Tuesday 3 November 2015

Clamouring to be Best Friends

As we wonder whether the UK has any friends left willing to do a bit of trade with us, and whether we have simply to content ourselves with China, up pops Evgeny Lebedev (proprietor of the Inde and the Standard), advocating that we cosy up to Russia, too!
Shouldn’t Britain be that very thing, the trusted intermediator, that Russia seeks..?  Britain should not be leaving it to the French [*spits*] to mediate between Russia and the West. For all the greatness of this island nation, for all its hard and soft power, there is a laxity in our approach to the Syrian crisis. Meanwhile, a plague is spreading, bringing terror to our shores. As we become smaller, others grow; and we should join all our allies in fighting the real threat to humanity now, which is Islamist terror. Picking up the phone to Moscow would be a good start.
Could use some friends ...
See - everyone wants to be friends!  And, as well as trying to pip us to the Putin post, Hollande has shot off to Beijing for a bit of his own Xi action too (which reminds me, I need to write about the Paris Climat 2015 thing).

Oh and Merkel offers to be friends, too!  Does this mean no-one wants to play with her in the German playground any more?  Wonder why that could be ... (h/t Raedwald).

ND

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Word from our MEP is that Dave will get a deal very soon and will go early (March 2016) while we have a warm fuzzy feeling. No one wants a break up or a slow down to integration.

Just like fishing, you slacken the line a bit before reeling them in.

dearieme said...

I've yet to hear a plausible explanation for Merkel's deciding to tempt millions of invaders into the EU.

MyLongNightName said...

@Dearieme - firstly shes a 3rd world migrant herself...

Secondly, this is about demographics. As I've mentioned here several time, there are far too many pensioners and not enough serfs to pay their pensions. People like CU love to parrot their Mammys opinions about immigrants but they'll be the first to cry when her savings/assets (inheritance) get pissed away because of rising care costs, reduced NHS service and privatisation of public services.

Still, house prices are high and rising, so they can sell them off to cover the deficit, no?

As someone else mentioned the Germans have been very savvy in restocking their population of young, healthy, near-slave labour by putting themselves at the head of the welcoming committee.

Its going the same way in Britain too; why pay women to have children and stay at home to provide normalized environments when you can have everyone working to pay taxes (fuck they kids, they'll raise themselves) and keep a roof over their heads?
Fuck it! Why bother with women at all, just import breeding stock as and when you need it.

This is the inevitable end to hyper-capitalism.

James Higham said...

The lie of the land then is quite clear and Washington must be looking askance at this.

Jer said...

MLNN - NHS services are going to get worse?

Gosh!

Electro-Kevin said...

MLNN - Tosh.

Why didn't Germany just invite young Greeks or Spaniards into their country ?

This pensions/demographics argument is a cover to make it look like things are under control when they're not.

Immigrants will need pensions to and it will be a while before most of them are contributing to the system - if ever at all. In fact I envisage that the majority will be takers.

This is how it ends

Enjoy England while you still have her. She - along with Europe - is about to be swamped.



DJK said...

I fear that EK is right and that this is only the beginning. The 180m people in Bangladesh, the 80m in Nigeria, the 150m in Pakistan, etc. have just seen on their TVs that all you have to do is travel to Europe, preferably en masse, and you get given housing and resettlement.

Electro-Kevin said...

We narrowly missed power cuts last night and it wasn't even sub-zero temperature.

We are closing three coal powered stations early (next year) and a green levy of over 100% of current price has been put on coal.

They want to electrify more railway soon - not including HS2 and they want to immigrate a lot more people *to pay pensions* (already discussed) and *to care for our elderly* (these yobs having left their own parents to IS terrorists, one presumes - as most 'refugees' are fit young men.)

We are utterly fucked and will start looking and feeling Third World very soon.

This government will turn out to be the most hated ever before the end of its term and by the very people that voted for it.

rwendland said...

The papers have over-hyped the power cuts story. National Grid said:

"This is one of the routine tools that we use to indicate to the market that we would like more generation to come forward for the evening peak demand period ... The issuing of a NISM does not mean we were at risk of blackouts. It means that we needed the safety cushion of power in reserve to be higher."

But that makes a less exciting story. After multiple breakdowns at UK power stations National Grid decided to use a facility they pay some large users for, which is cheaper than continuously running a larger spinning reserve: demand-side balancing reserve (DSBR). This is very sensible and efficient - for some large users powering off for a few hours is no sweat. The large frozen food warehouses are an example; they have such a large thermal mass switching off for a while makes little temp difference. Both the large user and National Grid save money, which Capitalists@Work would generally like.

Nick Drew said...

Mr RW is right, although I'd suggest there may be more challenging times ahead for the Grid than a mere mild November evening

in terms of their ability to deal with it they have a lot more where that came from, of course: which doesn't make it good, however

it's a fair point to say that an optimal solution might include a regime where switching some (self-selected) large users off routinely plays a part: but defining the actual optimum position is not easy

we can map out the perimeter: it will definitely be sub-optimal when some industrials get switched off who didn't volunteer for the DSBR

I'm inclined to think that voltage reductions are also a sign of a sub-optimal set-up

it would be interesting to learn how much DSBR actually switches to its own dirty diesel ...

rwendland said...

ND I think the answer to "how much DSBR actually switches to its own dirty diesel" is here (pdf). But it is not utterly clear what it means - I think the answer is either nearly half, or 61% (in 2014/15). Not clear what exactly is meant by the 25% "Use of other generating assets (that only export to the network) that are not aligned to an associated source of demand" - sounds like a generator somewhere else so not a true DBSR.

But if DBSR events are very rare, doubt that firing up a dirty diesel to reduce demand is a problem. Reading about big standby diesels, it is recommended they are periodically (every month or two) fired up for an hour or two to maintain best reliability and as a test. So a DBSR start-up can substitute for another periodic stirring of the oils.