Cycling UK Forum

Depends on how you define cost:

#vimesboots

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.

PDQ Mobile wrote: ↑31 Jan 2025, 9:05am And apologies to you for explaining in simple terms.

But even if a budget is reduced then if you wantonly waste money on unnecessary stuff that leaves less money for the other remnants (which remain important).

In the context of road maintenance I put AI into the category of unnecessary.
It may make you bread and butter but it doesn't help the rest of us.

Why?

Because you can't see how it might be used?

The fact that people are still conflating asylum with immigration is testament to the power of the media to stop people thinking.

Year ending Sept '24 there were just shy of 100k Asylum *applications*.
About 52% of those who had a decision were granted asylum, so ~50k asylum seekers.

The total immigration figure from Sept '23 (annoyingly not the latest) was 1.3m.
There was also a significant amount of emigration, which is why the net figure is closer to 700k.


People who originally came to the UK to seek asylum made up an estimated 4% of the UK’s foreign-born population in 2022 and 0.6% of the UK’s total resident population (many of whom have been here for decades, only 23% had been in the UK less than six years)

Asylum is about 7% of immigration, you could maybe up that to 11% is you include the bespoke humanitarian routes.

It's a bogey man, not a problem.

Dirty tesla (recently did a 2600 mile road trip, primarily using FSD (it doesn't yet do snow/slippery conditions anywhere near well enough).



That's the type of break/charge regime which makes very little difference to the journey as a whole - and yes, the young kids do impact the max average speed they could possibly attain.

The challenge is, as with any genuinely new technology - getting people to think about how they do journeys differently.
No longer do we need to stop off to swap horses, brush them down and feed them oats; no longer do we need to stand around whilst explosives are poured into our car.
Pull up, plug in, in most cases tap a card, and then in the time it takes to rent a coffee, or dispose of the previous one, the car is ready for you by the time you get back to it.

A survey won't work, unless you're surveying EV users, because non EV users tend to have a very skewed view of how charging works.

Clamp a bit of scrap over the front to act as a guide into the post?

pete75 wrote: ↑30 Jan 2025, 3:35pm You mean Reform will make 99% of the population worse off? Well they utterly destroy themselves in one parliament. Farage doesn't seem that daft.

They'll do what the tories do - make everyone worse off for four years, promise that better times are coming, you just have to hold your nose once more... maybe throw in a slight income tax dip (which gets wiped out at the next budget, shh) and get another session.

As a data driven individual it's infuriating to see - but then I also have some compassion, and don't buy the "blame it on this 'less fortunate than you' group" tripe which is the standard fare for the extremely right wing controlled media.

Does anyone feel that any of the last five parliaments has improved, well basically anything important?

pete75 wrote: ↑30 Jan 2025, 11:01am I don't want to see a Reform governement but am realistic about their prospects, unlike a lot here. Don't know if the current government will turn out to be competent, they may well be, but what counts against them is they're politically inept. Farage isn't

Neither do I - but I still think we'll be better off with a much more proportional electoral system.
I suspect that many of the votes they garnered were protest votes, and that actually improving public services (which have been deliberately screwed over for the last 14 years) will significantly reduce their share.

TBH during my lifetime I don't think a single past government has made any difference to me personally and many people I know say the same. Doubt Reform would make much difference to most people either.

Oh they have, they just haven't been very good at explaining it.
And reform would make a significant difference to everyone, it's just that unless you're in that top 1% the difference would be very negative.

If we need another runway it shouldn't be at heathrow - we should be distributing the various captials across the four nations of our country.

There is no good reasons for the political, financial, and cultural capitals of the UK to all be in one corner.
We could build a decent, fit for purpose, non adversarial, parliament building, with accommodation for MPs and their offices elsewhere in the country.

State opening etc can all stay at Westminster, but nothing would drive levelling up more than actually having some power elsewhere in the nation.

PDQ Mobile wrote: ↑29 Jan 2025, 4:46pm I didn't use the term first!

I think in terms of fixing damaged roads and doing maintenance AI is likely to be just that however.

AI is never going to fix the roads - but use of computer vision and planning can help manage teams who are out doing that work.
It's not going to magically employ more people to fix potholes, but we can increase the useful output of said teams.

The best back-up power for the long term will be green hydrogen, and action is needed now to commercialise this technology as fast as possible.

Hmm - I'm yet to be convinced that this should the current focus... though this is the one application in which I do see a future for hydrogen as long/medium term storage. I'm not saying it shouldn't have effort put into it, but it does seem to be the focus of too many headlines.

I'd be happier to see much faster movement on the low hanging fruit (like planning laws, regionalised pricing etc), with a focus on cutting the amount of time we need to burn anything at all.
Yes, we'd like to get to the point where we can generate and store hydrogen effectively over a period of months, but that's not going to happen faster than we can get the rest of the systems in place. About the only thing slower will be retrofitting 20+million homes with better insulation and more efficient heating systems.


We do really need to stop the price gouging by the gas plant operators, and get NESO to treat demand management as an equally valid method of balancing the grid.

On the 8th of January there were two ways that the grid was balanced:
- DFS was called upon, incentivising consumers to reduce usage, or increase export. NESO paid 90p/kWh (of which I saw 72p)
- Gas peaker plants were called upon, and were paid £5.75/kWh
(https://octopus.energy/press/pay-people ... wer-plants)

That's an insane difference for the same power from different places. The result of the low offer to consumers is that only a quarter of those who took part last year bothered.

Yes, DFS is probably worth a little less to NESO, because it's not "guaranteed" power, but whilst an individual consumer might vary behaviour from one week to the next the aggregate behaviour is consistent.

Biospace wrote: ↑29 Jan 2025, 2:24pm A sweet-driving machine with 150 miles+ range and 20 minute recharging from 30%-80% SOC is growing very close to desirable.

And it's more the second of those which matters if you're aiming for lightweight (though start at more like 10% for best charge rates on current technologies).

I've done long journeys in small battery vehicles, and 50kW charging is a bit of a faff - you want to be hitting 200+kW and at that point it doesn't really matter what the range is. Though I'd still like ~140 miles between a charge stop and the next (i.e. for 70% of the battery) being a nice round target, that's a two hour break to rest eyes, stretch legs, and resume refreshed.

pwa wrote: ↑26 Jan 2025, 8:45pm Someone we know is house hunting and found this house for sale in Tenby. Lots of charming cottage character at a reasonable price. And then they went down the page and opened the Streetview. Is the corpse included in the price?
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/ ... el=RES_BUY

If you go up the road you can see a lady stepping over him to go into the door, and then a few clicks down the road see him get back up and enter the house as well.

Clearly saw the GooCar a street or so away and decided to pose - it's relatively common.

Marc wrote: ↑9 Dec 2024, 7:08pm

Grldtnr wrote: ↑5 May 2023, 4:44pm All the blogs & blogs I've seen , they have massive chainring sized much bigger than 53 - 54 race sets, with very small rings for climbing, or mountain drives.

In the faster velomobile models, you usually find a big 60t, or 65t combined with a 36t or 38t chain ring. Strong riders tend to use 70t to 80t chain rings. In my Milan GT, I have 45t chain ring on my Patterson Metropolis 2-speed bottom bracket (similar to a Schlumpf Speed drive). In overdrive, thats a "virtual" 72t chain ring. I like to state to the officers at police stops, that my Milan still has a faster gear left at 75km/h.

Assuming 90 rpm I have a gear left over at 85kph... Top gear at 90rpm would be 96kph.

That's significatly beyond anything I would consider a reasonable speed... I'm pretty happy to about 80kph, assuming that the road surface is known to be good, and the sight lines are decent etc... I've not gone hunting for a nice long newly surfaced A road on a hill though.
I don't know if I'd want to push much past the 50mph though. But maybe I'll hunt for an appropriate test track one day.

PDQ Mobile wrote: ↑28 Jan 2025, 7:22pm Hmm just because some don't agree with your AI vanity project there's no need to cast us as uncaring and selfish.
My theme on the issue has always been demonstrable waste in the context of highways locally.

So why do you think AI is a vanity project - you've not yet come up with a reason you don't like it, other than purported cost.
But you need to come up with another way to get the results with lower cost - and employing people is much more expensive than most people think - it used to be rated at ~2x salary.

pete75 wrote: ↑28 Jan 2025, 7:53pm Right of centre parties got 72% of the vote - 14% Reform, 24% Tory and 34% blue Labour.

Very droll.
They're fairly centre left at the moment (which is a major reason they were able to win a majority in the house)