You Know Who's Pushing an Agenda When they Deny It's Existence: The Leftist Gaslighting Around 15 Minute Cities.

This is the day I start the call the far left loonies an new name: Left-Leaning fascists. Because if it quacks like a Fascist, walks like a Fascist, then it is most likely to be an actual fascist.

Allow me to introduce the 15 minute city concept and the people who have just started in the last couple of weeks to deny it's a thing in order to criticise the Conservative Government's announcement that it will set up legislation to oppose it.

The 15-minute city is another supra-national concept that is being promoted by governments across the world. Initially as a concept is sounds benign: at it's most basic it's about ensuring that all goods and services are available within a 15 minute walk from your house. Sounds wonderful , doesn't it?

Your doctor, your shops, your hospital and all essential services will be by design only 15 minutes away. Then you can ditch your car and cycle everywhere. 

Except, amongst the goods and services provided will be jobs. You'll never need to leave your 15 minute area because you will work, play, sleep, shop, live and die all within that 15 minute area. There will be no need to leave your 15 minute area, ever.

Now, on it's own it sounds like utopia. Finally city councils across the country and indeed the world will be working to provide all we need in our local neighbourhood.

Until that is, you look at the bigger picture and how (if you don't comply with the 15 minute neighbourhood idea) they will Enforce your stay within your zone.

Take Oxford. The city council there proposes splitting the city up into zones. You can travel within your zone as much as you want, but travel directly between zones will be limited to 100 trips per year.

Of course you will still be free to travel between zones, but you will have to pay a fine for each additional trip over the 100. So if you Live in Zone A and work in Zone C, you will eventually be forced to stop using your car for the journey. 

Of course the supporters of this idea promote the good: cleaner air, shorter journeys done by non-polluting means, you know by now the usual cheery rhetoric used by the authoritarians.

What they don't promote that well is the enforcement. Fines, bigger fines if you transgress more, smaller zones and more draconian terms inflicted later once the initial steps are accepted and the enforcement infrastructure is in place. 

Of course this is all decried as a conspiracy theory by the Fascist Left. They say that the 15 minute city proposals are nice cuddly neighbourhoods  where you have everything at your fingertips. 

It's merely a coincidence they say, that Oxford council have around the same time come up with proposals to split the city into separate zones (coincidentally very similar to the 15 minute zones) and to limit the number of times you can travel between these zones by enforcement cameras.

Yeah, and I'm THAT gullible.

This article by the United Nations paints a wonderfully rosy picture of the 15 minute city: The 15 Minute City | UNFCCC but it is the ENFORCEMENT aspect of climate control in cities along with these plans that those of us that can join the dots and see how the two will eventually work hand-in-glove.

The creepy thing is that JOBS will be included in the 15 minute city proposals. So who provides the jobs? How do they stop you driving a car out of your 15 minute area to a job in another part of the city or another city altogether? Of course the answer is enforcement.

They will limit your travel by introducing the local enforcement cameras and by eventually introducing pay-per-mile. I'm sure the enforcement cameras will be used to charge you more per mile if you leave your zone. The temptation will be too great to keep you in your zone under the auspices of reducing pollution.

So, is it really a conspiracy theory that 15 minute cities are not the benign things that the ideologues on the left promote. 

I certainly think there is more to the 15 minute city that the Fascist Left are letting on. If you don't realise that, you are a mug.

We're Officially a Third World Country...

The scrapping of the Northern leg HS2 now proves without doubt that the UK cannot complete large scale engineering projects. 

We really are a third world country. Actually this might be defined as a new term, because at least third world countries have the ability to become prosperous and move to first world status.

We are actually in a state of managed decline. We cannot complete the engineering projects befitting first world status. Instead we have crested the wave of technological progress and are on the downslope.

The next question is what now becomes of the London-Birmingham portion of HS2? It doesn't make financial sense to continue working on it, because what's the use is a high-speed rail link to Birmingham that would only save minutes off the time taken by existing rail links between London and Birmingham?

HS2 only made sense if it was completed as envisioned, to make the longer journeys further North shorter and to provide a cross-Pennine high speed rail link. 

Now you might as well accept we're crap at completing engineering projects on time and in-budget and cancel the lot. Why continue to sink money into a project that makes no sense monetarily and socially?

In fact, why was HS2 approved in the first place? How did costs spiral out of control so massively? Why were initial tenders so poorly priced? Just what were the reasons? Was it bad management? Was it numerous changes of plan? Were compulsory purchase settlements to buy land and buildings under-rated? Was the legal cost of planning opposition to blame?

Was it just a vanity project to prove we could do what they were doing on the continent? Were we told to do it by the EU? Why was it started without sound costings?

The lack of transparency from the government needs to be addressed. The costs and the reasons for those costs increasing needs to be out in the open in real-time. It shouldn't require a journalist to go digging through various sources to come up with the reasons.

Yes, Covid may have played a part, but had management been sensible about the requirements of working through the pandemic, it shouldn't have amounted to more than employing security staff to be on site while everyone else stays at home. If the works are mothballed in a decent state there should be no increased costs from re-starting work. So unless the whole shebang is managed by muppets, the costs shouldn't have escalated as far as they have.

I know material costs have increased substantially, but HS2 caused that by being the biggest building site in Europe. The costs of plywood and basic stuff like concrete and steel jumped as soon as HS2 construction started and it sucked in ALL the building supplies. That should have been envisioned and budgeted for as part of the costings. 

I'd hate to say we need another enquiry because that would increase costs even further. 

It's just sad that we can't seem to manage fuck all any more. Yes the country is more densely populated, yes, property prices are more expensive, but France and Germany can lay high speed tracks for a fraction of the cost we can.

We need to find out why. And fix it.

If Only...

If only there were more days like yesterday: where Solar and Wind generation exceeded fossil fuels (for a short while).

The Gridwatch.co.uk graph for the day looks like this:

Sadly this is an exceedingly rare event. 

Both gas AND solar exceeded the output around 1pm. After that? Well, it's back to gas filling the void as the weak autumn afternoon sunshine peters out. 

The grey band of Nuclear seems to be consistently providing baseband throughout the day. There's hardly a day it's offline.

And this is where I looked at having an all-electric system on my boat which seems to be the latest fad at the boat shows: electric propulsion and induction hobs.

I looked into the energy consumption. Basically doing a few miles of travelling and then stopping and using electricity for heating and cooking. Hopefully the heat from the water-cooled electric motor can go into a calorifier to heat the water while cruising.

In summer the power generation was enough to exceed the supply of the energy budget. But in the winter I'd need at least to triple the amount of summer solar power to compensate for the shorter days and the weaker sunshine. 

To do that I'd have to devise some sort of solar sail that could be hoisted on a mast that could be raised and lowered easily. There's no way I could have a fixed solar array of sufficient size on the boat.

And that's the problem with solar at UK latitudes. At best we get around 12 hours of usable sunshine to generate power in the winter, but that's cut to around 4 hours in winter if it's not cloudy. There could be days where there is next to no sunshine at all and it's cloudy. It could go on for weeks. Yes, I know solar panels do generate power in cloudy weather, but it's a fraction of the energy provided by direct sunlight. 

So you end up in winter with a fraction of the time providing usable sunshine compared to summer and you have constant cloud, which then provides a fraction of the sunshine that could be available. 

If you are relying on solar, that's a problem. 

I wouldn't rely in a solely solar setup for a boat. I'd go for a hybrid solution, so you've always got the option of sparking up the generator to charge the batteries. 

Renewables: still not good enough to rely on.