energy in UK

The UK still suffers from an old decision to base it's civil service on a misunderstood version of the Chinese civil service.

Chinese orthography is horrible and it took a lot of effort for anybody to get literate and stay literate. Entry to the Chinese civil service depended on proving that you could read and write, and any other expertise was secondary.

The UK imagined that the candidates were being tested for pure intellectual power. Being able to read and write English wasn't difficult enough to test this, so they tested for competence in Latin and Greek.

Science was despised - the civil service formula was scientist on tap, not on top. When it comes to technical matters like generating and distributing electric power cheaply, the English are still behind the game, because the crucial choices are still made by some classically educated mandarin who doesn't understand the problems in any detail.

Excellent summary.

Well done, Bill; you got something right for a change!

Getting approval from Cursitor Doom is a very mixed blessing. His enthusiasm for the absurd is well established.

They are on another planet. UK energy prices are sky high to the extent that making steel profitable here is completely impossible.

Unfortunately you are right about that.

Each successive NESO Electricity Ten Year Statement (ETSY) report gets more and more fanciful about how Net Zero will be achieved. The important technical content also disappears with each successive annual revision. Millibrain is being told it is all going very well.

They have taken to hiding old ones so you can't compare actuality with prediction (unless you have taken the precaution of downloading them).

They do have a few scientists and engineers in parliament but they are never given any significant roles. The joke at my university was why be a scientist (or engineer) when you can be a scientist's boss. Beancounters and lawyers rule the roost.

It is worse than that. They have fanciful schemes that will get us to net zero but only in their crazed imagination! The small problem of the laws of physics and in particular conservation of energy get in the way.

The UK has an insane imbalance between production of power in the North and consumption of power in London and the South East. The main cables running N-S are routinely overloaded during daytime during winter.

Page 6 of this mess shows the effects of the next decade of "improvements". Page 33 shows the pinch point at Thermal Boundary 7a

I switched on the radio a couple of days ago and almost immediately heard someone say that adding two effects together gave the result squared. A few seconds later another 'expert' said something like "because the material of a building hadn't risen in temperature as much as the surrounding air, it was working negatively, behaving as a refrigerator".

I immediately guessed that this was a BBC programme about the environment and the contributers were qualified 'environmnetal experts' brought into the studio to explain the science to us poor simpletons. It turned out I was right.

What hope is there when this sort of stupidity is used to bolster political decisions based on ignorance and justify it as "science".

Negative thermal conductivity is an interesting idea. It could raise a lot of money.

Radical improvements in fiberoptics, and cheap satellites, have hugely reduced the cost to transport data. But AI has hugely increased the energy requirement of computing.

So it's rational to put data centers where land and energy are cheap.

Call centers should be where labor is cheap, unions are weak, and there is a intelligent English-speaking population.

India.

It's worse than that.

Advertisers have worked out that gullible people are a more profitable audience, and seem to have been able to subvert primary and secondary education so that it tends to churn out a lot of gullible people.

America is a distressing example of a place where the process has been very successful, and a lying cheat like Donald Trump can end up getting elected president. He screwed up badly enough during his first term that he didn't get re-elected, but once the pandemic was over the population forget just how many people his incompetent management had killed, and re-elected him for a second term, where he seems hell-bent on putting the economy into recession - it gets him the attention he craves, and he's too ignorant to realise that it isn't a good idea to wreck the economy.

The UK did trust Boris Johson, and got themselves stuck with Brexit, and followed him up with Liz Truss, but at least the UK political system makes it easier to dump a complete twit fairly quickly.

Australia isn't immune - one of our right wing politicians recently told us that she wants to make Australia great again, but it seems she did it inadvertently. The right-wing party has a slogan that says that it is going to put Australia "back on track" - which granting their long-term record would be to hell in a handbasket - and that is probably what she thought that she was saying. Once your head is full of meaningless slogans the wrong one will come out from time to time.

I think is worse than that. I suspect that advertisers have worked out that they can make money selling stuff to a gullible audience, and have worked out how to subvert the education system so it churns out more gullible people than it used to. Politicians have gone along with this because it makes the electorate easier to manipulate.

This is the kind of conspiracy theory that Cursitor Doom loves to churn out, but it's hard to explain the success of bare-faced liars like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump on any other basis.

Cursitor Doom's own incapacity to understand the evidence of anthropogenic global warming is another example of the problem. John Larkin went to Tulane, so he may have a different problem.

Boris Johnson isn't a statesman but he managed to impersonate one long enough to get us through the COVID pandemic relatively lightly. He could have done a lot better - but most of the other 'leaders' around at the time would certainly have done a lot worse.

Any party that could tolerate someone as ignorant and bigoted as Liz Truss, let alone put her in any position of responsibility, needs to look seriously at the clique that is running it and ask if they really represent more than a tiny fraction of its graaa-roots members.

Actually it was the good people around him that achieved that outcome by threatening to resign if he didn't follow their scientific advice. Although typically he followed it ~2 weeks too late to do much good.

Boris was all for business as usual and letting the bodies pile high like the Mayor in "Jaws". That was why Cheltenham Gold Cup and the Liverpool Madrid match - both Covid super spreader events went ahead.

Liverpool and the NW never really recovered from that mistake in 2020.

It was the deranged grass roots activists that voted Liz the Lettuce in. Rishi Sunak who then became PM after her halfwit Chancellor had wrecked the UK economy was dealt an impossible hand to play and did his best to fix things. He is still a very good hard working constituency MP.

Now we are stuck with a landslide Labour government and Starmer as PM - someone who manages to make "the grey man" John Major look exciting.

I don't think so: she was elected by a small group at the top of the party. The grass-roots Conservatives I have spoken to are appalled by the things the party elite have been doing in their name.

That makes sense: Lawyers are used to bending the rule of law. They must think they can do the same with the laws of nature.

Good luck to you, GB.

Jeroen Belleman

Meanwhile in the real world ...

The MP's selected Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak as the top two contenders for leader. These were put to the Tory members who voted

Liz Truss 81,326 Rishi Sunak 60,399

The Tory party members did in fact elect Liz Truss.

... which again confirms my rule that any resource perceived to be cheap and abundant will be wasted until it becomes scarce and expensive.

Jeroen Belleman

I can't think of an example of that rule.

That was the point I was trying to make: there is a clique at the top of the party and ordinary grass-roots members don't get to choose freely.

I just gave you one.

Jeroen Belleman