@mjr @plyth and of course Boris Johnson is bezzies with Lebedev, and likes to go drinking at his parties after shaking off his companions. And Boris has his own unique history with EU disinformation. https://archive.ph/qMEQo

@cabbage @LittleProtection434 yup, everything talks to everything else. I'm reading/posting this from mastodon.

@IronBird @mirshafie did you use a comma where you should have used a semicolon there on purpose

@boonhet @0x0 they've got ten years from now in which they just need to remember not to buy a non-compliant one. The number of people still driving the same car they have now in ten years is small, surely.

@HermitBee because that's why Reeves said electric vehicles should pay per mile. She announced it by saying "Because all cars contribute to the wear and tear on our roads, I will ensure that drivers are taxed according to how much they drive, not just by the type of car they use.”
I'm not saying this particularly carries through to how roads are funded; I'm saying if this claim is the reason to tax EVs then the tax should be structured differently.

@BlasterM @LodeMike "a pedestrian or cyclist is 44% more likely to be killed if they’re struck by an SUV rather than a passenger car. The situation is even worse for younger victims – a child struck by a SUV is 82% more likely to be killed than a child struck by a passenger car." https://www.forbes.com/sites/lauriewinkless/2025/05/07/suvs-make-traffic-worse-and-are-more-dangerous-than-cars/

@frankPodmore @Jrockwar cars should be taxed according to size and weight, imo, if you're bringing road maintenance & wear and tear into it. Then beyond that fuel source can be taxed according to pollution levels, as it currently kind of is (especially if they actually do unfreeze fuel duty).

@TIN I agree with your last point: the per-mile setup should apply to all vehicles according to size and weight if it is truly for road wear. Pollution can then be captured separately according to fuel source. Unfortunately the government has been too toothless to increase fuel duty for years.
Regarding your other point: yes! I think councils should run permit charging like resident parking: if you have a resident permit you can charge in council car parks for £x.

@Rooster326 @xenomor not just SEO; also the blogs are paid for with inline ads so you need enough text to fit the ads in and a forced scroll through them to satisfy the view counters, plus you can't copyright a list of ingredients but you CAN copyright the text around a recipe so this is all a method of claiming authorship (not that that will stop the AI scrapers).

@TIN none of this is to say that nobody should be allowed to park near their house; but in general it would do us all good to recognise that parking is never free, even if we're not personally paying an upfront fee.

@TIN and, lastly, if all your roads have cars parked along them then there is no room for safe cycle lanes, which again challenges any efforts towards net zero. Not least for children and teens, as suddenly all their parents have to chauffeur them in cars for every middle-distance urban journey for their entire childhood and adolescence to get them safely to their destinations, rather than letting them get there alone or cycling alongside them in a segregated lane.

@TIN and high streets suffer because walkable town centres suddenly become a less tempting option for the people who could spend ten minutes walking in, or ten minutes driving out to a supermarket they can park at (where again, their parking is "free", ie it is subsidised by shoppers paying more, and not all of those shoppers are drivers)

@TIN meanwhile buses are held up in traffic by drivers living in or near urban centres, and those car owners drive door to door rather than using public transport, reducing the profitability of the public transport and leaving fewer transport options for non-drivers. Meanwhile pedestrians are left with no or narrow pavements because an entire lane of the carriageway, maybe two, is given over to stationary vehicles.

@TIN I'm based in the UK. I agree that parts of this could have been thought through better but I don't think publicly subsidised parking outside homes that were built within walking distance of towns & stations, because that was how you reached towns before cars existed, is neutral or a net good. Those houses become overvalued because people price in cheap parking, meaning people who can't/can't afford to drive are priced out of homes that would suit their lifestyles.

@TIN @manualoverride I wonder if longer term a solution might be for councils to offer resident-permit-charging in public car parks.

@TIN @manualoverride hmmm. I never like this argument. it implies you bought a car that you couldn't store with the assumption that you could get subsidised (perhaps free) parking on public land?

Don't get me wrong, I feel for you, but "I couldn't afford a plot big enough for a car in my chosen location, and wasn't willing to live somewhere cheaper, but bought a car anyway" is the neutral position people think it is. I'd like an extension but I can't just put a home office on the road outside.

@frankPodmore @tomiant all the journalists are still on there which is why they're so obsessed with immigration too.
And as far as I know, Labour / UKGov still only have accounts on X/Facebook/Threads. So again, all their (already useless) PR department feedback is going to be far right bots.

@ZILtoid1991 @MicroWave the Tories did that to the NHS here and then we had a pandemic.

@hotdogcharmer It's not that they're not used about men, it's that people don't consider likeability in men as an important factor when determining their competence as a leader. And in terms of aggression: men who are "aggressive" are "strong leaders". Women who are "aggressive" are "unlikeable". These terms work together. Aggressive can be used about both but it is only a pejorative for one.