Trains are easy and they’re easily electrified already. So putting solar on the trains won’t have any advantage.

Rails are the difficult part of railways. They never seem to put them between my house and my work. They’ve put something called a road in between instead.

Not when you consider the maintenance costs of the plants they closed. Basically of them were beyond original design life.

And the democracy sausage!

Because by having a private company “screen” people there’s added corruption.

He gets to simply sell clearances to private companies.

From the typical Conservative viewpoint this makes no sense.

“The state provision needs to be better or this needs to stay illegal”

So if the state can’t provide a service, neither can the private sector.

Extend that logic and Streeting is a hardcore socialist.

He’s not voting with any of his stated principles, which is proof he has none.

Yes, but your country being unable to have sensible judicial selection and poor judicial elections is not an argument for anywhere else.

The US ranges from failure to bad.

Other countries range from the good to the point other countries refuse to replace their own court system in order to continue using the good judiciary that’s trusted internationally.

Using the US as an example to follow in this case is a bad idea. Even if removing selection from the US system would be an improvement, it isn’t relevant anywhere else.

Especially when discussing an ideological law like making elections compulsory.

1st attempt was a republican shooter. He was

2nd attempt didn’t actually happen. They didn’t see Trump or draw their weapon. It was just someone who owned a gun in America.

It’s the republican party who have consistently displayed the attitude that the 2nd amendment is there for this type of thing, not the democrats.

How calm are you about your party doing this?

There are no illusions that politicians are experts.

Authority given to a judge is because of expertise, not in order to represent.

Elect representation, select expertise. Ensure oversight for both situations.

I’ve said before oversight is already in place be a democratically elected official. So stop with the silliness in claiming I’m antidemocratic.

The difference between you and me is you’re sprouting ideology and I’m explaining how a good system actually works in the real world in my country.

Asking millions of unqualified people to pick an expert and professional will not be as successful as an unbiased selection committee.

Not every problem is solvable with a popularity contest.

As long as a committee has democratic oversight democracy can still fix any problems as you wish. But it’s much more efficient and successful most of the time.

Resign from the senate.

Rather than just going back to that job after the campaign.

This campaign is literally zero cost for him as it stands. He’s a senator and will continue being a senator if he loses.

He should be forced to resign for things he’s done and admitted doing publicly.

So the problem with elected judges is the elections.

There are solutions to that. One of which is to appoint.

There are problems with appointed judges in America no doubt. Changes to appointments could definitely solve them. Elections most likely won’t.

Politics is inevitable and unavoidable. Your choice of sandwiches is ultimately political. Let alone judges.

Partisan politics is avoidable.

Avoid partisanship in the justice system and then you solve a lot of problems.

Small trucks vs. large trucks. Please follow the thread.

Those people use vans or second hand trucks built before they got fat.

You’re right. But it’s more that emissions standards didn’t happen.

Cars got them while trucks got them much, much less. So they build more trucks and fewer cars.

They should just have a road tax based on weight and an emissions tax based on emissions. Not emissions per class twice removed just CO2 per mile. All vehicles.

Roads get maintained by the weight tax, emissions tax to fund decarbonisation of the economy.

Well if that’s the meaning of "political you’re using then all judges are. That’s why I put it in quotes in my last reply, I assumed you meant partisan. Otherwise you’d have been making an irrelevant point.

Unfortunately the US has a storied history of elected local judges allowing lynchings, for example, while the appointed federal courts passed civil rights so I won’t be taking notes.

Of course the appointed judges and elected judges are now targeting women and minorities. So your appointment system is also broken.

Again, not taking notes.

An attempt to be representative is not equal to being “political”.

It’s actually a strength of the system that minorities get some representation rather than being always voted into zero representatives. And they still have to pass the standards to be considered as experts in the field.

No system is perfect, but look at America. Small area elections for judges produce poor corrupt picks. Large area elections produce partisan fights with extremists campaigning against each other.

There’s no country which is a good advert for directly electing judges.

The UK has an independent Judicial Appointments Commission.

Which can be overruled by an elected official but generally is directed to pick on merit and allowed to do so.

Allowing professionals to pick experts and only stepping in when there is a problem is much better to me than direct elections which quickly become partisan and obstructive to professional candidates.

In the UK the Conservative party decided to get rid of DEI initiatives in education. When?

When the minority specifically recommended to be targeted for support became poor/working class white boys.

Conservatives will go out of their way to harm the working class because as long as things are going badly for them they’ll be angry enough to vote for the ones with dog whistles pretending it’s someone else’s fault.

iPods had an 82% share of the US market at the time the term was first used.

https://www.theregister.com/2004/10/12/ipod_us_share/

At the time a “broadcast” to you iPod made the name podcast pretty understandable.

And there’s not much else I could think of to call it given technology at the time.

MP3 player was the generic term. But MP3 cast feels clunky.

I did hear audioblog used. But they weren’t all blogs.

It really comes down to the fact that at the time everyone knew “pod” meant “iPod” and that’s it.