Dunc H

@_Ava_VT Accept it, then headbutt them.

SERIOUS QUESTION: If somebody handed you $800,000 and said it's because you're ugly, would you accept it?

@Cornishview Only is you pay someone else to install them.

people with Solar panels are very keen to tell us how much they save on electricity - but omit to say they shelled out 8 to £10K to get them in the first place.

@godblesstoto It's to protect his State income that he is prepared to sacrifice yours.

Tony Blair thinks the elderly in our country don't deserve a state pension as it's 'unaffordable'. He himself has claimed the near maximum allowance of up to £115,000 a year as a former PM since 2007. That's a total of around £2 mil, despite having significant personal wealth.

@LeeySaxophone @kemixtryset @IndieChris71 @ClarkeMicah Printing money to pay for it means it's not real.

@182_DuncH @kemixtryset @IndieChris71 @ClarkeMicah Yeah, the real economy is building & making things - something you appear to be against?

The ridiculous overuse of cars (a 3000 lb vehicle carring a 180 lb person) has obliterated a huge amount of other forms of travel, especially by children. Not just trains. Trams, bicycle , foot . And they have led to towns in which simple journeys have become far longer, as they are designed with drivers in mind .@182_dunch

@ClarkeMicah @hygge_lee Quantify the "vast costs of congestion" for us?

Shouldn’t be so, @hygge_lee. The supposed tax income from cars is cancelled out by the vast costs of congestion, road carnage and the huge fuel cost of using backward high-friction road transport instead of advanced low friction rail.

@LeeySaxophone @kemixtryset @IndieChris71 @ClarkeMicah LOL. Very little would go to workers. Huge construction firms that spent money on lobbying would get it. Workers would get the inflation associated with mass money printing and the minimum wage. Do you understand what constitutes the real economy?

@182_DuncH @kemixtryset @IndieChris71 @ClarkeMicah You mean, "how much money could the gov print and directly give to workers supporting the economy?" Not a clue mate! But it'd increase our economy and quality of life greatly! People would get jobs instead of sitting on the dole, unless you'd prefer people on the dole?

There have historically been many regimes that have tried to impose their ideologies on their populations; they all fail. The concept of our democracy is based on freedom of speech and freedom of choice. People will choose to have private transport, given a choice, and they have always done. Not needing them is irrelevant.

Who has ever said wew didn't. Just not very many.

@stuey_beef It was a PONZI scheme and we are the victims. Nobody will face jail time over it, though. Funny that.

The state pension is not a random government favour, it’s the back end of a 35–40 year compulsory “contract” where people are forced to hand over National Insurance on the clear promise of a basic pension at the end. Politicians and think tanks helped design an unfunded, pay‑as‑you‑go system where today’s workers pay today’s pensioners, then have the gall to call it “unsustainable” as if the public dreamt it up. If a private firm sold you a retirement product on fixed terms, took your money for four decades, then announced at 66 that you “didn’t really need it” and would henceforth be means‑tested or frozen, they would be in court for mis‑selling and fraud. The crisis here is not pensioners “leeching off the young”, it’s a political class that built a Ponzi‑style NI system, diverted the proceeds for other spending, and now wants to default on the people who kept their side of the bargain. You do not blame the victims of a defective product for believing the brochure; you go after the people who wrote it.

@LeeySaxophone @kemixtryset @IndieChris71 @ClarkeMicah How many trillion would that cost to construct countrywide?

@kemixtryset @IndieChris71 @182_DuncH @ClarkeMicah Have you ever been to ANY capitol city with a metro system, it's all the vast majority of people use and it's quicker than taxis.

Or wait for a bus that doesn't arrive in rainy Manchester, then get sacked because you are late again. None of Mr Hitchen's employers has ever been overly concerned with his timekeeping, although from his personality I imagine he is usually early, but it does give him a biased view of public transport.

@ClarkeMicah @182_DuncH In Peter Hitchens mind there is no rational reason that people would avoid public transport. I invite him to ride the bus in East Croydon.

This is just unthinking abuse, .@182_dunch. The civilised world's crazy abandonment , since about 1918, of advanced rail transport in favour of backward, inefficient,dangerous, ugly,dirty road transport is an astounding development which needs to be understood and reversed.

@Helldivers_NOW Many now seem to be impervious to bullets until they manage to get the call off, same with bots.

A little econ 101 for the silly socialists. The natural state of the economy is deflationary. As humans we innovate, we become more productive so everything ‘should’ get cheaper to produce. Well it does, everything you see getting more expensive is getting cheaper to produce but the inflation of the money supply is causing prices to go up. So what is the mechanics of this, the two primary ones are: 1. Governments keep running deficits because democracy rewards them for lying and spending. 2. Banks create money out of thin air through lending and the people closest to credit get it first. Asset prices pump and wealth shifts toward those who already have assets. When things go up in price, say energy due to war, this is not inflation. Some politicians say it is, but they are lying or stupid. That’s a supply shock. Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Inflation is good for the state, it wipes away their debt. The mechanics of inflation are good for the rich, because they have assets. Inflation is terrible for everyone else - products get smaller, ingredients get worse and prices go up. It’s how companies manage inflation. Inflation forces dependency policies so people can scrape by - minimum wage, energy caps, renters rights. They are demanded by the public. But this the slow hollowing out of society, it is what breaks everything which is good. It puts pressure on a system which takes us from high trust to low trust. Why do I make fun of @zackpolanski and the socialists? Because they will run this experiment on crack. The Green’s model as far as I can see is: - Attack the productive class - Reward the unproductive class The problem with this is the rich will leave, the ambitious may leave and they will face the same question as both Labour and the Conservatives which is how do we pay for this? They will either have to raise taxes or borrow (print) more money, which accelerates the problem. So we will get lower productivity, higher taxes, more borrowing and guess what, more inflation. This is the exact mechanics which have destroyed every socialist state. I get it, socialism sounds warm and fuzzy - nobody should go without, free stuff for everyone. But the end result is poverty and misery, as it has been every single time. If you want jobs, good, medicine then you need a growing and prosperous economy which means unshackling the entrepreneurs. There is no other option on the table. It is the only thing that has ever worked. I haven’t voted in three elections. I will only vote if someone comes with a real economic plan which means a chainsaw to the state and driving growth.

@saintly_jim @Feduptony153815 @ClarkeMicah Do you think those in the government of private industry gave a shit about those things?

@182_DuncH @Feduptony153815 @ClarkeMicah Funny! I always thought it was for bolstering rail capacity and improving journey times

2/2 .@182_dunch I am a longstanding opponent of HS2. The money should have been spent on undoing the Marples-Beeching cuts of medium speed rail.

@meldrumjambo @ClarkeMicah @Jasonohoe

@182_DuncH @ClarkeMicah @Jasonohoe The worst take ever

Really .@jasonohoe? Funny the way huge-scale rail freight periusst in the US, then. And that the intrrstates put passenger rail between major cities out of business.

@PhilosophyOfPhy You should be picturing the effect in 3 dimensions.

Einstein’s path to the discovery that mass warps spacetime began with a profound thought experiment in 1907, which he later called, the happiest thought of my life. It started with the question he asked to himself, "If a person falls freely from the roof of a house, will they feel their own weight?" When Einstein realized that a falling person would feel weightless. In their perspective, gravity would effectively disappear. This led to several game-changing realizations; First one is, The Equivalence Principle; He concluded that gravity and acceleration are essentially the same thing. If you were in a windowless elevator in deep space being pulled upward at a constant speed, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between that and standing still on Earth. Next one is, Gravity as Geometry: Because gravity affects everything exactly the same way regardless of mass, Einstein reasoned it isn't a "pulling force" like magnetism. Instead, it must be a property of the environment itself, which we know now as the fabric of spacetime. Last but not least, Warping Spacetime; If gravity is equivalent to acceleration, and acceleration can curve the path of light, then gravity must also curve light. The only way for light which always takes the shortest path to curve is if the ground it's traveling on spacetime which is itself curved by mass. For those just looking for fancy science fact it's just one of the discoveries about nature but Einstein himself it was the way of living life.

@Feduptony153815 @ClarkeMicah HS2 was conceived to bolster a few huge failing private construction firms with public subsidy.

@ClarkeMicah @182_DuncH HS2 was one of those things we must have because other countries have them like a ferris wheel in your big cities.

@ClarkeMicah True, but who paid for them to be built?

Hamlets in the countryside used to have railway stations, unbelievable as it may now seem.

@PhilosophyOfPhy Relatively speaking?

"If all of mathematics disappeared, physics would be set back by exactly one week." - Richard P. Feynman

@ClarkeMicah @policy_uk Give people choices, and they pick the best one. Build more roads, and people will use cars more, because it's a definite advantage for them.

.@policy_Uk Have you not heard of induced demand, disovered in the 1930s in the USA and confirmed many times since? The more roads you build, the more traffic you get. See the M25, from road to car park in three years, and Peking's 7 (so far) ring roads.

@SEAFtrooper Time for payback, stamping on Helldivers a top priority.

SEAF mech…