On the positive side, UK to distract Trump from MAGA crap for a week.

I’m the slime, oozing out, of your temporal net.

I should probably write a bot to auto-reply when someone pulls a state as a comparison.
(Or ask the resident flamingo nicely to write it 😀)

I’ll put the gist of why hot weather can be a pain in the UK so it’s in the thread, not aimed at you obviously:

• Most housing was built around coping with -5 to 25’c comfortably.
  Which for a long time meant no insulation, and a fire/wet central heating system.
  And not a damn was given about air-tightness.
• A lot of the housing pre-dates WW1
• Air conditioning was not commonplace at all when the majority of houses were built (you could argue it still isn’t)
• Heatwaves were so infrequent, it wasn’t worth the cost of installing air conditioning domestically.
• It gets muggy as hell, with the high humidity making it worse. (But again, it’s variable, so tricky to justify spending money)
• Swamp coolers don’t work due to the humidity
• Lots of people grew up with the weather being (generally) mild enough that opening a window to get airflow was enough to keep cool. (I’ve had family members open the windows on a 30’ day to “cool” my 20’ basement…)
• Leccy is expensive. This is improving with solar and plunge pricing, but most people will want to tighten up their house in other ways before spending £8/day cooling it.

With both our warming climate, and more kit being installed, things are changing, and people are adapting.
More people now understand that cooling the fabric of the house at night when it dips into the teens, then closing the windows in the morning, is a better way to keep it cool.
Building regulations stipulate significantly more insulation, air-tightness, heat gain control.
And air conditioning has dropped in price a lot.
For anyone curious, you can DIY a mini-split for about £500/room, or get a better quality one installed for under £2000.

Going back to the source, the quote is: " LIVERPOOL are the UK’s cryptocurrency connoisseurs - with one in 10 (13%) regularly investing and checking their online stocks"

I’m not sure if they’ve bundled regular market investment with crypto.

Terminal 5 was an absolute masterclass in how to deliver a megaproject.
HS2 is, unfortunately, just another magnitude of complexity. Some of it avoidable, some of it was going to be a pain no matter how much was planned.

It also doesn’t help that HS2 got massively underestimated to get political approval and shovels in the ground. (The flipside being, if it had gone with realistic estimates, it could well have been stuck in committee for until 2050)

It’s fine though: They’ve just asked for freedom from liability. And I’m sure they’re going to use that power to build a reservoir or something…

This is honestly my hope. All these locations are getting a free trial of Reform competency.
In the same way Clacton are having a fun time getting in contact with their MP for surgeries.

Because it’s easy to take populist pot-shots from the side, compared to defending your decisions while actually running the country at the same time.

The important thing is, they’re using SMRs.
Megaprojects can go off the rails of time/budget because people try to make them special, bespoke, unique.
“Nothing like this has ever been done before!” When really, you want your project to be like lego: Lots of standard parts (or at least, mass-produced for your project) that connect together to make a larger whole.
SMRs mean more common parts, and more modular building. Build the first, build the second faster, learn from mistakes, etc.

Is that not inevitable once this round of vultures pick at the carcass some more anyway?

Sell shovels to miners, and coffins to the widows.

At this rate, Labour is going to end up supporting AV just to get seats next election.

Wait, that’s not a bad outcome…

It’s a well-known tune.

“How much will it cost to do this internally?”
‘£50 million, and we’d need to commit to staff to maintain it. But then we’d own it, and it would be about as financially efficient as possible’
“OK, this big company says they can do a basic version for £49m, and with the first year of support for free”
‘That won’t even do half of it. And they’ll just ramp the cost up later’
“No, this is a good plan, we should use the free market to efficiently do these things”

The project then becomes £330m once the private company quotes up including all the essentials that weren’t in the original quote, but the wheels are already turning, so it happens

Carrots and sticks.
The carrots society expects are under-provided, so removal can’t be used as a persuader.
So we end up spending money on more sticks.

This was my query: Are these meetings butter-up luncheons?
Or simply a minister attending meetings that are part of their job.

I don’t understand the fuss.
When my family’s estate was threatened, we sold the eastern farm to that fellow from the club, and it all worked out swimmingly.
This is no different, we just need to pull up our bootstraps, and stop whinging about “chilling effects on journalism”.

Now please excuse me, mummy needs a brace of pheasants by lunchtime.

“This is good for the economy. Now here is a middle-aged white man explaining why it’s bad for Rachel Reaves”

Why does it feel like every UK govt.'s response to any struggling public good is “Well, there is a nice man here offering to buy it, and we don’t want to spend any money, so he’s going to have it”.

Sounds like an unviable business that is throwing worse loans after bad, and needs nationalising a decade ago.
But what do I know: I’m just a schmuck who’s water bill just went up by a third.

The monarch has power to do a lot of things. In practice, that power would get removed the instant they deviated from the script.