S Coast Steve

Shameful figures. We have deliberately left our children and grandchildren poorer than we were.

@ICannot_Enough Hey - v young 66 years here, “no one alive” my a4se. I remember uniformed elevator operators when I was a child visiting Harrods in London with my mum. TBH - I think the elevators then didn’t need an operator - but Harrods felt the personal touch added value to the experience.

Nobody is skeptical of autonomous elevators because nobody alive today was even around to see a human elevator operator in real life before the last one got laid off. Automation is far safer.

The uncomfortable truth: Britain is still running on infrastructure built by previous generations. Reservoirs, rail, energy, most of it decades old. Ageing assets. Rising population. No serious expansion. Critical infrastructure shouldn’t be this fragile in a developed country.

@BBCSimonJack @elonmusk @grok As increased demand raises the price paid for copper, miners have greater resources to innovate more productive exploration and mining techniques. We are barely scratching the surface of Earth's resources (literally). But you knew that surely?

@BBCSimonJack @elonmusk @grok is copper more abundant now than it was 50 years ago (despite far greater consumption today).

@elonmusk how much copper will you need to build 1 billion robots. Genuine question.

Pandering to Nimbyism has a cost - apart from the damage it does to growth.

Another gas price spike is sending British energy costs soaring. But this doesn't have to be 2022 all over again. The Government has the tools to get prices down, they just need the political will to crack on with it.

@MorEdge_Insight @grok where are these spoken words from?

Powerful

It’s simple. What most people want is lower energy bills - today. Some people may be willing to sink long term investments into a lower carbon future for a healthy return (count me in) but we should not impose such decisions on grandparents unwilling to heat or cool their homes effectively.

Rightwing narrative fuelling false belief UK public oppose net zero, study finds Political elites are out of step with public appetite for net zero, with rightwing media driving a false sense of backlash. theguardian.com/environment/20…

@Microinteracti1 Surely you’re missing the point. This is Brits taking the p!ss out of Brits, out of a PM who has no compass. When a foreigner larfs at it, let alone a foreign leader, that’s just embarrassing.

Six months ago, King Charles III received Donald Trump at Windsor Castle. Horse-drawn carriages. A 41-gun salute. A state banquet in St George’s Hall with 160 guests. Trump stood next to the King, visibly moved, and called it “one of the highest honours of my life.” Britain smiled, nodded, and filed that away. Today Trump posted a hostile video about the United Kingdom. Downing Street issued a three-sentence response and got on with its day. Because here is the thing about Britain that Americans never quite grasp: this country has been burying empires since before the United States existed. It has outlasted Napoleon, Hitler, and the Soviet Union. It will outlast this. Trump wanted a reaction. He wanted the phone calls, the grovelling, the desperate reassurances. He got a shrug from a country that invented the stiff upper lip and has been practising it for a thousand years. While Washington careens between threats and tantrums, Britain is quietly doing what Britain does. Building alliances. Signing defence agreements. Hosting the leaders that actually matter at Chequers and Downing Street. The adults are in the room. They just stopped expecting Trump to be one of them. The special relationship was always a polite fiction. Britain knew that. It kept the fiction alive because it was useful. Now that it isn’t, Britain is doing what any self-respecting island nation does. It moves on. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

@michaeljburry You’re such an old romantic.

Kicks. youtu.be/SHYK96uGirM?si…

@SeeDeeMcLeod @tomhfh … which is entirely his point? We speak the way we do. Let us leave the bastardisation of our language to the post colonials and their pidginisations. (And, for the record, it’s ‘aitch, with a silent H).

@tomhfh Tom, you're yelling into the void. It's pronounced Gen Zee just because it is. Bizarrely I was in the beer garden of The Crown in St Margaret's just this afternoon and I overheard a group of Gen X/Boomers referring to it as such.

If you're British you have absolutely no business saying 'Gen Zee'. We had generation X, generation Y, and now we have generation Z. Zed.

@pete_stubbs1 @tomhfh Sure did. I got 99 probs and the alphabet ain’t one.

@alan_muso I don’t care for them either - but we could achieve these targets through local initiatives if we cared to. The shortsightedness is damning.

@SCoastSteve Don't really care about local pen pushers. We can achieve net zero through planting trees, no other country can do that. We should aim for 10 million each year and see how that goes

Imagine if, instead of Miliband's ridiculous net zero we started planting trees. We have the lowest tree cover levels in Europe (13% compared to Europe average of 46%). If we got to their level we would more than balance our CO2 in fact we'd be in front!

@TonyJuniper @lfg_uk We've definitely got too many utterly useless quangos like Natural England

@BenGrahamUK Between the late 1990s and 2017 NCP had four different PE owners. One of more of them will have loaded it with debt, and more debt - then stripped all the cash.

NCP has gone into administration. They’ve been running car parks since 1931, and somehow ended up £305m in debt. Surely the maintenance for a car park is simple: ticket machines, barriers, lights, and occasional cleaning. How can a business model literally based on people paying to park go bankrupt?

@wingnut5358 @Starlink @British_Airways Starlink? Where installed it’s free, or rather, included in your ticket.

@Starlink @British_Airways How much does it cost to use on BA?

Starlink's high-speed internet is now onboard @British_Airways 🛰️✈️

I have had enough of being told what is “un-British” by public intellectuals who barely try to hide their disdain for Britishness.

All because elected representatives will no longer take the executive decisions we might reasonably expect of those we have mandated to govern. We pay second rate salaries - to far too many representatives and get second rate middle managers. They are all more concerned about getting reelected than they are in making decisions. So for decades we have allowed them to build networks of quangos, committees and consultation processes that ensure no decisions are made that might lose a vote or two.

Most people don’t realise where the £180 million actually went at the A303 Stonehenge tunnel project. It wasn’t construction. It was years of: • Environmental impact assessments • Heritage & archaeological studies • Legal challenges and consultations • Design, engineering and traffic modelling • Public inquiries and revisions All before a single shovel hit the ground. This is the real problem in Britain: We don’t just waste money, we build systems that guarantee it. £180 million to build nothing.

Unbelievable incompetence.