Conversely, standing charges ARE regionalised - because that does advantage the SE of England. Oh well!

And when presented with this politicians and “green” sorts will handwave about pumped storage or whatever despite that basic back of the envelope calculations will show we can’t build enough of that to store 4 weeks worth of electricity for a whole country.

I apologise for my first comment, it seems like those critical of the latest decision are painting a simplistic picture - "this was one side attempting to be kind vs other side deliberately being unkind". But it doesn't appear to be the case to me.

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/full_text_of_marco_rubio_...

Of course the terrorist-excusers like to make out that it was just a bit of paint, what's the issue? It was 7 million pounds of damage (to be paid for out of our defence budget, so that's 7 million quid less to spend on other things) and put some of our key national defence infra out of commission for a period to boot.

But of course, that's ok - we should allow such groups to exist going around attacking people, crippling them and destroying national infrastructure to the tune of millions, its just free speech innit.

No sensible country in the world would allow such groups to exist.

They’ll say they are making hard, necessary decisions, but the truth is that ramming up taxes is the default mode easy decision for labour.

At this point I just try and avoid selecting people for interview who fit this profile at all.

So here, Phase 1 would be a market dominated by EMH believers who passively invest. In phase 2, speculative “noisy” traders start to exploit this landscape to profit. In phase 3 there’s a crisis or period of high volatility. The old complacent EMH strategies suffer losses and become extinct. Then no doubt in phase 4 the market moves to some new equilibrium with new strategies dominant!

So in this AMH theory what you describe is a natural process of evolution.

Really, oxford and cambridge as well as other top universities can have a simple algorithm. They should bias against those from private schools in terms of admissions criteria until the point at which outcomes (as measured by graduating degree scores) are equal. This wouldn’t happen though because then private schools would drop to 5% of enrolments and there’d be no advantage gained from paying for a private school education. Unthinkable!

(Also Edinburgh isn’t a redbrick, it was founded in 1583)

So despite the best efforts of critics, they can't really show that Scottish water is any worse in terms of sewage outflows etc - if anything it is marginally better on that metric, and significantly cheaper to run. And the actual water quality is good, although that has a lot to do with incidental geography. Why would I want it privatised?