Richard Galloway 🔰

@JD_Tuccille @Maggie_McNeill That ship sailed when they made a pack of fags 14 quid and 50g of rolling baccy £30. We're already at the stage where probably 40-50% of tobacco smoked here is smuggled.

The Brits are opening up what looks like a massively profitable black market opportunity.

@HibbertMatthew I've always been a milk fiend, probably used to get about a third of my calories from it at uni. Can't beat some late night biscuits/chocolate/PB or nutella spooned out of the jar washed down with a pint of milk IMO 😋

@HibbertMatthew I like not risking E-Coli, and although unhomogenized milk was nice for whoever was lucky enough to get the cream I do genuinely like being able to just guzzle a pint of consistently tasty 4% fat milk. Also it lasts 10+ days now (never a concern in my house mind).

@askeletalghost @griffitha I'm a member of ASLEF but also very much a technofuturist rather than a luddite, and should they ever strike purely against driverless trains I'll likely resign. I simply don't buy- at all- this glib argument that the unions are the main impediment to full automation.

@askeletalghost @griffitha @TfL Rockets have freedom of movement in three dimensions, and cars two. The fact that trains have one makes it a much harder operational challenge. ianvisits.co.uk/articles/tfl-r…

Humanity can do this…but @TFL cannot seemingly automate an underground tube train running on two parallel steel rails.

@LukeTryl I must admit I had to look up the term 'otter'. Still, I now know where I'd fit in if I was gay, you learn something new every day!😳

Perils of not running the cartoon past a gay man first.

@griffitha I would also point out that, while controlling one rocket with freedom of movement in all three dimensions is more of an engineering challenge than controlling one train with one dimension, there are hundreds of trains, so the logistical challenge is very different.

@griffitha @TfL How many passengers are on that rocket do you reckon? Starting and stopping a train is easy and a computer can do it perfectly well. Most trainees master it in a month. The training takes ~1 year and it's what they learn in the other 11 months that can't be so easily automated.

@AndrewT84537063 @griffitha @TfL Can an AI deploy a rescue ladder? Can it operate a manual air cock to release the brakes on a failed train? I know what an appeal to authority/credentials fallacy is but would still like to know whether you have any practical experience of train operations?

@RuudGit @griffitha @TfL Yes it can. Ai It's safer, faster reacting and costs far less.

@JulesBywaterLee @_TheLondoner It literally says in the BBC story that a bloke fell off the roof and was seriously injured

@_TheLondoner reputable dealers and bike manufacturers do not seem to be the problem- the fires are associated with conversions, dodgy batteries or damaged or mis charged battery packs this fire from 2024 whilst spectacular did not result in deaths of serious injury bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

This is footage of an e-bike exploding at a home in Catford. It's just one of 556 e-bike fires in the last three years in London. The infernos are toxic, spread within seconds and are almost impossible to put out. And they've killed half a dozen Londoners since 2023.

@fesshole Slow down next time, problem solved.

Years ago, on a country road, I had to drive through a very big puddle and a MASSIVE wave shot out into a drive, unfortunately a little girl was stood watching in her uniform ready for school. she would have been soaked. I still feel awful.

@JonjoOday @fesshole You could have hit the brakes though?

@fesshole Bus stop in my town had a massive puddle right in front on wet days. Couldn’t avoid it one day as oncoming traffic was a wide load. 6 adults and 1 child from head to toe 😬

@SimonMagus Can confirm, back when I was in the bus industry I did a training day where we found out that staff wages were ~70% of our operating cost. Everyone's fixated on driverless cars at the mo but dirt cheap mass transit seems a better idea with our already strained road capacity.

This is genuinely ground breaking. The biggest operating cost for buses is the driver.

@Layo_FH I was going to suggest South CircuRail from Woolwich Arsenal to Clapham Jn via roughly the road route then remembered that apparently the London Clay makes deep tunnels a real challenge. You'd think it'd be a lot easier than Crossrail otherwise.

@Layo_FH Been like that for donkeys years, when I commuted along the South Circular I used to come through Forest Hill and then divert via Perry Hill and Lower Sydenham to avoid it. They should dig a tunnel under St Dunstans or something.

The traffic gets so bad on Catford Hill that the bus driver tells people that if they’re heading into Catford, they’re better off getting off and walking.

Right now, British electricity pricing is bonkers. Prices are disconnected the from the underlying reality in several very important ways. 1. The costs of keeping the grid going, like transmission and balancing, are spread over every unit of electricity sold. This means the price of an extra unit of electricity is vastly higher than the social cost of providing that unit. The cost of having a grid connection at all is, conversely, much lower than it actually costs society to provide you one. Economically, this amounts to a crippling price cap on grid connections, which is part of why we can't expand infrastructure to plug people in: they don't pay for it. It also amounts to an enormous tax, over 2/3 of the price of electricity, on using an extra unit of it. Which is presumably why electricity use has cratered since 2003, when we started driving up the cost of our grid like this. Note how perverse the incentive is here. We are heading into a situation where electricity is extremely expensive because the ratio of grid costs to the amount of electricity put through that grid. Our high prices incentivise everyone to have a connection, but then to use it as little as possible, the EXACT opposite of what we need. We charge the most tax on people use their connection most intensively (i.e., efficiently) and the least on those who use it the least intensively! 2. We impose carbon taxes on electricity produced through gas that we don't impose on gas used directly. This is part of why electricity is so expensive, and means people electrify less than we would like, which leads to less decarbonisation overall. A child, with a basic understanding of supply and demand, would see how perverse this is. 3. We charge the same price for electricity nationwide, and pay the same amount, in a single market, even though electricity is worth more and less at different places. This is part of why people are building solar farms in Scotland, where it is not only less sunny, but which is on the other side of massive grid congestion that we are paying BILLIONS of pounds to relieve. Yet we keep paying people to make the problem worse. 4. We keep buying Contracts for Difference off electricity generators. CfDs say 'we will pay you X for every unit of electricity you produce, whenever you produce it'. (Recent iterations have cut off these payments when prices go negative, but they will still pay them £90 per megawatt hour when the megawatts they are producing are worth 1p each!) Renewables Obligations Certificates were a lot more honest. They just paid producers a top up on what they got on the open market: a straightforward subsidy. CfDs are a totally hidden subsidy. The amount of subsidy is set by the market trajectory after today. So, for example, every time we sign a new wind CfD we increase the subsidy for past tranches. The really messed up thing is that CfD recipients do not cover for when they don't provide any power. If the CfD was set on quantity as well, so generators had to pay back money when they didn't produce, to cover the cost of running the grid to accommodate them, and for the gas needed to keep the lights on, then we would get a good sense of how much we were actually paying. Buying a CfD would be buying new electricity at its going rate. Instead, practically all the important pricing functions are hidden. The result of all these broken pricing systems is poor coordination. Everyone is working exactly as the price system tells them to: plug in but only use your grid connection when the grid is having trouble, use less electricity, don't electrify, add generation far away from where it is consumed, and produce the most electricity possible whenever and wherever you like, not when or where it's rare and expensive. The ultimate result is expensive electricity, industrial decline, and economic stagnation.

@Gwydion_Wolf @DruidofNecro @LVTYIMBY Sigh. No we don't. You can't raise a LVT above the current rental value of the land as then literally nobody would pay it. If people want to pay their LVT and continue to use the land 'inefficiently' that's entirely fine by us.

@DruidofNecro @LVTYIMBY Of course you do. Because you want to raise and raise and raise that tax, until you force that person on the land out of it so you can do with it as ‘you’ want.

"LVT/property tax enthusiasts moralize too much surrounding the nature of property. If they talked about efficiency, it would be fine." Anti-property tax commenter: property tax supporters are committing one of the seven deadly sins.

A group of NIMBYs have courageously grouped together to try and block the development of... ...a cancer hospital. The UK's cancer survival rates are up to 25 years behind other European countries. Is this acceptable?

@SimonMagus He is pointing out that buy-to-let is a parasitical activity which makes society worse, and he's entirely correct. He is (as far as I know) in favour of building many more houses.

A rich man who doubtless owns at least one house pontificstes about housing. Can these people just stop it please.

@sallonsax People will drive more if roads are less busy. People will not start existing in two places at once if there are more houses. Fucking moron