openspaceman

In the context of what's been said about sugar beet and milk down the drain this happens some years, and you cannot switch off milk from a high yielding cow, Same with throwing over quota fish overboard. Similarly you cannot expect a farmer to stop producing beet. This is why I said farming is volatile which is why support is used. Also think how taxation has an effect on a person who's income varies greatly from year to year. A sole trader is only allowed a limited amount of leeway by the taxman if they have a bumper year but if they have a year when profit dips below the tax threshold? Yes I am sure a lot of farms depend on subsidy.

That was milking on a shoestring, the farm was hanging on by the skin of his teeth by the time he sold up. Poor old gent but he was cantankerous.

Do you mean King Edwards school by Witley station. If so the chestnut all around there was coppiced every 4 years for the walking stick factory which was just down the road. Closed a few years ago so the coppice grew on.

No ashpan then, do you just shovel ash out?

I think you are spot on with that but I think the mechanism was a bit different. Because the short termism of the shareholding classes after WW1 meant dividends and cashing in were the rule it meant there was little re investment. In turn the common market gave the financial sector a massive boost which was amplified by vastly increased mortgage lending in the 80s. The knock on from this is wealth diverged and the wealthy classes spent their money on services making manufacturing wages less attractive. So our labour rates became linked to our financial sector rather than our industrial competitors' rates Yes but the US has vastly better resources to counter the short term share culture, we had grown in victorian times because we had access to empire which disappeared (largely in exchange for american financial assistance as they won the war.) and with that access to cheap resources.

Not necessarily if they are a part of a large farming business, they will have a bigger proportion of subsidies, their accountants will make sure of that but as with any investment in capital equipment the rate of return on investment will favour a big capital spend that eliminates a unit of labour. We saw this in my industry when harvesters came in, two men working long shifts displaced about 20 men doing motor manual harvesting with tractors and trailers. That they messed up the soil structure and the matrix of trees in thinnings was one of the unforeseen outcomes, life adapts to change but it gets harder as you get older. Being a grumpy old man I don't see the advantage of much of it. Could this be to do with transport costs and population density? My father was born in Aberdeen but AFAIK he never went back to scotland after childhood till I threw him off big ben.

Farming is a volatile thing, some years there is glut and some scarcity. Farmers do well in scarcity because of the price elasticity of food, when you have insufficient you will pay a lot but as soon as you are satisfied you will buy no more at any price. The government intervenes to stabilise prices and when we originally joined the common market this europe wide intervention caused various food mountains and attracted a lot of fraud, not to mention the cost of administering the scheme in wages for two levels of civil servants.. While the CAP seemed to favour poor farmers in France its effect here was the opposite with big landowners gaining immensely while small marginal farmers struggled. My first job was on a dairy farm and a herd of 35 cows paid one man;s wages, now because of price pressure on milk (supermarkets pay less than cost of production) only big dairies with heavy investment in mechanised/robot milking can survive and one man has to deal with 200 cows. I think we now import a lot of our milk from economies with lower wages.

L&S list genuine just under 10 quid inc VAT and they normally get it to you in 5 days.

My experience was mostly car and bike engines, which do not have ports in the bore, most bore wear showed up just under TDC. Nikasil is so much harder that it doesn't seem to wear but it is only a 0.4mm layer.

Yes I believe so.

Not really, unfettered capitalism doesn't take the commons into account, it is a means to apply all the resources available to create more wealth, It has become the most successful system so far, outcompeting feudalism, centralisation etc.. It requires no limits to growth and the devil takes the hindmost. So if the transport cost is competitive then it pays a producer to transport globally. If regulation fails to address the external costs then it's only consumer choice...

cue quote from Mandy Rice-Davies 😁

You are confusing burning fossil fuels and increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with burning fossil fuels in an efficient engine that emits more particulates, which are damaging to health, than a less efficient engine.

Does the gap change as the ring is moved up and down the bore?

That's 40 thou; way too big a gap by a factor of 5, lots of gas escaping.

I actually said regulation, not state regulation, but yes generally voluntary codes fail so the state is the overarching authority. Anyway as with many of these discussions our views are so widely divergent there is no point continuing, I have propounded some of my views on the subject, you reject them and therefore no common ground to make sensible discussion possible.

By pyrolysing it. Fixed carbon in woody waste is about 15% of the dry matter in woody waste, less in non lignin containing stuff. At lower temperatures there is more yield but the tars in the char are less recalcitrant but still fairly long lasting. The term coined for using this char to store carbon in the soil long term, by a late ex-pat, Peter Read, is biochar. The challenge is to make this biochar from high moisture content green waste and utilise the heat in the process.

non sequitur anyway what makes you think I think current government in UK is any good at regulation, which is what we were discussing. In fact everything points to that growth in wealth disparity since 1970 is going the way to favour people with wealth aspirations by removing resources from regulators.

This is patently not so, without regulation we would have far more pollution, not to mention slavery and other abuses of workers.

It seems to me that local government attracts a lot of people looking for security and avoiding working but that's another matter. As to green waste; I think that too came as a result of someone in a LA realising that while there was no mandate to collect it once it was collected and sent to a composting facility it counted as recycling and in one hit put the recycling percentage up. As I have mentioned here before I think, once collected, green waste would be better used by fixing the carbon in it rather than composing it and returning the carbon to the atmosphere

Yes a properly regulated market can but as I said government takes a while to adapt whereas there/s always somone looking for a wrinkle to make some easy money without concern for the consequences for others.

I feel for your sentiment but it was an ill thought out directive that gave a financial reward in the form of recycling credits for stuff that was exported. This went entirely against the ethos of dealing with waste locally. It didn't take much for the entrepreneurial types to see they could collect rubbish, export it anywhere and claim these credits whereas the legitimate recycling industry had to actually do some recycling to claim theirs. Such is the capitalist system we live in, it allows any innovation then takes a while to react and regulate the new activity once someone realises it is done at a cost to the commons we all depend on. In the meantime fortunes have been made. Just consider how long we have had a two, or more, bin system, 20 years yet? Also consider that segregation near to where the final user wishes to discard something keeps the "resource" cleaner and purer, once you start mixing it it becomes of less value to the recycler. e.g. originally glass bottles were kept separate by my local waste collection but many people did not feel they should be responsible for keeping it separate, the council relented and allowed glass bottles of any colour, tins, paper and plastic food containers all in one bin. This immediately devalued the glass cullet but worse it contaminated the paper and card with shards of glass after sorting and damaged the re pulping machines, making the waste paper fraction less valuable and reduced the yield. However it increased the total claimed recycling and the chief executive was awarded a number of tens of thousand to his already corpulent salary for the increased performance.

Probably and I doubt I ever ate a whole one. From a very distant memory it was a sweet taste wasn't it? My mother talked about kids eating them during rationing when anything sweet was sought out.

Yes Yes That's plain ambiguous, yes you get more volume for the same weight so it looks a bigger load.

We started designing an incinerator for nappies for a care home, about 20 years ago, it all looked promising and there's mostly only aliphatic (straight chain plastics) in them, the sodium polyacrylate that is used to absorb the liquid shouldn't be a problem either, it is apparently a problem in landfill.. The main problem would be the effect of all that moisture on the combustion conditions of the burner.