I almost want to say 'well, the last one to leave turns off the lights', but as it is, it seems likely that there won't be any electricity for the lights anyway, so the lights will be off way earlier than that.

People keep on saying that we are going to hit the iceberg if we don't do something. They seem to have failed to have noticed that we hit the iceberg some years ago (probably a decade or so, when 'austerity' was chosen as the response to 2008, but certainly before Brexit.) We're now just seeing whether we hit the seabed at speed or drift gently down.

I have no idea what comes next.

I hear tax cuts are on the way.

And I'm sure there will be political ads in the US on how it is Biden's and the D's fault. Trump would not have let it happen.

[sarcasm off][somewhat]

I for one welcome Scotland in the wide-open arms of the EU, probably VERY SOON, as part of a Gaelic-Welsh-Northern-Ireland-Ireland union. And if that doesn't work, emigration to Amsterdam is not a particularly bad idea either. I run a nifty homebrew centered on Githyanki, I'd love your input.

It's worth noting that although Brexit isn't making things any better, most of the problems are coming from structural failure across Europe. And winter, without Russian gas, is going to be VERY cold.

Who knew that policy documents don't make up for having a broken economy, mired in bureaucracy, and with nothing to offer but tourist destinations?

Stuff I didn't want to put in the OP:

I expect the results of winter blackouts, superinflation, and food shortages will focus a lot of Scottish minds on independence as the SNP's deadline for holding a referendum (October 6th, 2023) looms close. If it doesn't, we're screwed: there is absolutely no way that a hard right Tory government, once it has wangled re-election, will not reverse the devolution of powers we've had since 2000 and reinstate direct rule over what they see as a fractious province. (Their attitude to Scotland is very similar to the Russian establishment attitude to Ukraine.)

In previous cycles the current crisis would be fixed by a short, sharp dose of socialism, probably delivered by the Labour Party. But Labour today is a right wing party, centered roughly where Margaret Thatcher once stood. The Conservative Party of 2022 is the result of the party of 2012 making a determined attempt to crush its right-wing fringe, the UKIPpers and BNP-adjacent soft-fascist extreme (as opposed to the violent street thugs of EDL or Britain First). They succeeded too well. Former "centrist" Tories -- Thatcherites one and all -- were pushed out as too liberal, and the party is now wholly owned by the far right, as Liz Truss's policy platforms suggest.

We might be looking at a choice between a military coup(!) or a fascist dictatorship emerging naturally from the ruling party within another 5 years.

The situation we're facing is backstory-of-V-for-Vendetta bad.

Parenthetically: woke up this morning and realized I was really depressed.

Putting this all together made me feel ... not better, exactly, but better about being depressed because depression seems like a reasonable response to these circumstances.

The sterling crisis started when the UK pulled out of the EU with the Brexit vote in 2016. And it's never recovered (and as an ex-pat it's cost me personally thousands of dollars as most of my money was in the UK). The FT, even before all the bad news this week was stating last week that if the pound hovers around $1.15 it would be doing well. Think about that. Mot of my life it's been between $1.56 to $2.

During the summer we spent five weeks in Europe, three of them in the England. What was quickly apparent was that the public still to be almost as clueless about what trouble the country is in, partly due to effective distractions by the Daily Fail and Express (I lost count how many Brits were telling me that Biden had dementia, which they clearly got from those rags, yet from my perspective, he's just passed four of the biggest bills in recent US history that actually help people, and I'm not seeing the same competence on the UK side).

Which brings us to the present. The UK has perfected the art with Boris Johnson of just winging it and hoping for the best. That's not going to happen this time around. And it's hard to see who is going to be able to stabilize the situation with an election two years away. As far as I can tell, the only hope is that the Tories decide it's better to lose the election, then blame everyone else for the mess the country is in that they caused, so they can sneak back in in 2027.

The other aspect I'm pretty confident about is that none of the ministers who handed out those massive no-bid contracts are going to jail for corruption. More likely booted upstairs to the House of Lords.

I'll bet on the latter. Never mind. We have two shiny new aircraft carriers for when the USA next wants to start a war somewhere (Iran?)

Serious civil unrest (possibly even an effective general strike) would be 'interesting', as we shall see whether Braverman (the new Home Secretary, according to rumours) and Truss use the Blairite powers to use G4S or even Constellis Holdings (ex Blackwater) to restore control.

Very understandable.

All this is a reminder to me that individual action is really no help here, what is needed is structural actions from especially the state. Of course your government seems to be hell-bent on just destroying everything (talking about the UK, not Scotland) and getting any kind of collective action addressing these crises from them seems... unlikely.

The situation is not irretrievable in theory, at this point.

The problem is that in practice a solution requires the political elite to collectively admit the falsehood of the axioms they built their entire careers on.

If an individual political leader defects from the nationalist-neoliberal consensus, then they get treated exactly the way Jeremy Corbyn was. Corbyn was a soft-brexiter -- his distrust of the EU was based on it having emerged from the EEC, as a capitalist institution: what they hated him for was for being an unreconstructed hang-over from the 1970s when Labour was actually a left-wing party.

Neoliberal politicians can't admit that the crisis is rooted in neoliberal policies.

A lot of the price crisis is due to fuel being paid in dollars, and the pound, as you say, plunging since Brexit.

But an anniversary that might make you feel things can be turned around: Saturday was the 350th anniversary of the death of Johan de Witt, effectively a Dutch Prime Minister. Why is he significant? He was deposed from power, jailed, then lynched and eaten. It seems unlikely fava beans were involved.

And to give it even more relevant, the man thought to be behind it was William of Orange, who later became King here.

We both forgot to add: Truss seems determined to start a trade war with the EU and antagonise the USA. That will do marvels for the economy.

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uks-truss-says-determined-deliver-n-ireland-protocol-bill-full-2022-08-17/

Any actual fix takes a post-imperial ethnogenesis that allows a re-introduction of empiricism into public life.

That's difficult in general and more difficult because movement conservatives are against empiricism. (It causes taxes.)

Combine that with a protracted forcible decarbonization event and I don't think the outcomes are predictable; I wouldn't give a Mind much odds.

Any recovery will require a forcible dismantling of the mammonite faith, though. A Schmittean Movement can't accept empiricism in public life. (That's kinda what they're for! topple the established order by convincing people any order is immoral.)

...in favor of boosting fracking and coal mining

Questions from ignorance... Does the UK have gas/oil rich geologic structures suitable for fracking? Are there still coal-fired generating stations around?

The remains of the deep coal layers that fueled the industrial revolution are uneconomical to exploit as coal but you can frack the hell out of them. (See also North Sea oil and gas.) But the last coal-burning power station closed for good a year ago.

Truss is either deeply stupid or immensely cynical (quite possibly both), trotting out endless reams of shibboleths that are pitched at the Tory party membership who will be voting in the run-off between her and Sunak in the next couple of weeks.

Problem is, even if it's just cynical electioneering she's writing cheques she can't cash -- she's going to have to appoint a cabinet from the ranks of the current Parliamentary Conservative Party, and she's promised them £50Bn in tax cuts, stat.

She's Johnsonian in her lack of overt respect for facts, the only question is whether or not she knows it.

(Sunak is in some respects worse -- he's an ultra-wealthy former Goldman Sachs banker and hedge fun manager, married to a billionaire. He's so out of touch with the ordinary people that he has no idea about the financial pressures they're under.)

No arguments here.

Scotland has a much better chance on its own -- even though the divorce from the UK will be a shit-show of epic proportions.

(The irony of Scexit is that it replicates in miniature all the myriad petty disconnects of the Brexit divorce process. If anything, it could be worse: it replaces the EU counterparty -- a legalistic committee -- with a malignant nationalist death cult.)

But once free of England, Scotland won't be forced to bob along in the wake of the UK's Conservative leadership. With 70% support for joining the EU, there's hope for a successful economic restructuring and reorientation --

Oh wait, that's what Ukraine was doing.

I'm very obviously going to stay away from transpondian politics, and I hope Chicago provides a bit of respite.*

That said, I'll pitch again Terry Tempest William's four stage dealing with horrendous shit mosaic model, as used in refugee camps.

--Your life breaks

--Mourn the loss

--Pick up the pieces

--Create new life with those pieces.

One of the things we all seem to have trouble with is the mourning part, because that's gotten really unpopular. So instead we deal with it as anxiety and depression, maybe?

I'd suggest that it's not just okay but freaking necessary to mourn the loss of the UK you all grew up with, as a necessary part of creating new things out of the rubble the scheisskopfs are leaving you to work with. Hopefully it helps provide structures for working through this unthinkable mess.

You're pretty close, here:

"...use the Blairite powers to use G4S or even Constellis Holdings (ex Blackwater) to restore control"

That's a polite way of saying that the regime are bringing in mercenaries who are not subject to international law* to carry out orders that the British army and police cannot be given and would not be trusted to obey if they were.

But you also said 'G4S'.

Close, and you may well be correct, in a way. But Mrs May and her successor Preeti Patel already have a militia: the UK Border Force.

They have auxiliary forces under contract which do indeed include G4S. Which is to say: not only are you right, They are in place already.

They also have detention centres, which are not open to inspection by the United Nations and the Red Cross, in which there is no statutory requirement for an inquest into the death or disappearance of any inmate.

If you ever hear of the Home Office's immigration personnel and infrastructure being called-up to assist 'as a temporary administrative measure' - and we probably won't use the term 'Emergency' and we don't actually need emergency powers to do that) - get on the next plane or ferry out.

The Home Office militia and prison camps will be normalised into a domestic security role - not law and order! - and they will be something far worse than the existing police and prisons because they routinely defy the courts already and there are no effective mechanisms of accountability and review.

The bitter end of that road to Hell - - and I can assure you that I won't be here to see it - would be the recruitment of 'auxiliary personnel' and 'National Security Volunteers'. Essentially, handing-out armbands to the successor organisations to the National Front, and any other 'loyal citizens'; less politely, skinhead thugs with swastika tattoos, and swivel-eyed crucifix-wavers who will obey any order, no matter how inhumane, if they get a crack at sexual deviants and abortionists.

Betcha there's a lot of them working for the Home Office detention system's private sector solution partners already: the process might not even need armbands.

So yes, you're right.

I bet you wish you weren't.


* No really: look it up. US armed forces and their auxiliaries - Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi, and KBR Logistical Support - are explicitly protected by American law, so as to never be rendered to the Hague and prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

Nile: You probably know this already, but we saw the start of this sort of thing in the US under Trump. He weaponized ICE (Immigration authorities) to a huge degree, and there were reliable anecdotal reports of random protestors being arrested by non-uniformed people who would only say they were Federal Agents and being taken who knows where. Then during the DC protests a group of Riot Cops (again wearing unmarked uniforms) appeared, wouldn't answer any questions. Turns out they were federal Bureau of Prisons riot cops (ie, the folks who go in when there is a Prison riot).

All this seems to have mostly been forgotten; one of Trump's magical powers is he broke so many norms that no one could keep up with them all.

But yeah, given the UK Tories seem to love them some Trump and the UK frankly has less protections against Police Overreach (what protections there are are statutory and can be changed or ignored) I think your prediction is probably spot on :-/

One thing that confuses Americans is that there seems to have been no movement away from neoliberalism by Labor. In the US the D Party is hobbled by too many D officials who are still stuck in the 1990s, but the public aspirations of the Party are in the direction of more activist government and a more generous welfare state, if not an open disavowal of Clinton's policies.

The Labour Party, from over here, seems to have basically nobody in it who realizes that it's not 1993 (or even 1999) anymore. You'd think there should be some space for at least a soft-Left Party with a platform of "Nobody freezes to death or starves" even if they won't go full on seize-the-commanding-heights-of-finance.

Well, yes. That's because Labour is currently in the grip of its own internal right-wing faction, after they went backstabby on Corbyn and Momentum (the internal left-wing faction). Which left them absolutely nowhere to go and with no plan of their own except for "(1) get into office by any means necessary, (2) ... (3) profit???".

Starmer has repeatedly made it clear that winning is the only thing that matters, because without control he can't achieve anything. So he's doing his best to make his party palatable to what he sees as an overwhelmingly Tory-leaning electorate. I believe the history books will index this under "mistakes".

Bear with me for a moment: I think I have spotted a way a #Scexit could really f**k over London.

Assume Scotland jumps instantly from UK to EU membership, and by "instantly" I mean that there is never a single moment in time, where Scotland is not member of either UK or EU.

Upon landing in EU, Scotland will be party to (the other side of) the UK/EU Brexit agreement, so all that stuff with customs &c &c &c. is already negotiated, signed and sealed.

To avoid EU's byzantine induction process, the Council of Ministers conclude that London did not have the authority to yank Scotland out of EU /the way they did/, and since the citizens of Scotland therefore never stopped being EU citizens, it is not an "induction" but merely a "continuation".

The /the way they did/ bit can be any technicality, up to and including the #brexit voting material not being sufficiently handicap-friendly or just plain misleading.

The #brexit agreement says, in almost as many words, "what's ours is ours, what's your's is your's", so everything physically in Scotland is now Scottish.

That includes any military units, submarines and nuclear weapons, and if Scotland wants to impose a specific real-estate tax on foreign non-EU ownership, they are free to do that under EU's laws.

It would go down in history-books under the heading "BXL has the last laugh"

The bit that's missing is how fast this is happening...

...Energy bills are soaring to the point where

We're past that point, and we're already seeing secondary effects: it's accelerating, damage has already been done, and it might not be possible to halt it - let alone recover from it - until the economy is much, much smaller than it is today.

Take, for example, private sector nurseries: the energy bill hike has hit them hard, they operate on razor-thin margins, and their customers - working parents who make a decision whether they can actually afford to work after their childcare costs - respond to rises in fees by ceasing to use the service.

But nurseries are also being hit by a second-order effect: they are losing staff to distribution centres - including Amazon, who are appallingly low payers - who have been forced to raise their wages in response to the cost-of-living crisis.

And the mass closures of a nurseries which have lost too many parents to be viable business has a it's own second-order effect: parents leaving the workforce.

So that's a consequential effect for other companies, both in terms of lost consumers and the forced contraction of their own businesses' ability to produce goods and provide services - and a secondary pressure to inflate their own prices, in order to pay enough to attract replacements as well as keeping up with their own workforce's cost of living crises.

Or not keeping-up, and contracting or closing, as they lose their own workforce.

I've picked-out the childcare sector because it's getting headlines, and the effects are easy to observe: but they are everywhere, and self-reinforcing by mechanisms which kicked-in far, far faster than pay rounds and monthly inflation surveys.

There is also the ultimate second-order effect: Central Bank anti-inflation economic Kool-Aid. Yes, we're getting an interest rate hike because businesses who borrow money must be forced to stop expanding and raise their prices. Or close.

The next question is: why are businesses so fragile?

And that's easy: energy companies aren't the only rent-seekers gouging their prices, and 'Rent-seeker Classic' - commercial landlords - have been bleeding the business sector white for decades.

Why are households so fragile is, of course, a related question, for values of 'related' that bring to mind parasitic fungi and the mating habits of bedbugs... The relationship is that British businesses have been underpaying the lower quartile of workforce so severely, and for so long, that nearly half of all foodbank users are now from households with one or more adults in paid employment. We are structurally a starvation wage economy and there is only so much you can do to cut the wage bill before you don't have any workers at all: ask any Nursery manager.

My heart bleeds for companies in that position.

Next step - create scapegoats. While it's traditional to use Jews, in today's UK politics, Trans people are more vulnerable, being attacked by most of the media and fashionistae.

While it might take some creativity to manufacture the link between rising energy prices and trans children, even more unlikely things have been adduced in the past. Trans people have been blamed for far more.

The FSB did a great job in most respects, but have been unable to prevent the short term flow of weaponry to Ukraine, while the British manufacturing economy still stands. Societal disintegration is happening, but far too slowly.

Bear in mind that UK courts have already ruled that the referendum itself was void - it's just that none of the damage was done by the referendum (which was purely advisory), but by the actions taken by the UK Government since the referendum (which were done in full compliance with the UK constitution, and could have been done before the referendum).

If the CoM want an excuse, the easy option is to rule that while English constitutional requirements were met, Scottish were not, and thus the Article 50 notice was void in as far as it covers Scotland. With a bit of political dancing (and I'm about 85% confident the SNP would be a willing partner in this dance), you could get Scotland to take over the former UK membership in return for the Scottish government giving up the UK opt-outs permanently and declaring that the EU should end opt-outs entirely over time.

That, in turn, would involve some careful behind-the-scenes work with Denmark (EMU, Schengen sort-of, Area of freedom, security and justice) and Ireland (Area of freedom, security and justice, Schengen) to get them on side, but would put a lot of pressure on Poland (Charter of Fundamental Rights) to rejoin the CFR and end its opt-outs completely.

I don't know enough about Danish politics to know how workable such a deal would be - with the Irish opt-outs, they exist to maintain the CTA with NI, and there's some clear routes to removing the formal opt-out by referencing the Withdrawal Agreement in its place (leaving the CTA protected by other means).

"But the last coal-burning power station closed for good a year ago."

Coal is going, but not totally gone in the UK. According to https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ it has about 1 GW of capacity left and, though coal frequently delivers nothing for extended periods, in the interval 1 June 2022 - today provided a total of 547 GWh. Total demand was 61.4 TWh, so coal is pretty tiny, but not zero.

I have no idea where that coal was burned.

(As long as I have the spreadsheet open, it shows that for those same summer months, combined cycle gas turbine generation provided 30 TWh, half the total demand. The UK may need a fair amount of gas this winter.)

Given that's happened to sterling since 2016, Scotland could plausibly take on the euro as a currency -- the real issues would be debt gearing and interest rates, not the exchange rate making the voters suddenly feel poor. Which is negotiable, with a bit of goodwill on the part of the EU and the ECB (in return for expansion and a chance to stick it to Westminster).

(The "just coast along using sterling like nothing has changed" is an obvious non-starter, and the "we'll invent a Scottish Pound, pegged against a basket of reserve currencies" was always a workaround for "join the euro zone" anyway.)

Part of the "fun" is that many of our biomass burning stations are converted coal plants, and can still run on coal. So by one definition, we have no coal burning plants left (because they're all biomass plants), but by another, we have coal capacity left (since most of our biomass plants can burn coal instead of biomass).

"most of our biomass plants can burn coal instead of biomass"

Thanks, I didn't know that. Coal, now that one thinks of it, could be seen as a type of biomass...

I recently noticed something interesting in the cinema. I've seen three movies in the last couple of weeks, two of which were definitely mainstream. The ads before them all were, relatively speaking, 'woke'. But ads have one purpose: to sell people stuff, and they're not about to produce something unless they think it does that. So these ads were what they were because either people want that or at least the advertisers think they do. And these were not obscure arthouse films and not in obscure arthouse cinemas (well, one was, but I'm discounting that one).

My guess is the former: most people actually think that treating other people decently, even other people who are different in various ways, is a good thing.

So what's the whole anti-woke thing about then? Well, I think it's just the same as everything else they're doing: Sunak and Truss are competing for the votes of a bunch of decrepit white men who are extremely unrepresentative of what most people actually want.

I don't know how this plays out in terms of winning the next election. If they intend to have a meaningful next election of course.

You're too nice!

No, really. You want a 'Screw-Em-Over Screxit', start with the premise that a seceding territory which achieves self-determination and statehood does not take on any part of their former rulers' debts.

This is the the sting in the "We're going and just you try to stop us" flavour of independence: if it's achieved by negotiation and mutual recognition, the former capital can get an agreement to take on a share of their national debt.

Effectively, they're forcing the new nation to buy its way out.

But... The new state can subsequently repudiate these obligations - it's a type of onerous debt - and default on the payments. If, and only if, it has sufficient diplomatic and economic support from other countries, and no need to fear retaliation from their former rulers.

And if independence isn't achieved by negotiation at all, and enough third-party nations do recognise the new state, then none of the former 'parent' state's obligations apply. No debts, no treaties, no rights for resident citizens, nothing.

In practice, human rights, and rights of property, must be respected by a new state, or they'll lose friends immediately.

But...

If there's diplomatic support from enough trading partners to negate lawsuits, retaliatory sanctions, and a WTO complaint, the newly-independent state can declare any assets (land, public services, public infrastructure) that have been sold by their former rulers to the private sector, without their citizens' democratic consent, to have been unlawfully expropriated, and therefore subject to renationalisation without compensation.

...And, as we're talking about Boris Johnson's successors in the next Conservative government, it would be very, very easy to reinforce those claims of unlawful expropriation with credible accusations of corruption.

If ever the SNP decide to play hardball, they can hint at doing that: or state it, explicitly, that this will be the policy of the post-independence state. And that's a very powerful weapon of blackmail, to force the current Westminster regime to the negotiating table:

"We'll renationalise with compensation if you accept our terms: otherwise, your campaign donors and your hosts for those lucrative directorships when you retire, will lose everything they unlawfully 'own' in Scotland at midnight on Independence Day".

Plus, of course, there's the matter of any evidence that might exist in support of prosecutions for corruption - both for (say) privatisation contracts, and for any irregular Covid PPE contracts that might have had an impact on Scotland.

The Scottish Lord Advocate and Procurators Fiscal might, just might, be free of the strange reluctance of Westminster's Director of Public Prosecutions to investigate such allegations - and the Lord Advocate might, just might, be happy to cooperate with countries who pursue 'extraterritorial' action against bribery and corruption and the associated money-laundering, wherever it occurs, by pressuring international banks to freeze the funds involved.

So there is every prospect of the independence process being messy - and I fully expect an attempt at looting by the Westminster regime - but The Scottish National Party has some very powerful threats available to use against any Conservative politician who believes that they need not negotiate at all.

Meanwhile, the SNP have to do everything they can to mitigate English rent-seekers' artificial recession and Westminster politicians' attempts to worsen it.

I expect we'll see continued industrial action over the next 12 months and probably a significant increase in trades union membership. The Labour Party is probably correct in their assessment that struggling working class voters who are fed up of the Tories have nowhere else to go in large numbers. Which means the the Labour Party can disavow in public the rowdy trades unionism and industrial action whilst blaming the government for mishandling the crisis. Keen as I am on more bargaining power for workers I'm not sure that increased trades unionism, even if successful in strike action and pay negotiations, necessarily fixes things over the medium term. If the fundamental problems are climate change, energy and food price increases caused by Covid and war related disruption those problems don't go away just because workers have more bargaining power.

You can't just declare internationally traded gas to be a lower price.

Not sure what the Labour Party do once they win the 2024 General Election and have to deal with more robust, larger, better resourced and potentially victorious trades union movement - given that the UK government has limited options to fix the underlying economic problems the country faces in the short-term. Even if they started a national programme of onshore wind turbines and insulation that's still 3 years away from having a meaningful impact on energy prices.

And the country feels in a truculent mood after two or three years of Covid and the behaviour of Boris Johnson. I'm not sure they (we) are in the mood for another round of patient endurance.

So I can see real potential for large scale civil disobedience and violent protest - probably next summer (especially if hot) once the impact of energy prices and food prices has had another 9 months to impact people.

Far more likely, Muslims and 'immigrants'.

The problem is that that's last year's bogeyman, and is fast becoming played out as a source of fear. Trans people are the upcoming bogeyman, and not yet played out.

I've seen three movies in the last couple of weeks, two of which were definitely mainstream. The ads before them all were, relatively speaking, 'woke'.

Last week at my niece's wedding I was chatting with one of the other guests, and we noticed that in most of the ads we saw in the last year or so many of the families were mixed. While I'm happy to see my nieces relationships finally show up in advertising, I am curious whether those same ads are playing in more rural areas, or if they see different versions.

Mourning generally happens when something is over.

(A demand that something be over because that allows emotional processing has happened with COVID; it was not a net win for anybody.)

Creating that state of being done is a political force in and of itself; it was a significant issue in both World Wars, for instance.

There is no meaningful prospect of over any time soon.

Any future is going to be won, not recovered.

I don't know how this plays out in terms of winning the next election. If they intend to have a meaningful next election of course.

Short answer: it doesn't.

They don't have to worry about fighting the next election unless they take over their own party first -- and can rally the party behind them.

Also, the backers of the Tory party have complete mass media control. Expect a very dirty GE campaign to be fought on both the culture wars propaganda we are currently seeing, but also using ratfucking attacks ads (once they've co-opted Ofcom and the Electoral Commission so that a blind eye will be turned to American-style attack ads -- although most of the attacks will come via social media, which is currently unregulated).

If ever the SNP decide to play hardball, they can hint at doing that: or state it, explicitly, that this will be the policy of the post-independence state.

Who was the MP from Scotland (not SMP, regular MP in London) who did the speaking for the SNP in the Commons during the Brexit arguments? I would pay to listen to him deliver that message.

The Drax power station in Yorkshire was converted from coal fired to biomass. Could be converted back again, should the Tories get rid of the rest of the "green crap", to use David Cameron's phrase. Food, staying warm, having a roof over your head. This winter, it's pick your favourite two (at most) for a lot of people. As others have said, this is the road running out on forty plus years policy from Conservative and Labour Tory Light governments.

And the danger of London bridge falling down grows every day. Imagine a coronation with all of Charles' siblings (Andrew?) and offspring and relatives (Fergie?).

Yeah, where's the coal coming from? It'd have to be imported -- the UK has no current operational coal mines. In a sterling crisis, that gets expensive fast. (Last I heard they were shipping coal in from as far afield as South America.)

Trans people make a convenient bogeyperson because they are sufficiently rare so as to ensure that most people don't know many personally. It is much easier to hate a 'weird looking' stranger you only see in pictures and memes, and then only the most extreme 'weirdness'.

Of course, most bigots don't consider that many of the people they know are quietly not 'normal' in the bigoted sense of the word.

I have tried to point this out to a couple of very conservative acquaintances in the last couple of years. 'I've known you for 15 years. 10 years ago you never thought or talked about trans people at all. Now it's all you talk about. Have you met any in the meantime? Have you observed any scary behaviour? Or is it just possible that you are being manipulated into fearing the 'other' rather than noticing what's actually happening.'

I'm quite certain the transphobia will continue until it stops being useful to those who are fanning the flames. I'm also certain there will be some stochastic violence as a result of that campaign. It's fucking infuriating.

While all of this is problematic, I've come to the conclusion that democracy generally won't solve problems. It kind of meanders until a crisis state is reached. (Crisis -> breakdown of civic order on levels that appear unlikely to be contained by local law enforcement.). (eg, rioting after MLK assassination...)

Fundamentally, the cost of involvement for a civilian exceeds that benefits they receive, whereas 'interests' receive quite a bit more. So, there is a real issue of motivation until things get bad enough that relatively sane people start lighting things on fire.

Since there is not rioting yet, there isn't a crisis yet. Come winter, if people are squatting in local mansions to avoid freezing to death, that'll be a crisis. If they freeze to death in the streets, not a crisis, just a bad thing.

Gosh. Depressed again.

Honestly though, I respect all forms of protest.

Oh, yes, they are likely to be persecuted, but they don't make very good scapegoats. The latter implies, not merely that you can arouse hatred against them, but that you can convince people that they are to blame for all the current problems. And, despite what Simon Farnsworth says, Muslims and 'immigrants' are NOT just last year's bogeyman - the hate rhetoric is ongoing, just as for Jews in previous eras.

Remember that homosexuals and the disabled were persecuted under the Nazis, but were not used as the scapegoats.

The hate rhetoric about Jews is still ongoing, and that about homosexuals. It's just that polling shows that Muslims and immigrants are joining Jews and homosexuals as an ineffective choice of target, partly because we've had it played so often that it only works on the people who are already primed for it, and not on people who need a scapegoat, and partly because there's now enough people who are openly Jewish (or gay) that people are asking "why are the Jews a threat when people like Stross are clearly just people like anyone else?".

A challenge with constantly motivating people with hate is that, by and large, people expect things to get fixed. If things aren't getting fixed, the "it's the XYZ group what break it" rhetoric falls apart unless XYZ keeps changing so that your average bigot in the street never realises that they're being offered scapegoats.

Paraphrase from the Grauniad:
How appropriate that Truss is going to be PM of an island, that is lapped entirely by its own sewage

Potatoes - mine have grown, but I've been watering them, though I expect them to be undersized.
Handing over to Raab would only make things worse - see the shambles over the lawyers' strike (!) today. He's "just" another incompetent obstructionist feeding red meat to the tory shire-tossers, just like Shapps ....
Not so sure about blackouts, bacause so many business' will have closed, the demand for power will be down. But we will be in a slump, how nice.
Power supplies: String a greenie up TODAY! { Maybe not, just isolate them in a house with neither electricity nor gas } Nuclear power is horribly expensive, no power is even more expensive.
Don't know about re-nationalising power, but water should be renationalised WITHOUT COMPENSATION, immediately, under the Sale of Goods Act - water privatisation was "Not of Merchantable Quality" ......

This is the sort of crisis that brings down nations.
Actually, no. THIS is the sort of crisis that brings REVOLUTIONS.
If the food & power run out, especially the food, it's game over.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Charlie @ 6
"Hard-right tory guvmint wangling re-election?
NOT going to happen
- @ 16 - I'd go for cynical & amazingly stupid!
@ 42 - that new mine in Cumbria
Also, last I heard, a lot of the Eastern Yorkshire coal-field was still exploitable ... Um

EC
Braverman as Home Sec? Euuuwwww ..... Violent spppression won't work, not this time.
If only because everyone will simply sit down, I think.
- later
Truss starting rabid trade war will crash the economy even faster, of course.
- @ 34 - I fear you are correct.

Nile
get on the next plane or ferry out. - I'm 76, my wife is borderline unwell, though still working OK .. I can't get out.
You are in Ireland, are you not? Dublin?

PERSECUTED: How about all the "Dangerous left-wing intellectuals" { I would qualify under the tories rules }
ANYONE AT ALL who speaks in BBC English & asks awkward questions & points out that they are arseholes could be scooped up & blamed ...

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
WANTED
An easy route to getting an EU passport ...
Could I bullshit my way into an Irish one?
If Scotland does break away, what criteria for a Scottish one, as I have connections to both Clan Johnstone & MacNeill ??

There is still a small about of open cast about. The government delayed the decision on the new pit near Whitehaven, as they've all checked out till there is a new leader. No idea how the supply/demand thing plays out with firing Drax from the available, or medium term available coal in the UK. Now the NUM is almost completely dead, I'm sure there are some conservatives who would love to revive deep mining with a suitably cowed work force. British pits for British children! It's a possible Tory policy, so it doesn't have to make any sense.

If Scotland does break away, what criteria for a Scottish one, as I have connections to both Clan Johnstone and MacNeill ??

Unknown and unknowable.

Before the 2014 referendum the SNP's position was that anyone legally resident in Scotland on the day of independence could ask for and get citizenship and a passport.

An earlier precedent is the Anglo-Irish treaty, which allows for dual nationality for anyone in Ireland at the time of separation, and full reciprocal rights (including voting, not just residence) for citizens of the two nations thereafter. But the A-I treaty situation would require a degree of goodwill on the part of London that I fear is simply lacking (and yes, I am aware of the Black and Tans, Easter Uprising, etc).

Really, we can't know at this point. It's reasonably certain that anyone living in Scotland now (and indeed up to the date of the referendum next October) has their feet under the table. And I expect Scotland to have a much more enlightened immigration policy than the UK currently has -- all parties agree Scotland needs to import workers. But that's all we can say.

Ian Blackford MP springs to mind.

So....

I'm wondering. If the UK parlimentary system breaks hard fascist and the rule of law gets rewritten to "whatever we can get away with," what are the chances of an authoritarian takeover by a billionaire family?

Not that lot. Them. King William the (Re)Conqueror, starting the whole conquest of the British Isles all over again most of a millennium later, after everyone else hives off England and rejoins the EU?

How bad would it have to get before this would become the better solution?

Ian Blackford MP springs to mind.

That's the gentleman. I have no idea whether his politics or other personality quirks are good or bad, but I greatly enjoyed watching him do outraged.

Charlie, I realize how cruel this is... but are you looking at an English potato famine?

ARound '85/86, when my second marriage was going down the tubes, and between my then-still-wife and myself, we'd had an insane number of people die - 8? 9? Some older, some our age.

I put a sign over my desk at work that would be appropriate for you: "If I am depressed, it is for good and sufficient reasons (which may or may not be any of your business), and if I wasn't depressed, I wouldn't be facing reality".

Everything that any "oh, cheer up, it's not that bad" could possibly say... used against them.

Re: "The new state can subsequently repudiate these obligations" - as opposed to Haiti, paying off it's "debt" to France for ending slavery for what, 100 years?

And immediate nationalization, with no compensation... you're skipping over what happens on the other side of the border: all those "poor" investors, ruined. Why, they might jump out windows, or shoot themselves....

Admittedly, the Israelis are doing Jews no favors whatever, with apartheid of Palestinians, and the "cities"/balkanized camps of them, and raids on human rights groups.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1094317/DUKES_2022_Chapter_2.pdf Describes the UK’s production and use of coal. There are still UK coal mines, including some small deep ones. Though most of the supply is from imports, including Russia. There are still 3 coal power stations running as such, but they would only be capable of supplying single digit percentages of electricity. The other major use of coal is industrial, e.g. steel manufacturing.

I saw a mention that Britain has just received its first shipment of LNG from Australia. Coal isn't as energetic per tonne as gas and it's more difficult to burn for energy but it's available in large quantities from various countries that haven't drunk the renewables Kool-Aid. Who knows we may even end up importing coal from China or even lignite from Germany.

Britain does have a few coal-fired power stations kept in reserve, all of them in England AFAICT. They are usually only operated during the high-energy-demand periods of winter and limited by law to less than 1500 hours operation annually. This could change.

We're losing most of the nuclear generating capacity we had -- both Hinkley AGRs and both Hunterston AGRs are now shut down and in decommissioning. That's about 2GW of predictable capacity gone forever, with the other 3GW or so of AGR capacity expected to shut down over the next five years unless arms are twisted regarding serious engineering problems intrinsic in the AGR design. That will leave only a single 1100MW PWR at Sizewell operating until the first EPR at Hinkley Point C starts up (first fission officially expected by 2026, realistically not supplying power to the gird until 2028 at the earliest).

Alas, potatoes are mostly farmed in Scotland.

Potatoes
Most "seed" - that is good, clean, disease-free potato tubers are raised in Scotland, for export to England & Ireland ( Brexshit has fucked the latter ). BUT - Those potatoes are then re-planted in England (etc) for the next year's crop to be eaten.
Like a lot of agriculture, there are long lead times, something city dwellers & non-allotment holders do not recognise. The seed catalogues for 2023 have just started showing up, for instance.
For me & my fellow allotment holders, the problem is going to be sourcing spuds ready to be planted March - May 2023 & possible even worse in 2024.

Nil. And it would be a VASTLY better solution than what we have now, because he would do a much better job and be a lot more socialist.

Personally, I think history is a more reliable guide, and I can think of no cases where using old scapegoats failed and using new ones succeeded,

"The Labour Party is probably correct in their assessment that struggling working class voters who are fed up of the Tories have nowhere else to go in large numbers." Unfortunately, they do - specifically, nowhere. They stay at home because the Labour Party they grew up with, the one that would actually solve their problems, doesn't exist any more, and the options are the Lib Dems (right-wing by nature, perfidious by habit) and the Greens (who've been thoroughly painted as cranks, and have played into that with their flirtations with homeopathy and transphobia).

When will the first bank crack under the strain of defaulted mortgages?

That would have been 2008.

Bit overly pessimistic. It's an EPR, presumably it will have a test phase greatly resembling OL3, which did not wait two years to deliver power after first fission. OL3 is in test phase now which amounts to "We supply power when that is convenient to us while we run this baby through its paces", and expected to be running full throttle in commercial service come December.

.. Uhm. looking at app . electricitymaps and the interconnects.. The French reactors should almost all be back in service when winter hits, so that is 3 gigawatts of power that can probably be counted on (especially since both sides of the channel are EDF, and EDF wont want blackouts for reasons of pride if nothing else).. but Belgium and Netherlands are distressingly heavy on the gas.

I don't know much about what is happening over there, but I did find the following in the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/16/world/europe/uk-energy-bills-inflation.html?searchResultPosition=2

"Leadership Vacuum Heightens Worries as Crises Loom in U.K.

As energy prices and inflation soar under a caretaker prime minister, critics say transition at the top is leaving Britons in limbo at a tumultuous moment."

Money quote: "But the transition in leadership in the top tier of the British government has made those challenges more acute. The country has a caretaker prime minister who is preparing to depart, there is a war of words between his two potential successors, Parliament is not in session and it’s vacation season, too.'

But there is another side of the story presented:

"“The conversation between the energy companies and government is being facilitated and continuing,” said Hannah White, acting director of the Institute for Government, a London-based research institute. “So, I don’t think policymaking is quite as paralyzed as some of the media is seeking to portray it.”

Ms. White said that part of the criticism of Mr. Johnson might come from those who always opposed him. “They may be using the fact that he’s not solving this problem as a stick to beat him but, in my view, it wouldn’t be right for him to be making a policy intervention,” Ms. White said."

"Neo Liberal Policies"? You guys are still using those? Count yourselves lucky, our conservatives have gone all the way over to corporate feudalism over here.

I note OGH is apparently now writing editorials in The Guardian...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/22/the-guardian-view-on-liz-truss-a-little-englander-pm-risks-running-a-little-england

Liz Truss’s no-holds-barred approach to campaigning seems likely to put her into Downing Street. The betting is that she has built an unassailable lead in the Tory party leadership race. Her maverick boosterism seems to play better with party members than Rishi Sunak’s wonkery. However damaging her economic policies turn out to be, it may be her Little England politics that do the most harm. A poll this weekend showed Scotland is more likely to become independent if Ms Truss becomes prime minister. Her hard line on the Northern Ireland protocol has alienated nationalists and moderates in the province, which is on course to leave the UK within 20 years. Nationalists in Wales too would be boosted by a Truss premiership.

And the rest of it runs down most of Charlie's points in an abbreviated way.

Mourning generally happens when something is over.

No. Mourning is about letting go of something. It's part of the process for marking that something is over.

You and I live in different parts of the world and see things differently. What I'm seeing here is a lot of "let's get back to normal" causing all sorts of misery, when "normal" has no covid and ignores climate change.

If you're trying to hold onto normal AND trying simultaneously to deal with all the problems and monsters (mostly human) who are shredding your normal, you're caught in two struggles at once. Anxiety, depression, and burnout would be predictable in such circumstances, would they not?

My advice to let go and mourn isn't to give up adapting, it's to give up the hopeless position maintaining the world as it was 20 years ago, to process the emotional consequences, and hopefully to free yourself of that one struggle so that you can start creating with what you have.

Then, instead of trying to cling to the shreds of a (neo) liberal society, you can hopefully join the struggle to build an equitable society in the face of climate change, in your part of the world. No guarantees, of course, but it seems like a shorter course of pain than storing up all the mourning you need to process until that hoped-for day when it's over.

Normally I would agree with you, because in most cases that would be the wiser mindset. But there is an exception: when your life was broken from the beginning, from before you were born, and there are no pieces to pick up. For many people clinging to their traditional way of life isn't a choice, it's the only safe course they know.

Not 300, but this is for Greg. The fun starts about 60% of the way through... gauge 1, live steam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxPUU87OIEA

It sounds like England should surrender to Scotland. Immediately.

The situation is not irretrievable in theory, at this point.

Well, no, it isn't, but a theory of the UK getting a government having a good chance of fixing the problems, or at least trying seems quite far-fetched to me.

I'm also dreading what kind of crisis we get at some point here in Finland - yeah, the 'prime minister was caught dancing and maybe drinking at a party' 'scandal' seems minor compared to many other places, but that's forgetting our quite leftist and Green government hasn't been that good in many other respects. For example, the actions taken to mitigate the climate crisis have been lacking, and our healthcare situation is not brilliant, either.

Our Minister of Family Affairs and Social Services has mostly just shrugged and made non-comments on the lack of nurses, for example. 'Nothing to be done'. There's also 'gentlemen's agreements' that different healtcare instances don't compete for nurses with wages, for example. At the same time, doctors seem to be getting raises.

Not the UK, and not yet comment 300, but even though the UK seems to be pretty far in the crises other places are not without at least the makings of some.

Well, if you want a new nurse who is trained in $specialty, I think that typically takes about 4 years not including admissions time and recruitment (3 years for their degree, and another one for training). For a doctor that is more like 7 to 10 years. That's typically 1 to 2 terms of a government yes?

"I'm also dreading what kind of crisis we get at some point here in Finland - yeah, the 'prime minister was caught dancing and maybe drinking at a party' 'scandal' seems minor compared to many other places,"

One party. No Covid restrictions making it illegal. No fine. Didn't lie about it repeatedly and get other ministers to lie about it. Didn't eventually have to resign, after the government is effectively paralysed for months over it. Didn't immediately check out and go on holiday for more months while the potential successors fight it out to replace them and ignore what's left of your country sliding in to chaos. You've got a long, long way to go!

Troutwaxer
We ALREADY DID THAT - in 1603

Whitroth
Interesting - however, I managed to get one good shot of the old "Bournemouth Belle" train, before the end of steam (!)

whitroth
BUGGER ...
Google is falling down on the job & I can't "see" your blog address - I want to send you a picture.

The two main problems with the Scottish Independence scenario are both economic. The first is that 2/3 of Scotland's trade is with the rest of the UK; quitting the UK would create the same issues of red tape and border controls as Brexit. If Scotland joins the EU, it would gain access to that larger market, which would offset some of this disadvantage, but look at the geography.

The second is that Scotland is currently running a deficit and its not clear how this would be funded; it could lead to most austerity measures. This would especially apply if Scotland were to join the EU and the EU required Scotland to keep to EU deficit targets (although in practice other EU members seem able to finesse this requirement, at least for short periods).

Economically, ScExit would be been more practical while the UK was in the EU. Brexit has decreased the economic viability of Scottish independence while simultaneously increasing the political reasons for leaving.

This situation is a combination of the Winter of Discontent, the Three Day Week and the 1973 Oil Crisis.

The Winter of Discontent was over 1978-79 under a Labour government: high inflation led to high wage demands from unionised workers, lots of strikes, and the subsequent election of Margaret Thatcher.

The Three Day Week was the response of a Conservative government in the winter of 1973-74 to an energy shortage caused by a national miners strike. Businesses were limited to operating only 3 days per week to save energy. At the time most UK electricity was generated from coal.

The oil crisis stemmed from the formation of OPEC as a global energy cartel. Energy prices increased dramatically, leading to a world economic recession.

Energy is an input into pretty much everything, so if there is less energy then there is a general reduction in world economic output. If outputs drop then consumption must drop. The question is: how does a national government spread the pain of that adjustment? For people on the breadline a drop in consumption means hunger, cold and homelessness. For people not on the breadline it means a reduction in their standard of living that they dislike and blame on whoever is handiest. Its not their fault, so they feel literally short-changed and demand that Somebody Do Something to restore their standard of living to what they feel entitled to have. Unfortunately you can't do that for everybody, so politicians naturally seek to help those who will vote for them and concentrate the pain on those who wouldn't vote for them under any circumstances. Under a Conservative government that means hitting poor while trying to support the middle class.

The current wave of strikes demonstrates the fundamental limits of unionisation as a strategy for improving the lot of workers. Some groups of workers have industrial muscle; they can cause serious disruption with a short stoppage. When the train drivers go on strike for 1 day its a major news story. Other workers are not so fortunate. I haven't heard about the pay demands of the train cleaners, for example, because if they go on strike for 1 day nobody would notice, and if they went on strike for a week they would simply be replaced. Thus the benefits of industrial action flow primarily to workers with that industrial muscle, leaving out the workers who lack it.

The next general election isn't going to happen until 2024 or Jan 2025. The Conservative party has enough of a majority to avoid any vote of no confidence, and the longer the delay the more time it has to get the economy back into some kind of order and let voters forget about the whole Boris fiasco. This is unlike 1978, when the Labour government had no overall majority and hence lost a vote of no confidence.

Looking further forwards, we can hope that the longer term result of this is a greater emphasis on nuclear power, energy efficiency, renewable energy and storage as means to gain better energy security. That was the response to the 1973 Oil Shock. As they say, never let a crisis go to waste. Unfortunately the current government is in headless chicken mode (literally: the PM is MIA and many cabinet posts are empty) and is barely able to think past one month, let alone a decade.

For Charlie, and anyone else feeling depressed, remember: this too shall pass. As a rule the response to a crisis is a broad rethink of how things work. Thatcherism was a response to the long-term failures of Keynsianism, triggered by the crisis of the Winter of Discontent. Now we have a new crisis caused by a combination of the long-term failings of Thatcherism and the trigger of Putin's War. This is a new opportunity for the world to rethink how it does things. The unwisdom of relying on politically unstable countries for energy has been exposed for a second time. (And all countries where energy is the major industry are politically unstable by nature). The unwisdom of treating the regulatory state as an intrinsically Bad Thing rather than a tool that must be carefully maintained has also been exposed. This is the point where think-tanks can publish papers that make politicians go "aha" and start to push the right long-term policies.

In the very long run of course, those long-term policies will either contain errors of their own, or they will be pushed beyond the point of effectiveness by people who have inherited the ideology but not the understanding (c/f Truss and Thatcher). This will lead to a new crisis in another 50 years, and the people then will no doubt get depressed about it too.

The recent train strikes have in part been about the cleaners and their pay. But as they're in the same union as the guards who are rather more critical to services running then they can cause disruption.

"Far Kurnell!"

This is the rumoured utterance of Lieutenant James Cook when he first set foot in a locality now known as Kurnell in NSW (the conceit is that it is in memory of this statement), on encountering members of the Eora nation who tried to spear him. Some of the spears are still in the British Museum, as I understand it. No-one has been able to identify the locality in the UK that Cook is supposed to have been recalling at that moment, but that's how things go.

The question isn't whether "this too shall pass"; it's who will take control and which policies will they implement?

A couple of counter-points:

It is pretty obvious, that the countries which have been most resistant to "green energy" is faring significantly worse in the putin-energy-crisis, than the more forward thinking countries.

Germany is an interesting case, being split in north and south, where north often have a surplus of wind generated electricity and no way to send it to the south, due to fossil interest's successful political sabotage of the necessary transmission facilities.

This will hurt UK big time, and even though wind-generation is a LOT faster to build than nuclear power, the energy-crisis in England may well last a couple of years longer than elsewhere, because of the political idiocy, past, present and future.

Nuclear in it's present multi-GW form (ie: EPR) is not going to play any relevant role: It is too expensive, too slow to build and has far too high financial risk attached to it.

Even where it does get built and hooked to the grid, it's inability to modulate production is going to erode the business case.

France and UK will do it anyway, at great expense, for reasons of "national pride" and more pragmatically because they need the career-path for their nuclear sailors.

Smaller reactors will be too expensive where alternatives exist, but they will have a role in arctic/military/research context, where today diesel is flown or sailed in. (McMurdo, Concordia, Jan Mayen, Daneborg, Thule etc.)

The UK has a very services based economy and for this to work it requires enough people with enough disposable income to keep it running. As peoples finances reduce due to increases in food, energy, mortgage, and rent they'll have less to spend on the "nice to have" as they'll be concentrating on the "need to have". So businesses with less of an issue with energy costs will still find themselves going under as their customers can no longer afford what they're selling/providing.

Well, there are trained nurses, they've only gone to other jobs in increasing numbers during the last couple of years, due to poor wages and working conditions (wonder why...).

So, even though the lead time for educating new ones is many years, there are at least some people who could do the job, if they thought they would get enough compensation and if the working environment wasn't too bad.

Of course apparently the various nursing education establishments seem to have some trouble filling all the available starting places. It's not very surprising, to me.

Incidentally, apparently there are also problems getting enough workers also in the event business (festivals and such) and restaurants and hotels. People have been laid off or suspended for a couple of years, so it seems many of them took the hint and sought other jobs. This summer many festivals seem to have been in trouble because they couldn't get enough people working for them, and it seems to be same for many restaurants and hotels.

there are trained nurses, they've only gone to other jobs in increasing numbers during the last couple of years, due to poor wages and working conditions

Australia has a great many of those too. Not helped by the supposedly "Labour" governments deciding that 6% inflation means wage rises need to be capped at 3% which is really 2.5% due to shenanigans with compulsory superannuation. So while for the past 10 years they've had a 1%-2% pay cut every year, this year it's at least 3%.

As pointed out by many people, "the government" employs a lot of people, so if they think wages need to rise they have an obvious way to do that...

My expectation is they won't, but also that if they did bang in a 10% pay rise across the board for all government employees the noise from the far right media would focus on the very highly paid ones getting hundreds of thousands of dollars extra. But if teh guvvimunt did the "smart" thing and said pay rises drop for anyone on more than ~1.2x median wage and blah blah no-one on more than 2x median wage gets a pay rise (~$170k, which in the old days was about 50k British Pounds but this week it's more like 110k)... the far right would latch on to some povo staff and go absolutely mental. "cleaners in parliament are getting 20% more than the poverty line!!@#%$#!"

The second is that Scotland is currently running a deficit

We don't actually know this because the UK government has very carefully obfuscated everything to do with Scotland's balance of trade, to ensure that no economic case for independence can be made.

Consider businesses operating in Scotland but headquartered in England, where their profits are reported -- and vice versa, of course (but it's usually the English management tail wagging the high employment Scotish dog). Or consider people working in Scotland but paying income tax in England, and vice versa, because they're working in the other country on a "temporary" contract (which can be 12 months at a time, with rolling renewals, as in the case of one middle-to-senior university administrator I know).

Australia has a great many of those too. Not helped by the supposedly "Labour" governments deciding that 6% inflation means wage rises need to be capped at 3% which is really 2.5% due to shenanigans with compulsory superannuation. So while for the past 10 years they've had a 1%-2% pay cut every year, this year it's at least 3%.

Yeah, it's pretty much the same here, too. The negotiations for pay rises for nurses and similar professions seem to be capped at a couple of percent per year, which is a pay cut. There were also complaints by other unions that if the nurses get a high pay rise, they have to get it, too - so there's really no way for nurses (generalizing here) to get relatively higher salaries.

(I for one would like higher wage rises, but I also understand that I'm pretty well off and really have not yet issues even though the cost of living goes up. Better to even out the salaries, I say.)

better about being depressed because depression seems like a reasonable response to these circumstances

Yep. That's the pattern I see in myself, though sometimes the alternative construction, "lalalalalLALALALALALALAICAN'THEEEEEEARYOULALALALALA" works better for me, especially if accompanied by loud music and alcohol.

Singing helps too. And bird photography, dinghy sailing and making things with my hands (well along with a bunch of power tools). A well known Australian science journalist wrote a book about coping with climate grief recently, but I've been struggling with it as I find it almost hopelessly privileged and self-indulgent. Persevering but, seems like it might be worth it. There's a nice chapter on hope versus courage which I disagree with, but not in a way that makes me angry and that seems to make all the difference.

Truss is saying that whether or not energy use should be restricted is up to individuals, and not the government's problem.

According to a comment I read elsewhere there used to be a weak link in the London gas network. Contingency planners estimated that if it went down it would take all the currently licensed gas fitters in the UK about 30 years to reconnect all the houses

If a city loses its gas supply it's effectively gone forever.

Does 2x4 not understand that there is a difference between restricting energy usage and subsidising insulation and renewables?

The posties are going on strike as well: https://inews.co.uk/news/when-next-royal-mail-strike-dates-august-septebmer-2022-1798589

I'll go with "does not understand" and leave it at that.

I almost recommend moving to Canada. The worst thing we have is the Ontario premier cutting nurses' salaries and using staffing losses to justify shifting work to private clinics... who are allowed to pay higher salaries to their nurses (;-))

I think we also had situations with nurses leaving the public clinics... and coming back to work as contractors via contracting companies, having better salaries and terms of employment. Which is of course more expensive than just raising their salaries in the first place, but that doesn't seem to be an option.

While reading this blog, some older blogs and similar stuff lately, one thing gets popping up in my mind.

What will happen when all of the sudden Queen Elisabeth will die?

She been the public face of GB almost since the end onthe whole Post-WWII Era.

And she more and more reminds me in a away of good old Emperor Franz Joseph I. Who in one way or another was basically the glue that held the Old Austrian Hungary Monarchy together.....

I'm not sure if "want of understanding" disqualifies someone from being a Member of Parliament, although I think it can disqualify them from voting.

Not the UK, and not yet comment 300, but even though the UK seems to be pretty far in the crises other places are not without at least the makings of some.

Yeah. Imagine the problems in the U.S. if IQ45 wins in 2024... :-(

I think we also had situations with nurses leaving the public clinics... and coming back to work as contractors via contracting companies, having better salaries and terms of employment.

Overworked, underpaid, and burned-out nurses in the U.S. are increasingly becoming travel nurses, giving them higher pay, more control over their working conditions (easy to change to a different employer), but usually no benefits. A mixed blessing...

Looking at the Scottish parliament makes me wish we had an English one.

"This is a new opportunity for the world to rethink how it does things."

We've just had one of those, with the plague. The response has been to deliberately reject the opportunities for learning, to direct public opinion into pettiness and bitchery to prevent the public from learning from those opportunities itself, to stick with blind determination to the procedures whose crapness has been made blatant, and generally to try and pretend there's nothing happening as much as possible. Not limited to the UK, but it has been particularly noticeable here because we've had a government that basically doesn't seem to give a fuck about anything that has any rational connection with the welfare of the country in any sense (in contrast to the usual pattern of bad governments in the past, who have at least had some kind of concern for the welfare of the country even if it was misdirected in concept and cocked up in implementation). We've still got that same government, moving even further towards irrational and counterproductive irrelevancy, and with every prospect of not being able to get rid of them for another couple of years, and I don't see any reason to believe they won't respond in the same way only worse.

Overworked, underpaid, and burned-out nurses in the U.S. are increasingly becoming travel nurses, giving them higher pay, more control over their working conditions (easy to change to a different employer), but usually no benefits. A mixed blessing...

Were becoming travel nurses. That window is closing.

As most know, my wife works at a hospital, and she flagged the whole travel nurse phenomenon for me. It peaked during the pandemic, because the hospitals were burning through nursing staff trying to cope with the flood of patients in the ICU.

The people who became travel nurses tended to be young and mobile. Given that hospitals were crazy-busy and not giving their employees proper time to recover, not having a job was one way for the nurses to deal, if they could afford the break between traveling contracts.

This led to some nasty problems. One is that it increased the burden on settled nurses (with families and houses) who couldn't pick up and leave. Since they're more senior, and unionized, this became a problem for the hospital. Did I mention that many hospital executives are nurses with MBAs, not doctors? And did I mention that the nursing world is small enough that people traveling from hospital to hospital in the same city get rapidly spreading reps through all the local hospitals?

The bigger problem is that hiring travel nurses messes up budgets, because they have higher per-hour costs. Yes, they have no benefits, but that's a different budget. So hospitals paid more to fill in staffing holes with contractors. As one might expect. These costs weren't bearable in the long run, because Covid care in the US didn't make money for hospitals. Elective surgeries make the money that supports emergency care, and replacing elective surgeries with Covid care seriously decreased hospital incomes, at the same time they were paying more for traveling nurses.

The good news with omicron is that so far, while infections are high, admissions to the ICU are not. Most Covid cases in the hospital are actually getting detected in people coming in for other reasons (as well as non-lethal Covid). This is a bit of a nuisance, since an infectious person can turn up anywhere, instead of in emergency headed for ICU, but the load on the nurses is less.

And so is the call for traveling nurses. It was a good opportunity while it lasted.

Do it again!

Paul
You analysis is generally good, but: And all countries where energy is the major industry are politically unstable by nature - Britain 1815-1914 - I think not.
- which leads to Dave Berry's comment, to which I would add ... ..."And how badly/terminally do they screw-up by-the-numbers" - as this lot seem determined to do.

dpb
If Truss is saying that, she's even further out of her tree than I suspected - really, seriously bonkers. Of course, if she follows through on that expect a (too-late) screeching U-turn, after it's all imploded.

paws
Doesn't matter, because 2x4 will simply APPOINT ( "An unelected bureaucrat ) a total fucking thicko like "lord" Frost - who is already tipped for some job where he can do maximum damage, such as Environment ...

Pigeon
@ 100 - YES @ 101 - Oh shit, how true.

What will happen when all of the sudden Queen Elisabeth will die?

Your google search term is "London Bridge". That's the UK government contingency plan for her death. Large chunks of it are already public, starting with two weeks of national mourning, lying-in-state followed by a state funeral, a probable hit of 1% to annual GDP that year due to all the time off/disruption, and (some months later) the coronation of a new King.

The new King will be Charles, unless he dies beforehand. No ifs, no buts. It's the job he's been waiting for all his life, he ain't gonna abdicate.

The stench of patriotic bullshit will reach positively American levels of nostril-stunning offense to anyone who would prefer to see the UK dragged kicking and screaming into the 19th century. The likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg will use it as a bully pulpit to bash on anyone seen as insufficiently forelock-tuggingly obsequious to hereditary power during the whole wank-fest. It will be, in a word, ghastly.

The hangover will set in only once Charles (by some other name -- Henry IX?) is on the throne, and delivers his first official State Opening of Parliament speech as himself rather than a proxy for mum.

At that point expect support for the monarchy to fall off a cliff, especially in Scotland and NI.

Having been identified with a single person for the past 71 years, it may never recover from the cognitive dissonance of being suddenly amputated and attached to a guy with a face like a horse's ass.

all countries where energy is the major industry are politically unstable by nature - Britain 1815-1914 - I think not.

Peterloo. Tolpuddle Martyrs. Rise of the workers' movement. Foundation of the Labour Party (who took power not long after your window) and groundwork for the collapse of Liberalism. Rise of the Irish nationalist movement leading to secession which would probably have happened by 1916 if not for the First World War. Extension of the franchise, first to working men, then to women (again: would have happened sooner if not interrupted by a world war). Introduction of an income tax, reform of the commons, introduction of modern policing practices -- what do you think the aforementioned were a response to?

The UK would have been unrecognizable -- politically, probably culturally, and certainly economically -- to an MP from 1815 who fell asleep and woke up in 1914.

The only reason it didn't collapse was because the establishment was able to loot resources from the imperial dominions to buy stability -- both by stuffing the rentier class's mouths with gold, and by spreading a thin veneer of prosperity around for the proles.

Other than Anne, my respect for the Saxe-Coburg-Gothes is somewhere around the bottom of the Challenger Deep

London Bridge Falling is also probably the functional end of the Commonwealth, or at least the aspect of it where the Queen is the official head of state of somewhere other than the UK.

NSFW Honest Government Ad from TheJuice that "everything is fine in the UK, thanks to the Tories".

It's a rather profane parallel to OGH's original post, plus some things the UK government purportedly doesn't want you to do to help the situation.

https://mrw.5-cent.us is my website.

The hangover will set in only once Charles (by some other name -- Henry IX?) is on the throne, and delivers his first official State Opening of Parliament speech as himself rather than a proxy for mum.

Still trying to figure out why it's more cognitively dissonant to go with Chuckie 3 than with some other name. We've know him as Charles since 1948, and he's not going to reign at most more than a decade. It won't help him to be "Who's This King Henry IX dude" when everything's contracting around him.

Anyway, I want to see more nerds calling him Charles the Darwinator....

"Long-term Keynesian failings"... or the reached-the-breaking-point of the wealthy to be ultrawealthy, stick it to the proles, with a heavy dose of OPEC creation?

Can I ask about this "newly installed" "Queen of Canada"?

What are the chances that the Tories decide to respond to the Scottish Referendum the way that Spain responded to the Catalan one -- i.e., the referendum is illegal, and thus we will arrest the leadership of the SNP for holding it? Will we see Nicola Sturgeon fleeing into exile in Brussels?

Except, of course, the hospitals, etc, are also paying the contracting companies to make a profit, and so cost a lot more than simply raising the nurses' salaries.

One situation you're missing: a lot of places like nursing homes are hell-holes, run by the incompetent and empathy-surgically-removed. I head about this from #1 Daughter all the time.

My guess is that they will declare it void, ignore the result (unless it is 'no' to independence). refuse a binding referendum, and reject any verdict of a European court. What happens then is unclear.

Charlie and others, one question: since Corbyn was displaced... what happened to Momentum? Has it disintegrated, or ?

the 'prime minister was caught dancing and maybe drinking at a party' 'scandal' seems minor compared to many other places

From what I've seen in English media (not being able to read Finnish), I get the impression that if your prime minister wasn't female this wouldn't have been newsworthy.

Be careful what you wish for - you may get it.

I think that most of you will see the abolition of the monarchy, and the constitutional reorganisation necessary will be (ab)used to remove the last remaining checks against fascism.

There's also 'gentlemen's agreements' that different healtcare instances don't compete for nurses with wages, for example. At the same time, doctors seem to be getting raises.

Cynically, I'm wondering if nursing being majority-female while doctors being majority-male has anything to do with that?

Because here in Ontario, female-majority professions are getting shafted while male-majority ones are getting (or have been given) pay raises.

If I remember correctly a report from ages ago, Charles once planned to use the name "George" when he gets crowned.

One situation you're missing: a lot of places like nursing homes are hell-holes, run by the incompetent and empathy-surgically-removed. I head about this from #1 Daughter all the time.

Speaking from very personal experience, I know. I got to oversee care for a relative with Parkinsons when he couldn't be cared for in-home.

The nurses in these places aren't short term contractors, they're immigrants, often from the Philippines in my part of the world. If you're careful choosing the home (again speaking from experience. Guess who got to tour a bunch of homes?), the workers are neither incompetent nor unempathetic . They're just overworked, because they're stuck trying to provide "affordable" care to people who can't be cared for by their families or by in-home caregivers, and that's a lot of work.

And so it goes.

No, it's still around, but is c. 5% of the size of the Labour party, and the latter's ruling clique regards it as a worse enemy than the most extreme Conservatives. Realistically, there has been little change since the 1950s, except that Blairites treat the left wing as heresy, but there have been periods when left wing views have been considered as a minority viewpoint.

Given that Clegg destroyed the Liberal Democrats, England will be stuck with a bifurcated single party system for the forseeable future. The left wing may hope that the forthcoming disaster and chaos will lead to a change and voters moving to them, but I think that is implausible.

https://mrw.5-cent.us is my website.

I successfully logged on. Apparently, when I first tried to register two weeks ago, your server stored my information even though I never received a confirmation email, so another attempt to register resulted in "email address already in use" error. So today I clicked on a "Forgot password" link, and it allowed me to reset the password and to finally log on.

Charlie @ 105
Agree about the tories desperately trying to get the Monarch to represent THEM, but it ain't going to work ...
Chas has been pushing Environmental issues for over 60 years - directly in opposition to the ultra-rights "what climate problem?" lies.
Expect a clash.
I also expect Chas ( With William's help ) to try to tone it all down - unlike 2x4 they are not stupid.
In the meantime, Queenie has a record to beat - that of Louis XIV of Frogland, whose offical reign was: {looks it up } - 72 yrs, 110 days.
Lizze became Q on 6/02/1952, which takes us to ..... 2024 .... 27th May { If I have calculated correctly. }

@ 106 Every single one of which was a minor incident. { Excepting the Curragh Mutiny, which then produced an even worse reaction in 1916 ...}
The only actual problems were in 1832 { The so-called "Great Reform Act", which specifically disenfranchised women } & 1847-8, when the whole of Europe was in turmoil, because of utterly shit harvests.
And, actually, the "rentier" class did better than that - the major enlightened employers were setting up workers insurance & pension & sickness schemes as early as the mid 1870's - "going along with Bismarck" in fact(!)

justify shifting work to private clinics... who are allowed to pay higher salaries to their nurses

Which is interesting, as Bill 124 has been used to control the wages of other workers not employed directly by the government but by a third party paid with public funds (ie. just like private clinics).

I think the difference in this case is that the Tories are trying to privatize the public health system, so this is a way of opening the door. It's the same playbook Harris used to "create a crisis" in education a generation ago.

The end result will be what is already happening to dentists. Used to be a dentist owned their own practice, but now many dentists (and vets, who are in the same situation) are mere workers in practices owned by private venture capital, with quite low wages. When only a few clinics were corporate-owned wages were reasonable, but as independent clinics get thinner on the ground dentists' wages are going down…

(Source: family conversation, three nieces and two nephews-in-law being dentists.)

So end game is public tax dollars got to private clinics, wages are held as low as possible (partly because private nurses/doctors will be removed from unions), and the health care spending goes to profits. Just like private Long Term Care homes…

1847-8, when the whole of Europe was in turmoil, because of utterly shit harvests.

Utterly shit harvests? You don't say...

Charlie and others, one question: since Corbyn was displaced... what happened to Momentum? Has it disintegrated, or ?

Labour Party membership is down 100,000 in the past year (from a peak of roughly 500,000 five years ago), giving them a serious cash flow problem -- they wanted to make it up with donations from wealthy supporters, oddly the wealthy supporters' donations have not materialized.

So of your three national parties, the LibDems are only in it for the money/power, the Tories are incompetent (or at least their ideology is incompetent,) and Labour is stuck in La La Land? What a Fustercluck!

What are the chances that the Tories decide to respond to the Scottish Referendum the way that Spain responded to the Catalan one

If they could they'd already have done so.

There's a case heading for the UK Supreme Court right now, asking for a ruling that the Scottish Government is legally competent to order a non-binding, consultative referendum on independence. (Note that "consultative, non-binding" is what the Brexit referendum was.)

The SC may rule it is, or is not, lawful.

If it is lawful, then the referendum will go ahead. If it is unlawful ... then the SNP and Scottish Greens will vote to dissolve the Scottish Parliament and hold a snap Scottish Election, on a single manifesto policy: "if we are elected to form the next government, it is the will of the people that we should declare independence." (If you don't want independence, vote against us.)

Note that under the Scottish electoral system it is difficult (but not impossible) to form a majority government -- it's a mix of FPTP constituencies and a top-up vote allocated via a Party List PR system in multi-seat districts.

Anyway, the point is: Scotland was an independent nation until 1706, then voted to merge its parliament with the UK parliament. Then in 2000 Scotland got its parliament back, after a referendum. Some powers are reserved for Westminster, but a straight majority vote (within Scotland) was what it took to achieve major constitutional reform. And the UK constitution today, EU membership aside, is much the same as it was in 2000.

Spain, in contrast, fought a civil war and adopted a constitution in 1939 which basically said "this is a unitary state, secession is treason".

To switch the UK over to such a system would require a government -- led by second-raters like Truss or Johnson -- to draft and pass extremely disruptive constitutional-level legislative modifications in a single parliamentary session (without getting cock-blocked by the House of Lords, who can currently send anything they don't like back for revision for 12 months, no takesie-backsies), and get it in place before next October. This is a tall order.

Someone with the malign intellect and drive of the younger Margaret Thatcher might get it done to deadline, but probably not while dealing with: COVID19, hyperinflation, an energy crunch, a disastrous recession, Brexit, and yadda yadda.

Truss is no Thatcher. She's just a deeply stupid Thatcher cosplayer. She probably won't even try, she'll just stand in the road looking puzzled as the HGV bears down on her.

As it is, more than 40% of the English population don't care if Scotland leaves (per polling), and about 60% of Brexit voters would prefer to see the back of Scotland if that's what it takes to protect their precious Brexit. Johnson dealt with this by sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting "I CAN'T HEAR YOU", but that tactic only works for a while, and after a winter of rolling blackouts, possible food rationing, and inflation, it's going to be very hard to make the case to the Scottish public for the union being in Scotland's interests.

Pretty much, yeah. Why anyone who has the option doesn't vote SNP, PC or Scottish Green I do not know. Are the Welsh Greens a separate party from the English Watermelons?

That is unfair on the LibDems - they are well-meaning, centrist, disorganised and politically stupid. They are generally to the left of New Labour.

Labour are trying to win at all costs, mostly by applying pink lipstick to Conservative policies.

Someone with the malign intellect and drive of the younger Margaret Thatcher

Someone like Vivienne Rook (from HBO's "Years and Years")?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUPf5GagKF0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcvvhQCG8Yw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOnnq41BTPQ

Paws
NO ONE with any sense votes "Green" - they are against the only long-term solution to baseload power - nuclear -& would like to leave Zelensky to Putin's mercies whilst withdrawing from NATO. { Note: The Scottish greens may have come, partially, to their senses by now, I don't know }
EC
Yes - the Lem-0-crats got a bad deal in 2012 & acted stupidly, but - Cameron had the largest party.
We still need electoral reform, before Scotland breaks away, otherwisw we are stuck with a permanent fascist majority in England.

NO ONE with any sense votes "Green"

Greg, we know you hate Liebor with a passion, The Greens are shit, and the LibDems are just useless. You don't seem to have a lot of choices for parties to vote for.

France and UK will do it anyway, at great expense, for reasons of "national pride" and more pragmatically because they need the career-path for their nuclear sailors.

I think your assessment is spot on and this in particular rings true.

I suppose the fun what-if question around Scottish independence is what mileage could Scotland make by going nuclear-free, assuming it can achieve energy independence from the UK by other means?

Yes, this is true, and it's bloody annoying. It ends up being a case of "vote for whoever's most likely to get more votes than the Tory candidate". Even if there is some minority party candidate for your constituency who does provide some reason to vote for them, with our shitty electoral system it's more likely to be a counterproductive move than anything else.

That's the whole point of a two party system, though. You're not supposed to have the option of voting for a party you like, and parties are actively discouraged from being likeable. They need to have policies that at least some of "their side" hate, because other parts of "their side" require them.

That's both explicit in the first past the post rules, and implicitly in the behaviour of the dominant parties. Look at how the English parties in the supposedly "British" parliament refuse to have anything to do with nationalist-but-not-English parties. Even Plaid Cymru get the cold shoulder.

With explicit coalitions you can have the green side allied with the left side and the authoritarian side if you want, or whatever other weird and wonderful mix of parties can be persuaded to work together on the day (why hi there Italy). But when you're locked into two parties, the cost of changing positions is huge. So you end up with a brown-green fight in the left party and so on.

I took a quick look at Scottish GDP figures and it appears that Scotland is running a deficit of 5%, which is not that bad. The interesting thing is that Scotland is running a modest surplus with the rest of the world and a big deficit with the rest of Britain, which is getting worst. My guess is that the reason for this is that the English economy is tanking and they are not buying Scottish stuff whereas the Scottish economy is doing better and they are still buying English stuff.

5% percent is manageable if you have the full rang of economic tools. The one thing Scotland must NOT DO is adopt the Euro. The Euro is a disaster for Europe. The Euro averages the national currencies of countries involved. If you have a stronger than average economy like Germany, your currency is permanently undervalued increasing your competitiveness. If your economy is weak, your currency is permanently over valued stifling growth.

If Scotland joins the Euro, it will probably arrive with an overvalued exchange rate, and the Euro restricts the economic tools you can use, like a stimulus over 3% of GDP to dig your way out of a recession.

New Zealand and Scotland have almost identical populations and GDPs. New Zealand has its own currency, and it does fine.

A couple of years ago I expressed the opinion that relying on imports of fossil fuels was a bad idea, and that they would be cut off or become ruinously expensive. I also expressed the opinion that the crunch would come in far less than the 20 year build time of nuclear. That the outflow of money from the purchase of expensive fossil fuels would devalue the pound enough that the price of imported food and energy would be out of reach and that the UK would become effectively uninhabitable, at least at the population size it currently has.

This current crisis is shit, but it's not unexpected is it?

Well, they could let the Scots run the UK. They seem to know what they're doing.

No?

Is there no-one the country might rally behind? Anyone? Leaders of vision and courage are now needed - are there any who might emerge?

The problems of the UK are the problems of modern democracy writ large. The US founders, classical republicans all, expected that the country would elect wise far-seeing statesmen to lead the USA. Well. No. Instead the country was dominated by mechanics and shopkeepers, and the demagoguery was beyond belief. That era more-or-less ended with the Presidency of the slaving, genocidal Andrew Jackson, who left the USA in a shambles. The country shambled along for decades after that, and then came the Civil War.

They didn't know. They couldn't know.

But we do know. What now?

Is there no-one the country might rally behind? Anyone? Leaders of vision and courage are now needed - are there any who might emerge?

For the next couple of years the question that matters is "is there no existing tory MP that the country might rally behind?"

Until there's an election or a revolution, they're stuck with electing a prime munster from the MPs in parliament, that are also inside the party that holds a majority.

It's kind of like looking in a bin of reject kiwifruit for a nice apple to polish up and give to the teacher. You can look, but I don't like your chances.

(there may be better similies from people who didn't grow up picking and grading kiwifruit)

»[…]become ruinously expensive. I also expressed the opinion that the crunch would come in far less than the 20 year build time of nuclear.«

I understand why you guys are fascinated by nuclear power, because so am I.

But you seem to think if a different kind of nuclear power than what the laws of physics allow.

When the chairman of the AEC said "too cheap to meter" back in 1954, he did not say "cheap", he said that the overhead of installing meters, reading them and calculating the electricity bill would be waste of money.

Here's the technical/historical background:

First remember that in USA there are different electricity rates for "commercial" and "residental".

In 1950-1960, electrical utilities saw growth in demand to the tune of a doubling every ten years or more, and since nobody dared predict where the curve would flatten, the only plausible way to grow was nuclear: Oil and coal reserves were known to be finite.

But nuclear power cannot be modulated on a daily basis.

If you reduce the power output of a nuclear reactor to 70% for some hours, you will either have to shut it down or run it flat out 100% for approximately 72 hours, in order to keep the control domain stable.

In order to meet daily peak demand, the nuclear reactors would have to run flat out 24*7, which again means that the capital and operational costs are controlled entirely by the peak demand, essentially making the electricity "free" at all other times of the day.

Since the peak demand was from commercial consumers, installing meters on residential consumers, which would only be active during peak-load, would be a waste of money: The residential load is capped by the fuse on the pole.

That is why future power would be "too cheap to meter" for residential consumers, but not even close to "cheap" for commercial consumers.

And since the laws of neutronics have not changed, the situation is still the same:

You can use nuclear up to around the minimum daily load, and that will be "very nearly cheap" as Pterry described it, but using nuclear for any of the variable daily load is hideously expensive.

If you do not believe me, find me /any/ nuclear power reactor in the world, which modulates its production on a daily basis.

If you look at the recently approved(-ish) "small" reactor from USA, what they are proposing is five or six small reactors in the same pool, so that you can modulate the total plant output by turning them entirely on or off individually, on a rotating base.

But their target customers are military bases and polar habitation (McMurdo, Concordia, Jan Mayen, Daneborg, Thule etc.) which have a very high minimum daily load from heating, and where the competition is flying, sailing or sledding diesel in.

In theory molten salt reactors, with "continuous fuel adjustment" can be modulated, because that is an euphorism for out-gassing the Xenon as fast as possible and removing other neutron-eating fission products using hand-waving technologies. If you think anything is going to be easier with 700-800°C hot molten alkali salts and continuously reprocessing spent nuclear fuel dissolved in it, I can point you at any number of "nuclear startups" who would love to take your money.

So your dire predictions /does not matter/: There is simply no way to supply more than the minimum daily load with nuclear power, which will not redefine your notion of "hideously expensive" or bring you deep into "Things I Wont Work With" territory.

Moz
Calling you out on that one: we know you hate Liebor with a passion, - LIAR
This person is my local MP - I have always voted for her, she lives 8 doors away from me, her mother is a personal friend & I know Stella to speak to & have a chat with { Assuming she's not rushed off her feet, which she usually is }
Get it right, in future, huh?

The Raven
They seem to know what they're doing.{The Scots} - really?
Ask Charlie & Paws about the piles of festering rubbish in the streets?

You can use nuclear up to around the minimum daily load,

But just as with renewables, you can add storage to increase that minimum load. That's both the traditional "off peak heating" load and the newfangled chemical and hydro storage schemes. I say newfangled meaning "invented well before terrestrial nuclear power" but whatever. In the UK that could easily mean invading Scotland to build more pumped hydro plants, because they have a big one (and wave it about surprisingly little, all things considered).

Back in the olden days when it was transmission capacity that was the limit Aotearoa had quite some encouragement for people to run water heaters and solid storage heaters on controlled loads so that the morning peak would be lower, and the evening peak would avoid having much water heating in it.

In coal fired countries I understand they did the same thing for the reasons you describe - coal fired generators don't like daily cycling.

It seems to me that a nominal function of the monarchy is to ensure that the government acts to preserve the United Kingdom and to serve and protect the British people. If you were a trusted advisor to the crown, what practical course of action would you propose to forestall the unfolding crisis?

Heat buffers. For reactor designs which are not water cooled, adding tanks to the cooling loop before and after the turbine block is quite cheap. Then you make the turbine block oversized for the reactor, and now you have a setup where the reactor can be left in "Full throttle", while power production shifts with demand.

Heat storage is vastly cheaper to build than electricity storage, and since with this setup it happens before converting any heat to electricity, there are no conversion losses.

Gates is building a sodium cooled reactor with this feature, and Seaborg is doing with with NaOH cooling (Yes. The base. They have chemists that got it to stop eating steels via additives.) A liquid regime of 323 to 1388 Centigrade is pretty useful for cooling, but the same idea should work with lead and salt cooling too.

Oh, my mistake, I was misled by your passion for Corbyn and anyone left of Blair. I assume you're a fan of Starmer but search here is a bit borken so it's hard to find out.

Here's the view from a life long LibDem voter, I find them to be more pragmatic and less ideologically driven than the other two main parties.

From the left they believe in the welfare state and trying to mitigate the vagaries of life we're all prone too. From the right, properly regulated businesses and an acceptance of them making a profit.

The issue is that left wing voters see them as capitalist lackeys in hock to big business and the right sees them as pandering to the weak and work-shy and how dare they try to limit what businesses can do.

In pure coal grids it's generally handled by building for the peak, then using steam bypass. Coal plants are even more discomforted by shutting down than nuclear.

I know a few people involved in the uk nuclear sector who were very upset when load following was forced on nuclear operators post privatisation.

Their solution was to buy gas turbines for the variable part, of course.

It's not a helpful comment at all, but boy am I glad to have left the UK in 2013. The writing was already on the wall, but nobody wanted to hear about it. At the time it was easy for me to compare UK to German political reporting, and it was abundantly clear that there was a severe disconnect between the two.

Within the UK, the UK's relatively special position within the EU was viewed as a guarantee that renegotiation in the UK's interest was going to be successful. Outside the UK - in Germany, at least - the same position was seen as a challenge to the foundations of the EU that must be squashed by just about any means; the higher the cost to the UK, the less ambiguous the message to the other member states.

I wish I had any answers or better yet, a way out to offer, but all I've got is ramblings from the perspective of someone who has lived on the edge between the EU and UK during (parts of) a crucial period. So I'll leave it at this.

I suppose the fun what-if question around Scottish independence is what mileage could Scotland make by going nuclear-free, assuming it can achieve energy independence from the UK by other means?

Scotland's remaining nuclear power stations need to be decommissioned in the fairly near future -- possibly by 2024, certainly this decade (I haven't been tracking the latest) -- because they're all AGRs, coming up on 40 years old, and it turns out there's an irremediable design flaw (neutron irradiation induced cracks in the graphite core that threatens to block gas channels and jam the control rods and can't be fixed).

Meanwhile Scotland produces on average more electricity than it consumes solely from renewables -- we have the largest offshore wind farms in Europe -- and is a net electricity exporter. Even if you subtract North Sea oil and gas (what remains of it) Scotland is in an energy exporting nation, although renewables are subject to supply interruptions so either grid-scale backup or gas peaker backup plants are necessary.

The main risk of Scotland aiming for 100% renewables is that solar is a non-starter up here (demand is at maximum during those 18 hour long winter cold nights), and if climate change leads to significant changes in the prevailing winds we could be in a big trouble. As it is, a case can probably be made for a couple of replacement nuke plants -- and possibly for SMRs with municipal heating hook-ups for Aberdeen, Dundee, and Inverness when the oil and gas are tapped out.

For the next couple of years the question that matters is "is there no existing tory MP that the country might rally behind?"

You are correct that that's the right question, but unfortunately they monstered all the sane (and experienced) former front bench ministers right out of parliament and party over the 2017-19 period, because the current incarnation of conservativism isn't your old school One Nation conservativism, it's an ideologically committed hard right English Nationalist party engaged in the pursuit of an unattainable utopian ideal of Brexit -- a mirage they can never reach.

There have been competent Tory leaders within living memory. Most of them have quit politics, been exiled to the House of Lords, or officially come out in support of the LibDems, which also tells you everything you need to know about them.

There is simply no way to supply more than the minimum daily load with nuclear power

There is a solution to this problem, however: go all-in to use nuclear to meet peak demand, then find some intermittent application for the surplus power output during slack periods.

What we really need is a Fischer-Tropsch synthesis plant that can handle variable power inputs -- possibly by using molten salt reservoirs as thermal batteries? -- so it takes water vapor and CO2 out of the atmosphere and turns it into long chain alkanes, as feedstocks for chemical processes (plastics production for example) or jet fuel.

This is of course all horribly expensive etc. but it allows us to keep burning jet fuel and keep the planes flying without additional fossil carbon emissions, and it gives us the cheapest possible baseline for nuclear power (i.e. mass produced plants running at optimum power output all the time).

Greg: the piles of rubbish on the streets are due to the bin men going on a two week strike.

They're on strike because a Scottish parliamentary committee on funding municipal workers was deadlocked right down the middle until Labour enlisted Tory support to block an SNP move to offer a 5% pay rise.

This then filtered down to municipal level where the Edinburgh council -- which is an Labour-Tory coalition, despite the SNP being the largest single party on the council -- refused to deal.

So this bullshit isn't something you can blame on the SNP. It's entirely due to Labour being so intent on sabotage that they'll actually go into coalition with the Conservatives and sabotage any attempt to solve the problem.

Moz
I will take that as a partial apology .... Starmer is what we have got & the best hope of getting the tories OUT.
However, see Charlie, later on { # 155 }, oh there WERE half-ways reasonable people ( "One Nation tories" ) once upon a time - they were, quite deliberately, thrown out, in favour of the smiling faragistes we have got now - not a pleasant prospect.
One can hope that the Lem-0-Crats have learnt, but I'm not holding my breath.

... the pursuit of an unattainable utopian ideal of Brexit -- a mirage they can never reach. - is it deliberate? Do they know it can't be done, but they can keep whipping their base in the following of this mirage?
Or are they religious believers, whom no facts can shift?

If you were a trusted advisor to the crown, what practical course of action would you propose to forestall the unfolding crisis?

Arrange a fiery car crash that takes out both Liz and Chuck simultaneously?

Seriously, there doesn't seem to be anything the crown can accomplish by intervening other than to make everything far, far worse. Liz is 96 and about as proactive and energetic as any other 96 year old, which is to say, don't look for her to start dragging wannabe PMs onto the carpet for a dressing-down.

Prince Charles is a 73 year old multi-millionaire. And that's our starting point for the next monarch's reign.

They are institutionally ossified and rigid, eyes fixed on a horizon that is measured in centuries or decades, not years or months. Their overriding preoccupation is: don't rock the boat, don't jeopardize institutional continuity. To such an extent that they're unlikely to recognize a pre-revolutionary situation emerging in time to get on the right side of history.

They're also so insulated from the ordinary people that they probably don't have a clue what's going on -- all their information is filtered through the increasingly deranged Conservative-aligned press, and ministerial and civil service briefings that emanate from guess who.

• Or are they religious believers, whom no facts can shift?*

It's religion: Little Englandism.

From outside England, it looks like the contraction of Empire didn't end when all the dominions gained independence; it kept on pulling back, and today the UK is run like an English empire (with NI, Wales, and Scotland as distant dominions).

Ask yourself why there are so few Tory MPs in Westminster elected from Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. Or, Wales excepted, Labour MPs. There's a huge crisis of legitimacy within the UK and it has been growing for decades -- and been systematically ignored.

When the UK is run by a duopoly of Conservatives and Labour who are minority parties in the other countries, that's not a good sign for the future.

I don't see what good your think that car crash would do, however much you think that William would be better. I cannot see King William suspending Parliament, appointing a (military-style) socialist government to sort out the immediate crisis, and organising a constitutional convention. Much as I regret that :-(

Your last paragraph is definitely wrong. That could be said about the British sheeple, but I can assure you that the major royals are much better informed than you imply. It doesn't reach the press much, but they take the trouble to talk to real experts NOT appointed by the government. Out of touch, yes, though much less so than our current ruling clique.

It looks that way from inside England, too, though I would quibble about 'distant'.

Obviously, there are global challenges - general energy problems, supply chain disruption, the COVID pandemic which lingers, the increasingly obvious consequences of climate change, political instability in several regions.

Ideally, each one of those would lead to a re-thinking of the global consensus - but it's not clear the impetus has been strong enough, and there are powerful forces arraigned behind the status quo.

The UK faces all those challenges, but they are exacerbated. The causes are myriad and contain all sorts of feedback loops.

Through a long chain of events, we will have a government in 2 weeks which aligns with the values, priorities and goals of a (very!) small fraction of the population. That government can barely rely on the support of half of its own fraction in parliament, and has to maintain the line on various reality-defying policies (any minute now, those Brexit opportunities will come to the rescue!).

We have an opposition which is so hamstrung that it cannot propose policies which would go beyond "anodyne".

So, along with the global challenges, we have:

• A health service [https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1562004612172873728?s=20&t=3uMO5UqrjmAgSdi0zVxesg[(which is crumbling, in summer).
• Inflation which will exceed that of most countries experience
• Low productivity, compared to our G7 competitors; Brexit is likely to have a significant negative impact over the next years.
• A heavily financialized economy, which rewards financial engineering and investment in property rather than productive investments; coupled with short-termist incentives.
• A decade+ of low investment in and/or privatisation of public services, leading to low public trust in our institutions
• A constitutional arrangement with many brakes - FPTP, devolution, House of Lords with little legitimacy
• Long-standing, and increasing inequality, in income, wealth and opportunity

My worry is that we won't "rethink" the way our society works. Even if Ms Truss had a coherent view on how to organize the UK and a plan for delivering it, she lacks the backing of her party. Even if the Labour party win an election, they're so hamstrung I can't see anything beyond status quo, but slightly less terrible, as the policy.

Debts that cannot be repaid won't be repaid. The foodbanks are already running out of stock. Businesses are closing or simply ignoring their energy bills. The home-owership revolution, which has sorta discouraged people from demanding change over the last 40 years, might not be as effective when people are facing unemployment and unpayable bills...

I may be unduly pessimistic, but I think we're in for a chaotic few months.

Latest doom and gloom: More than 70% of pubs won't survive winter due to skyrocketing power bills.

Broad question about inflation: to what extent does it matter? If it's resolved, is the UK still witnessing a mounting crisis, or is Brexit plus climate woes plus Ukraine enough on its own?

I note that 10% inflation seems to be the norm in almost every country of the world right now, and that it's not being driven by demand (wage growth is relatively modest...everywhere, really, so we're not seeing prices rise because disposable incomes have suddenly increased by 10%.)

This indicates that inflation is supply-side, mostly due to the pandemic, but also the war, which leaves you with good and bad options. One bad option is to hike wages to meet inflation, compounding the problem. ("Now you've got supply-side inflation and demand-side inflation.") Another bad idea is to hike interest rates to cool demand, which is a bit like throwing water on an electrical fire: the wrong tool for the job.

A better idea is to go after the big end of town and discourage their blatant profiteering (in contrast to wage growth, global corporate profits have been quite healthy since the pandemic). Alternatively, or simultaneously, wait it out while the logistical chains are re-established and the problem more or less resolves itself. This is, at least, the solution for any country which isn't facing multiple crises at once. But where does that leave the UK?

EC
In almost complete agreement - "The Monarchy" is "Above Politics" - but with the ongoing "controversy" ( i.e fascist lies about there being no climate crisis ) a long-term view of Charles ( & William ) has become political. This will lead to, um. interesting" fights.
Liz undoubtedly knows about her grandfather's stance during the General Strike, when the tory right tried to "capture" the Crown & got: "I want to be King of ALL my people" from George V (!) REAL PROBLEM: How bad does it have to get, before they are entitled & allowed to intervene? See also the Norwegian fim: "The King's Decision" - & we are probably getting into that territory!
..... Charlie @ 164
THAT would be as bad as severe food shortages & will lead to rioting, but there's a nasty Puritan streak in today's politics which will try to take advantage of this.

BATTEN DOWN EVERYBODY.
All I can think of is the end of Bernstein's Opera: "Candide"

The UK is especially fucked as even before the Ukraine war, food prices were spiraling out of control due to Brexit-induced shortages -- the UK imports much/most of its food from the EU, so you can imagine what adding 48-72 hour delays to low cost but spoilable fruit'n'vegetable imports at customs clearance did. Food was set to go up 20% this year and then we got sandbagged by energy bills on top.

The energy component of inflation might come down, but the Brexit-induced bits are locked in for years to come.

Also, official statistics low ball how much British workers earn on average; more than 50% of families receiving Universal Credit (social security top-up payments) are doing so despite having wage earners in full time employment. There has been a huge and horrifying pay squeeze in progress since 2008. But the general Tory reaction to "I'm not paid enough to live on" is "get yourself a better-paid job, like bank manager or MP".

If pubs and chippies going out of business doesn't provoke revolution, nothing will.

"as feedstocks for chemical processes (plastics production for example) or jet fuel."

Or fuel for combined cycle turbine power plants to serve as backup for intermittent wind and sunshine?

Of vague relevance, I went to the never-sufficiently-to-be-praised Gridwatch and got its demand, wind and solar power data for the UK for last meteorological winter, 1 Dec 2021 to 28 Feb 2022. It turns out that wind + solar fell short of meeting total demand by a factor of ~3.6.

So at a minimum you need to build a lot more more solar panels and windmills if going all-renewable is the goal. But even if the wind + solar had been 3.6 times greater last winter, there would have been an unbroken period of nine days, 15 Dec to 24 Dec when demand exceeded supply, often by more than 25 GW and for a total shortfall of over 5 TWh. Just building more windmills and solar farms, while necessary, might not be the best way to handle the overall problem.

And yes, "horribly expensive" is going to be a mild way to characterize any approach.

This indicates that inflation is supply-side

I think that's a false dilemma fallacy (applying law of the excluded middle when the middle is not really excluded). Wages growth isn't the only inflationary demand-side measure. Tax cuts are inherently inflationary, for example, possibly more so than wages growth.

But that's just a starting gambit... while most forms of economic activity involve creating value in some way, you don't have to buy into the labour theory of value to recognise that there's a difference between value that is created using inputs like labour and materials, and value that is created literally from nothing. I would argue that any value created literally from nothing - in activities like arbitrage and property speculation - are themselves inherently inflationary.

That won't be enough. I think that it will happen only when the government manages to crash the economy, and half the population is facing actual starvation and even homelessness. Until then, they will be able to keep the bottle corked. I stand by what I said in 2016 and again in 2020 (see All Glory to the New Management! #965), except that Patel has lost her chance (thank heavens!)

An interesting new form of energy storage, designed for the European winter:

https://newatlas.com/energy/reveal-aluminum-energy-storage/

I take your points, and of course I'm simplifying, but we're witnessing high inflation throughout the world which implies it's not substantially down to fiscal policies – or else the inflation rate from country to country would be more variable. However, that hasn't stopped the RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia), for example, from pointing the finger at the labour force and consumer spending and calling it a day. Per Charlie's comment, the UK government has found a similar scapegoat.

The real solutions are slow and politically unpalatable. Putting a dent in property speculation by increasing affordable housing stock, for example. And probably too little too late when you're being fucked from every direction at once.

135 - Greg, I specifically talked about the English "Greens" as the "watermelons" (green shell with red inside). Beyond ignoring my point, what are you saying?

138 - s/Tory/Liebour in Scotland.

139 - Once again, it's Scottish National (no "ist") Party, and the Welsh name "Plaid Cymru" translates into English as "Party of Wales".

145 - Ok. This would be an issue of lack of funding in the Block Grant, as paid to the Scottish Government by Westminster, and controlled by either the Con Party or Liebour. That said, it appears Charlie know more about the fine detail than I do.

160 - Northern Irish Political Parties Yes folks, there's an entire Wikipedia article on the subject.

Scotland is in an energy exporting nation, although renewables are subject to supply interruptions so either grid-scale backup or gas peaker backup plants are necessary.

In a sane world, an independent Scotland would remain part of the shared GB energy market, in a very similar way to that in which the island of Ireland has a shared energy market. Then the variability of Scottish renewables get diluted into the much fuzzier variability of British renewables (because when you have a bigger system, especially a geographically spread-out one, both supply and demand have gentler variations), and whatever storage / peaking plant / demand response / etc is needed at a GB level is applied however it makes the most sense.

Obviously we don't live in a sane world, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Westminster threaten to cut the power lines at the border. Even though, as noted, the mean flow is north to south.

There are already electrical interconnects between Scotland and NI. I wonder whether strengthening them a lot (expensive) and joining the Island-of-Ireland market would make sense...

Reading through the comments here, mostly UK and Australian based, it seems both of these countries AND the US where I sit have a similar problem. A majority of the populations and politicians (of all political stripes) want to think the problems are local to their countries and can be fixed with policy changes within their borders.

EC @ 171
Almost - they will probably finally realise, when it's already too late & then panic & inevitably fuck it up by the numbers, because that's what they do.

A few elementary calculations show that wind and solar could only just meet the UK's current electricity requirements, and don't have an earthly of meeting the requirements when (if!) our direct fossil fuel use is converted to electricity. Whatever you may think of nuclear power, it is not a short-term solution. There is simply no option but to cut our use, drastically, AND import power.

Scotland, on its own, is in a better position.

No dissent there. But, in any case, once a crash has started, it is impossible to stop, and the best that can be done is to mitigate some of the effects and plan how to pick up the pieces afterwards.

Interesting. Having looked at the paper, it hasn't yet been prototyped and, worse, needs the development of viable inert anodes. I haven't checked its calculations, of course, but it seems to have addressed all of the right points.

OK, let me be un-depressing...

"England is officially in drought too"

You'd have a tough time believing that looking out the window here. Place is soaked. It did it a couple of days ago too, and a couple of days before that, and a couple of days before that.

A drought is an event of prolonged shortages in the water supply, whether atmospheric (below-average precipitation), surface water or ground water. A drought can last for months or years, or as few as 15 days.
In other words 2 or 3 rain storms do not constitute an end to a drought. I'd need to check Met Office figures, but I'd not be surprised to find that Scotland is at least in a prolonged dry spell based on monthly average rainfall since April.

"There are already electrical interconnects between Scotland and NI. I wonder whether strengthening them a lot (expensive) and joining the Island-of-Ireland market would make sense..."

There's an interconnect from France to Ireland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Interconnector), in the works, although its 4 or so years out. Assuming the French can keep their power going, it would make a lot of sense for Scotland to be in that market also.

You can do the same thing with sodium, too, the chemistry being somewhat less fierce because of the generally lower melting points of sodium compounds. Electrolysing NaOH is a tolerably tractable process operating at much lower temperatures than electrolytic aluminium production, and you can use metallic anodes rather than graphite.

One thing the article doesn't mention is that the energy output from the metal+water oxidation step in the discharge process doesn't have to be all heat; if you treat it as electrolysis backwards you can get most of it as electricity. So it's versatile enough to not be wasteful for houses that are well insulated enough not to need much extra heat.

The only thing is that it's a very old and well-known idea (which has been suggested many times on here, as well), yet it still hasn't gone into action...

There are already electrical interconnects between Scotland and NI. I wonder whether strengthening them a lot (expensive) and joining the Island-of-Ireland market would make sense...

Revive Icelink to bring geothermal and/or hydro power from Iceland into that as well?

The answer to nuclear power's inflexibility is the same as the answer to wind and solar power's variability: storage.

Pumped Storage development in Portugal

Pumped Storage development in Switzerland

Pumped Storage development in the EU and Scotland (from 2020)

Essentially, super-Dinorwig pumped storage facilities; and the EU appears to be committing to breaking ground on 20 gWH per year of it for the next decade.

To be clear: this isn't about the Dinorwig use-case of handling transient demand spikes - this is about smoothing supply across a 24-hour cycle.

The Alps and the Pyrenees have about 200 geologically- and commercially-usable sites for Nant de Drance equivalent installations - more, if energy prices continue rising - and that brings us into double-digit Terawatt-hours of storage capacity; and, as this is storage of water that is pumped back up to the upper reservoir, rather than use-the-water-once hydropower, long periods of reduced rainfall are less of a problem.

Whether the EU keeps up the momentum on pumped storage is another matter; but the investments involved are roughly the same as the next 10-20 years of Europe's anticipated replacement costs for end-of-life coal and nuclear plants. Which is to say: expensive, and possibly double the costs of business-as-usual, but not unaffordable. And probably cheaper in terms of the ecological and geopolitical gains of sustainability and energy security.

England also has a major 'pumped storage' development opportunity in the single-digit Gigawatt-Hour range, with two free pumping cycles every day: a tidal barrage on the Severn Estuary: whether Brexitstan will ever consider doing it is another question.

I take your points, and of course I'm simplifying, but we're witnessing high inflation throughout the world which implies it's not substantially down to fiscal policies – or else the inflation rate from country to country would be more variable. However, that hasn't stopped the RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia), for example, from pointing the finger at the labour force and consumer spending and calling it a day. Per Charlie's comment, the UK government has found a similar scapegoat.

It's entirely possible that, since the dollar is the world's reserve currency, American decisions to print lots of dollars as a response to the pandemic are simply rippling around the world, with every other economy responding to that (or not, as they choose).

I agree that inflation gets highly political, though. In my simplistic understanding, everybody wants to be paid a living wage. But if you pay everyone a living wage, then the price of the stuff they do and produce goes up, driving up the cost of living, so you get caught in a spiral if you're not careful. The nasty, normal solution to this is to suppress wages in critical sectors of the economy (growing food and commodity production, traditionally), which in turn means that the people who are politically active get a living wage and support the system. This works so long as the slaves and serfs don't revolt. We've tried to automate our way out of this trap (replace slaves with machines), but that hasn't really solved it either.

The real solutions are slow and politically unpalatable. Putting a dent in property speculation by increasing affordable housing stock, for example. And probably too little too late when you're being fucked from every direction at once.

This one is wrong, unfortunately. Tenements and slums are classic ways for the rich to get richer. It's easy to exploit the desperate. Right now, the new hot real estate scam is buying up trailer parks and gouging the residents until they scream.

Don't get me wrong--I'm all for equitable and affordable housing. The problem is that providing a space that's a) affordable, and b) meets the sanitation codes of sniffy people like me is tricky anyway, and doing it in the face of politics and expensive urban land is trickier still.

Squats and shanty towns are the classic response, and likely too in the UK and elsewhere.

Now if you want a cure for billionaires, that's a bit trickier. The good news is that none of the fuckers are eternal, and most rich families blow through their fortunes in a few generations.

The bad news is that A) they're fucking anarchists, who maintain their staffs of lawyers, accountants, guards, and fixers to keep it that way. Anarchy and "above the law" are synonymous. B) They treat the rest of us as their flock to fleece, not as fellow humans.

A society run by the super-rich (aka an authoritarian regime, plutocracy, monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy) classically has one caste above the law (anarchist rulers, kept that way by their mooks), their essential supporters well cared for (socialism for the well off), and everyone else exploited to provide resources for "their betters" (capitalism for the poor).

Fortunately and unfortunately, such systems aren't stable. That's why countries like Egypt and China, which have "long histories of monarchical rule by pharaohs and emperors" actually have lots and lots of dynasties, each of which ended when a regime fell apart. If you look a bit more closely, you'll find that the periods when there wasn't a stable empire/kingdom are quite long too. And if you think about it a bit more, you realize that this means that there's no country on the planet with a long history of stable rule by autocrats...

The bad news in all our cases is that the last time we overthrew the bastards in the West and made ourselves more democratic, we had a lot of resources (taken, erm, from everybody and everywhere else) to make life better for everyone in our countries. We no longer have so much stolen surplus, and it's hard to make a capitalist or even a communist utopia with a shrinking resource base. Especially with a lot of people who grew up in better times and expect those times to return.

It would have been cool if nanotech had worked out and provided all our wants without our input. Or if FTL flight had gotten us to dozens of other planets that were unoccupied and free for the looting. Alas.

If I had to guess, I'd say that would be the point at which we start hearing the phrase "paramilitary wing of the SNP" on the evening news.

Yep: pubs are going to go under - maybe not 70% of them, but certainly more than a quarter: half is entirely plausible.

And this is a commercial opportunity for the chain operators who will buy them up: some of them are Conservative Party donors, and at least one of them is a prominent UKIP and ERG supporter who famously told his staff that they weren't getting any furlough payments to tide them over through the Covid lockdowns, and should seek opportunities in their local supermarkets.

Those people matter, rather more in Westminster than The Society of Independent Brewers, who spoon-fed that article to the Guardian.

Shock doctrine, writ large: and somewhere new for the water companies to pump untreated sewage if they're ever prevented from dumping it into English rivers and the sea.

The big problem with sodium is that even sodium hydroxide is seriously nasty, and sodium metal is incredibly dangerous. It is definitely NOT suitable for most domestic use. What do you do if there is a fire on the premises? Aluminium is cuddly by comparison.

But I agree with you that all such 'solutions' are speculation, at least until they are prototyped.

Sorry, but the coalition with the Tories, for which they got nothing but the Tory agenda, leaves me a significantly jaundiced view of them.

The chip shops, and the pubs? Okay, then, so, have you received your party notice of The Revolution? When are you all going to set up the Humane Inventions?

Supply side... well, but there's more, and not only price-gouging by oil companies. You may have missed this... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/23/record-profits-grain-firms-food-crisis-calls-windfall-tax

I have issues with the concept of "value created from nothing". In what way is that not purely a scheme to get rich quick? I mean, "oh, wow, we can eat this mud, and it tastes great" implies the mud is there, and needs to be dug up, packaged, etc.

"But I agree with you that all such 'solutions' are speculation, at least until they are prototyped."

Which is what worries me. So far, the decarbonization agenda seems to be "Build more wind and solar farms!". That might be necessary, but it's far from sufficient. It would be good to see some of the dozens of candidate supplemental solutions (storage of some sort, mostly) being prototyped at scale.

"At scale" might mean, for a start, backing up a 10 GWe mean output wind + solar plant that suffers a 50% sustained reduction for a week every quarter. Preferably do several of those at a time to explore the multi-dimensional parameter space.

For a start. After running that/those for, say, five years and learning lessons, Phase Two could be instituted. Needless to say, that's very unlikely to happen.

BTW, I take EC's point that the discussion is now centered mostly around current electricity needs. Expanding that to total decarbonization/electrification is TBD.

I have issues with the concept of "value created from nothing". In what way is that not purely a scheme to get rich quick? I mean, "oh, wow, we can eat this mud, and it tastes great" implies the mud is there, and needs to be dug up, packaged, etc.

Probably I'm confused, but I think there are at least two things going on here.

One is monetary inflation. Money's this magical stuff that, in theory, can be traded for anything else, if someone's willing to take the amount of money you have in trade for whatever they have. Create more money (as the US government has done), and the monetary value of everything goes up, because more total money means each unit of money is proportionately less valuable.

Then there's speculation, which is where you drive up how much money people are willing to pay for something else. That doesn't create value from nothing, it alters the terms of trading money for that something else.

Then there's alienation, which is where you take some mud and trade it to someone else for money. The mud in itself has no intrinsic value, nor does your act of scooping it up. The value comes when someone else is willing to give you money for it. Only at that point does the mud become alienated from the wider universe, and incorporated into the economy in which that money circulates. This is where, in terms of that economy, something is created from nothing. It's truly a magical act.

The fundamental problem we have is that all our economies run inside larger systems (biosphere, Earth, solar system) which are mostly outside our economies, and no economy is remotely self-sufficient. Alienation tends to be destructive, and assumptions of universal alienation are unreachable. So one way or another, we've got to figure out how to exist, partially or entirely, without alienation, or we're not going to exist at all. This last is probably easier than we think (lots of things in the world are inalienable), but it is hard to think this way, after a lifetime of being conditioned to think in economic terms and regard ourselves as economic beings. As I said, it is all very magical.

Dead wrong. The SNP have not only disavowed Sìol nan Gàidheal, but have actively banned known members of the extremist group from holding membership of the SNP.

Doesn't mean they can't start another one that aligns more closely with their objectives and values.

But the point I was trying to make is that if the party of government makes a policy of only abiding by referendums (or is it referenda?) if the result is the one they want, the SNP and the people of Scotland in general are going to be left with two choices: Just putting up with it or resorting to violence.

And I don't think they're likely to pick the first option. Not after the last five years.

Which is what worries me. So far, the decarbonization agenda seems to be "Build more wind and solar farms!". That might be necessary, but it's far from sufficient. It would be good to see some of the dozens of candidate supplemental solutions (storage of some sort, mostly) being prototyped at scale.

Speaking from certain knowledge, some are being designed and built right now.

One problem with pumped storage is that any place that could hold the second reservoir, but which does not already have a reservoir on it, probably has real issues that need to be solved first (guess how this environmental activist is getting sucked in....).

Otherwise, battery peaker units are going in with minimal fanfare, because they're simpler and cheaper than natural gas peaker units.

In places like San Diego, I think the general push is less for grid-level stability at the moment, and more for business and homeowner stability, meaning that it's easier to get people to spring for home solar and house batteries than to build regional systems. Likely it's cheaper to pay for poor people to go solar than to build regional systems. This comes down to a few things, including the price of vacant land, grid instabilities, the, erm, personalities and tactics of big power companies like SDG&E and PG&E, the fact that the grid suppliers cut power during red flag fire alerts, because they've already lost billions when their equipment touched off conflagrations, and the fact that per-building solar and storage is really fungible.

On the last, if a charity or someone who needs carbon credits has, say, $100k that they want to invest in decarbonization, installing solar, house batteries, and electric appliances in a few low-income houses or a trailer park is easier than investing in one fiftieth of a solar farm that needs to be permitted, to deal with local NIMBY suits, and only then can be built.

Actually, esp. in the US and "allies", a lot of inflation is driven solely and exclusively by not merely speculation, but changing the terms and fraud. The price of housing in the US is a perfect example, with people who want to get rich quick massively raising housing prices in what is effectively a closed market (what, you don't want to live 60+km outside of town, and spend 3 hours/day commuting?).

And there's the social imperative "you must buy the latest, because we made that crap so cheap it'll break 30 sec after the warranty ends."

When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, "Come." I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, "A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not damage the oil and the wine."

It's an old, old problem. The Third Horseman of the Apocalypse is charging about a day's wages for a legionary to cover the cost of wheat for a loaf of bread (or three loaves of barley bread), but saying that the foods of the better off (wine and olive oil) are not to be touched. Seems like whoever wrote this text had some opinions about profiteering during a disaster?

In the UK that could easily mean invading Scotland to build more pumped hydro plants, because they have a big one

Actually the big one (Dinorwig, 1800MW) is in Wales, Scotland's entries of Cruachan and Fall of Foyers only amount to 730MW between them! Granted Cruachan does have a lot of storage capacity. There's Loch Sloy (which was proposed for conversion to a pumped hydro station) which adds another ~155MW, and there are several other projects in various states of planning that could add another ~3000MW in total.

There's a project aiming to product a small ~100MW(?) pumped hydro scheme somewhere in Wales, but that was running into difficulties as I recall because the UK military had after WW2 dumped unwanted munitions into one of the pools they wanted to use as a reservoir!

I seem to recall reading somewhere that there's a plausible pumped hydro site on Exmoor, and if all else fails there's the build a very large plastic lined dam and use the sea as the lower reservoir option which I'm sure has been used somewhere. (I think it was mentioned in "Without the hot air" e-book?(

From here*, it looks like life would be less dire if reactionaries didn't act like they were modeling their behavior to match a Dennis Leary novelty song. Is part of the attraction of right wing movements a license for bad behavior?

*Western Missouri.

"I seem to recall reading somewhere that there's a plausible pumped hydro site on Exmoor"

No, there isn't. No lakes at all, and certainly nowhere to have one above the other. There's about one site where you've got a decent enough combination of flow and head to get a worthwhile output from a local generation-only system, and it's already got one.

You need the basic landscape to have started out with a lot more elevation in the first place, and then been glaciated so you get big wide lakey valleys at low level plus useful corries or hanging valleys higher up. So Wales, Scotland, and the Lake District is pretty much the lot, and while there are a few possible sites for little ones that haven't been used yet, for anything with significant capacity we're pretty much out of luck (though I don't know Scotland well enough to question what I've been told in that case).

it's Scottish National (no "ist") Party, and the Welsh name "Plaid Cymru" translates into English as "Party of Wales"

A party can be nationalist, viz "preferring to be a nation" while not having that in its name. Wikipedia, for example, calls the SNP a nationalist party.

While it's certainly possible that the SNP is strongly in favour of UK unity as a single kingdom and at worst neutral on a separate Scots nation, it's IMO hard to draw that conclusion from observation. In other words, {citation needed}

nationalist, viz "preferring to be a nation"

I struggled with a recent episode of The Minefield, where the usually quite reasonable co-hosts Waleed Ali and Scott Stevenson engaged in a discussion where for them it was obvious that there is a clear distinction between the concepts "patriotism" and "nationalism". To me they have long been synonyms, except that some people associate positive connotations with one and negative connotations with the other. I think for them the distinction is that one is about being and acting like part of a polity, which might or might not be a nation state, without necessarily saying yours is better than anyone else's, and the chauvinistic determination that yours is best and all the Others best watch out. I think their claim is that nationalists only hear the first part of the quote "My country right or wrong", and neglect the part that "patriots" also require: "If right to keep right, if wrong to set right". For them "patriotism" is more aligned with "civic commitment" or something of that nature. I think the confusion is really about what is a polity and what does membership of one mean, versus a nation state and especially an ethno-state. Maybe "nationalism" is supposed to imply or require an ethno-state too, but if so I'm not sure I agree (maybe "nationalism" is "patriotism plus racism for them?) I don't think I agree with their usage in terms of the word "patriot", I think my old understanding is still correct, but I don't disagree such concepts exist and can be distinguished.

I think it's different with SNP and Plaid Cymru and it's actually much simpler and more clear cut than this. Both Scotland and Wales are existing polities, countries and historical nations. Nationalism for them means more or less what independence meant for the USA, Canada, Australian, Aotearoa, India and a myriad others, with a strong sideline of "independence specifically from the English". Maybe one or both do have a strong thread of cultural or ethnic national identity that I've missed, but to me it looks like they are talking about self determination for a well-defined polity that already has its own parliament. Maybe this is getting into the same sorts of muddled definitions and distinctions, I'm not sure. But I don't think it's unreasonable to offer a distinction between "national" meaning "I want my polity to be a nation" versus "nationalist" meaning "I think my nation is the best nation", or whatever other thing we associate with that conceptually.

"Actually the big one (Dinorwig, 1800MW)"

Might I humbly suggest that output capability, expressed in MW, be distinguished from storage capacity, expressed in MWh?

Perhaps, instead of pumped storage, which requires topography, someone might investigate acquiring and mooring a bunch of CNG transport ships converted to compressed air storage. Compressed air energy storage at the utility level is a thing, and if there are surplus-but-functioning CNG carriers around that could hold enough pressurized air to make a difference, they could be used as load balancers. Mooring them out of the way and interconnected to the grid might be a wee chore, but so is making a dam for pumped storage in a world running short on cement.

"someone might investigate acquiring and mooring a bunch of CNG transport ships converted to compressed air storage. Compressed air energy storage at the utility level is a thing"

Mebbee, but E = PV, power is dE/dt = VdP/dt and the P goes down as the V is emptied. You'd have to run a model with realish numbers to see where it gets.

and if there are surplus-but-functioning CNG carriers around that could hold enough pressurized air to make a difference, they could be used as load balancers.

I assume you really mean LNG carriers. Because once you liquefy the gas the carriers are really larger refrigerators more than pressure vessels. Some of both but LNG is really about cold. I wonder how compatible "air" is in terms of being liquefied.

But if you pay everyone a living wage, then the price of the stuff they do and produce goes up, driving up the cost of living, so you get caught in a spiral if you're not careful.

Prices only go up if companies can't automate their production. Of course, this leads to other problems, as we've discussed at length in earlier threads.

Create more money (as the US government has done), and the monetary value of everything goes up, because more total money means each unit of money is proportionately less valuable.

Each unit of money is proportionately less valuable only if the economic output of a country (or world?) does not go up. If the U.S., for example, does not create more money when its GDP goes up, then each unit of money is more valuable. The rich get richer, and everybody else struggles.

This was the historical problem with the gold standard, which many countries (including the U.S.) used to have. New gold production couldn't keep up with increased economic output, so those who owned gold got rich. Thus the speech by U.S. Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan in 1896, in which he famously said "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold".

Is part of the attraction of right wing movements a license for bad behavior?

I suspect that the answer is "yes" for quite a few people. What a significant number of convoy protesters apparently wanted was the freedom to be nasty to people they didn't like.

I assume you really mean LNG carriers. Because once you liquefy the gas the carriers are really larger refrigerators more than pressure vessels. Some of both but LNG is really about cold. I wonder how compatible "air" is in terms of being liquefied.

Not in this case. I meant compressed natural gas. Kardashev nailed the problem with it, of course, but they do use compressed air for load balancing in power plants, so it can't be entirely stupid. Especially if you can get the tanks and pumps really cheap (as from a surplused CNG transport) to keep down manufacturing costs.

I actually contemplated both liquid air and liquid natural gas, both in liquefy and vaporize, and for the methane, liquefy, vaporize, burn, and reconstitute. I could be wrong, but I think you lose too much energy liquefying air and methane to make either workable. Burning the methane would get the energy out of course, but then you're stuck dealing with the CO2. Since the best processes for making CH4 out of CO2 seem to demand a lot of energy, I doubt it would work.

Each unit of money is proportionately less valuable only if the economic output of a country (or world?) does not go up

One of the hidden subsidies, at least in Australia, comes from the question of who exactly issues this new money. Here it's banks. Not the Reserve Bank of Australia, but profit-making banks via the miracle of fractional reserve banking. Which does great things for the profitability of banks, and consequently the wealth and income of their shareholders. But sadly not everyone is a shareholder, and even when everyone was a shareholder that was only of some banks (the state-owned ones). Note that this is separate from the subsidy of government bank guarantees (including the "too big to fail" cash injections)

Which is a polite way of saying that the necessary increase in money supply is deliberately used to increase inequality.

It doesn't have to be this way, and if you're the naive Marxist sort it would seem more just to give that money equally to everyone. Or if you accept the ideas behind progressive taxation and social welfare, that money could be given more to poorer people, or even used as government spending.

Both liquid air and compressed air energy storage exist and there are people trying to commercialise both.

It's also the Reserve Bank.

When the government wants money, for say, a covid support payment, it borrows the money by issuing bonds. Those bonds are nearly all bought by Reserve Bank that creates money out of nothing with which to buy them.

Then the government has created this enormous debt that they've "saddled our children with". Except that the debt is owed to itself, in the form of the Reserve Bank.

As long as the money doesn't leave the country, it doesn't matter how much money is magiced into existence. All it does is circulate around making jobs and creating real wealth.

»Coal plants are even more discomforted by shutting down than nuclear. «

Coal is, as you correctly term it "discomforted", because it is only a matter of economy.

With Nuclear it impossible, because the laws of physics stand in the way.

To get around the laws of physics, you would have to build approx five times peak-capacity in a range of reactor-sizes, so that you can regulate by running a subset of them at 100% while the rest are at 0%.

Poul-Henning Kamp said: it is only a matter of economy.

Well, in the end, everything is only a matter of economy.

If you shut down a coal plant the molten clinker freezes to the boiler tubes and walls. Some poor grunt has to climb inside and chip it away by hand and clean everything out before you can restart. 3 days to a week of work. I don't know if you can call freezing a law of physics, but it is a fuck load of work that you can't skip.

Ramping the burn rate up and down wrecks the boilers. Is thermal expansion a law of physics? I don't know, but again, when the boiler tubes split you have to shut it down and plug that tube at both ends and clean all the shit out again.

The practical upshot is that you don't ramp coal plants up and down or stop and start them if at all possible.

Can you find a link or explain a bit more how that self-borrowing is explicitly inequality-exacerbating? I'm thinking it's tied into the anti-MMT arguments that if the government uses too much productive capacity the whole economy suffers, but you seem to rule that out at the end. Obviously the limiting case of the government self-borrowing 10x last year's economy in order to usurp 90% of the productive capacity would be exciting, but if we just increased the government share of the economy from 30% to 40%, say, and the extra 10% was borrowing rather than tax... then what? Does it necessarily have to increase inequality the way giving that money to private banks (shareholders) does?

Sorry, or did you just mean "it's also the reserve bank creating new money"? Coz yes, they do it too, and that effectively becomes part of general government spending which can do whatever the government likes to inequality.

The "N" in LNG (and CNG) is actually more or less a synonym for methane. LPG tends to mean (rarely) ethane, and more commonly propane and/or butane. It's not that unusual to see frosting on propane and butane tanks on a frosty morning. This can give a vague indication of the gas level.

EC
Corollory of that is that Nuclear IS a long-term solution {Especially for baseload} - but - because it's long-term, it should have been started 20+ years ago ......

Nile
Yeah, fucking 'spoons & Tim Martin - I won't drink in a spoons, nor will many CAMRA members, because of this.

AlanD2
And, of course you have "goldbugs" { "Satoshi"? } & others demanding a return to the gold standard, because it's "not FIAT money" - which is complete bollocks, of course.
Which reminds me - how is/are "Crypto" currencies doing & how long before the whole scam crashes?

You're saying the laws of physics make ramping nuclear plants up and down impossible, have you told the French? They've been running at least some of theirs in load-following where they can adjust between 30-100% for several decades.

Moz said: Sorry, or did you just mean "it's also the reserve bank creating new money"?

Yes. That's all I meant. The money so created can be used for good or evil at the government's whim.

paws said: This can give a vague indication of the gas level.

Best way of checking the liquid level is to pour hot water down the side of the tank. Then feel the side. The liquid draws the heat away quickly, so the transition from hot above to cold below is the liquid level. No need to wait for unusual weather.

But every need to get closer to a bulk tank than you're normally allowed under UK laws.

How easy it is depends a lot on the type and size of the reactor.

Large AGR style graphite cores are particularly I'll suited to rapid changes, and that describes most of the current UK plants.

Really?

Weird laws of the world...

I suspect many of them are mimicking the behavior of TPTB, many of whom take the social shortcuts of judging people by melanin content, religion or income, avoiding the chore of evaluating on a case by case basis, and alienating theirselves from the majority of the world. Gets to be a bit of an issue in various ways when they start viewing other human beings as inferior (See most of this thread), and worse when law enforcement picks up the attitude.

Suspect he may be interpreting a different scale. But didn't say that, so hohum.

Damian said: different scale

Oh, yeah.

"With Nuclear it impossible, because the laws of physics stand in the way."

It's a matter of design more than physics. Naval nuclear reactors can be shut down and started up readily enough, and can be throttled rapidly when running.

LPG tanks like this

Lighthouse Beach Holiday Village https://maps.app.goo.gl/iksoRvsHfYzA4z4i9

feel like bulk to me.

The big bulk LPG tanks tend to be underground, or indeed actually just ground. The ELGAS bulk facility in Sydney is literally a hole. They dug an artifical cave 130m under Port Botany. So I don't think you'd see frosty sides.

Kinda looking forward to what paws comes back with.

Like that yes, but in a fenced compound, and no way would there be trees that close.

oh, noes! Cue the revolution! Peace, prosperity, and beer!

I suspect many of them are mimicking the behavior of TPTB, many of whom take the social shortcuts of judging people by melanin content, religion or income

I won't disagree with that. I'm an immigrant, but being British I never get hassled by the very people who think my Canadian-born nieces should "go back where they came from".

It's particularly obvious when the hassler has an accent that identifies them as an immigrant themselves. I'm by no means good at identifying accents, but RP English is soooo obviously not Canadian. And even in Alberta we don't have Texas drawls…

In any case, what many of the "Freedom" protesters wanted was the freedom to be nasty to people who weren't like them, whether in skin pigmentation, religion, or sexual orientation.

It's entirely possible that, since the dollar is the world's reserve currency, American decisions to print lots of dollars as a response to the pandemic are simply rippling around the world, with every other economy responding to that (or not, as they choose).

It's possible, yes, but is that what we're seeing? From what I can gather, economists are attributing current inflation to restraints in the supply of commodities – particularly crude and staple crops such as wheat – as demand-driven inflation was already waning late in 2021. In the link, economist Paul Donovan also explains why he doesn't think labour costs are a factor right now either (wage rises aren't inflationary unless they outpace productivity).

Donovan also argues that the solution for inflation right now is do nothing, the problem will resolve itself. But if that's going to take too long, the UK government is in a position to warn industry leaders of potential blowback. "Ease up on the price gouging, or the tide of public dissatisfaction is going to turn hard against you." Unlikely under a conservative administration, I know, but the mounting instability you describe is going to find an outlet somewhere and most businesses wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of it.

Oh, OK, so we're thinking of roughly the same thing. Just as you can see, ours fend for themselves. The big ones like this (well, anything over 90 kg) tend to have gauges on them, but they might be hard to read if you can't get to the tank. The hot water trick works up to 250 kg tanks that I've tried, but I don't know if it would work on these bigger ones.

how is/are "Crypto" currencies doing and how long before the whole scam crashes?

The crash actually started a few months ago: BtC dropped below $20K per 'coin and crypto exchanges are going bust at a frightening rate as it turns out they were all ponzi schemes leveraging one another.

It coincided with the energy price spike -- it became unprofitable to mine cryptocurrencies using proof-of-work and a lot of folks tried to convert their holdings into hard (fiat) currency simultaneously.

Ethereum might survive: they just conducted a long-planned switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake which in theory decouples the currency from runaway energy consumption.

Naval nuclear reactors can be shut down and started up readily enough, and can be throttled rapidly when running.

Yes, but they're usually an order of magnitude smaller than civilian power reactors, and use HEU as fuel rather than LEU or MOX. So there's a lot less hot material actually reacting, and it's much easier to dump waste heat when you're entirely immersed in an ocean.

In practice you don't design a civilian reactor to throttle like a submarine because the fuel is vastly more expensive (and can be used to make weapons if it's stolen) and ideally a civilian reactor should deliver power constantly at peak output, or as close as possible: to run it at low power is an inefficient use of resources.

It's possible, yes, but is that what we're seeing? From what I can gather, economists are attributing current inflation to restraints in the supply of commodities – particularly crude and staple crops such as wheat – as demand-driven inflation was already waning late in 2021.

Do I believe this?

Well, the news on floods, droughts, and fires makes me think that food prices would be the problem. So I googled "bumper crop 2022" and find that prices for US corn, soy, and wheat are currently tanking due to...bumper crops. This won't entirely make up for the Ukraine wheat shortage. But remember that Third Horseman quote in 201? People have been price gouging in disasters since probably before Biblical times.

Then I thought about oil prices. There's always a story in the news about how gas prices are going up due to "crude oil shortages" or "manufacturing problems hobbling plants at key times." Thing is, if you google something like oil or gas price over time, it has this totally bizarre pattern: when there's a push on for Republicans to win in US elections, gas prices spike, going back to around 2008. It's completely magical how disasters just seem to come out of nowhere in time for politicians to make arguments about why democratic policies are failing.

That is, of course, a USian point-of-view, but I'm not buying what this revered senior economist is saying.

»Naval nuclear reactors can be shut down and started up readily enough, and can be throttled rapidly when running.«

And precisely for that reason are naval reactors designed to have much, /much/ higher excess reactivity available, so they (almost always) can overcome Xenon-poisoning.

The main design-elements are the use of HEU and more compact core geometries.

But "Excess reactivity" is just another way of saying that you will not live to tell about "that one time I pulled the control-rods out too far".

See for instance Chalk River, or SL-1. (Recommended reading: INL's pdf-book "Proving the Principle". SL-1 is chapter 15)

In designing civilian reactors, it has always been an explicit goal to have the smallest possible excess reactivity, preferably none at all. Chernobyl became a problem because the control rods had graphite tips, ("negative void coefficient") and that caused "excess reactivity" over unity.

Designs have even been proposed with "negative excess reactivity", working as "energy amplifiers" with an external particle-accellerator providing the input. One of these designs infamously assumed that one could suspend 13 tons of molten lead in a dewar-beaker.

»You're saying the laws of physics make ramping nuclear plants up and down impossible, have you told the French? They've been running at least some of theirs in load-following where they can adjust between 30-100% for several decades. «

No, they are not.

They are running the fleet of nuclear reactors load-following, not the individual reactors and that is part of the reason electricity in France is not cheap, but the existence of other sources, primarily hydro, has prevented it from becoming so expensive, that it would be "too cheap to meter".

The practical upshot is that you don't ramp coal plants up and down or stop and start them if at all possible.

A friend/neighbor worked for a major utility on such things.

You run nuclear 100% until you have to fix something or refuel. You run coal almost the same way. You spin up and down natural gas. If a modern plant that can happen in hours or even less.

Side question. As we move off of coal for electrical power, what happens with the production of drywall/gypsum board?

But every need to get closer to a bulk tank than you're normally allowed under UK laws.

You don't have propane tanks in rural back yards for the house and/or other buildings?

»If you shut down a coal plant the molten clinker freezes to the boiler tubes […]«

Depends a LOT on the specific design.

Most of the Danish coal-plants have had "Benson" design, and they only cleaned the kettle once a year, despite being fully load-following.

But ultimately, it is just an economic question: You can make any technology work, even solo, if you are willing to pour enough money into it.

Boiling water reactors can run up and down between about 60% and 100% power output without problems. The BWRs owned by Commonwealth Edison/Exelon in Illinois varied their output over that range to follow the time-of-day load for years. ComEd joined the PJM Interconnection so they could run the reactors at higher output all the time, selling their overnight surplus into the US East Coast market.

But ultimately, it is just an economic question: You can make any technology work, even solo, if you are willing to pour enough money into it.

So the USA can do this, but maybe not the UK so much, at least right now? From what I've been reading, mass action to get the water treatment and sewage handling stations working again is rather higher on the list than constructing a shiny new fleet of reactors using whoever the New Management would choose to hire for that job.

Perhaps the UK needs biomass-fueled generators, using the crowd-sourced Wickerman design, set up to power Westminster and financial centers connected thereto? Or are the emissions-control sections of those designs still being worked out? Such things might help ameliorate the aspects of climate change that are causing crop failures, if you believe the "past performance" part of the prospectus.

»Boiling water reactors can run up and down between about 60% and 100% power«

Yes BWR's have a bit more range than PWR's in this respect, primarily, as I understand it, from the different fuel geometry they have.

But I would be surprised if they did it with all reactors every night ? Didn't they use some kind of "turnus" so each reactor only reduced every other or every third night ? Otherwise their control-law would get hideous.

From what I've been reading, mass action to get the water treatment and sewage handling stations working again is rather higher on the list than constructing a shiny new fleet of reactors using whoever the New Management would choose to hire for that job.

I suspect as people get colder with higher power bills there will be a clamor to fix THAT over the sewage issue that is happening downstream or off the coast.

240 - Agreed; as another point of comparison, do you store "portable" LPG tanks, say 5 to 40 kg, in cages like we do? All this is covered under the Health and Safety at Work Act (1974) and associated regulations.

247 - I think you're misinterpreting me, or possibly I'm being insufficiently clear? You, as a casual passer by, would not be allowed to walk up to an LPG tank and tap on it, but I, as the owner or manager, am allowed closer access to read the contents gauge.

»So the USA can do this, but maybe not the UK so much, at least right now?«

France can build reactors (... "eventually" as they say in Finland), and will probably continue to do so, as a matter of national pride and nuclear submarines.

At this point in time, UK cannot build a nuclear reactor, neither technically nor financially. Hinkley Point C is a french reactor built for chinese money.

USA can, in principle, build a nuclear reactor, except all the big hard parts will have to be manufactured in Japan or France, since no forges in US are certified any longer. But nobody trusts USA to do so, so at best they manage to sell the drawings to a "joint venture". Westinghouse is for al intents not a US company any more.

China builds nuclear reactors, and have the money and ideologically driven regulation to continue to do so, but their initial plans have been scaled waaaay back, because wind and solar is just so much cheaper and compatible with the approach to quality assurance in chinese manufacturing.

Russia can probably not build a nuclear reactor right now, due to sanctions.

Semi-serious question: who's building the reactors for the Columbia-class US missile subs? Two are in design, with up to 14 on order.

Hmm. Let me remind you of fusion power, Josephson junction computers and weak-force (if I have it right; I forget the classical name) capacitors; there are others that I forget. This issue is almost certainly much more tractable, not least because serious research has been minimal for many decades, but it's not clear how to proceed.

The UK is rich enough to build nuclear reactors, but abandoned the skills a long time ago.

In the UK, biomass reactors were originally hyped to be carbon-neutral, as they would use grain straw etc. As many of us predicted, they got permission, and now burn wood pellets, often from non-sustainable forests. They wouldn't help more than a little, even if done right.

»Semi-serious question: who's building the reactors for the Columbia-class US missile subs? Two are in design, with up to 14 on order. «

It is not very clear precisely who does that, the closest I have been able to figure it out is that various companies supplies parts but that somebody under DoE autority is responsible for the actual design and DoD is responsible for the operation.

Either way, it has very little in common with building civilian power reactors.

»The UK is rich enough to build nuclear reactors«

Well, that depends what kind of "afford" we are talking about.

Could UK build a nuclear reactor if it gave it top priority and made everything second priority ? Yes, of course they could, just like North Korea did.

But can UK build a nuclear reactor for power production without making it a matter of national emergency ?

No, they can not.

See Hinkley Point C financing for proof.

"And even in Alberta we don't have Texas drawls…"

There was a bizarre inflection point in the late 80s, on the arrival of 'New Country', where many of the people I had grown up with in Alberta spontaneously developed a southern drawl.

A fellow whom I'd been through 12 years of school with, who had mostly worn ACDC and other 'metal' shirts suddenly started sporting boots, snap shirts and a string tie while spouting drawled homilies. He was not receptive to my incredulous mockery (which is why I have a deviated septum).

Mikko Parviainen (he/him) @ 1:

I almost want to say 'well, the last one to leave turns off the lights', but as it is, it seems likely that there won't be any electricity for the lights anyway, so the lights will be off way earlier than that.

What about those in such dire financial situations that they can't leave?

"who's building the reactors for the Columbia-class US missile subs?"

Bechtel. The reactors have the designation S1B, meaning first submarine reactor built by Bechtel.

Greg Tingey @ 104: *You analysis is generally good, but: "And all countries where energy is the major industry are politically unstable by nature" - Britain 1815-1914 - I think not.

During the Industrial Revolution energy was not the major industry of Britain. We also had iron works, steam trains, cotton mills, name it. Of course all of these things were fired by coal, but merely digging coal out of the ground was (AFAIK) never anywhere near 50% of GDP.

Meanwhile in Russia resource extraction is around 60% of GDP. I'm not sure how much of that is energy and how much is metals etc, but it still dominates the economy. In a resource extraction economy there is only one path to wealth and power, and that the resource industry. Control of that industry is control of the country, and never mind the people. That's what makes such places so unstable.

Having said that, Charlie posted a nice list of instabilities in Britain during that time frame. Britain was not, by modern standards, a stable country because it was still emerging from a comparatively strong monarchy to modern parliamentary democracy. Other countries didn't get it right and had revolutions. (Actually, the UK had one by proxy over the other side of the pond). But a different roll of the dice could have meant that any one of Charlie's list became the spark for a revolution.

This "nationalism" may depend on a lot of factors. For example... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/25/everyone-loved-each-other-rise-yugonostalgia-tito

Pigeon @ 101:

[Me]: "This is a new opportunity for the world to rethink how it does things."

We've just had one of those, with the plague. The response has been to [change nothing].

I wasn't talking about the Tory party. No, they aren't going to change until they've lost a couple of elections.

Compare with the Labour Party in 1979. They had just overseen a crisis, and their response was "more of the same, because the crisis shows we haven't been doing it enough". They were steamrollered by Margaret Thatcher, who's message was "The crisis shows that the old polices aren't working and we need to try something different".

Now the situation is reversed. We have a crisis: lots of threads are coming together into a perfect storm. The Tory party is now the one saying "more of the same, because we obviously haven't been doing it enough". Now we need the Labour or Lib-Dem equivalent of Mrs T, who can present a new way forward.

BTW, before someone says "That's Jeremy Corbyn", no it isn't. Corbyn isn't proposing anything new: he wants to resurrect the same 1970s Labour policies that led to the Winter of Discontent, as if the last 50 years had never happened. Mrs T's policies were not standard Tory party policies, any more than they were Labour policies. She came in with a radical new set of policies that were fundamentally different from what had come before from either side.

Meanwhile it took the Labour party 10 years and two electoral failures to realise that the 1970s were over and were not coming back. Hopefully the Tory party is now going to do the same, and for the same reason.

Not exactly. Robert Reich noted, in 2019, "As Wall Street bankers and corporate executives take home record bonuses, the wages of most Americans have barely budged. Since 1985, Wall St. bonuses have increased by 1,000 percent. By comparison, if the minimum wage had grown at the same rate, low-wage workers today would earn a baseline wage of $33.51 an hour."

Here's a modest proposal: long time ago, in Model Railroader, I saw that there were plans for emergencies to simply bring in half a dozen locomotives (diesel electric), and use them to provide literally megawatts of power, until power plants could be brought back on line.

Build large nuclear power plants in ships, and then dock them at cities. Easier to build (std. production facilities), and, if anyone actual *gave

* Note that no Irish children were harmed or threatened in this post.

You, as a casual passer by, would not be allowed to walk up to an LPG tank and tap on it, but I, as the owner or manager, am allowed closer access to read the contents gauge.

In the US propane tanks for heating houses are NOT required to be in a cage. They do have to be certified and are made of fairly heavy stainless steel. And I'm guessing come with expiration dates like the ones we use for outdoor grills and such. But I was in a house for sale in a subdivision (in the burbs) where all the houses had a tank next to the back of the house. These were about the size of a 55gal oil drum on a stand. Lots of rural houses in the US have larger propane tanks in the "back yard". Some buried. Some not. And anyone on the property can walk up to most any of these.

If they will let you go to zillow or redfin real estate sites, pick a city or area like mine (RDU or Raleigh) and use the key word propane. You'll get a lot of hits.

Yes BWR's have a bit more range than PWR's in this respect, primarily, as I understand it, from the different fuel geometry they have.

For the reactors ComEd has, the 60-100% range comes from running the recirculation pumps at different speeds. From everything I have read, at times ComEd ran the power output of their individual BWRs up and down using this method on a near-daily basis.

Westinghouse is for al intents not a US company any more.

Westinghouse IS a US company. But they sold off their nuclear bits to Toshiba (I think) a few decades ago. I only paid attention as their nuclear division was HQ's a mile or so from where I lived at one time.

A lot of the nuclear work force in the US is now in the eastern NC area. NCSU keep graduating engineers and they keep getting jobs designing plants that someone is slowing building somewhere else.

What Labour needs is someone to stand for MP, and campaign on "I'm going to fight to renationalize the railroads, nationalize electric power in the UK, and tax the f*ck out of the financial industry. And enforce existing anti-money laundering laws."

I would, of course, if I saw that contribute to pay for their security, and body armor.

55 gal oil drum size? I've never seen a propane tank that small for house heating, maybe for cooking. The one pictured on this page https://www.dorroil.com/propane/propane-tanks/ is probably what we bought for the immobile home, when I moved to TX in '86 - 550gal. We'd have to get it filled two-three times a year, depending on the winter.

There was a bizarre inflection point in the late 80s, on the arrival of 'New Country', where many of the people I had grown up with in Alberta spontaneously developed a southern drawl.

I was visiting Toronto on a somewhat regular basis for a few years in the early 80s. The locals talked about adopting a US movie western drawl when dealing with French speakers. Especially if in Quebec. Otherwise the French speakers seemed to loose their hearing. This was at the height of the Quebec separatist movement.

That's nonsense. Hinckley C is costing only about 0.7% of GDP. You do NOT need a national emergency to spend that sort of money. The government regularly waves a wand and conjures that amount up (despite saying that it can't afford critical projects that cost 0.1% as much). It's hard to believe but the UK is still a very wealthy nation.

If you were to say that the entirety of the UK's governance and economics is already a national emergency, I would agree with you, but that's a separate point.

That's not how they would be destroyed - look at what happened to Corbyn, who stood on a similar platform.

Oh, but I forgot: reverse Brexit.

Vineyard @ 122:

If I remember correctly a report from ages ago, Charles once planned to use the name "George" when he gets crowned.

I believe his full name is "Charles Philip Arthur George (Windsor?)", so why not Arthur II?

Partly because the sequence of regnal numbers begins with Willie the Conk, and kings before him don't count, especially ones who probably didn't exist. But mainly because everyone would take the piss.

It's a very funny thought - Prince Charles claiming to be Arthur - but the jokes were all written in the early 1970s, starting with "Run away!"

"It is extremely fortunate then that the current political heads of the UK and the US absoluetly in no ways whatsoever suffered any forms of harm at their boarding schools that they might then have spent decades trying and failing to work through in public. So that’s a relief. Just imagine if they had suffered harm there. What a mess we might all be in then." - Paul M. Cray

I found this piece of superior sarcasm - verily, the perfect champagne of sarcasm, here:

https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/

There was a bizarre inflection point in the late 80s, on the arrival of 'New Country', where many of the people I had grown up with in Alberta spontaneously developed a southern drawl.

I moved east in 1986, and haven't noticed that on trips back (which only amounts to a week a year).

Not disagreeing, just noting that it doesn't match my experience. Fortunately, from the sound of it :-/

Since 1985, Wall St. bonuses have increased by 1,000 percent. By comparison, if the minimum wage had grown at the same rate, low-wage workers today would earn a baseline wage of $33.51 an hour."

And if minimum wage earners were free to basically set each others wages, they would be at least that high.

I think it's Brin who refers to the CEO class as a circle of 5000 golf buddies who sit on each other's boards and take turns approving each other's contracts and bonuses.

Well, yes. In the novel I'm currently looking for an agent for*, I simplify by referring to the trillionaires (not the ones who are in, then lose a lot, and are out) as the 400, echoing old NYC.

* Actually, that depends - with the shuttering of Eric Flint's Ring of Fire Press, I, and about 200+ other authors, are out of print. HOWEVER, Toni Weisskopf/Baen, are considering "rehoming" us. And I was put in touch with her directly, and if she likes 11,000 Years, I may have a good chance of selling the next novel.

What Labour needs is someone to stand for MP, and campaign on [good policies]

The problem is that none of those are Labour policies, so while an individual could certainly run with them, it wouldn't be as a Labour candidate (unless they were able to effect Labour policy change within the party prior to standing). Running as an independent would be possible, or running with one of the other parties whose policies do reflect these values, most likely Green I guess.

Re: 'Boris Johnson is still Prime Minister for a couple more weeks ... he's been holidaying in Greece.'

Who with? ('With whom?' for the Brits.) And has anyone checked whether the UK version super secret 10 Downing Street documents are still there and make sure that he hasn't/won't take anything with him that he shouldn't?

I ask cuz for the longest time BoJo's been the embodiment of a made-for-the-UK version of DT right on up to the orange hair. (Ability to quote Latin is what makes BoJo electable-for-PM.)

Poul-Henning Kamp wrote in part at 7.36 on August 24, 2022:

But nuclear power cannot be modulated on a daily basis. If you reduce the power output of a nuclear reactor to 70% for some hours, you will either have to shut it down or run it flat out 100% for approximately 72 hours, in order to keep the control domain stable. find me /any/ nuclear power reactor in the world, which modulates its production on a daily basis.

Seth Grae of the Nuclear Security Working Group appeared on BBC's INSIDE SOURCE and noted Zaporizha's No. 5 & 6 reactors were running at 50% capacity today and the past few days. But, that must be impossible.

For those of you concerned about the work required to bore transport tunnels, do I have good news for you!

https://newatlas.com/energy/earthgrid-tunnel-boring-robot/

A plasma tunnel borer! Science fiction come to life! Tunnels across the USA! Under the Pacific to China!

Re "Propane and Propane Accessories"

4.5 and 9 kg nominal size LPG cylinders are treated like any other object that's "worth nicking". The places with "Swap & Go" keep the tanks in a cage to prevent casual theft. Often right next to the 250 kg tank that they use to fill customer tanks that isn't in a cage.

Home LPG is divided into two. There's swap on demand. You have two 45 kg tanks. Between them is a switch. When one is empty, you switch to the full one and call the gas people. They come and swap the empty for a full. Obviously they need access, but there can be "arrangements" for that so it can be behind a locked gate.

Then there's fill on schedule. You have a tank that's 45 kg or more. The guy comes around on a schedule, so there has to be constant access. The tank must be less than a certain number of metres (that I used to know and have now forgotten) from a public road, or a driveway rated to carry a certain number of tonnes (that I used to know and have now forgotten, but it's a lot of them). Obviously that's so you can drive up with a heavy truck that has a hose, and fill a stationary tank. Which also means that anyone can just walk up to them (like that tank in the caravan park I linked to)

In both cases the tanks must be prevented from falling over (earthquake) or floating away (flood). That's a chain with a clip in most cases. Fire isn't an issue. Tanks have over pressure vents. If there's a fire big enough and close enough to the tank that it starts to vent, the house is already burning down. A squirt from a fire hose cools the tank and it stops venting, or the firies just ignore it.

Re: 'It's hard to believe but the UK is still a very wealthy nation.'

The UK may be wealthy on paper but an increasingly large part of the wealth it reports in its GDP actually gets sent/belongs to people outside the UK. Money that doesn't get circulated within an economy doesn't do that economy much good. (In fact, this speedy movement is counterproductive -- it's basically a sleight-of-hand balance sheet trick.)

Noticed that there's some new legislation about foreign owners having to register their purchases of UK homes. Will be interesting to see how various parties respond. In some Canadian cities it was discovered that foreign owned multi-unit residences were sitting empty during a housing shortage. The foreign owners were waiting for prices to go up before selling - they didn't buy rental properties to rent out but to flip. (Lots of Canadian commenters here - they can fill in the details.) I think something similar is happening with the financial sectors in some economies.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/1/uk-enacts-ownership-register-for-property-held-by-foreigners

A plasma tunnel borer! Science fiction come to life! Tunnels across the USA! Under the Pacific to China!

Yes, what could possibly go wrong?

I mean, I can just see them using a plasma torch on the London Clay while burrowing under the Thames and pumping water out furiously. It'll be fun! Plasma and dirty water mix in so many exciting ways.

And when they want to enlarge the LA subway next to the La Brea Tar Pits, I'm sure that using plasma torch cutters around the petroleum seeps will be an absolute blast.

Sincerely though, thank you. I needed that!

A plasma tunnel borer! Science fiction come to life! Tunnels across the USA! Under the Pacific to China!

Or London to New York.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tunnel_(1935_film)

Caught this on TV on a bad weather Saturday a few years back.

At this point in time, UK cannot build a nuclear reactor, neither technically nor financially. Hinkley Point C is a french reactor built for chinese money.

Not true. The UK can build reactors. Trouble is, they're military ones for the submarine fleet -- build rate is roughly one per 1-2 years.

Rolls-Royce's proposed design for a small modular reactor is, AIUI, a scaled-up version for civilian use. But they haven't built any of those yet.

What the UK lacks is the capacity to build EPRs, PWRs, or large civil designs, including the gas-cooled designs (Magnox/AGR) that they relied on back in the day. Everyone involved has retired, the last AGRs came on stream more than 30 years ago.

From here, it doesn't seem like the Tories wish to do anything but cling grimly to the wheel all the way to the rocks.

In some Canadian cities it was discovered that foreign owned multi-unit residences were sitting empty during a housing shortage.

True. Also Canadian-owned ones as well (or partly Canadian-owned, corporate ownership of nested numbered corporations being intentionally opaque).

The more I learn about REITs, the more I think they shouldn't be allowed.

“I mean, I can just see them using a plasma torch on the London Clay while burrowing under the Thames and pumping water out furiously. It'll be fun! ”

I’m not seeing a problem here. I mean, heat, clay -> pottery. You’d only be tiling the tunnel anyway, so win! Plus big machine waving light sabres around - what more could you want?

And of course it’s a perfect use case for a small modular reactor to power it. Double win!

I’m not seeing a problem here. I mean, heat, clay -> pottery. You’d only be tiling the tunnel anyway, so win! Plus big machine waving light sabres around - what more could you want?

Nothing. You're right. London clay incidentally is what the brownish bricks of London are made out of so...Tunnel lined with brick? Why not? I'm sure we can figure out how to make pottery with plasma swords and wet clay. It'll be fun

make pottery with plasma swords and wet clay. It'll be fun

I can't wait for the movie to come out so I can see what happens. Please, no spoilers.

The original article said:
72 plasma torches to drill a 1-meter (3.3-ft) bore. In its low-power state, with each torch consuming 500 kW, ... 40 megawatts. ... the high-power state would draw as much as a constant 120 MW.

I'm thinking they might want a steam* turbine on the tunnel entrance to recover some of the waste heat. The hole is only 1m across and they make steam pipes that big. It'll be fine.

The scary thing is the "full size" one pulling 1.2GW. Not only will the "small nuclear reactor" powering it actually be quite large, the ducts carrying the cooling fluid in and out will be quite busy too. I wonder if they could use the liquid sodium from the reactor as the cooling fluid?

• rock vapour is steam, right?

Before anything else ...
Panthalassa

timrowledge
IIRC H Beam Piper had plasma tunnel-borers ("terrenes"?) in 3 sizes: Snap, Crackle & Pop (!)

Tim H
You noticed- but I think the crash may come next spring, without waiting for a GE ....

»Seth Grae of the Nuclear Security Working Group appeared on BBC's INSIDE SOURCE and noted Zaporizha's No. 5 & 6 reactors were running at 50% capacity today and the past few days. But, that must be impossible. «

No, that's perfectly possible.

What is not possible is changing that power level to any other power level you like, at will, at any time.

The possible "trajectories" depend on the precise core geometry (ie: how it is built, how it is loaded, and the burn-up of every cubic decimeter of fuel.), and the history of neutron density in those cubic decimeters for the last three days.

The general outline of the problem is that you can always regulate down, but only in surprisingly narrow "lanes" can you regulate up and have it happen, and happen in a way you will feel comfortable with.

In addition there are secondary limitations arising from limits on temperature changes on individual parts, and limits on temperature differences between different parts of the reactor etc.

A good search term is "Axial Shape Index"

Plasma cutters sounds like a good idea. I've used small plasma cutters and they're great. They even work underwater. The ones I've used use burning to make the plasma, but electric ones exist. You can cut a hole in rock very easily. The drilling speeds they claim sound quite possible.

If you're running out of things to grumble about, SpaceX and T-Mobile have agreed to put cell towers on Starlink V2. So your ordinary mobile handset will work as a satellite phone. I'm sure there's some reason why this is a terrible thing.

If you allow the reactor to be brought down in power at very short notice, how quickly could you bring it up to 100%? Are we talking minutes / hours / days?

Just wondering how much on site battery capacity would be required in order to make a nuclear plant as throttleable as a CGT plant.

Have you tried making blind holes with a plasma cutter? That's something normal metal cutters try very hard to avoid because the blowback is extremely messy. I have no experience of doing it deliberately, put it that way :)

I'm thinking the rock cutting one is possibly closer to a plasma drive or thermic lance than a commonly available plasma cutter, where the actual cutting is done by a jet of plasma rather than by turning the substance to be cut into plasma.

I do wonder whether the tunnel machine works by using a torrent of coolant to turn the vaporised rock into fine grains that can be pumped out of the resulting tunnel, rather than using conveyor belts like a conventional tunnelling machine. But either way it does seem like using prodigious amount of energy to save time, and the product will be hot rock rather than just rock.

If this works as promised, you could dig a deep hole anywhere* and get geothermal energy at a fraction of cost of nuclear. * best location would be near existing coal plants, so you can reuse the steam turbine.

Probably most/all of people here is aware that Chernobyl incident was due to an borked experiment where they were testing how fast they could increase the produced power (if I remember well, they had to postpone the start of experiment, when they had to run the reactor at reduced output, because the grid needed more power than initially planned, but then when they changed the crew in control room, the next shift followed the original power ramp, increasing too fast the power. The final error was to try to damp the reaction with the control rods, but the tip of the rod in that type of reactor is inert, so it displaced cooling media, pushing the reactor to supercritical stage).

Reading the original article (I know! I know!) they talk about fracturing and spalling the rock rather than simply vapourising it, which is slightly less insane.

Presumably the plasma softens up a surface layer that is then scraped away in the usual manner with reduced wear on the cutters. Seems over complicated to me though.

Although the service via Starlink will be for low data rate services only. Users will have SMS, MMS, images and maybe video clips but no real time voice or video. Voice should be available "eventually".

I've made blind holes with a thermic lance, but underwater, so blowback was cold, mostly, I ended up with little holes burnt in my wetsuit, but not in me.

David L @ 246:

Side question. As we move off of coal for electrical power, what happens with the production of drywall/gypsum board?

I dunno. Maybe build a new coal burning plant (with all the environmental controls needed to capture the pollutants) dedicated just to producing the raw materials needed for manufacturing drywall/gypsum board ... and if it produces a bit of electricity as a by-product, sell that on the open market?

Rocketpjs @ 260:

"And even in Alberta we don't have Texas drawls…"

There was a bizarre inflection point in the late 80s, on the arrival of 'New Country', where many of the people I had grown up with in Alberta spontaneously developed a southern drawl.

A fellow whom I'd been through 12 years of school with, who had mostly worn ACDC and other 'metal' shirts suddenly started sporting boots, snap shirts and a string tie while spouting drawled homilies. He was not receptive to my incredulous mockery (which is why I have a deviated septum).

I don't think you can actually get a deviated septum from a punch in the face. That sounds like a traumatic nasal fracture (trust me, I know the difference from having had both).

Side note - and I apologize if it's too soon to go off on a tangent - but day before yesterday I decided to put on an actual shirt, you know the kind with buttons & pockets & collar & have to be ironed and all that. I can't remember the last time I wore one, but it must have been before the beginning of Covid. Felt weird.

timrowledge @ 287:

What would really be Science Fiction Kool would be if they could somehow fling the melted rock outwards & compress it to create the tunnel's lining all in one go.

That is unfortunately true, and has been government policy since Thatcher. I have never seen any good figures on how much and the changes over time, though.

In the case of clay and chalk, that's a complete waste of time - they can be cut using a knife, so even ordinary borer cutters have long lives. The main problem is embedded flint, especially in chalk.

Start modestly: Scotland to Ireland (via the Isle of Man) or north to south island of New Zealand :-)

Oh, but I forgot: reverse Brexit.

Can't be done.

There are two or more parties to any international treaty and the UK pissed off the other parties in the EU beyond all reason by the conduct of the post-referendum Brexit negotiations.

Scotland and NI will probably be allowed to rejoin on a fast track basis. Wales might well be allowed in, some way down the line. England? English nationalism was the driving force behind Brexit, and other nasty nationalisms (Hungary, PiS in Poland) are giving the EU indigestion, so there's no way England will apply for membership -- or be allowed in -- while the Tory party or its heirs are still a feature of politics on these islands.

Charlie Stross @ 292:

At this point in time, UK cannot build a nuclear reactor, neither technically nor financially. Hinkley Point C is a french reactor built for chinese money.

Not true. The UK can build reactors. Trouble is, they're military ones for the submarine fleet -- build rate is roughly one per 1-2 years.

Rolls-Royce's proposed design for a small modular reactor is, AIUI, a scaled-up version for civilian use. But they haven't built any of those yet.

I had a thought a while back about how you could take a number of the kind of reactors that power submarines and build them into power barges anchored off the coast. In addition to providing electricity, the cooling system could be used to supply fresh water by letting some percentage of the salt water boil and condensing the steam.**

Don't ask me how this would work because I'm not an engineer (so from my point of view it's all underpants gnomes), but I'm pretty sure this is an engineering problem and real engineers could figure out how to make it work AND be cost effective.

**Maybe a MASSIVE engineering project to pump the condensate inland many, many miles and just dump it into the headwaters of the Colorado River. Use several of those plasma boring robots to create tunnels to the Muddy River NE of Las Vegas (feeds the Overton Arm of Lake Mead) and into the Green River near the Flaming Gorge Reservoir ... and let nature handle the distribution from there

It could be a multi-year project creating a lot of jobs and injecting money into the economy ... like the way the CCC & public works like Hoover Dam did during the depression.

... and before you criticize, remember this is a SciFi Blog ... the dreams our stuff is made from. Maybe one of our problems today is we don't think big enough because the banksters can't figure out how to extract a profit from Blue Sky ideas.

If you're running out of things to grumble about, SpaceX and T-Mobile have agreed to put cell towers on Starlink V2. So your ordinary mobile handset will work as a satellite phone. I'm sure there's some reason why this is a terrible thing.

So Musk has decided to do for radio astronomy what he's done for optical astronomy?

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

I'm assuming that the NSA is OK with this plan or it wouldn't be happening (although given how often Musk ignores regulations in almost Trumpian fashion he might have ignored some quiet warnings).

I had a thought a while back about how you could take a number of the kind of reactors that power submarines and build them into power barges anchored off the coast.

Russia is/was doing exactly that, for remote mining installations on the Arctic coast. Too far away for a grid hookup to be practical, no roads or railway access, so a floating barge with reactors was ideal. Not just for power, also for municipal district heating during the long Siberian winter.

"If this works as promised, you could dig a deep hole anywhere* and get geothermal energy at a fraction of cost of nuclear. * best location would be near existing coal plants, so you can reuse the steam turbine."

That's the idea. Deep geothermal is the best idea for helping to deal with global warming, if we can create the boreholes. It is also envisaged using microwaves:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25533992-500-millimetre-wave-beams-could-give-us-access-to-deep-geothermal-energy/

Robert Prior @ 294:

The more I learn about REITs, the more I think they shouldn't be allowed.

And the management should be taken out & shot before being broken on the wheel and drawn & quartered.

they talk about fracturing and spalling the rock rather than simply vapourising it

But they do the former via some of the latter. The process is very much built around heating rock dramatically. This is heating up the front of the rock so fast that it expands and breaks off the still-cool back of the rock.

So sure, you're not getting all of the rock out as vapour, but the amount of power going in suggests that you're definitely getting some of it out that way. And the number of jets on the front of the machine makes me think any chunk even 10cm on a side is going to get tangled up in the machine (they show a 1m diameter cutting head with 70-odd jets on it). So the output will be gravel or sand rather than the chunky bits you get out of a current-edition TBM.

The more I learn about REITs, the more I think they shouldn't be allowed.

What have the Real Estate Institutes of Tasmania done to you?

Show me on the doll how they hurt you...

JBS @ 316:

I apologize if "before you criticize" came out the wrong way. It is NOT aimed at our host.

It is a generalized comment about some of the naysayers who comment here. I realize some of my ideas may be impractical from real world standpoint (particularly those ideas that won't immediately, directly profit the rich & powerful), but dreams should be big.

Reach for the stars & maybe someday you will make it to the planets ...

»If you allow the reactor to be brought down in power at very short notice, how quickly could you bring it up to 100%? Are we talking minutes / hours / days?«

The major problem is Xenon-135 poisoning, and it has a half-life of nine hours, so that gives you the order of magnitude, but it is trickier than just that.

One of the tricky issues is that when you run a reactor at fractional power, it essentially means that you have only been using a limited central volume of the reactor-fuel.

That means that you have normal Xenon-135 buildup in that central part but not in the periphery. When you then try to increase power, you get a situation where the central part of the core has lower activity, because the Xenon eats neutrons, surrounded by a shell with /much/ higher activity, where there is no Xenon eating neutrons. (And no, it is not a simple spherical situation, it depends on fuel geometry and history.)

As an example, the regulations in Belgium allow a reactor to ramp down at <1%/min to 70% percent, and stay there for up to six hours, after which it must either be shut down or brought back up up to 100% (@ 1%/min) for at least 72 hours. They can do this at most five 5 times in a rolling 12 month period for load-following purposes.

This is why the just approved-ish new "small" reactor design i USA consists of five or six small reactors in a common pool: You can crudely load-follow by turning one up to 100% in the morning, and another down to zero at night, in a weekly-ish rotating pattern.

»So sure, you're not getting all of the rock out as vapour,«

Even though they have thought about temperature, as evidenced by the flippant labelling of random parts of machinery as "tungsten", I am pretty sure they will also get their electronics, cameras and LED-lights out as liquid or even vapour.

I particularly like the "camera" they have placed all the way out front: What kind of lense material will they use in an environment ?

I could ask our technology development group, but only at the risk of getting laughed right out of the room.

The proposed technology is a re-invention of ancient methods, dressed up by tech entrepreneurs with surprisingly bad graphics skills. This is how mining and other tunnels were driven through rock before the invention of explosives - build a wood or coal fire, retreat, come back in a couple days when the canary (or mouse / other small animal) remains conscious and repeat.

It would be spectacular when this equipment encounters groundwater. For a short period, anyway, until the explosion and collapse of the tunnel.

REIT: Real Estate Investment Trust

Since the UK is infested with them, and since all y'all might have a wee bit of a housing crunch that squatting might solve in the foreseeable future...

I'd simply suggest that right now is an excellent time for entrepreneurs to get busy writing guides to where UK REIT properties are, what state they're in, how full or vacant they are, and other details that restless types might want to know about. If you hurry, you might get it in press just as the demand ramps up. And you do want it in paper copy, because I have a sneaking suspicion that such information will get taken down if posted online.

After all, an empty building owned as a tax dodge, owned by an investment trust controlled by who knows in whatever country, is simply an unused resource. Can a physical human demonstrate ownership with papers and deal with desperate squatters? It might become a question worth raising. Possibly more than once. Heck, if squatters promise to pay taxes in exchange for free title, the local government might even see it as a win-win.

Just speculating of course, because this is obviously about an alternative fantasy world. In our world, everybody respects asserted property rights as a matter of course.

the management should be taken out & shot before being broken on the wheel and drawn & quartered

I assume you're thinking of non-fatal shooting? Otherwise it rather defeats the purpose of the rest…

One starting point... https://www.private-eye.co.uk/registry

Kneecap them, Provisional IRA style.

They used to shoot them through the kneecaps -- permanently disabling and extraordinarily painful -- but decided to save bullets and use a Black and Decker drill instead.

Charlie
Can't be done - unfortunately true.
BUT, once the tories are out, we could & should start reparing fences & re-making friends & re-joining those "bits" we can do - like the Scientific, Technical & Cultural schemes we stupidly rejected.
I think we could re-join the Customs Union, which would help enormously?

Re. your last bit - IF we get electoral reform, thus freezing the splintered remnant of the tories out, then in 10-20 years, maybe.

If you think that Blairite Labour will reverse a significant amount of the Conservatives' damage, you weren't paying attention during Blair's rule. And Labour are even more set against useful electoral reform than the Conservatives. I shan't live to see an improvement, and you probably won't.

I consulted my tame expert, who said that several government departments do have estimates of how much goes abroad, but they aren't going to be published as none of their definitions/assumptions of abroad (and, to a lesser extent, GDP) are the same, and none are objectively justifiable.

32: you need a new nightmare? read up on how Haiti had to buy itself out of the French Empire; wrecked itself economically and never quite recovered before decades (generations!) of internal political blunders turned it into a failed state;

CHARLIE STROSS:

frankly your listing of what's coming to UK as crisis-of-the-month is optimistic; I've been looking closely here in US and my listing of American shitstorms includes all of yours plus:

== worsening climate; as bad as we’ve seen it, gonna get so much worse; oranges growing in London and Montreal by 2030; pineapples in Madrid and Miami by 2040; Mexico City and Phoenix abandoned by 2050; Dallas and Houston melting by 2060;

== climate refugees; especially when Mexicans flood northwards as farms fail and starvation sets in; refugees of at least 5% of 129 million, if we are lucky, could be 8% or 10%; then there’s ever more destabilized South America, at least 5% of 423 million; where to warehouse and feed 24 million refugees when the US is drying out and crops are failing?

== rising food prices will lead to malnutrition; which in turn after a brief delay will lead to (preventable) nutrient deficient triggered illnesses; actual shortages and/or fear of shortages will lead to panicked buying and hoarding; wheat flour will not be found in stores; ditto powdered milk;

== unionizing will trigger response by CEOs; intimidation and crackdown and leg breaking and data breaches and SWATing, etc; google “pinkertons” if you need a reminder of what CEOs have done previously;

== shortages of cardiac medication; impossible to get treatment for mental illness and/or addiction; nurses burn out leads to forced overtime (70H/W) of those not quitting/retiring; stress of treating long covid; crashing new waves of unique variants of covid; GSWs on the rise; malnutrition on the rise; domestic abuse on the rise;

== resistance to Green New Deal; Saudi Arabia will desperately seek to prevent California from outlawing fossil fuel cars in 2035; ditto Big Oil; massive bribery of state legislatures; buggering up court cases; moonless nights sabotage of EV charging stations; shortages of lithium-nickel-etc will trigger further thuggery-warlordism-chaos in Africa;

== drama ‘n tramua leading to ‘great literature’; there's already a brisk niche for CLI-FI that's not just SCI-FI but mainstream; "Love in the Time of Cholera" & pirates-centric soft porn becomes romance novels set in midst of economic & ecological collapse;

== next recession unemployment will hit 15% as lay offs trigger further downturns; also when the next wave of covid hits; after massive wreckage from hurricanes; inevitable bank collapses; mega-corp belt tightening; major point of failure illustrated by Florida’s FUBAR’ed unemployment insurance, folks are going to end up starving;

== grid failures; folks already building home windmills/turbines leveraging alternators bought from junkyards; 0.8 to 1.3 KW/H might seem silly if you have USD$0.20 KWH electricity with 99.7% reliability but when it worsens to 75% (40%?) reliability or costs USD$0.60 KWH (USD$0.85?) not so silly; given lots of lay offs there will be plenty of idle hands available;

== water shortages; going to be a lot of thoughtful folk installing thousand liter below ground water tank filled from roof gutters; everyone ought get accustomed to shorter showers sooner than later; you ought consider a shallow plastic bin to stand in whilst showering which then gets bucketed into toilet; 10 liters double used per person per shower; == violence in general; with wacky American centric fetish for guns leading to daily (not weekly) body pile ups; GSWs are nasty requiring lots ‘n lots of follow up care; medical insurance companies will soon set higher deductibles for anyone who fails to duck ‘n cover on theory it’s a ‘lifestyle choice’ not staying alert to possible gun attack whilst at the shopping mall;

== teachers quitting and/or striking due to accumulative misery + low pay + loyalty oaths + censorship + violence (students) + violence (parents) + long covid + new waves of covid

== schools burning down because of improperly installed emergency heating (winter) or direly need cooling (summer) due to lousy maintenance and worsening climate;

== the Republican Party has decided better to tear down the entire economy and wreck democracy and abandon millions to starvation-homelessness-illness rather than lose too much more power; theirs is an opposition to any significant change because at this point all changes in technology-culture-economics weaken them; a political party so narrowly fixated on its own perceived status losses it is hamstrung in proposing policies which would go out and actually operate government effectively;

== in any rational system of governance, such as over on Earth-2, any of these crisis would qualify as needing a lot of deep thought and possibly, a “Manhattan Project” level of commitment and funding; because each one of these crisis qualifies as a society-wrecking shitstorm; so it would would lead (over on Earth-2) to a loud gnashing of teeth, howling of aggrieved special interest and painful soul searching and rejiggering of global commerce networks and inter-nation consensus; but it's clear that no matter how many children go uneducated-underfed-poorly-medicated still not impetus strong enough to dig down to implement wide ranging changes; too many have chosen to hold onto the status quo ante with (naive) expectation if the monster (monsters!) in the corner of the room can be ignored long enough it (they) will die of loneliness;

...and now I gotta go buy a new bottle because I’ve finished slow sipping this cheap arse vodka long before I got done listing all the shitstorms likely to hit in 2023 and definitely will have smacked down by 2030;

RE: punishing people who build and control REITs. If you want such people to be useful...

--Dose them with MPTP to give them stage 5 Parkinsons.

--Surgically install deep brain stimulators, which use electrical signals to counteract the total loss of dopamine production. At least it works in some people.

Then put them to work undoing the mischief they've caused.

The catch here is that deep brain stimulators have to be adjusted fairly frequently. An improperly adjusted stimulator will leave them a quivering mess, which might incentivize them to work for you in hope of continuing something faintly resembling a normal life.

Currently there's a choice: with the older model stimulators, you go to the neurologist's office and get it adjusted, but getting an appointment takes weeks to months. Which is unpleasant. To get around that, the newest models are internet enabled, so that the doctor can adjust the implant remotely, during a telemedicine call.

And to answer your question, no, I have precisely no idea what kind of security they have on these systems, or whether it's possible to do a firmware upgrade on an implanted unit. Since I'm intensely cynical, I assume that, like most such devices, they have no security features now, and they'll only start installing security features when patients get hacked en masse and held for ransom.

The other problem with this is that, eventually, the stimulator and accompanying meds are going to fail, leaving them in final-stage PD, with all that entails. So almost certainly this would be banned as cruel and unusual punishment in jurisdictions that have such laws.

So yeah, maybe kneecapping? That's more temporary.

Several of the UK teams were deliberately disbanded and older members given "wheelbarrows of money" to retire early.

I think QMC lost its department of Nuclear Engineering in the late 80's.

The pool of expertise in the UK is now pretty much in one town and employed by one company.

There was actually a Twilight 2000 module centered around the “power a town with a nuclear sub” idea

https://twilight2000.fandom.com/wiki/The_Last_Submarine

"I particularly like the "camera" they have placed all the way out front: What kind of lense material will they use in an environment ?"

Gas in a rotating tube?

We have almost all of those, plus some of our own. The original post didn't cover EVERYTHING.

There was actually a Twilight 2000 module centered around the “power a town with a nuclear sub” idea

There is historical precedent for this. Back in 1982, the US Navy seriously floated the idea of powering the Island of Kauai after hurricane Iwa knocked out all power on the island, including to the water pumps. The plan would have sent 1500 kW into the island grid, and they actually sailed the sub into the harbor in preparation (the sub was based in Oahu, so not a long voyage).

Ultimately the idea was shelved because it would have taken too many workers to connect the sub to the main island power plant, and the local power company wanted those people doing repairs instead. The Navy ended up bringing in a bunch of portable generators to power parts of the island grid until the locals could get everything repaired. AFAIK, that's been the standard Navy playbook in disaster relief ops ever since.

»Gas in a rotating tube?«

Bell Labs did a LOT of work on gas-lenses before fiber-optics happened, and one of the main intangible problems was turbulence, and they were speculating about installing a cooled 2" pipe clear across USA to cope with that.

I dont think you will get a gas lens working at temperatures where you have to use tungsten :-)

Also, what protects the sensor from random fragments blasting through the gas lens ?

And the obvious pinhole is not the way to go, because that will get clogged in no time.

To me it sounds like they pointed a plasma-torch at a rock, looked at each other and yelled "We're RICH!!" without ever having heard about, much less understood the terror in Stefan-Bolzmann's Law at high temperatures.

To me it sounds like they pointed a plasma-torch at a rock, looked at each other and yelled "We're RICH!!" without ever having heard about, much less understood the terror in Stefan-Bolzmann's Law at high temperatures.

Yes, I completely agree with you that Stefan-Boltzmann is horrific. That T⁴ term sprouts teeth and tentacles if you get it just a little bit out of its preferred environment.

To be fair, this is in the same class of August science story as electro-gravitic aircraft engines from the 1950s, and the "Kraken's fossil garden" of a few decades ago. It's a fun story, it's August, they got in the news and probably made a prop for cheesy sci-fi and another mining scam. What's the harm? Heck, maybe they'll get hired by the Boring Company.

EC
Agree that it's currently Labour's policy, BUT - the rules change, the moment Scotland becomes independent - that locks a permanent fascist ( oops, um, "tory" ) majority into England & Labour need to look into that future, don't they?
Will they? Before the next election with an independent Scotland, that is.

Howard NYC
To add to which, there's the little matter of a Nebraska school board ignoring a "constotootonal right" { A free press } Here
- here the tory party is doing the same
... has decided better to tear down the entire economy and wreck democracy and abandon millions to starvation-homelessness-illness rather than lose too much more power; theirs is an opposition to any significant change because at this point all changes in technology-culture-economics weaken them - spot on, same here.

Grant
I assume the US was behind that?

»That T4 term sprouts teeth and tentacles if you get it just a little bit out of its preferred environment.«

I was quite surprised to find it on my bedroom floor.

Floor-heating primarily works through radiation and thus (T1⁴ - T2⁴).

The first thing you do with your bedroom is fill most of the floor with a great big insulated radiation absorber to lie on, which is very far from ideal.

> ships with reactors to provide shore power

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH-1A

MH-1A was the first floating nuclear power station. Named Sturgis after General Samuel D. Sturgis, Jr., this pressurized water reactor built in a converted Liberty ship was part of a series of reactors in the US Army Nuclear Power Program, which aimed to develop small nuclear reactors to generate electrical and space-heating energy primarily at remote, relatively inaccessible sites. Its designation stood for mobile, high power. After its first criticality in 1967, MH-1A was towed to the Panama Canal Zone that it supplied with 10 MW of electricity. Its dismantling began in 2014 and was completed in March 2019.

oranges growing in London and Montreal by 2030

Hahaha nope.

To grow something, the climate needs to be stable. If every 5 years Montreal gets a massive cold snap in the winter, your orange trees are so much firewood.

My section of the world is nestled between 3 Great Lakes, so we may¹ get some temperature & precipitation buffers that other places won't get. But we can't feed everyone.

Honestly, if we get to 2040 without too many state extinctions (failed states, except eventual recovery cannot occur), I'll be surprised. What I expect to see is large chunks of the world going the way of Somalia, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. Or the way Syria was going pre-Russian intervention.

¹ But probably won't.

Re the many posters talking about plasma cutting and how it can't work.

Fill the tunnel with water.

No worries about camera lenses (though I don't know why you'd want one). No worries about ground water. No worries about melting the TBM. No worries about removing spoil if you pump enough water in at the face and let it flow out. No worries about explosions. No worries about undiscovered tar pits catching fire.

I thought this might amuse some of you. And it's actually a positive story about a Florida man!

The Florida man [Chaz Stevens] plans to “flip bureaucracy 180 degrees and use its weight against itself” by papering Texas with Arabic-language posters bearing the motto.

“We’re going to donate hundreds of Arabic-language ‘In God We Trust’ posters to schools in Texas, flooding the public school system with our Arabic IGWT artwork,” he wrote. “Don’t fight the man; let the man fight himself.”

Initially he planned to donate just Arabic signs, but then realized that other languages would also be useful.

“Future artwork will not only include Arabic, but also Hindu, Spanish, Chinese, and perhaps African dialects,” Stevens told CNN.

The law, Senate Bill 797, was passed last year and requires schools to display such signage if it is donated or “purchased with private donations,” as The Texas Tribune reported.

https://www.al.com/news/2022/08/florida-man-sends-arabic-language-in-god-we-trust-signs-to-texas-in-wake-of-new-law.html

u need to listen to the soothing predictions of peter zeihan

BUT, once the tories are out, we could & should start repairing fences & re-making friends & re-joining those "bits" we can do

i think people would need to know that the tories were out and not coming back, and much as i might like to fantasize about them being used for large-scale lamppost decoration or whatever i think that would be part of a path to a very different world

i always felt the idea that the provos did that out of frugality a little weird, were they really that short of ammo?

i imagine a drill would make a much cleaner hole too, even if u wouldn't enjoy it much

belfast hospitals was said to have the most experienced orthopedic surgeons in the world around that time

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-36093680

thass a shame, i was fond of that kraken

i think people would need to know that the tories were out and not coming back, and much as i might like to fantasize about them being used for large-scale lamppost decoration or whatever i think that would be part of a path to a very different world

I might suggest that, in honor of King George IX ascending the throne and the tories being disempowered, that they follow the hallowed tradition of persecuted religious extremists of yore and board leaky ships for the New World. Georgia in their case, or possibly south Florida would welcome them, I'm sure.

And then you could welcome in a bunch of refugees from Ukraine to take their place in England. That way, both groups (emigrating and immigrating) would feel they'd ended up in a better place than they'd left.

thass a shame, i was fond of that kraken

To be fair, I got the date wrong on the kraken, it was October 2011 (Halloween!) when Prof. Mark McMenamin came out with his idea that 30 m krakens existed in the Triassic.

I admire him. He's a deep time paleontologist, and he's managed to be both crazier than I am (!) AND to get tenure at a respectable college (!!). I first read his Hypersea, which is one of those books I put next to The Aquatic Ape and The World Until Yesterday as probably more useful for SFF worldbuilding than for high quality research.*

*Just to be clear, there are plenty of books that can have decent research AND be good for SFF worldbuilding. These are off on the psychedelic fringe, shall we say.

Can a physical human demonstrate ownership with papers and deal with desperate squatters?

In Australia at least the cops will only intervene if there's violence or threats of it. Which can be amusing when you see the owner invited to sit in the back of a cop car until they calm down. Friends of mine have had everything from "the boys" turning up to encourage them out to a nice lawyer coming round to let them know the development timetable and suggest that it would be easier for everyone if the place was vacant by {date six months away}.

Community squats are subtly different in that they tend to be very public and no-one really wants to fight with the owners. Unless it's a protest squat where the whole point is to prevent demolition by occupying the building. Those tend to collapse through police raids, either through the owners claiming drug sales etc or just through the owners being an arm of government.

Before you get too excited about systematically squatting absentee-owned properties it would pay to look around your local anarchist and squat online communities to make sure you're not duplicating work that's already being done.

this might amuse some of you

I am laugh out loud amused. Even thinking about this reply is making me smile. Inshallah!

Bismillah! An excellent beginning!

And with text recognition on phones, it's child's play to ensure that yes, it does say 'in God we Trust' (rather than the Arabic for 'The Governor of Texas is a horse's necktie.')

with text recognition on phones

Even that can be dubious because there's a lot of similar languages and scripts. My Farsi/Persian T shirts looked so much like bad Arabic that I ended up putting the Arabic text underneath much smaller so people who only read that language would look at the small text and realise the big text wasn't a fuckup. The only OCR systems I've been able to find have all decided that it's Arabic and have failed to translate it accurately as a result.

It might work just because they're ONLY using very popular languages.

Conceptually it's a bit like the "ye olde english" problem, where thorn is a real letter that has been replaced by the pair "th" in modern english but maroons don't know that so say "ye oldy english". It's common enough that it's kind of not really wrong any more (descriptive linguistics does not exist only to annoy pedants, that's just a happy side effect. lol).

»Even that can be dubious because there's a lot of similar languages and scripts.«

Even without the text-recognition there are problems.

In Nordic languages "dag" means the same as "day" in English.

But we also have a more specific word "døgn" which means "24 hours (counted from midnight)".

Because all machine-translations take a detour via non-nordic languages, "døgn" invariably gets translated to "day".

(I've bugged Peter Norvig about it, but so far no improvement.)

»No worries about melting the TBM.«

Water would probably just make everything worse, because it is so much better at transfering heat.

If you look at the wattages they casually throw around and do the math on how much water you would need, I think you can just leave all the plasma stuff out of it, and just drill your tunnel with the water-jet.

Which btw, has been done, but it is not an ideal process either, because you get a very fractured wall and risk pushing water under high pressure places you dont want it.

It may be a little early, but if Scotland joins the EU and is better governed and a better place to live than England, have you thought about what you want for your border/immigration policies?

As I recall, folks here were expecting (talking about?) food riots in the UK to start immediately after Brexit was first going to be implemented. So far, the results have been bad, but not that bad.

I believe it's easy to predict disaster, but hard to predict the effects of people who are working to prevent disaster-- they don't always win, but they can at least take the edge off.

H @ 363
Curiously enough ..... about the time that some of the religious nutters were heading for what became the USA ... a different set of persecuted refugees arrived in Britain - some of my ancestors, the Huguenots. Who enriched us enormously, not just with money, either.
A hopeful sign?

to make sure you're not duplicating work that's already being done

Not sure how organised squat-hunting is communities like the one you describe, but in my world it seems more ad hoc (although clever for that). I've seen suggestions about using census data to identify likely long-term empty premises, which you'd then verify by casing in person passively for a few weeks. This is at the level of people coming from the left who are elected officials in some capacity and posting on their Facebook feeds.

358 - Well, IME "ye olde", as in say "ye olde tea shoppe", is a cod attempt to imbue a false sense of being older than it actually is on a business. So pronouncing it as "ye olde" is a snark at the business owners and not a lack of education on the part of the speaker.

359 - I see your point, but in English "day" usually means "a period of 24 hours from midnight to midnight" unless the context is otherwise.

361 "have you thought about what you want for your border/immigration policies?" - With apologies to the resident Finns (they'll see why):-
A Scots border guard sees Achmed the mad terrorist and an Englishman advancing Northbound on his position. Which does he shoot first?

Achmed, because business before pleasure.

Poul-Henning Kamp said: If you look at the wattages they casually throw around and do the math

4 cubic metres/second doesn't seem like an outrageous amount of water to supply. That would swish the spoil out nicely at about 35 km/h assuming the area of the tunnel is a bit less than the full metre circle due to the pipe and power cables.

So apply 40 million watts to 4 million grams of water per second, you're applying 10 W to each gram per second. So that's 10 J into each gram. So a bit less than 3 degrees temperature rise.

Back in the 2000's indymedia.org and a bunch of similar sites were also linked to a bunch of other anarchist stuff, including some very organised squatting collectives. What was interesting to me was how even squatters who were very much outside those circles often dropped in to see what was happening and exchange info. The Herd sang about a famous Sydney squat at one stage:

31 in the shade and I can't understand
How I feel like the only man left in Iceland

Iceland was a woman-only squat overlooking Sydney harbour, site of some memorable parties.

My impression from some of the social media stuff I'm still linked in to is that those hangouts still happen and the politics is the 20 years later version of the stuff I'm familiar with.

This isn't "every squat is known to some central web", but more like "political squats tend to be politically active". If you're just looking at drug users and occasional breakins by homeless people then there's probably still no meaningful organisation. But if you were looking to, say, organise tracking of vacant properties owned by absentee landlords you might be surprised at how far down that path people already are.

There's huge amounts written by political squatters, from local howto's to political tracts. And of course songs, like "let's lynch the landlord" (apparently squatting even happens in the USA)

Given what I said in #117, I don't see Scottish independence much before 2030. Given their record, Labour will be totally disorganised for 5-10 years after that, and the currently dominant Blairite wing will try to keep it tracking the Conservatives (fascism, monetarism, Europhobia and all). It is at least as likely that some other party will eventually arise as they will even try to oppose those.

Your view of labour is so wrong as to be laughable - round here at any rate

»4 cubic metres/second«

And how do you propose to keep your drilling robot from being pushed and washed out of the tunnel, from the combined force of the nozzle recoil and counterflow ?

And again, if you are going to use 200kW to pump water anyway, just drill the tunnel with that and forget about all the tungsten

Moz @ 322:

The more I learn about REITs, the more I think they shouldn't be allowed.

What have the Real Estate Institutes of Tasmania done to you?

Show me on the doll how they hurt you...

I'm not completely sure how they've hurt me so far, other than driving up prices and causing my property taxes to go up ... plus I'm sure my other taxes are higher to compensate for the tax breaks they get.

But mainly they just irritate the fuck out of me and increase my base ANGER level by calling me multiple times per day to "make me a cash offer" on my property.

The phone is right here on my desk, and the ringing is SO ANNOYING I have a hard time tolerating it long enough for the answering machine to pick up. And maybe once in a blue moon the call IS important to me ... my doctor's office, family member or one of my few remaining friends, so I can't help myself from picking it up.**

Asking to be put on their "DO NOT CALL" list doesn't seem to do anything, so now I've taken to asking them if their mother is proud that they've chosen a career swindling old people out of their homes. Alternatively, I ask where EXACTLY they are calling me from (street address) so that I can visit them in person to make a counter offer.

I don't like being so angry all the time, but just when I'm finally regaining my cool, another asshole is calling to try and swindle me.

** Just had a thought ... maybe I could move this computer to the desk in my bedroom and put my Photoshop Computer here on this desk? ... leaving the phone in here so it will mute the ringing. I'll have to think about that.

Robert Prior @ 328:

the management should be taken out & shot before being broken on the wheel and drawn & quartered

I assume you're thinking of non-fatal shooting? Otherwise it rather defeats the purpose of the rest…

Well, they shouldn't bleed out TOO SOON after being shot.

Charlie Stross @ 330:

There's a discount tool store here that has a really good price on a "20V Cordless 1/2 in. Variable Speed Hammer Drill".

Howard NYC @ 334:

Just one nit-pick ... by the time pineapples will grow in Miami, Miami will probably be under the Atlantic Ocean.

Heteromeles @ 340:

I wonder if Congress would consider funding a nuclear powered "Hospital Ship" à la USNS Mercy or USNS Comfort? Give it a couple of submarine style nuclear reactors and wire them up so that all you need to patch them into the local grid is pull a cable down to wherever they're docked from the nearest electrical sub-station.

Would require minimal diversion of local workers from disaster recovery efforts to provide power until the local power plants can be put back on line.

Heteromeles @ 353:

Thanks a lot. That's what the south-eastern U.S. needs, more privileged right-wingnut assholes. Why don't you take 'em to California instead.