The Politics Thread

Now Dianne Abbott was seen drinking an M&S mojito on a tfl train should they change their name to Marx and Spencer .......

 

M&S also seem to have done a roaring trade in tinned cocktails too

Sort of like when the Wail went apeshit about Corbyn wearing an £80 M&S anorak at the Cenotaph...which led to a sudden upsurge in people buying reasonably-priced raincoats at M&S

...does anyone think they have a stake in M&S?

 

On a totally different subject. Has any one thought what will happen when 10 million of us get home from work and plug in our electric cars to charge them? The national grid gets strained when about 5 million people plug a kettle in at half time during a world cup final. Each of those kettles on average draws about 2kW. A baby car charger draws between 7 and 15 kWh and a proper 3 phase charger draws up to 45 kW. Without renewing and upgrading every supply cable in the country, overhead cables will be glowing bright white and buried cables will be going pop and jumping out of the ground. Pylons will not be able to carry the weight of cables necessary, it will be a right royal feck up that makes Brexit look well organised.

 

Other thoughts on the subject, the business I work for looked into converting a fleet of 50 Van's over to electric and found that the industrial est that the site is on could not handle the power needed
Also what will the car industry do with the batteries when their life is over, at present that's about 6/8 yrs

 

What will they do with batteries? The same as expended solar panels I'd guess, send them to African villages where there is little or no H&S so the locals can cut short their lives recovering what is recyclable.

 

All resource utility networks suffer from this problem (in telecoms this is the
core and access network) .

Where the resource is needed most is far away from where the resource is produced
at the most efficient cost. Similarly the access network is unable to provide the
capacity for the actual demand. Given that there are orders of magnitude more access
networks than core, someone has to bear the cost of upgrading the access networks.

This is precisely why the UK has taken two decades to get vaguely decent
residential Internet speeds. The tech has long been there, but the costs (in the maIn
human labour) have been too high for providers to bear.

So it will be for the scenario you described.


"Also what will the car industry do with the batteries when their life is over, at present that's about 6/8 yrs"

That is the 'TCOA' (total cost of achievement) problem.
Specifically that you may be robbing Peter (environmental) to pay Paul (electric powered vehicles) .

I have yet to see a decent template method for doing ball-park TCOA on stuff like this
(the inter linking/working of on-paper orthogonal concerns) .

 

So true,the attitude to much of the waste that the western world creates

 

The classic combo of NIMBY + "beneath me" that epitomises the "chattering classes" .

 

.
Q. What in your opinion would help, I cycle locally, recycle as much as possible ,try not to use single use plastics and when in towns and city prefer to use public transport, but on the other hand I drive a vehicle as part of my job , love to drive my car and have continental holidays twice a year

 

I have often wondered what the TCOA would be for a residential
house in the UK that uses a combo of ground heat exchangers +
solar roofing + wind turbines, in order to produce enough electricity
to be able to run the house and an electric car for typical family use
(school runs, shopping, work commutes with a 30m radius etc) .

I suspect a large majority of UK denizens are covered by the above scenario.


As for recycling, I believe in a "carrot and stick" approach for both
consumers and producers. If not easily recyclable, then it must be
reusable. Producers who do the former should be rewarded (lower CT etc) .
Vendors such as Pringles crisps take note (tis an effing nightmare in time +
effort to get the aluminium disc at the bottom into a clean state) .

If as a consumer I personally remove the inside/outside facades from a Tetrapak,
remove the plastic from a windowed envelope etc, I should be rewarded somehow
(pts on a supermarket "reward card" etc) .

As for "single use" plastics, that may well be a lie borne out by the numbers.
The bottle top on the plastic milk bottle I have, could be reused. So is the one on
the Innocent fruit juice bottle. And the three components that comprise my roll-on deodorant.
And the guard/handle on my disposable razors. And ...

The bottle tops that are not the above, if correctly sorted by colour + plastic type,
can they be melted down and remolded into same/different items etc.

There is a lot of "Pareto principle" work that can be done on paper/cardboard/plastic
recycling (if you have the correct tools to do a decent TCOA analysis) .

 

Food for thought , thanks for that. Housing is a good point , where I walk the dog the local council in conjunction with a housing group are throwing up the most basic uninspiring houses and flat without as far as I can see any of the energy devices that you mention. The extra insulation in roofs,walls and windows is a fraction of what it would cost to retro fit .
Government needs to act now to make these energy saving ,producing items law in new homes but I very much doubt this will happen due to the strength of the building industry lobby fighting to protect the profits of their pay masters

 

Donald Trump 'set for June state visit to UK'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48020410

Time to start practicing our booing methinks.

 

Ned Kelly lives!

 

Cue his supporters kvetching that no other world leader ever faced protests when they visited the UK (with the usual Trumpist buzzphrases thrown in to make that sound less like a coherent argument and more like a point accidentally got left in a bowl of regurgitated alphabetti spaghetti)

...so I'll get ahead of it and point out that Putin, Xi Jinping and Mohammed bin Salman all faced protests when visiting the UK

 

Citizen May needs to get some practice in for her best "poker face"
when Trump rips into her on her handling of the EU exit negotiations
during press meets.

 

Don't you think that she may actually have a sense of humour and this may be a present for Boris to make him look the twat that he is?

 

No.

"and this may be a present for Boris to make him look the twat that he is?"

He does that well enough by himself, so would be just a waste of money.

 

From one country in a state to another in a mess.Bringing his daughter ****er with him?

 

Wouldn't it be terrible if a political party made their own name the source for endless punchlines?

...or, in the case of The Independent Hashtag Change Group Ltd, wouldn't it be terrible if a limited company masquerading as a political party fatally undermined their own name if they not only came out and said they would support the Dire Leader if she faced a No Confidence vote, but they are opposed to calling another General Election?