Let's just have a dozen of those, then.

From the BBC:

A nuclear power station being built in Somerset is on track for its next major milestone, the firm behind it has said.

The construction of Hinkley Point C began two years ago after the government signed a deal with French firm EDF and its Chinese partner CGN.

It is expected to provide 7% of the UK's electricity needs for 60 years.

The oldest functioning nuclear power plant will be fifty years old next year. Assuming we've learned more than we've forgotten since 1969, a sixty year life span seems perfectly plausible.

Housing crisis sorted!

Now all they need is some land...

I'd keep very quiet if I were him

From The Sun:

AN ARCHITECT could be forced to tear down a £4.65million building where he lives with his family because of a planning row with the local council.

... the 47-year-old is locked in a battle with Islington Council who claim it is out of keeping with the neighbourhood and it is not the same as the original plans submitted in 2012 – which, for example, indicated a brick-faced building.

Mr Taha insisted the switch to stone was subsequently approved by planning officers and they had simply lost, and therefore not uploaded, the most recent designs.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this, admitting that he didn't get the right planning permissions (or some proof that his submitted application had been approved) is not very good advertising for an architect.

"At long last, economists appreciate that private debt was the catalyst for the crisis"

Paul Ormerod in City AM:

A particularly interesting paper in the journal is by Atif Mian of Princeton and Amir Sufi of Chicago. Their focus is considerably wider than the crisis of the late 2000s in the United States. They quote empirical studies across some 50 countries with data going back to the 1960s. They found that a rise in household debt relative to the size of the economy is a good predictor of whether GDP growth will slow down.

Rickard Nyman, a computer scientist at UCL, and I applied machine learning algorithms to data on both public and private (households and commercial companies) sector debt in both the UK and America. We find that the recession of 2008 could have been predicted in the middle of 2007.

This is news? People have known about the 18-year credit/land price bubble cycle for over a century. Fred Harrison predicted the 2007-08 credit crunch in 1997. The Neo-Libs and Homeys like to airbrush this out of history and pretend that economic depressions are somehow random events.

Perhaps the most striking result is that public sector debt played little role in causing the crisis. The driving force was the very high levels of private sector debt.

Again, this ought to have been clear to anybody with half a brain. Labour's deficit spending was A Bad Thing, but clearly not the cause of the credit crunch. I can understand why Tory politicians claim that it was, but I am baffled why so many Labour politicians go along with the lie (a particularly twisted kind of Indian Bicycle Marketing).

A critic might say that this is simply a case of generals fighting the last war. True, we don’t know whether a completely different nasty event lies around the corner. But at long last, economists appreciate the fundamental importance of debt and finance in Western economies.

There'll be another credit crunch in 2025-26, full stop. That is the next 'war' and we haven't properly won the last one yet.

Test your recycling knowledge.

OTOH upped the ante in the comments here:

Pre-sorting your waste is no biggie... to more-or-less try to get it right for adults, but my council puts bossy warning stickers on the bin if you get it wrong. My children try. e.g. Pringles seem cardboard to them, but it has silver foil on the inside and is unrecyclable. For many things I am supposed to peel off the thin plastic film on the top to throw away, but recycle the plastic tray. Other things say 'refer to the recycling policy in your area.'

So either the recycling policy is not very strict, which makes the 'product' unusable other than for burning so this is all just virtue signalling, or the council policy is very strict, which certainly makes the obligation a "biggie"

Test your knowledge

Recycling cardboard - should you remove all the sticky tape?

Cooking oil - do you pour your cooking oil into a plastic bottle and place it in your food caddy, or absorb it in newspaper and dispose of in your caddy?

Wrapping paper - recyclable?

Unused tissues - recyclable?

Black plastic plant pot - recyclable?

There are 50 types of plastic, but only 6 are labelled. Which of those labelled 1-6 can be recycled?

Can triggers can be left on cleaning product bottles and pumps on soap bottles?

Knowing full well that I'll get most of these wrong, I will venture:
- Yes
- Neither. Take the bottle of oil to the recycling centre and dispose of there.
- Yes
- Yes
- I take them back to the garden centre if I can, if not I chuck them in the plastic.
(I've a nasty feeling they're not recyclable, going by the question).
- Not the foggiest
- I remove the metal bits and put them in the metal.

Spiteful!

From the BBC:

Controversial four-weekly bin collections will be rolled out across a county on Monday - the first area in England and Wales to make the move...

It has been met with controversy, with residents and councillors calling it "unfair" and claiming the trial brought more rats, seagulls and flies. Conwy council said it had addressed concerns and it could save £390,000.

Many parts of the UK are now moving towards three-weekly bin collections in a bid to cut down on residual waste and increase recycling.

Conwy County Borough has 116,550 residents, so about 50,000 households.

Divide £390,000 (let's assume this is an annual figure) by 50,000, that's £7.80 per household, or about 1% of their Council Tax bills. Not clear if they are moving from two- or from three-weekly collection to four-weekly, but it works out at 60p or £2 per bin collection.

So clearly, cost savings are not the motivation:

Conwy County Borough say:

A year-long trial showed that putting recycling at the heart of the service has really paid off, with residents’ recycling more than ever since their refuse collection went to 4 weekly...

The service change will mean that all Conwy residents will have:
* a weekly collection for food waste;
* a weekly collection for paper, card, Tetra Paks, cans, aerosols, foil, glass bottles and jars, plastic bottles, tubs and trays and batteries;
* a fortnightly collection for green waste, textiles and small electrical waste;
* a refuse collection every four weeks; and
* a weekly nappy or incontinence products collection for those who need it.

So in defence of the council, you should only be putting "stuff that doesn't rot" into your four-weekly bin anyway. Where I live, they empty the green bin (food and garden waste) weekly and alternate between the recycling and the black bin (general waste), so the black bin is emptied once a fortnight.. Our black bin is hardly ever more than half full, and probably never more than half full two fortnights on the trot, so in theory, four-weekly is just about do-able (depending how big the bins are).

Going against the council is the fact that they are already spending all that extra money (rightly or wrongly) doing all the weekly collections. Ultimately, they are relying on people's public spiritedness to put the right stuff in the right bin and not in the general waste; only picking up general waste once every four weeks has a purely punitive aspect to it.

That is the spiteful bit. It's not just the naughty people who put food waste in the general waste bin who are being punished, their immediate neighbours suffer too.

"How embarrassment may be Putin's downfall"

Sven Hughes in City AM, three days ago:

When serving as a British army reservist within Psychological Operations, we used to refer to these subtle divisions as “fissures”.

These fault lines in enemy audiences could be exploited to create great chasms between the authoritarians and the minions that sustained their power. Quite simply, the minions love the sense of associated status they get from being in cahoots with the authoritarian – they don’t like to be laughed at.

The RT interview seemed to reveal this exact fissure – Putin’s arrogance is starting to make even his most loyal supporters feel social embarrassment.

This could be the one silver lining for the west from the Salisbury incident. Information warfare only works when you have the broadcasters and re-broadcasters in place to disseminate your message. One break in the chain, such as a pair of agents becoming an international laughing stock, and the whole propaganda machine quickly suffers a complete malfunction.

An interesting but very bold prediction, I thought.

To my surprise, from the BBC today:

... the cover-up seems to have backfired as badly as the actual operation. Instead of quaking with fright, many Russians are laughing at their spies instead.

"It's not just teasing, it's mockery. I have friends who couldn't believe our lot could be so rotten," Gennady Gudkov admits. "Now they call me, and they believe."

With jokes and memes flooding social media, some commentators suggest a line has been crossed.

"What seemed morally unacceptable before has become the new norm, it's routine," Andrei Kolesnikov wrote on Gazeta.ru, calling the Salisbury suspects' appearance a "clown show" and their story "obvious, evasive lies".

But he sees another new norm in response.

"Society is laughing at the authorities," the journalist wrote. "State propaganda is becoming genuinely comic and that discredits and weakens those in power."

Total Irony Fail

Classic piece of self regarding nonsense from Haldane at the Bank of England.  He is blaming 'groupthink' by the Great Unwashed driven by social media for future crises.

It does not occur to the tin eared numpty that he and his cronies are just as vulnerable to groupthink as are us poor plebs.  You only have to read the article and see his ongoing adhesion to punk Keynesian claptrap as believed by every other Central Banker to know that he is not capable of thinking outside his own box.

As for the notion that "...the Bank can learn from “folk wisdom” of ordinary people to help it understand the economy better.  is just a delusion.  In any event if us plebs know more about the economy than the Bank does as this remark implies, just why are they bothering?

Epic fail.

Nobody move or law-abiding citizens get hurt!

From the BBC:

A no-deal Brexit would make it harder to protect UK citizens, a leading police officer has warned. The Home Office has given £2m to police to work on replacing systems such as the European Arrest Warrant.

Sara Thornton, chair of the National Police Chiefs' Council said fallback systems would be slower. She said it could be harder to pursue suspects like those blamed for the poisoning of a former Russian double agent and his daughter in March.

EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier has ruled out Britain using the European Arrest Warrant after Brexit. At the moment, it is used more than 1,500 times a year.

UK Police face losing access to 40 law enforcement tools under a no-deal Brexit, such as the Schengen Information System, an intelligence database used 539 million times last year by British authorities to look up suspects and vehicles. The fallback is an Interpol system which is not automated.

For sure, if 'they' want to be spiteful, they will chuck the UK out of these information-sharing and co-operation agreements to everybody's overall detriment, which is 'their' call, not ours.

But as per usual, the argument ignores the big difference between deportation and extradition.

Most people (including me) get much more upset about foreign criminals whom we can't deport than about UK criminals who have absconded abroad whom we can't get back.

Leaving the EU will make it easier for the UK to deport foreign criminals (less of this human rights crapola). If the quid pro quo is that it is harder to get other countries to extradite criminals back to the UK to face punishment here, that is a price worth paying IMHO. Good riddance.

Logic also tells us that even if it is 'harder' for the UK to get other countries to extradite criminals back to UK, if we tell those other countries who they are, they will be happy to deport them anyway, achieving the same result.

The Sun on top form.

From The Sun:

Witness Felipe Carvalho, 31, was riding home from Islington on his moped when he saw two men arguing in the street where houses cost £1million.

He told the Sun Online: "A man had a large rucksack on and I saw another man shouting at him saying 'give me my phone back'.

"The man then pulled a huge knife out of his bag - it was about 60cm long.

“He showed it to the other guy and seemed to be threatening him. I shouted ‘leave it, it’s just a phone’ but they kept on arguing."

He added: "I tried to help. It’s so sad that a man has lost his life over a mobile phone."