Nonsense! Sprouts are delicious at any time of year. Furthermore, if you ban sprouts you’d also have to ban cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli as they are cultivars of the same plant.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassic...

We do tax on taxes all the time. VAT on petrol is an excellent example as it is charged on the petrol duty element too. A tax in a tax is just a higher rate of tax.

I almost switched to an EV last year but I live in a leasehold, terraced property so installing a charging point is currently a no-no. I drive a hybrid and do under 2,500 miles p.a. I’m lucky to live within a 20 min walk of the city centre.

From a climate perspective, we should be encouraging people to use public transport, cycle or walk. Yes, EVs are better than petrol but subsidising trains is better than subsidising EVs.

We tax petrol/diesel vehicles by a combination of flat rate (road tax) and mileage-based (petrol duty). Charging explicitly per mile, i.e. road use charges, is an idea that’s been floated for a while to replace both of these.

EVs are electricly fuelled. They currently don’t pay duty on that fuel but they could. It would just be taxed at the charging point. It’s not rocket science.

P.S. for comparison, petrol duty works out at just under 7p per mile according to Google

I probably should mention that I got food poisoning in the restaurant recommended by the tour company

Segways are fun! I did a segway tour of Granada a few years back.

That’s 3p per mile, which is small compared to depreciation and energy costs.

Something had to be done to recoup lost road&fuel tax which, partially at least, fund upkeep of the road network. EVs are still cheaper to run.

A 4B pencil and a marked sense card. The pencil marks were read by a machine that turned them into regular 80 column IBM punch cards. This was 1973 and I was a 15 year old school kid on a FORTRAN IV course provided by Liverpool Poly ( now LJMU)

The Onion calls it:

theonion.com/trump-threat...

If only we had a public body whose sole purpose was to assess whether a person is suitable for a public role!

Oh, wait…

publicappointmentscommissioner.independent.gov.uk

(I can’t help wondering who assesses the assessors.)

I was still stacking Zs at 7:05!

I listened to bits on BBC Sounds app. It sounds like BBC is borderline dysfunctional at the top, which again comes down to poor leadership. I get the bit about charter renewal but it all seemed a bit vague and conjectural.

Surely the resignations are simply because they were not people of the right calibre for the job? They conspicuously failed to act when they should have acted and don’t appear to have seen this as a problem.

Speaking as a spacecraft engineer, the thing that gets me about Loeb's interpretations is that his alien engineers are insultingly incompetent.
RCS thruster plumes visible from the other side of the solar system, making no difference in the trajectory?!
And 'Oumuamua was a *terrible* solar sail.

I picked it as a study subject for a project within my MSc. It turns out that, apart from being close, it is a monumentally boring object.

Nice photo, though!