Raja Clavata

It’s the songs on the radio that do my nut in, at least I’ll escape two weeks of it in the run up this year with a winter summer holiday.

Saved me the typing 👍

I’d be interested to know how they communicate, or maybe hand directions are all that’s needed to point towards the meat grinder. If reports are to be believed 10k troops on the Russian side are about 8 days of losses. If there really are NK troops on the ground in Ukraine then, a) it is a world war b) it reinforces the reports that Russia is running out of “cannon” fodder.

+1

Currently reading a national populism book co-authored by Matt Goodwin, he asserts two right wing “labels” - radical right and extreme right. I don’t know if it helps the discussions here but it helped me avoid lumping everyone on the right in the far right bucket…

Was out of Bradwell yesterday on Warrior 165 live-baiting for bass, we picked the forecast we liked best when deciding on Tuesday night 😉

The data I shared in the table, which comes from official sources, predominantly shows the complete opposite of that for the five seats that Reform won! I agree with everything else you stated.

My other half can help, do you want to PM me the details? All I know is saddles can be expensive, we paid £3k for one a couple years ago and got a 17h Dutch warmblood thrown in for free😂

I previously looked at the figures for each of the Reform seats and compared those to the national average as well as local Labour and Conservative constituencies in my home county of Essex. What you can see is that, with the exception of Basildon S & Ockenden E, the Reform constituencies have higher than average percentages for economically inactive but, with the exception of Ashfield, several points lower percentages than the national average of those not wanting to work. Economically Inactive % Don't want to work % National Average 21.2 82.4 Ashfield 33.5 82.2 Basildon S & Ockendon E 14.5 76.2 Clacton 41.5 74.7 Great Yarmouth 29.3 76.7 Boston & Skegness 27.4 68.3 Labour (Harlow) 25.6 81.4 Conservative (B&B) 23.9 74.9 What the numbers suggest to me is if >20% of working age people are economically inactive combined with an aging population, then the system is broken and the burden on the rest of us is huge and growing unsustainably. The answer is we need more people who are net contributors, the answer is not more people who are low skilled and a net drain. One of the significant issues is we do not attract enough of those in the net contributor group beyond our borders, for various reasons. Another issue, and pending risk, is what happens when a significant portion of the workforce who are skilled and at or near net contributors today are replaced by AI agents. Perhaps we'll see a positive shift in salaries of people who undertake labour intensive work but then the AI enabled robots will be along shortly afterwards to replace them too...

Potentially a more insightful way of looking at it is that the national average of working age population who are “economically inactive” is 21.2% of which 82.4% do not want to work. That 21.2% average rises to 41.5% in bastions of industry like Clacton, Essex. I’ve not looked but would be interesting to know what percentage of our population are actually contributing something. No wonder we’re such an attractive proposition to scroungers beyond our borders.

Hezbollah emerged and exists for several reasons but the only reason it's as large, and well armed, as it is today is because it acts as a deterrent to Israel launching an all out attack / war on Iran.

Indeed, there are various trials all over the globe. The second Hydrogen week in the UK in Feb saw a modified Hyundai ix35 cover 406 miles on one tank. Agreed on the pressure vessels, not my area I have to admit, but with relateddevelopment also going on in the aviation industry and the like I'm confident it's not insurmountable. Yeah, that's why I referred to user. Agreed.

Do you have a source for the notion of EVs being dead after 7 years? That does not align with the data I see. I’m not an EV evangelist, don’t own one but can see us transitioning to one in the future, although it would most likely be leased. On the basis of economical use, we worked out several years ago that it would be cheaper for my mum to use Uber rather than own or lease her own car. I don’t know a single EV user that regrets getting it, I assume the ones who do didn’t think it through properly beforehand. Clearly it doesn’t make sense for everybody, at least today. I’ve never said publicly that ICE is dead but I do believe BEV is a transitionary step. In the future I reckon BEV will return to be quite niche, a bit like how they started as milk floats. Mainstream will be hydrogen or other fuel cell. The predictions on future mobility habits is an interesting one, OEMs sunk so much into the notion of subscription based services that the revenue predictions were absurd. This was, pardon the pun, fuelled by analysts like McKinsey whilst we were very skeptical making a prediction that in most markets and segments people would be reluctant to pay much more than the cost of a car wash per month for subscription based in car services. I believe the outright ownership vs. lease vs. Mobility as a Service will very much depend on demographic and geographic factors. I expect I’ll own and lease several vehicles for the rest of my life, my kids already lease their cars but I suspect my kids kids may never own or long term lease their own vehicle.

I don't think VW are looking that far ahead. I'd already posted somewhere else on here recently that in Germany, across all their brands, VW have between 500k and 750k over capacity in manufacturing today. Do you have a source / link to the forecasted 75% drop off?

I was in Ingolstadt this time last week visiting the VW Group campus and specifically the CARIAD team. Their issues cannot all be blamed on EVs. VW set-up CARIAD as their internal "software house" with new, improved, T&Cs for people from the VW Group joining this new initiative. Rather than taking the highly automated transformation path that car manufacturing took for their product development, which coincidentally is precisely what most EV startups do, they decided to throw thousands of people at the problem - not very smart. Whilst EV is an issue, VW Groups main struggles are legacy and culture, the CARIAD initiative has been pretty much an unmitigated disaster, none of the car brands are happy with them. Whilst competitors strongly pushed off-shoring to reduce development costs, CARIAD and VW persisted with the vast majority of their development taking place in Germany - very expensive. CARIAD spend €2B per year on software development alone, this is just for the base platforms for things like EE Architecture, Infotainment, ADAS and Vehicle Motion, which are then applied/specialized to each brand. They spend slightly less on hardware and system integration - about €1.8B. The CARIAD cost structure is mental, someone in a comparable position to myself there in Germany earns a base salary of around €500k. Then there are the bonuses, LTI programs, pension, healthcare, cars etc. There is also a revolving door "policy" at higher levels of their management. A colleague and peer left our company to join CARIAD as the CEO of their US operation and lasted less than a year - all change, constantly. More coming soon if the rumors are to be believed. Regarding EV, generally speaking, it's actually easier and cheaper to design and build an EV compared to an ICE, the costs associated with emissions compliance are huge and require large lumps of CAPEX and OPEX investment. It's a popular misconception to associate problems with EV when in fact the biggest development challenge, for legacy players like VW, is evolving the EE Architecture and dealing with resultant/concurrent legacy supply chain disruption. Europe had the head start on this and in fact JLR were the first legacy OEM to start working on the building blocks to enable the new architecture, which in itself is an enabler for Software Defined Vehicles(SDV). So my point here is that it's necessary to differentiate between EV and SDV. Whereas Europe engineered a lot of the SDV concepts in powerpoint and Excel, the China EV startups just cracked on and did it (as did Tesla and others). VW sunk a ton of cash into their Car.OS initiative which provides no end customer user experience gains nor positive brand differentiation. I would also add the observation that, generally speaking, Germans aren't particularly good at Software Engineering, they seem to fall short on the basis that it's a combination of science, engineering and art. There are rumors that the RIVIAN investment/acquisition/collab is seen as a way of fixing their SDV issues but that needs to be managed as the addition of a RIVIAN SDV EE architecture means they now have 7, yes 7, vehicle EE platforms. This needs to be managed very carefully, what could possibly go wrong!? Legacy OEMs in China have similar issues to legacy players elsewhere, the main threat to VW and other legacy OEMs is the Chinese EV startups. That said, it is true that Europe can't compete with China on a like for like cost basis on EV due to the level of vertical integration that the Chinese achieve, along with lower material costs. In summary, there are multiple contributing factors to VW issues including lack of clarity on EV / net zero goals, poor decisions on org structure, numerous legacy issues, unviable product develop costs, mindset. The diesel gate episode might also be a contributing factor to their EV "rush". All that said, they have decided to throw €1B+ per year into F1, which may or may not - most likely will - prove to be another poor decision. The new dedicated facility in Ingolstadt looks nice mind. I could go on but I'm sure you get the gist...