www.theguardian.com Ministers prioritised driving in England partly due to conspiracy theories
Exclusive: Documents show shift in transport policy influenced by unfounded fears about loss of freedom of movement in ‘15-minute cities’
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That’s it. We should hand back our “developed country” card.
People will rip off the headsets if the ads are too intrusive and annoying. Which is why they’ll either be dead subtle, or they’ll offer you paid ways to avoid them.
I don’t think there’ll be mass adoption of this either way, mainly because it’s an expensive gadget coming at a time when folks on median incomes are feeling the pinch.
What’s his negotiating stance with doctors again?
What’s funny about all of this is everyone is obsessed with the funding model instead of the delivery model.
If you choose to fund it privately, please keep in mind that they need to make a profit - which means that if a publicly funded service could do things within the same cost envelope they would be cheaper as they wouldn’t need to add the profit margin on top. There is no more cost effective solution than single payer, public sector service.
So. Why does no one talk about how healthcare is actually delivered?
That’s right. Let’s totally fail to consider arguments on their merits, one way or the other (and recognise that his party has been holding down doctors pay for over a decade while demanding more of them, not to mention the whole pandemic thing), and instead worry about “sending a message”.
I wonder if he has a bet riding on the outcome of this?
“Government does not understand” - standard current-era (c.2010 onwards) Tory.
Cancelling a chunk of HS2 in a way that at the time and increasingly since comes across as “on a whim” suggests a total lack of understanding not just of rail but of national infrastructure, our economy and our people.
HS2 never had to be some kind of souped up bullet train service. All HS2 had to be was an increase in capacity, with any added speed as a bonus. Four track instead of two track - so that fast trains didn’t get stuck behind stopping services. That’s all that was needed.
This country is ridiculous. We are a tiny island. How hard is it to connect up all the bits with road and rail? The roads are falling apart and our once world-leading and world-beating railways are outdated, poorly routed/connected and economically constrictive.
It’s incredible. I went to a consultation forum regarding intruding 20mph speed limits and all these conspiracy nuts just came out of the crowd like some zombie apocalypse.
It’s conspiracies all the way down.
Predictably it’s the 15-minute-city conspiracy crap.
The inside of the right-wing brain must be a fearful place; ripe for radicalisation and manipulation.
I don't see the £50m in quite same way as you do; I see it as the "opportunity cost" of the strikes - and it often seems to be the case that the opportunity cost is much higher than what it would cost to negotiate and settle (by extension, it also seems that employers / governments playing hardball with workers is probably based more on ideology than on financial sense).
I believe we share the same sentiment though; these RMT folks are critical to the economy and they should be treated (and compensated) as such.
www.theguardian.com London Underground tube strike called off
RMT suspends action which threatened to halt virtually all tube services in the capital over next four days
The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said the strikes would have cost the hospitality industry £50m alone, and the suspension “shows what can be achieved by engaging and working with trade unions and transport staff, rather than working against them”.
Not just mosquitos and not just in the long term either; with the colder weather not being as harsh a lot of other critters are either making a comeback, hanging around for longer or not dying out in the colder temperatures - think Blandford flies, horseflies, tick bites...
www.theguardian.com British workers missing out on £10,700 a year as living standards fall
Report by Resolution Foundation and LSE calls for economic strategy rethink after 15 years of relative decline
“The result of a three-year inquiry by a group of the nation’s top academics, businesspeople and policymakers, the study warned that a generation of younger adults was being failed in particular – with 9 million having never worked in an economy with sustained average wage rises.”
www.theguardian.com BMW, Subaru and Porsche drivers ‘more likely to cause a crash’, study finds
Research found speeding or jumping a red light less likely in a Skoda or Hyundai than in brands sold as ‘performance driving’
So it’s not purely anecdotal then… link to the original paper is here.
Project Orbis is about approval (and it seems like a good idea). It isn’t about supply or cost.
Close to home think Gibraltar and Northern Ireland. Further afield - I work with people who regularly travel for tasks that require an on-site presence and who have long term health conditions.
Probably more common than you think.
Private Eye - In The Back - False account Tees freeport , Issue 1608
“TEES VALLEY regional mayor Lord (Ben) Houchen's South Tees Development Corporation (STDC), responsible for Europe's largest brownfield regeneration project, is using Enron-style accounting to mask the remarkable deals it has struck with local businessmen and their effects on the body's finances, an examination of its latest accounts shows.
Epitomising the smoke-and-mirrors is the single most expensive project at the heart of Rishi Sunak's flagship freeport: the construction of a £113m quay on the south bank of the Tees, planned to serve green industrial companies such as the Korean wind turbine monopile manufacturer SeAH, which is building a plant next to it.”
It’s sad but just leave it be. What’s lost is lost and cannot be easily replaced or replicated. In another millennium or two there’ll be something else there and those of us around today won’t really have any control over that.
Gray. Wheeler. Who next? If these people didn’t have excellent reputations for what they do, it could almost be trolling.
The pure ChatGPT output would probably be garbage. The dataset will be full of all manner of sources (together with their inherent biases) together with spin, untruths and outright parody and it’s not apparent that there is any kind of curation or quality assurance on the dataset (please correct me if I’m wrong).
I don’t think it’s a good tool for extracting factual information from. It does seem to be good at synthesising prose and helping with writing ideas.
I am quite interested in things like this where the output from a “knowledge engine” is paired with something like ChatGPT - but it would be for eg writing a science paper rather than news.
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA.
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.
USE THEM TOGETHER.
USE THEM IN PEACE.
Exactly. The data harvest has had years in the making.
“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Yes. Seriously.
www.theguardian.com UK admits extra £330m a year in charges for post-Brexit animal and plant imports
Labour’s Stella Creasy elicits confirmation of higher charges to firms which some say risk further fuelling food inflation
Brexit. Benefits.
deadline.com Revealed: Russell Brand Exited Comedy Central’s ‘Roast Battle’ After Facing Sexual Predator Claims On-Camera
EXCLUSIVE: Russell Brand’s last major television job in the UK ended with him being dropped after he was repeatedly accused of being a “sexual predator” during the recording of th…
www.theguardian.com Road casualties have become normal in Britain. But there is another way
A parliamentary group has compiled 10 recommendations to make our roads safer for pedestrians and cyclists
“Poll after poll has shown that the biggest reason for people not wanting to cycle is perceived danger. And anyone who has dared to ride a bike on unprotected roads will soon discover that a large part of this danger comes from pure illegality, not least the vast proportion of drivers who speed, especially on residential roads.
This neatly leads us to the other factor highlighted by the report, and its reaction to it: the howls of outrage if people politely suggest that people could perhaps be less of a danger to others when they drive.
Before the report’s launch, the only one of 10 recommendations highlighted in the media was the idea of removing the so-called tolerances in speeding offences, whereby you can currently go about 10% plus 2mph above a limit and not be penalised.”
The link to the parliamentary group report (.pdf file) is here.
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk Whatever happened to ‘the best-governed city in the world’?
The effective insolvency of Birmingham city council shows the decline in how local government is taken seriously
“The ultimate problem is perhaps the lack of seriousness with which local authorities are regarded and the lack of seriousness with which councils are run. More than in 1890, our political culture is dominated by Westminster and Whitehall. We are an over-centralised polity. We do not take local government seriously enough to give councils significant powers and adequate resources and tax-raising abilities. And we do not take local government seriously enough for the powers and resources and revenue-raising abilities that local authorities do have to be used well.
Few take any serious interest in local government matters. An account of the government of a large city other than London will rarely get 12 paragraphs in an earnest newspaper, let alone the 12 pages of a fashionable transatlantic journal. The sort of individuals who in 1890 would manage major acquisitions and improvement projects for provincial cities as part of their civic roles are not often the local councillors of 2023.
Observational and model evidence together support wide-spread exposure to noncompensable heat under continued global warming
Abstract
As our planet warms, a critical research question is when and where temperatures will exceed the limits of what the human body can tolerate. Past modeling efforts have investigated the 35°C wet-bulb threshold, proposed as a theoretical upper limit to survivability taking into account physiological and behavioral adaptation. Here, we conduct an extreme value theory analysis of weather station observations and climate model projections to investigate the emergence of an empirically supported heat compensability limit. We show that the hottest parts of the world already experience these heat extremes on a limited basis and that under moderate continued warming parts of every continent, except Antarctica, will see a rapid increase in their extent and frequency. To conclude, we discuss the consequences of the emergence of this noncompensable heat and the need for incorporating different critical thermal limits into heat adaptation planning.
Global trends in incidence, death, burden and risk factors of early-onset cancer from 1990 to 2019
Zhao J, Xu L, Sun J, et al Global trends in incidence, death, burden and risk factors of early-onset cancer from 1990 to 2019 BMJ Oncology 2023;2:e000049. doi: 10.1136/bmjonc-2023-000049
Abstract
Objective This study aimed to explore the global burden of early-onset cancer based on the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2019 study for 29 cancers worldwid.
Methods and analysis Incidence, deaths, disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and risk factors for 29 early-onset cancer groups were obtained from GBD.
Results Global incidence of early-onset cancer increased by 79.1% and the number of early-onset cancer deaths increased by 27.7% between 1990 and 2019. Early-onset breast, tracheal, bronchus and lung, stomach and colorectal cancers showed the highest mortality and DALYs in 2019. Globally, the incidence rates of early-onset nasopharyngeal and prostate cancer showed the fastest increasing trend, whereas early-onset liver cancer showed the sharpest decrease. Early-onset colorectal cancer
conservativehome.com Who is Sunak? | Conservative Home
He may have less than a year, as Parliament returns and his Party's conference looms, to persuade voters of his case - which he has scarcely even begun to make.
After sharing the article from the London Economic about possible votes of no confidence in Mr Sunak, this is what I find on ConHome this morning:
“There comes a point in the electoral cycle when voters have simply had enough – and their cry is “kindly leave the stage”. Every bit of good news, such as the sensational upgrading of Britain’s post-Covid growth figures, is met by quibbles and qualifications that, for some reason, never greeted the bad.”
These guys are spinning so hard I want to make a joke about harnessing that motion for electricity generation.
www.theguardian.com Sunak refused to fully fund repairs of England’s crumbling schools, says ex-official
PM shown evidence of ‘critical risk to life’ when chancellor, says former top civil servant at Department for Education
Rishi Sunak refused to properly fund a school rebuilding programme when he was chancellor, despite officials presenting evidence that there was “a critical risk to life” from crumbling concrete panels, the Department for Education’s former head civil servant has said.
After the department told Sunak’s Treasury that there was a need to rebuild 300 to 400 schools a year in England, he gave funding for only 100, which was then halved to 50, said Jonathan Slater, the permanent secretary of the department from 2016 to 2020.
Conservative ministers more widely believed a greater funding priority was to build new free schools, Slater told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday, as pupils returned to many schools in England for the new term.
“For me as an official, it seemed that should have been second to safety,” Slater said. “But politics is about choices. And that was a choice they made.”
www.thelondoneconomic.com Tory MPs submitting letters of no confidence in Sunak
"It just feels like we have completely lost control, the country is falling apart. Nobody really believes the PM can win the election"
In the words of Brenda from Bristol “you’re joking, not another one!”
No idea how much substance there is to this.
www.theguardian.com Jeremy Hunt under fire after Treasury says no new cash to fix Raac in schools
Chancellor had pledged to ‘spend what ever it takes’ on concrete crisis but repair costs will come from existing education budget
That’s the story now; it was different in the morning.
The morning article included:
“He added: “The moment the education secretary has heard about any problem in a school, any risk to children, she has acted.
“And we have 22,000 schools in the country and there has been since that incident a huge programme going through this Raac/asbestos issue because we want to be absolutely sure that every child is safe.
“And we have then made sure as soon as we have information of any risk that something is done to mitigate that risk.”
Hunt, who later told the BBC that the government would “spend what it takes to sort out this problem as quickly as possible”, denied the problem could cause a repeat of lockdown-style teaching, where substantial numbers of children missed out on attending classes for long periods of time.”
A day is a long time in politics.
www.theguardian.com Takeshi’s Castle is back! UK television gets its best ever version of the Japanese gameshow
Romesh Ranganathan and Tom Davis host a fun, refreshing reboot of the classic show. Brace yourself for charm, dodgy sets and ludicrously difficult challenges
“Except that’s not the case. For the first time, British audiences get to see entire episodes of Takeshi’s Castle as it was designed to be seen by Japanese viewers. Not sneered at by Chris Tarrant, or packaged with a culturally insensitive “oriental riff” influenced theme tune. No, these are new episodes, in full, with graphics, in-studio analysis and actual rules. We even get to know the contestants, which is refreshing after decades of seeing them as, essentially, a procession of screaming crash test dummies.”
[…]
“But you know what might have been even better? Giving us the show just as it is. The success of Netflix’s Old Enough last year should be proof that global audiences are now sophisticated enough to enjoy non-scripted Japanese shows without having their hands held via the medium of jokey commentary. As fun as Romesh and Tom are, perhaps a better idea would have been a straight, subtitled version of Takeshi’s Castle. Clearly, our relationship to the show is still evolving.
www.theguardian.com No 10’s Ulez stance reverses ‘decades of clean air progress’, says Sadiq Khan
Rishi Sunak’s lack of support for expanded scheme risks stunting Londoners’ lungs, says mayor in run-up to Tuesday’s launch
“The government has given financial assistance to Birmingham, Bristol and Portsmouth to help fund their clean air zones but has refused to support London’s scheme, arguing that powers over transport and air quality are devolved to the capital.”
www.thetimes.co.uk What’s driving Cycling Mikey, Britain’s most hated cyclist?
In four years Mike van Erp has filmed 1,400 drivers using their phones, leading to 1,800 penalty points, £110,000 of fines — and him being assaulted by disgruntled motorists. Is he a road safety hero or just a darned nuisance? Nick Rufford joins him on patrol
“In four years Mike van Erp has filmed 1,400 drivers using their phones, leading to 1,800 penalty points, £110,000 of fines — and him being assaulted by disgruntled motorists. Is he a road safety hero or just a darned nuisance? Nick Rufford joins him on patrol”
I’ve watched a few of his videos. I should be surprised that he catches so many drivers in their phones, but in and around London? Not surprised at all.