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I'm going to offer Conal Robinson (or maybe Robertson) for Tony's late vending company. Maybe someone can improve on this, or point out my error? Anyway, I'm thinking that this was the outfit with the legendary "temporary shopfront" that over the years became a standing joke. Yes, they prominently and permanently painted "temporary shopfront" on the signage, and this remained there for many years!

Yes, there was a vending machine company on Front Street East at some point. Something Vending prominently displayed there. Back to Weymss: the snacks for the Market Place factory came from there. Also, I've got a vague memory of taking boxes of something like KitKat bars (though maybe they were Penguins) to the Mechanic's Institute for them to sell, that may well have originated from Wemyss.

So many warnings from so many insightful people, and the markets aren't heeding them! Joe goes on making promises to get reelected that he can't possibly deliver on. A whole generation of students got conned the last time around that their student loans would be forgiven, but there's now a new generation to pull the same trick on!

One of a growing number of indicators that we are heading for the biggest bust of our lifetimes, and that might be the least of our worries! No one knows who the real gold buyers are, but the speculation doesn't seem too far off the mark. Biden's weaponising the dollar is behind this. A Telegraph article today by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard makes chilling reading.

Question for Councillor Sanderson: Have you ever been in a modern data centre? If you have, the one thing you'd have noticed is the distinct lack of human beings. Yes, a sprinkling of security staff and the odd cleaner, but thousands of jobs?!!! Though... maybe he means Chinese jobs building the gear, and remote administration, and supervisory jobs in the SE? Are they going to duct all the waste heat into local homes to provide free super-clean central heating, so providing a REAL benefit to the community? Now, THAT would be worth having, and any politico worth his/her salt should be pushing for such a scheme.

Blackstone to Buy Britishvolt Site for Massive QTS Data Center Alamy https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/buildconstruction/blackstone-buy-britishvolt-site-massive-qts-data-center#close-modal

Britishvolt’s gigafactory site sold off in electric car blow The site that had been earmarked for the Britishvolt gigafactory has been bought by Blackstone Credit: Owen Humphreys/PA Wire US private equity investors have bought the site of what had been hoped would become Britain’s first electric car battery gigafactory in a blow to Britain’s net zero ambitions. Land in Cambois near Blyth in Northumberland had been expected to become the home of the £3.8bn Britishvolt factory before the company fell into administration last year. However, Northumberland County Council revealed it has sold the site to Blackstone, which plans to turn the site into a data centre. Britishvolt, which was backed by mining giant Glencore, collapsed with the loss of more than 200 jobs and had been in line for £100m in funding from the Government via its Automotive Transformation Fund. An Australian company, Recharge Industries, had promised to buy the site before itself being hit with a winding up petition. The Blackstone deal, for an undisclosed sum, comes after what receivers at Begbies Traynor Group described as a “complex” sales process for the 235-acre site. Northumberland County Council leader Cllr Glen Sanderson said Blackstone’s plans would lead to an investment of up to £10bn and support as many as 4,300 jobs. He said: “Driving growth and jobs is a key priority for this Council. Next week, Cabinet will consider this really unique opportunity for Northumberland which offers a huge boost to the regeneration and renaissance of the local area.”

Didn't one of those on the left used to be Wemyss (sp?), the wholesale confectioner, back in the mid 1950s? I can remember carting an unstable load of empty crisp tins there on my bogey as an infant. Yes, those packets of crisps with the little blue bag of salt used to come in oversized biscuit tins to keep them fresh. My motive was purely economic - to pocket the deposit on them. Mr Wemyss, however - god rest his soul - wasn't prepared to cough up the going rate, likely embossed on the tins, and all I got was a pittance (or maybe a few sweets) for my trouble. The sweets are long forgotten, but the bitterness lingers on - such is life! 🤣

The Nissan supplier is piddling compared with other international efforts, so their use of "giga" probably raises some chuckles in international circles. I seriously doubt whether any of the other UK efforts will get off the ground, as there's already oversupply. The TYPE of battery matters enormously these days, and by the time you ramp, it's very easy to find that there's no market for what you are producing at any price. We've seen this before in our area. Remember the Siemens DRAM factory off the spine road. By the time they were able to produce 1M bit chips in volume, the market had already moved on to 4 Mbit and the factory was a very expensive white elephant. The speed of innovation in batteries at the moment is even faster than that!

A Telegraph heading this morning says: The world stands on the brink of all-out war According to the Democrats and other miscellaneous leftists, Trump would surely start WW3! For people living in the real world, he was actually the only president in recent history that DIDN'T start a conflict. The death toll in Ukraine is likely well North of 400,000 already, and to that you need to add all the other miscellaneous deaths throughout the world that Obama's semi-senile (and thoroughly corrupt) puppet has caused. What a price to pay in order to protect the feelings of deluded idiots from "mean tweets"! November can't come soon enough!

I've likely said this before, but at the risk of becoming boring... 😁 Looking back, it will be no bad thing that early expectations regarding Cambois weren't met. The reason I say this is that world battery prices are on spectacular decline (per kilowatt) right now. What looked economic a few months back could easily turn into a white elephant today. There are so many plants now in construction that there's going to be a painful shake-out in the not too distant future. Also, Lithium batteries are rapidly becoming a strategic material: what would the military now do without its modern armada of drones?! Import barriers and local incentives are becoming the order of the day. So if you don't have a large enough domestic market established to take all the output, it's doomed from the start. It's always nice to be on the cutting edge of new technologies, but those who play with sharp objects... Doing what you do do well still has a lot to say for it. If you consulted Elon Musk on this, he'd certainly say start at the downstream end small and then vertically integrate backwards. Nice that some of this is already going on:- https://etn.news/energy-storage/rimac-energy-opens-new-bess-manufacturing-facility-in-the-uk

8 years later... ..and this cool-laid-back is even built in to the software! I did come across a reply to a "how to" technical question on a forum last night posted five years after the question was asked; but it's nice to know that Bedlington.uk is right up there with the best!

It's not simply braking, your engine/transmission is contributing lots of drag too. There's a charging station in practically every garage or on every drive - it's called a wall outlet. We quite happily used the little box that came with the car for over a year, and could still get by without the 3-phase wall charger. But it's nice to know that we can head off on a long trip at max capacity at very little notice, and that we can offer destination charging to visiting friends. I got an extra long Type 2 cable so that it will reach under the door onto our back lane: one day someone will thank me for this! People have been fed the idea that you must have dedicated fast chargers everywhere, but the reality is that all you need is to adjust your mindset away from your expensive dinosaur juice addiction. My only wish is that our wall charger and the car could agree to a slower charging rate, as even the minimum setting (5A of 3-phase) generally tops up the car in little more than an hour of cheap rate power when actually I want to extend this over much more of the cheap rate period. So IMHO too much is made of charging times. Very rarely have we ever been ready to go from a stop before the car was, and not having to queue to pay at service stations is an extra bonus. You can be taking on power within a few seconds of arriving, and it's simply pull the connector and go. In fact, there have been occasions when a short charging time has been a bit of a pain: getting to the top floor of a hotel and flopping down on the bed to almost immediately get a message that the charge is complete, and you're expected to remove the vehicle from the charger within ten minutes! Always best to find a hotel with a reserved destination charger that tops you up overnight for free. We arrived at one posh Italian hotel in the early hours to find the manager - no less - standing ready to remove the reserved sign right outside the main entrance to enable us to plug in for a free overnight charge. No lugging our bags from the car park, and very satisfied customers who will definitely revisit. PHEVs are a bit of a joke when they park up at public chargers in an attempt to bolster their tiny electric range, and actually annoy other EV owners. There's a usage case for people who do short commutes and can filch power from an employer, but generally they are the worst of both worlds: none of the maintenance savings and very little fuel saving to compensate for all the extra complexity. I convinced one of our neighbours here to wait for an affordable proper EV, and I'm sure that's coming fairly soon now. I agree that you've a special case there, but in a different way we were "way out in the styx" in the first year or two. We didn't even have any service available this end of Italy, let alone fast public charging. Any concerns we had were very easily overcome, and we'll never buy another ICE vehicle. I will bet you are going to see some Cybertrucks locally in the next year - 18 months max!

OK, we are both right. Power directly from the engine is at around 30%, but power into the wheels is at around 17% efficiency. Also, ICE engines can't recover the kinetic energy of the vehicle, so it's wasted in the braking system. This can be a huge factor as Pepsi are reporting with their new semis.. Of course, the waste heat from the engine can be very useful in cold climates, so there can be some offset. This doesn't seem to have influence our Norwegian friends too much, though, as more than 80% of their new vehicle purchases are now EVs.

Carbon emissions aren't the problem. The major problems with ICE are: The UK has depleted its own oil reserves. It can only get more expensive. There's a huge, hidden health problem from NOX emissions. It's extremely inefficient as a method of propulsion (circa 17% efficiency). It's all in the wrong places on earth, so costs more energy to transport. It costs lives in other ways: practically every war in modern times has oil as root cause. Lots of more minor problems too. Think gas street lamps in the age of the electric light bulb - that's where we are currently at! People resisting EVs are of exactly the same mentality as those silly people in the 1910s claiming that the horseless carriage would never catch on.

Coal is too valuable to burn. It's an excellent source of hydrocarbons to make organic compounds with. ...even those "evil plastics"! This will become very apparent to future generations.

I think the focus there is on the females are able to multitask and males aren't - myth. But... if it gets food put on the table at all the right times (etc. etc.), then we really shouldn't knock it.

"There will be a shuttle bus to get people from one side of the crossing to the other..." Well, I can dream! This one was supposed to be flying by 2018, and it seems there are quite a number of such designs. Maybe it's going to take Elon to bring one to reality!

I understand, but no need for the sad face: it's not written by Microslop. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/devices-not-working-after-a-major-windows-update-a15667e6-baa1-4437-80aa-a77f08b3aaff

Whoops yet another BBC wokey whoopsie.. You can't get the staff these days! Or rather, you can't get the staff if you only advertise your vacancies in The Guardian. They need to be more inclusive and advertise in Socialist Worker too!

Only missing the fact that I was cleaning out the reports to moderators and found it there. Thought the additional info might be useful to someone, someday - even if it is an AI bot in 2060. The board software has just been upgraded to the current version, too.

If it was on the BBC it must be true.. unless it was about Nigel Farage's bank account, of course!

https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/whats-on/shopping/wilko-collapse-fears-live-high-27450620 Wilko collapse fears live as high street giant falls into administration Alnwick, Ashington, Blyth, Cramlington.. Think I was in the Cramlington one a couple of years back. 12,000 jobs is a pretty big hit these days.

Even bigger lack of info: what kind of tree? The cedars here cause me real problems, but these are obviously deciduous.