Goat

The problem that you'll encounter once EV's become the majority, is that there won't be such a thing as cheap-rate electricity any more, because the demand for charging them during off-peak hours will easily mop up any excess generation. The Treasury isn't going to give up the ~£25bn p/a as well it gets from fuel duties without a fight, so they'll find some way of taxing the electricity used for EVs, at which point it'll be more like 18p/mile.

They have some of the cheapest electricity in Europe, less than half the cost than in Germany, it's perhaps not surprising that they're using it to power their cars. If you're interested, it's because they have vast amounts of stored hydroelectric, which makes it virtually free to generate, sadly we can't copy that due to geography.

Technically, Labour did have a candidate in Rochdale, they may have disowned him, but he was still the Labour candidate.

Some interesting stuff from the ISW today: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukraine-conflict-updates The Kremlin is likely attempting to portray Russia as an equal defense partner with China ahead of Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu’s visit to Moscow from April 16 to 18. The Kremlin is likely hoping to make itself more attractive to China by launching Russian Pacific Fleet exercises to project Russia’s naval power in the Pacific. Translation: Russia is begging its overlord for help, China says no. Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is setting information conditions to exploit a Russian military failure if the planned Ukrainian counteroffensive is successful. Prigozhin explicitly rejected the notion of any negotiations to end the war and urged Russians to continue fighting, even if it results in Russia’s temporary defeat. The Russian nationalist discourse about the acceptability of Russia suffering defeat in Ukraine deviates from some Western assertions of the need to preserve Russia from humiliation and allow Russia to “save face.” Translation: they think they're going to lose and are jockeying for position in a post-Putin Russia.

That doesn't sound that plausible to me, for the regulars maybe, but elite troops, I have my doubts.

In what sense are they drug addicts? Are they all on heroin etc? Or are they all massive steroid users?

Interesting article: Telegraph - Moscow's special forces 'gutted' by fighting Russia’s elite spetsnaz forces have been “extremely depleted” by the war in Ukraine and will take years to rebuild, according to documents in the leaked trove of Pentagon files. The findings, reported on Friday by the Washington Post, confirm anecdotal evidence from Russia last year that several Special Forces units were almost wiped out in the first weeks after the invasion. A sign of just how badly the whole thing is going for the Russians.

How many would've died without the vaccines?

I'm seeing about 1% for February and March, once you adjust for population ageing, ONS is actually saying -7% for February, but we're using different bases.

I don't know where you get your 60,000 number from, this is what the Prime Minister's Office has to say about it: That training will be in addition to the recruit training programme already running in the UK, which has seen 10,000 Ukrainian troops brought to battle readiness in the last six months, and which will upskill a further 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers this year. This guy seems to be on the ball, he says 60,000 - 80,000:

I think that number includes troops already committed to the front lines, what they probably have is about 60,000 assembled in a mobile striking force, but equipped and trained to a level the Russians could only dream of.

This one here: Deaths registered in England and Wales. I realize that it's not strictly correct to subtract all deaths for 2021 to get a mid-2022 population, ideally I'd use the second half of 2021 and the first half of 2022 to get there, but that data isn't available to me, and I think this will be close enough.

It's certainly suspicious, whether that's provable or not is another matter. One does have to wonder what else was going on that we don't yet know about.

More likely, it was about Prigozhin's personal standing within the Russian ultra-nationalist community, either setting himself up as a successor to Putin, or otherwise too important to be easily eliminated. There's not much point in owning a salt mine, if you end up taking a one-way gravity assisted trip down the mineshaft.

Here: Use "mid 2021 edition" of that dataset.