alurqa
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Post by alurqa on Aug 17, 2022 8:37:10 GMT
Meanwhile, the heatwave has caused havoc for power supplies as water levels in the Rhine have fallen so low as to inhibit the transport of coal and diesel to power plants along the river, he said. Germany has an excellent rail network. www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/germany-to-give-energy-essentials-priority-by-rail-if-rhine-disruption-worsens/ar-AA10DQuhGermany to give energy essentials priority by rail if Rhine disruption worsens
BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany plans to give the transportation of materials and equipment essential for energy production priority on the country's rail networks should water levels on the Rhine fall further and hamper shipping by river, a draft decree shows.
DB Netz, the rail network arm of railway operator Deutsche Bahn, has already rejigged usage conditions to give preference to trains carrying mineral oil products and hard coal for power generators as Germany tackles an energy crisis.
"The aim is to ensure the ongoing operations of power stations, refineries, electricity grids and other system-relevant infrastructure," said the draft drawn up by the transport and economy ministries and seen by Reuters.
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Danny
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Post by Danny on Aug 17, 2022 8:38:48 GMT
Latest inflation rate even higher than predicted, with CPI going to a record 40 year high of 10.1% Truss is going to have to get serious if she has any hope of preventing a tory collapse at the next election, telling workers outside London need to 'graft' more and giving tax cuts that favour the better paid wont cut it ONS has a web page here published 17 August which quotes CPI as 10.1%. CPIH as 8.8% and the more comparable to 1980s experience, RPI as 12.3%. Just checking, I see RPI includes housing costs, whereas CPIH includes owner occupier housing costs. Thats kinda suggestive that renters are being more hit than owner occupiers. But then you find a slightly more detailed explanation which says ONS calculate owner housing costs by reference to rental values for comparable homes. Clear as mud.
Since they also say CPI was introduced so as to harmonise with EU indices, presumably we could now go back to the generally higher RPI for all purposes? Except that being systematically higher and being used to clculate many rises in payments, there are also further moves in the pipeline to change the way RPI is calculated so it gives a lower total - to cut those historic contractual bills (particularly re pensions)
I think a passing alien would indeed wonder where the UK Parliament is , during a recess. A sensible time to have this contest I suppose. But , as I may already have said , its too long; Why the 1922 Committee wanted it this way I have no idea. But then-I dont think their members should be choosing the PM. The MPs should.. If they had ,Sunak would have been PM weeks ago. There will be an election which con are going to lose in a couple of years. Until then every delay in assuming responsibility might help a little. If the new PM takes a couple of extra months to be chosen, then thats 2 more months they are not to blame.
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Danny
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Post by Danny on Aug 17, 2022 8:48:12 GMT
@danny - "So. This is a man made crisis caused by world lockdown..." No it isn't. Please stop being so stupid. I do wonder if you think about what you write sometimes. You chopped off my sentence there leaving out the other reasons, but even taking it as you did, you must realise that ordering everyone to stop working and go home for extended periods crippled the world economy?
normally most people ignore the fact they have some illness and carry on working. In this situation we got the opposite, with people ordered to stay home, even in so far as they werent there anyway under general lockdowns because they were deemed essential workers, even when they had no symptoms whatsoever.
This morning someone talking about forthcoming possible vaccination drives stated the real risk was to over 75s. Pension age is around 65- the bottom line is working people were never at serious risk from covid, and the economy would have been largely unaffected had we done nothing at all in terms of interventions. If it increased the rate of death amongst the very oldest, this would simply have saved on pensions, soial services charges and sped up wealth redistribution to the young. Which would have eased the NHS health crisis for us working age youngsters (and indeed the surving great majority of the pensioners). There would be no world recession now.
Alec, you and those thinking similarly created the current economic crisis. Take responsibility for what you did.
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alurqa
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Post by alurqa on Aug 17, 2022 8:52:07 GMT
From the June bulletin: "EU imports In January 2022, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) implemented a data collection change affecting data on imports from the EU to Great Britain (GB). As a result, our EU to GB import statistics from January 2022 are not directly comparable with previous months." Well if they are not directly comparable, why didn't they wait a few years until things had settled down so we could see how well brexit was going? Oh, hang on a minute...
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Post by lululemonmustdobetter on Aug 17, 2022 8:53:13 GMT
Hi colin Sorry but I'm quite disappointed with you on this. You claim to be on the side o women's rights in relation to topics such as Afghanistan - but think its ok to paint women in such a light as a joke! You have no idea what it feels like to be pregnant and its much more likely that the bloke will bugger off and leave the woman to fend for herself - imagine what the response from men would be if the 'joke' was coaxed in those term! I just watched it again. I really don't get the offense. Its a light hearted ad. Everyone is portrayed as happy. I don't see the misogyny in it. Please don't question my opinion about the misogyny which condemns Afghan women to utter social exclusion. I think the offense being heaped upon them ( thanks to Trump/Biden & NATO) is not , in any conceivable manner, to be equated to the content of that Crown paint advert. I am quite disappointed that you think it is. Sigh - you just don't get it, and I don't think you ever will. In about 20 years time ads such as this will be seen in the same way that 'It aint half hot mum', 'Love thy neighbour' etc are seen now generally seen (I'm sure Mercian still finds them hilarious - they are a bit before my time but I have seen clips of them), as completely inappropriate and offensive. The point is people such as yourself cant really do anything about the misogyny of the Taliban, but if you were a true ally you would do what you could to support women in our society. Calling out stereotypical tropes that negatively portray women - in what ever form they are communicated - is something you and others could do!
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domjg
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Post by domjg on Aug 17, 2022 8:57:59 GMT
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domjg
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Post by domjg on Aug 17, 2022 9:04:10 GMT
That's for acid reflux. I find not watching misogynistic 'jokes' to be a good anti-nausea measure. Just a few additions to the excellent response from crossbat11 You could find the "real meaning" in that word ,which he commends to you , by talking to women in India, or Pakistan-or Afghanistan where the West sent them back to the Middle Ages. But you would need to leave that cosy Western Armchair and experience real offence against women. ....or you could just have a look at J K Rowling's Twitter account. Says the very definition of an armchair warrior. Colin the warrior for global gender equality. Love it!
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2022 9:04:57 GMT
nickp /pjw1961 I suppose what I'm really saying here is that the hellishly difficult path to victory that Labour leaders are always confronted with has more sheer drops, twists and turns and back breaking climbs than any other trek in British politics. The rise of the SNP in Scotland has steepened the gradient too, with impending boundary changes making the path even trickier. It seems to me, especially with the size of the mountain bequeathed to him to climb, that Starmer, despite the current propitious political circumstances, has a Herculean task. A task that spine and socialist vision alone won't necessarily perform. I thought that the recent You Gov poll showing Labour now seen as less extreme than the Tories was interesting. This is good moderate and mainstream political terrain for Labour to occupy and, maybe, to win on too. Self evidently, not enough voters to win an election will ever coalesce around a party that is viewed as extreme. I'm not at all sure about some of this polling on specific economic and social policies that voters claim they want. I suspect they're really after something that makes things work and makes their lives better. That could be public ownership and a more progressive taxation system, if they can be convinced that those things will work better that way, but I don't think most voters are into political dogma and ideology. Telling them they need socialism, and this is what they're going to get in an open wide and swallow sort of way is not going to do it for Labour. My advice to Starmer would be to keep banging on about why Labour will make things work better. Some of that may indeed be socialism of sorts but not socialism for socialism's sake. It's a sort of getting there slowly, buggering on sort of politics. I'm competent, you can trust me and my party and we can build something better than this lot. I think he might get there like that, with a little help from the self-imploding Tories of course. I'm not sure I've ever been convinced that there is any other way for Labour to win. Well we certainly need a mixed economy as state ownership of everything doesn't work. But where the market is rigged so that effective monopolies are handed to private companies or when long term planning is required to maintain vital infrastructure then public ownership seems a no brainer to me. The market is right ideology looks poisonous to me.
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Post by alec on Aug 17, 2022 9:23:42 GMT
colin - That Times story on Russian sanctions busting is illuminating. There are two concurrent themes in much western reporting of sanctions. Firstly, the Kremlin pushed narrative that claims that sanctions aren't working because Russia is earning billions still from oil and gas exports. The Times article touches on that theme. The second is that there are high levels of sanctions busting and Russia has friends and allies that are helping her to evade sanctions. The undercurrent of both of these is that the west is going to struggle, sanctions are less than effective, etc etc. My take on this is that the stories of ever more complex attempts to evade sanctions is that they are working. This also matches the evidence that the Kremlin doesn't put into press releases for friendly western journalists and political admirers, who have been cultivated over recent decades. Every independent analysis that looks beyond the narrow measure of hydrocarbon export earnings tells the same story: the Russian economy is going through a massive contraction because of sanctions. They are being brutally effective at reducing Russian economic power. This is also hinted at in the geopolitics of the Russian satellite states. Belarus has so far, despite multiple suggestions, failed to join the war. Kazakhstan has openly condemned the war and is reconfiguring it's defences to face more towards Russia, along with developing oil export routes to Europe that bypass Russia. Uzbekhistan is following a similar path, challenging the abusive practices the Kremlin is using to recruit their citizens into it's army. All of these show a similar theme of Russia starting to lose control of it's satellite nations, because they are not stupid - they can see the way Russia's military power is being degraded and it's economic power evaporating. I don't see a particular cause for pessimism on sanctions, but I do think it is important for western media to report about this truthfully. Yes, there are evasions, but the big story is the economic carnage being experienced by Russia.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2022 9:25:27 GMT
nickp /pjw1961 I suppose what I'm really saying here is that the hellishly difficult path to victory that Labour leaders are always confronted with has more sheer drops, twists and turns and back breaking climbs than any other trek in British politics. The rise of the SNP in Scotland has steepened the gradient too, with impending boundary changes making the path even trickier. It seems to me, especially with the size of the mountain bequeathed to him to climb, that Starmer, despite the current propitious political circumstances, has a Herculean task. A task that spine and socialist vision alone won't necessarily perform. I thought that the recent You Gov poll showing Labour now seen as less extreme than the Tories was interesting. This is good moderate and mainstream political terrain for Labour to occupy and, maybe, to win on too. Self evidently, not enough voters to win an election will ever coalesce around a party that is viewed as extreme. I'm not at all sure about some of this polling on specific economic and social policies that voters claim they want. I suspect they're really after something that makes things work and makes their lives better. That could be public ownership and a more progressive taxation system, if they can be convinced that those things will work better that way, but I don't think most voters are into political dogma and ideology. Telling them they need socialism, and this is what they're going to get in an open wide and swallow sort of way is not going to do it for Labour. My advice to Starmer would be to keep banging on about why Labour will make things work better. Some of that may indeed be socialism of sorts but not socialism for socialism's sake. It's a sort of getting there slowly, buggering on sort of politics. I'm competent, you can trust me and my party and we can build something better than this lot. I think he might get there like that, with a little help from the self-imploding Tories of course. I'm not sure I've ever been convinced that there is any other way for Labour to win.
Arguably, Labour win elections when the Tory vote is suppressed enough to let them through in the key marginals. The best way of suppressing the Tory vote is 1. don't be too scary/extreme (as you say) and 2. allow the Tories to be absolutely terrible in every way possible. They seem to be achieving both at the moment.
A potential '3' would be to present a set of competent and popular policies and '4' would be to generally look good/cool (-Brittania). These actually increase the Labour vote and excite the sort of people who turned out for Blair in '97 and Corbyn in '17 but otherwise don't usually bother to vote. Blair achieved all 4 and won a landslide. Corbyn achieved 3 and 4 but failed on 1 and probably 2.
Starmer has 1 and 2 in the bag and is finally getting round to a bit of 3, but maybe needs to give up on 4 or give more airtime to his less wooden colleagues. Just 1 and 2 on their own should be enough to be the largest party though.
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wb61
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Post by wb61 on Aug 17, 2022 9:34:54 GMT
I just watched it again. I really don't get the offense. Its a light hearted ad. Everyone is portrayed as happy. I don't see the misogyny in it. Please don't question my opinion about the misogyny which condemns Afghan women to utter social exclusion. I think the offense being heaped upon them ( thanks to Trump/Biden & NATO) is not , in any conceivable manner, to be equated to the content of that Crown paint advert. I am quite disappointed that you think it is. Sigh - you just don't get it, and I don't think you ever will. In about 20 years time ads such as this will be seen in the same way that 'It aint half hot mum', 'Love thy neighbour' etc are seen now generally seen (I'm sure Mercian still finds them hilarious - they are a bit before my time but I have seen clips of them), as completely inappropriate and offensive. The point is people such as yourself cant really do anything about the misogyny of the Taliban, but if you were a true ally you would do what you could to support women in our society. Calling out stereotypical tropes that negatively portray women - in what ever form they are communicated - is something you and others could do!Spot on, I was reminded of Matthew Chapter 7 verse 5 "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."
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Post by alec on Aug 17, 2022 9:42:00 GMT
This is where we need to be focusing covid action -
There have been a number of key breakthroughs in identifying antibodies that go way beyond the spike protein which could protect against all sars type viruses, and if these could be delivered by nasal spray, we have the chance to pitch for a pan-coronavirus neutralizing vaccine. We really could (and should) be talking about elimination of covid as a medium term objective.
However, the false 'learn to live with it' narrative has taken attention away from the focus we need, on second generation vaccines as well as short term transmission reduction measures. I suspect that part of the problem here is that everyone things of covid as a coronavirus, and links this to the common cold, also a coronavirus. This is misleading. Covid is actually a sars virus, completely different to the common cold. They are classified as coronaviruses purely because when looked at under a microscope you can see a corona like outer layer.
It's the biological classification of claiming that you don't need to worry about a man eating tiger because it's a mammal, just like the common shrew, and shrews are harmless. There is a monumental difference between sars viruses (all known version highly dangerous) and the common cold (so mild it doesn't even activate the adaptive immune system).
So we've allowed ourselves to imagine that we're facing something that will automatically become like a common cold, when all the evidence says that it will never evolve that way.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2022 10:32:38 GMT
I just watched it again. I really don't get the offense. Its a light hearted ad. Everyone is portrayed as happy. I don't see the misogyny in it. Please don't question my opinion about the misogyny which condemns Afghan women to utter social exclusion. I think the offense being heaped upon them ( thanks to Trump/Biden & NATO) is not , in any conceivable manner, to be equated to the content of that Crown paint advert. I am quite disappointed that you think it is. Sigh - you just don't get it, and I don't think you ever will. In about 20 years time ads such as this will be seen in the same way that 'It aint half hot mum', 'Love thy neighbour' etc are seen now generally seen (I'm sure Mercian still finds them hilarious - they are a bit before my time but I have seen clips of them), as completely inappropriate and offensive. The point is people such as yourself cant really do anything about the misogyny of the Taliban, but if you were a true ally you would do what you could to support women in our society. Calling out stereotypical tropes that negatively portray women - in what ever form they are communicated - is something you and others could do!......at which point I will leave this conversation before it gets even more personal.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2022 10:34:35 GMT
Thanks. Sadly that is paywalled for me, but I get the drift. Yes it has clearly been a massive wake up call. And not just for Germany imo.
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Post by leftieliberal on Aug 17, 2022 10:40:20 GMT
I don't believe Musk knows what he's talking about. If you think about it, almost all of the velocity needed to put a satellite in orbit is horizontal, not vertical. Look at vertical launches and you see that the rocket launcher quite quickly turns over once it gets above the lower atmosphere. To get a launch vehicle to a height of 100 miles (160 km) requires a vertical speed of 1.8 km/s; to keep a satellite in orbit at this altitude requires a horizontal speed of around 8 km/s (5 miles/s). Well, there is the need to travel vertically to get beyond most of the atmosphere before your speed ramps up, in order to avoid too much pressure, as alurqa points out, but the atmosphere also causes considerable heating as you go faster (indeed this was an issue in the design of Concorde and a reason it travelled at higher altitudes than normal jets). incidentally, if you travel more vertically initially, you can use gravity to help pull you into the horizontal later, saving on fuel, known as a gravity turn. (It’s a similar principal to using the gravity of Jupiter to slingshot a probe towards the outer planets). Launching from 40,000 feet (13 km) you are already above 95% of the atmosphere. I think you need to read up on what a gravity turn is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_turn because it isn't the same as the slingshot manouevre. Like I said before Musk is talking b******t. (The only part that is right is the bit about needing a humoungous-sized aircraft if you wanted to launch a big payload, like his man-carrying launchers). I've seen the Saturn rockets both at Kennedy Space Centre and at Huntsville and they are longer than football fields.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2022 10:40:53 GMT
colin - That Times story on Russian sanctions busting is illuminating. There are two concurrent themes in much western reporting of sanctions. Firstly, the Kremlin pushed narrative that claims that sanctions aren't working because Russia is earning billions still from oil and gas exports. The Times article touches on that theme. The second is that there are high levels of sanctions busting and Russia has friends and allies that are helping her to evade sanctions. The undercurrent of both of these is that the west is going to struggle, sanctions are less than effective, etc etc. My take on this is that the stories of ever more complex attempts to evade sanctions is that they are working. This also matches the evidence that the Kremlin doesn't put into press releases for friendly western journalists and political admirers, who have been cultivated over recent decades. Every independent analysis that looks beyond the narrow measure of hydrocarbon export earnings tells the same story: the Russian economy is going through a massive contraction because of sanctions. They are being brutally effective at reducing Russian economic power. This is also hinted at in the geopolitics of the Russian satellite states. Belarus has so far, despite multiple suggestions, failed to join the war. Kazakhstan has openly condemned the war and is reconfiguring it's defences to face more towards Russia, along with developing oil export routes to Europe that bypass Russia. Uzbekhistan is following a similar path, challenging the abusive practices the Kremlin is using to recruit their citizens into it's army. All of these show a similar theme of Russia starting to lose control of it's satellite nations, because they are not stupid - they can see the way Russia's military power is being degraded and it's economic power evaporating. I don't see a particular cause for pessimism on sanctions, but I do think it is important for western media to report about this truthfully. Yes, there are evasions, but the big story is the economic carnage being experienced by Russia. Sanctions are certainly a long game. I have been reading up on South Africa. Meantime the Geopolitical schism between western democracies and the Iran/Russia/China sphere of influence is changing our lives as well-perhaps permanently.
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Post by robbiealive on Aug 17, 2022 10:40:56 GMT
Ok, so I watched the bl--dy advert.
(1) I don't watch many ads but it looked like an example of a student's practical course-work in a Film School assessment. These ads featuring a group of nice-looking young people -- both white and black -- singing in harmony derive?? from the '70s Coca-Cola advert "I'd like to teach the world to sing ..." which itself is lifted from Milos Foreman's film "Taking Off".
(2) The line "Dave's just hoping that it's his" provides a clumsy shock element, to hold yr attention: the reversal of the usual "happy-young-couple-making-new-home" gig; it deliberately "subverts" the viewers expectations (ha ha) & hardly suggests the couple are happy: it's behind-the-hand snide which explains why Colin was quite comfortable with it.
(3) Crossbat "I couldn't see where there was any mysogony in it. If I understand the meaning of that word it describes a hatred of women. If the one minute sketch cum advert could be accused of anything, there may have been undertones of sexism, but the joke seemed to be about infidelity and promiscuity, two practices common to both genders." Sexism is usually defined as prejudice against people on the grounds of sex or gender, especially directed against women. It did seem to have a misogynistic element to it, although it's hard to say where sexism ends & misogyny begins. On these matters I tend to be guided by women who seem to object to the advert.
(4) At least I learned how to spell misogyny, so my time wasn't entirely wasted.
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Post by alec on Aug 17, 2022 11:07:50 GMT
mandolinist and isa - thankyou. Personally, I thought my 'lunches' gag was quite funny, but either it was too subtle for most of them, or you two have experience of the 3pm Blur in some past life.
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Post by alec on Aug 17, 2022 11:13:12 GMT
From the Grunge Live Feed:
"Elsewhere, the eurozone economy grew by 0.6% in the second quarter from the first, slightly lower than the 0.7% growth reported last month.
Ricardo Amaro, senior economist at Oxford Economics, said:
This is still a solid outturn which leaves the GDP figures painting a flattering picture of growth dynamics in H1 2022 as today’s release confirmed GDP rose by a solid 0.5% q/q in Q1 – in this case boosted by known distortions to Irish GDP. But we think growth will slow in the second half of the year and into 2023, with our latest forecasts anticipating near-stagnation in Q3 to be followed by a modest contraction in Q4 and almost no growth at the start of 2023.
The labour market also recorded healthy improvement in Q2. Eurozone employment rose by 0.3% q/q, underpinning a further drop in the unemployment rate to an all-time low of 6.6% in Q2. But here too, we think improvement will stall in the coming months as softening in the wider economy also impacts the labour market."
I seem to recall that the UK fell by 0.1% in the same period. Surely some mistake? We are in the sunlit uplands after all, are we not?
Europe was initially expected to suffer worse consequences from the Russian gas and oil prices, and there is certainly going to be economic pain in the EZ in the coming months, but the divergence between the dismal UK and the just about managing EU seems to be clarifying.
Oddly enough, in part it was the ability ti survive difficult economic times that was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the EU's forerunners, and so successful was it that now, nearly every country in the world is in or seeking to join some form of regional economic union of one type or another.
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Post by robbiealive on Aug 17, 2022 11:14:30 GMT
mandolinist and isa - thankyou. Personally, I thought my 'lunches' gag was quite funny, but either it was too subtle for most of them, or you two have experience of the 3pm Blur in some past life. I did get the joke but would not overdo the subtle bit. As my mother used to say, I'm sure lots of 'em did, self-praise is no recommendation.
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Post by alec on Aug 17, 2022 11:14:33 GMT
"As inflation rockets, Liz Truss has accused the Bank of England of having been too slow to increase interest rates."
There you go.
If only they had used a horizontal launch, inflation wouldn't have been half so bad.
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Post by alec on Aug 17, 2022 11:18:04 GMT
Slight worry that Truss is making such a hash of this that she might not actually win - although if the doddery blue rinsers vote early, perhaps it won't matter.
She is displaying vividly though why she will likely be such an electoral burden on the Conservatives.
Starmer seems to have done the Perry Mason Lawyer bit. You should all know that the verdict always hangs on the last minute bombshell.
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Post by leftieliberal on Aug 17, 2022 11:18:05 GMT
I don't believe Musk knows what he's talking about. If you think about it, almost all of the velocity needed to put a satellite in orbit is horizontal, not vertical. Look at vertical launches and you see that the rocket launcher quite quickly turns over once it gets above the lower atmosphere. To get a launch vehicle to a height of 100 miles (160 km) requires a vertical speed of 1.8 km/s; to keep a satellite in orbit at this altitude requires a horizontal speed of around 8 km/s (5 miles/s). Oh I think he does.[1] Rockets need speed. The problem is the atmosphere gets in the way, so you need as little of your flight to occur within the atmosphere as possible. That's why they go straight up, they get through MaxQ, which depends on both velocity and air pressure, and then they can start to accelerate to the required orbital velocity. Once past MaxQ they can safely begin to increase the horizontal velocity component with less and less atmosphere to worry about. Concorde could only go so fast, and had to fly extremely high (but still in the atmosphere) to achieve this speed, simply because the atmosphere got in the way, as it were. It was fighting its own MaxQ, but in a different way. [1] He spent $100m of his own money to get Falcon 1 into orbit. Everybody thought he was crazy. When the Russians wouldn't sell him some of their old ICBMs, he had to build his rocket from scratch. Then no one would help him, no one from Nasa would work for him so he had to become his own chief engineer. Now everybody wants to be his friend. He recently raised another $200m of funding to keep his amazing Starship project going. :-) My background is in Physics, and I can tell when people are writing about what they don't understand. What you are ignoring with your Concorde comparison is that Concord had air-breathing engines and wings for lift and that dictated the height it flew at. It took some pretty amazing engineering to make an aircraft (A-12/SR-71) that flew at up to Mach 3.5 and 26km. You need to understand that the Earth's atmosphere does not suddenly cut off at a certain height, there is an exponential reduction in pressure with altitude: at 10km the atmospheric pressure is 10% of that at ground level and each time you go 10 km further up it falls by another factor of 10. A large amount of fuel for a ground-based vertically-launched rocket is used to get it slowly through the lower atmosphere; I remember that the Saturn V only accelerated at about 0.25 g from the launchpad, but was accelerating at over 7g just before first-stage burnout. You only have to look at how small a rocket engine the Virgin Galactic sub-orbital vehicle has, compared with one of SpaceX's launchers, to understand that the principal requirement for orbit is horizontal, not vertical speed.
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Post by mandolinist on Aug 17, 2022 11:21:04 GMT
mandolinist and isa - thankyou. Personally, I thought my 'lunches' gag was quite funny, but either it was too subtle for most of them, or you two have experience of the 3pm Blur in some past life. Shamefully, the latter!
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Post by robbiealive on Aug 17, 2022 11:32:16 GMT
My memory is that the UKPolling1 was a bit bit iffy on cycling, if not downright anti- The battered remnants of that unregenrate forum may be interetsed to hear that Shapps says:
“Somewhere where cyclists are actually breaking the law is when they speed, and that cannot be right, so I absolutely propose extending speed limit restrictions to cyclists. Particularly where you’ve got 20mph limits on increasing numbers of roads, cyclists can easily exceed those, so I want to make speed limits apply to cyclists.That obviously does then lead you into the question of ‘well, how are you going to recognise the cyclist, do you need registration plates and insurance and that sort of thing'" (Such eloquence) The identification may take the form of a numbered tabard, most visible if in the shape of a Star-of-David.
He babbles on, that this may mean subjecting cyclists to a test etc & “I don’t want to stop people from getting on their bike [sic], it’s a fantastic way to travel, we’ve seen a big explosion of cycling during Covid and since, I think it has lots of health benefits."
What cobblers! Poor boy is desperate to get his name in papers.
I won't bother to cite the relative numbers of deaths n serious injuries caused by motor vehicles & cyclists, nor the number of cyclists killed by drivers, many of whom need to spend an annual stint in a boot-camp learning how to respect other road users.
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Post by leftieliberal on Aug 17, 2022 11:41:48 GMT
Appalling behaviour by Scottish Nationalists leads to censure by SNP leader: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-62576062Unfortunately this is far from the first time that BBC journalists doing their job have been targeted by extreme nationalists. One only has to recall what Sarah Smith went through.
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Post by laszlo4new on Aug 17, 2022 11:53:17 GMT
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graham
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Post by graham on Aug 17, 2022 12:03:26 GMT
Latest inflation rate even higher than predicted, with CPI going to a record 40 year high of 10.1% Truss is going to have to get serious if she has any hope of preventing a tory collapse at the next election, telling workers outside London need to 'graft' more and giving tax cuts that favour the better paid wont cut it ONS has a web page here published 17 August which quotes CPI as 10.1%. CPIH as 8.8% and the more comparable to 1980s experience, RPI as 12.3%. Just checking, I see RPI includes housing costs, whereas CPIH includes owner occupier housing costs. Thats kinda suggestive that renters are being more hit than owner occupiers. But then you find a slightly more detailed explanation which says ONS calculate owner housing costs by reference to rental values for comparable homes. Clear as mud.
Since they also say CPI was introduced so as to harmonise with EU indices, presumably we could now go back to the generally higher RPI for all purposes? Except that being systematically higher and being used to clculate many rises in payments, there are also further moves in the pipeline to change the way RPI is calculated so it gives a lower total - to cut those historic contractual bills (particularly re pensions)
I think a passing alien would indeed wonder where the UK Parliament is , during a recess. A sensible time to have this contest I suppose. But , as I may already have said , its too long; Why the 1922 Committee wanted it this way I have no idea. But then-I dont think their members should be choosing the PM. The MPs should.. If they had ,Sunak would have been PM weeks ago. There will be an election which con are going to lose in a couple of years. Until then every delay in assuming responsibility might help a little. If the new PM takes a couple of extra months to be chosen, then thats 2 more months they are not to blame. RPI inflation is now 2% higher than what was inherited by Thatcher in 1979.
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neilj
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Post by neilj on Aug 17, 2022 12:07:27 GMT
Yougov poll, is Truss's honeymoon over :-)
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Post by leftieliberal on Aug 17, 2022 12:08:12 GMT
Arguably, Labour win elections when the Tory vote is suppressed enough to let them through in the key marginals. The best way of suppressing the Tory vote is 1. don't be too scary/extreme (as you say) and 2. allow the Tories to be absolutely terrible in every way possible. They seem to be achieving both at the moment.
A potential '3' would be to present a set of competent and popular policies and '4' would be to generally look good/cool (-Brittania). These actually increase the Labour vote and excite the sort of people who turned out for Blair in '97 and Corbyn in '17 but otherwise don't usually bother to vote. Blair achieved all 4 and won a landslide. Corbyn achieved 3 and 4 but failed on 1 and probably 2.
Starmer has 1 and 2 in the bag and is finally getting round to a bit of 3, but maybe needs to give up on 4 or give more airtime to his less wooden colleagues. Just 1 and 2 on their own should be enough to be the largest party though.
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-membership-loss-accounts-deficit-b2146691.htmlThe Independent reporting that "A mass exodus of supporters saw the party's membership – which stood at 523,332 at the end of 2020 – fall to 432,213 by the close of 2021." If this means that the Extreme Left have left the Labour Party, then Starmer should find it easier to manage; a united party is always better for VI in the run-up to an election and over 400,000 is still a healthy membership these days. It will be interesting to see what the Tory Party membership is when they release the figures for the leadership election now underway.
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