I suspect that’s some thinking internally too. Wait until you have more political capital.

Unfortunately, at the moment the government isn’t even committed to going past Birmingham so at the moment we paid a lot of money to slow down the west coast main line in order to relieve capacity for Milton Keynes. So I guess in terms of priorities I’d say getting it up to north Scotland more important

Technically it was precisely designed to be connect directly to HS1 avoiding Euston/St Pancras altogether before the bean counters decided the tunneling was too expensive then it was designed to at least interconnect with an easy interchange with HS1 (E.g. through a new bridge between stations) then the beans counters decided that bothering to get into London at all was too expensive. Finally, we have a decision that half the number of platforms we need in London will be built ensuring we either cripple it’s performance for decades or end up spending even more retrofitting the station at a later date.

Thanks Treasury!

I read something about how the best outputs are done using a blend of make-up/models with CGI adding the layer of realism on top so pure CGI is worse but film studies pursue that because its cheaper and outsourcable compared with a heavy unionised make-up/prop workers.

But will it go past Birmingham

Don’t leave us hanging - what was the one book that was so bad?

Not sure how serious this comment is but these are anomalies against expected behaviour from models. These models include historical data with the addition of how we expect the changes we are making to impact it with the best knowledge we have of how the systems work.

So its not saying its surprising that Australia is hot this time of year it’s saying it markedly hotter than we expect or can explain using everything we understand about the climate.

Ebbsfleet should be on the cards but we also need to be getting on with Crossrail 2 and 3 at least. I’ll hold my breath.

Will order a review of prosecutions but won’t do the fare reform we need and allows above inflationary increases to cost

I feel duty bound to say that the DLR came about because Thatcher was trying to cheap out on a jubilee extention and that there’s been much more cost since the initial cost to bring it up to the current level of operation.

That’s not overtly a criticism perhaps a cheaper MVP that you can get over the line politically and upgrade along the way might be the right way to do it but I wonder if it would have been cheaper to do it at the start

What a waste of money it was. For a similar price we got 13 miles of DLR

My understanding is that this will require new designing and consulting stages of phase 2. We have already spent about £2billion on Phase 2 which is likely not recoverable so you would need to respend at least a significant fraction of that on new design consultation and lawyers etc. So any cost savings you expect from different design requirements would need to be much greater than that (probably around 3-4% of total cost).

Yes slower services allows more flexibility with alignments but it comes at a cost of larger fleet sizes and likely more warehousing requirements(unless you reduce the passenger capacity to correspond). Speed was looked at in the original plans and found that reducing the speed somewhat did not reduce overall costs that much but did reduce the outcomes quite a lot.

The biggest problem is in the way costs have been amalgamated and communicated. HS2 had lumped in some really major project works that needed to happen anyway (notably rebuilding Euston that is currently not for for purpose for current passenger numbers) alongside at least two new stations to facilitate interconnections with the rest of the network. In other countries thought would come under separate budget lines and not look like one project.

The other big cost factor for HS2 was simply to demand more from it. We required it to be incredibly good at avoiding as much ecological disruption as possible and that meant more expensive tunnelling. It would have been the UKs only climate resilient line in the country partly as a result. So as another commenter said if its cheaper (which I would stake money it won’t be significantly) it will be at the cost of much less care towards the environment and offering a much less future proof outcome. If we wish to meet climate obligations we need massive increases in rail usage and that only begins to be possible if you free up this scale of capacity from the rest of the line.

The other thing to say is the cost is a bit if a fiction in itself. The cost is paid for by borrowing against future revenues of the service so to downgrade the service to save 1% of cost and you potentially downgrade the return even more which means you could actually cost the treasury more. This isn’t money that is available for anything else despite how its been reported.

Its just so tragic.

Such nonsense to suggest any new line could be built quicker than HS2. Any new route would need to go through the same consultation and design process HS2 did i.e. years delay. So its shovel ready HS2 or new line with uncertain risks and costs and time frames that’s the choice l.

If you want to review HS2 fine look at where there are issues you can resolve whilst building fine but don’t pretend there’s some mythical option which avoids all the issues inherent in a project of this scale.

Took me a while to dig out my copy but very much not. The next sections of the diary are:

It is. I liked the film but they reworked some elements of it. I don’t think it does the book justice.

Love this!

“Enjoys” is not how I would describe it.

This is from The Prestige by Christopher Priest in case any one wonders. It’s a good book!

I’m pretty sure it’s real. I met someone once who worked in materials research for food and they said that modelling was big there because the scope for experimentation is more limited. In materials for construction where they wanted to change a property they could play around with adding new additives and seeing what happens. For food though you can’t add anything beyond a limited set of chemicals that already have approval from the various agencies* and therefore they look at trying to fine tune in other ways.

So for chocolate, for example, they control lots of material properties by very careful control of temperature and pressure as it solidifies. This is why if chocolate melts and resolidifies you see the white bits of milk that don’t remain within the materia.

*Okay you can add a new chemical but that means a time frame of over a decade to then get approval. I think the number of chemicals that’s happened to is very very small and that’s partly because the innovation framework of capitalism is very short term.

Yes I agree that the headline and article is silly to reference memes and undermines the study as a whole which seems more sound.

I know loads of people of take hundred of photos a day and then pay a cloud hoster (or use a “free” service) to store it indefinitely and never look back at it again.

Cloud storage isn’t straight forwardly just hard storage because its kept in data centers such that it can be downloaded at any point.

Cloud storage is replacing any sense of needing a digital archivist processes for people and businesses because it much cheaper and easier to store it just in case the data is needed again rather than actually strategetically thinking about what data is important to keep and what isn’t.