We have a lot of university graduates, but I'd argue that this hasn't translated into the skills base of the economy. We're heavily reliant on immigration to get the skilled workers we need (with the NHS being the obvious example), but that has obvious political complexities.
>good connections
We're a lot less well connected than we were in 2016. The ports and airports are still there, we're still physically close to Europe, but Brexit has created a massive burden of trade barriers that severely undermine the attractiveness of the UK as a destination for new investment.
Rubbish, financial services clearly generates the most profit but your ignoring whole bunch of high precision engineering companies based in the UK, to name a few Rolls Royce producing aircraft engines, BAE producing military kit, - the fact the UK is one of the few countries capable of manufacturing nuclear submarines.
Other countries may do these things better or/and on a grander scale but the whole 'UK has only the financial sector to keep it going' is simply incorrect. Even the idea the UK cannot into volume manufacturing is questionable given the Toyota and Honda factories in the UK.
>the fact the UK is one of the few countries capable of manufacturing nuclear submarines
And I thank the British government for it everytime I climb into my very own nuclear submarine. Could've gotten a decommissioned Russian one, but my neighbour was right when he advised against it and told me to buy British. Now and then we race our submarines, but there's no match for his skills. But we always have fun nuking Greenland on a day out.
What I am saying is, a near-handful of examples of good and profitable British engineering doesn't mean we're still good at producing stuff in the greater scheme of things.
British engineering is almost exclusively top-notch, because of the lack of government support over the years. Other countries have lots of mediocre engineering firms that bumble along doing medium-skilled, medium-value work, but that isn't an option here. Land is too expensive, there aren't enough skilled workers, the government doesn't give enough support with capital investment and R&D; unless you're at the top of the value chain doing medical or military or aerospace, you're staring down bankruptcy whenever there's an economic downturn.
Our engineering industry is very good, but it's much smaller than it could be with the right government support.
Come on, the Ami is a right laugh. In France, you can drive one when you're 14. You can drive one if you've been banned for drink driving. The police aren't even that bothered if you're drunk behind the wheel of one as long as you don't take the piss. Only the French would have the genius to create special shit cars for children, alcoholics and (presumably) alcoholic children.
>>458372 I'm a bit surprised they bothered getting it approved in the UK. These are some pretty serious caveats. I do like the delivery version, where they no-fit a seat and stick a shelf in. Since it's LHD, too, less chance of getting your door knocked off or getting run over hundred times a day. As long as your delivery round is entirely urban and barely more than walking distance.
"The Citroën Ami 100% electric is classified as a quadricycle and will be seen in the UK as a left hand drive.
As the Ami has range and speed limitations as outlined in the specification please ensure that this is suitable
for your needs and operating purposes. Due to the speed limitation, the Ami is not legally permitted on UK
motorways, and further consideration should be given where the speed limit of the road exceeds the speed
limitation of the Ami.
Whilst the Ami is manufactured with a European two pin plug, charging in the UK is completed via a Type 2
wall box converter, which is supplied with your Citroën Ami. Charging via a wall box does not decrease the
charging time, as the Ami itself limits the charging speed as opposed to the charging solution.
>>458393 and takes 10 seconds to get there.
As that statement from Citroën says - "further consideration should be given where the speed limit of the road exceeds the speed limitation of the Ami."
It's going to be character forming on B-roads. Maybe being drunk would help?
>>458394 I was going on the M1 the other day and I got stuck on the slip road behind an old woman in a Citroen who didn't accelerate beyond 45mph once she got on the motorway either. That was fun.
I went on a smooth asphalt road at 26 mph on my mountainbike the other week. It's quite a scary experience because a bicycle just feels much flimsier at those speeds than a scooter or a motorbike. But I was chuffed with myself because getting up to that kind of speed on a bike on a level road, not downhill, really takes some leg strength.
>>458406 I'm a sensible driver and never speed 10%+2mph notwithstanding but these people are a massive peeve of mine and are outright dangerous at worst. Yeah by all means if someone isn't a super confident driver and wants to go at 50mph on the inside lane of a motorway yeah that's fine, if they want to go 20-30mph round some twisty country lanes, I try to be understanding and not get annoyed by it. But when someone is on a slip-road going 20mph below the traffic they're trying to merge into, they're a danger to themselves and everyone else.
>The big picture: Global surface air and ocean temperatures have spiked sharply in recent months, along with record low Antarctic sea ice, extreme heat events around the world, as Canada's heat and wildfire crisis grips North America.
I think Rowan Atkinson is talking about embedded carbon. A newer car may have lower emissions, but it's going to take a very long time to make up for the energy used to build that car. And if making EVs needs 70 percent more energy than petrol cars, at the moment at least, then it pushes the net-zero point much further into the future where one single EV actually balances out the energy used in its creation against the carbon emissions it saves during its lifetime. Especially considering that in their current form, Li-ion batteries in modern EVs will last no more than ten years, or even shorter with heavy use and more frequent charge cycles. The ideal scenario one day would be EVs that last 20 years on the factory-installed battery, and until that day comes, there are always going to be caveats against the true emission and natural resources savings of electric vehicles.
And I also agree with him about fast-fashion car sales. Getting a new car every three years, petrol or EV, is a massive waste of resources compared to keeping it for five or six years. Or even ten to twenty years. Most model cycles are four to five years now, sometimes still longer than that, so chances are your neighbours won't even notice that you're a pauper who can't afford a new (leased!) car every three years.
There are areas where that also applies, e.g. with the clothes you buy or electrical appliances. Where there's increasingly a sense that less is more. And car technology doesn't tend to improve so drastically that the emissions from a six year old car are vastly higher than from a three year old one. And that is likely also going to be true for EVs as a whole.
>And I also agree with him about fast-fashion car sales. Getting a new car every three years, petrol or EV, is a massive waste of resources compared to keeping it for five or six years. Or even ten to twenty years. Most model cycles are four to five years now, sometimes still longer than that, so chances are your neighbours won't even notice that you're a pauper who can't afford a new (leased!) car every three years.
Yeah, I've always thought about this. Same with phones. There's really very little difference between a phone from, say, 2016 and a brand new one today. They've only gotten bigger and more daft. A high end flagship laptop from 5 years ago is still perfectly serviceable today. I'm typing this on a PC that's probably coming up to its tenth birthday, and I'm only going to upgrade it with other spare parts I have laying around but never got around to buying a new motherboard for.
Everything about our economy is so wasteful, and I feel like dialling that back would have way more impact than any promise of saviour by miraculous new technology. But of course, it will never happen, because it's also kind of what our economy (from the perspective of those who influence it) depends on. It's kind of like when you're trying to save money- The little things like going from Coco Pops to Asda Choco Krispies or whatever can add up and save you a bit, but it won't ever make up for ten pints and a gram of coke every weekend. You have to save where the actual expenses are, and in terms of carbon, I bet it's far more in our short-term consumerism than it actually is in the emissions of our current vehicles and tech.
>Especially considering that in their current form, Li-ion batteries in modern EVs will last no more than ten years, or even shorter with heavy use and more frequent charge cycles.
EV batteries have, for the most part, proved to be much more durable than we expected. The first-generation Nissan Leaf is now approaching 13 years old, but most of them still have more than 80% battery capacity.
Newer batteries with improved chemistry and water cooling are even more durable. A Tesla only loses about 2% of battery capacity per year, so a Model S with an original range of 250 miles should still have a range of about 160 miles after 20 years. That might not be satisfactory for the original owner, but there are lots of second-hand buyers who would be more than happy with that sort of range.
The drivetrain an EV is very durable because there are so few moving parts, so the industry assumed that there would eventually be a lot of demand for battery pack replacements in cars that were still in good condition but had a worn-out battery. The surprising durability of batteries means that the industry is now working on the opposite problem - what to do with batteries that still hold a useful charge, but are installed in cars that have reached the end of their useful lifespan. Tesla developed the Powerwall home storage battery for that exact reason; a tired battery pack from a written-off car can still have a useful second life as a storage battery for solar or wind power.
Atkinson has a valid point that we're buying too much shit for the sake of having something shiny and new, but I think that ultimately the move to EVs will be a massive net positive. Those people buying new EVs on 3 year PCP deals are contributing to a second-hand market that will eventually make EVs affordable for all motorists. I would love to live in a world where you can buy a tatty but perfectly functional EV for two grand on AutoTrader. If the British market one day becomes oversaturated with second-hand EVs because those people keep buying EVs on PCP, then there's a big international export market that gladly buy up the cars that are too old or unfashionable to be desirable here.
Conspicuous consumption is a really hard problem, but it isn't particularly connected to any one technology. It's a big cultural shift to persuade people to stop showing off to their neighbours and I'm not sure how that can be easily achieved.
An iPhone 13 has a carbon footprint of 64kg, including the energy used to charge and recycle it. Any comparable smartphone will be in the same ballpark. That's about the same emissions as a kilo of beef or £40 worth of petrol. Our intuitions about carbon emissions are really unreliable, because we tend to assume that anything expensive and modern must be particularly bad for the environment.
Does that include the mining and shipping and what have you for the materials it's made of? Because if so you're right, that's shockingly low. But it's hard to understand how all of the fuel used in that supply chain amounts to less than a couple of weeks commuting.
Yep. It's a full lifecycle analysis from cradle-to-grave, conducted and audited by independent third parties. Mining is a dirty business, but it's done at such immense scale that it's very efficient. Metals and glass are infinitely recyclable and a smartphone just doesn't contain very much material.
An iPhone might have travelled halfway across the world to get to you, but it only weighs a few ounces and you can pack tens of thousands of them in a container. Your Ford Fiesta might only trundle down the road and back, but it weighs well over a tonne.
Eating locally may not always be the most eco friendly option, but connected to that is eating seasonally. Just take a food like peaches. Even if a giant peach orchard in South America or South Africa can produce peaches in January with a moderate carbon footprint per peach, they still have to travel to Britain by air because a ship takes two to three weeks (and wouldn't have a decidedly smaller carbon footprint). If you buy them in summer when they come from Spain or Italy, they'll still be brought into the UK by lorry, but their cabon footprint will overall be smaller.
>>458702 I'm one of those gimps with an EV on contract, replaced every 3+ years. Company car, so it makes moderate sense - the government's crazy-low benefit-in-kind rate for EVs is something I choose to believe is them priming the market for second hand EVs. No (sane) bastard is going to buy one new personally and chop it in every 3 years.
I'm probably doing more harm by hoarding old petrol classics and putting 500 miles a year on my diesel tow barge.
Longer term, I don't think we'll be using ex-EV battery packs as powerwalls, we'll be running flow batteries or something else cheaper, and lithium packs will be efficiently recycled , like lead acid batteries currently are. That, or gridscale flow batteries or whatever mean that we won't want powerwalls so much. Unless everything goes completely to shit, the grid goes untrustable and the rich live on little power islands with generation and storage, and the poor just burn each other.
They're building a massive battery farm near me, as well as more and more solar farms, north sea windfarm terminations and a weird rotating flywheel thing to stabilise the grid. All good fun, and slightly promising, in a world of shite.
So that's two major hurricanes in a fortnight. But Helene begins with H and Milton begins with M. What happened to I, J, K and L? Hurricanes - hold on while I look them up - Isaac, Joyce, Kirk and Leslie? I know not every hurricane is a big one, but surely it's not normal for a new one to form every three days?
I saw some of my Yank mates on another interweb place talking about a hurricane a couple of weeks back, and I assume it was that one, but when I was trying to google it for information I kept getting different reports. I think it's just that round those parts, the bit at the southeast of the USA and like, Caribbean, Mexican gulf, sort of area, there's just loads of hurricanes over this time of the year and that's normal for them. We only hear about it when they're proper mega ones that people will lose their homes and everything in.
What I think is wild is how the American government does basically fuck all to help too. When we have a couple of feet of flooding it's all over the news for a week and the emergency services and army are all hands on deck with the aid effort, in America they're just like "fuck 'em".
>>466632 The conditions for storms to form happen every day, and the region for naming these storms runs all the way from the coast of West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico.
If you want to get into the maths of it, the storms are discrete events happening on continuous but bounded time (there's an official "season" from June to November). They roughly fit a Poisson distribution, with an average of about 14. That means the interval roughly fits an exponential distribution, with a mean of a around 13 days and a median of around 9 days. So something like Isaac being named around two weeks after Helene while Joyce gets named the following day is not particularly unlikely.
>What I think is wild is how the American government does basically fuck all to help too. When we have a couple of feet of flooding it's all over the news for a week and the emergency services and army are all hands on deck with the aid effort, in America they're just like "fuck 'em".
"I also convened my entire cabinet as part of a whole government response and that response is to increase the number and intensity of the extreme weather events and be wary we're going to be... Use all the resources available to us as the government to do it." - President Joe Biden
