Disqus - Latest Comments for tonydyer

Re: ‘Bristol is not, and never should be, a one-party dictatorship’

tonydyer — Fri, 25 May 2018 06:44:14 -0000

What planet is Don Alexander living on?

The city is suffering from cuts to local government funding instigated by the Tories.

We have decisions being made by a Labour cabinet with only one representative from south Bristol despite south Bristol providing a third of Labour councillors.

South Bristol has by far the most neighbourhoods in the 10% most deprived in the city. It has the lowest level of students going to University in the country and some of the worse unemployment blackspots in the South West with many South Bristolians having to travel across the city to Avonmouth, Severnside and the Northern Fringe to find jobs.

Yet he turns his fire on the people of Bedminster and Southville who don't vote in Tory councillors (unlike Avonmouth), and haven't voted in a Tory MP since the 1930's (unlike his part of Bristol) claiming they dominate the city!

What we are guilty of is electing decent Labour and Green councillors to represent us. It is not our fault that the people of Avonmouth and Lawrence Weston have elected a muppet.

Re: Features: EatDrink24/7 recommendations: best of south Bristol

tonydyer — Sun, 04 Jun 2017 04:22:53 -0000

Zazu's Kitchen has closed. It's now The Malago.

Re: Bio

tonydyer — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:53:25 -0000

James, of course the implications of my first paragraph does not neccessarily lead to the narrow conclusions that I drew, in the same way that the implication of reducing our carbon emissions to 4.5 tonnes per household does not lead to the narrow conclusions that you drew. That was the point. We both chose options that suited our arguments.

But let's look at this consensus idea a bit further;

"our understanding of the basic warming effect of CO2, and the contribution of human emissions to that effect are well founded in physical sciences"

Well I will certainly agree that we have reached consensus upon that statement. The Synthesis Report put it another way, on the very first page:

"The scientific evidence has now become overwhelming that human activities, especially the combustion of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate in ways that threaten the well-being and continued development of human society."

Do we still have consensus?

Re: Bio

tonydyer — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:40:51 -0000

My pennorth worth is;

All-out elections once every four years - if for nothing else then for the potential cost savings, and the break from political campaigning. Move towards one councillor per ward (35) elected on FPTP, and then 15 councillors selected from a list to make the council better represent the share of total votes cast.

Finally each ward councillor to be assigned a budget to be spent at ward level in co-operation with a voluntary ward council elected once every four years from individuals resident within the ward, with the ward council having responsibility for those council operations to which the principle of subsidiarity can be successfully applied.

There you go - something old (FPTP), something new (PR), something borrowed (four-year elections), something blue (individual councillor's budget - ask Nick Yarker),

Re: Bio

tonydyer — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:09:36 -0000

If we accept the alternative implied by James’ opening paragraph, namely that human carbon emissions are NOT causing catastrophic climate change then we have no choice but to conclude that the recognised national scientific bodies of every developed nation (not to mention our principle seats of learning like Oxford and Cambridge, business organisations like the CBI and their corporate membership, and of course the leaders of major political parties including the Conservative Party) consist either of frauds or incompetents.

Unlike James, I am not prepared to let that slide because it has major implications for a world in which science underlies much of our everyday lives – for example, affecting our confidence that the Large Hadron Collider won't create a "God" particle that will destroy the planet, reducing trust in the principles that guide the workings of auto-pilots in jet aircraft, and undermining the belief that microwaving your TV dinner isn't going to fry your brain at the same time as cooking your food. The conclusion is quite simple, if you quite happily use the microwave, don’t run into the basement screaming every time a plane flies overhead and are only remotely interested in the search for the Higgs Boson rather than sitting in the corner of the room shaking and terrified whilst muttering “the end of the world is nigh!”, then I suggest that implies that you don’t think that the overwhelming majority of scientists are fraudulent charlatans selling their “expert” opinions to the highest bidder (or rather in the case of ExxonMobil versus the Corn Street chuggers: the lowest bidder) – in which case you have to accept that climate change is happening, the general trend is a warming one, and, almost certainly, anthropogenic carbon emissions are a prominent cause of this.

A world in which every household in Bristol is restricted to an average of just 4.5 tonnes of carbon emissions does not have to equate to the alarmist idea of “bronze age” living that James’ appears to think it would. As just one example it has been perfectly feasible for some time now to build homes (and, in fact, several thousand have already been built in Germany and other European countries) that are able to maintain the average temperature required for comfort in the majority of British homes (19 degrees) without the need to use any active heating elements whatsoever – and as heating contributes over 80% of the energy requirements of a typical domestic property…..well, I am sure you can do the maths – the point is that the people who live in those homes have not returned to some bronze age existence despite having cut their residential energy usage by 80%.

What WILL lead to us living something akin to a bronze age lifestyle is burying our heads in the sand having based our decisions on rather dubious websites that tell us there is nothing to worry about, rather than the detailed, objective and scientifically based studies produced by those who have access to the latest data and the skills required to interpret that data correctly - studies that are telling us that, yes there is a problem and the sooner we apply ourselves to it the greater the chance of reducing its effects.

Personally, like James, I'm a lot more optimistic about all this. However my own optimism is guided by the fact that the human race has proven to be remarkably innovative and adaptive, and when it does recognise a challenge can resort to considerable ingenuity to resolve its problems. However this will only happen when we focus on the problem in order to solve it.

The sort of focused decision-making required is similar to that in which the British population acquiesced to the unwelcome but neccessary lowering of their levels of consumption in the 1940s (including coping with a 80% reduction in food imports) in the face of the clear and present danger of Hitler's panzers across the channel – thankfully for us today they made the necessary decision rather than trying to convince themselves that the panzers were not there........or even if they were, it would involve too much discomfort to defeat them so they might as well unfurl the white flags!

PS James, the 0 in postcodes does not signify industrialisation merely that it is one of 10 digits available to identify a SECTOR within a Postcode DISTRICT. BS is one of 124 national postcode AREAs, which are then subdivided into districts (there are 46 registered under BS but only 39 are live) identified by either a single or double digit code. Together the Area and the District make up the OUTCODE (for example BS6) which is separated from the INCODE by a single space. Within the Incode, the sector is identified by a single digit (for the BS Area there are 191 sectors) and is then followed by two alphabetic characters that identify a WALK. The whole conglomeration makes up the POSTCODE of which there are 41,653 in the BS Area of which only 26,712 are live.

Yours, The Pedantic Postman.