Robert Slinger

The use of primary energy on the vertical axis is an old trick by the fossil fuel industry to mislead people into thinking that one unit of fossils = one unit of renewables. In fact, one unit of primary energy for wind or solar electricity is the equivalent of three units of fossil fuels for electricity. Another trick is to pretend we need all those fossils if we switched to renewables. In fact, if we switch to renewables, 12% of the fossil fuel energy disappears because that is how much energy is used to mine-transport-refine fossil fuels+uranium for energy, and we wouldn't need to do that anymore A third trick is to pretend we need so much energy if we go to all electricity powered by renewables. In that case, because EVs use 75% less energy than gasoline/diesel vehicles, heat pumps use 75% less energy than combustion heating, etc., energy demand goes down another 42%. In sum, this plot illustrates the real story of where we are and where we need to go. The proper metric is end-use energy, not primary energy. web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jac… and here's the paper web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jac…

I've spent over a decade in longevity, spent hundreds of thousands on personal health optimization and was an owner of one of the most innovative longevity clinics. If I lost every supplement, device, and protocol tomorrow, these are the 5 things I'd keep as a woman. (THREAD): (photo: me in HBOT in 2020)

@RAF_Luton Thats an F 117, not a B 2.

Photo of the Day: B2 Stealth Bomber flown by Sqn Ldr Nottie Zactly-Trew conducting Aerial Refuelling Safety Exercise from an A380 Refuelling Airplane over Nottingham (Lincolnshire) Photographed from a Canberra

Wow. Talk about shadow banning! This post must have triggered every algorithm in the book. Elon managed to make sure that fewer 500 people saw. So don't read it. If you do, you will be defying Musk, MAGA, Trump and Putin.

@iAmJoshHunt Some spending multipliers are >1, some a bit less. This is well studied, but appallingly understood in classical UK treasury logic. If yr sure welfare spending is <1 multiplier, what's the net loss to Treasury in a financial year, or over the full transactional cycle?

@iAmJoshHunt The most important thing is to frame the discussion coorectly, which unfortunately the receipts / expenses frame which you adopt does not. 1 expl: framing a 333 Billion welfare "bill" as a simple Treasury outgoing is incorrect & leads to eroneous conclusions like those you make.

One of the hardest conversations to have in this country is about pensions and welfare spending. It’s because the moment you raise them, people assume you’re attacking pensioners or the vulnerable. So let me be clear before I go any further. This isn’t an argument against supporting people who need it. It’s a question about whether the system that provides that support can survive in its current form. Because if it can’t, the people who depend on it the most are the ones who get hurt first. That’s why this conversation matters. Now the numbers… The government raises roughly £1.2 trillion a year in total receipts. Here’s where it comes from. £329 billion from income tax. £200 billion from National Insurance. £214 billion from VAT. £105 billion from corporation tax. £50 billion from council tax. Plus fuel duty, stamp duty, alcohol and tobacco duties, inheritance tax, capital gains tax, and everything else. The welfare bill is £333 billion. Every penny raised from income tax, the single largest source of government revenue, doesn’t cover it. The welfare bill is larger than income tax receipts. Combine income tax and National Insurance and you get roughly £529 billion. Welfare takes £333 billion of that. Debt interest takes another £114 billion. That’s £447 billion gone before a single pound goes to the NHS, schools, police, defence, roads, or anything else. Those two items alone consume 85% of everything raised through income tax and NI combined. Everything else the government does has to be funded from VAT, corporation tax, council tax, and every other levy. And here’s the thing people don’t always connect. You pay those too. VAT is 20% on almost everything you buy. Employer National Insurance, just raised to 15%, gets passed on through higher prices and lower wages. Corporation tax gets passed on through the cost of goods and services. Council tax comes straight out of your household budget. Fuel duty, insurance premium tax, alcohol duty, tobacco duty. It all comes back to you. The tax burden is at its highest level since the 1940s. Income tax thresholds have been frozen since 2021, dragging millions more people into higher tax brackets without anyone voting for a tax rise. There are now 39 million income tax payers, up from 33 million just four years ago. Six million more people paying income tax. And it’s still not enough. Welfare spending rose by £18 billion this year alone. The two biggest drivers are the triple lock on pensions, which has added £21 billion since 2019, and disability and incapacity benefits, which have added £24 billion in the same period. Both rising faster than the economy that funds them. The two-child benefit cap was just lifted at a cost of £3 billion a year. Whether you think that’s the right call or not, it’s another £3 billion added to a bill that already exceeds total income tax receipts. And that’s the pattern. Every individual spending commitment has a justification. The total is unsustainable. And anyone who tries to talk about the total gets dragged into an argument about the individual line items. None of this is an argument for pulling support from people who need it. It’s an argument for being honest about whether the current system can continue to provide it. Because right now, it can’t. Everyone who’s looked at the numbers honestly knows it can’t. The OBR knows it. The IFS knows it. The Treasury knows it. The cruellest thing we can do is pretend it’s all fine and let people plan their lives around promises that won’t be kept. The woman relying on her state pension at 67. The carer who needs the system to be there. The disabled person who depends on support that’s already under political pressure. They deserve honesty more than anyone. But we can’t get to honesty because the conversation gets shut down before it starts. And the people who benefit most from that silence aren’t the vulnerable. It’s the politicians who’d rather nobody looked at the numbers too closely.

@iAmJoshHunt Yes, and produced things have to be consumed. That's why austerity, based on domestic balance sheet metphor of yr initial numbers, didn't work then & can't work again. 333 billion is not a net outgoing, so looking to "pay for it" with income tax revenues makes no sense.

You're right that benefit spending recirculates. But the multiplier on a transfer payment is always less than 1. Money goes out, a fraction comes back. The countries paying £20k pensions didn't get there by recirculating welfare payments more efficiently. They got there by producing things. You can't consume your way to prosperity. You can only produce your way there.

@UKLabour @labourpress Labour is in power. Stop whingeing about the Greens & deliver if you want to win back the trust of everyone who are fed up of yr broken promises.

The Green Party want you to think that they care about housing. But here’s the facts that Zack Polanski would rather you ignore.

@MrWayneGarton @david_stillwell The technical arguments against flat roofs were important 50 years ago, but not any more. For different reasons, both need to be well built in order to work properly.

@david_stillwell Are you in one of the flat roofed ones? Hope it drains well with all the rain.

I live in one of these south Cambridge new build estates. I highly recommend it. The people living here are great and the sense of community is lovely. Why is that? I think it's because people who move to a new estate are by definition not afraid of change. 1/

@woodasleep @david_stillwell There is absolutely nothing carceral about this architecture.

@david_stillwell They're visually horrible, I'm sorry. There is something almost carceral about them, and they're not congruous with the English countryside, or even suburban environment. As a visual statement, they appear to be openly hostile to the place in which they're built.

MAGA calls Europe freeloaders. Here’s what they’re not telling you. ​1. Ramstein Air Base, the most important US military hub outside America, is built on German land provided rent-free, with Germany contributing hundreds of millions to its upkeep. The US couldn’t replace it anywhere in the world. 2. Every US military operation in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia flows through Ramstein. Lose it and US power projection in the Eastern Hemisphere is crippled. 3. The UK provides and maintains RAF Lakenheath used almost entirely by the US Air Force. Italy provides Aviano. Greece provides Souda Bay. Turkey provides Incirlik. European land. European infrastructure. American operations. 4. The US Sixth Fleet depends entirely on European ports for fuel and supplies. Souda Bay, Naples, 11 Greek ports. Without them the Sixth Fleet cannot operate in the Mediterranean or project power into the Middle East. 5. The majority of NATO’s intelligence and surveillance capacity is hosted on European soil and fed directly to the CIA, NSA and Pentagon. 6. Early warning radar at Fylingdales, UK. Missile tracking in Greenland. Norwegian monitoring stations near Russia. All dependent on European goodwill. 7. It would cost America MORE to bring the troops home than keep them here. European hosts subsidise roughly a third of all basing costs. 8. Europe is America’s largest arms customer. Stop buying American and part of their defence industry goes bankrupt. 9. The bases aren’t charity. They’re America using European soil, European money and European goodwill to project power across the world. 10. We’re not the freeloaders.

@NW_Spurs @The_Banned_Vids Drones

@The_Banned_Vids So why wouldn't you run cable underneath ?

Ukrainian soldier shows a device that constantly rotates a barbed wire to cut off any Fiber optic cable

@Americanist144 @The_Banned_Vids Drones

@PDonahue1959 @The_Banned_Vids Drones

@The_Banned_Vids So what's the point of this rotating barbed wire? And why would there be any fiber optic cable just hanging exposed in the farmers field? 🤷‍♂️

@fritzfelgentreu @PBahners @CaliRN619 The post is bot-driven rage farming. Bamberg has of course the highest property prices in Oberfranken.

@CaliRN619 Pure invention. Bamberg is a beautiful place with a university, a midieval city center, great food and great beer. People love to live there. Your silly lies can only impress the clueless. They are just as unreal as yourself.

We were stationed in Bamberg, Germany for over 5 years. When the base closed down in 2014, it devastated the local economy. Now it’s a housing center for illegal immigrants and the once beautiful city looks like a third world shi!hole and the locals are stuck between letting their city die or letting the illegals kill it. Pull our troops home and let Europe deal with the consequences of their actions.

@s8mb High levels of home ownership are always coincident with commensurate levels of what we now call nimbyism, for entirely predictable reasons. This is much more important than any of the factors you describe.

Why is there such a divide between “New World” and English/“Old World” YIMBYs over design? It may just be a difference of opinion or social networks (and, eg, England’s preoccupation with design is basically a coincidence caused by a few charismatic Rasputin figures), but here are a few other factors that I have heard that seem plausible: - England’s postwar housing is genuinely uglier and worse than America and Australia’s, because of (a) England’s larger share of council-built homes, (b) mortgage lending constraints leading to “shrinkflation” in the 1960s–70s (worksinprogress.co/issue/britains…), (c) modernism caught on more in England, partially down to fashion and partially down to the planning system. - England’s prewar buildings are generally better than America’s and Australia’s are, so the gulf between old and new is greater (see below for some 1930s vs 1960s equivalents) and the cultural fondness for older designs is deeper-rooted. - English YIMBYism involves a larger share of traditionalist right-wingers than American and Australian YIMBYism does, which are more dominated by people who appreciate modernist styles and a general sense of architectural novelty/progress. - The American/Australian YIMBY strategy seems more dependent on left-wing political support to succeed and association with traditionalism will discredit them with those groups. - It’s much sunnier in most of America and Australia than England, and ugly buildings don’t look as bad in sunshine as they do on grey, overcast days. - Americans/Australian homeowners are less interested in “beauty” than English ones, and their complaints about design are generally insincere. - NIMBYism is stronger in England and English YIMBYs have either adapted their views to try to work within that (ie, making concessions on design to English NIMBYs) or have been psychologically defeated and have made needless concessions to their opponents. - American/Australian YIMBY strategy is very focused on promoting the benefits of new housing, and conceding that some / much of what gets built has serious flaws undermines that approach. (I think the last three explain why we enjoy arguing about this so much – to the New Worlders, the English beauty enjoyers are idiotically handing big rhetorical wins to their opponents for no benefit, instead of sticking to the line that all houses are beautiful; to the English, the New Worlders are trying to polish turds for propaganda’s sake.) I’m sure I’ve missed some other possibilities!

@naomirwolf Whilst they don't teach you the difference between the dark side and the far side of the moon in English class, one would assume you picked up the skill to read about it.

The UK’s single largest potential power asset is very rarely talked about. “When the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow” This is a popular sentence rolled out by people who are sceptical of renewable energy. This does not tell the entire story as energy can be stored. A good example of this, on a smaller scale, is having solar installed with a battery, which I have (13.5kw). If my solar panels are generating more energy than my house is using, it is stored in my battery. Then at peak times like 4pm - 7pm, when there’s high demand for energy from the grid, (meaning the price is at its most expensive at 20p+ kwh) I can use the energy from my battery. This was produced at zero cost to me via the sun. Another advantage of having a battery, even in the winter, is I can buy electricity from the grid at off-peak times (2am - 5am) when there’s low demand (5p kwh or less). This means the electricity is cheaper (sometimes it can be free or even negative). During Storm Dave recently, there was excessive wind energy produced on Saturday & Sunday and prices went negative. This meant over the two days we were able to put 8 loads of washing on, 3 tumble drier loads, 3 dishwasher loads, heat our water with the immersion heater, power all electrical appliances including fridge, freezer, TV, and lights for free. I also filled up my battery twice giving me 24 hours additional free electricity. All I paid was a standing charge of 62p per day. If I owned an EV I could also have filled my car with this free energy. The average size of an EV battery is around 60kw (4.4 times the size of my home battery). This leads to something coming soon that’s quite exciting. Vehicle to home and vehicle to grid charging. The average person drives less than 30 miles a day, which equates to around 8.5kw. So every day they would have 51.5kw of spare battery capacity in their car. Not a lot on its own but the average house only uses 8 kWh of electricity per day. So this could power your house for 6 days. Very worthwhile if you are charging your car at a cost of 7p kwh, meaning it would cost you around £4.20 to fill your car (or power your house for 6 days). It gets a lot more interesting when you realise that only around 5% of the UK population have an EV or around 1.9 million people. By 2031, or within 5 years EV drivers are expected to make up 22.5% of the population. If all these people used the average i.e. 8kw a day, choose to export 30kw to the grid leaving (22kw for themselves) the numbers get very interesting. These drivers would be exporting 256.5 GWh on a daily basis. This could power the entire United Kingdom for 8 hours and 20 minutes without any other power source being active. The typical evening "peak" (where electricity use spikes as people come home) usually lasts about 4 hours. This EV fleet could cover that peak twice over. For comparison, the UK's largest nuclear power station (Sizewell B) generates about 1.2 GW of power. To get 256.5 GWh from Sizewell B, it would have to run at full capacity for nearly 9 days. The EV fleet provides that same amount of energy in a single discharge cycle. In this 2031 scenario, the UK’s fleet of cars effectively becomes the single largest power asset in the country, dwarfing every wind farm and nuclear plant combined in terms of immediate "burst" storage capacity.