Mailman,
Agreed. Point was that the £200,000 would have meant far fewer people taking it further. It would still leave quite a pool of money to settle the deeply injured. The £75,000 offer meant a *lot* more people took it further. One way the money goes to the victims, the other way, it largely ends up in the pockets of lawyers.

tomo,
Abuse of medical statistics in legal cases? Say it isn't so! It feels no more than 25 years since Sally Clark was convicted on the back of some outrageous statistical ignorance.

We can be thankful the law always gets it right eventually, with occasional casualties along the way.

Sad to see that Sally Clark died from alcohol poisoning in 2007. Didn't know that.

I suppose the DOGE team has enough work ahead of it in the USA. Nice to fantasise about borrowing them to debulk Australia's bureaucracy.

Things that make you go hmmmmm...where else has statistics been abused to support a conclusion favoured by "scientists"??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAOjeSUZeq8

Statics in the Letby case.

Robert

yeah, dividing the "establishment" quoted amount by number of possible participants has been a tic of mine for a long time.

Process is the punishment some say....

Robbo,

I suspect that for those who lost their businesses, homes, marriages, friendships, family etc that 200k wouldn't even scratch the surface.

I wonder how many people took the 75k payout to avoid the scrutiny with having to relive everything while justifying every single cost to the exact decimal place? And I wonder if we will ever see the numbers of costs proposed by the claimants vs costs paid out after going through the scheme?

Sunlight is what is required. We need sunlight to shine a light on the true scale of the disaster this was! And prison sentences. Sunlight AND prison sentences!!

tomo,
Blown out by £208m? Over the 736 subpostmasters who got dudded, that would cover £282,000 each. They might have saved quite a bit by just offering a flat £200,000 each. Less fun for the bureaucrats and lawyers though.

Maybe get them to make up the shortfall from their own pockets for a little empathy boost.

Josh Szeps talk with Jonathan Rauch was mildly amusing. The guest was introduced as having recently written a book about how the church might be the nemesis of "Trumpism". That set expectations one way, but it turned out that Rauch is an activist leftie, and his demands that Christians hold properly to their values of tolerance and putting aside fear came across (at least to me) as a mighty big do as I say, not as I do.

He was articulate though, and easy to listen to, just not at all convincing.

tomo,
Good coverage, and the comments were interesting. For all the appearance of "relentless improvement" in air safety, you're left wondering how many other places are getting by on alright so far. It's not like Washington DC's some sort of backwater.

Phil Clarke is most welcome to stay away.

John Anderson had a good guest, Aidan Morrison, for his podcast. Clear speaking on the madness of Australia's efforts towards Net Zero. Unfortunately, Anderson lets enthusiasm get the better of him rather a lot — interrupting to agree, etc. — which gets a bit irritating. The fellow knows what he's saying; let him say it.

Jo Nova covers the wing-clipping going on at USAID. I've long doubted Australia's equivalent, though not in such criminal terms. A lot of our overseas aid is tied to the recipient nation using Australian advisors/consultants. A lot of the money ends up in Australian hands anyway. Wouldn't be astonished to learn that there was outright theft going on too.

DaveS,
I meant to comment on the trolls at Climate Etc. I think it's particularly bad there because the articles are often sceptical, but have an academic air about them that might lend credibity to the case. The flame-wars in the comments allow the whole site to be dismissed as a hangout of extremists.

The Bushaw fellow turned up around a year ago (under the name ganon1950). Another turned up around that same time: George J Kamburoff; I always assumed that surname was synonymous with off-camber — he's here to divert.

Wrote an author-tallying Perl script a few years ago. Here's the tail of its report on Planning Engineer's posting:

1: sherro01
2: Pat Cassen
2: cerescokid
4: Wagathon
4: jacksmith4tx
6: burlhenry
9: jim2
10: Chris Morris
20: Joe K
31: B A Bushaw
ce.html total: 107

DaveS,
Yes, I went too far describing his view on intermittency as being a "red herring". Still, his wording:

Overcoming intermittency ... at best gets us around a molehill which will leave a huge mountain ahead.

I'm not sure the stability problem is as big as he says either. If the entire generating fleet had no inertia (i.e. all DC + inverter), the problem could be addressed (I believe) by careful time synchronisation (sub-millisecond, e.g. from GPS time signal), and setting a fixed phase for each generator based on where they are on the grid. You might even declare Greenwich to be "in phase", with 0V at the start of each second. Everything else gets its phase according to the propagation delay from there.

A big problem with this is that spinning generators would have great difficulty staying synchronised with a perfect 50Hz waveform. Just like a car engine, they slow as the load increases and speed up as it lightens. For decades, the deal has been 50Hz average over the whole day. Tall order to make it 50Hz fixed, every second of the day.

Separate grids? It's only money after all.

tomo,
Agree on NVG. In an urban setting, I suppose they show a bit more of what's between the point light sources, but colour and peripheral vision are a lot to trade away for that. NVG == not very good.