Sell shovels to miners, and coffins to the widows.

At this rate, Labour is going to end up supporting AV just to get seats next election.

Wait, that’s not a bad outcome…

It’s a well-known tune.

“How much will it cost to do this internally?”
‘£50 million, and we’d need to commit to staff to maintain it. But then we’d own it, and it would be about as financially efficient as possible’
“OK, this big company says they can do a basic version for £49m, and with the first year of support for free”
‘That won’t even do half of it. And they’ll just ramp the cost up later’
“No, this is a good plan, we should use the free market to efficiently do these things”

The project then becomes £330m once the private company quotes up including all the essentials that weren’t in the original quote, but the wheels are already turning, so it happens

Carrots and sticks.
The carrots society expects are under-provided, so removal can’t be used as a persuader.
So we end up spending money on more sticks.

This was my query: Are these meetings butter-up luncheons?
Or simply a minister attending meetings that are part of their job.

I don’t understand the fuss.
When my family’s estate was threatened, we sold the eastern farm to that fellow from the club, and it all worked out swimmingly.
This is no different, we just need to pull up our bootstraps, and stop whinging about “chilling effects on journalism”.

Now please excuse me, mummy needs a brace of pheasants by lunchtime.

“This is good for the economy. Now here is a middle-aged white man explaining why it’s bad for Rachel Reaves”

Why does it feel like every UK govt.'s response to any struggling public good is “Well, there is a nice man here offering to buy it, and we don’t want to spend any money, so he’s going to have it”.

Sounds like an unviable business that is throwing worse loans after bad, and needs nationalising a decade ago.
But what do I know: I’m just a schmuck who’s water bill just went up by a third.

The monarch has power to do a lot of things. In practice, that power would get removed the instant they deviated from the script.

With the right investment into production automation, and classifying energy generation as a national security factor, I could see us building our own at prices that make sense.
The real kicker I guess is going to be the supply of rare earths required.

not flash enough to make their Instagram account about renovating the house which I have been advised not to read as they are horrible people with bad taste

I’ll take “slapping grey paint on every surface, then fitting grey laminate flooring and black gloss worktops” for $500, Alex.

That, and painting over every patch of damp with tanking rather than actually fixing it.

I like to rant about this, but it is possible to insulate old properties without causing damp and mould.
It requires understanding of how the materials work (breathability, etc), and more expensive materials, so it’s often difficult to get it done for a reasonable price.

‘You’ll need new radiators, and ideally more insulation’
“Utterly unworkable, now fit me a new gas boiler”

(Imo, the thing really holding ashps back is the costs. Companies treating installation like a dark art, and using the government grants to print money)

Where I live, there is no restriction (other than the standard policed ones) on using amps etc.
This means on a 500m pedestrianised high-street, every Saturday is 6+ separate people making noise.
It gets unbearable, because while one in ten is actually half decent, the other nine are cranking the backing track up as loud as possible to get some people paying attention.

I don’t live in London, but am I correct in thinking that TFL made people do auditions for busking spots on the tube?
That seemed to be a neat way to improve the quality. And did make me laugh the one time I had to wait just outside a station, then realised that the busker was playing the most well known 30 seconds from Wonderwall over and over.

Snip, Snap, Snip, Snap.

Was the MSP in the environment at the time?

And now we just wait for the inevitable US lift of the embargo, while conveniently forgetting to apply the tariffs.

Alleyway of origin, more like.

I think I’ve said before; If I can’t be certain of the origin of the chicken, I just won’t eat it in the future.