Roger Mexico

Still not offloaded that timeshare then, eh?

Well except we don't know that there are any cyclists to slow them down. It could just as well be drivers bemused by the bizarre road markings slowing down going WTF. Not sure, but presumably those monitoring devises that flash your speed at you are normally set up so as to register vehicles of only a certain minimum size and/or speed. But I suspect they can be adjusted to pick up cycles if not. And this article from April refers to dedicated cycle counters. Though even the figures for increased cycle use in that aren't that impressive if you consider the special circumstances (the Manchester route must be one of the most student-heavy roads in Britain for instance).

Well no, but it needs to be done in a particular way and this wasn't. If you are interested I suggest you look at Peter Robery's report which is Appendix 1 in the FoI response I referred to earlier, especially page 4 (5 of pdf). Can't quote at length, as it's been put up as a image, but "Rail and tram projects commonly use a soft encapsulation system around the rail". This one didn't.

Been and gone. It was a written question in last week's Keys from Hooper. Worth quoting in full: So not only do they not know whether it's increased cycling, they have no intention of finding out. And intend to spend a lot more money based on this complete absence of proof. They have the technology to measure the speed of all the cars going along but not, apparently, to count the bicycles

I think it could include pensions. There were 17,205 people over 65 in the 2016 Census, though some will have a pension from elsewhere and some will collect from the Post Office. And things like child allowances will be included in benefits as well. There's a lot of people who aren't 'on' benefits who get benefit. Presumably the people involved are fairly high up in the Treasury (it's a lot of money in total), so they should have other things to do the rest of the time.

Quite. As you can see it from the above the "reason that the payments were not made was that an email prompt to authorise the Bacs payment process was sent to an incorrect email address". And Edge later got the confirmation that it was an internal e-mail that was involved (she asked about data breach). So some people were being a bit dozy. Hooper incidentally had a second go at getting any sense out of Cannan and got the reply: "Treasury officers are working closely with Internal Audit. Internal Audit will provide a report to me and other Treasury politicians tomorrow morning and we will progress matters from there". But you wonder why it took nearly a week.

We've got some more information from Cannan's statement to Tynwald today (as usual link will soon be superseded line 41 on of whatever current version is): Hooper speaks for all of us: And doesn't get an answer except: nothing to see here, no need to change anything, moving forward. Though it's interesting that the mistake must have been made on Monday and not noticed until a member of the public rang a mate up on Thursday.

It's actually over 700. Here's a news item from earlier this year: (Note that MR have actually split a sentence to get the regulation five paragraphs). It's worth clicking through to hear Hooper's remarks which highlight something I've been pointing out on here for years - that there has been very little building of extra local authority housing to cope with increased population etc. There has been a lot of building of (very expensive) new LA housing, but it has only been to replace existing properties. This is the sort of thing we see again in the proposals for Lord Street flats. This may keep existing tenants happy and the building trade ecstatic, but it means more and more people who are low-paid and/or on benefits are being forced into expensive private rentals and spend more of their (and the taxpayers') money on that. Which may also please certain people, but is not good for the economy or taxpayers in general. In that context whether a handful of Syrian families are included in the mix is pretty much irrelevant. The real problem is that housing policy has been inadequate for decades - at least if the purpose of it is to actually house people rather than make certain people richer.

The information that Buster is referring to available on the FoI website described as "Defective concrete Douglas Promenade" with a date of submission of 24/09/2019 (as usual the servlet problem means I can't give direct links). It wasn't actually answered till 11 November, so the response was rather buried, the delay being partly to allow the DoI to get its excuses in. These comprise What seems to be happening here is that the DoI and its engineering designers Burroughs Stewart Associates (BSA)[1] are trying blame this particular part of the mess on Auldyn Construction for not laying the concrete right. Auldyn have however commissioned a report from Professor Peter Robery of Robery Forensic Engineering Ltd (Appendix 1 in the FoI Response) which is fairly devastating, both in showing the errors in the design that BSA produced (and possibly the DoI requested) and how these would make the cracking of the concrete inevitable. It's particularly harsh on the allegations that the DoI made about Auldyn's concrete laying (see the Comments by Client section) Now this is a report commissioned by one side of the argument and Robery points out that he didn't actually visit the site (though much documentation and visual evidence is supplied by both sides). But it repeats many observations that have already been made in this thread and elsewhere (such the DoI bizarre complaint that the temperature was too high to pour concrete (at 23C). And much of the attempted rebuttal doen't convince. [1] They say they operate in conjunction with our like minded sister organisation Burroughs Stewart Associates in the Isle of Man, though the embedded link goes to a domain name seller, which either suggests that either BSA(IOM) is defunct or that they're no better at hanging onto their websites than they are at design.

Weren't they always called that though? I suspect it might have more to do with trademarks that political correctness.

Contains the Most Guardian Correction Ever:

But the bad admin on the private side appears to have been working to the advantage of the private patients (or at least their consultants) by not charging enough for the NHS services provided. So they were hardly going to complain about that (if they were aware of it). And if other admin problems arose they're going to assume it's an unavoidable side-effect of the cheaper service. In any case consultants will tend to intervene more to sort things out with private patients - if only because they will tend to be more aware of any problems.

I don't think raw meat is a 'staple' part of the diet in any part of the world. Certainly a number of raw meat and fish dishes do feature in quite a lot of cuisines around the world, but most of the meat that people in those societies eat is cooked. The only exception I can think of is traditional Inuit society, but even there a lot of the meat is cooked when it can be.

If you think about that, it simply isn't true. If most of what animals ate was other animals, there wouldn't be enough animals to go round. Herbivores eat an entirely plant-based diet, but most omnivores also have a plant-based diet, but with some extra animal input. Obligate carnivores (that eat nothing else but animals) are only a low percentage of animal life.

I suspect not. Large trauma centres in the UK probably see more motorbike accidents in any 'normal' week than Nobles does during the TT and that gives them the continuous experience. The truth is any motorcycle use is high risk and a hospital with a big catchment area will have more bike accidents to deal with, even if the likelihood of a crash to any individual is higher during the Race Period. And of course many of the worst cases are flown off-Island as soon as they are stabilised. That's not to say that the TT doesn't impose extra stress on the health service - some of which will simply be due to the increase in population.