In Today’s News…

I think you’re getting a swipe from the tail end of Kirk which is heading across northern france & germany

Yeah it’s a bit cool here too :upside_down_face:

BBC Weather app bug suggests hurricane winds in UK

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Presumably that’s the other Kent and Cornwall. You know the, Eye of Jupiter Kent.

A hypersonic flip of the tail

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That headline confused me. I only knew of the Scottish kelpies, the horse water spirits which can turn into humans.

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Turns out Barbie is a greedy capitalist slave driver. Who’d have thought…?

Kelpies are a working breed and extremely loyal, great dogs but require a lot of exercise. I love a good animal story with a happy ending.

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https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-cut-17000-jobs-delay-first-777x-delivery-strike-hits-finances-2024-10-11/

Boeing deserve it, they only care about and chase after profit, instead of taking care of their people, and product quality.

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Completely agree highlighted by the fact that the control that stopped the 737s crashing was an optional extra. What a joke.

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Elon Musk has demonstrated prototypes of a driverless taxi and minibus, with no internal override controls. Maybe the future, but scary. Very.

If Israelis can boobytrap pagers being bought by Hezbollah members to later trigger, how much easier would it be for some hacker from a rogue nation or organistion to get into an online computer system and set all linked robot vehicles to maximum speed?

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I wouldn’t get in anything of his. Years ago he seemed a decent bloke, obviously moneys gone to his head he now comes across as a smug bastard with little regard for anyone else. But that’s just my opinion.

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Sod politicians, go listen to some music……

Bands are skipping many more towns and cities on tour - BBC News

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Moreover it is all temperate climate centric. The idea that a self driving car can navigate where I am for 6 months of the year is ludicrous. The road marking are under 12" of ice and cease to have meaning. Roads that are 4 lanes becomes three or two “consensus” lanes. Snow drifts cause the entire road itself to naturally be shifted, often several meters away, from where the actual road is. Non one even realises until spring that the slip road they were taking is in fact over a park. Someone followed a snow plough there and the precedent was set for the season and no one has a clue until the following April or May. Residential roads becomes one-way rally legs, much of which is over private property to get around boulders of ice the size of SUVs.

Those pushing driverless are doing their best to pretend that the only roads that such cars need to deal with will be like grids of Pheonix or at worst, Sheffield under 2" of snow. I’m not sure what they are expecting. That the problem will go away? That cities in challenging places will go away? That roads will be moved underground to suit their cars?

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As if that wasn’t bad enough!..…

Burning household rubbish now UK’s dirtiest form of power, BBC finds - BBC News

Add this to what Drax is doing and you wonder if we shouldn’t have just kept on burning coal.

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I suspect burning waste still might be the best solution. The waste is destroyed and there is a useful byproduct.
In the context of the scale of coal fired power stations in other countries including some in Europe it seems sensible to me.

I think we were all sold incinerators locally primarily based on how ‘clean’ emissions would be due to capture of potentially hazardous/toxic metals/compounds. Clean of course, releasing entirely natural by-products including greenhouse gasses would not necessarily mean ‘green’ in the climate debate sense.

There was also often talk of the heat generated being used to heat new developments.

Must admit I’ve always been a bit sceptical of these large incinerators simply because a lot of what I’d imagine people put in non-recyclable waste bins has a high percentage of things which don’t combust well in the first place, reduce efficiency and still require disposal to landfill later, though perhaps that waste comes out as a safer molten blob of something which encases things which would potentially be more harmful loose in landfill (e.g. the broken glass tumbler or china cup you might not put in recycling, sharps of any kind whether suitable for black waste or not).

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I’ve seen some of these incinerators. They are quite scary in the size of the cavern. Stuff of nightmares. But modern ones don’t smell of anything nearby and they run on electricity rather than gas to get to combustion temperatures, similar to modern smelting furnaces. The heat from the burn is also used to drive a turbine to assist in energy reclaim. So there is high inititial current load which then reduces as the burn starts to contribute to load requirements. After that, pull from the grid is mostly to cover entropy of the energy cycle.

I’m not sure it is really “clean” in every environmental sense either but I’m sure it’s better than landfill.

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Had a conversation (in a bar) with a friend who is in the Oil industry. He said that one gas (ethane?) that had no commercial use and they used to flare off at the well head was now used to produce single use plastics. These plastics can’t easily be recycled so the plan was always that after keeping our cucumbers fresh (other vegetables are, thankfully, available) these plastics should be incinerated for energy production.

Willy.

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