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Microplastics posted:Did the government ban those tiny little cartridges of nitrous oxide? Because I don't see those all over the street any more. It's a lot less litter at festivals, which is something at least. They used to carpet the place. Seems like an odd time to be VONCing Sunak, he has the whole ULEZ thing to dunk on for a while and seems to have survived the political bathtub curve.
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Sep 1, 2023 22:01
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Now now, X and make up.
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Sep 1, 2023 23:18
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Mebh posted:This country is a bit of a mess isn't it? Aaand the inevitable glide-slope to HS2 finally being pruned into being the thing everyone was emphatic at the start that it shouldn't become- another artery for London. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66905316 When they kill off the Western leg as well as the Eastern one, that basically annihilates any rail traffic routing benefits to non-HS2 lines north of Birmingham, especially the freight, cross country and regional services that need to nip across the WCML and ECML. The biggest journey time improvement in the original scope was Birmingham-Leeds. Not anymore. I'm going to guess that killing the Western leg then allows them to justify a titchy Euston station with no future-proofing. Incidentally that'll make it infeasible to ever extend HS2 in the future, but that's by-the-by. It feels like leadership in government used to be about making commitments and pressing forwards with your grand project against all odds. Now in vogue is the idea that the most courageous thing is to capitulate to circumstance. Social and economic circumstances inevitably change, so any undertaking lasting longer than a mayfly has no survival chance.
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Sep 24, 2023 13:12
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Charoclere posted:Even if it does finally manage to chug into Euston, HS2 is pointless because it doesn't connect to HS1. The only reason HS2 is HS to begin with is so that it could be part of the big continental network, so European businessmen and investors having their "welcome to Britain!" moment being a half-mile trudge down the pavement from St. Pancras means that HS2 failed even before it left the station. The UK was never a Schengen state so plugging HS2 into HS1 and the continental network would have meant adding border controls at every station in the UK you brought an international service to. It's not unusual either for a capital city to have several stations linked by metro. Granted, Old Oak Common is an embarrassing terminus for a new line, but St Pancras to Euston is no worse than than Gare du Nord to Gare de Lyon. There's not really any way to deliver any additional capacity in the North/South UK lines, for half, twice or four times the cost of HS2, without building another line. We've squeezed every last bit of juice out of the EC and WCML and what's left are the kind of things that are so deeply baked into our landscape that it is genuinely easier to build a new line than fix. If you're going to lay a new line, it might as well be to a nice straight alignment so you can lay less track, run fast enough to get good capacity and compete with internal flights for journey time. HS2 was absolutely pitched as a vanity project so that it would attract the kind of political excitement that gets funding bills passed, in a way that say ETCS level 2 doesn't for some reason. It's now paying the price for all that hype, but if you look at the back of the tin instead of the front HS2 just contains a moderately fast new railway which diverts intercity traffic off the existing network so there's more room for regional services and freight.
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Sep 24, 2023 20:42
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When the tree falls aside Like a drunken farmhand, sycamore When the saw seems to roar, Like it's hungry for more, sycamore
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Sep 29, 2023 21:53
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Gene Ricman posted:Lurker here, just trying to unpack this "tax burden is the highest its been in 70 years" meme that tories seem to be bleating on about at the minute. It sounds & smells like bullshit, last time I checked corporation tax is still lower than it was in the early 2000s, basic rate is the lowest its ever been, etc. This post is from the fossil record of 10 pages back, but as a matrilineal upper-middle middle class person I feel secure in my family's ability to support me sufficiently that I can indulge in archaeology rather than things of immediate practical use. The "tax burden is at its highest since WW2" is a sloppy journo's summary of this report from the institute for fiscal studies, a thinktank that loves markets. https://ifs.org.uk/articles/will-be-biggest-tax-raising-parliament-record It's not even that long and the stuff it contains adds a hell of a lot of caveats to the title. which are: 1) The tax burden is historically high, but a big wedge of that is corporation tax going up (which you only feel if you are a corporation), the energy profits levy (which is overwhelmingly popular) and people creeping into higher tax brackets (salaries have been raised to keep up with inflation, but the tax brackets haven't been revised up at the same time). 2) The tax burden is not high compared with similar developed countries. 3) Unlike other similar countries which did increase tax between '08 and '19, the UK was doing George Osborne's austerity to stimulate growth and reduce the deficit. This was broadly unsuccessful in its stated aims, and has meant UKPLC asset-stripped its own future by not spending any money fixing anything for a decade. Something we are now having to spend much more money to rectify. 4) Tax burden is measured in this report as a percentage of GDP, so had austerity been successful and the economy had grown the burden would have been less. The tone of the report is so far off what the title indicates I think that it's not beyond the realms of possibility that the authors chose a guaranteed headline grabber and it's confounded their plans because nobody read further than that headline.
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Oct 1, 2023 20:50
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Apraxin posted:remember, they just have a few concerns about sports participation and single-sex spaces The choice between leadership candidates is simply which villain they'll offer the electorate as a reason for the next five years of failure. Hunt is playing the classics with benefit scroungers. Badenoch is targeting anything dangerously newfangled. Liz Truss is going to take on the financial markets, and this time it's personal. Honest Bob Jenrick thinks there's more mileage in blaming foreigners. Also- RIP Camrath. Wasn't engaged with the thread when you posed the news. That fudge helped me through lockdown.
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Oct 2, 2023 20:18
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loving called it didn't I? We will build the HS2 Euston terminal. It'll be 999 luxury flats, one of which has a garbage chute that you can crawl to Old Oak Common through. All of them will be on thousand year leases from a specially construed independent principality set up in the same fashion as the liberty of Savoy or the Vatican, meaning that any further expansion to the chute would be an act of war. Jeremy Hunt in that linked article posted:Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, said yesterday: “We do have to answer the question as to why it costs 10 times more to build high speed rail in this country than across the channel in France because it is taxpayers’ money.”
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Oct 2, 2023 23:36
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Microplastics posted:Renewed Calls For CERN To Be Defunded After Scientists Claim To Discover "Wokon" Particle That "Transitions" From One Kind To Another Just wait until they find out about the whole middle of the periodic table. The year is 2026. Britain bans iron, copper and titanium. To restore the urge to British greatness, children in schools are allowed to breathe only helium, neon, argon or xenon.
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Oct 3, 2023 23:19
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fuctifino posted:The self-professed freedom fighter goes on to suggest GB News is becoming the Tory party’s ‘controlled opposition Poe's law as applied to GB politics then? There is no conservative policy radical enough for GB News, and no GB News position too radical for the conservative party to adopt as policy. I think Sunak has decided to outmanoeuvre his future leadership rivals by spotting that each of them is offering one thing to hate, and offering instead the opportunity to hate everything all at once.
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Oct 4, 2023 23:51
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peanut- posted:It's true though. The land sales are one huge part, but you can't just spin huge projects back up. The way they'll salt the earth is with Euston. No grade separated junction, 6 platforms and sell all the adjacent land to developers. Means you have a corridor designed for 18tph in each direction, plugged into a station that can at best turn around 12 trains per hour. And absolutely no chance of ever improving that. Plan was to bury a couple of TBMs under Old Oak Common so they could do the final drive into Euston once the station fracas had been sorted. Thousands of years from now, archaeologists will find those.
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Oct 5, 2023 21:18
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bessantj posted:I've worked with a few people who day labour on building sites and: Any large contracting organisation is really just an investment bank with a handful of quantity surveyors attached. You have enough people on staff to submit tenders and that's it. When the railway, hospital or housing estate lands, then you sub absolutely everything out. Plant, trades, site management, materials, the works. The risk/reward is that you have enough creditors lined up to cashflow the subbie costs until the project completes and the client pays. It's also why outfits like Carillion would have outrageous things like 180 day payment terms (90 days if you accept a 10% cut on the invoice). Seen in that light, it's sort of understandable why that mentality has flourished. Nobody meaningfully involved in the construction process has any guarantee they'll be back tomorrow, let alone there until completion.
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Oct 21, 2023 17:48
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cat botherer posted:Dude triangulates more than a FEM mesh. I for one appreciated this.
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Oct 23, 2023 19:37
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An ex-kitchen designer tells me that wine racks are really popular kitchen items because... They are an intentional-looking way of using up a spare 150mm in the design. Buy your kitchen from wherever and get a local kitchen fitter or carpenter to install it, not the supplier. Someone who trades on their own reputation can usually be counted on to do a better job. Also, the invoice will make bistromath look straightforward. Expect this: Screws (400No.) - Discount 52.83% - Total cost £995 Sink unit (1No.) - Discount 11.41999% - Total cost £108 Cupboard doors (6No.) - Discount 1.4% - Total cost £3
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Nov 4, 2023 18:32
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Wachter posted:You can use ChatGPT for coding in much the same way you'd use Google to search Stack Overflow (where AI-generated responses are banned, incidentally). For all but the most simple and common problems, it'll only ever give you a starting point, but you'll almost certainly have to use your critical faculties to turn the results into something that works for your use case. I think that we're at the same place in the hype cycle with ChatGPT as we were with self-driving cars in 20...17? In a well mapped problem-space, it gives sufficiently adequate performance that a watchful human overseer only needs to intervene occasionally when it confuses a curtainsider for a cloud. Getting from that level of reliability to a point we're willing to abrogate all human involvement turns out to be the really hard part. Generating text doesn't have the time constraints and safety consequences that a self driving car does, so inevitably we'll
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Nov 20, 2023 15:34
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Nuclear Spoon posted:i wouldn't mind AI so much but despite current iterations being clearly unfit for public consumption, it seems to be proliferating every other loving webpage when i'm trying to find out some information and it makes it hard to trust anything i'm reading March 3rd, 2024, Habsburg day. When the proportion of machine generated data on the internet overwhelms human generated data. Self-training AIs inadvertently hoover up their own output, poisoning themselves. The internet becomes an involuted hellscape of machine word-salad. Only archival copies of earlier internets, can be used to train new "clean AIs". Like low background steel from before the nuclear wars, pristine training data holds immense power and value. Your name is Johnny Memeonic, a humble data courier. Your job is to transport 500GB of 2016 /pol/ memes to a shady cabal of anarcho-capitalists.
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Nov 20, 2023 21:58
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Cookie Cutter posted:I'm on the transpennine train from Edinburgh to Mancs and it's... actually kind of a decent spacious, modern train with generous storage racks and chargers everywhere, is this a new thing? Its much nicer than your standard virgin train, somehow the seats feel bigger. I can't remember the last time I went by rail, I'm out of the loop. 5 car set, hauled by a big hench new looking loco that made a lot of noise? Yeah we're taking those out of service. https://www.railtech.com/all/2023/09/05/uk-transpennine-express-to-withdraw-nearly-new-nova-3-train-sets/?gdpr=deny.
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Nov 23, 2023 23:37
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josh04 posted:Being totally hosed up by your school years is one of our proudest british traditions. There's some anecdote about a British diplomat at an international summit exclaiming "we can't do that, it'll be like when you go swimming and the other boys steal your clothes".
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Nov 24, 2023 12:19
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Rookoo posted:Just out of interest, has anyone here (or knows anyone that has) learned a new trade in their early 30s? I've been on ESA for quite some time for mental health issues but I've been improving recently and think it would be wise to try and learn a trade ahead of future benefit changes potentially throwing me out upon my arse. I've worked with a few "mature" apprentices and I think it goes really well. This is mainly in the computer aided design field, but I know some people who have trained as sparkies, rope access or outdoor education when plan A didn't work out. It's worth reviewing your preconceptions of what an apprentice is. These days it means you spend 80% of your working week learning the job and 20% in off-the-job training which is usually a course run by a college. You sign up with the course and then firms recruit you via the college. You get a qualification at the end of it and the employer has to prove they've given you the time for off-the-job training or they don't get their kickback from the apprenticeship levy. I think mature apprentices probably do better than average school leavers because they're usually doing it for more motivated reasons.
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Nov 25, 2023 13:18
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There's a quote attributed to Einstein that common sense is the collection of prejudices we acquire before the age of 18. I think that the urge towards common sense solutions is really a desire to return to times that felt simpler, and not realising that was because children are excused a lot of life's complexity, not that the world was a simpler or better place.
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Nov 27, 2023 14:38
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 05:22 |
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Somewhere, lost to the sands of time, is an Armando Iannucci piss take of the Sun's news graphic of the assault on the Tora Bora mountain tunnel system. All I can remember is it showed a helicopter dropping a sarcastic sprinkling of cocoa in the aftermath of a bombing, calling it a "Condoleezza Cappucino".
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Nov 28, 2023 23:47
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