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Post by mrsonde on Apr 5, 2017 9:47:00 GMT 1
Not the least of the dismal disappointments around Gove's defenestration of Boris was the sinking of his Estuary Airport plan, and the consequent victory of the insanely narrow-visioned third runway scheme at Heathrow. Having watched the Impossible Engineering program (a magnificent series, if you've never seen it) about Kansai Airport at Osaka (now one of Asia's largest international hubs) I can think of no reason why Boris' plan wasn't welcomed with open arms by every Londoner - or anyone interested in the UK's future economic growth. Even the bird people - of whom I count myself - were making an unnecessary fuss: there's no reason the flats should have been disrupted at all.
The cost of Heathrow's third runway is estimated at £18.6 bn, pluas £20 bn or so for the increased access works. As it happens, this was the cost of Kansai, give or take a billion. And the Estuary is less than a third of the draught of Osaka harbour - and the Japanese learned all the lessons to be learned, made all the mistakes to be avoided - so construction will be a lot easier, and a lot quicker, with no real reason to expect a cost over-run. The new access roadss and bridge to the proposed island would also cost about £20 billion - so in terms of cost there's no difference to speak of. Environmentally Boris Island is far preferable, however. In terms of actually solving the problem, it is too - four new runways, instead of a cramped extra one at an already over-crowded (and inconvenient) airport.
And what an achievement it would be! What a magnificent boost to this country!
I don't understand it, why this decision was taken - surely not merely to puncture Boris? Cui bono?
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Post by alancalverd on Apr 7, 2017 18:16:02 GMT 1
Piecemeal expansion of crumbling old airports is good for private business and can be left to local MPs, councils and contractors to sort out and ride roughshod over pettifogging matters like public health and the lack of decent rail connections, because it is cheap, incremental, and poses no political risk beyond one or two safe seats. Windsor and Twickenham will always vote Tory, Hounslow and Southall are safe Labour, so who gives a damn apart from the residents of Richmond, who are quite likely to vote Green or something equally fashionable and pointless?
Major infrastructure development requires government decision and probably public money, and a commitment from private rail companies to build and run a new line. No hope. And what about the newts?
The difference is that the Japanese government governs Japan; British governments play at getting re-elected.
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Post by mrsonde on Apr 7, 2017 18:51:29 GMT 1
Piecemeal expansion of crumbling old airports is good for private business and can be left to local MPs, councils and contractors to sort out and ride roughshod over pettifogging matters like public health and the lack of decent rail connections, because it is cheap, incremental, and poses no political risk beyond one or two safe seats. Windsor and Twickenham will always vote Tory, Hounslow and Southall are safe Labour, so who gives a damn apart from the residents of Richmond, who are quite likely to vote Green or something equally fashionable and pointless? Any party that assumes it can bank on a constituency's loyal or instinctive vote these days, looking ahead for twenty years or more, is making a serious miscalculation. In 1910 the Liberals assumed the same in England and Wales; 20 years ago Labour thought Scotland was theirs however they behaved - the Liberals are gone now, and Labour will be within that timescale. Whether the Tories survive remains to be seen - probably, it would seem, but who knows? One new party is going to arise for sure - maybe two will. A decision, of course - permission, rather, but not necessarily money. The canals and railways and shipping lines and original airlines were mostly built on private issues. The Chunnel only needed a public bailout towards the end, and I think it was returned years ago wasn't it? There'd be no problem raising enough from a bond issue for a new airport - it's as near a sure long-term investment as anyone could imagine. A third runway will have to be funded publicly however - what happens when it gets full up after five years? Is that a local football team? Well, we have a working democracy, usually, that sometimes offers a genuine choice, as now - Japan is more like the US in recent decades: it doesn't matter which party wins, they're both run by the same corporations. |
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Post by alancalverd on Apr 7, 2017 18:54:19 GMT 1
20 years is at least four parliaments. No politician thinks that far ahead.
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Post by mrsonde on Apr 7, 2017 19:07:21 GMT 1
20 years is at least four parliaments. No politician thinks that far ahead. That's why they suddenly find they've vanished into the past. |
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Post by jonjel on Apr 13, 2017 15:15:48 GMT 1
And what will air travel be like in 20 years time? No doubt we will all be forced to fly naked having had full body scans in case we have inserted explosives into places where the sun does not shine. Our luggage will follow in a remote controlled craft of some description with no crew.
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Post by mrsonde on Apr 14, 2017 6:24:58 GMT 1
And what will air travel be like in 20 years time? Hydrogen-powered airships, for the most part, I should think. I saw a design getting on for ten years ago that, high-altitude, was almost as fast as a supersonic jet, for those self-important executive types who still believe their physical presence is required, pronto. All explosives need a detonation device, don't they? A circuit closing. In Iraq the US were losing so many humvees, even main battle tanks, they started using a directed pulsed electrical field to set off any IEDs that might be in their path. Like frying the electronics on a plane using a radar beam. So maybe we'll all be asked to pass through a reinforced concrete blast bunker before embarkation, with our luggage, wearing a Magneto helmet and a heart shield no doubt, get zapped, and hopefully step out the other side still with our molecules intact. Suicide bombers can sign a no-liability waver before they enter. |
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Post by alancalverd on Apr 16, 2017 17:56:33 GMT 1
Among the products I sell is a full body x-ray scanner that can detect anything that the Almighty did not put there. It's considered safe for aircrew who may have to undergo 2000 scans a year, but isn't very popular outside of the prison service because of concerns about "modesty". When we have put them in airports, those who prefer not to be scanned have the option of a full body search using rubber gloves instead of x-rays. And plenty choose it. Unbloodybelievable.
Meanwhile at Prestwick airport I have seen a bloke hand a couple of vials of yellowish liquid to the "security" staff, saying "these are homeopathic remedies and must not be x-rayed", so they were duly passed as safe by declaration, and not x-rayed. Looked like nitroglycerine to me, but an x-ray inspection would have been definitive. Unbloodybelievable.
Anyway, us mere mortals won't be travelling by air in 20 years' time. The only people permitted to use fossil fuels will be politicians and members of Greenpeace going to conferences about Original Sin or whatever it is that they are on about.
And detonators don't need to be electrical. Consider a conventional bullet, or a burning firework fuse.
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Post by mrsonde on Apr 17, 2017 17:32:44 GMT 1
Among the products I sell is a full body x-ray scanner that can detect anything that the Almighty did not put there. It's considered safe for aircrew who may have to undergo 2000 scans a year  Yeah, right. At least you did mention you sell this product. The number, integrity, motility of your sperm may go up or down, and your continuing existence may be at risk.
Quite correct. That's one reason I said they'll be hydrogen-powered. Not the most important, of course - that will always be cost. True, I suppose you could try and smuggle nitroglycerine or gunpowder aboard. But surely Lovelock solved that sort of low-level problem decades ago, didn't he? They surely have conventional explosive detectors at airports? I was thinking the exception was those dual chemical explosives - the IMF chewing gum Tom Cruise likes to set off when he's feeling upset. But if the allahu akbar loonies are getting that sophisticated we'd better just close our doors and hide under our beds. |
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Post by alancalverd on Apr 17, 2017 23:21:58 GMT 1
1. If you are that worried about radiation affecting your sperm count, be sure to live in Norfolk. The difference in natural background radiation between Norwich and Birmingham is about the same as our maximum predicted dose to aircrew.
2. There's one born every minute. The trick is to find him.
3. Alas, the fossil fuel input required to generate hydrogen makes it a very unlikely candidate in 20 years'time. Not that logic has anything to do with it. The green lobby want you to believe that rail travel generates less CO2 than air travel, and new cars are a Good Thing. Bunkum.
4. Everything you need to hijack an aeroplane is available, free of charge, in the departure area. In most airports you can also buy enough stuff to set fire to the plane. But that's what airports are for! You can buy a £10 flight from London to Dublin, say, but it costs you £40 per day to park your car, £30 to put a suitcase on the plane, and a king's ransom to buy a coffee and a sandwich once you have passed through the Ghastly Retail Experience. They might as well give away the flight tickets and share the retail profits among the airlines instead. Which brings me to another question: why do they sell suitcases and wristwatches at airports? Surely everyone sitting in the departure lounge already has both!
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Post by mrsonde on Apr 18, 2017 6:58:15 GMT 1
1. If you are that worried about radiation affecting your sperm count, be sure to live in Norfolk. The difference in natural background radiation between Norwich and Birmingham is about the same as our maximum predicted dose to aircrew. I'd be a little worried about receiving over 2,000 X-ray scans every year, yes, whatever the salesman in the white coat said. Background radiation is one thing, being zapped by X-rays that can see every little thing inside and out that's not my body is another. Is this more of your homespun Communist apologia for hypocrisy? It's okay to bilk the capitalists because unlike you they don't realise there's a better way? Sunlight, old chap, sunlight - not a fossil fuel, last time I looked. The process that every plant on the planet uses to break down water - its equivalent, at any rate. Merely a matter of time - I'd give a well-educated guess (I work on this myself, and have done for over five years) that we're about 18 months away. We're already at a better cost v output ratio than wind or solar, and if we hadn't poured trillions of dollars of subsidy into those technologies we'd have been there years ago. I think 20 years is a gross over-estimate myself. As soon as we can produce electricity from salt water for no expense other than the infrastructure - a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost of a wind turbine or photoelectric cells - with the only other product being clean potable water, the technology will sweep the planet within a couple of years. Why wouldn't it? Who could possibly stop it? I've edited that for you, to save breath. Yes, does seem to generally be the case - for the past forty or so years anyway, since the Left took it over for their own nefarious purposes. Yeah, I saw Beavis and Butthead do it once. They've never shown that episode again. Is that so? Someone should write to their MP about it. Subconscious processing...The time is nigh, could be my final journey before the biggy...Or else it's the wives having waved their husbands off, deciding to make a break for it. Anyway - I thought you flew your own plane everywhere, when you're not taking your helicopter, you whingeing commie. |
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Yeah, right. At least you did mention you sell this product.