The Idirans were right all along.
Readit NewsMvandenbergh commented on The Culture novels as a dystopia boristhebrave.com/2025/09... · Posted by u/ibobev
It sounds like you have a bone to pick with GL, which is totally fair. But do you have any thoughts on the proposal itself?
It's fine but a proposal to do something without the political will to make any of the difficult compromises required to achieve them is meaningless.
I mean, ok, fine guys but this is just more empty gestures from a club of empty heads in the GroenLinks/PvdA clown-car.
I don't recall that they were against (in fact they were in favour) of the removal of the 30% tax rules intended to attract expats in, among other things, tech businesses. I don't recall that they've ever done or said anything to make the country a more attractive place to start or grow a business of any kind, let alone the kind of venture capital funded technology startups that would allow us to move a substantial fraction of our tech consumption to homegrown alternatives.
Maybe they're at least in favour of permitting for data centres so that we can at least host our own services... oh wait, they don't want those either.
The message is fair and valid, and seemingly true, but cripes, that's some thick reading unless you are literally a scholar. Dial it back. Talk about never use 5 words when an opaque and obscure reference will do.
Which of those references are obscure?
This is a terrible article, written by someone who is either dishonest or doesn't know what they're talking about and has never been to London, covering a paper that appears to be reasonably well done but has some serious limitations.
The study is here: https://ijbnpa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12966-024...
The data was collected during the 2018/2019 academic year and then during the 2019/2020 academic year (but before the Covid school closures).
First, some context: -The original ULEZ, which the referenced study looked at covers central London and should not be confused with the much larger recently expanded ULEZ which covers the whole city. Nor should it be confused with the much smaller congestion charging zone or the larger and older Low Emission Zone which covers freight vehicles. -The ULEZ rules are designed around penalising the driving of the oldest and most polluting vehicles only. In 2019 this was 80% of cars, the expanded ULEZ has overall vehicle compliance of 95%+.
As as result of the second point, it would not be expected that it would have a substantial effect on the number of vehicle journeys since 80% of passenger cars in the zone were already compliant anyway, therefore any effect at all is actually surprising. The paper notes a drop of 9% in total vehicle counts.
"Four in 10 London children stopped driving and started walking to school a year after the city's clean air zone went into effect."
This little quote heads the article. It seems like quite a result, right?
It isn't.
Let's look at the baselines here, something which immediately anyone who lives in London would be suspicious about because like me their first question would be: "who was driving their kids to school in central London in 2019? Are there enough for there to be four in ten at baseline to switch?". It turns out not many people do, and no.
Let's look at table 2 from the paper: (there were about 1000 kids in both the Luton and London samples) At baseline, 856 kids in London travelled using active modes and 105 using inactive modes In Luton that was 599 and 364 respectively
So first, we can say that "four in ten children" has to be interpreted pretty carefully here since 85% of kids were already walking to school (note that if they just took the bus the whole way this also counted as walking).
At most, we must be talking about changes to the minority of kids who weren't using active travel before, in other words maybe it's that "Four in 10 London children (of the minority who were being driven) started walking to school.
But, if we look at the changes, that doesn't quite stack up either.
In London: 47 kids switched from active to inactive (all measured based on travel "today" and in many cases there will be variation in modes across days) 44 switched from inactive to active 61 inactive/inactive 809 active/active
In Luton:
124 active/inactive 74 inactive/active 290 inactive/inactive 475 active/active
It doesn't look like, ignoring the Luton control for the moment, there was any modal shift at all for London!
Luton has proportionally shifted away from active transport and only in relative terms to the control has there been a modal shift.
This is already a much less positive message. "Kids in general less likely to walk to school, except in London where (potentially due to a low emissions zone) their behaviour didn't change." Where's my four in 10 gone?
The "four in 10" comes from the 44 kids who were inactive in the first sample but active in the second (out of 105 total inactive in first sample). Of course that is a much larger % of children from that group who switched in that direction than the 47 who switched the other way from much larger number of first sample actives. If your transition probabilities from A to B are much higher than B to A, but B is much larger group, you can end up in this situation here where you have impressive sounding % changes which nonetheless mean nothing and don't change the population behaviour at all.
It's a very fine thing, no doubt, to run multilevel binomial logistic regression models on data and come up with statistically significant odds ratios but I don't think these results remotely justify the news article headline and subhead.
I listen to a few podcasts on clean energy. Two of them are by Brits (Michael Liebreich's Cleaning up and Robert LLewellyn's Fully Charged podcast). So, the UK's energy market gets discussed a lot.
It's pretty interesting. Like many energy markets, the key challenges are actually legislation and policy related. The new government just removed a ban on new on-shore wind turbines. Which given that they are so cheap now is a sensible thing to do. The ban was madness to begin with of course. Offshore wind is of course also huge. And the UK has a lot of former offshore oil industry that is now adapting to doing offshore wind (a lot of overlap in tools and skills).
And while they are shutting down coal, they still have a huge former coal plant that is now burning biomass in London. That's a single plant that powers most of London.
Basically the way that works is that the Canadians and the British both subsidize this "green" and not so renewable power. The Canadians basically chop down what little proper ancient forests they still have on the west coast, which from an ecological point of view is criminally insane. The wood then gets shipped half way across the planet to the UK where it is burned. Shipping it of course involves burning a large amounts of nasty bunker fuel. There's nothing cheap, sustainable, clean, renewable, or green about this business. It's only economical because of the subsidies. And those subsidies exist because of fossil fuel industry lobbying and very willing politicians. That would be the same jerks that banned on shore wind in the UK.
Another key policy challenge in the UK is that energy prices are the same throughout the UK. Most of the cheap wind power is up north. Much of the demand is in the south. So they are firing up gas plants in the south at the same time they actually have a surplus in Scotland. And then prices in Scotland are high because the gas they use in the south is expensive. Even when they have more wind power than they can use and they rarely have a need for any gas power in Scotland. They are a net energy exporter most days of the year. And they are connected to the Norwegian grid which enables them to import hydro power from there.
Part of the solution is cables but installing those is expensive and challenging because it involves a lot of haggling with local councils and planning commissions. But the real solution is actually changing how this market works. This kind of change is much more challenging. Why move the power south when you can move the demand north? Variable pricing would cause that to happen.
>And while they are shutting down coal, they still have a huge former coal plant that is now burning biomass in London. That's a single plant that powers most of London.
Do you mean Drax? That's nowhere near London.
>And those subsidies exist because of fossil fuel industry lobbying and very willing politicians
Why would the fossil fuel industry lobby in favour of wood-chip biomass?
One of Labour's more important policies is to repair the damage that the Tories did to the energy production system. The UK has a huge amount of potential wind energy just from off-shoring. Hopefully they'll start building onshore too and closing more of these ugly and polluting biomass plants.
Which damage?
The electricity system has done most of its decarbonising under either the coalition or Conservative governments, they used quite a lot of the machinery (the CfDs, capacity market, etc) setup at the end of the last Labour government but it has been the subsequent governments that have chose the annual budgets for the auctions as well as setting up the carbon budget system.
There have been only two things that I would regard as material mistakes in this time:
First, not adjusting the max strike price for offshore wind in AR5.
Second, changing the planning rules to make it very hard to build onshore wind.
Everything else, including things like the offshore bootstraps / HND which are now receiving FID (like EGL2 which was just approved), the upcoming decision on zonal pricing, and most of all the massive buildout of solar and offshore wind generation and battery storage has happened under previous governments.
It's arguably the only area of policy which has gone quite well over the last decade, so I'm intrigued which damage you have in mind.
Mvandenbergh commented on I bought an encyclopedia optoutproject.net/what-is... · Posted by u/cratermoon
There's a very implicit assumption in this text that the encyclopedia you buy in 2024 does NOT contain all sorts of AI-generated stuff.
Not sure I have that much faith in the world anymore to trust that to be true.
The timelines for encyclopaedia article contributions, editing and publishing are such that I highly doubt that an encyclopaedia bought in 2024 has much if any LLM generated content.
I wouldn't want to make that bet for an encyclopaedia published in 2027 though.
I think the biggest hurdle to heat pump adoption (at least in North America) is likely to be that it provides an experience that simply isn't as good as a gas furnace. On a chilly morning the air coming out of the vents just isn't that warm and it may take hours to bring the house up to temp, whereas gas puts out pleasantly warm air immediately and can quickly warm the house even on the coldest days. When it's truly cold (like < 20F) the heat pump will run continuously and struggle to maintain temp. Don't misunderstand, the heat pump is certainly _good enough_, but people typically don't pick the "good enough" experience over the "better" experience when the better option is available and they can afford it.
For reference I've lived in NC and TN near the mountains where heat pumps are pretty standard. I imagine we don't get the ultra high efficiency cold weather heat pump units that would be used up north, but they also get much colder temps than us. Several of the houses I've lived in have been recent construction (2008 and 2018), so well insulated and reasonably new & efficient heat pumps. For the last 2 years I've been in a house with gas, and it's just so damned pleasant... I know on paper that heat pump is better, but I really don't want to give up that furnace.
Part of the problem is that heat pumps aren't really well suited to a use case where you frequently have to bring a house up to temp in the way you're describing. If you have a big overnight set-back and then the heating comes on in the morning, that will require much more heat output than constantly putting out enough heat to maintain temperature.
In a well insulated property, the greater efficiency from operating at low output temperatures outweighs the additional heat loss from no / a low overnight set-back. In a poorly insulated property, the optimum set-back is higher and the efficiency at that optimum point is also much lower because the heat pump has to operate at higher temperature in order to ramp up the temperature.
I don't know if they are available in North America, but in the UK we have hybrid systems available that use heat pumps for 80% of the annual heat load and gas for peaking / ramping. OpenTherm gas boilers can be retrofitted to be controlled in this way so you only add the heat pump. An air source heat pump driving a hydronic / radiator system in this climate can serve 80% of the annual load with a unit sized at 55% of peak heat load. Different climates will have slightly different numbers but it shows the power of a hybrid system as you save a lot on HP capex and also maintain redundancy.
The advantage of this system is that the failure-mode of an incorrectly sized system is an efficiency penalty rather than not being warm enough, the same as an incorrectly commissioned or sized gas system. (Most gas systems are not optimally sized or configured and are delivering 5% to 10% less efficiency than they could).
I don't know if these systems are available in ducted air configuration for the US market though.
Mvandenbergh commented on Why is it so hard to build an airport? construction-physics.com/... · Posted by u/gmays
I thought the main counterexample to that argument was the fact that it has never worked anywhere.
From what I've heard, the Olympics have failed to benefit every city that's hosted them except LA, and the reason they were good for LA was specifically that no new infrastructure was built to accommodate them.
London as well, or at least broke even. (Although of course this is complicated to assess and contested).
Same reason, all infrastructure was either already there or usable after (the Olympic stadium was sold to a football team).
Generally the larger a city is, the better able it is to host an event like this for obvious reasons.