Posts by MK_E 64 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Sep 2015
Diesels aren't so dirty when you consider that you can turn them off when you're not using them. Considering the alternative of keeping conventional plant idling 24/7 "just in case" you need to turn it on at a moment's notice, the fact that a diesel engine is only producing emissions when you absolutely need it makes a big difference.
Most STOR usage isn't diesel anyway, it's far more common for them to run gas CHPs (usually industrial greenhouses) or turn off the freezers at cold storage warehouses for a couple of hours.
Trying to compare peak load generation to base load generation is like trying to compare a hatchback to a lorry - if you were going to transport fifty tonnes of goods the length of the country, you'd be better off using a lorry than a hundred hatchbacks, but by the same token it'd be woefully inefficient to use a lorry to pick up your weekly shopping.
When I briefly worked for RBS, every transaction I performed with online banking would generate me a code, for which I'd have to insert my card into a reader, enter my PIN and the code, and the reader would spit me back an auth code.
Bit of a pain in the arse if I want to use online banking and I've not brought my widget with me though.
To be fair to him, I watched that interview with Gove. He was cut off towards the end of his sentence, but he didn't say "the general public are sick of experts", he said "the general public are sick of experts getting it wrong".
So presumably referring to all the people banging on about how the Euro was gonna be a great thing and Britain was going to be left behind by not joining and so on and so forth, who were mysteriously quiet when the euro crisis happened in... just about exactly the way that other commentators (who were largely ignored the first time around) said it would.
So it's more of a swipe at Heseltine (who's been pro-Europe in precisely the wrong places for the last two decades) than a general anti-intellectual statement.
Have an upvote. That last part is especially true - pretending that public opinions outside of the mainstream don't exist, or sweeping them under the carpet and calling them fringe bigots or whatever, is exactly what drives otherwise reasonable people towards the fringe parties.
Remember the outcry when Yorkshire voted in a BNP MEP? The establishment response was to scream and stamp their feet and call an entire county nazis while not actually bothering to look into what caused them to vote the way they did. UKIP, on the other hand, who were barely a footnote in british politics back then, moved into the position of "hey we'll represent you on this issue so you don't have to go for the COMPLETE racist lunatics" and suddenly seemed a much more attractive option. Basically ate the BNP's lunch in the process.
If Brown had allowed a referendum on the Lisbon treaty like he promised, when anti-EU sentiment hadn't reached the boiling point it has in recent years, one of the biggest pieces of ammunition the leave campaign had, that it was undemocratic and that it didn't have a mandate, that we'd voted for a trade union and not a political one, would have been invalid.
Dismissing people and calling them fringe lunatics or whatever other smear you can come up with doesn't magically make their concerns go away. All it does is make them ensure you're not in earshot before voicing them to whoever WILL listen.
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