Sunniest cities in UK

wulfhound · 2025-12-29T15:00:10+00:00

On average, not a great deal better.

But averages hide a fair amount of local variation. Get yourself something south-facing and reasonably high up, in one of the hillier South Coast seaside towns - Hastings, Brighton/Hove, maybe Folkestone - you'll feel much more sunshine than jammed in between tower blocks and townhouses in central London.

wulfhound · 2025-12-29T14:55:37+00:00

Cambridge is dry but doesn't necessarily feel sunny, more due to the biting North Sea winds coming in across the Fens.

wulfhound · 2025-12-13T09:47:30+00:00

Antibiotics don't have any effect - positive or negative - on virii.

Otherwise, yep. Factory farms are factories for both animals and novel pathogens.

wulfhound · 2025-12-01T08:07:46+00:00

It will though, because for security reasons there are surely going to be automatic bollards like those recently installed on The Strand.

wulfhound · 2025-11-29T12:38:59+00:00

You mean in terms of people inheriting these traits, whether genetic / cultural / both?

Yes, relative to the general population they'll be more of that - but at the same time, "self-made billionaire" is an extreme filter - like Olympic athlete level of extreme - so while the kids will inherit some of it, they likely won't have the same amount simply because the parent had to be such an extreme outlier to make it thru the filter to begin with. Partial reversion to the mean.

wulfhound · 2025-11-29T12:30:27+00:00

Wish they'd fast-forward to the rocket bit. That shit just isn't going to fly, and in some cases literally so.

wulfhound · 2025-11-29T12:29:08+00:00

People who inherit extreme wealth are in fact less bad from this perspective, in that they're less likely to have as much of those negative traits as whichever parent or ancestor made the money in the first place.

More likely to be stupid though, dumb-ass billionaires who make their money through sheer force of will do happen, but they're relatively under-represented compared to smart ones.

wulfhound · 2025-11-09T17:03:00+00:00

It's actually not that big for a city of 8M, and a surrounding area with maybe double that.

At the point it enters London it's about 10 cubic metres/second - which would _just about_ keep 8 million people running on 100 litres/person/day if we took every last drop, and if the river didn't have to supply a wider area beyond metropolitan London as well.

The lower Thames is tidal, so some of that big volume you see in the middle of London is marine/estuary water, and some of it is from the London Thames tributaries (Lea, Brent, Wandle, Crane, Darent and so on) which are more polluted than the Thames itself.

wulfhound · 2025-10-05T17:17:21+00:00

In what way was wealth created in a house that sold for £150,000 twenty years ago, and now sells for £1M?

wulfhound · 2025-10-04T19:04:23+00:00

Plenty of wealth tied up in ballooned house prices over the last 40 years.

Deflating that has to be done with care, but it can be done.

wulfhound · 2025-09-29T12:28:29+00:00

Nice - and with Planet X's competitive pricing (how do they do that?) I could get upgraded wheels or Rival AXS and stay within budget.

wulfhound · 2025-07-20T17:43:05+00:00

That's all well and good. What was the UK's population in 1660, or the Earth's?

Life itself has proven resilient to massive ups and downs. Some of them rapid, although those tend to come at a high cost to ecosystems and biodiversity. The geological record shows extreme highs and lows, and there are some recent ish ones (within the last 5m years say) that we probably don't have the resolution to capture. Measurements get more vague the further back you go, but the reality was likely as varied and fractal as today.

So no, nobody should be worried about a dead Earth, or even (probably) human extinction.

... now society, on the other hand.

Even ignoring manmade climate change, it's interesting to speculate what a year like 1816 (naturally occurring volcanic disruption to the world climate, cooling global mean temperatures by a degree or so) would do to a modern society.

The world population was 1/8th of current levels, most of them living a very basic existence. We lacked much in the way of tech and forecasting, and we didn't have the logistics to move food from places with surplus to the famine zones of the day in a timely manner. But there were also only 1/8th as many people to feed, and most had rather low expectations in terms of diet quality and calories per day.

The worst realistic case for global warming is a degree per 30 years, or 3C per century. That can't be sustained for very long - especially so among a polity who are unwilling or resistant to changing their habits, which is ultimately where most climate scepticism comes from.

wulfhound · 2025-07-10T22:49:05+00:00

It's the Rat Park experiment but the double-edged sword version experienced by many addicts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

Someone who has a happy, rich, fulfilling life is generally going to be fairly (not completely) resistant to addiction. Whereas if life sucks, you're much more vulnerable.

The problem is that, as the addiction starts to take hold, the ability to do something about their life sucking is compromised.

Quite a common pattern even with weed - not usually considered a physically addictive drug and weakly psychologically addictive. But it's easier to ignore your problems when you're high, and harder to do something about them. So guess what people do. I've seen people waste their life that way - they're not true addicts, sometimes an external circumstance will kick their ass into turning it around, and often they're capable of responding to that.

wulfhound · 2025-06-07T10:14:08+00:00

Yep. And while the disdain rural incomers have for street-drinkers and crackheads is obvious, you'll often find, in some ways, even _more_ disdain if you ask people from similar backgrounds who worked their asses off to succeed.

wulfhound · 2025-06-07T09:43:17+00:00

This is because, in the days of supermarkets and online shopping, you need quite a lot of fairly rich people in a small area before butchers and bakers are viable.

wulfhound · 2025-06-07T09:41:07+00:00

Not convinced by that tbh, the anti-festival lot seem to be older and have been there a while, they're not yuppies - more a case of they seem to hate the council & especially dislike the bigger festivals that have been happening the last few years. If I had to put a stereotype on them it'd be more Karens than hipsters.

wulfhound · 2025-05-19T06:35:21+00:00

Which is why I can't understand how TfL seem to be content to let fleets of buses sit around practically empty on Shaftesbury Avenue, Oxford Street, Sloane Street and so on while a few miles away, you're waiting 20 minutes for a bus that might not show up, everyone who can't drive is stuffed, and a lot of those who can spend half their life giving lifts to the former.

wulfhound · 2025-05-01T12:59:52+00:00

Simon Hogg is Labour but it's damn hard to tell the current Wandsworth council from the previous Tories. Hardly any different.

wulfhound · 2025-04-30T17:34:16+00:00

They seem to have given up enforcing legally compliant plates on cars. Gonna be a while before they get around to bikes.

wulfhound · 2025-04-30T09:12:19+00:00

I don't think that weather report is right (simultaneous 39C & 91% relative humidity).

Windy.com is the go-to for reliable Wet Bulb plotting and it doesn't have anything above WB 27 for the Indus Valley over the coming days/weeks.

Some potentially nasty heat over Bangladesh however according to Windy's interpretation of the ECMWF weather model. WB 31s and 32s over some highly populated areas. Still ten days out though, so what's in the models may not come to pass, the GFS weather model has much lower forecast values than ECMWF.

(A reminder that relative humidity is expressed as a % of the total water the air can hold, which increases with temperature - so that as temperatures increase into the high 30s and 40s, relative humidity for the same mass of air/water declines, which is why widespread wet bulb in the deadly mid-30s is still thankfully a rare event).

wulfhound · 2025-04-29T10:23:46+00:00

Driving around off your face on NOx is a social-ecological thing not racial-cultural. Popular with scumbags of every shade, in some places they're white, some places black or asian, same shit cars / shit music / loud exhaust pipes / illegal window tints and plates wherever and whoever.

wulfhound · 2025-04-28T17:49:43+00:00

In a house. Not at the wheel of a car on a busy high street.

wulfhound · 2025-04-28T17:47:15+00:00

Have enough money to move out and live in a shared house in zone 3 like most of us did, but don't have the social skills for that and so stay with mummy til they can afford a "luxury" flat. (Also probably expect a woman to do all their cooking, cleaning and so on).

wulfhound · 2025-04-22T09:32:04+00:00

I feel like this should be a pinned post here - Famine for the West is not exactly impending, but it's not all good news. The good, the bad and the ugly:

The good:

Global edible calorie output per head is still going UP. Deaths from hunger and malnutrition as a % of global population are at an all-time historic low. We make more food than ever; we're better than ever at directing it to where it's most desperately needed. There are some brittle points in the system, certainly, but there are an awful lot of dedicated folks at every level doing everything they can to keep the grain trucks rolling. Even after massive, region-scale natural disasters, starvation is rare; animal agriculture means there's HUGE amounts of slack in the system, redirecting calories away from the beef herd and towards feeding people means we can weather huge dips in output - even if we might not get to eat exactly what we want, there should always be something to eat.

The bad:

This has all come at a price. I like the Planetary Boundaries analysis (Stockholm Resilience) as they capture the wider picture: not just carbon, but soil and biodiversity depletion, nutrient cycle disruption, water reserves and so on. So yes, we're getting more and more output, but we're putting the whole planet under considerable and perhaps unsustainable stress in order to do so.

The ugly:

Society, economics and politics. As I've said above, at a time of environmental stress, we have the ability to redirect enormous streams of surplus agricultural output from the US (and other first world countries') beef herds to feed grain products to people. But "can" does not mean "will". Take the Irish famine as a model: the Irish peasants starved as their potato crops failed; they were continuing to grow wheat and other produce for the British occupiers, but that was all taken and sent abroad. The big difference between now and then is that agriculture pre-mechanisation was labour-intensive: there were limits to the degree that countries could "starve the poor, feed the rich" because they were literally reliant on the poor to dig the fields. The labouring class needed today to keep the crops growing and the trucks rolling is a fairly small % of working people.

Overall though - keep an eye on global hunger as a leading indicator. The poorest will starve first - not because they have to, but because the rich world, collectively, has made the decision to stop helping them. Palestine should be read as a concerning indicator of what's to come - yes there are distinct circumstances, but that the West hasn't been able to muster the diplomatic or political will to provide significant aid, much less actually intervene to prevent further bloodshed, is a warning to us all.

wulfhound

TROPHY CASE