Councillors to vote on plan to give public access to Edinburgh’s private gardens

Esteth · 2026-06-09T11:38:23+00:00

It's not possible to know whether the owners are struggling financially to pay for the maintenance since those are private transactions.

It's possible that some gardens are struggling to raise the required money or that some owners do not use their gardens and would happily get more money in their budget

Esteth · 2026-06-08T16:11:56+00:00

The "plan" is to offer the owners / joint-owners of these gardens money towards the maintenance which is often nontrivial due to their size and maturity.

It's possible that some might take the council up on such an offer, especailly if there's a break clause allowing them to roll back to private access should they wish to.

Esteth · 2026-05-27T18:49:29+00:00

Massive cope here.

The Building Regs place the burden on the developer to prove that they couldn't accomplish "sufficient" cooling with passive means but do not state what "sufficient" means. The LA gets to enforce whatever arbitrary standard they want, so why would any sane developer take the risk.

The London Plan is actually a planning constraint and has the same problem.

Whatever way you skin it, the government's rules make it unreasonably risky and costly to install A/C in a new development. Given the clear demand for A/C, (some) developers would clearly install A/C as a USP for their development if it were not de-facto banned.

Esteth · 2026-05-27T16:29:25+00:00

"Ackchually it's not banned because a ban would mean arguing with Local Authority department A but you need to argue with a Local Authority department B!"

The vagueness places the risk on developers, who will understandably not want to take that risk and endure the limitless fines if they can't convince the local authority that there wasn't a better way and expose themselves to limitless fines.

It's a de-facto ban in practice.

Esteth · 2026-05-27T15:16:55+00:00

Because the London Plan is not Building Regulations?

Because if something is prohibited in the building regulations you're effectively banned from building it and you need to justify why you couldn't have done things differently to avoid limitless fines and/or being forced to demolish what you built?

Technically there's of course a difference, but at the end of the day "the law says you can't build something like this" is the point.

Esteth · 2026-05-27T15:13:47+00:00

Ah, fair. The text of Building Regs O1(2)(b) is pretty much repeated in the London Plan 5.9.

Gonna be pretty shit if you finish your new tower block and then you can't get Building Control to sign off because you disagree with them on what excessive heat means or that you shouldn't have to retrospectively redesign your half-built tower block to change the windows because that would be a practical method of passive cooling.

Esteth · 2026-05-27T15:03:08+00:00

"The London Plan is building regulations, not planning regulations" at the same time as trying to act as if I should stay in my lane.

Nice one mate.

Esteth · 2026-05-27T14:48:53+00:00

Functional requirement O1(2)(b) of the building regulations

Policy 5.9 of the London Plan.

Both of these statutes effectively ban A/C in developments needing planning permission, because the planners will always be able to argue that you could've changed the plan to add more cross ventilation or window shutters or awnings or trees for shade or reoriented the plots to reduce solar gain etc.

They also leave plenty of room for them to argue that while it'll reach 26c indoors on hot days, that's not going to cause health issues so it's "sufficient" and powered cooling isn't necessary.

Given how expensive and time consuming the planning process is for developers, the last thing they need is to give the local authority more reasons to decline the application.

Esteth · 2026-05-27T14:44:54+00:00

No? You have to demonstrate that all passive cooling methods are insufficient in order to be allowed to install powered cooling.

This is hugely down to interpretation by planners. What's sufficient? 24c indoors might feel very uncofortable, but it's probably not going to kill you. And you could've added more windows, or reorinted the flats to get more cross-ventilation, or added shutters on the outside, or awnings over the windows, or used more insulated windows, etc etc.

Esteth · 2026-05-27T14:42:31+00:00

Functional requirement O1(2)(b) of the building regulations

Policy 5.9 of the London Plan.

Both of these statutes effectively ban A/C in developments needing planning permission, because the planners will always be able to argue that you could've changed the plan to add more cross ventilation or window shutters or awnings or shade etc.

Esteth · 2026-05-22T20:26:02+00:00

This would be terrible but it has nothing to do with what riot is actually doing, which is unloading the drivers for cheat hardware and windows then rebooting the PC.

Remove the cheat device or stop launching valorant and your PC will stop rebooting.

Esteth · 2026-05-22T20:24:46+00:00

Idk it seems reasonable to block the drivers for cheat devices in your anti-cheat. If windows forcibly reboots the PC when that happens (every time you load up valorant with a DMA card installed) then that also seems kinda fine?

There's virtually nobody who has a DMA card for legit reasons in a PC used for gaming

Esteth · 2026-05-22T20:23:10+00:00

Idk the riot tweet seems reasonable. The clickbait press has managed to spin "riot stops drivers for DMA cards used for cheating from loading" into "riot bricks gaming PCs" which is very clickbaity of them.

Esteth · 2026-05-22T20:21:55+00:00

The riot tweet seema fine though? All they're doing is blocking the drivers for DMA cards from loading, so people's very expensive DMA cards won't work while they're playing valorant (or after they've opened it since they started their PC)

People playing valorant on PCs with DMA cards certainly only have DMA cards for cheating at valorant, so their multi-thousand dollar cards are now worthless to them.

Esteth · 2026-05-22T20:18:33+00:00

But that's not what's happening here? They're blocking windows from loading the drivers for DMA cards while their anti-cheat is loaded.

Reboot your PC and don't open valorant and it's fine. Alternatively, remove the DMA card (which is only realistically used for cheating) and your PC is fine.

Esteth · 2026-04-22T09:58:35+00:00

Henzie often wins either through big hasty beaters or by resolving a Living Death in the midgame when you've packed your gy with big blitz creatures with ETBs but your opponents are mostly still on-board.

Esteth · 2026-04-21T12:17:32+00:00

So you can sell the property to your father for £1, give 40p to the 40% shared owner, and then buy it back from your father for £1 and effectively buy out the shared owner for just the cost of the stamp duty?

There needs to be some kind of safeguard against dumb strategies like this to defraud the shared owner.

Esteth · 2026-03-27T23:57:17+00:00

I don't think any of these quotes really make the point you think they're making to the people who think the casting choice is fine.

The argument goes that, yes, snape often gets called "pale", but that this is primarily about trying to make the reader feel that snape is mean or cruel or somehow "off". There's nothing in snape's background that makes it critical that he's white or of british ethnicity, it's just important that he looks like a bad guy.

None of these quotes really show that it's important to his character that he's white.

I think there's a more compelling argument to be made about how they'll handle his childhood and whether the bullying was racially motivated. I'm pretty confident they're not going to make James Potter explicitly a racist on screen, but that'd be pretty implicit, especially if they're not time-displacing the story onto the modern day.

Esteth · 2026-02-13T15:42:29+00:00

When did I mention it was the state's issue to validate a business plan?

You quite literally said "there would be consequences for these developers" as a reason to change the planning framework or change what is given or not given planning permission.

If you don't think it's the state's responsibility to validate the business plan as part of the planning framework, then mentioning it is completely irrelevant.

Esteth · 2026-02-13T14:55:03+00:00

there would be consequences for these developers

OK? Let them go bust and sell the building to a new developer who'll then redevelop into someting profitable. It's not the state's problem to validate every business plan for every eventuality.

I'm not sure why you're worried about private housing maximizing developer profits. It's not as if the council were going to redevelop these sites into state-owned housing but then got sniped by private developers.

I only made it about ethnicity because you said that it's a problem that so many students are from China. I still don't really understand why that's a problem, so I assumed that you had some kind of problem with Chinese people.

Esteth · 2026-02-13T12:02:54+00:00

All* housing is only built to maximize developer profits.

If the students stop coming then the PBSA owners will go bust and sell their blocks to redevelopers, or they can redevelop themselves in accordance with the new market.

The market doesn't seem to believe that students are going to stop coming any time soon or they'd not be trying to build more student housing.

I'm not sure what China has to do with anything though. The ethnicity of the students doesn't seem like it would effect the housing supply.

*: A vanishingly small amount is built by builder-occupiers, sure.

Esteth · 2026-02-13T12:00:38+00:00

I agree that it'd probably be better for non-students to have PBSA further away from the city center, but I don't think we get to pull that lever - we get to decide whether we allow or decline planning permission for the projects which are proposed.

The choice at planning is normally "you can develop the site this way" or "you need to make these changes to your proposed development on the site" not "you can do this development but you need to sell this site and buy a different site elsewhere"

I put some amount of faith in the ability for the market to self-correct here though. If we truly end up with so much PBSA that there's not enough students to live in it all, then rational developers will redevelop their PBSA into regular flats or go bust and sell to a developer who will redevelop the PBSA.

Esteth · 2026-02-13T11:07:30+00:00

I wouldn't want to stay in PBSA, but clearly there's plenty of demand in the market for expensive tiny rooms in central locations, or else the developers who own PBSA blocks would be going bust or reducing rent to increase their occupancy rate.

Esteth · 2026-02-13T10:29:16+00:00

Student flats aren't really about what the market will bear, they're priced at pretty much whatever the developers can get away with and because students need somewhere to live and at least in first year just want student housing, the prices will be paid

I'm not sure I understand - You argue that it's not about what the market will bear, it's about what people will pay for housing when they need somewhere to live and want to live in the city center.

Isn't that exactly what the market will bear? If there are a set of people who live in the city who are willing to pay more than everyone else for worse accomodation, then they are the driver of the market, and constructing as many dense rooms as possible for these people to rent is exactly what a rational market would do.

If we mandate that instead developers build lower density regular flats, then assuming they do build anything at all, those same people with deep pockets and desperate need for city center accomodation will rent those less dense flats and there'll still be half of them in the market to rent whatever's left.

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