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So the plan is for GBR to take on Amazon? Metric Amazon (Global 2024) British Rail Industry (2024 UK) Revenue $637.9 billion $32 billion Profit $59.25 billion -$15 billion (total government subsidy) Employees 1.5 million 100,000 Other Assets Owns an air fleet of 101 aircraft and 31%...

Something I came across recently in the policy space: The "Cheems Mindset" (Cheems is on the right) Essentially it is the belief that policy difficulties are iron laws of nature which should not be tackled. If the nation wanted to make a new town of any size below literal millions of...

It always makes my heart sink when I see "creating thousands of jobs" in any government announcement. Jobs are a cost and it leads us to a "broken windows" theory of public investment (break windows, fix windows, jobs created).

That sounds like British exceptionalism and status quo bias. The whole Spanish model of regional government is less than 50 years old and it works in this context. What you appear to be saying is that only the central government can possibly manage a budget. The incredibly centralised British...

Therein lies the problem and the solution, the UK is centralised and virtually all tax is paid into and doled out by central government, even councils are not mostly funded by council tax. Thus there is a complete disconnect between the tax we pay and the service we get. Voting for a mayor or...

You can get an idea of what people are interested in by looking at what politicians are offering in their manifestos. In the example below the Conservatives in 2023 have 15 bullet points, one of them mentions Investment in adults and children's services, building new schools, classrooms and...

The figures for 740 seats will be for an all second class "Ouigo" seat arrangement. TGV Duplex seats 644 when configured for Ouigo and 510 when configured for SNCF. If I recall correctly on the Duplex they have an entire upper deck taken up by a cafe so there is plenty of scope for adding extra...

This is the big one, the majority of council budgets are taken up with services that: 1: Aren't really local in character, there isn't a distinctly Mancunian way of operating an old people's home or offering foster care. 2: Aren't actually what people vote about or value from their local...

Well the people lending money to the regional authority is going to want to see how they will pay back said money before they lend that money. In most cases I presume it will simply be more local tax raising powers. The key point is that other countries in particular Spain have made this work...

Looks like there is some potential for ONR to be made to change, we will see what the final outcome is. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-regulatory-taskforce/nuclear-regulatory-taskforce-interim-report We do see some other countries building, they are just all in Asia and...

There is plenty of difference between a commercial eVTOL aircraft and GA. Helicopters don't need to do a pre-flight check every time they can touch and go and I'm not even sure what you'd check on an all-electric aircraft. Helicopter taxis already exist and do 5-10 minute cycles of landing...

We do have a British developer who have a manned flying prototype with allegedly completive performance, their principle problem is that they are pretty much out of money and have nowhere near the resources of the US or Chinese competitors. The UK regulator is broadly aligned with the FAA/EASA...

Got to be careful with this line of thinking or you end up being like Gareth Dennis and suggesting that Hyperloops will never be feasible because they will end up being regulated by ORR to railway principles! As it stands today we do not apply security screening to private flights and...

It's based on a bit of both, it's entirely reasonable to extrapolate that stuff that is currently in labs or at low volume production will come to the mass market in the near term (best Lithium Ion batteries in production are 360wh/kg, however are unlikely to have the lifetime required for an...

This is basically the argument which everyone in an industry about to be disrupted makes, "technology X is just a version of something I already understand and that at the moment I don't see as threat/think will work". This normally because the incumbents don't recognise development potential of...

First rule of politics, learn to count. Cars ARE transport in all developed nations with trains doing 1/5 to 1/20 the amount of passenger miles. Slight changes in the number of people per vehicle would result in more passenger miles than the entire rail network. That is precisely how AVs...

If we are talking about timescales of 200 years all bets are off. Someone in 1825 would not have been able to predict world population in the year 2025 had they even had the statistical tools to actually forecast it. If we had looked at growth rates in the 1800's then we would have concluded...

200 years, seriously? We can’t predict the direction of IT technologies beyond a timeframe of 5-10years. Technologies tend to have inverse senescence, ergo the longer they have been around the longer they are likely to survive. That would mean that there is a decent likelihood that rail will...

I did use a winter insolation figure and gave the device 3 days battery. It would cost another £100 to give it another 3 days more battery. It would be possible to work out the balance between storage and the cost to charge up the odd unit which is running low. I should also add that I expect...

Solution would be to locally power points with a solar panel and battery. Typical motors are around 500w. If we assume a 10 second cycle and 10 moves an hour we need about 0.33 of a KWh a day assuming 24hr operation. Average insolation in UK in December is 0.52KWh per day so accounting for...