louisiana

Buses fine going up and down LL, to the Plough and beyond. 40 also seems to be running fine. I've noticed the bus drivers are driving a little more carefully than usual. None of that screaming brakes nonsense.

Current underfoot conditions can be impossible even for those normally mobile but with the usual 'getting older' conditions: poor balance, tripping feet etc.

As Mark says, around 1/10 at the mo'. (I'm on Dulwich south-side)

"When temperatures fall to sub-zero, the number of deaths from heart attacks peaks three days later, from strokes five days later and from respiratory infections ten days later." (From Met Office website.) Please check on your elderly neighbours...

There are more than 5,000 people in the area (4.5k or so in ED ward, but then the same again in College ward etc. etc.) so the ratios above don't really stack up. On the other hand, some of us also eat out outside the area, while others come into the area to eat out... I cook every day, but I make extra for the fridge and freezer, and probably only eat out once a fortnight or at most once a week, usually as part of a social get-together. I also eat at the homes of friends, and they at mine, so sometimes the home cooking is of industrial proportions. My favourite recipe for this time of year is Nigel Slater's fish pie (smoked haddock, mussels, white wine, mash etc.), but it takes two hours to prepare...

Not in the main section, but is this for real? http://www.eastdulwichforum.co.uk/forum/read.php?9,578620

HAL, to a local councillor *everything* looks like an opportunity to swing votes. Even The End Of The World As We Know It. B)

James Barber Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > > We?ll then have ensured all East Dulwich street > lighting has been modernised by the end of the > financial year. You presumably mean East Dulwich WARD, *not* East Dulwich. ---- Posted on 25 November, not responded to yet by you, James, though a number of other queries since have been answered by you.

Jeremy: "Not if you've constructed an adequately fortified security perimiter... and of course, taken the appropriate measures to prevent detection." Well gun training might not go amiss... but we do live on a small island with rather a lot of people in just about every nook and cranny. HAL9000: "It's a plausible scenario - the problem is no one knows how it will unfold: whether it will be gradual and controlled or swift and chaotic." Yes, there's quite a range out there. Michael Greer's theory (originally described in a 2005 paper, and later in his book The Long Descent) is catabolic collapse, a self-reinforcing cycle of contraction. www.dylan.org.uk/greer_on_collapse.pdf "Of late, I?ve been wondering whether the western banks have already discounted the effect Peak Oil will have on future property prices ? hence their reluctance to lend on real estate in general?" I doubt it. There a few corporates out there who are now looking at this, but AFAIK none of the banks are. In my view, bank reluctance is owing to expected further major falls in prices (hence their demand for very large deposits) and general short-term economic uncertainty and existing shitty assets on the balance sheets which have yet to crystalise (known unknowns?). I'd add that every bank has a chief economist, but none to my knowledge has a chief geologist. As a breed, economists tend to think that given enough money we will create the perpetual energy machine that is required for future survival etc. In other words, they don't see energy or fossil fuel as a constraining factor. So there's probably nobody whispering in the chief exec's ear anything about peak anything. "Mortgages are long-term investments - the maturity dates of new mortgages fall in or around the projected Peak Crunch in population levels - coincidence or what?" HAL, I'd remove your tin foil beanie if I were you. They are really not that bright or big-picture thinking. Brendan: "Guns." That might work in the US mid west (lot of land, few people), but on a small island with lots of people perhaps co-operation might get us further. Huguenot: "So from a food perspective the transport oil thing wouldn't necessarily be a crisis, just a change of style." First, while we produce a fair (but falling) amount of food, a lot of it is exported, while we then import a lot of what we use. Are you proposing imposing some kind of dictatorship? (i.e. abandoning the free market) And hundreds of our farmers are going bust or abandoning farming every year. We are not, as a nation, supporting the sustainability of agriculture in our country. Second, and most importantly, most of the petroleum used in food production is not used for transport; it's for all the other stuff, such as drilling and other operation of field machinery, pesticides (made from petrochemicals) and a very long et cetera. Most UK farms (and all conventional farms) could not function without huge amounts of oil and gas-derived products. (Gas will also peak later, and is the feedstock for all conventional fertilizers.) We have built a model of industrial farming (extensive farms highly reliant on machinery and on petroleum and gas products - fertilizers and pesticides - and that cannot function without huge amounts of oil and gas. Third, the governments of the world, including our own, seem to think that we're going to be producing copious quantities of bioethanol in the future (to feed all those hungry cars). The only place we can produce this from is our farmland. If you look at the targets on bioethanol, and measure how much land will be required... Some commentators consider that it has been policies such as US government subsidies to bio-ethanol production (yay, love the free market :) ) that cause price spikes in certain food crops in recent times (owing to land being turned from food production to bioethanol production). And you could say that in this regard, we ain't seen nothin' yet. "The ones that aren't much good without oil are things like refrigerated overseas distribution." Or pesticides or field machinery or... which our entire system is dependent on. James Barber: "You, we, I need to cut our absolute carbon use by 80% by 2050. If we nationally do that then we can afford carbon prices to rise by 500% and we'll still be spending the same ratio on energy as we do now." 2050... Well, given that peak conventional oil has already occurred according to the IEA (so now it's officially admitted), and from now on it's all going to be more difficult and expensive, 2050 seems a bit of a long-term target and a bit of a head-in-the-sand position. (Compare the IEA position this year to last year - huge revision.) High prices are going to be hitting long before then; and 500% price rises are going to be hitting some considerable time before 2050, I predict. That in turn is going to have a significant impact on how we do things, what we do, and the state of the economy. As HAL says, nobody knows if it's going to play out fast and dirty or slow and not so dirty. But the population issue is certainly going to speed things up. (I always wondered whether school maths would be of any use, and yes, understanding of exponential growth has proved useful.) The 'bumpy plateau theory' seems quite credible. I think the only certainty is the longer we leave it to completely revolutionize how we do things and what we do, the nastier it's going to be. And it's not easy to make major changes in a worldwide recession with everyone and their dog loaded with debt. On the other hand, it is probably only the bad times that convince a large body of the population that 'Houston, we have a problem'. Maybe.

Terrifically annoyed that I can't type as fast as I can think the words. Annoyed that the word-cloud-of-ideas needs to first be expressed in actual words before they can be typed. I just want to be able to throw the cloud of 50 words onto the page (screen). And yes, peed off that I can't phone everything I lose on a daily basis. I want to be able to phone my keys.

James Barber Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > > We?ll then have ensured all East Dulwich street > lighting has been modernised by the end of the > financial year. You presumably mean East Dulwich WARD, *not* East Dulwich.

Not an experience, but just an observation: on Thorpewood Avenue north side (Forest Hill) there are some very different sized gardens, seemingly as a consequence of the builder keeping the lion's share. This resulted in his garden going behind at least one other (of course, the property was later sold, no longer belongs to him). It's a fab garden, and really the extra width of land makes quite a difference. This garden now opens as part of the Open Gardens scheme.

Cashew nuts - interesting! I'd agree with practically all your list David. And SG - except perhaps the cashews. My hot pepper sauce of choice is Encona (the original one) which is excellent on cheese on toast amongst other things.

DaveR Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > The whole report is a scenario, and one of the > elements is an assumption that oil demand from the > OECD will fall. I'm assuming that the basis for > that assumption is as strong as the other > underlying assumptions (otherwise it wouldn't be > in the report), The basis is promises made by governments. They've taken all the measures promised and their impacts, added them together etc. (That's certainly a sounder way than the method the IEA used for calculating oil reserves for the Outlook up to 2008: finger in the air.) Colin Campbell (who has advised the IEA on reserves) provides some insight into how these things get put together in a letter he wrote to the Guardian a while back: http://aspoireland.org/2009/11/20/ieawhistleblowerresponse/

I wrote articles interviewing BP head honchos about alternative energy investment and developments back in the late 90s. Yes, they are certainly doing something, but it's fairly small beer compared to total development spend (4% now? I not up to date with the figures) and has been downgraded a few times. Under Hayward, there were some who saw BP's more recent moves as pulling back from alternative.

Brendan Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Loz Wrote: > -------------------------------------------------- > ----- > > You probably don't heat your house or cook with > > oil, anyway. > > > No the impact will be on transport. Try doing just > about anything in the modern world that isn?t > reliant on roads, rail, air travel. > > Unless you?re talking about olive oil which I do > cook with. Yup, Brendan, huge impact on transport, especially air transport (we have yet to invent the commercial wind-power aeroplane!), but also on a host of products such as a wide range of petrochemicals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrochemicals Also consider the impact on, say, farming, where every step in the process is highly dependent on oil and gas. Farming today is one-man-and-his-barrel-of-oil-in-many-guises.

DaveR Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > It's easy to miss this bit, which is pretty > important: > > "demand in the OECD falls by over 6 mb/d" > > So that's over a billion people (and rising), > representing essentially the entire developed > world, reducing their dependence on oil, and the > level of reduction is not insignificant - 6% of > total global demand. To me that suggests that the > situation is serious but not necessarily > catastrophic, because at least some of the means > of reducing demand for oil are already known and > in play. That's just a scenario. We can all come up with scenarios. But this scenario would need to play out or else...

DJKillaQueen Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Well there is still plenty of coal to burn. > Environmentally bad yes, but there's enough there > to keep the generators going for a while. There is some coal to burn.... which will become economic to dig out when oil reaches maybe 3x/4x/5x or more than it's current price? In other words - the IEA's new position as of this year - is yes, energy, but at a price. Providing infrastructure to cater for mass change to alternative energy sources will also be expensive. Unfortunately, right now there doesn't seem to be a lot of money kicking around for major trans-national infrastructure changes.

Install a lovely wood-burning stove (for smokeless zones) with a rear-mounted flue. Light stove, and get some chunky logs going, to get warm and toasty. With a rear-mounted flue, you can cook bacon - or anything else - on the top of the stove. While still sitting on your sofa. :)

gwod, that's kind of what I was thinking, but obviously the exact location needs some consideration and good sense. I would like to think that years from now I could go and see 'my oak' wherever it is planted. :)

It's a pdf on the Home Office website that I don't have an html page link to, but you should be able to grab from here: http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/hosb1105.pdf It's 2004/5, so not up to date, but I'm sure the main principles still hold now.

I'm stocking up/topping up my kitchen cupboards for winter - golly, sounds like I'm going into hibernation! - so a lot of surveying what is there and what is needed. Which led me to wonder what other people think are essential kitchen cupboard (or fridge or freezer) items, things you should always have to hand.

Mick Mac, I have exactly the same set of vision issues as you. I took a look at varifocals a few years ago, but they looked like they were going to take a lot of getting used to. A friend of similarly advanced years suggested monovision daily contact lenses. This is where you have one contact based on distance vision, and the other based on near vision. I tried them out, and found the brain only took a few seconds to adjust. Now, quite a few years later, I'm still a happy user of monovision contacts. They do not give you the top, top sharpness you'd get with glasses for one specific purpose, but for me they are fine. Also means you can wear ordinary sunglasses/goggles/whatever over the top. I still have a pair of cheapo glasses for nearer work e.g. if I'm sitting at the computer all day long, as I don't like wearing contacts all the time.

I've come across a lengthy Home Office report on crime stats in England and Wales. A quick skim appears to reveal that... - just 77% of burglaries with loss are reported. Other kinds of burglaries (e.g. attempted, no loss) have lower reporting rates. - the police record just about all burglaries with loss that are reported to them. That means if you report it, they will record it. - consequently, it seems to me that an important factor in police crime stats under-reporting burglaries appears to be people not reporting. Other issues include... - thefts from sheds etc only count in domestic burglary stats when the shed etc is physically attached to an inhabited dwelling. So theft from free-standing outhouses such as your tool shed or bike shed don't count. So sometimes what we may count as a burglary may not be counted as such in the crime stats. - similarly, thefts from common areas of buildings in multiple occupation (blocks of flats etc.) don't count. - one the biggest factors associated with being a victim of burglary is not having security measures. People with security measures get burgled a lot less. There's a table showing all the different measures used by the general population as compared to those used by victims of burglary (percentages using each measure for both victims of burglary and for general population).

sedgewick Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > > > Are you really surprised though James? the amount > of people that whine at you all day on your > councillor thread clearly shows that the ED > massive are complainers. I was recently advised by two members of staff at Kings that I should complain formally about my so-called GP and they suggested I change surgeries too, owing in a large degree to the appalling referral this GP made, which they both described as "very, very poor". I think they were a bit stunned. That's not an ED'er complaining, that's two health professionals who are not receiving healthcare information from a primary carer, which they need to do their job and care properly for the person in front of them.