Sometime before midnight Monday (UK local time) a ship dropped its anchor and broke, not one, not two, but three undersea cables serving the island of Jersey in the English Channel. Jersey is part of the Channel Islands along with Guernsey and some smaller islands.
(via Not one, not two, but three undersea cables cut in Jersey)
30th November 2016
Notes: 1
More than 2.5 million customers struggling to pay water and sewerage bills with single people hit hardest, says regulator
screenshot from BBC News
The three top stories on BBC News this afternoon are infrastructure-related. We’re still confused about who owns what and how it all fits together and therefore who’s actually responsible. In the meantime, most people still talk as if everything were still publicly owned. Surely government agencies should be able to deal with this - but no, we started voting for the policies to transfer these things into privately-owned corporations with ineffective regulatory systems 35 years ago. And so we all suffer because we treat global weather-weirding as an externality, maintenance of gas mains as a reduction in dividends for shareholders and organised labour as the enemy within.
thanks lloyd! // jay
Reblogged From lloyddavis
Marina Hyde: For a post-imperial power struggling to accept its place in the world, rationing power is a sobering prospect
“Whatever happens, we’ll struggle for others to blame”
The challenge of designing a pylon for the 21st century is, in some sense, a trick question. Or rather, it predicates an answer for which there is no clear question. Behind the challenge there lies, nonetheless, an interesting problem. As the UK National Grid faces its transformation over the next few decades of energy revolution, the grid itself will need to be renewed and expanded, with, inevitably, new lines being installed. Many of these will run across rural landscapes. The response is easy to predict: expect protests, local campaigns and acrimonious planning disputes. The existing design of the UK electricity pylon may be deeply-loved by some, but it is deeply reviled by many more. It articulates the contradiction presented by that part of us which protests against a ‘blot’ upon rural skylines even as we insist upon resilient energy supply, or campagin against the installation of telecommunications masts near our homes, moments before complaining that we can’t get a decent signal on our mobile phone.