Eleftheros

Well, I'm not sure whether they're in power or not, but the UK Government, with its imbecile Net Zero strategy and ruinous Climate Change Act, is a good example of what I'm talking about. It is a masterpiece of ill-thought-out drivel, seemingly created by people who missed their calling to write instruction manuals for ice-cube trays. Read the whole thing if you dare - personally I would rather read the whole Harry Potter series in Latvian - but it notably includes the idea of creating "hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs" in the green energy business. A sensible energy policy tries to minimize the number of people involved in energy production. The fewer people you employ for a given output, the more efficient your industry becomes, and all the other people can go and do something more useful. We have gradually moved in this direction for hundreds of years - first we had everybody spending all day cutting down wood and collecting dung, then we employed an small army of people to dig coal, then a handful of people to operate oil rigs, and finally some guy sitting in a nuclear power station trying not to twiddle the knobs. And now, Net Zero wants to take us back to the era where huge numbers of people do nothing more than create energy. Madness.

That sounds about right. It is only the deranged activists who think that we can wave a magic wand and suddenly switch to "renewable" energy. As for fusion power, if at long last one day it does prove to be viable, I expect those same activists will have found some excuse to claim that it is "dangerous", or "discriminatory" and do their utmost to hamper it in every way possible.

Yes, I saw that, not hard to find with a Google search, was it? I would say that the most notable feature of this paper is the extraordinary length of the chain of occurrences that have to happen to make this possible. If the temperature goes up by 3C, and if that in turn causes the Amazon to go up in flames, and if there is a loss of stratocumulus clouds, and if we don't improve political stability and if there is an infectious disease pandemic and if the Greenland ice sheet collapses and if and if and if .... Terrifying ourselves with shadowy goblins, and focusing on improbable worst-case scenarios may generate headlines, but it is not a very good strategy for solving the multiple problems that we do have. Leave that sort of stuff to Prince Charles and Bono.

I don't think I've seen any serious scientists say that climate change is an existential threat. The only people I've heard say anything like that are Prince Charles, Bono, Greta Thunberg, people like that, though probably Gwynneth and Leo have said something similar.

Yes, it can.

Quite. No-one with an ounce more sense than a billiard ball would bet their economies on "renewable" energy for many years to come. As for fusion, "an infinite source of clean energy" is the absolute worst nightmare for the radical green activists who would rather see everyone living in yurts powered by whale blubber.

7-11 will become self-service very quickly.....

I don't think they've put out the tender for Hell freezing over, or decided who will operate it, so it could indeed be a long time coming ..... As someone who lives in the Ramkhamhaeng area, I really hope they get the Yellow and Orange lines running soon. Those roads are a nightmare.

If you want a fairly simple operation turned into infighting and total chaos, simply employ a bunch of Thais. Instead of four years to organize this, they gave themselves about a week, and then built a convoluted system of rights and responsibilities, which could either be misunderstood or exploited to the benefit of one or more opportunists. Then spend the next year arguing the toss about who did what to whom, and come up with a 'solution' which satisfies nobody.

There are so many long weekends in Thailand that it would be more economical to alert us when there is a 'short weekend'.

The main thing holding back the British economy is the British government.

This is one of those irregular verbs, isn't it? I engage in substantiated argument You peddle unsupported claims He engages in projection bordering on flaming.

Two of the UK's worst health apparatchiks, Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, the natural heirs to Trofim Lysenko, have just warned that the UK faces a "prolonged period of excess deaths" due to lockdowns. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/whitty-warns-of-high-death-rates-due-to-lockdown-treatment-delays-vtx0v6z7j Not just cancer, but cardiovascular as well. Plus, RSV cases are now on the point of overwhelming hospital systems in Germany and the UK. The main victims are young children.

The main entities 'incapable of understanding the issue of degree' were governments and their health apparatchiks. The degree to which Covid overwhelmingly affects the elderly; the degree to which lockdowns were much more physically and mentally damaging to children than older people; the degree to which natural immunity after infection protects someone; the degree to which vaccines pose a greater threat to the young than the old. Some of this (the superiority of natural immunity) was known 2500 years ago, some of it emerged very quickly in the data, and some of it is just plain common sense. Their one-size-fits-all, spreadsheet by-the-numbers approach was one of the most signal failures of the whole sorry mess.

And when the Chinese government cracks down, they are vile Communist authoritarians. When Western governments crack down, they are nobly defending democracy itself.

I pray that England don't get an early goal. Because their instinct will then be to sit back and try to hold on like they did against Croatia in 2018 and Italy in 2021. It doesn't work.

Either you support people's right to protest or you don't.

Especially with Griezmann lurking around as well. Maguire will be handing out flyers with Giroud's photo on them "Has anyone seen this man?" so that he can go and mark him. The professional makers of odds have it - France 7/5 ; England 2/1.

Also good viewing at the New York Times, which has supported the China protests and called China's Covid response "a strategy steeped in authoritarianism". It seemed to find no irony in this given that it ran a headline in 2020 "Germany's Coronavirus Protests: Anti-vaxxers, Anticapitalists, Neo-Nazis". The only standards understood by the NYT are double standards.

I'm not the one making the comparison - Trudeau is. For him to be able to even utter the words: "We will stand for human rights and with people who are expressing themselves." is dreadful hypocrisy, and I'm far from the only person to think so.

It's telling how the BBC gloats at the failure of China's lockdown policy, yet has constantly supported to the hilt an almost identical policy in the UK. No hint of self-awareness. It's hypocrisy on the same staggering level as the awful Trudeau saying that protesting is a human right, that "Everybody in China should be allowed to protest, we will continue to ensure that China knows we will stand for human rights and with people who are expressing themselves." Oh, really?

I don't mind them publishing Covid information all the time, but by the same token the government should also be publishing regular data about tuberculosis, HIV, dengue, influenza, overall excess mortality, suicides and murders, which are affecting the Thai population much more than Covid at this point. Where is the RSV Information Centre? Are we in China or Russia?

It's important to keep these numbers coming. Otherwise, what would happen to all those make-work jobs at the Covid-19 Information Centre?

The problem is that the continuing various responses of governments to the covid virus has nothing to do with public health, if it ever did.

Cue another round of insane numbers diarrhea about tests, case counts, hospital counts, death counts etc.