Scots with a single t! Do not make that mistake if you’re ever there, or someone’s gonna rip your bawbag off

You live in the UK, right? You know that Frank Dobson’s best achievement as health secretary was bringing in the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE), which makes decisions about what treatments to fund? Because no health system has infinite money, and so the alternative to making difficult, but calm, considered, evidence-based decisions for the whole country, is making those decisions whimsically and locally creating postcode lotteries and funding care for the patients who excite the most sympathy (eg cancer) over care for who who don’t (eg Alzheimers).

I have a dear friend, a senior clinician, who has served on a NICE committee. Genuinely some of the most amazing work he does. The decisions are really hard but they’re also inescapable.

Worth remembering that many European countries have tax-funded state provision of healthcare, often with national components. It’s not all social insurance like France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Spain, Portugal, Italy, DK, NO, SE, FIall Beveridgean. The UK has the highest degree of centralised organisation, though.

1. Separate shots haven’t been made at scale since 2009, so there’s no chance of doing this for the relevant populations
2. It creates a significant window of months in which babies are unprotected for two of the diseases, so it’s materially more dangerous
3. It means all these kids have more injections and discomfort
4. It’s pandering to idiocy. It’s really simple to explain that kids are exposed to far more pathogens on the daily than they’ll get in the three shots, and that their immune systems can cope. We need to do that, not admit defeat by dumbasses

Gosh, what a thing to live in a country with unstoppable child rape gangs. How *is* President Trump, by the way? Bitten any 13 year old nipples lately? Silly question, of course he has!

It is always, *always*, ALWAYS projection with you lot. Every fucking time.

I understand the *theory*, in the same way I understand the *theory* of the second amendment. But just like I cannot look on with anything other than horror and bafflement at the *actual consequences* of the theory being implemented for 2A, so I cannot look on with anything other than dismay and bafflement at the *actual consequences* of having small settlements run their own police departments.

And obviously, while the citizenry of a place can, in general and in principle, vote the bastards out, or up sticks and leave themselves, many types of consequence of the (ab)use of coercive state power are permanent and terrible. From disfigurements to deaths to many other sorts. So when a town kicks out its councillors or fires its police chief, it may simply be too late for an individual innocent citizen lying dead in the gutter thanks to an aggressive and badly trained cop who took against them.

And that's just misreading errors! When you compound it with the mess that is the NCIC, plus other errors in the system, it's fairly miraculous that it ever actually manages a true positive.

Same in the UK. Designed for legibility above all else, and deliberately so

That difference is just bonkers to look at. But unsurprising: the UK designed the registration plate as a standardized machine-readable piece of road infrastructure. US states treat it as a state-issued identity/emblem/mini-billboard which also happens to carry a registration number. States literally sell specialty plates for money. Sometimes a state will go for a sane design, but mostly they just arms race their way to the gaudiest shite possible, legibility be damned. And then have creepy shitty AI ALPR readers with wild false positive rates trying to pick up the pieces.

Sometimes the UK's centralisation is a really obvious advantage, and this is one of those cases.

Why on earth would a small town (30k population!) be the right scale of organisation to run all this stuff? The UK is massively over-centralised, but it's still better as an approach than this. The smallest unit of government here is a town council, which goes up to 40k people, and all it has powers to do is manage things like parks, playgrounds, community halls, cemeteries, allotments, and bus shelters. Next level up is the district / borough / unitary council, up to 400k, and their powers are still limited to housing, parking, social services and a few other things, notably not including emergency dispatch or policing!

The tension between local and central is eternal, but I'll never understand the attraction of pushing coercive state power down to hyper-local level: it's just a recipe for abuse and fiefdoms, every bit as much as a fully national force accountable only to a national minister.

As you yourself pointed out, the people already have cameras in their phones and use them for counter-surveillance with ICE etc. The objection is to hidden cameras that are used against other people, not overt cameras that are used against state agents.

I don't mean to be unkind, but it's literally the first phrase quoted: "The 183,000-square-foot plant, representing a $71 million investment"

I think that's perfectly clear.

Ah, so not only do you not know the difference between stocks and flows, you’re unable to figure out very basic ideas like “you don’t have to solve all of a problem in one go”. The UK doesn’t need to have a solution for dunkelflautes today. It can carry on decarbonising the 90%+ of annual electricity consumption that does not get used during dunkelflautes, and keep the gas peakers and their gas in reserve for that 10% of demand.

The UK today uses 270TWh of electricity annually. About 50TWh of that happens in winter lulls, ie periods combining cold temps, low wind & low insolation. So a little over 80% of current UK electricity demand can be covered with wind, solar, nuclear, intraday storage, stacking flexibilities, etc, with practically no calls on gas. Gas peakers can deliver the remaining 20% (albeit they only have to cover most of it, not all of it, nuclear etc will still be there, wind doesn’t drop to zero, etc). And as the price of renewable generation assets and battery storage continues falling, we can build out more and reduce that 20 to 10 and 5 and one day zero.

We’re at a touch under 190TWh of low-carbon generation today in the UK. We can focus on the 30 needed to get us to 220 over the next 5 to 10 years, and bearing in mind it’s a moving target / virtuous circle of increased electrification of heating and transport, by the time we’ll get there, we can do another 30 and another 30 after that without needing to worry about turning the gas peakers off and shivering through a dunkelflaute. This gets us into things like strategic reserves and temporal arbitrage, but don’t worry your pretty little head about all that.

Yes, this is an excellent point. The American Leadership Council on Batteries or whatever they're called can be as gungho as they like about the marvels of building sodium batteries using sawdust, and I'm sure there's lots of scale-ups and start-ups looking to do just that, but this particular plant is using imported cells, because China has at least three really huge players who have made progress on sodium (CATL, BYD and Gotion), and so just like oil and gas, it's subject to supply-chain constraint fuckery imposed by the dipshit administration.

You misread what was there. The $71m doesn't include a single cent of payment for *batteries*. It's an investment in the battery assembly plant. It's not income from customers to cover the costs of assembled packs.