I mean, there's a reason Banks chose to write Consider Phlebas with a narrative perspective from someone on the side of the Idrians. As I said in another comment, I think Banks fully intentionally means to make this perspective visible, legibible, understood as not entirely unreasonable.
Which is part of what makes the books so enjoyable to me, being invited to see multiple perspectives (especially reading Consider Phlebas after reading others that establish the Culture from it's own point of view).
Sure, Banks is portraying the best society he can think of for what he values and wants -- but acknowledging that even the best society he can think of has warts and can be seen by some as a dystopia too, and that not all might share the same values and wants.
> I have to admit to a soft spot for the Affront. Terrible terrible people, but they did seem to be enjoying life more than anyone else.
Honestly, I didn't really enjoy them. Except for that shape-shifter, Banks seemed to tend to write anyone who doesn't subscribe to his utopia as a grotesque cartoon.
That's like saying you have a soft spot for unit 731, they seemed to enjoy doing their little experiments. It's not like that of course, the Affront were worse.
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.
I don't vote for this party but you sre totally straw manning them with respect to data centres. The whole reason those became controversial is because American big tech companies would come in and negotiate deals with municipalities to consume all the energy of newly built green energy projects so they could claim they would make their green goals withouth making any investments themselves. Also you can question if the Netherlands is the right place being so densly populated resulting in issues with both the electricity grid and general land shortage.
Not all these motions were by GL/PvdA (but a few were), and they haven't been in power for a long time, and aren't now, so there's not much more than "gestures" you can expect of them at the moment.
But yes, the key thing will be how the government (current and future ones) will followup.
The move from home grown solutions to Google/Microsoft cloud services happened under the VVD government some 10 to 15 years ago. The "pro-business", somehow always end up being the "pro giving a big contract to the most compelling lobbyist from the US".
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 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
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
