In the news

Nice idea but apart from both our cars which are both diesel

Lawnmower and garden shredder are petrol
Chainsaws and leaf blower are two stroke using alkylate fuel
Tractor is red diesel

Does the tractor have a full tank...?

It’s low too. I get red diesel from a neighbouring farmer.

red diesel

Brings back memories of helping my dad fill up the car from a giant can under cover of darkness, possibly my first crimes.

Queued for about 15 minutes at Texaco Crouch End.

No queue in Shell Rawtenstall but they were limiting people to £20 of fuel.

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Siphon it out of his tractor?

Welll..... In this instance it's hard to argue to that there aren't advantages.

Electric cars have the same perceived advantages as early combustion driven vehicles. Clean, efficient, fast, convenient. The reality is continued gridlock, loss of public space to storage, high demand for power, road danger, destruction of land for more and ever wider roads, massive co2 emissions from production, destruction of land for mining raw materials, continued Ill health from particulate emissions from brakes and tyres.

And while petrol stations are fairly ugly, smelly things, they do provide useful emergency shops for non car users. I'm sure many of us have grabbed food at one on a ride, or a late night snack. Now we have pavements increasingly littered with charging docks and trailing cables to look forward to. Life's going to get alot harder for anyone with mobility or access issues.

Is there a means to unplug them and lash the cable or are they key protected ?

Instead we have a surplus (of one too many).

Talking of dead dinosaurs and that sort of thing, archaeologists have found fossilised footprints in New Mexico of what are probably teenagers or children from 22,500 years ago:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02597-1

This blows my mind. The National Park Service Insta has this artist's impression of what this might have looked like. I imagine there's some artistic licence going on here but I find the idea that people were walking around 23,000 years ago and the stuff they'd have seen incredible.

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Stations around us (checked 4 between Chiswick and Ladbroke grove) are dry now. I have a trip today and not enough to complete it, so will have to continue looking ..

I find the idea that people were walking around 23,000 years ago and the stuff they'd have seen incredible.

At the risk of pissing off people for chatting in the news thread, a documentary I saw recently made me reconsider the image of prehistoric humans pictured:

Homo sapiens sapiens have been a species for ≈300,000 years, with similar levels of intelligence and creativity, but we generally hold the idea that >13,000 years ago people were just wandering around in loin cloths, living in caves, using stone tools.

It only took us 500 years to go from circumnavigating the globe to putting people on the Moon. 300k years is a long time, perhaps they were less primitive than we give them credit for?

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/quad-leaders-meet-white-house-amid-shared-china-concerns-2021-09-24/

This.

Whilst I'm sure you could take up a human from back then and train them up relatively easily to be just like us now, the main advances have come from societies as a whole being able to save, share and build upon specific knowledge rather then losing much of it each generation from the development of written language through to printing and eventually IT stuff. Big ideas from geniuses are learnt and developed by regular people, technology is incrementally improved upon and that all snowballs quite quickly over the last few hundred years. Soon it will kill us all and the radioactive remnants can slowly start again.

Soon it will kill us all and the radioactive remnants can slowly start again.

Yay! The circle of life.

A friend of mine lives in a flat overlooking a Shell station in Manchester. His WhatsApp updates have been gold today. Never a dull moment. I'm trying to convince him to live tweet this stuff.

I was one of these people yesterday as I had 200 miles to do and only quarter of a tank, sat stuck in a line waiting which was backed up blocking a round about and people were getting out and getting all shouty at each other, people driving wrong way around the round about, over verges, blew my mind how things can descend to pure self interest and disorder so quickly, this was over having to wait 30mins to fill up ffs

Most annoying thing for me was I landed up at a pump that only had high octane and no way I was going to the back of the queue so had to suck it up

It’s rather refreshing being currently outside the UK on a short break. Where it’s vibrant, colourful, happy, prosperous, even the sun is shining, despite its often misty, cool and wet weather. Seafood in abundance and celebratory festivals to boot. A very diverse European city with tons of history and culture within the EU all of which feels likes a million miles away from the shite show of London.

wow the petrol queue looks mad, those lads are going to be waiting for ages!

And even funnier is that the new E10 fuel will absorb more moisture (as it has double the ethanol in it) will lead to more engine problems if it's stored for ages before being used.

It's going to be a long wait for those mammoth to turn into oil for sure.

that was the joke :( hence 'ages'

pls let me troll @Fox in peace

All energy is solar energy if you go back far enough :)

BP garage by me is just coned off completely with lots of M&S ready meals being reduced

All energy is nuclear.