The Bastard

Odd that there's so much of a focus on "road safety" these days yet the inspection of vehicles seems to be completely off the radar. The 100 defect notices is only to be expected on an island full of smoky old bangers held together with spit and sellotape.

Nobody does that. It's one of those things (like planning) that nobody gives a toss about. Ring needs an internet connection of some kind, but a cheap one will do. Piggyback off a neighbour's connection, or get a 4g router or a Mifi.

You're right, surprisingly expensive recently, it's even £5 a fillet in Tesco. Things are not cheap, premium meat and fish are back to being an occasional treat, expectations should be adjusted accordingly.

Um, so where does your point about "muslims" fit in if it's nothing to do with race ? Is this what you are trying to say ? "i'm not so sure , alfie wants 15000 new residents, we could easily get 1000000 new residents if we invite a few people to move house"

I totally agree. She's not a welfare officer in a student union, she's a senior elected representative. Choosing to back such an absolutist slogan is staggering. Where do the Jewish community (who originate from the region, and have lived there for thousands of years) belong in that scenario ? It's clearly a call for erasure.

That adds nothing to the argument, that's just Daily-Mail-Reader scaremongering drawing on racism. You're forgetting we already have a substantial Muslim population here. This isn't 1970.

It seems a very studenty, binary perspective - a side has been chosen and the other side is demonised, and ridiculous language used about "being on the right side of history" whilst ignoring the deaths of 1,500 in outrageous terrorist attacks on civilians. My side good, other side bad. Unfortunately, the history and politics of Israel and Palestine are far more complex than she thinks, and there are clearly a lot of issues that don't make it past her own confirmation bias. Part of the good thing about democracy is having some stirrers and shakers that upset the applecart and bring in new perspectives. It's pretty rare on the staid, conservative, pipe-and-slippers IOM, but the thing to note is that it's OK to express alternative opinions. It doesn't mean they have to be adopted. That being said, the prospect of a tiny town-council-sized government wading into middle east politics is ridiculous, an exercise in virtue-signaling. Whenever things like this are considered, the main focus should be on the benefits for the IOM. Nothing good for the IOM will come of blundering into a complex multi-national conflict based on some naive student-union outrage.

Troll farms. Much of the divisive media content that's been rumbling on for years probably sources from there. Hostile regimes have figured out it's easier to break enemy societies from within, to turn groups against each other, to promote passive, anti-government thinking to weaken military capacity. A few social media campaigns can turn genders against each other, age groups against each other, sexualities against each other, races against each other. Send naive alternative types out on the streets, convinced that they are saving the planet when they're actually just destabilising their own society. Before his demise, Prigozhin's "Internet Research Agency" was saturating social media and online sources with divisive commentary, generated by a paid army of trolls based in St. Petersburg. It makes me wonder how much of the social media trends have been sourced from weaponised media. Every time I see gender panic, anti-male, newspeak, civil disobedience, anti-boomer, anti-ethnic, anti-trans, anti-LGBT, I wonder if the mob with torches started as a campaign in a troll farm. The whole anti-5g campaign started on a now-banned Russian channel in the USA. It was theorised it was a response to interference with military technology, possibly because 5g was affecting long-range military radar. It didn't take much to get the headcases convinced that it was some kind of sinister plot, and they started doing Russia's work for them

It's a two-edged sword. One one hand the IOM definitely needs workers to drive economic growth, but on the other hand it's good protection against the nepotistic "jobs for the boys" attitude that sometimes creeps in. IMHO, part of the quality of life on the IOM is due to the screening questions that used to be asked at work permit time - there was always an obligation to provide details of criminal activity, and permits were denied for robbers, burglars, murderers and rapists and the like. No job meant no incentive to move here and contribute to wider societal issues.

There are a lot of Youtubers that say that the earth is flat and that Donald Trump is the messiah. Doesn't make them right, and a lot of Youtube (like much of the media) is driven by personal agendas rather than facts. A lot of boomers desperately want it to be an EV because they're threatened by them, in the same way that their forefathers electrocuted elephants to prove how unsafe it was to have AC electro-trickery in your house. So far all the commentary from official sources (such as the actual firefighters) has said it was a diesel and I'd tend to believe them over a tinfoil-hatted Youtuber. I'm waiting for the results of the inquiry, who knows if it was accidental/deliberate/diesel/hybrid. Range Rover diesels did actually have a recall related to vehicle fires early in their history though.

Good question to ask ! If you read the article I posted on ferry fires in the last page or so, you'll see the opinion of a firefighter that's tested burning a number of EVs from different generations. Technology has advanced over the generations, and he pointed out that in the newer-model Tesla that was tested, the fire they induced didn't spread to the entire battery, but was limited to the single cell where the fire was deliberately started. There are no doubt some advances to be made in battery containment, but it's clearly been thought-about - I note from the firefighter article that they didn't note any damage to the decks under the vehicles, despite them deliberately starting a significant fire.

You're missing some vital context on that - it wasn't a director of Toyota, it was an opinion from the vice president of sales and marketing for Toyota Australia. He was talking specifically about Australia at the moment, where the majority of electricity comes from coal-fired sources, so the environmental benefits aren't as clear-cut as elsewhere. For context : It's right in a sense that the environmental arguments for uptake of EVs don't make sense in Australia at a point in time where electricity itself is generating huge emissions and there's no plans to change. That's the reason why in other more advanced countries, EVs are a part of a wider strategy - converting electricity generation to renewable sources, and using that zero-emission generation to fuel vehicles, either through EVs alone or by generating renewable fuel such as hydrogen. It also overlooks the other arguments for EVs. People don't just buy EVs because of emissions. They also buy because of performance, cheapness (Citroen Ami, anyone ?), lower maintenance, convenience of charging at home (maybe from a solar panel), and concerns about the impact of funnelling funds into oil-producing regimes with terrible human rights records. You're also overlooking the fact that EVs doesn't mean "cars". It means boats, buses, delivery vans, motorcycles, scooters, e-scooters. Fitting a hybrid engine into a e-motorcycle would probably mean adding some extra wheels to support the huge increase in size and weight, adding maybe a roof to keep the rain off, maybe some extra seats. Suddenly that's a car.

Don't know, would presumably be covered by SOLAS regulations. AFAIK all vehicle fires would release toxic fumes, so there would be some provision you'd think.

That's a blanket statement that doesn't align with the facts. I already posted a link to a professional firefighter's assessment of EV fires on ferries, the nature of the fires, the development in technology and the means of extinguishing them. Just to prevent us going back to square one and going through the same perceptions over and over, have a read of it. https://cfpa-e.eu/new-knowledge-about-battery-fires-in-electric-cars-on-ferries/

Nope, that's not how maths works. Percentages don't change as the numbers go up. The total number of fires would go up as the number of vehicles grows, but the percentage of fires remains unchanged.