
Carlos
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Of course we could suggest that an AHS site at Clickamin with a 3 way share of sports / arts / venue facilities in 3 separate but inter-linked buildings might be a more workable solution overall.....
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Re Jonathan Wills' letter I would see some opportunities to combine some of the facilities proposed for Mareel with the new AHS, the educational/rehearsal stuff could fit, and I imagine the school hall could be a kind of upgraded Garrison for occasional film / concert events. I don't think it would be able to be the same kind of facility overall that Mareel is proposed to be, and I don't think it would be anywhere near feasible to have it open for music gigs, and I can't see where adding to the AHS brief is going to match up to reducing the AHS costs. If Mareel is blocked, then adding to the AHS facilities is an option to look at, but I think in the end we would pay 50% of the costs for 25% of the facility.
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Assuming it will all happen by changes in people's behaviour is optimistic to say the least, but I would guess there will be quite a bit of peer pressure starting to act as taxes for CO2 removal / offsetting / damage limitation research and projects start to bite. The main problem is just how bad things would be before we got to that stage.
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The 2008/09 SIC capital programme http://www.shetland.gov.uk/capitalprogramme/ShetlandIslandsCouncil-CapitalProgramme2.asp There's £2M in that year for Mareel, and just over £2M of slippage highlighted - projects that have not been allocated all the money they asked for (typically they would get 2/3 at the moment), but who have first call on anything going spare. They are all useful stuff no doubt, but it does show that axing Mareel funding does not "save" £2M this year, all it means is that the £2M is spent on different things. I haven't found a full 5 year programme or whatever, but it's likely hiding there somewhere.
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Give it 2 years and washing powder will be advertised as "carbon neutral" You're both right. Burning gas is not carbon neutral. Generating more energy from gas that is already burnt is a carbon neutral change to the process, even if the process is not - basically an efficiency saving.
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Again, the business proposal is for Mareel to not need any subsidy for running costs after the first few years. No subsidy. It does not say it will pay back the capital costs, that one off expenditure would have to be seen to be worth it for the benefits that having the place would bring in over its lifetime. You can argue that the business model is not solid, although I don't think it has been questioned by anybody that has been through the figures, but on their own numbers they are not planning to ask for a subsidy. There is plenty to debate on the pros and cons of the reality of the proposal, maybe we could try that stuff?
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Because it would not make a return on the investment. The Mareel analysis has them making enough income to more or less cover the running costs. A business setup would want to cover the running costs, it's £9M mortgage payments and a healthy profit before they would look at it. That's the point I was making there isn't one because a cinema isn't financially viable in an area where the population is so small and scattered. The case "for" is that if you invest the capital money, the running costs will be self financing, with no future revenue drains year on year. That may or may not be decided to be acceptable, but as has been discussed, is a more positive long term outlook than a lot of other council projects where you spend the inital costs and then that commits you to spending more each year to not "waste" the investment. That would obviously not be acceptable for a purely private venture, as it would not get back the capital. There is a case that the council should maybe look to get it's capital money back too, but that kind of change of approach would have very heavy implications on everything council related.
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Because it would not make a return on the investment. The Mareel analysis has them making enough income to more or less cover the running costs. A business setup would want to cover the running costs, it's £9M mortgage payments and a healthy profit before they would look at it. To follow from Caeser's point, in terms of viability is it not better that the building would be set up to cover a combined 85% of music venue/cinema/music development/media hub needs? To make worthwhile facilities in each of those things individually would cost more, and give us something that is less likely to be financially viable. Regardless of your feelings on the need for Mareel, I think a big positive of the design so far is that they have added extra functionality to the same sized building as the original proposals by cutting back on the "fancy bits" and making the spaces as flexible as they can be, instead of what has often been known to happen on Council projects, doubling the size and budget.
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Just read the NS article on Carbon Capture and Storage.... and did not realise it was quite so bad...... industry wants $20 billion for R&D and 25 years to make a commercial CCS power plant..... it would use between 10 and 40% of the power station's output to remove up to (maybe) 85% of the CO2.... and add 75 to 100% to the energy production costs... Seems to be some debate starting on how much coal we have left too. http://www.moneyweek.com/file/40638/are-we-heading-for-peak-coal.html
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Yup, basically there are a whole range of unknowns because of the difficulty in making measurements accurately enough. I have read one theory that was able to explain how it was only an apparent slowing of the probes purely in terms of a mis-alignment of the transmission dish..... there is something that is not explained, and one explanation could be errors in our physics theories..... but there are others too...... when we find out, either we will have new physics to work on, or a better understanding of the practical effects of those we already knew about - a win either way.
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"Now, Kjell Tangen, a physicist at the firm DNV in Hovik, Norway, says tweaking the law of gravity in a variety of ways cannot explain the anomaly – while also getting the orbits of the outer planets right. After modifying gravity in ways that would match the Pioneer anomaly, he inevitably got wrong answers for the motion of Uranus and Pluto." http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12070-exotic-cause-of-pioneer-anomaly-in-doubt.html
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Another +1 on the tone of the debate lately. I'd agree that now the question is about the balance of what we gain and what we loose with each possible proposal, now and for the future, and I hope that with more information coming over the summer we will start to get some more solid idea on the pluses and minuses.
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Am I assuming the obvious, or is that the difference between the area of land "inside" the wind farm and the area of land disturbed by its construction?
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The economics work out that colonising the galaxy is almost inevitable - to collonise the whole galaxy, you only have to pay for the first wave of spaceships, after they settle, they produce the second wave for "free" and so on.... it's like the ultimate pyramid scheme. Cue Fermi paradox...... disclaimer:- building the first wave might not be easy
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Almost no project the SIC spends money on is self sustaining, schools, leisure centers, old folks homes, ferries.... they all cost more to run than they take in in payments/government funding. Different people have different views on the importance of each area of spending, but I think the realistic way ahead has to be for any new capital spending to be on projects that do not commit us to unsustainable levels of revenue costs - that at least prevents the situation getting any worse.
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To clarify, the projection does not say it will ever pay back the SIC capital investment, or even that it will turn much of a profit, but that it should be able to cover it's own running costs. I'd agree that the accuracy of those figures remains to be seen, but it is a more positive starting point than some other funded projects.
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Supermarkets in Shetland - prices, ethics and experiences
Carlos replied to breeksy's topic in Shetland News
The interesting thing will be to see if they match their mainland prices, or just go for "competitive".... which would likely end up not much different from the current situation. Do they have a policy on that?- 2,063 replies
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The projected for the running costs need minimal SIC funding to start off, and show a break even after a few years. Those may or may not turn out to be good estimates, but I'd assume they've had enough of a going over by council officials to show they are feasible at least. On that basis Mareel would seem to offer a better investment than a lot of the things the council is going for....
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If somebody can tell me sizes I'll knock up a scale drawing of something like that. So far google tells me Burradale - 45m tower, 47m diameter blades VE proposals - 90m tower, 100m blades Blackpool tower - 157m Not much luck on the power station or the flare stack. Although a picture like that can give you relative scales, it does not do much for the subjective stuff..... "how big will the VE turbines look from Voe compared with looking at the Burradale turbines from the Brig o Fitch" type comparisons, which will hopefully come in the next lot of VE updates.
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Agreed it's cold, but remember, average "global temperature goes up" does not mean "shetland gets warmer". Predictions for the next 50 years or so are generally agreed on Shetland being a bit warmer, a bit wetter, a bit windier and the stronger storms becoming a bit more frequent. Depending on the individual weather that could mean just about anything day to day, but would suggest "wind and rain" winters with the occasional surprise.
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Pretty similar to Einstein then Einstein started with an assumption that gravitational mass and inertial mass were always equal, and derived GR from there, with it's warping of space by mass model for gravitational forces, but what mass is, why anything has a mass, why there is inertia.....not covered under Einstein's GR.
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The accelerating expansion of the universe is one of the leading research subjects at the moment, and whichever explanation you go for - dark energy, variable cosmological constant, string theory, brane cosmology - you are going beyond Einstein's formulation of GR. Some theories look to add to GR, which is not a bad idea when a theory has held up to experimental study for so long, and others propose a simpler explanation is a modification or replacement of GR. Vacuum energy is going to come into it somewhere along the way, but is an area that is not well covered by theory at the moment, with predictions for it's effects from quantum theory 100 orders of magnitude greater than that observed...... Whatever the cause of the expansion, it appears to be an effect that only acts noticeably on the intergalactic scale, with established theories not showing any measurable deviations on the smaller scale, so while a new overall theory may come along that brings them all together and adds new insights, I think it's safe to say that gravity on earth acts pretty much as Newton showed.
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Some new findings on the link between CO2 levels and temperature. Story - http://www.scenta.co.uk/Home/810161/global-warming-predictions-are-underestimated-say-scientists.htm Research paper - http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2005GL025044.shtml Short version, they seem to be linked to each other in both directions. The paper studies the changes during the "little ice age" in the 1600s and finds that an initial temperature drop because of reduced solar heating was followed after 50 years by a drop in CO2 levels (more CO2 gets stored when it is colder) which amplified the effects, dropping the temperature further. If you apply that to now, the CO2 we have been putting out will have raised the temperature, which will cause more CO2 to be released during the natural cycle, which will increase the effects of the initial changes. The estimate is that this effect will raise temperatures 50% more than models have predicted.
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Good timing! One of the big unresolved things in the Big bang theory is why there is an imbalance of matter and anti-matter left over, since theories suggest the big bang itself should have been very very closely balanced between the two. It had been suggested that this may be linked to the fact that the weak nuclear force, unlike the other forces, does not act equally on mater and anti-matter. An experiment carried out recently has shown a stronger effect on this CP violation than the standard model predicts. http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0659 That's science.... not good news if you want to pick one thing and never never have to adapt, but fascinating if you see it all as an on-going journey towards new ideas.
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Possibly interesting physics, but not so much to do with Einstein, as they say themselves they are extending things to a hypothesized combination of GR and QM beyond any formulation that Einstein presented. I've maybe been reading too much, but I also don't find the quantum bounce any more "crazy" than the big bang, or an endless infinite universe for that matter.... they are all far beyond anything we are comfortable thinking about. Not quite sure if it's Einstein, GR, QM or physics in general that is causing you concerns.....hard to tell from the stream of the thread. Also hard to tell if anything anybody else is saying is of interest to you, or if you're just keeping us up to date with links to your own reading.......