rockershovel

7 hours ago, johnofwessex said:

 

 

Should Broadmoor be doiong a roll call?

 

Seriously though about 33% of RTC's dont involve another vehicle and they account for about 37% of car occupant fatalities

It's not hard. Road maintenance is largely a lost art in the Fens. Cambers vary wildly, huge potholes appear without warning. Strips of a metre or more in width are sunk below the general level; levels fluctuate so that a vehicle will abruptly top out or its sump guard strike the surface. 

Abrupt bends (not curves, bEnds) are common; sometimes signposted, sometimes not. 

Add in the speeds sometimes seen - I saw a car only a couple of days ago doing around 90mph on a road I wouldn't do 60 on - and the result are entirely predictable. 

I've just had a deviation by way of a couple of those eccentrically-named Hamlets you find out in the Fens. A curious experience, driving around a 12 mile loop without losing sight of your destination. 

For why? The risibly-named A1101 is blocked about a mile from site due to an RTA requiring so far, 2 police cars, a fire engine and two ambulances. 

I'm sure my thoughts on how someone would drive off a straight road in broad daylight, with no other traffic in sight are superfluous... 

19 minutes ago, jamie92208 said:

 

Yes a unique Staler feature, the power pack with four diesel engines stacked  up with 2 either side of the gangway. 

 

 

Must be a narrow,noisy gangway!

4 hours ago, DenysW said:

Most of the Victorian sanitation spend was on pipes to move the sh1t out-of-town, and pipes to bring in uncontaminated supplies. That fixed the worst outbreaks of disease caused by using village pumps and wells that were rarely going deeper than 6m. This treatment business to protect the environment mostly started happening (much) later. 1930s to 1970s mostly. Disinfection (in the UK) was driven only by EU Directives (Shellfish, Bathing Beaches) so is almost exclusively coastal, and started this century.

Indeed; but it couldn't be started until the work of collecting the outflow was well advanced 

1 hour ago, iL Dottore said:

There’s no helping some people…

Well, I don't speak any of those languages.

2 hours ago, SM42 said:

Nasty, often fatal, water borne diseases and other nasties I find fascinating. 

 

The fascinating bit  is how on earth did we get on before the great works of sanitation were built. 

 

How did iron age man cope?

 

How did we survive so long as a species?

 

While we are at it, how many did we lose in experiments as to what was edible and what wasn't ?

 

 

 

Andy

Not too well, by all accounts. 

Google "the Great Stink of 1858" for more on the subject 

24 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

FLIRT is the acronym for Fast Light Intercity and Regional Train (and also “Flinker Leichter Intercity- und Regional-Triebzug - the original German)*

 

FLIRT is complete, modular, series of EMUs and DEMUs (see: https://stadlerrail.com/en/products/)

 

* when you say “Swiss” to refer to the language, are you referring to (Swiss) German, French, Italian or Romansch? (all official Swiss languages)

* I neither know, nor care - since the point seems equally valid for all possible answers! 

8 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

This is how end-of-life care should be managed!
 

I’ll be doing a version of this for Lucy and Schotty (Mrs iD and I have decided that when it’s time for them to go, we’ll euthanise them at home - together with their loved ones, amongst familiar surroundings, at peace, unstressed and not scared). And I expect that, when my time comes, I will discharge myself home and enjoy the pleasures of my life one last time.

 

Someone once wrote that death to modern susceptibilities is as pornography was to the Victorians: something you knew existed, but something you certainly didn’t talk about and avoided thinking about.

 

Unhappily, far too many people die in hospital - often after considerable expense has been taken to prolong their lives by a mere few weeks, if not just a few days. And in another interesting and provocative journal article, it was claimed that for every hundred pounds spent on your healthcare, over £80 of that £100 will be spent on end of life care - to little or no avail.

 

Unfortunately, both traditional medical training, and – especially – the law do not recognise that dying can only be managed and not prevented. Whilst letting a patient die does, on the surface, seem to be the complete antithesis of what a doctor should be doing, in reality successfully managing a patient’s death is as important as preventing death where it can be prevented (although to be pedantic, you are not preventing death, just postponing it to a more natural time).

 

The Victorian approach to death, considering it to be as much part of life as birth and marriage, was (and I would argue is) a heathy one. 
 

I think this comes from the passing from public life of the generation who knew about death from their wartime experiences, and the subsequent instillation of a sort of soft-headed magical thinking in the general population. 

I grew up with the ever-present background of my fathers' early death from his war wounds, and my mothers' chronic ill-health and eventual early death, totally worn out and quite senile in her early 60s.

O death, where is thy sting-a-ling? Her last years were an expensive Via Dolorosa serving no useful purpose at all. Her final passing was a merciful release and although I would never claim to be a devout man, the forms of my childhood religion a comfort at times. 

My daughter now works in the NHS and has a necessary coping mechanism for some of the things she sees; but she was quite panic-stricken by the orchestrated hysteria of covid. She developed a sort of automatic reaction, a furious rant about a colleague of hers who died with covid listed as a co-morbidity ... apparently it is totally unacceptable that a relatively young man (he seems to have been in his 50s) should ever die of natural causes. I don't believe she realises she is doing it; it switches on abruptly and she switches back to "normal" when she is done. 

One of my sons lost his mother-in-law as a consequence of the general abandonment of long-term outpatient care during covid. She wasnt a well woman but was quite stable; but the stress and interruption to her therapy were too much. That left him with the problem of explaining it to his daughter, then about 4. She now comes to me with questions about "is Nana Baa really gone to live in the stars?" to which I have no answer, being forbidden on pain of something unspecified but awful from dissenting from the "Party line". 

She says prayers now at meal-times, having learnt this at her C of E primary school and is rather coming to be aware of the contradictions. My daughter's self-righteous atheism doesn't help, when her children ask who their cousin talks to with her eyes closed. 

Im awaiting developments with interest. 

I've lately been working on a drilled crossing under the railway at a benighted spot called Shippea Hill. I know rural British stations frequently bear little relation to their notional names, but this one seems to be the avatar of the type. 

Watching the trains clatter past on their low embankment, I notice that one type in use seems to be a four-car set which I take to be diesel-electric - the second or third car seems to be half-length power car. 

Anyone know what these are? 

*BR class 755 Stadler FLIRT, it seems. I can only assume the acronym means something else in Swiss? 

7 hours ago, DenysW said:

There's also a technology to liquify air, store it cold (77K or thereabouts, potentially for months) then release it through electricity-generating turbines. It's asserted to have about the same efficiency (about 70%) as batteries. A large-scale proof-of-concept site has just been announced.

 

However, all storage costs big money and, shades of the NHS, we-the-country have not funded it at a rate that matches generation.

So... these storage costs are added to the cost of generating power at the wrong time, at an excessive cost? 

22 hours ago, Northmoor said:

I REALLY like this idea.  Especially when they discover that the ambulance, A&E and overnight monitoring for concussion after they drank too much, fell over and banged their head - typical of thousands of cases the NHS has to deal with every week - cost the NHS about nine grand.

If nothing else it might silence those poisonous people who say it's all the fault of (a very small number of) foreigners abusing the system.

A classic example of British either/or thinking. 

Don't you perhaps think that BOTH might be a problem? Right now we have a system whereby a person with no right to be in the country, can present themselves for many, many tens of thousands of pounds' worth of treatment for a pre-existing condition AND conduct a lengthy court case at public expense, on the basis that the fact of having received that treatment constitutes their right to continue to do so AND be supported indefinitely by the taxpayer while doing so. I would seriously question that that was the intended purpose of the NHS founders. 

As to the notion of presenting costed breakdowns of the cost of treating sundry Saturday night misadventures to the sort of people who tend to pitch up in A&E, in the hope of appealing to their better natures... good luck with THAT. 

A propos the good Doctor, the relationship between earnings and housing costs in UK was very different within quite recent memory. 

Of course we still had a Labour Party which represented us, which kept the Conservatives in check to a fair extent. 

7 minutes ago, polybear said:

 

 

Not sure exactly when HSD became BAe (Puppeeeeeeers......), but that'll be 43+ years ago.

 

 

In the days when the 10pm news (or was it 9pm news?) finished with "And Finally....." (20+ years ago at a guess) there was a story about a worker in the US DoD querying just what was so special about a "Missile Aerial Spanner" - and he wanted to see one.  It turned out to be a cheapo Piece of Sh*t made just like those stamped out of steel by the likes of Raleigh, Qualcast etc. and supplied with their products.

It turned out the Manufacturer (Lockheed?  General Dynamics? A.N. Other?) was charging the DoD $100K EACH for one of these spanners....

Once that had been discovered the DoD started looking at the prices of EVERYTHING to see what they were getting for their money.

Interestingly enough, Norton motorcycles covered its overheads for many years by producing cheap "toolkit" spanners of that sort 

1 hour ago, polybear said:

 

Oh yes....

 

Maybe 10-15 years ago a certain Defence Supplier (not the G.E. - this time....) was getting computer keyboards (£10 - 15 quid in Currys?), counting them, changing the legends on three of the keys (= sticky labels) then charging HMG £400 for them.....

 

 

I know of a Guy that is waiting for a gall bladder removal op;  22+ weeks wait on the NHS.  Private?  Eight Grand - with one night in Hospital....

 

 

Both 70mph.

3 points on the licence for that man. Speed limit is 70mph on motorways and dual carriageways - 60mph on single carriageways BUT not all A roads are dual carriageways. Nor is a road with two lanes in one or both directions but no centre divider. The M11 near Cambridge is built to A road standards - 2 lanes plus hard shoulders - because the original design had the motorway starting at Stump Cross. 

25 minutes ago, SM42 said:

 

Is this a thing we do for free?

 

It is. The NHS will treat anyone who manages to present themselves at its doors. There is no basis in law for it to do otherwise. Nor is there any provision for screening for pre-existing conditions prior to entry. 

There ARE, however legal precedents that a person who has entered without a visa, and subsequently managed to receive palliative or stabilising treatment for AIDS (which cannot be cured, only stabilised) is able to resist expulsion on the grounds that such treatment is not available in their homeland. 

2 hours ago, DenysW said:

Healthcare costs in the USA for the in-work are generally funded by the employer (as insurance) and the user (via an excess system). The insurance will only pay out what is 'reasonable and customary' and can restrict you to the local low-cost provider of healthcare. And it still ain't cheap. And it has to pay for practitioner malpractice insurance and the cost of administering and checking all of the payments. It ain't cheap in the non-NHS world either.

The NHS is seriously good value for money. Per Capita costs really aren't bad by any standards. 

However it certainly needs a large, sharp knife taking to its staffing costs, in conjunction with a large slice of Common sense. Expecting people to take on £50,000 degree debts to work as a nurse is simply not viable. Nor is expecting people to take clinical speciality degrees without providing a proper professional development structure - the words "full time equivalent posts" should be erased from the recruitment manual. 

Nor should we be dispensing immense quantities of anti-depressants with no serious clinical scrutiny. The costs of this are immense, and rarely mentioned.

Nor should we provide anything but emergency treatment for persons not resident in UK. Few, if any other countries do this, after all. 

Nor should we be employing people to pursue the latest ideological obsessions and quackery. 

1 hour ago, DenysW said:

But data is never quoted to show/fail-to-show accident rates that compare the choices. If "smart" motorways are so lethal, why isn't there an equally noisy campaign against no-hard-shoulder dual-carriageway A roads? It looks like an identical design to me!

 

I've actually an open mind on this, I just like the discussions to be about facts not opinions. I also remember the M42 before, during, and after it was "smartened" and there didn't seem to be a change in disastrous hold-ups due to crashes (fairly rare anyway), but the congestion did get less dire.

Aren't motorways supposed to be a higher specification than A roads, with a higher speed limit in accordance? 

Anyway, we have a long custom-and-practice of building A roads with dual carriageways and no hard shoulder. For a certain traffic density and cost per mile, they are the accepted solution. 

One thing I do know, is that considerable sums gave been spent (principally on the A1) in eliminating right turns across the oncoming traffic - Elkesley and Worksop, for example. So someone is doing the research. 

There are a lot of problems with "smart motorways", one being that the hard shoulders aren't built to the same specification as the carriageways. Run main carriageways loads on the hard shoulders and they WILL wear out and fail, sooner rather than later. 

The drainage pipes are often under the hard shoulders.....

There is also the not-so-small issue that the hard shoulders are used as access for emergency vehicles. 

Smart motorways are supposed to be a cheap way of generating extra capacity and guess what. There's no such thing as a free lunch. 

I've been to Switzerland and I certainly didn't perceive it as a "low tax" country, or a low "anything else" country for that matter. I've bought cheaper rounds in Norway....

IMHO a lot of people are in for a lesson about inflation. No-one under about 45 years of age in this country knows about inflation; I think they are about to find out....

Regarding infrastructure, HS2 gets all the headlines but you might be surprised at the scale of water infrastructure development in recent years. The Tideway scheme; water pipelines in the North and East of the country. 

Or look at the new A14 from Cambridge to Huntingdon; essentially one long reinforced concrete structure traversing a route no-one would choose if there was any option, but the volume of traffic from Dover and Southsmpton to the vast distribution warehouses of the Daventry/Coventry "Golden Triangle" dictate it ... along with the Werrington Grade Separation....

On a less distinguished note, the M1/M5/M6 nexus was plunged into chaos for several years, at huge cost building "smart motorways" which are now being quietly dismantled as the numerous critics of this quite insane scheme are being shown to have been right all along..  

3 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

All this talk about tax has got me thinking about the parlous state of the UK and how various parties claim that the country’s dead skint, yet the OECD reports that the UK's current tax level burden is the highest rate on record (matching the 1948/49 tax levy - but without the rebuilding of a nation that came from that taxation).

 

So where’s the money going? The NHS is an endless money pit, always underfunded (and will remain in that state until Britain has a grown-up conversation about healthcare in the UK, and does something about the incompetence and toxic corporate culture seen in far too many places across the NHS), the military has been stripped to the bone, public services have disintegrated and much of the public infrastructure is Victorian and Edwardian and almost unchanged from when it was built. So I repeat myself, where is the money going?

 

Although Switzerland is perceived as a low tax country (27.2% of GDP versus 35.3% of GDP for the UK), personal tax burden varies from Kanton to Kanton, with mostly rural Kantons having a lower tax burden. One of the differences (and possibly the reason why the UK’s infrastructure is crumbling and Switzerland’s isn’t) is that we pay taxes to the Gemeinde (roughly equivalent to a UK council), the Kanton and to the State. These are three separate tax bills with the biggest chunk going to the Kanton followed by the Gemeinde and then the state. This means that both Kanton and Gemeinde raise funds for local needs and don’t have to go cap-in-hand to central government for funds. 
 

Would I pay more tax if I were in Britain? Quite possibly (but not certainly) and as much as I grumble about paying taxes (a common refrain across the world and across social classes),  overall I am fairly happy with the way my tax money is being spent: I have a public transport system which is second to none, a clean and well maintained public infrastructure and public services that work effectively. 
 

The biggest drawback to paying taxes in Switzerland? There is no PAYE, which means you have to set aside a certain percentage of your gross income to pay taxes and the tax departments will send you two bills for each tax year: a provisional tax bill (their estimate of what you should pay based on previous tax returns) and then, after you have submitted your tax declaration, they send you the definitive tax bill (which sometimes means money back, but mostly not).

 

And with three tax departments to keep happy, above a certain level of income, a Treuhand is definitely needed to keep things sorted out - not because the Swiss tax system is particularly Byzantine (unlike the UK and US tax codes), but the various tax departments are always tweaking the rules and regulations, making it almost impossible for someone who only deals with tax matters on an incredibly infrequent basis (i.e. once a year for personal taxes) to keep up with the changes.

Where to begin?

We disbursed quite staggering amounts on Covid schemes from "track and trace" to totally unchecked "business loans", very little of which has been recovered. God alone knows what was spent on the "furlough" scheme, or where significant amounts of it went. None of this was planned for. 

Some thousands of "covid volunteers" were employed in the NHS, who knows to what purpose....

The Civil Service and local authority numbers have increased greatly since Covid, particularly in the DEI sector. 

None of these are contributing a brass farthing in real wealth. 

Then we have two million immigrants in less than three years. Local authorities are now bidding above the market for hotel block bookings, renting and purchasing accomodation. Huge sums are paid in benefits to people who aren't even in the country. 

Our "green energy" plans are an utter shambles. We supply none of the hardware and most of the work is carried out by foreign contractors. Much the same can be said of HS2: we have apparently just won a moderate sized contract for rail track supply to some foreign customer, but its a drop in the bucket. We are bribing Tata Steel to finish the job of trashing our remaining steel industry. 

The fiscal governance and resource planning of this country makes drunken sailors on a "run ashore" look like models of probity. 

15 hours ago, MidlandRed said:

The problem here, and with Mike’s response, are that they ignore the fact this is Government funded capital finance - i.e borrowing - not a problem unless there is a sudden large increase in the cost of Government borrowing - as occurred around 18 months ago when the Government abandoned a normal fiscal approach and chaos ensued - the increased cost of borrowing did nothing for the ability to pay for the project. Government’s response is often to extend the programme period (so as to stretch the financing out). Combine this with all the inflationary pressures and one can see where problems can occur - yes you can say eventualities should be allowed for in risk planning - although I have to say I had never seen a global pandemic appear in a major project risk register prior to its occurrence, or the fallout from an unexpected upheaval caused by a one in a lifetime political change, upheaval and challenge (B***it). 

The problem with THAT is that it has already been tried. During the mid-1990s we went through a period when the Jubilee Line Extension was pretty much the "only game in town".

The damage to the UK construction industry was enormous. Several of the leading names of that era - Taylor Wood row, for example - are entirely gone. The skills training structure was largely destroyed by the pressure for wage erosion and quasi-self-employment which resulted.

A gap appeared in the construction industry's demographic which has still not been properly addressed. 

Overseas contractors such as BAM, Ferrovial, SKANSKA and the like cherry-pick the market at will. 

The British construction industry isn't capable of taking advantage of long-term security of workload without root and branch reform. 

2 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

They stopped because they were too expensive and there was too much pressure based on what else that money could be spent on - after having met the objective - "put a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth".

Exactly. People had looked into the abyss of nuclear war over Cuba. Kennedy, in a stroke of pure genius, redirected the tension in the international arena into this vast project. 

Once the objective had been achieved, that was all. Most people understood that. The Americans had done what they said they would; the Soviets couldn't keep up. 

The REAL outcome was when Reagan threatened the USSR with the "Star Wars" defence and the Soviets, faced with an unaffordable project which they couldn't assess properly (COULD the Americans do this? Moscow simply didn't know) folded their hand and left the table. 

1 hour ago, GrumpyPenguin said:

Really, I disagree, especially as the next 10 or so posts after yours were "political" & no one single "technical".

Politics is proverbial as "the art of the possible" and HS2 appears to have fallen at this fence. 

I reckon there is a window of opportunity to complete any given project; HS2 has over-run that window. 

The "sunk costs" fallacy tends to apply, and work already begun will be brought to some sort of conclusion - but that will be it, for any foreseeable future. 

I was watching "Paul" on the TV this afternoon (it's so nice having the wife away for a few days) and something occurred to me.

Given that this whole film is basically about in-jokes and running gags of various descriptions... is the gas station they stop at, the same one that appears in Easy Rider? 

France is the great exception, a major European country with more-or-less natural borders but generally speaking, the federal land empires which grew up from the 1840s onwards were children of the railways. 

Italy and Germany; the USA, Canada and USSR; Australia to a considerable extent are defined by them. Abraham Lincoln considered the construction so important that it continued through the Civil War. 

I discovered, working in the FSU that there was a whole genre of literature and propaganda (the two being much the same, there) revolving around the experience of travelling by train to University, military service or simply a new job by rail. Smiling Komsomolski sitting on bunks as though around a campfire, playing guitars or flirting with the girls while the vast Russian landscape rolls past the windows.

The founders of the EU knew this. Unelected technocrats traveling seamlessly between regional capitals; constant population transfer (after all, 5% of Americans change state annually for whatever reason) ... this has always been part of their vision. 

4 hours ago, melmerby said:

Brexit?

IMHO His rhetoric influenced many peoples's decision at the Brexit poll.

 

Way off topic for HS2 though.☹️

The EP was and is, by design an impotent talking-shop; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. 

 However HS2 and the EU are intrinsically linked.