a loss.

    235:

    Nixon was despicable for other reasons, but when you look at his actual proposed and implemented policies as president, he was somewhere on the left of today's Democratic party.

    Quite right. For one thing, Nixon's proposal for a Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan was more liberal than Obamacare.

    “Without adequate health care, no one can make full use of his or her talents and opportunities. It is thus just as important that economic, racial and social barriers not stand in the way of good health care as it is to eliminate those barriers to a good education and a good job.” — President Nixon

    Unfortunately, Nixon's plan was killed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who gave in to pressure from unions, as labor leaders wished for a single-payer system.

    236:

    The details between the British and American political systems are real enough, but the gist is the same; both major American parties need to be staked, beheaded, burned to ashes, doused with Holy Water with the cremains dumped into the nearest ocean;I assume the same for the top 2-4 British parties.

    Surely you would prefer to visit this punishment on the real culprits - American voters.

    237:

    David L @ 230:

    Closing U.S. bases in Germany is another legacy of Bush II's Iraqi misadventure. It was a cost cutting measure.

    Based on the discussions with our relatives, friends, and those US military who were or are now stationed in Germany; the Germans are NOT UNHAPPY that we no longer have tank corps there. NATO bases OK. Well mostly. Tank Corps, nope.

    Iraq II was not so much the reason as the excuse for this bit of basing reduction.

    Whether reason or excuse, the bottom line is American service members who used to spend their pay in Germany are now more likely spending that pay in Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary or Romania - NATO's new front line states.

    The Germans have good reason not to be happy about losing all that money. But logistically, Germany is no longer the front line against the Soviet Union. That front line has moved east, and so have the U.S. forces.

    Germany no longer needs U.S. forces stationed there to serve as a trip-wire against Soviet aggression.

    The newer NATO members do seem to need (want) that reassurance given Putin's stated intentions to reclaim the Russian empire's former glory.

    238:

    »And our system of COUNTING votes worked since the 70s.«

    … until Florida 2000 ?

    Yup. America's first (but not last) brush with an extreme right-wing Supreme Court... :-(

    239:

    Der Eisener Wetterhahn turns again! - apparently, today's printed Torygraph is loud on how the Travel-Iron Lady is "Not for turning" - spluttered into my first cup of tea when I heard that.
    Right - what improbable lunacies come next?

    240:

    Greg: I personally prefer "La Trussterfuck".

    241:

    Re: ' ... some equivalent of post-polio syndrome when the statistical-first-approximation entire population has had COVID would be highly sub-optimal.'

    Maybe scientists will do a comparison between polio and COVID now that polio is making the news. I'm not sure that I'd take old clinical case study articles on polio at face value if only because there weren't as many tools to study viruses back in the polio heyday (mid-1900s). Back then - a bit less so now - quite a few clinicians just dismiss anything that they don't have a quick lab test for. (Circular reasoning.)

    The below is some recent research from a Brazilian lab. Brazil got hit really hard with COVID - mostly because their Prez was/is just like DT and didn't give a damn about facts or people.*

    'Study Reveals Main Target of COVID-19 in Brain and Describes Effects of Virus on Nervous System'

    https://neurosciencenews.com/covid-19-astrocytes-21569/

    https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2200960119

    *And returning to RW politics - looks like Brazil might be able to vote out Bolsonaro in the run-off vote. Good article - interesting info that might be applicable to understanding other RW countries esp. the large gap between voter polls and voting results.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/brazil-election-bolsonaro-lula-1.6603351

    'With 99.5 per cent of the votes tallied, former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had 48.3 per cent support and incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro had 43.3 per cent support. Nine other candidates were also competing, but their support pales to that for Bolsonaro and Lula.

    The tightness of the election result came as a surprise, since pre-election polls had given da Silva a commanding lead. The last Datafolha survey published Saturday found a 50 per cent to 36 per cent advantage for da Silva among those who intended to vote. It interviewed 12,800 people, with a margin of error of 2 percentage points.'

    Greg @ 239:

    That was fast! Wonder how they're going to disguise the tax cuts to the rich now. I checked a couple of new-to-me sites for more info on UK politics and learned that Truss fired the chief treasury civil servant. That answers one of my previous questions re: who's briefing her? (The article didn't mention who the replacement is.)

    And thanks for the update on your gardening. I didn't plant any veg this year but everything else has survived. We went from too little to too much rain. Not a real problem if one's concern is aesthetics, but serious for some folks around here who were hoping to supplement their food supply. Food prices have gone up a lot on weekly staples plus, plus some stores are putting more limits on how much you can buy of a special as well as limiting the total quantities of whatever they're advertising as a special that week meaning they're no longer offering rain checks. Not a good sign.

    242:

    "What is fast becoming apparent is that she actually believes all the crap that comes out of 55 Tufton Street: Randian, Libertarian, Low Tax, minimalist state, etc, etc. It is not -- as many of us would have assumed -- an act.

    She has not yet joined the dots on all the decisions she's been making."

    https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/lyndon_b_johnson_137074

    And it's not Thick Lizzie.

    243:

    Yes. There were a lot of proposals the UK pushed or helped to kill, and the role of GCHQ etc. shouldn't be underestimated. But the UK largely made itself redundant as the USA's fifth column in the EU in 2004, and the attitude of the USA to the UK thereafter noticeably changed. I agree that pissing off Biden is close to the last straw. There are still a good made surveillance and active force bases, such as Lakenheath and Menwith Hill, but it's not as if the USA is short of bases in foreign parts.

    It's been a very one-sided relationship all along, but now is almost entirely so.

    244:

    So what's going through Truss's head as she pisses off the President of the United States? Arrogance? Stupidity?

    Both. Truss is a deeply stupid individual, for all her expertise in certain narrow fields. It's the kind of blinkered stupidity you get when someone very smart latches onto an ideology and insists on viewing everything through its frame, even though they've misunderstood it and it's actually broken.

    245:

    In the other thread I reasoned that once Truss was in place at least the UK government would be able to start pulling the fiscal levers and manage the economy away from disaster, over Boris' absenteeism. I didn't predict that she would instead accelerate the economy into a brick wall.

    Kwarteng is going into the economics textbooks for all the wrong reasons, accompanied by that quote about the BoE having to forcefully intervene to prevent pension funds from collapsing "by this afternoon". He's done the most single-handed damage to the British economy since the Right Honourable Matt Ridley presided over the Northern Rock bank run. Time will tell what future disasters are in store from Thatcher le Petite

    246:

    Dominic Cummings

    Probably not by Cummings: today he's tweeting that it's time to wind up the conservative party and create a new centre-right party based on, like, actual principles. Sounds like he's completely disgusted with Truss.

    247:

    Charlie
    OK - that or the Travel-Iron Lady (!) ...
    Truss is a deeply stupid individual, for all her expertise in certain narrow fields. - This is named "Dunning-Kruger" is it not? Or is it worse than that?
    - also plus hippoptolemy ...
    Now that "experts" are allowed back in, after the Gove fiasco, apparently the hate group are people who follow "orthodoxy" - i.e. anyone not in the IEA.
    Which reminds me, some idiot from said IEA was on R4 this am, & said {paraphrase} "I've never seen Truss do a U-turn before" - which is either a deliberate lie or total stupidity - probably the latter, of course.

    248:

    Meanwhile back in America we have the Fed raising interest rates to curb inflation.

    Aside from the fact that ordinary Americans will pay the price for this cluster by losing their jobs (God forbid that the rich and powerful who created the situation will ever have to pay the price, can't have that now can we?), raising interest rates now won't do jack to curb inflation short of completely crashing the economy.

    Unless someone can someone explain to me how Federal reserve rate hikes will address the true causes of inflation:

    Broken supply chains caused by Covid-19 (and China's zero tolerance pandemic policy that shuts down entire manufacturing sectors and cities).

    Retiring Boomers world wide (along with long term demographic trends of lower birth rates resulting in shrinking and greying populations) that have caused labor shortages and spike in labor prices.

    Declining EROEIs for fossil fuels, leading to increased real costs for energy

    Climate change playing havoc with crop yields world wide (America lost half its spring wheat crop this year and China's rice belt experienced the worst heave wave in recorded history) causing price spikes in food. What can the Fed possibly do to restrain the true causes of inflation?

    Like old generals, the Fed is fighting the last war.

    249:

    Your blog, but I think the "Iron Weathervane" is more descriptive than either your preference or Greg's.
    I'll submit into evidence the partial reversal of last week's "mini-budget" at this point.

    250:

    The contemporary Labour party looks to be a semi-sane center right party already, though I doubt escapees from the once conservative party could mind their manners.

    251:

    Re: 'Kwarteng is going into the economics textbooks for all the wrong reasons ...'

    One reporter referred to him as an economist while another reporter said his field is the history of economics. Makes a difference re: how much expertise he has and in what.

    Danged - his PhD thesis is under lock & key. Might be that there are a few folks here who might be able to access this via the channels mentioned below.

    https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/251742 Citation

    Kwarteng, K. A. A. (2000). Political thought of the recoinage crisis of 1695-7. (Doctoral thesis).

    'Description

    This thesis is not available on this repository until the author agrees to make it public. If you are the author of this thesis and would like to make your work openly available, please contact us: thesis@repository.cam.ac.uk.

    The Library can supply a digital copy for private research purposes; interested parties should submit the request form here: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/digital-content-unit/ordering-images

    Please note that print copies of theses may be available for consultation in the Cambridge University Library's Manuscript reading room.

    Admission details are at'

    http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/manuscripts-university-archives

    Here's a very brief description of the event:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recoinage_of_1696

    252:
    Dominic Cummings Probably not by Cummings: today he's tweeting that it's time to wind up the conservative party and create a new centre-right party based on, like, actual principles. Sounds like he's completely disgusted with Truss.

    Charlie,

    I think you are correct: although they all mixed in the same circles, it was probably Hannan.

    Anyway, I've been thinking about what causes right wing politicians, and I have a hypothesis that needs it's tyres kicking.

    Right Wing Autocratic Tendencies manifest in people who were bullied as kids

    Hannan: Grew up in Lima Peru, and was sent to school in England when seven (Winchester, I think). Claims that he was shocked by the laid-back attitudes of his school mates. I suspect he was bullied as an oustider.

    Truss: A dumpy plain little thing as a kid, and over-exposed by her parents at Lib-Dem conferences. Must have been bullied at school.

    Kwartang: A Black man at Eton. And something of an arrogant intellectual, apparently. Not a chance in hell he wasn't bullied by someone.

    Johnson: One of the School bullies, but was bullied by his father.

    Hitler: Certainly bullied by his father; probably bullied at school.

    Trump: Again, bullied by father. And hard to imagine his school contempories gave him an easy ride given how dumb he is.

    Raab/Patel/Braverman: I'm getting bored now, but note all of these are immigrant children (similar to Hannan, though his parents were UK ex-pats). All will have felt like outsiders, even if there was no actual bullying. Note also Raab took up boxing at Oxford.

    And the reaction of all these people is to get enough power to show their tormentors that they "amount to something."

    As before, just some random musings, which could easily be wrong...

    Perhaps someone who knows their background could comment on Lenin, Stalin, and Putin. I think I'd put a fair sum on Putin having been bullied as a young kid.

    253:

    I can, but I am afraid I am not going to, for several reasons, including: until my immune system recovers, I am self-isolating; I lack the background to interpret it properly (or even intelligently); and it is probably very boring, and may not tell us anything about his views. Sorry about wimping out.

    The bureaucratic blither is confusing. What it means is that there is a single, non-borrowable, paper copy, which is currently stored in the archives. I doubt that anyone has shown any interest in making an online version available.

    254:

    I think that you will also find the same for a good many left-wing radicals. I was bullied, fairly badly - and this carried over into discrimination (and occasional bullying) in my adult life on grounds of my partial disabilities - feel free to call me a wannabee autocrat, but you would be deluded or mendacious if you call me right wing :-) It is perhaps the main reason that I have taken notice of and opposed the tyranny of the majority over my lifetime, which gets me flamed for standing up for unpopular minorities.

    255:

    Re: '... until my immune system recovers, I am self-isolating;'

    Understood and wholeheartedly agree - stay safe, get well!

    256:

    "Political thought of the recoinage crisis of 1695-7." - Isn't this normally called "history" rather than "economics"?

    257:

    First degree in Classics and History, PhD in Economic History. If he stayed with Trinity College for his PhD there's probably a paper copy of the thsis in their College Library (or if he switched, whichever College he was with) as well as the copy at UL. There's also a British Library reference so they probably hold a copy. I suspect from the vintage the electronic copy on offer for 75 quid and a good excuse will be a scan to PDF.

    258:

    comment on Lenin

    I don't know a huge amount about his childhood except that he hero-worshipped his elder brother, a student radical ... who was hanged during the crackdown after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. It was a pivotal event in the young Ulianov's life and it radicalized him: his subsequent trajectory contains a heaped serving of revenge.

    (The others are all plausible. Bullying is ubiquitous, toxic, and self-perpetuating.)

    259:

    Danged - his PhD thesis is under lock & key. Might be that there are a few folks here who might be able to access this via the channels mentioned below.

    Is he on LinkedIn or a similar UK thing. It might have more information. Or be totally self serving.

    260:

    On the subject of Truss pissing off of the American president, I would say that there is another way to look at that. The president is only part of the state, the ideology that lead to current events and most of the funding behind it, came from America. I would think that the funding of the Tufton St. lot would require at least tacit approval from the state department and CIA, it is major interference in a nuclear armed allies politics. There is also a section of American thought that sees the EU as a potential rival, and therefore pulling the UK away from the EU could be seen as beneficial. This is not to mention Americans making large sums of money from it. Truss knows she is totally aligned with America, indeed even to the detriment of her own country and the benefit of Americans, so she thinks she has nothing to worry about.

    261:

    I doubt that there is one in Trinity (or whereever), as college libraries were put into the records some years ago, and I can find only a single entry for it (*); the British Library probably does.

    (*) I checked that as someone with borrowing rights, so there isn't a privilege issue.

    262:

    It looks like a lot of people are tweeting about Kwarteng's thesis. Google the title and dig in. The most informative stream I found (a Cambridge professor who went and actually opened the document recently and tweeted about the contents) is https://twitter.com/mariaaabreu/status/1575060114809434114

    One key quote (p. 1 of the thesis, apparently) is "Rather, the recoinage and is attendant controversy are considered as a rich source of political ideas.”

    The tweets aren't a hatchet job. Apparently it's well written and balanced (there's a "don't blame Cambridge for the current mess" comment in the tweet stream). Perhaps the most telling part is that he didn't publish it?

    My 0.01 cent takeaway is that he was trained as a historian more than an economist, and in his training he apparently focused more on the politics surrounding the crisis than the economics of how the crisis unfolded. Doesn't mean he's a priori incompetent to actually run an economy in crisis, but it does suggest he'll focus on the politics of the situation more than on the processes of recombobulating the UK economy. It's also somewhat more likely that, when his economic staff gives him advice, he might not catch all the implications of what they're trying to tell him.

    This is all just speculation, of course. I don't know whether Exchequer chancellors are required to be economics wonks, or merely to manage the career ones at the treasury.

    Putting him in charge of the UK economy right now? Interesting choice. Hope he exceeds expectations on the positive side. Or something.

    263:

    "Perhaps the most telling part is that he didn't publish it?"

    He did, which is why there is a copy in the British Library; that is (or was) the normal practice for PhD theses; few PhD theses are published more widely than to the sponsoring institution. It is JUST possible that it is now standard practice to make online copies available, but Cambridge University is not reknowned for changing its procedures with great frequency.

    264:

    Meanwhile, the tories rabid hatred of the EU, coupled with - "It's working, let's smash it!" - has produced a proposal to smash GDPR & replace it with a "Wonderful, new better British version" { !! }. I kid you not.
    Same as their proposed new "British Bill of {removal of} Rights"

    EC
    "Bullying" - or it can turn you into a cantankerous refusenik, who simply WON'T - NOT GOING TO! / NOT PLAYING - like me.
    - also re. Charlie @ 258 ....
    Though I didn't know it at the time, I followed the advice of the Gautama ... I simply Stepped off the Road

    Toby
    Yes / maybe / highly probable.
    The "Tufton Street poison" is almost-pure distilled current Rethuglican policy, after all, isn't it?

    265:

    "I don't know whether Exchequer chancellors are required to be economics wonks, or merely to manage the career ones at the treasury." Chancellors are politicians first, economists second. Most likely a Commons MP. Possibly a member of the Lords, though that is less likely these days for one of the big offices of state. Those politicians have to make the right alliances with some one who succeeds in climbing the greasy pole to become PM. The PM is likely to choose the least bad finance person from the very small pool of politicians that are allied to them from their party and is also not seen as a threat to their own position. The chances of them having much more than degree level economics training is low.

    266:

    To add to the above, those politicians that do make it to Chancellor are likely to have some sort of City banking background in their pre politics CV's, rather than academic economics training.

    267:

    "The "Tufton Street poison" is almost-pure distilled current Rethuglican policy, after all, isn't it?"

    From what I've read here it sure sounds that way. Pure "make the rich even richer with whatever justification sells" bullshit.

    268:

    Truss is a deeply stupid individual, for all her expertise in certain narrow fields. It's the kind of blinkered stupidity you get when someone very smart latches onto an ideology and insists on viewing everything through its frame, even though they've misunderstood it and it's actually broken.

    So, think of her as a political kind of techbro, then?

    269:

    He did, which is why there is a copy in the British Library; that is (or was) the normal practice for PhD theses; few PhD theses are published more widely than to the sponsoring institution. It is JUST possible that it is now standard practice to make online copies available, but Cambridge University is not reknowned for changing its procedures with great frequency.

    Not what I mean. I never published my MA thesis, but most of my PhD dissertation is sitting in three, peer-reviewed journal papers, and the remaining study is unpublishable.

    My understanding is that in the social sciences, it's fairly normal for a wannabe academic to turn their thesis into one or more books that (in his case) would be published by Cambridge University Press. Since he's published at least two books since (per Wikipedia), the publishing world isn't foreign to him. We can speculate on why he didn't publish it, but given that another professor thought it was of good quality, it's not because it sucked. The most likely reasons are that he had no interest in academia, and that he was well and truly sick of the subject. Since he kept working in economics-adjacent fields, the latter is less likely.

    If you want tinfoil hat speculation, he became interested in the political tactics and strategies each side deployed during the crisis, and thought that they might be useful today. If so, publishing gives potential opponents some insight into what he's doing. Yes, this requires him to be some sort of evil genius, and reality may disagree.

    The only reason I bring this up is that the GQP seems to be using strategies and tactics that were honed in the political conflicts leading up to the Civil War and especially in defeating the Reconstruction afterwards. Since some of the GQP players have backgrounds in American history, I don't think this is an accident, if I'm reading the situation correctly. And all I'm doing is reading standard references about the era and periodically pulling my eyebrows off the ceiling.

    270:

    To add to the above, those politicians that do make it to Chancellor are likely to have some sort of City banking background in their pre politics CV's, rather than academic economics training.

    Thanks! That makes sense. I'm obviously used to the American system, where one doesn't have to be a congresscritter to be tapped for a secretary-level post.

    271:

    the GQP seems to be using strategies and tactics that were honed in the political conflicts leading up to the Civil War and especially in defeating the Reconstruction afterwards.

    That's one of the points that Sjursen makes in A True History of the United States — that the conflicts playing out today have done so in the past, although ignored by most popular histories.

    272:

    Should have remembered College libraries were now on the main index as I had to tweak the dedicated search PCs at Sidney as the systems merged.

    I know the Sidney library had some shelves of theses by its postgrads and it seemed to be standard practice that UL, College library and supervisor got a printed copy which is why I thought Trinity may have a copy.

    273:

    Re: '"Rather, the recoinage and is attendant controversy are considered as a rich source of political ideas.”'

    Thanks! I read through her tweets and followed a link on which the below struck me as interesting.

    https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2013/09/crisis-chronicles-the-not-so-great-re-coinage-of-1696/

    'The crisis ultimately spurred a new era of economies driven by a broad set of financial instruments, not just specie, and laid the foundations for the later development of “fiat money,” which is backed by full faith and credit in the issuing government,'

    It's all fiat money everywhere these days - so Kwarteng should be able to grasp the implications of what the drop in the pound's value means politically.

    I don't know the timing of (a) Truss announcing her mini-budget and (b) Kwarteng enjoying champagne with financial market cronies but it would be interesting to see the real-time market reaction during both.

    I'm guessing the London Stock Exchange keeps records of all foreign currency trades, i.e., number of trades, amounts per trade, customers, which shares got bought/sold in different currencies, etc. so it shouldn't be too difficult to find out who bought/sold most. Regardless of whether they were buying or selling though the agents/traders probably made a fortune in commissions/fees - like George Soros maybe?

    'Soros is known as "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England" because of his short sale of US$10 billion worth of pounds sterling, which made him a profit of $1 billion during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis.[17]'

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros

    The below provides an example of the types of currency trades done that day.

    https://www.forex.com/en-ca/market-analysis/latest-research/how-to-short-the-pound/

    274:

    "it seemed to be standard practice that UL, College library and supervisor got a printed copy".

    I'm not sure about that. I think I had to provide 3 copies of mine, but I think they went to the department/faculty library (who maybe forwarded one to the UL?), not directly to the UL, college library or supervisor. Also, that was ~40 years ago so the system may have changed.

    275:

    It's certainly always worth checking.

    276:

    "it seemed to be standard practice that UL, College library and supervisor got a printed copy".

    I'm not sure about that. I think I had to provide 3 copies of mine, but I think they went to the department/faculty library (who maybe forwarded one to the UL?), not directly to the UL, college library or supervisor. However, that was ~40 years ago so the system may have changed.

    ...anyway, you might be able to find a copy in the History Faculty's library.

    277:

    I didn't have much to do with that end of things, I think extra copies for various people and places was custom rather than requirement. I've no idea if physical copies are still required, most written work is submitted online these days. Some DoS's ask for handwritten essays now and again to give the students practice for the exams, but even those get scanned so they can be handed in online.

    278:

    "Thanks! That makes sense. I'm obviously used to the American system, where one doesn't have to be a congresscritter to be tapped for a secretary-level post."

    Being able to appoint some one to the job who, though sympathetic to the ruling party, is an expert actually makes more sense than the Westminster governments method of selecting the least bad option from a very small pool of politicians. Theoretically, could a PM could make an expert they wanted a Peer, then appoint them Chancellor of the Exchequer? A Peerage is for life, but recent governments have had no qualms about packing the Lords with their donors and chums. One day we might get democracy in the UK central government, but it's a long way from being one now.

    279:

    Being able to appoint some one to the job who, though sympathetic to the ruling party, is an expert actually makes more sense than the Westminster governments method of selecting the least bad option from a very small pool of politicians

    This is the advantage of list systems, where a party lists the people it wishes to have in parliament/government if elected. Its a good way of making sure the party has expertise where needed; eg a small party in government making sure its economic expert is elected, etc.

    There are often ways around it - parachute people into "safe seats", in Ireland we have a senate voted by local councillors, which works out to be a list system "by the back door".

    280:

    Bullying and exclusion have been so ubiquitous we can hardly ascribe it to all the monsters of the current and past world. Most people have been bullied at some point, many of them horribly. Most are also not monsters or even just complete arseholes.

    There is a particular type of intelligence that will lock onto something that is intuitively appealing and use it to interpret the entire world. Economics as a discipline appears to appeal to people with that form of intelligence.

    I remember finishing a couple of undergrad economics courses as a 19 year old and thinking 'it all makes such good sense'. With a bit more lived experience I was able to perceive the woefully reductionist and morally bereft limitations of basic Economics modelling. Many people never get to that point, and in some schools are actively discouraged from reconsidering that point.

    I can't remember the exact quote, but it goes something like 'For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, easy to understand and completely wrong'. Truss and Kwarteng seem to have locked onto von Mises as the only answer worth considering, and damn any more complicated answers to this simple solution.

    281:

    Ideally Ministers can be questioned by MPs in the House of Commons, but in order for that to happen the Minister must also be an MP as no-one else may speak in the House. The last holder of a major office I can remember being in the Lords rather than an MP was Lord Carrington who was Minister of Defence during the Falklands war.

    282:

    H.L. Mencken seems to be the go-to person for the quote:

    "For every complex human problem, there is a solution that is neat, simple and wrong."

    283:

    This is the advantage of list systems, where a party lists the people it wishes to have in parliament/government if elected.

    In the US this is what was unofficially happening in many places into the 60s. Which in so many ways led to the Chicago Riots at the 68 D convention. Which led to both parties requiring primaries.

    Both ways have failure modes. And determined ass holes will work hard to exploit the modes.

    284:

    Every political and economic system will have major failure modes, and in every case we will have sociopaths and their enablers finding ways to game the system until it breaks, usually ending in tears.

    I suspect a long-term sustainable system of democracy would, at predetermined intervals (15-25 years?), switch between a variety of electoral systems. Most importantly, which system you are switching to won't be known in advance, and will be chosen by a random lottery one month prior to the next election.

    First Past the Post plurality systems work well for some things, but lead to other problems such as gray dictatorships leading to extremist takeover. Pure Proportional Representation works well for other things, but can lead to ossification at the top of party lists and disproportionate power for minority parties (i.e. Likud). Mixed proportional has other failure modes.

    Each system would need enough time to work but not enough time to overly reward sociopathic climbers before it is replaced with a different system that has been chosen at random. Maybe we could have a citizen jury or assembly every decade to examine the successes and failure modes of 15 different proposed systems - in order to choose which 5 will be in the lottery box next time around.

    It will never happen, but it would at least make failure modes harder to identify and exploit for oligarchic types.

    285:

    Troutwaxer
    Another example of IEA/Tufton/"Republican" policy in action - SLIGHT problem - this, also is exactly contrary to our leaving treaty with the EU, so anpther manufactured fight is on the way.....

    286:

    AFAIK, no paywalls at the Guardian.

    287:

    It got really serious the day that LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act (1964). Within four years or so, almost all the old Dixiecrats - pro-segregation, etc Democrats - changed parties and became Republican. That was a huge factor, and, as I type, think that let the ultra-rich have a one-stop-shop for all their goals.

    288:

    "The US trending isolationist"? Only the GOP side. They are not the same.

    289:

    I suspect a long-term sustainable system of democracy would, at predetermined intervals (15-25 years?), switch between a variety of electoral systems. Most importantly, which system you are switching to won't be known in advance, and will be chosen by a random lottery one month prior to the next election.

    In theory, ducky. In practice, you probably need at least a year, if not two, to switch voting systems. There's ballots to print, equipment to buy, modify, or warehouse, workers to train, systems to certify, and so forth.

    Also, if you're picking randomly from a known menu of systems, the hackers may have an advantage over the defenders. They'll have time to game the possibilities, and if the alternate systems are being used elsewhere, they'll have time to practice. The defenders will have similar possibilities to practice, until someone complains about the cost, but they'll be defending, not attacking.

    Speaking of complaining, how can anyone know a new election system worked? So if you're dealing with authoritarians for whom power is the only metric and truth is situational, their predictable strategy to deal with losing under a switching system is to claim every change is almost certainly going to be a failure, for the purported reasons I gave in the previous paragraph. Throwing the validity of the election into doubt is a good counter to losing it.

    290:

    FUTURENEWZ: 26FEB2039 declaring victory over inflation, the triumphant Tory Party marches through London, waving to the surviving eighty-six inhabitants https://pic.twitter.com/HHGQCrZqHM

    (shamelessly stealing someone else's art post & glomming off the resigned sense it will all end in tears)

    291:

    That's bs. The two US parties are not anywhere near the same. Unless you're claiming that the racist, "make America officially a Christian nation", anti-woman, xenophobic GOP is the same as the center-barely-left Democrats. Please include references to "the Squad" (that includes Ocasio-Cortez). And Shakowsky of Chicago (my old rep). And Raskin (my current Congressman), and how they're "the same".

    292:

    We were at Capclave over the weekend, and the three panels I were on went well. Folks here may be interested in the one we had on class and poverty. The moderator was a friend, Jennifer R. Povey, UK working-class ex-pat.

    On UK news... as I was catching up here, an odd thought struck me. I saw that the Pot-metal Weathervane had a private interview with the King, and he's announced he won't be attending COP. Given his long-term interests... one wonders if he offered her a deal, he withdraws... and she drops the tax cut for the rich. She strikes me as someone who would be impressed by THE KING.

    I've also seen a suggestion that one of the Princes might go in his stead. Who knows... maybe William?

    293:

    I suspect a long-term sustainable system of democracy would, at predetermined intervals (15-25 years?), switch between a variety of electoral systems.

    There's an economics axiom to the effect that since all metrics will be gamed you have to keep changing the metrics. Or it may be a political axiom translated into management, but either way I'm pretty sure that's where the Red Queen Race idea came from.

    Also crops up in geek explanations for social systems: sociability is an evolutionary marker for humans, so inherently there cannot be a single, fixed, known set of rules - the characteristic being selected for is exactly the ability to understand an ever-changing set of social rules. Which for the social darwinist types can be explained by the fact that humans are not uniform, so in order to have large societies we absolutely must have the ability to cope with a diversity of social rules.

    So yes, we're not looking for the one political arrangement to rule them all, forever. We're looking for the next iteration of what's happening now, ideally one that addresses rather than exacerbates the current problems. The current move towards neo-feudalism is not a step in the right direction (as anyone wh's worked for Bezos or Musk will testify)

    294:

    Also good to see a tweet below that from a ridiculously rich Catholic talking about how bad inequality is. I assume it's part of a chain where they also talk about the importance of helping children, letting women make decisions for themselves and not judging others.

    295:

    If I understand the comment correctly, what I said is "both sides do" and I shouldn't do that. If I under correctly, why should I not say this, if both sides actually do it? Yes, they are two different parties, with one extremely corrupt and conservative, while the other party is even more corrupt and just batty. The "better" party is just not as batty. Lead or arsenic? What a choice!

    Heather Cox Richardson had a relevant quote last night (emphasis added):

    "After World War II, political philosopher Hannah Arendt explained that lies are central to the rise of authoritarianism. In place of reality, authoritarians lie to create a “fictitious world through consistent lying.” Ordinary people embraced such lies because they believed everyone lied anyhow, and if caught trusting a lie, they would “take refuge in cynicism,” saying they had known all along they were being lied to and admiring their leaders “for their superior tactical cleverness.” But leaders embraced the lies because they reinforced those leaders’ superiority, and gave them power, over those who did believe them. "

    She (and Arendt) aren't the only ones to make this observation. Paul Linebarger (who wrote SF as Cordwainer Smith) wrote Psychological Warfare, a textbook based on his work as a WW2 psyops officer, before he became a professor. In it, he observed that citizens of fascist countries were easier to manipulate, not because they were stupid, but because they believed that they were always being lied to, and that this actually degraded their ability to tell truth from fiction.

    So it may be that cynicism is a suboptimal response to being taken in by a liar. Everyone gets fooled occasionally, but cynicism, rather than embarrassment, may make it harder to learn from the mistake.

    297:

    amckinstry @ 279:

    parachute people into "safe seats"

    How does that work exactly? Here in the U.S. you have to actually live in the district you represent. OTOH, you don't have to be a member of Congress to hold a federal office.

    In fact you can't be both ... like when Trumpolini nominated Jeff Sessions as his first Attorney General, Sessions had to resign his Senate seat before he could take up the position.

    But I understand things are a bit different over there ...

    Does the person being "parachuted in" have to physically move to the district before being elected?

    And what about the "member" who already occupies that seat? What happens to them? What do they gain?

    298:

    they believed that they were always being lied to, and that this actually degraded their ability to tell truth from fiction.

    Pretty sure it was here someone linked to a similar article about corruption in the context of the Russian military. It's not as simple as 10% losses to corruption mean everything costs 1/90%=~111% more, it's that nothing is reliable any more, nothing can be trusted. Consistently everyone expects that everyone else is on the take and they want to get their share. Right down to the conscripts who sell their boots because who cares, they're going to die anyway, might as well die drunk. And complaining just makes you a target.

    Same with "everyone lies"... effectively true, but you have to work out who is lying, when, and why. Otherwise you're practicing learned helplessness. Worse, when parties try not to lie they're saying stuff so different from the liars that it sounds insane... see also "The Greens" various problems when they spout things many of us think are obviously true but are politically unspeakable.

    But part of it is the policy of immiseration: keep people so busy just trying to stay alive that they don't have the time or energy to waste on politics.

    299:

    In Australia you don't have to live in the electorate.

    https://www.crikey.com.au/2011/08/15/one-in-10-federal-mps-dont-live-in-their-own-electorate/

    Sadly "parachuting" is done here and is not even slightly physical. It's not so much that they're not given parachutes as they're not even pushed out of aeroplanes.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-12/kristina-keneally-fowler-labor-diversity-woes-tu-le/100451344

    Spoiler: the nice white lady from the rich suburbs failed to win a "safe" but ethnically diverse seat after the leadershit shoved aside the locally preferred candidate. Somehow they won the election anyway which means I suspect they will consider the loss acceptable.

    300:

    It got really serious the day that LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act (1964). Within four years or so, almost all the old Dixiecrats - pro-segregation, etc Democrats - changed parties and became Republican.

    The process took much longer than that to play out. It was still ongoing in the 1980's.

    The Republicans had the effect of a Congressional majority with help from conservative Democrats (mostly from the southern states).

    301:

    Funny you mention that, I was just listening to a history podcast today about US presidential elections today.It struck me how much the rhetoric used by Regan is eerily similar to the 2016 election (if you subtract Trumps baffonary and bombast and personal attacks and narcissistic self obsession that is). The conclusion of the presenter was pretty much that RonReg cemented the shift started in by the Nixon southern strategy and set us up for the current radical rights insanity.

    302:

    We regret to inform you the assimilation of the UK by the United Snakes has advanced further: https://www.engadget.com/us-uk-data-sharing-agreement-in-effect-171316794.html

    303:

    Passed 300 so have a scroll through to page 45 of A book of images drawn by W.T. Horton & introduced by W.B. Yeats from 1898. There's a fairly familiar face there.

    304:

    Speaking of lies…

    A company that has received billions of pounds in green energy subsidies from UK taxpayers is cutting down environmentally-important forests, a BBC Panorama investigation has found.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63089348

    Drax told the BBC it had not cut down the forests itself and said it transferred the logging licences to other companies.

    But Panorama checked and the authorities in British Columbia confirmed that Drax still holds the licences.

    Drax said it did not use the logs from the two sites Panorama identified. It said they were sent to timber mills - to make wood products - and that Drax only used the leftover sawdust for its pellets.

    The company says it does use some logs - in general - to make wood pellets. It claims it only uses ones that are small, twisted, or rotten.

    But documents on a Canadian forestry database show that only 11% of the logs delivered to the two Drax plants in the past year were classified as the lowest quality, which cannot be used for wood products.

    Panorama wanted to see if logs from primary forests cut down by logging companies were being transferred to Drax's Meadowbank pellet plant. The programme filmed a truck on a 120-mile round trip: leaving the plant, collecting piles of whole logs from a forest that had been cut down by a logging company and then returning to the plant for their delivery.

    Drax later admitted that it did use logs from the forest to make wood pellets. The company said they were species the timber industry did not want, and they would often be burned anyway to reduce wildfire risks.

    Repeated denials and explanations that turn out not to be the case…

    Also interesting that they claim that it's not an old-growth forest if near a road — not part of any definition I'm aware of.


    So some of you UK blokes are powering your lights with old-growth forest rather than dead dinosaurs.

    305:

    289 "There's ballots to print, equipment to buy, modify, or warehouse, workers to train" - Printing ballots, 2 to 3 weeks rather than months, seasons or years.
    Equipment to buy, modify or warehouse; months, season or years for a stock of pencils"!?
    Workers to train; again this is observed to be doable during a single campaign, so weeks for anyone below the rank of Returning Officer, who is typically 1 (one) person in 50_000.

    292 - Maybe; that has been one of the duties that Chuck had assumed over most of the last 71 years (stand-in when something was "too political for the Monarch").

    297 "Does the person being "parachuted in" have to physically move to the district before being elected?"
    No, not least because as per 289 above you've assumed that everyone else uses USian laws; we don't.

    "And what about the "member" who already occupies that seat? What happens to them? What do they gain?"
    This happens at a party candidate level, not an elected member level. So what happens is that they are deselected as the candidate for $party for $district. The parachutee may or may not then win the said district.

    299 - Pretty much, yes. To the extent that the above and your post are pretty well interchangeable despite the difference in our electoral systems, yes?

    306:

    On whether Kwarteng is an economist (he's not), an economic historian (most accurate) or a political historian with a passing interest in economics, the reality is that he's more than knowledgeable enough to know better than to execute a series of tax cuts in the middle of an inflationary death spiral. Right now the headlines are reading that he's done a backflip or performed a U-turn, when all he's really done is remove the most patently regressive high-income tax cuts from the mini-budget and left billions of pounds of tax cuts in. This isn't naivety, it's ideologically motivated, wilful stupidity from someone who's deliberately ignoring all outside counsel and paying absolutely zero heed to the current economic environment.

    307:

    Too bad that if someone decided to feed Drax employees into a biogas facility to reduce their emissions, some poor Mounties would get stuck gearing up in the Tyvek to investigate what happened.

    I get so tired of shit like this.

    308:

    Yeah, exactly the same process with some minor tweaking around the edges for the subtle differences in structure. I still say our branch stacking is more biggerer than yours though. And we get (to) rank candidates 😋

    309:

    ...(1964). Within four years or so, almost all the old Dixiecrats - pro-segregation, etc Democrats - changed parties and became Republican.

    The process took much longer than that to play out. It was still ongoing in the 1980's.

    Thank you.

    I first voted in 1972 in far western Kentucky. Registration was around 80/20 D. Maybe 90/10. To the extent that in the general election there were no R's running for most local offices. Maybe the mayor. Mostly for Senate, House, and President. Most local races were determined in the D primary. Now Kentucky mostly voted for Nixon but no where near 80/20. He won the state by maybe 10 points. It took another 10 years or so before the switching became fixed.

    310:

    I want to know why Germany (and other countries on that side of the pond) say that burning pellets from our trees is "green"?

    Not exactly old growth but clear cutting our soft pines in the eastern marshes of NC isn't a great thing to be doing. Much less processing them into pellets and shipping them 3000 miles or more.

    311:

    How difficult is it to stage a military coup? Asking for a friend...

    It's not trivial but there is an instruction book that's straightforward and easy to read.

    312:

    "297 "Does the person being "parachuted in" have to physically move to the district before being elected?" No, not least because as per 289 above you've assumed that everyone else uses USian laws; we don't.

    "And what about the "member" who already occupies that seat? What happens to them? What do they gain?" This happens at a party candidate level, not an elected member level. So what happens is that they are deselected as the candidate for $party for $district. The parachutee may or may not then win the said district. "

    The UK system. Parties can parachute a candidate in to a constituency for a General Election, but that is a maximum of every five years, so no good if they want to get some one in straight away. Alternatively, wait for an existing MP to resign, die, or otherwise leave one of the 650 Commons seats free. A byelection is called for that constituency. That seat may, or may not be winnable for the party that wants to parachute their person in. All very random. The average age of MPs skews higher than the general population, so there are deaths in office maybe one, or two a year. MPs resign after doing something particularly awful, but sometimes the electorate can punish the party as well by voting against their replacement candidate, so not a safe bet for the parachutee. This means that in practice, to parachute a candidate in you need an unpredictable death in office, in a safe seat and there just aren't that many to go round. The major parties have a habit of turfiing out the local candidate for a parachutee when one comes up.

    A recent example of a byelection going bad for the previous holders party is the North Shropshire seat. Owen Patterson won it again in the 2019 general election with 62.7% of the vote and a 35,000 majority. About as safe a Conservative seat as it is possible to have. You could usually stick a blue rosette on a hat stand and it would get in. In 2021, he was at the centre of a corruption scandal. PM at the time, Boris Johnson tried to have the parliamentary standards rules changed to spare his chum. Scandal gets worse. Eventually, Patterson resigns as an MP. The resulting byelection has the Lib Dem candidate beating the new Tory candidate by nearly 6,000 votes. Lib Dem is the way UK Tories go when a twinge of conscience makes them protest vote.

    I can't think of any example of an existing MP, outside a general election, when all seats are up for grabs, standing down for no other reason than to let a parachute candidate take over after a byelection. I suspect that the local electorate would take that badly and punish the party responsible.

    313:

    whitroth
    Yes - William is known to be strongly enviromentalist/saving the planet, as well as his dad.

    jensnail
    I can.
    Long, long ago, the then Labour guvmint lost a safe { Birmingham, Smethwick } seat to a tory racist bastard, so they "sent the boys round" & forced the sitting labour MP, who had been there { Leyton } since 1935 (!) in the constituency next to mine - out - kicked him upstairs to the Lords. And parachuted said other man in.
    He lost, big-time ... there were vast allegations of racism, which was not the case { That time }.
    Because the new member of the Lords, went round the streets, assisted by local Labour party members, literally crying most of the time, begging people to "Vote anything but Labour - or stay at home".
    The poor victim who was booted was Reginald Sorenson
    The Parachutee was Patrick Gordon Walker

    314:

    "Danged - his PhD thesis is under lock & key. Might be that there are a few folks here who might be able to access this via the channels mentioned below."

    Looking at the repository from the University VPN, I get no access to the text except a privileged chance to pay £75 to ask the library for a copy, a request that they then pass to the author for consideration. No thanks. I could go to the main library to search for the paper copy if it were important, but I think it not very relevant.

    The repository at Cambridge is generally better than this and very open.

    315:

    Agreed, with the note that the $year General Election candidate for $Party for "Much Binding in the Marsh" (traditional British name for a spoof seat folks) need not, then or ever, be a resident of or registered to vote in MBitM.

    316:

    Agreed that this is entirely wrong. But what is to be done? Drax is one of the few base-load generators that can be carbon-neutral right now, if fed with pellets from a proper source. It's not a facility we can easily afford to lose, and AFAICS it belongs to the eco-vandals.

    317:

    Scale error. You can heat your summer cottage responsibly by buying compressed sawdust from a sawmill which can't avoid producing that as part of it's operation, as long as only a reasonable number of people do this. You simply cannot source the sheer tonnage a facility like Drax burns responsibly. This is not a case of the operators being especially a-moral. Pick a large scale biomass burner at random, follow the sources back, exact same story, sometimes worse. Biofuel is simply flat out a terrible, bad, no good, "Burn the planet to save it" idea.

    318:

    316 & 317 - The UK does produce tonnage loads of wood pulp. How these loads compare with the bulk Drax power station burns I don't know.

    319:

    "316 & 317 - The UK does produce tonnage loads of wood pulp. How these loads compare with the bulk Drax power station burns I don't know."

    Drax was converted from coal firing. That coal would have been delivered by the train load. Wood takes a higher weight than coal for the same energy output and much higher by volume. The wood comes in by ship, then by very long trains. I've seen them go by, marked up with greenwashing claims for the contents on the wagons.

    320:

    The parties generally have two or three "Jumpers" in safe seats. They are reliable party drones without the connections to ever make the front benches and who will resign their seats for personal reasons/spend more time with their families/health issues/whatever at the drop of a hat. If called upon to make their noble sacrifice they will generally feature in the next Honours list or appear as a non-executive director at Big Government Contractor PLC a few months later.

    321:

    Britain has a very traditional name for someone resigning a safe seat to make way for a well-connected rising star of the party, "Taking the Chiltern Hundreds".

    Basically it's forbidden for an MP to resign due to a standing order of Parliament dating back to 1624. However there are a couple of outside jobs that would force an MP to leave Parliament and one of them is accepting the position of Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds, something which is today a paper position.

    https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-information-office/p11.pdf

    Loophole loophole!

    One does rather wonder what would happen if an MP became the Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds and left Parliament but then refused to give up her new position when it was deemed necessary for someone else to resign from Parliament for whatever reason. Hilarity would no doubt ensue.

    322:

    This arose a thread or two back, and I looked it up, but can't recall the details. Candidates may not even need to be British, or British-resident.

    323:

    Some of us predicted this would happen when the power station was claimed to be sustainable because it would burn only locally-produced waste material.

    On another thread, no, they don't always lie - but that's the smart way to bet. Dictatorships and similar don't always have to be brutal and violent - deceit and guile often work better.

    324:

    Still, by-elections take time and often don't of the right way. It's generally good form to save such hijinks for a general election, and for the would-be candidate to publicly set up house in the electorate a decent interval beforehand (in fact, seeing a prominent party figure do so is often the first sign such a manoeuvre is about to occur).

    Here in Oz this is common for talented Senators seeking to move the House of Representatives before being promoted to one of the senior ministries... and in fact if a Senator has been promoted, it's more or less inevitable to happen eventually. If for no other reason than Question Time in the House gets a lot more attention than Question Time in the Senate. The Senate-to-House process never happens outside a general election, mostly because filling casual Senate vacancies is an alternate flow that historically has led to unwanted outcomes.

    In general the rule that a minister should be an MP is a requirement for Responsible Government. It's an odd concept, with conventions laid on top of conventions and depending on actors' good faith for things to keep working. The odd thing is that is the part that seems to work reasonably well: the problems are mostly elsewhere.

    325:

    FUTURENEWZ: 21JAN2023 every morning vans slow drive London streets, drivers yelling "bring out your frozen dead"; there are now days when vans have to make a second & third trip to the morgue to unload

    FUTURENEWZ: 13FEB2023 announcement by PM Truss of private-public partnership with Soylent Corp for extracting lingering value from increasing numbers of "frozen dead"; Truss boasts of win-win-win: cheap protein for working poor; no funds wasted upon burial; percentage paid to Exchequer;

    FUTURENEWZ: 14FEB2023 announcement by Buckingham Palace, the royal family, by order of KC3 are as of this day, vegetarians; most of British elite follow their lead;

    327:

    Makes perfect sense thanks; I really didn't know what sort of tonnage Drax burnt, or how far away it was shipped from.

    328:

    A good rule of thumb is that it takes about 2.5 million tonnes of carbon to generate a gigawatt of electricity each year. That means over 3 million tonnes of decent-quality thermal coal, four million tonnes of lignite and over five million tonnes of dried processed wood pellets.

    The wood-burning Drax 2 station runs 24/7 pretty much. I've never seen the biomass figure reported Gridwatch fall below a gigawatt and it sometimes peaks up to about 2GW. Going by that figure I'd estimate Britain burns about eight million tonnes of wood pellets each year to generate green renewable electricity of this form.

    329:

    Many of the biggest producers already have a power station using the wood waste on site. See the AW Jenkinson site at Lockerbie for example. They use extra large trailers to collect wood waste from harvesting sites as problem is it is not a dense fuel.

    I use biomass for heating here as was installed when I arrived. Finding reliable source of certified pellets is not that easy. Many sources were withdrawn last year when they were found to be using non sustainable Russian sources for timber.

    330:

    MP’s don’t need to be. Ministers are expected to be. As examples Boris Johnson and the current MP for Beaconsfield were both US citizens when they were elected.

    331:

    I'm pretty sure the only reason Drax is kept running is as a "just in case" facility to burn domestic coal if that should become necessary.

    332:

    That might have previously been the case, but the UK simply doesn't mine enough coal any more. At one point the Drax complex produced about 10% of the UK's base load: those days are gone.

    333:

    Drax was built as a part of the Wilson government’s central planning. It was built as close as possible the the Selby coalfield (Britain’s biggest at the time) to reduce the need for long rail journeys. A similar decision built an aluminium smelter close to the Wylfa nuclear power station.

    334:

    Fascinating to see a topic of which I have some direct knowledge being discussed on here. A friend of mine manages the port facility that loads the bulk ships with those pellets.

    The use of wood pellets for heating or generation can be relatively sustainable, in the sense that the trees can be replaced. Additionally, if they use the scrap from a cut block - branches, damaged wood, non-market lumber, it can be more sustainable than other sources (fossil fuels).

    That region is mostly pine and white or black spruce forests, with a mix of other types (Balsa Fir, Alder) depending in specific locations (moisture, sunlight, soil content). Marketable species are primarily spruce and pine. Some varieties of alder are also used, but at a much lower rate. Often a logging company will leave that stuff on the ground.

    Every tree gets stripped of its branches, which are also left on the site. That may or may not be a good thing - leaving biomaterial on site reduces erosion and boosts the quality of the soil. Replacement happens on a particular schedule- within 7 years there have to be a certain density of new and healthy trees or the loggers face some penalties.

    I have trouble seeing that region as having any 'old growth' forests at this time. Anything close to roads was logged decades ago, and is almost certainly second or third growth. The only true old growth remaining in the interior of BC is difficult or uneconomic to access (i.e. on a cliff face).

    335:

    Kamikwasi's U-turn has apparently now reversed and is in danger of turning into a corkscrew turn.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/04/kwasi-kwarteng-fiscal-plan-date-thrown-into-confusion

    336:

    "I have trouble seeing that region as having any 'old growth' forests at this time. Anything close to roads was logged decades ago, and is almost certainly second or third growth. The only true old growth remaining in the interior of BC is difficult or uneconomic to access (i.e. on a cliff face)."

    A good few years ago, I had a chance to walk through some actual old growth forest on Vancouver Island. The difference between it and previously logged woodland was striking, even to my untrained eye. One of my companions on the trip was a botanist and didn't want to leave!

    337:

    Maybe an Immelman; a half-loop with a flick half-roll off the top?

    338:

    It's true if you remove the "only" and the "domestic" though. Comes pre-greenwashed, which Radcliffe-on-Soar didn't, and conveniently close to Hull docks for import (as at present) as well as being closer to most of the likely areas from which domestic supplies might be re-established.

    339:

    It's not in Germany. Despite the un-English-sounding name, it's in Yorkshire, and the locality has been called that for centuries. Whether there's any connection to Hugo is unknown.

    340:

    Hmm. This reminds me of Richard Morgan's Market Forces. Not the actual story but the world in the background.

    341:

    Re: 'the Onion files an amicus curae in support of a Supreme Court petitioner.'

    Excellent brief - thanks! Would be useful in HS English Lit or social studies classes as an example of contemporary usage.

    Re @286: '... no paywalls at the Guardian'

    Nope - the page gets blocked for me every time lately and I don't trust my level of tech skills (i.e., none/zero/nada) to try work-arounds.

    342:

    "The use of wood pellets for heating or generation can be relatively sustainable, in the sense that the trees can be replaced. Additionally, if they use the scrap from a cut block - branches, damaged wood, non-market lumber, it can be more sustainable than other sources (fossil fuels)."

    Their propaganda relies heavily on inflating that "can be" and "if" to "of course that's all we ever do". The actual source has changed two or three times, to places which are further away and more difficult to find out what's really going into the shipments, when it became too obvious that the claims as applied to the previous place were bollocks. They're kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel now, since even disregarding the status of the actual wood, it's tough to pretend that bringing it in ships all the way from the west side of Canada isn't shit.

    343:

    "A good few years ago, I had a chance to walk through some actual old growth forest on Vancouver Island."

    There are some majestic patches of old growth on VI, but the most accessible to visitors is the Cathedral Grove forest on the highway near Port Alberni. That can best be described as a Potemkin forest, since it is the last remnant surrounded by clearcuts (more generously, second or third growth forests).

    There are ways to 'harvest' lumber sustainably. There are ways to preserve old growth forests. We need to do both. Where the trouble arises is in scale - lumber is one of the better building materials and we build a lot on this planet. It has to come from somewhere. I don't have all the answers, but I don't think we should be cutting wood to burn it.

    344:

    Prop 13 was a bad idea from the beginning, and it's still a bad idea. I benefited from it, my parents benefited from it, and it was and is a bad idea.

    The basic problems is that corporations are essentially immortal, and people aren't. So it ends up with everything that has a low tax rate being owned by corporations.

    Ok, that's oversimplifying it a little bit, but that's the essence of what's wrong with it. Even without that problem it would still be a tax on being poor, but that problem is a real killer.

    345:

    "I want to know why Germany (and other countries on that side of the pond) say that burning pellets from our trees is "green"?"

    Because they needed baseload that was "renewable" for areas that could not have hydro in order to say that we don't need nuclear power at all.

    Even Greenpeace was claiming that "biomass burning from managed forests is renewable" and that it was a good replacement for nuclear.

    The MEP most responsible for ramming the biomass burning plants into the RED directive was Claude Turmes. He's from the Greens. They think it's more important to destroy the nuclear power plants than not to destroy the biosphere with climate change, because they were founded on opposition to nuclear power in the 1980s, and didn't care about global warming yet.

    346:

    Re: 'Kamikwasi's ... corkscrew'

    What data and methodology does the OBR use when coming up with a forecast? Curious about how they can come up with any longterm projections considering how unstable some G20 economies are right now.

    347:

    Sorry, what about the Chicago Riots? I can tell you as a matter of fact - I was there - that overwhelmingly, it was against the Vietnam War. And I'll also note that a federal commission, appointed after (and before the election), declared it to be a police riot, and that the Mayor had literally given the pigs - the riot cops, not to be confused with the ordinary cops - a St. Crispin's Day speech to go out and split heads, which they did.

    You also seemed to have missed the assassination of King and of Bobby Kennedy.

    348:

    Pawalls: the Guardian is user-supported, and they beg you to support them. I've never been blocked. I will note that, as I've noted before, that I run noScript with firefox, no deep technical knowledge involved. Just allow the link at the top, and then as little as possible after that.

    349:

    It's not in Germany. Despite the un-English-sounding name,

    I was piling on. Much/most of our North Carolina pellets go to Germany. For use in home heating.

    350:

    I just looked up the total UK wood production per year. 11.2 million tonnes. Of which 0.3 million tonnes end up as wood pellets, the remaining 10.9 million tonnes finding better uses. Yhea, Drax was never, ever going to be sustainably or domestically fueled.

    351:

    Guardian

    Nope - the page gets blocked for me every time lately and I don't trust my level of tech skills (i.e., none/zero/nada) to try work-arounds.

    I use Ghostery by default. I have not trusted the Guardian site in Ghostery so it is blocking all the known tracking scrips and such. Of which it shows 13 just now. Anyway pages load fine for me in Firefox on a current macOS. Well fine after I clear the cover the page asking for money popup. But that's easy as it has a big "X" in the upper corner.

    352:

    You also seemed to have missed the assassination of King and of Bobby Kennedy.

    I was talking about the political operations of the prior 100 years that got us to that point. You being there was a current event at the end of that sequence.

    353:

    I meant a proper emergency just in case, as in we need to start mining again. I don't know how easy this would actually be to do , but I think it is the plan.

    354:

    I don't know how easy this would actually be to do

    Strip mining is easy to start and stop. Well somewhat depending on how much you care about runoff. In my college days the 5 hour drive home took me through a hour or two of strip mine country. On a clear night in the winter when the trees had no leaves it was like driving across the moon.

    Here's a musical description: "Paradise by John Prine" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEy6EuZp9IY

    I don't think the pics of the coal mines are from the area. It was so flat you could see that shovel operating about 5 miles away when driving down the highway.

    But I'm guessing that most of the coal left in the UK is deep.

    355:

    Troutwaxer at 212 -

    Re UK (Tory) politicians pissing off the USA:

    The conclusion I came to was that their interest is in being big fish and if that means shrinking the pond it's a price they are prepared to pay.
    That is a large motivation for Brexit among them, and this is a playing-out of that logic.

    356:

    Wood is solar energy and with Britain being so far north we don't get a lot of solar energy that would grow a lot of timber. Certainly Canada can grow a lot of timber and most of Canada is at similar latitudes to Britain but there's 40 times more land area to grow timber on in Canada compared to Britain. It also doesn't help that about 70% of the UK's land is rated agricultural and hence not usually planted with trees whereas in Canada it's 6%.

    The timber plantations in the US making wood pellets in places like North Carolina get a lot more solar energy per annum than Britain or Canada so they can grow more timber than either, hectare for hectare. The Amazon basin would be an even more solar-energy-rich source of pellet wood but the Greenies whine and bitch when anyone dares touch their Precious.

    357:

    The timber plantations in the US making wood pellets in places like North Carolina get a lot more solar energy per annum than Britain or Canada so they can grow more timber than either, hectare for hectare.

    The problem is these trees are not grown like corn. They exist in a vast area of flat marsh land between I-95 and the Atlantic Ocean. Some would like to clear it and pave it over in the name of progress. Hurricanes make that a bad idea in just one way of 1000 or so. Anyway saying these trees are great for German home heating is like saying tar sands are a great way to mine oil. After all no one lives there? Right?

    As we clear more and more marsh land we will get more and more of this. An aerial view of I-40 a few years back.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHo0fe78KWo

    358:

    "But I'm guessing that most of the coal left in the UK is deep."

    Yes, and although there is absolute craploads of it there is no rapid way to get at any of it any more.

    There are some opencastable deposits left in South Wales, and there are/were also rumours that one area was designated as a kind of "strategic reserve" so that in the case of a national emergency severe enough that "fuck whatever's on top of it already" was an acceptable way of thinking, it could be rapidly turned into a great big opencast site. Quite what that was really supposed to be I'm not sure, because IIRC the coal is about 100m down in that area and it's nowhere near the usual candidates for opencast sites, although unlike those it does still have good rail connections.

    There were also a few pits which were supposed to be maintained in reopenable condition after Thatcher destroyed the mining industry, mostly close to the concentrations of power stations. But since we moved from firing power stations off imported coal instead of our own to closing them down altogether, there ceased to be any point, since we don't have anywhere to burn it any more. There are only two coal power stations left in Britain and they're both partly closed down with only a year or two left to go, plus Drax which can still burn coal.

    359:

    Leszek Karlik
    Exactly what i've been saying about the "greens" for years.
    They are not actually "green" at all ...

    Meanwhile ...

    "Evening Standard" giving Trusstercluck less than a month before "letters to the 1922 committee" start rolling in - & some MP's already want to "Roll the dice" a 3rd time, rather than go for a GE.
    How bloody lunatic does it have to get before we get a prorogation & a snap GE, I womder?

    360:

    "I have trouble seeing that region as having any 'old growth' forests at this time"

    You might want to tell that to the protestors at the Fairy Creek watershed.

    As of 2021 the B.C. government said that there were "13.7 million hectares of old growth in British Columbia, and 10 million of those hectares are protected or not economical to harvest". Quoted from the CBC website from a story published in May 2021.

    361:

    “I am not a number; I am a free man. I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own!"

    While we are on the subject of repressive societies, I'd like to go somewhat off-topic and recommend Patrick McGoohan's "The Prisoner"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osNmf_zmSyE

    It's 55th anniversary is this week.

    Be seeing you.

    P.S. The S2 Lotus Seven driven by Number 6 is way cooler than 007's Aston Martin, even without the gadgets.

    P.P.S. Love British sf from the 70s

    362:

    Roll the dice" a 3rd time, rather than go for a GE.

    Help out a furriner.

    How does the party get the few who might be PM into the election process?

    363:

    For the Conservative party, candidates must be an MP and party member in good standing, and need to get a certain number of nominations from their fellow party MPs to go on the list. The Tory MPs then get to vote repeatedly, and at each stage there's either a minimum number of votes to proceed to the next round or the candidate with the lowest number of votes gets eliminated. Once they're down to just two candidates it goes to the party membership.

    364:

    "You might want to tell that to the protestors at the Fairy Creek watershed.

    As of 2021 the B.C. government said that there were "13.7 million hectares of old growth in British Columbia, and 10 million of those hectares are protected or not economical to harvest". Quoted from the CBC website from a story published in May 2021."

    I could tell that to the protesters at the Fairy Creek watershed, bet they would look at me like I'm a moron, since it is 870 km, an ocean strait, a couple of mountain ranges and a climatic zone or two away from the site we are discussing - which has no old growth forests that I am aware of.

    365:

    paws4thot @ 305:

    297 "Does the person being "parachuted in" have to physically move to the district before being elected?"
    No, not least because as per 289 above you've assumed that everyone else uses USian laws; we don't.

    I didn't post "289 above".

    If I had assumed everyone followed U.S. law, I wouldn't have needed to ask how it works in the U.K.

    366:

    David L @ 309:

    I first voted in 1972 in ...

    I turned 21 in summer of 1970, which was the voting age in North Carolina at the time 1. So I was able to vote in the 1970 mid-term election.

    Before the Presidential election rolled around in 1972, the XXVI Amendment was ratified making the voting age 18 nationwide.

    1 Each state set the voting age for that state - some states allowed 18 year olds to vote, but not all of them. North Carolina was one of the ones that didn't.

    BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY, 21 was the age where you could finally legally buy spiritous liquors from the ABC (Alcohol Beverage Control) stores.

    The state holds a monopoly on liquor sales, and counties, cities & towns can decide whether to allow ABC stores (and/or mixed drink sales) in their jurisdictions. Apparently the last Dry County in North Carolina went semi-wet, allowing some hospitality businesses in the county seat, Robbinsville, to serve wine.

    https://thecounter.org/north-carolinas-last-dry-county-allows-some-booze-sales/

    367:

    Nojay @ 321:

    Britain has a very traditional name for someone resigning a safe seat to make way for a well-connected rising star of the party, "Taking the Chiltern Hundreds".

    Does it pay well? What do Members of Parliament get paid?

    368:

    David L @ 354:

    Here's a musical description: "Paradise by John Prine" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEy6EuZp9IY

    I don't think the pics of the coal mines are from the area. It was so flat you could see that shovel operating about 5 miles away when driving down the highway.

    I think he's taken a bit of artistic license ... If there ever were strip mines where Paradise lay (37.26840034728783, -86.98288611321014) they've been filled in again.

    What's there now is a big TVA power plant ... Fossil Fuel (coal) plant that's being phased out and replaced by a "Natural Gas" plant

    The one thing the video got right is "the abandoned old prison down by Airdrie Hill". - which was used as a temporary prison to house POWs during the American Civil War.

    Airdrie Hill

    369:

    Wood is solar energy and with Britain being so far north we don't get a lot of solar energy that would grow a lot of timber

    Kinda thing that might mean you run out of timber for charcoal, and have to start digging for coal. Which then leads you to use that coal to run some steam-powered pumps for your coal mines, and hey that steam engine thing looks useful, and then...

    Britain starting to run short on timber 200 years ago had pretty big historical effects.

    (Unlike Venice, whose famous Arsenal was the greatest shipyard in Europe until the Venetians panicked about the size of a Muslim fleet and cut down all their forests to win the arms race. Not a long-term win.)

    370:

    Apropos of burning things for energy...

    I did a bit of quick checking, and pine plantations produce around 80-100 tons of wood per acre per harvest, with a harvesting cycle of 18-35 years.

    Hemp produces around 3-8 tons of fiber per acre per year. If you do the math, these are in the same range of biomass laid down per year. Now this isn't completely surprising, because the plant physiologists say that the photosynthetic rate per acre of vegetation can be modeled pretty well by assuming it's just one huge leaf, so you'd somewhat expect anything from corn to redwoods to add about the same amount of photosynthate per year. What they do with it is where things get interesting.

    The other argument is whether growing a biomass crop like hemp takes up valuable farmland, while trees do not, versus whether it's safe to invest decades in plant growth given climate change, or whether it's better to plant and harvest annually, as with hemp or something similar (kudzu?)

    So yeah, maybe there's a theoretical future in which Drax ends up smoking millions of tons of weed to keep the English baking*, and that'll be fine.

    Or you can be like my mother, and advocate for big ol' waste-to-energy conversion facilities (e.g. mega-incinerators for trash), as a way to recoup some of the energy embodied in all that post consumer waste we're discarding. Keeping incinerators from blowing GHGs is one of those things that I'm sure the SpinLizzy administration will be all over.

    *with their electric ovens. What did you think I meant?

    371:

    "But I'm guessing that most of the coal left in the UK is deep."

    I vaguely recall proposals from decades ago about burning deep coal in situ by pumping down air, striking a match, and using the hot combustion gases in various ways. Probably you'd have to pre-frack the coal so the air could get to it.

    372:

    The folks in Centralia can tell you about some of the issues with that plan.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire?wprov=sfti1

    373:

    Hemp produces around 3-8 tons of fiber per acre per year.

    Fibre or biomass?

    Hemp also produces leaf and hurd both of which are useful. Pine bark and leaves aren't much use. Both wood and fibre have uses other than burning, and unlike fossil oil the primary use is not the burning one.

    374:

    361 - Which Aston Martin (by model, not registration plate) are you claiming is "less cool than a kit car"? DB5, DBS, V8 Vantage, Vanquish, DB9...?

    365 - I didn't say that you did make #289; I said that you said the same erronious assumption as in #289 that everyone else uses USian law.

    367 - On resignation of an MP, quote from Wikipedia "Members are not permitted to resign their seats. In practice, however, they always can. Should a member wish to resign from the Commons, they may request appointment to one of two ceremonial Crown offices: that of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds, or that of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead. These offices are sinecures (that is, they involve no actual duties); they exist solely to permit the "resignation" of members of the House of Commons. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for making the appointment, and, by convention, never refuses to do so when asked by a member who desires to leave the House of Commons."
    I can't find a quote for an MP's salary, but will note that they can claim various expenses in addition to their salary, including salaries for various office staff, and in most but not all cases, "for keeping a house in London".

    369 - Like the long standing tradition of the Royal Navy having some of their vessels built in French shipyards (but paying RN crews for said vessels).

    375:

    Fibre or biomass?

    I saw fiber. Since hemp fiber is mostly lignin and cellulose and so is wood, it seemed like a reasonable comparison.

    To me, the more interesting questions are when and where it's worth growing trees as a fuel crop, and when and where it's worth growing annuals like hemp, sugarcane, kudzu, bamboo, etc.

    376:

    Re biofuels:-

    Fortunately we won't have to put up with them for much longer: they are zombies, dead but still walking.

    The paper in Joule by Way, Ives, Mealy and Farmer ("Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition") is apparently making a bit of a stir in policy circles.

    Its implications are that there's no point doing anything besides PV and off-shore wind: the costs of those two are falling so fast that in a few years the capital cost will be comparable to the cost of a year's fuel for thermal generators. (Fuel. Not even operators' wages.)

    PV and off-shore wind don't have to use any land, either: off-shore wind for obvious reasons; PV you mount vertically on post-and-wire frames in pasture. It improves the growth of the pasture (by cutting down wind effects) so there is no net land cost.

    For storage, based on that paper, the winners are batteries and electrolysed hydrogen derivatives (ammonia and methane). Exactly which battery technologies win is still open for debate, but collectively their costs are falling even faster than PV's. Methane would be the obvious candidate for seasonal storage, since the tanks already exist, but I don't know yet.

    So, we can look forward to saying goodbye to biofuels (worst idea ever), concentrated solar, nuclear, and gas peakers in one or two decades. (One if governments see which way the wind is blowing; two if they fight it.)

    377:

    Johns
    "Chiltern Hundreds is either unpaid or a nominal sum ...
    As for MP's salaries - try reading htat, OK?

    378:

    "[kwarteng] has written a book about gold

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/12/war-gold-500-year-history-study-money-society-kwarteng-review

    which didn't win any prizes

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/02/liz-truss-and-kwasi-kwartengs-foolish-dash-for-growth-is-a-non-starter"

    fun quote from the article "Kwarteng might not know how to stabilise a financial system that floats on credit, but he certainly understands the forces and the mistakes that have led to that destabilisation."

    379:

    »[PV] improves the growth of the pasture«

    That depends a LOT on your geography and meteorology, but there is no dispute that PV-fields give a much higher end-user yield, than anything you can (currently) grow and turn into bio-fuels.

    »saying goodbye to bio-fuels (worst idea ever)«

    I agree.

    According to most competent models, we would barely be able to grow more bio-fuels than we need for the tractors used for growing the bio-fuel raw material and the cost of food would increase almost catastrophically if we tried.

    It is worth noting that a lot of the so-called "solutions" which have the shape of something you can pour into a vehicle, bio-diesel, hydrogen, ammonia etc., are being pushed by the oil-industry, who would hate to shut down all their hydro-carbon polluted outlets and tank-stations and face demands for environmental remediation.

    380:

    "[PV] improves the growth of the pasture"

    Not in northern Europe, it doesn't. The main limit on pasture growth (like everything else) is sunlight, so solar panels are incompatible with ANY sort of farming. That is the main reason that local solar power is NOT a good solution for any high-latitude location that is currently used for farming.

    And one of the arguments for Drax was that it would burn the waste straw produced from arable crops. It never has, as far as I know, because the energy density of those is inconveniently low. However, those DO come 'for free'.

    381:

    »so solar panels are incompatible with ANY sort of farming.«

    No, not even close, and in the future very possibly the contrary.

    Sharing the available sunlight with PV obviously reduces the /potential/ photosynthetic yield.

    But the /actual/ yield depends more on water than on sunlight.

    Most industrialized fields in northern Europe are not limited by sunlight, but by water.

    Shading the plants during high noon already often increase yields, by reducing evaporation, and that is only going to become more of an issue in our future climate.

    (Most climate models say there will be no significant agriculture left in Spain during my lifetime, and it looks like Sweden may end up having the most fertile soil in Europe. Not because of sunlight, but because of water.)

    382:

    You are assuming that this last summer becomes the norm, and that's not what the climatologists predict; they are predicting increased unpredictability, and possibly even increased rainfall for northern Europe. Shading plants here often produces increased wet yield, sure, but not usually nutrient content, and a reduction in calorific content. It's very obvious in my suburban garden, even this year.

    To remind you, I said northern Europe, and I meant northern Europe. Things are different further south. Spain is most definitely not in northern Europe, and Sweden is.

    383:

    »You are assuming that this last summer becomes the norm,«

    As a matter of fact I do not.

    Remember some years back, when the meterological institutions in EU did a "weather-forecast 2050" to "raise awareness" ?

    That was almost exactly the weather we had this summer.

    I have talked to people who prepared some of those weather-forecast, and every one of them said they had toned it down to make it credible and not too scary.

    Climate models are conservative, both as a consequence of their limited physical resolution, but also because the people who write them tend to disbelieve the bad end of the output and tweak them down.

    I have spent considerable time in the last decades digging through the raw output from climate models, and you can take it from me, this summer is not going to "become the norm", rather, in 20-30 years time, this summer will "the good old days before..."

    384:

    If the storage tech sufficiently manifests in the real world, while I'm still "This side of the grass",it will bother me not at all.

    385:

    I meant a proper emergency just in case, as in we need to start mining again. I don't know how easy this would actually be to do , but I think it is the plan.

    Can't be done.

    Nojay can give you chapter and verse, but all the shallow coal deposits were worked out literally centuries ago. This isn't the 18th century when the stuff was all but lying around on the surface, and this isn't the USA, where you can just shave off the top of a mountain. What's left are deep seams -- deep meaning 0.5 to 2 miles deep -- many of which run out under the North Sea. Unmaintained roofs collapse, water seeps (or floods) in, so the existing mines are essentially equivalent to collapsed skyscrapers five times taller than the old World Trade Center in NYC.

    New mines could be dug but you're talking years of work to order and build the necessary excavation machinery and lifts just to get down to the coal seams, not to mention new rail heads to move the stuff to where it's needed.

    In recent decades it's been cheaper to import coal on bulk freighters from South America.

    386:

    Concerning the apparent desire of conservatives to be "Big fish" even at the cost impoverishing their nation, I think you've hit on something that applies outside the U.K. as well. The "GQP" custom of abandoning treaties negotiated by Democrats, or insufficiently conservative Republicans, erodes the soft power of the (Sort of) United States, analogous practices in the (Barely) United Kingdom must do the same.

    387:

    Regarding coal mining in the UK being restarted, there's a slight issue of Health and Safety which would have to be overcome. Basically all the way up into the 1990s when underground coal mining stopped for all intents and purposes, men[1] were sent into foul dangerous workplaces that were grandfathered in as being safe and not harmful to the worker's health and wellbeing, thanks to hundreds of years of "we need the energy" and "they're only working-class expendables".

    Any new underground mineworking operations would have to meet modern H&S standards and, to put it bluntly, they just can't. Toilets alone are a major stumbling block -- in the old days but within living memory what miners underground did was shit and piss in "manholes" which were then filled in. How about clean places to eat their "snap", hand-washing facilities? Not going to happen underground and it would take them an hour or more to go to the surface, clean up before eating and then another hour to go back underground again. Radon breathing limits, never mind firedamp, humidity etc. It just isn't going to happen unless robots get a lot better than they are today.

    After all of that you get to the safety issues of, say, sharing a two metre high two metre wide drift with a haulage cable that can snap at any time. My father came home early from work one day. After a while sitting staring at the wall he let us know he had witnessed someone he knew being killed by just such an incident.

    [1] Women and children were barred from the getting of coal in Britain back in the 1800s because even the Victorians regarded coal mining as being such a dangerous, toxic and dirty industry. This was at a time when children were still being used as chimneysweeps (cf. "The Water Babies" as referenced in this here blog in the past).

    388:

    My understanding is that there aren't a lot of major seams that haven't been at least partially mined. And, because the mines were closed down rather than being put on maintenance only, they have flooded, the props will have rotted/rusted, and most will have at least partially collapsed. Deep mining in fractured rock is vastly trickier and more dangerous than in intact rock; I don't know even if existing technology is up to it. So it's rather more than years of work ....

    389:

    Sorry - that mostly repeats what you said. I am a bit under the weather today.

    390:

    Re: Energy Choices for Britain (and everyone else)

    I'd like to recommend this video from the ever insightful and even handed "Just Have a Think" on Rolls Royce Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ3DvcXd3mM

    He really does a good job of examining the pros and cons of this complicated issue.

    Bottom line: renewables in general can provide 80% of our energy needs with the overall levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of PVs, windmills, and storage systems continuing to fall. Something like SMRs can provide the baseline for the remaining 20%.

    391:

    While we are on the subject of repressive societies, I'd like to go somewhat off-topic and recommend Patrick McGoohan's "The Prisoner"

    ... To which there is an extensive homage in next May's novel, "Season of Skulls".

    (Yes, Eve is Number Six, by hook or by crook, and hilarity ensues.)

    392:

    I can see one ongoing use for burning fuel oils: in transport mechanisms that are weight-sensitive and where range is a priority. The classic examples would be as fuel for aviation across non-trivial distances (batteries have huge drawbacks for long-range flight) and for military kit (energy density is a priority).

    Hydrogen is useless for in-atmosphere craft -- it's barely useful as a space launch fuel from ground level. Problems: poor energy density, cryogenic handling requirements, and a tendency to leak like crazy. Methane is less leaky and less of a noxious cryogen, but leaks need to be contained (it's a potent greenhouse gas). We'll know more about its practicality on a large scale in a couple of years once Starship is flying.

    Kerosene is still the go-to fuel for aviation because it has a higher energy density per unit volume than the cryogens, doesn't require exotic handling, and we've got lots of kit in place for transporting, storing, refining, and burning it. Drawbacks: currently it's almost all fossil carbon sourced, which is bad.

    Biosynthetic kerosene is available, but that's pretty terrible in terms of energy efficiency (although there are tantalizing hints at synthesis pathway breakthroughs in the offing). What we really need is PV or offshore wind powered synthetic kerosene (using atmospheric CO2 and water as inputs, along with copious electricity), so that it's not releasing fossil carbon when we burn it and thereby return it to the atmosphere.

    Bonus extra: if synthetic kerosene is practical it's also a viable shipping fuel. On the other hand, ammonia is also a viable shipping fuel. (Methane not so much, except possibly for LNG tankers which are already designed to haul the stuff around.)

    Anyway: I can see civil aviation as we know it persisting for a very long time in the future, burning kerosene in jet engines. It'll cost 2x - 3x as much for fuel per passenger-kilometer (adding maybe 50% to the price of an economy class seat) but it'll be fossil carbon-neutral and sustainable.

    393:

    "kit car"!?!?!

    The S2 Lotus Seven wins on style and detailing alone - size isn't the issue here.

    Those who buy larger more powerful cars do so because they are obviously compensating for something.

    No. 6 obviously has nothing to compensate for.

    Besides, John Drake had a much cooler theme song.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iaR3WO71j4

    And yes, No. 6 IS John Drake, aka "Danger Man" (aka "Secret Agent Man" in America)

    And he remains way cooler than any James Bond.

    394:

    As a lover of British 70s sci-fi, I ask if you could you have a reason to include the ladies on UFO's moon base wearing purple wigs into your next novel?

    If you really are a good author you'll come up with a valid reason for them wearing those purple wigs.

    395:

    paws4thot @ 374:

    365 - I didn't say that you did make #289; I said that you said the same erronious assumption as in #289 that everyone else uses USian law.

    Look to your own "erronious assumption" then. I don't expect U.S. law to apply anywhere except the U.S.

    396:

    Thanks to everyone who answered the question about "what was going through her head?" Much food for thought.

    397:

    »What we really need is PV or offshore wind powered synthetic kerosene«

    That is not a thing.

    Kerosene is typically a dozen carbons long, and stringing those together from a supply of electrons is neither efficient nor, in terms of side products, a good idea.

    When you start from electrons, you stop after the first carbon, or if you have /really/ good reasons, the second.

    The entire point about electrons is that you can transport them without the losses caused by Newton's laws, and we should focus on that, the "we have to truck something liquid around" psychosis is just the oil-industry talking.

    Yes, we will need liquid fuels for long range flight, agricultural tractors and rockets, and that is where biofuels and electrons-to-methane come into the picture. Everything else can be done with battery technologies.

    398:

    As a lover of British 70s sci-fi

    There was always "Space 1999" where none of the plots were plausible at any level.

    But it was so bad it was fun to watch.

    399:

    Methane is no better in energy density than ethanol, which is easy to produce sustainably, and worse in other aspects. I haven't been able to find out the energy density of ethylene, which is apparently easier to synthesise than ethane.

    400:

    (Yes, Eve is Number Six, by hook or by crook, and hilarity ensues.)

    I hope we get an answer to the question of who is Number One!

    401:

    When you start from electrons, you stop after the first carbon, or if you have /really/ good reasons, the second.

    We have on the order of 50,000 jet airliners today, in a fleet that turns over on a period of roughly 30 years. At an average of $0.1Bn per jet, that's a fuckton of hardware to replace if you want to swap fuels. (On the order of $5Tn over 30 years, or $150Bn/year to replace gradually.) As civil aviation costs break down roughly 1:1:1 between airframe depreciation, crew (including maintenance and flight side), and fuel, that suggests a $150Bn/year market for jet fuel.

    Kerosene is desirable because it's energy dense; 43-46MJ/kg and roughly 0.8kg/litre

    Liquid methane gives you 55MJ/Kg, but only 0.423Kg/litre, so you need significantly larger fuel tanks -- and they need additional insulation because it boils at -161 celsius, only 20 celsius higher than liquid oxygen. Even if the aircraft's tanks and plumbing are insulated, you then have to handle it on the ground at airports. Not ideal!

    402:

    You also get a free bonus Boys From Brazil tribute! Not to mention perilous escapes, poisonings, sea voyages, imprisoned! in a gothic asylum for wayward women, escape! from same, equoids, pirates, shoggoths, a mad scientist natural philosopher, and much tea drinking.

    Because 1816 was approximately the midpoint of the Regency period, and I've always (well, for a few years) wanted to know what happens when Lovecraftian horror meets Regency romance.

    I am expecting the reader reviews on Amazon and Goodreads to be very mixed ...

    403:

    This isn't aimed at you, but I am completely boggled as to why anyone would even consider methane for such uses (space rockets excluded). If you are using fossil fuels, stick with kerosene. If you are producing it sustainably, then why not ethanol? Double the (weight) density and the same energy density - unless I have got it completely wrong. So you still have to redesign the engines and rebuild the aircraft, but it's a bit less of a jump - and handling it is a doddle by comparison. We have known, fairly efficient, clean methods of producing sugars from cellulose and ethanol from sugars, so grain straws are a perfectly good feedstock.

    404:

    Please may I make a Humble Request? You invite some of the Regency fantasy bodice-ripper authors to review it and include their comments :-)

    405:

    Re: '... digging through the raw output from climate models'

    How does wind factor into agriculture as it is currently practiced? Higher temps lead to stronger winds. Stronger winds increase evaporation leading to more water vapor in the atmosphere which leads to ...?

    And how does this vary by the distinct tiers/layers of clouds and wind currents? Not sure whether these layers typically interconnect and what happens when they do but am guessing if both air/cloud streams are moving faster then the resulting collisions will be stronger.

    406:

    Let's not forget Quartermas and those Hammer Horror films

    407:

    SpaceX is going with methane because Musk is fixated on colonizing Mars, and you can synthesize methane from water (the in the Martian permafrost) and carbon dioxide (which Mars has a shit-ton of). It's also less critical for space launch vehicles because you're going to need cryogenic tankage for the LOX anyway, and the humongous quantities you need mean your booster has a reduced surface area to volume ratio for heat transfer to/from the atmosphere.

    For aviation ... it's been tried, and found wanting: you need substantially larger fuel tanks and heavier insulation -- for example, you can't store liquid methane in "wet wing" tanks as is normal with regular jet fuel, you'd get icing on the outer surfaces.

    (Wrt "bodice rippers", don't let them hear you call their genre that, is all I can say. And yes, I have made extensive use of test readers and incorporated their feedback. The historical romance community are also historical accuracy obsessives -- they're as focussed as the slide-rules-and-rocket-equation school of hard SF fans.)

    408:

    Re: 'Regency romance'

    1816 --- So two years before Mary Shelley's Frankenstein? Half wondering whether that era had its own version of The X-Files.

    409:

    Sugar cane is only worth growing if you plan to eat the sugar. Otherwise pick something that produces more biomass. I don't know about hemp, but anecdotal evidence suggests it's easier to grow. And, of course, kudzu is famously easy to grow, but I suspect that the resulting biomass might be very high in water.

    One thing that I've seen proposed is switchgrass. I'm not sure what that is, but it might be easy to grow and easy to dry. I envision it as a kind of hay. https://www.thespruce.com/switchgrass-plant-care-5079140

    That said, if you want to transport the biomass, you want it in a compact form. For that, trees are probably a better choice.

    410:

    Carbon-based liquid "fuels" - y'all missing something.
    There's something even more important than fuel - LUBRICATION - even if it's 100% carbon-free elctricity powering it, there will be rotating & possibly reciprocating parts that REALLY MUST be lubricated, to keep them going, with minimal wear.
    These lubricating oils have to be very closely controlled in their manufacture, synthesis & hydrostatic/dynamic properties - one reason they have always been expensive.
    The very well-known firm/label "Castrol" got their start in the then-new field of lubricating oils for steam locomotives in the late 1890's as traffic loads increased, working temperatures rose & the introduction of superheating, f'rinstance. Those problems are not going to go away.

    EC
    Unfortunately, the best of them all is some time dead Georgette Heyer ...
    However, in the Laundry/DLD series, is this an obsatcle?

    411:

    Methane becomes methanol and methanol-air fuel cells seems to be where the existing shipping industry is going. Trains or tractors, I don't know, but you can just buy a methanol-air fuel cell APU for your cargo vessel today.

    There are about three problems with atmospheric carbon kerosene; one of them is that you need to kill off every diesel engine on the planet, because they all produce black particulate carbon which is a warming problem even if the fuel is carbon neutral. (The other two are "this is a lot of increasingly inefficient synthesis" and "the big sprawly supporting infrastructure will fall over as ubiquity of combustion energy tech decreases".)

    Aircraft may work fine on aluminium-air fuel cells; there's no obvious technical bar (someone in the UK claims to have solved the various problems with non-conductive sludge since 2000) and several advantages to all-electric if you can manage the energy density. (This is also a decently plausible solution for heavy equipment and trains.)

    It's also at least somewhat plausible that air travel is going to get impractical; habitual long-distance travel may not survive food insecurity as increasingly iffy supply chains stop being able to make or maintain wide body airliners at acceptable costs.

    412:

    Well, actually I think they COULD design robots (well, telefactors with autopilots) that could do the job. But I wouldn't claim that they could build them cheaply. And the design time would probably be several years if they started NOW. Then they'd need to be built. So say on the close order of a decade.

    Many of the control issues are similar to the issues in the space program, though of course the routing of signals would be a lot different. I think wireless control would be fairly doable, but it might need to be light based with properly positioned mirrors, to avoid radio interference. (Infrared might do the job, but light is easier to reflect.)

    OTOH, 5-15 years lead time for an emergency project is rather...difficult.

    413:

    Yes, we will need liquid fuels for long range flight, agricultural tractors and rockets, and that is where biofuels and electrons-to-methane come into the picture. Everything else can be done with battery technologies.

    We might scratch tractors from that list. Electric tractors are enough of a thing to have their own Wikipedia entry. Admittedly most of the current models are small, but John Deere's working on a plug-in. Literally, a big tractor that tows a power cord.

    As for air travel, you have to look at what most of it's used for: high speed/luxury shipments, tourism, and business. Getting tasteless raspberries in January that have been air-freighted from Chile may make money for someone, but not that long ago we ate fruit in season and made jam, and there was no resulting famine. Ditto vacationing in the Maldives. I'm not sure how far our air fleet can shrink (personally I'm betting to zero within 50 years), but its current use has a lot of frivolities along with critical stuff.

    As for space travel, if the loons over at JP Aerospace succeed in orbiting a semi-dirigible, that will probably become the way stuff launches. I think this is a long shot, but they're still progressing on literally a patreon budget. Which is kind of awe inspiring.

    The other liquid fuel use we're missing is military. Unless an electric-powered force decisively defeats a Big Iron petro-powered combined arms force, I think we're stuck with a "Mexican standoff," where states abandon they petro-boomers only when they can no longer afford to field them, due to the vulnerability of being under-armed. Looking at the US here...

    414:

    CharlesH @ 412:

    Well, actually I think they COULD design robots (well, telefactors with autopilots) that could do the job. But I wouldn't claim that they could build them cheaply. And the design time would probably be several years if they started NOW. Then they'd need to be built. So say on the close order of a decade.

    Many of the control issues are similar to the issues in the space program, though of course the routing of signals would be a lot different. I think wireless control would be fairly doable, but it might need to be light based with properly positioned mirrors, to avoid radio interference. (Infrared might do the job, but light is easier to reflect.)

    OTOH, 5-15 years lead time for an emergency project is rather...difficult.

    Maybe it would be worthwhile to start DESIGNING the robots, but wait to build them until it became absolutely certain they were going to be needed. That could cut down the lead time.

    If it never became absolutely necessary you wouldn't have to build them.

    That's the kind of thinking that was behind some of DARPA's weirder projects that never saw fruition, but kind of covered the bases as to "What IF?"

    Contingency Plan:
    1. What combination of circumstances might require the U.K. to resume coal mining?
    2. IF that combination of circumstances occurs, what will the U.K. require to do so successfully?
    ...
    3. Here are the proposed designs for the robots that need to be manufactured.

    Probably a bunch of steps between 2 and 3 I haven't thought of, but it's a basic form for an idea.

    After all, the MoD in the Laundryverse had a contingency plan for Martian cylinders landing in Britain or for an invasion by elves from another dimension ... why not plan for purely earth based crisis?

    415:

    »Kerosene is desirable«

    Absolutely, but that does not mean that it can or will be made from green electricity.

    The current synthetic route is:

    electricity->methane->hand-wavium-catalyst->profit

    I personally expect trans-oceanic flight to become one of the primary consumers of biofuels, and the ticket prices will reflect that.

    416:

    »One thing that I've seen proposed is switchgrass.«

    The person proposing it was GWB's speechwriter, and that is really all you need know about that. It was meant to "sell" green fuels to red america, where switchgrass is considered one of the most useless plants in existence.

    Grasses are not a particular good starting materials for bio-fuels.

    417:

    We might scratch tractors from that list. Electric tractors are enough of a thing to have their own Wikipedia entry. Admittedly most of the current models are small, but John Deere's working on a plug-in. Literally, a big tractor that tows a power cord.

    One thing you want in most (farm) tractor situations is weight. Traction and to help keep them from turning over. Which is why virtually all farm tractors have the big tires 80%+ full of a calcium chloride water solution. So heavy batteries fit into the situation. Especially since you can stuff them into the volumes that used to contain the engine and drive train bits. Maybe keep a small pony engine that will drive it at 1 or 2 mph to get it somewhere it can be repaired if the electrical drive breaks.

    418:

    Here are the proposed designs for the robots that need to be manufactured.

    One reason people still go down in deep mines is due to the constantly changing environment and issues. People know (mostly) when to stop and think about things for a minute or few.

    IMNERHO it will take a very good AI system to deal with deep mine operations.

    419:

    One thing that's got me wondering, re: the exodus from Russia.

    I've been reading that people are flying out of RU. However, I thought that while aviation within RU was happening, aviation to / from RU wasn't happening due to lack of international-approved safety maintenance. People were mentioning this on this blog many posts back.

    Am I missing something, or did we get it wrong back then?

    420:

    Airlines other than Aeroflot exist. Turkish Airlines, most of the Gulf carriers, and Air China are still running a full service on their own metal. Ditto most of the national airlines in the ex-Soviet states.

    421:

    A lot of folks are transiting via the older Soviet Republics before heading onward to somewhere else.

    422:

    Please note that growing things like hemp (and there's plenty of types of non-smokeable hemp - see "hemp rope")... unlike a lot of crops, they don't need fertilizers. I mean... they're a weed. Try to stop growing a weed. (Which is why, after the US was afraid the Japanese would cut off supplies of hemp from se Asia, they had farmers in Kansas grow it. After the war, "stop, please".... but, weeds, etc, which is why in the seventies, Kansas was the dope capital of the US.)

    423:

    Sugar cane is only worth growing if you plan to eat the sugar. Otherwise pick something that produces more biomass. I don't know about hemp, but anecdotal evidence suggests it's easier to grow. And, of course, kudzu is famously easy to grow, but I suspect that the resulting biomass might be very high in water.

    Um, we need to work this one down quite a bit. Sugarcane's energy production mostly isn't sugar, it's biomass, to the tune of 17 tons/acre/yr, about twice what you'd get from hemp or pine.

    The reason it's about twice what you get from fiber or wood production (at least on a per year basis) is C4 vs. C3 photosynthesis. C3 is great in low-light conditions, but it maxes out at around 30% full sunlight. C4 can go up to 45% sunlight, so it's great in high light, high temperature conditions, but sucks badly when it's dim and cool.

    Wild kudzu infestations get a bit interesting. Fields measured produced about 2-4 tons/acre/year dry biomass aboveground, but 6 tons/acre/year of dry biomass belowground. Kudzu roots can be 7 inches across and weigh up to 400 pounds. Kudzu was originally grown for the tubers, before people found other plants that actually tasted good, and kudzu was then kept around for medicine, emergency food, and selling to credulous white plant hunters. Anyway, kudzu biomass might be on the same scale as biomass from sugar cane. However, it's fairly undesirable for any other use. But it does grow readily on suboptimal soils.

    One could readily imagine a peri-postcivilizational scenario in which villagers burn down enemy settlements and sow kudzu on the sites, so that they can come back and harvest them for energy to power still more conquests. Or at least, there seem to be parts of the world where people think that way...

    424:

    Please, beggin' yer pardon, gov, but no giant white balloon...?"

    425:

    Thanks for the link. But... who produced that video? I mean, an all-white crew of meh dancers, all in suits and ties?

    426:

    378 "Kwarteng ... certainly understands the forces and the mistakes that have led to that destabilisation." - Which rather begs the question "Exactly how and why did he make so many of them?"

    387 - All pretty much true. Reference expansion The Water Babies by CHarles Kingsley.

    391 - Who is Number Two?

    393 - Other than later Caterhams, most Lotus 7 derivatives have all the aerodynamics of a barn door, oh and the L7 S1 and S2 were both designed as kit cars to allow the builder to avoid purchase tax (a loophole closed by the replacement of purchase tax by VAT).
    "No. 6 IS John Drake, aka "Danger Man"" - Cite needed, particularly for those of us who never liked either show.

    394 - The UFO metallic purple wigs were supposed to be anti-static (show canon), although I don't recall why it was only the women who wore them.

    397 - Well, clearly this why a Scalextric car is heavier than an ICE car of similar performance (range is a performance metric just like acceleration and top speed are).

    410 - Agreed, with the note that "Castrol" is an abbreviation of "CASTeR OiL"; see one of their earlier products "Castrol R", which is/was a caster oil used primarily in motor sports.

    427:

    Asylum for wayward women - shudder. Seriously, shudder. At CostumeCon, earlier this year, one of the winners in historical were women dressed as some who had, for real (with pages of documentation as to the historicity of it), were women... one disguised as a man so she could be a firefighter (they found out, and institutionalized her), one for - I kid you not - reading too much. And three or four others....

    428:

    I would think farm tractors would see an early turnover towards electric models, as well as farms switching to renewable power fairly easily.

    Reason 1: Tractors are not doing long haul trips. They will most often return to home every evening for a charge. Electric motors also tend to have more torque and pulling power, which will appeal for a lot of farm purposes.

    Reason 2: Most larger scale farms are operating at a high capital rate. The price of adding a few solar panels, or a few hundred, are a rounding error for most larger farms. Equipment costs in the hundreds of thousands for a single item (i.e. thresher), and the farms around where I grew up sometimes had dozens of various heavy equipment items and attachments for various purposes. Replacing an expiring diesel tractor for an electric would have a trivial additional cost.

    Reason 3: Farms operate on the long game. Spending the money to set up independent power generation that can push your machines at a relatively fixed cost for X years is very attractive to a farmer when compared to volatile fuel costs which have to be paid to and delivered by an outside provider. Throw in the apparently much lower maintenance costs of electric and it will appeal. All the farmers I knew on the prairies were very motivated to control their external costs as much as possible.

    All that must balance against increased variability in weather and crop yields. Whatever the end result, all the large scale farmers I've known have favoured long-term predictability whenever they can find it. Having the ability to control your own power production and outputs at relatively fixed costs will be extremely appealing to farmers facing wild variability in other areas.

    429:

    »We might scratch tractors from that list«

    Tractors are surprisingly tricky vehicles.

    First, they are wildly different in different parts of the world, so anything you know about them from your childhood or friend who is a farmer, is probably only valid within a radius of 500km.

    The fundamental task is hard: Tractors need good traction, hence the name, they should have as narrow tires as possible, but they cannot exert too high pressure on the ground either.

    Rolling out a cable means you have the entire roll on the tractor when you begin, that limits range and you need to spool it up again on the way back.

    Dragging a cable will wear out the cable surprisingly fast, it has been tried many times and was abandoned as many times for that reason.

    The smart money are on guided and autonomous farming robots.

    Just like with lawn mower robots, people are now realizing that farming can be done with much smaller equipment, and a lot less energy, when the action is 24x365.

    430:

    I foresee the revival of actual express train service, even in the US. VASTLY more efficient... and for three-four months after 9/11, even the pilots' union was saying that for trips under 300-400 mi, trains made more sense than planes.

    431:

    Why only the women? Because mostly, back then, women wore their hair a lot longer than men. Same reason that women, early on, were required to wear cotton, NOT nylon, underwear in large mainframe computer rooms.

    432:

    It doesn't seem workable for restarting coal mining, that doesn't mean it isn't the plan though. Drax has received £6 billion in "green" subsidies. This seems excessive. Mind you, it could just be corruption and/or incompetence!

    As for alternative fuels, there are these:

    https://newatlas.com/energy/bacteria-biofuel-higher-energy-density-jet-fuel/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butanol

    433:

    Actually, some grasses ARE good starting points - Miscanthus x giganteus is grown for that purpose.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscanthus_%C3%97_giganteus

    434:

    I can assure you that at least some of us males who worked in such rooms did NOT shave our pubic hair! The main reason was that few men wore nylon underwear back then (at least not in the UK) - cotton was near-universal.

    435:

    Paul, in #116: "the increasing number of people who get their news from social media"

    But getting your news "from social media" is usually following a link to "traditional" media. Or, even more commonly, reading the headline and posted summary, but still the professional media are usually the source.

    wg

    436:

    if you want to transport the biomass, you want it in a compact form. For that, trees are probably a better choice.

    These days chopping bamboo is an industrial process and I'm told it works quite well. The advantages are that the stuff grows fast and comes in a variety of sizes. Trees do that whole exponential growth thing which means early harvest really costs you.

    Hemp fibre for biomass makes no sense, you're throwing away 80% of the mass of the plant via a tedious process (retting). If you want hemp to burn biomass you'd just dry the whole stem. Low density but very easy to grow and quite tolerant of unexpectedly wet conditions (convenient when the climatologists are currently revising their models of the south pacific osculation (it's giving Australia a big sloppy kiss again... it just won't stop)).

    437:

    Maybe keep a small pony engine that will drive it at 1 or 2 mph to get it somewhere it can be repaired if the electrical drive breaks.

    Nah, they already have systems in place to service tractors in the field, they're mostly too big to move easily without tow trucks that are too big to be road legal...

    Not to mention that increasing the problems are "computer says no" variety that can be fixed with a cellular modem and a laptop, plus a replacement for the one smart component that has broken.

    Unless you're Harry's Farm (youtube) where apparently English combine harvesters have been catching fire rather more often than is ideal.

    438:

    Here's a less biased source showing hemp yields per acre, over a variety of sites:

    https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/41740/15859_ages001ei_1_.pdf

    It turns out that some studies report total dry biomass, some studies report dry fiber mass, and they come out within the range of 2-12 tons/acre (2-3 in England, up to 12 tons/acre a century ago in the US, which says something poignant about soil degradation). And it's not clear whether the top-line yields were fiber or biomass...

    Feel free to dive in to your hearts' content. The thing we're forgetting is that with a disaster, you lose multiple years of tree farm production, but only one year of hemp production. Depending on climatic uncertainty, that matters a bit.

    439:

    Oh, I'm not forgetting that, it's something that Australians are very thinking about. Three wet years in a row (so far) is going to make for a really shitty fire season when we get a dry one again. I expect Chileans will be complaining about red skies.

    One advantage of deep rooted perennials is that they recover from fires faster. You can skip most of the weedy year after the fires and go straight back to cropping. I suspect growing anything annual after a fire has sterilised the top 5-20cm of soil is hard work.

    I once read something about burning sugar cane fields where they had to leave them fallow every few years to let the soil grow back.

    440:

    https://poweroutage.us/area/state/florida

    there's the good news less than 300K in Florida are without power...

    which suggests there's been adaptation to crisis by those down in the mud 'n chaos after hurricanes in getting the job down... now if only politicians stopped bragging about thing they never did and accepted responsibility for FUs they did indeed do...

    441:

    Also, I am currently thinking out the meaning of "this year's climate" because with the speed of climate change that's becoming an increasingly relevant idea.

    442:

    Recent UK politics has convinced me that the Laundry novels are in fact a utopian fantasy where the leader of the UK may be evil but they're also very intelligent as well.

    443:

    Re: '... leave them fallow every few years to let the soil grow back.'

    Okay - but that assumes that the local soil microbiome will survive. Yes, I understand that microbes because of their much shorter life cycles/faster reproduction rates probably can adapt much faster than more complex organisms but there's no guarantee that what they adapt to/become in order to survive climate change will be of any use to us.

    There's some research in the connectedness of biomes of various plants, animals and humans. The article below is paywalled but the Abstract mentions 40 soil microbes that impact plant, animal and human health. This is a new area so it's likely there are more such microbes and networks to be discovered.

    'Soil microbiomes and one health'

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00779-w

    I'm still plugging for indoor vertical farming combined with some CRISPR to reduce excess/non-nutritive plant bits.

    444:

    I was thinking of post-fire recovery rather than changing climate adaptation, but yeah, soil microbiomes are one of those vaguely guessed at things. Regenerative agriculture people are fascinated by it, as are the various organic farming groups.

    Vertical farming seems like an energy-intensive way to get food into very densely built up areas, at least for the immediately foreseeable weather conditions. I suspect it will be a lot more practical once we shed some of the excess population and have spare buildings. Otherwise getting the vertical space is also very capital-intensive. But I suppose you can look at the glasshouses that are taking over Spain as a counterexample where growing food inside is already done on a large scale.

    Not sure there's any way you'd ever want to use vertical farms to produce biomass to burn for fuel. Algae to biodiesel seems likely to be more efficient.

    445:

    Re: kerosene, hand-wavium

    Charlie is right. Kerosene is the most energy-dense fuel we have. It's also incredibly safe and easy to handle for something so energetic, it has undemanding storage requirements (room temperature, thin-walled containers) and it is tolerant of a very wide range of environments. Nothing else comes close. Which is why it's used for air transport. The facts that it is used up in flying, and reducing the mass of a plane increases its range, just make it even better. Those are the reasons why we use it.

    I live not very far from a synthetic fuel plant that was built in the early 1980s in response to the second oil crisis. It would have been profitable if OPEC had kept its solidarity and prices had stayed up. No hand-wavium at all. In 1980.

    With electricity prices a tenth of 2019's, and with reasonable improvements over the synthesis technology of 1980, kerosene from air-captured carbon will be competitive with fossil kerosene.

    With the improvements in materials science that we have seen over the last 40 years, and the (very new) ability to prototype in silico, and just the general Wright's Law improvements we can expect, profit is a reasonable expectation.

    The price of air travel may or may not fall very much, but it's unlikely to rise very much either. Political instability, on the other hand, is likely to rise, and borders are likely to harden. (What is your social credit score, citizen?) Air travel may well decline a lot.

    446:

    “Hydrogen is useless for in-atmosphere craft” Someone at Airbus disagrees: https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/zero-emission/hydrogen/zeroe

    Also you overestimate the difficulty of handling hydrogen. It’s already routinely schlepped over highways in LH2 tankers to warehouses where it’s dispensed into fuel cell powered forklifts.

    It’s true that there was recently a spot of bother with loading LH2 into the SLS, but the keyword there isn’t LH2 but rather SLS, the worst mismanaged fustercluck I’ve ever had the misfortune to be even peripherally involved with.

    447:

    Golly gee, and here I got this little PhD in mycorrhizal ecology...

    The thing about fast growing plants is that they tend to be "hungry," meaning if you're taking tons of biomass off the site every year, you're going to need to get those nutrients back into the soil somehow.

    Right now we do it using mass quantities of chemicals, some of which are very energy intensive to make (N) or transport (P). In the absence of these inputs, productivity gets limited by the whatever's in shortest supply.

    That's the basic agribusiness chemical model.

    The point of fallowing a field is to let the fallow biota fix a bit of nitrogen, release some phosphorus, and let some of the pests and pathogens die off. This of course reduces long term yield, so it's incompatible with running an energy-hungry civilization. (tag-line: Drax can't live by smoking sustainable weed 24/7).

    Anyway, I don't know where the field is now, but a few decades ago, microbiomes were thought to take about five years to switch over. So if you were growing conventional corn and wanted to go with organic hemp, there would be decreased biomass yield for ca. five years while all the bacteria favored by the chemical fertilizers went away, while the ones that processed organics increased and took over. It's not just their life times, it's getting communities working with inputs and outputs.

    448:

    our new research finds over the last 1,000 years, Australia has suffered longer, larger and more severe droughts than those recorded over the last century.

    These are called “megadroughts”, and they’re likely to occur again in coming decades. Megadroughts can last multiple decades – or even centuries – with occasional wet years offering only brief relief. Megadroughts can also be shorter periods of very extreme conditions.

    https://theconversation.com/megadroughts-helped-topple-ancient-empires-weve-found-their-traces-in-australias-past-and-expect-more-to-come-191770

    Seems weird to read that when it's been consistently wet for about two years now but it makes a scary amount of sense. The flip side of three La Nina years in a row is that El Nino could stick around longer as well. We're well used to 3-10 years of El Nino at a time, 30 years of it would really get on people's nerves.

    449:

    Three years of La Nina is three years of epochal droughts around here. If you here screaming that the Colorado River is running dry, it's because the Pacific Ocean thought you needed the rain more on your side. And so it goes.

    450:

    "SLS, the worst mismanaged fustercluck"

    You need to go back to 2010 and see how SLS came about, and at whose initiative (five Senators were involved). Once you do that, it can be seen that SLS has been brilliantly successful at achieving its intended purpose, which was to send tax dollars into the states of those Senators. Doing Apollo 2 would be nice, but not really relevant.

    One of those Senators is currently head of NASA, though I'm not sure that's currently relevant.

    451:

    I'll put a bucket out for a few minutes and post it over to you :)

    I recall there was once a proposal to use a second hand oil tanker to ship water from Milford Sound to somewhere less damp. But presumably to be used as bottled water rather than agricultural. At 24 acre-feet of water to the supertanker (300Ml) you'd need rather a lot of shipping to make irrigated agriculture work.

    452:

    David L @ 418:

    Here are the proposed designs for the robots that need to be manufactured.

    One reason people still go down in deep mines is due to the constantly changing environment and issues. People know (mostly) when to stop and think about things for a minute or few.

    IMNERHO it will take a very good AI system to deal with deep mine operations.

    Or tele-operators.

    453:

    Women and children were barred from the getting of coal in Britain back in the 1800s because even the Victorians regarded coal mining as being such a dangerous, toxic and dirty industry.

    Was that really the reason?

    This article makes it seem that a moral panic over their clothing was more the issue:

    https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pit-brow-lasses-women-miners-victorian-britain-pants

    454:

    There was always "Space 1999" where none of the plots were plausible at any level.

    Space: 1889 was much more fun, if one played it with tongue firmly in cheek :-)

    455:

    But getting your news "from social media" is usually following a link to "traditional" media. Or, even more commonly, reading the headline and posted summary, but still the professional media are usually the source.

    Is it?

    I've ended up on a lot of Republican mailing lists etc (thanks to at least a couple of Americans who don't realize that our name is not unique). A lot of material circulating there isn't based on traditional media. Well, unless you consider PenceNews traditional media.

    I'm seeing the reverse — that a lot of material in traditional news seems to originate on social media. One of the things that bothers me about my local paper is that too many of its stories are basically repeating unverified Twitter stories…

    I suppose you could consider Fox traditional news, although Fox is on record arguing in court that they are not in fact news but entertainment…

    456:

    In Aotearoa there's an ongoing habit of the bought media grabbing stories off reddit. Generally with no additional research other than perhaps making sure the location(s) referred to actually exist.

    I am not certain that r/newzealand plays games with them but it seems likely. Reddit has lots of fiction writers, and some of the stories seem oddly tilted towards what the bought media like. What definitely happens is that some stupid story on reddit ends up in the tabloids, is eventually debunked but the tabloids have already moved on.

    457:

    437 - Well, there's a surprise (not); Case IH, John Deere and Massey Ferguson are about as "English" as "apple pie and cheese". ;-)

    451 - I can't name names off hand but there have been various (usually not very thought through) stories with a MacGuffin of towing an Antarctic table berg somewhere hot then letting it melt as a source of "water in a desert".

    453 - Not a historian. Nojay states the position as the history was taught in Scotland correctly.

    455 - Well, there must be reasons (plural) why the company is known as "Faux (USian pronunciation) News".

    458:

    NecroMoz said: (it's giving Australia a big sloppy kiss again... it just won't stop)

    Sydney just broke the wettest year on record, with nearly 3 months left in the year. 2199mm

    For comparison London is at 531mm so far.

    459:

    "combine harvesters in England" then. However you look at it just remember to bring a toasting fork :)

    Disk Smith (in)famously decorated a barge up to look like an iceberg and towed it into Sydney Harbour one April Fool's day.

    https://dicksmithadventure.com.au/april-fools-iceberg-prank-1978/

    460:

    Some of the native trees in my garden have drowned. They are actually dead, not even dormant now. Were perfectly happy for a decade with regular droughts but then Sydney sank back into the swamp and it's game over.

    The good news is that so far most of my fruit trees are fine (one died, probably the same problem). The lemon tree is sulking, it flowered but then dumped everything and went back to plaintive cries of "when will it stop raining" (I assume, unlike our beloved king I don't speak (to) plants).

    461:

    For those outside the deluge: The previous annual record of 2,194mm of rain, which had stood since 1950, was broken at 12.30pm on Thursday after 27.2mm of rain fell at Sydney’s Observatory Hill Bureau of Meteorology station since 9am. The bulk of the rain fell in about 90 minutes, beginning at 11am.

    With nearly three months remaining in 2022 and the declaration of a third consecutive La Niña by the BoM in September, more rain is expected to fall before the end of the year, further inflating the record.

    We've had three months with the highest rainfall on record, blah blah etc. At least I have a new(ish) roof on my house which is actually waterproof, as well as my DIY sleepout being waterproof. There will be lots of people in NSW suffering, especially renters, from shitty damp housing. Plus all the ones being flooded out, some of them repeatedly.

    On that note, the building industry here is suffering from excess demand so prices and availability are not improving. Pity the people who went with nominated value insurance rather than replacement. Or the ones unable to get flood insurance. Apparently some tenants are also being refused contents and tenancy insurance as well.

    462:

    Re: 'Golly gee, and here I got this little PhD in mycorrhizal ecology...'

    Yeah - complexity is becoming the norm.

    463:

    H
    if you're taking tons of biomass off the site every year, you're going to need to get those nutrients back into the soil somehow.
    Hence - crop-rotation, lying fallow for a year { Maybe with grazing } & then planting beans as your first crop, eh?

    Necro Moz
    People don't realise how much water there is in even a "light shower"
    I worked out that half an inch {less actually) of rain, 10mm over an approximate standard allotment plot, call it 25x10 meters is ...
    0.01x25x10 cubic metres = 2.5 cu metres = 2.5 tonnes of water.

    464:

    Yeah,when I said "Antarctic table berg", I meant typically something like 8x3x1, for 24 cubic miles of water.

    465:

    In Melbourne during a drought we used to get 100-300 litres of water off the roof in even light showers. Which is all we got during the drought, but once there was enough to wet the roof the tanks filled pretty fast. Admittedly with about 300m2 of roof. Flip side of the huge roof+paved area was the tiny garden didn't need much water. Other way round in my current house, ~150m2 of roof and the other 450m2 is lawn and garden (and in droughts the lawn does not get watered)

    Water volume definitely works the other way most of the time... "faking" 1mm of rain over a few hectares of farm means pumping a lot of water from somewhere. Drip irrigation is all very well, but each gram of added biomass takes several litres of transpired water... and farming is all about adding biomass.

    I assume this is another thing where plants vary wildly in efficiency as well as in how much of the added biomass is edible.

    paws: yeah, I've seen some of the write-ups about towing those around and it always struck me as one of those "first we build a (fleet of) nuclear-powered tugboats, then we annex Antarctica, then we ... {six impossible things before breakfast}". These days it's all Mars bases and hyper yachts (who is it that has a second superyacht with a helipad because their main superyacht has masts that prevent a helicopter landing on it?).

    466:

    That figures. Trees adapted to north-west European conditions are generally pretty resistant to quite long periods of flooding, especially when dormant - not merely do we get such floods in some places, but a wet winter means waterlogged soil for months on end, irrespective of flooding. Far more 'tender' (for the UK) woody plants die from waterlogging and fungal attacks during the dark, wet months than die from the cold or frost. And, yes, citrus don't like those conditions - I nearly lost one for that reason.

    467:

    pumping a lot of water from somewhere

    Or even trucking it in, which is why water can cost more than diesel in some places in some seasons in drought years.

    468:

    What hydrogen is NOT suitable for is a simple replacement for natural gas, and in most motor vehicles; one of the main drivers to replace town gas by natural gas was to reduce the risk of explosions, bother due to leaks and in buildings (and it did, considerably). Its density issues are at least simple, and its safety ones are the killer.

    For aircraft, I would assume that every crash that today results in a fireball or fire engine use would result in an explosion. That might be an ecceptable risk, and I am sure that Airbus have done the calculation. But, if the same were true for road vehicles, ....

    469:

    we annex Antarctica

    I occasionally consider what Australia's actual ability to defend its extensive antarctic territorial claims would be if it came down to it. Considering the distance are way outside combat range for jets from RAAF Edinburgh (looking like all F-35s very soon anyway). Is that what we actually need SSNs for?

    superyacht has masts that prevent a helicopter landing on it

    I thought the SY Maltese Falcon and its sibling(s) did have helipads, but looking at images it seems there's some sort of backstay in the way on the after deck and no pad.

    470:

    Recent UK politics has convinced me that the Laundry novels are in fact a utopian fantasy where the leader of the UK may be evil but they're also very intelligent as well.

    Alas, this is becoming increasingly true.

    I wrote the pivot to the New Management into the universe in mid-2016, thinking it would buy me at least a decade of dystopian satire, but it's already looking increasingly optimistic.

    (Which is why Season of Skulls is mostly but not entirely set in 1816, and the "present day" bits in early 2017, and A Conventional Boy takes place circa 2008-2010.)

    471:

    Vertical farming seems like an energy-intensive way to get food into very densely built up areas

    The core problem with vertical farming is indeed energy density.

    Trad farming (meaning anything except vertical farming) relies on sunlight -- photosynthetic plants are of course nature's own PV panels for converting CO2, water, and trace elements into biomass.

    Vertical farms can't rely on sunlight, they need high efficiency light at the correct wavelengths to maximize chlorophyl absorption. So using PV plants to feed juice to vertical farms is inherently inefficient. However in places prone to extreme weather, or (like the UK!) long dark winters, other energy sources -- like wind farms -- may be substitutable.

    Enabling places in the far north to grow crops all year round using wind, geothermal, or nuclear power to replace sunlight would indeed be a huge win, but it all depends on the efficiency of generation, distribution, and illumination (there are losses at every stage) before we even get to whether it's cost-effective to grow crops that way.

    They don't even have to be stacked terribly high: windowless warehouse-style buildings should work and are relatively cheap to construct -- the main objective is to protect the crops from severe weather events, after all.

    472:

    Considering the distance are way outside combat range for jets from RAAF Edinburgh (looking like all F-35s very soon anyway). Is that what we actually need SSNs for?

    Yes, and I'm astonished it's taken the Australian defense community so long to bite that bullet.

    Spitballing a cost-no-object megalomaniacal empire-building strategic defense plan, it would make sense to have a north circular railfreight route -- north from Perth then east all the way to Darwin and then on to Brisbane. Plant strategic garrisons, supply depots, and airfields along the route and you'd have the beginnings of a continental defensive line. Assuming an invasion of Fortress Australia might arrive by sailing into one of the larger ports and it would then be necessary to re-take it from unoccupied territory.

    But realistically, the best defense Australia has got is diplomacy and sheer remoteness -- much like Siberia.

    473:

    the main objective is to protect the crops from severe weather events

    I guess if you need to spread out to collect PV (or at least wind) anyway, the question arises whether stacking is actually more efficient than just spreading out the building too? And wouldn't doing that enable the use of more sustainable materials? Even if it's one-to-one PV per conventional agriculture there's still a sort of a win (year round growing with topups from wind? Definitely resilience against temperature extremes).

    474:

    I doubt that anyone else is much better placed to annex/defend Antarctica, not even New Zealand or Chile.

    475:

    Artificially-list (often hydroponic) farming is used in northern Europe to provide green vegetables (especially salads) in winter; the stacking is merely a space-saver, and land is expensive here. As OGH said, it's inefficient, but it needs much less energy than calorific crops (because it's quick), and the alternatives are air freight or doing without. Yes, we can avoid malnutrition without those, but it does mean living on cabbage for much of the winter - we old fogies remember doing that ....

    476:

    But realistically, the best defense Australia has got is diplomacy and sheer remoteness -- much like Siberia.

    Well, apparently nobody wants to invade us for lebensraum, and just about everything else we're more-or-less happy to sell.

    477:

    Another bonus I forgot: you can control the CO2 level in your growing area. A lot of our plants love a higher CO2 level in the atmosphere, and you can boost the CO2 level fairly efficiently by sticking a cold trap in your aircon intake to scavenge it and rejecting some of the low-CO2 efflux. Boost the CO2 in your farm to 2000-3000ppm instead of 400-ish ppm, and give the humans respirators when they have to go inside (or just flush the farm air out with fresh while maintenance is taking place).

    478:

    the best defense Australia has got is diplomacy and sheer remoteness

    Well yes. For most scenarios fortress Australia is just an unnecessary complication, and any would-be invader automatically has hopelessly exposed supply lines from the very start, no possible element of surprise (missile first strikes aside) and a long overland fuel burn to get anywhere at all. Japan had completely ruled it out as a possibility during the war, and that's probably the closest anyone ever got. The only thing capable of asserting anything like air superiority would be a USN CVBG, while co-incidentally Australia is one of the USA's closest long-term strategic allies. Perhaps one day China will field such things, and perhaps by that time we'll have moved up from LCSs too.

    I think it's a bit like the becoming-a-cliche-phrase about the US Civil war: that when you're young you learn that it was about slavery; later you learn that it was more about economics; finally you learn that because of economics, it really was entirely about slavery. In Australian defence circles, when you're young you learn about the "air-sea gap" as a defensive ploy making super-high defence spending less urgent that it might otherwise seem, later you learn the various reasons why that's not the whole story and there are shortcomings to this; later again you find that actually it's a pretty solid strategic asset, particularly assessing the costs.

    But defending those territorial claims in Antarctica... that's another story again :). We typically do NOT enforce them against Japanese whalers, although there are NGOs who have stepped up to that task.

    479:

    Meh, I say "LCS" when what I mean is "LHD". I didn't remember the right term and picked the wrong thing from a hasty google search. And only now do I remember the correct search term was actually "HMAS Canberra".

    480:

    The 8-hour safety limit for CO2 in the UK is 5,000 ppm - just checking employees for heart problems (or not, if you are less ethical) would be enough.

    481:

    The easiest way to raise the CO2 level in a greenhouse is to use fossil fuels to warm it. There's NZ farmers who do exactly this. Which has obvious problems from an environmental perspective.

    482:

    Heteromeles would know for sure, but ISTR reading a while ago that plants growing in atmospheres with elevated CO2 did grow more, but the bits humans want to eat are not improved. The plant puts more into stems, leaves & so on.

    Once again, totally not my specialty. So I could be utterly wrong.

    483:

    the main objective is to protect the crops from severe weather events

    sometimes it's to protect them from being noticed by officer plod

    484:

    Which are exactly what you want for winter greens in northern Europe! The point is that this ISN'T a general-purpose panacaea - as OGH said in #471, it's a solution for a few extreme problems. Yes, it can also be used in near-deserts, where solar power is almost unlimited and water is in desperately short supply - enclosed farming means that most of the water used can be recycled, so it uses relatively little.

    I still don't see the advantage of verticality except when space is short and possibly because it uses less material to build the enclosure. The key factors are that it is enclosed and artificially-lit.

    485:

    The discussion of Drax's lack of sustainability reminds me of the issues with nuclear power plants, and of the problems that we had trying to avoid the worst effects of the 2008 banking crash, and has parallels with the current dominance of web search by Google and social media by Facebook: our economic system encourages us to have a small number of entities filling a given role, which become too big to fail.

    As a consequence of this, when those entities don't live up to the desired standards, we are forced to relax standards because of a lack of alternatives, rather than being able to drive the sub-standard entities out of business.

    But this leads to a contradiction: the claimed way our system handles sub-standard entities is to put them out of business (bankruptcy), yet our system is also set up to encourage entities to grow to the point where we can't just put them out of business for being sub-standard, allowing them to break the rules with relative impunity (basically as long as the breaches of the rules are done far enough away from the regulator's vision).

    486:

    On vertical farming. This is very outside my area. How does the efficiency of photosynthesis in food crops per acre of agricultural land compare with using a vertical farm and the remaining acreage covered with PV panels (~20% efficient)? Feeding that electricity to LED's in the vertical farm. Summer, winter, yearly average? Boosted CO2 levels? Supplementing the PV with wind during the winter? On the general rubbishness of the higher latitudes of northern Europe for PV and agricultural production for food and biomass can. This is mitigated some during the summer by the very long days and short nights. I recall reading that the lowlands between Dundee and Aberdeen were particularly good. Being in the rain shadow of the Grampian mountains mitigated weather extremes and the long summer days and good soil making it very productive for agriculture.

    487:

    Nah, they already have systems in place to service tractors in the field, they're mostly too big to move easily without tow trucks that are too big to be road legal.

    I'm speaking from personal experience. Not all tractors are used the same way pre the someone else up thread.

    There were times I got into a jam due to, well all kinds of operator error, and getting out of it took all my fuel as I was at near the end of the tank when I got in the jamb. But I could walk back to the cheap old truck, grab the extra can of gas and get back to it.

    With an electric tractor if you run the batteries down too far you'd better have a $70K pickup and a $2K 200' or more long extension cord to juice things back up. Now, EV pickups WILL get cheaper but no where near the price of a crappy gas powered one anytime soon. And you still need that big ass extension cord. Or a pony engine.

    488:

    Anecdata related to a couple of the agriculture themes...

    Eastern Nebraska in the 1970s was full of places where WWII industrial hemp had gotten established on land where power equipment couldn't go. I worked three summers at an agricultural field lab and was the one stuck going out to the remote portions to tell the hippies harvesting that it was industrial hemp and wouldn't get them high.

    Colorado's large-scale indoor marijuana-growing industry is generally instructive. One of the big problems is controlling moisture and keeping assorted fungal diseases from getting established. Once the spore-based fungus is in, sterilizing is difficult or impossible. See also, Mir and the ISS. If we ever get to where we're sending a crewed mission to Mars, one of the crew's activities will be hours per week scrubbing walls and other surfaces to control the mold.

    489:

    there's the good news less than 300K in Florida are without power...

    I don't know if they are in that 300K number or not. But a LOT of power customers don't have a safe system to turn back on / get hooked up. I suspect many of those 300K are on the situation where the crews are going down the street and disconnecting individual customers before energizing the sub feed lines. (Which may now be how it is done in Europe. What I'm calling a sub feed is typically a block or few long tapped off a main line via a tripable fuse/breaker.) Then hooking individual customers back up when they have fixed their service entrance and are ready for power.

    After a big one here I got power back in 12 hours. Many neighbors across on sub feed lines took a week. Being one of the first houses in the area got me a hookup direct to the line out of the substation.

    490:

    Once you do that, it can be seen that SLS has been brilliantly successful at achieving its intended purpose, which was to send tax dollars into the states of those Senators.

    50K jobs around the country averaging $100K to $150K was the plan. And it worked. The jobs were concentrated in a few states but most every state got some of that action.

    I'm a big fan of space exploration. And I've been against SLS since day one. And the shuttle once the true costs were clear. And my other space fans don't get me.

    491:

    There are also a good many cases where you DON'T want a huge or heavy tractor because you don't have room or it compacts the soil too much (*). I am not sure that they are a case where electrification is necessarily going to work.

    (*) Yes, some farms have gone back to heavy horses!

    492:

    On our vast acreage US farms they somewhat solve most of the weight issues by putting the tractor on the equivalent of 8 rear tires. 4 in front, 4 in back, in pairs. You can get the weight but it's not nearly as concentrated. Plus tire treads without so much cleats.

    493:

    Is it?

    Yes. No. It depends. I don't know Wendy's experience but social media is all about engagement. In other words, how can we get you to come back and let us sell your eyeballs to more ads. If you tend to click on a story from the NYTimes, WaPo, WSJ, etc... then that's what you'll mostly see.

    If you tend to click on shared stories from folks sharing things from the Daily Wire or similar then you'll see a totally different feed.

    It is a feed back loop and it is a large part of what riles everyone up.

    And a LOT of my relatives, friends, ex-friends, etc... post excerpts from such or just things they heard from a friend at McD's coffee that morning with no reference. No links at all. And many times they either get the details wrong by mistake or on purpose as it suits their point of view. And if you point out the errors in their post they get incredibly pissed that you don't see the one true light. And this is NOT restricted to right wing folks. At least in the US.

    494:

    Apparently electric pickups are hitting the market now that are on par with ICE trucks, at the 'work fleet truck' level. ICE or EV trucks with all the fancy bits are a different story (leather seats etc). As one person has described them, top shelf high speed luxury shopping chesterfields.

    Farmers I have known have typically favored low-end pickup trucks that get switched out every few years. Those who are also mechanics obviously get more years out of them, but on large scale prairie farms spending a few days/annum fixing your beat up old truck isn't really a cost effective option.

    495:

    The political problem is not the random myths propagated by individuals - while those reinforce the prejudices and bigotry of the electorate, they also reflect the prejudices and bigotry of the electorate, so don't bias things that much. Yes, there are occasional exceptions. The main problem occurs when an organisation launches an effective campaign of misinformation, pushing in one direction, usually over a long period, and this is how we got to Brexit (and Bozo's landslide).

    496:

    ICE or EV trucks with all the fancy bits are a different story (leather seats etc).

    The biggest bump in the current Chevy EV pickups comes from the massive battery pack tied in with the ability to power a decent set of corded tools at a job site for 8 to 10 hours. And drive you there and back. And they don't toss in leather seats for the price. Just to make you feel you're getting your money's worth for the extra $20K or $40K.

    If you have an EV tractor you'd want something like this in case your tractor used more battery in the field than expected so you could top it up from the truck to get it back to a charging station after finishing the day's work.

    497:

    I'm not disagreeing with your main point. Just that you are dismissing the impact of these social media posts. I've seen them in action as my Trumpish brother spread Russian myths back in 2016. Yes the Russian's (and others) set up troll sources of news on US hosted sites that would go up, look like a news site but only host a few stories, get linked to in Facebook and Twitter then vanish in a week or so. Many times political disinformation (later even spread by national politicians) could be tracked back to these things. And after tracking through a LOT of misdirection, the trail would finally lead back to known Russian (and other) agencies.

    498:

    But somebody upthread mentioned bamboo, which I had forgotten, and it's a really good choice. Well, in many ways a really good choice. (At least some varieties are ferociously invasive weeds.) If you want it in compact form you need to chop and crush it, but that's not excessively hard. And it comes in varieties that grow in all sorts of conditions.

    As a bonus bamboo can also be used in many circumstances where other woods are more commonly used. Furniture, for example.

    OTOH, you do need to sterilize it before transporting it, because some rather unpleasant insects like to live in it. (Many of them won't survive freezing, though.)

    499:

    Heteromeles would know for sure, but ISTR reading a while ago that plants growing in atmospheres with elevated CO2 did grow more, but the bits humans want to eat are not improved. The plant puts more into stems, leaves & so on. Once again, totally not my specialty. So I could be utterly wrong.

    Okay, I'll have to go plant nerd to help this make sense.

    In algae, there are thought to be these things called Redfield ratios, which is the concentration of elements in a plant (H:C:O:N:P:S:K:Ca:Fe:etc.). With algae optimal growth supposedly happens when these elements are available in the Redfield ratios and in forms the algae can take up.

    Plants also have Redfield ratios, sort of, because their living tissue is very similar to that of algae.

    The "problem" is plant cell walls. This always confuses people, so pay attention. if you imagine a cell as a balloon, the balloon is formed by a membrane. In the cell, that's called the cell membrane, and all living cells have cell membranes.

    In plants, they basically secrete something a lot like papier mache out of their membranes to form a cell wall outside the membrane. The cell walls let plants take in more carbon than they need and do stuff with it, because cell walls are fairly biologically inert compared with the insides of cells. The best examples are trees. Wood is nothing but dead cell walls that are heavily fortified with cellulose and lignin. Some of the dead cells become water vessels, through which water moves the tree to evaporate out the leaves, so there's this really efficient method for moving water which requires no active pumping. The live parts of the tree are the leaves (flowers, etc), the young branches and roots, and the cambium between the bark (dead) and the wood (also dead) that connects the roots and leaves. The cambium lays down wood on the inside and bark on the outside, and that's how trees grow. It's a really cool system, where the living tissue is a very thin layer around a dead but still vitally necessary trunk and bark system (the trunk still conducts water through its vessels and holds up the living parts of the plant, while the dead bark protects the living tissue).

    Now we get to what happens when you jack the CO2 a plant takes in. Most of that carbon ends up in the cell walls, but also in other carbohydrates. So, for instance, if you're growing cannabis, cranking the CO2 favors resin production, as THC and CBD are nothing but carbohydrates (C,H,O).

    For nutrition for plant eaters, more CO2 is a problem. While we need carbs, we also need all the other elements in those Redfield ratios. If the plant has stuffed its walls full of carbon, by mass it has less of everything else. This makes it less nutritious on a per weight basis.

    Whether this will be a big problem or not remains to be seen. The proportional decrease in nutrients has been observed in wild plants, so it's not just plant breeders creating plants that lay down more sugar or wood (which has also happened).

    Where this can be problematic under climate change is when bad weather decreases crop production. If the crops are less nutritious because of changing air chemistry, this makes the food shortage worse.

    Long answer, but hopefully it makes sense.

    500:

    Towing a berg for water could probably work. But as you note one would need to trim it to the size that one could handle. I don't know the proper method to do that, though. My first guess is you drill a bunch of holes and stuff them with explosives. My second is that you lay a line of thermite. If you need to use jackhammers it's probably not practical.

    501:

    It's my understanding that plants grown in a high CO2 atmosphere have very low levels of proteins, limited oils, and lots of carbohydrates. For some plants that could work well, but it had better be a small part of the food chain.

    502:

    Ethylene, ethane, and methane are all much of a muchness at 50-and-a-bit MJ/kg, the exact values varying a bit depending on where you find them to look up. 50, 52 and 55 MJ/kg respectively if the back of your envelope has that many significant digits. Ethanol you find between 28 and 30 MJ/kg, with the additional source of variation that the "standard conditions" figure includes the energy used to vaporise it whereas a "real use" figure may or may not.

    503:

    Yes. I meant to post a correction, but I forgot; thank you for doing so. I took my data from a Web page which quoted MJ/L and mangled the units field, thought it was MJ/Kg, and didn't double-check. I did say that I was feeling a bit grim when I posted that!

    504:

    "Well, clearly this why a Scalextric car is heavier than an ICE car of similar performance (range is a performance metric just like acceleration and top speed are)."

    Took me a while to work out what you actually meant there, because of course the range of a Scalextric car is either zero or unlimited depending on how you think of it. So I was going off into things like "I wonder how you could make some equivalent to a pantograph or collector shoe for transferring liquids, without having it leak like fury"...

    505:

    Well, it's possible that USA politics is strongly influenced by the Kremlin, though I doubt it, but repeated investigations (including parliamentary ones) have shown that the UK is not. Yes, OF COURSE, it is conducting a propaganda campaign using social media (*), but all the evidence is that it's highly ineffective, which should surprise nobody given how completely they have fucked up the political and propaganda campaigns over the events of 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine.

    On the other hand, we DO know where the money (and much of the propaganda) for Brexit came from, and it was mainly the USA and some 'British' non-doms, with spontaneous bigotry and Russia merely bit-players. Similarly, those for the anti-Corbyn, mammonite and similar campaigns has those way, way down; they were orchestrated, and Anyone With Clue knows by whom.

    (*) Anyone telling me that the USA is too honourable to do that to Russia will be justifiably mocked.

    506:

    In the US, Russian disinfo tactics may be more effective. Even so, I still have the icky feeling that a lot of the Discourse around them is a way of avoiding honest conversation about domestic malefactors of great wealth, who are using the same techniques in service of a similar agenda. (Cambridge Analytica was funded by an American hedge fund billionaire family, not the Kremlin.)

    507:

    It comes back to my "Why do you want to do that?" issue. Northern Europe's winter greens are needed primarily for fibre and vitamins C and K, with everything else secondary. How do vitamins C and K do under such conditions?

    Growing protein- or calorie-heavy crops in near-deserts is a completely different matter.

    509:

    Simon Farnsworth @ 485: ...our economic system encourages us to have a small number of entities filling a given role, which become too big to fail.

    This is a huge over-simplification of a complicated problem.

    The place to start here is Ronald Coase's paper The Nature of the Firm, where he asks the surprisingly simple question: why do companies exist? After all, in a free market system you could do all the same things with everyone being their own company, owning their own equipment, making deals for inputs and selling their outputs. Couldn't you?

    Of course that doesn't work: imagine trying to build cars with every worker buying a partly completed car, screwing a few extra components in, and selling the result on to the next person. Big factories with production lines exist for a reason: frictional costs. The overhead of such a system would vastly exceed the value of its production. Hence we have companies who own huge factories with long production lines and thousands of employees working on them.

    But companies have their own costs, as anyone in a big company can attest. Coordination costs rise, senior managers become information bottlenecks, middle managers engage in empire building, and generally people find their incentives don't line up with the good of the organisation. The bigger the company, the worse this gets.

    So you have a balance between economies of scale and diseconomies of scale. In some industries (e.g. light engineering ) the balance favours towards smaller companies with narrow specialities and agile marketing. In other industries, like car making and Internet search, you get a small number of giant companies.

    The balance between economies and diseconomies of scale applies regardless of the economic system you are working in. Capitalism happens to be particularly good at pushing companies to optimise for the balance between the two, but one of the things that killed the USSR was that it's centralised system created massive diseconomies of scale in every part of the economy that wasn't naturally the size of the Russian Empire.

    ...yet our system is also set up to encourage entities to grow to the point where we can't just put them out of business for being sub-standard, allowing them to break the rules with relative impunity

    So yes, there is the problem of what to do with industries where the optimum company size is Very Very Large. We don't currently have a good solution, but the "regulated monopoly" looks like the least bad one yet invented. In theory it draws a clear line between the people who make and enforce the rules and the people who are supposed to be working under them, allowing the companies flexibility they need to operate while still enabling democratic oversight of their operations. In theory.

    Of course in practice you have the problem of regulatory capture, where the notional regulator starts to behave more like the government lobbying branch of the industry it is supposed to be regulating. Nobody has yet figured out how to stop this, although sunshine laws and public pressure groups do seem to help. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

    A lot of people, looking at this problem, say "obviously the problem is capitalism, so get rid of that and you solve the problem". Unfortunately they never seen to propose any kind of replacement system beyond a vague handwave at words like "democracy" and "commune". But if democracy worked that well, regulatory capture wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

    510:

    I wonder if that's Victorian reporting bias preferring to talk about forms of clothing to avoid having to talk about them having nothing on at all, which tended to happen a lot if the mine was warm. The impression I get is that concerns of that type tended to focus not so much on the women, who did it because they were just irretrievably awful and only fit to be excoriated, but on the poor little helpless innocent kiddies who had no option but to be forced into it.

    Really, of course, there were several aspects to it. One point that comes to light in accident reports on occasions is that children were given tasks that they weren't physically up to; they would do them badly because they weren't strong enough, or fall asleep from exhaustion and not do them at all, and then something went horribly wrong because the things weren't being done as they should. It also made for having a very inefficient workforce because by the time someone got to adulthood their working life would be half over already, and even as adults they would be malnourished and likely partially disabled as well. Then with the beginnings of labour power, the men began to object to having women and children doing things for less money instead of giving the work to the men at mens' wages. These and other matters all contributed to the pressure for some change in practices, and it wasn't just the mines but the factories as well, where people weren't working in conditions that prompted them to take their clothes off.

    511:

    492 - The same in parts of Scotland; duallies all round or single fronts and duallie rears.

    497 - So Trumpolini was a sock puppet; the Ruzzians put him in?

    500 - I didn't actually say all of that; I did imply that I thought that 2 deep ocean salvage tugs weren't enough to handle an entire table berg but that's all.

    504 - Well, sure the pantograph (or 3 rail) would make the e-car bit lighter than vast numbers of accumulators, but you'd make the road a lot heavier, and effectively prohibit them from overtaking...

    512:

    "Or tele-operators."

    Already going that way. To give a brief sketch, underground coal mining these days is all about finding seams that are uniform for significant distances, setting up some very big machines and then letting them charge ahead ripping out coal at a rate of knots. There is labour involved in setting it all up, but when it's actually going there's little point in trying to monitor it by actually being down there and looking at it, especially when you can't see your hand in front of your face for coal dust. You can do better by using instrumentation, and of course once you start doing that it doesn't matter where your chair is. So there are a lot fewer people underground now than there used to be. The main use for labour is in the peripheral functions rather than the actual coal-getting.

    513:

    “what happens when Lovecraftian horror meets Regency romance.”

    2009’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies proved the undead mashup concept works as a pedagogical device to make even Americans voluntarily read Jane Austen, since the comic was largely a straightforward graphic presentation of the novel with zombies thrown in. The movie not so much. But any effort to make the public better aware and informed about history is worth the effort, hopefully you might include some of your distinctive economic analysis as well. Picketty remarked extensively on the world of Jane Austen as an example of how the rentier society we’re becoming has existed before, and it wasn’t pretty. Looking forward to Sense and Sensibility and Cthulhu, sounds like a fun read.

    514:

    David L
    Simple answer: Stick with one of these, actually!.JPG) .. there you go.

    515:

    ...but if they can't overtake then the road can be a lot narrower, and to increase capacity you'd want to join a lot of them up nose to tail so they didn't all have to keep their own individual braking distances etc, and then you don't need individual drivers, you can just have one driver up front and all the other vehicles do is follow...

    516:

    A lot of people, looking at this problem, say "obviously the problem is capitalism, so get rid of that and you solve the problem". Unfortunately they never seen to propose any kind of replacement system beyond a vague handwave at words like "democracy" and "commune". But if democracy worked that well, regulatory capture wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

    I've been thinking about that a little. Obviously capitalism is the problem, but the obvious solution involves most people dying, so willfully doing that is off my table.

    Anyway, getting back to Moz' comment (298) about one of the problems with assuming all politicians are lying is that you're practicing learned helplessness, I think one of the big problems with capitalism is that most of us practice learned helplessness in the face of greed at many levels.

    If I could wave a magic wand and discipline everyone's greed, a lot of the problems we face would be ameliorated. Obviously I can't do that, of course. But it may be worth separating out the mechanistic working of capitalism from the more problematic behavioral and cultural problems that go with it, like pervasive greed and lying. I have no idea if it will make any of these problems more tractable, but so far we haven't come up with a decent, non-capitalist way of feeding billions of people per year either. So...

    517:

    I wonder if that's Victorian reporting bias preferring to talk about forms of clothing to avoid having to talk about them having nothing on at all, which tended to happen a lot if the mine was warm. The impression I get is that concerns of that type tended to focus not so much on the women, who did it because they were just irretrievably awful and only fit to be excoriated, but on the poor little helpless innocent kiddies who had no option but to be forced into it.

    Ahem: "won't somebody think of the children?" has been the go-to weapon of reactionary culture warriors since the year dot. You can see it embedded in the historic anti-semitic Blood Libel ("the evil Jews are kidnapping Christian children and draining their blood to bake their matzo with!") and you can see it right now with the TERFs trying to shut down the Mermaids charity and Tavistock clinic for treating under-18 trans people (note that Gillick Competence, the legal test for whether someone is fit to make decisions bearing on sexual health like contraception and abortion, is a movable feast but usually cuts in somewhere between 12 and 16 depending on the individual).

    Back in 1805 it was normal for women and children to be aboard Royal Navy warships in battle -- they helped carry powder and shot and helped with the wounded. The Admiralty banned the practice when they realized how many war widowers they were paying pensions for (aided by the RN having achieved total global maritime supremacy at that point, and keeping it for the next century).

    There was a wave of feminist thought in the late 18th century that gave rise to stuff like Mary Wolestonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" and early gains during the French revolution. It was followed by a vicious crackdown on womens' rights, both in France (led by Napoleon, who was a male chauvanist asshole) and in the UK after Waterloo. Women in 1815 owned businesses in England: by 1850 almost the only business they were allowed to transact was horizontal. (Trivial exception for upper- or middle-class spinsters who could sometimes eke out a living as a governess for upper class families. But teaching girls in schools wasn't a thing at that time: girls were educated at home or not at all.) You can think of the erosion of womens' rights in England from 1815-1850 as proceeding a lot like it did when the Taliban rolled back into Kabul last year, only much slower and without the face-veils.

    Anyway, the 1841 moral panic over naked! women! working! in! coal! mines! should be seen in this light as a panic about women working, and the nudity was an excuse to ban it. Like the moral panic over gender-neutral public toilets today, it serves a badly-articulated political agenda and that agenda is entirely conservative and reactionary in aim.

    518:

    513 - I think there is already a book in that slot titled "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters".

    515 - Not convinced, because roads have a width usually based on the dynamic loading gauge of the largest vehicles using them, like 2.6m wide (static) refrigerated bodies.

    519:

    Perhaps the answer to regulatory capture is... nationalization. I mean, if a company is huge because there's a huge demand, nationalize it... and then you also have control over the quantity of middle managers, many of whom were promoted, but not doing more than they were before....

    520:

    Nationalization got the UK such bloated monstrosities as British Airways (what on earth was the government running a commercial airline for?), British Leyland (say no more), and British Aerospace (okay, that latter could be justified in the 1960s/1970s because modern jets were too damned expensive for any one British aircraft company to compete at -- forced merger and coordination by the Air Ministry made some kind of sense, at least before the costs mushroomed beyond the UK's capacity entirely and required either a consortium like Panavia or Airbus or a superpower like the USA).

    Where nationalization makes sense is for infrastructure (which shouldn't be run as a profit centre in the first place) and rivalrous monopoly suppliers. There's no reason to have competing electricity grids or gas pipeline or railway networks or road networks or private universal-service postal services. Arguably once you've nationalized those natural monopolies there's little reason not to also include the vertical segments that feed into them -- train operators, power stations.

    We get into hazy territory when it comes to stuff like the phone system. Prior to the 1960s that was definitely a natural monopoly, but once the modern microelectronics revolution spun up a central monopolistic provider was too inflexible to keep up. Arguably we're heading back to a natural monopoly situation -- at least for cables in the ground (the UK has two rival cable networks: the OpenReach network -- formerly part of British Telecom, that's their fibres-in-the-ground arm -- and Virgin, a Branson-branded horrorshow that emerged when Telewest and NTL's cable TV networks coalesced).

    But there are clearly some things that shouldn't be nationalized (unions, retail banking, shops, publishing, theaters/cinemas, restaurants ... the list is endless but mostly about discretionary individual spending rather than collective goods), and other activities that should (cough, healthcare -- if only to keep the profit motive the hell away from the sick and dying -- also Police, courts, prisons -- absolutely no private let alone for-profit prisons should be allowed -- highways, ambulance and fire services): stuff where there is universal service is required and profit-taking is inimical to the health of the nation.

    521:

    Agreed on most of that, but I do think telecom should be. Dozens of towers here, with many, many receivers for cell, and the backbone itself....

    And - given I was working for Ameritech, a Baby Bell, in '96 when the US deregulated - that was a load of bs, and there's tiny players, and most of the rest have returned to monopolies, because capitalism says "buy your competitors". Of course, there's all the venues (rural areas, parts or all of cities, where there IS NO CHOICE in the US.

    522:

    To be fair, those three examples WERE regarded as infrastructure when they were sort-of nationalised - and is why they were - it's only in hindsight that we know the decisions were totally wrong. That is, of course, no excuse for the government turning them into subsidised, government-backed monopolies, which have all the faults of state-run businesses and private monopolies, combined.

    523:

    Charlie @ 517
    Indeed ... it was not until the "Great Reform Act of 1832, that women were specifically disenfranchised.
    The slow crawl back didn't start until the various Women's Property Acts & still is not finished.

    524:

    One fun part of privatising electricity retail in Victoria (the Australian state, not the British Queen) was the plethora of dodgy door to door salespeople who sprang up. They DGAF what the facts were, they were paid commission and by god they were going to get it. We had one chap tell us that the company he sold would deliver much higher quality electricity through their own poles and wires. I said "pop in once the wires are installed and I'll sign up".

    The frustrating thing was that all they needed was the unique meter number so create a new account. So we kept getting confirmation of our new sign-ups with random retailers, in names we'd never heard of. After a while I took to ringing whoever it was and saying "we've never heard of this person but we're happy to have them pay for our electricity" and mostly we were immediately un-flipped back to our original account. Except the last one... they said they'd confirm with the new customer and get back to us, but never did. So we didn't pay for electricity for ~5 months (and then we moved out).

    525:

    Who are these perfectly ethical government employees who run such entities.

    All systems have failure modes. You're just changing from one you don't like to one you do.

    526:

    And - given I was working for Ameritech, a Baby Bell, in '96 when the US deregulated

    Yes. It created some big messes. But the previous setup was also a big mess.

    96 was a very long time ago in terms of a technology industry. A very long time.

    527:

    Actually, I believe it was Doubtful Sound, not Milford Sounds. Specifically, transport the fresh water from the Manapouri Power station tailrace.

    528:

    “For aircraft, I would assume that every crash that today results in a fireball or fire engine use would result in an explosion.”

    A little while ago I heard a talk by a guy from the Compressed Gas Association who’s working on updating codes for industrial and commercial hydrogen handling.

    Indoor use of hydrogen is horribly dangerous because of the range of explosive ratios. But outside is a different story. It’s really hard to make a big bang with hydrogen because any leaks go immediately up up and away. (Unlike methane which being heavier than air can pool and form an accidental fuel air explosive.)

    The big problem is the jets of invisible flame.

    529:

    Texas in the US did it right. Sort of. The consumer process for picking a provider works. You don't get slammed. There is verification. And you get to pick from a variety of companies generating power. Green, wind, solar, solar with gas backup, etc...

    But where they totally blew it (in the cause of free markets) is little regulation so plants can be run with little or no long term planning and when things go bad, the consumer gets to pay for the mess. Not the generating company. As has happened twice now. Plus they export their mistakes. Nat gas customers in Minnesota will be paying for the last Texas mess for a while.

    And after each "bad" thing the state says they will fix it. Then don't.

    530:

    Methane is a valid lifting gas, see discussions on aerostats passim.

    531:

    Well most likely the easiest way to concentrate CO2 is to run a CO2 scrubber in reverse, which is a little like what Charlie said but with a heat/cold cycle or a high/low pressure cycle and a material that absorbs/releases CO2 in the same conditions. Medical oxygen concentrators (used for oxygen therapy) work the same way. The point is they'd run from the same PV used to power the grow-lighting and whatever heating or cooling is needed during the night or day, depending on the plants and the local climate conditions.

    532:

    "But it may be worth separating out the mechanistic working of capitalism from the more problematic behavioral and cultural problems that go with it, like pervasive greed and lying."

    Greed and lying aren't limited to Capitalism. They also affect communism, feudalism, etc., any political system really which involves a "bigger ape."

    533:

    Currently the easiest way to get CO2 is as a byproduct of air liquification. If you look at prices of industrial gases CO2 is often ridiculously cheap, nitrogen slightly less so and then you get into "trace gases" where price starts to matter - argon, for example, is an important gas but they have to grind through a lot of "bullshit gas" to get it.

    534:

    Victoria and NSW both got cleaned up after a while, regulators actually responded to the problems and it works fairly well now.

    But it's an area that is complex both legally and technologically, and especially the latter is developing at a very quick pace when it comes to legislative responses. Right now it's not economic for almost anyone in urban areas to go off grid, but that is going to change within the next five years. Any grid without a critical mass of subscribes can easily become uneconomic. Thee's a counter-force though, microgrids are technologically mature but almost entirely missing from the legislation (including some regulations - not only is it illegal for me to sell electricity to my neighbour, there's no regulation describing such a connection).

    My expectation is that we're going to see a fight between mandatory supply charges, voluntary disconnections, and the cost of operating the thing. Much as we've seen with water already (technically it's a 'supply is available' charge). Both NSW and VIC dropped their consumption charges and increased their connection charges during the droughts when water consumption dropped dramatically (... because they asked us to). My last water bill was $20 of consumption charges and $180 of fixed charges for the quarter (admittedly that's ~80l/day/person where the 'major drought' targets are typically around 150l/day/person... but it's up from 50l/day/person during the drought, and down from ~300l/d/p when the house was rented out).

    536:

    The problem isn't the universality of such things, but the outcomes when they are specifically selected for and rewarded in a way that excludes other behaviours. I agree that Capitalism doesn't do it the wrong way intrinsically, but the way that we structure certain relations around market-oriented ideas frequently does. The devil is in the implementation details. Both nationalisation and privatisation provide fresh opportunities to implement the right balances and controls, the problem is when the people doing it believe that one process or the other delivers balances and controls intrinsically. To me, a mixed model is probably always better, depending on the specifics, and to pro-market people that makes me a socialist, but probably not vice versa because my version of a mixed model is about using whatever mechanisms are available to ensure the delivery of services is done well for the benefit of consumers, or the population at large, or "society" as a whole rather than the value to investors and shareholders.

    538:

    Yeah, those overweight EVs. I mean Tesla model 3 dual motor @ 4065lb versus the svelte BMW series 3 sedan @ 4145lb, terrible. Oh, wait, the weights are the other way round.

    539:
    The place to start here is Ronald Coase's paper The Nature of the Firm, where he asks the surprisingly simple question: why do companies exist?

    TL;DR: Companies exist to insert a bit of planned economy in a market economy.

    That's my takeaway, at least.

    540:

    Charlie @ 520: [on the phone system] Arguably we're heading back to a natural monopoly situation -- at least for cables in the ground (the UK has two rival cable networks: the OpenReach network -- formerly part of British Telecom, that's their fibres-in-the-ground arm -- and Virgin, a Branson-branded horrorshow that emerged when Telewest and NTL's cable TV networks coalesced).

    Actually we seem to be headed in the opposite direction. My town is currently having fibre laid by both OpenReach and a new outfit called Toob (thats gonna date fast). And I came across a third company called CityFibre doing the same even though we are not on their maps for a planned roll-out. So that is at least 3 lots of new fibre-to-the-home networks going in the ground right now.

    Interestingly, the thing that makes this practical seems to be access to the OpenReach cable ducts; Toob are installing their own street cabinets for the final connections, and in some cases they are putting up poles, but almost all this plant is next to pre-existing BT manhole covers. They are digging up a few bits of pavement, but most of the work seems to involve pulling lines through the existing ducts. This is because OffCom have mandated that OpenReach lease out space in their cable ducts to rivals.

    However I do agree with you about the barfulous excrescence of Virgin Media. I was with them once, and never again. Judging by the state of their street furniture their network is being "managed for value" (i.e. run down while extracting as much money as possible before abandoning it). If you pay attention while walking around you may be able to judge this for yourself. When you see a bit of telecom street furniture, take a look at the nearest manhole cover. If it says "CATV" that stands for "Cable Access TeleVision", which means the 1990s cable TV network that Virgin runs on. If it says "Post Office", "BT" or "GPO" then it belongs to OpenReach. Around here all the OpenReach street furniture is shiny, new and well maintained, while the Virgin stuff is old, scruffy and unmaintained; some even have doors hanging open.

    This also ties in with that other thread here about regulated monpolies. Back in the 90s and early 2000s OfCom was a classic example of regulatory capture; they supported BT and refused to enable competition or provide much in the way of price controls, which meant that the UK had expensive telephones and really crappy Internet. But then things changed. I regret I wasn't paying enough attention at the time, but BT got split into OpenReach and the (still existing) consumer arm, and OfCom acquired some teeth. As a result we now have broadband access that varies from tolerable to good over 99% of the population, and its about to get much better.

    541:

    Sure, there's a lot more going on than just the fact that we allow entities to grow to the point where they're too big to fail.

    But the underlying issue in capitalism is that the feedback mechanism for "you are doing the wrong thing" is loss of money and ultimately bankruptcy. It breaks down with entities that are too big to fail because any entity that becomes too big to fail is now outside the scope of capitalism's feedback mechanism - we will do whatever it takes to stop that entity failing.

    This is separate to the engineering and physics (ratio of volume to surface area, for example) concerns that also drive us to scale up. And it doesn't affect all large businesses; Apple is 1000x the market size of Drax, but we have no problem letting Apple fail if it does the wrong thing consistently (since, while it's huge, it's not too big to fail - we can ride out the disruption caused by Apple refusing to serve the market), while Drax has found an enviable place where it's too big to be allowed to just fail (because if it does so, UK electricity supply goes offline).

    So the solution is not simple - Apple versus Drax is a clear sign that it's not mere size that's the problem - because it comes down to the relative costs of permitting a company to fail versus permitting it to break the rules. The underlying issue is that in attempting to avoid known failure cases, it's possible for an entity to reach a point where the feedback mechanisms that are meant to prevent bad outcomes no longer apply to it. Regulatory capture is one example of this - the regulator is supposed to be a feedback mechanism preventing bad outcomes, but becomes a protective shield for the entity.

    One of the issues with this particular problem is that it's easy to see the problem after it happens, and it's easy to verify that a solution to a given instance of the problem is workable but it's very hard to come up with a workable solution to a given instance of the problem.

    Fundamentally, though, it's about escaping from the control mechanism that stops you becoming a problem for society - Drax has managed this, Google Search appears to have managed this, there are government entities that claim that Facebook + WhatsApp have managed this - without there being a new mechanism in place to control you.

    542:

    Of course in practice you have the problem of regulatory capture, where the notional regulator starts to behave more like the government lobbying branch of the industry it is supposed to be regulating.

    i think regulatory capture of individual regulators would be less of a problem if regulatory capture of the legislative bodies responsible for setting them up in the first place could be avoided

    but that ship seems to have sailed

    543:

    I was paying attention to BT's regulation in the 1990s and early 2000s. Oftel (not Ofcom) was full of traditional telco backgrounds, who shared the same assumptions as BT about what was and was not "reasonable". Oftel was fully captured by BT as a result.

    When the government merged 5 regulators (including Oftel) together to create Ofcom in 2003, Ofcom/BT relations turned into a battleground. The telco side, including former Oftel people within Ofcom, took it as read that separating out physical infrastructure from wholesale services was inherently a bad idea; the radio side of Ofcom wanted this justified, since their experience was that having physical infrastructure like towers owned by one company (like Arqiva today) that leases out space on those towers to the user-visible companies (like Classic FM today) worked beautifully.

    Within Ofcom, the radio side got its desires met - BT was ordered to split out the physical infrastructure into Openreach, and did so. But BT weren't stupid - they also put some of the traditional telco network that BT owned into Openreach, and ensured that Openreach thus had management from the traditional telco side (the WLR family of products is the legacy of this). As a result, Openreach was set up to push back against things that would transfer value from BT to other operators.

    This did not satisfy Ofcom, since it meant that Openreach continued to push back against being just a steward of "dumb pipes" at reasonable, because significant parts of Openreach's own revenue depended on being able to sell value-added services on the WLR products. As these value-added services depended on landlines attached to equipment in the exchange, Openreach was set up to try and keep you using an exchange terminated copper pair landline, rather than moving off the landline completely; various oddities existed, like FVA + FTTP data being comparable in price to FTTP data without the FVA side, to encourage you to stick to landlines that could provide value-added services.

    Accounting-wise, Openreach was as opaque as it could be on the relative costs and profits of the physical infrastructure versus telephony value-added services, making it hard for the regulator to act as it was meant to, since its major power is fines, but it was hard for Ofcom to assess the legally permissible fine level, since the bookkeeping for Openreach allowed BT to transfer revenue accounting between Openreach, BT Wholesale and BT Retail as needed to keep the fines down.

    We got stuck here for a good ten years, since Ofcom had reached the limits of what it could do within the law, and while it kept pushing on BT, it had no power to force more change. Our break (as consumers) came when BT bought EE, partly using revenue from Openreach, and declared an intention to do what other telcos were planning at the time - integrating mobile and landline voice services.

    Ofcom was then able to force BT to separate out the remaining telephony parts of Openreach (WLR products covering ISDN and PSTN) from the infrastructure side within Openreach's accounts, on the basis that to actually do the declared thing and integrate mobile and landline voice, BT would need to have full control of the telephony parts it had pushed into Openreach, and would not be able to offer equivalent control to Hutchison 3G, Vodafone Group and Telefonica (causing competition issues in the mobile space).

    This puts us into the position we're in today: because of the EE acquisition, Openreach is effectively barred from profiting from telephony value-added services (if Openreach does profit from telephony as opposed to infrastructure, Ofcom has the power to force BT to sell EE, whereas before the acquisition it could merely assess fines that BT could account for in advance and adjust revenue splits to minimise). And we're getting better outcomes as a result, since Openreach is now laser-focused on infrastructure, not being distracted by maintaining telephony revenue opportunities for BT.

    It was a very long haul from Oftel's full regulatory capture, to today's setup - it took 15 years of hard slog, and a big mistake by BT to get here.

    544:

    The problem occurs as it escapes the vehicle - it will mix with air as it rises, pretty well all ratios will burn and most will detonate, and hydrogen/air mixtures are set off by incredibly small sparks and low levels of heat. There are a LOT of such things in a crashed vehicle, which is why even petrol leaks often burn (and it's VASTLY more difficult to ignite).

    If that speaker told you that methane is denser than air (it's half the density), you should disregard everything else he said.

    545:

    My car weighs under 2,000 pounds and is more functional than either of those. I have some suspicions that the recent rapid increases in petrol-fueled vehicle weights were to prepare people for EVs - there doesn't seem to be another mechanical reason.

    546:

    I can't speak for the accuracy of this, but the proportion of inclidents that were classified as explosions (and in the 'open air') is striking.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_safety

    547:

    Crash safety, both perceived and real, is the main reason for car weights spiralling. Cars have got bigger in dimensions too, which adds weight, all else being equal. If you see a car designed in the '80's now, it looks tiny, let alone those from earlier decades. SUV's have skewed peoples sense of how big a car should be, so even so called small cars have got enormous. Compare a BMW Mini with the original Issigonis design. People also expect to survive big crashes now, so safety standards need big roof pillars and heavy side impact bars in doors to pass. Perception is that big cars survive crashes better than small ones. An illusion, but that's the way lots of people think.

    548:

    My suspicion is that there was also a soft lock in angle that ratchets the sizes up too.

    Teenager with few possessions learns in a small car. Many people buy the car they learned in because it's familiar.

    Then they accumulate stuff, family etc. and the manufacturer wants to sell them something familiar only bigger so the next model is scaled up slightly.

    10 years later the sub compact has been replaced by a small family car with the same name, and a new small car is introduced at the bottom of the range.

    549:

    If you look at prices of industrial gases CO2 is often ridiculously cheap,

    To the point that most college dairies and similar sell solid CO2 to pack your ice cream and take it back home after a college visit. It is cheaper than the ice cream. A lot cheaper.

    Just put it in the trunk, not in the back seat.

    550:

    Er, "Cat V" is short for "Category 5 fibre".

    551:

    Simon Farnsworth @ 543: I was paying attention to BT's regulation in the 1990s and early 2000s.

    Thanks, that was interesting and informative. And also a good case study.

    552:

    If you see a car designed in the '80's now, it looks tiny, let alone those from earlier decades.

    Obviously if true then things varied a LOT by global area.

    In the US from WWII up into about 1980 cars just got huge. Watch any old TV show or movie from the 70s and you'll see the road covered by these land yachts. We (the US) have been shrinking ever since with the occasional Hummer or similar to be the edge case.

    Pickups and SUV being the exception.

    But for sedans, most are much smaller here that in decades past.

    553:

    I don't want to make too much of this, but I was referring to the past decade (I said 'recent').

    554:

    Re: Vertical farming

    Haven't read all the comments since I last logged on but did notice there were a couple about vertical farming.

    First off - I am not proposing this as a one-size-fits-all solution.

    Second - there's going to be a real-world large scale experiment in Dubai. Not thrilled that the story emphasizes lettuce/greens as the crop but - Heh! you gotta start somewhere. [Article is from the World Economic Forum site.]

    https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/05/vertical-farming-future-of-agriculture/

    Third - crop rotation - haven't looked for/seen any articles yet on whether vertical farms have tried [vertical] crop rotation, i.e., different crop by floor by temp, light, moisture requirements, but there's no reason that I can think of for not doing so. Put the high temp crops on the higher floors and the lower temp crops in the basement levels. Maybe also rotate by season - higher temp crops in warmer months, cooler crops in colder months, etc. No idea whether anyone (apart from The Martian) has tried growing potatoes indoors in the cold but this is a high nutrient food crop that's popular worldwide. (Also mushrooms - yum!)

    Fourth - more/multiple crop yields per year per 'acre'. We're running out of arable land plus since I doubt most people would like to give up their own patch of land, we're going to have to make do with (multipurpose) whatever land we can access. And if the food production is going to be indoors, the land/soil doesn't have to be (very expensively - time and money-wise) decontaminated first.

    Fifth - transportation costs - fossil fuel use for transport of goods internationally and within nation is huge but usually gets buried (not reported as such) in most reports!

    Sixth - reliability of transportation - haven't looked for the stats/numbers but my impression is that GW/CC is going to make overseas/marine transport much riskier/unreliable in the future.

    Seventh - storage - large quantities of exported/imported produce takes up a lot of space (and energy resources) everywhere. This is where the storage facilities owners could save their investments by renovating their facilities to 'vertical' indoor farming.

    Eighth - less wastage - from the few examples that I've seen, it seems that indoor farmed plants have smaller roots, smaller/shorter stems with more fruit per stem (e.g., vine tomatoes) which suggests that there's less 'garbage' overall. Not sure about the leaves - whether they're bigger, smaller or same size. But having all of this processed in the same area probably makes it a lot easier to recycle the residue.

    Etc. - the above is top-of-mind and there are probably many more reasons for.

    My overall feeling is that we need to look at this (domestic food production/security) as a Rube-Goldberg-meets-the-real-world exercise - it's messy, it's got all sorts of weird components, some/many of the components and connections aren't obvious, and it's probably more likely to be solved by a bunch of 5th graders than the current crop of pols or even ag scientists.

    Feel free to critique - looking forward to learning more about this topic from various perspectives. Thanks!

    555:

    "In the US from WWII up into about 1980 cars just got huge. Watch any old TV show or movie from the 70s and you'll see the road covered by these land yachts."

    Yes, my perspective is very European. You'd only very occasional see an American land yacht here, back then. They just weren't sold in to this market. Most of them were shipped over by Americans living here, many in the services and sold when they returned, or moved to their next posting.

    556:

    Simon Farnsworth @ 543: I was paying attention to BT's regulation in the 1990s and early 2000s.

    Thanks, that was interesting and informative. And also a good case study.

    557:

    To solve regulatory capture I regularly recommend that anyone involved with regulating an industry be forbidden from receiving ANY emolument from that industry, including after they have retired from being involved with the regulation. You'd need to pay the regulators more to get quality people, but you'd get MUCH enhanced regulation.

    558:

    Um. "Cat V" vs CATV. One of these things are not both the same.

    "Category 5 fibre" would be the special kind of fibre that uses twisted pairs of copper wires instead of silica, in which the photons travel in the space between the copper elements, following the Poynting vector.

    559:

    I once saw a land yacht that had failed to negotiate a bend in a Cornish road, getting totally jammed at three points. As there was already someone advising him, I reversed half a mile, turned round and took another route. We occasionally saw one in East Anglia (Lakenheath), but the roads there are wide and straight (well, relatively); God alone knows where they parked them, except at their home base. There were reasons they weren't sold here :-)

    560:

    Category 5 is usually written as Cat-5 not Cat-V to distinguish it CATV (cable TV.) And even at the lower end nobody wants Cat-5 (100 megabits) anymore. They want a bare minimum of Cat-5e (1 gig) or Cat-6.

    561:

    Good summary.

    It is also why it's still near impossible to get a residential fibre connection in central London - none of the players want residential plans interfering with their lucrative commmercial plans, so all the inner city apartment owners are stuck with vdsl, 4G or microwave.

    562:

    When they have to start replacing CO and area DSL gear they will likely switch to fiber.

    Lower Manhattan and other places after Hurricane Sandy flooded all those underground copper cable systems. So if they had to rip them out ....

    563:

    Troutwaxer @ 560:

    Category 5 is usually written as Cat-5 not Cat-V to distinguish it CATV (cable TV.) And even at the lower end nobody wants Cat-5 (100 megabits) anymore. They want a bare minimum of Cat-5e (1 gig) or Cat-6.

    CATV doesn't actually mean "cable" TV, it's an abbreviation for Community Antenna TV ... the cable-TV part came later.

    564:

    In the US from WWII up into about 1980 cars just got huge. Watch any old TV show or movie from the 70s and you'll see the road covered by these land yachts. We (the US) have been shrinking ever since with the occasional Hummer or similar to be the edge case.

    Edge case my (redacted). SUVs in the 1990s took over from the land yachts up to the 1970s. The OPEC gas shocks produced a temporary reduction in car size in the 1980s and early 1990s in the US. Then the car companies got SUVs treated as trucks under gas mileage regulations, and grew those as urban assault vehicles car-replacements that were "safer" than the compacts they replaced. Remember the Ford Exploder? They're not safe if driven at high speed. While big SUVs have their place (mostly where big families have to haul lots of kids and lots of stuff), often they're an expensive excuse for a style of driving I call "get out of my way or I'll kill you," which is as poorly thought out as it sounds.

    So yes, big trucks took over from the re-christened "pimpmobiles" of the 1970s, and here we are, still a stupid as ever about supersizing shit. It was amusing a few months ago to be at the gas station (with my crossover) and listen to a big truck dude behind me laughing in disbelief at filling up his behemoth for well over $100.

    While I'd hope more people would go electric, and Tesla owners have taken over the reckless driver crown from the beamer owners, but at the same time, MAGAts and their camp followers are still buying authoritarian-scaled overcompensation vehicles, Oh well.

    And if you really want to read a rant, get my opinion about how well most SUVs do the job they were purportedly designed for, which was hauling a lot of people to remote job sites over crappy roads. But I'll bet you can guess the answer to that one already.

    565:

    Perception is that big cars survive crashes better than small ones. An illusion, but that's the way lots of people think.

    With SUVs while they aren't safer they make small cars less safe, as passengers in a small car colliding with an SUV is more likely to have injuries than passengers of the SUV. Small car on small car and SUV on SUV are roughly the same as the SUV in the SUV on small car crash.

    So getting an SUV 'for safety' is a logical decision if there are many SUVs around you, as it means you don't face the small car penalty when SUVs are common.

    I don't know if large cars are like SUVs in this respect.

    566:

    A miniscule sliver of good news Airlander is GO! ... Here's hoping it all works out, shall we?

    567:

    An illuminating window on Putin - Warning, it's from "The Atlantic" - open in "Incognito" or use a browser that sidesteps paywalls 7 similar.

    568:

    “The [UK] government is committed to strong fiscal discipline and to debt falling as a percentage of GDP over the medium term. Further details will be set out in a medium term fiscal plan shortly, alongside a forecast by the independent OBR.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/06/bank-of-england-confirms-pension-funds-almost-collapsed-amid-market-meltdown

    huh? WTF? it took me three reads to realize they were serious when they said this... this...!

    while I am far from expert on UK economy and government, to my amateur eyes it obvious a twelve kilo sack of nonsense

    only if I was utterly blind with stupidity could "strong fiscal discipline" and "UKPM's plan" be assembled into the same sentence...

    569:

    Aberdeen is being provided with wholesale full Fibre by CityFibre. I get my retail FTTP 200/200Mbps from Vodafone on the CityFibre infrastructure. They had to trench in the pavements everywhere to lay their own ducting with an access in front of every home. And new cabinets on every street.

    570:

    Indeed, but they do mean it. What they mean by this is there will more cuts in public spending, and then when services no longer work they can be done away with or sold off. This is part of their plan.

    571:

    IIRC there's evidence that chassis rail designed are less safe for the occupants but more dangerous to others than unibody designs, all else being equal.

    But in many ways that just adds to the arms race... what you want is a heavier vehicle with higher off the ground chassis rails than the thing you drive into. The obvious answer is one of those giant military off road trucks that have metre-high wheels and loft the chassis rails to the top of the wheels. You don't even need the missile they're designed to carry to wipe out hundreds of people (while dropping your kids off at school, presumably). Obviously they get many gallons to the mile driven.

    While I think of it, do you USAians say "17/64ths mpg" in cases like that, or do you use decimals?

    572:

    do you USAians say "17/64ths mpg" - It'll be worse than that because they use USian gallons which are way smaller than real Imperial gallons.

    573:

    Liv Struss gives us "when the going gets Truss, the Truss gets going". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VVuvTgpS3o

    Meanwhile Teh Guard points out that if nothing else she's often confidently wrong.

    In a remarkably short period, the prime minister has established a record of saying things with confidence that turn out to be wrong

    Also note the absence of "later" in "that turn out to be wrong".

    574:

    Oh wow, blast from the past -- "Damn the dam", a protest song written about the Lake Manpouri project, jumped straight into my head: Damn the dam cried the fantail as he flew into, as he flew into the sky To give power to the people all this beauty has to die...

    575:

    Canadian, but old enough to remember when imperial was used for gas sale & mileage1.

    It was always [integer] miles per gallon. Now it's apparently litres per 100 kilometres.

    1 Indeed, I remember after the 1979 budget of the short-lived PC government, the price of gas rose to the scandalously high price of $CDN 0.36 per litre in my town.

    Checking the Bank of Canada's own inflation calculator, that price in 2022 would be $CDN 1.32. Which is almost identical to the current price of gas.

    576:

    Petrol prices in the US are just astounding -- I drive a (sort of) ordinary 12 year old sedan and it has cost me more than $100 to fill up for some time now, albeit with premium petrol. I remember being in Florida late in the 20th century and staying with a friend; she wanted to fill up her minivan and asked me to throw in some money as board. She filled it up and then told me it was $20 -- I was so obviously shocked at the price she had to ask me if it was too much.

    577:

    While I think of it, do you USAians say "17/64ths mpg" in cases like that, or do you use decimals?

    I'll save Robert the trouble and point out I'm the Yank, he's the cool guy from BC up north.

    578:

    Toby @ 570
    Straight out of "Britannia Unhinged" in fact ....

    NecroMoz ...
    Like my old Land_Rover, you mean? ...

    579:

    Nah, too small, too low. I was thinking more like the appropriately named Oshkosh "Striker" but more along the lines of working your way up through their military range, starting with the JLTV with the weird sales motto "Beyond requirements. Beyond expectations" then escalating as necessary until you're cruising along in a Hemtt ("get there or die trying")

    They even make a version with a long range fuel tank - you could drive the kids to school and home again without refuelling!

    580:

    The coincidence of the "oshkosh" brand being used both by overpriced baby accessories and overpriced baby toys makes me laugh. "the price of prams has got out of control, quarter of a million dollars for the base model now".

    581:

    And just closing the circle: the old cable TV networks (at least here) run thin coax, very much like the old 10base2 network cable, which with DOCSIS 3.0 gives up to 1Gbps, apparently up to 10Gbps with DOCSIS 3.1 or 4.0. This forms part of the Hybrid-Fibre-Coax model, which over here is the best you can hope for if you are not in an area where fibre-to-the-premises is available.

    I don't know about apartment buildings. I imagine internal structured cabling in cat6 and 5e for large ones, (probably 6 for risers, that is between frames, with 5e on the floor level and active kit in riser cupboards each floor. I imagine just one router cabled however in small/legacy buildings like 6 packs, and everyone better choose the same ISP. I find it hard to imagine new UTP cable runs outside buildings; maybe for new developments, but full FTTP is still probably cheaper.

    I'm paying for the "up to a gig" HFC service currently, and typically get a bit more than half a gig down. I like it, it sometimes seems like a luxury but it's very enabling. In contrast the industry over here was overflowing just a few years ago with human resources who would insist that no-one could possibly ever (really) need more than 10-20Mbps...

    582:

    As long as we're talking about SUVs, whaddabout the similarly shaped but smaller variety? Ie and eg, the earlier versions of the Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4. Recent versions have gotten, alas, biggified, but the earlier ones seemed to hit a reasonable balance for people who like the form-factor but don't want a behemoth.

    When we lived in Central America, we had a Hyundai Creta, something along those lines, which we liked a lot. Alas, we're now back in the US because of the plague, and Cretas aren't available here.

    583:

    We've got a Lexus RX350 that's well into it's second decade, and it's doing pretty well. They're ubiquitous around here.

    There are so many makes and models, including an increasing number of EVs, that I'd just say go out and test drive, after you've figured out what features you want. I'd guess the question is whether you want to by another new gas car, whether you want to go for an EV, or whether you want to find a used car to tide you over until EVs become normalized and you can buy one of them.

    584:

    Hanging out for something like that as an EV, it would solve a lot of the issues I have with stupid 4WD tracks. The ex had something like that (to me it will always be the "not a viagra") in the fossil form and it was surprisingly reasonable. You're not going mud-plugging without serious vehicle mods, but it would do normal "4WD only" tracks quite happily. For me not driving very much means I wouldn't be paying the 4WD tyres and high-lift drag price very much, but I also wouldn't need to drive a truck when I'm just pootling somewhere casually. Trucks usually have better ground clearance than cars, as well as being more tolerant of towing/people bolting winches on.

    One secret benefit of making those things EVs is that it should lower their centre of gravity and thus make them safer for the average urban moron to drive.

    My current process is to use trains and mountain bikes but I'm very aware that my 5 year plan to buy a semi-rural property means I'm likely going to buy something where you can drive to it but not on it with a normal car. Or more likely, you can go down it but not up it :)

    585:

    Speaking of which, this just happened. In shocking news, a vehicle specifically designed to leave the road and plough through things... left the road and ploughed through things. Only one dead by some miracle.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-08/woman-dies-after-car-ploughs-through-suburban-home-in-sydney/101514912

    586:

    The coincidence of the "oshkosh" brand being used both by overpriced baby accessories and overpriced baby toys makes me laugh. "the price of prams has got out of control, quarter of a million dollars for the base model now".

    Funny thing: Oshkosh B'gosh was founded in 1895 in Oshkosh Wisconsin.

    Oshkosh Airport Products is the current name of the Oshkosh Motor Truck Manufacturing Company from 1918.

    Oshkosh is a medium-sized town in central Wisconsin. It has an unusually large airport for its size, which hosts the Experimental Aircraft Association Fly In every year.

    Just another one of those Wisconsin oddities, like Lake Geneva (birthplace of TSR).

    587:

    It seems like Wisconsin's main export is eccentric whimsy.

    589:

    As long as we're talking about SUVs, whaddabout the similarly shaped but smaller variety? Ie and eg, the earlier versions of the Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4. Recent versions have gotten, alas, biggified, but the earlier ones seemed to hit a reasonable balance for people who like the form-factor but don't want a behemoth.

    In general they are called "crossovers" in the US these days. My wife wants one. We wanted to buy a Subaru Crosstrek when her 2009 Hyundai Accent was totaled a couple of years ago but you can't buy or get serviced the plug in hybrid version around here yet. So we share a Civic and I drive my monster Tundra truck more than I want.

    590:

    Speaking of which, this just happened. In shocking news, a vehicle specifically designed to leave the road and plough through things... left the road and ploughed through things. Only one dead by some miracle.

    Back in the 80s a guy in the office jumped up and said he had to run home. His wife had just called and said someone ran OVER his car?!?!?!

    Later we got the full story. It was one of those boutique hand assembled British cars from the 50s or 60s. Sized like an MG back then. Some elderly lady in a land yacht got distracted and hit the rear bumper of his car while it was parked on the street. Yacht ran up and over his small car.

    The incident ended his restoration project.

    591:

    "Large" vehicles crushing cars (etc) ?? - utterly insane .. apparently the car driver only had minor injuries.
    - It's a CCTV clip, incidentally.

    592:

    In the UK, it's usually miles per gallon, but petrol is sold in litres and most people don't know how many litres there are in a gallon, let alone can convert values without electronic aid. While I can do both, I use miles per litre, but I have always been a fan of mixed units (they keep you mentally flexible!) :-)

    593:

    "In the UK, it's usually miles per gallon, but petrol is sold in litres and most people don't know how many litres there are in a gallon, let alone can convert values without electronic aid. While I can do both, I use miles per litre, but I have always been a fan of mixed units (they keep you mentally flexible!) :-)" In the firkins/furlongs/fortnight system, fuel consumption could be given in furlongs-2, being furlongs travelled per cubic furlong fuel consumed. A nice large number, to look impressive in the vehicle sales literature.

    594:

    2 miles of forestry road means I will be staying with my Defender 110 at 25 mpg diesel for the present. Until I can generate sufficient electricity here not by the generator it is not worthwhile charging an EV. Getting stock availability on PV and hydro controllers is proving hard in the UK. Having the ability to haul your own stuff to your site gets a bit more useful as soon as you are off regular carriers delivery routes. At least I am not so concerned by prospect of rolling blackouts which is where the current UK government seems to be heading for as it continues to fail to plan.

    595:

    Better to invert it to furlongs^2, with dimension of area. That is then the required cross-sectional area of the scoop you'd use for continuous refuelling from a roadside fuel trough.

    596:

    The 'invasion' of Australia will be through economic coercion. The PRC has tried this to a limited extent over the past few years by blocking particular Australian exports from being imported into China but it seems to have generally worked out worse for them than for Australia.

    Real economic coercion will involve blocking the sea lanes we require for our imports and exports (a few years ago something like 10% of AU's GDP went out through Port Hedland - a few mines would really hurt the economy). At that point, we either submit or hope someone will get into a hot war on our behalf to reopen the sea lanes.

    The other possible way for an invasion of AU to work would be one proposed to me by a good friend years ago. Someone sails a container ship into Sydney Harbour with 50,000 refugees on board. This is followed in short order by a phone call from the opposing leader to the AU PM asking for their surrender. If none is forthcoming, a second ship arrives a few days later and so on.

    As for the theoretical SSNs, I really doubt they will ever eventuate given the timelines currently being proposed and the history of Australian Govts to deliver on something like this. Personally, I think we should (and there is a lot of handwavium in here), rent or lease Virginia class boats from the USN with crews. Put an RAN officer in command and fly it under an Australian flag. This gets us the boats without the decades long procurement process. How you avoid the USN crew mutinying (or otherwise "advising" the captain) when there is a disagreement between AU and US policies and goals is an exercise for the reader.

    597:

    rent or lease Virginia class boats from the USN with crews

    i don't think that's a thing

    598:

    One of the problems of privatisation / nationalisation is the creation of a market that can survive bad times, and what is "infrastructure".

    An opening example is the privatisation of lots of US military services to Halliburton, KBR, etc in the 1990s. When the army got into a real war again in Iraq (specifically the first attempted battle for Fallujah) the insurgents realised that if they shot at the civilian drivers of the ammo convoys, they'd just quit and go home.

    We're facing this problem now in Ireland with energy. We've a nationally operated grid but mixed private generators in a market. When wholesale gas prices went up 7x, generators decided to not-bid into the next generation market, and a number pulled existing contracts. We're now in a bind with the government working out a mechanism to tell one of the vendors to simply build new capacity , and fraught legal battles as companies that decided not to bid suing because the market is now unfair.

    Meanwhile the long-term picture involves an offshore wind generation network and windfarms costing hundreds of billions (in the N Atlantic for Europe as a whole), so simply nationalizing the industry is beyond what Ireland could afford. And nationalizing bits or changing the rules threatens that long-term investment that we now depend on.

    599:

    That's definitely not a thing.

    What is a thing is the USN (or USAF) having allied officers on board for training and liaison purposes, and also the USA authorizing the sale of military tech overseas: they'd love to sell you Virginia class boats (mebbe with some of the most sophisticated bells and whistles stripped out, or non-critical bits manufactured in Aus so they could claim to be home-built), and embedd Australian sailors aboard their own for training purposes. They did something similar with the UK in the past few years for maritime reconnaissance -- after the Nimrod MR.A4 failure the UK opted to buy Boeing P-8 Poseidons, and for a few years RAF crews were flying them with the USN P-8s for familiarization.

    601:

    It seems like Wisconsin's main export is eccentric whimsy.

    Shotz Beer?

    602:

    Well, you could always satirize contemporary politics by having stand-ins for current Tory politicians suggesting these horrible ideas to the PM and their suffering gruesome fates afterwards.

    603:

    That's definitely not a thing.

    One thing the US military (and I'm guessing others in NATO) tends to do is build training setups for their baubles. This is one reason Ukraine is getting rapid results from new stuff and the Russians are trying to figure out how to convert from peace time training "in unit" to war time "throw them into the fight with no training".

    Aus could run a recruits through a 1 year training cycle and get an enlisted crew. NCOs and officers would take longer. But since this needs to be done anyway, once the first crews are ready, we could hang out the rental sign.

    604:

    592 - I know it's 4.5 l to 1 real gallon to 1 DP, but it's not really worth doing 2 or 3 DP unless you're better at mental arithmetic than I am (good according to one retired maths teacher who worked 1930s to 60s).

    596 - Latest class HKs from the UK, which will also keep BAe Systems Barrow in business for 15 years or so...

    605:

    I'll save Robert the trouble and point out I'm the Yank, he's the cool guy from BC up north.

    Actually, although I've visited almost yearly I've never lived in BC. England, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and back to Ontario…

    606:

    In shocking news, a vehicle specifically designed to leave the road and plough through things... left the road and ploughed through things. Only one dead by some miracle.

    Looks like #41 Monfarville Street, correlating the aerial footage with satellite maps. From the wreckage the SUV came down Carpenter Street and just kept going.

    I've seen enough records of accidents at T-intersections that if I ever lived at the top of the T I've have a large boulder or something so that vehicles who don't notice their road is ending hit that rather than my house.

    607:

    FUNFACT: hungry people are prone toward unrest leading to tipping over of governments

    my local super market $5.03/dozen eggs... last year during supply chain hiccups it had $2.45/dozen... prior to covid $1.98/dozen

    bread $3.49/20oz was $2.99/20oz and before that $2.69/20oz

    just 2 examples out of many... any of you notice such spikes locally?

    between UKR wheat kept off the world market and NorAm reduced harvest due to drought and OPEC+ reducing production and RUS oil & gas being banned, we are looking at active famine amongst the poor not just occasional hunger... just how many starving middle class peasants does it take to change a light bulb?

    meanwhile UK-PM & US-GQP along with various #BSGC politicians in France-Italy-Hungary-Poland are fixated upon power-without-accountability

    608:

    I agree - for such things as mileage calculations, I don't bother with more than a few percent accuracy nowadays. Even if you can, what's the point?

    EVs are no better - most ratings seem to be in watt-hours per mile, but there is a new and inscrutable industry standard E-rating from A++ to E-, which has the following illuminating definition:

    The Electrifying.com Efficiency Rating, known as the E-Rating™, has been reviewed and verified by leading independent industry experts and is formulated using an algorithm that takes into account a number of factors; including how well the car converts electrical power into miles on the road, the speed at which the battery can be recharged and features such as energy saving heat pumps, intelligent brake recuperation and climate control preconditioning. There’s also a ‘secret sauce’ based on our expert team’s experience of driving, testing and reviewing electric cars in the real world.

    I particularly like the last paragraph, with all the scope it gives for, er, commercial adjustments.

    609:

    Actually, although I've visited almost yearly I've never lived in BC. England, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and back to Ontario…

    Abject apologies, sir. I'll remember next time.

    610:

    EVs are no better - most ratings seem to be in watt-hours per mile, but there is a new and inscrutable industry standard E-rating from A++ to E-, which has the following illuminating definition:

    I think they're trying to get at "range anxiety," which is a combo of "can I take it on a road trip?" and "how long will it take to recharge?"

    This isn't silly. I saw a recent article (LA Times?) where a reporter went on a road trip to check out the status of EV chargers across California. Turned out that a lot of them were broken in various ways, which would could leave an EV driver stranded in the middle of nowhere, California (which is southeast of Bakersfield, if you're interested).

    What we're used to with petroburners is ca. 400 mile range, less than 30 minute refuel (counting time in line, if it's Costco and cheap gas). With an EV, you're generally looking at 200-300 miles, followed by an eight hour recharge if you're using an old-school system. Getting the range up and non-explosive recharge time down is a major goal, as is figuring out how to make recharging infrastructure that takes the place of gas stations. I'm actually surprised that more franchise fast food outlets haven't gotten into the charger game, but it will likely come. Stop for food and juice seems like a reasonable combo.

    611:

    Range is usually quoted separately. This is some measure enabling vendors to claim that their overpriced products are superior because they are more gimmick-ridden.

    612:

    Spawning another topic, any thoughts about the Crimean Bridge kaboom? What happened, whodunnit (*), what the sequelae are likely to be?

    (*) Yes, the Ukrainian Security Service spooks very likely. But the Russians have an impressive history of creating their own accidents of an explosive nature, so I don't totally rule that out. Mostly out, but not totally.

    613:

    'I think they're trying to get at "range anxiety," which is a combo of "can I take it on a road trip?" and "how long will it take to recharge?"'

    "This isn't silly."

    No, but doesn't it matter where you live?

    If you're in a densely populated conurbation, even sizeable ones like SANSAN or SEATAC or BOSWASH or the Texas Triangle or France or England or Germany or Tokyo-Kyoto etc, the shorter ranges make sense for most driving.

    And if you want to do really long road trips, renting a suitable vehicle can be a good option, as our daughter has discovered.

    614:

    Howard NYC
    Yes. About 2 years ago a 2-litre container of milk was about £1.05 - now the cheapest I can find (Aldi) is £1.45. My favourite & expensive butter has increased in price by 50% in the past 3 months.
    We are all right, if only because we do not pay for vegetables & baking your own bread is, at present only fractionally cheaper than from the shops ... but you know what went into it & it actually tastes really good. { The latest innovation, using liquidised home-grown tomatoes as the yeast starter for Focaccia bread is simply amazing! } but if you are on the "new poverty line" it's getting miserable, for sure.

    Kardashev
    Who cares, actually?
    It will fuck-over, even more, the RU supply & logistics chains, thus helping to reduce, even more, the poor Russian conscripts & their arsehole officers.
    I get that gut feeling that there is going to be another RU military collapse in the works, before the freeze starts, yes?
    Whather it will involve Kherson or an advance near Lyman is anyone's guess, though.

    615:

    »Spawning another topic, any thoughts about the Crimean Bridge kaboom?«

    Explosion clearly coming from under the road-surface, no truck-bomb involved.

    Most likely done from the water, either by frogging in and tying explosives to the pillars, or very likely, by an autonomous underwater vehicle.

    (There is some hint of the latter in the form of waves coming under the bridge right before the explosion in one of the cctv clips.)

    I have a harder time figuring out where the burning tank-wagons on the train fit into the picture, and it is not clear that it is even related to, much less targetd by the explosion on the road-bridge.

    I guess fragments and sparks from the road-bridge explosion could have hit the train and ignited it, but that would have been pure luck, given the distance covered.

    If somebody frogged in, it might be tempting to take a couple of pot-shots at the passing train while there anyway, but it could make it a long and dangerous swim home, if somebody found out.

    616:

    Kardashev @ 612:

    Spawning another topic, any thoughts about the Crimean Bridge kaboom?

    It was clearly a brilliant Ukrainian special-ops coup -- claimed to have been achieved by exploding a truck bomb right alongside a fuel train. (Yes, I've seen other theories, but that matters less than that the Ukraine Security Service did it and impliedly could do it again.)

    Until Russia are able to repair the Kerch Strait Bridge rail link, they have serious logistical problems all over southern Ukraine, and their ability to supply either their military positions and their entire presence in Crimea is at risk. If Ukraine can follow up and recapture two cities north of Crimea along the lower Dneiper/Dnipro River (Kherson, Nova Kakhovka), they can shut off 85% of the water supply to the Crimean Peninsula (by cutting off the North Crimean Canal, an irrigation canal).

    In general, Ukraine has concentrated on breaking the rail lines Russia needs, that being Russia's primary method for moving things by volume throughout modern times.

    617:

    The gap in RAF maritime patrol capability was mitigated by sending Seedcorn crews to multiple allies including the RAAF and RNZAF. The concept continues with AWACS - it's a bit more extended than a simpler change in aircraft type (eg Norway/AU/NZ change from P-3 to P-8). Often the training for ground crew is longer than aircrew

    https://www.raf.mod.uk/news/articles/wedgetail-seedcorn-crews-support-exercise-pitch-black-2022/

    Ahead of the delivery of the first RAF Wedgetail seedcorn Programme has been established with the Royal Australian Air Force which sees RAF maintainers, technicians, and aircrew embedding within 2 Squadron.

    618:

    Until Russia are able to repair the Kerch Strait Bridge rail link,

    They've said late Saturday. So the rail damage must have been collateral to the roadway explosion. Apparently 3 flammable tank cars lit off.

    619:

    Over a concrete span that's been superheated, with heat-damaged rebar? I have some serious doubts where this is concerned. I suspect it will work for a few days/weeks then fall apart.

    620:

    you could always satirize contemporary politics by having stand-ins for current Tory politicians suggesting these horrible ideas to the PM and their suffering gruesome fates afterwards.

    Can't.

    The time from starting a new novel to it hitting print publication is at least two years. Even a novella is 12-18 months.

    Politics in the UK is currently too unstable to pencil into a book -- we've had two PMs both lasting less than 3 years now, and are into a third who'll probably be done for in six months. There's a revolving door of transient nobodies in cabinet but none of the current ministers were part of the government as recently as June 2016. In many cases they were nobodies as recently as mid-2019.

    Now, the Laundryverse is stuck in the past (the last untitled Laundry main series novel will be set in an alternate 2015; the New Management will have progressed as far as March 2017 as of "Season of Skulls", when it comes out), but by having had a coup d'etat in mid-2014 (and killing off half the Cameron government in a cultist orgy gone wrong) I've ensured that none of today's political leaders can get a look in.

    So I can satirize types, but actual people? Not so much.

    621:

    Aus could run a recruits through a 1 year training cycle and get an enlisted crew. NCOs and officers would take longer.

    I suspect significantly longer for an SSN -- the Australian navy has zero experience with nuclear reactors at this point so if they want to follow the USN training ladder they will need to graduate a cohort of officers with degrees in nuclear engineering. So, even starting with experienced submarine officers, that's 4+ years ... but I doubt the RAN has enough spare sub officers with the right type of academic aptitude. It's probably easier to select new officer trainees and funnel them through both submarine training and a degree syllabus. So 6-8 years before they're ready? And prepare for the inevitable attrition/academic failure/drop-out rate and to have post-operational career options in mind for the officers and crew once they age out of being deployable (Australia has no civil nuclear reactors that might provide those engineers with post-military jobs).

    Luckily it takes about that long to build a boat, so there's probably time to solve the training problem, at least.

    622:

    Over a concrete span that's been superheated, with heat-damaged rebar?

    Yes. If that is what it is. Roadway was many meters higher than train tracks where the explosion occurred. PHK thought not withstanding, the early analysis seems to be a truck bomb. Which lit off 3 rail tankers. So it depends on how the tank cars burned as to how damaged the roadway is.

    You just know this is likely the top construction project in Russia just now. And Russia has rail transport as a separate branch of the armed forces.

    623:

    Or, I dunno, you could pay attention to people that have experience and had no problems. As an example, https://electrek.co/2022/10/08/2200mi-electric-roadtrip-it-was-easy-so-whats-the-big-deal/ Yes, it’s west coast. Yes it’s a Tesla. Which merely demonstrates that you have to do some things properly. I mean, how do you think people did road trips in infernal confusion engined rattletraps before Big Oil had spread its cancer-liquid dispensing spigots across the world? Perhaps one might also consider that a large fraction of the US population never leave their “home state” and the implications that could have regarding “long trips”. Or are we to be forever trapped by the chuds claiming that they drive 2000 miles a day, every day, and that is the bare minimum an EV should cope with? Remember that old aphorism about “perfect is the enemy of good”? And maybe we might consider that the claimed “perfect” is in fact nonsensical?

    624:

    608 - I agree; that last sentence in particular seems to be a "fiddle factor", to allow you to say that a Tesla Model S in "Ludicrous Speed" mode uses less electrickery per ell than a Citroen Ami.

    610 para the last - Yes, but I want to get OK or better food rather than a KFMcBell into me whilst I am getting some watt-minutes into my LiTandy.

    612 - I think it's more likely the Ruzzians trying to blame the kasplat on the Ukrainians than the Ukrainian special forces, whom I'd see doing a better job.

    613- Really!? ;-) A Citroen Ami can do maybe 60km at a top speed of 50kph. There is no route that takes me more than about 2.78km (rumbline) from my door that doesn't take me onto a road with a ruling speed limit from 64kph up to 112kph. Still think a "shorter range" makes sense?

    625:

    Perhaps one might also consider that a large fraction of the US population never leave their “home state” and the implications that could have regarding “long trips”.

    I put about 8K miles a year on some car or the other. For the last 10 years I've had maybe 2 trips a year of over 500 miles round trip. I can plan that out. I doubt I drove over 200 miles in any one day other than those.

    A friend drove from central NC to LA and back just as the pandemic started. In his Tesla. 200 to 250 miles per segment. 20 minutes to charge up for the next segment. Bathroom break and quick walk around and he was ready to go again. At or over 5000 miles round trip.

    626:

    Two litres is a non-standard size round here. It's the size you find in small shops like Dernier and Miserable Shopper, supplied by Sourways or some related outfit with the same characteristic of going off well before the sell by date thereby making the word "Freshways" on the label distinctly inappropriate. Used to be £1.30 but it's £1.90 as of a couple of weeks ago.

    More common, and sold by respectable shops, is 2.272 litres aka 4 pints, which has crept up from £1.50 to £1.80 in 10p stages, and does not go off before it's supposed to.

    Dunno about Aldidl. Their milk usually is cheap but just as good, but I'm not going in there just to get milk, and nothing else they have is worth buying, the "basics" equivalents from normal supermarkets being both cheaper and tastier.

    627:

    Repairing strategically important rail bridges in an unfeasibly short time is something military engineering has been unfeasibly good at ever since there has been such a thing as a strategically important rail bridge. Maybe you wouldn't want to run high speed passenger services over the result, but you can get your supply trains over it, and it's the difference between that and not being able to which is important.

    Also, if the construction is as you say, and the burning fuel was from 3 tank wagons on the railway, it's probably only been done rare anyway.

    628:

    As far as I am aware supermarkets in the UK have their milk packaged at the same place. I was a temp briefly at the old plant near White City in London and consignments were being made up for most of the major supermarket chains.

    Horrible job. Glad I resisted the offers to go permanent.

    629:

    Why should one trust an article that reports X rather than another article that reports !X? I don't consider "X is what you would like to be true" a defensible reason. In the case under discussion, mere ordinary prudence dictates that !X should be the default belief.

    The trouble with electricity is you can't carry it about. If an ordinary car runs out of juice in the middle of nowhere, it's merely a massive pain in the arse. All you have to do is get yourself plus a petrol can to a source of fuel and back, and there is a choice of methods, including walking.

    If an electric car runs out of juice in the middle of nowhere, you're screwed. There's no way out of the situation that doesn't involve shifting something or things of weight and size sufficient to preclude not only walking, but any other sensible method of transport that you could use to get a can of fuel.

    So the kind of risk involved in going somewhere in an ordinary car, such as finding that the petrol station that was there last time you went isn't there any more, is still tolerable. But the risk with an electric car of finding that the charging facility you intended to use is buggered is not tolerable.

    630:

    I think it's that plant, or that site at least, that is now what Sourways use. Maybe what's going on is that the respectable shops are now supplied from plants that do all the respectable shops in some given area, while Sourways supplies all the Miserable Shoppers all over the country from White City by unrefrigerated wheelbarrow.

    631:

    A long time ago I read about the process of how to seriously bugger up a railway track for military reasons. It involved unfeasibly large amounts of explosives, copious amounts of time and it really helped to have some heavy construction equipment to hand. The end result, if you managed it was a camouflet-sized hole in the trackbed that the oppo would have to fill in before they could lay new track and restart rail operations over your handiwork. The Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs were designed principally to do this in a one-shot package from twenty thousand feet and they were only successful a couple of times by targetting viaducts and rail bridges.

    I may have mentioned in previous postings but the Hiroshima trams were up and running again on the line running past the Atomic Dome a few days after Fat Man was dropped there in August 1945. That included repairing and replacing the overheads, catenaries, substations and electricity supplies as well as the tracks and switches, and the city centre trams weren't even a military logistics priority.

    632:

    I see we are winding up the electric car debate again.

    I have owned a Kia Niro for over a year now. At a full charge it has 446 km of range, give or take 20km if I use the AC or Heat.

    Here in BC there are now fast chargers in every small town along the highways, and at roadside stops where there are no towns. Drive for anywhere from 1-4 hours, stop for a charge and a break, carry on. Charging from 30% to 100% took us <1 hour on our road trip in August. We ate lunch.

    As for 'running out of juice' somewhere remote, we also pay the exorbitant $70/annum fee to be members of the provincial automobile association. Said membership includes about 3 free tows/annum from anywhere in the province to (resolution of problem).

    In the vanishingly unlikely event that every single one of the rapid chargers along our route are non-functional, we will use our cellular telephones to get help. Just as we would in the event of a breakdown.

    In the even more unlikely event we decide to drive the Alaska Highway for some reason, we will rent a gas burner and bring spare cans of fuel. Although even on that remote stretch of highway, our provincial electrical company has places fast chargers every couple of hundred kilometers.

    I wrote the above in full knowledge that facts, lived experience or the reality that the tech has caught up to most use cases will not be accepted as valid by people who have already decided what is fact.

    633:

    I have to wonder if the Ukranian Special forces (or whoever) that placed the bomb on the bridge would have placed a few more at other points? Wait for it to start running again, then blow it a couple more times? If you've figured out the holes in Russian security of the bridge, why not make the most of it?

    Whatever the military impact, strategically it won't do much for Russian morale at the front to be running out of stuff.

    634:

    Pigeon @ 629:

    If an electric car runs out of juice in the middle of nowhere, you're screwed.

    To quote the old IT joke punchline, "Well, don't do that, then." But in practice, avoiding doing that has proven to be no problem (in the western USA, at least).

    My family's first real test with my wife's new EV was a road trip in early July from our home in Silicon Valley to the Tonopah, Reno Westercon and back, via a side-trip each way to Reno to pick up and drop off a friend. (That's a bit over 500 miles each way.)

    Out of an abundance of caution, we'd painstakingly researched charging stations along our route and likely alternate routes, but need not have bothered: Between the car's own trip planning and real-time data link to query the status of charging stations and smartphone apps for the same task, you are aware at all times of where all the public charging stations are, whether they're in service, whether they're currently in use, which ones are the fast Type 3 service, and so on -- along with warning you prominently if your route would take unwise risks. (A charge cycle to the recommended 80% fill mark takes about 25 minutes at a Type 3 charger. Total range is 230 miles, give or take.)

    If we had run the battery flat in the middle of nowhere, which takes effort and extreme negligence, mobile road service these days includes mobile charging ability. Certainly, I would not have been able to hike with jerry-can analogue to a filling station as with a petrol car, but I'd have been less than thrilled about hiking or hitchhiking US-95 in the middle of the Nevada desert to get petrol, anyway.

    635:

    Amusingly I've just been reading similar things about battery powered lawnmowers in a local forum. Since they can't mow continuously for 8 hours while producing an acceptable cut, clearly no-one should buy one, and obviously the professional lawnmowing people don't use them.

    The was raised as a counterpoint to someone asking whether the professional mower person they saw using a Makita mower was doing something weird since the other services in their area uses Husky or Ego mowers. Several people chimed in having seen Ego and Husky in use but never Makita, until a couple of people who are certain that everyone is is lying took over the discussion. All pro services mow continuously for 8 hours every day, no battery mower can do that, ergo anyone who says otherwise is lying.

    I remind the fossil fans of one inescapable fact: one way or another fossil cars are going to fall out of mass use. You can choose to use electric, or you can choose not to drive, or you can hope you die before you have to make that choice, but you can't choose to keep driving fossils.

    In that context "I can't drive electric" is very Cohen the Barbarian "I'd rather die".

    636:

    631 para 1 - Or Sherman's neckties? OK, not a possibility on a bridge over open water.

    632 - Do let us know how you got on after getting stuck behind a broken-down or spun out truck, or in a white out, if you survive!

    637:

    This is learned helplessness. Seriously, stop for fifty seconds and put a bit of thought into how you would actually solve this. Even in the event I owned a car and didn't have a road side assistance subscription, which would be silly, renting a generator is 30 euros. Getting it delivered to the back end of nowhere. is, uhm, 3 times that, but still. As a "I was implausibly unlucky" tax, 120 euro isn't the end of the world

    638:

    Charlie Stross @ 520:

    Where nationalization makes sense is for infrastructure (which shouldn't be run as a profit centre in the first place) and rivalrous monopoly suppliers. There's no reason to have competing electricity grids or gas pipeline or railway networks or road networks or private universal-service postal services. Arguably once you've nationalized those natural monopolies there's little reason not to also include the vertical segments that feed into them -- train operators, power stations.

    I think the country should own the airways, the rails and roadways and those should be supported & maintained by both use taxes & general revenue taxes because they benefit the general population even those who don't fly or drive. The Railway companies should pay use taxes to use the rails the same way Trucking companies pay to use the highways.

    I think the government should also control the electric grid/gas pipelines and regulate any monopolies. You could have private entities feeding power into the grid/pipeline but they shouldn't be able to charge excess or manipulate the system to jack up prices like Enron did to California in 2001.

    Phone and/or Internet and TV needs some kind of regulation; especially here in the U.S. where whole communities are under-served or not served at all due to their remote locations. Costs should be regulated & access guaranteed FOR EVERYONE.

    My own brother here in North Carolina can't get cable or a landline phone or decent cell service and he lives only 20 miles from downtown Durham, NC; 15 miles from Hillsborough, NC and less than 10 miles out of Roxboro, NC in Orange County, NC.

    They wouldn't even have electricity in the area if it hadn't been for the New Deal and the Rural Electrification Administration

    The U.S. needs the same kind of New Deal for Telephone, Internet and Cell Phone service.

    639:

    There is a non-trivial number of people who, 50 years after the last ICE car is sold, will still be making up bullshit reasons why EVs cannot work. I posit that there is some infectious agent that causes this strange obsession, probably carried by the nasty liquid. Perhaps a relic virus from the days when ancient Oilosaurs roamed the Earth

    640:

    Pigeon
    Aldi's packaged cooking Ham is surprsingly good, for easy use ...... { Grilled Ham in the breakfast rolls! }
    NOT to be compared with the (Vimes Boots) Ham we get from Brindisa, at approx £80/£85 per 2-3kg lump ....
    Cut up into segments, freeze all the ones you are not using "Right Now" & you have hand-cut {By me} best-quality, dark-smoked Iberian Ham, at ridiculously low prices per portion, which will keep you in very tasty snacks for over a year .......

    Nojay
    Actually, all you need to really screw railway track up is a suitable "plough" towed behind the last train .....

    641:

    All pro services mow continuously for 8 hours every day, no battery mower can do that, ergo anyone who says otherwise is lying.

    Hmmmm. So the Pros in Aus don't use equipment with batteries that can be swapped in a minute or so? But use gas equipment that has a full day tank size?

    Interesting.....

    Which gets back to the newer EV work pickups in the US are designed to supply power for other electric things. So you can charge your tool batteries in the field.

    642:

    Re: 'All pro services mow continuously for 8 hours every day, no battery mower can do that, ergo anyone who says otherwise is lying.'

    'Continuously' as in no meal or bathroom breaks ... robot drivers?

    643:

    I don't buy eggs as I have chickens -- but the food I buy them recently went up 25% in one hit.

    644:

    Yes, but I want to get OK or better food rather than a KFMcBell into me whilst I am getting some watt-minutes into my LiTandy.

    ANY TIME I'm on a drive of a few hours or days I have a cooler or two with me. KFMcBell is for getting an iced drink and free Wi-Fi. The cooler is refilled at the local grocer. Fruit, cheese, crackers, drinks, and sandwiches.

    And I have a nice one that folds up into the size of a larger hard back book for when I fly somewhere before the drive. (I used to buy throw away styrofoam coolers but have stopped that bad habit.) The shape is a bit odd as it was sold to carry home ice cream from a college dairy with some dry ice in the bottom.

    645:

    Simon Farnsworth @ 541:

    When a corporation becomes too big to fail, it shouldn't mean those who are running the corporation have become too big to hold responsible. This was the fundamental error the Obama administration made with the Wall Street Banksters who crashed the world economy in 2008.

    We're still paying for that mistake today.

    646:

    I keep thinking this entire batteries vs gasoline took place around 1905 to 1910. But it was horses vs automobiles.

    There are still use cases for horses. And they still exist. But the village smithy is now mostly for recreation needs, not to much for "working" horses.

    I have a friend whose daughter took up riding before college and went to a college which was competitive in the various horse related sports. It would have been cheaper for him to buy her a private plane.

    647:

    I think you have the chain of reasoning reversed: "we" know that battery lawnmowers cannot work. It follows that there is some reason why pro lawn people don't use them. The most obvious reason is that they spend too much time mowing... I think the same applies to electric cars.

    Meanwhile it's Sunday morning, working bee is cancelled due to rain so I'm catching up on TV. Sabine Hossenfelder hopes that cold fusion might work, this time, but runs though why it doesn't hasn't yet (she's a real physicist).

    "Guilty of Treeson" is an arborist youtuber who is quite taken with battery powered chainsaws. For the 90% of "trim little things" where a light saw that starts and stops easily is way more important than a metre-long blade is. Latest vid is him leaving some sponsored/donated battery saws with a guy in Norway, but has footage of him using one: https://youtu.be/9DtzJQkWz7M?t=2164 (channel history has a bunch more battery use, sprinkled through his two-stroke saw use)

    648:

    "Sabine Hossenfelder"

    I like her take on the current state of particle physics too.

    649:

    dpb @ 548:

    Comparing the automobile I learned to drive to my current automobile:

    1963 Chevrolet Bel Air 4-door sedan (V8, auto)
    curb weight: 1553 kg / 3424 lbs
    Fuel consumption
    extra-urban (up to 62mph/100km/h) / city / highway (up to 87mph/140km/h) / average combined:

    l/100km: 10.5-12.6 / 17-20.4 / 14-16.8 / 14.2

    mpg (U.S.): 18.6-22.4 / 11.5-13.8 / 14-16.8 / 16.6
    km/l: 7.9-9.5 / 4.9-5.9 / 6-7.1 / 7.1

    2003 Jeep Liberty Sport 4-door SUV (V6, manual, 4WD, A/C)
    curb weight: 1742 kg / 3840 lbs
    Fuel consumption
    extra-urban (up to 62mph/100km/h) / city / highway (up to 87mph/140km/h) / average combined:

    l/100km: 9.3-11.2 / 13.4-16.1 / 11.9-14.3 / 11.9

    mpg (U.S.): 21-25.3 / 14.6-17.5 / 16.5-19.7 / 19.8
    km/l: 9-10.8 / 6.2-7.5 / 7-8.4 / 8.4

    The Jeep is 189 kg / 416 lb heavier, but I guess a good bit of that difference is safety & comfort features the Bel Air didn't have. The Jeep has slightly better fuel economy and is actually a smaller vehicle than the Bel Air, although it does sit up a bit higher.

    650:

    NecroMoz: deanimator of the undead @ 579:

    Nah, too small, too low. I was thinking more like the appropriately named Oshkosh "Striker" but more along the lines of working your way up through their military range, starting with the JLTV with the weird sales motto "Beyond requirements. Beyond expectations" then escalating as necessary until you're cruising along in a Hemtt ("get there or die trying")

    They even make a version with a long range fuel tank - you could drive the kids to school and home again without refuelling!

    You do realize those are MILITARY tactical vehicles and aren't intended for the general consumer.

    When I was a platoon sergeant I had one of these

    I think you can buy one surplus for around $60,000 U.S.D.

    651:

    Actually, all you need to really screw railway track up is a suitable "plough" towed behind the last train

    That assumes you are retreating and wish to deny the enemy the chance to use the track you are abandoning. Blowing up bits of track, switchyards etc. already in use by the enemy with aircraft or artillery or rockets only causes pinprick damage, fifty metres or so of blown-up track and displaced ballast, easily fixable by a construction battalion with fresh logistics trains rolling over the repaired section a day later. A really big hole in the right-of-way takes more work to fix but even that's not insuperable, it just takes longer. A collapsed tunnel or railway bridge is a lot more work to repair but conversely they're a lot more difficult to damage really badly in the first place.

    In other news the Russians seem to have at least part of the Crimea bridge's rail system working again, possibly with limited traffic but operational at some level. Ditto for the bridge's road connection, routing two-way traffic through the undamaged span like a motorway contraflow. Not unexpected and not what the triumphalists were thinking this attack would achieve a few hours ago.

    The shock to Russian morale of having the bridge damaged in the first place is probably worth more to the Ukranian cause than the physical results and the necessity for Russia to increase coverage of an exposed target like this will pull resources away from other theatres of the war.

    652:

    paws4thot @ 604:

    592 - I know it's 4.5 l to 1 real gallon to 1 DP, but it's not really worth doing 2 or 3 DP unless you're better at mental arithmetic than I am (good according to one retired maths teacher who worked 1930s to 60s).

    That's where a pencil/pen & a piece of paper comes in handy. There's a lot of math I can't do in my head that becomes possible writing it out.

    653:

    "Schlemiel! Schlimazel!"

    654:

    Yes, that was my point.

    If you're going to have a war on the roads and pick your vehicle purely for personal survivability military vehicles are the obvious option. They explicitly have that as a criteria, where civilian vehicles get all soft and fluffy about other people and wah wah look seriosu, who gives a fuck if some stupid old lady dies crossing the road, it's her fault for not having a properly armoured all-terrain vehicle like I do.

    Put like that many people recoil, but then when they're shopping for a car that's exactly the reasoning they use.

    655:

    Kardashev @ 612:

    Spawning another topic, any thoughts about the Crimean Bridge kaboom? What happened, whodunnit (*), what the sequelae are likely to be?

    If Ukraine did it, they should do it again, only harder this time.

    Ukraine says mass burial sites found in retaken town of Lyman

    Ukraine says two mass burial sites have been found in the recently-recaptured eastern town of Lyman, after Russia retreated.

    The Ukrainian governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said one burial site had about 200 individual graves containing civilian bodies.

    It was unclear how many bodies the second site held, but it may contain both soldiers and civilians, he said.

    656:

    And yes, that vehicle is very much was I was referring to when I said "long range tank so you can drive the whole school run without refuelling". Exaggeration for effect, I expect that with the tank in the load bed full they could drive several thousand miles... but the point is they're not paying for fuel economy per ton carried as the main priority with that thing. It's all about "did I drive off the road? Why, I think I may have. Oh well, I'm sure there'll be another road up ahead somewhere" and "Did I run through a house and over some people? {shrug} C'est la mort".

    657:

    timrowledge @ 623:

    ... I mean, how do you think people did road trips in infernal confusion engined rattletraps before Big Oil had spread its cancer-liquid dispensing spigots across the world? ...

    Well, one difference was at the time the two large oceans off either coast of the U.S. really mattered and most internal logistics chains were fairly regional (and based on local railroads, of which there were many).

    Here in the U.S. the conditions under which we need to gear up a national infrastructure to support a mass conversion to EVs TODAY are a little more intense than those that attended the automotive boom of the ninteen-teens & ninteen-twenties.

    658:

    Pigeon @ 629:

    The trouble with electricity is you can't carry it about. If an ordinary car runs out of juice in the middle of nowhere, it's merely a massive pain in the arse. All you have to do is get yourself plus a petrol can to a source of fuel and back, and there is a choice of methods, including walking.

    I will note (from experience) that most stations that service highways running through "the middle of nowhere" will SELL you a petrol can1 should you find yourself in need. And there's often someone who will offer you a lift back to your car to get you going again.

    It's been a while since I made a really long road trip (November 2019), and longer still since I was goofy enough to run out of gas (sometime last century - late 70s) but I can't think things have changed that much.

    1 SOMETIMES they would "lend" you the petrol can if you left a deposit to ensure you'd bring it back.

    659:

    paws4thot @ 636:

    631 para 1 - Or Sherman's neckties? OK, not a possibility on a bridge over open water.

    The bridge being over open water would not be that big of an impediment by itself. The Russians controlling the terrain at either end of the bridge would be, 'cause it's gonna take time to heat the rails. I don't think you want to linger long enough to dig up the rails & twist them ... 😕

    660:

    Thomas Jørgensen @ 637:

    This is learned helplessness. Seriously, stop for fifty seconds and put a bit of thought into how you would actually solve this. Even in the event I owned a car and didn't have a road side assistance subscription, which would be silly, renting a generator is 30 euros. Getting it delivered to the back end of nowhere. is, uhm, 3 times that, but still. As a "I was implausibly unlucky" tax, 120 euro isn't the end of the world

    Or, if you still have cell phone service, call a damn tow truck and get yourself towed to the nearest functional, compatible charging station.

    It's not an "implausibly unlucky" tax, it's a "next time don't be so stupid" educational fee.

    661:
    Yes, but I want to get OK or better food rather than a KFMcBell into me whilst I am getting some watt-minutes into my LiTandy.

    ANY TIME I'm on a drive of a few hours or days I have a cooler or two with me. KFMcBell is for getting an iced drink and free Wi-Fi. The cooler is refilled at the local grocer. Fruit, cheese, crackers, drinks, and sandwiches.

    And I have a nice one that folds up into the size of a larger hard back book for when I fly somewhere before the drive. (I used to buy throw away styrofoam coolers but have stopped that bad habit.) The shape is a bit odd as it was sold to carry home ice cream from a college dairy with some dry ice in the bottom.

    Thing is, I LIKE McDonald's coffee. Lately I've found it much more convenient to park & go inside than use the drive-thru. When everyone else is in the drive-thru it takes less time to get a coffee at the counter.

    Plus they do usually have clean restrooms.

    662:

    Damian @ 653:

    "Schlemiel! Schlimazel!"

    hasenpfeffer incorporated!

    663:

    "Even in the event I owned a car and didn't have a road side assistance subscription"

    ...you would then be in the same position as most people I know or have known.

    "renting a generator is 30 euros. Getting it delivered to the back end of nowhere. is, uhm, 3 times that, but still."

    I used to work in a place that did that, and it was a LOT more expensive than that. The smallest one we did was a 2kVA petrol generator, which would just about get you some charge if you left it long enough. I can't remember the exact prices because it was some decades ago now, but we would charge a hefty deposit - generators being very popular theft targets - that would bring the charge up to over half the price of buying a new one. "Out-of-town" delivery charges would then come on top of that. These days of course everything is more expensive, so I'd be expecting to need more hundreds than just one and a bit.

    I didn't feel the need to explicity rule out methods that require horrendous amounts of money, because I figured it was already implied by the size/weight transport difficulties.

    "put a bit of thought into how you would actually solve this."

    I already have. The most practical method appears to be to semi-permanently install a petrol generator of some kVA output, able to power the motors independently of the battery, so that the car would at least be able to creep to a power outlet somewhere. Since this is something I would not be doing under a necessity of having to do it "right now", I could do it cheaply, by scrounging the major parts from scrap sources and bargain-hunting for the minor bits.

    I didn't mention this before because I don't think many other people would do it. I was trying to put it in terms of the circumstances that apply to most people I know, ie. are not members of the AA etc, do not have a lot of money, do not consider it trivial to haemorrhage a few hundred of the local major currency unit at random moments, and do not, from experience, regard running out of juice as something so very unlikely that it can be assumed not to ever happen. On the other hand I can think of very few (though more than zero) other people who would even consider pre-emptively modifying the car to allow it to use portable fuel in emergency.

    I find there is a curious inversion involved with many, many propositions for "making the world a better place" - for things on the scale of national infrastructure and governmental expenditure the cost is taken to be of superlative importance, with crippling consequences, whereas on the personal scale it is assumed that money is available at the turn of a tap. In reality the reverse is the case, but nevertheless the principle gets applied, and the discrepancy at both ends provides two complementary causes of things turning out to be crap.

    664:

    very few (though more than zero) other people who would even consider pre-emptively modifying the car to allow it to use portable fuel in emergency

    It's an interesting line of thought though. The mention of EV trucks and utes being able to power portable tools suggests also being able to interface with portable tool batteries. And it's not a big stretch from charging a small battery to taking charge from it. Tool batteries are in the region of 60Wh, which isn't much in vehicle terms, but it shows a tantalising way forward, especially with batteries converging on standard interfaces.

    665:

    But has he demonstrated one of the original, hand-cranked models? Yes, chainsaws were invented to help with childbirth

    (For a given value of "help". It sounds ghastly.)

    666:

    Right, I keep forgetting how absolutely terrible at their jobs US building suppliers are. You know how contractors insist they need great big pickups to haul supplies? That always sounded off to me until I checked timber yard delivery pricing. Also just general prices. I.. really just do not get how the entire industry hasn't been taken over by subsidiaries of European chains.

    667:

    Pigeon said: Why should one trust an article that reports X rather than another article that reports !X?

    My personal reason is that I've delved deeply into about 5 similar articles, down to geolocating the actual chargers used.

    All of them have been what can only be described as lies.

    Look at the "broken" chargers and discover that the user reviews show the charger has exactly zero problems except for one day, about 2 months before the story is published. Then the user comment is usually something like "charger showing error when I arrived. Called support and they said it looked like someone had pressed the emergency stop. They reset the charger and it was fine". So the "journalist" has a photo of the charger showing an error. The only exception to this was a charger that had a bad display (prominently captured in a photo of the journalist looking glum). There were dozens of comments showing the charger had been like that for a year, but it worked perfectly.

    Another ploy is to describe having to get up early to creep to a charger before they can get going, but when you check the hotel they stayed at, they have a guest charger.

    There's always a story about having to creep along not knowing if they can make it to some place, but when you look at plugshare you see they've driven past several chargers (I counted over 40 in one article, but about 10 seems the norm).

    Often there's a story of being towed. Always towed away from a place they could have charged albeit slowly. Always from a place that's only a few km from a fast charger that they could have reached after a few minutes of slow charging of they'd actually been out. Always not actually out.

    668:

    637 - Did you not understand "white out"? Ok, this means that you actually can't see to the end of your own bonnet. Neither can anyone else, so your rented generator is not coming.

    644 - So you never eat hot food between breakfast and dinner/supper when on the road. That's certainly the implication I've received from your statement. It also suggests (based on UK installations) that you're happy to spend 30 minutes to an hour sitting in your car or on a park bench in a car park every couple of hours.

    659 - If the bridge is over open water, where are the trees you're going to bend the heated rails around?

    669:

    Nojay
    Actually effing-over tunnels is easy, if you have the right kit ... One Grand Slam - or Tallboy - does the job

    John S
    Yes, well, agree. But ... we all have a problem for the future, here ..... Assume Ukraine wins & the Russians are pushed out.
    Then what? Especially if Putin is still in charge { Though I suspect he would be ousted or defenestrated or something }
    All the multiple evidence of gross War Crimes committed against civilians, as monitored & examined by International Observers with clean records { And "The Hague" etc } - right.
    How are these murderous thugs ever going to be brought, even to trial?

    670:

    This is the "McBell" that serves the nearest Tesla Supercharger.

    https://twotriplefour.com/the-menu/

    Pardon the formatting, I just copied the pdf

    Roast Pumpkin + Crispy Rice, twotriplefour Mole Sauce + Cashew Cheese Add Wicked Elf Porter "Black Bacon"

    Near River Produce Pork Belly, Carrot + Miso Purée, Edamame, Pickled Radish, Black Sesame

    Pan Roasted Kanooka Creek Chicken Breast, Pearl Couscous, Ras el Hanout, Labneh, Pistachio

    Catch of the Day - En Papillote, Asparagus, Kipfler Potatoes, Fennel, Orange, Preserved Lemon

    Handmade Pasta of the Day See Special’s Board

    GRAZING PLATES Spiced Butternut Pumpkin Doughnuts, Winter Anglaise, Dark Chocolate Foam twotriplefour Carrot Cake, Cream Cheese Crémeux, Walnut, Mandarin Chai Poached Pear, Macadamia Brittle, Cardamom Coconut Affogato w/ Vanilla Bean Ice Cream, D.O.N. Espresso, House-made Biscotti + choice of Raleigh Winery Butterscotch Cream Mobius Distilling Apple Pie Liqueur FARMHOUSE PLATTERS + PICNIC HAMPERS MAIN COURSES

    Apart from the restaurant, there's an award winning winery,

    https://www.cassegrainwines.com.au/

    with a tasting room and cellar door sales. Plus horse riding, a lake that you can take a picnic basket to (they sell picnic baskets) and a winery & vineyard to walk through.

    671:

    Not that sort of award winning whining. Geez, you ozzies with your awful accents.

    673:

    Re Bridge demo from underwater...

    Someone might know how, but I know I couldn't do it.

    674:

    »Assume Ukraine wins & the Russians are pushed out. Then what?«

    For one thing, the area we call "Russia" mostly isn't.

    In total there are close to 100 distinct areas in "Russia", but only around 80 are officially recognized by their constitution, which sorts them into many different classes "oblast", "republic" etc.

    I'm sure there is a wiki-page with all the gory details.

    "Russia" is a "Fürstendom", everything is about The Court in the capital, and anything else which matters, does so at the grace of the "Fürste".

    Specifically anybody smarter than average will attempt to enroll in a university in the "Fürstenstadt" because that is the only path to advancement. The fact that students at universities are exempt from, or get cozy assignments in, military service serves as a strong secondary motivation.

    As long as the "Fürste" is successful and graceful, peace can be maintained.

    With western economic sanctions, a costly defeat in warfare, there wont be much wealth for the "Fürste" to be graceful with and everything becomes shaky, in particular internal peace.

    Some of the many areas will want to (re-)assert their independence and attempt to align with "anybody but Moscow".

    That's relatively easy for areas bordering navigable water like the Black Sea or Caspian Sea, for instance Kalmykia.

    It is not so easy for Buryatia who would need to get cozy with Mongolia and China to get to anywhere.

    Nobody is going to step into Putlers vacated shoes and continue his "Fürstlige" legacy, at least not long enough to matter.

    His girlfriend might try, but I doubt she would live long.

    In theory there could be a gentle revolution, and some universally respected "good guy" could be installed as pilot to try to row the locomotive ashore. (ie: The Lech Valesa/Vaclav Havel model). Historically this leads to less bloodshed but there is no single "obvious candidate", which is a precondition.

    And if you think any of this can be boiled down to sound-bites or predicted with any usable probability, I have thousand years of russian/asian history for you to plow through.

    675:

    "No generalisation is true, not even this one." I should have known that there'd be one supercharger at an Australian winery.

    676:

    I think the government should also control the electric grid/gas pipelines and regulate any monopolies. You could have private entities feeding power into the grid/pipeline but they shouldn't be able to charge excess or manipulate the system to jack up prices like Enron did to California in 2001.

    See my previous post: when considering what should be nationalised or private, you need to think about what happens when the private operators simply don't turn up : they're in the business of making a profit, not providing electricity or houses, etc.

    We're in the midst of a housing crisis right now in Ireland, and major issue is construction: I can look around at half-completed housing projects, where with a 50%+ increase in materials costs, the builders have decided the supply chain issues will be temporary, and laid off workers for a couple of months.

    We've electrical generators not being built because of the spike in gas prices.

    Whats to be done? can you "simply" intervene by putting a government agency in charge of building "temporarily" while the market doesn't work ? Will you be sued by private industry, will the market even ever "settle down" as we work through the economic and geopolitical consequences of climate change ?

    677:

    Actually effing-over tunnels is easy, if you have the right kit ... One Grand Slam - or Tallboy - does the job

    Easy? I don't think so...

    It took a modified Lancaster bomber with an experienced eight-man crew and a VERY long runway to get a single Grand Slam or Tallboy bomb to hit somewhere near the target, if the wind and weather didn't get in the way (or if the Luftwaffe or the flak brigades were on their game that day). Circular Error Probable is a bitch, sometimes -- the final Tirpitz attack dropped 29 Tallboys on a stationary target which was literally the size of a battleship and only got one confirmed hit with another two probables and some others that hit close enough to do some damage.

    Infrastructure is tough and often can be repaired quite promptly if the opposition is even vaguely competent and in control of the damage site. It's the sort of thing decent militaries equip themselves and train for.

    678:

    We had a battery-powered mower once. Our lawn slopes at 2%, with one 3" high lump of 5%, and it couldn't get up it. We got rid of it. (For the humour-challenged, this is a JOKE.) (*)

    The UK's range problem is that, in many places, the EV infrastructure is simply not up to it. In the UK as a whole, there are 15 EVs for every public charge point, and only 2% of cars are EVs. There are also serious charging connector incompatibilities, and places where suitable chargers are separated by distances that are a significant proportion of most cars' ranges. None of that is a fundamental problem, and principally reflects the UK's lack of investment in infrastructure.

    The other problem is that the currently available EVs are mostly gimmick-ridden, unreliable, overpriced and with very poor functionality. Again, that's not fundamental, but I don't see it changing in a hurry.

    I expect to be flamed from both extremes, as usual.

    (*) Disclaimer: that was in the days of lead-acid, and it was a really cheap and nasty device passed on from a parent. If we buy a new one, it will be a battery model (for a 200 m^2 lawn).

    679:

    If an electric car runs out of juice in the middle of nowhere, you're screwed.

    Or you don't know how to operate it correctly.

    Almost all new cars come with satnav built-in and get map updates over a built-in cellular modem. In the case of Teslas and other EVs, the map updates include the location of chargers and the routes the satnav provide take into account battery drain and incorporate recharge pauses. In fact, they reportedly warn you if your route is projected going to run you low on charge. I'd be unsurprised to learn that they either can, or shortly will, book your slot on a charger and arrange pre-payment, and furthermore optimize your routing for fastest charging (i.e. drive until you're at 10% remaining capacity, pause 20 minutes to top up to 50%, drive to 10% again, top up again, and so on, so you "filled up" with 80% of your battery capacity in 40 minutes en route rather than having to stop for 2 hours to get there).

    Oh, and another thing. If your IC engine gets stuck in a 3 hour tailback due to an overturned HGV blocking the carriageway, you're going to burn fuel idling and creeping. The EV, on the other hand, doesn't waste energy that way.

    No, really, EVs are not a drop-in replacement for internal combustion engines, they need to be considered as a different type of transport technology with its own distinct angles (notably you don't fill up to 100% then drive until the fuel light comes on, you top up little and often and fast).

    680:

    P H-K
    "Russia" is a "Fürstendom", everything is about The Court in the capital, and anything else which matters, does so at the grace of the "Fürste". - EXACTLY the same as when the Tsars ran the show, in fact.
    I have ploughed through a potted Russian-history or two, myself.
    You appear to be predicting a collapse or implosion, similar to that between Boris Gudonov & Michael { 1605 - 13 }
    I now remember that their formal title was: Tsar of all the Russias ... there were many "Rus" lands & territories.
    e.g. Kyiv, Moscow, Vladimir, Novgorod, etc ...

    681:

    Nice in theory - not so much in practice. Charging 40% of a 70 KWh battery needs a 100 Kw charger (and car that can take it), which are not exactly dense over the UK. 50 Kw chargers are fairly common, but running a 40 Kwh battery car (200 mile range?) down to 10% is definitely stupid in many parts of the UK, because any problem getting to or with your designated charger means you are stuffed. The red light comes on in petrol cars with about 50 miles left (for damn good reasons), and wise people fill up earlier than that in the less-populated parts of the UK. There are also the downsides of touring by charging points rather than routes of interest, including basing yourself where you can charge the car rather than where you want to be.

    It's not insoluble (in the UK) even now, but it doesn't help claiming that there isn't a problem when there is one.

    682:

    Aargh! I omitted the "in 20 minutes".

    683:

    It's an interesting line of thought though. The mention of EV trucks and utes being able to power portable tools suggests also being able to interface with portable tool batteries.

    Not for a while. Way too many battery shape and charging standards. It will be a long slog to get there.

    But what is going to happen next year is the Chevy Work Truck EV will supply up to 10.2 kW at a time via 10 outlets. So you plug your brand of tool multi battery charger in and keep a supply of fully charged batteries on hand. Plus the corded things you have like a table saw or small cement mixer.

    https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/01/chevrolet-shows-off-the-2024-silverado-ev-its-first-electric-pickup/

    684:

    Right, I keep forgetting how absolutely terrible at their jobs US building suppliers are. You know how contractors insist they need great big pickups to haul supplies? That always sounded off to me until I checked timber yard delivery pricing. Also just general prices. I.. really just do not get how the entire industry hasn't been taken over by subsidiaries of European chains.

    Not really. That's just not how it works. (I've been involved in such for 50+ years.)

    You get most supplies for all but simple jobs delivered via large tractor flat bed trailer truck or maybe one with an 18 foot bed. It likely has a small lift crane at the front of the bed/trailer and/or a fork truck that can attach itself to the rear of trailer. This is how supplies have been delivered since the 1960s in most of the US. Some smaller yards used to (and maybe still do) send out two guys to pull lumber off a truck by hand but no one is going to unload rooms of drywall by hand. Not at 90 pounds per pair of sheets for the 8' sheetss. 135 pounds for the 12' ones.

    The pickup trucks on site are mostly crew cabs (up to 5 or 6 people) and the back is where those guys put their personal tools. And yes pickups do go and get supplies at times. This was my job in my later teens for my dad's houses. But it was things like 2 sheets of plywood because we figured wrong. Or 5 boxes of nails, a toilet, and the light fixture that just arrived. (I was told the day I got my license that I had free use of the house vehicles on two conditions. Stay our of trouble and he never hears the crew can't work because I didn't run a needed errand.)

    In the US we have Lowes and Home Depot who sell building stuff for the home owner replacing their bathroom vanity and shower. Or opening up 2 rooms to 1 bigger one. They will even rent you a nice truck by the hour at reasonable rates. Builders doing whole house remodels visit the "Pro" desk at those places or just use the non retail operations where they don't talk to you unless you are buying large truckloads of stuff.

    You're seeing propaganda from folks who are against all trucks.

    And this is totally separate from the suburban folks who buy a pickup truck because they go buy a used table from someone once every year or 10. But use it to commute to work every day. Those vanity buyers are a different thing.

    And yes I have a large pickup. And it gets driven only when I can't take the Civic. Or I need to go pickup 6 pieces of 10 foot long vinyl outdoor fascia trim. And will pull the 10K pound excavator I will soon buy or rent. Currently it has been parked for over 2 weeks. I need to get in and fire it up for a few minutes just to be the lubricants "flexed".

    685:

    So you never eat hot food between breakfast and dinner/supper when on the road. That's certainly the implication I've received from your statement. It also suggests (based on UK installations) that you're happy to spend 30 minutes to an hour sitting in your car or on a park bench in a car park every couple of hours.

    Eating a hot meal in the middle of the day is a great way to get to be sleepy. I save those for the hotels or decent restaurants where I begin and end my day. Lunching on fruit, cheese, and such? Why is that a bad thing?

    Stopping every 4 to 6 hours to get out and walk around is NOT a bad thing. At all. Says he who has done long road trips off and on all my life. Home to college was 5 hours of incredibly boring (western Ky strip mine country) drives. And walking gets the blood out of my legs and butt. And if I'm with my wife 90 minutes is about the range limit for other reasons.

    A couple of hours is only 100 to 140 miles on most major US roads. So you're really talking about 4 maybe 5 hours of driving between charges. Most EV cars no specifically design for urban short trips only give you 200+ miles of range. Especially if not starting and stopping.

    686:

    We had a battery-powered mower once. Our lawn slopes at 2%, with one 3" high lump of 5%, and it couldn't get up it. We got rid of it.

    I've had multiple generations of battery powered things over the last 3 decades. The first decade items were basically electronic recycle the day after you bought them.

    The second decade were decent NiCAD. But still the batteries burned out in a year or two.

    Now the LiIon are nice. And last me years. And fit the older NiCAD tools. I'm not ready to buy a battery riding mower but I suspect they are MUCH better than just a few years ago. (My current mower is a push 21" 40volt battery unit. It gives me exercise.)

    687:

    Ok so Pigeon is so committed to burning gas he will retrofit a gas generator to a hypothetical future EV. I suspect that some kind of portable 'spare' battery with enough juice for a few extra km of range would be a better option.

    It is clearly a decided thing, no contravelent information, facts or ideas will penetrate. As such I'm going to opt out of the EV discussion on this thread.

    688:

    I agree about meals in the middle of the day. The break recommendation in the UK is once every 2 hours, but I stop for 5-10 minutes once every 1-2 hours to give my eyes and back a break. My estimate is that the frequent partial fast charge approach would increase my overall long trip time by c. 15% on long trips, and constrain me slightly on which routes I take. It would make damn-all difference pottering around my home, of course.

    689:

    The break recommendation in the UK is once every 2 hours,

    Up until my early 60s I had a 5 hour bladder. I could drive 5 hours, drink a few sodas, eat some cheese, then stop. Now it's more like 3 or 4 hours with fewer sodas. Prostates seem to age faster than the rest of our male bodies.

    Note: If you're driving with the heat or AC on you will be dumping moisture via your breath which increases your bladder range.

    690:

    Gasdive @ 673: Re Bridge demo from underwater... Someone might know how, but I know I couldn't do it.

    So we've now had two attacks on Russian infrastructure with large amounts of underwater explosives and no clear idea of where to attribute them. Hmmm.

    I wonder what other bits of important infrastructure Russia has in the water.

    691:

    Super-heavy ordnance dropped vertically is doing it the hard way. In the Korean war, an American FB squadron doomed a tunnel full of enemy by "skipping" light bombs into the portals at each end; a kind of lofting attack. They sealed about a brigade of victims into the hill, IIRC.

    692:

    For over 20 years the US (and I suspect others) have been bolting $25K guidance systems on their inventory of dumb bombs. Then having B-52 do figure 8s with them. They drop them when asked within a few miles horizontal of the target and someone guides them in via GPS or laser.

    693:

    Various ref comfort stops - I might want one ever couple of hours, but using an ICE vehicle I can make them when/where I want to, not when/where I have to recharge a battery.

    694:

    My ICE cars have finite capacity gas tanks. And my butt/bladder usually run out before the tank. I only see an issue to be resolved with some slight planning a few times per year.

    I don't see your point.

    695:

    Did you not understand "white out"? Ok, this means that you actually can't see to the end of your own bonnet. Neither can anyone else, so your rented generator is not coming.

    I grew up on the Prairies, where white-outs are not uncommon. If conditions are that bad, nothing but emergency vehicles (and idiots) are moving. You aren't walking to the closest gas station with a can, you're in your car with your emergency blanket. Every year when I was growing up we heard of someone who decided to walk from a stalled/stuck/out-of-gas car and got turned around and was found hours later. The advice was (and still is) to stay in a vehicle and wait for conditions to improve.

    Even if you had gas you had to be careful about running the engine for heat, as carbon monoxide poisoning was a real possibility (depending on how the snow drifted).

    Honestly, I'm not seeing how "running out of electricity" in a whiteout is more dangerous than "running out of gas in a whiteout".

    696:

    Meanwhile back at the ranch.

    Is this a reasonable write up of the status of UK politics just now?

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/09/britain-brexit-poorer-boris-johnson

    697:

    David L
    I already read that & YES But, there's an awful lot of if not outright refusal, a lot of sideways "skittering" because people are simply not prepared to accept that they were lied to, deliberately conned & had & fleeced.
    My reaction to when I've had that pulled on me is an almost permanent anger against those doing it, but other people are not so ruthless at analysis. { In my case: 1 - Brexit - I was very nearly persuaded & only voted "Remain" at the last moment & I'm still angry. .. & .. 2: Christianity - I was v nearly completely brainwashed in my early teens, escaped by the skin of my teeth & even then it took another 20 years before the penny finally dropped, that all religions are con-tricks & blackmail, in some combination. }
    In a way, another year to the next GE will be a good thing, because, as time goes by & the enormity of the giant theft that was Brexit sinks in, the rejection of it will be the more profound.

    698:

    Is this a reasonable write up of the status of UK politics just now?

    It misses out some critical stuff -- the rise of regional nationalisms within the UK (including English nationalism, which wraps itself in the union flag and calls itself "British", but is nevertheless English uber alles) -- but it's mostly on the nail. The Brexiters denounced all anti-Brexit warnings as "project fear", but the predictions of project fear are now being vindicated. They've taken longer to arrive than some (myself included) expected, but there's a huge amount of momentum to an economy the size of the UK, and it's now going to take at least a decade to turn the supertanker of state around, even if the people at the helm want to make a U-turn.

    699:

    694 - So do mine. That capacity is way more than my bladder (to the point that my Xantia could do about 700 miles at 70(cough) mph between fuel stops). Now do you get why I say that the deciding factor in where/when I stop for more than a comfort stop time is not how often I need more fuel for the car?

    696 - Well, certainly still waiting for the "extra £350 million for the NHS" that Bozo said we were getting if we voted for WrecksIt.

    700:

    It was a couple of months ago so I may be misremembering. He might have meant cold methane, or I might have just mixed it up with something else entirely.

    It was a hydrogen energy conference so there was a lot of spinning going on, and a lot of vapourware (so to speak) and PowerPoint engineering. (Which may or may not include some or all of the Airbus projects.)

    But there was also some real stuff happening. A lot of engineering work has been done and is being done, and handling mass quantities of hydrogen seems less daft than it did a couple of decades ago.

    701:

    and handling mass quantities of hydrogen seems less daft than it did a couple of decades ago.

    You'd think the SLS folks would have gotten better at it by now.

    702:

    "For over 20 years the US (and I suspect others) have been bolting $25K guidance systems on their inventory of dumb bombs. Then having B-52 do figure 8s with them. They drop them when asked within a few miles horizontal of the target and someone guides them in via GPS or laser."

    Yes, JDAM has been a totally amazing story, achieving radically improved military effectiveness at radically reduced cost. The "few miles" is part of it -- a JDAM bomb is really a precision guided glide bomb with a footprint measuring 20 km or so laterally and along-track around the drop-point.

    I hope someone writes a good history about it.

    703:

    Oh, yes, that's true. People ship quite a lot of liquid oxygen around, and that's another substance you really don't want to get loose.

    704:

    "for over 20 years" and the rest. The first Paveway GBUs were in development in 1964, and trials in 1965.

    705:

    No - it’s hopelessly optimistic. The UK appears to have signed a suicide note. This what happens when a bunch of libertarians get a go on the steering wheel. As Nicola says “Tories are despicable “

    706:

    OGH's comment at 679 pretty much nailed most of the reasons sentiments like "If an electric car runs out of juice in the middle of nowhere, you're screwed" miss the mark about EV usage, but I wanted to add a couple of more bits.

    It really would require an act of unusually determined stupidity to run an EV entirely out of juice on the road, given that the car is working hard to tell you about your options (using real-time satnav/cell-Internet data) and articulately warn you not to be reckless. However, let's say you stupidly have been leaving the car down around 15% charged and ignored the car's strong warnings and advisories that it's shutting down some services to save power. Let's say you suddenly need to drive your neighbour 30 miles to hospital anyway, make a run for it, and get there on figurative fumes. The car now somewhat mournfully tells you the nearest working public charging station is 10 miles away, and you might not make it. What to do? Are you forced to make to Call of Shame to have a mobile charging van visit?

    No, actually. You offer the hospital staff, or the reception staff of a nearby motel, etc. a nice bottle of wine for the privilege of plugging in your EV for a few hours into handy mains (AC) outlet for the next four hours, telephone home to say you'll be late because you were bloody stupid, and get comfortable with a book. Charging using the household-electrical cables built into your car's "frunk" (front trunk) will obviously be slow, but not impossibly so, given that all you need is enough range to get to the nearest proper Type 3 charge station, plus the margin of safety you foolishly didn't give yourself earlier.

    Elderly Cynic @ 678:

    [snip explanation of the origin of the EV-range problem in the UK]

    The other problem is that the currently available EVs are mostly gimmick-ridden, unreliable, overpriced and with very poor functionality. Again, that's not fundamental, but I don't see it changing in a hurry.

    Being 1/3 of the way around the globe in Northern California, I'm unfamiliar with the mix of EVs currently available in the UK. California might be a best-case counterexample as to infrastructure (charger network is quite good), but even rural Nevada next door proved excellent on our long road trip there. The EVs themselves are, as you say, pricey, but part of that is firms targeting the high end of the market first, and it'll be interesting to see what happens with larger production volumes and economies of scale. Reviews of the lowest-end EV, the Chevrolet Bolt, are reasonably admiring, i.e., they aren't junk. Base price before tax credits, etc., is US $26,595, equaling £23,980 at current exchange rates -- still not pocket change, but within range of many mere mortals.

    I haven't perceived the EVs I've known, including my wife's Audi (which certainly cost a lot more than a Bolt) as unreliable or to have poor functionality. (I don't disbelieve what you say, let alone intend to flame anyone, but would be interested in you elaborating.)

    My wife did perceive her new Audi E-tron as gimmick-ridden at first, but she finds that all of those fancy features do have a point and make her drive more safely. Examples include the distance-sensing and camera display while parking, and the "smart" cruise control. The latter mystified me on first encounter: I'd set it for 50 MPH, and am accustomed to automation giving me, as we say, what I asked for good'n'hard, so it was perplexing to see the car override my instructions and slow down, until I realised it was interceding to enforce a 5-second following distance from the vehicle ahead, without my needing to kick it out of cruise control. The car is choc-a-bloc with subtle tricks like that -- making adjustments and giving you a nudge in ways you realise make sense, after brief surprise. I'm sure Clarkson would utterly hate it.

    707:

    "The first Paveway GBUs were in development in 1964, and trials in 1965."

    Yahbut the first Paveways were air-dropped bombs that homed on a laser spot provided by an external source, either the launching aircraft or other source. The basic JDAM needs no external help other than GPS after it's been given the coordinates of the target and dropped. If the GPS is jammed, its inertial part picks up the slack, albeit with a slight degradation in accuracy.

    In later days, Paveway and JDAM have converged, Paveway getting GPS/INS and JDAM getting a laser option. It's not clear to me what the difference in performance between the two is.

    708:

    EC said: I stop for 5-10 minutes once every 1-2 hours to give my eyes and back a break. My estimate is that the frequent partial fast charge approach would increase my overall long trip time by c. 15% on long trips

    And also: needs a 100 Kw charger (and car that can take it), which are not exactly dense over the UK

    A Tesla or any of the current generation of 800V, cars charges at between 500 and 1000 miles per hour. So if you stop for 10 minutes every hour, you'd need to be driving well over 80 mph for the remaining 50 minutes to cover the 80-160 miles of range that you put in the car. That's before you reach the point that charging even adds to your trip time, let alone 15%.

    As for the "not exactly dense" coverage. Consulting Zap Map and filtering for 100 kW or over chargers, the furthest you appear to be able to get away from a 100 kW charger by road in the UK is John o Groats, where you're 117 miles (less than half a charge for most EV) from Inverness. But there is a 50 kW charger there, so assuming you actually look around JoG for a few minutes, you'll have a fully topped off car anyway.

    There are 10 chargers of 100 kW or more between Glasgow and Edinburgh. So averaging 4 miles apart.

    709:

    Local council has just burped out a bunch of traffic humps and intersection modifications, asking for general suggestions of similar things. I have used their online survey(s) to say I approve, but also the general feedback request to ask for on the the notorious "cyclists (and everyone else) dismount and lift your vehicle up 2-3 steps for no reason" things in my street to defeat the rat runners. I live on a nice wide street with smooth surfacing and a steep-ish downhill. So rat runners come off the main road at the top, scream down the hill and up the street at the bottom to beat the lights at the major intersection 300m past my street.

    Council have been "considering" everyone's many requests for speed humps since well before we bought the house.

    710:

    Perhaps you should ask your local paramedics and firefighters for *their views on "speed" humps? I know what the views in the West of Scotland on the subject are.

    711:

    If an electric car runs out of juice in the middle of nowhere, you're screwed. Or you don't know how to operate it correctly. Almost all new cars come with satnav built-in and get map updates over a built-in cellular modem. In the case of Teslas and other EVs, the map updates include the location of chargers and the routes the satnav provide take into account battery drain and incorporate recharge pauses. In fact, they reportedly warn you if your route is projected going to run you low on charge.

    Let's back up two.

    First, here's the article: https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2022-09-22/boiling-point-californias-ev-charging-network-could-use-a-jolt-a-trip-down-i-5-shows-boiling-point Note that it was dated September 22, 2022, so it's current, and it's based on a reporter's experience, not a hypothetical.

    As an EV owner, I've been close to this multiple times. The big one was when I went to an all-day meeting 1/2 charge away (per mile). Now realize, I don't just depend on Chevy charging station directions for my Bolt, I'm subscribed to two charging networks and have an app for a third map. All assured me there was a block of eight chargers half-mile from my meeting.

    Turned out, first, the trip to more than a half charge. I was driving on a hilly freeway (I-15 north) before 7 am, so if I didn't want to get steamrollered by all the semitrailers charging north from the Border to the warehouses close to I-10 and railroads east, I had to keep a speed well above 70 mph. Uphill half the time. Which ate up quite a bit more than half a charge.

    Then it turned out that the block of chargers was turned off for the weekend (it was in a business park, and no one was there).

    I got out of the jam by begging for help until I found a private charger that wasn't on any map.

    Now I think this kind of reliability problem can be and will be solved, but right now it's quite real. This won't stop me from promoting EVs, but it's worth realizing that apps right now won't necessarily tell you whether a charger is working, only where it is.

    Moreover, it's worth thinking about the engineering, social, economic, even political changes that have to happen for EVs to take over from petrocars.

    Here's one example: you're on a long road trip, charge is becoming an issue, and you find a working charger some place sketchy. Knowing how many things about it that can be hacked, do you stick your credit card or charge card into it? Give it your password? Plug it into your car, which is basically a computer, but which may have limited internet connectivity at this sketchy place to call for or get help?

    Now, as an EV charge supplier, what do you do to charge EVs in sketchy areas with a reasonable level of security?

    It's an interesting question, and one that's likely to spawn Red Queens galore.

    712:

    Rick Moen @ 706:

    Being 1/3 of the way around the globe in Northern California, I'm unfamiliar with the mix of EVs currently available in the UK. California might be a best-case counterexample as to infrastructure (charger network is quite good), but even rural Nevada next door proved excellent on our long road trip there. The EVs themselves are, as you say, pricey, but part of that is firms targeting the high end of the market first, and it'll be interesting to see what happens with larger production volumes and economies of scale. Reviews of the lowest-end EV, the Chevrolet Bolt, are reasonably admiring, i.e., they aren't junk. Base price before tax credits, etc., is US $26,595, equaling £23,980 at current exchange rates -- still not pocket change, but within range of many mere mortals.

    I just can't get over that when I learned to drive & was first looking at buying a car the base model Chevrolet cost 1/10 as much. Couldn't afford it then, can't afford that now.

    713:

    Spawning another topic, any thoughts about the Crimean Bridge kaboom? What happened, whodunnit, what the sequelae are likely to be?

    What happened: Embarrassment to Putin; plausible deniability.

    Whodunnit:-

  • Chechen separatists.

  • Sibir separatists.

  • One or other of the Azerbaijanis or Armenians. (I can never remember which is which; terrible, I know.)

  • Mossad. (By themselves, or as a favour.)

  • Kurds.

  • Ukrainian special forces.

  • Chinese special forces, as a reprimand to Putin.

  • France's DGSE (Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure). They like blowing stuff up.

  • Sequelae:-

  • Putin orders intensifed artillery bombardment of Ukraine, targeting children's hospitals and similar buildings.

  • Putin makes more threats of tactical nuclear weapon usage.

  • 714:

    Last chat I had they preferred speed humps over high speed crashes. I suspect it depends on the mix that a given individual has to deal with.

    But Sydney for the most part has a dense enough network of bigger/faster roads that it's not a huge issue if the last 500m has a speed hump or two on it.

    I'm also geuessing that digging people out of impromptu drive-through setups is a lot less fun than being 5 seconds later on scene because there's a traffic calming measure. My street has a slight offset between the top and bottom halves, about 3-4 metres, and someone went straight through a few months ago. The corner shop they drove into is still closed and propped up to stop it completely collapsing. I expect it will be demolished and turning into a house if they can convince the council that it's safe to put anything at all there. The (new) house diagonally opposite is set back beyond the straight line path from the street. I suspect that's deliberate.

    715:

    Is this a reasonable write up of the status of UK politics just now?

    It misses out some critical stuff -- the rise of regional nationalisms within the UK (including English nationalism, which wraps itself in the union flag and calls itself "British", but is nevertheless English uber alles) -- but it's mostly on the nail.

    When I predicted four years or so back that Brexit wouldn't be so bad, I assumed that although the Great Unwashed Public swallowed the rhetoric, the Political Elite knew better, and would undertake sensible economic policies to mitigate the effects.

    Little did I know. It turns out that the Political Elite believed what they said. Bizarre. The Tory party is role-playing a Famous Five/Billy Bunter/Back In The Jug Agane fantasy role-playing game, oblivious to the real world. The Starmer Labour Party has bought into the same fantasy. Bizarre, bizarre. Bizarre, really.

    716:

    The (new) house diagonally opposite is set back beyond the straight line path from the street.

    A few blocks from here there is a house directly across form the T that has had (I think) 5 cars go through and into his property. He has some smaller trees and such so so far no one has wound up in this living room. During the recent debate on speed humps on the street his situation was brought up in favor of the humps. Then the owner of the house pointed out that in every case the driver was drunk, doing 2 or 3 times the speed limit and any "bumps" on the street would not have mattered one bit. One was going so fast the curb launched his car into the side of an RV. Made a real mess of things. Totally pissed off the speed hump fans that their best argument was a fail. We got the humps but there was a lot of hand waving about the safety improvements.

    There is another small house a block from my daughter's in the almost urban area. Some one doing 80mph (drunk I think) went through the top of the T and managed to go between a large tree and fire hydrant and go into the house and kill the owner in his bed. To to this the drunk had only about 6" of clearance. Very unluckly shot.

    717:
    • But there was also some real stuff happening. A lot of engineering work has been done and is being done, and handling mass quantities of hydrogen seems less daft than it did a couple of decades ago.*

    Maybe. There wre an awful lot of building fires back when town gas was a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

    Compared to methane, hydrogen has a higher flame temperature; a vastly greater range of air:fuel combustion ratios; and a much higher flame speed (boom!, not woosh!).

    Not to mention its steel embrittlement problems, or its propensity to leak through the walls of its storage containers. Or its low energy density, compared to methane.

    Best thing to do with hydrogen is to combine it as soon as possible with nitrogen to make ammonia/urea (fertiliser), or with carbon to make methane/methanol/ethanol/propanol/butanol or octane/ diesel/kerosene. Those are relatively safe and useful fuels.

    718:

    I can only imagine what kind of PM Nigel Molesworth would be. The goriller of 3b sure had imagination, as any fule kno.

    719:

    what kind of PM Nigel Molesworth would be. The goriller of 3b sure had imagination, as any fule kno.

    Shurely better than the present incumbent. Please check out Nerine Skinner on YouTube, if you can stand watching (short) videos. ("Who is satirising whom?", you may well ask.)

    720:

    It's time for the U.K. to elect Captain Sensible!

    721:

    JohnS @ 712:

    I just can't get over that when I learned to drive & was first looking at buying a car, the base model Chevrolet cost 1/10 as much. Couldn't afford it then, can't afford that now.

    Depending on how many candles on your birthday cake, 10x price inflation may or may not be noteworthy. Speaking as a Boomer from the Eisenhower Admistration, I'm not even a tiny bit surprised that a 2022 dollar has declined 6x in value over the 48 years since my first learner's permit. FWIW, though I've sometimes been able to afford new car prices, ethnic Scandinavian frugality has always impelled finding much better deals used.

    1974 new-car base-model prices ran, IIRC, about US $3400 (Chevrolet Camaro, Pontiac Firebird). I wasn't buying any car at all for another six years, but personally I'd have considered springing US $3920 for a Fiat X 1/9 -- like an updated MG, except without taking the clutch apart every weekend.

    Heteromeles @ 711:

    I've confirmed with my wife Deirdre (the EV owner in my family) about some public chargers turning out (vexingly) to be reporting "unavailable" even though the smartphone apps and car-navigation displaces claims otherwise. However, she said (and the LA Times article confirms) that reliability and availability differ greatly between companies, one reason why she favours the Electrify America ones over competitors.

    I saw for myself even Electrify America's infrastructure being a bit flakey on our recent return trip from the Sierra Nevada: At an installation in Richmond, CA, out of a line of four chargers, two of which were reported usable, one was currently (no pun intended) in use, such that we could have just waited 15 minutes, and the other was mysteriously unresponsive. We opted to drive on to Emeryville, a few miles down the road, with much better luck.

    LA Times author Russ Mitchell's example of "running low on juice at the foot of the Grapevine" (the steep climb up the Tehachapi Mountains / San Emigdio Mountains to Tejon Pass), well, you know what I'm going to say about that, right? Despite the I-5 freeway, that's a desolate spot on a desolate road, and there were many stops with larger banks of Type 3 chargers further back along the road south. Banking everything on a ChargePoint station in the middle of nowhere with only two chargers was, IMO, reckless of him. Why allow a situation where he was running low at all? EV 101 dictates just not doing that.

    It's almost like a contrived example to fuel (sorry!) a newspaper editorial, particularly with his having banked on a sparse installation operated by ChargePoint, far and away the least reliable of the three biggest US chains.

    In fact, looking more closely at a map, I have to doubt Mr. Mitchell's basic common sense. Contrary to what his narriative suggests, Frazier Mountain Park Road, where he bothered to seek a charger, is nowhere near "foot of the Grapevine". It's very near the summit of that long, steep climb.

    EV 101, I say again.

    722:

    Our farm had a T almost opposite the main entrance, but wise people long ago had planted a row of trees there instead of a house. Then when cars started getting faster than drivers are sensible my (step)father and his dad picked up some old railway lines at an auction, cut them down to about 4m lengths and banged them in to the alluvial gravel before concreting up a wall there. There was a ditch between wall and road, so it would have been a challenge to get a car through (but it was hit at least once).

    Allegedly this is why the council put armco up on the missing side of the T, but as Reg said "protects the wall?" I think he was being funny, it was never easy to tell with a man so laconic that I think 90% of what he said was "yep".

    723:

    My understanding is that if you take a bike ride along the Rhine, every so often you see a pair of bridge pillars and a new railway bridge side by side. Those are bridges which the Germans blew in 1945 and were not feasable to repair.

    I suspect that the Russians will be able to get the Kerch Strait railway bridge working sometime in October. I suspect they could not do it if it were in range of the big single-projectile, GPS-guided load from HIMARS (I think its called ATACMS) because if they fix it on Monday morning another missile hits the same spot +- 2 metres at noon. So a lot depends on whether Ukraine can launch further attacks on the bridge. This is a very long bridge and Late Putinist Russia is not good at civil engineering.

    724:

    The rail link has been back up for some hours.

    As you say, it needs some precision hits, then hit again whenever the crews come out to repair it until they run out of skilled workers willing to be blown up.

    725:

    timrowledge @ 705
    Yes - and - No. The suicide note has been signed, & we are very badly damaged, but some recovery is possible.
    It depends upon Labour being able to openly say - probably some time next year - that Wrexcit WAS a total disaster. And then, at a minimum, re-joining the Customs Union as a first step back.
    Even so, it will take a long time.
    Britain was horribly damaged 1685-8, it wasn't really until 1704 that the recovery had really begun to be seen.
    - { Note: There is a Labour Movement for Europe, who are fighting desperately for common sense, but Starmer is still frightened of not regaining the Red Wank, oops, wall, seats. }

    paws
    Also - "speed" humps on any sensible bus route are a real no-no.
    Especially if you have any sort of Back, Neck, Lumbar, or other "vertical-joint" problems, or are old & frail.
    Come to that some speed humps are a real pain in ... everything to many cyclists - it depends on the hump profile, too. One of my regular cycling routes has "normal" humps along its length - no problem, I can go down there at a steady 12-15 mph, but at the junction at the ned, they put in a "brick table" hump, with a one-brick rise round the edges. OUCH ... good old LBWF, fucking stupid.

    726:

    My family's first real test with my wife's new EV was a road trip in early July from our home in Silicon Valley to the Tonopah, Reno Westercon and back, via a side-trip each way to Reno...

    And a wonderful convention in the middle of nowhere it was, too!

    My gasoline adventure through that was much the same. For those who didn't get there: Nevada has lots of nothing, for miles and miles. Reno to Tonopah is 237 miles (I took the Fallon route, trading 60 miles along a busy road for 55 through empty desert) and fuel consumption was on my mind at points. I'd tried to top up the tank just in case as I left Tonopah but the pump at Giggle Springs (yes, that's really the name) didn't like my car that day so I left with what I calculated was enough fuel to get me to my preferred refill site at Fernley (the last interesting place before the Reno/Sparks metro area). As it worked out I did indeed get there, though I could have tanked at Fallon if necessary, or even Hawthorne.

    (BTW, did you get into the Hawthorne Ordnance Museum? It wasn't a good time for me either time I went past.)

    The "trapped in the middle of nowhere" problem had nothing to do with the engine; that was headed towards Tonopah when I had a tire blow out in the mountains between Fallon and Hawthorne. (No cell service, either.) By the time we got the spare on it was late enough there was no point in trying to find a spare in Hawthorne and we went on through to Fernley hoping nothing else would break. We made it, though I was aware we had less margin than I liked.

    727:

    The thing that I like about our crossover (Mazda CX-5) for longer drives is the full-sized spare. Because you totally don't want to have a speed-limited hundred or so kilometres to the next place to get a flat fixed in business hours. Not that I wouldn't drive the little Mazda 2 to Melbourne and back if I had to, but its half-size-spare does seem like a liability on a trip like that.

    Similarly, if I wanted to replace the 2 with something more practical for trips like that, but still low-to-no carbon for commuting, the only really likely looking thing on the market in Oz right now is the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV.

    728:

    Damian said: Similarly, if I wanted to replace the 2 with something more practical for trips like that, but still low-to-no carbon for commuting, the only really likely looking thing on the market in Oz right now is the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV.

    The Outlander is almost exactly that same price as the base Model 3 (it could be 3k more, it's not clear if the price I can see is on road). I'm not sure where you are, but it's got nearly 500 km range which covers most of Vic. I can't see how you'd pick the Mitsubishi.

    729:

    I don't want to be drawn into this lunacy but, as Heteromeles says, the problem is real. It's NOT that "EVs are useless", but that there are many places, routes and uses in the UK where the issues I posted arise. Yours being a reasonable post, I will respond, and stop here.

    "It really would require an act of unusually determined stupidity to run an EV entirely out of juice on the road, given that the car is working hard to tell you about your options (using real-time satnav/cell-Internet data) and articulately warn you not to be reckless."

    The same has been said to me about petrol cars but, from personal and second-hand experience, even a 50 mile reserve is not reliably enough in many parts of the UK(*), and that's 25% of the range of an average EV (no, gasdive, Teslas are not typical). There is often no WiFi, the information is not entirely reliable, noighttime and weekends can be a problem, and the situation can change (or a road be diverted) before you get there.

    Your approach about begging favours won't work here, not least because there is generally no parking anywhere near where hospitals etc. have power supplies. Yes, you can go to a hotel etc., but my experience with similar requests is that they are not cooperative; if you are lucky, you can check in (expensively), otherwise, tough.

    The electronic gimmickry and its unreliability is not unique to EVs, but they are even more infested with it than modern petrol cars. Everyone I know of has wasted days (often tens of them) because some unnecessary gimmick failed and could not simply be ignored. Mine has vewry little, but they have caused more problems than everything else put together. I don't want to start that damn thread again, so won't go into details.

    (*) Consider driving fromn Laxford Bridge on the west coast of the Highlands to Lairg along the A838 and finding the road is blocked at Shinness Lodge. 50 miles gives you just enough range to get back to (say) Scourie or Kinlochbervie, and you had better guess right. I have had episodes like that a couple of times (not there), and have had a 35 mile diversion before I could start driving to the nearest refuelling/recharge point.

    730:

    The thing that I like about our crossover (Mazda CX-5) for longer drives is the full-sized spare.

    I bought a full-sized spare for my Hyundai Accent, because I used to make holiday drives between Ottawa and Toronto, and having a flat in the middle would put either city at the limit of the small-sized spare (not to mention the difficulty of finding a repair shop on a holiday).

    Totally worth it for the reduced worry.

    I've also got CAA+ for the same reason.

    731:

    I used to stop every couple of hours because of backache. But when I changed my Skoda Fabia for Skoda Yeti with cruise control the combination of a better seat and the ability to test my right foot made the backache a thing of the past. I could go back to driving from Norwich to North Cheshire in one go.

    732:

    Consider driving fromn Laxford Bridge on the west coast of the Highlands to Lairg along the A838

    That's a ridiculous, stupid edge case.

    You're talking about a part of the UK (the Highlands) where about 1M people (out of 67M total) live, in an area about the size of Wales: Kinlochbervie is tiny (population: roughly 400), as are most of the "towns" in that part of the world.

    Really, it's the arse end of nowhere. Great scenery, good hill walking and, I gather, sailing if you're into that sort of thing -- but unless you actually live there (and 99.5% of us don't) worrying about EV charger proivisions there is idiotic: they're not on the gas grid, all the houses have backup generators for winter, the roads have measuring poles so the snow ploughs know where they go when they're socked in. If you need to go there you either catch the bus or rent a suitable 4WD vehicle with a big fuel tank.

    Remember the UK is a predominantly urban nation, and roughly 70% of us live in cities. You might equally well dismiss FTTP broadband as useless because there's no availability in those scattered villages -- and it'd be just as ridiculous.

    733:

    Talking of Batteries
    Any opinions on this - it's obviously only at the largeish Lab-scale stage at present ...

    In other news ... any reactions to Putin's brutal lashing out at purely civilian targets, all over Ukraine?
    I also note that "only" about 48% of his missiles got through ....

    734:

    There are rapid chargers in Durness, Scourie, Kinlochbervie and Lairg. I've done that road in an EV.

    Next!

    735:

    any reactions to Putin's brutal lashing out at purely civilian targets,

    Ukraine striking military targets set up next to civilian centers is terrorism.

    Russia aiming a city centers is fine and dandy.

    What's your point?

    [sarcasm off]

    Putin wants the dirt of Ukraine. If he has to obliterate everything on top of it to get it. Well sucks to be a Ukrainian.

    736:

    FWIW driving around Wales in an EV is a much bigger ask than Scotland. The government north of the border has done a much better job of investing in grid upgrades.

    https://www.zap-map.com/live/ is the app on practically everyone's phone.

    Key:

    Pink is DC (Always 50kw, often over 100KW).

    Blue is generally between 7 and 45kw AC. Many EVs don't bother to support 3 phase charging so experiences vary. I expect to get 21KW 3 phase at most of them but check first.

    Yellow isn't worth bothering with unless desperate. Usually some unusually accommodating home owner with a 3kw charging port on their drive.

    737:

    That's not the point I am making. I was responding to the "Of course, EVERYONE could use an EV if they were just prepared to" claims. I have also repeatedly said that I can for much of my driving, in theory (*), and that these problems are not fundamental, but exist at present for a fair number of people.

    Look, I am NOT opposed to EV's. The reason that I post these responses is that I have tried several times to find an EV that would be functionally adequate for my requirements (ignoring the price), and failed dismally every time.

    I chose an extreme case to show the issue, but there are other places that have the same problem to a lesser degree: e.g. mid-Wales, Lincolnshire, Northumberland/Cumbria and probably Ireland. The problem is not just the people who live there, but those who visit or travel through the area (and there are a lot more of us); I know that you aren't one such person, but I am. As I said, I have had the experience of finding that a 50 mile margin is barely enough several times (in several parts of the country, as well as the Highlands.

    I agree that what you, I (and others) have said in the past, that the sane solution would be to hire a suitable car for the occasions when I need to go there, but that is made ridiculously difficult to downright impossible in the UK, largely by the insurance cartel. And, yes, I have looked into doing just that. It's a complete non-starter - dammit, it's cheaper for me to take a taxi from Cambridge to (say) Kyle of Lochalsh and another one back again, and doesn't have the problem that most hire-car companies won't accept me as a customer, anyway!

    And an even saner solution would be to take the train, but they have abolished the last guard's van :-(

    (*) The EV car Web sites are extreme examples of information-free marketing crap but, as far as I can see, the only available EVs that reach even the limited functionality of my small, low-powered car are well over twice the size and weight and at least three times as expensive.

    738:

    714 - Moz, what you say is correct, up to a point. I'm going to guess that paramedics also prefer roads that don't cripple them because they're standing up and fall over when giving a patient emergency treatment. I won't name the guy, but this happened to someone I know.

    725 - Greg, agreed.

    729 - Another example. My car was in Lochboisdale being repaired. I had a courtesy car from the repairer. When my car was ready I drove from Balivanich to Lochboisdale (27 miles) to collect it, and discovered that the local garages were both out of diesel. If the repairer hadn't been reasonable and taken cash instead of a full tank, I would have had to do another 42 miles return to get to the next nearest filling station and back.

    731 - Makes sense, with the note that not everyone has the same back issues driving the same models.

    739:

    It looks like they are using a lithium metal anode. The problem with lithium metal anodes has been that when you charge them, you are plating metallic lithium, and lithium really likes to grow dendrites when plated. This means that charging a lithium metal battery tends to short as the lithium metal dendrites grow through the separator between the positive and the negative plates.
    The battery community has been trying to make separators that prevent this. The problem is that the separator must be able to allow lithium ions through.

    If you think about it, lithium ions have just two electrons, and apart from having a positive charge, are about the same size as helium atoms. This means that they can easily diffuse their way into crystal lattices and some ceramics.

    The cathode also looks different. I don't know enough about the use of selenium and sulfur in batteries to say much, though.

    It looks like NASA has funded a group to try to combine several promising technologies and see if a battery suitable for aircraft is feasible.

    740:

    Speed humps are a pain in the arse on a mobility scooter, too. They're OK if there is a wide enough gap between the edge of the hump and the edge of the road to get through without actually going over the hump. Very often, though, there isn't. You get roads where the shape of the camber is basically elliptical, so it gets much steeper towards the edges, which have humps of similar profile and unusual height, placed so that you can only get one set of wheels between the hump and the kerb while the other set goes over more or less the full height of the hump. And they like to put humps opposite drains, and the drains then sink, so the nearside wheels go down this additional drop over the drain cover while the offside wheels are being maximally hoisted.

    So either you go along at a perilous angle leaning your body sharply to the right to prevent being tipped over sideways, or you have to swerve out into the middle of the lane and tackle the bloody thing head-on. But speed humps also act as points which greatly exacerbate the already infuriating tendency of cars to creep along behind you sitting on your arse so you know they're there but can't see what they're doing or watch for what they're about to do, instead of putting their foot down and getting the fuck past ASAP and ceasing to chew up all the CPU time of the traffic-from-behind-you predictor. So there is a conflict between the need to swerve out and go right over the hump to maintain acceptable stability, and the certainty that the car sitting on your arse won't be expecting it and so could quite well pick the exact same moment to realise that there actually is buckets of room to get past after all.

    The problem of them causing cars to behave unpredictably in especially awkward places also manifests itself when they are placed close to junctions. Some cars take them in their stride and negotiate them with aplomb, while others fanny around as if they'd never seen one before and think it's going to jump up and bite them. The kinds of cars which are bought by people who basically can't drive - very small ones and very large ones - are naturally fairly consistent circumflabellators, but you can never really tell, and the overall effect is to randomise the speeds and acceleration/deceleration profiles of approaching vehicles right at the point where it's critical for judging whether there's room (in four dimensions) for the mobility scooter to make the turn across the traffic or not.

    And then there are the more general annoying effects, such as their interference with the flow of traffic meaning that whenever there's more than next to no traffic at all, there's always lots of traffic - the road for some distance on either side of them is always occupied by a procession of slow-moving cars, and there is no opportunity for gaps to occur that are big enough to cross the road in between them. It's especially bad when the humps are close enough together that the processions in either direction overlap, so you need gaps in both flows to occur at the same time, and they just don't. The kind with two humps and a gap in the middle are particularly bad, because you get cars in opposite directions meeting and then pissing about because they both insist on putting one set of wheels through the gap instead of just going straight over; and the supposed advantage that buses and ambulances will be able to straddle the hump does not materialise, because there are invariably parked cars on either side too close to make this possible.

    No, you can scrape the whole bloody lot of the things up as far as I'm concerned.

    741:

    NecroMoz: deanimator of the undead @ 709:

    Local council has just burped out a bunch of traffic humps and intersection modifications, asking for general suggestions of similar things. I have used their online survey(s) to say I approve, but also the general feedback request to ask for on the the notorious "cyclists (and everyone else) dismount and lift your vehicle up 2-3 steps for no reason" things in my street to defeat the rat runners. I live on a nice wide street with smooth surfacing and a steep-ish downhill. So rat runners come off the main road at the top, scream down the hill and up the street at the bottom to beat the lights at the major intersection 300m past my street.

    Council have been "considering" everyone's many requests for speed humps since well before we bought the house.

    Maybe what you need are those pop-up bollards. Tie them into a motion detector that lowers them once a vehicle gets within X-number of feet. They move slowly enough that the drivers would have to slow down to clear them.

    Or tie them in to that traffic signal so that they stop traffic that can't get to the light without speeding?

    Around here the problem I have is an elementary school at the bottom of the hill and a major thoroughfare at the top. The street I live on is 3 blocks long, 1,740.43 ft (530.48 m), and people dropping their kids off at school treat our street like a drag strip, even though there are cars parked along both sides of the street, pedestrians & cyclists and a speed limit of 25 mph (40 Kph).

    I live about half way up the hill and I've clocked vehicles going 60+ mph (96+ Kph) when they passed my house (using a borrowed radar gun). The city will NOT install speed bumps, especially NOT the axle breaker kind that would be necessary to slow the idiots.

    Anyway, I don't think speed bumps would work as well here as making the two cross streets 4-WAY stops, which would also be a less expensive solution to the problem.

    742:

    Here we go: nationalize, then have a civilian review board. And to be on the board, you can not have an income greater than 1.5 the national median.

    743:

    Messes? No. It was a deliberate gaming, by the telecoms, to deregulate... and, as we've seen has happened, they followed their plan and reaquired each other, so now we have a few near-monopolies, unregulated. Enjoying the price jumps?

    744:

    Cars got larger, one reason being the oil industry controlling the auto industry in the US.

    Decades ago, I ranted about wanting a law requiring all SUVs to have an ugly - the law must specify "ugly" - adapter to the front bumper, to prevent running over a smaller car.

    745:

    I'll second, and indeed third and fourth, that. Based on travelling in/on bicycles, various cars and minibuses, and PCVs.

    746:

    Ah, yes, treated as "trucks". A woman I was working with on the Kerry campaign in '04, in FL, told me she was a dentist, and had to tell her accountant NO when he tried to get her to buy an SUV for tax breaks. No, I'm not joking.

    Over $100? How big a tank? I have a 2008 Honda Odyssey minivan, bought used in '13. I really keep meaning to replace the spark plugs, and it has dreadful city milage, short trips get me under 18mpg... but highway? I'm still getting the new-car spec of 23mpg, or more. Tank is, I think just under 18gal. TWO WHEEL DRIVE. The ONLY time I needed four, and didn't have it, was in '04? 05? when my son and I drove from FL to Maine, to look at some land I'd owned since the seventies (which we decided I should sell), and that was 2/3rd up a private road on a mountain.

    747:

    Just remember, 1.2x10^12 (IIRC) furlongs/fortnight isn't just a good idea, it's the law.

    748:

    Greg vP @ 713:

    Spawning another topic, any thoughts about the Crimean Bridge kaboom? What happened, whodunnit, what the sequelae are likely to be?

    What happened: Embarrassment to Putin; plausible deniability.

    Whodunnit:-

    I've looked at the different security camera views that have showed up on the internet and I'm having trouble even figuring out WHAT "dunnit" ...

    The Bridge is two bridges - a highway bridge and a railway bridge. The railway bridge is a long incline leading up to the arch. The highway bridge is a 4-lane divided highway that crosses a long causeway bridge before climbing up an incline to where the arches are.

    This photo - taken during construction of the railway bridge - is (I think) in the approximate area of the explosion and shows the road incline going up to the arch, along with the elevated location of the railroad.

    In one view looking north down the length of the roadway there appear to be two trucks & two cars (car passing the lead truck, car overtaking trailing truck) northbound out of Russia to Crimea. The lead truck starts up the lower part of the incline going up to the arch and there's an explosion.

    But it appears the explosion is slightly behind that truck? And the explosion has a large horizontal component to the left carrying it across the southbound lanes and into the elevated railroad bridge.

    In the other view, looking to the north-east from a security camera underneath the railroad bridge, there's only a single truck - NO CARS - and it's on the level causeway portion when the explosion occurs. And the explosion appears to come from the right of the north bound spans; from somewhere off the bridge on the east side.

    Also, if it was a truck bomb, given what you can see in the videos, it would have had to have been a suicide bomber. And in that case there's usually someone who wants to proclaim a martyr ... and no one has.

    Plus trucks have to go through security & be inspected. How would you get that big a truck bomb through the inspections?

    I guess it's possible a truck from a Russian military contractor carrying explosives could get on the bridge, and saboteurs could have planted a charge in the truck with a remote detonator ... but I think the explosion came from underneath the bridge.

    I think the Kerch bridge explosion was another false flag operation by Russia. Putin's already using it to advance claims that Ukraine terrorists are attacking Russia and now Russia is firing missiles into Kyiv.

    Reporter who witnessed Russian missile strike in Kyiv describes what he saw [YouTube - CBS News]

    I think if Putin continues to lose he WILL use a nuclear weapon against a Ukrainian city.

    749:

    Ah, yes, the privatization of military services. Ammunition? Hell, there were stories in the mainstream media about infantry getting 1-2 quarts PER DAY in Iraq, and the excuse was the difficulty of the contractors in getting insurance.

    750:

    I want a Congressional investigation into the spiking food prices... and the US DoJ to go after the companies for price gouging, sending the CEOs to jail for that.

    I just looked this up, and I see due to avian flu, they lost 10% of the chickens. So, explain to me why the price of eggs, for the free-range ones at Aldi, jumping from $2.34 to close to $4.50?

    751:

    Strongly disagree - at least in the US market, Aldi's brands run, on the average, about 50% of supermarket (example: "Cheerios" is about $3.75; Aldi's Millville is about $1.75, same size... and does not have high fructose corn syrup in it).

    752:

    Don't be silly. If what you say was true then I wouldn't have bothered thinking of the subject in the first place - I'd just have gone "fuck electric cars" and not bothered posting on the subject at all. What I am "committed to" ("what I do insist on" would be a better choice of words) is not having a vehicle that is capable of stranding me in Nether Bugfuck beyond my ability to move it even without something breaking or going wrong. Note that "my ability" means "my", as in me, not "...and someone else, who wants money for it". Avoiding the unwanted characteristic means having the ability to run on portable fuel for a non-negligible distance - note also that the combination of "portable" and "non-negligible distance" excludes all batteries from consideration as "fuel" (and unlike spare fuel cans, spare batteries don't stay charged of their own accord).

    I rant about the subject for the same broad category of reasons that EC does: I think electric cars are basically a good idea in theory, if not the magical panacea that they are often made out to be, but the observed practice is several different overlapping loads of dogshit, quite unnecessarily, and is practically certain to remain so for the same infuriatingly shit reasons that give rise to all kinds of situations that people on here repeatedly rant about. And it's infuriating in a personal context because the personal consequence of it being done so bloody badly is that as far as I can see there is no way I will ever be able to have an electric car, as by the time it becomes a feasible proposition I'll be far too dead.

    My requirements for a minimum-spec electric car would go "basically like a Morris Minor, except for having better seats, a better heater, <=2x the power-to-weight, and several times the range". It would be much cheaper to obtain such a thing by getting hold of a scrap anything with a dud engine and comfortable seats, and replacing the engine and fuel tank with a brand new motor and set of batteries, than by buying any new electric car or nearly any second hand one - and yet still far too expensive for me to ever seriously contemplate.

    (Range: for it to be worthwhile having it at all I would need it to be able to go for a holiday somewhere, diddle around while I was there, and get home again, without any recharging beyond what I might get from a bunch of portable solar panels in British weather while it was parked up. I'd not be expecting mains to be available at the other end, and I have never seen a single charging point anywhere that isn't inherently unusable because it doesn't have anywhere to put the fucking money in.)

    The aspect that clobbers it more than anything else is the impossibility of providing the battery, and we seem to be irretrievably stuck now with that problem as well as having the other consequences of ignoring the need for infrastructure all the way back to generation. We're having it shoved in our faces right now that our electricity supply isn't up to scratch even as things are, without having to charge a nation's worth of electric cars as well. Instead of the government planning and paying for upgrades to generation to be done properly and done in advance of the upgrade being needed, they ignore the whole thing and allow profit-making organisations to do as little of it as they can get away with in as cheap and shitty way as possible. So we get generation fuelled by natural gas which is amazingly cheap and available until all of a sudden it isn't, which for some unaccountable reason seems to be a tremendous surprise; and undersea cables to use someone else's generation instead of having our own, which seems to work fine until the someone else's generation starts having the same problems and they find they can make more money sending electricity the other way, and a gentle overall flow coming in suddenly turns into a torrent going out, with nobody even seeming to notice which is no surprise at all. And then the government panics and suddenly remembers that actually they can magic up billions of pounds out of nowhere, but now there's no time to spend it properly and all you can do is hand it out to people and say "here's some gaffer tape for the moment".

    Similarly with distribution, there have long been warnings along the lines of "the grid is going to start falling over before much longer, but we're not actually going to do anything about it until things start catching fire because that would mean spending money", instead of it being reinforced ahead of time because it's important national infrastructure without worrying about whether it "makes a profit" for some circumscribed and already highly advantaged minority to everyone else's disadvantage.

    When the only electric vehicles were milk floats, it was pointed out that even if you could make a battery that would accept charge as fast as a petrol tank, the rate of energy transfer through the hose of a petrol pump is several megawatts, so an electric version of a "petrol station" would be a quite enormous and quite horrible load that would be a major problem to supply. Since there was no such battery anyway, the conversation then stopped. When batteries that could be charged significantly faster came along, it didn't resume. As things were just left to sort of happen, instead of making a point of doing them properly, we have multiple incompatible styles of charging points, hidden in odd corners where there happens to be a bit of spare supply capacity, and "getting away with it so far" because there aren't that many of them and they're only a few tens of kW so they haven't pulled the grid down yet.

    What we should have done is set up a standardised national resupply network before trying to get everyone interested in electric cars, so they didn't have so many reasons not to be. Install alongside the petrol pumps some battery-replacement machines; instead of buying a gallon of petrol, you exchange one ISO-standard 40kWh battery pack (of which your vehicle has as many as it needs), by automatic handling. (I don't count as objections: "present electric cars aren't built for that therefore no electric car ever could be"; $engineering_problem that was solved industrially a while back; someone tried it in California and it failed because it was done so bloody badly that it didn't actually solve any problems but just created new ones.) And you don't buy the battery; it works like LPG cylinders, where the cylinder is owned/maintained/safety-checked by Calor or Blue Oyster Cult, and you just pay a set fee to swap an empty one for a full one.

    This way not only is recharging as straightforward as refilling with petrol (with attendant service, too, which the UK doesn't have any more), but unlike LPG cylinders you can still top it up yourself at home if you want. And you don't have to argue with people about where you can and can't do it, because it's the same thing at the same places that they do already. Nor do you have to argue with people about how long the battery lasts before you can't charge it properly any more. Nor do you have 10 grand extra on the price of the new car compared to a petrol equivalent to pay for the battery. Nor do you have people who aren't rich permanently prevented from having an electric car no matter how second-hand it is because of this one single component that's never less than a few grand as long as it still works at all. Etc.

    On a broader scale, not only is it a simpler problem to supply a small number of battery-pack-recharging plants than a huge number of extra several-houses-with-everything-switched-on-at-once point loads, but it assists with grid stability and the introduction of renewable sources. Charging points have to supply power when people need it. Charging plants aren't worried about going to work in the morning, so they can take their time and charge when there is spare power available - and do some discharging as well when there's not enough; you get powering electric cars and grid energy storage in the same box. This is a better way of doing that than ideas about discharging people's cars on their driveways, because you can install the capacity you need rather than making do with what you happen to have got, the same considerations of the necessary wires apply, and you don't have to piss millions of people about.

    Of course, the principle of minimal disruption indicates that what we should have should have done was go balls out on developing artificial photosynthesis of liquid hydrocarbons, for mass deployment on non-agricultural land, in the same kind of way that we have on lithium batteries, as opposed to the repeated dribs and drabs we do get of someone makes it sort of work in the lab and then we hear no more about it, like we get with other sorts of batteries. That way all we have to do is unplug the oil wells from the refineries and plug the photosynthesis output in instead; everything else stays the same, so the whole thing is FAR less hassle for very nearly everyone and it doesn't create anywhere near as many opportunities to make new ones of things people have already got and get them to throw the old ones away. And you can build far more than you need just to replace existing oil wells, and use the surplus for making big blocks of polythene mixed with rocks and dumping them in ocean trenches.

    753:

    So, I take it you haven't worked a lot in business? You want to talk about "perfectly ethical government employees"? Shall we discuss "perfectly ethical corporate employees (and managers)"?

    At least with government employees, oversight is possible. Corporate? ROTFLMAO. (And I'm thinking of when I worked for the Scummy Mortgage Co., and for Ameritech....)

    754:

    Let's see - how many hours do battery-powered lawnmowers last before needing a recharge? My not-overly-large, but with steep sections, takes me 1-2 hours (depending on the air temp).

    I have a plug-in mower. It runs, except when I've let the grass get too high, and the 100' power cord decides to pop its breaker, and I have to walk to the back of the house to reset it, until I'm done. (By which time I am done in).

    755:

    Not sure you could make Sherman's neckties now. Back then, I'd guess that the rails were maybe 55 or 70lbs. Modern is about 100lbs, except for heavy mainline usage, where it's about 132lbs.

    756:

    So that's what we saw being hauled along on a flatbed, no camo, no large fuel tank, just the vehicle itself, this weekend.

    757:

    The US, too. We really need the equivalent of council housing here, and a lot of it. And if the construction wasn't outsourced, I suspect the cost of new council-type housing would be half or 1/3rd of commercial housing.

    758:

    Ah, yes, I've seen one or two installations of those pop-up bollards. For a few days they seem to be OK and everyone pats themselves on the back. Then they settle into their normal mode of not working somewhere between 20% and 50% of the time. During the times when they are working, people drive over them when they're just about to pop up, so they come up under the car and hoist it into the air. People also drive into them when they are popped up. The rate at which such things occur remains more or less constant, while the periods of the bollards not working get longer and longer, until eventually they get switched off permanently and the council just tries not to look at them.

    759:

    I see. "Use the Force, Luke!"

    760:

    Right near where the house my late wife and I had in Chicago, there was a mess of an intersection. There used to be a bike shop right at the corner, and after the third time some idiot drove into their shop, they got a highway steel barrier in front. https://www.google.com/maps/place/W+Touhy+Ave+%26+N+Ridge+Blvd,+Chicago,+IL+60645/@42.0123204,-87.6830384,3a,75y,119.54h,73.61t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sKujSiDXZlKSF46YnbnH-tA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m5!3m4!1s0x880fd1cc7989eadb:0x334ea163b823e93f!8m2!3d42.0122942!4d-87.6830711

    761:

    $3400 for sport/muscle cars. It was 72? 74? that my ex's Maverick cost, I think. Using mark's economic indicators, which track amazingly well with the fancy economists' ones, the current US dollar is worth about 1/8th of the 1968 dollar.

    And what I want is a hybrid minivan. Two wheel drive. They started selling them in Europe in '08. (Maybe around the time the Prius started in the US, and for 10 years, US dealers kept saying they wouldn't sell....) The first hybrid minivan in the US was Chrysler Pacifica in '17. I just looked. Gee, used hybrid minivans are running MORE than new, and the new seem to start around $34k, which would be something like a third of my savings and retirement.

    762:

    Yes, that's what people think they're like over here, but it turns out not to be true. To make up an extension to your example (I don't eat breakfast cereal, so I'm inventing it, but it works this way for things I do eat): an ordinary supermarket has Cheerios at £3.75. Aldidl has Millville at £1.75, and it tastes like cardboard. But the ordinary supermarket also has something with a name like "Basics Cereal Hoops", for £1.50, and it's barely distinguishable from the full price version, especially if someone serves you some without showing you the box. In fact it most likely is the full price version, coming out of the same factory in a different box. But the Millville version actually is different stuff, from a different factory, who aren't very good at making it, probably the same lot who make the plastic cakes with labels in unusual languages that you find in corner shops.

    The thing is the ordinary supermarket has a big shelf with lots of Cheerios on it right in your face, whereas the Basics Cereal Hoops are tucked down in a corner right at floor level where they're hard to see and quite often other people have bought them all already. So people don't realise they're an option at all, and conclude that Aldidl are cheaper.

    763:

    Oh, forgot to add: my use case include long drives - train/air and car rental costs more - such as this past weekend, when we drove to Mannington, WV (the basis, with some liberties taken, such as moving a power plant near there, for Grantville, of the 1632 shared world), to look at the town (and a memorial for Eric Flint - his widow, Lucille, and some of her family were there); driving to Chicago next month (and that would include visiting friends on their small farm in se Indiana, and probably Michigan City, IN, after the con, for Ellen to do genealogical research). Some areas - WV, and se Indiana, I would expect to resist charging stations as long as possible. Getting a hybrid two-wheel drive minivan will get me far better milage than my current van, which is up there in years, and may be my last vehicle. So I do get annoyed at times, with the eternal argument ICE! EV! without anything in the middle.

    764:

    The BBC has an angle looking down at the water with a possible boat coming underneath the span. In both views there seems to be a lot of what looks like water thrown through the air.

    765:

    Perhaps they're manufactured differently. Having just gone down to look, these are made in Batavia, IL, and on the occasion that Ellen eats some, her sense of smell and taste being significantly better than mine, she has no problems.

    766:

    Rick Moen @ 721:

    JohnS @ 712:

    I just can't get over that when I learned to drive & was first looking at buying a car, the base model Chevrolet cost 1/10 as much. Couldn't afford it then, can't afford that now.

    Depending on how many candles on your birthday cake, 10x price inflation may or may not be noteworthy. Speaking as a Boomer from the Eisenhower Admistration, I'm not even a tiny bit surprised that a 2022 dollar has declined 6x in value over the 48 years since my first learner's permit. FWIW, though I've sometimes been able to afford new car prices, ethnic Scandinavian frugality has always impelled finding much better deals used.

    I understand all that intellectually, but for some things, emotionally my ideas of reasonable price are still stuck in the mid-60s. I can calculate (using an on-line calculator) based on actual inflation that $2,600 Chevy from 1965 should have morphed into a $24,445.86 Chevy today (so $26,595 IS a price increase), but my heart doesn't agree with my head in this matter.

    And, whether it's $24K or $26K, it's almost $10,000 MORE than the purchase price of this house (although I knew I was getting a bargain when I bought it in 1975). So that's another reason my emotions, my heart over-rules what I know in my head about fair prices.

    1974 new-car base-model prices ran, IIRC, about US $3400 (Chevrolet Camaro, Pontiac Firebird). I wasn't buying any car at all for another six years, but personally I'd have considered springing US $3920 for a Fiat X 1/9 -- like an updated MG, except without taking the clutch apart every weekend.

    1974 was about the time I got rid of my 1964 Bel Air station-wagon ($300 used in 1971) for a 1968 Fiat Spyder (used for $1,500).

    I looked at the Mazda Miata back in 1992 1 and not only would it not fit my budget, I couldn't fit my body into it - every time I went to put my foot on the brake my knee rubbed against the steering wheel.

    Since I couldn't afford/fit the Mazda, and because I had owned the Fiat when I was in my 20s ... I thought I'd look for another used one in 1992. I was astonished by how much they were selling for ($4,500 - more in fact than I had originally paid for the one I bought back in the early 70s).

    So I looked around for comparable vehicles & found an MGB. Which I still have & would still have running if it hadn't been vandalized (but that's a different story for another time).

    Having owned both the Fiat and the MGB, my experience is the MGB is/was a much more reliable vehicle ... and it cost me less to buy the MGB ($1,800) than another Fiat Spyder would have.

    1 If I was going to have a mid-life crisis, I had to get me a sports car & I needed to do it while I had a fairly good paying job.

    767:

    It's something I've mentioned before on this blog, but "electric cars" aren't "petrol cars with an electric drivetrain and a battery pack" but most people think of them as such. They're a different mode of transport added to the mix of horses and carts, bicycles, buses, marathon runners, traffic cones etc. you find on today's roads.

    If you approach EVs with that attitude then the decision to buy and use one becomes a different proposition versus replacing your existing mode of transport with an EV and expecting it to work just the same.

    768:

    Damian @ 727:

    The thing that I like about our crossover (Mazda CX-5) for longer drives is the full-sized spare. Because you totally don't want to have a speed-limited hundred or so kilometres to the next place to get a flat fixed in business hours. Not that I wouldn't drive the little Mazda 2 to Melbourne and back if I had to, but its half-size-spare does seem like a liability on a trip like that.

    Similarly, if I wanted to replace the 2 with something more practical for trips like that, but still low-to-no carbon for commuting, the only really likely looking thing on the market in Oz right now is the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV.

    You can get a full-sized spare for any car, even if it's not a factory option. Might take a trip to a salvage yard, but it's gonna' fit in the hole the mini-spare stays in because that hole has to be large enough to hold the full-sized tire if you have to put the spare on.

    One thing I think is funny is how some drivers will put the mini-spare on and never bother to get the full-sized tire repaired/replaced and put back on the car.

    769:

    how many hours do battery-powered lawnmowers last before needing a recharge?

    Somewhere between 0.5 and 10. When I was mowing the whole 400m2 that isn't built on here a new Ryobi brushed mower with 36V/5Ah battery could not do the whole thing unless the grass was quite short. Using the catcher you get about 20 catchers full before the battery is sad. Mostly I mulch which apparently uses more power.

    These days brushless motors are more efficient, batteries actually are their rated capacity, and you get mowers with dual 36V/6Ah batteries. I suspect that means you really can push the thing into long wet grass for as long as you like and the mower will keep on laughing at you.

    But if that's not enough you can just buy more batteries. Someone here sells "Ryobi compatible" batteries for ~2/3 the cost of Ryobi ones, or if you have money you can buy into the Husqvarna system and worst case they make a backpack battery that's over 1kWh rather than the 1/6kWh batteries Ryobi etc make. I'm more likely to swap the Ryobi for a Makita because the battery system matters more than the advantages of plastic motor mounts.

    770:

    If you approach EVs with that attitude then the decision to buy and use one becomes a different proposition versus replacing your existing mode of transport with an EV and expecting it to work just the same.

    That I completely agree with. Using an EV for commuting, errands, and around town has lowered our gas bill by around 75%.

    Since it's still more environmentally friendly to keep the old car until it wears out, we use it for second car, road trips, and medium-scale hauling.

    If you're in a family with multiple cars, it's straightforward to divvy up the tasks and cars, and slip an EV in for all the short hauling. It's a bit trickier if you have to do everything with one car.

    On the other hand, if you're only taking long road trips every five years, it's fairly reasonable to get a single EV, and rent the specialty vehicles you need as you need them. That's when you get the sports car for the road trip, the 4WD for the mountains, or the cargo van for moving stuff.

    771:

    I'm not sure a full-sized spare would fit where the donut is in my Odyssey.

    772:

    Charlie Stross @ 732:

    Still, I think having EV chargers out there would be a boost to tourism, which I think is a big industry in Scotland. And if the future is EVs, then the infrastructure to support them needs to be anywhere the local community wants tourism revenue.

    More generally ... The argument about California's charging infrastructure is telling.

    To make the switch over to having EVs replace ICE vehicles, the ability to charge has to be as reliable as it currently is for refueling ICE vehicles.

    Filling stations are EVERYWHERE, and if you pull into any one of them, you can be virtually 100% certain of getting gasoline (petrol) to fill your tank.

    For EVs to take over there's got to be a similar ubiquity of charging stations (with multiple chargers) and every one of those chargers has to be reliably operational.

    The switch over to EVs isn't going to work until the EV driver can have the same 100% assurance of "refueling" anywhere they pull into a charging station. When I drive, I have no concern whether I'm going to find gas when I need it. It's got to be the same for EVs if they're going to succeed.

    Right now, the advantage I see for ICE vehicles is generally longer ranges & quicker refueling plus NO CONCERN whether you are going to find a working pump. Those are all solvable problems for EVs, but they haven't been solved yet.

    They need to be solved before EVs can really become a viable alternative. I want to see EVs work as transportation (even though I doubt I'll ever own one - because it looks like the Jeep is going to last me until I'm too old to drive), but there's still a lot to be done before that becomes possible.

    773:

    Pigeon @ 758:

    Ah, yes, I've seen one or two installations of those pop-up bollards. For a few days they seem to be OK and everyone pats themselves on the back. Then they settle into their normal mode of not working somewhere between 20% and 50% of the time. During the times when they are working, people drive over them when they're just about to pop up, so they come up under the car and hoist it into the air. People also drive into them when they are popped up. The rate at which such things occur remains more or less constant, while the periods of the bollards not working get longer and longer, until eventually they get switched off permanently and the council just tries not to look at them.

    Well, it was just a thought. Should have put an emoji to show I wasn't deadly serious about them 😕

    But I don't think idiots wrecking themselves is that much of a drawback. And if enough idiots DO, word gets around and even idiots figure out not to fuck with them.

    774:

    The switch over to EVs isn't going to work until the EV driver can have the same 100% assurance of "refueling" anywhere they pull into a charging station. When I drive, I have no concern whether I'm going to find gas when I need it. It's got to be the same for EVs if they're going to succeed.

    So you know that there's a cluster of four EV charging stations at a suitable point on your route for you to stop and charge at. Great. And then you pull up at that stop and find there are four cars already charging there and no free "pumps", those vehicles are going to be there for at least another fifteen minutes or longer and you're third in the queue of EV cars waiting for the next available charger. All four chargers are working and they're mid to high-capacity chargers so the web app didn't lie to you when you set off. The site owner isn't willing to pay the extra money to pay for another half-megawatt of grid capacity to this location to add another four chargers, they're already coining it from the four chargers already there which are in almost constant use.

    Like I said, thinking about recharging EVs in the same way you'd fill up with fuel from a gas pump is the wrong way to approach EV ownership. It's a different thing.

    775:

    Back when I was working, the vast bulk of my driving was within the GTA, and an EV would have done just fine for that with only home charging.

    My problem is that I did enough road trips with awkward timings (relating to when rental offices are open) that renting a ICE wouldn't have worked for me. (And also involved taxi trips to the rental agency, because none of the ones around here offer pickup/dropoff.)

    Now I'm no longer commuting (yay!) and EV would still do fine most of the time, but the charging infrastructure in rural Ontario isn't widespread enough for me to be comfortable doing road trips in an EV — especially as a big attraction is exploring and not planning routes etc. Also an ICE vehicle can be serviced anywhere, but not an EV (yet).

    I'm hoping to keep my 12-year-old car running until chargers are more common. It seems wasteful to buy another vehicle now when this one works just fine. (Not to mention, with the supply shortages, buying an EV now means paying a deposit and waiting to see how many extra fees the dealership tacks on when the car actually arrives.)

    If I was a two-car household, one would definitely be an EV — when the next car needed to be bought. Being as I only have one vehicle, I'll keep maintaining it and hope it reciprocates :-)

    776:

    EVs are already reasonably priced, for those whose compensation has kept up with inflation, for others, not so much. Inflation corrected prices for EVs seem comparable, for me, to premium priced small cars from around 1980, and much more capable, but nothing yet comparable, inflation corrected, to low end transport modules of the same vintage.

    777:

    Also, if it was a truck bomb, given what you can see in the videos, it would have had to have been a suicide bomber.

    Assuming these were nice bombers, they would park the truck on the bridge (simulating a breakdown). The truck driver then gets in an accomplice's vehicle. They drive up a bit, wait until there is no nearby traffic, and then remotely detonate the bomb. No suicide (or collateral deaths) required...

    778:

    The space saver tyre storage being big enough for the full size tyre would be an obvious thing. But driving a 2000 Volvo V70 estate down a weirdly empty German autobahn and the rear tyre decides to redistribute itself over several lanes. Time to replace the tyre,luckily it had stopped raining, unluckily this was on the return leg of a family camping trip. So take off the bikes from the rear hatch, unload several tons of camping equipment and dirty clothes, Volvo's have big boot space, to finally get the spare tyre. It was a space saver type, so no problem fitting it. Then putting the hub back into the storage space reveals a full size hub don't fit. Much hilarity ensues as I try real life Tetris trying to get everything back into the car. The kids ended up all holding suitcases and bags on their laps for the rest of the trip home. Fun,not. The 2014 Ford Fiesta we had next did not even have a space saver spare but a tube of gunk to pump into the leaky tyre. Not much use if the tyre shreds though. The fact the gunk had solidified within a year did not help either. Though it did not have a spare tyre the fiesta did have a full size tyre storage space, which now contains a full sized tyre.

    779:

    752 - I can't think where you'd put the e-Minor's accumulator pack. The "better (front) seats" are trivially easy if you'll accept some form of "sports seats".

    754 - Based on manufacturer's adverts, a battery pack for a rechargeable lawnmower will last 30 to 40 minutes. That would mean I'd have needed 2 battery packs to cut the lawns at 12 BP as they were laid out when my parents owned it. The present owners have reduced the size of the front lawn, to make it easier to have multiple automobiles.

    766 - I had similar experiences with the Mazda MX-5/Miata, oh and my right elbow bumped on the door card (RHD, not Wrong HD, cars) every time I tried to steer right.

    780:

    Vulch @ 764:

    The BBC has an angle looking down at the water with a possible boat coming underneath the span. In both views there seems to be a lot of what looks like water thrown through the air.

    That's the second security camera view I was referring to.

    If it is a boat, its nose is poking out from under the west side of the highway bridge (under the southbound lanes). Also looks like it's larger than a kayak.

    The explosion appears to me to have occurred off to the east side of the highway bridge (where the spans have collapsed). I don't know about water being thrown up, but it looks like the explosion sweeps across the highway bridge from east to west - from somewhere off the far side of the bridge in the BBC video showing the "boat"; and off to the right (way off to the right the more I look at it) of the bridge in the first view with the two trucks driving northbound.

    And this from the BBC article:

    The footage shows a huge fireball erupting just behind - and to one side - of the truck as it begins to climb an elevated section of the bridge.
    The speed with which the truck bomb theory started to spread in Russian circles was suspicious. It suggested the Kremlin preferred an act of terrorism to a more alarming possibility: that this was an audacious act of sabotage carried out by Ukraine.
    "I've seen plenty of large vehicle-borne IEDs [improvised explosive devices] in my time," a former British army explosives expert told me. "This does not look like one."

    I'm no expert on VBIEDs, but that explosion doesn't look like it came from the truck.

    And the "mysterious unmanned boat" the BBC article mentions (and links to) doesn't look like it could carry an explosive charge as large as what appears to have hit the bridge. News reports said it had a payload of 140 lb (63.6 kg)

    ... so I dunno.

    781:

    We call them "rising bollards" here in Manchester, where they are used to ensure only buses and trams can access the pedestrian area in the centre of town.

    You can witness the mayhem when cars try to "tail-gate" buses on the Manchester Evening News video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIas-5pwpZk

    782:

    Finally some sensible Covid reporting, this time from Umair Haque: How Covid Became the Normalization of Mass Death

    TL;DR "Now. Covid. What’s the big deal? The big deal is this. In America, Covid’s cut life expectancy. Go ahead and guess how much. Almost nobody knows, but everybody should. Three months? Wrong. Three years."

    https://eand.co/how-covid-became-the-normalization-of-mass-death-95e44b477804

    783:

    500 km range which covers most of Vic

    Well I live in Brisbane, so when I talk about driving to Melbourne it's more by way of an alternative to flying. A 500km range is competitive with petrol, and I bet there are emerging charging networks, so you're right (it just means more planning to understand where charging is available in places like Moree and Coonabarabran... something that is bound to become much simpler as the years wear on). wa

    The rationale around PHEV is that it would be functional as a straight EV most of the time, and just burn fossils for these long trips. I think that by the time it is anything more than a daydream, however, the advantage of this arrangement over a true EV will have eroded (as you suggest has already happened).

    784:

    Swedish Probe Finds More Evidence of Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage The article doesn't come out and state anything, but it's almost certainly external explosives.

    https://gizmodo.com/swedish-probe-finds-explosives-used-nord-stream-pipelin-1849625102

    785:

    All those times the Ukrainians blew up an ammo dump or whatever Putin insisted it was an accident. Now Putin’s insisting this was Ukrainian action - maybe that means this one was an accident?

    786:

    Re: '... recharging EVs in the same way you'd fill up with fuel from a gas pump is the wrong way to approach EV ownership. It's a different thing.'

    A couple of questions:

    a)How long did it take for gas & diesel stations to become efficient/fast - refuel within 15 minutes? Highway (gas) refueling that takes 15+ minutes isn't an issue for me because by the time I need to refuel the car I usually need a coffee/food, rest room, stretch my legs, etc. This usually means something like a 20-30 break if traveling alone - longer if traveling with company, esp. kids. As it is, very often getting coffee and food at the counter takes longer than the refueling.

    b)Is battery switching no longer one of the options being considered? The battery switching would work as follows: drive into a service/refueling space, pop open the hood/trunk, remove/replace battery, pay and go. Total elapsed time under 5 minutes. If battery switching isn't difficult to do, carrying a spare battery for long drives/emergencies could become standard practice.

    c)What percent of EV batteries are currently being manufactured in the US/UK? Domestic brands would make it easier to support infrastructure changes/spending esp. wrt economics and politics.

    d)International standards organization - is there a body overseeing and setting international standards yet? There are ISOs for all other new techs - and having/advertising something like this would probably help grow the market.

    787:

    Heat Waves Set Off Record Ice Melt in Greenland Last Month Over 7 cubic miles of ice melted last month... :-(

    https://gizmodo.com/greenland-ice-melt-september-2022-heat-waves-1849630945

    788:

    Domestic brands would make it easier to support infrastructure changes/spending

    That's now how modern industry works. For small things you want an international standard so for example any muppet can make an 18650 LiPo and it will go into your widget. For bigger stuff you tend to get "standards" that amount to several major manufacturers agreeing on an interface specification - power tools have an 18V standard like that, Bosch being the major manufacturer I know of that uses the standard.

    For cars I don't see any standard happening in the near future, there's no enough battery swapping going on to make it useful. Which also means that it doesn't matter whether the UK makes batteries that could go in electric cars, the chances of Tesla allowing you to put them in their car are zero. The European car manufacturers might possibly do that for EU-made batteries, but I understand the UK has decided to be non-compliant with EU rules wherever possible.

    Where you will see a standard, likely soon, is heavy trucks. There are a few standards being discussed, but since there aren't really products yet deciding on a standard is high risk. I expect that the second manufacturer to release a product will demand that the first one release a battery standard...

    789:

    b)Is battery switching no longer one of the options being considered?

    Customers have rejected that idea wherever it's been suggested. Tesla actually offered it as an option and it was laughed out of the room.

    I suspect it will come as trickle-down from the trucking industry. Once the big players settle on a format for truck batteries and the associated swapping stations it's only a matter of time before some fleet operator looks at the numbers and decides that the smallest size battery could be wedged into a car, does so, and suddenly there are taxis or whatever using little truck batteries.

    In this context I suspect 50kWh counts as "little", think the 200 litre box tanks you see on the side of delivery trucks, one each side on the truck become batteries instead and they just drive onto the robot, it swaps the batteries, and goodbye. With a bit of work the robot might be able to shove one up between the front wheels of a car and ditto. Once you have that standard size available at every truck stop in the country it would make sense to use them in smaller vans as well, and so on down to building a small car around that battery (and robo-changer access requirements). No-one in the city really cares what the thing looks like, the, um, "diversity" of shapes in urban fossil cars should tell you that).

    790:

    ""electric cars" aren't "petrol cars with an electric drivetrain and a battery pack" but most people think of them as such."

    Yeah, that's the whole point: they need to be made in accordance with people's expectations. It would be weird if people didn't think of them in that way because... because it's a car, so it's got to be like a car, what else could it be like, if it's not like that it's not a car is it, etc. etc. If it does not in fact behave like a car, but instead requires you to learn workarounds for idiosyncratic pain-in-the-arse things it does which an ordinary car doesn't do, then you can be very sure that you will repeatedly and frequently encounter people citing each and every one of those things as evidence that it is shit. You can also be very sure that telling people that it's not really shit, it's just their attitude that's wrong, is not going to go down well at all. Heck, you still get this happening in arguments over petrol vs. diesel because they don't behave identically, never mind comparisons over much greater differences.

    And it's not even necessary for such statements to be true; they merely happen to be true for electric cars the way they're being done at the moment - ie. with no form of planning or strategy, just allowing random instances of things called "electric cars" to be brought into existence by random groups who offload every scrap of related effort and responsibility that they possibly can (like charging infrastructure, right back to generation) onto someone else in order to make more money. Such an approach will inescapably lead to a proliferation of bodged solutions that result in people complaining about them ad nauseam. And the longer we piss about allowing this to happen and not bothering to do anything about it, the harder it becomes to start doing it any better, and the longer these unnecessary obstacles to people's possible interest in electric cars persist.

    791:

    I suspect the primary worry of most EV owners is that they might get stuck with a faulty battery after a switch. If we use the battery that came with the car it is warrantied, and more to the point we have been using it and there aren't any surprises.

    All the extreme edge cases that people bring up for why they cannot possibly use an EV (I might get stranded in the middle of the Sahara!) would come to the forefront with battery switching, particularly if there is any variability in manufacturing quality.

    792:

    The idea was rejected because vehicle owners are used to dealing with an industry that is entirely untrustworthy.

    If £15k of the value of a £20k car is tied up in the battery then there is no way that anybody sane would allow someone to replace it with one "just as good".

    A model where batteries were leased worked for a bit when nobody knew how long they lasted but then reasonable concerns about planned obsolescence killed it.

    Technically replaceable batteries make sense, and leased batteries make some sense but that doesn't matter because asking people to trust anyone in the vehicle industry is insane.

    A model where everyone rents vehicles would allow for battery replacement but right now only a mug would allow a filling station to take half the value of their investment away.

    793:

    I should point out that virtually all my EV charging is done at home. That's not something most people can do with gas cars.

    What I do see happening (because there's pressure for it in California) is large employers setting up charging facilities. Eventually, the upper scale ones (looking at you, Qualcomm), will probably offer valet service for those who want to recharge their cars. This is a trivial perk, because the real purpose of the valets is to maximize use of the charging stations. Currently, people park in charging slots all day (at least at my wife's work, which is not Qualcomm), because it's too much of a hassle to come out and move your car. It's better to have lower-wage employees managing the charging.

    The logic here in sunny So Cal is that:

    a) most sunlight arrives during the day

    b) EVs are a large majority of home electricity usage in homes that have them.

    c) Most EVs charge at home at night

    d) we've got real power demand crunches in the evening, because everyone comes home, turns on appliances, and charges their cars.

    Rather than having rolling blackouts in the evenings, making it easier for people to have their EVs charged during the day should be a no-brainer, at least until HR departments start whining about why they have to cover the salaries of a small crew of valets.

    And note also, most cars need to be charged 1-2 times per week, based on commuting, so this probably is doable even in big companies.

    794:

    I'm guessing the battery switch stuff will be via leasing of the whole package, including recovery/support service. I don't know almost anything about this except for my cousin getting stranded somewhere in Victoria once and the leasing company paid for a motel for a couple of days while they worked out how to deal with his Appropriate Car for a Busy Executive that had mystified the local repair shop in some smallish town.

    I expect when you lease an Appropriate Car (electric) it'll be the same. You are explicitly not allowed to arrange your own service, you ring 1800-it-no-go and the helpful people help you. Assuming the car doesn't arrange the service itself and just displays "the repair team will be here in 73 minutes" as a countdown timer.

    For individual owners you'll buy the whole bundle and lease the battery, with random variations depending on local consumer protections (Texas: you pay $X every swap, the end. California: you pay an annual membership plus a swap fee plus an energy fee and get full support if anything goes wrong)

    795:

    That crappy Tesla effort has been described on here before. I remember reading the description and thinking "well no wonder it failed when it had all those different stupid things wrong with it for no reason". It failed to gain the advantages of either method of resupply (swap vs charge), but did have the disadvantages of both, along with some special extra ones all of its own. Makes me suspect they did it as badly as possible on purpose to put people off the idea so they didn't start using their own choice of batteries.

    The rest of your post is very much the kind of thing I think we should have been installing pre-emptively all along, ever since it was decided that having electric cars become popular would be a good idea. I'm rather glad you posted it, because it makes it sound as if we actually do have some chance of not being stuck with the present methods for the foreseeable future.

    796:

    The other side of battery swaps is just as terrifying: you run a business where people bring in large explosive devices that they have had for an indeterminate time and swap them for explosive devices that you have recharged. What could possibly go wrong...

    They do that with gas cylinders now and the "buy and pay to swap" model has largely taken over from paying a rental charge every month. So it definitely can be done, and now that everything is a computer it's probably easier with batteries than with dumb lumps of steel. But it still sounds slightly terrifying...

    797:

    Yeah, the trucking industry has little patience for bullshit and has some large players who spend millions every month on buying and maintaining trucks, so for them EVs are not as scary. They already have to deal with vehicles that get monitored every which way by accountants, can only go on special roads and into special refuelling stations, have limited range, need specialists to operate them as well as service them, and so on.

    Once the accountants say "we make an extra 0.1% of turnover as profit if we ... {electric trucks}" the question will be when not blah blah it cannot possibly work. Look at Deutsche Post and FedEx, both having custom electric vans made to their exact needs.

    798:

    Not at all: the battery that comes with the car is as much of an unknown quantity as any other major component is (already). They tell you it's all completely great but then of course they do, and it doesn't stop things packing up. Compare the situation with LPG tanks: I'd much rather get a second hand LPG car that you refuelled by exchanging tanks than one with a tank built in, because you can be sure that the tank you get in exchange has been serviced and safety-tested correctly and promptly by the outfit that owns and refills it, whereas the condition of a tank that's just sat in the back of a car since someone put it there is pot luck.

    799:

    I keep thinking back to my grandparents, who lived during the switchover between horses and petroleum. And the lack of moaning about how loss of horses who could get their drunk owners home at night would destroy civilization (well, it kind of has).

    Anyway, a century and more ago, we went from whole urban ecosystems that produced tons of horseshit and various health calamities, to whole urban ecosystems that produce even more GHGs, NOx, SOx, and other calamities...

    ..And I wonder: why the fuss about EVs as civilization killers? Have we wussified to such an alarming degree? Or is it too many industry talking points getting etched into various brains?

    Probably I'll never understand. Oh well. Should we have stuck with the horseshit and a billion humans on the planet? To late to ever know, I guess.

    800:

    John's said: For EVs to take over there's got to be a similar ubiquity of charging stations (with multiple chargers) and every one of those chargers has to be reliably operational.

    There will never be a similar ubiquity of charging stations. (Talking about the UK).

    There are 20888 charging locations with 57613 connectors in the UK, not counting the electricity supply that virtually everyone has in their home.

    There are 8378 petrol stations including the ones under construction.

    So at the moment, EV charging is more than twice as available as petrol, and I can't see that gap doing anything other than widening.

    As for reliable operation, if you count the time that petrol stations are closed as being nonoperational, then the charging stations are vastly more reliability operational. Almost all of them are 24/7. A few are like petrol, business hours only, but that's very rare.

    801:

    The battery that came with MY specific electric car came with a 10 year full replacement warranty. So I am not worried about it at all. If it fails somehow anytime between now and June 15, 2031 I will get a whole new battery. On top of that, I take care of the thing by following all the various suggestions for extending battery life (mostly not charging past 80% unless I am planning a long trip).

    Everything that comes with every car is an unknown quantity, unless you are a practicing mechanic (and nowadays not even then).

    802:

    Tim H said: nothing yet comparable, inflation corrected, to low end transport modules of the same vintage.

    Citroen Ami is £2000 in 1980 GBP. (8000 quid on road today)

    It's not the right vehicle if you want to tow a caravan from London to Athens non stop using motorways the whole way, but then neither were the low end transport modules of the 1980's. If you want something to get you down to the village for shopping, or to the train station for a trip into London to see the specialist, then it's fine.

    803:

    PS, the Citroen 2CV was 2700 quid in the 80's. The Citroen Ami at 8000 is about 3/4 the price in inflation corrected pounds.

    804:

    Pigeon wrote on October 10, 2022 19:38 in # 752:

    My requirements for a minimum-spec electric car would go "basically like a Morris Minor, except for having better seats, a better heater, <=2x the power-to-weight, and several times the range". It would be much cheaper to obtain such a thing by getting hold of a scrap anything with a dud engine and comfortable seats, and replacing the engine and fuel tank with a brand new motor and set of batteries, than by buying any new electric car or nearly any second hand one - and yet still far too expensive for me to ever seriously contemplate.

    https://www.vintagevoltage.tv/ may be of interest. I watched the episode showing the conversion of a Volkswagen Type Two 'splittie' (had one when at uni and it was splendid at dealing with Lake Erie snow). They show was positively inspirational, though I'd double the battery pack (without regard for the perfect interior restoration).

    And, yes, they did convert a Mini, an Isetta, and several other non-behemoths.

    805:

    If you're committed to the inland route, it would be a giant pain. Doable, but horrible. By the coast or New England Hwy, then Hume to Melbourne it's currently easy. The NRMA is putting a 50 kW charger in every little country town in NSW. So it's nowhere near the UK coverage, but it's improving fast. QLD gov has put chargers all the way up the coast to Port Douglas. So that's all easy now.

    (for scale, for UK readers, we're discussing the equivalent of distribution of electric chargers between London and Ankara)

    806:

    EVWest do a lot of conversions of assorted VW & Porsche models, along with some MR2s etc. Oh, and BMWs for some racing class.

    Some guy(™) in UK converted an old Ferrari 308, selling the original engine. It ended up quicker, faster, lighter, better handling, and having better range.

    BYD (I think) in China do the battery swap thing in a fairly big way. AIUI they are considering trialling it in UK, though right now I’d imagine any plans to go anywhere near Perfectly Normal Island must be suspended.

    Wrt inflation I recall checking the “my lifetime (since 1960)“ inflation for UK a few years ago and concluding that it was about 17X and that houses were pretty much 10X that. It can only have gone up since then. When comparing car prices over time one really must admit that even Chevrolet have managed to improve their barges over time. Why, some of them even have independent suspension these days! That ought to be considered in costing.

    807:

    Nojay @ 774:

    Like I said, thinking about recharging EVs in the same way you'd fill up with fuel from a gas pump is the wrong way to approach EV ownership. It's a different thing.

    I understand that. Do you understand that the general population is not going to be willing to switch to EVs until they can JUST GET IN ONE AND GO without having to worry about whether they're going to be able to find a functioning a charging station?

    As long as it does remain "a different thing" it's not going to gain general acceptance.

    808:

    paws4thot @ 779:

    754 - Based on manufacturer's adverts, a battery pack for a rechargeable lawnmower will last 30 to 40 minutes. That would mean I'd have needed 2 battery packs to cut the lawns at 12 BP as they were laid out when my parents owned it. The present owners have reduced the size of the front lawn, to make it easier to have multiple automobiles.

    Thirty to forty minutes is fine for the homeowner cutting his own grass every week or so, but what about the "lawn care" guy with two riding mowers (4 weed whackers, a push mower & three of those goddamn leaf blowers); cutting grass 10+ hours per day.

    How many spare batteries is he going to need & how is he going to recharge them all? How many different types of chargers is he gonna' have to haul around?

    809:

    Heteromeles wrote in part on October 11, 2022 01:37 in # 793:

    What I do see happening (because there's pressure for it in California) is large employers setting up charging facilities. Eventually, the upper scale ones (looking at you, Qualcomm), will probably offer valet service for those who want to recharge their cars. This is a trivial perk, because the real purpose of the valets is to maximize use of the charging stations. Currently, people park in charging slots all day (at least at my wife's work, which is not Qualcomm), because it's too much of a hassle to come out and move your car. It's better to have lower-wage employees managing the charging.

    At Intel, here in Hillsboro, Oregon, EV drivers & riders do move out of their charging spot after three hours. Why do Oregonians support each other? Something in the water?

    810:

    Evidence suggests that they can get enough battery to make it work. But there don't seem to be any lawn care people here so it's hard to know the details. I suggest that the lawn care guy is unlikely to be running more than one or two tools at a time, so if he has three batteries that's one in use, one in the other tool, and one on charge.

    Admittedly he could carefully buy only one tool per battery type so need 8 different battery chargers and 8 spare batteries, but the fossil lawn guy could have a diesel truck to go with his mix of two and four stroke petrol tools plus methanol/nitromethane for the higher performing tools like chainsaws. Some people are like that.

    My guess, just based on Guilty of Treeson who's an arborist rather than a lawn guy, is that they will either start with one tool and one battery, or go all in and buy the six tools (or however many) and as many batteries as they can afford/think they need. Treeson actually dealt with someone who was more at the tree-care end of the gardening professionals who said that once you have the battery the tools are much cheaper than an equivalent with its own two-stroke engine, and they're cheaper to run. They had both a battery system and one (or more?) of the "power head" things where you get a motor and hand grips then switch in the string trimmer, brush cutter, hedge trimmer etc as needed. Even Ryobi offer one of those, but so do Husky and Makita so I assume most brands have them.

    Remember that even if they're running a generator to charge these things, the alternative is not "the grid" it's "a two stroke motor in their hand" which is loud, toxic and expensive.

    811:

    JohnS @ 807 (commenting to Nojay):

    Do you understand that the general population is not going to be willing to switch to EVs until they can JUST GET IN ONE AND GO without having to worry about whether they're going to be able to find a functioning a charging station?

    As a reminder, I can speak only to California/Nevada realities, not the Scottish Highlands, Oz Gold Coast, und so weiter. Also, I'm just an EV passenger and occasional secondary driver, actually preferring my ratty old Trek 1400 road bicycle or more-ratty Honda Fit (called Jazz in Rightpondia) gas car, in that order.

    My wife Deirdre confirms that there's a necessary adjustment in thinking. Folks who aren't up for that will and should eschew EVs (just as those in sundry problematic locations and situations certainly should). I'm not any kind of EV-evangelist, nor is she. But after that brief adjustment of perspective, in her (and my) experience in an admittedly charger-rich US state, around here, at least, you really don't "worry about whether you're going to be able to find a functioning a charging station." You will. Your car will practically chauffeur you to one -- especially after you learn, unlike LA Times's Russ Mitchell, that (in US market) ChargePoint is unreliable especially when it claims that a 2-charger station is 100% absolutely for-sure operational.

    You quickly learn that having the EV proclaim an estimated 150 miles or more of range is what you want, and not to run it down to 30: You could, but having to drive straight to a charger or a nearby alternate is annoying, so Don't Do That, Then.

    As someone mentioned, most EV owners charge them primarily on the home mains, pretty slowly, overnight. We don't have that option with Deirdre's Audi, as Chez Moen's 1956 electrical panel would probably need replacement, and we're cheap. Fortunately, there are innumerable Type 3 chargers in a 5 mile radius, and a Type 2 (slower) one a block away. (But we live in the Valley of Tetravalent Metals*, so there's that.)

    In short, yes, it's a different thing, many simply won't like that, and there is nothing even remotely wrong with that. However, for whatever it's worth, at least one sexagenarian software engineer (Deirdre) and her even more agèd sysadmin husband found difference no big deal.

    *Chez Moen is across town from Farcebook, such that I've been known to taunt its staff about their inability to maintain network routing tables.

    812:

    At Intel, here in Hillsboro, Oregon, EV drivers & riders do move out of their charging spot after three hours. Why do Oregonians support each other? Something in the water?

    Sorry to bring this up, but if you're willing to either ship Oregonian water south to California, and/or suffer more fracking southrons vacationing in your very fair state*, then you'll spread sanity and civility south. I know this is unpopular...

    Anyway, my wife works at a hospital where a couple of chargers are offered as an amenity. They're usually occupied.

    I'm "picking" on Qualcomm, not because they're scofflaws, but because they're purportedly going to massively increase the solar production on their main campus. I still think, for that facility, having valets would really simplify getting a lot of cars charged, because the owners wouldn't have to deal or get into conflicts. Whichever, I still completely agree that people should be good citizens and not bogart the plugs.

    *A good chunk of my family lives around Portland, and (apologies to Oregonians) it's one of my favorite cities to visit.

    813:

    until they can JUST GET IN ONE AND GO

    I suspect you're so habituated to the hassle of "just getting in your car" that you're unaware of it. When I've been in places that car is the only option it's really, really obvious to me that it's a huge PITA. Find car keys, make sure I know how to navigate there, make sure I have the correct toll pass(es), run through the pre-start checklist in the vehicle, drive to the vicinity of my destination and start looking for a carpark. If necessary find somewhere to refuel along the way. And allow a large margin for variations in traffic, even with an "up to the minute" traffic reporting app. With electric you swap "where's the cheapest fuel" for "did I plug it in last night". I don't see the problem.

    As a cyclist I'm habituated to the bicycle version of that. Be vaguely aware of the weather in case I need to take more clothes, jump on bike, squeeze brakes, bounce on seat to make sure there's air in the tyres. Usually while pedalling up driveway. Ride vaguely in direction of destination, if necessary check phone map for exact location. Bike to exact destination, look for bicycle parking (within 10m of door, obviously). Bicycles trip times are almost entirely about your preferred riding speed, it's very hard to get a traffic jam of bicycles (you need 10x the density as with cars, and that's a lot of people).

    Public transport is more like the bike, except I swap "make sure bike" for "make sure PT card". Unless I'm taking the bike on PT, which I usually am. Plus the obvious "check timetable", usually more focussed on whether buses replace trains because I would rather ride 50km than take the bus. In the case of my ex "wait until 6 minutes before the train leaves, then run 800m to station", with me it's more like "amble towards station, look at timetable display thing when I get there". Traffic jams on PT make headlines, that's how rare they are.

    Similar processes, one involves much more risk and cost. There's no "zero hassle", just different types of hassle.

    814:

    Yeah, we're very likely doing it (again) in April in the CX-5, so not an EV, but I'll make a point to look out for charging stations for future reference. The plan will be to take multiple overnight stops and load all the visits and catchups on the way down, then drive back by the fastest route with the least stopping and minimal ground contact.

    We did the reverse last time. I remember some very extensive EV charging facilities at the service centre just off the Hume near Logic, the industrial/logistics hub outside Wodonga, but we turned off the Hume and took the back road into the Blue Mountains on that trip. The rest of the way was on the Pacific though, and while I don't remember the EV facilities quite so clearly I have a vague impression they were there. Will probably do the NE next time, hoping to catch up with an old school friend in Tamworth, but that would be on the way down.

    815:

    Heteromeles @ 799:

    The difference is your grandparents didn't have internet access and forums like this one where they could kvetch about trivial shit with anonymous strangers. 😕

    816:

    NecroMoz: deanimator of the undead @ 813:

    Similar processes, one involves much more risk and cost. There's no "zero hassle", just different types of hassle.

    I view it as more hassle or less hassle. I don't want to adopt (and I don't think most people will want to adopt) anything that seems like MORE hassle.

    And that's where I see EVs currently. For most people they're more hassle. For them to replace ICE vehicles they're going to have to become LESS hassle.

    817:

    My EV is a 10 year old motorcycle, so only 100 miles range.

    My go places routine is similar Moz's bicycle. Hop on, go.

    The ICE bike is vastly more hassle for any trip under 100 miles. It's also vastly more effort for service. During the warrantee period the nearest service was 550 km return. Just one service consumed more of my time than all the charging my EV has since I got it. Every trip is a 3 minute wait to warm up. The resentment I feel every time I have to go to a special shop just to fill it is unreal.

    If this transition was going the other way, you'd have a point. No one would put up with petrol if there is any way to avoid it. Because its so much hassle.

    818:

    AlanD2 & others
    That bridge: & was/not a "truck bomb" ... ?
    Suggestions are being made, given lots of previous "form" & the way the actual war in Ukraine is going - that it was another False Flag operation. We already know that Putin is quite capable of murdering a few of his own population to further his ends, after all.

    kiloseven
    Have you seen the PRICES on those "vintage" conversions?
    To convert my classic L-R would be getting on for the cost of a new one ...
    { Which reminds me - I just came across a brand-new L-R fake "Defender" on the road, yesterday - what an ugly, massive brute! No thank you. }

    819:

    786b - AIUI the Tesla "replaceable battery pack" required dropping an replacing the vehicle underfloor.

    796 - Gas cylinders are pressure tested "supply side" between consumer1 returns cylinderX to dealerN and dealerO places refilled cylinderX in their available to consumers rack.

    802 and 803 - Let's examine some of the other details of the Citroen 2CV vs Ami (electric) use case:- The 2CV (602cc) would do ~70mph (enough to keep up with extra-urban UK traffic) for several hours whilst carrying 4 occupants and luggage. The Ami (electric) can just about do 30mph (marginal whether it can keep up with suburban traffic) for 1 hour whilst carrying 2 occupants.
    I've just checked, and that means that I would need to recharge at Stobhill to have used the Ami to get from my residence to the dialysis facility I used for a year prior to a transfer because, never mind that I had to use 60 and 70mph roads in a vehicle that could only do 30, I didn't have enough range to do a 35 mile return trip unrefuelled.

    806 - Remove the V8 from a Ferrari 308 and you've removed what makes it a Ferrari.

    808 - My point was that the 35+/-5 minutes "sounds adequate" for a householder, but is actually marginal at best. I know a garden contractor, who has all IC power tools because he can be using them for 6 or 7 hours a day.

    820:

    Funny thing about the Kerch Strait Bridge. Long before it was attacked, it has been predicted to be in danger of collapse, despite the US $4.5B+ Putin threw at the problem of getting it built with record speed (and despite major insurance firms being unwilling to cover it):

  • The ocean floor there, and also the nearby land, is known to have massive "mud volcanoes".
  • The deep mud layer (60 metres) would require far deeper pillars than the current bridge uses, to be properly anchored in bedrock.
  • The bridge is said to be too low to be safe from damage from winter ice. (The previous Soviet bridge constructed across the strait in 1944 lasted only six months until it was wrecked by ice.)
  • The area's quite seismically active: There's a tectonic fault through the strait. Thus the mud volcanoes.
  • 821:

    [i]There will never be a similar ubiquity of charging stations. (Talking about the UK).

    There are 20888 charging locations with 57613 connectors in the UK, not counting the electricity supply that virtually everyone has in their home.

    There are 8378 petrol stations including the ones under construction.

    So at the moment, EV charging is more than twice as available as petrol, and I can't see that gap doing anything other than widening. [/i]

    It takes about 120 to 180 seconds to recharge an ICE car. The typical petrol station averages 12 pumps, at a guess.

    It takes about 2000 seconds to recharge a BEV.

    Ignoring both charging at home/work and the poor reliability record of electric charging points (which factors point in opposite directions), you need (2000 / 180) × (8738 × 12) = 1,165,066 charging points in the UK. Preferably more.

    822:

    Ignoring both charging at home/work

    This, I think is an assumption that renders pretty much the entire remainder of your point moot. You cannot ignore this kind of "background" charging, because it radically affects how often an EV needs to access the EV equivalent of a petrol pump.

    My GF's Toyota Auris needs to visit a diesel pump at minimum every 900km , and probably more like every 600km (i.e. not running it completely dry) - call that about 370 lifetime visits to a refuelling station to date. My parents keep a log in both their diesel and electric cars - the EV has visited a fast charging station 7 times in just under 80,000km driven, or about every 11,500km driven, i.e. much better than an order of magnitude fewer visits. All of the rest of the energy (approx 98%, or pretty much two orders of magnitude more) to drive that car was delivered by plugging in at home.

    To be sure, that might be an atypical example - the hatchback is a bit more efficient than average; and my parents are absolutely atypical! - but the point is that you simply can't ignore that EVs car derive some - and often most - of their energy from private charging.

    To also be sure, that's not true of everyone; there are lots of cases where people can't plug their EV in at home - onstreet parking, renting where the landlord refuses to install a charger, etc etc. And I have no intuition just what the average dependency on public charging stations is (or how it changes in peak holiday travel time). But nevertheless, that assumption fatally undermines your point.

    823:

    Let's use the Australians' beloved Citroen E-Ami, and my dialysis trips to Stobhill as the use case, and your guesstimate of 370 lifetime refuellings. I need 3 dialysis sessions per week times weeks in a year for 156 dialysis sessions per year. Unless I was prepared to run the car "dry" at base or hospital every trip I now need some 312 refuellings per year, which, by your figures, means the vehicle has a life expectancy of 370/312 years or 1.19 years!

    824:

    Next time you fill up an ICE, time yourself, from when you pull alongside the pump to when you pull away again. For myself, I might only be pumping petrol for 2-3 minutes, but even using pay-at-pump I'd be surprised if the total time is ever under 5 minutes: engine off, seatbelt off, get out of car, operate pay-at-pump interface, open filler cap, [pump fuel], close filler cap, get back into car, seatbelt on, pull away. I'll measure it the next time. On the occasions when I don't pay-at-pump (go into the petrol station, pick up a coffee or some groceries, maybe use the loo, queue to pay, pay, back to the car), it's surely 10 minutes.

    Also, I hugely doubt that there are, on average, 12 pumps at filling stations in the UK.

    825:

    Apparently EV battery swapping is a thing in China which they're now exporting
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61310513

    On inflation, I occasionally 'have a moment' when I realise I'm paying 5 shillings for an apple !

    826:

    Instead of EV cars wouldn't it be simpler, easier and more cost effective to achieve significant CO2 reductions by mandating 100+ mpg fuel efficiencies?

    827:

    I can speak only to California/Nevada realities, not the Scottish Highlands, Oz Gold Coast, und so weiter

    Point of order: the Gold Coast is a predominantly urban area, with suburban sprawl overlapping Brisbane suburbs and several towns in northern NSW. It has its own Tesla dealership and a quick search (carsales.com.au) also shows 72 used Teslas listed for sale there. Which is one way of saying it's probably one of the better covered areas in Oz for EV charging, so it would be completely unfair to compare it to the UK which, per the commentary here, clearly lacks a similar infrastructure.

    The Brisbane to Melbourne drive I was talking about is not like LA to Las Vegas ("we can't stop here, this is bat country"), it's more like LA to Denver, at least in terms of driving distance. In terms of terrain I wouldn't be passing through anything like the Rockies, but that's mostly because there are routes available to avoid doing so (I'm unlikely to deliberately go into Victoria via the Snowy Mountains for no reason). I'm a bit more optimistic than gas dive here: I think the Newell will end up quite well served with charging infrastructure by the time I'd contemplate actually doing this. Generally there's a town big enough to most likely have a charger every 100-200km, though stopping to charge that often ("the name is Case. Justin Case") would be annoying.

    Actually it isn't hugely more (15%ish?) than driving from Land's End to John o' Groats, something I see has been done several times in EVs, with records currently reducing as charging time improves. Current record holder drove a Tesla model S, beating a record set by someone with a Nissan Leaf.

    828:

    What we should have done is set up a standardised national resupply network before trying to get everyone interested in electric cars, so they didn't have so many reasons not to be.

    You really don't understand primate politics, do you?

    In principle you're right. In practice, what you're proposing is impossible, at least in the UK today (and probably anywhere else that has elected governments and some semblance of a market economy).

    The planning event horizon is always: the next election. That's why big capital infrastructure projects (hint: HS2) are almost impossible to get off the ground -- no benefits for the current administration, huge start-up expenses, and so on. HS2 only got traction once enough corporations bought into the public money trough to keep lobbying for it, and even so it keeps getting cut back and back. Installing EV infrastructure with no EVs on the roads is just nonsense on stilts -- politicians will laugh at you and the taxpayers who are funding it will be angry.

    No. You have to get people to buy EVs first, then they'll demand charging infrastructure -- and vote for it.

    829:

    There are issues with EV charging "on the road" that will confound expectations -- the busy periods such as vacation weekends when the demand for "pumps" doubles or triples or worse. It's frustrating to wait in a queue at busy times for fifteen minutes for a fuel pump to become available when driving an ICE vehicle, it will be much more frustrating to wait in a queue for five hours for a charger to become available. The solution is lots and lots and lots of chargers[1] at each station, the resulting problem is the multiple megawatts of electricity that need to be supplied to that station to power all the chargers simultaneously to cover a couple of dozen hours a year of peak demand.

    [1]Looking at the comparative designs a station EV charger is simpler and, I presume cheaper than an ICE fuel pump to build and install. It's the backhaul to meet peak EV charging capacity and the load on the grid and generating upgrades needed at a national level that are going to cause the issues. There's no point building a charging station with fifty chargers if they're all going to be used simultaneously unless someone spends millions of dollars installing a 400kV step-down substation and/or a coal-fired power plant next to it.

    830:

    There's a cut-off date after which all vehicles that can be zero emission have to be. The optimists say 2050, the pessimists say that date is in the past. In the meantime we have to ramp emissions down as fast as possible, including emissions from manufacturing cars. Cars are fairly durable, they last decades rather than years, so changing only new cars means the overall fleet performance changes very slowly.

    Saying "new cars have to be zero emissions" would be politically difficult in most countries, but the US approach of mandating an overall efficiency number seems to work (except that for the "truck" loophole). The overall number lets manufacturers make/import a certain number of wankermobiles, but they have to compensate by having a larger number of zero emissions vehicles in order to meet the required average.

    Which means that saying "100mpg for all cars starting in 10 years" (to give manufacturers time to make them) would effectively be pushing out the ramp down time by another 10 or 20 years. Years that we definitely do not have.

    Also, the more we learn about efficiency standards the less plausible 100mpg for a mass market fossil fuel car sounds. Yes Porsche made one supercar that did it for real, and every EV meets the standard, but apart from that I think it's fantasy.

    831:

    Yes: the 100mpg figure is something like 2.3l/100km, less than half the fuel consumption of my Mazda 2, which is itself a tiny car by most people's standards, and beats most non-plugin-hybrids in fuel consumption. Sure applying hybrid tech to a Mazda 2, putting 50cc motor in it with electrics to make up the difference or something, that all might help. But by the time you've got there, it might as well have all been electric, it's making complexity almost for its own sake just to keep burning unnecessary dinos...

    832:

    I actually agree with this: there's going to be a big problem with service stations limited by the kilowatts they can deliver at peak times, especially in relatively remote locations on long-distance routes. There are some saving rolls here though. Logistics companies need to solve the same problem for their trucking fleets. Once that's done there is a business model established for rolling it out for retail.

    And what about those power plants along the route. For the sake of argument lets say each of those towns I mentioned 100-200km along the route commissions its own you-beaut submarine-sized nuclear reactor to provide for its roadside service areas (retail and commercial). Well if we're doing SSNs maybe that would make sense too. But actually at least 3 of the towns in question already have large solar farms you drive past on the highway (I've seen them myself), and building more is something literally everyone is doing. I am pretty sure we're not there yet with capacity, and storage is going to take a lot of work, but those are challenges rather than dead stops.

    I don't personally think it's going to be in time to stop the worst effects of climate change, but it's definitely happening.

    833:

    »The typical petrol station averages 12 pumps, at a guess.«

    First, I'm going to note that the entertainment- and enlightenment-value of "grumpy old men yelling at EVs" is very limited.

    Second, I'm going to point out that most of the numbers presented as arguments against, as exemplified by the quote above, are utterly bonkers and have little or no relevance outside said segment of grumpy old men's arguments.

    Please do better.

    834:

    "storage is going to take a lot of work"

    Are there any models of the storage it would take to sustain a solar powered EV filling station? How many KWh and what technology?

    835:

    Still, I think having EV chargers out there would be a boost to tourism, which I think is a big industry in Scotland.

    You're assuming the tourists are driving. That's ... odd.

    The main cities are all walkable because they predate the steam locomotive, never mind the automobile. For outlying stuff there's a railway network and there are buses and ferries. You can't get to the islands by car -- you need a boat or a plane. That leaves the hill-walking trips, for which, yes, a car is a good idea -- but Scotland is a long way away from where most tourists start out and it's probably cheaper to hire a car when you get there. (From London it's a 350 mile trip just to get to the border, and another 200 miles to the highlands, with petrol at US $9/US gallon.)

    836:

    "The planning event horizon is always: the next election"

    IIRC President LBJ solved that problem with NASA and the Apollo program by using good old fashioned pork - aka the grease that lubricates the wheels of legislation.

    He spread out nearly all of NASA/Apollo's infrastructure and manufacturing base to 50 states and as many key congressional districts as he needed with promises for future spending in those states and districts.

    LBJ was an SOB but he knew how to work the levers of congressional power.

    Though I wonder if anyone could do the same today in this era of polarized hyper-partisanship.

    837:

    Probably I'll never understand.

    No matter what many say, most people treat change as a friction to their life. Day to day most people want things to work the way they did yesterday. The exception being something that obviously adds value to their lives. But in many cases ONLY if it doesn't disrupt too much of their life.

    Even those sociologists who study such things say most people are happier 5 years down the road if all the change happens at once vs. continuously. But up front people don't like the big change all at once.

    And changing the way we move ourselves around the world is a big deal. A really big deal.

    The entire issue of cell phones, flip phones, land lines, etc.. fits into this mold. Ditto Brexit and MAGA. Too much change too fast that didn't seem to benefit most people. At least not in first order effects.

    838:

    I don't see that this as being an insoluble problem, provided that it is tackled properly. That means NOT just trying to slot EVs in as replacement petrol vehicles, but in changing use patterns. For example, if most destinations had an adequate number of 7 KW chargers, many fewer on-road fast chargers would be needed. But the REAL gains would be in reducing the number of long-distance trips, which is another matter.

    As you say in your last paragraph. You may remember some of my posts on this topic a long while back. I estimated that the UK electricity generation and distribution capacity needed enhancing by (if I recall) a factor of 3 to convert both domestic heating and transport to electricity. Not an impossible task, but not an easy one, either. Doing the same for endpoint charging (on-street, 'location', business and domestic) is another matter.

    Something that rose up out of the depths of my, er, mind last night is that I remember the range issue from 50-odd years ago. A lot of (petrol) cars had only a 200-250 mile range back then, and I still have the gallon can I used to carry in the boot for travelling in the problem areas.

    839:

    How many spare batteries is he going to need & how is he going to recharge them all? How many different types of chargers is he gonna' have to haul around?

    They buy into a brand. If Ryobi (cause I know the choices) they buy mostly 40V tools and 4, 6, or more AH batteries. They need likely 2 1/2 sets. One in use, if they run out before the job is done, swap them into the charger and finish the job. Go to next job. Depending on the job keep using partially charged batteries or swap for fresh ones. The charging is done via the over sized battery on the ICE truck via an inverter or the AC ports on the EV truck designed for such.

    After a while they get into a rhythm and plan their usage to spend less time swapping batteries.

    Depending on a lot of issues my yard needs a bit under a 6AH to maybe 9AH worth of 40V batteries for my mower. So I start with the 4AH and when it runs down swap in the 6AH with the 4AH on the charger. I rarely need the 4AH a second time but if I do it has enough charge to let me finish.

    I suspect I've mowed more grass than most on this blog. Mostly 6 feet at a time. But a lot of yard grass cutting of an acre at a time. I would plan my day around gas cans, food, water, grease needs, spare shear pins, rain, etc. Similar but different planning for electric yard mowing.

    These days mowing my yard is mostly based on weather, height of grass, how wet is the grass, and my time. Plus a side order of are dogs coming for a visit. (One likes to run beside me barking at the mower.)

    840:

    You quickly learn that having the EV proclaim an estimated 150 miles or more of range is what you want, and not to run it down to 30: You could, but having to drive straight to a charger or a nearby alternate is annoying, so Don't Do That, Then.

    A friend has been driving EVs since the first non Tesla's showed up. His first Leaf only got 70 to 80 miles. Once below freezing winter night driving back from the movies his wife told him to turn on the heat. He had to tell her there was a choice. Get home or get warm for a little while. They got home.

    Now he drives a Chevy Bolt with well over 200 miles of range. And like others have said, driving around town is no issue at all. He has a "free" L2 charger in his garage. He got it when the power company was subsidizing them.

    And yes, apartment dwellers/street parkers will have issues. Like me with my woefully under powered mains hookup at my house.

    841:

    David L said: change as a friction

    Hit the nail square on the head.

    Modern EV are better in every way than modern petrol except that they're different. Which is the killer. Normally it wouldn't matter. The old farts who believe that automotive design peaked in 1970 will die, and the children they leave the cars to will ring the junkyard and have the cars towed away. But we don't have decades to waste.

    842:

    This all circles back to what I said earlier, the mistake of assuming EVs are car-shaped objects that work exactly the same as ICE cars. They are different and there are consequences for those who own and drive EVs.

    Things will change as more EVs are on the road, more charging options become available and there may come a time when someone planning a long journey in an EV doesn't have to sit down with Google Maps and charger websites to plan their refuelling operations en-route beforehand. Right now a carefree attitude to travel with an EV isn't possible in the same way that driving an ICE can be undertaken (absent edge cases like Death Valley etc.). Commuting and short journeys via EV is now a no-brainer in most situations with almost no risk of not finding a charge point or not being able to get home again on the existing battery charge. Long journeys in an EV car-shaped object, not so much.

    This has been a problem for a long time, even going back to the 1990s with the GM EV1 experiment based around lead-acid cell batteries for cars with very limited range -- DisneyLand had two EV1 chargers in the car park and anyone planning to drive their EV1 had to phone up and reserve a charging spot before they set off to the park since they'd drain the car's battery pack (typical range 100 miles or less) getting there and a full charge took eight hours.

    843:

    There are issues with EV charging "on the road" that will confound expectations -- the busy periods such as vacation weekends when the demand for "pumps" doubles or triples or worse. It's frustrating to wait in a queue at busy times for fifteen minutes for a fuel pump to become available when driving an ICE vehicle

    I have a thought that the various major hotel chains (US/Canada here as I know Europe is different) will offer free or 1/2 priced or some kind of discount charging if you're a member of their top tiers of points members. I'm a member of some of these and I get free internet when others pay, free breakfast when others pay, etc...

    So your rental or personal EV charges overnight while you're on vacation at a reasonable price for many.

    844:

    but the US approach of mandating an overall efficiency number seems to work

    Of course that is what has led to the spare tire with jack as an extra option with the can of expanding foam as standard equipment to save weight. And also why even small cars have 15" rim tires to keep the rolling resistance down.

    Not saying it's a bad idea but most folks don't understand why some US auto features/non features have come to be.

    845:

    I actually agree with this: there's going to be a big problem with service stations limited by the kilowatts they can deliver at peak times, especially in relatively remote locations on long-distance routes

    Actually in the US remote locations might be better than more urban ones. Pure gas stations need X watt of power to operate. Convenience stores need a bit less for the pumps but way more for the refrigeration systems. So the convenience stores you bump into in remote areas might be better connected to the grid than those semi-urban gas stations.

    846:

    "From London it's a 350 mile trip just to get to the border, and another 200 miles to the highlands" - A little over half that, Charlie. (125 miles) The Highland Boundary Fault surfaces at Kidston Park on the West side of Helensburgh, where you can stand with one foot in the lowlands and the other in the highlands, and take a photo that proves the point.

    847:

    Yes. I have never denied that but, what many people seem to miss is that few people in the UK or similar countries have the space for two cars, even if they have the money. They are then constrained to wanting something that solves ALL of their requirements - until and unless the issues that prevent other solutions (such as hiring) are resolved. It really doesn't help to push 'solutions' that address only the easy part of the problem. Worse, tackling them in the wrong way (e.g. by simply enhancing EVs) makes the overall problem worse - yes, a 400 mile range 'estate' EV car is feasible, but (with current approaches) would weigh 3 tons, and we DON'T want everyone with cars like mine (of whom there are a lot) tripling the size and weight of our vehicles.

    We really have to start thinking of the whole problem, not just one aspect, and taking more of an engineering approach rather than a political one.

    848:

    Though I wonder if anyone could do the same today in this era of polarized hyper-partisanship.

    To be honest I think a lot of it depends on if they can get the SLS into space and successfully orbit the moon and return. If not the last huge enormous bucket of NASA pork will likely go away.

    If SLS fails all they have left are military airplanes, ships, and explorations of Abrams tank replacements.

    849:

    "Things will change as more EVs are on the road, more charging options become available and there may come a time when someone planning a long journey in an EV doesn't have to sit down with Google Maps and charger websites to plan their refuelling operations en-route beforehand. "

    Can't speak for the rest of the world, but that time is now here in BC, outside of extreme edge cases like the Alaska highway (and possibly even there, I haven't looked). Rapid chargers everywhere I might need one along some very long roads.

    850:

    It occurs to me that the difference between an EV and an IC vehicle is very analogous to the difference between a land line telephone and a cellphone.

    The landline phone connects places, the cellphone connects people. So you use them for subtly different purposes and expect differences. You call a land line to takl to a place, you call a cellphone to contact a person, with different expectations in each case.

    IC vehicles you expect to have to refuel at a filling station. These are not generally collocated with people's homes or workplaces -- they're special purpose businesses and they tend to be isolated because they have tanks of potentially explosive fuel on hand.

    A mature EV infrastructure won't reflect a mature IC infrastructure. Instead of discrete filling stations you'll get charge points in every household's garage, and (for a fee) in multi-story car parks at shopping malls. Maybe with on-street parking spots that are currently metered parking: parking-with-power will cost more than parking without power.

    The point is, EV chargers will be found at destinations, they won't be destinations. Driving cross-country? Check the motels and roadhouse diners. Don't look for dedicated charging stations analogous to gas stations.

    It'll also depend strongly on comms infrastructure. You use satnav not necessarily because you need to know where you're going but to tell the EV where you're going so that it can if necessary book you top-up stops en route, reserving the parking spot with charger before you get there. (Don't overstay your slot or you'll be charged extra, especially if you block someone else who needs a charge.)

    But the point is, you will be able to "hop in your car and just go" because your car should never be run down below 80% when you first need it that day.

    And there's going to be a huge, invisible, raft of arbitrage and trading networks beavering away in the background to make sure there's always a charger ready and waiting for you along your route when you need it -- just like the search engine marketing business.

    851:

    One thing to keep in mind during any talk of EVs:

    Nobody makes money selling printers, they make money selling ink.

    Elon isn't selling Teslas, he's selling batteries.

    EVs basically last for ever. There are only a dozen moving parts in an EV drive train compared to the thousands in a standard ICE drive train.

    But even the best li-ion battery wears out over time and stops taking a charge.

    This creates its own hazwaste disposal/recycling headaches, which nobody seems to be factoring into the overall cost of the transition to EVs.

    Until new technology is developed, such a method of recycling li-ion batteries that does not require massive amounts of cheap labor (that used to be China but not any more), or an entirely new type of battery technology - this will remain a serious problem and external cost.

    852:

    This creates its own hazwaste disposal/recycling headaches, which nobody seems to be factoring into the overall cost of the transition to EVs.

    Nope, it's being factored in.

    Elon's talking points are that (a) Tesla batteries in the field last longer than originally expected, (b) after they're no longer useful for cars (say, down to 70% of new capacity) they can be racked up on concrete slabs as grid backup/load-balancer farms until they're down to, say, 10% -- land is cheap, after all -- and then (c) recycling: there's 20x as much reclaimable lithium in any battery as there is in the best ore deposit, so it's absolutely worth working out how to recycle them.

    Imagine something like Apple's Daisy recycling robot, only on a much larger scale. If you've got enough standardized widgets (like 18650 cells racked by the thousands in a honeycomb grid) then it makes a lot of sense to build a robot for dismantling them. (And yes, one of Daisy's tasks is safely removing the spent LiOn cells from the iphones for recycling.)

    853:

    "[large towns] have large solar farms you drive past on the highway (I've seen them myself), and building more is something literally everyone is doing."

    But not for long!

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/10/ministers-hope-to-ban-solar-projects-from-most-english-farms

    854:

    Not nobody, although it should probably be talked about more.

    One point of reference I can offer off the top of my head is a Swedish company, Northvolt. https://northvolt.com/recycling/

    Judging by the salary they're paying a relative, it's very much not a "massive amount of cheap labour" type setup. To be sure, the individual fire-resistant robot cells in which batteries are dismantled do catch fire occasionally, but there's no particular reason to believe that they're not heading in the right direction to meet their recycling goals

    855:

    Instead of discrete filling stations you'll get charge points in every household's garage, and (for a fee) in multi-story car parks at shopping malls. Maybe with on-street parking spots that are currently metered parking: parking-with-power will cost more than parking without power.

    I suspect it will become a benefit many companies offer to employees over time. Parking here has charging stations for 20% of the spots. Then 50%. Then 80%...

    This helps deal with people who don't have single family homes with garages or other reasons they can't charge overnight.

    And the extra power bill to most work places with 50 or more people is somewhat trivial compared to the existing electrical load. Once a company gets to be that sized they start to have vending machines, microwaves, HVAC loads, etc... that go up. Places like my wife's old airlines HQ with 10K employee staffers per day plus a few K more visiting has food services for 1K or 2K at a time. Plus an onsite hotel. And flight sims. A few KW for car charging would be a minor budget item after the hookups are built.

    Assuming folks are still driving autos.

    856:

    but there's no particular reason to believe that they're not heading in the right direction to meet their recycling goals

    This is one of those topics where if someone is talking about something from a year or two ago they may be 2 tech generations out of date in their facts and thus opinions.

    857:

    You might also look at the Prius V, which is the station wagon version.

    858:

    Don't overstay your slot or you'll be charged extra, especially if you block someone else who needs a charge

    This is another case for limited self driving. Park your car in a reception bay and wander off to book into your hotel or whatever, charging system tells the car to move to a holding area and does a shuffle of vehicles between the holding area and chargers.

    859:

    Yes. 7 KW is just a standard domestic cooker or immersion heater circuit, and will charge most current batteries overnight. It seems likely that most hotels, B&Bs, rental accomodation etc. with parking will eventually have one charging point per room. Most housing with on-site parking would have at least one, often two. Medium-stay (up to 24 hour) car parks, such as are used for people parking for work, ditto. Many will need their supply upgrading, but it's all standard, and is the same work that is needed to covert from gas (or oil!) to electric heating.

    I am less convinced about the short-term destinations, such as most eateries, because 7 KW for half an hour or an hour isn't a lot, and I doubt that many of them will install more than a few 22+ KW chargers, because that would need a major investment in infrastructure that is not part of their core business and wouldn't be used all the time. Quite a few of the larger ones (including supermarkets and some recreation area parking) already have several, but the smaller places seem to have only one or two.

    But I don't see those eliminating the need for 50+ KW chargers for long-distance drivers, and people staying in accomodation with no charging.

    860:

    Probably he has a second/larger alternator installed in his engine compartment and charges them in transit.

    861:

    I think you mean "...assuming people are still being flow in aeroplanes".

    862:

    Damen
    Um .. The "Gold Coast" is in Africa, & these days they call it ... Ghana ...
    { Couldn't resist the snark ... }

    Charli @ 828
    And, of course, once it's open, spending even more, to bring it up to the original spec, or close to ... they never, ever learn, do they?

    864:

    This is another case for limited self driving.

    There is a HUGE problem with car parks and self-driving vehicles: car parks carry pedestrian traffic -- pedestrians who furthermore are randomly encumbered with luggage, or who are loading/unloading vehicles (so doors and tailgates open and unable to get out of the way).

    865:

    Tying into a lot of the EV talk here, today GM announced they are trying to be a part of the electric future.

    https://www.engadget.com/general-motors-ultium-battery-more-than-ev-gm-energy-100022884.html

    Time will tell of they are able to move into a more nimble company in these areas.

    866:

    And again, meanwhile back at the ranch.

    Bank of England intervenes in bond markets again, warns of ‘material risk’ to UK financial stability

    Dysfunction in this market, and the prospect of self-reinforcing ‘fire sale’ dynamics pose a material risk to UK financial stability,” the bank said in a statement Tuesday.

    Plus this gem:

    Moves of this magnitude are highly unusual in developed world sovereign bond markets.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/11/bank-of-england-expands-bond-market-intervention-in-effort-to-quell-volatility.html

    After reading this my mind wanders to the ending of the movie "Thelma & Louise".

    And on this side of the big pond there is a growing meme. "Lawyers hiring lawyers".

    867:

    A mature EV infrastructure won't reflect a mature IC infrastructure. Instead of discrete filling stations you'll get charge points in every household's garage, and (for a fee) in multi-story car parks at shopping malls. Maybe with on-street parking spots that are currently metered parking: parking-with-power will cost more than parking without power.

    That's becoming the default on new construction (this is something I've been actively involved in), but it's half the story.

    The problem for EVs is that, to keep us from spending a ruinous amount on electricity storage (ruinous both in financial and lithium terms), we need to charge EVs wherever they are when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. For most people in sunny places, that means they need to be charged primarily at work during the day, not at home at night. Indeed, there's talk about charging EVs at work and using them to power homes, because there's a surplus a daylight solar and a dearth of peak (4 pm-9 pm) electricity.

    Power storage and evening charging will still be essential, for all the working vehicles out there. But for sedentary jobs, if the workers have to drive in to work, it really is ideal for them to charge their EV during the day. It's even more ideal for them to work from home, of course, but that's another conversation.

    As for the car batteries into home batteries deal, I waited five years for that and it still hasn't happened, so I just contracted for a couple of powerwalls to be installed soon. Tesla powerwalls don't work quite the same as the EV battery. They're also much smaller (I'd need four of them to charge the Bolt) with a much lower peak amperage. For example, I'm not connecting the batteries I'm getting up to my car charging circuit, because that would close to half the total output of the two batteries. Their main job is keeping essential circuits operating when the power goes off, because we're almost certain to get hit with rolling blackouts during fires and heatwaves.

    As a society still quite a ways off from being able to completely charge your car in your garage using your rooftop solar--at least at prices the non-super rich would be willing to pay. I'm not sure whether we'll ever get there, either. It's equally likely that, as people do now, they'll top off their EVs regularly, rather than draining them down and completely recharging them.

    The other fun thing few are talking about is how we're going to have to rewire the grid to increase its capacity. Just imagine the joys of telling a problematic company like PG&E that they're going to get a multi-billion dollar deal to upgrade powerlines all through fire country. Where will that money actually go? And more importantly, who's going to maintain it, given that PG&E thought that using century-old equipment made financial sense? Would something similar happen if someone mentioned that to Lil Trusty and her merry band of thieves?

    868:

    “Remove the V8 from a Ferrari 308 and you've removed what makes it a Ferrari.” Well, thank goodness. Remove the insane service costs and dreadful (especially of those older ones) fuel consumption. Much better.

    People romanticise these things and forget just how crapulous a lot of them are. I forget the precise model but I think the 355 was nicknamed the widow maker because it cornered almost as badly as a corvette.

    869:

    It would need to be a fenced off no random humans area. Get out of the car at the barrier and the charging system takes over, when you're ready to go use the app on your phone to call the car to the loading area.

    870:

    'And on this side of the big pond there is a growing meme. "Lawyers hiring lawyers".'

    Speaking of which,

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/10/trump-lawyer-christina-bobb-mar-a-lago-certify-documents

    Donald Trump’s lawyer Christina Bobb was instructed to certify to the justice department that all sensitive government documents stored at his Mar-a-Lago resort subpoenaed by a grand jury had been returned, though she had not herself conducted the search for the records.

    871:

    And then there are places where the power isn't there. For example, I'm thinking of somewhere in the US sw that I've driven past, where there's a sign: "Last gas station for 123 mi". Want to bet that there's no 100KW or 1MW power line to there?

    872:

    Better still: I've driven a stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway that had a sign saying "last gas for 350km".

    Middle of nowheresville, of course. (Luckily that road was off our route.)

    873:

    Housing prices up 10X? I think not. My first house, 1972, three stories, full basement, first started building (each story was different) in 1852: $11,500. Current house, FAR less space, split level, half a basement, was almost 30x.

    You may have missed that after the tech bubble, they started using real estate as a money-maker.

    874:

    100mpg? No problem - I've been seeing since the last century how the US gummint has a 100mpg carburetor hidden away, until we're "ready" for it.

    875:

    1970? Hell, no, those 8mpg monsters that you could land a helicopter on? Give me my '86 Toyota Tercel Wagon....

    876:

    It seems there are 20 or so lawyers who have "worked" for Trump that now have had to hire their own lawyers.

    Bobb is stuck in that she can't be a witness in a situation before the courts while representing someone in the case. Which is what is happening to most all of these folks.

    You would think no lawyer would even take his call anymore. But I understand it is almost there now.

    877:

    Some of this may sound familiar...
    From the description in this week's Private Eye the derivatives involved are LDIs (Liability Driven Investments) which have been sold to pension funds that run defined benefit schemes - i.e. final/average salary schemes.
    These LDIs provided a way for these funds to meet their commitments despite very low interest rates, but also enabled... leverage. The expectation was that the eventual gradual return to more typical rates would be handled by a gradual controlled sale of assets to meet margin calls - the current crisis is that the sharp increase in rates (and hence fall in gilts) resulted in funds having to sell assets very quickly, hence cheaply, hence having to sell even more assets.
    According to PE a 2019 review by the UK regulator found nearly 400 funds (out of ~600 total) used LDI interest swaps with leverage up to 7 times the capital. Liabilities hedged using LDIs were ~ £1.5 trillion in 2020. A Financial Times journalist wrote back in July about LDI's risk to the gilt market. The chairman of Next says he warned the BoE in 2017 that LDIs were a "time bomb".

    878:

    For interesting values of good, "Margin Call" is a good movie and worth finding for a watch.

    879:

    The known issue with "foolproof human excluders" is that the designers consistently underestimate the ingenuity of fools.

    880:

    With a side order of "No one would ever ...."

    881:

    David L { @ 865 }
    Well, there's the parallel case(s) of the Steam locomotive manufcturing industry, trying to get a piece of the diesel &/or electric loco manufacturing. Sometimes it worked { Vulcan Foundry, became part of English Elastic { Oops, Electric } & carried on, sometimes it didn't { North British Loco - whose diesels were an utter disaster } IIRC, in the Youessay, neither Baldwin, Lima, nor Alco made the transition & all died.
    .. { @ 866 }
    I give the Trusstercluck & Kamikaze-Kwarteng no more than a month at this rate.
    So far, the shortest serving PM, who did not die in office, was: Lord Goderich - 144 days - is Trumpss aiming to break this record?
    I had to look up the Wiki of the plot of THelma & Louise - who fucking cares, as long as they don't take us with them?

    Paws
    Another version of: "Squaddie-Proof" or "1st-yr Undergraduate-proof" in other words?

    882:

    Well, there's the parallel case(s) of the Steam locomotive manufcturing industry, trying to get a piece of the diesel &/or electric loco manufacturing. Sometimes it worked

    Yes.

    But Chevy/GM has been selling about 25K to 30K of them each year for the previous 5 years. They are learning a lot. Especially after that recall of almost all of them due to a battery production issue.

    What some here don't seem to get is these guys are big enough to experiment with battery chemistry tweaking and such year by year so they are learning a lot.

    But GM is a very big ship and turning it might not work. But the Bolt owners I know are happy. And their Silverado pickup trucks look to be a winner. I think they've already booked 80K reservations for them. Ford's truck also looks like a winner.

    As to the comments about interchangable batteries, the same issues as come up with cell phone apply here. The battery shape and size determines so much about the features and design of the device that each device maker wants to control it. Device = phone or auto.

    883:

    Rick Moen wrote (in part) on October 11, 2022 05:42 in # 811:

    As someone mentioned, most EV owners charge them primarily on the home mains, pretty slowly, overnight. We don't have that option with Deirdre's Audi, as Chez Moen's 1956 electrical panel would probably need replacement, and we're cheap.

    Keep your eyes open for the availability of this no-panel-upgrade charger interface https://new.siemens.com/us/en/company/press/press-releases/smart-infrastructure/siemens-and-connectder-partner-on-home-ev-charging.html

    884:

    Almost all of them are 24/7.

    When I was a boy my city had one all-night gas station. Now it's standard that a gas station is open 24/7. At least in cities — rural areas might be different, although along the main highways there are 24-hour stations.

    885:

    So at the moment, EV charging is more than twice as available as petrol, and I can't see that gap doing anything other than widening.

    How about the time required to use the device? Filling a tank is about five minutes (or less if you pay-at-pump). I was under the impression that charging takes considerably longer. Ig charging takes an order of magnitude longer than pumping gas, you'll need an order of magnitude more charge points to have the same capacity. Longer if vehicles regularly sit fully charged in a charger because the owner has got busy doing other stuff and is late returning*…

    For some people having a charge point at home will be an ideal solution, but not everyone can do that.


    *Ask anyone who looks after children how usual it is for every kid to be picked up on time, and how much people resent being asked to be prompter…

    886:

    If you are relying on intermittent power and your grid gives a bent euro-cent which-o-clock people charge their cars you are having blackouts every time the weather fails to cooperate. This is one of those futures that just cant happen. - if there is enough storage to make intermittent power viable at all it wont matter when people charge.

    887:

    Though I wonder if anyone could do the same today in this era of polarized hyper-partisanship.

    Given the spectacle of Republican politicians loudly demanding disaster aid for their districts, from the disaster relief bill they voted against, I rather doubt that 'money for support' is now a viable tactic…

    (Well, within government. Campaign donations for preferential access and sponsored legislation still seems to work.)

    888:

    So far, the shortest serving PM, who did not die in office, was: Lord Goderich - 144 days - is Trumpss aiming to break this record?

    Well, from here in the colonies…

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQGtGmwIIS8

    (Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie singing "Canada's Loser Prime Ministers", about the slew of short-term prime ministers we had after MacDonald.)

    889:

    881 - Squaddie-Proof. I've reviewed some accidents involving squaddies, and best I don't say any more.

    882 - Given the cases of the Vauxhall/Opel "firelighter" (aka Zafira), are you sure an electrically powered GM is a good idea?

    890:

    "it's absolutely worth working out how to recycle them."

    I get a little worried when future planning is based on technology that isn't there yet.

    I'm in the waste/hazwaste/recycling business and these robot recycling arms have been around for a while, like this model from Finland:

    https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/zenrobotics-remeo-partner-start-automated-robotic-mrf-finland/

    The technology still has a way to go, although I will admit that it is easier to train a robot to handle uniformly sized and shaped batteries compared to the complicated jumble that is a typical municipal solid waste stream.

    Here's hoping you are right.

    891:

    Headlines:
    "Russian troops pouring into Belarus"
    TO take over Belarus, or to try a {literally} borderline attack towards Lviv/lvov/Lemberg in an attempt to cut off "Western" supplies to Ukraine?
    Worrying.
    At the same time, we are told that Russia is "exhausted" or close to ... but they have still got vast numbers of { Untrained, ignorant, undisciplined } "troops" to play with.
    Even more worrying.

    Oh yes, referring back to self:
    How long do people give Trusstercluck - out before the middle of February, to break the record? { 144 days, remember! }

    892:

    Perhaps I was unclear- I meant 10X the general 17X inflation! UK house prices are insane, even more than here on the island.

    893:

    Re: 'The other fun thing few are talking about is how we're going to have to rewire the grid to increase its capacity.'

    Not sure whether this is going to be about rewiring the grid but I think I'll sign in to watch these (Canadian) folks discuss plans for EVs in Canada. Yes - I know that things are different in the US but given the similar huge distances, investment scale, and vehicle purchase/usage patterns, etc., there might be some good learning here. Previous sessions took audience questions.

    FYI - The Globe&Mail is the premier daily newspaper in Canada and they've been hosting/sponsoring online events for a while now. The three speakers/guests have environment/engineering related and biz* backgrounds.

    https://globeandmailevents.com/vehicletogrid/GlobeEmail

    *Had no idea IBM was involved in EV - very intriguing and why I'm attending: IBM is international and I'm very interested in how this industry is likely to evolve internationally. (Plus - it's free.)

    I've looked up auto buying behavior - 25-54 year olds are the largest segment across vehicle types. However something to keep in mind is that the under 25 year olds are not as interested in (nor as financially able to) buy any type of car. Given the economic outlooks across the globe, this trend has to be factored in: auto makers are going to keep having to satisfy the whims of the 25-54 year old crowd if they want to continue to sell cars in the foreseeable future.

    The below is the best I could find but I wouldn't take it as gospel because they don't show some of the largest auto manufacturers/makes. The demo data and car purchasing behavior makes sense/correlates with other sources.

    https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2019/01/new-car-buyer-demographics-2019/

    894:

    EV estate car? One apparently quite good example is the MG 5 (see https://www.mg.ie/model/mg5-ev for a review randomly chosen from the goog) which weighs in at the staggering bloat of..

    1600kg.

    Not three tons. Not twice as much as any comparable car. I wouldn’t call it exciting - but then, estate car. It’s even reasonably good looking in that blandly modern way.

    895:

    "Last gas station for 123 mi". Want to bet that there's no 100KW or 1MW power line to there

    The reason there's no fuel is that there's not enough customers to keep a servo open. So sure, once a week they fire up a second generator and charge someone's electric car. Then they go back to sitting in the dark reminiscing about the good old days when a horse drawn coach came each way every day. And more than 100 people lived in the province.

    I've ridden through parts of Australia that are like that, and 10 years ago most of them ran a generator 24/7 to keep the lights on. It wasn't even worth running power lines to them. So they were paying $1/kWh or more. These days they've mostly gone from a couple of solar water pumps to 100% solar everything, because batteries are cheap enough that running a generator overnight isn't worth the cost and hassle. Sadly the really poor people out there who didn't run the generator all night still can't afford the capital investment for solar. And the government by and large isn't interested because they're not white people.

    Anyhoo, in Australia obviously those remote servos will just use some of the giant expanse of land that separates them from the next servo to host a solar farm. Selling electricity they grow locally rather than marking up fossil fuel they have to truck in from 2000km away will be a win.

    In darkest Canukstan they can't do that, and likely can't farm hot air either. I'm not sure what they'll do - maybe build a train station and hope to trap tourists that way?

    896:

    David L @ 876:

    Bobb is stuck in that she can't be a witness in a situation before the courts while representing someone in the case. Which is what is happening to most all of these folks.

    According to the Grauniad article, there's a small but intriguing twist: Bobb signed that DoJ affadavit as a custodian of assets, not as legal counsel. Therefore, client/attorney confidentiality doesn't apply, and she is free to, well, speak freely.

    I concur that Дональд Дж. Трамп must be scraping the bottom of the stupid-lawyers barrel, which has limits even in Florida.

    Being of a certain age, I considered Watergate prime entertainment during my initial high school years. (I had entered as the main identifiable McGovern/Shriver-supporting freshman.) Three decades later, there was an extremely revealing documentary worth seeking out, Watergate Plus 30: Shadow of History, which is on YouTube (but GeoIP-blocked in the USA). One of the biggest recurring themes, throughout the documentary, is that every single official caught up in the scandal, most especially the lawyers, ducked and weaved determinedly so as to avoid any whiff of perjury, and (e.g.) word of the tapes' existence emerged suddenly when the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities asked White House Deputy Chief of Staff Alexander Butterfield a direct question he could not evade or deflect.

    Gerald Ford required Butterfield's resignation from his subsequent position as FAA head, as part of housecleaning of Nixonites. Not retaliation, of course. {cough}

    Anyway, have Republican officials and lawyers become that much more stupid in 49 years? (On reflection, don't answer that.)

    897:

    Thanks to all for comments on EV charging.

    You have yet again confirmed the old internet adage, "the best way to find something out is to confidently assert something wrong in a forum thread". Thanks again.

    Damian @832 et seq.: Demand burstiness is probably going to have to be handled by having on-premise grid-connected batteries for the peak loads, which charge when there is cheap power (during the day in sunny California, any time it's windy in the Irish Sea, or near Scilly or the Orkneys or on Doggerland).

    Those thousands of grid-connected batteries (tucked away in car parking buildings, hospitals, shopping mall basements, etc. etc.) will make management of a 100% renewables grid much easier, without the environmental problems of pumped hydro or disruptive grid re-wiring.

    So having cheap grid-connected batteries is the key problem to be solving right now. Fortunately battery prices are falling even faster than PV has over its six-decade price trend.

    But as for businesses installing chargers for their employees: most of those that employ lots of people run on tight margins, and their cost of capital is high. The bulk of employment is in small and micro-businesses, whose cost of capital is even higher. I wouldn't hold my breath.

    (Based on the finance news (David L @866), everyone's cost of capital is going to be high for a while.)

    Your hotel, gym, restaurant, or hair salon (i.e. the one where you are a worker) will reserve its chargers for patrons, and the cost will show up in higher prices.

    Charlie @850: The BBC article on taxis in Beijing confirmed what someone said upthread: battery swapping is doable, and probably necessary for many commercial fleets. With time and standardisation, it will probably become a distinct business from vehicle operation.

    So at least for some use cases, the ICE model of vehicle recharging is still better.

    And those vehicles may get sold off to householders/small businesses, as happens with ICEVs, although once the battery is removed as a factor, vehicle economic lifetime will probably depend on the chassis' corrosion-proofing and/or accumulated damage to the cabin or exterior more than anything else.

    (I wonder if a cottage industry of aftermarket vehicle cabin refits (like home redecorators: fashion for taxis) will grow.)

    898:

    Robert Prior said: rural areas might be different,

    It was rural areas we were talking about. Specifically, the most rural areas in the UK. UK urban areas are so densely packed with EV charging that it's a practically a toss-up if you're closer to a rat or a charger.

    And the whole premise was absurd anyway. That you can't just get in a modern electric vehicle in the UK in 2022 and just go where you want without planning like you're flying a light plane.

    Added to that there were objections like you can't pay cash. FFS, in 2022? Buy a visa card with cash if you're so scared of credit cards.

    899:

    I just checked the value of my original house which I bought in 1974 for £6,525. It would now sell for about 43 times as much.

    900:

    you can't pay cash.

    Amusingly the public transport card in Sydney is now free, you just pay for the "credit" actually on the card. With cash if you prefer, either at a (larger) train station where some machines take cash or at the convenience shops which all do. I suspect this is the compromise when shitty cardboard tickets with printed RFID widgets on them proved so unreliable they weren't worth doing, and pulling out the old mag stripe readers was much of the reason for bringing in the RFID systems (thus removing the many full time workers charged with maintaining the complicated mag stripe systems that had many moving parts).

    Victoria last time I visited you still paid $5 for the card, and it expired after 6 months of non-use. So tourists like me are expected to pay $5 every time we visit. Can't even get from the intercity train station to anywhere else without paying the $5 "convenience fee", so unless I get someone to meet me at the station I can't borrow a card. Fucking fuck mumble {shakes fist at cloud}. "just get in and go" my fat arse.

    901:

    Must be nice to have public transport to shake your fist at.

    902:

    Robert Prior said: Filling a tank is about five minutes (or less if you pay-at-pump).

    Due to many such discussions, I've been obsessively timing my filling time. My current record low is 9 minutes. Usually 12, often 15. If you include that it requires a special trip, the record high at the moment is 28 minutes. (go fill the tank the night before a big trip so I can start with a full tank). That's without including the times I've driven around looking for a place that sells ethanol free fuel.

    With an EV you pull into the spot, plug in, and then walk away (toilet, coffee whatever). In 10 minutes a Tesla, and any of the modern 800V cars add about 150 miles of range. Don't forget that it's not an ICE car. You don't have to fill it up. Just put in enough to get where you're going, because you can plug in when you get there. So you start with 350 miles (because you can fill at home, you always start full). Stop for 10 minutes, and that makes the "range" 500 miles. (if you have the short range Tesla, this blows out to about 15 minutes) There wouldn't be many people who drive over 500 miles without stopping or refuelling an ICE car (this is where someone pops up to say they do this all the time with long range tanks fitted to their car, two drivers and an empty drink bottle to piss in and everyone rolls their eyes). I do a 500 mile run every month. If I take the ICE car, it's 2 fuel stops. (unless I spent 28 minutes the night before brimming the tank, in which case I can do it in one stop).

    ICE drivers hear "an hour to fully charge" and simply translate that into standing and holding a trigger for an hour every week. That's not the right mental model. As others have said, EV are different. They're not an ICE car with a tiny tank and a slow bowser.

    903:

    Nick Barnes @ 824:

    Next time you fill up an ICE, time yourself, from when you pull alongside the pump to when you pull away again. For myself, I might only be pumping petrol for 2-3 minutes, but even using pay-at-pump I'd be surprised if the total time is ever under 5 minutes: engine off, seatbelt off, get out of car, operate pay-at-pump interface, open filler cap, [pump fuel], close filler cap, get back into car, seatbelt on, pull away. I'll measure it the next time. On the occasions when I don't pay-at-pump (go into the petrol station, pick up a coffee or some groceries, maybe use the loo, queue to pay, pay, back to the car), it's surely 10 minutes.

    To be perfectly fair, since I try to fuel up at Costco whenever I need fuel, I think it only fair to include the time waiting in line to get to the pump. So figure half an hour or so for that. The actual fueling itself only takes 5 - 10 minutes.

    OTOH, when I've been traveling and purchase fuel at whatever random station that's there when I need fuel, there's usually no wait and I figure 5 - 10 minutes max for the whole transaction from pulling up to an open pump, credit card, fueling, tidying up (receipt, gas cap, log book, seat belt).

    If I have to go inside to use the rest room & get a coffee I don't count that as time spent refueling.

    Thing is, I don't have to put any extra effort into planning for the fuel stop. I know from long experience there's going to be Service Station convenient to whenever & wherever I need to fuel up. I don't have to search on-line for a pump, they're just THERE.

    Also, I hugely doubt that there are, on average, 12 pumps at filling stations in the UK.

    I think you have to remember that most of the pumps are double sided nowadays. You have to multiply the number of pump housings by two.

    Looking at random here in the U.S. (North Carolina) looks like the range is between 8 (4 double sided pumps) and 20+ (10+ double sided pumps) with possibly a separate island for diesel ... not counting truck stops out along the interstates that usually have a completely separate fueling operation for large trucks. Those usually have 10 - 12 pumps for automobiles and a like number strictly for large trucks.

    I took a quick look in Google Maps at a random location in the U.K. (Eccles) and searched for "Petrol Station" ... most of the ones I could see in street view had 8 (4 double sided) pumps, and there were a couple that had 12 (6 double sided pumps).

    I can't remember the last time I saw a Service Station that only had single sided pumps.

    904:

    Here in Aotearoa/NZ, I use a phone app "Gaspy" that tells me the price of fuel at each IC gas station within a certain radius of where I am - based on my selected fuel of choice (generally diesel). This means I can choose one more or less on any route I am driving. (And I am sure there are the same or equivalent apps in most other countries).

    I am sure that there are (or soon will be) equivalent apps for EV charging stations that would also indicate which are free, and (probably) the ability to put a (say) 15min "hold" on them for a fee that was refundable one you arrived and started using it.

    905:

    Oh, I very much enjoy the public transport side of living in Sydney. RMTransit counts it as one of the better PT systems in the (western) world because it's so ubiquitous. For me the choice was Auckland of Sydney, and Auckland fucking sucks for public transport as well as for cycling. In Auckland when I was looking you had to pick both where you lived and where you worked to make cycling practical, where in Sydney you mostly just have to make sure the distance is plausible. Well, and rule out a couple of black holes where access just sucks for everyone (special shout-out to "North Ryde" for epitomising the bad side).

    One thing I love is all the motorists who hate PT, but the day there's a major transit disruption they lose their shit because the roads grind to a halt. "it's useless, it doesn't work, it can't work, and all you people need to go back to it right fucking now". (sounds the same as the EV discussion here).

    906:

    There are a couple of apps in Australia already, and vigorous debate about which are best. Similarly there is more than one "cheap fossil fuel" app. There is even an "accessible mains outlet" app that I have because it's very handy for things other than cars. Interestingly security people in many psuedo-public places seem to be programmed to tell people not to use those power outlets, even for phone chargers. I suspect that's easier than replacing them all with secure outlets and managing the access system for them. Providing cheap contract cleaners with the access tokens doesn't sound fun.

    907:

    Charlie Stross @835:

    Still, I think having EV chargers out there would be a boost to tourism, which I think is a big industry in Scotland.

    You're assuming the tourists are driving. That's ... odd.

    The main cities are all walkable because they predate the steam locomotive, never mind the automobile. For outlying stuff there's a railway network and there are buses and ferries. You can't get to the islands by car -- you need a boat or a plane. That leaves the hill-walking trips, for which, yes, a car is a good idea -- but Scotland is a long way away from where most tourists start out and it's probably cheaper to hire a car when you get there. (From London it's a 350 mile trip just to get to the border, and another 200 miles to the highlands, with petrol at US $9/US gallon.)

    Not all THAT odd ... after all, I am an American and when I visited Scotland I was an American Tourist.

    Fly in and rent a car seems to be the default for most Americans nowadays ... although I didn't try to rent a car when I visited in 2004. That was because I chose Scotland so I could travel by rail. Missed the one train I really wanted to ride, but maybe someday I'll be able to come back again.

    I got to see most of the touristy things I wanted to see. Photographed a castle on a hill (with a double rainbow for a bonus); took boat tours of Loch Ness from both ends; enjoyed the Guy Falks Day fireworks in Glasgow from the park beside the glass palace; climbed Arthur's Seat and watched the sunset as the lights came on around Edinburgh Castle; walked all the way up Glen Nevis to the headwaters of the eponymous river; jumped the first time I heard the gun go off; photographed another castle on the banks of Loch Ness & got another rainbow; photographed a piper busking on the sidewalk outside of Waverly Mall; climbed as far up the Walter Scott monument as my "fat arse" would fit and rubbed the head of Greyfriars Bobby.

    I even bought a book from Transreal Fiction (not one of yours unfortunately - I don't think I'd discovered your writing yet at the time).

    Wish I'd had more than 15 days. If I had, maybe I would have tried to rent a car ... if I could have found an MGB for hire. As it was I only got to see some cities and the countryside in between looking out the window from a train or bus.

    908:

    Duffy @851: But even the best li-ion battery wears out over time and stops taking a charge.

    This creates its own hazwaste disposal/recycling headaches, which nobody seems to be factoring into the overall cost of the transition to EVs.

    This is not going to be a significant problem.

    Right now, the wisdom is that if you limit everyday use to "charge to 80%, discharge to 20%", in moderate climates you can expect 3500 cycles to a loss of 20% of capacity--at which point the battery is supposedly useless for vehicles. (You can charge higher and discharge lower every now and then, without materially affecting the life of the battery. Just got to plan ahead.)

    With daily charging, that's 10 years (allowing people to be sick at home, have holidays, weekends, and such).

    With more usual domestic twice-a-week charging or daily charging at more shallow depth of discharge, it's 20 years or more. The rest of the vehicle will be looking tired by then.

    Also: as manufacturing and usage experience with batteries grows, their durability (calendar life and charge cycle count) grows too.

    And: lithium ferrophosphate is set to take over. It's got twice the durability of current nickel-manganese-cobalt, as well as being cheaper, safer and made of more abundant and "ethical" materials (nickel comes from Russia, cobalt comes from hell-holes in the DRC, they are toxic heavy metals, etc.; iron and phosphate for LFP batteries will always be rounding errors on global production of either).

    That's if CATL's sodium-based battery doesn't sweep LFP aside. (Early days, but it's apparently better than LFP at being LFP: cheaper, even more abundant and benign materials, safer, more durable, etc., etc.)

    Post-primary use: We have lots of stationary applications for batteries, and lots of people waiting impatiently for used vehicle batteries so they can put them into these applications. They'll be waiting a long time, because the "worn-out" cars with only 80% of original range will be passed down to the children or sold on the used vehicle market.

    It'll be feasible to get another 20 years out of a 20-year-old "end of life" vehicle (with lower-intensity usage), provided the chassis/brakes/steering/airbags/aircon are still OK.

    And if manufacturing improvements continue, the battery will still be fine after that. Stick it in the garage as part of your home PV system.

    Batteries are set to become family heirlooms in 20 years, if commercial battery swap recharging fails to take off.

    A few decades after that, old batteries will be everywhere. They won't be heirlooms, they'll be clutter, despite holding respectable amounts of charge still. But there'll be new (and old) industries that can use free energy storage.

    Hazwaste recycling is not going to be a major issue for many decades. It'll be a business opportunity eventually. And people are already doing it, for failed battery packs.

    909:

    David L @ 844:

    Not saying it's a bad idea but most folks don't understand why some US auto features/non features have come to be.

    Or they're like me, buy an older car and drive it into the ground (although that can take a long, long time if you do simple PMCS), so they don't encounter the new bugs, uh "features" until YEARS after everyone else has gotten used to them.

    910:

    Which ties into the main problem for battery recyclers at the moment... getting enough batteries to recycle. A story that has been going on since Nissan announced that their "old car batteries in the home" programme would be paused while they waited for batteries to arrive.

    One of the "problems" is that it turns out that EV owners will often keep driving the battery as it falls through 80% capacity, down to 50% and ... look, eventually they will retire the battery, shuttup.

    A friend with a second hand Leaf seems to do just fine with about 80% capacity, the longer trip they do regularly isn't an option with the EV regardless because little buzzbox + trip to the holiday house with the family doesn't add up. They've done it a couple of times taking the EV as the second car, but it's a PITA because you have to balance how much shit you take against range against the off grid holiday house (so you end up carrying diesel the last 100km to run the genset to charge the car... because they only just put PV on the shed taking them from ~3kW to about 20kW of solar. Ain't no-one charging an EV off a 3kW array while they're also running the house off it)

    911:

    A couple of weeks ago the economic historian Adam Tooze revived the term "polycrisis" to label the situation in Pakistan.

    A polycrisis is lots of crises all at the same time. In Pakistan's case: bitter divisions in its political class amounting to open warfare (political instability), a current account crisis (not enough exports to pay for imports, plunging exchange rate), so a transport crisis as well, a government borrowing crisis, an overtaxed electricity grid killing economic activity, thanks to a heat wave, an ineffective civil service, inflation, meaning food and cooking fuel shortages, and then - the straw - the monsoon floods, made worse by the political class's failure to invest a red cent in flood control measures since at least the 1970s.

    It occurs to me that the situation in the UK is trending along the same lines. Nothing is intense enough to be called a crisis...yet, but only one or two elements are lacking. A return of "The Beast From The East" this winter could cause a...polydifficulty, let's call it.

    912:

    Charlie Stross @ 850:

    It occurs to me that the difference between an EV and an IC vehicle is very analogous to the difference between a land line telephone and a cellphone.

    Yeah, the point I'm trying to make is we're still in the early days of the "cellphone revolution" with regard to EVs ... it's still at the stage of 1G BRICK phones with limited coverage, outrageous roaming charges and little or no interoperability between "carriers" (i.e. manufacturers).

    One thing is somebody has got to force standardization so there's only one charger to fit them all ... and that includes fuckin' Teslas.

    A mature EV infrastructure won't reflect a mature IC infrastructure.

    I don't know if a "mature EV infrastructure will have Service Stations or not. What I do know is that recharging the EV is going to have to be at least as convenient as the Service Station infrastructure for ICE vehicles is today.

    Doesn't matter HOW you get that convenience, all in one place or spread out, but EVs aren't going to be the future without it. Y'all seem to be fixating on "Service Stations" and ignoring "convenience" (accessibility). Service Stations are convenient for ICE vehicles because they're so ubiquitous and widely accessible.

    Doesn't matter how you do it, but EVs have to have that same level of convenience, i.e. accessibility for recharging or they're not going to solve the problem.

    I'm not arguing against EVs, I'm just trying to lay out what I think is necessary for EVs to succeed. The closer we get to a "mature infrastructure", the more EVs are going to be the preferred solution.

    But we ain't got there yet.

    913:

    Yeah, the Leaf batteries have way exceeded expectations, despite having a universally derided pack design that "should" cause the batteries to cook themselves.

    And lithium batteries are much more durable than nickel-metal hydride, according to Wikipedia. We shall see.

    BTW my phrasing "hazwaste recycling is not going to be a major issue for many decades" was awkward. I meant to say both that it'll be a long time before it's a problem, and that assuming the expected changeover to benign materials, broken batteries will only be hazwaste for a few decades at that time. After that, they'll be relatively non-haz.

    914:

    Nick K @ 853:

    [large towns] have large solar farms you drive past on the highway (I've seen them myself), and building more is something literally everyone is doing."

    But not for long!

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/10/ministers-hope-to-ban-solar-projects-from-most-english-farms

    Weeeeeeelll, that's pretty stupid.

    Does the right hand even know what the right hand is doing? Never mind the left hand.

    915:

    I agree, John.

    The current situation corresponds to the time with ICE cars when owners bought tins of gasoline from the general store and stored them in their stables/garage.

    Ten thousand or so battswap stations (in the UK),that you drive through like a car wash that takes 2 minutes: that is going to be more convenient for regulators, grid operators, builders, car makers, fleet operators, insurers, and on and on...oh, and drivers, than having charging in every home and destination.

    Civilization advances by increasing the number of operations that can be performed without thought, or some such phrasing. Having to plan ahead to book a charger is...uncivilized.

    916:

    John @914:

    It all makes sense if you believe, as I do, that the Tory Party (and 55 Tufton Street) have adopted 1840s England as their goal.

    Dark, dank, dirty, dilapidated, crowded, disease-ridden tenements overstuffed with ragged, malnourished, and hypothermic people riddled with influenza, TB, and cholera: just the ticket, old boy! Capital!

    917:

    Had no idea IBM was involved in EV

    IBM is one of the few companies offering contract programming on projects involving millions of lines of code. And know how to manage it. Supposedly. Good or bad that's what goes into an EV these days. I know a guy her locally who was involved in what I think was the initial project for the first Chevy Bolt.

    918:

    Robert Prior @ 884:

    Almost all of them are 24/7.

    When I was a boy my city had one all-night gas station. Now it's standard that a gas station is open 24/7. At least in cities — rural areas might be different, although along the main highways there are 24-hour stations.

    When I was a boy almost all of the "gas stations" were FULL SERVICE - they'd fill your car with gas, check the oil and coolant and clean the windshield for you ... and gasoline was $0.25/(U.S.) gallon.

    Times changed.

    In the early days of "Pay-at-the-Pump" (mid to late 1980s when I frequently had to drive LATE at night for the alarm company), there used to be stations in eastern North Carolina where the stations were closed, but pay at the pump was left turned on overnight. They not only took credit cards (and ATM cards with the VISA logo), they had the dollar bill readers that would take $1, $5, and $10 bills.

    919:

    Due to many such discussions, I've been obsessively timing my filling time. My current record low is 9 minutes. Usually 12, often 15.

    I'm struggling to imagine what makes it take so long, unless your service station has lineups?

    My usual pattern is pull into service station I'm passing anyway, pull up to empty pump, turn off car, get out and do the pay-at-pump authorizations, take off gas cap, full up, replace gas cap, pick up receipt that machine has been printing while I put gas cap back on, get in car and leave. This takes about five minutes.

    I usually top up regularly, so almost never have to fill up right away. Even for long trips I just do it on the way out of town (because any direction takes me past multiple gas stations). I can get to Ottawa (450 km) on about half a tank of gas so haven't had range anxiety in years. (Not since I had a pickup in the 80s, actually.)

    920:

    "...there were objections like you can't pay cash."

    As far as I am concerned you can delete the final word of that quote without altering the meaning. Consequently, I will object, most strenuously, to being arbitrarily blocked from access to anything I might otherwise be interested in because it's run by wankers who won't let me do something as totally basic and straightforward as paying for it with ordinary normal money, but instead insist on trying to compel me to jump through impossible hoops erected by otherwise entirely irrelevant third parties.

    I have put "impossible" in bold to emphasise that I mean it literally. I've repeatedly tried any vaguely reasonable possibility I've been able to find, but every single outfit that claims not to erect hoops turns out to be lying, and in several cases I have had to actually spend money to discover this.

    And the relevant consequence here is that regardless of any other objections, there is no point in me even considering any form or variant of electric car unless it has such a tremendous range that it can do the kind of expedition that would involve refuelling an ordinary car several times without getting any charge at all, and get me back home still with a comfortable margin against conking out. Given the kind of chemistry that would be needed for a battery with several times the energy density of petrol, which the above requirement implies, I can pretty confidently predict that this is never going to happen, therefore I am arbitrarily excluded from any possibility of having an electric car. I'd have thought you ought to sympathise with such a predicament rather than taking the piss.

    "Buy a visa card with cash"

    Can't. They don't do that in the UK any more. They used to, but they don't now.

    Can't use any of the more or less similar alternatives that purport to exist, either, as per the above.

    They don't even do ebay gift cards in the UK any more. The only card thing of any kind that I can use at all these days is Amazon gift cards, which you can just walk into a shop and buy without any ridiculous fucking about at all. But of course for anything other than buying stuff off Amazon they're no use at all.

    921:

    Robert Prior @ 885:

    So at the moment, EV charging is more than twice as available as petrol, and I can't see that gap doing anything other than widening.

    How about the time required to use the device? Filling a tank is about five minutes (or less if you pay-at-pump). I was under the impression that charging takes considerably longer. Ig charging takes an order of magnitude longer than pumping gas, you'll need an order of magnitude more charge points to have the same capacity. Longer if vehicles regularly sit fully charged in a charger because the owner has got busy doing other stuff and is late returning*…

    For some people having a charge point at home will be an ideal solution, but not everyone can do that.

    *Ask anyone who looks after children how usual it is for every kid to be picked up on time, and how much people resent being asked to be prompter…]

    He's also disingenuously comparing the number of EV charging points to the number of Service Stations - where each Service Station has multiple pumps available; usually somewhere between 4 & 12, so call the average number "8". You're going to need to multiply the number of Service Stations by 8 to get an ESTIMATE of the number of pumps so you can compare oranges to oranges or apples to apples.

    And then factor in the number of charging stations that are out of service, inaccessible or just the wrong type before you can even begin to compare how long it takes to refuel with how long it takes to recharge.

    Compare the optimistic 75% availability of charging stations to the 90+% availability of petrol pumps ...

    We're a long way from parity and a claim chargers are twice as available as petrol is absurd, farcical, hysterical, laughable, ludicrous, preposterous, ridiculous, riotous, risible and not at all accurate. 🤣

    See Also: ROTFLMAO!

    922:

    a claim chargers are twice as available as petrol is absurd

    Well, yes. At least in countries where most houses are on some kind of electricity grid, since each electric car will almost certainly have its own charger. So you add the number of EVs to the number of public EV chargers and get a ridiculous number. Especially on a "per vehicle" basis, which is kind of important for "new" fuel types (see also hydrogen vehicles).

    The flip side is that even in countries with gas piped to the houses most people can't fill up their fossil car at home.

    Except, of course, for the fossil die-hards who will not change their behvaiour even if they're forced to get an EV. Which they will run down to ~50km range then refuel it at a general-access charger no matter how long that takes. As "Don't change" ... "don't change for me, I won't change a thing, for you" (INSX).

    923:

    Greg Tingey @ 891:

    Headlines:
    "Russian troops pouring into Belarus"
    TO take over Belarus, or to try a {literally} borderline attack towards Lviv/lvov/Lemberg in an attempt to cut off "Western" supplies to Ukraine?
    Worrying.
    At the same time, we are told that Russia is "exhausted" or close to ... but they have still got vast numbers of { Untrained, ignorant, undisciplined } "troops" to play with.
    Even more worrying.

    It could make sense if it's a bluff, trying to spook Ukraine into pulling troops away their offensive in east and southeast to protect against a threat from the north. It adds about 350 mi (560 km) to the front Ukraine is going to have to prepare to defend.

    I see little or no chance Ukraine will launch an offensive against Belarus to eliminate the threat from Russian troops deploying there, but Ukraine will have to make defensive preparations against any attempted Russian pincer attack into their rear.

    If Russians actually attack out of Belarus, I don't think Ukraine is going to put up with that shit.

    They're liable to hand the Russians their heads and then it's time for PAYBACK against Belarus.

    But then again, I think Ukraine should have already carried the war into eastern Russia to any military installations west of Kursk.

    924:

    timrowledge @ 894:

    EV estate car? One apparently quite good example is the MG 5 (see https://www.mg.ie/model/mg5-ev for a review randomly chosen from the goog) which weighs in at the staggering bloat of..

    1600kg.

    Not three tons. Not twice as much as any comparable car. I wouldn’t call it exciting - but then, estate car. It’s even reasonably good looking in that blandly modern way.

    Manufactured in Zhengzhou, China and priced in Euros ... Is it even available in the U.K. post Brexit? I know I couldn't get one here in the U.S.

    I like it, but I'm mad for the Station Wagon/Estate Car platform anyway, They're calling it an MG, but can it really be if it's not assembled at Abingdon?

    I dunno. It's going to be a long time (if ever) before I'm ready to buy another car, but I don't have much hope that's going to be available when I finally get there.

    925:

    Rick Moen @ 896:

    I concur that Дональд Дж. Трамп must be scraping the bottom of the stupid-lawyers barrel, which has limits even in Florida.

    News reports are that his latest HIGH POWER (actual criminal defense) lawyer demanded - and got - a $3 million CASH retainer.

    Further news reports say that Trumpolini and his other lawyers are not listening to said high power criminal defense lawyer's advice, 'cause he's been telling 'em to quit fuckin' around before they find out! ... and that's not what HE wants to hear.

    926:

    A good part of the point was to illustrate that things aren't being shit because they intrinsically have to be, they've just ended up shit because [cite the rest of your post, then expand] ;)

    I don't regard points of the same class as yours as counterarguments or objections, I regard them as part of the problem. After all, I've been seeing this that and the other buggered up for such reasons ever since my first vague awareness that those reasons operated, and at an accelerating rate. Practically every news article I come across which is about an infrastructure-ish project encountering crappy embuggerance cites specific cases of those reasons as explanation. (HS2 is a crappy embuggerance, and you've neatly described a good part of the reason why.) It's impossible not to see them as part of the problem, and usually I find that so obvious that it doesn't occur to me to specifically point it out.

    I also very rarely mention even vague ideas about how to deal with that part of the problem, because I very rarely have any. I'm quite happy to admit to being utterly shit at that category of intellectual endeavour. It's just a shame that so many other people are too, including ones who pretend not to be.

    However, I don't take that as meaning that nobody can have any good ideas, and it baffles me when people cite such reasons as if they were immutably absolute objections. Indeed, they're absolutely mutable: they're things that people have made up, so they can always be made up different. To solve a problem sensibly it is necessary to give priority to the interaction of factors that genuinely are absolutely immutable - of the general nature of "you can't have two trains in the same bit of platform at the same time" - over those that are not, otherwise the result is at best silly. Of course, failures to do this have ended up providing the source material for a great many articles on this blog.

    927:

    EOFTWAWKI [1]: here in New York a Starbucks has closed... forever

    one of those biblical signs (King James as revised by King Charles edition) of a forthcoming capitalistic apocalypse

    [1] End Of The World As We Know It

    928:

    JohnS @ 912:

    One thing is somebody has got to force standardization so there's only one charger to fit them all ... and that includes fuckin' Teslas.

    A few months ago, I read a lucid and reasonable account from some Tesla executive (possibly Musk) about the origin and near-term elimination of the Tesla 480VDC Supercharger network's proprietary connector in the US market.

    He said (paraphrasing) that Tesla hadn't intended to create a walled garden, that the proprietary connector(s) was(/were) an artefact of having to do initial buildout before there was a prevailing standard and was determined by the requirments of regulators, and that Tesla would be eliminating that barrier one way or another so as to make the problem go away

    The actual standard for sockets on EVs everywhere except China and Japan is called Combined Charging System (CCS). I had no clue about this until just now when I looked it up: Ordinarily, it suffices to know "that ubiquitous socket you plug a Type 3 fast DC charger cable into, or, on a bad day, a lesser type". There are North American (Type 1) and European (Type 2, IEC 62196-2) subtype couplers, which strikes me as a problem only in rather exotic edge-cases. (If one can afford to ship an EV across the Atlantic, one can probably afford to exchange its charge socket.)

    So, for now, my wife Deirdre ignores the rows of flamboyant red Tesla Superchargers. Sorry, if you are short of others in North Carolina, but we out in California/Nevada certainly aren't. We're rather spoiled for choice, generally.

    But that brings me to my other point: I hear a lot from commenters unaccustomed to EVs that charging stations are "inconvenient" because not "ubiquitous and widely accessible" -- but the obvious question is: How do they know? Thus, how do you know? Did someone tell you where all the chargers in North Carolina are? I doubt it, very much.

    Having spent 64 years living in a gas-car-centric world, I notice filling stations because they're prominent in the modern world's semiotics, and are promoted by big illuminated advertising totems 20 metres high over major thoroughfare roadsides. By contrast, until my spouse bought an EV, I hardly noticed EV charging stations at all, and even now most often miss them entirely -- because the information model is simply different: You don't find them by scanning the skies for a corporate granfalloon sigil. The car or your smartphone app tells you where, in what (at least claimed) real-time operating condition, whether now in use, how far away, how many, how fast-charging, etc.

    I was in fact surprised that there's no master Web site to see all chargers of all brands on a map. That's not how it works, either.

    929:

    StephenNZ @ 904:

    Here in Aotearoa/NZ, I use a phone app "Gaspy" that tells me the price of fuel at each IC gas station within a certain radius of where I am - based on my selected fuel of choice (generally diesel). This means I can choose one more or less on any route I am driving. (And I am sure there are the same or equivalent apps in most other countries).

    There's an app here in the U.S. called "Gas Buddy". I use it when traveling, but mainly to find the nearby station with the lowest price for regular gas wherever I am when I need to fill up.

    I'm one of those guys who does run the tank all the way down before filling it. The Jeep has an 18.5 (U.S.) gallon tank and I average around 17.9 gallons when I fill it up.

    If you're interested there's a hack I figured out.
    •When gas prices are rising, you pay less when you do run the tank all the way down before filling (get the most miles you can from the less expensive gas).
    •When gas prices are falling, TOP OFF EVERY DAY so that the average cost per gallon of gas in your tank keeps falling.

    Doesn't really help me any more since I've not been driving anywhere. The Jeep sits for a week at a time & I might go a month without needing to buy gas. I've driven 1,550 miles so far in 2022. I used to sometimes drive that far in a week when I worked for the alarm company.

    930:

    I actually more or less agree with that. Food is more important than energy. Britain produces a lot less food than it eats, and the problem has been noticeable for at least 200 years. If a piece of land has the two possible alternative uses of planting potatoes or cows and planting solar panels, then absent some exceptional consideration the choice should obviously be the steak and chips.

    Though it's not going to make any difference at this stage, it's worth noting that for alleviating the kind of doom and gloom currently being forecast, having planted cows/spuds at a suitably early date would have been of more use than having planted solar panels, too. As has been pointed out innumerable times, as renewable energy sources for use in a British winter solar panels are shite.

    It's also been pointed out many a time that even taking averages all the year round, given the essentially complete absence of any kind of storage and the poor average energy-to-area ratio you get with average British insolation, they're not a great deal of use for Britain overall. Again with reference to current doomy forecasts, they're closer to being part of the problem. They allow a simple method of appearing to "meet renewable energy targets" as measured by installed capacity, and they provide a steady source of local news articles of the "wheee look how greeen we're being" variety every time some three-person local business puts some on the roof of their unit, which all helps distract attention from the point that they don't actually do very much and the system is becoming increasingly dependent on papering over the cracks with cheap-arsed minimum-effort attempts to evade the problem like gas turbines and undersea interconnections. When the gas goes away and the flow in the interconnections reverses, we see there's more paper than substance, and the cracks are that much wider for the lack of winter input from those wonderful panels.

    Of course any notion of scale or significance is missing from this post. The article says that 58% of Britain's agricultural land will be protected against empanelment, but I don't know what the figure is now, so I don't know what that means. Similar considerations apply to other bits of it.

    931:

    NecroMoz: deanimator of the undead @ 922:

    Except, of course, for the fossil die-hards who will not change their behvaiour even if they're forced to get an EV. Which they will run down to ~50km range then refuel it at a general-access charger no matter how long that takes. As "Don't change" ... "don't change for me, I won't change a thing, for you" (INSX).

    I hope that if I ever do get an EV I'll be able to adapt. The current way I operate my ICE vehicle is run the tank down to empty and fill it up ... although if I was traveling out west & saw one of those signs "150 MILES TO NEXT GAS" I would top off the tank early ... BTDT-GTTS!

    So I guess I could get used to running an EV down to 20% & stopping to charge back up to 80% ... but it goes against my nature.

    932:

    Howard NYC @ 927:

    EOFTWAWKI [1]: here in New York a Starbucks has closed... forever

    one of those biblical signs (King James as revised by King Charles edition) of a forthcoming capitalistic apocalypse

    [1] End Of The World As We Know It

    But do you feel fine?

    933:

    Amusingly the public transport card in Sydney is now free, you just pay for the "credit" actually on the card. With cash if you prefer, either at a (larger) train station where some machines take cash or at the convenience shops which all do.

    My Hop Fastpass card (used in Portland, Oregon, for fares on TriMet trains and buses, C-TRAN (Vancouver, Washington) buses, and the Portland Streetcars) is connected to my VISA card and automatically transfers money when my balance gets low. Really convenient...

    934:

    "When gas prices are rising, you pay less when you do run the tank all the way down before filling (get the most miles you can from the less expensive gas)."

    I think it doesn't work like that. The less expensive fuel is in the tank anyway no matter when you put more in or how much the more costs. Filling up more often then increases your chances of beating the next price rise.

    JHomes.

    935:

    Well I can’t see that having a price quoted in Euros is a surprise when the website is an Irish one 😁 According to Fully Charged - by far the best YouTube blog on elecktrickery- it is available in the UK and quite highly rated. Not my sort of car to be honest, I just can’t help wanting a model Y.

    936:

    Yes, more or less nowhere has any single sided pumps these days unless they're on a ridiculously restricted site. But the double sided ones do not count as two independent pumps in practice. Most cars here have the fuel filler on the right hand side; it's not uncommon to see cars queueing for pumps because all the positions are occupied on the left hand side of all the rows of pumps, but all the positions down the right hand sides are vacant.

    Cor, you don't 'arf get some looks when you bypass the queue, do a three point turn and reverse into the vacant right hand side of a row. If you could put glares in your tank you wouldn't need any petrol. People are so averse to having it demonstrated that they're making a rod for their own backs in public that nobody even copies the idea.

    At this point someone pops up and says you don't need to reverse in, the hose is long enough that you can just reach it around from the wrong side of the car. If you try that on my car the nozzle will only go in the hole upside down, which confuses the cutoff and makes it click off after a second or two. But indeed you can do it on most cars, which makes the observed behaviour even more strange.

    937:

    And so is my problem @ 920 - that's listed too.

    938:

    I hear a lot from commenters unaccustomed to EVs that charging stations are "inconvenient" because not "ubiquitous and widely accessible" -- but the obvious question is: How do they know? Thus, how do you know?

    In my home town, which serves a large-ish rural catchment, there are about 36 petrol pumps and about 15 diesel pumps, probably more of both, thinking about private businesses here. There is one EV charge point. We're undersupplied by (2000/180) * (36 + 15)/1 using the basic model, which I haven't seen convincing reasons to discard.

    I'd like to have an EV. As an upper-storey apartment dweller, it's currently infeasible for me. An electric scooter might be OK for my daily commute...except in the rainy season, eight months of the year.

    I know because I do web searches, as well as walk around. Here and now, the EV charge station is pure virtue signalling.

    939:

    David L said: change as a friction

    Hit the nail square on the head.

    Well change IS friction for most people, and not just old farts and curmudgeons. In organisations that do change implementations well, it often takes more resources than, say, the new software thing they are rolling out, and in organisations that do not, often changes fail, as in possibly the new software is fine, but it doesn't support the workarounds people put in place for the broken old software so in their minds it can't possibly work, and they just don't use it. There are tonnes of frameworks for change management, some of which are clearly batshit but the widely used and respected ones (Kotter and ADKAR as examples) seem to work reasonably well... really though it's more that if someone is actually thinking about it and doing things that are proactive, useful and above all expensive in project staff and time, like sending someone to go and talk to the people whose workflow needs to change, then it works out okay (the failure rate is only around 20%, rather than the usual 80%).

    General societal and especially technological change have the same patterns. And while talking through the issues deep in curmudgeon country can be a bit frustrating and abrasive for all concerned, it's also worth doing just for the understanding that comes from it. And sometimes maybe we really are just talking about workarounds that are no longer all that important.

    940:

    Rick Moen @ 928:

    So, for now, my wife Deirdre ignores the rows of flamboyant red Tesla Superchargers. Sorry, if you are short of others in North Carolina, but we out in California/Nevada certainly aren't. We're rather spoiled for choice, generally.

    Not generally a problem for me since I still own an ICE vehicle. But I think you should refer back to the LA Times Article article posted earlier. It ain't all Unicorns & Puppy Dogs farting rainbows.

    But that brings me to my other point: I hear a lot from commenters unaccustomed to EVs that charging stations are "inconvenient" because not "ubiquitous and widely accessible" -- but the obvious question is: How do they know? Thus, how do you know? Did someone tell you where all the chargers in North Carolina are? I doubt it, very much.

    No, I already knew where some of the chargers are because I HAVE seen them. For the rest, use Startpage as a front end for Google and when I did a search for "NC EV charging stations", the first 10 hits gave me maps to find plug-in charging stations. OTOH, I think you missed my point again. I don't have to search for maps on the internet to find a Service Station when I need one. I just take the next exit off the interstate and take my choice.

    I'll give you an example:

    I live in Raleigh. For a while I went to a Community College down in Asheboro, NC. I'd commute back & forth once a week; did the math and figured it was going to cost an average $425/month for gas if I commuted every day PLUS 3 hours driving time every day. Instead I found a one bedroom apartment for $450 a month. Cost more than the gas would have, but that extra 15 hours/week for schoolwork was well worth the extra cost.

    But here's a thought, suppose I was having to commute to Asheboro for school today.

    How many gas stations do I have a choice of on my commute? I count 36 in 73 miles (234 pumps, but I'm sure I missed a few that weren't visible in Google Street View - yes, I am OCD, why do you ask?); 33 of the stations were directly on my route or visible from my route ... and 2 of the remaining 3 were visible from the top of the ramp at an exit (NC has signs along limited access highways telling you what Service Stations are located at the exits), so I knew they were there even when I couldn't see them.

    For EV chargers: My home electrical service would not allow me to have an EV charger at my house. I'd have to use public access chargers.

    I found THIS MAP and there are 15 chargers on (or within 1 mile of) my route. Six of them are located at car dealerships (single charging points by the entrance to the service departments); three are at a medical complex about a third of the way along, but still within a mile of my route.

    The school has one EV charging point with 2 chargers, but the apartment complex I lived in has no EV chargers. None of the apartments in Asheboro had chargers that I could find on the map. But Siler City has a Tesla Super Charger with 8 stations. So 30 actual charging points (again if I didn't miss any).

    But the main point here is I HAD TO USE A MAP APP TO FIND THEM. And the map didn't tell me if any of them would be locked up where they would be inaccessible or broken so they won't work. The little icons on the map don't tell you if it's a Tesla charger or the other ones.

    I could NOT just drive along and find one when I needed it the way I can find Service Stations.

    It doesn't matter if the chargers are clumped at Service Stations or just in the parking lot at Walmart or Lowe's or Home Depot or some strip mall or just along the street side. But there have to be enough of them that when you need one all you have to do is look around and there it is.

    Having spent 64 years living in a gas-car-centric world, I notice filling stations because they're prominent in the modern world's semiotics, and are promoted by big illuminated advertising totems 20 metres high over major thoroughfare roadsides. By contrast, until my spouse bought an EV, I hardly noticed EV charging stations at all, and even now most often miss them entirely -- because the information model is simply different: You don't find them by scanning the skies for a corporate granfalloon sigil. The car or your smartphone app tells you where, in what (at least claimed) real-time operating condition, whether now in use, how far away, how many, how fast-charging, etc.

    Again, that's my point. You shouldn't have to be looking at your smartphone to find a charging station. Maybe they don't need the extravagant signage the Service Stations use out on the Interstates, but they should be readily identifiable as you drive along.

    I think I'll suggest North Carolina add them to the signs along the limited access highways that show the Service Stations located near the exits. Maybe something that tells you what type of charger?

    I was in fact surprised that there's no master Web site to see all chargers of all brands on a map. That's not how it works, either.

    This map appears to come close:

    https://pluginnc.com/find-a-charging-station/

    But the bottom line is that unless we reach a point where EV charging points are so available you don't have to search for them on a map, EVs are not going to be the solution to our problems.

    941:

    »I don't know if a "mature EV infrastructure will have Service Stations or not. What I do know is that recharging the EV is going to have to be at least as convenient as the Service Station infrastructure for ICE vehicles is today.«

    No, no & no.

    Energy-supply infrastructure for EVs is nothing like the one you think you know from ICEs.

    First, EV charging does not require attendance, and that totally changes /everything/

    Second, consumer gasoline outlets come in only two kinds:

    A) There's nobody else closer than 15-30 minutes.

    B) I'm on my way to/from work and low on gas.

    (Disclosure: I used to work for Q8)

    With EVs everybody with a driveway, carport or garage are going to charge at home overnight - because it will be cheaper and it frees up time.

    (To a first order approximation, those are also the same people who use a lot of energy to commute in their cars.)

    Commuters unable to charge at home will prefer to charge while parked at work, at public transit park&ride, or in rented parking facilities - because it frees up their time.

    (Many of these have short cross-town commutes and can go several days between charges.)

    The entire "B" raison d'etre for propulsion-energy-outlets is simply going away.

    And so will those outlets, unless the oil-industry manages to make hydrogen, methane or ammonia a "thing" for propulsion.

    Precisely what proportions of outlets and sold energy that involves varies /enormously/ across the world. Do not even attempt to extrapolate your own limited experience on the world.

    The future market for propulsion-energy-outlets will be the "A" category, which we can now subdivide further:

    A1: Low usage vehicles in dense urban areas.

    A2: Vehicles on trips longer than their battery capacity.

    A3: "Oops I couldn't/didn't/wouldn't charge where I used to."

    These three markets will all favor the highest possible wattage, because, like gasoline-pumping, the driver is itching to be elsewhere.

    Again: The proportion of A1/A2/A3 will depend /enormously/ on local conditions: Do not extrapolate your limited personal experience on the world.

    Because electricity is nothing like gasoline, we are also seeing a new market segment appear:

    D: Charge while I'm here anyway.

    Shopping malls, hotels, museums and other tourist attractions...

    The world of EVs is almost as different from the world of ICEs, as the latter was from the world of horses.

    942:

    JHomes @ 934:

    "When gas prices are rising, you pay less when you do run the tank all the way down before filling (get the most miles you can from the less expensive gas)."

    I think it doesn't work like that. The less expensive fuel is in the tank anyway no matter when you put more in or how much the more costs. Filling up more often then increases your chances of beating the next price rise.

    I track my gas mileage and fuel purchases very closely in a log book and then enter them into a spread sheet (legacy from driving a company vehicle when I had to justify every expense). I can pretty much predict to the mile when the little light is going to come on on the dash to tell me I'm low on gas. And I can tell almost to the mile how much farther I can actually go without running out.

    I ran a whole bunch of "what-IFs" noting what I saw gas prices doing and plotting various strategies. The savings did appear to be real and so far has worked for me. It does rely on putting substantial miles on the vehicle every day. I figured it out when I was averaging about a thousand miles on the road every week; sometimes filling up more than once a day.

    If you're sitting at home like I am now, there's no telling if the price of gas will be higher or lower when you do have to fill the tank again a month from now.

    As they say on the interwebbys ... YMMV

    943:

    the hose is long enough that you can just reach it around from the wrong side of the car

    I do this all the time with the little car, because... well it's really little and the hose could wrap all the way around it if needed. Sure the angle sometimes gives minor hassle with touchy sensors in some pump nozzles, but that's unusual and it's nothing like the trouble I had in the days I drove a Hilux, where the fuel cap was on the end of a pipe supported by a pipe clamp directly under the tray a couple of feet behind the driver's door.

    I sometimes do it with the crossover too, if it's clear I'll have to wait more than a couple of minutes otherwise. I may have done your reverse-in trick once or twice when I was young(er) and silly(er), but really this counts more as hijinks than standard usage :).

    944:

    First:
    It looks as though The City { through the BoE } have finally had enough ... they were against Brexit & were bypassed, then came "fuck Business", now the Trusstercluck.
    Here is their reply - I think the misgovernment will implode well before Yule at this rate.
    Thoughts?

    { One afterthought: This - from the Grauniad - looting a nation for greedy bastards' profit, yes? }

    EV's
    GIven my driving habits, especially since I got Wiley E Bicycle, a switch to EV would be ideal ... but: Conversion of my L-R would cost about the same as that MG mentioned up thread & I cannot possibly afford that much, so I'm stuck.

    Mike Collins
    House - 1947 £2700 ... now? Probably about £900k - £1.1mk.
    To realise that profit, I'd have to MOVE HOUSE.
    Maybe not.

    945:

    Are you sure they weren't just one of the branches trying to organise a union? Starbucks definitely has form in that area. The branch that starts organising suddenly falls victim to outlet capacity rationalisation; "nothing to do with their union activities, trust us on that".

    946:

    "...there were objections like you can't pay cash."

    you're in the UK and can't find any non-cash means of making payment. I'm just curious, why? Are you an undischarged bankrupt or something?

    I have a UK bank account and a debit card. I've had the debit card so long I can't remember how I acquired it. I think the bank just sent it to me.

    I have a couple of credit cards. One acquired recently (because, Amazon). I don't recall a lot of hoop jumping to get it. Neither debit not credit cards cost me anything.

    947:

    JohnS @ 940:

    No, I already knew where some of the chargers are because I HAVE seen them. For the rest, use Startpage as a front end for Google and when I did a search for "NC EV charging stations", the first 10 hits gave me maps to find plug-in charging stations.

    As a reminder, I'm not an EV guy, but rather a road bicycle and aging Honda Fit guy married to a wife who fairly recently bought an EV. That having been said, I submit that you've just revealed that the correct answer to my question is that you do not know where the chargers in North Carolina are.

    Why? Because when I approached the subject, out of unfamiliarity and bad assumptions, I made the very same methodological mistakes, and was worried about an apparently alarming paucity. My wife Deirdre pointed out that, no, the information model is simply different. You either get briefed by your car, which uses satnav, cellular data, and online queries, or by installing the charging companies' "apps" on your smartphone, and being briefed by those. Deirdre proceeded to show me the difference, and it was a dramatic delta, something like an order of magnitude or more.

    Quod erat demonstrandum.

    Mind you, this was in/around Silicon Valley. I would not presume to speak of anything in/around Research Triangle, NC -- but my point is the basis of your assumed knowledge is questionable on fundamental grounds, and IMO you really ought to review how well your map matches the territory (if you'll pardon the General Semantics).

    I think you should refer back to the LA Times article posted earlier.

    I think you should refer back to where I showed that the author had done something incredibly dumb -- starting out on low charge at the base of the infamous I-5 "Grapevine", then toiling up that very steep climb to the top of Tejon Pass, staggering off into the middle of nowhere, banking on a mere pair of chargers operated by the least reliable of the three charger firms, and then acting all outraged that one of them was offline.

    To get there, he had had to travel past thick clusters of just-off-I-5 chargers for the preceding fifty or so miles through flat Kern County. And then, staring up at the sinuous freeway ascent up "the Grapevine" to Tejon Pass, instead of saying "Gee, maybe I should retreat five miles and charge up", he decided to go for broke and ascend a few thousand feet? Sorry, in what universe is that a sensible idea?

    Don't just take my word for it. Look at a map. Note the base of "the Grapevine", where the small unincorporated place called Grapevine lies at the southern end of the ~800 mile long California Central Valley, and then notice where Frazier Park is, about 10 miles further south. That's 10 miles of steady, steep uphill. Which of course chews up any type of vehicle fuel. Would you have done that, sir? Why, because you like risking breakdown in the middle of the boondocks?

    Author Russ Mitchell claims to be an EV owner. If so, and if he wasn't just conjuring up a tall tale to support a newspaper editorial, then he's a pretty inept EV owner, who doesn't learn quickly. And thus, even I, who drive mostly a 20-year-old aluminum-frame road bicycle, can see that what he said was absurd.

    Again, that's my point. You shouldn't have to be looking at your smartphone to find a charging station.

    You don't look at your smartphone while driving. That's both illegal and very unsafe. ISTR that Deirdre sometimes has her smartphone's app display on the car's dashboard display while the car's electronics tells her, based on that data, where stations are, what state they're in, which ones it recommends, etc. It's not necessary to pair (if that's what it's called) her phone to the car, though. The car has the ability to do that, itself.

    (I am told that the extent and depth of what the car's dashboard display is allowed to show the driver is limited by law and safety regulations. E.g., if it is showing a route map, you are not permitted to make most sorts of manipulations, as those are specifically disallowed while in motion for reasons of driver safety.)

    But the main point here is I HAD TO USE A MAP APP TO FIND THEM.

    No, you did not. The EV itself tells you -- based on just on "a map" but on real-time data.

    Apparently, the phrase "the information model is simply different" is very seriously just not getting through to you. That is too bad. I trust that it's getting through to many other readers, so I will rest content with that.

    948:

    Its partly incompetent politicians ("if you must do this stupid thing, don't do it this way"), and partly the City happily repeating the behaviour that lead to the 2007/8 crash (because they got away with it that time so why wouldn't they).

    949:

    Administrative note

    The blog will be offline on Friday, overnight. Explanation here.

    950:

    I suspect that's easier than replacing them all with secure outlets and managing the access system for them. Providing cheap contract cleaners with the access tokens doesn't sound fun.

    I believe some places in the UK used to use special sockets with the pins rotated 90° (called Walsall Gauge), or with other non-standard-ness, and just fitted suitable plugs to all the cleaning appliances. No access tokens needed there, and only a specially prepared outsider could plug anything else in.

    Whether similar "standard non-standard" plugs exist for non-UK electrics, I don't know.

    951:

    JohnS said: He's also disingenuously comparing the number of EV charging points to the number of Service Stations

    No. 20888 separate locations of publicly available chargers. More than double the number of locations that sell petrol.

    Locations. Not connectors.

    I also gave the number of connectors. 57613. I gave it specifically so there could be no confusion between the number of connectors, and the number of locations.

    Please try not to pour scorn in such large measure when you so publicly lack a clue. It makes it hard to remain as polite as OGH has so reasonably requested.

    952:

    With a 200-250 mile EV, I would simply go back to what wise people did in the 1960s, with minor variations. Don't plan to run the charge below 25% and, in problem areas, not below 50%. That conflicts with efficient charging, but it's better to suffer the inconvenience and expense than the much greater one of getting stranded. As I said, this is not insoluble (even today), but IS a serious problem for many people.

    I partially take the correction about the weight of EV estates, though it doesn't match what I said could be built (range) - the MG5 EV is new since I last looked, and one Web page says that it is the only one available. If the Web pages weren't so uniformly cleansed of information, I could check whether it has the needed properties in name only.

    Pigeon's complaints about paying may be exaggerated, but are fully justified. Inter alia, there are security issues, and car manufacturers have a dire record in security.

    https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/5-problems-with-electric-car-charging-and-how-to-fix-them-a7ZWB7T3mlKh

    953:

    I have a friend who likes electronic gimmickry, drove into a WiFi dead spot, the real-time data packed up, and he went into a flat spin, not knowing where to go! One of my requirements for navigational equipment (not just cars) is that it MUST work with no WiFi, because I particularly need it in places where there may be no WiFi (*). The 99.5% coverage in the UK is by population, and far more of the area of the country is WiFi-dead than most people realise. In theory, these things could work by satellite connections, though that's not as reliable in the UK as most people think, but I doubt that many do.

    (*) Please note that my main requirement there was for a map reader to use on an unpowered recumbent trike, and I can assure you from actual experience that the extra hassle to go WiFi-free has paid me hands down, many times. It works when driving, too :-)

    954:

    arrbee
    Yes & but NO.
    "The City" are royally pissed-off with what the tories have become ... remember that they were solidly "Remain", so nothing to do with 2008.
    Revenge is a dish best served cold.

    meerkatmcr
    "Walsall" plugs used to be standard on railways here, for a long time.
    You can still get them, but: 1} You have to be prepared in advance & 2} You have to be able to switch end-plugs easily.

    955:

    EC
    They are called MAPS ...
    I have a full set of 1:50 000 OS maps for England/Scotland/Wales.

    956:

    EC said: I have a friend who likes electronic gimmickry, drove into a WiFi dead spot, the real-time data packed up, and he went into a flat spin

    Did he drive into 2007?

    Memory has been cheap enough that this hasn't been an issue for a decade.

    957:

    I am NOT carrying all of those on an unsupported trike tour :-)

    Even just ones for the areas I need would be a real pain - even slow cyclists like me can cover a large area in a few weeks, and I might need half a dozen to a dozen maps.

    What I have is simply the electronic equivalent, though - it's exactly the OS 1:50,000 map data downloaded onto a tablet, with suitable software to display it, and I can assure you that it works extremely well. I also have OpenStreet map data for the same area on it, which is very useful in finding B&Bs etc. Whether you regard this as a low-tech or high-tech solution is a matter of taste ....

    958:

    Since when do you have any control over how your prat nav or car's electronic gimmickry worked?

    Far too many of those things assume universal WiFi and download the data as needed. Almost none have the ability to be told to download the data for an area in advance (and, no, just the route isn't enough, because of diversions).

    959:

    Greg Tingey @ 955:

    EC
    They are called MAPS ...
    I have a full set of 1:50 000 OS maps for England/Scotland/Wales.

    EC
    They are called MAPS ...
    I have a full set of 1:50 000 OS maps for England/Scotland/Wales.

    Can you get them for 1:25,000? I found that scale a lot easier to use for dismounted land-nav.

    960:

    EC said: Since when do you have any control over how your prat nav or car's electronic gimmickry worked?

    November 2015

    961:

    Yes. And you can get the electronic version, if your tablet has enough memory. You can even get 1:10,000, but they are normally only used by surveyors.

    962:

    Regarding Walsall Gauge plugs and similar:

    Yes, that is true, but it's not the same scale of problem you would have if you used some sort of computerised access control. I was also assuming that the building owner would own and maintain the appliances, even if the cleaning staff were external contractors, and they'd employ someone who would be able to change a plug.

    That's certainly the way it is in the office I work in, though given that I (employed as a programmer) had to change the (ordinary) plug on the vacuum cleaner when someone trapped the flex, perhaps that doesn't support my argument very well.

    And yes, I know railways used to use them for various things, and I've seen it suggested that LT use them for 110V circuits, though I have no idea if that is true. I think the Beeb also used them for things which needed a clean earth.

    963:

    PS: ... with UTM & MGRS overlays.

    964:

    Finding things by looking out your window rather than by looking at your smartphone? That is so 20th century! (Only half kidding.)

    965:

    Going beyond this, essentially public "service points" will be (a) destination points, ie shopping, work, and (b) publicly subsidized tourist/support routes.

    I'm involved in (b) as part of the EV charging point policy for our local council. We have some money to subsidize the installation of charging points where they would not be economic: these will be limited to making sure there are no black-spots without coverage. For Ireland, this is likely to mean subsidizing charge point installation in community centres, etc; there are almost no points where you're 20km from nothing else; Australia, US, Canada will need some other solution.

    For (a), various companies are building out networks that would be installed in eg shopping centres, places of employment.

    But the bigger picture is understanding the shift: rapid charging is an emergency procedure, most charging is at home/destination. This is favoured for two reasons: it means no build-out of the electricity grid - the grid operator wants 3-7 kW chargers with short runs to the solar panels, house, not MW plants for charging and swapping batteries.

    Secondly the bigger picture is that cities become mostly car-free; the answer to "how do I charge in my terraced house" is "don't do that. Take public transport / cycle and rent an EV when needed.". There is an understated calculation that there isn't enough Lithium or energy for a like-for-like swap; EV cars become a last-10km solution for rural living.

    Also: EV cars are essentially grid-support batteries. With 48hrs power distributed around the country in car batteries, renewables and associated spikes become easier to manage.

    966:

    I can't remember the last time I saw a Service Station that only had single sided pumps.

    Yeah? That's because between the 1990s and 2010s about 80% of service stations in the UK closed for good. A bunch of them now exist as drive-through car washes and similar, but most were just knocked down and redeveloped.

    The survivors are big enough to have 6-12 pumps and an attached convenience store with long opening hours (up to 24 hours in many cases), usually a mini-supermarket chain: the nearest to my front door is an M&S Local, the next nearest one is owned by Tesco. Indeed, most large filling stations today occupy supermarket car parks.

    967:

    EC
    Yes, the "tablet" version is suitable, if you are covering a large area & space/weight is limited ...
    - John S. I have quite a few 1:2500 maps & IIRC, they also can be had electronically.

    968:

    Quite. While I have seen a fair number of single-sided pumps when riding around on my trike, you can guess in what sort of area :-) Almost all have been attached to (repair) garages that looked like something from the 1960s, and I don't know how many provided a filling service for the public. Quite a few of them might no longer have been operational, and simply not been removed. It's probable that there are more left on large farms, haulage depots etc. than on the road.

    969:

    Same thing happened here over a similar time period. Here's an example of an old petrol station with city views, which was occupied by a music shop for many years, then split in two... now one half is a cafe and the other a dry cleaner (though the cafe takes up most of the outdoor space). If you turn the street view around you'll notice there's a surviving tiny petrol station/garage across the road, but that's an unusual artefact of being in a trendy inner city area with the aforementioned views. Another nearby has been a bike shop for 20ish years. But most were just removed, and many replaced with 6-pack apartments or larger. Of the newer petrol stations around here now, 12 pumps is small.

    970:

    I think the Beeb also used them for things which needed a clean earth

    40 year old memory says for things that needed to be on sustained power. The standard 13 amp sockets weren't powered when running on generators, the "chinese copy" sockets were. The usefullness of this was shown by an incident at the ITV company I worked at later when the generator tripped out at about 3pm due to all the office kettles...

    971:

    I do this all the time with the little car, because... well it's really little and the hose could wrap all the way around it if needed.

    As I buy 95% or more of my gas at the local (1 mile away) Costco they have 10 or 12 lanes with 2 nozzles each and many times will have every pump in use with 2 to 6 cars in the EVERY line behind them. I fill up my Civic and Tundra (large truck) from either side. Which ever one I feel will get me out in a hurry. (So I scan for big trucks and SUVs in lines and pick the ones with lots of compact cars.)

    Since Costco is so close and next to so many of my typical destinations I and my wife just start watching the lines once our tank gets below 1/2 full and pull in when the lines are sort or we get to less than 50 miles of range. A full tank gives us 350+ miles in the Civic. Driving a tank to empty can actually create issues if you have water condensation or muck in the bottom that has built up over the years.

    As to charger locations, I live a few miles, maybe 4 or 5 driving, from JohnS. He's on the edge of the original city center. I live next to the "hot" alternate city center. We are LITTERED with charging stations. To get them early it seems to help to live in a more up scale neighborhood. And to be honest the city center is well covered with charging stations. JohnS just picked the wrong side of town to buy a house 30+ years ago. Should have shaken that 8 Ball a few more times maybe? And when I bought my house 30+ years ago, future EV charging stations were NOT in the consideration.

    972:

    I live in rural Norfolk. I jnave an iPhone. I ust said “Hey Siri find the nearest electric car charging point. “ The reply was “The nearest is engenie in Dereham”. There was a list of four within ten miles. I could have just said “Hey Siri navigate to the nearest electric car charging point using Maps. This is the 21st century. You don’t have to manipulate phones while driving. I know of other charging point in car parks and garages which are closer but not yet listed.

    973:

    To realise that profit,

    My wife muses at times about cashing out of our tear down and taking the $500K-$700K we'd get for the dirt. I think point out we'd likely have to move 20+ miles away to get a decent house for only $200K-$400K. (The point being to pocket the cash.) When tends to end the conversation.

    974:

    That would also make sense as a reason. I wonder if hospitals used them for that in the past, though I don't think they do now: just ordinary BS 1363 sockets with red notices on them about being for medical equipment only (or NOT for medical equipment; I forget the sense).

    975:

    One of my requirements for navigational equipment (not just cars) is that it MUST work with no WiFi, because I particularly need it in places where there may be no WiFi (*)

    Google maps on smart phones allows you to cache very large areas so you can see what's up when in dead spots. I learned that quickly driving down from Central Pennsylvania through Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia with about 100 miles of near zero cell service. I was glad I had looked over the route ahead of time.

    After that I always cache areas I plan to be in. Worked well on a drive from San Francisco up to Bend Oregon then to Portland. Lots of nothing technical along that route taking the older highways. Ditto the drive through the "Four Corners" area of the south west.

    976:

    I use two satnav apps regularly. Google maps has the ability to download maps to use offline. This was very useful in rural New Zealand. Navmii does not need an internet connection. All the maps are offline although internet helps with traffic information.

    977:

    I guess I could get used to running an EV down to 20% & stopping to charge back up to 80% ... but it goes against my nature.

    No, it goes against your habit. Habits can be changed.

    As witness your 'hack' of sometimes running nearly to empty and sometimes continuously topping up.

    978:

    That's because Siri is the wrong tool for the job. Try zap-map or plugshare.

    979:

    This seems germane to the current discussion: Researchers Develop Lithium Battery With 40% More Energy Density. People who know more than me will have to judge how credible the claim is.

    980:

    What we should have done is set up a standardised national resupply network before trying to get everyone interested in electric cars, so they didn't have so many reasons not to be.

    You really don't understand primate politics, do you?

    In principle you're right. In practice, what you're proposing is impossible, at least in the UK today (and probably anywhere else that has elected governments and some semblance of a market economy).

    That's actually a strong argument against democracy. Democracies are fundamentally incapable of multi-decade, let alone multi-generation, projects which will not bear fruit until long after the initiators are dead or retired. Whereas centrally managed societies such as China CAN tackle such projects, at least in theory. If continuous existence of human civilization ends up relying on multi-generation projects (as seems to be increasingly likely), then humanity may or may not survive, but democracy definitely will not.

    About a year ago I read on a different online forum a discussion about immigration and how to assimilate immigrants into the host society. Some Chinese contributor mentioned how China has centuries of experience successfully assimilating immigrants, and asked why can't other countries apply the same methods. When asked what these methods are, she (I think it was a "she") explained that the tried and true method is to integrate children of immigrants to a certain extent, then to integrate their children further. What struck me is that there is NO expectation that second-generation immigrants will be fully integrated -- it's a bonus if they are, but policymakers do not count on it. The process is expected to take AT LEAST three generations.

    I do not see this ever working in a democracy.

    981:

    Does the right hand even know what the right hand is doing? Never mind the left hand.

    The current UK government are malevolent idiots.

    That's the simplest explanation.

    The day before yesterday the Health Secretary (and deputy prime minister) decided to cancel all anti-smoking campaigns and said she intended to legalize smoking in vehicles carrying children. (Theresa Coffey is a smoker herself.)

    Yesterday Liz Truss reversed her opposition to a windfall tax on energy companies, as expected ... by capping their operating profits, which will disproportionately hammer renewable power companies who have been profiting from the high fees they were able to charge because they get paid the same as gas peaker plants who are being soaked by the high price of natural gas. The gas burners themselves won't pay this tax, it falls on renewables only. (Liz Truss loves her some coal-rollin' oil boys.)

    Oh, and she wants to ban building out solar arrays on land currently classed as agriculturally marginal. Because it's got environmentalist cooties or something.

    Listen, the New Management was intended as a parody -- what if we had a British government where the cruelty was the entire purpose?

    But the New Management is competent and evil. This is just clownish clusterfuckery.

    982:

    Yes. That brings me back to my comment that this is like the 1960s. We learnt how to handle it then, and I hope people nowadays are still capable of learning. At least we don't have the Highland and Welsh Sundays any longer ....

    The real problem is the conflict between running it down to 10% and charging to 50% for efficiency in time and electricity, and needing to recharge at 25% (sometimes 50%) to avoid getting stranded. This isn't solely a back of beyond issue, either, because 24-hour, public-access rapid chargers (50+ KW) are NOT thick on the ground, and waiting for a 11 KW charge is a right pain (*). HOWEVER, this is exactly the same for petrol.

    Cambridge (England) is poorly served for a significant city, and people there are faced with a 30+ mile round trip to recharge if one not-24-hour location is unavailable, which makes a significant difference to most EVs' range.

    (*) At present, 22 KW is a joke, because few cars (one model?) can use it.

    983:

    Pigeon: Buy a visa card with cash": Can't. They don't do that in the UK any more. They used to, but they don't now.

    Yes you can. Try Revolut. It's what I use for overseas travel now. (UK banks are taking the piss and charging up to £5 per debit card transaction in the US, while Visa want about £2 plus 2% of the transaction value. Revolut lets you open an account on your phone -- yes, you can order a contactless card if you need one as well -- and buy or sell dollars, sterling, euros, or other currencies using your bank account: you can then spend it like any other payment card.)

    984:

    Most clowns at least make you laugh. The current lot make you want to scream, cry or throw things. Malevolent idiots is too mild.

    If I were an optimist, I would assume that Starmer is pursuing the Blairite position until he gets in with a convincing majority, and then will change all voting to STV, provide government funding for elections (with large donations being allowed onto to the Electoral Commission) and Do Horrible Things to our media and its oligarchs. One can dream ....

    985:

    Well, yes. At least in countries where most houses are on some kind of electricity grid, since each electric car will almost certainly have its own charger.

    It must be fun to live in a country where all residences are houses. Or where all houses have garages or parking spaces. Or where most houses postdate the invention of the horseless carriage at all, for that matter.

    986:

    CHarlie @ 981
    OK, I'm repeating .... How long before it implodes? Judging by a sliver of PMQ's that I heard, before running to R3 ... not very long.
    Whilst this was on, I heard Starmer point out that Trusstercluck & Grease-Smaug were contradicting each other, in the space of about 3 hours ... & - "Which answer is correct?" ... Needless to say, there was no actual reply to that one.

    987:

    I don't understand the money markets, but the Bank of England has said it will stop buying gilts this Friday, so we shall see what happens to the pound next week. Some pundits are predicting the fall will resume.

    988:

    You misunderstood my point. You feel my have to fiddle with a smartphone while driving. Voice commands make it easy. I have the app but it can’t be used with voice commands. There were also moans that you can see petrol stations from the road but not charging points. Almost all Shell petrol stations have fast chargers. As do a lot of the other brands. Every service area on the A11 and A14 has chargers. I doubt if it’s much different elsewhere. There are more charging stations than garages everywhere. Overall there are about half again as many charging stations as petrol stations. Petrol stations are closing. Charging stations are mushrooming. Zap map is more up to date than Apple Maps but it doesn’t show my nearest fast charging station which has been open for at least a year Google maps does show it. I don’t have an electric car but I’m seriously looking.

    989:

    ? The phone managed to change should not into feel my!

    990:

    I do not see this ever working in a democracy.

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're the child of immigrants, right?

    In the US, Obama was the son of an immigrant (father), Trump was the son of an immigrant (mother). Biden's got the deepest American roots of any president for most of 30 years (his go back to the late 1840s...)

    So yeah, it's possible for a family to assimilate into a democracy rather rapidly. Since I married into a family of immigrants, I can personally attest to this. I suspect you can too?

    China has its own, fascinating story with immigrants, but it's not at all what your correspondent was saying. Age-old Chinese wisdom tropes conveniently skips over the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, WW2, the Republicans, warlords, Boxers, Opium Wars, the Tai Ping, being ruled by the Manchus for 400-odd years and the Japanese for 30...But anyway, Central Asia and the highlands of Southeast Asia, and parts of the Russian Far East are populated rather extensively by the descendants of Chinese (especially minority Chinese) who bugged out when they could. The current treatment of Uighurs and Tibetans may help explain why.

    I'd suggest that history is one damned thing after another for basically everyone, and that's what historical continuity really is, regardless of political system. With authoritarian leaders, (per Arendt) you get stuck having to kowtow to their bullshit and lies or else, while with a democracy, dealing with political bullshit and lies does not entail kowtowing to it. Whether the work of dealing with political bullshit is more worthwhile than the humiliation of kowtowing to it is a matter of personal taste. Personally, I prefer it, and a lot of others seem to as well.

    991:

    Changing the subject a bit.

    Just spend an hour and half at a bank with my wife closing down an account we didn't open. Someone was identity stealing my wife's information and trying to get Texas and NC to approve a bogus request for unemployment benefits. We've shut it all down. But so far I'm about 5 hours into this. Fraud locks on credit agencies and such.

    I hate thieves.

    Now our financial dealings get to have extra friction points. Maybe for the next 30 years. Ugh.

    992:

    My suspicion is that the Bank of England, representing "people with money who give a fuck" has spoken sharply with Truss & Co., explaining that "some things should not be attempted lest they collapse the economy."

    Whether the talk took is completely another matter. First, a certain number of ultra-conservatives in every country these days are clearly Putin-aligned. Second, this a group clearly can't think much past "grift against the different, use the money we collect to punish the small and weak," while lacking the the imagination to understand what happens when people become unable to heat their homes or find food at any price.

    In short, the sane money vs. the corrupt and stupid money.

    993:

    Yeah. As I said, they're treating real estate as though they were stocks. The rest of us are screwed. I'd really like a house at least 25% larger (this lists as just under 1600^2), but no way I can afford it, as well as getting a little old to move myself.

    994:

    On the subject of electric cars, I think there may be an unspoken divide which is responsible for the "inaccurate" ideas about how the EV charging system works: That is that anyone who drives a gas-powered car and desires some degree of anonymity can use cash at a gas station and also can find the gas station with a turned-off smartphone if necessary, with motives ranging from criminality to ordinary discretion.

    What's obvious from the discussion is that owning an electric car puts everyone several steps higher on the "I'm being surveilled" ladder. It's not surprising that this results in a divide on the subject of whether "finding" an EV charger is easy, along with discussion of whether people should be able to pay cash for their charge.

    995:

    Hmmm... Five min or so sounds about right, maybe 6-7 - I wait until I'm under 1/8 tank, and fill. On the other hand... this means I usually fill around 300mi. Unless I've been driving a lot of highway, when I can fill around 350 mi. So, two charges for an EV (and if I could afford a hybrid, less).

    996:

    The simple answer around this stupid regulation is, of course, put in windmills.

    997:

    Saw that in the Guardian. GOOD article, and overwhelmingly, most folks have no idea how bad the collapse of the USSR was for most of its citizens.

    998:

    Absolutely. All this discussion of "use app to find chargers" means the phone, and/or the vehicle manufacturer are surveilling you for all of your driving, and that, of course, is available under court order, as well as saleable.

    999:

    There is a vast difference between the children of mixed marriages, growing up among the culture of one of the parents, and a group of immigrants in another culture. They should not be confused. You are talking about the first, and ilya187 the second.

    1000:

    That is true, and we're it not for the national network of ANPR cameras I would be worried about it.

    They already know exactly where your car is

    1001:

    907 - Look up Bo'Ness and Kinneil Railway and Strathspey Railway on Wikipedia. If those appeal, try also National Mining Museum Scotland (formerly the Lady Victoria Colliery) and Summerlee Museum of Industrial Life.

    918 - IME offering it 24/365.24 is the default for pay at pump, and the pumps normally accept at least Mastercard, Visa and most debit cards.

    946 - You have a credit card because Bezos Books!? They'll quite happily accept my debit card.

    947- Wrong! Not everyone has a "smart" phone.

    959 - I think there is an OS 1/25_000 scale mapping of at least most of the UK. Where there isn't one, just flag down a local and ask.

    1002:

    It's not just anonymity - it's security. Being forced to store identification and financial authorisation to 'apps' on mobile phones (let alone bloody cars!) is a major security risk. Even when the phone is secure(ish), apps can be extremely iffy, and I am pretty certain that you only have to download one bad app for it to hack data out of another. Apple are among the most secure, but are not immune, despite their claims. Also, what security any phone provides is only to the owners of very recent models.

    https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/mobile-phones/article/mobile-phone-security-is-it-safe-to-use-an-old-phone-a6uXf1w6PvEN

    Many people never pay for anything by mobile phone, and are fairly immune from identity theft or fraud even if the phone is stolen. But I will bet that you can't usually book a charging slot and NOT have direct or indirect financial authorisation on your phone!

    The idea of using the car's electronics for such purposes should make people gibber, because car manufacturers are notorious for insecurity and opacity.

    1003:

    I don't use the EV's electronics for payment (??). I do use my credit card, usually to 'charge' my account on the BC Hydro app, which allows me to pay for a charge. In a year I've spent a whopping $28.43 on electric charging for the car away from the home.

    There is a certain amount of technological engagement that will be necessary for people who want to take an EV on a long trip. A slight bit more for people who don't live in a place with a parking space or accessible outlet.

    I don't think there is much likelihood that EVs will ever reach the point that a couple people on here demand - namely that they must be cheaper than their current used car, more convenient than anything that has come before, and not to have to use any kind of digital payment to access power away from the home.

    It's really too bad that EVs have such a large block of barriers in their way. Apparently the only possible answer is to just burn the planet down, since we don't want to incovenience a few people in various unique situations. Said people are also, amazingly, hostile and dismissive to various energy proposals that might help prevent said planet burning.

    So fuck it. Let's just all die and doom our descendents, so that nobody will be ever so slightly inconvenienced by change of any kind.

    1004:

    I have a mobile, aka cell phone. I don't pay anything using it. But then, it looks like this...https://www.bestbuy.com/site/tracfone-alcatel-myflip-2-4gb-prepaid/6466546.p

    1005:

    Do you have to use your credit card through an app on the phone? That's one of the things I don't do, on security grounds - I either pay by speaking to someone, or via my desktop.

    I agree with your point that people will have to change, but it is seriously unreasonable to expect people to be happy with having unnecessary disadvantages (and even swindles) forced on them, just because the car manufacturers have got us by the goolies.

    1006:

    Alas, remember Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions for a while, and then held shadow cabinet briefs for Immigration and then Exiting the European Union (ie. Brexit)?

    My read on him is that he's smart, but he's an instinctive authoritarian who'd be at home in the Home Office. I have no idea whether he's reform-minded but somehow I doubt it. The one ray of hope is that he's particularly well-informed on the pros and cons of how the Tories botched their hard Brexit and will probably try to slap a plaster on the sucking chest wound rather than ignoring it.

    1007:

    There is a vast difference between the children of mixed marriages, growing up among the culture of one of the parents, and a group of immigrants in another culture. They should not be confused. You are talking about the first, and ilya187 the second.

    What do you think you know about me? Since my uncle was the family genealogist, I can state quite definitively that, every 2-3 generations going back to the early 1700s, someone in my family either married an immigrant or the child of one.

    I'm the product of a couple of centuries of both your definitions, and I merely continued the pattern. Furthermore, I married into a large family of immigrants, whose members and children have both married within that community and married people of very different communities. It makes holidays fun.

    This is what being an American is about, for everyone who isn't in an indigenous community.

    1008:

    So yeah, it's possible for a family to assimilate into a democracy rather rapidly.

    Faster than that!

    My paternal great grandfather and his wife and kids immigrated into the UK in 1906. (My grandfather was 8 at the time, I think.)

    Grandpa's youngest brother Barnett Stross, aged 7 at the time, went on to become a cabinet minister under Harold Wilson.

    So: first-generation immigrant who became a government minister.

    (As for my dad: born in the 1920s, attended a minor public school then went to Cambridge, was sounded out by the Tories about running as a candidate for parliament in the late 1960s but decided not to. So I think we can reasonably say fully assimilated within the first local-born generation, if you leave out the "but Jewish" angle.)

    Anyway, taking 2-3 generations to assimilate immigrants bespeaks insularity and xenophobia on the part of the receiving culture.

    1009:

    feel a little like it’s the very early 1900s and we debating horses and cars.

    There are people (correctly) pointing out that horses are flexible, don’t need refined fuel at specialist retailers, don’t need mechanics, can eat oats or, in an emergency, grass. They are flexible, can deal with road surfaces other than asphalt.

    They aren’t wrong, but they are wrong. The tide of history is flowing against them.

    I have an internal combustion car that will probably need replacement soon (it’s small and the child grows). The immediate replacement may rely on burning tree-juice for reasons explained at length on this thread.

    The car after that will be electric.

    1010:

    Check out comment 646.

    1011:

    Thank you for the suggestion, but I've just poked around their website and eventually, buried deep in the FAQ, I discovered explicit confirmation that no, I can't use them because they make the same infuriating demands for bollocks I haven't got as all the rest of them do. I also found a definite statement that I wouldn't be able to put money onto the thing if I could get one.

    Even before I found the FAQ, I had tried the "get a card" link to see what would happen, and found it doesn't actually do anything, it just goes to a page with nothing but a numeric field to enter a mobile phone number. I can't find any links to a page that does do something by poking around, nor can I discover in the FAQ any hints of where a "really get a card" page might be, so even if they would give me one, I still can't see how to ask them to.

    I've a reasonable idea I may have looked at them before, as it happens; the name rings a bell, at least, although I wouldn't have been regarding them as a hopeful proposition; having looked at far too many of these things it seems a pretty general rule that the ones offering more bells and whistles are the quickest ones to extinguish hope. The people who are likely to be interested in all the bells and whistles are also the most likely to already have all the multifarious tools to work around restrictions as a matter of course, so they don't notice them, so the card company can get away with making them a lot more difficult to use than the basic versions for people who only want the minimum.

    1012:

    It's really too bad that EVs have such a large block of barriers in their way. Apparently the only possible answer is to just burn the planet down, since we don't want to incovenience a few people in various unique situations. Said people are also, amazingly, hostile and dismissive to various energy proposals that might help prevent said planet burning.

    It's very possible to solve the privacy problems around electric cars without destroying the planet; make it possible to pay cash, deliberately make the interior of an (electic) car as private as a home, create decent server/application security and develop appropriate barriers to getting information about a car. None of this is remotely impossible except for "reasons."

    1013:

    My '08 minivan, bought in '13, is getting up there. I really want a ->hybrid<- (don't understand why I keep saying that, and everyone ignores it, and all electric or all ICE), but the used prices are higher than new right now.

    1014:

    The big picture about EVs isn't about the EVs: it's about the future of geopolitics.

    EVs are electric. They don't burn gasoline. So the geographical distribution of power sources used by EVs are going to be different -- all part of a zero-fossil-carbon-burning future.

    Petrostates may continue to export energy but it will be from different sources. Take Scotland for example: North Sea oil and gas still exists although the big reserves are played out, but Scotland is still a net energy exporter because it has huge offshore windfarms. Similarly, Saudi Arabia has a huge expanse of sparsely populated desert that's not fit for food cultivation but gets lots of sunlight. And so on.

    Anyway: the politics of concentrated fungible oil reservoirs (fuel oil) tend to lead to corruption (it's concentrated money!). But renewable power sources are stationary and widely distributed. You don't get the same concentration of wealth. Nor is there a global monopoly on wind turbine manufacture, or PV panels.

    A big part of the reason the oil kleptocrats like Putin and MBS are going apeshit right now is because the transition to renewables threatens to end the financial conditions upon which their concentrated power is based.

    (Not all dictatorships are oil kleptocracies. China is authoritarian and a dictatorship -- at present -- and the Party hierachy are wealthy, but their wealth isn't based on energy concentration. China has always been wealthy, 1780-1980 set aside as an aberration.)

    1015:

    http://www.streetmap.co.uk/ has 1:50000 and 1:25000 OS mapping covering all of Great Britain. It's also a rare example of a site that actually works, because having got it working in the first place they then very sensibly left it alone, instead of continually doing stupid things that break it like every other bugger does. Doesn't use Google bloody maps, doesn't use open bloody layers. It seems to be pretty good at understanding the various numerical representations of lat and long that get used (number of digits, decimal point usage, base, etc), so if someone passes around a link to some inferior map site you can pick the lat and long parameters out of the URL and paste them into streetmap and have it go to the right place. I have a tab of it open all the time.

    1016:

    "That's actually a strong argument against democracy. Democracies are fundamentally incapable of multi-decade, let alone multi-generation, projects which will not bear fruit until long after the initiators are dead or retired."

    Democracies really aren't. They're more of plebiscite oligarchies, where the plebeians are allowed to vote in a plebiscite every few years to select the new crop of oligarchs, but the media are owned by the capitalists anyway and make sure that the newly selected oligarchs mainly do the bidding of their owners, like for example ensuring that we keep the multi-generation project of exponential economic growth regardless of consequences.

    We don't leave in democracies, we live in capitalism, a system where the capitalists control the levers of power.

    A true democracy is incompatible with capitalism, so there will be no democracies until the current system fails spectacularly by killing off 80% of the biosphere and discovering that in fact unlimited exponential growth within limited planetary boundaries is not possible.

    PS. As as for speed bumps discussed earlier, speed cushions are a much better solution: they're narrow enough that a bus or a large emergency vehicle like a fire truck can drive over them without slowing, and bicyclists can just drive between the speed cushion and the kerb, but passenger cars will hit the cushion with at least one wheel.

    1017:

    Re: 'There is a certain amount of technological engagement that will be necessary ...'

    All I want is for the car to start in the middle of winter, efficient climate control (heating & AC), seat and steering wheel warming, and not slow down to a crawl or die when going uphill. In an ICE car I know that I can't keep the battery powered stuff (heater, car radio) running long once I shut the engine off. No idea how this differs with an EV.

    How much power does your typical smartphone/car sound system (radio) suck out of the EV batteries? Many/most people use their ICE car to recharge their phones during commutes.

    Also - I'm assuming that like regular ICE cars, any EV already on the market comes complete with all of the built-in maintenance monitoring (beeps at you when you're low on fuel, windshield wiper fluid, oil, display for google maps, etc.) so I'm not sure what the fuss is about. Haven't seen anyone mention what impact more built-in surveillance might have on auto theft.

    Not exciting - but real-life.

    1018:

    I was referring to your counter-examples, not you.

    1019:

    Witnessing Russia's terrible failure to adapt to all this is instructive, but I doubt very much the other petrostates are going to learn anything from the whole business.

    1020:

    I have the entire continental US at 1:25000 on my garmin watch

    It doesn’t do route finding but works without a Wi-Fi and talks to all three of the gps systems. Plus the battery last for weeks

    I decided to go with a watch after I wandered away from my campsite once to hang my back pack got turned around and realized I didn’t bring my phone with me

    So now, basically impossible to get lost (in the Us at least)

    They did charge me out the ass but I own it, it’s not a subscription

    1021:

    Wrong! Not everyone has a "smart" phone.

    I certainly don't. A flip phone is more than good enough for an old fart like me! Cheaper, and I don't need the bells and whistles of an iPhone.

    Of course I don't have a car either, so I really have nothing to contribute to the main thread of discussion here.

    Unless somebody wants to start talking about electric bicycles? I just might need one when I turn 80 in a year and a few months. Going up long hills has become more of a challenge for me in the last few years... (Going downhill is another story - I hit 36 mph down a steep hill coming home from a group ride in Portland, OR, yesterday!)

    1022:

    Unfortunately, yes :-( But, if he doesn't tackle the electoral issue, we WILL get another government like the current one when he gets kicked out.

    1023:

    1015 - Cheers; added Streetmap to my geography folder.

    1016 - And if they're wide enough that ambulances and police vehicles will hit them one sided, oh and because cars hit them they slow buses down to the same speed anyway?

    1024:

    Agreed about the need for electoral reform which is why I'm a strong proponent (locally) of Scottish independence. The divorce will suck, but at least it's finite and it'll get us out from under the FPTP boulder that's squashing us.

    The Scottish parliament doesn't run on pure FPTP, it has a mix of seats elected by FPTP and seats allocated by a regional party list system using the d'Hont mechanism. The result is we get local representatives and it's much harder for one party to monopolize power -- the system tends to throw up coalitions. And among the consequences is a much better political culture than Westminster, which I want to see with more self-determination.

    (There is sadly no chance of Westminster switching to the same mechanism used in Scotland, even though it would fix many of the problems the House of Commons suffers from.)

    1025:

    Absolutely, you beat me to it.

    I was quite staggered to hear, from this thread regarding the US and from the Which article EC linked to regarding the UK, that there aren't any comprehensive websites where you can look up maps showing the locations of all charging points, not some highly restricted subset, and whether or not they're currently functional. I had always just assumed that of course there were several. After all, there are several map sites for each item in a whole list of pointless geeky crap, like the exact positions of trains/ships/planes, which wind turbines are going round how fast, and all sorts, so surely the mapping for facilities that are necessarily internet-connected already and are of general rather than purely geeksome interest ought to be even easier to find. This isn't just shit, it's suspiciously deliberate-looking shit.

    1026:

    having unnecessary disadvantages (and even swindles) forced on them

    I think that's key. To some people this whole climate catastrophe stuff is just a bullshit swindle. Any change forced on us in an attempt to avoid the worst of said catastrophe is therefore unnecessary.

    It's very hard to build a usable electric car that isn't a computer with an internet connection (also wheels etc). There's a lot of software, there's a lot of integration with various services. Someone on the outside deciding exactly how much of that is necessary and how much is pointless frippery that lawmakers should force car makers to remove or make optional is a fun debate. Look at the IE debate from ancient times, for example, and compare it to Chrome today.

    The flip side is that most people want the convenience. And all those conveniences add up, making the overall package much more attractive. To the point where the car might not count as usable without them.

    The good news is that people who are willing to pay not to be tracked can buy a retro-car converted to EV. They can install e-ink "number plates" and chameleon paint etc, drive round wearing a mask and whatever else it takes to avoid having their location logged 200 times a day.

    1027:

    The good news is that people who are willing to pay not to be tracked can buy a retro-car converted to EV. They can install e-ink "number plates" and chameleon paint etc, drive round wearing a mask and whatever else it takes to avoid having their location logged 200 times a day.

    Yes, but they shouldn't have to do that. EVs and legitimate privacy concerns should go hand-in-hand, and it shouldn't take more than five minutes of thinking about this to work out the broad details. We can't possibly be so utterly stupid that we can't (for example) a contract with a charging company which states that they won't give out someone's details without a subpeona. Or whatever. Not hard.

    1028:

    "In an ICE car I know that I can't keep the battery powered stuff (heater, car radio) running long once I shut the engine off. No idea how this differs with an EV."

    In an EV you just leave it on. The motor isn't on at all until you put it into gear, all the rest operate just fine. That can continue for multiple days, given how much power exists in the batteries.

    Where we live we take a ferry to the nearby metropole, where eldest lives and the head office of our respective jobs are located. That means sitting in ferry lineups, sometimes for long periods. Unlike the ICE cars, which must idle the engine to keep the AC or heat going, we just leave it on. While actually on the boat ICE vehicles are REQUIRED to shut off for air quality reasons, our EV is not.

    Such things amount to a drain on the battery, but a relatively tiny drain overall. Running the AC on a hot day takes about 30km off the top end of the range, but that still leaves >400km on a full charge.

    The EV does of course have all the built in maintenance monitoring (I think a lot of it is now mandated by various transportation regulators). I see no reason to get all worked up because the car might beep at me if a tire is a bit low. Thus far (1.5 years along) there has been no issue whatsoever. I've also got a 10 year warranty on everything possible, particularly the electronics. I assume that is because they want to make EVs as attractive as possible.

    1029:

    Charlie @ 1014
    CORRECTION
    oil kleptocrats like Putin and MBS and TRUSS - are going apeshit ......

    1030:

    How much power does your typical smartphone/car sound system (radio) suck out of the EV batteries? Many/most people use their ICE car to recharge their phones during commutes.

    I always place my iPhone onto recharging tray when I drive my Tesla. But recently I found something curious:

    If I plug a GoPro camera into one of Tesla's USB ports, instead of recharging the camera the car will suck the electricity out of it -- and quite rapidly.

    1031:

    David L @ 971:

    I do this all the time with the little car, because... well it's really little and the hose could wrap all the way around it if needed.

    As I buy 95% or more of my gas at the local (1 mile away) Costco they have 10 or 12 lanes with 2 nozzles each and many times will have every pump in use with 2 to 6 cars in the EVERY line behind them. I fill up my Civic and Tundra (large truck) from either side. Which ever one I feel will get me out in a hurry. (So I scan for big trucks and SUVs in lines and pick the ones with lots of compact cars.)

    I'm just an old fuddy-duddy and probably OCD to boot. There are 8 lanes at that Costco - 4 for vehicles with the filler on the right & 4 for vehicles with the filler on the left. Mine has the filler on the left, so I get in one of those four lanes that put me on the "right" side of the pumps. Anecdotal observation - it seems like people who pull up to the wrong side of the pump have more hassle pulling the hose across to the other side & it takes them longer to fuel.

    To each his own, but I'm pretty sure I'm more efficient, so the guy behind me in line isn't gonna' be sitting there waiting an extra long time because I'm struggling with the hose. Especially as I'm getting less agile as I get older.

    Since Costco is so close and next to so many of my typical destinations I and my wife just start watching the lines once our tank gets below 1/2 full and pull in when the lines are sort or we get to less than 50 miles of range. A full tank gives us 350+ miles in the Civic. Driving a tank to empty can actually create issues if you have water condensation or muck in the bottom that has built up over the years.

    I get 300+ miles per tankful out on the highway (average 245.91 miles according to my spread sheet with mostly city driving the last 3 years thanks to Covid) and in 57 years of driving I've had to replace 5 fuel pumps; 2 of those were the mechanical kind that mounted on the side of the engine.

    Don't think I've ever had a problem with sucking up water from the bottom of the tank.

    OTOH, I am careful to monitor my fuel mileage so that I don't run out of gas (been ~ 40 years since the last time) because tank mounted electric fuel pumps can lose their prime if you do. And THAT IS a real PITA.

    As to charger locations, I live a few miles, maybe 4 or 5 driving, from JohnS. He's on the edge of the original city center. I live next to the "hot" alternate city center. We are LITTERED with charging stations. To get them early it seems to help to live in a more up scale neighborhood. And to be honest the city center is well covered with charging stations. JohnS just picked the wrong side of town to buy a house 30+ years ago. Should have shaken that 8 Ball a few more times maybe? And when I bought my house 30+ years ago, future EV charging stations were NOT in the consideration.

    If it's the "wrong side of town", why do so many people want to buy my house? I get MULTIPLE cold calls every week. 😎

    In my defense, I bought the house in December 1974 (during the Arab Oil Embargo) for $17,500. It was a STEAL even then, but the man who owned it knew what he was doing. He wanted to get rid of it so he could retire. He didn't want to be a landlord, he just wanted to go fishin'!

    I'm surprised it was available long enough for me to see the Want Ad he put in the newspaper.

    I took over a VA mortgage & the seller offered to carry a second mortgage himself for the balance. The combined payments were less than rent on a 2BR apartment.

    I was newly married & the house was less than a mile from where my wife worked, which was on the way to where I worked (2.1 miles total even with the one way streets). And if we had to, we could have both walked to work back then ... although my then wife would have given me hell & bitched at me every step of the way if I had suggested it.

    She ran off just about six months before I finished paying off the second mortgage.

    The house has become the Palace of Maintenance Deferred and is worth practically nothing, but the tiny piece of dirt it sits on has the advantage of LOCATION, LOCATION & LOCATION!

    I know where the nearest EV chargers are to my house. Eleven Tesla super chargers and two of the other kind across the parking lot from the Target Store at North Hills Shopping Center. It's about 3.5 miles if you turn in off of 6-Forks Rd and slide down the ramp through the parking garage.

    They're the ones I'd have to use if I bought an EV.

    ... and with that, I'm going to bow out of the EV charger discussion. I think I've made my views clear and there's no need for me to flog a dead horse.

    1032:

    dpb @ 1000:

    That is true, and we're it not for the national network of ANPR cameras I would be worried about it.

    They already know exactly where your car is

    Ever forget where you parked at the mall and tried to get THEM to tell you where your car is?

    1033:

    "legitimate privacy concerns" and "they shouldn't have to"... have number plates on their car? ANPR systems should be banned? Toll roads should have to accept cash? Cars shouldn't have (cellular) radio connections?

    There's also issues with how smartphones interact with the emergency call system, with exact location reporting being available even when turned off by the user "under some conditions". That's independent of the cellphone company location tracking, which typically isn't much finer than the cell size (often under 100m diameter these days... NFG for finding an unconscious person, better for finding a car). So obviously privacy-focussed individuals don't have smartphones and probably no cellphone at all. Including the cellular radio in an OnTrack or equivalent system, their GPS/nav tool/app etc.

    ANPR is readily available in security cameras so even if the government doesn't track you other people do (and many governments buy that data when they're banned from collecting it themselves).

    Even very specific car chargers are often smart enough to record the unique ID of the car they're charging. The flexible chargers effectively have to do that, they need to negotiate charge voltage and current in some detail and making something smart enough for that but so dumb it provably cannot convey a unique ID is beyond my expertise. Then you have to pay, and cash-accepting machines that are cheap, reliable and vandal-proof are expensive. Which goes against the whole "must be readily available in large numbers"... so we'd be back to the service station model. Oh, except then we have ANPR tracking the vehicle owner, and that's not allowed in your model. Shit shit shit. Um, maybe we just make charging free? Put chargers everywhere, paid for with taxpayer money?

    So the question becomes... why is "have to pay with a credit card" the line in the sand?

    1034:

    paws4thot @ 1001:

    907 - Look up Bo'Ness and Kinneil Railway and Strathspey Railway on Wikipedia. If those appeal, try also National Mining Museum Scotland (formerly the Lady Victoria Colliery) and Summerlee Museum of Industrial Life.

    If ever I do get the opportunity for a return visit, one of my desires is to not only ride the Jacobite, but to spend at least a couple of days around Glenfinnian to see if I can make some good photographs. And then there's this from the Wikipedia article on the Jacobite:

    The daily service departs Fort William at 10:15 and arrives at Mallaig at 12:25. The return from Mallaig departs at 14:10 arriving back into Fort William at 16:00. The service crosses the additional afternoon train at Glenfinnan on Mondays to Fridays and this is the only regular crossing of two steam services passing each other on the national network.

    [Emphasis added] I'd like to find out more about that if I could. What is the other steam service that crosses with the Jacobite?

    I'd also like to take another stab at photographing Edinburgh Castle & the sunset from Arthur's Seat now that I know to go around to the back side where the climb up is not so arduous.

    918 - IME offering it 24/365.24 is the default for pay at pump, and the pumps normally accept at least Mastercard, Visa and most debit cards.

    I think they stopped doing that around here after 9/11/2001. Having an unattended pump where you can buy gasoline anonymously for cash worries some people. It might be nothing more than SECURITY THEATER, but ...

    946 - You have a credit card because Bezos Books!? They'll quite happily accept my debit card.

    They accept mine too, but the credit union doesn't give me 2% cash back on ALL my purchases & 4% cash back for purchases at Costco like Citi Bank does. IF you can manage to pay the bill off completely every month it can be a real advantage. I've managed to do that for 8 of the last 10 years I've been with Costco (and the other 2 years would not have been possible if I'd been strictly pay as you go) and I hope to be back to paying the balance every month by the end of this year (if I don't break another goddamn tooth or wander into Costco on an empty stomach again).

    David L is THE GURU on taking advantage of credit card rewards, frequent flyer points & hotel club memberships.

    959 - I think there is an OS 1/25_000 scale mapping of at least most of the UK. Where there isn't one, just flag down a local and ask.

    Yeah, I was just goofin' about that. I don't think Ordinance Survey has maps of the U.S.

    1035:

    Ever forget where you parked at the mall and tried to get THEM to tell you where your car is?

    Round here the answer to that is easy: wait a couple of weeks and you'll get a letter in the mail telling you exactly where it is. And how much it will cost you to get it back.

    1036:

    Johnny99.2 @ 1009:

    They aren’t wrong, but they are wrong. The tide of history is flowing against them.

    You need 20-20 hindsight to see which way the tide of history is flowing. While you're swimming in it it's not always possible to see which way it's going.

    1037:

    You're telling me how things work where you live. I live in the U.S., and things work differently here... for starters, we don't have a national system of license plate readers. Would you like to tell me more about how EVs and the legal system do work vs. could work where I live?

    1038:

    I should also note that you're much better set up to decide how to allow both privacy and EVs where you live than I am... as soon as you decide the combination is not impossible.

    1039:

    GM gets exactly what the Pro-EV people are talking about. They're starting their own solar company to sell utility upgrades to their customers.

    https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/11/23391433/gm-energy-ev-battery-solar-panel-charger-grid-utility

    1040:

    "why is "have to pay with a credit card" the line in the sand?"

    I think for most of us it isn't. There is one person on this blog whose idiosyncratic approach to financial management precludes them having a credit card, at all, which makes it a deal breaker for that one person.

    JHomes

    1041:

    I'm explaining that "don't track me" and "I have number plates on my car" are not compatible with each other. Once you accept that having to have an app or registered credit card to charge away from home (or your equally private friends places) kinda of fades into the distance I would have though.

    The US has had a number of "scandals" where cops have used ANPR systems or bought data from them to track people and in doing so have violated various guidelines ('scandal' in scare quotes because no-one was held to account and the behaviour doesn't seem to have changed).

    To me the obvious answer is that someone who doesn't want an internet-connected computer can't have a cellphone or an EV. That's just the way it is. I don't have to like that, or think it's a great idea, to accept that I can't change it.

    If you want an EV that's hard to track get an e-bike. Especially since most of the US seems to have a very relaxed approach to restricting e-bikes, so you can quite possibly get away with having a 200 mile range, 80mph EV and calling it a bicycle because it looks more like a bicycle than a fossil motorbike. It'll charge off 110V/15A in an hour or two, it doesn't need a numberplate, insurance, working brakes, any of that stuff.

    1042:

    EC said: Do you have to use your credit card through an app on the phone? That's one of the things I don't do, on security grounds - I either pay by speaking to someone, or via my desktop.

    One of my many jobs... Taking phone payments from people who didn't trust the Internet.

    To do it I opened exactly the same website and exactly the same interface that the customers would use and typed in exactly the same information.

    1043:

    If it's the "wrong side of town", why do so many people want to buy my house? I get MULTIPLE cold calls every week.

    I was referring to the area being littered with chargers. As Charlie noted, more and more chargers are going into areas with retail stores. You're near my daughter. Very desirable for tear downs and build new. But without the retail I have a 10 minute walk away.

    As to Costco and hoses, it adds MAYBE 20 seconds to the entire process for me.

    1044:

    Round here the answer to that is easy: wait a couple of weeks and you'll get a letter in the mail telling you exactly where it is.

    The airport here (RDU w/600 or so flights a day) has someone walk the car parks every day and take pictures of all the license plates. So they can tell you where yours is and know if it seems to be abandoned. They've been doing this for 15 or more years.

    1045:

    Oh, yeah. Every 4 to 6 months the airport has a sale of lost things that no one has claimed. Almost always a few cars in the lot. Sometime quite nice ones.

    And yes they try and track down the owners. At times the owners don't care for whatever odd reason. When they can't find them they suspect they are people who flew somewhere and died and didn't have any relatives who cared about the car.

    1046:

    This is such a weird thread, when I assume everyone here has read OGH's work which is often all about spy craft, and "not being tracked" and how exceedingly difficult that is.

    The idea that simply by paying cash one can drift through society like a ghost is just bizarre. Automatic number plate readers, facial recognition trackers, gait trackers, rfid trackers.

    Unless you're a drug courier from an alternate timeline it's just not worth it. You're more likely to attract attention as a hole in the data stream. Who is this guy who has no phone, no card, no face, no walk, no RFIDs? Where did their money come from, what are they up to? Why are they working so hard to remain unseen?

    1047:

    I'd be surprised if they still need the person physically walking around taking photos, and can't just get it all from their CCTV direct into OCR direct into a database, with whatever cross checking against published registration data is available. For instance in QLD when you look up the plate via the public interface, you get the VIN and a string stating the year, make, model and class of the vehicle (not the colour, oh well).

    1048:

    To do it I opened exactly the same website and exactly the same interface

    The system I worked on had the subtle difference that once entered and confirmed the card details could not be read back out, only re-entered. That made it slightly harder for staff at the outsourced call-centres to collect credit card details in bulk.

    I am one of those people who changes my credit card number regularly and reports the old one stolen, just to discourage people who have the details from charging me again in the future. I'd rather cope with reminder emails or complaints about it not working than try to chase up random charges after the fact. Not least because I deal with a few companies based in a certain country that is notorious for obscure contracts, weird fees, and recurring billing.

    1049:

    On the issue of privacy, it's always possible to track someone if you really, really want to. The three questions are "when does it become legal," "when does it become too easy" and "how vulnerable am I to either legal action or blackmail?"

    At some point the "legal," "easy," and "vulnerable" values become too much for some people and they start to shy away from a particular technology. Given the possible rise of fascism right now, I don't blame people for shying away - why would anyone trust Truss/Trump with easily knowing where they paid for gas and what kind of car they were driving?

    That said, I'm describing a kind of behavior, which I am not advocating. Everyone has a different "boiling point" where this is concerned - I've always found that the best protection is to let my freak-flag fly and damn the torpedoes.

    1050:

    Don't think I've ever had a problem with sucking up water from the bottom of the tank.

    IIRC you live in a fairly hot place. Up here it's usual to keep a bottle of gas line antifreeze around, and condensation in the winter is enough of an issue that multiple mechanics have recommended I keep the tank over half-full.

    'Course, block heaters are standard equipment as well.

    1051:

    why would anyone trust Truss/Trump with easily knowing where they paid for gas and what kind of car they were driving?

    I keep getting hung up on the whole "but you have to register the car with the government" part of your argument.

    Not telling Truss/Trump what sort of car your driving will cause way more interaction with authority than most people think is worth while.

    At least in Australia AFAIK every petrol station uses ANPR as part of their video security to catch people who don't want to pay for petrol. How secure that footage/detail is is largely up to the servo but if you were to guess "hahaha what?" I reckon you'd be close to correct.

    But then in Australia we have zero right to privacy and the government get quite upset with people who ask questions about that. Especially if they ask what exactly our government sends to the US and why. So we never question Five Eyes or any other form of "security cooperation". We like big brother, the government is my friend and they want to help me. Everything is fine.

    1052:

    1034 re 907 - I've never seen a steam locomotive overnight at Mallaig; there is no engine shed there either.
    re 918 - I didn't say you could buy fuel anonymously, just that you could make a card payment on pay at pump literally whenever it suited you.
    re 946 - Which again is a different argument to you originally presented and I answered. I simply said you could use any credit or debit card (except possibly Amex or Diner's Club?) at BB.

    1041 - Cellphone and "smart phone" are not synonyms. "Smart phone" is a subset of cellphone.

    1053:

    This is such a weird thread, when I assume everyone here has read OGH's work which is often all about spy craft, and "not being tracked" and how exceedingly difficult that is.

    The amusing part about this is the concept of "dark data," which is that, in aggregate, keeping all these pointless copies of data currently has a GHG emissions budget on par with air travel in aggregate.

    Now if this turns out to be true, I can see a real revolution in the offing: ditching the panopticon as a way of decarbonizing civilization. Life and freedom, all rolled up in one very, very interesting package.

    Hope I live to see that day.

    1054:

    Yeah. As I said, they're treating real estate as though they were stocks. The rest of us are screwed. I'd really like a house at least 25% larger (this lists as just under 1600^2), but no way I can afford it, as well as getting a little old to move myself.

    I'm kind of getting to the point where I might have some money to save for the bad days. Looking at the options beyond a savings account (which don't really have that good interest rates) from a small-time 'investor' angle, taking a mortgage for a second apartment seems quite easily as the most rational choice. Keeps its value and has historically even grown in price, and also has some utilitarian value (can rent it out, can use it as a second apartment for us if needed, so on).

    The frustrating thing here is that I know that that would be contributing its small part to considering real estate as stocks, and also to the housing problems apparent also here. It's just that it's one of the best choices for small players like me, if I want to maybe have some money saved when I retire. Stocks? Well, they haven't been doing that well. Bank account? Well, they don't really pay, I would lose money doing that.

    Maybe buying something like PV manufacturer stocks would be nice, but, uh, I don't know enough of the market, really.

    (If there is a society, or even a livable planet when I get to the retirement age, and if I'm alive then, but I seem to be an optimist. Or at least good in not thinking about matters too much.)

    1055:

    Hey there! Get this! (~Waves arms wildly~)

    I'm not making the goddamn fucking argument! I don't believe in the argument. I'm describing the argument because I think it's heavily involved with the unspoken thoughts/emotions happening under the surface of people protesting against EVs (which I think are a great idea. I can't wait to own one!)

    What I am saying is that if you want to speed up the adoption of EVs you have to respect the fact that people have issues with the privacy aspects. You don't have to agree, but you do need to deal with the fact that this issue is happening. And yes, I agree that the thinking about this issue isn't entirely logical.

    I'm also saying that, contrary to your thinking, "fixing" the privacy aspects is possible, if we want EV adoption to happen quickly-enough to make a difference.

    1056:

    We ahould at least take a moment to celebrate the fact that Alex Jones is now the world's first negative billionaire

    1057:

    Charlie @ 1014, big picture/geopolitics:

    (Not all dictatorships are oil kleptocracies. China is authoritarian and a dictatorship -- at present -- and the Party hierachy are wealthy, but their wealth isn't based on energy concentration. China has always been wealthy, 1780-1980 set aside as an aberration.)

    Ah, thank you for pointing that out. That explains the good news coming out of China: 645 GW of annual PV production capacity to be added 2022 - 2024, to add to 2021's capacity of 190 GW. Adding more than triple the current capacity in a few years: amazing.

    The next few decades are definitely going to be interesting geopolitically.

    1058:

    According to today's Grauniad ... The Trusstercluck's misgovernment want to abolish ALL "EU regulations" by the end of 2023 or 4 - mostly including any restrictions on "development" & trashing all environmental legislation.
    At the same time, "Modern Slavery" is now an "Immigration" issue, not a cruelty one, blaming & demonising the victims.
    This lot have go to go - how to get rid of them?

    1059:

    "I've just poked around their website and eventually, buried deep in the FAQ, I discovered explicit confirmation that no, I can't use them because they make the same infuriating demands for bollocks I haven't got as all the rest of them do. I also found a definite statement that I wouldn't be able to put money onto the thing if I could get one"

    I'm still baffled by "demands for bollocks I don't have". What is this curious "bollocks"? a bank account? an email address? a smart phone?

    1060:

    I took " bollocks I don't have" rather more literally.

    1061:

    JohnS@1034: "I don't think Ordinance Survey has maps of the U.S."

    Well, actually ...

    I was surprised to find that the OS Maps website and Android app (presumably the Apple one too) have world-wide mapping. I assume the rest-of-the-world data is from OpenStreetmap.

    More surprising, if you have an OS Maps paid subscription there's an option of "premium topo" mapping not just in the UK (25k Explorer and 50k Landranger) but also in Australia, NZ and the USA. I assume they have some kind of reciprocal subscription arrangement with the national mapping agencies of those countries.

    1062:

    Do you? It doesn't surprise me. Yes, I would do that, too - on my desktop or perhaps laptop. That is not where the main security risk is.

    The risks are specifically to do with the use of mobile phones. I don't know if the interception loopholes have been closed, but let's assume they have been. There is still the massive problem that every damn 'service' expects you to download an app, and you need only one bad app for scammers to get hold of your identification or financial details when you enter them into ANOTHER app. Worse are the apps that will store such information, or authorisation for access to it, which is clearly needed for such things as semi-automatically booking a charging station. You then have the risk of it being stolen, and the thieves using your identification or financial details.

    Yes, I know that, in theory, those problems are the same on desktops and laptops, but (a) it is possible to upgrade operating systems on those and hence get continuing security fixes and (b) there is a LOT more that can be done to protect against such attacks.

    1063:

    I agree. While I know (in theory) how to avoid being tracked, both physically and on the internet, it would be a full-time occupation to do so. Nuts to that. I do enough to piss off Google while not inconveniencing myself, and assume that GCHQ etc. have no interest in me. If any competent snooping organisation wants to track me, I can't practically stop them, so why waste time trying, ineffectually?

    My concern (and that of most IT-savvy people I know) is about our systems being hacked, and having money stolen from our accounts, having our identities abused, and put to the MASSIVE inconvenience of sorting the matter out.

    1064:

    If you want further fun, Biden is trying to restore the USA's near-total control of, er, almost everything and almost everywhere, but India and China are now big enough to resist and many smaller countries are following suit. He has just got pissed off with Saudi Arabia for being insufficiently subservient.

    https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-thinks-us-evaluate-relationship-saudi-arabia-white/story?id=91327505

    1065:

    Also attempting to weaken what might be taken as an attempt hasten the transition of the (Sometimes) United States to single party authoritarianism, the GOP would try to ride an oil price increase to Congressional majorities next month.

    1066:

    I don't want to get drawn into this lunacy, but we have a good many posters who seem determined to create straw men, and it is clear you have been caught out by some of them. The main payment problem (certainly in the UK) has NOTHING to do with anonymity, and the 'line in the sand' (if one exists) is not EVEN being able to pay with a credit card. I posted this link before, but I clearly need to quote its start:

    "Imagine if a major fuel chain such as Esso announced you could no longer pay for your petrol or diesel with cash, credit or debit cards at most of its fuel stations.

    Instead, the company said you can refuel your car, but first you have to download a poorly rated app on your smartphone, which may not work very well.

    The alternative to that app is that you must order a special Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) card, set up a payment account with Esso online and then link it to the card.

    But this same RFID card is not going to work with BP, Shell or supermarket petrol stations. It could, but it won't. Nor will the app. Instead, you're going to need different apps and/or RFID cards for most other brands of petrol stations - and there are more than 30 of them."

    https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/5-problems-with-electric-car-charging-and-how-to-fix-them-a7ZWB7T3mlKh

    1067:

    To continue, the Biden administration is doing what a hypothetical Labour administration would be occupied by on your side of the world, trying to repair the web of understandings and agreements that the previous administration savaged because they had been done by Democrats, or their insufficiently conservative predecessors, something analogous to the unpleasantry in Britain.

    1068:

    I'd be surprised if they still need the person physically walking around taking photos, and can't just get it all from their CCTV direct into OCR direct into a database, with whatever cross checking against published registration data is available.

    I don't know. Maybe they drive a golf cart / ATV around with a movie camera and software extracts the information.

    A big side benefit is that they can tell folks where "their" car is located. For that you need to know which space it is in. Or at least close to the space. This they do a lot.

    1069:

    Like a dog, they wish to wash away the odor of competing authority and replace it with their own.

    1070:

    I know you're a really smart guy.

    But your idea of how modern Apple iPhones work (and in many ways Android) is severely flawed.

    And you'll know tell my you know better and then I'll ignore your comments.

    1071:

    During the summer months there are 2 steam trains a day from Fort William to Mallaig. As this is a tourist service each one stays a couple of hours in Mallaig, so they are scheduled such that the second one out from FW passes the first one returning to FW at a place where there are 2 tracks (like a lot of rural train services large parts of the line comprise a single track).
    The regular 2-carriage bus-like diesel service tends to run once or twice a day, morning and evening - often as an extension to the Fort William / Glasgow service.

    1072:

    AH, that makes better sense than JohnS' description which I read as having "the Jacobite" starting from An Gearasdan* and the crossing service starting from and overnighting in Mallaig.

    *Yes, this is a very political statement.

    1073:

    I'd really like to take a vintage tourist steam train ride like some of the ones in the older mining areas of Colorado. But I'm severly conflicted in terms of this being damn the environment tourism for rich folks. (By world standards.)

    And when I watch these various tourism / history channel shows about the folks maintaining steam trains and remember the overhaul shops where I grew up, I think about Charlie talking about the person (relative?) he know who operated a horse drawn carriage setup for special occasions. And how much effort went into getting things set up and taken down. And it's obvious why autos replaced the horses so quickly. Lack of gasoline stations and frequent breakdowns be damned.

    1074:

    This lot have go to go - how to get rid of them?

    Truss is almost certainly toast.

    Two options:

  • She and Kwarteng are going to make a hugely embarrassing U-turn on their toxic mini-budget in the next few days (some suggestions they'll do it as soon as he gets back from the USA). At which point she's a lame duck, having signally cocked up getting her own program implemented -- everyone knows what she is, also that she's weak.

  • They hang on until October 31st, when the OBR/audit report on the implications of the mini-budget are due to be published and we all get to see the official report explaining what we already know: that it was fucking stupid and self-destructive, that they were warned it was FS&SD before they did it, and still they persisted.

  • After which, the next 1922 Committee meeting will be even more toxic than yesterday's (where Truss apparently got really rattled by the knives coming out and nobody defending her).

    I see that today Jacob Rees-Mogg of all people is trying to greenwash himself as the protector of environmental concerns and our zero carbon future. Which is absolute bugfuckery of the first water, but suggests he's pitching his stall out front as he starts the campaign to be Truss's successor.

    Finally: Tory polling must be terrifying for the MPs right now.

    Everyone knows Labour has a roughly 30 point lead overall, and the entire Red Wall of northern constituencies that flipped Tory in 2019 are poised to flip right back to Labour.

    But the Blue Wall is also collapsing. The south-east is a bastion of Tory safe seats, and voted 50% Conservative/24% Labour at the last general election.

    Labour is now leading by 13 points in the Blue Wall constituencies, with the LibDems threatening to push the Tories into third place.

    If they held an election this week the Conservative party would be a smoking crater. And we've hit the point where many individual Tory MPs may make the calculation that they want to fight an election right now in their own constituency on a platform of personally opposing Truss, rather than fighting one on her timetable and being tarred as her supporters. If they support a Labour no confidence motion and the government is dissolved there'll be no time for central office to get them de-selected before the election. The Whips office and party discipline can't hold them in line during a collapse ...

    1075:

    This has been discussed around here as a great thing if it can happen but ...

    AstraZeneca's vaccine formula under nasal spray trials is a near total bust.

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/nasal-covid-vaccine-blows-clinical-trial-flinging-researchers-back-to-the-lab/

    Oh well.

    I plan to get my 4th Covid vaccine shot tomorrow along with a flu shot. I tend to feel lousy for a day after either so I'll go for one day of maybe double lousy over two separate lousy days.

    1076:

    Biden is trying to repair what Trump broke: to whit, that any given country is (or is not) a U.S. ally regardless of whether the current administration is Republican or Democrat. Yes, he'd also like to win the election, but Biden, unlike Trump, understands the principle of "Dance with the one what brung ya."

    1077:

    It's so bloody annoying that it makes me mad just to think about it. Demands to send them X pieces of bog paper off list A plus Y pieces of bog paper off list B plus some assortment of other similar crap which the website throws up after telling me that the signup process was "successful", when I wouldn't have bothered starting said process if the site hadn't claimed that I wouldn't have to do that, and without which they won't send me the card.

    Or it happens after they have told me the signup process was "successful", I have sent them the signup FEE, and they have sent me the card. THEN they tell me they're not going to switch it on unless I send them this pile of crap, so as well as wasting my time and effort by lying to me, saying they weren't going to do this and telling me I signed up "successfully" when I obviously haven't, they've stolen the bloody signup fee as well.

    Or it happens after I've had the card for a few years, used it without problems, and even been through the expiry/renewal cycle at least once. Suddenly it stops working and they refuse to sort it out without etc etc etc.

    I've been through several of the bloody things over the years as they have all successively failed and each time it's become harder to find a replacement without being blocked by this shit. At first it sometimes even was possible to pick items off the lists A and B that I actually had, but the lists have got shorter and shorter and all the viable items have dropped off them. The card outfits have got steadily more and more bloody awkward about it - not all at the same rate, which is how I was still able to find alternatives for a while, but they've all caught up with each other now. Several of them used to offer the choice between a "full" version of the card if you did send them all the crap, or a "restricted" version if you didn't (can't put more than a certain amount of money through it a month, but the amount was still more than I've got so it didn't matter), but one by one those have all gone down the drain too and even the "restricted" versions demand crap now (can't see why they still exist when their advantage no longer does, but they do). It's now got so bad that for the last couple of years, since the last functioning one I had shat on me, I haven't been able to find anything at all any more.

    This is all so the bloody government can claim to be acting against "money laundering" by proudly displaying all the shit it dumps on little people who aren't even trying to do it anyway, but can't fight back, while still allowing the actual significant operators to carry merrily on doing it all the time. Which just goes to make it even more maddening.

    1078:

    I agree with everything you say but unless the Conservative Party changes it’s election process or fiddles it like they did with Theresa May’s election we will be doomed to another month with no government at a time of crisis for the economy. Party leadership elections by members are taking us into the same black hole as the USA where elections are decided not by the electors but by the few nutters and entryists who bother to vote in the Primaries. And Truss’s replacement will be decided by the little Englanders and swivel eyed loon entryists from UKIP who are entitled to vote. I wrote to my Conservative MP about this and he replied that he agreed it was undemocratic for unelected people to decide who becomes Prime Minister and was planning to speak to the 1922 committee about this. The Labour Party system is just as bad. It gave us Corbyn. So the Next PM could be Jacob Rees-Mogg or Nadine Dorries. It’s OK but unwise for parties to do this when out of power but lunacy to use this method to choose a Prime Minister.

    1079:

    If you want further fun, Biden is trying to restore the USA's near-total control of, er, almost everything and almost everywhere, but India and China are now big enough to resist and many smaller countries are following suit. He has just got pissed off with Saudi Arabia for being insufficiently subservient.

    Generally speaking, aiding the man who threatens the world with nuclear war is not very helpful...

    1080:

    Mike Collins & Charlie
    Try opening this in firefox - or something similar that dodges paywalls.
    Warning, you will need brain-bleach afterwards. It shows just how utterly & dangerously bonkers they are - the target date for the UK is 1906, I think, coupled with a full mini-me of Trumpism.

    1081:

    "It's very hard to build a usable electric car that isn't a computer with an internet connection (also wheels etc). There's a lot of software, there's a lot of integration with various services."

    Actually it's very easy. You just build a car, including the wheels, and don't go to the extra effort of putting all the bloody computers in it.

    The statements in the second quoted sentence happen to be true of the way electric cars happen to be built at the moment. They are not a description of how an electric car has to be. It isn't like the wheels; if you leave the wheels off you can't even push the thing, but if you leave the computers out it still works perfectly fine, just as cars always have done since long before computers were invented.

    It is not necessary to stuff it with computers in order to locate refill locations any more than it is for any other kind of thing that needs some kind of refill (examples: practically every single other thing that needs some kind of refill; every other species that eats food or uses nesting material or does something that it needs to keep getting more supplies for). When you need to recharge a power tool, you don't have to use the internet to find a socket to plug the charger in, you just look for it.

    The electric car situation is that you've actually got a hundred sockets in the room, but they're all under the wallpaper or behind bookcases or under the carpet or something, with only one or two where you can see them (which probably are in use already). You have to use the computer to find the others because they've all been hidden away. You also have to use the computer to turn them on, because they haven't got a normal switch that you can work with your finger. And (per #1066 et al) it will still only find on average 3 or 4 of those 100 sockets, which may be in use or buggered, and you have to install a whole different OS to find each of the other 30 or so scattered sets of sockets, a different one for each set.

    Oh yeah, and you're also back in the days of having 3 different sizes of round pin plugs plus 13A square pin fused plus light bulb socket bayonet plugs etc etc etc instead of one single standard, only this time you can't even get an adaptor to plug the plug you've got into a different kind of socket.

    This is done deliberately because each of those sets of sockets are owned by different people who get money when you use them, so they're all trying to make sure you only find their sockets and not anyone else's. And they also intend to subvert your tool to blurge crap at you to try and persuade you to spend more money on random other shit, and want to make sure it's their crap and not someone else's that gets added to the blurge count.

    It's presented as a workaround for chargers being few and hard to find, but all that's really needed to solve that problem is to have a bloody map that shows where they all are, like you can find for pubs or railway stations or churches or any other thing that a lot of people want to find. We don't need a whole new method to solve a problem that has been solved for as long as mobile animal life has existed.

    "Put chargers everywhere, paid for with taxpayer money?"

    Yes! Like the roads and the streetlights on them and the drains and the traffic police and all the other components of the road transport infrastructure that are put everywhere and paid for with "taxpayer" money.

    1082:

    The Labour Party system is just as bad. It gave us Corbyn.

    Nope: they've already replaced the one-member-one-vote-for-party-leader electoral system that threw up Corbyn. (They did so immediately after the front bench knifed him in the back.)

    I get zero say because I'm in a safe-ish SNP constituency, and neither Labour nor the Tories will have anything to do with the SNP. Luckily the SNP leader in the Commons is (a) competent, and (b) not the leader of the party anyway (that's the First Minister in Holyrood), but unfortunately (c) there's no chance of there ever being an SNP Prime Minister for the UK as a whole (I can't see them doing a worse job than any of the three main UK-wide parties).

    1083:

    OPEC (i.e. Saudi Arabia, Russia etc) have a vested interest in the US not being a functional, outward looking country. Anyone on the planet can see that placing the current incarnation of the Republican Party anywhere near the levers of power is the quickest way to throw the US off the rails and out of Saudi Arabia and Russia's business.

    In a rational world, lowering oil supply during an inflation crisis and fuel shortage would be self defeating in the sense that it will hasten much of the world to transition away from burning fossil fuels. In our hopelessly irrational world, a spike in fuel prices will create an opening for fascist reactionary political types to seize power and move us sharply away from dealing with climate change at all.

    I can see why Biden is mad at the Saudis, they have raised prices in a transparent attempt to cause Republicans to be elected in the US.

    Here in Canada we are entering into another cycle of right wing Albertan Triumphalism as they wallow in a firehose of oil cash and whine about the rest of the country not being sufficiently thankful for their superior intelligence. After the inevitable crash they will wallow in regret and whine about the rest of the country not taking care of them.

    1084:

    Actually, you DO need a computer to control the lithium battery and its use, because they are prone to serious misbehaviour if not. Er, that's it. You don't need the other (hundreds of?) computers, nor all of the frobs, gizmos, bells, whistles and brass knobs that modern manufacturers foist upon us.

    And you CERTAINLY don't need an Internet connection. Even maintenance can be done more reliably and securely by a direct connection to the garages's computer, which might need an Internat connection.

    1085:

    I am fully aware that my knowledge of iOS and Android is extremely limited. Perhaps you would care to share your wisdom with us? And why the following page is wrong:

    https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/mobile-phones/article/mobile-phone-security-is-it-safe-to-use-an-old-phone-a6uXf1w6PvEN

    1086:

    Sorry, didn't feel a need to spell it out. A speculation, is "Drumph's" issue with soft power the result of conflating it with impotence?

    1087:

    Here in Canada we are entering into another cycle of right wing Albertan Triumphalism as they wallow in a firehose of oil cash and whine about the rest of the country not being sufficiently thankful for their superior intelligence. After the inevitable crash they will wallow in regret and whine about the rest of the country not taking care of them.

    Rural Albertan triumphalism. Smith is running for a rural riding because rural Alberta feels hard-done-by that it didn't have the strongest voice at the table around Covid measures. (Note: rural Alberta is 1/5 of Alberta's population. So 1/5 feels that they should have more say than the 4/5 of Albertans that live in cities.)

    1088:

    So 1/5 feels that they should have more say than the 4/5 of Albertans that live in cities.

    They prefer to look at maps instead of numbers. Trump is the same way.

    1089:

    A speculation, is "Drumph's" issue with soft power the result of conflating it with impotence?

    As a casual Trump watcher since the 80s he has one over riding goal. To claim he is number one at everything he does and never (APPEAR TO) loose.

    Having the world largest military is great. But using it might mean soldiers die so don't go there. Which is why he was fine firing off those cruise missiles at Syria but kept pissing and moaning about the troops there. And when all those US troops got concussions from the Iranian missile strike he kept saying it was just some minor headaches. Never admit to any weakness or loss.

    Multilateral treaties with groups of countries are similar. For the US to enter almost any treaty with one other country, the US tends to have more leverage than the other guy. In multilateral treaties with groups the US can't just demand and get what it wants. So he's against them.

    1090:

    Yup. Can't be having any of this democracy in the Labour party - it might lead to (Shock Horror!) socialism.

    1091:

    That article is written to the ignorant. And I would think you're not in that group.

    But back to your earlier point. Yes, I know that, in theory, those problems are the same on desktops and laptops, but (a) it is possible to upgrade operating systems on those and hence get continuing security fixes and

    I'm on the Apple Security Update list for software releases. (Anyone can join.) Here's what has come out in terms of security fixes since May. This does not include feature updates, new model support updates, or the new iOS release.

    support.apple.com/HT213258 supports back to 6s models

    support.apple.com/HT213346 back to 6s

    support.apple.com/HT213412 back to 6s

    support.apple.com/HT213428 back to 6 (must have been a bad issue that they went back further than before)

    support.apple.com/HT213480 back to iphone 8 as iOS 16 dropped support for earlier. But it seems the update doesn't address thing that would be in older phones.

    FYI - The iPhone 6s has not been for sale since September 2018. And was considered out of date by most in 2016 when the iPhone 7 was introduced.

    The iPhone 8 was introduced in September 2017 and really replaced by the X in November 2017.

    Normally Apple supports things longer but iOS 16 needs so much RAM that they bumped older phones off the feature list faster. But in general they still issue fixes for older phones for a year or few after they stop supporting them with the new OS.

    If you track back through their patch releases you'll see things where they will go back to a phone not "supported" for 5 or 6 years and issue a patch.

    Google Android, not nearly so good. At all. Which is why the only one I deal with is just to play with so I can answer the odd question that pops up.

    In general those in the security fields feel iPhones are more secure than most desktop or other brands of phones.

    But I will agree that things are getting WAY TOO complicated just now.

    But updates are there and are distributed.

    1092:

    Again from your earlier comment.

    and you need only one bad app for scammers to get hold of your identification or financial details when you enter them into ANOTHER app.

    For a long time now Apple iOS has required you to give permission for one app to see or even ask for data from another. And Apple tightens it down with each major release.

    Plus they make it as hard as they can for the cross site tracking that Facebook and others are so fond of.

    www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/facebook-says-apple-ios-privacy-change-will-cost-10-billion-this-year.html

    1093:

    Yup.

    The general rule with smartphones is:

    With Apple products, buy a new generation phone when it comes out. It will be supported for at least 5 and possibly as long as 7 years. Costs more than non-flagship Android phones, however if you amortize it over time it works out cheaper than all but bargain-basement budget tier Androids.

    With Android phones, no-name brands may never issue security updates after you buy the thing, and even premium vendors (Samsung, for example) only do so for 2-3 years. The only way to be definitely secure is to roll your sleeves up and install your own patched OS -- to learn how, the xda-developers.com discussion fora is a good starting place, but at this point you're getting into roll-your-own-linux-distro territory.

    Remember: Google make money off Android by giving it away for free and selling advertising that Android users find hard to avoid. Apple mostly make money by selling hardware, so protecting their customers' privacy is a marketing angle. This is why my phone is an iPhone 12 Pro Max (and I won't be upgrading before the iPhone 15, unless it dies suddenly).

    1094:

    Speaking of security, I treat my iPhone as a security token. It does get used for smartphone stuff, but I'm pretty cautious about what I allow on it.

    I don't allow the official Twitter, Facebook, or other social media apps on board. No TikTok, no Tumblr, no LinkedIn, no Meta (Facebook) products whatsoever. (I do have a third-party twitter app -- a subscription one that's designed for customer privacy and blocks promoted tweets/ads.) I have a VPN and an adblocker or three. I use biometrics, a 2FA authenticator app, and 1Password (a password vault app): all websites and online accounts have unique passwords or 2FA enabled. Default search engine is not Google.

    And I don't install ad-supported software ever, jailbreak it, or sideload apps that bypasses Apple's basic anti-malware precautions (which are leaky these days because there's so much stuff on their app store, but still better than nothing).

    1095:

    I live in very rural Pennsylvania - several hours drive from large cities, an hour from even a small one, and 40,000 people on 1,000ish square miles.

    Offhand, I know where at least three EV charging locations are, all of which have multiple chargers. I didn't have to look those up.

    I don't have an EV, but since I now have a house where I could*, but the range on them would easily accommodate the needs of every one I know, almost all the time, without ever using a charge station.

    I do find it deeply amusing that a science fiction author's blog has such a high percentage of people who would have us at horses and doubloons.

    *Not being able to home charge is legimately an issue for huge chunk of the US population.

    1096:

    I just upgraded my iPhone 11 Pro to an iPhone 14 Pro. We did it by trading in my wife's (one upgrade cycle ago) iPhone X.

    T-Mobile is giving me $890 in credits to do this so how could I not? If I wait a few months I'll only get $300 or so in credit. If that. And yes I understand US cell phone marketing is a strange and alien beast to others around the world.

    An interesting point is many, maybe most all now, of those non smart simple flip phones are really Android under the cover. With almost no security updates ever being sent out. There are all kinds of bad actors who will rent out fleets of infected flip phones to do fake ad clicking or DDDS or similar. And are sending home to Septre cnetral every text message sent and received. Just because you have a flip phone, don't assume it's not really an upatched and maybe infected Android phone.

    And if you want to dig deeper read up on why Google is somewhat apoplectic about the entire blue and green bubble debate that they are loosing.

    All of which has been leading to Apple going from under 10% of new sales a few years ago to a bit over 50% now. (In the US) And it seems that over 50% of the in service phones in the US are iPhones. Especially since teens want nothing to do with almost anything else.

    1097:

    Other should-be-obvious stuff: do not walk while texting/messaging/reading the screen. If I need to read something I find a convenient wall to stand in front of and maintain situational awareness. Indeed, the phone stays in an inside pocket most of the time while I'm out and about.

    (The Apple Watch -- a budget one -- is a useful inconspicuous remote control for music, maps, and notifications that I can check unobtrusively. Of course it lives up my sleeve, so ...)

    I live in a city centre with traffic noise so I use noise-canceling Airpods Pro and listen to music while walking. Which in turn necessitates learning to behave as if I'm deaf -- always look both ways and use eyeballs while crossing the street, watch other pedestrians, and so on. And I pause the music and switch from noise cancellation to "hearing aid" mode if I'm not sure about my personal safety. (It looks as if I'm wearing headphones while actually I'm able to hear ambient sounds better.)

    But at this point we're getting beyond "is my smartphone secure?" and into "is my person physically safe?" territory.

    1098:

    "For a long time now Apple iOS has required you to give permission for one app to see or even ask for data from another."

    That's fundamental to the Android architecture, too. Each app runs under a separate (random) userid in a separate process, so it's very difficult for one app to see another's data.

    At the app level, the architecture of phone OSs is nothing like the OSs on desktops or laptops, which draw security boundaries between different logged-on users, but not the apps they happen to be using.

    Yes, of course there are exploits in all of these systems, and I'm not advocating one or another, just noting that you can't carry a mental model based on Windows etc. across to smartphones.You need a different model to make a realistic risk assessment.

    1099:

    Sigh. Yes, I know that. Are you seriously claiming either that (a) IOS is immune from 'root' exploits or (b) even a root exploit doesn't allow that check to be bypassed?

    1100:

    I have a VPN

    Turns out a lot of apps bypass installed VPNs. Lots of chatter the last week or so about this.

    I expect Apple to clamp down and/or fix this soon. And it turns out some Apple apps are bypassing them. I suspect there's a logic flaw in the VPN enabling software.

    I'm not a draconian as you on which aps I install. But I do do things like have a very unique email account for Facebook which makes me look quaint to them as I don't seem to do much anywhere else on the Internet.

    And I find it somewhat amusing but also scary that on Android some 1Password equivalents and VPN software actively sends your data to bad guys. Google is still trying to deal with cleaning up their app store. Not to mention how trivial it is to side load apps.

    1101:

    Yes. That is a reasonable use of an Iphone. I and many other posters here positively do not want to do what you do - if I got an Iphone, it would be for linking to my hearing aids so that I could use a mobile phone as people with more normal hearing (*) do and possibly installing speech to text tools.

    As I mentioned, my current approach to phone security is to use a cheap one for calling my wife (one way, because I can't hear it!) or texting her and my daughters (two way!) It has nothing on it except a few telephone numbers, so I don't care much if it gets nicked.

    https://imgur.com/gallery/VR37hRl

    1102:

    The iPhone has speech-to-text built into the OS, and as of iOS 16 can do OCR on text in photographs (including language translation).

    Yes, it can talk to hearing aids. They've even added a hearing booster feature to the newer high end airpods that makes it easier to hear stuff in a crowded/noisy space -- not true hearing aids, but vastly better than nothing.

    A nice feature of iOS (and Apple kit in general) is that if you buy into their ecosystem and get an Apple ID and use it with the iCloud web front end you can enable location tracking on all your devices and see where they are. Then if your iPhone is nicked you can throw up a message on the lock screen ("give it back") or, if you just lost it, "reward for return", and remote-wipe/remote-kill it if there's no hope of recovery. With iCloud backup so as soon as you get a new phone and log in you can restore your phone's personality (apps and data) over the air.

    But -- this is an important angle -- the iCloud account now becomes an important security point of failure. So: long, solid password, preferably with 2FA enabled on top. Apple are pretty good about supporting 2FA confirmation via their own APIs on other Apple devices; if I need to log in on my phone or a new machine I get a simultaneous permission request on all my other currently-unlocked machines, complete with a map showing the location of the new login attempt, an "is this you?" question, and a six-digit pin to enter on the new machine in order to link it to the account.

    1103:

    From the point of view of a (hardware) capability machine, that's actually very similar, with apps being like programs run by different users. They both have the weakness that any flaw in the operating system (whether a root exploit or poor networking separation) will potentially allow data to leak. That's fundamental to ANY Unix-like system, including Linux, Microsoft and iOS.

    1104:

    Thanks for the information about speech to text. My audiologist was saying that they are the only game in town for linking to hearing aids. I can witness that they are the only mobile phone I can hear at all without doing that.

    That iCloud information is useful, too, and sounds very attractive. But the 2FA sounds horrific if you are away from home and your iPhone runs out of battery or you need to turn it off. Having recharged it or turned it on, you then want to log in. And you can't call home for help until you have a working phone .... Is that really the situation?

    1105:

    Heard a story on the radio a year or two ago: Someone on a commercial plane saw a car parked outside the airport on a road that no one used. When they returned, they drove out and checked it out. Then reported it to the cops, who towed it, removed the drugs from the wheels, I think it was, and sold it at auction. The folks who reported it bought it, had the bullet holes and other maintenance done, and had a fairly new Lexus for about $10k.

    1106:

    My answer is to use mostly, of the two cards I have, the one with the lowest limit (under $2k).

    Works. In '14, my now-ex had several cards, but I pushed her to get one with a low limit. She got a TJ-Max card with an $800 limit. In London (for Worldcon), someone stole the card information, and went to an Apple store, and tried to buy a $2600 computer.

    As we said on usenet, "Bzzt! Thank you for playing."

    1107:

    The issue of privacy: think of it this way - after my van was stolen, then found, in '09, I took the cop's advice and bought a Club. If a professional car thief wants the car, no problem. But it deters everyone else.

    I do what I can. If the Authorities have a warrant, they can get my info, ditto on any other state-level actor. The script kiddies and the rest, nope.

    1108:

    Back in the seventies, a buddy had gotten an appointment to the Merchant Marine Academy. He and a friend came ashore around Houston, I think, and they wanted to rent a car to drive home to Philly, that being cheapest.

    Nope. The two of them offered to put down their paychecks, over $5k (more than the car cost, those days), and the rental co said "nope, we only rent to credit cards, never mind that "good for all debts" on the US dollar".

    1109:

    Not having a "smart" phone, I don't understand why every bloody organization, from the public radio station to Amazon, wants a separate app for each of them, rather than a mobile-enabled browser website.

    1110:

    Having recharged it or turned it on, you then want to log in. And you can't call home for help until you have a working phone .... Is that really the situation?

    You log into your iPhone with a passcode. Make it as complicated as you wish. The log in to iCloud FOR THAT PHONE is embedded into that phone. The 2FA is for getting to your account from a device not on "your" list or via the web.

    Also once you get into your phone, you can enable face id which will work until you restart your phone. Then you need the passcode. (I seem better than most at confusing face id.)

    And the storage INSIDE your phone is encrypted with your passcode. Which makes it unlikely normal hackers can get to it if they find/steal your phone.

    1111:

    Sigh. Yes, I know that. Are you seriously claiming either that (a) IOS is immune from 'root' exploits or (b) even a root exploit doesn't allow that check to be bypassed?

    Sign yourself. Are you claiming the iOS is inherently less immune than whatever device you are using just now to read and comment on this blog?

    1112:

    Um, no. Saudi Arabia, it's state-run oil company having just declared a ->90% increase in profits<-, is making OPEC cut output. This will raise the price of gas/petrol, help Russia... and shove the world over the edge into a recession. And hopefully, that will get the GOP elected here.

    1113:

    I do find it deeply amusing that a science fiction author's blog has such a high percentage of people who would have us at horses and doubloons.

    Given the likely consequences of BREXIT, they will have to settle for ponies and singloons…

    (With apologies to Flanders and Swann.)

    1114:

    But the 2FA sounds horrific if you are away from home and your iPhone runs out of battery or you need to turn it off. Having recharged it or turned it on, you then want to log in.

    Not a problem because when the phone restarts you need to enter your regular PIN (six digits) to log in, and thereafter that unlocks the secure enclave and allows the phone to use it's Apple ID to connect to Apple's services. (Unlocking also lets you thereafter use biometrics, whether Touch ID or Face ID, as alternatives to PIN entry. Note that Touch ID and Face ID are not simple image matchers, Apple put a lot of thought into making them difficult to spoof photographically. It might be worth googling for info on the T2 security enclave in Apple's processors: it does some nifty stuff.)

    1115:

    I got my first credit card before I left Philly in '86. I had it until a few years ago, the account having been sold twice. Finally, the owner of the account outsourced "servicing" the account (and if anyone can explain to me how that makes any sense, please do) to HSBC. And a year later, I got a letter telling me they'd cancelled the account. I had stopped using it, because, although I always paid it off at the end of the month, they had raised the interest rate to 25%, what the rate is for a college kid getting their first card.

    I tried to send a letter back to complain, and it bounced, the PO telling me "no such box address".

    I really should have called my Congresscritter and complained that was illegal. But the next year, HSBC got massive fines for money laundering....

    1116:

    we only rent to credit cards, never mind that "good for all debts" on the US dollar".

    Until they rent the car they don't have a debt.

    Rental car companies have found that restricting things to people who have a credit card sharply reduces the amount of stolen and/or trashed vehicles they have to deal with. Ditto renting to someone under 21 and/or 25 in the US. If you have a credit card they also require you to allow them to charge for any special cleaning or repairs they have to make. And if you have a real credit card in your name you're more likely to be a real person with a real address to go with your non fake drivers license.

    Now on the other hand someone now 92 has a story of visiting France a lot and renting a car for vacations. When he turned 70 or 71 he discovered they would not rent to anyone that "old". So he got the local college kids to tell him where they got their fake ids and managed to get one saying he was 60 or so.

    Enterprise will (would?) rent to people on a debit card but only if you called ahead and they checked you out.

    1117:

    Brain bleach is right. Oh, none of it's economic idiocy, it's all the fault of The System....

    1118:

    This will raise the price of gas/petrol, help Russia... and shove the world over the edge into a recession.

    My read on this is:

    Saudi Arabia have noticed Germany and Europe in general panicking over their dependency on Russian gas and making a crisis-driven move to switch to renewables. Meanwhile they've noticed that EVs are close to the crossover point at which they will overtake IC vehicles -- we're only a few years away at most.

    At this point, the oil under Saudi Arabia loses 80% of its value. It may still be needed as chemical feedstock and for ships and planes -- for a bit longer after the cars stop burning the lighter fractions -- but demand will plummet.

    So they're getting ahead of the curve by ramping the price, aiming to make hay while the sun (demand) still shines. Because they know that this time -- unlike the late 70s -- demand isn't going to pick up again after the crisis.

    1119:

    I don't understand why every bloody organization, from the public radio station to Amazon, wants a separate app for each of them, rather than a mobile-enabled browser website.

    Because no mater what the web folks say, the experience is worse. It's much better than it was but still clunky compared to most apps.

    1120:

    A client in her 70s has Bluetooth enabled hearing aids that work very well with her iPhone.

    They can be a pain to get setup the very first time but she says they work very well.

    After I tried to help her when we got her a modern iPhone a few years ago I gave up and had her visit her audiologist. They did everything in a few minutes. Experience does help.

    1121:

    My read on this is:

    With a side order of stopping Russia from dumping oil on the market at half price to India and China and thus distorting their (SA's) idea of how the market should work.

    1122:

    Thanks. That sounds plausible, and an interesting reference. Apple do seem to be continuing their long tradition of actually THINKING about user interfaces, but I am still not convinced to buy one.

    Following what I have learnt on this thread, I am even more convinced that I am NOT going to trust anything important to any Android device! I had to to log into Google on my tablet to download my map reader software and other essential tools, but that is all.

    1123:

    Suggestion? Apple just discontinued the iPod Touch a few months ago. Pick up a second-hand one (most recent model) and see how you get on with it. If the answer is "I don't", offload it via eBay.

    The iPod Touch is basically an iPhone minus the phone. It has wifi and bluetooth, runs iOS and most apps, has Touch ID and a basic camera, and will give you a taste of iPhone without the full commitment. (Drawbacks: it's a taste of a small, old iphone -- like trying out a ten year old VW Polo rather than buying a brand new SUV with all the bells and whistles.)

    Alternatively, an iPad Mini 6 is like an extra-large iPhone minus the telephony (although you can buy one with a 5G cellular stage for always-on broadband). 8" screen, makes a great ebook reader, can also work as a note-taking machine, and is a whole lot more powerful than the iPod Touch (which wasn't updated for 2-3 years before they end-of-lifed it).

    1124:

    In some ways, I know that it is (*); in others, I don't know (either way); I rather doubt you know how my system is set up. But that's irrelevant to what I said in #1062 and your insults in #1070. I am NOT downloading programs from sites I don't at least partially trust onto my desktop or laptop, and I am NOT limited to using only security mechanisms provided by the 'vendor'. The same is NOT true when mobile phones are being used the way that was being discussed in this thread.

    As I said, it needs only one bad app for scammers to get hold of your identification or financial details when you enter them into ANOTHER app. Yes, that definition of 'bad' may refer only to ones that use a root exploit to do that, but it is assuredly true in iOS.

    (*) No Apple device as old as my desktop will run a supported version of IOS, so doesn't get security updates.

    1125:

    Thanks. I may try that. I need a new Ereader.

    1126:

    Okay I actually snorted outloud at that. Well done.

    1127:

    How do we get people to move to EV's?

    Hybrids. Everything's the same as ICE. You can't plug it in at home (I certainly can't - we have a driveway, and my van's been keyed a number of times, and an extension cord that was there before I bought the house was cut - you can see that it was done with a wire cutter - about six years ago, and no, I have no idea who or why), you plug it in when you can, and buy gas. Milage goes up, use of gas goes down. Gives the industry time to improve and ramp up batteries. And pollution goes down.

    Government subsidies to buy one (and I don't mean tax breaks).

    Go ahead, tell me why this won't work and is a bad idea.

    1128:

    your insults in #1070

    You may not agree but I was replying to your comment which had what I, and I suspect most others who keep up with Apple products, false statements. That's all.

    And they seemed to be based on old out of date information and folklore. Which surprises me a bit from you on technical things. That article you referenced was aimed at the 6pm local news channel filling in time with their consumer help bit.

    But what I read your last comment as saying is you don't really trust ANY system provided from a vendor. Be that as it works for you it doesn't work for 99.9999% or more of the population.

    As to root exploits of iOS. Yes if it happens you're screwed. But on an iPhone with current software, unless you're Elon Musk, Liz 2x4, or similar the changes are infinitesimal that it will happen to you.

    1129:

    Apple just discontinued the iPod Touch a few months ago. Pick up a second-hand one (most recent model) and see how you get on with it.

    The reverse also happens. I know multiple people who collect old iPhones and use them as touch iPods to play music or be web cams. The smarter ones isolate them on their wifi networks.

    1130:

    Can confirm from experience that an iPad Mini 6 is the best Kindle ebook reader, including all the tablets Amazon sells. (Although TBH it ought to be, given the price difference.)

    1131:

    Please stop misrepresenting me.

    What I really distrust is the apps, NOT the vendors, because the use being discussed involves downloading 30+ apps from mostly untrusted vendors. Worse, those apps are exactly the sort of thing that hackers use for inserting their malware, and don't expect to be told that an app was bad.

    I suggest that you look up Which? magazine, incidentally, because you are maligning them.

    1132:

    Apps requiring other apps? Oy, as they say, vey. I get really annoyed when someone posts a link, and in my browser, I try to go there... and then I have to enable two or three things in noScript. And then... I had one the other day that wanted me to enable 19 other sites.

    No.

    It's bad enough when I'm trying to pay for something, and they want such and such enabled. Then I fill in data, and hit next... and it wants three or four more. Lather, rinse, repeat, including re-adding the data. because the programmers delay calling the other links until you get past the previous.

    1133:

    »Saudi Arabia have noticed[…]«

    … that is becoming harder and harder to pump oil out of the ground.

    It is not outside the plausible, that they are not dialing back production by choice, but because that is their sustainable level of production now.

    (Think: Why else would they have floated ARMCO ?!)

    1134:

    I don't know whether apps require other apps, because I use so few, but I was referring to 30+ independent apps. That's how many EV payment systems Which? says there are in the UK, and I believe them.

    I quite agree with you about the script lunacies, and my experience is similar, though my solutions are slightly different.

    1135:

    Or, at least, while not needing to drill new holes. Whatever it is, I agree that it will be an attempt to maximise profit, not play international politics.

    1136:

    In case their tankers had a crash?

    1137:

    you DO need a computer to control the lithium battery and its use, because they are prone to serious misbehaviour if not. Er, that's it.

    When I said "usable electric car" that wasn't an accident.

    But I've driven one like what you want. A dressed up golf cart with an AC motor and a very basic inverter. Performance of a shopping cart and similar range. You can still buy them. Well, you can buy the parts and DIY all the connections.

    As soon as you get into modern electric motors you have a computer to control them. "variable reluctance motors" and suchlike are not trivial to make work. But they are much more efficient than the other sorts, for several axes of efficiency. Giving that computer more access to the outside world increases efficiency, especially at the point where it knows your planned route and charge points, because it can manage the battery in some detail to get best overall driving experience (run the battery down going up the hill to the charger or whatever).

    Preventive maintenance is one of those eternal arguments. Should the car decide that it's time to replace something that's nearly worn out, or let you decide to drive until it breaks? Is it better to truck your car to a proper dealership that is equipped to diagnose and repair everything in your vehicle, or to have the car diagnose itself and go somewhere that is barely capable of fitting the exact thing that was shipped to it?

    Likewise charging. You can have a smart charger in your car that will accept 90V-600V AC of one or more phases or DC at anything from 1kW to 200kW, and it will do all the work. It'll weigh at least 50kg though. Oh, and it'll be a computer. But it doesn't have to connect to the internet, you just plug it into whatever power outlet you can find.

    But instead charging is done via a "universal" socket that can take three phase AC or DC and yadda yadda, but that's a smart socket that has comms to negotiate exactly what comes through. That lets the car have a very basic charger that turns AC into battery DC for relatively low power charging, plus a direct connection to the battery for high power charging. Tesla are also moving in that direction, at least as far as superchargers being able to charge all comers (AFAIK, saw a mention somewhere).

    But USABALE electric cars... they come with a computer screen in the front that has weather, navigation, youtube videos and games and all the rest of the crud. Whatever. If it's not built in the motorist will plug in their smartphone and demand that it interact with the car to provide those things. That's just how it is.

    1138:

    With Android phones, no-name brands may never issue security updates after you buy the thing, and even premium vendors (Samsung, for example) only do so for 2-3 years.

    Not sure where Fairphone comes into your listing, super-premium? Admittedly they're fairly new so we can really only say six years, albeit Fairphone 2 can't run Android 11 so the latest version is Android 10 from 2021. Not bad for a phone from 2015.

    As far as security Android seems to be way behind Apple, but OTOH the linux-phone ecosystem is getting better quite rapidly and they have Android sandboxes which allow you to completely isolate apps from each other. But that's still at the "compile your distro from source" level of hackery right now. I expect that within a couple of years Librem or Fairphone will be pre-installing that as an option. I watch the space because I have to run Android or iPhone apps for work, and the sooner I can move away from "all Android, all the time" the happier I'll be.

    Generic desktop OS is moving the other way, too. Microsoft have their app store and ad-supported OS versions, I hear whining from my Apple-OS using coworker occasionally about "features" they want not to have but I assume it's not as bad as MS.

    1139:

    many, maybe most all now, of those non smart simple flip phones are really Android under the cover.

    All sorts of things are Android under the cover. Buying a music player that isn't is really hard, for example. At work we can buy a touchscreen for about $10 more with android on it than without. Of course there are no software updates once they're in the field, there are barely software updates after the thing is designed.

    A big part of this is development cost. With Android not only is there a huge ecosystem of existing apps, there are lots of developers. If you go with FreeRTOS or something instead you have fewer developers, smaller ecosystem and longer development time for a given amount of extra functionality.

    This is why your security cameras run Android, and talk to a DVR that runs Android (and probably send data to a server running Android for all I know).

    1140:

    What’s not the same in EVs and hybrids is service. The last two EVs I looked at had two year service intervals. And many fewer parts to service. And I considered buying a hybrid 6 years ago but decided the combination of high price and not very good IC fuel economy (worse than my previous patrol and diesel cars) ruled it out.

    1141:

    an iPad Mini 6 is the best Kindle ebook reader

    I concur here, and I still have a WiFi-only iPad Mini 1, which is only compatible with the long-out-of-support iOS version 9.3.5. I use for this for same purpose with the Kindle app, and also as a remote control for Cubase running on other devices on my home WiFi.

    The size of the Mini is great. It fits in a coat or cargo-pants pocket easily. It also fits in a small camera bag, so it's handy for PhotoPills, the e-version of the Field Guide to Australian Birds and various ephemera apps for astro... but these days the smallest camera bag I carry around fits my relatively modern iPad Pro just as easily, so I don't use the old Mini for that anymore. I would be interested in a new one, but can't really justify so many expensive devices (embarrassment of riches and all that).

    1142:

    I deny that the final paragraph describes what it says it does. It's not specific to electric cars, but applies to all cars regardless of power source; and if it doesn't describe a car which is legally UNusable then it's high time it bloody did. Youtube videos and GAMES??!?! You're supposed to be WATCHING THE BLOODY ROAD, not playing computer games at the wheel FFS.

    (I'd add too that if their smartphone can't do all this stuff on its own already but needs to be connected to a car to do it, it can't be all that smart.)

    Some of your other points also apply unspecifically to any kind of car. Like the route planning for maximum efficiency wrt gradients etc, which affects engines also (and BTW doesn't need an internet connection, all it needs is a map with topographical information on it).

    Your points about things which do use computers aren't the same as those things having to use computers. Variable reluctance motors were invented long before computers; it's not computers that caused the revolution in electronic control of high power motors, it's the development of power MOSFETS (which I remember coming in, and they were dead exciting) and IGBTs and suchlike, fast and easy to drive beefy switching devices which you can turn off as well as on without having to bust a gut. It's entirely possible to generate the signals to drive them using only analogue methods; digital devices and computers often make some aspects easier, but it's still really really trivial in the amount of "processing" that's going on and none of the conditions can change faster than a big lump of metal going round, so one of the old 8-bit PICs is good enough.

    The case is much the same for all the other instances where a computer is using some tiny fraction of its processing power to do something actually functional: they're all things that were done without even using any electronics once upon a time, and though computers do usually make the computational aspects easier, the actual amount of computation that needs doing is still at roughly the same level as what was once achieved with big moving lumps of metal and cool weird spinny electromagnetty things. Maybe you go up two or even three orders of magnitude to gain some useful increment in precision, but there's no point going mental over it since you rapidly disappear under the noise floor of the desired effects of the computation necessarily being expressed through very big and slow-responding lumps of metal, with tolerances and wear and variable external conditions and dead spiders and all the rest of it. Computers, though, got several orders of magnitude beyond that level a long time ago, so the kind of computer you actually need to be useful in that situation is now so small in comparison to what's available that it's on the border between usable and not usable for minor housekeeping functions in a real computer like controlling the lowest speed of USB. Using the equivalent of a whole PC when you only need the equivalent of a USB controller is obviously silly on its own account, and also makes all that huge amount of unneeded processing power potentially available as a swamp for hosting and breeding all kinds of nameless evil. (And it makes writing the useful software more difficult too, even...)

    1143:

    This is why your security cameras run Android, and talk to a DVR that runs Android (and probably send data to a server running Android for all I know).

    On yes. I know it. The smart TVs in my house are used as nice big 4K panels with an Apple TV or Tivo or similar doing all the work. (Roku also works fine but it's not my personal preference.) I have absolutely no trust in any of those built in apps and the W-Fi in them is never enabled. Well most TVs now really want you to use it and keeps looking but I never put in any of the credentials for my home. I do plug in an Ethernet cable every now and again to see if there are updates but once they install the cable is removed.

    My point about flip phones was that some people here (and not here) buy them to avoid getting a "smart phone" and all the security headaches. And don't understand they are mostly buying a smart phone with a dumb screen with again to be updated Android. Like my car dash which I think is running Android 4.3.3 tablet. And I never connect it to external Wi-Fi either.

    1144:

    It's not surprising at all. A science-fiction writers blog is full of people who first, understand the risks, and second, understand enough about computing to understand the alternatives.

    I'll also note, in reply to a couple others, that software for controlling a car doesn't need to be millions of lines - thousands would probably do (batteries aside) - and there's not a single interface for stuff outside the car's computer that can't be run with serial lines* and/or USB connectors and/or Ethernet connectors. Attaching a recent Raspberry Pi to a 24-port switch, with lines going to the various systems would probably give you everything you need as long as the hardware was built to a decent spec. (Whoever wrote above about how large amounts of overhead involved proprietary interfaces was absolutely correct.)

    My dream in all this is that a big consortium parts manufacturers will finance an Open-Source car.

    • You could probably use serial lines for everything but the steering and the brakes - no matter what you use the slowest part of the system will be human reflexes.
    1145:

    EC said: The main payment problem (certainly in the UK) has NOTHING to do with anonymity, and the 'line in the sand' (if one exists) is not EVEN being able to pay with a credit card. I posted this link before, but I clearly need to quote its start:

    I'm not going to bother debunking that article, because as we know, it takes ten times more effort to debunk a lie than to tell it, and 1000 times more effort to debunk a lie than to simply link to it. Then you'd ignore the debunking anyway.

    Suffice to say, every line line is either a flat lie, a lie with a mistold truth or an intentional diversion.

    If you're happy to swallow such drivel there's nothing anyone can do to change that. It aligns with what you want to think and it's therefore unassailable.

    1146:

    Because it makes it a lot more difficult for you to block adverts, tracking shit, and other malware, while making it easier for them to put more of that in. They probably can't bypass/ignore the global privacy settings through a browser, either, as I have observed (by routing it through a decrypting proxy) Amazon on Android doing. (Come to that, I also saw that the OS itself doesn't respect some of them.)

    1147:

    I do find it deeply amusing that a science fiction author's blog has such a high percentage of people who would have us at horses and doubloons.

    Why? Don't you want a smart, self-driving, all-terrain vehicle built from room-temperature nanotech out of 100% recyclable materials, and that can be part of a self-replicating system with an affordable investment?

    The amusing (?) part is how often high tech is trying to reinvent solutions that already exist. Uber and Lyft have basically become taxis, server farms try to monetize memories, YouTube takes the place of asking the neighbors, and Tesla still hasn't come up with a self-driving car that's as good as a horse at getting you home when you're too inebriated to drive.

    1148:

    »I'll also note, in reply to a couple others, that software for controlling a car doesn't need to be millions of lines«

    It really depends what kind of car you are building.

    If you are building a car for careful, attentive drivers no software is needed.

    What software enables is higher performance, for instance through more optimal regulation of the ignition, and lower cognitive load for the driver.

    As a first-order rule of thumb, the only way to get to "million lines of code", is by adding a bit-addressed display, and the only way to get to "millions of lines of code" is to also turn it into an input-device.

    This situation has been complicated somewhat by emission rules, which have put something resembling PLC/Ladder diagrams into modern engine control, thereby enabling manufactures to implement different modalities, for instance "executing official emissions-test".

    This leveling up of expressiveness changes the power of "a line of code" dramatically, rendering it almost useless as a measure of complexity.

    As it happens, software in cars is actually very tightly regulated ("MISRA") and firmly split into "control" and "entertainment", for which very different rules apply, which is why a Tesla can still drive, presumably safely, no matter what happens to the big distracting touch-screen they put right in front of the driver.

    1149:

    ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICE

    Comments now disabled until Saturday (for final backup of blog prior to server relocation).

    1150:

    And we're back again. (But I have COVID -- confirmed by test, this time, it's the bad head-cold version -- so I won't be around much for the next few days.)

    1151:

    I am extremely dubious that most of the 'safety' features actually improve safety, and suspect that a lot of them are a combination of excessive bureaucracy and the established car manufacturers wanting an excuse for gimmickry (and to discourage innovative competition). But, certainly, there are also desirable uses of computers in cars as well as necessary ones, even if the majority are totally unnecessary or even harmful.

    I have seen claims that 'hands-free' phones are as distracting as hand-held ones, and have certainly see evidence of it with some drivers of cars (especially taxis) I have been in. The same may apply to prat navs that can be controlled when in motion, but I have seen very few. And entertainment consoles are quite simply a disastrous idea. Incidentaly, for UK drivers, the press has been full of claims that the law on hand-held devices has been tightened; it hasn't, only the Highway Code has, and both the law and it remain ambiguous and illogical.

    1152:

    Re: 'But I have COVID -- '

    Take care and get lots rest!

    As kids, for colds/flu we'd get very warm thin chicken soup and if the sinuses were very stuffed up we'd also get a side of raw garlic slices on buttered toast. Then we'd keep a full box of tissues nearby because once the sinuses opened up, the gunk didn't stop pouring down and out. Also - sleep/nap on your side nose pointed down to make sure stuff drains out of your nose and not down into your throat, etc. Seriously. Vaseline dabbed on, in and around nostrils and immediate area helps prevent chafing - from the combo of runny stuff and constant tissue rubs/scrapes. End of unsolicited home care advice ... for now. :)

    And thanks for getting your blog back up on schedule!

    1153:

    Grandpa's youngest brother Barnett Stross, aged 7 at the time, went on to become a cabinet minister under Harold Wilson.

    By sheer coincidence I just yesterday visited an exhibit about the massacre of Lidice and was wondering whether there was a relation when I saw the name.

    1154:

    Meantime, back somewhere near topic - The Iron Weathervane has replaced Kamikahzi Kwartang with "Jeremy "A"unt" making KK the second shortest tenure of the post, and the only holder to have a shorter tenure was literally dying to get out of the job.

    1155:

    And ... In the short space of time for Charlie's blog to recoinfigue ... the Trusstercluck's misgovernment disintegrates a little bit more, with what appears to be a circular firing-squad in assembly

    1156:

    I'm one of those guys who does run the tank all the way down before filling it.

    That's what I'm doing as well.

    The Jeep has an 18.5 (U.S.) gallon tank and I average around 17.9 gallons when I fill it up.

    My car (from 2007) nominally has a 35 litre tank, which gives me a range of about 700 kilometers, and I average around 36 litres when I fill it up. (Yes, you read that correctly; I like to fill it to the brim.)

    1157:

    Good luck with the COVID.

    1158:

    I'll also note that much of the software a completely computer controlled car needs is stuff a first-year student could write. "Make this light blink." "Make that light blink." "Turn on the air-conditioning fan."

    A second or third year student might be able, under supervision, to write software for the steering wheel: "This sensor will give you a number of degrees the steering wheel is turned. Divide that number of degrees by 8 and send it to the wheel actuators. You will receive data in degrees from each steering motor, make sure they are within 95 percent of 'steeringwheeldegreesdividedby_eight' and send an error message if not. Note the edge cases when the car's wheels are oriented for exact forward travel."

    You'd probably want an experienced programmer for the accelerator and brakes. The difference between back and front brakes is important and what to do if one of the brake cylinders fails is far more problematic than steering, not to mention that in a hybrid or electric car braking is also a way to generate electricity.

    1159:

    the Trusstercluck's misgovernment disintegrates a little bit more, with what appears to be a circular firing-squad in assembly

    From over here on the other side of the pond is seems they are using 50 cal machine guns and readying the RPGs.

    In the mean time it seems the average person is trying to figure out if they will have to sell off their car or first born to pay the heating bills this winter.

    And I get to vote in the next week or so. We might have as big of a mess just different.

    1160:

    What's happened to the law about not being allowed to have a TV screen where the driver can see it? Is it that the law was written when nobody could imagine any sort of screen other than the output device for a receiver and decoder of broadcast video signals, so it ended up being written in such a way that when other kinds of screen did appear it could be claimed they didn't count, even if what they were actually doing was not significantly different? Or has some idiot relaxed it? Or was it only ever just a rumour and such a law never actually existed?

    I see no reason why hands-off phones should be significantly less distracting than hands-on ones. There's still the distraction of talking on the thing, and of operating the various controls it has which depend on some form of visual feedback to confirm that you have made it do what you were trying to, not to mention the non-phone things that phones now do but didn't when the law about hands-on phones came in, which are all about intensively operating such controls. The only real difference is that you only have to take one hand off the wheel intermittently to use a hands-off one, instead of for the whole duration of your use, which doesn't actually count for all that much (and is something people do all the time even without a phone, going along with one hand resting on the gearstick or out of the window or whatever).

    Seems to me that the phone law was probably written as it was because (a) unless you are going along with one hand to your ear there's nothing the police can see you doing to pull you over for, and (b) because if it did cover hands-off phones as well, people would be even more inclined to ridicule and dismiss it with "what's the problem, it's no different from talking to a passenger" than they were anyway, and you wouldn't be able to use "it's about taking your hands off the wheel" as an argument to justify it.

    I remember when that law came in that people were constantly making remarks such as "it's only having a conversation, ffs", and refused to believe that such an everyday thing as having a conversation could possibly be a problem merely because it is an everyday thing. I tried many times to explain that having a conversation by such a deficient method made it a lot worse than having one by natural means, but since they were unable to perceive the problem directly they refused to believe that it existed at all, and I could not come up with any straightforward and convincing demonstration in the way you can back someone up against a wall to prove that yes, their arse does stick out when they bend over.

    Come to that, even having a conversation with passengers by natural means is a significant distraction; simply by reason of doing it you're necessarily concentrating on something other than the road for significant stretches of time. Not to mention the number of drivers who are apparently unable to speak without turning their head 90 degrees to the left to look at the bloody passenger all the time their mouth is open - yes, they're still there, they haven't opened the door and jumped out without you noticing... and the only guy I knew who installed the equipment to comply with the law when it came out used to look at the microphone in the top corner of the screen while he was speaking to it.

    1161:

    You'd probably want an experienced programmer for the accelerator and brakes. The difference between back and front brakes is important and what to do if one of the brake cylinders fails is far more problematic than steering, not to mention that in a hybrid or electric car braking is also a way to generate electricity.

    Most EVs (and I think hybrids) have regenerative braking. Which takes this up an entirely different level.

    Hell, my ICE Civic has all kinds of edge cases it deals with to get that last bit of MPG out. And all that simple programming has to existing inside of a complex system that has to work together almost instantly.

    I was on a CAT scanner project as a contractor in the late 70s. They took the approach that "these things" are simple so have the recent grads do it. Integration was a total mess. The company was not in the X-Ray business within a few years.

    And I have similar examples on other situations. When writing to the edge of systems that need to either fit into tiny spaces or have real time responses, you need really good programmers who can look at the larger world than the screen in front of them.

    1162:

    Right. Those fall into my category of 'desirable, but not necessary'. Good integration IS necessary.

    But one thing that experienced (and good) programmers do not do is to write 10,000 lines where only 1,000 are needed. Inter alia, more code usually means a slower program and often makes integration harder.

    1163:

    YouTube takes the place of asking the neighbors

    Well some of that is very helpful. The world has changed.

    I grew up with my parents and their friends being WWII veterans or nearly so. We had the wood working stuff. And most of the basic mechanical stuff to go so far as to overhaul a car or tractor. My uncle was the welding guy. Both of us could handle most residential house wiring. My uncle was an electrician at the same plant as my dad worked. Down the street was a guy who ran an electronics (mostly TV) repair shop from his detach garage. My grandfather and other uncle were on a medium sized working farm. Sawmill and all. Of the 6 houses my father built in our small neighborhood in my teens, 3 of them were for people who worked at his Uranium refinement plant. The actual plant manager, 2 production managers, 1 operator and one guy from the lab. (One had someone else build his house.) Plus another guy from the lab lived down the street.

    The local auto parts store was run by people who had been around since my before my father was born. Someone behind the counter likely had heard of a solution to a problem you had.

    There was a LOT of knowledge floating around my area.

    When I moved to Raleigh nope. After about a year in my current house I wanted a second socket wrench for an odd hard to get to bolt so I asked my 4 or 5 nearest neighbors. None even owned a socket set. I owned 3 but non had a handle that would get where I wanted it. I then realized I was now in a different world.

    1164:

    I am not entirely sure there ever WAS such a law. In my chasing around in this area, I have found that a lot of what is claimed to be the law is merely guidance, interpretation and just plain established convention. Some of it is law, because there is precedent, but most has never been tested in a high enough court. Quite often, such rules apply to drivers, but there's no requirement on the manufacturer to make them possible to comply with; or apply only to vehicles at the point of sale; or other such variations. I am disinclined to search the Construction and Use statutory instruments to check.

    1165:

    I think we have determined to a fairly high confidence that EVs will never be successfully marketed to the elusive 'Recalcitrant Curmudgeon' market segment.

    I sincerely hope that UK Labour has some coherent and meaningful plans for when they win power in the next election. Truss has to be doomed, and any future Tory PM probably shouldn't bother with redecorating at #10 either.

    1166:

    "When writing to the edge of systems that need to either fit into tiny spaces or have real time responses, you need really good programmers who can look at the larger world than the screen in front of them."

    I'd certainly prefer that for any car I drive - and I'm definitely not saying that recent grads should write automotive software, merely that some of the tasks are not terribly difficult. As someone noted above, the big problems which require ridiculous amounts of code are integration of multiple proprietary components from multiple manufacturers and all the commercial aspects.

    Mandating a set of standard intefaces would go a long way towards fixing the problem, and almost certainly result in much safer cars.

    1167:

    I think we have determined to a fairly high confidence that EVs will never be successfully marketed to the elusive 'Recalcitrant Curmudgeon' market segment.

    Yep.

    1169:
    But USABALE electric cars... they come with a computer screen in the front that has weather, navigation, youtube videos and games and all the rest of the crud. Whatever. If it's not built in the motorist will plug in their smartphone and demand that it interact with the car to provide those things. That's just how it is.

    And the same is true of fossil-fuel burning cars, at least on the high end of the range. My brother's (at this point) aging BMW came with a built-in navigation system. And that has to be heading down-range; there's an obvious appeal, and the stuff is cheap.

    (Conversely, if someone wanted to fit out a '67 Ford Mustang with an electric drive train, with batteries, current-model motors, and computers programmed to keep them humming but do nothing else, the main missing thing for a lot of its drivers would be the roar of the engine. So, you'd also have to add speakers tied into the drive train pumping out "vroom-vroom" noises at appropriate moments. Which, coincidentally, is something current-model petrol-fueled Mustangs have had for years, since the actual engines no longer are nearly so loud as they were in the '60s...)

    1170:

    Long-time listener, first-time caller, because for once I can actually speak to the topic at hand with some competence. Sadly I can offer no solution and minimal comfort to everyone in the UK right now... but I [i]do[/i] drive an EV!

    First things first, I hope you feel better soon, Charlie.

    Credentials: I've owned and driven a Chevy Bolt since mid 2020, and my model was one of the ones affected by the mass recalls (though fortunately ours didn't have any misfolded anodes). I live in Des Moines, Iowa, USA, which is an interesting place to own an EV, because we're the largest city in an otherwise very rural state, and DSM in particular is very isolated compared to a lot of Iowa's other cities. There's precisely one fast charger between us and the big(ger) urban corridor in the east of the state.

    I mostly charge at home, with a power cable plugged into a kitchen outlet and run through an open window (it's, uh... very Cyberpunk 2077, is the charitable way to describe it). There's really only one fast charger in the metro area and it presents a potentially interesting topic of discussion: the other part about the infrastructure question, aside from availability, is reliability.

    EVs themselves are dead simple compared to ICE cars, just on the number of components required to turn the wheels, but charging stations are pretty sophisticated machines compared to gas pumps, and that sophistication has, IMX, led to some fairly big software and hardware problems. To give you an example, I've pulled up to a charge station that I [i]really[/i] needed to be working... and all of the charge points had bluescreened themselves. Obviously this didn't make me sell my Bolt and buy a Camaro, but ever since it's made me think that in addition to there being more chargers on the map, there may also need to be a training program of some sort for on-site/roving maintenance workers. Federal job program, perhaps?

    Charlie's comment about charging stations being [i]at[/i] destinations, not destinations themselves, has some interesting implications. You mentioned shopping malls as a good spot, and I'll admit my first thought was "well finally people will have a reason to actually go to a shopping mall for the first time in 20 years." But, that's sort of the thing... there's not really anything wrong with the idea of putting a bunch of shops and services all in one central location, and making some or many of North America's undead malls into massive EV charging stations might go a long way to turning malls into what, as I understand it, their original intent was, which was America's answer to Europe's central plazas.

    The flipside of that is, in large, spread-out countries like the USA and Canada, I think there will probably be "detached" service stations for as long as there is private vehicle ownership in such places, simply because places like hotels and large restaurants are mostly clustered around mid-sized-or-bigger cities, and those are not very evenly distributed here, especially west of the Mississippi. What might be kind of interesting, though, is if we were to implement something like a turnpike in those places: a dedicated, high-speed toll road, but part of what you're buying with your tolls are "free" fast charging stations spread out regularly across the turnpike. ICEs could still use these turnpikes, of course, but if you'd already be paying for other people to charge their cars, maybe that's an incentive to think about getting an EV yourself if you use that road regularly. And if you're really against paying for a service you're not using, then maybe that discourages needless highway driving (of which there is a lot, sadly, especially in rural North America).

    I'm picturing specifically converting I-80 into a turnpike, partly because I'm very familiar with that highway, but also because it's one of the most important roadways in the USA, running from NYC to San Francisco. Obviously building more highways is a fool's game, but turning the highways we already have into giant EV support has a lot of appeal. And since most people don't want to build things right up next to a highway anyway, maybe it's easy to get some of that land and turn it into wind/solar to provide the actual power for the chargers.

    This is, I know, very pie-in-the-sky thinking, but as someone who drives one of these electrified sneakers (he said with love in his heart), all of that would certainly improve [i]my[/i] quality of life.

    1171:

    “I see no reason why hands-off phones should be significantly less distracting than hands-on ones. There's still the distraction of talking on the thing, and of operating the various controls it has which depend on some form of visual feedback to confirm that you have made it do what you were trying to, “

    You need to keep up. My phone is linked to the car by bluetooth. Phone rings. I say “Hey Siri answer”. End of interaction. No need to move eyes from the road. Car microphone picks up my voice. Car speaker for the caller. Anyone in the car can answer. To make a call. “Hey Siri call home” or anyone else in my contacts. This isn’t cutting edge. My car is an unmodified 2016 Skoda Yeti.

    1172:

    "I think we have determined to a fairly high confidence that EVs will never be successfully marketed to the elusive 'Recalcitrant Curmudgeon' market segment."

    Not that it matters. Most cars sit idle most of the time. Life will eventually change to a automobile subscription service, Uber on demand. With self-driving, self-charging EVs. Recalcitrant curmudgeons will rage at the lack of control over this. But use it anyway.

    1173:

    You're still burning CPU on talking on the thing though.

    1174:

    He said "the distraction of talking to the thing", and that is a major part of what research said is the problem. Your cognitive load goes up significantly with a 30 dB hearing loss (mild), similarly with even slight distortion, most older people have mild hearing loss, and VERY few telephone calls are not distorted. Conversation is somewhat less distracting to much the same, depending on how noisy the car is and how strident the passenger is. I don't know whether reliable, voice-operated prat navs exist, but I have my doubts, given how often even typing addresses into map search engines doesn't; and they CERTAINLY work by giving visual feedback! Let's ignore the taxi systems I have seen in use, which have been uniformly a safety disaster area.

    So it's not clear. If I had to guess, wildly, based on observation of other people, I would guess that your kind of use is possibly half distracting, on average. It would be dangerously distracting for me, but I am an extreme outlier (see #1101).

    1175:

    God help us, yes. Allowing for inflation my (VERY popular) low-end car would cost 15,000 today (11,000 in 2011) - but the equivalent 2020 (petrol) model has most of those frobs, gizmos, bells, whistles and brass knobs and they demand 18,000 for it. Another manufacturer demands 30,000 for the nearest equivalent EV, which probably has fewer fgbw&bks than the 18,000 one, but FAR more than my perfectly usable current one.

    Aside: Using those figures, and current petrol and electricity prices, over a 10-year ownership, the overall cost is lower for EVs only if they are used for fairly high mileages (over 10,000 miles a year). That's not good for EV sales in a time of recession, or reducing car use.

    The tragedies are that we are heading towards a MORE car-dominated society than we have today, with even more horse-, cyclist- and pedestrian hostile roads, and that the many people who want a car for transport rather than worship will refuse to change (*). None of that is good for the environment, and it's totally unnecessary. We need EVs badly, and NOW, but we DON'T need gimmick-ridden juggernauts, self-driving or not.

    (*) The UK has stated that it wants all new cars to be EV after 2030. What are the chances of that policy being changed if no more than 40% (or even 60%) of new cars are EV in 2028?

    1176:

    QUOTES
    1: One of the Conservative party’s most generous donors, John Griffin, said the prime minister was “out of her depth” and called for her to be replaced.
    2: Lord Rose, the Tory peer and chairman of the Asda supermarket chain, described her as a “busted flush” and said the current situation was unsustainable.
    3: Another major donor, Alexander Temerko, said: “I hope that the sense of self-preservation will force the government to co-operate with business to pursue a co-ordinated, socially responsible economic policy.”
    4: Lord Rose, the former boss of Marks & Spencer, who sits in the House of Lords as a Conservative peer, said "The current situation is completely untenable and cannot be sustained. In my view the prime minister is now a busted flush."

    Get the popcorn out, again?

    1177:

    The Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations 1986

    Get out clause for modern vehicles is "In this regulation “television receiving apparatus” means any cathode ray tube..." and exceptions for various driver assistance displays.

    1178:

    Years ago, as we were debating our 'no phones while driving' law in Ontario, I saw a study that looks at driver distraction. Their results showed a hands-free phone was significantly more distracting than a passenger.

    Turns out the average passenger* has some awareness of what is going on outside, and can read the driver's body language enough to stop talking and avoid distracting the driver when they need to focus on the road. While someone on the other end of the phone line has no queues to do that, so unless the driver says "hang on for a minute, I need to focus on driving" they just keep talking/interacting as normal.


    *I had an ex-girlfriend who insisted on having a conversation while I was driving. And I had to look at her when she was talking, so she knew I was paying attention to her. My refusal to do that led to a couple of massive fights (because being young and stupid, I didn't break up after the first one).

    1179:

    He also said “ and of operating the various controls it has which depend on some form of visual feedback to confirm that you have made it do what you were trying to, “ None of which apply. I use satnavs I’m not a prat. At least I don’t think so. I first started using one when my wife’s eyesight deteriorated. She is an excellent navigator but could no longer distinguish the colours and fine details of.maps. For 50 percent of journeys I can say “Navigate home” and be 100% successful. Details can be a problem. When I ask it to navigate to the house my father live in it sends me to a town in Bulgaria. But asking it to navigate to Manchester is successful. I’m 74. I have hearing loss. An iPhone is good. Calls are clear, much clearer than a landline. Even better using air pods. Satnavs are safe and easy to use. You enter the destination before you start. And there’s real time navigation around traffic problems. Try using an A to Z in a city in poor light to navigate round a traffic jam. I even use a satnav when I’m riding my bike round Norfolk lanes. I can explore unknown roads and still be sure of finding my way back without pulling out a map.

    1180:

    I also use GPS for unfamiliar navigation, and am not a prat as far as I know. O stop the car, find the destination on Google maps or the onboard navigation system. I select 'begin navigation' and the voice guides me to my destination.

    There have been a couple of odd directions that later turned out to be routing around traffic, but overall it's been great. No en-route screen interactions required, though the live map is available to my passenger or myself if I feel the need.

    1181:

    experienced (and good) programmers do not do is to write 10,000 lines where only 1,000 are needed.

    Frustratingly I am in the middle of adding several thousand lines of code to kludge around the existing design of something, because management don't want to rework the whole subsystem just because the requirements have significantly changed. We're going to have a relay at the client side that talks to a relay on the server side... admittedly that's largely so that we can use SSL. Alarm systems are a marvel of "improved" standard encryption libraries, wrongly used standard encryption libraries with a few cases of DIY "encryption" that is probably more secure than ROT-13 but I wouldn't count on it. So we're shipping a particular variant of ROT-13 packed up inside SSL.

    (I am still traumatised by "the IV shall be all zeros" and that "standards" document links directly to the crypto standard that says "the IV shall be random, must never be all zeros, and should change regularly".)

    I could redo the server code to allow for pluggable encryption, or non-encrypted, but it's easier just to have the relay decrypt, translate then ship it out over SSL.

    From what I know every system eventually ends up here, and if it lives long enough version 10 will be version 9 with one subsystem reworked to take account of one major change in operating environment. Meanwhile there's 27 such things "in the works"...

    1182:

    David L @ 1043:

    If it's the "wrong side of town", why do so many people want to buy my house? I get MULTIPLE cold calls every week.

    I was referring to the area being littered with chargers. As Charlie noted, more and more chargers are going into areas with retail stores. You're near my daughter. Very desirable for tear downs and build new. But without the retail I have a 10 minute walk away.

    Well, again, don't take everything I write TOO seriously, but back when I moved in here, there was more retail within walking distance (TWO actual supermarket grocery stores - Winn-Dixie 3,700 ft & IGA 1,800 ft) and some other small businesses.

    As to Costco and hoses, it adds MAYBE 20 seconds to the entire process for me.

    That's you. Take some time to watch when you're there and see how much others struggle with them; especially petite soccer mom type people driving large SUVs & pickups and other, maybe not so physically fit people (like me).

    Why do they get in one of the four lanes where they're going to have to struggle with it when they could get to the pumps just as fast in one of the other four lanes that puts the hose on the same side as their filler cap?

    Not complaining, just slightly amused by it.

    David L @ 1044:

    Round here the answer to that is easy: wait a couple of weeks and you'll get a letter in the mail telling you exactly where it is.

    The airport here (RDU w/600 or so flights a day) has someone walk the car parks every day and take pictures of all the license plates. So they can tell you where yours is and know if it seems to be abandoned. They've been doing this for 15 or more years.

    Best place to dump a stolen get-away car is the long term parking lot at any major airport ... or so I've been told.

    1183:

    If you want an EV with minimal widgets, boy do I have a deal for you https://electrek.co/2022/10/15/weird-alibaba-chinese-electric-car-roadster/

    ;-)

    For some of you crumbleys it looks right up your street and just like the cars you learned to drive in.

    1184:

    paws4thot @ 1052:

    1034 re 907 - I've never seen a steam locomotive overnight at Mallaig; there is no engine shed there either.

    I looked at the timetable & seems like the Jacobite goes out from Ft. William in the morning and returns in the afternoon & that afternoon return meets an outbound afternoon (round trip) steam train from Ft. William that departs before the morning train has returned.

    Oddly enough I can't find any video of the two trains meeting on YouTube.

    re 918 - I didn't say you could buy fuel anonymously, just that you could make a card payment on pay at pump literally whenever it suited you.

    And I explained why I think they NOW turn the pumps off when the stations are closed (at least here in the U.S.). It's not the method of payment, it's the unattended pumps.

    And that's why I think it's more Security Theater than security, because paying at the pump with a stolen credit card during the day would be just as anonymous as paying with cash.

    1185:

    Richard H @ 1061:

    JohnS@1034: "I don't think Ordinance Survey has maps of the U.S."

    Well, actually ...

    I was surprised to find that the OS Maps website and Android app (presumably the Apple one too) have world-wide mapping. I assume the rest-of-the-world data is from OpenStreetmap.

    More surprising, if you have an OS Maps paid subscription there's an option of "premium topo" mapping not just in the UK (25k Explorer and 50k Landranger) but also in Australia, NZ and the USA. I assume they have some kind of reciprocal subscription arrangement with the national mapping agencies of those countries.

    Hah! Hoist on my own petard.

    1186:

    As opposed to ignorant managers who measure "productivity" by "lines of code".

    1187:

    I ADORE it! (Can I get it in green, or cream?). Okay, I just went to alibaba.com, and tried to search for electric vehicles. It flashes them at me... then gives me only a header and footer. I enable everything... and still get nothing more.

    And what's really weird is noScript telling me I can enable 127.0.0.1

    1188:

    paws4thot @ 1072:

    AH, that makes better sense than JohnS' description which I read as having "the Jacobite" starting from An Gearasdan* and the crossing service starting from and overnighting in Mallaig.

    *Yes, this is a very political statement.

    Maybe you could go on Wikipedia and edit the article so that it is clearer.

    1189:

    COVID - damn. Hope you feel better soon, Charlie.

    1190:

    And I had to look at her when she was talking, so she knew I was paying attention to her

    I think it makes a difference whether the other person does or doesn't drive: people who do not simply won't understand when you need to concentrate, even with body language, and even when they understand in the abstract that at times you do have to focus more on driving. I think this can apply even if it's someone you're talking to on the phone, because while they won't have the visual cues, they can pick up on cadence and it matches their mental map to some extent. But absence of visual cues is obviously important anyway, and what you say rings true.

    On the other hand I think we all, I mean literally all of us, have at least some tendency to slip into a "stop what you're doing and pay attention to me!" mode. It's not necessarily a deal breaker in a relationship, sometimes it might be the surface representation of a quite important thing that needs looking at. Even when it's your front seat passenger trying to show you something on their phone, and even after you've asked them not to...

    1191:

    Sorry to hear about your COVID, Charlie. I hope you have a full recovery.

    1192:

    Turns out the average passenger* has some awareness of what is going on outside, and can read the driver's body language enough to stop talking and avoid distracting the driver when they need to focus on the road. While someone on the other end of the phone line has no queues to do that, so unless the driver says "hang on for a minute, I need to focus on driving" they just keep talking/interacting as normal.

    For 12 years I drove 2008 Camry Hybrid (still have it, just do not use it much). It pairs up with phone easily and automatically, and the "phone" button is located on the steering wheel directly under my left thumb. It did not take me long to get into habit that if I am talking on the phone and driving situation calls for added attention, just hit that button and hang up. Not once did anyone got mad me for that, nor did I ever get into an accident.

    Tesla does not have such conveniently placed cut-off button, and I generally avoid talking on the phone in it.

    1193:

    David L @ 1073:

    I'd really like to take a vintage tourist steam train ride like some of the ones in the older mining areas of Colorado. But I'm severly conflicted in terms of this being damn the environment tourism for rich folks. (By world standards.)

    I would like to ride them before they get shut down for those very reasons. But more importantly, I want to photograph them.

    1194:

    Charlie Stross @ 1074:

    Latest news I've seen, Truss fired Kwasi Kwarteng. Jeremy Hunt is the new Chancellor of the Exchequer.

    As UK's Truss fights for her job, new finance minister warns of tough decisions [REUTERS]

    1195:

    Heteromeles @ 1147:

    I do find it deeply amusing that a science fiction author's blog has such a high percentage of people who would have us at horses and doubloons.

    Why? Don't you want a smart, self-driving, all-terrain vehicle built from room-temperature nanotech out of 100% recyclable materials, and that can be part of a self-replicating system with an affordable investment?

    Yeah, but who's gonna' shovel up all that horseshit?

    1196:

    Yeah, but who's gonna' shovel up all that horseshit?

    Same people who are going to scrub those GHGs out of the air, I'm afraid: us.

    And horseshit's easier to shovel, at least.

    1197:

    Why? Don't you want a smart, self-driving, all-terrain vehicle built from room-temperature nanotech out of 100% recyclable materials, and that can be part of a self-replicating system with an affordable investment?

    Not if it requires two hours of daily on-site maintenance, whether it is in use or not.

    1198:

    David L @ 1167:

    I think we have determined to a fairly high confidence that EVs will never be successfully marketed to the elusive 'Recalcitrant Curmudgeon' market segment.

    Yep.

    Hey now! I resemble that remark.

    But, you know, when I did figure out I was going to have to bite the bullet and get a "smart" phone I went and talked to some people I know to find out which was going to be the least aggravating, which is how I ended up with the iPhoneSE.

    And those same people told me just last week if I wait to "upgrade" until the next generation I can get USB-C instead of the lightning connector.

    1199:

    And horseshit's easier to shovel, at least.

    It also has some possible use after the fact. E.g. fertilizer, fuel, compost ingredient, expressing displeasure to the local politician, etc.

    1200:

    For those that desperately want to run an EV out of battery on some remote road, just for you there is The Charge Fairy. They have (electric) vans with Big Batteries and will come and zap you some volts. Probably UK only right now but I don’t see why it wouldn’t become a Thing. At least for a while until all the idiots die out.

    Personally I think it’s a use case for The Jewish Space Laser. Use it to zap power to a suitable rectenna and there you are. Convenient to blast away nasty ICEholes that block charger access too.

    And it’s even suitably SFnal.

    1201:

    Can an "alibaba" be retrofitted with modern batteries, I wonder?

    "Horseshit" - please deliver to my allotment plot, &/or to all our plots! ....

    1202:

    Re:'... the other part about the infrastructure question, aside from availability, is reliability... making some or many of North America's undead malls into massive EV charging stations'

    First - welcome and interesting post!

    About reliability - I'm guessing that remote, less populated areas especially in snow belts have had some experience with shortages, i.e., oil trucks unable to reach them. No idea how this would translate in terms of reliability when almost everything gets transitioned to electric power only, so a couple of questions:

    a)How much extra electricity has to be generated per EV?

    b)Where is this reliable electric power going to come from? Is your local electrical utility already building additional capacity?

    c)Tiered pricing strategy - in place in many parts of NA with the largest volume users paying the best/lowest price. If we're serious about reducing power hogging (and fighting GW/CC), this strategy needs to be turned completely around. The US is no longer the world's manufacturer (China is, for now) therefore the old reason/excuse no longer applies. Plus - this would compel energy-hog manufacturers to finally upgrade/modernize their systems.

    Lastly - if malls become centralized EV stations which would probably increase the volume of regular traffic entering and leaving, I'd add a vertical farming/ag wing to the mall. Major grocery chains are still used as mall anchor stores (primary destinations), i.e., they've already got food safety systems in place, and being next door to one of their most regularly restocked food categories would make sense economically and environmentally. Also, placing a vertical farm at/near an already common high traffic area would normalize the concept.

    1203:

    Tiered pricing strategy - in place in many parts of NA with the largest volume users paying the best/lowest price. If we're serious about reducing power hogging (and fighting GW/CC), this strategy needs to be turned completely around.

    I'm on a tiered scheme rather than time-of-day here in Ontario. After a certain monthly usage my rate goes up.

    Of course, retail consumer not corporate, so no influence on policy.

    1204:

    Troutwaxer @ 1158:

    I'll also note that much of the software a completely computer controlled car needs is stuff a first-year student could write. "Make this light blink." "Make that light blink." "Turn on the air-conditioning fan."

    A second or third year student might be able, under supervision, to write software for the steering wheel: [...]

    No. Not even close. I was never in the automotive industry, but I've done some safety engineering in my time, and this fails to appreciate just how complicated this stuff is.

    A car is a safety critical system. A system consists of people, process and technology. The first mistake everyone makes is to focus on the technology and forget about "the nut behind the wheel". Car makers are a bit of a special case here because they have very little control over who drives their products (unlike most systems where the training and procedures for the system operators are an important factor in system safety). But you can still do a lot with the right kind of warnings, prompts and little nudges.

    The second mistake everyone makes about computerised systems is thinking that "bugs in the code" are the only hazard. If only.

    Things in complex systems interrelate in lots of complicated ways. One tiny example: the engine management code in a modern car needs to know what colour the car is, because pale-coloured cars need less power fed to the aircon than dark-coloured cars do. At a more safety-related level, steering inputs affect what the anti-lock brakes should do, and how the suspension should react, not to mention what the engine should be doing.

    Safety is a system property. One scenario that system engineers are familiar with is "every component worked, but the system failed". Unexpected interactions between properly working components are the bane of system engineering. And that's before we get on to potential failure modes of components. Yes, reading a steering wheel sensor is simple, but detecting that the sensor has failed and deciding what to do next is not. How bad is a steering wheel sensor failure? That's a question for the system safety engineers.

    System safety starts with a careful and structured inquiry into the question "What could possibly go wrong?". First, make a top-down list of all the ways in which the system (in this case car plus driver) could fail in dangerous ways. Then look at the proposed system design bottom-up, and make a list of all the ways each individual component might fail. So for instance with the steering wheel sensor: what if it over-reads? under-reads? glitches occasionally? misses a reading? sticks on zero? sticks on max right? etc. Then look at what happens to the rest of the system under each of these failure modes. If the only impact is that the indicators stay on when they should be turned off, that's pretty minor. On the other hand if the car suddenly swerves off the road that is pretty major.

    (Incidentally, in feedback loops the delay between sensor and actuator is a key part of the stability analysis, so timing analysis of the software is a whole complicated problem in its own right)

    Based on all this you can start writing requirements for the components in your system. If a steering wheel sensor error is a big deal then you have to decide how to (a) prevent it, and (b) minimise the impact when it happens. Some of those mitigations might be in hardware, others can be done in the software. So both the associated hardware and the code that reads the sensor, and the code that takes action based on those readings, gets a long list of requirements. A lot of those requirements are about what to do when things go wrong.

    So now you hand this programming job off to the software engineers, who need to make sure that the code meets the requirements. They will break the software component up into smaller units, which are then finally handed off to coders. Part of this decomposition is that each component gets its own set of requirements. So you have a hierarchy of requirements from the top level system requirements right down to individual hardware and software units. At each level those also translate into tests: you create tests for each bottom-level requirement to show that the unit does what its supposed to do, including all the failure modes. Then you create tests at the next level up to show that some sub-assembly of units does what it is supposed to do, and so on right up to the top level where someone wearing a crash helmet and 4-point harness first sits in the prototype and drives it around a test track.

    So no, this is not some trivial job you can hand off to a junior coder and expect them to get it right.

    As for not needing computers to do all this, yes you can do a lot with analog electrical and mechanical stuff. I remember learning about the BL Series A engine in my first Metro. It had a centriguge-weight-spring mechanism to do the spark advance, and a precisely tapered needle in the carburettor to regulate the fuel-air mix. But those old mechanisms are complex, expensive and above all inaccurate because they can't take many factors into account. That made those old engines burn more fuel and produce more pollution than modern engines, and indeed more than modern standards allow. Having carburation and ignition timing done by a computer lets you do more sophisticated things. Which comes back to my earlier point about how things can relate in unexpectedly complicated ways.

    1205:

    Well, yes, but that's not really the point. It's the large amount of gimmickry that should never have been integrated with the essential and safety systems in the first place, usually because it's unnecessary, but sometimes on safety grounds. If that were kept separate, the unnecessary junk could be handed over to a tyro, though a better solution would be to omit it.

    You will know that the first rule used by engineers of such projects is to "keep it simple" - not least because testing failure modes feasible. The second is to "keep it separate", so that one component does not unnecessarily compromise another. Both rules have been thrown out of the window in modern cars.

    The one that annoys me most often is electric windows, which won't work unless the ignition is on. That is NOT good when a passenger is left waiting in a car on a hot day (or rain comes down, if they are open). Indeed, quite often the damn DOORS won't open unless the passenger can find a tiny and often well-hidden button somewhere else entirely, which is great for people with impaired eyesight in an unfamiliar car.

    That was possibly a component in the killing of a teenage girl recently. She was waiting in a car and turned the ignition on (possibly to open a window). That released the automatic handbrake (!!!), the car rolled down a slope into water, she couldn't get out (did the doors release when that happened?) and drowned. What brain-dead idiot automates a HANDBRAKE? Its purpose is precisely to hold a car on a hill until the driver is ready to drive, with a secondary use of being a purely mechanical system to use when the electrics (sic) have failed.

    I know several people who have lost days of their life and hundreds of pounds because sensors on NON-critical systems failed, and the car wouldn't operate properly until they were fixed.

    I could go on (and on and on), but won't.

    1206:

    That sounds like the one I saw a reference to. I didn't get hold of the original, but got the impression that it was a product of its era, and considered only the use of mobile phones to make phone calls.

    1207:

    I agree that an IPhone distorts no more than a landline, but both distort. Also, it's not JUST the device you are using that matters, but the device THEY are using, the background they are in, and the quality of the connection. Even if those are good, you will definitely be expending significant cognitive load using any phone in a car, and are almost certainly more distracted than you realise. See also Robert Prior's point in #1178.

    More importantly, safety legislation that assumes everything is going to work and be used optimally, where all the evidence is that is the exception not the norm, is no great help with safety. Unfortunately, the politics of this are such that there's little hope of improvement.

    1208:

    V**xh@11 and VAG (owners of Audi, Seat, Skoda and Volkswagen plus about 10 others, to name 2) have automoroned the handbrake, and somehow got round the requirement for the handbrake to be "mechanically operated".

    1209:

    Regarding the 'controls on a flatscreen' problem, over the last two years with a Tesla M3 I have found that none of the driving controls need me to interact with the screen - gears (Drive, Park, Reverse) are handled by a control stalk in the right of the steering wheel column, indicators ditto on the left of the steering wheel column, wipers and lights are automatic, high beams are controlled by pushing the indicator stalk away from you and you can trigger a couple of wiper sweeps (plus some washer fluid) by pressing a button on the end of the indicator stalk.

    The flatscreen is down at the bottom-left of my peripheral vision where it's showing the satnav map (on two thirds of the screen) plus what the sensors are 'seeing' immediately around the vehicle (plus indicated speed, the posted speed limit and current battery level) on the other third - a quick flick of the eyes can take that in, which has become part of my 'check mirrors' routine.

    About the only time I might need to interact with the screen as a driver is if I need the climate controls adjusted, in which case I ask the person in the passenger seat to do it for me; if I'm driving alone then I can open or close the windows instead (using the buttons in the door armrest) without needing to take my eyes off the road or I can wait until I need to stop at the next traffic light and fiddle with it then.

    It's a very easy car to drive IME.

    1210:

    In all this talk of un-needed and frivolous things in autos keeps bringing to mind an experience I had in 1971. An elderly gentleman was driving me around his property showing me what he wanted mowed. (6 foot mower on a tractor.) He was driving a 62 or so Chevy with a clutch and "3 on the tree". I noticed he kept shifting between 1st and 3rd and never using 2nd gear. I asked if it was broken. I then got what was obviously a standard polite but strident spiel about how 2nd gear was stupid, useless and should have never been put into cars. A model T like he learned to drive on didn't have one and no one should ever need it.

    Earlier I found he was the same age as my grandfather and went to grade school with him. Both born in 1885.

    1212:

    Based of the behavior of my older Prius (the new ones don't do this) it may have been turned off while in gear, which means it wasn't really off...

    The default on the newer Priuses is simply put the car in park when it's turned off. The older ones leave the car on and beep at you.

    1213:

    I’ve no idea how it works with keycards but my last two cars had remote window operation from the key fob. Just hold down the unlock or lock on the key fob. Mos T people just don’t know this. In a similar way that people don’t realise that you can turn sun visors through 90° when the sun is on the side of the car father than the front.

    1214:

    "Well an electric motor is a machine..." I can't remember the exact excuse they use, and I think it's a bit more complicated than that ("...and there's a pawl in there somewhere, too" perhaps?), but it's still crying out for some mechanically-minded judge to find some legal way of saying "but that's not the fucking point, is it, you twats".

    See also Vulch @ 1177 - "cathode ray tube" - in 1986, ffs, when it was already obvious that things like LCDs or plasma panels were either about to become viable for such a use, or already just about were (can't remember when the first "proper" laptop happened, but it was around then). (It's also an open invitation to someone like me to make one using a Nipkow disc just to take the piss.)

    Law-makers really should take a bit more care to ensure that their wording is not dependent on the technology prevalent at the time of writing it to align the intended and actual meanings.

    Have you ever tried arguing with someone who thinks automatic handbrakes are a good idea? "Oh, all you have to do is press a button" (if that was a reasonable consideration they'd also need a pile of other modifications to make the car drivable by someone with such weak arms) "and most of the time you don't even need to do that, it does it itself!" (so they're such a hopeless driver they can't even cope with using the handbrake correctly?) At this point someone else will chime in to point out that sometimes it will do it itself unexpectedly, when you don't want it to and go on to spin a tale of woe involving several hundred pounds' worth of damage to the outrageously expensive bits of plastic on the ends of both their own car and the one that was parked next down the hill from it. Which is immediately dismissed as not worth worrying about... Basically, such an attempt is utterly hopeless.

    1215:

    Exactly. The handbrake is a manually-operated system for a reason!

    1216:

    Have you ever tried arguing with someone who thinks automatic handbrakes are a good idea?

    I've been driving cars since I was 14 and riding lawn mowers built from car bits before that. I'm 68 and have had in my sphere of control maybe 20 or 30 cars. Compacts up to SUVs. Trucks to tractors.

    My current electric parking brake (a worm gear design to compress against the disk brake pads I think but haven't looked) has been the only one that has worked reliably and well with no thought about it. And for over 6 years now.

    Things are just better built these days. At least the stuff I buy. I and my friends who own cars made in the last 10 years are amazed (when we think about it) how much better they work and less maintenance they need than in days of yore. And yes if some whiz bang thing breaks it costs more to repair than in the past. But I suspect the over all cost is the same or lower due to things just rarely break.

    Anyone need a timing light and dwell meter? Sitting on the top shelf and not touched for 20 years. They timing light looks neat with it's chrome 50s SF ray gun look.

    1217:

    The whole point is that the passenger doesn't HAVE a key!

    Yes, the teenage girl might have saved herself if she had known how to operate that facility, but it's totally unreasonable to say it was her fault for not realising she could do so. IF that was the reason she turned the ignition on - it may have been to make something else work, or even by accident, for all I know.

    1218:

    Raging about tiered pricing is emotionally appealing, but all higher prices for big users would accomplish is to drive energy intensive industry to use gas or coal instead. The actual problem is that no utilities are bending enough steel or pouring enough concrete.

    If we are serious about this, where the heck are the parks of electric cranes stacking granite blocks up and down, where are the plans to build enough reactors to triple the grid?

    1219:

    A quick search found just such tales of woe, and further reasons they are a disaster. As others have said, they work until you don't, and then you are in deep shit.

    But what about reversing in complicated situations? That's a lot safer without a seatbelt fastened, but it apparently completely prevents that. Even 40 years ago, I would have had significant difficulty reversing down 1/2 mile of a narrow (8'), twisting lane belted up, and it would now be almost impossible. For the people from the prairies, that's a real and not uncommon requirement in some parts of the UK.

    1220:

    Definitely.

    Although framed as a joke, it’s still true that the most dangerous component is the nut that holds the steering wheel.

    Which is why all contemporary cars, not just EVs, have colossal amounts of computer power- for the lane keeping assist, the automatic emergency braking, the ABS, the traction control, the engine management systems, the BSRJ unit, let alone navigation, entertainment, and communications. And since you a computer, it might as well provide control of windows, seats, mirrors, and remember where they go for each driver.

    Anyone complaining that it’s the fault of electric motor traction is, frankly, doing a bang-up job of making a total Truss of themselves.

    1221:

    Yes, indeed. How much of that gimmickry actually adds to safety is less than clear, though dogma says it all does (*). It certainly doesn't justify forcing all the extra gimmickry on people just to jack prices up.

    But the total Trusses also include the people claiming that all that gimmickry is essential to make an electric car usable.

    (*) If all the claims of lives saved by technological improvements were added up, driving would lead to resurrection of the dead. In the UK, there was essentially no reduction in deaths from 2010 to 2019, which rather implies that the fancy gimmicks have had little effect on those. 2020 was COVID.

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-annual-report-2020/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-annual-report-2020

    1222:

    That was possibly a component in the killing of a teenage girl recently.

    Do you have a reference for this anecdote? I find the facts as stated difficult to understand. Why would anyone park facing downhill into water and leave the car in gear or neutral, and depend on some kind of brake actuated by the ignition being off to hold it? Why weren't the wheels turned in to the curb so it couldn't roll? What make was it (so that I can avoid it in future!)?

    But the sad fact is that, no matter what trade-offs are made in the design of safety systems, whether mechanical or computerized, there will always be some edge cases that are not covered, and they will always result in various anecdotes of woe.

    1223:

    Coming back to actually serious material ....
    Russia deliberately killing artists who do not co-operate, real Stalin stuff

    As for - everything works perfectly, nothing can go wrong ... Yet again, my favourite example is the 1927 Hull Paragon rail crash. There was "only" a crash because new, improved systems had been installed & a signalman was very good at his job ... managed to fit a 0.7 second slot inside a 0.9 second slot, with electro-mechanical ( & pneumatic ) analogue equipment

    1224:

    Nobody is making that complaint. I think we all know all too well that all cars are stuffed with computers these days, no matter what they're powered by. It's just that it was through electric cars that the concept entered the discussion, and specifically in terms of the essentially enforced dependency on multiple computer systems both inside and outside the car for locating recharging facilities, as described by various people above, which does not apply to petrol cars. It is of course entirely predictable that the topic has drifted to include excessive computery in cars in general, but I don't think anyone's that confused about which bits apply to which.

    1225:

    Re: '... where are the plans to build enough reactors to triple the grid?'

    Yes - this is part of what I meant: Has anyone done any forecasting on future energy needs and sources based on likely scenarios?

    This involves more than building more reactors, it could also potentially mean delaying some industries including EVs.

    Paul @ 1204:

    Re: 'A car is a safety critical system...'

    Great post and description of how this stuff works - straightforward enough that a non-techie can understand. Thanks!

    Related everyday auto usage questions ...

    a)Has driver's ed including driver license testing changed since interior electronic devices/distractions have become standard in ICE autos? Ditto for EVs.

    b)My understanding is that ICE police cars usually had some additional kit, security/safety and probably other stuff/capabilities built in. How is this transitioning wrt to EV? And since EV seems to mean an additional layer of programming and testing, is this likely to increase what police cars and cops overall can do? (I'm imagining a scenario with some suspect driving away and a bunch of police cars start converging on it without any direct help/steering by the cops inside the cars who are busy putting on gear. An alternate scenario is that whatever can do this navigational override gets hacked and sends all of the police cars out of town/driving off a pier/cliff.)

    1226:

    "Why would anyone park facing downhill into water and leave the car in gear or neutral, and depend on some kind of brake actuated by the ignition being off to hold it?"

    Because that's the only thing there is to hold it, the manufacturers having deliberately made it like that.

    "Why weren't the wheels turned in to the curb so it couldn't roll?"

    Because nobody ever does that. Look at any row of cars parked on a hill and nearly all of them will have their wheels straight. Any that have done it properly are conspicuous by the oddity. It's one of those things that you get taught about when learning to drive and then forget about as soon as you pass the test.

    1227:

    Things in complex systems interrelate in lots of complicated ways.

    Indeed. Watching Mentour Pilot has been eye-opening about just how thoroughly air incident reports go into determining what went wrong and how to ensure that it doesn't happen again. Often it's an unexpected interaction between systems that's perfectly logical (but not what the pilot was trained for) happening during a high-workload part of the flight.

    1228:

    No. If I recall, it was on dw.com, so was probably true, but was very short of hard information. There may not have been a curb - it could have been a sloping car park for all I read. The driver may have been negligent, or may not.

    1229:

    plus indicated speed, the posted speed limit and current battery level

    Does this mean a Tesla driver can't use "I didn't know that was the speed limit" as an excuse?

    Wondering because I've often had Teslas bomb past me at well over the limit…

    1230:

    And that is precisely why competent engineers (a) keep it simple and (b) keep things separate. In software (with a zillion components), almost all non-trivial failures involve the interactions of multiple components. But they aren't given the option by the ruling bureaucrats, marketroids and other semi-sentient rulers.

    1231:

    Answer to (a): in the UK, sort of. The required manoeuvres have changed, and reading a prat nav is now part of the test.

    1232:

    I never leave a passenger in the car without a key. The alarm would go off. There is a dog button which switches off the internal motion sensor but it’s not always obvious that it’s l working. And like many other features most people don’t know it exists. Why are you leaving passengers you don’t trust in a car with no key in hot weather?

    1233:

    1225: "Has driver's ed including driver license testing changed since interior electronic devices/distractions have become standard in ICE autos? Ditto for EVs."

    I took USian Driver's Ed in 2004-5, so just as teenagers with their own cellphones was becoming a common sight, and certainly long before there was any kind of hands-free system in place. Our instructor spent a whole day on the subject, which included more than a few scare tactics that, in retrospect, may have had some unintended effects, but at least instructors in my state were trying to get out in front of it. I know I certainly had it drilled into me to leave the damn thing in my pocket (or, these days, on the USB charger).

    How much good it's done, compared to if we weren't doing it, is a hell of a counterfactual, but for the sake of including some numbers, according to the Iowa Dept. of Public Safety, about 10% of 719 dead teen drivers in 2018 ended up that way thanks to a cellphone or other distraction. And we're a small state, in terms of overall population.

    1234:

    Various reference "switch parking brake 'system' " - I've only driven one car with one of these, a V@*xh@11 Morona? Not impressed by it in any way. In any event, pretty much anything else named in this thread has 3 separate brake circuits, each one operating on 2 or 3 road wheels, and in the cases of the various Citroen BX and Xantia models I've driven there were 2 circuits working X-split on the BXs and L-split on the Xantias, plus the 3rd handbrake circuit working on both front discs and delivering a 0.7g stop in the event of total failure of both hydraulic circuits.

    1235:

    “Yes - this is part of what I meant: Has anyone done any forecasting on future energy needs and sources based on likely scenarios?L Damn - you found us out. No, nobody has thought at all about any of these issues and it’s all just Elon musk winging it with backing of shadowy organizations wanting to destroy your freedom to kill off the human race.

    Rats, foiled again.

    1236:

    What on earth ARE you talking about? Where did you get the delusions that (a) the passenger isn't trusted and (b) that I am the driver rather than the passenger?

    Removing the key when you leave the car is a good habit to get into, and most people are creatures of habit. Furthermore, if a passenger ISN'T trusted (as with children of a certain age), it is ESSENTIAL to remove the key. But that's not even what I was moaning about!

    The damn windows generally don't operate unless the ignition is TURNED ON - merely leaving a key in the hole is not enough. That's utterly cretinous, and catches me when I (or someone else) stop in a layby to consult a map, discuss the route, have a drink, eat an apple, or whatever - and, being both 'green' and a traditionalist, I turn the engine off.

    Also, fer chrissake, why on earth does the passenger need a key - except to bypass design imbecilities, of course? If a car turns the motion sensor on when the key is removed, rather than when the car is locked, that's an imbecility. And automatically locking the car when there is someone in a seat (it's already got sensors to nag about seat belts) is another.

    1237:

    Ah. Like making the signal turn off after a turn is completed. This makes very good sense.

    1238:

    Re: 'No, nobody has thought at all about any of these issues ...'

    No - seriously.

    Most of what I've read in regular/consumer news media (current events headlines) focuses on home heating, GW/CC, cryptomining - nothing so far about forecast total demand, capacity, demand by industry sector, demand by industry, gov't services vs. residential, etc.

    This is no joke - we need energy accounting systems and we need them standardized and reported on. Right now the only reliable consumer level energy consumption rating guide I've seen is the label on some home appliances sold in Canada (EnerGuide). The below is the first I've read that addresses this at an institutional/industry level.

    https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1172701

    'Abstract:

    Miscellaneous and electronic loads (MELs) consume about one-third of the primary energy used in U.S. buildings, and their energy use is increasing faster than other end-uses. In health care facilities, 30% of the annual electricity was used by MELs in 2008. This paper presents methods and challenges for estimating medical MELs energy consumption along with estimates of energy use in a hospital by combining device-level metered data with inventories and usage information. An important finding is that common, small devices consume large amounts of energy in aggregate and should not be ignored when trying to address hospital energy use.'

    1239:

    We had a thousand-comment thread a while back which got onto the UK driving test having been changed to include a compulsory navigation system component. It got predictably bogged down in people who don't have a problem with such systems refusing to accept the existence of people who do, but it just about managed to pull itself out again IIRC.

    One point which I don't remember coming up then, but which I have been reminded of by several comments further up this thread, is that people seem to me to fall into two very distinct categories in matters relating to geographical awareness, but this is rarely acknowledged and so fosters mutual incomprehension between the two groups. A lot of people seem to find it entirely normal and unexceptional to be setting off for somewhere with basically no idea where they're actually going, and aren't disturbed in the least by not really knowing where they are at any point in the journey. These days such people love the idea of having a machine tell them where to go because it's basically the same as what they always do anyway, but without many of the difficulties of having a passenger doing it and certainly much easier than relying on vague guesswork plus stopping and asking random passers-by. Many people have posted both in this thread and in past threads that they just get in and go without knowing how to get there and relying on the machine to hold their hand, but the same behaviour was exhibited by loads of people before such machines existed using a different set of real-time information sources.

    Me, I can't understand how people can bear to be so geographically disconnected - how they can stand that level of uncertainty and ignorance in something so basic as knowing where you are without going nuts. If I want to go somewhere I make sure I know how to get there before I set off, not just the route itself but how it relates to everything for about 20 miles on either side of it and possible alternatives etc; when I do the journey I already know what to expect for miles ahead, and observing it for real is simply refining my knowledge. I can't stand not knowing where I am or where to go without having to look it up on the spot, and I have a large part of my mind assigned to assimilating and remembering geographical relations between things, whether they're relevant to anywhere I might be going myself or not. If I know a route well enough I can draw a freehand map of it from memory (replaying the output from the mental inertial plotter) that is within a few hundred metres of the Ordnance Survey at all points. As a passenger it's not at all uncommon for me to have a better idea of where we are than the driver does, even if I've never been there before. I do the same kind of thing on trains. So with all these people who don't seem to have even any recognition of such things and are quite comfortable with delegating all their geographical needs to other people or machines, I basically just can't imagine where their heads are at; and the indications are that the same applies the other way.

    A lot of the discussions over navigation systems seem to contain a large element of actually being arguments between people who are happy not to care and people who care automatically, but without recognition of the disguised incorporation of this fundamentally irreconcilable difference. And there seems to be (unsurprisingly) a great deal of overlap with the people who think that the idea of getting into an electric car without knowing where you're going to recharge it and relying on the car to tell you where to go is great, and those who think it's hideous.

    1240:

    Or no sense whatsoever; at WGS84 55.945161N, -4.566704E there is a roundabout, which by visual inspection is not actually circular. If you wish to navigate from Glasgow Road westbound (A814) to Strathleven Place ENE (B830) you will have to release right lock on the roundabout between the Church Street north entrance and the A814 west exit, which will automatically cancel your right signal which should remain on until you pass the Church Street N (later Townend Road N) exit.

    1241:

    Greg Tingey @ 1201:

    Can an "alibaba" be retrofitted with modern batteries, I wonder?

    I'm pretty sure somewhere in the back issues of Mother Earth News there's an article that would prove useful.

    "Horseshit" - please deliver to my allotment plot, &/or to all our plots! ....

    With all the horseshit going around, I'm just positive I'm finally going to get a pony for Christmas this year. If I do, I'll see if I can't hook you up. Will UPS deliver to your allotment?

    Reminds me that in one of Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan stories she has Miles explicating on how Barrayar had fought civil wars over the output of the Imperial stables.

    1242:

    That sort of thing is... kind of a rounding error, once you internalize the need to electrify heavy industry and start calculating how much power we are going to need to reduce ores...

    1243:

    Do you think I’m lying? I bought a Fabia 15 years ago. The windows open and close when there’s no key in the ignition. The key fob opens and closes the windows when there’s no key in the ignition. The Yeti I bought 6 years ago does the same. If I leave someone in the car I leave a key with them. Why do I need a key if there’s someone in the car. Why would I trust someone to be in the car if I couldn’t trust them with the key? What I do is press the button which disables the interior motion sensors ( low on the central driver’s side door pillar and leave the key in the ignition. If you’re bothered about windows and doors leave the door ajar. There are always some features in every modern device which I wouldn’t have chosen. I work around them. They’re always more than balanced by the positive features I would never have known I wanted. Bluetooth connectivity which enables voice control of music and navigation. Controls at my fingertips if I don’t want to use voice control. I wish I’d paid a bit more and got active cruise control, auto parking and a rear camera. The extras improve the driving experience. I’m not keen on the idea of aotomatic parking brakes but they’ve got to be better than the foot controlled ones in some of the cars I hired in New Zealand. My sister hated hers when she got her last car but is now happy with it. If I wanted time to stand still I’d have kept my Wolseley 16/60. But I want better. And it’s not a prat nav, it’s a sat nav A useful tool in the modern world. Used by intelligent and stupid people.

    1244:

    SFReader @ 1202:

    Re:'... the other part about the infrastructure question, aside from availability, is reliability... making some or many of North America's undead malls into massive EV charging stations'

    [...]

    c)Tiered pricing strategy - in place in many parts of NA with the largest volume users paying the best/lowest price. If we're serious about reducing power hogging (and fighting GW/CC), this strategy needs to be turned completely around. The US is no longer the world's manufacturer (China is, for now) therefore the old reason/excuse no longer applies. Plus - this would compel energy-hog manufacturers to finally upgrade/modernize their systems.

    THEY are turning that around in some areas. The more you use the higher the unit price. It's a delicate balance between reducing energy consumption and pissing off your largest industrial/commercial customers.

    It's been going on for a while ... back in the mid-80s when I worked for the Alarm Company I was involved in working out the fine details of an Energy Management System for a major department store chain.

    The energy management system included progressive load shedding as power consumption increased (mostly from HVAC, but from building lighting as well) to try to reduce demand & keep it below a certain level (where the higher unit price kicked in).

    They wouldn't have spent all that money if they couldn't save enough from avoiding paying the higher tier pricing.

    Lastly - if malls become centralized EV stations which would probably increase the volume of regular traffic entering and leaving, I'd add a vertical farming/ag wing to the mall. Major grocery chains are still used as mall anchor stores (primary destinations), i.e., they've already got food safety systems in place, and being next door to one of their most regularly restocked food categories would make sense economically and environmentally. Also, placing a vertical farm at/near an already common high traffic area would normalize the concept.

    What I've envisioned is stuff like they have at North Hills in Raleigh, but with more of the other kind of chargers and not just Tesla.

    North Hills, Raleigh NC charging stations

    Put 'em out near the far edge of the parking lots where they don't really interfere with mall traffic. I guess you might need an excess number of chargers to accommodate mall customers who want to hook up & recharge while shopping - which might mean some cars remain hooked up when they finish charging, "blocking the pump" so to speak.

    But if you start with a number of chargers sufficient to service current demand, you can add additional chargers as demand grows with the the switchover to EVs.

    In the street view above (Feb 2022) you have 13 chargers (11 Tesla & 2 "other") and only 2 vehicles charging. When you get to the point that 2/3 (???) of the chargers are in use most of the time, it's time to start planning for adding additional chargers to avoid getting to the point of having no chargers available.

    Additional odd thought: Can Teslas use the "other" chargers in an emergency? Like if they're getting down to that 20% charge point and there are no Tesla chargers within range?

    1245:

    Can Teslas use the "other" chargers in an emergency? Like if they're getting down to that 20% charge point and there are no Tesla chargers within range?

    Yes, absolutely. My Tesla came with an adapter which allows it to plug into SAE J1772 charging ports, which are standard for all other North American EV manufacturers.

    1246:

    David L @ 1210:

    In all this talk of un-needed and frivolous things in autos keeps bringing to mind an experience I had in 1971. An elderly gentleman was driving me around his property showing me what he wanted mowed. (6 foot mower on a tractor.) He was driving a 62 or so Chevy with a clutch and "3 on the tree". I noticed he kept shifting between 1st and 3rd and never using 2nd gear. I asked if it was broken. I then got what was obviously a standard polite but strident spiel about how 2nd gear was stupid, useless and should have never been put into cars. A model T like he learned to drive on didn't have one and no one should ever need it.

    I think that old man qualifies as a "Recalcitrant Curmudgeon".

    My Jeep is a 5-speed. I frequently shift from 3rd to 5th. Fourth gear is not useless, but it's not needed all the time.

    Works the same with 2nd gear in a 3-speed. Most of the time (on fairly level ground) you can shift from 1st to 3rd without lugging the engine and stalling ... but if you are on even a slight incline, you need that intermediary 2nd (or 4th) gear to keep engine RPM within it's useful range.

    PS: The way you climbed a hill in a Model T was to turn around and put it into reverse and back up the hill. Because reverse was a lower gear than either of the two forward gears.

    And that's why the Model A Ford had a 3-speed transmission.

    1247:

    No, but your experience is not mine, perhaps due to the model or year, or one of us may have an aberrant or buggy computer. My central locking developed a defect, where it wouldn't lock unless it was fully unlocked (i.e. back doors as well), which is claimed to be a blown resistor. I have never bothered to reverse engineer exactly when it will and will not allow the windows to open - it certainly allows opening and closing for some time after being turned off, and using the key works even when using the internal controls doesn't.

    But it is not JUST my car that I have had the same experience with - my wife's Mercedes behaves in a similar way, and I have (as a passenger) been unable to open windows in several other cars, too. It's a total moronicity. YOU may always hand the keys to a passenger, but most people don't, and it's unreasonable for the manufacturers to demand it.

    Something that you may have missed is that a passenger with a key in his possession is 'in charge' of the vehicle, and therefore better not have exceeded the alcohol limit.

    1248:

    Yup. I remember having to reverse up hills - the lower reverse lasted for quite a while. My car is low-powered, so I rarely skip gears, but I do so when accelerating downhill or when gradually slowing right down and then needing power again. Not as many gears as I skip on my recumbent trike (which has 14 gears) when doing the same, though!

    1249:

    The number of mechanical parts necessary to convert igniting hydrocarbons into forward motion is so mind-bogglingly huge, when compared the number necessary to convert an electric current into the same, I had come to the conclusion that the entire concept of an ICE car is the very definition of "kludge". And mankind wasted unbelievable amount of mental capacity over last 120 years on getting this kludge to work.

    I have deep respect for people who know how to fix a transmission, just like I have a deep respect for people who know how to code in Assembly. But I can't help thinking that human race would be better off today if all hundreds of millions of men and women (although mostly men) who spent trillions of man-hours tinkering with ICE engines and transmissions, had instead spent maybe one twentieth of that time on electric cars instead, and had the rest freed up for something more productive.

    1250:

    Because that's the only thing there is to hold it, the manufacturers having deliberately made it like that.

    Do you know which manufacturers have done that? Which models? It seems very unlikely to me. I'd like to know more.

    Because nobody ever does that. Look at any row of cars parked on a hill and nearly all of them will have their wheels straight.

    I spent decades driving around the hills of San Francisco, and I can assure you that that is not the case.

    1251:

    It also has some possible use after the fact.

    There is, however, a classic epidemiology graph showing two lines: cases of tuberculosis, and horses per capita. They both decline in parallel, the horses leading the TB cases by a bit.

    The introduction of the first TB vaccine is marked on the graph: it causes a slight dip. But the really big fall in TB tracks the decline in urban horse-drawn transport.

    Modern horses aren't a significant human TB reservoir because there aren't many of them, they're generally well looked-after, and they're not stabled cheek-by-jowl with humans in urban mews. But back when horses were prime movers for urban transport, they were worked hard and over-exposed to humans (and vice versa).

    1252:

    1243 - I have used a prat nav, and indeed it was a prat. It managed to get lost 3 times in just under 300 miles, first time taking us 20 miles out of our way before saying "at the next opportunity, turn around", second time telling us "turn right" at a junction clearly signposted "no right turn" and refusing to help until we had managed a U-turn, and the third time failing to identify a motorway exit and then throwing a fit of the sulks and issuing no further direction until we reached our destination, when it said "You have reached your destination". Well yes, but no thanks to it.

    1246 - Similarly, but maybe more so. I need to accelerate hard from rest onto a 40mph speed limit road. I accelerate hard in first and second to achieve 40mph as quickly as possible, then block shift directly into 5th. Third and fourth are perfectly usable gears but redundant when I have achieved cruising speed with just first and second.
    OTOH if I was overtaking a 40mph truck on 2 lane I'd definitely drop from 5th to third or fourth for acceleration.

    1253:

    Hand up I do. There's a street near the big local market which is very steep but usually has parking on market days because you actually have to walk a bit to get there. While I admit my car is usually the only one, I do indeed turn the wheels in to the curb. I like to find my car where I left it.

    1254:

    See paws @ 1208 for a non-complete list which is still very large. Yes, it does sound unlikely, but nevertheless it is true.

    Funny that the convention should be better followed in San Francisco http://media.istockphoto.com/photos/cars-parking-in-the-streets-of-san-francisco-in-a-typical-hill-street-picture-id1128671281 where surely with a large number of automatic transmissions you have the "park" position as belt and braces, than it is over here, where this is what you get: http://c8.alamy.com/comp/C5XTDH/narrow-street-with-cars-parked-on-both-sides-of-the-road-harrison-C5XTDH.jpg

    1255:

    SFR
    The "new" (cough) Brit Driving Test includes using a shat-nav ...
    I refuse to have one, AT ALL - I consider them as dangerous as using a mobile phone whilst driving & they are notoriously inaccurate, too.
    If I ever have to re-take a test, now what do I do?

    1256:

    There is, however, a classic epidemiology graph showing two lines: cases of tuberculosis, and horses per capita. They both decline in parallel, the horses leading the TB cases by a bit.

    We can have a LOT of fun tracing the public health consequences of using horses versus using cars. Ecological ones too, as there was purportedly a massive die-off of urban bird populations as horse dung disappeared from the streets. I suspect, when you factor in deaths from petroleum air pollution and high speed collisions, versus horse-mediated kills and bacterial infections, it's going to be close to a wash at best, and might even favor horses.

    And we can also compare the time wasted caring for horses versus the time wasted caring for cats while driving cars (and caring for cars, of course).

    Anyway, I personally hope all equine species survive the next century, just as I hope all hominid species do.

    Finally, I think that Tesla's attempts to create a de novo horse (aka a self driving car), and other's attempts to recreate trains (lanes for self-driving cars and programming for pods of self-driving cars) are rather asinine. With apologies to the donkeys out there, who don't deserve to have their intelligence so impugned.

    1257:

    Learn to use one, and take the test in someone else's car.

    1258:

    Greg Tingey @ 1223:

    Coming back to actually serious material ....
    Russia deliberately killing artists who do not co-operate, real Stalin stuff

    Another bleak assessment of the Russian invasion's outcome:

    We Are On a Path to Nuclear War

    1259:

    Hope for an endorsement process such as the one they used to use for people who took their test in an automatic? You would be able to get your licence but it would only be valid for driving cars without a sat nav. Speaking of changing driving tests, when I took my test in NZ many years ago you had to be able to perform a manoeuvre which is now illegal -- backing around a corner.

    1260:

    Pigeon @ 1226:

    "Why weren't the wheels turned in to the curb so it couldn't roll?"

    Because nobody ever does that. Look at any row of cars parked on a hill and nearly all of them will have their wheels straight. Any that have done it properly are conspicuous by the oddity. It's one of those things that you get taught about when learning to drive and then forget about as soon as you pass the test.

    Nobody? I do it every time I park.

    I always cock the wheels so that if the car does roll it's only a few inches for the tire to roll up to the curb. Here in the U.S. turn to the right if you're facing downhill, turn to the left if you're facing uphill. And usually I'll let the car roll that few inches until the car is already in contact with the curb before I turn the engine off & lock the steering in that position.

    Plus putting the transmission** in reverse (lowest gear = most engine compression) along with engaging the parking brake (mechanical in the case of the Jeep).

    **Manual transmission. Park supposedly serves the same purpose with automatics.

    1261:

    focuses on home heating, GW/CC, cryptomining - nothing so far about forecast total demand, capacity...

    That sounds like a feature of your government, or possibly your media.

    In Australia we have a lot of work and some stupid politics around exactly that issue, with the climate (de)nihilists saying we don't need to change anything (because we're all going to die?) and the technical people quietly sweating out ways to make the system work within the constraints dictated by various laws (both sorts).

    Total demand forecasts are done out to 20 years or more, with grid capacity projections and all sorts of fine print included. Then politicians announce new developments that the boffins haven't predicted, because who the fuck ever says "let's assume they will build 100,000 new houses on this flood plain". That's the sort of prediction that gets you laughed out of the meeting. Or causes major panics when announced because 100k x 20kW peak demand needs more than a quick trip to Bunnings for another extension cord. AFAIK the proposal to limit new houses to 10kW peak demand was rejected as impractical in the new building code. Don't worry, it's not as though the people building those houses pay for the extra electricity requirements, that lands on the taxpayers in general. After all, we voted for the idiots who appointed the lackeys who approved the damn thing.

    1262:

    kind of a rounding error, once you internalize the need to electrify heavy industry and start calculating how much power we are going to need to reduce ores...

    Again, in Australia we kinda know this stuff on account of having things like aluminium refineries built on coal fields because it's easier to transport the ore than the coal. The coal-to-electricity plant is part of the refinery. And they're all out in wide open spaces where it rarely rains.

    The only really fun part is the political process of deciding exactly where the solar farms go because "terror nullius" lurks on the surface like a genocide that's busy gnawing through its leash. The question of whether first nations people should have land rights is still up for debate... welcome to Australia.

    Technically it really is a political problem. Getting the money together to scale up some of the processes will inevitably reveal further problems, but it seems unlikely to me that the answer will ever be "no, we can't do this at all". Any more than "cobalt occurs in little seams that are hard to mine with machines" means we can't mine cobalt. We have a whole lot of bulk handling taking ore and related materials to places where it's cheap to refine them. If the cheap places change we already know that we can move the processing, that's why the dark satanic mills are silent now.

    1263:

    when I took my test in NZ many years ago you had to be able to perform a manoeuvre which is now illegal -- backing around a corner.

    That's amusing, I didn't even realise they'd made it illegal. I had to do the same and got told off for looking at the inside rear wheel using the wing mirror as my guide, apparently I was supposed to just guess so the instructor could correct me.

    Mind you, the rules in Australia are if anything worse.

    you must not drive in reverse unless it is safe to do so, and you must not reverse further than is reasonable in the circumstances.

    Well, thanks for making that abundantly clear. Obviously if there's a crash it wasn't safe, but if there's no crash it was just as obviously safe. Sigh.

    1264:

    ilya187 @ 1245:

    Yes, absolutely. My Tesla came with an adapter which allows it to plug into SAE J1772 charging ports, which are standard for all other North American EV manufacturers.

    At a risk of being pedantic, and very much not as correction but to expand on that remark: The long cable and plug from a standard north American EV charger ends in a Combined Charging System (CCS) subtype Combo 1 connector -- which, as the adjective "combined" would suggest, is a superset. CCS Combo 1 has, at the top, a circular structure with five pins conforming with SAE standard J1772, which is known internationally as IEC 62196 Type 1. Those five pins support AC charging, ranging from a US/Canada household delivery rate of (12 amps @ 120 volts) to a Type 2 dedicated charger stand delivering up to 19.2 kW (80 amps @ 240 volts).

    When the vehicle is connected to such an AC charger, the actual charger, that converts from AC to DC and spools electricity out to the battery pack, is the vehicle's on-board charger circuitry.

    Higher-end Type 3 charging stations are where the round assembly is joined below by a second housing with two large pins able to deliver DC current up to at up to 350 kW, thus doing very fast charging.

    UK/Europe's own round AC-delivery plug, IEC 62196-2, gets extended with the same two-pin DC addendum, to create the very similar Combined Charging System (CCS) subtype Combo 2 connector (aka IEC 62196-3).

    The gist of all this is that ilya187 and others can do AC (up to Type 2, up to 19.2 kW) charging of Teslas at commodity, non-Tesla-specific chargers -- using the adapter he mentions, that converts from the Tesla Proprietary Connector (TPC) socket to a SAE J1772 one. I gather that Tesla's car models include an onboard AC/DC converter.

    1265:

    Pigeon @ 1226:

    Because nobody ever does that. Look at any row of cars parked on a hill and nearly all of them will have their wheels straight. Any that have done it properly are conspicuous by the oddity.

    Local angle: The City and County of San Francisco requires curbing (UK "kerbing" does not appear to be known as a verb, but perhaps should be) your wheels on any street of 3% grade or higher, and everyone has a hortatory horror story of what may happen if you don't (not even counting the large, punitive fine). 22 years after ceasing to be a San Franciscan, I still do it, religiously, every time, and shake my head when others fail -- having once seen a runaway car. So do most of us, here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

    1266:

    Pigeon @ 1239:

    A lot of the discussions over navigation systems seem to contain a large element of actually being arguments between people who are happy not to care and people who care automatically, but without recognition of the disguised incorporation of this fundamentally irreconcilable difference. And there seems to be (unsurprisingly) a great deal of overlap with the people who think that the idea of getting into an electric car without knowing where you're going to recharge it and relying on the car to tell you where to go is great, and those who think it's hideous.

    Seems to me there are some people who cannot comprehend a map. They can barely follow directions & NEED someone or something to tell them when to turn.

    I had a Sgt Major like that when I was in the National Guard - which I have never understood because basic map reading & land nav skills were REQUIRED for promotion to E5 and he was an E9. I don't know how he ever found his way to the armory for drill.

    And Lord Help Us if he tried to lead a convoy movement, 'cause we were going to be lost before we got out of the armory motor pool.

    I can use a navigation system, but I can read a map too. And I'm familiar enough with the maps I can recognize when the navigation system is wrong (or being read wrong).

    1267:

    polite but strident spiel about how 2nd gear was stupid, useless and should have never been put into cars

    I wonder whether much of that's about the introduction of synchromesh, or whether it's about "any extra gear should be for making it go faster, not overlapping the others in range". Whether he changed down from 3rd to 1st, or just rode the clutch to a stop.

    1268:

    Yeah, no fines or anything over here, which no doubt makes a difference, but it's still odd that people have no sense of the inherent precariousness of the situation when relying on the handbrake alone to keep the car stationary on a gradient that makes you feel like you're slamming the brakes on when you're not moving at all. I do it voluntarily when I feel the gradient is steep enough to warrant it - which would certainly include the street in the British photo I posted (look at the rooflines) - and the chances are pretty high that the owners of those cars all live there and have stories about when No. 15's car rolled into No. 17's and stove the bumper in etc, but it doesn't seem to make any difference.

    That horrible verbed noun which I cannot agree with your advocacy of is in fact already used over here, but it means getting the wheels too close to the kerb in a parallel position so you scratch them on the kerbstones, eg. by trying to park too close to it.

    1269:

    Pigeon @ 1268:

    That horrible verbed noun which I cannot agree with your advocacy of...

    I could mildly demur that "but perhaps should be known as a verb" falls a bit short of advocacy. Call it more a good-natured suggestion, albeit from the Happy Hunting Land of questionable neologisms.

    I was a participant on the Linux user group mailing list for the Melbourne region for years, with hardly anyone knowing I'm an ocean away and that their kind offers of sharing a pint wouldn't avail without airfare, when one of the regulars chided me gently for using the term "fall" in place of the proper "autumn", the former being unacceptable on grounds of Americanism. I gamely thanked him, agreeing "We must keep up standards."

    In any event, the larger point if any can be found in this meandering into language, is that UK idiom might (absent someone providing one) lack an equivalent to the Leftpondian verb "curb" in the sense of San Francisco's saying "Always curb your wheels". You-plural might have an opportunity to Sapir-Whorf yourself into greater situational awareness about runaway vehicles.

    (Oh, no! Thus, I have verbed again. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea gravissima verba.)

    1270:

    paws4thot @ 1240:

    Or no sense whatsoever; at WGS84 55.945161N, -4.566704E there is a roundabout, which by visual inspection is not actually circular. If you wish to navigate from Glasgow Road westbound (A814) to Strathleven Place ENE (B830) you will have to release right lock on the roundabout between the Church Street north entrance and the A814 west exit, which will automatically cancel your right signal which should remain on until you pass the Church Street N (later Townend Road N) exit.

    Makes perfect sense to me. You have to omit the N and E (55.945161, -4.566704) to find it in Google Maps. I would have to remind myself y'all drive on the left.

    In MGRS/UTMREF it's 30UVH 02549 00439 - Zone 30U VH 02549e 004391n (I found an online converter). In MGRS you read RIGHT then UP from the lower left corner of a 1km grid square.

    30U identifies a UTM Zone; VH identifies a 100km grid square within UTM Zone 30U and the 10 digit coordinate identifies a 1m square within 100km grid VH.

    Given a paper map with MGRS/UTMREF overlay I can do six digits (100m) using only a Mark 1 Calibrated Eyeball and easily do 8 digits (10m) with a ruler or a map protractor ... that's with a 1:50,000 map. On a 1:25,000 map I can easily do 10 digits with the protractor.

    PS: WGS84 is the same map datum current MGRS/UTMREF uses, so no problem there. I learned on WGS72 but that's only a problem when you're mixing different series maps using different datum.

    1271:

    Re: 'Technically it really is a political problem.'

    Ummm.... nope, fundamentally it's an accounting problem.

    If you've never measured it by component and then by operating and/or standby system, then you've no idea how efficient/effective that power guzzling gizmo is. If it's a power hog, then you need to look at other design options. Looking only at the total consumption by a corp entity/biz is just an excuse to continue to ignore the problem or look for better alternatives. (White vs. black paint is a good example - airlines and cars would never have figured out how much fuel they could save if they never looked at each component of the vehicle.)

    What really surprised me in the article I linked to is that about 15%-20% of various pieces of equipment have zero info on power consumption provided by the manufacturer. (Hey! - You designed/made it, shouldn't you know?) And as this article also mentioned - it's highly unlikely that businesses and healthcare facilities (as well as consumers) will stop developing/acquiring/using more products powered by electricity.

    An accounting problem is a finance problem in waiting. And finance problems morph into political problems because who's gonna pay for all this?

    About the tiered pricing for electricity ...

    Thanks to all who replied! Glad that at least some regions are looking at this seriously and not rewarding high energy consumption via price breaks.

    1272:

    Charlie Stross @ 1251:

    Modern horses aren't a significant human TB reservoir because there aren't many of them, they're generally well looked-after, and they're not stabled cheek-by-jowl with humans in urban mews. But back when horses were prime movers for urban transport, they were worked hard and over-exposed to humans (and vice versa).

    That raises a question in my mind. When Miriam and the family transfer to the Commonwealth which still has a significant number of horse drawn transportation, does she use the same knowledge of antibiotics she used to cure Erasmus Burgeson of TB to push for treating horses? ... post revolution with locally developed antibiotics?

    Seems like if horses are a reservoir for TB and you're stuck in a horse drawn society (even one undergoing a forced march into the future) one way to reduce TB in humans would be to eliminate it in the reservoir.

    It would make sense to try and eliminate TB in horses the way we've gone after rabies in domestic animals? Even if the horses are asymptomatic.

    Do horses show symptoms from TB? Would there be a practical way to vaccinate all the horses against TB? ... a practical way to treat & cure them?

    1273:

    If you've never measured it by component and then by operating and/or standby system, then you've no idea how efficient/effective that power guzzling gizmo is.

    Sorry, are you talking about the extra demand from shifting major energy users to electricity, or about efficiency within industrial users?

    There's two elements: for some industries the major energy demand is laws of physics stuff, like refining aluminium. Stripping oxygen off aluminium takes X amount of energy, and has to be done at Y temperature so heating everything up takes another Z energy. That can be tweaked, but making a big heat exchanger to move heat from hot aluminium to cold ore is technically tricky. Outside of that you drop a number of decimal places down to transport then a few more until you're heating and cooling the offices. Standby power consumption in the refinery is not hugely relevant because they really, really want them to run 24/7.

    But the more general case of industrial use of electricity is much harder than the home user case. There's not a lot of "standard item X, which brand?" going on that would allow energy efficiency labelling. But there is a great deal of "it costs this much to operate" which includes electricity. Also some fun arguments about whether something that consumes half the electricity but twice as much electricity-in-the-form-of-aluminium in consumable parts is better. Luckily there are people who make their whole careers out of those sorts of discussions, and "embodied energy" is one useful key phrase to start from.

    Addressing this at a political level is necessary, though, because the political system creates the rules that govern these decisions. "we have agreed"* not to use price signals to do this, which means we need regulations.

    (* using the best democracy that money can buy, for the most part. Viz, it's a necessary condition of being allowed democracy that we accept its corruption by money)

    1274:

    Do horses show symptoms from TB?

    The short, brutal answer is that you kill the horse. Or whatever other reservoir animal has TB. Treatment isn't an option because there's no incentive to make an effective treatment. Even in humans it's only poor people in shithole countries that get it, so the necessary research and development is slow and often charitable.

    Treating it is hard, and current regimes take a long time, so there's a lot of partial treatments which obviously promote resistance.

    I strongly suspect that a covid-19 type push would solve it in short order, but it's important to remember that part of that push was experimenting on millions of people who had the disease. Ideally you wouldn't be able to do that (due to lack of patients).

    1275:

    One other polticial issue is the use of subsidised electricity to attract electricity users. Aotearoa built a hydro dam to persuade someone to refine aluminium, for example. That's never been profitable overall, but lack of profit has been hidden in the political system. The current owners, Rio Tinto, have been explicit during negotiations that unless they get guaranteed cheap electricity they will shut the thing down, and if people keep complaining about the toxic waste they generate ditto. They're paying someone to truck it away, that's the end of their involvement.

    Lots and lots of countries do this, so do regions within countries. So the political will might have to go up to the WTO right down to local councils being "persuaded" to cover the cost (in this case, the problem has so far agreed to cover $4M of a $200+M bill)

    1276:

    paws4thot @ 1252:

    1246 - Similarly, but maybe more so. I need to accelerate hard from rest onto a 40mph speed limit road. I accelerate hard in first and second to achieve 40mph as quickly as possible, then block shift directly into 5th. Third and fourth are perfectly usable gears but redundant when I have achieved cruising speed with just first and second. OTOH if I was overtaking a 40mph truck on 2 lane I'd definitely drop from 5th to third or fourth for acceleration.

    Same technique I use for merging onto limited access highways (dual carriage motorways?). Accelerate to highway speed on the ON RAMP adjusting speed with the accelerator so I can seamlessly merge with the flow of traffic.

    I don't need 4th gear accelerating down from an overpass, but it comes in handy accelerating UP HILL from an underpass.

    City driving on more or less level ground surface streets is where I find it easiest to skip 4th gear. Even there, if I'm accelerating UP HILL from a full stop at a traffic signal or a stop sign I'll probably need to use 4th as an intermediary gear to get up to speed with the traffic flow.

    That's why there are intermediary gears, so you can use them WHEN YOU NEED THEM. You don't have to use them if/when you don't need them.

    1277:

    Even in humans it's only poor people in shithole countries that get [TB]

    For values of "shithole countries" that include America and Canada. At least one strain of TB-MR got its start in NYC after Reagan cut funding.

    https://ed-stapleton.blogspot.com/2008/05/tb-and-mrsa-and-ronald-reagan.html

    1278:

    not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

    Trump and Reagan have in common the interpretation of the above that if we don't count something it very definitely does not count.

    https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/26/everything-counts-einstein/

    1279:

    NecroMoz: deanimator of the undead @ 1263:

    you must not drive in reverse unless it is safe to do so, and you must not reverse further than is reasonable in the circumstances.

    Well, thanks for making that abundantly clear. Obviously if there's a crash it wasn't safe, but if there's no crash it was just as obviously safe. Sigh.

    So I guess this is NOT ON THE DRIVER's TEST 😕

    1280:

    NecroMoz: deanimator of the undead @ 1274:

    Do horses show symptoms from TB?

    The short, brutal answer is that you kill the horse. Or whatever other reservoir animal has TB. Treatment isn't an option because there's no incentive to make an effective treatment. Even in humans it's only poor people in shithole countries that get it, so the necessary research and development is slow and often charitable.

    So it would be feasible somewhere like the "New American Commonwealth" in the Merchant Princes series which is struggling NOT to become a shithole country?

    Treating it is hard, and current regimes take a long time, so there's a lot of partial treatments which obviously promote resistance.

    Which is why Miriam told Erasmus to TAKE ALL OF THE PILLS even if he started to feel better ... to head off the development of drug resistance.

    I strongly suspect that a covid-19 type push would solve it in short order, but it's important to remember that part of that push was experimenting on millions of people who had the disease. Ideally you wouldn't be able to do that (due to lack of patients).

    And again, would that kind of push be feasible in the "New American Commonwealth" which does NOT lack for patients?

    The only thing I see being required is the government be true to their ideals and be open and up front with the population about what they're trying to accomplish; eradication of a disease without eradicating the people who have contracted the disease.

    Informed consent as national policy and a national consensus.

    1281:

    would that kind of push be feasible in the "New American Commonwealth"

    They don't have the scientific/research ability to do it, and you can't put 10 years of training into people in one year no matter how hard you push, so it's going to be a while before they have a mass of high school kids who can start bio/med undergrad degrees. It's like taking the kids who've been taught evolution instead of science and trying to make them into doctors, but worse because they need to be wildly inventive researchers rather than just{cough} synthesising knowledge and having experience with patients.

    If they had the wholehearted cooperation of the US or maybe EU+China, they could supply the patients and money for someone like that to thump it through, at least post-covid when we have mRNA as an industrial-scale technology. Assuming that an mRNA vaccine/treatment for TB is possible.

    1282:

    Part of it is the gap between copying technology "we" have, like making covid vaccines, and copying "our" ability to perform research.

    So there's the mass of educated/trained people problem, which is linked to the mass manufacturing problem. If you need 1M people to do TB tests, and 10M TB tests manufactured, shipped, used and evaluated very week... the Commonwealth can't do that.

    But also, a huge pile of things that we can effectively just ring and order they have to make from scratch. Miriam is showing them how to make rod or wire operated disk brakes, so presumably they have a mild steal producing industry and can get lengths of steel rod from a factory somewhere. But the gap from that to autoclavable gang pippettes is enormous. They probably don't make stainless steel, they may not even refine chromium and nickel. It's vanishingly unlikely they make aluminium given the size of their electricity production. And so on, down to post-it notes and aglets.

    1283:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1205 [in response to my explanation of system safety engineering]:

    Well, yes, but that's not really the point. It's the large amount of gimmickry that should never have been integrated with the essential and safety systems in the first place, usually because it's unnecessary, but sometimes on safety grounds. If that were kept separate, the unnecessary junk could be handed over to a tyro, though a better solution would be to omit it.

    It was the point of Troutwaxer's post that I was responding to.

    I do agree with you about all the increasingly non-optional bells and whistles in modern cars though. We got our current cars second hand, and deliberately went for ones with the least number of bells and whistles that we could find.

    [Rule 1: Keep it simple] The second is to "keep it separate", so that one component does not unnecessarily compromise another. Both rules have been thrown out of the window in modern cars.

    Quite. This story springs to mind. Although I gather that as a result of such stories newer cars are at least using a separate CANBUS for the critical systems.

    However mixed in with all the non-essential stuff are some really quite important bits. A reversing camera would be really nice to have in both our cars, but its treated as one of those bells and whistles.

    The other problem is that for the car makers all those optional extras are where they make their money. The car market is very competitive and profit margins are slim. But once the dealer has got the customer to say "yes, I'll have one of those" they can dangle all the bells and whistles in front of them, for amounts that individually seem small compared to the up-front cost, but which collectively add up to quite a lot. They've always done this with leather seats and alloy wheels, but with computerised systems a lot of this stuff is zero cost to the manufacturer: if the customer wants sat-nav, just install the right bit of software in the car's computer. Even better, you can then charge a subscription fee for the map updates. That's just pure profit for the car maker.

    The one that annoys me most often is electric windows, which won't work unless the ignition is on.

    That's a safety issue either way. Strangulation by electric windows happens from time to time, probably a lot more often than someone accidentally sliding into the water (BTW I completely agree about electronically controlled hand brakes). Having them only work when the keys are in the ignition at least makes it less likely that some toddler is going to tread on the switch while leaning out of the window. Having switches that only close the window when pulled up is another important feature.

    Maybe may post made it sound like car makers are really good at safety engineering. Unfortunately they aren't in the general case. They've got good at traditional mechanical car safety engineering, but they are having to scramble to catch up with the electronic age.

    1284:

    with computerised systems a lot of this stuff is zero cost to the manufacturer

    BMW allowing buyers to rent the ability to heat the seats springs to mind. Every cars gets it, but only some people have the ability to use it. I'm guessing that it's cheaper to make one style of seat rather than two, and ship half as many different versions of car.

    1285:

    Does this mean a Tesla driver can't use "I didn't know that was the speed limit" as an excuse? Pretty much, yes.

    Of course I'm doubtful it ever helped beyond giving a traffic cop an excuse to, ahem, exercise their judgement[/paperbagtest].

    1286:

    Nuts. 'Fall' is rarely used here, but it's not an Americanism.

    https://allpoetry.com/Autumn-Fires

    1287:

    Except in the USA cars don't have "hand brakes", they have "parking brakes", which are usually a toggle or switch, often mounted at floor level. Nothing like the UK-mandated big-ass handle attached by a cable to the rear brake disks/drums ... except on newer cars that appears to be no longer mandatory.

    1288:

    Why would anyone park facing downhill into water and leave the car in gear or neutral, and depend on some kind of brake actuated by the ignition being off to hold it?

    Because they're an idiot.

    Idiots are everywhere.

    Fear them.

    (Also: why do you believe drivers know how their vehicle subsystems work? Most people seem to believe the world we live in is animated by immaterial spirits, judging by their behaviour. Which the FAANG stacks encourage with voice-controlled gizmos like Alex, Cortana, Siri, and Google: you shout at the machine, sometimes it replies ...)

    1289:

    Because nobody ever does that.

    Pigeon, you're English.

    In the USA, pointing your wheels at the kerb while parked on a hill is part of standard drivers' education. If you've ever driven in San Francisco you'd know why!

    In the UK it isn't standard but should be. Similarly, in the USA, drivers are generally not taught how to do a three-point turn or parallel park (much less how to do so with a manual transmission -- although I expect that latter requirement to disappear within the next decade as the shift to EVs and smarter automatic gearboxes continues).

    1290:

    Some may be just ignorant. People who live in the flatlands and have no experience of serious hills generally do not know how to handle them - just as most people from other areas don't know how to handle West Country lanes or even the easier single-track roads in the Highlands. Dammit, even I have to brush the rust off my memory to recall how to drive in seriously hilly country, and I learnt to drive in that!

    1291:

    Many researchers link TB more with malnutrition and living/working conditions than exposure and (lack of) vaccination. That, of course, changed at the same time, but more recent data can exclude the equine element - figure 1 in this is interesting and, if cause and effect, is another damning indictment of Thatcherism, monetarism and neo-libertarianism.

    https://thorax.bmj.com/content/73/8/702

    1292:

    NecroMoz @ 1281: ...It's like taking the kids who've been taught evolution instead of science...

    WAT!

    Would you like to rephrase that?

    1293:

    Whether he changed down from 3rd to 1st, or just rode the clutch to a stop.

    He would down shift for going slow. To him all anyone ever needed was a getting going or go slow gear plus an "at speed" gear.

    I've driven most everything but semi tractor trailer transmission setups. And can shift without sync into lower gears if needed. Old tractors are a great way to learn such things. And learning to drive in a 59 Chevy pickup in fields.

    He was just adamant that the way he learned to drive was all anyone should ever need. Because model T tech was as good as anyone needed.

    I didn't argue the point. I was more interested in making $70 that day instead of the expected $35.

    1294:

    1260 - If you think that's how Park works on an automatic, read on. What Park actually does is engage a locking pawl in the transmission which locks the entire transmission irrespective of the orientation of the vehicle relative to any slope.

    1262 - When we built an aluminium smelter in Scotland we also built a hydro-electric power plant more or less beside it, about 100 years ago.

    1270 - The WGS reference was only there to specify the location of the roundabout, not to replace a discussion on self-cancelling indicators with one on geographic systems, but no you did not confuse me.

    1272 - And you have just ignored bovine TB, which is/was also a thing.

    1295:

    My Jeep is a 5-speed. I frequently shift from 3rd to 5th. Fourth gear is not useless, but it's not needed all the time.

    Yes. I have frequently skipped gears on 5 or 6 speed (forward) transmissions. Especially after a bit of driving in the car to get used to how it handles. But at times all have been handy.

    1296:

    Double declutching saved my life once, but it's an obsolete technique on modern cars. I regret never having driven a Model T - I have heard that they were 'interesting' to drive.

    1297:

    In the UK it isn't standard but should be. Similarly, in the USA, drivers are generally not taught how to do a three-point turn or parallel park (much less how to do so with a manual transmission -- although I expect that latter requirement to disappear within the next decade as the shift to EVs and smarter automatic gearboxes continues).

    Hunh? Parallel parking is very much taught, to the point where the standard joke about a driver's license exam is the applicant failing to parallel park correctly*. Three point turns are also normal.

    What is changing here is the increase in people who park boot/trunk in. Partly it's a Korean thing that's catching on due to K-dramas, partly it's the paranoid fantasists talking about the "death cone" of a carjacker/mugger/rapist/one of Them coming up behind you while you get in your nose-in car (the open door is "the cone of death," with death coming from behind while you're getting in and not on guard). The Korean back-in makes some sense, because it's about parking so you can get the car out in too-crowded parking structures. The other can be seen when someone backs their urban assault vehicle in, sometimes taking two spaces, and glares at everyone like we're going to shoot helpless little them. And to be honest, the thought does cross my mind every once in awhile when I watch them park, which is yet another reason why I keep practicing mindfulness.

    1298:

    I have heard that they were 'interesting' to drive.

    I have heard that they were 'interesting' to drive.

    9 minutes. Worth it. Interesting to today's drivers is a total understatement.

    It makes the 1954 Ford 8N flat head tractor I spent my teens driving look easy. No synchronized transmission, no split clutch so without an add on overrun PTO attachment a mower or similar could push you against all the braking, rear wheel brake where single shoe in opposite directions so they grabbed differently on each side, crazy over stearing (wear good leather gloves or you thumb will hurt for a few days if you bump into a rut or stump), and so on. Gravity fed fuel.

    But I was able to swap out a head gasket in the field once. Try that with an overhead valve engine. All it took was a single wrench, a putty knife, a gasket, and some sealer.

    1299:

    Similarly, in the USA, drivers are generally not taught how to do a three-point turn or parallel park (much less how to do so with a manual transmission

    Who is telling you such? I believe it is the #1 reason people fail the driving test. Too far from the curb? Fail. Hit the curb? Fail. Too many attempts or so? Fail.

    As to manual vs. automatic, well you get tested on the car you bring. There may be some but most state don't care which transmission you have when taking the test.

    Now as to how hard it is to parallel park, my high school history teacher told his story of taking the test one county over from our small town county. The first thing the policeman giving the driving test said was "pretend there's a curb". There were no curbs in the county seat and likely not in the entire county. This would have been in the early 60s.

    1300:

    What is changing here is the increase in people who park boot/trunk in.

    I've been doing that for years, ever since I got hit backing out in a parking lot* and the police told me that being in reverse makes a collision automatically my fault if I made a claim. Bonus is that it's a lot easier to pull out when people park big SUVs on either side of me.


    *by a woman who turned a corner and was't watching where she was going

    1301:

    What is changing here is the increase in people who park boot/trunk in.

    Yes, I've noticed that, as well. Wonder if it's partly due to the increasing prevalence of backup cameras? Now required in the U.S. after 2018.

    1302:

    I've been doing that for years, ever since I got hit backing out in a parking lot

    My backup camera on my Civic has a wide angle mode. I can see almost 90 degrees off the back of my car in both directions. So I back out a few inches and can watch the crossing cars. I just leave it in wide angle mode.

    My 2008 Tundra has no camera. I tend to park it away from the crowds. Even though in most collisions I win (the collision) but might loose on insurance.

    1303:

    Wonder if it's partly due to the increasing prevalence of backup cameras? Now required in the U.S. after 2018.

    Oddly it is now safer to pull in front first. You can more easily put stuff in the car via the doors. And as I just mentioned with a wide angle backup cam you can see what's happening as soon as your bumper clears the cars next to you. If you pull out front first you have to maybe be a couple of meters out in the lane before you can see around tall things.

    1304:

    Er, you have got two points crossed there. Opening the windows is one point; opening the doors is another.

    I take your point about strangulation, though that does NOT justify the windows working only if the ignition is actually turned on (rather than the key being inserted). And, yes, I have checked - it is as I said. That's created a serious safety problem while reducing another. I would have preferred manual windows, but they weren't an option, especially as they have been THE most unreliable part of the car and have wasted many days' of my time :-(

    Refusing to open the doors when stopped is creating another unnecessary problem, which can be a safety issue; I agree that there is a dilemma about whether to allow it when moving even slowly. No, cars are NOT supposed to be devices to imprison people who are unfamiliar with the unlocking rituals!

    1305:

    Mr Stross: From that Wikipedia article on 55 Tufton Street: 'A group of these think tanks, dubbed "The Nine Entities[…].'

    I'd say that 'The Entities' (for some non-large value of X) would be a great name for the group ruling some crossroads-of-the-galaxy (or, if fantasy, '…-the-realms') city. Its motto:'Not paranoiagenic at all!'.

    1306:

    "Similarly, in the USA, drivers are generally not taught how to do a three-point turn or parallel park"

    This is not right. Both of those are required for most state license tests and teaching them is a the default everywhere.

    Many people don't actually DO them after their tests, but it is taught and required.

    1307:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1286 said:

    Nuts. 'Fall' is rarely used here, but it's not an Americanism.

    https://allpoetry.com/Autumn-Fires

    Well, I thank you for the lovely literary citation, but: (1) I myself had no idea of the term's provenance; I merely quoted the gentleman from Oz's persnickety online objection. (2) Since you mention that, RLS having used the term in 1850 doesn't necessarily make it Scottish any more than my using "bagel" in 2022 makes it Californian.

    I suspect, however, that it's an ancient English idiom, given being a natural coinage and being what leaves do.

    1308:

    I was actually supporting your use of it! Your suspicions are correct - it was first recorded (meaning autumn) in 1550 and has been used on occasion ever since. Many 'Americanisms' are simply English as it was used a couple of centuries back, or in some parts of Britain.

    1309:

    The authors of the WIRED article on hacking Jeeps have made that, and their other studies, freely available at https://illmatics.com/carhacking.html

    Bless them.

    1310:

    Oddly it is now safer to pull in front first. You can more easily put stuff in the car via the doors. And as I just mentioned with a wide angle backup cam you can see what's happening as soon as your bumper clears the cars next to you. If you pull out front first you have to maybe be a couple of meters out in the lane before you can see around tall things.

    I agree that, with the Bolt, it's safer to nose in. The back has not just a backup camera but motion sensors (testing out self-driving tech, I believe), so it will yell and scream if you back into oncoming traffic.

    As I noted above, apparently in South Korea (per my wife), backing in is the norm, purportedly because the parking garages are so small that it's easier to pull out than back out. Just passing this along.

    1311:

    My experience is that backing in is more difficult in really cramped parking areas, and the UK has its share! I suspect that's not the reason.

    1312:

    Well, theoretically obsolete due to all gearboxes now having synchromesh on all gears, but practically I still find it useful; synchromesh wears, and by the time the car is old enough that I get to drive it, changing down into second is somewhere between "no longer as easy as it should be" and "won't bloody go in" if you rely on the synchromesh instead of matching speeds yourself.

    I can also change gear without using the clutch at all, which came in very handy when the clutch linkage broke a couple of miles into my journey to work, and I completed the remaining 20-odd miles with no more delay than stopping to look underneath and make sure both ends were still attached to the car so I could weld it back together over lunch.

    Sometimes I do it anyway even when everything's working fine, just for fun. And quite a lot of people do that on motorcycles, because once you're on the move using the clutch makes very little difference anyway on a bike.

    1313:

    But the backup cams. When I do back in with my lowly Civic I get to see the view plus a superimposed where the car will go based on how the steering is turned. Plus three 18" (1/2 meter) distance lines. Backing in is now easier that pulling in forward in this car.

    But in general I'd rather see the lanes when leaving to avoid bumping someone not paying attention.

    On a side note a few years ago as I went into our local Costco. (Large warehouse store.) A lady walked up to me and said what I did in the parking lot was dangerous. I said I didn't know what she meant. To which she said: "Exactly" and walked away.

    Corrective action was NOT taken.

    1314:

    "What is changing here is the increase in people who park boot/trunk in."

    I do that anyway, mainly so I can see what I'm doing when I pull out. People claim it's more difficult, but I don't see that; either parking or unparking has to involve reversing, so you can't avoid that, and by reversing in it's the "back" end of the car that steers so you have fewer awkwardnesses with clearance aligning with the slot.

    It's only more difficult in those shitey parking areas where the slots are angled towards the approaching cars. Fortunately these are not very common, but when they do turn up it's always in places that make reversing out of the slot an especially bad idea: supermarket car parks where there are often kids running about and also adults treating it as a purely pedestrian area, or attempts to cram more parking along the side of a street so backing out means reversing against the flow of traffic when you can't see it (bicycles especially will be invisible in that situation).

    1315:

    People claim it's more difficult,

    Once you learn to backup with a 2 axle trailer attached where the front axle steers with the tongue/hitch all backing is easy.

    1316:

    "Pigeon, you're English."

    Guilty, though I plead partly Welsh ancestry in mitigation.

    "In the USA, pointing your wheels at the kerb while parked on a hill is part of standard drivers' education. If you've ever driven in San Francisco you'd know why! In the UK it isn't standard but should be."

    Yeah, that's part of what I was going on about. There are plenty of places in Britain that are built on the sides of steep hills and people who drive in them certainly ought to "know why", but for some reason the insight eludes them. So you get scenes like the photo I posted @ 1254 being the norm rather than the exception.

    I'm fairly confident it's even in the Highway Code, so people really shouldn't be claiming ignorance. (I know I've seen it in several driving-manual-type books but not sure if the HC was one of them.)

    "Similarly, in the USA, drivers are generally not taught how to do a three-point turn or parallel park"

    Hehe. I remember endlessly practising parallel parking for my test, between crates out the front of our house. When I did the test, the examiner didn't ask me to demonstrate any parking abilities until we got back to the test centre, when he indicated a space at the side of the road and said "pull in there". It was a fairly large space, where you could go in forward, but backing in would make it easier to align neatly without hitting the kerb; just the sort of thing for checking whether someone could basically do it without being unnecessarily severe. So I came to a halt just beyond it, saying "OK, I'll back in". The examiner then said "No, don't do that", directed me to a larger space further along and said explicitly to go in forward.

    Made me feel a bit of a knob for putting in so much practice on something they actually avoided examining, but it has of course still been extremely useful in real situations.

    1317:

    You don't need mRNA to make a TB vaccine, we've had one for years. There is something a bit weird about it which I can't remember the details of, that isn't like most vaccines, but it's not horribly exotic. It's called "BCG" which stands for something that again I can't remember. We all had it at school and spent the rest of the term comparing the welts on our shoulders.

    A week before the actual vaccination, we were all tested to see if our immune systems already knew about TB; some TB antigen was jabbed into our arms with a kind of six-pointed staple thing, and the one or two lads who showed a reaction did not get the vaccine.

    They started doing the same kind of test on British cows before WW2, only if you were a cow and showed a reaction you did not get to live. Farmers whose herds could be certified free of TB by this procedure got paid a bit extra for their milk. I don't see why you couldn't do the same thing for horses if they too were a risk.

    1318:

    In the USA, pointing your wheels at the kerb while parked on a hill is part of standard drivers' education.

    Mostly true -- though I was also taught that if you park on top of ice (which at the time was about five months out of the year... probably down to three, these days) to leave your wheels pointed straight, so your car won't slide into the street.

    1319:

    I work a few hours a month at a local football stadium, often helping to park cars. The stadium rule is reverse parking with the front of the car facing out. The reason for this rule is the safety of other people around, drivers as well as pedestrians. Someone leaving their parking space is facing forward and closer to the front of the vehicle than if they reversed in. Their line of sight is less obstructed and they can better see what's happening past the cars on either side of them as they drive out.

    1320:

    Getting back to the title of this post. I can't even

    But from a US perspective. Pardon the disruption.

    My wife has a story of getting a "Man from U.N.C.L.E" membership card when in the 4th grade. About 11 years old. She in all seriousness told her dad that she might be called on at any time if her assistance was needed for an "U.N.C.L.E" emergency. She says her dad never broke into mirth and treated it as a serious thing.

    After Friday night's US Senate candidate debate between D's Warnock and the R's Walker, Walker flashed a badge an said it was his real law enforcement badge.

    In a later interview a correspondent asked if the badge was honorary or not. His reply: “It is an honorary badge but, they can call me whenever they want me and I have the authority to do things for them, to work with them on things.”

    His biggest claim to fame is carrying a Merican football in the 80s. And to be honest he was very good at it. Exceptionally good. But past that he has way more misses in his life than hits. My wife wanted to watch the debate but she said she had to turn it off after a while because he "was so stupid".

    But there's a non trivial chance he will be one of the Senators from Georgia next year for the next 6 years.

    Tribalism is totally wining out over any sense whatsoever.

    As Charlie said, I can't even....

    1321:

    Re: '... does she use the same knowledge of antibiotics she used to cure Erasmus Burgeson of TB to push for treating horses?'

    Depends on which TB. Also there's been an increase in drug resistant TB. (The Gates Foundation is still actively funding TB research.)

    https://ourworldindata.org/vaccine-preventable-diseases

    'The vaccine for TB – Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) – has been in use for nearly 100 years. It protects against severe forms of TB but is not effective against pulmonary TB (in the lungs) and has variable effectiveness against TB in adults.6 7 Furthermore, resistance of antibiotics used to treat TB is increasing, meaning some people can no longer be cured by drugs. The estimated number of people in 2016 with multi-drug resistant TB was 490,000.

    The fact that there is not a fully effective vaccine and that antibiotic treatment is facing serious difficulties makes TB the most deadly VPD, as we see in the chart. This chart shows the latest data on the number of deaths from VPDs. In 2017 more than 1 million people died as a result of TB.'

    BTW - this site also has some energy production/consumption and EV data by year and occasionally by country.

    1322:

    I certainly didn’t get tested on parallel parking when I took a driving test after moving to California. Nor did my wife.

    Then again, when we moved to VanIsle we just given Canadian driving licences without any testing at all.

    1312 - don’t forget a lot of modern bikes have autoblippers these days, making the clutch even less used.

    And for a slightly more plausible minimal EV, try this - https://electrek.co/2022/10/17/moke-californian-international-us-electric-vehicle/ Very nice if you’re in SoCal or Florida (well, it would be the only good thing there) or Portmerion.

    1323:

    waldo I REFUSE POINT BLANK to use one - they are dangerous & innacurate And "someone else's car" will also have one, too ...

    Parking ... If parking not parallel-to-the-kerb I always back in.

    1324:

    parking areas where the slots are angled towards the approaching cars

    There's a shopping centre like that quite close by here, where I'd always park nose in anyway but the interesting thing is when there's still an opportunity to take a through-er, it puts the car at a slightly awkward angle to pull out.

    In Queensland several rural towns have 45º mandated-reverse-in parking on their main streets, with or without concrete wheel stops aligned normal to the parking spaces. In theory it should be safer to reverse in than parallel parking, but I guess most people passing through are unfamiliar with the angle and challenged to aim the kerbside quarter at the kerb just so. The interesting thing is that in Queensland road camber is quite pronounced, so even on a moderate slope, this makes it unlikely a car can roll away.

    This stuff is unknown in Brisbane, which does have some very steep streets.

    1325:

    Way back when (70s), I was tested on parallel parking, and I used a manual (Vega). Failed the driving test when I kept drifting through stop signs (oh, well).

    Several years ago I had to parallel park our Pontiac G6 in DC in space that was, I swear, about a foot longer than the car. I think I went back & forth about 20 times (at least), but I got it parked!

    Thought I had about EVs & electricity use: If the power company has to start doing rolling brown/black outs how long before people start resenting/attacking EV owners and/or charging stations? We already have "rolling coal" idiots parking in Tesla charging spots "just because".

    1326:

    When Miriam and the family transfer to the Commonwealth which still has a significant number of horse drawn transportation, does she use the same knowledge of antibiotics she used to cure Erasmus Burgeson of TB to push for treating horses? ... post revolution with locally developed antibiotics?

    I don't know. The answer is "probably yes, but the decision would be taken below her pay grade" by some committee in MITI tasked with compiling a burn-down list of "low-hanging fruit we can pluck to improve things for everyone", like the free launderettes and kindergartens at every factory (long term net effect: expand the labour force by 10-20%).

    1327:

    RE: 'Stripping oxygen off aluminium takes X amount of energy, and has to be done at Y temperature so heating everything up takes another Z energy.'

    Using current tech/methods.

    If there's a serious energy crunch then I'm guessing some materials scientist/engineer will look at how to get the same or better product made using a more energy-economical process. (As this is an SF/F author's blog, how about pulsed lasers?)

    Back to one of my other rant points...

    Benefits of measuring usage of small/ordinary energy-using devices:

    'Researchers are also keen to explore what measures might nudge people to conserve energy. Past research has established that simply getting direct feedback on energy usage from a meter can improve conservation by 5–15% . In 2020, a randomized-controlled trial showed that adding appliance-level detail can improve savings by another 5% over aggregate household data. Detailed data probably help to dispel misconceptions about which appliances are using the most energy, says Andor.'

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03261-y

    Looks like I'm not the only one thinking along these lines.

    About the TB vaccine:

    Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) is the standard TB vaccine in most of the world and was first used in 1921, i.e, over 100 years old. The US stopped using giving it to the population at large because it felt that the risk of TB infection was too low to bother getting everyone vaccinated*. Vax programs were instead targeted at kids and a couple of other demos. (BTW - Looks like it's the same in the UK and Canada.)

    Antibiotic resistant TB - it's already impacting health care workers according to the CDC.

    *Guess no one connected very sharp increased international travel to countries that have active outbreaks with potential domestic risk. (And of course why should we look/test for it here, as in: we just KNOW that it can't possibly be in our sophisticated/developed country. How utterly egotistical, shortsighted and unscientific!)

    1328:

    simply getting direct feedback on energy usage from a meter can improve conservation by 5–15%

    Yerbbit that's for ordinary consumers. Even for office worker if you, say. turn off your computer at the wall every day you're likely to find someone comes to have a little word with you, support generally require them to be in standby so they can do maintenance remotely.

    I have been entertained a great deal of late by one friend who is a classic dumb consumer but also loves gadgets. So he has a home server, several routers and dozens of "things" plugged in at all times. And whines about power bills. BUT he finally got solar recently. And like all good solar systems it utterly fails the elderly curmudgeon test, it has a web server built in, it actively tries to export data to external servers, and it has really cool graphs and charts and sensors and... stuff. It even has an app! And geek boy has gone all in. Week one it was all "we generated 123.456kWh today!!!" stuff, week two it was "WTF, our minimum consumption was 3.4kW overnight", followed by "how can I measure single circuits", then a visit from an electrician. Now he's busy chasing things round and trying to decide whether his wife will let him buy a heat pump clothes dryer. I am fair pissing myself at the transition from "bah, whatever I can afford it. Also my power bill is too high" to "I have purchased remotely operated wall socket gadgets that measure power and let me turn them off using an app" as part of a truly scrooge-like obsession with reducing power consumption. And he has finally consolidated several "servers" into a clusterfuck of docker images on a Raspberry Pi. One replaces a laptop that was being used to log signal strength from his wireless internet connection (sigh!)

    Anyhoo, enough of that. Industry is different in general. Individual workers generally have little control over power consumption, even their own - although I suppose I could buy a more efficient PC than my employer provides, the average office worker can't get away with that. In an actual factory all hell would break use if someone turned off the machine at the end of their shift...

    1329:

    Thanks for that, I was lazily running off a vague "TB vaccine is unreliable and drug-resistant TB is a horrible problem" sort of memory. IMO unlikely that the Commonwealth has a TB-naive population so the existing vaccine would be dubious, and with limited high-tech manufacturing capacity the current cures ditto. An mRNA vaccine, especially a room temperature one, would be a whole different game. Especially if it was one-and-done style (which is a huge focus of general vaccine research - run round shooting people up then vanish, job done).

    FWIW I agree that more energy-efficient ways of refining things are likely to be a research focus, but I suspect that will be a secondary effect of switching to electrical power. If nothing else the ability to turn electricity on and off really fast and really often is so different from burning tonnes of coal that there are bound to be new methods available purely from that. But using photons instead of electrons might work, and for that matter with the new(ish) efficient/effective linear accellerators it might even be worthwhile firing protons at things instead.

    1330:

    Guess no one connected very sharp increased international travel to countries that have active outbreaks with potential domestic risk.

    With the resumption of international tourism I expect Australia will start seeing multi-drug-resistant sexually transmitted diseases, especially the ones popular in the UK. Not something I look forward too, it's bad enough dealing with people in my age group who are disturbingly naive on the general topic or just willfully ignorant. Adding more incurable and annoying options to the mix makes me sad.

    1331:

    My '08 Honda Oddyssey has a foot break, and yes, it pulls. I've also rented cars over the last dozen years, and all appeared to have real hand or foot breaks.

    I really need to pull my spark plugs, check, clean, gap, or maybe replace - they came with the vehicle in '13. I'm ashamed to say I haven't done it on this vehicle (it's a real pain,transverse engine). And I'm still getting original spec for highway... or better.

    Yeah, I could use my timing light in a costume as a DeLamiter....

    1332:

    "Reversing" - driving backwards? That's what rear view and side mirrors are for. Ask my SO about the time in '19 when we went to where she used to live for the big moveout to my house. Dead-end street. One parking lane, one drive lane (turnaround at the end). Two morons parked half on the grass, and half in the street on the side of the street that says NO PARKING EVER.

    Ellen and Sam's jaws were on the floor as I backed up, let's see, was it a 16' truck or a 20' half a block back that street, then parallel parked.

    1333:

    Um, yeah. If we didn't eat beef, cattle would be either extinct, or on the endangered species list.

    1334:

    As opposed to the Leader Of the Evil Empire... Kruschev, who actually won the Cuban Missile Crisis. US didn't invade, and did remove missiles from Turkey. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/16/cuban-missile-crisis-60-years-on-russians

    1335:

    These are the morons who only listen to pratnav... and are trying to do 85, and suddenly hear "take the next exit", and cut across three or four lanes of Interstate traffic because THEY DIDN'T BOTHER TO READ THE HUGE SIGNS OVER THE ROAD.

    And for the occifer who couldn't read a map? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXnJVkEX8O4

    1336:

    Std. treatment for TB, as of < 10 years ago, is 10 months of daily pills, and the Surgeon General of the US has the authority to jail someone who can't or won't keep up the regimen.

    1337:

    I like the ones who drive into canals, or down boat ramps. "it looked like a road on the satellite image"... yes, it does, and you'll even see cars on it sometimes. But not many cars can drive all the way down it and then back up.

    The ones who drive onto train tracks irritate me. I expect they annoy train drivers even more.

    We've all seen the videos of drivers ignoring the HUGE SIGNS and wind chimes before failing to drive under the low bridge. Apparently signs aren't all that useful.

    1338:

    I've told the story before here - when I moved to TX to be with my late wife, she had a washer. It had no water levels, only one. We looked in a repair-it-yourself book to fix something... and couldn't believe what we read. I took off the control panel cover... and yep, there was a water level control For $100 more, they gave you one with an extra hole drilled in the cover, and a knob. I drilled the hole, and we used a screw driver.

    It was cheaper for them to make them all alike, and charge for "additional features".

    1339:

    I've yet to see that, even in rental cars (which are < 2 yrs old). All had a real cabled brake.

    1340:

    At least 25% of Americans on the road need to go back to being 4 yrs old, and rediscover gravity. None of them seem to ever get the idea that going up a hill, you have to ->press down on the gas<- to maintain your speed.

    1341:

    I hate people who back in. And the biggest reason is they don't know how to drive. Watch them, in their cars, and see them in the stupormarket lot, or the medical facility parking garage, back in 3 or 4 times at least, and they're terrified of coming within 2 meters of the cars on the other side.

    1342:

    And I see today there was one last debate... and Walker didn't show.

    1343:

    No, it's a hard limit - heat of combustion of aluminium, with the sign reversed. The amount of energy you get out when you oxidise it is the same as the amount you have to put in to get back to aluminium and oxygen. Aluminium is a highly reactive metal, so that's a lot, and always will be.

    Because it's so reactive the only practical method of smelting it is by electrolysis (the alternative would be to reduce it using something even more reactive, like sodium, which was how it was first isolated but the inefficiency is through the roof). All the other "common" metals can be smelted chemically, usually with carbon as the reductant, which "hides" the amount of energy used in statistics for tons of coal, as well as needing less because the chemistry doesn't call for it. Aluminium, by contrast, makes it dead obvious by using energy in electrical form where the amount used is measured directly in units of energy, and at the same time needs a lot of it.

    The ore also needs to be melted first in order to mobilise the ions and allow it to conduct electricity in the first place. There may be some scope for reducing the energy used to melt it. The process already involves mixing a small amount of cryolite with the main bulk of bauxite to lower the melting point; this kind of thing depends on the additives being readily available in the right proportions to the main ore, which is already a difficulty with cryolite and I expect if there was a practical alternative they'd be onto it already. Aside from that there is the potential for recycling heat from the refined product to the starting materials, but as noted above the kind of heat exchanger needed to do that, while not impossible, would be a gigantic pain in the arse, and you could only ever save a small percentage of the total requirement because the amount of energy required for doing chemistry swamps the amount used for effecting physical transformations.

    1344:

    The mistake they always make with bridges is to depend entirely on signs and flimsy jingly things, and do not install a ruddy great steel girder across the road slightly lower than the minimum clearance under any part of the bridge. If you can't persuade them to stop in time, you have to make them stop, or at least plane the top of the roof off so what's left will fit.

    And put it right at the point where there is the last opportunity to turn round or go down a different road, not just before the bridge itself, so they aren't encouraged to try their luck because it would be such a pain to try and back out from where they've got to.

    1345:

    BCG vaccine is not unreliable. It’s not 100% but it’s easy to test for the antibodies. I was part of the generation who were all vaccinated at school. Everyone was also tested later with the Heaf test in the forearm. My first real job in 1966?(I don’t count picking rhubarb) was in the bacteriology lab of a TB hospital. Everyone was tested before being allowed to start and vaccinated again. Nobody caught TB despite culturing hundreds of TB samples per week, preparing and staining slides, injecting formalin into removed lungs to preserve them for histology and, when working in haematology, collecting blood from the patients on the wards. Until the 1980s I had to be tested before starting other jobs (I’ve worked in 8 different hospital labs). I don’t know anyone in those labs who caught TB. A doctor I met in Leeds Infirmary claimed that whenever she attended patients with TB the years old Heaf test on her arm developed red lumps again.

    1346:

    I don’t know if the signs in the USA are the same as Canada but I did this going to Toronto Airport. Without a satnav. I mistakenly assumed the signs would be like UK motorways where the signs on the bridges are always above the correct lane fog the slip road. I had to swerve across the whole highway when I reached my turn. If I’d had a satnav it would have indicated which lane to be in.

    1347:

    Over here the people like that just don't bother trying, and indeed the people who can do it don't bother all that often. If you're going to do it at all you quite often have to do it smartly; you have to get the initial angle, get the reversing lights on, and be in actually perceivable rearwards motion, quickly enough to make sure that the next car to come along gets the message not to stop a foot away from your rear bumper and then sit there like a lemon with a look of drooling moronicity on their face.

    1348:

    Looks like someone else is considering a relatively simple EV: https://www.citroen.co.uk/about-citroen/concept-cars/citroen-oli.html

    Being a concept car, no telling how much of this sees production, but good ideas.

    1349:

    Charlie Stross @ 1287:

    Except in the USA cars don't have "hand brakes", they have "parking brakes", which are usually a toggle or switch, often mounted at floor level. Nothing like the UK-mandated big-ass handle attached by a cable to the rear brake disks/drums ... except on newer cars that appears to be no longer mandatory.

    Except that ... up until recently the "parking brake" WAS a mechanical brake (and by "recently" I mean within the last 5 years or so). More "sporty" cars would have a big ol' lever on the console with a button on the end to release it. Pull up on the lever to set the brake; pull up slightly to release tension on the release button and then lower the lever.

    More sedate vehicles had a little pedal over on the left side that you can stomp on to set the brake and a little handle mounted under the dash board you pulled to release the brake. I think that's the origin of the hand brake becoming the parking brake, because it was a "foot brake" to set it & a "hand brake" to release it. The computer controlled brake was introduced into the U.S. from Europe or Asia.

    Someone told me the switch away from mechanical hand/parking brakes is because of the adoption of 4-wheel disc brakes. And I think anti-lock brakes might have something to do with it too.

    Charlie Stross @ 1289:

    Because nobody ever does that.

    Pigeon, you're English.

    In the USA, pointing your wheels at the kerb while parked on a hill is part of standard drivers' education. If you've ever driven in San Francisco you'd know why!

    In the UK it isn't standard but should be. Similarly, in the USA, drivers are generally not taught how to do a three-point turn or parallel park (much less how to do so with a manual transmission -- although I expect that latter requirement to disappear within the next decade as the shift to EVs and smarter automatic gearboxes continues).

    Oh the memories ...

    I took "Driver's ED" here in the U.S. in the summer of 1965. Turning your wheels so that you won't roll off down the hill if the "parking brake" failed wasn't part of the curriculum (don't remember where I learned it, but it's just common sense).

    We also didn't learn to drive a manual transmission because by that time most cars sold were automatics & the cars the school system used were loaners from a local car dealer.

    The three point turn & parallel parking WERE still in the curriculum. They were also part of the road test I had to pass when I went to get my driver's license later in the summer.

    A year later when my sister went to take her road test she didn't have to parallel park.

    Wheels turned to the curb & manual transmission were already dropped from the road test requirements because by then most new cars were sold with an automatic transmission and a lot of new drivers never encountered a manual transmission.

    One of my friends failed his first road test because he didn't adjust the rear view mirror. Even though the mirror was already adjusted to the right position for him, adjusting it when you got in the vehicle was a requirement on the road test.

    OTOH, putting on a seat-belt was NOT a requirement even though it was already being taught in Driver's ED.

    PS: They didn't teach you how to use the hand brake IF the hydraulic brakes failed, because by then the hand brake had morphed into the parking brake. It took a lot more finesse to slow a car with a pedal style parking brake & most people never mastered the skill.

    1350:

    These are the morons who only listen to pratnav... and are trying to do 85, and suddenly hear "take the next exit", and cut across three or four lanes of Interstate traffic because THEY DIDN'T BOTHER TO READ THE HUGE SIGNS OVER THE ROAD.

    I quite like my satnav (Apple Maps on my iPhone, which I connect to my speakers so I can listen to the voice instructions and don't need to look at the screen). It warns me well in advance of exits and the like, and often tells me which lane to be in (very useful when some lanes are exit-only, but the signs are hard to see). 10 km warning, 5 km warning, 1 km warning…

    I much prefer it to trying to see the huge signs over the road, which in Toronto* are almost always hidden by HUGE TRUCKS so by the time you can read them it's too late to safely change lanes. (Assuming you can, because like I said HUGE TRUCKS.)

    I suspect that those morons drive like that because that's how they drive, not because they are using satnav. When I was commuting I'd see it every day — people driving like crazy in the fast lane and then forcing their way to an exit. Often they'd do the same thing in the exit lanes — racing up the empty lane for westbound and then blocking it trying to force their way into the line of cars heading east. They aren't lost, they're just assholes.


    *The 401 is the busiest highway in North America. A large chunk of that traffic is trucks. (One day quite a few years ago there was a truckers strike and there were no semis on the highway — and there was absolutely no rush hour: 18 lanes of traffic traffic flowed smoothly at 100 km/h, rather than at a stop-and-start crawl.)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_401

    1351:

    Given the dubious joy of replacing those rear plugs, eroded by 14 years of high voltage, I suggest new plugs. A drop of light/penetrating oil at the base of each plug the day before you change them may make the procedure easier.

    1352:

    David L @ 1299:

    Now as to how hard it is to parallel park, my high school history teacher told his story of taking the test one county over from our small town county. The first thing the policeman giving the driving test said was "pretend there's a curb". There were no curbs in the county seat and likely not in the entire county. This would have been in the early 60s.

    I had to do the parallel parking portion of the road test against a "pretend" curb. Two lane asphalt side road with a gravel shoulder near the Highway Patrol station in Durham, NC. They painted a white line along one edge of the asphalt & measured whether you were parked close enough.

    1353:

    "PS: They didn't teach you how to use the hand brake IF the hydraulic brakes failed, because by then the hand brake had morphed into the parking brake. It took a lot more finesse to slow a car with a pedal style parking brake & most people never mastered the skill."

    I had to do that once around 1986. I was exiting the freeway at 70 mph on to an exit that did a 270 degree circle when I lost the footbreak. I was driving a 7-passenger shuttle van with a full-load when it happened, but fortunately the shuttle company had trained me to use the handbrake/footbreak combination, so we all lived!

    1354:

    I suspect that those morons drive like that because that's how they drive

    Todays gem was a smallish bus turning right into a side street. There was a car ahead of the bus in the "queue", but no visible gap in the two lanes of oncoming traffic. So after a few seconds the bus driver made a gap... they just turned right and started driving, going behind the car in front, and into the wrong side of the side street.

    There was a chorus of honking noises to indicate that the goose was ready for chopping, but no actual collisions. So by rule #1: if nothing bad happened everything is ok; that was a perfectly fine and normal driving manoeuvre.

    1355:

    SFReader @ 1321:

    Re: '... does she use the same knowledge of antibiotics she used to cure Erasmus Burgeson of TB to push for treating horses?'

    Depends on which TB. Also there's been an increase in drug resistant TB.

    But they don't have drug resistant TB in the New American Commonwealth; at least NOT YET. Wouldn't that give them a bit of a head start on eradicating TB if they didn't have to deal with drug resistant strains by ensuring patients always completed the required course of antibiotics.

    I mean, we have drug resistant TB because patients would take some of the antibiotics, get to feeling better and stop taking them before the pathogen is completely killed off.

    If you have a situation where you can NOT ALLOW PATIENTS TO STOP TAKING THE MEDICATION before the pathogen is completely killed off, would that prevent the development of drug resistant strains?

    1356:

    Pigeon @1344:

    You may be pleased to know that "ruddy great steel girders" are increasingly common on rail-over-road bridges in Brisbane. They're typically installed immediately adjacent to the bridge, as protection for it.

    We have the signs and the jingles too, of course. Defense in depth.

    1357:

    Pigeon @ 1344:

    The mistake they always make with bridges is to depend entirely on signs and flimsy jingly things, and do not install a ruddy great steel girder across the road slightly lower than the minimum clearance under any part of the bridge. If you can't persuade them to stop in time, you have to make them stop, or at least plane the top of the roof off so what's left will fit.

    And put it right at the point where there is the last opportunity to turn round or go down a different road, not just before the bridge itself, so they aren't encouraged to try their luck because it would be such a pain to try and back out from where they've got to.

    Over the years they've done both with the "can opener" bridge in Durham, NC. Neither were really effective. Apparently aluminum truck bodies can bend that "ruddy great steel girder across the road" given sufficient impacts.

    11Foot8 Crash Compilation 2019-2021

    They even raised the bridge ...

    Can Opener Bridge Has Been Raised - But Not Enough!

    At 4:22 you can see the old guard-rail & how much it has been deformed by impacts.

    1358:

    Pigeon @ 1317

    It's called "BCG" which stands for something that again I can't remember. We all had it at school and spent the rest of the term comparing the welts on our shoulders.

    I see that SFReader already answered (Bacille Calmette-Guérin) -- something I and my sister had administered upon arrival in 1966 in British Hong Kong, because children are at serious risk of TB, and the BCG vaccine is highly effective. My parents mindfully and forcefully ignored the American Medical Association's disrecommendation.

    The only disadvantage I had is that each subsequent school I attended wanted to give me a chest X-ray under the assumption that I would have a positive skin test. I soon started pushing back and finding more-polite and firm ways to say "no".

    Speaking of bridges: Non-propagandistic estimates of repair time for the Kerch Strait Bridge are now running about six months. So much for the quick takes in this space, eh?

    1359:

    Given the dubious joy of replacing those rear plugs, eroded by 14 years of high voltage, I suggest new plugs. A drop of light/penetrating oil at the base of each plug the day before you change them may make the procedure easier.

    Ah, the joys of long lasting plugs. Which removed the need to make it easy. I have no idea about the van in question but the process for the passenger rear side plug on the V8 in my mid 90s explorers had step one: remove passenger side front tire/wheel. I leave the rest to your imagination.

    1360:

    1328 - Contrarywise; management want computers to be "off" outside core hours to save on the electricity bill.

    1337 - Or through a gap that is too narrow "because it shows as a road on my prat nav!"

    1344 - Check out the 11'8"+8" bridge on YouTube, and then tell us where your beam would go.

    1361:

    1328: Most admins would specify their PCs to have "Wake-on-LAN" enabled in the "BIOS" for overnight updates. Your shut-down PC is probably still using a quarter of a watt or so, possibly more, unles you pull the plug.

    Also energy conservation happens because electricity is ridiculously expensive. When we can buy a roll of PV plastic to roll out on your roof or wall and staple down, 100 kW nameplate for two hundred dollars, and buy batteries to store the nine-tenths of the electricity that you can't use on the spot, say 200 kWh for two thousand dollars, your friend will go back to not bothering. Unless it's a hobby, like making your own cheese, or ultra-light bushwalking/hiking/tramping.

    Price trends are heading there. It'll be a couple of decades, maybe less.

    For a real minimalist EV, check out these.

    1362:

    Para 1 - And if management explicitly instruct you to throw the mains switch, and require IS to install BIOS passwords?

    1363:

    real minimalist EV

    Strictly for the enthusiasts, or people who live in places with awesome bicycle infrastructure. In which case why not buy a bike?

    Those are pretty good for commuting or something else where you're carrying one person and a handbag on smooth surfaces but they deal badly with bumps. Even the ones with bigger wheels and suspension. I see them round sometimes, but not the same person on one for more than a few months. Admittedly that could be because they're illegal in NSW so the cops catch up with them eventually.

    Bicycles, and I mean that in the legal sense, are much better. More options, more capable, safer etc. Also bigger so parking is more hassle, but OTOH once you get into decent speed and range on the scooter you're in cheap-ish ebike territory (in Australia we have two classes of ebike: cheap direct imports with no warranty, and Australian-retail ones with full warranty and pretty good chance of being road legal. The latter start about $AU1500 now (about $US1000 or twenty billion UK pounds).

    1364:

    The ones who drive onto train tracks irritate me. I expect they annoy train drivers even more.

    We had a real bozo a few years ago who somehow drove up the MAX light rail tracks here in Portland, Oregon. He proceeded to drive into a tunnel and go more than a mile up the tracks to the Washington Park station (450' underground). I suspect a lot of people were irritated!

    1365:

    The mistake they always make with bridges is to depend entirely on signs and flimsy jingly things, and do not install a ruddy great steel girder across the road slightly lower than the minimum clearance under any part of the bridge.

    Rather than destroy the over-height vehicles with a girder, connect the flimsy jingly things to a controller that triggers bright flashing lights and sirens...

    1366:

    The general trajectory of the Commonwealth is to make two years' progress per year of wall-clock time. They've got a serious industrial espionage organization, a government with an obsessive focus on education and skills, and a playbook of all the mistakes not to make (because other people already did that).

    When Miriam first encounters them their tech base is 1940-45 adjacent (she saw them as more primitive because in 1940-45 the cutting edge stuff wasn't very visible and in particular the local culture had no equivalent of modernism). By the time of "Empire Games" they're at 1970-75 parity, and the graduate education pipeline is finally beginning to deliver in bulk. By 2030 they should have reached roughly 1995-level parity, and by 2040 they'll have hit 2015-20: the gap will be invisible or even reversed by 2050.

    The point is, the Commonwealth knows what the next generation's critical path looks like -- they know where the bottlenecks are going to be, what the biggest obstacles and shortages are, and what derailed the USA's timeline. (For example, lithium sources, demand for rare earth elements, the need to develop EUV lithography if they want to still be advancing their microelectronic node size in 30 years' time.) So they're able to do central planning right -- not setting factory quotas for shoe production 5 years in advance, but knowing what technologies "shoe manufacturing" (metaphor) in the future will depend on and nurturing the skills to push them forward.

    1367:

    TB vaccines
    I don't know about now, but "NZ" used to vaccinate everybody, because there was (is?) a huge reservoir of TB across the nearer Pacific islands & people comiong to Aotearoa from there tneded to have it - but that was 40 years ago.
    What do they do now?

    whitroth
    Yes - Nikita was NOT stupid, unlike the nutters in charge of the madhouse at present.

    1368:

    For people who do not do it every day, it is much easier and safer to turn round and use your eyes normally, which is what wearing seatbelts prevents. Mirrors invert the image, and you have to develop a different set of reflexes to use that safely and at a reasonable speed (*). Yes, I can reverse using mirrors alone, but need to keep my speed at less than half what it is when turning round.

    (*) Needed to get back to somewhere you can turn around before an arsehole who can't reverse, traditionally a caravanner, comes along the same road and blocks you in.

    1369:

    As to manual vs. automatic, well you get tested on the car you bring. There may be some but most state don't care which transmission you have when taking the test.

    Which is why nobody there can drive stick. Well, almost nobody.

    In the UK, we have different vehicle license categories for manual and automatic transmissions. A manual endorsement allows you to drive automatics, but not vice versa. And without that endorsement you can't get insurance, which is mandatory -- with ANPR cameras to track uninsured vehicle plates, the vehicles can be seized and crushed if they're caught on the public roads. So there's a strong incentive to learn to drive on a stick shift, although that's probably going away as EVs take over and the huge price premium for an auto transmission goes away (they used to burn 10-20% more fuel and add 20% to the price of a new car).

    1370:

    Antibiotic resistant TB - it's already impacting health care workers according to the CDC.

    Ahem. The new hotness thirty years ago was MDR-TB, multidrug-resistant TB. Persistent strains, resistant to more than one front-line antibiotic, the only workable treatment was to use multiple antibiotics simultaneously and strictly enforce the treatment regime because the symptoms would cease after a few months but it'd take up to six months to eliminate the bacteria.

    As of twenty years ago the new hotness was XDR-TB -- virulent eXtreme Multidrug-Resistant TB, in some cases completely untreatable but in most cases only one or two fallback/emergency AB's still worked. IIRC it was first reported in South Africa and in Russian prisons. Tends to be fatal within 2-6 months if untreated, so really not something we want to encourage.

    1371:

    As opposed to the Leader Of the Evil Empire... Kruschev, who actually won the Cuban Missile Crisis. US didn't invade, and did remove missiles from Turkey.

    You missed the Turkish IRBM quid pro quo. (K moved the missiles into Cuba in retaliation for the USA putting Thor IRBMs in Turkey, about three minutes' flight time from Moscow. When the Cuba face-off de-escalated, those American missiles oddly vanished at the same time as the Soviet ones. Can't imagine why!)

    1372:

    I think that modern automatics are somewhat better than that, but I agree that the UK (and many other countries) will go straight from manual to EV, and it will become increasingly hard to get a manual licence! I suspect that it will just decay, like some of the obscurer existing licence categories. I can see things being a bit complicated for driving instruction and tests in the transitional period (*).

    I can see some EVs intended for heavy loads having gearboxes (probably epicyclic), to get up really steep hills, but they will be more like the high/low range changers on some off-road vehicles and so not relevant.

    (*) As you might expect, the gummint has managed to balls this up already. They don't seem to have explicitly stated that EVs are automatics for the purpose of licences, and they have introduced another regulation that seems to require 5 hours of special training!

    https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2018/784/pdfs/uksi_20180784_en.pdf

    And God help the poor person trying to discover if a category L licence allows him to drive an electric car!

    https://www.speakev.com/threads/anyone-know-the-law.6791/

    1373:

    Charlie @ 1370
    There was a movement to "go back" to the very first antibiotic drugs of the late 1930's { The Sulphonamides? }.
    If only because there is absolutely no bacterial resistance to these. Severe side-effects, but a lot better than dying. { My mother was treated, using one of these, for a persistent blood infection ... she said she was - basically - out of her head for about a week-&-a-half, but the infection curled up & died & was never seen again. }
    Is this still under consideration, or not?

    1374:

    Greg The main reason sulphonamides went out of use is widespread resistance. If they work well now it because there is no selection pressure for sulphonamide resistant bugs if it’s not used often.

    1375:

    Well, yes, but I was referring to serious hills (25% isn't rare in many parts of the UK). There are quite a lot of things that you need to do differently, compared to on hills of under 15%, both going up and going down, especially if your vehicle has only a moderate power/weight ratio.

    1376:

    We had a real bozo a few years ago who somehow drove up the MAX light rail tracks here in Portland, Oregon.

    For a spell we had a string of idiots driving on the streetcar tracks and into the tunnel downtown, at which point their car (usually and SUV) would get stuck and require heavy equipment to remove, blocking the tunnel and causing chaos to the morning commute. There was lots of wailing in the press about how the signage needed to be improved and there needed to be gates to stop cars entering the streetcar tunnel.

    But I've seen the tunnel entrances. There's no way you could miss all the warnings you have to pass to get into them. Given that virtually all the incursions happened in the wee hours of the morning, about the time nightclubs are letting out (and right beside the Entertainment District), my personal conclusion is that many of those drivers were sufficiently impaired that they shouldn't have been driving in the first place. (Whether it was alcohol, other chemical substances, exhaustion/hormones from hours of dancing, or whatever.)

    "Despite bollards, signs, rumble strips, flashing lights and raised track, some still manage to drive their cars down the Queens Quay streetcar portal, though mostly on weekends and in the middle of the night," he wrote at the time. "The TTC will now be installing a gate mechanism."

    https://www.blogto.com/city/2018/04/ttc-stop-cars-entering-streetcar-tunnel-toronto/

    I find the apparent belief expressed by some commentators that all you need are some signs and everything will be fine rather touching. No doubt some believe that over-reliance on satnav is the reason these drivers entered the tunnel. And no doubt satnav is responsible for the chap* who removed his license plates, cleaned his SUV, and abandoned his vehicle, too. "Remove your license plates and personal belongings, walk up the stairs, turn left and in 50 metres…"

    https://www.cp24.com/news/streetcar-service-disrupted-after-driver-gets-car-stuck-in-queen-s-quay-tunnel-1.3740683


    *"Chap" because the drivers are usually male, according to the police.

    1377:

    The point is, the Commonwealth knows what the next generation's critical path looks like -- they know where the bottlenecks are going to be, what the biggest obstacles and shortages are, and what derailed the USA's timeline.

    What happens when they catch up? At that point they won't have the foreknowledge about critical paths etc.

    The transition could be interesting. Will the central planners loosen up, or will they retain control (or at least try to)?

    1378:

    Oh, I don't know. Given how advanced some people seem to think those 'AI' systems are, the question "How do I hide myself from the police?" may have got just such advice :-)

    I agree that is it very unlikely that a prat nav was relevant in this case - he was just a prat failing to nav.

    1379:

    Apparently reverse parking is also standard practice when working on oil rigs (on land), in order to facilitate clearing the car park quickly if there's a blowout (and associated risk of big fire).

    1380:

    Once it's mandatory, it's mandatory. Then you have to use it (for the test, anyway), or choose to fail your test. Your call.

    1381:

    Until our oh! so wonderful! libertarian government restricts my freedom by abolishing the Disability Discrimination Act, I might be able to require them to drop that part of the test. It's VERY unclear how mandatory it is. The chances of me living until the court case was settled are somwehere between small and negligible, but that's by the way ....

    I haven't tried recently, but I could certainly use a suitable prat nav without compromising safety TOO badly; whether any such still exist, I don't know, and there certainly are a lot which would be hopelessly unsuitable. There are (VERY rare) circumstances in which I might even turn one on to see if it would help me (I have in the past), but I would ensure that I had a way of killing it and a more reliable fallback in the likely case it did not.

    1382:

    If you have a situation where you can NOT ALLOW PATIENTS TO STOP TAKING THE MEDICATION before the pathogen is completely killed off, would that prevent the development of drug resistant strains?

    It would certainly slow down the development of drug resistance a lot, but patient compliance (or the lack of it) isn't the only factor.

    By far the biggest source of antibiotic resistance is our insane, perverse willingness to permit the indiscriminate addition of antibiotics to animal feed. Farmers love it because it cuts down on illness in the herd and antibiotics promote weight gain, so profitability. But antibiotic resistant strains show up early and often in farm animals and then get into the human food chain and ultimately it kills us.

    1383:

    I suspect that it will just decay, like some of the obscurer existing licence categories. I can see things being a bit complicated for driving instruction and tests in the transitional period ().*

    Yeah. I know how to double-declutch, but only because for a while an elder sibling had a Morris Minor and they taught me in case I needed it. It was already a 25 year old car at the time, and was a very late manufactured model, and older than me!

    As I'm 58 today, I suspect very few drivers under 50 have that skill any more. And stick shift, or driving without a reversing camera or satnav, will go the same way.

    1384:
    If you have a situation where you can NOT ALLOW PATIENTS TO STOP TAKING THE MEDICATION before the pathogen is completely killed off, would that prevent the development of drug resistant strains?

    It would certainly slow down the development of drug resistance a lot, but patient compliance (or the lack of it) isn't the only factor.

    By far the biggest source of antibiotic resistance is our insane, perverse willingness to permit the indiscriminate addition of antibiotics to animal feed. Farmers love it because it cuts down on illness in the herd and antibiotics promote weight gain, so profitability. But antibiotic resistant strains show up early and often in farm animals and then get into the human food chain and ultimately it kills us.

    But I'm thinking adding antibiotics to animal feed would be another item listed in the Commonwealth's "Big Book of Other People's Mistakes We Should Avoid Making!"

    Wouldn't it?

    1385:

    Yep.

    Before Trump's lunatical grift in 2020, there was some hope that malarial resistance to hydroxychloroquine -- once the anti-malarial of choice -- was fading away and we could start using it again where absolutely necessary (resistance is becoming a problem with newer antimalarials too).

    Unfortunately convincing millions of doorknob-lickers to take it like candy for an infection it doesn't touch probably set that hope back years if not decades.

    1386:

    One might assume that the New Commonwealth would ban that practice, with draconian penalties for people doing it.

    1387:

    What happens when they catch up? At that point they won't have the foreknowledge about critical paths etc.

    What happened to Japan, South Korea, or Ireland when they "caught up"?

    They don't stop making progress, they just do so more slowly and the former leading nations have to deal with the cognitive whiplash of no longer being in front.

    Japan in 1946-66 made huge progress; from 66-86 they jumped ahead of the USA in per-capita GDP, causing significant paranoia, although the second two decades of progress were slower. Similarly, South Korea in 1953 was a basketcase flattened by war: it was really only after the end of the military dictatorship in the 1970s that they began to accelerate, hitting parity with the developed nations in the early 1990s. As for Ireland, Brits who didn't keep their eye on the neighbours have severe cognitive dissonance the first time they see 21st century Dublin. (My wife and I were visiting fairly regularly for a while and the changes from year to year were dizzying: it went from a priest-haunted poverty-stricken backwater to a leading western European economy in about 20 years flat. Oh, and the priests lost their grip on politics at the same time, yes, thank you Greg.)

    1388:

    The best way of dealing with a satnav is to learn how to selectively ignore it.

    If it tells you to take an exit you know to be wrong, you ignore it.

    If it tells you to take an exit you can't make because a convoy of trucks is blocking the lane, you ignore it.

    The satnav doesn't care: it won't sulk, it will recalculate and plot a new route then tell you in due course. It might tell you something blinking stupid ("take the next exit, make a U-turn, then drive 18 miles back to the last motorway junction and make a U-turn ...") but you can always ignore it. Just remember to tell the driving test examiner.

    1389:

    But I'm thinking adding antibiotics to animal feed would be another item listed in the Commonwealth's "Big Book of Other People's Mistakes We Should Avoid Making!"

    Yep.

    Or, more to the point: if you have a superpower to boostrap and an unlimited budget, you hire epidemiology professors to teach your own students and then you fund something like the CDC, with enough independence of remit to tell the politicians to fuck off if they plan to do something that will accidentally kill millions of people.

    (Really, biodefense ought to be on the same priority level and footing as civil defense or actual no-shit military defense. Everywhere. If the goal of government is to stay in business, then it follows that preventing its nation from collapsing by accident due to war or natural disaster is part of the job, and biodefense is ... well, if it's not obvious to you that it's fundamental, I'm not sure why I'm even bothering to type this.)

    1390:

    I agree that they will, though I think that driving without a sat nav will remain a minority use at least until 'AI' lives up to its name, for tricky and specialised cases.

    I assume that Google maps uses a similar algorithm to Google sat navs, and I use that a fair amount. If there is an obvious route (or 2-3), it usually gets them, but it has serious difficulty when there isn't. "Now THAT's a stupid idea" occurs 1% of the time even for obvious routes, and perhaps 30% of the time for seriously tricky ones. Interestingly, I occasionally get "WTF?" routes (*) even in fairly obvious cases, and perhaps 5% of the time in tricky ones. As I would want a prat nav largely for the tricky cases, that's not greatly useful!

    AA Routefinder is no better, incidentally.

    Even worse is the inability to say "DON'T route via the Ax from Y to Z" or "Make sure you turn LEFT onto the Ax". That's more important on my trike, of course, but it's fairly important with my car (think M6 Midlands). Sat navs may be better, but none of the people I have seen use them have succeeded in getting them to give up a stupid route and provide another. On Google maps, such attempts often lead it into generating loops, or turning a stupid route into a "Don't be a total arsehole" one.

    (*) Such as Cambridge to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

    1391:

    but you can always ignore it.

    Yes. Totally. I leave the voice off on my most of the time and just use the big lettered 0.3 MILES LEFT ON xxxx. And if I can't safely see it or my wife isn't telling me what to do I just deal.

    Around home not so much. Mainly it is used by me and most I know to avoid traffic slow downs.

    In the Dallas / Fort Worth metroplex I almost always would wind up with one or two recalculations. You have to try driving there or in Houston to really appreciate how crazy things are there.

    1392:

    Interestingly, I occasionally get "WTF?"

    These for me tend to be slow downs that Google EXPECTS to happen due to time of day or such.

    On Google maps, such attempts often lead it into generating loops

    I wonder if there's a country element to this. I only get into MAKE A U-TURN WHEN YOU CAN with them when it thinks my route will take much longer for whatever reason. Usually it's because I decided to stop in a store or similar on the way.

    1393:

    Hopefully the Commonwealth has got "don't feed antibiotics to farm animals" in its big list of big don'ts.

    They may also be able to establish a better convention for delivering a course of antibiotics. You'll always get a significant number of non-compliant patients simply because people forget or can't be arsed. Maybe the standard procedure, at least for some antibiotics, could be to give the first couple of doses individually, then once you know the patient isn't going to have a reaction to it, give the remainder of the course as a slow-release implant. This would be particularly valuable for things like TB where the bacteria shut themselves up in forts and you have to wait out the siege to the bitter end, and it seems to have proven a popular and desirable option for the vaguely similar dosage regime of contraceptives.

    This is far more your area than mine but I guess it's quite possible that we have ruined through ill-controlled use some of the antibiotics that would lend themselves to delivery by implant, whereas the Commonwealth is in a position of being able to control their use properly from the start by using the implant method and so avoid becoming lumbered with the same restriction. So it could be a useful idea for them even if it's now a missed chance for us. (I've no idea whether it is or not, I'm just reckoning that it might be.)

    1394:

    Yes, indeed - but my problem is the distraction they cause, largely because of my disabilities. I can drive perfectly safely if I avoid circumstances where they handicap me, and I have adapted to doing just that.

    I can drive safely while listening to Radio 4 (without hearing aids at 90-100 dB!) or when people are talking in the car (with hearing aids), because I give absolute priority to the road, and (logically) switch off my hearing when I need to concentrate. I have done this all my life, because hearing is very hard work. Passengers are told NOT to interrupt the driver - and, if I have to be rude to guests to enforce that, I am. Very. Yes, I can hear the clearer sat navs if they are loud enough - though not together with Radio 4 or passenger conversation, of course. Have you ever tried to tell car passengers that they must not speak to each other?

    I have lost all accomodation (At 74? surprise! surprise!) and cannot handle bi- or vari-focals because of my balance, so the dashboard is blurred. Dial speedometers and lights are no problem, because I don't need to read the numbers, nor are digital speedometers with large numbers. So, legally and for safety, there isn't a problem. But reading street names on a sat nav, oh! dear! I can use them by seeing the pattern of streets, but that's not totally reliable, and it takes some concentration, so is distracting.

    1395:

    Look up the Cambridge to Birmingham route, and think of circumstances when routing via Beachy Head is sane. The WTFs I was referring to have been less large-scale, but no less insane.

    1396:

    Which is why nobody there can drive stick. Well, almost nobody.

    Your way over simplifying a societal issue. IMNERHO

    In the US currently sales of stick vs automatic are something like 5/95. Where in Europe last I looked it was more like 70/30. My exact number may be off but I'm in the ballpark. And in the US that number is shrinking for all but sports cars.

    Two things happened in the US to eliminate sticks. First we just had more money in the 50s and 60s. And wanted bigger cars. Which led to more demand for power steering, brakes, and automatic transmissions. Family cars in the US many times had automatic transmissions in the 50s and by the early 60s were well established. Talk to women in the 50s/60s trying to drive a big car with a clutch and no power steering or brakes in heels. You'd get an earful. Our 62 Ford Falcon small station wagon had an automatic.

    Then came car mileage. Some here don't seem to believe it but automatic transmissions for a while now get better gas mileage than all but the best clutch drivers. So it made it easier to hit the EPA mileage targets.

    I suspect that in Europe lower incomes after WWII and higher gas taxes leading to smaller cars in the 50s/60s was also a factor in keeping automatic transmissions at bay.

    I made my kids learn to drive a clutch. My wife and future daughter in law can drive a clutch. My son in law is the outlier in our clan. But 5 out of 6 is a rare clump except for farming communities.

    1397:

    Being forced to store identification and financial authorisation to 'apps' on mobile phones (let alone bloody cars!) is a major security risk. Even when the phone is secure(ish), apps can be extremely iffy, and I am pretty certain that you only have to download one bad app for it to hack data out of another. Apple are among the most secure, but are not immune, despite their claims. Also, what security any phone provides is only to the owners of very recent models.

    I emotionally want to write an essay but will pass.

    The above is just not true. Especially on Apple phones. No matter what "Which ?" magazine says. It was somewhat true 5 or more years ago. Maybe 10 for sure. But the last few (4 or 5 or more) years of iOS have locked such things down. Even on older phones.

    Unless your name is Liz 2x4 you don't need to worry about a recent phone being rooted. At least with Apple. Android is sill behind here but working hard on it. I've been working around system admins dealing with 100Ks of phone users and none of them have ever deal with rooted iPhones.

    As to "Which ?" it seems to be similar to the US "Consumer Reports". And I subscribe to CR. I use them before buying an air conditioner or washing machine. But never for things like computers or smart phones. The boil it down to a simple chart just doesn't work for a device with so many use cases. And CR also writes some what inflammatory stories where they just loose the nuance of what they are saying.

    I could write a book but to summarized, your information is wrong.

    But it also sounds like the UK EV charging situation is a mess. And on that I have no idea.

    1398:

    My experience with non-nautical GPS navigation is almost entirely Google Maps. Occasionally it gives me an unexpected/inexplicable direction. I have learned to usually follow it, because it tends to be routing me around a traffic obstruction of some kind.

    A very common experience for where we live is coming off a ferry and going to a hockey arena in multiple vehicles. 10-15 vehicles deboard the same ferry and take their own routes to the same destination with very similar starting conditions. That creates an informal experiment on route taking and GPS effectiveness. On multiple occasions I've arrived at a common destination as much as 30 minutes ahead of others because Google maps took me through a strange little diversion that (I was later informed) avoided an accident site or other holdup.

    I've never bothered to do any kind of formal sampling (i.e. Google Maps vs. other map software) because I don't care enough.

    1399:

    That is a repetition of previous posts, and I shall not respond to again, except to refer you to OGH's posts #1093 and #1094.

    No, I am NOT prepared to do that, and I agree that those are necessary precautions to keep an Iphone with financial authority on secure.

    1400:

    Charlie @ 1387
    Oh my, how true that is .... the first time I went to Dublin in 1965 .. "third World" was, in places, a step up from the actual situation.
    It wasn't "just" or "only" the RC church, of course, there was an awful lot of collateral damage from having the revolting "Dev" in charge for years & the outright corruption, particularly in fianna fail.
    Unfortunately the corruption in the Ulster Unionists was as bad, & in some cases, worse.

    @ 1389 ...
    Because, particularly in the Youessay ... "Life, Liberty & the pursuit of Happiness" DOES NOT apply to the health/welfare of the citizens & there are nutters shouting from the rooftops that this is a "good thing" ....

    1401:

    I learned to drive stick as a desperation move. One type of 'casual' labor for young people on the prairies was 'rock picking.' In the spring there would be any number of large rocks that the frost had pushed to the surface of farmer's fields over the winter.

    So they would hire a dozen or so young people to walk the field behind a tractor and pick up all the rocks to load on a trailer. On one such day it was about 30C and we were suffering. The farmer got called away and asked if anyone knew how to drive stick (in the air conditioned tractor cab). I put my hand up and spent the next half hour stalling and lurching my way through understanding the clutch and other mechanisms. And then I understood how to drive stick. There was much resentment from some of the other rock pickers...

    1402:

    And having to buy a new socket, and I have to go into the engine to find which one fits, because the rubber inside the socket's gone, which means I can't pull the damn plug out... and it's in a deep well.

    1403:

    Yep. He'd seen WWII, and was well aware that the USSR had 10% of the entire population die in it.

    1404:

    Huh? You may have misread what I wrote - I said that JFK got the missiles out of Turkey.

    And, of course, the "right" people knew that he'd "given in" to the Evil Emprire, and that's why he was assassinated (yes, I'm one who doesn't believe it was Oswald).

    1405:

    I've generally had good experiences with SatNav. However, I also drove for the shuttle company before SatNav was available, so I'm familiar with the alternative method of dealing with not knowing where you're going, which is the use of a map book, which generally sits in the driver's lap as they try to find their way through your neighborhood, usually while in a tearing hurry! I think I can safely guarantee you that the Satnav, if mounted on the dashboard, is much safer for everyone than the use of a map book.

    1406:

    First, yep. Coming back from near Havre de Grace yesterday with Ellen, it wanted us to take I695, aka the Baltimore Beltway, rather than stay on I-95. Now, it clearly had zero input on right-then traffic. We could see the traffic jam of people trying to get on the Beltway as we breezed by on I-95, and we got home about, having stopped to pick up subs for dinner without ordering ahead, about the time that it told us we would get home by taking the Beltway....

    That is the really aggravating one - the inability to say "DO NOT ROUTE ME ON x". It desperately wants to use its algorithmic route, never mind you know better.

    1407:

    On the occasion when traffic's REALLY bad, I will tell anyone/everyone in the car "do not talk to me, I'm in full cab driver mode, and need 100% of my attention to the traffic".

    1408:

    give the remainder of the course as a slow-release implant

    That simply won't work for most medicines. Consider a course of amoxycillin where you take 4 x 250mg capsules a day for five days. That's a total of five grams, which is a mammoth damned implant: you'd really know where it was! And most antibiotics are worse. For TB you're talking about a six month course of several hundred milligrams per day of various drugs, so on the order of 100g-1Kg.

    Thing is, we have some drugs where the effective dose is tiny: nanograms/kg body weight. But for most of them it's micrograms to multiple milligrams per kilogram. And they metabolize, decay, or are eliminated in a matter of hours, so you have to keep replenishing them.

    Antibiotics: a decade or so ago my father had bacterial endocarditis, so they shoveled a penicillin it responded to into him intravenously until he began developing an allergic reaction, then switched to gentamicin (somewhat toxic, but no allergic reaction). At one point they were shovelling three grams of penicillin a day through his veins, and they kept it up for ten days. Think in terms of a bottle of 60 old-school 500 gram tablets. That's going to be quite some implant!

    1409:

    Speaking of Liz 2x4, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/18/britannia-rechained-liz-truss-hostage-era-jeremy-hunt

    Great lines: "Hunt is the new chancellor, in the German sense of the word."

    1410:

    I side with Ballard, and believe that Oswald was killed to ensure he wouldn't talk - by someone who couldn't reasonably be questioned at length. Yes, who DID load the starting gun?

    1411:

    So Labour's job is to sink the Bismarck?

    1412:

    If I recall, the old rabies injection was 1/2 pint and had to be put into the abdominal cavity. My tumour in the same place is (was?) bigger than that, and had no visible effects. It could be done, but abdominal surgery isn't something you want to do lightly, not even on livestock!

    1413:

    Remember that (a) I am using it on a desktop or laptop, not in a car and (b) the routes I am most interested in don't have enough traffic for Google's snooping to give a decent estimate. On the simpler routes where it DOES have enough data, a temporary glitch could easily account for the 1% of stupid routes, but I have no explanation for the (admittedly rare) WTFs.

    I have certainly beaten its best route by significant margins on several occasions, but mostly on rural, minor road routes, with little traffic. Yes, you are lost in a maze of twisty little lanes all alike territory :-) Its algorithm is not good on those.

    1414:

    My personal opinion is mid-level CIA and military (and there are possible evidence the E. Howard Hunt was one of the assassination team - he may have been one of the five men arrested for "loitering" or whatever they arrested hobos for... five minutes down the railroad tracks that were on the other side of the grassy knoll, 15 min after the President of the US was assassinated. Yep. And they found Oswald three-quarters of the way across town in a dark movie theater by an off-duty cop. Yep.

    On the other hand, I don't believe the Warren Commission was in on it. Back in the early nineties, I dipped into alt.conspiracy for the humor value... and one day found a post that I believe to this day. Whoever did it made sure that all the evidence they'd find in the first days would point to Cuba... and if Castro ordered it, then the US would have to go in, and it would be WWIII, the Big One. And LBJ saw that, and every member of the Warren Commission saw that, and LBJ said "you will find him a lone gunman, because I will NOT end the world on my watch" and the Commission agreed 100%.

    1415:

    That's a very believable theory. There's no evidence it's true, but it might fit the issues and motives.

    1416:

    EC said: "I can see some EVs intended for heavy loads having gearboxes (probably epicyclic), to get up really steep hills, but they will be more like the high/low range changers on some off-road vehicles and so not relevant."

    Well, Teslas only have 1 gear in their transmission. It seems more likely that instead of trying to make a transmission that can take the torque (which electric motors have in spades) that a heavy load EV will just gang up multiple motors to use when needed, and shut them down and disengage them when a single motor is sufficient. Sort of like turbo boost on CPUs.

    1417:

    That's very plausible - one motor per axle or whatever. It would still be done either automatically, or like selecting high/low ranges, so wouldn't be like a manual gearbox.

    1418:

    Ah, right, I do tend to forget how huge the doses for antibiotics usually are. I'm more inclined to think of pills as being 99% inert material to make it possible to handle a dose you can barely even see (eg. nitroimidazoles for pigeons, single-digit milligrams per bird). I think a 5g implant could be made reasonable by not shaping it as a compact lump, but 1kg would be a bit more tricky.

    1419:

    whitroth
    A US Liberal view on our political utter fuck up.

    EC
    Strange as it may seem, I side with you & whitroth ... it was all far too "pat" & convenient, wasn't it?
    Jack Ruby was plainly off his head - how very useful - he'd been gaslit, probably.
    ... And showing { per. whitroth again } that LBJ was seriously sane, unlike Putin.

    Mr Tim
    For actual heavy loads, you do NOT use automotive models, you do what railways do for electic locomotives, yes?

    1420:

    1383 - I found out that I can drive clutchless when the clutch cable on the car broke. So, down the years, have various of my workmates (ages and sex also vary).

    1396 - You may find this hard to believe, but in general a European car with a torque convertor automatic is slower (acceleration and top speed) and less economical than having the same engine in the same bodyshell, with the same trim level than a manual version.

    1402 - Sight unseen and model unknown, if you're talking about a plug box I'd guess 10mm or 14mm.

    1408 - Or pertinent to mentions of Covid-19 Xevudy 500mg is made up to 0.5l and administered by infusion over 30 minutes. Even for one doze that's a lot, even with a patient who's already been cannulated.

    1421:

    Ever seen the pics from the mid-seventies that started in the Yupster Times (the Yippie newsletter) that, two weeks later, were in the NYT of the "vagrants" being busted? Blow-ups of one of them showed the ear, oddly sticking out, looking just like Hunt's.

    1423:

    The Grauniad covers today's Expressen piece (that is mostly paywalled), showing the first public photos of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline damage. 50 friggin' metres of the pipeline is now simply missing, and photos "appear to show long tears in the seabed".

    What that says to me is that someone used a whole lot more explosives than would have been required simply to disable the pipeline. It was overkilled.

    Earlier, Swedish prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said his country would decline to participate in an international investigative effort because doing so would require agreeing to share all information, and "there is some information in our investigation that is confidential because it is directly linked to national security". (Denmark similarly declined.)

    What that says to me is that at least Sweden, if not also Denmark, knows quite a lot about the sabotage, but has major intelligence sources and methods it wants to carefully protect.

    OGH @ 1371:

    You missed the Turkish IRBM quid pro quo. (K moved the missiles into Cuba in retaliation for the USA putting Thor IRBMs in Turkey, about three minutes' flight time from Moscow. When the Cuba face-off de-escalated, those American missiles oddly vanished at the same time as the Soviet ones. Can't imagine why!)

    Those were PGM-19 Jupiter intermediate missiles, not PGM-17A Thor intermediates.

    Kennedy ordering the Jupiter missiles removed (from both Turkey and Italy) was actually something of a fake-out -- but this was in the era of fake-outs and perilous blundering on both sides of the Cold War (e.g., the "missile gap" nonsense, and NORAD's BMEWS site at Thule Air Base, Greenland nearly triggering WWIII by misinterpreting the moon rising over Norway as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia).

    Both the Thors and the Jupiters were damningly slow to erect, fuel, and launch -- about 15 minutes -- and lacked any site protection, hence had approximately zero value as a counterstrike weapon in a four-minute-warning world. Far from protecting anyone, they basically invited attack. (Actually, the Thors needed to be erected before fuelling. The Jupiters were stored erected, with warhead, scarily vulnerable to lightning strikes, which happened on two occasions, causing everyone around to have nightmares for years, I'm sure.)

    In essence, JFK pulled them as part of the "deal" primarily because they were a terrible idea, anyway, and needed to go.

    1424:

    No, I haven't, but what you've presented is certainly one of the more believable scenarios.

    By any chance did you ever read the Illuminatus Trilogy?* They had a very dark, very funny take on the Kennedy assassination. From what you've written about your take on alt.conspiracy you should if you haven't - it will make you laugh like a crazy person.

    * For those who've never heard of it, Illuminatus is Lord of the Rings for really freaky people. It even has the same structure of 2.5 books plus an appendix. If you're at all aligned with the Discordians or the Church of the Subgenius, or simply find conspiracy theories fun it's excellent reading.

    1425:

    Which will be a lot more feasible as batteries/power supply systems get better. My Bolt is front-wheel drive only, which I never mind until I need to go down an icy hill -- having independent axial motors, or even independent wheel motors, would be a big help. Not viable with my current batter, of course. I'd like to be able to get more than 100 miles out of it on a cold day.

    As for Kennedy, I'm not sure what I believe other than that the Warren Commission never got the full truth, and that the glaring hole left in its wake went a long way toward the ever-widening gyre of paranoia, both the reasonable and whacky kind, and both the naturally-occurring and politically-encouraged kind. Though I do like some of the theories that hinge on Secret Service incompetence, especially given what we've learned about that organization in the last ten years or so... namely that they sometimes make the Pennsylvania Highway Patrol look like the Men in Black, in terms of personal professionalism.

    1426:

    Yeah, I read part of it at least, a long time ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_tramps Which does not explain why a single Dallas cop would be busting vagrants, and not running around like chickens with their heads cut off... and then so easily pick up Oswald.

    1427:

    The authors, one of whom was Robert Anton Wilson, definitely weren't trying to explain it, but they were being very blackly humorous.

    1428:

    one motor per axle or whatever.

    Sydney buses have one motor per rear wheel, this removing the need for a differential. 150kW per motor, oil cooled.

    I vaguely recall Tesla has done the same thing. I think one of the electric supercars has even gone for more than one motor per wheel, for efficiency reasons - over some ridiculous speed they kick in the extra motors that are designed to only really work at ridiculous speeds, and that extra megawatt gets them from ridiculous to insane...

    I can see lots more things becoming 4WD just because four smaller motors is easier to deal with than two larger ones, with the benefit of better traction and handling being important but not critical. Especially with trucks, where a standard {smallish} motor times two for little trucks and times four for slightly bigger ones, times six for the even more middle-size ones. Maybe. I'm not an engineering economist or whatever they call the BoM optimising people (in architecture this is an important part of a project managers job).

    1429:

    By the time of "Empire Games" they're at 1970-75 parity, and the graduate education pipeline is finally beginning to deliver in bulk.

    Sorry, in my mind they're still fighting the WWII-era revolution. I get that they're past that point, but it still feels very "one country, coming out of the war". But yes, they will definitely be running way ahead of our history. And much as I would like to argue with the author, I ain't gunna 😋

    The biological warfare side doesn't have to be intentional, but it probably will be. Maintaining strong biocontrol borders when you have world-walkers is hard. Plus introducing diseases is a traditional colonial technique, so it seems likely to me that the Commonwealth would be dealing with covid sans mRNA vaccines or any real anti-viral treatments. Except for the elites, as always. Basing that on our difficulty vaccinating everyone, so assuming that a planet with less high tech industry as a proportion of population would struggle more. But balancing against that the history of Cuba as an exporter of medical staff, and the apparent success of Russia as a failing, partially industrialised power that seems to have managed covid less badly than expected.

    1430:

    Speaking of which I saw a headline today and TBH I don't even know where to start: "Report: Trump Considers Marjorie Taylor Greene a “Great” Pick to Lead DOJ". I.. just... can't......

    1431:

    RE: 'Wouldn't that give them a bit of a head start on eradicating TB if they didn't have to deal with drug resistant strains ...'

    Maybe they could get one of their people a job at the Gates Foundation to check on progress. The B&BGF has contributed $217 million in TB research and control funding since about 2004 - that's TB-specific funding to uni research labs, private labs, etc. (Basically, I'm saying that there's still a lot of work to do wrt TB, but hey! SF absolutely allows for a handwavium mRNA vax for TB.)

    Based on what we saw in how COVID spread, my thinking is that globe-trotting is the geographic 6-degrees-of-separation equivalent: if you're in a major city, you're potentially exposed to at least half of the planet including its various germs.

    And like COVID, not everyone who 'catches' TB automatically shows TB symptoms. These folks have what's called latent TB infection (LTBI). While LTBI means they can't - at that particular moment in time - spread TB, if they don't undergo treatment then the LTBI can potentially become 'active TB' which they then can spread (infect others).

    Charlie @1370:

    Re: 'As of twenty years ago the new hotness was XDR-TB -- virulent eXtreme Multidrug-Resistant TB ...'

    That's a lot worse than the CDC write-up suggests. Thanks!

    1432:

    Charlie Stross @ 1389:

    (Really, biodefense ought to be on the same priority level and footing as civil defense or actual no-shit military defense. Everywhere. If the goal of government is to stay in business, then it follows that preventing its nation from collapsing by accident due to war or natural disaster is part of the job, and biodefense is ... well, if it's not obvious to you that it's fundamental, I'm not sure why I'm even bothering to type this.)

    Preaching to the choir here at least.

    1433:

    Greg Tingey @ 1419:

    whitroth
    A US Liberal view on our political utter fuck up.

    I do wish "editors" would PROOF READ news stories instead of just running spell-check.

    The Britain is a COUNTRY, not a COUNTY.

    I know I'm nit-picking, but it gets on my nerves. I would have failed high-school "English" classes if I had left such glaring mistakes in an essay.

    1434:

    Greg @ 1367: TB in NZ

    We still vaccinate AFAIK. The worrisome reservoir is not Pacific Islands, but 1) South and Central Asia, and 2) the feral Australian possum, common rat, and mustelid (stoat, weasel) populations, which interact with cows and sheep (and directly with humans, in towns).

    It's more prevalent in deprived areas (poor housing, malnutrition, etc.).

    1435:

    1374: antibiotic resistance

    I remember my mum (who was a biochemist) telling me that before the sulfa drugs (i.e., in the '10s and '20s) they used silver-based antimicrobials. From a quick web search it seems resistance to "colloidal" silver is still muted.

    1436:

    alantyson @ 1425:

    As for Kennedy, I'm not sure what I believe other than that the Warren Commission never got the full truth, and that the glaring hole left in its wake went a long way toward the ever-widening gyre of paranoia, both the reasonable and whacky kind, and both the naturally-occurring and politically-encouraged kind. Though I do like some of the theories that hinge on Secret Service incompetence, especially given what we've learned about that organization in the last ten years or so... namely that they sometimes make the Pennsylvania Highway Patrol look like the Men in Black, in terms of personal professionalism.

    I'm inclined toward the "theory" the problems with the Warren Commission have two sources:

    •1 I'm convinced Earl Warren had a "secret" charge from LBJ that no matter what the truth was, the final report had to eliminate Cuba as the force behind the assassination. I think the CIA was looking to use the assassination as a Casus belli against Cuba (that's why I believe the CIA had a hand in the conspiracy) and Johnson told Warren to short circuit that.

    •2 The Warren Commission relied on the FBI for investigative resources and J Edgar Hoover was not only willfully incompetent, he had actual malice toward the Kennedys. Bobby Kennedy was going to enforce the government's mandatory retirement age rules against Hoover & force him out as Director of the FBI.

    Hoover had means, motive & opportunity to cover up the FBI's incompetence (if not actual involvement in the conspiracy).

    I've seen convincing evidence that Oswald was making his living after he returned from Russia as a PAID INFORMANT for the FBI. He even listed the payments as income on his income tax return. He was NOT an FBI agent, just another no-account being USED by the FBI.

    Remember this is the period where the only think keeping the CPUSA afloat was FBI informants paying their dues. They were the only ones who could find work (black lists, McCarthyism, ...) that paid enough for them to do so.

    Google "Oswald & the fingerprints of intelligence".

    I don't know who was running the conspiracy to murder Kennedy. I doubt we ever will untangle it. But I am certain Oswald's role was FBI informant inside the conspiracy & he was scapegoated after.

    PS: I don't think Cuba had anything to do with the assassination, but I do think the CIA's "leadership" wanted to blame Cuba and use it as an excuse to overthrow Castro. And they wanted to get back at Kennedy for failure of the "Bay of Pigs" invasion because he wouldn't commit U.S. military forces to it.

    1437:

    Makes you go permanently blue though...

    1438:

    "the Satnav, if mounted on the dashboard"

    That's the only way I'll use it if driving: sitting at eye level so it can be seen with a side-way glance while keeping the road in the field of vision. Better yet is to have the passenger use it and serve as the navigator.

    1439:

    Yeah, that's one of only two places I'll use a satnav:

    (a) Mounted on the dashboard directly beneath the rearview mirror, in line of sight but not obstructing the view of the road ahead

    (b) A built-in satnav where the screen is part of the instrument console

    (The latter is generally preferable and probably going to be universal within a very short period).

    1440:

    This is the first time I've seen the Kennedy Assassination being a strange attractor on this blog.

    It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng, and his security. If such a non-entity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd.
    —Norman Mailer

    This is quoted at the beginning of Stephen King's 11/22/63. King said in the afterward:

    Early in the novel, Jake Epping's friend Al puts the probability that Oswald was the lone gunman at ninety-five percent. After reading a stack of books and articles on the subject almost as tall as I am, I'd put the probability at ninety-eight percent, maybe even ninety-nine. Because all of the accounts, including those written by conspiracy theorists, tell the same simple American story: here was a dangerous little fame-junkie who found himself in just the right place to get lucky. Were the odds of it happening just the way it did long? Yes. So are the odds on winning the lottery, but someone wins one every day.

    It comes down to parsimony. Was there a conspiracy, huge or small, that hasn't leaked in almost 60 years? Or was it just "a small lonely man", like all-too-many mass shooters in the USA? I could be wrong, but I know which option I'd put my money on.

    1441:

    I suppose it would be possible to run a satnav with a HUD (per jet fighter). That won't really work until it generates a set of "what to look for" symbols, though; an arrow when you're 100 metres short of a turn, and so forth.

    1442:

    TAOCP Volume 4b is available (only Kindle so far)

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0BHZL3XKP

    1443:

    You are misreading the "small lonely man" senario. Many (probably most) of those have been radicalised by 'social media' etc. That wasn't a thing back then, but turning a "small lonely man" into a killer has been a known technique for ages. You don't need a full-blown conspiracy, just suitable nudges. Was Oswald 'encouraged' and, if so, by whom? Similar, we should ask the same about Ruby. The parsimony argument cuts two ways: TWO "small lonely men", with such a neat closure? Hmm.

    Actually, there are lots of conspiracies that don't leak for 60 years, and it is even possible that some of the extant conspiracy theories have come close to the truth. I can't remember the examples, but several have recently surfaced in the UK dating from the Macmillan era and earlier. Yes, it does argue that there wasn't a large or complicated conspiracy, but a few people quietly arranging something like that? I remember seeing contemporary reports of the political pressure to find that Oswald was a lone gunman, and of the people who were trying to start a war. JohnS's post is very plausible.

    1444:

    I suppose it would be possible to run a satnav with a HUD (per jet fighter).

    I rented a GM truck in Florida five years ago that had exactly that. So handy I almost bought one when I got back to California.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgK9telG2b0

    1445:

    For what it's worth, I agree with yours and Mailer's point that one of the reasons a lot of people reach for conspiracies is that it's so hard to imagine a figure so huge that he's practically a work of fiction or myth, being taken down by some schmo. But I think EC's got the right of it, that it can be both the small, lonely man, and some great (seemingly-fictional) power, like an alphabet soup agency, and maybe that's the best/only way to do it.

    As for how the truth could never leak in 60 years: the lesson we've all had to learn (or re-learn, or stand aghast as people who really should know better claim to never have learned) in the last decade is that "truth" just ain't enough if it's not the truth to everybody. Bad actors in the U.S. gov't having been "flooding the zone with shit" for far longer than ass-ticks like Steven Bannon have even been alive, and "deny, deny, deny" has been domestic policy since before there was a USA that could have a domestic policy. Not to get all "meta-conspiracy theory," but I think there's something to the idea that, even if the US gov't had nothing to do with the assassination (and, again, I don't believe they did, and I don't not believe they did), they had a vested interest in muddying the story, and maybe allowing or encouraging some of the wilder-but-still-plausible theories to take root in American culture. It's easier to bury the truth (whatever the truth is) if you have a lot of trash bags lying around full of bullshit.

    I mean... I'm a decently well-read student of my country's history, and up until fairly recently, I thought MK-Ultra was fictional, and had no idea as to its scope. Nowadays, my mom knows full well that her, my dad, and their classmates may well have been targeted by it. I guess you just never know when the pieces are gonna suddenly click together in the collective unconscious.

    1446:

    Robert Caro's The Passage of Power starts with a pretty compelling picture of how LBJ won big with the assassination. Just saying.

    Anyway, back on the topic, the NYT is covering Truss's troubles: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/19/world/europe/liz-truss-uk-parliament.html

    And Paul Krugman tries to make the case that there are no libertarians any more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/18/opinion/liz-truss-uk-conservative-politics.html.

    Though, I think that compelling graphic (from Lee Drutman) is a bit misleading. But that lower-right quadrant is pretty empty.

    1447:

    So who had "Home Secretary" in the Next Minister To Quit sweepstakes?

    Confidential documents sent from personal email...

    1448:

    One note: the FBI, I think it was, had someone who was current on their expert marksmanship shoot at a comparable target with that rifle... and hit the target something like one time out of three. This was not the competition sniper rifle of Julie in the 1632 series.

    1449:

    Re: 'As for how the truth could never leak in 60 years: ...'

    Where would you put Guatanamo Bay on the 'the truth is out there' continuum?

    By international law/UN standards, no civilized country should operate a prison like GuatBay. Yet, it's still there. Basically - ignore any/everything that clashes with your (country's) self-image. Have wondered whether a lot of the fuss about not encouraging USians to travel to Cuba is so that they don't find out what's been in plain sight for the past 20+ years.

    1450:

    Not me; I did however, ~18:02 BST, comment "To lose one Cabinet Minister may be misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness."

    1451:

    Two in one day if the Chief Whip is confirmed as having resigned.

    1452:

    I’ve been using a HUD satnav for years. Navmii. It’s nighttime only unless you buy a Hudway glass and works by mirroring the screen. You then place it just below the windscreen and the reflection acts as the HUD. It works very well and displays next turn instructions, distance to destination, speed, speed limit and safety cameras I use the windscreen as the display. The phone has to be in landscape orientation and if you don’t have a suitable mounting it can slide during sharp cornering. I use Blu-Tac. I would buy a Hudway but Navmi uses an open source map which is slower than Google Maps to load up to date traffic data. Anyone who has travelled on the A11 and A14 for the past few years knows the need for traffic updates.

    1453:

    I mean, that's a case of the truth not only being "out there," but it being documented by multiple reputable sources both before and after Guantanamo Bay because a household name. The trouble is "documented by multiple reputable sources" not only isn't the same thing as "in the public consciousness," these days it seems the two are almost antonymous.

    Which in this case is a damn shame. I'd love to visit Cuba. I remember traveling to Toronto around 2013-14 to visit a girl I was dating, and seeing travel advertisements for Havana. I felt like I'd... well, frankly, like I'd worldwalked (thought I didn't know the term at the time) into a slightly saner, slightly kinder universe.

    Re: Marjorie Taylor Greene, of course Trump loves her. She's very much his type, if you know what I'm [puke] saying [/puke]. With the one exception being that MTG might actually believe some of the shit she's saying, and I cant' decide if that makes her more or less dangerous than someone like Trump.

    1454:

    I know; so has the Deputy Chief Whip, and they resigned live on Channel 4 news (19:00 to 20:00 BST).

    Timings included for non-UK residents.

    Oh and BTW I have no idea how to snark this!!

    1455:

    I put one dollar on the head of lettuce surviving longer.

    1456:

    With the one exception being that MTG might actually believe some of the shit she's saying, and I cant' decide if that makes her more or less dangerous than someone like Trump.

    Definitely more dangerous. Somewhat mitigated by the fact that she is significantly dumber than Trump. Although I suppose one has to be that dumb to actually believe it.

    1457:

    turning a "small lonely man" into a killer has been a known technique for ages.

    The FBI are notorious for producing "domestic terrorists" this way, generally people so lost and hopeless than even when given everything they need they still can't make their plot seem plausible. But it does make me wonder how often those types get radicalised by the FBI but are just clueful enough to realise they're being set up and either go quiet or obtain the necessary supplies elsewhere before carrying out a successful attack. I'm sure the FBI would tell us when that happened.

    1458:

    Apologies; the above is apparently inaccurate, but let's leave these both standing as a measure of just how f*cking stupid UK politics is being.
    Oh yes and Re-Smog has admitted to the English BC that he doesn't know what's going on. So what chance does the Iron Weathervane stand? ;-)

    1459:

    When no-one has any idea what's actually happening, when "unprecedented" doesn't represent a change, when anything at all starts to seem plausible, it's really hard to guess whether a given rumour of insanity is true. Especially when there's a lot of wishful thinking... wouldn't it be funny if the Trussterfuck appointed OGH to her cabinet. Or decided to quit her job and become a DJ in Ibiza. How would you even know which of those stories is an obvious fiction?

    1460:

    paws4thot @ 1454:

    I know; so has the Deputy Chief Whip, and they resigned live on Channel 4 news (19:00 to 20:00 BST)

    No 10 claimed later that Wendy Morton and Craig Whittaker un-resigned (de-resigned?, non-resigned?). Stay tuned for more drama, when As the Weathervane Turns comes right back.

    Grauniad's John Crace is attempting to be emcee of the death watch, and has contributed the sobriquet "Librium Liz" while it's still useful. It's not quite Hunter S. Thompson-worthy prose, but reaching heroically in that direction.

    I was hoping Truss would make it to Guy Fawkes Day on ceremonial grounds, but it appears the bonfire is being lit early. (Fellow Northern Californians, don't miss the Nov. 5 evening bonfire on Muir Beach, right near the Pelican Inn.)

    1461:

    paws4thot @ 1450:

    Not me; I did however, ~18:02 BST, comment "To lose one Cabinet Minister may be misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness."

    And, ... three times is enemy action!

    1462:

    Seen on Twitter:

    A source close to the lettuce says it is “growing in confidence that I’ll see her off.”

    -- @ShippersUnbound

    1463:

    And what's 4 times? Particularly if we have "no take backs" in operation!

    1464:

    "And what's 4 times?"

    We have met the enemy, and (s)he is us.

    JHomes

    1465:

    The one that annoys me most often is electric windows, which won't work unless the ignition is on.

    My car is wired this way, which has annoyed me more than once.

    Worse, the remote trunk release is wired this way, meaning that I can open the trunk (rear boot) while driving full speed on the highway but not when stopped in a parking lot. Who thought that was going to be a good idea?

    I would like a momentary-on button that would turn on these secondary systems for only as long as it was held, for exactly these situations (and I think it should be on the overhead light mounting panel, so anyone in the car could reach it), but nobody who makes cars seems to have thought of that, either.

    1466:

    My understanding is that ICE police cars usually had some additional kit, security/safety and probably other stuff/capabilities built in. How is this transitioning wrt to EV?

    I can't speak for electric police vehicles (I haven't seen any yet) but as I do happen to drive a retired police car... There are some antennas no longer connected to anything; they're irrelevant. There's a button to turn off whatever Ford called the sane traction management system (I can't be arsed to go look right now); if the driver really wants to drive like a maniac, peel rubber, and push the car to the edge of its performance envelope the ability is there (although I've never used it); I'd assume electric police cars will have a "drive like a maniac" mode, just in case.

    One thing electric vehicles won't have is the little sticker from Ford saying in effect, "We know some of you want a manual transmission but you're getting an automatic anyway." This seems to have been a point of contention between patrol officers and fleet vehicle buyers in the US.

    I know it will quite happily cruise at 90mph (145kph) because out in very rural Idaho a few years back I happened to glance down at my speedometer and got a surprise... I have no idea what the top speed is but it's way above any speed I've wanted to go. Future patrol cars can be expected to have a "yes, go very fast now" mode too.

    Also the rear doors don't open from the inside, which is typical of certain vehicles and not an option I'd have asked for. I've got rather more driver's seat control over the window control privileges of others than I need but I think that's a standard option, if only because some families have small children.

    I'm imagining a scenario with some suspect driving away and a bunch of police cars start converging on it without any direct help/steering by the cops inside the cars who are busy putting on gear.

    I've got a cartoon of a cop standing by a stopped car and asking the driver, "Do you have any idea why my car pulled over your car?"

    1467:

    Just heard an ex-editor of the Torygraph (!) - Max Hastings - on the current chaos.
    He was outspoken about the disaster of Brexit - he almost sounded like a Lem-0-Crat or a very right-wing Labour person.
    How times change.
    People are now muttering about how the Trusstercluck will be lucky to last this week out. Um.

    1468:

    I'll answer the bits I can:-

    1) The traction control on mine has an off switch (which I have used to climb snow banks left across access roads).
    2) UK emergency services vehicles are not tuned above manufacturer specification.
    3) All European vehicles have, for some years, had mechanical levers in the rear door jambs which disable the interior rear door handles.
    4) Similarly, my driver's door has a lock/unlock switch for all 4 doors, and cutouts for the other 3 electric windows, oh and switches so I can work all 4 windows (actually useful when you come out of work on a sunny day).

    1469:

    In the UK, we have different vehicle license categories for manual and automatic transmissions.

    In Queensland, these are not separate license categories. Instead, there's a licence class (say "C" for car) and type (say "O" for open, as opposed to "L" for learner). For those who tested in a car with automatic transmission, there's a licence condition "A", for "you may only drive a car with an automatic transmission". Other licence conditions include "S" for "you may only drive while wearing corrective lenses", "M" for "you may only drive with a medical certificate" and "I" for "you may only drive a vehicle fitted with a prescribed alcohol-ignition interlock".

    This varies in other states. For many years one state (I think it was NSW) let you test on auto, but the restriction dropped after a couple of years. But mostly it's harmonised now, although like everywhere the switch to EVs will obviate the concept (see also CVT, which is technically just auto, but would probably be the future if we weren't going electric anyway).

    1470:

    Do you mean something like this: https://www.volkswagen.com.au/en/technology/infotainment-systems/active-info-display.html ? It is fitted to the 2017 VW Passatt (not-an-EV) I currently own/drive. (The map is actually one of a number of different a user selectable options as to what can be displayed on that screen as is much of the detail).

    This whole instrument cluster in front of the driver is just a 12.3" LCD display. Plus there is a separate centre screen console which can also display sat nav and has the sat nav controls.

    And I can connect my phone's sat nav equivalents and display that on the centre console should I wish (but I don't).

    1471:

    "wouldn't it be funny if the Trussterfuck appointed OGH to her cabinet"

    I can see the headlines: "SF author goes into hiding to escape cabinet post."

    1472:

    In the UK, these things are set by DaFT, and they are. Automatic transmission only is a subcategory, but needing glasses is a restriction code.

    1473:

    Can you enable the radio (at very high volume), and simultaneously enable the satnav with the sound completely off? Oh, and disable all traffic announcements and similar not-absolutely-critical interruptions?

    1474:

    I've got rather more driver's seat control over the window control privileges of others than I need but I think that's a standard option, if only because some families have small children.

    My 12-year-old bottom-of-the-line Hyundai gives me full control over the windows and door locks, including a button that locks all controls. The latter is apparently because of children. I accidentally hit it one day and couldn't close my windows, so took the car to the mechanic at school who showed me the button and said it was for child safety. It seems odd that it disables the controls less than an inch from it as well as the controls on the other doors, but hey, bottom-of-the-line and all that.

    When I was a child my younger brother liked to fiddle with things (and tended to ignore the word "no"), so my parents fitted child-proof locks to the back doors of our car. When locked the door wouldn't open from either side, and you needed a key (any key, or a screwdriver) to open the lock. I guess they were more worried about him opening ythe door and getting out while the car was in motion than us being trapped in a wreck.

    1475:

    Talking of utterly DAFT, as opposed to DaFT - the Trusstercluck has gone - a new record for briefness, oh dear, how sad.

    1476:

    AND SHE'S STEPPING DOWN.

    Shortest-serving PM in UK history.

    Replacement leadership contest to be concluded within the week?

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/20/liz-truss-to-quit-as-prime-minister

    1477:

    We have a winner !!

    1478:

    Wee Nic says "this is beyond parody, or even satire" and agrees with Kier Stammers that a General Election is beyond due.

    1479:

    The lettuce won.

    Perhaps it's time for Charlie to write about vegetables?

    1480:
    Perhaps it's time for Charlie to write about vegetables?

    'fraid not.

    Here in Britain we have just tried and failed with Lákhanocracy (motto: "Government by the Vegetables, of the Vegetables and for the Vegetables"), so the only solution left is Government by Nyarlathotep -- "The Crawling Chaos".

    There Is No Alternative!

    (You know it makes sense.)

    1481:

    What a record: preside over the UK just long enough to see the monarch pass on your watch, then trash the place by opening your mouth and repeating what your handlers taught you to say.

    Wonder what the libertarians will try next? Keeping their masks on longer, maybe?

    1482:

    Re: '[UK] General Election is beyond due'

    Maybe someone here can provide a brief summary of what that entails along with a timeline for those of us across the pond?

    IMO, a major problem all the parties will be facing is whether they have enough candidates who are sufficiently competent to fill all the ministerial seats to avoid another Truss debacle. (Unless whoever is pulling the political strings wants the UK to terminally stall out of the global arena politically and economically.)

    Also - now is the time for a clear position paper from each party - minus/forget the idiotic slogans.

    And - now that the economists have come out of hiding, wonder whether they'll stick around to provide their expert opinions/commentary on the various parties' positions. Ditto for human rights, environment, health providers, etc. by their respective experts. (The for-profits have pocketed enough and should stay at home.)

    'Food vs. heat' policy plank?

    I've been reading up a bit about one of the key challenges that UK (and probably anyone living in the northern hemisphere temperate climate) will be facing: food vs. heat. Bottom line: You need both. And you're even more likely to need a sufficient stable supply of both (at the same time) if you're older (60+ years of age), have any pre-existing medical condition (esp. diabetes) and/or have had or get COVID*. Here's why:

    'Body temperature regulation in diabetes'

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4861190/

    'Alterations in Glucose Metabolism Induce Hypothermia Leading to Tau Hyperphosphorylation through Differential Inhibition of Kinase and Phosphatase Activities: Implications for Alzheimer's Disease'

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6729502/

    'Energy metabolism in humans at a lowered ambient temperature'

    https://www.nature.com/articles/1601308

    Okay - some are mouse studies and some have small sample sizes which is not all that surprising since thermoregulation-diabetes is a relatively new research area. (BTW, there are more studies about the effect of hot temp and diabetes than of cold temp and diabetes - the largest was from China.)

    *Diabetes is now seen as a common consequence of COVID including in young kids.

    1483:
    Re: '[UK] General Election is beyond due' Maybe someone here can provide a brief summary of what that entails along with a timeline for those of us across the pond?

    Before we get to that point we have to have Parliament (in which there is/was an 80 seat majority of Conservative MPs) voting for an election. The trouble is that the Conservatives are currently polling at about 15%, meaning that perhaps all but 80 of the current Conservative MPs will be out of a job.

    Once an election is called it can happen quite fast -- say three to four weeks. All that needs to happen is the printing of hard copy voting slips (About A5 or A6 size), and their distribution.

    One other thing you may find interesting is that the polling stations are often manned by local council employees, and we fill in our votes using pencils. My brother in Rees-Mogg's constituency actually votes in someones front room!

    1484:

    Minimum time for calling an election is 25 working days between the dissolution of Parliament and polling day.

    1485:

    There are experienced civil servants, and they could even ask Tom Scholar back again; listening to those would enable them to avoid at least the bloody obvious errors. But, if you think that the politicians we have will abandon their idiotic sloganeering, you haven't been following UK politics for the past 25 years! Our political system is totally broken.

    I still feel that we would be better off with King Charles ruling directly - but I might not go as far as thinking he should appoint the lettuce as prime minister :-)

    On your last points, I used to go hill-walking (camping out) at 2,500' in the Scottish Highlands, and burnt c. 7,000 Kcal/diem; a significant proportion of that was thermoregulation. It's pretty damn obvious that it will be compromised by diabetes.

    Actually, in most of the UK, healthy people of working age (and even older children) do NOT need artificial heating in most winters - it's really only the very young, very old, and unhealthy that do. I am not saying that living without it is pleasant, but it's not critical until the temperatures drop lower than they usually do. DRY shelter and adequate food and clothing are, however, essential.

    1486:

    What USAns might not realize is that a UK general election ballot is really simple -- a single sheet of paper the size of a page from a mass market paperback, with a list of names/party affiliates: you tick the one you want and shove the sheet in the ballot box.

    (There's a prior stage, finding your name on the electoral roll and crossing it out, and then hole-punching the ballot to prove it's an officially issued one and not something a dodgy grifter ran off on an office laser printer, but that's about it.)

    The count ... is held in a sports hall or church hall or something, starts as soon as polling closes, and the constituency teams race to deliver the first result: polling closes around 9pm and we usually get the first results by midnight, with the shape of the election confirmed before 11am the next day (some stragglers may take days to come in if they have a close result and need to go to a recount).

    Scottish elections are much more complex -- you get two ballots, one with an X-marks-the-choice list of candidates (for FPTP) and a second (smaller) ballot, with a set of regional party lists: you pick your preferred party for your region (much larger than a single constituency, each region returns a whole bunch of MSPs) and then some complicated d'Hondt run-off voting method is applied. (Lest you think this sounds suspiciously European, it was first invented by Thomas Jefferson.) The party lists are used to fill about 20-30% of the seats, and the special angle is that they're allocated between the parties who did not win a majority of the FPTP votes, so it acts as a top-up to ensure representation of minor parties.

    But the point is, the UK GE voting system is really fast, as is the count. And even the Scottish system is extremely fast, compared to the newspaper sized ballots with all the different categories down from president to municipal dog-catcher you used to get in the USA (which are why they now use voting machines instead).

    1487:

    Before we get to that point we have to have Parliament (in which there is/was an 80 seat majority of Conservative MPs) voting for an election

    Is that still the case, even with the Fixed Term Parliament Act repealed? I thought the PM now just needs to ask the monarch to dissolve Parliament, and doesn't need a vote to do so.

    1488:

    But the point is, the UK GE voting system is really fast, as is the count. And even the Scottish system is extremely fast, compared to the newspaper sized ballots with all the different categories down from president to municipal dog-catcher you used to get in the USA (which are why they now use voting machines instead).

    Thanks for the explanation.

    In California, we get paper ballots that we fill out in black ink. Voting machines are for crooks, since it's been demonstrated that many can be hacked in a few minutes, and some don't leave an audit trail for recounts. Our ballots get put into locked boxes, run through optical scanners with monitors watching, then retained for any recount.

    Otherwise I agree that our paper ballots are much bigger than yours, but it's mostly because they have to cover all the districts: school districts, public health care, public college governing boards, water, fire, etc., but not dog catchers here. When you do all the combinations, that adds up to a lot of different ballots, which incidentally keeps out printing companies in business, as it has for centuries.

    1489:

    Seen on Twitter:

    flatmate has just asked me whether i think the lettuce voted leaf or romaine in the brexit referendum and im frankly furious at how funny i found it

    -- @bencsmoke

    1490:

    Andrew,

    You may be right. Anyway, someone Conservative has to go for an election whilst currently polling 15%.

    1491:

    Thanks Vulch. So five weeks.

    1492:

    There are two key hidden assumptions behind the (various) dysfunctions.

    One is that elections happen for every post -- judges, prosecutors, dog-catchers -- and the other is that elections happen on a fixed calendrical cycle.

    The latter made lots of sense in the late 18th century -- to synchronize in getting your elected reps to the capital in time for the new session, across a distance of about a thousand miles.

    (British parliaments didn't need to do this because even in 1800, you could get from Edinburgh to London by stage coach in about 48 miserable, cramped, smelly, rattling non-stop hours: the entire nation (the bits that got to vote) lay within a single week's travel time. Hence the variable parliamentary terms: parliament is dissolved, a few weeks later there's an election, a week or three after that, a new session commences.)

    But then there's the "let's elect everyone" problem. I don't know how/why that emerged in the USA but it has, let's just say, toxic/dysfunctional side-effects which parliamentary systems with a working non-political civil service (note this caveat) side-step. British judges are not obviously more corrupt than US judges, despite being appointed by a civil service judiciary committee. Same with prosecutors. Indeed, the opposite may be true: they're able to function as dispassionate arbiters of justice without having to worry about looking "tough on crime" in front of an audience of voters.

    And by leaving a lot of this sort of thing to the civil service (under the supervision of elected representatives) we get to have a streamlined electoral process.

    (Just don't get me started on the failure modes of either system or we'll be here all month.)

    1493:

    Seen on Faceplant:

    10 memes:

    --The new front door. Revolving, of course.

    --A fake(?) AirBnB posting for the address, listing it as perfect for short stays.

    No word yet on whether Larry the Cat has thrown his hairball into the ring for PM.

    1494:

    Re: 'Seen on Twitter:'

    So - one hour after handing in her resignation, this is one of the top trending tweets in the UK. Interesting!

    Below is an old tweet of a flashmob doing 'Ode to Joy' - beautifully done. (FYI - 'Ode to Joy' is the basis of the EU anthem. Maybe some BBC comedy panel show will come up with lettuce-appropriate verses.)

    https://twitter.com/ClassicFM/status/1237397257613385728

    1495:

    Indeed. Some places are reporting it as a straight 25 days, but the generic timetable from the Electoral Commission (links to a .doc file) states "days which are disregarded in calculating the timetable for a UK Parliamentary election are Saturday, Sunday, bank holidays and any day appointed for public thanksgiving or mourning".

    1496:

    Thanks Vulch. So five weeks.

    1497:

    Indeed again.

    Makes the next compulsory election interesting as the gap includes a number of bank Holidays.

    1498:

    But then there's the "let's elect everyone" problem. I don't know how/why that emerged in the USA but it has, let's just say, toxic/dysfunctional side-effects which parliamentary systems with a working non-political civil service (note this caveat) side-step. British judges are not obviously more corrupt than US judges, despite being appointed by a civil service judiciary committee. Same with prosecutors. Indeed, the opposite may be true: they're able to function as dispassionate arbiters of justice without having to worry about looking "tough on crime" in front of an audience of voters.

    I'll leave it as your call about whether you want to get derailed into 19th Century US politics and its continuing effects today, but that's the general answer to your top question.

    As for the rest...since I've now been involved in San Diego planning issues as an environmentalist for a decade, I could (theoretically) give you a set of methods for corrupting just about anyone, elected, appointed, hired, or promoted. The only reason I won't is that I don't understand UK libel law well enough to guarantee that the examples I'd use wouldn't get the blog in trouble. Also, most of it's effing obvious if you think about it a bit.

    Long story short, any system can be hacked. Disenfucking it, supporting the sane, ethical people, and trying to educate the newbies is a job that people should get paid for, but don't.

    1499:

    I can't speak for electric police vehicles (I haven't seen any yet)

    My town's police department has one, an electric BMW. Not vouching for an exact model, but it looks like this one:

    https://www.carvana.com/vehicle/lt/2508260

    1500:

    "The lettuce won."

    So is "the lettuce" not Truss then? Just a generalised metaphor for the UK political system as a non-intelligent organism, or something, which has now "won" in the sense of having made one of its leaves fall off... dumped one specific sub-population of grubs and snails to devote more resources to supporting the other sub-populations?

    Doesn't really work that well though... or is that part of the point? I dunno, I'm just trying to figure out the meaning of this expression which popped up on here out of nowhere and seemed to mean Truss from context at first, but if now Truss has got the boot it is deemed to have "won", it obviously can't be that.

    1501:

    Lettuce v. Truss. (Skip back a bit in the stream)

    1502:

    While that is true, it is also irrelevant, and FAR too often quoted as an excuse to oppose fixing a broken system. The point is that any system that does not have adequate checks and balances WILL fail precisely because of that. The USA founding fathers understood that, and inserted the checks and balanced that they felt were appropriate for their time, but they knew it would need changing as circumstances changed.

    The UK's system was not designed, and its checks and balances were (and are) as much historical accidents and trusting that people will behave reasonably, as anything else. The fact that it was in bad shape was clear in the 1960s, and it has been becoming more broken (and obviously so) ever since (*). Worse, several Prime Ministers (especially Thatcher, Blair and Johnson) dismantled some of the most important checks and balances. That is not soluble by the approach you mention.

    (*) Perhaps the worst failure is its increasing control (and I do NOT mean just influence) by external, even foreign, organisations. But there are other very serious ones.

    1504:

    So candidates will need at least 100 votes by 2 pm Monday? What if nobody gets that many, and none of them will withdraw? Lettuce hope.

    1505:

    Oddly, the self-described "originalists" seem to hold the the founders got it right the first time, because they were the bestest wisest men ever. Like biblical fundamentalists arguing that jesus changed water into grape juice, their mental gymnastics would be a funny game to watch if they didn't insist that everyone has to play, and by their rules.

    1506:

    I disagree - that's easily up to early Hunter S. Thompson-level insanity.

    Btw, for those that never read it, Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, with his reports of all the drugs in Nixon's campaign vehicles, as been described as "completely untrue... and absolutely correct."

    1508:

    While that is true, it is also irrelevant, and FAR too often quoted as an excuse to oppose fixing a broken system. The point is that any system that does not have adequate checks and balances WILL fail precisely because of that. The USA founding fathers understood that, and inserted the checks and balanced that they felt were appropriate for their time, but they knew it would need changing as circumstances changed.

    Who said anything about fixing it? As I noted elsewhere, civilization is clunky. I'm one of the checks and balances you mentioned, totally unelected, doing my tiny little thing to keep stuff working.

    A big difference between the US and UK is the length of the bureaucracy between the elected and the bottom-level worker. In the US, it's often quite short, while in the UK it's longer. I'll get into the reasons for that in a sec. The point is that you can corrupt an elected in fairly obvious ways, but you can also corrupt a career bureaucrat too, from the top (political pressure), bottom (union pressure, complaints) or side (bribery, etc.). "Any system can be hacked" to me is not a motto for inaction, but a reminder that democracy is the work of the people to keep this fucking kludge running, not leaving the chore to others.

    Thing to remember about the US is that it's young and was built out of mutual mistrust. A fair number of people came to California to get away from politics they didn't like, people kill each other over racist politics, and so forth. National standardization is scary for all sides in this situation, especially when we ask who's doing the standardizing and who controls it thereafter.

    What does this have to do with the vote? New towns need to run stuff, including fire, water, and school systems. They can and should hire experts, but who oversees the work? A board of directors, representing the interests of the town. Who appoints the directors? The townsfolk, by vote.

    Why didn't the US nationalize all this crap? Who is then in charge? Since any system can be hacked, giving up local control is about the tradeoff depending on whether the bigger system delivers better results or worse.

    An example is fire. San Diego County used to not have a County fire system, just a conglomeration of fire districts that were too small to handle conflagrations. Most California counties have a county fire system, who work closely with the state CalFire (formerly the California Board of Forestry). Why not just make it all CalFire? Well, look at CalFire's history. They switched from being a pro-industry forestry board to being a pro-industry fire board. There's an apparent contingent in there who think that establishing a fire-industrial complex in California (based around the $20 billion-odd we spend on fire emergencies every year) is a great way to direct money to their, erm, friends. And the CalFire board is appointed. Is it a good idea to give them still more power? Probably not, IMHO.

    As I said, any system can be corrupted. While I'm not going to accuse CalFire of being corrupt (almost all the CalFire people I've dealt with are not), much of that huge pot of money they swing around goes to private contractors. Environmentalists (raises hand) get into battles with them playing fast and loose with the law, too, typically under the rubric of preparing for and/or dealing with fire emergencies. Those legal and political battles are the checks and balances in action.

    1509:

    "if the driver really wants to drive like a maniac, peel rubber, and push the car to the edge of its performance envelope the ability is there"

    ...by leaving the traction control switched on? :)

    The reports I've heard of what those things do from people who are clued up enough to report intelligently seem to confirm that it behaves as one would expect from how it does it: by reacting faster than a human driver, and being able to do things like modulating individual wheels which the human driver can't, it reduces the area of the zone just inside the actual physical limits of the performance envelope which is difficult to use because of control/response uncertainty and suchlike. Where the human control system with its long feedback time constants and minimal number of controlled variables is beginning to have to back off to keep things stable, the faster feedback and greater number of channels of the machine system allow it to keep the hammer down much closer to the ultimate limits. So although those ultimate limits of course do not change, the usable area inside the performance envelope is increased by shrinking the breadth of the fuzzy zone just inside the limits.

    The result is that the car remains stable under extreme conditions that would render it uncontrollable with only human-mediated feedback, and it feels like magic. But the other side of this is that when you nevertheless do push it beyond the ultimate physical limits, it's a sudden parachute drop into the middle of uncharted hostile territory. The machine (at best) recognises that it has no idea what's going on any more and switches off, while the car is now much more wildly out of control than it would be if it was merely the lesser human-performance boundary that it had edged over. What you're effectively doing is to exchange the performance envelope perceived by the driver between a soft-boundaried one with gentle breakaway characteristics which when encountered tend to take you into a region where you still stand some chance of being able to recover, and a hard-boundaried one with breakaway characteristics that suddenly snap you to a point well outside the possibly-recoverable region so if you do lose it you're definitely fucked.

    Manufacturers provide the facility to turn the system off in case you encounter conditions that it hasn't been programmed to handle in the first place, such as paws's snowbanks and other situations involving water in the solid phase.

    It's an interesting speculation whether the operational politics of a police organisation would lead to the training of pursuit drivers including something like "turn it off; you're going to be pushing the limits under stressful conditions, so you're very likely to go a bit too far and you need the bit of extra recovery margin because it looks really bad when police vehicles hit things", or something more like "leave it on; if you hit something and it comes out you had something advertised as a safety system switched off at the time it'll look even worse". I could probably find out which way the British system does it, but the information would probably be embedded in an endless and ancient gigabytical flamewar over which way is better.

    1510:

    1489 - I also find it funny, but my sister gave me an "old-fashioned look".

    1500 - I think you've misunderstood; the point was that the lettuce would still be edible after the Trussterfisk resigned. Which is in fact the case.

    1509 Para 4 - Yeah, I actually met the snowbank at about 1500 rpm in first gear, and got wheelspin followed by the engine management cutting the engine revs to idle so I didn't have the torque to climb the bank. So I turned the traction control off to keep some revs on whilst I flattened the snowbank enough that I could get over it.

    1511:

    Vague burbling about possible improvements to the way we elect MPs... How about instead of having the variable-up-to-some-maximum-limit term thing applying to parliaments as a whole, have it apply to individual MPs. At first it doesn't make any difference because all the MPs' terms have been synchronised by the last present-method election, but as time goes on and MPs resign or die, their replacements' terms start counting from their by-elections and after a while every constituency is running on a different cycle. You'd have to either remove the ability to call a general election or make a general election not count for resetting the zero points, otherwise it would ruin the whole thing every time one happened and you'd get them being called specifically in order to do that. On the other side you could add extra removal functions on the individual scale, such as if more than 50% of an MP's constituents submit an expression of no confidence, in writing, then out they go.

    The inspiration for this idea was to get rid of the next-election limit beyond which governments will not look. It would also get rid of the astable-multivibrator style repetitive flipping back and forth between "an X government" and "a Y government" and the various forms of unproductive behaviour that the Xes and Ys indulge in according to how recent the last flip was and how soon the next one looks like it'll be. It would also heavily clobber the notion of a "party of government" as we have it at the moment, and so discourage a lot of the tribalisms, conflict mandated by convention, argument for the sake of it and other such behaviour arising from the "us vs them" structure.

    On similar lines, to me at least it looks as if a major problem with the US political system is the rigid regularity of having the Olympics at the same time once every four years and the Winter Olympics on the same cycle but 180° out of phase, both with immense amounts of run-up. So every two years there's some kind of upheaval, the pot-boiling is going on more or less continuously and the whole thing basically turns into a circus.

    1512:

    I also met a snowbank once, but unfortunately at that point I was going backwards at about 100 kph and control was a distant memory. I was driving much too fast for the conditions, hit a snowdrift and went into a spin, coming to a stop in a big puff of snow on the opposite side of the highway. The closest I have ever come to a serious crash, when I was an idiotic 16 years old. As it was the only damage was a burn on the seat when I dropped my cigarette in the excitement.

    Mercifully, the roads and highways in rural Alberta are level and straight, no cliffs or rock walls to smash into. My passenger and I were able to push the car back out of the snowbank and drive home (much more cautiously). I didn't tell my mother about the event until about 35 years later, as it was her vehicle.

    1513:

    Thank you; by using the link as a search term I managed to find an explanation. (NYT is refusing to serve the UK and I cba to look for a US proxy.)

    1514:

    1511 - And how do you select a premier, given that the present method is to use the leader of the largest Westminster party. A lot of the present complaints relate to how the Con Party was not led by either the Iron Weathervane or AN Other at the time of the last General Election.

    1512 - As you may have gathered, I was doing more like 5mph; I had to hit the bank 4 square at low speed if I wanted to get through the bank into work.

    1515:

    More on Tiwtter:

    New addition to the unit conversion table: 1 Truss = 4 Scaramuccis

    -- @delagoya

    1516:

    I haven't tried, so cannot confirm whether this combination is possible - and I have no interest in finding out.

    1517:

    From The Register:

    Readers may remember Johnson resigned in July. Having been in power for two and a half years, he at least left enough of a tech legacy for The Register to review.

    Lasting just six weeks, Truss gives us no such option. But, as one keen tech copywriter pointed out, it at least gives us a minimum unit of political tenure, with 1 Merkel equal to approximately 140 Trusses, something The Register can at least add to its weights and measures standards converter.

    1518:

    25 working days between the dissolution of Parliament and polling day

    So if you really pushed it you could have a general election every second month.

    1519:

    By competitive examination!

    1520:

    Charlie Stross @ 1486:

    What USAns might not realize is that a UK general election ballot is really simple -- a single sheet of paper the size of a page from a mass market paperback, with a list of names/party affiliates: you tick the one you want and shove the sheet in the ballot box.

    (There's a prior stage, finding your name on the electoral roll and crossing it out, and then hole-punching the ballot to prove it's an officially issued one and not something a dodgy grifter ran off on an office laser printer, but that's about it.)

    One difference is the U.S. holds elections at fixed intervals. It applies to Federal, State & Local (city, county, district) offices. That's why so many different races go onto a single ballot.

    The political party in power can't hold off an election until when they think it's going to be politically advantageous ... or hold an election early to reset the clock (which I believe the English Tory party did during the Brexit vote leveraging the euphoria around that into a majority locked in for 5 years?)

    Also in the U.S., the executive is elected by the voters instead of the party holding a majority in the legislature (Congress/State Legislature).

    The RepubliQan party couldn't just Dump Trump and make Moscow Mitch the new "President" (although they were able to block him being convicted in BOTH of his impeachment trials).

    There are downsides to doing it either way.

    1521:

    About Liz Truss - Her smile triggered an "uncanny valley" response every time I saw it.

    1522:

    Pigeon said: What you're effectively doing is to exchange the performance envelope perceived by the driver between a soft-boundaried one with gentle breakaway characteristics which when encountered tend to take you into a region where you still stand some chance of being able to recover, and a hard-boundaried one with breakaway characteristics that suddenly snap you to a point well outside the possibly-recoverable region so if you do lose it you're definitely fucked.

    What you say is true for petrol cars, but not true for electric.

    With a petrol vehicle you can squeeze on the throttle, and at some point you break traction. At that point you're at part throttle, and the engine can only get a certain amount of air and fuel per unit time, which is to a first approximation, a power limit. As the wheels speed up, the engine speeds up. As it speeds up there are more "suck" strokes per unit time, but no more air and fuel, so each suck stroke gets less, and each bang is smaller. That limits the wheel spin and you can feel around the limits of traction.

    Electric isn't like that. The throttle controls the amps, so it's a torque limit. If you open the throttle past the limit of traction, nothing limits the wheel speed. You're directly into the the "definitely fucked" region, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.

    For an amusing couple of weeks Tesla released a "Dyno mode". It turned off allllll the driver's aids. To get to it you had to agree to all sorts of warnings that it was only for use on a dynamometer, not the road etcetcetc.

    Following the release there was a rash of youtube videos of men (always men) going something like "now we've been told that this dyno mode is dangerous, so we've come to this long straight road, and we're going to start off already rolling so there's no surprises off the line. So here goes, this is full Ahhh gurrrgaaaaaAAaHHHH. Owwww err, are you OK?"

    1523:

    paws4thot @ 1510:

    1500 - I think you've misunderstood; the point was that the lettuce would still be edible after the Trussterfisk resigned. Which is in fact the case.

    Who believes rotten lettuce is "edible"?

    1524:

    Umair Haque has another depressing article today for those of you on the east side of the pond: Why Britain is Collapsing

    "These are your choices, if you’re in the mess that Britain made for itself. Borrowing. Austerity. Tax cuts. Big Lies. And Grand Experiments."

    He presents good arguments showing why none of these options can succeed. My question is this: why didn't he mention raising taxes? After all, much of Britain's problems (as is also true here in the U.S.) are due to massive income inequality. It seems to me that raising taxes on Britain's millionaires and billionaires would be a much better solution than what's going on right now. What am I missing?

    https://eand.co/why-britain-is-collapsing-e5590018e04c

    1525:

    By competitive examination!

    Having watched a John Bercow greatest hits compilation or two I'm inclined to the view that they should bring back duelling. It would clear the grumpy old men out of parliament pretty quickly.

    For civil servants a qualifying exam mediated by a vote of confidence from their peers has traditionally worked quite well. These days I think the bar is close to "not convicted" so almost anything would be an improvement.

    'Straya has increasing problems with politicising the public service, in some cases through the brutal means of defunding inconvenient bits of it. The contest between the "yes, minister" version of it and the US "political lackey" version is hard to untangle, but I'm firmly on the side of a completely independent non-political advisory arm separate from the implementation arm, which in turn needs to be kept away from the political wing. Which we need, because government is far too complicated for even the best team of politicians to deal with by themselves... and in many cases we can only wish such a team existed.

    This is also where the UK could benefit from a formal constitutional reaction to the fast'n'loose stuff of late, make some rules and have him of the pointy sword decree that they shall be followed on penalty of an interview with said sword. "all budget announcements shall be presented alongside a review by the {whoever does that}" to avoid whatever the hell just happened. And so on. You could even argue that this is traditionally how constitutional changes are made in the English Parliament.

    1526:

    "My question is this: why didn't he mention raising taxes?"

    He did.

    "or rising taxes at a time people can ill afford them?"

    Them as can be taxed cannot pay the tax, them as could afford it have moved their stuff out of the taxman's reach.

    JHomes

    1527:

    On a completely different subject, but its at the intersection of money, technology and (up until a few years ago) science fiction, so it ought to be of interest here:

    How do you sue a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO)?

    DAOs are something of an experiment in being able to form new kinds of organizations quickly in non-traditional ways. It’s not a corporation. It’s a much more amorphous digital setup to bring together a group of people to work towards a common goal, often (but not always) involving some tokenization and voting power.

    But, then, of course, there are the legal questions. A few weeks ago the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed a lawsuit against Ooki DAO. In theory, the Ooki DAO was decided to allow members to make leveraged trades on digital assets. The lawsuit alleges that the Ooki DAO violated commodity trading laws, as well as failing to abide by know your customer (KYC) laws for financial products. But… that’s left open a big question: just how exactly does one sue an amorphous blob of people who have come together for this purpose?

    A bit of background: DAOs are built on the Etherium blockchain. Etherium lets you write arbitrarily complex programs to be executed by the blockchain, so voting protocols and consequent financial actions can be built into a software mechanism which is then executed in a distributed manner. There have been some notable financial disasters associated with buggy code, but that's not the problem here.

    In this case the first problem was service: Ooki DAO has no service address, responsible officers or other conventional mechanisms. So the court gave permission for service to be done via the help bot and discussion forum.

    What happens next is going to be interesting. As one of the commenters on the article says, this is like suing "that bunch of people who get together after Church". How do civil and criminal penalties intended to apply to an identifiable organisation apply to something like this? Are individual investors liable for the actions of the entity they have invested in? Are they liable for more than their investment? Are they merely jointly liable, or jointly & severably liable (i.e. any one of them can be sued for the debts of everyone)? Its going to get messy.

    1528:

    Even worse is the inability to say "DON'T route via the Ax from Y to Z" or "Make sure you turn LEFT onto the Ax". That's more important on my trike, of course, but it's fairly important with my car (think M6 Midlands). Sat navs may be better...

    This observation may be redundant, but Google Maps can do that. I don't know about whatever Google Satnav apps exist, but I've played with Maps on my laptop enough. While it doesn't specifically have a "not through Lower Arseton" option it will let you drop in waypoints for the route to go through; by selecting one or more known good points you can avoid it trying to send you through the bad places. When you have some time, try calling up Google Maps, defining a route, then selecting the indicated line and dragging it off course; the software should recalculate the whole path to go where you're telling it to go.

    I can't help you with the "turn LEFT" part, I'm afraid.

    1529:

    "or rising taxes at a time people can ill afford them?"

    Them as can be taxed cannot pay the tax, them as could afford it have moved their stuff out of the taxman's reach.

    Them as could afford it in the U.S. have bought themselves a bunch of Congresscritters, which is why raising taxes on the wealthy is a non-starter here. I assume this is more or less true in the U.K. too...

    1530:

    One straightforward option is to seize the assets and hold them until the owners come forward. If that means shutting down the whole Etherium system I suspect that would be a bonus.

    1531:

    Pigeon ...
    "Iolanthe"?
    Srsly ... "G&S" is more factual than this shambles, especially as it looks as though the vicious, spiteful, lying bigmouth BJ might be returning.
    Please say it isn't going to happen.

    1532:

    Thank you. It is, however, one of two combinations that I could use safely - and the other would be too tiring for long motorway trips. You can understand why I don't use prat navs.

    1533:

    Not really. I use it a lot in that way, too. Yes, you can use large numbers of waypoints, but that makes its route finding redundant - in particular, YOU have you guess the best route not involving XXX. Also, dragging the route away from XXX fairly often turns it into complete insanity, occasionally even creating loops.

    1534:

    Google Maps... drop in waypoints for the route to go through

    This can be a huge PITA with bike routes. I use it that way fairly often, because google is pretty stupid about what constitutes a bike route (observation suggests that "can physically get a bike through" might be too restrictive). But that easily leads to insanity as the planned route becomes 90% circling around the bits where I ride 20m of "impossible" while google takes a 2km detour. Annoyingly it does the opposite too, blithely insisting that a multi month construction project doesn't exist*, or that a river can be ridden across.

    More tedious to do is just have several routes that start and end at those points and ride them one after the other. That gives a slightly more accurate distance and journey time.

    Of course, if I don't intimately know the area none of that is any use, I just have to hope that google produces a usable route even though it won't be optimal.

    (* because "bicycles are vehicles" doesn't mean we always get marked detours, notifications of closures, or even warnings before entering a route with no exit - "they" will cheerfully block a cycle route 1km after the last intersection, often right at the point you have to cross a road, and assume we're happy to ride back that kilometre and work out how to get round the blockage ourselves. I can't understand why battery powered angle grinders are not more popular...)

    1535:

    Cyclestreets is little better. It has a loathing of roundabouts , but is quite happy with pedestrian stretches and even stairs, which is not a lot of good for me. Yes, I know that I could get hold of a copy of the source, and improve it, but I hate to think what it's written in and what the database format is.

    And our road 'works people are no better than yours.

    Maps rule, OK?

    1536:

    Actually, there's some good news too. They're finally fixing an underpass on a major bike highway, having also fixed a bridge and a couple of access points.

    this abomination is only about 1.7m high and 600mm wide, so you can't get a trike through it, or most trailers, and before someone bent the fence out you couldn't ride most bikes though either.

    That underpass is both on a busy bike path, and important because the alternative is crossing a busy four lane road and the nearest traffic lights are 200m away up the hill. So not only do you have to walk back, up and round to get from the point shown to the road, you end up farting about trying to cross. But 30-odd years of "it would cost money" in response to campaigning and they have finally gone ahead.

    1537:

    TAOCP Volume 4b is available

    Including a quote from OGH :)

    1538:

    Effectively, yes.

    That article is wrong, though. Those are NOT the only options, largely because we don't have to choose just one, and there are ways of increasing tax revenue without causing actual suffering; it would in theory be possible for the UK to start pulling ourselves out of the hole we have dug ourselves into. Not painlessly, and not quickly, because we spent 40 years excavating our hole, but less painfully than in the 1950s to early 1970s when we in a similar hole. I don't see a hope in hell of it happening, though.

    1539:

    Where's your evidence that the lettuce is rotten John?

    1540:

    polling closes around 9pm and we usually get the first results by midnight,

    This can be true in the US. And is in states that want it so. North Carolina is one. And most are. But fast results are not what some politicians want in close elections. Look at Arizona.

    Our NC results are almost always posted by midnight state wide for nearly every race. Of course there are always a few races where the process stumbled and doesn't catch up until the next day.

    The biggest exception being outstanding provisional ballots, ballots that don't scan, and mail in ballots and whatever the deadline for the later happens to be this cycle. (It is an ongoing fight.) But as long as the outstanding ballots will not change things the counting is over.

    Recounts rarely change things. Unless they notice some crazily marked ballots. Pictures drawn on them and such.

    1541:

    I guess they were more worried about him opening ythe door and getting out while the car was in motion than us being trapped in a wreck.

    Been there, done that! When I was a teenager we had a black labrador with more energy than sense. One day when driving through town something must have gotten his attention; I was in the passenger seat with the window down, he was peeking forwards between the seats from the back, and suddenly he was running over my lap and leaping out the window! I had just enough time to grab him and keep his butt and rear legs in the car as he hung half out the window of the moving car and my mother freaked out. He didn't see anything wrong.

    It's more hilarious in hindsight than when clinging to a large stupid dog projecting out of one's car.

    1542:

    I know nothing of UK tax law, but in the US the loopholes are immense for the wealthy. "Bonuses", allegedly given for performance, are not wage increases, and so taxed differently and significantly less than ordinary paychecks. That I think I've had a couple of bonuses in my career... while corporate CEOs get millions in bonuses every single year, even when the company is collapsing.... And as of 1972, 16.67% of the US federal revenue stream was from individual income taxes (with a top tax bracket of 70%), and just under 25% from corporate taxes. As of several years ago (after 2015), that was 44% from individual income taxes, and just over 10% from corporate taxes.

    Oh, and "interest and capital gains" are taxed at about a third of what "regular income" is taxed at.

    Those would be the first places I'd start.

    1543:

    I would think the same way that you deal with a mob (say, one that attacks the US Capitol): each for the part that they played, so the bigger money players, in this case, are more liable.

    1544:

    Perhaps in the way you use it, but I believe that's what my partner uses on her mobile, and it continually ignores either moving the route or directions to avoid, say, the Interstate, when she's navigating (and she's a good navigator).

    1545:

    Alan,

    I'm afraid I'm going to disagree with EC (if he claims that things in the UK are the same as the US).

    I assume this is more or less true in the U.K. too...

    In the UK the ultra-rich have off-shored a generation or two ago. The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man are both a short journey away.

    A friend worked as an accountant in the 1980s, and said that our richer Labour Politicians were as invested in tax havens as Thatcher's Conservatives.

    Now, if you are going to play these games you need a good accountant, because it's perfectly legal to have your wealth off-shored, but you will have to pay Capital Gains Tax on any asset appreciation. However, what is the value of a Private (Untraded) Trust Fund? It has assets, but it can write down notional losses of intangibles like "Good Will".

    You do need to be careful about keeping your income to a sensible minimum, and of course, one of the major advantages is that off-shored assets can be hidden more readily from Inheritance Tax, if they have phoney valuations. Permitting wealth transfer from one generation to the next.

    1546:

    Eh? I said that things were effectively the same here, and they are. Why do you think those loopholes have never been closed (and, indeed, were opened in the first place)? Well, it's because the Money has 'bought' our ruling parties and much of the mandarinate. Are you saying that is NOT true?

    1547:

    BBC Radio 4 listeners may be familar with The Atlantic's staff writer Helen Lewis from the long-form interview programme "The Spark". I think she bears watching, as she displays a deft hand with phrasing in her current piece "Liz Truss Fought the Lettuce, and the Lettuce Won":

    Today, the lettuce looked a little bruised, but it could still be incorporated into a healthy salad. Sadly, Liz Truss serves no such useful purpose.[...]
    Since I opened the casket for a sniff on Monday, the Truss administration has continued to decay with impressive speed.[...]
    I’ve long nursed a theory that we underestimate how difficult some jobs are—talk-show host, bomb-disposal expert—because only talented people are usually allowed to have a go at them. This week has revealed something similar about running a government. Wow, we all thought this summer, Boris Johnson is presiding over a chaotic, undisciplined mess. This is the pits. And then Liz Truss said, Hold my beer.[...]
    The upcoming leadership contest will be fast, furious, and divisive: The Conservatives currently look as unified as a sack full of raccoons and cocaine.[...]
    1548:

    "Recounts rarely change things. Unless they notice some crazily marked ballots. Pictures drawn on them and such."

    With sharpies... ~Sighs~

    1549:

    In the UK the ultra-rich have off-shored a generation or two ago. The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man are both a short journey away.

    I have no direct knowledge, but I'd be very surprised if U.S. millionaires and billionaires aren't doing this too. U.S. corporations definitely do this... :-(

    1550:

    They've done that by buying off state legislatures - Delaware, one of the Dakotas....

    1551:

    You mean like a mobility scooter toolkit which contains such things as metal shears, jemmies, big adjustable spanners, and home-made doobries to fit weird-shaped nuts used for holding fences together, but seems to be missing any tools which actually fit things on the scooter?

    Maybe it does take longer to recover from the effort than it would to find an alternative route, but it's the principle of the thing.

    1552:

    paws4thot @ 1539:

    Where's your evidence that the lettuce is rotten John?

    Lettuce is like fish; rots from the head down.

    1553:

    Yep... still just as relevant as ever, since after all the same basic faults have still not been fixed.

    When in that House MPs divide
    If they've a brain, and cerebellum, too,
    They have to leave that brain outside,
    And vote just as their leaders tell 'em to.

    It occurs to me that one reason for embedded dysfunctionalities in political systems that are supposed to be better than what they replaced is that they have to include some means to lock themselves in place, simply to cope with the inevitable attempts of the old lot to reverse the replacement. Then those means fossilise in place and become as inseparable a part of the structure as any of the more forward-looking bits; over time they gradually cease to be necessary for maintaining the conditions that allow you to actually get stuff done, and metamorphose into things that maintain conditions which make it more difficult to get stuff done (and may become considered necessary in consequence). This is particularly clear and obvious with the US, but it's also visible, over a much longer timescale and as lots of little lumps rather than one big one, in the development of the UK parliamentary system.

    1554:

    it's the principle of the thing.

    Precisely.

    1555:

    https://eand.co/why-britain-is-collapsing-e5590018e04c

    cheerful

    i mean he's quite likely correct but the idea that while this is happening the rest of europe will in contrast be quietly going from strength to economic strength seems a little unlikely

    1556:

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/most-significant-cost-effective-policy-reduce-road-toll-richard-tooth

    Here's a fun one for the privacy people. Reduce the road toll by encouraging car insurance providers to more vigorously surveil their customers and charge them based on their actions.

    Result being that poor people drive slowly, during the day, in safe places. Well, the safest places they can afford to be in or drive through, just as many already drive the safest (motor) vehicle they can afford... ie, one that's not very safe at all. But anyone who can afford it will face less congestion and safer conditions on the road. At the small cost of a less free and less equitable society with more expensive personal services (assuming the market for cleaners etc is at all responsive to such things, despite the best efforts of neoliberal governments)

    1557:

    EC, Alan,

    Yes, I am saying that there is a difference in their treatment of personal taxation. And that is that the IRS insists on knowing about and taxing you on all your assets/actions world-wide, whereas the HMRC has any number of dual taxation treaties behind which you can shield these things legally.

    You may recall the trouble Boris Johnson -- then a US-UK dual national -- had with the profits from a house sale in the UK (exempt for the HMRC, but chargeable for the IRS). In the end he gave up his US citizenship.

    And this is before we get to the "rules" about NonDoms (Resident, but Non-Domiciled for UK tax purposes). Roughly speaking you pay £30,000 per annum for all other tax problems to disappear. Famously Rishi Sunak -- prospective PM -- (born in the UK, but married to an Indian wife) was Non-Dom for a time. I don't think we yet know whether he was Non-Dom while he was Chancellor!

    1558:

    Oh, yes, i agree with that, but that wasn't what the point of what I was replying to or what I said. I was referring to the regulatory capture, by the Money controlling our 'elected representatives'. THAT's essentially the same.

    1559:

    I didn't think that Rishi Rich was, but his wife definitely was.

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