Eccentrist Dad

Partly, but some of the optimism was based on lies all along (Space "Shuttle", anyone?) - it's easy to forget how much information just didn't flow back then.

The Soviet collapse was, afaict, a surprise to the people whose job it was to understand it.

The X-Files was fantasy, but not implausible.

There's a few roads around here which are 20s and on which a small minority of psychopathic dickheads will perform risky 40mph overtakes if you stick to the limit.

Still though, the problem is psychopathic dickheads, not road design. We have solutions for that. 👮🏻📸

Adds "Not being on fire" to list of "Things that are woke".

Without wanting to be too Everything-is-Gender about it, the Venn diagram of people who romanticise Big Drill Ruggedness, and people who throw "ugh, gayyy" at anything and everything they dislike, looks approximately like this:

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Thanks for saying that better than I could!

Educated humans are perfectly capable of managing their numbers, unlike livestock which are bred for our consumption and their numbers controlled by us.

Given the news lately, it's perhaps not surprising your first sentence there gives me a mental image of Tommy Robinson yelling Islamophobic slurs at a field of bemused livestock.

ISTR the Anglican church thrived pretty well on that kind of messaging for about half a millennium?

The other parties' sums add up just fine.

Balancing the budget on the back of depleting irreplaceable resources and permanently degrading the planet's life-support systems. If it ain't on the balance sheet, who cares.

The sub-prime mortgage bros would be proud.

To some extent. The growth in membership must surely be bringing more of that through the door - they're singing from the same hymn sheet on climate as insurers, MoD types, medics/public health, food supply-chain people...

They may not be out front, but that doesn't necessarily mean no supervision.

That comes back to a combination of the bug/feature I referred to in policy development (everything going via Conference, hard to do dry/technical stuff that way), and frankly a lack of a "they" to do the adopting (two rural and two urban MPs, for a little under two years, plus the AMs and Cllrs).

No doubt about it declining, but there was a whole raft of such bands popular here until 2010 ish, alongside EDM and hiphop. After that, not so much.

Hard to separate organic taste from what labels decide to put money behind - certainly streaming made things tougher for album artists around then.

Neither - the death of rock bands as a major superstardom category. (Lots of amazing heavy bands, just not in mainstream culture with mega ££ behind them).

The risk being that of investing £MM in a group of five 20something dudes and have them spend a decade hanging around huge crowds of teenagers.

It _should_ be low salience, but as someone with a fair few Mumsnet-brained elder millennial / GenX women in my social circle. well.. 😬

Plus, frankly, it's the policy / systems people who are, in my experience, most alarmed about climate. Because it's hard for that type to NOT look at it and go "oh.. fuck."

So I feel like pragmatist Greens have got a wider base of supportive expertise to draw on there than is generally recognised.

.. the first is counterbalanced, to some extent, by the civil service and others around the machinery of government.

And where Greens have got close to power, and been able to work cooperatively with others (the GLA stands out here), they've proven adaptable and willing to engage with experts.

It's both a more general problem in popularity-contest politics - the under-representation of systems thinkers, not many autistic spectrum people in the Commons for example - and perhaps to some extent a bug specific to the Greens' policy-development mechanism.

Having said that...

I don't think that's entirely true, if your aim is not to upset the Waveney Valley set - OK, so e.g. trans rights is in principle low salience for them, but it's in principle low salience for a whole lot of other people who have nevertheless whipped themselves into a state of moral panic about it.

The potential difficulty I see here is that a regional government large enough to include e.g. both Birmingham and the Cotswolds might, maybe, be better at getting HS2 done, but in other ways not great for the city.

(Is our rural / urban divide starker than e.g. Spain / Germany perhaps?)

Hard to judge, given that the present moment (huge wave of fresh popularity, almost none of it yet translated to actual power) is perhaps the least tactically opportune time to do that.

He's shown moral consistency on other difficult issues, so I'm hopeful.

Would this have helped HS2 not cost £60BN, something like 10-20x the cost per km of the Barcelona/Madrid line?

But they're able to block stuff because of a legislative framework which empowers them to do so, and 10x so now that the information environment is frictionless.

I suspect a YIMBY gov't could cut them off at the knees with some boring, technical process changes, but I'm not sure they've the will.

The business analogy is perhaps sales / brand / marketing types vs design, engineering, operations.

Where the sales people have the stronger hand, the key is whether or not they'll listen to the pragmatic back-room folks and sell something that actually exists and can be produced.

It helps for the leaders themselves to be on board in the first place - Polanski strikes me as somebody more willing than most to walk the walk there - and to have a support base composed of others who are.

"You can't please all the people...", but it needs a clear theory of who you can and should.

"Please don't object to this important, physically quite minor but a bit annoying and ugly pylon scheme, we really need that clean North Sea energy to get to London."

"Meanwhile, we're so desperate to expand Heathrow we're going to build a runway over the top of the M25."

Make it make sense?

Tbf, I'm not sure the leadership / narrative thing has really been tried, Ed M was the only one that got close, and was monstered by the media and superseded by events.

Neither the average citizen, nor the national leadership, act like they're genuinely concerned about climate change.

I'd love to believe this was an organic cultural trend, but it has the whiff of risk management by labels about it.

Although, after (casts arm across the last 60 years of the music industry), I guess who can blame them.

(You also might find it curious how the Venn diagram of the "no more trains on these tracks please" crowd overlaps with the "reopen Hammersmith Bridge because public transport, no really" lot).

Early 2030s? LOL, and let me also add, LMAO.

But you'll like this even better. The existing track through SW London has level crossings for a mile or two, and the car-NIMBYs of Sheen, Mortlake and Barnes go nutso every time SWR tries to run more trains along there.

Rock stars are just much less of a thing, most of the culturally dominant artists of the last 10 years are solo women singers, rappers, sensitive blokes with acoustic guitars and a few boybands.

Odds of DfT being able to authorise a trial, in the same way as they've been able to for e-scooter licensing?