Who is in and who is out?

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phil.p":2m3a0iq3 said:
If we do leave, it would of course be honourable for the government to immediately call a general election. Four million people who voted last would probably vote differently this time - besides any other swings.
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeooooowwww ... see that flying pig? :D
Looking forward to it! Almost inclined to vote out if it gets Cameron out too!
 
Jacob":7ia2pp2e said:
The evidence is taken as "proof" in inverted commas - i.e. not "absolute truth" but the best we can come up with.
In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

Oh Jacob. Its not worth reading if its all still a miss-ter-ree...

Oh, childbirth is a certainty. ;)
 
stuartpaul":2sevd1c7 said:
This is clearly going to rumble on until June 23 :D It's been mostly friendly which is a good thing!

The EU clearly has a lot of work to do to and there are aspects of it's activity that are impossible to justify (e.g. decamping en mass to Strasbourg is inexcusable). Of course getting 28 countries to work together is difficult and not all are going to agree. I bet you couldn't get 28 individual woodworkers to agree on sharpening so what's been achieved up to now isn't all bad surely?

Have to say I've learned quite a lot by having to go and read (and try and understand!) an awful lot of stuff.

Let me give you two options:

Option A:

Leave vote wins. 24 June the £ will drop considerably as the financial markets hate uncertainty. The price of exports will drop and the price of imports will rise. The effects on all of us will be fairly immediate through a slow but inexorable rise in prices.

Prime Minster to be Johnson's face will be everywhere as he crows about how right he was. My television will be destroyed as a couple of bricks are launched at his buffoon like features.

The French will give a Gaelic shrug and walk away from 'the jungle' and the English will have to deal with a very difficult immigration situation.

Option B:

Remain vote wins. 24 June the £ will rise slightly as the markets will feel there is a degree of certainty. This means that the price of oil will drop as it's priced in $. We however will petrol prices rise as the greedy effing chancellor gets his sticky mits on more duty.

That **** Cameron's face will be everywhere as he crows on and on and on and on and on about how wonderful he is in leading us towards the promised land. My television will be destroyed as multiple bricks are launched at his grinning gob.

Outcome:

Win or loose I'm going to need a new television and be worse off financially. I'm still voting to remain though!

That made me laugh - A LOT =D>
 
Cheshirechappie":3iziw4ks said:
If polluting power stations are to be closed (arguably a good thing) it would make sense to replace the capacity they offer before closing them, not later. The resulting shortfall in spare capacity could mean that demand exceeds available supply on occasions - we've been very close to that in the UK. Instead of replacing coal capacity with a generation method that delivers reliably all the time, we've had to comply with directives to install' renewable' capacity that isn't a reliable supplier (wind and solar). We also have to comply with directives on nuclear generation, which means we can't just make our own decisions on that.

The EU directives may be well-meaning, but collectively they tie us in so many knots, the UK ends up unable to take the decisions necessary to ensure energy security in the long term.

I don't think EU directives can be blamed here for our energy security, beyond the closure of coal plant perhaps.

Sucessive governments have dithered for years over new nuclear build; the dilemma has been between requirement for clean generating capacity (in so far as nuclear can ever be regarded as clean), and public acceptability. Basically until the situation was dire no decision of nuclear build was going to happen. Having missed the point at which the decision need be taken, wind / solar etc are a stopgap solution, allowing the unpopular decision to be deferred even longer. But now there is the question of whether we can afford to build it. And if it will be completed within any sort of useful timeframe.
 
A friend of mine has recently closed his carpentry business doing mainly site work,first and second fix.The business was started by his grandfather and had been running for over 50 years.They took on and trained 5 apprentices a year and put them through part time college courses for three years.He say the reason he closed was he could no longer compete with new gangs of east european carpenters who always undercut him which is no suprise when they live 10 to a room have no real uk living cost and do not take on the cost of training yougsters (this countries future).And some still want to stay in the EU.Lets spend the savings on training the next generation of trades people,they can't all work in "media " or moving cash around the world for profit.
 
We need better training schemes - a lot have been closed down.
We also need higher minimum wages enforced so that cheapskate employers can't undercut the locals.
Oddly enough the few EU trades people I've met have been highly skilled, particularly in traditional stuff, so they must have good training in place over there. Also none of them want to work for lower wages than anybody else, believe it or not!
 
Still waiting for a valid (emphasis on valid) reason why they keep shuttling between Brussels and Strasbourg. The MEPs voted to end it but were vetoed by the French. Just goes to show how much influence (not) the MEPs actually have.

And for a valid (again emphasis on valid) reason for that daft cookie law.
 
phil.p":3r01uujn said:
Many of the CO2 spikes in the past have been larger than recent ones and happened with no human interference at all....
Yes they have, such as the Cretaceous surge in volcanic activity or the Late Permian mass extinction. But as I said these happened over hundreds if thousands of years if not millions, there are NO EXAMPLES of a rise in global temperatures influenced by CO2 as fast as the present rate.

In true science there is no such thing as 'proof'. A 'theory' is the term used to desribe the highest level of certainity in scientific terminology.

The likelyhood Climate change being caused by humans is classfied as "higly likely" by the IPCC last time I checked.
http://www.ipcc.ch
 
RogerS":2exyolgj said:
....

And for a valid (again emphasis on valid) reason for that daft cookie law.
Was explained in a link earlier. Google it.
Basically we are entitled to be asked before anyone can plant stuff onto our computers. Seems fair enough to me.
Not daft but certainly trivial and not a game changer!
 
Sheffield Tony":1xnxrmaj said:
I don't think EU directives can be blamed here for our energy security, beyond the closure of coal plant perhaps.

Sucessive governments have dithered for years over new nuclear build; the dilemma has been between requirement for clean generating capacity (in so far as nuclear can ever be regarded as clean), and public acceptability. Basically until the situation was dire no decision of nuclear build was going to happen. Having missed the point at which the decision need be taken, wind / solar etc are a stopgap solution, allowing the unpopular decision to be deferred even longer. But now there is the question of whether we can afford to build it. And if it will be completed within any sort of useful timeframe.

I agree with much that you said above, with some comments:

The trouble is that coal is ideally suited for base load generation. It's typical of the EU to issue a directive that's more like a piece of polemic, without any real attempt to address unintended consequences.

For decades we have understood coal-burning pollution, and we have had strategies to mitigate it. For example, fitting filters to generating stations is effective, particularly so as the pollution is concentrated in one place. It's a cost-effective approach.

We cannot sustain our present energy use (or anything close to our present energy use) without fossil fuel consumption. Right now, the vital base-load stations like Drax and Didcot are being replaced with gas-fired plants - hardly any greener, geo-politically dodgy (as the gas comes from Russia in the main, and is a vulnerable import), and no more effective against the greenhouse effect than the coal they replace.

"Green" energy still only accounts for 1-5% of our supply, and this is unlikely to rise significantly in the next decade or so. It has bought us no time at all (I quite agree about politicians dodging the essential decisions about nuclear until it's too late). Worse, it has diverted scarce resources (cash, mainly), into inefficient and environmentally unfriendly stuff that basically doesn't deliver. The EU has been a driver for much of this, because it feeds off the lobbyists (corruptly), and big profits have been made from the subsidies, land deals, etc.

One of the major problems with 'green' energy is that it's not very green. Solar farms have a predictable limited lifespan of around ten years (UV kills solar cells, cumulatively). This is probably not stressed when the rooftop versions are sold to naive householders! The chemicals involved are not friendly, and some are quite scarce resources themselves, and if you look at the cost-per-gigawatt of the capacity, it is quite enormous - far more than the proponents admit to, because the real-world efficiency is extremely low, and the infrastructure cost is huge.

How did we get here? You have to look at history - you can't ignore it if you want to understand the present.

I mentioned earlier that the EU was conceived by Schuman and Monnet to have a Stalinist/Fascist command economy (they were admirers of Soviet Russia, which at the time appeared to be successful, and there are dark hints in the literature that they also admired the Nazi's and Fascists's ability to "just get things done").

The coal and steel community came first, and was intended to do two things - cover Europe's energy and raw materials needs to make Europe independent of global trade cycles, but also to make countries dependent on each other (so they couldn't/wouldn't go to war again). This was to be achieved by removing the ability to do certain things from each country: so the Benelux countries and Germany got to mine coal and make steel, France got agricultural rules in its favour, and so on. The rest of the EU-to-be was to depend on them.

Unfortunately there weren't roles for everyone in the new utopia, and realpolitik played its part too, so we found ourselves with no fishing grounds any more, and signed-up to rules about government subsidies, affecting the big raw materials and energy industries in particular, that frankly weren't in our interests.

It's subtle; it's all in the name of "competition law" and "preventing monopoly positions" etc., but it goes right back to the statist approach of the EU's founding fathers. Over decades, successive UK governments have become more compliant too (the biggest change was probably with John Major). Big industry loves all this, because lobbying has become highly cost-effective, and is also a good entry barrier to these markets, and unfairly discriminates against smaller players.

Control of energy policy has always been at the heart of EU policymaking.

We NEED green energy, very desperately, but there are presently no solutions to the problem - there simply isn't a "green" method of base load generation, and no commonly-agreed method of storing renewably-generated energy for it to be used as a base load substitute. We can't make "green" energy in sufficient quantity; we can't store it; and the technologies aren't actually green and are HUGELY expensive compared to what we've got used to.

The only currently public technologies that might offer hope for base load generation both exist in the EU already: thorium fission reactors, and fusion. Both are insufficiently funded, thorium reactors particularly so.

The ITER project (being built in France - can you guess why?) is actually a fully international scheme (not just the EU), as a next step towards a practical fusion generator, although the first successful* fusion experiment was done at Culham, Oxfordshire (JET). The UK arguably had more and better Tokamak fusion expertise than anyone else (other fusion systems are available...).

The Germans had a functional production Thorium reactor, albeit a poor design. It came on-line very late, was very expensive, and has recently been shut down (or dramatically scaled back its output - can't remember which), largely on safety grounds, I think after the Japanese tsunami containment breaches (Germany is essentially trying to become non-nuclear).

The UK has university-based research teams with new Thorium designs. They remain very under-funded.

*getting more energy out than was put in, albeit for a rather short time.
 
Jacob":21d6vwmv said:
RogerS":21d6vwmv said:
....

And for a valid (again emphasis on valid) reason for that daft cookie law.
Was explained in a link earlier. Google it.
Basically we are entitled to be asked before anyone can plant stuff onto our computers. Seems fair enough to me.
Not daft but certainly trivial and not a game changer!

I did ask for VALID reason. I looked at your link. Couldn't see any reason at all. Let alone a valid one.

Most websites won't work properly or deliver what you want if you don't use a cookie. besides, there are other better hi-tech solutions that does not involve wasting time clicking on that daft 'Do you want to accept cookies'.

But you won't agree naturally.
 
phil.p":252znioa said:
If we do leave, it would of course be honourable for the government to immediately call a general election. Four million people who voted last would probably vote differently this time - besides any other swings.
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeooooowwww ... see that flying pig? :D
Why should they call an election? Much as I dislike the Tories they are just delivering against their manifesto (unusual I know but there you go!).

What will be interesting is to watch them try and put the Tory party back together again!
 
stuartpaul":4n777ysw said:
This is clearly going to rumble on until June 23 :D It's been mostly friendly which is a good thing!

The EU clearly has a lot of work to do to and there are aspects of it's activity that are impossible to justify (e.g. decamping en mass to Strasbourg is inexcusable). Of course getting 28 countries to work together is difficult and not all are going to agree. I bet you couldn't get 28 individual woodworkers to agree on sharpening so what's been achieved up to now isn't all bad surely?

Have to say I've learned quite a lot by having to go and read (and try and understand!) an awful lot of stuff.

Let me give you two options:

Option A:

Leave vote wins. 24 June the £ will drop considerably as the financial markets hate uncertainty. The price of exports will drop and the price of imports will rise. The effects on all of us will be fairly immediate through a slow but inexorable rise in prices.

Prime Minster to be Johnson's face will be everywhere as he crows about how right he was. My television will be destroyed as a couple of bricks are launched at his buffoon like features.

The French will give a Gaelic shrug and walk away from 'the jungle' and the English will have to deal with a very difficult immigration situation.

Option B:

Remain vote wins. 24 June the £ will rise slightly as the markets will feel there is a degree of certainty. This means that the price of oil will drop as it's priced in $. We however will petrol prices rise as the greedy effing chancellor gets his sticky mits on more duty.

That **** Cameron's face will be everywhere as he crows on and on and on and on and on about how wonderful he is in leading us towards the promised land. My television will be destroyed as multiple bricks are launched at his grinning gob.

Outcome:

Win or loose I'm going to need a new television and be worse off financially. I'm still voting to remain though!

Option C:

Leave vote wins. 24 June the £ will rise considerably as the financial markets have already priced this in as they realise the huge potential to the future growth of the UK now that it has freed itself from the fetters of the EU.
 
RogerS":n4wxg0jd said:
Option C:
Leave vote wins. 24 June the £ will rise considerably as the financial markets have already priced this in as they realise the huge potential to the future growth of the UK now that it has freed itself from the fetters of the EU.

The price of Exports will go up and imports go down, hammering in the final nail in the coffin of UK manufacturing.
Stuart will still need a new TV though.
 
mind_the_goat":2l4z0spo said:
RogerS":2l4z0spo said:
Option C:
Leave vote wins. 24 June the £ will rise considerably as the financial markets have already priced this in as they realise the huge potential to the future growth of the UK now that it has freed itself from the fetters of the EU.

The price of Exports will go up and imports go down, hammering in the final nail in the coffin of UK manufacturing.
......

Some economists say they will go up.

Some economists say it they go down.

Heads or tails anyone ?
 
RogerS":1axzs70o said:
Leave vote wins. 24 June the £ will rise considerably as the financial markets have already priced this in as they realise the huge potential to the future growth of the UK now that it has freed itself from the fetters of the EU.
Along with the collapse of the bacon industry as all the pigs fly away.
 
RogerS":tmoqjmf6 said:
mind_the_goat":tmoqjmf6 said:
RogerS":tmoqjmf6 said:
Option C:
Leave vote wins. 24 June the £ will rise considerably as the financial markets have already priced this in as they realise the huge potential to the future growth of the UK now that it has freed itself from the fetters of the EU.

The price of Exports will go up and imports go down, hammering in the final nail in the coffin of UK manufacturing.
......

Some economists say they will go up.

Some economists say it they go down.

Heads or tails anyone ?

... And remember that you lot in the Leave camp are the ones who would gamble your future and everyone else's on that toss of the coin.
 
RogerS":oyqh9fyf said:
Some economists say they will go up.
Some economists say it they go down.
Heads or tails anyone ?
But it's not so simple is it ? It's far more like;
9 economists say leaving is very likely to be bad
1 says it might be good.

Skews the odds a little doesn't it ?
 
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