Carlos

When you are building anything somebody essentially choses the level of risk they are happy to go with - you can design for 1 in 50, 1 in 500 or 1 in 5000 year events provided you are given the budget to cover the incresed costs. You can also design smarter, and making things fail safely has been given a lot more thought now than for Fukushimo. Again, their are varying risks, costs and advantages with different means of generating power and you pay your money and take your choice......

Perhaps simple regular updates linking to the SIC website where the full informative document(s) or information is held might be an idea. I never check out the SIC website unless it is to phone housing repairs (I've memorised the number now), but if there were regular updates via Facebook (I don't tweet) I'd be more likely to have a look-see and learn more about what was happening. I suppose it depends on the circumstances and the amount of detail people are looking for, but if you imagine in bad snow, individual messages for each school open/shut, each leisure centre open/shut, each ferry route on schedule or not, road reports for various areas and updated a few times a day..... Could easy be up to 50 posts per day? Unless you are keeping up it'd take while to trawl and find the things you were interested in?

Facebook/Twiter communication is worth looking at, but my impression is that there could be an awful lot of chunks of information, and it might need a fair bit of through about how to make each individual messages easy to find? A revamped interface to the SIC website, adding information bulletins organised by subject and searchable, and making it easier to find the information that is already there would be very helpful too.

Any details on the brief for the new £450k fixed link study? Is there an appendix to the Council report maybe? I can see why you might have a quick look over the old technical study, update the pricing and think about likely funding sources and timing..... but can't really see what work is needed to that value?

But isn't that the main point about Peak Oil - peaking of the achievable production rates?

It's not that people are dishonest, it's that they have thought about it, come to a conclusion about how they feel on an issue, and think that any other reasonable person who does the same is going to end up sharing their point of view...... Any consultation is about finding out those various points of view and how people will be affected and making sure that they have all been considered, but whether or not that will change the final proposals will depend on other factors too. Similarly with a referendum on VE. It would be a fair assumption that it might not be that different from the Shetland Times poll, something near to a 3 way split, so after the arguments about what they means in terms of support and majorities, the council will still decide something and 1/3 of people will still think that they council did not take proper account of their views......

And folk carrying out a consultation will say that the public never think it was a decent job unless it ends up agreeing with their own view. The truth as usual is likely somewhere in between the two....

China going ahead with development of Thorium reactors http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/01/china_thorium_bet/

Exactly. But suppose you have 10 toilets to keep open from your budget and you have been asked to make a 15% saving? You don't have the option to cut anything else, the budget is only for keeping toilets open, so your only option is to make the proposal to close toilets. It might not save much money in the grand scheme of things, but it saves the % you are supposed to find from your budget. Those are the proposals you will get if you ask for an even reduction in all budgets. Then the councillors will do some juggling and shuffling if they choose to prioritise some services.

Hmm, apparently that's not so. The SIC has to find 15% savings(7.5 this year and 7.5 next year) and as I understand it what's happening is that each depertment is coming forward with a list of possible cuts from their dept. Yup, could be, I'm not sure what percentages have been asked for from which budgets, and if they are all the same..... and then as you say there is also the potential for some areas being cut further to make up short-falls if there is public pressure or councillor objections to proposed cuts in other services.It does show though how any small individual cut will end up being looked at, as helping towards a % saving on a small budget, which is part of a service cost, which is part of a departments spending.... and so on.

Each budget has likely been given a percentage saving to find....so if your budget is public toilets and you have 10% saving to find somewhere.....

Appropriate respect from drivers is as likely to prevent an accident as reflective clothing is.....

I think people worry about erosion of the rights issue though. You can argue the same point for many situations in life, and while they might all start out as taking a small, sensible action, some people will see them as opening the door to more and more restrictions on personal freedom. If we are taking about runners wearing reflective clothing at night and then getting appropriate respect from drivers then I think that's a fair enough balance.

I'd agree that it makes a lot of sense to wear hi-viz gear in that situation, but wasn't there a case maybe 15 years back where someone walking at night was killed by a car, and the driver convicted because they were expected to know that was a possibility and to take suitable care?

I'm pretty sure it's been on mentioned somewhere before, but since I was reading it today... http://www.withouthotair.com/ Cuts through a lot of the spin, on both sides, on all kinds of energy/renewables issues.

Although of course, the council choosing to offer a subsidy for a route or not doesn't stop the bus company running a service on it if they want to....

It is not a normal Planning Application:- this is not the SIC granting permission, this is the SIC recommending approval to the Energy Consents Unit in Edinburgh. It is now for the ECU to decide yes/no and for them to place any conditions.

If there was a blackout on mentioning any car accident then there would presumably be some effect on driving from the assumption that accidents never happened. If every car accident that ever happened was given a full page report in every newspaper then the higher perception of risk would likely result in some people taking more care when driving.In the real life in-between situation, does anything make much difference on its own? Likely not. Does it make some small difference? Hard to say it doesn't?

After you found out about a car crash at a particular place you're sure that you wouldn't drive 1 or 2 mph slower round that bend for a day or two afterwards? Even subconciously?

Advice from the Institute of Advanced Motoring http://www.iam.org.uk/latest_news/cyclistsclaimyourlanesaysiam.html Basically cyclists should take "primary" position where they need to in order to be safe. Otherwise takes "secondary" position. Primary position is the middle of the lane, secondary position is roughly the nearside wheeltrack. It's not advised to go any closer to the edge of the road than that, as it puts you out of the line of sight of drivers and can encourage cars to squeeze past without pulling out to give enough space when there is on-coming traffic. The safe position to take on the road does not have that much to do with what is convenient for drivers, but don't hold them up unnecessarily. My note for cyclists - get decent front and rear lights and use them day and night at this time of the year.

Or possibly a pedestrian with a high paying job would pay more overall and not end up with vehicle use of the road at all? There's really no way of telling how much folk pay in total in tax contribution relative to how they use the road, only which individual taxes they pay. But yes, there is no doubt that all things being equal using a vehicle means you end up paying more individual taxes, the only question is whether paying that extra tax means you should be entitled to something extra in return, and if so what it would be. And then what extra benefits people who pay more than average tax in other individual areas should expect from their contributions...... Churchill started the process of removing the road tax as a fund for road works because "It will only be a step from this for motorists to claim in a few years the moral ownership of the roads their contributions have created" You could argue the point that that is a nice political body swerve to avoid direct accountability for the way in which the money was spent, or you could see it as more like an attempt to be inclusive, and not divide folk up by creating individual interests based on which separate taxes they pay..... Moving quite far away from the Staney Hill now though.....

Which gets more complicated when you factor in that income tax, vat, fuel duty, inheritance tax corporation tax and so on all go (or can go) towards roads spending too. So we don't know how much people are paying at the moment, even before we try to make any changes to how much we think they should pay....

And a road designed to carry that loading for a resonable lifespan is almost unaffected by cars, never mind cyclists or pedestrians. Well, a cyclist, horse rider or pedestrian already pays the same as a car driver with a Band A car, and 99% of drivers are also pedestrians if only for getting to and from the car, but should there be a direct link between what is paid and the dammage the use causes? Or per mile traveled? Or a fixed poll tax per person regardless of how they use roads?

Where do these figures come from? I'm not disputing them, but they seem fairly arbitrary round numbers. Yeah, pretty much rounded all round and about The first study was carried out in the US by physically driving trucks round and round a test circuit and seeing how much damages was caused. That found damage was proportional to the axle loading to the 4th power. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AASHO_Road_Test 4th power gives you quite steep curves , and more recent research says that it's maybe not as simple as that, but the 1 truck = 10,000 cars = 10,000 x 10,000 bikes gives an idea of the sort of magnitudes involved.

Bare in mind the differences between what has actually been said by scientists on past issues and on how politicians and the media have run with things for their own means......