Lighthouse

I think we all know how that one ends.

Define 'minimum'. We're talking about incidents making the news, some of which may be entirely down to one individual on a planet of 7,000,000,000+. I don't know what portion of that has internet access but you get the idea.

He said the bulk of the work in reducing the outbreak was down to the lockdown, which I thought we knew already. If it wasn’t, what would be the point in having them? Vaccines take time to have an effect and are our best defence against future outbreaks IF everyone who is able to take the vaccine takes it. Up until about a month ago we’ve been doing almost entirely first doses, which they reckon are around 60% effective. If your starting point is 1,800 deaths a day - even if you managed to perfectly predict every single person who was about to be infected and killed and give them one dose - you’d still only knock it down to just over 700 a day, without a lockdown. That is also (completely incorrectly) assuming that the infection rate would have stayed the same and that 1,800 was the highest we could possibly have achieved, which it wasn’t. Without lockdown the vaccine might have protected 60% of people out of 5,000 who were ‘supposed’ to die, I.e. 2,000 per day would still be dying. Boris can’t win. If he’d said it was mostly down to the vaccine, the conspiracy theorists would have been foaming at the mouth saying, "look, this is proof it’s all about controlling our behaviour, they’re locking us down for months and they’ve just admitted there was no need to!"

I heard an advert a couple of days ago which trumps anything else I’ve seen recently on the environment; you can now get Costa coffee from Über Eats. That’s right, you can pay somebody to make you a cup of coffee and someone else will drive it across town to your house.

Fear not, it will clearly be a tongue in cheek banning.

One more of them and you're having a week off. 🙄

Sounds like a pretty good reason not to keep him to me. I'm sorry, I don't think he's worth keeping. He may be better than Djenepo or Redmond but that's in much the same way that Jakobsson was better than Davenport. If we're going to keep the likes of Walcott and Bertrand next season, we're going to keep getting the same results. It's not all their fault but they're a part of the problem we at least have the option to do away with, cost free.

Press release from the NRA, "There should have been an even better guy with a gun, to shoot the merely good guy with a gun."

Cheers. This was the part of the story I was referring to: "The Premier League ace arrived at the camp on April 20 for a period of three weeks, with his military service having previously been delayed after the 27-year-old inspired his national team to a gold medal at the 2018 Asian Games."

Why do you sarcastically accuse me of making a 'great point' then compare the cost of a flight, which is deliberately high in CO2 and never going to happen from Southampton, to the price of one laptop or pair of trainers? However you try and dress it up, aviation is 1.9% of global emissions and around 12% of the transport sector. We don't go to New York every weekend, we do buy consumer goods. A more realistic return flight to Ibiza will burn around 280kg, so assuming your c14kg is correct for a pair of trainers (and rather lazily extrapolating that to other items of clothing) equals 20 items. I have exes who would buy that on one Saturday, before lunch. I would agree with you on a lot of environmental issues. I'm all for developing bio-fuels in aviation, I'd agree with the French and their ban on regional flights and when I ski in Europe I take the Eurostar. I find it mental that people fly from here to places like Manchester and Leeds. However, when there is a need to flying we're better off doing it from as close to home as possible, I'd have said that was fairly obvious.

I'm done, good night.

I think he was aiming for the top left.

Daft challenge, dismal defending in the build up.

End to end, this.

Been all Southampton the last 14 seconds!

Absolutely dreadful so far.

Must have decided Bartley was interfering. Thought that should have counted personally.

Except that’s a completely separate issue. We don’t need need uninsulated, freezing cold houses. We don’t need 5 litre, V8 Range Rovers to drop the kids off in Hammersmith. We don’t need our Watts to be produced by some dirty, coal burning power station. We do need to fly and planes are more efficient than ever. The most modern jets are anywhere between 10-20% more fuel efficient than the ones which preceded them. You’re completely right about China and Indonesia - so the question is why are none of those products being demonised? Why are we picking on the 1.9% industry and more specifically the regional deployment of aircraft? Why are there never climate change activists breaking into Top Shop, JD Sports or Curry’s PC World? You’ve got it the wrong way around. Cities grow, economies expand, aircraft become more cost efficient and eventually you reach a point where routes become viable. The demand is there; we have Southampton, Pompey, Bournemouth, Salisbury, Winchester, Basingstoke, Havant, Chichester and a whole bunch of other places within an hour of Eastleigh. I used to live in Three Bridges - I took the train to Southampton and back every Saturday to watch us play for several years. If I will do that for 90 minutes of football and some beer, most other people will do it for a long weekend in Barcelona.

Low cost airlines like Ryanair and Easyjet buy planes in large bulk; they get the biggest discount possible that way. Sometimes the number they order is into triple figures and will cover their fleet development for a decade. They don’t just say, "hey here’s a new airport, let’s buy ten more planes," they deploy them seasonally where it’s most profitable. Ryanair are notorious for this; they will take 5 planes out of Stansted’s summer schedule and stick them in Poznań and Tenerife, just like that. Aviation expands whatever happens. As the economy grows and more people have more wealth, they will take more flights; either for business, family or leisure. If it’s not here, they’ll just be packing even more into Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted. The difference is those flights often have to hold for anything up to half an hour, just flying round and round in circles, burning jet fuel over southern England.

No, you’ve missed the point. In the grand scheme of things, small expansion at a regional airport isn’t going to make any significant impact compared to the worldwide aviation sector. Aviation accounts for 1.9% of CO2 emissions globally. That’s all planes globally, added together; do you think blocking the runway expansion at SOU is going to have any noticeable impact on worldwide emissions? In the time flights have been grounded, China has probably built another 1,000 factories pumping out billions of CO2 as we speak. I’m all for saving the planet; the push for electric cars by 2030, all coal power stations to be closed by 2025, wind turbines, more efficient aircraft etc. But we can’t just sit here saying, "that releases some carbon, ban it," if there’re no credible alternatives.

It’s not exactly an abstract concept. I’ve just been on the EasyJet website, picked a random Saturday in June and flights from Gatwick to Mallorca. There were four and a pop up said you can also fly from Luton, from where there were a further three. That’s seven flights a day, just from one airline at two of the six London airports. Factor in all the airlines at all six airports and you’re well into double figures. My point is, you’d never notice if there were only 13 flights from London instead of 14 but if there’s one more from Southampton you do. Anyway this is all completely trivial; Covid has wiped out enough flights in the UK to cover SOU for the next 100 years.

No because that’s a 7 hour drive minimum, which is clearly prohibitive. One hour to Heathrow or 1.5 to Gatwick isn’t going to put people off going away for the weekend. A lot of London commuters do that every week anyway. I do think people need to take a certain amount of responsibility and jetting off somewhere for a break once a month would go against that but to basically say get rid of SOU completely so we can save the environment is a fallacy. That’s what will happen without the runway extension, it’s just not viable without Flybe.

You make it sound like Christmas (which is kind of a taboo subject on this forum) but I admire your enthusiasm! Come on Saints!

Wasn’t there some criteria whereby he wouldn’t have to do it if South Korea won some competition? I’m sure that was news 2/3 years ago.

Why do you assume it’ll be more jets? What if instead of 8 flights to Mallorca from London per day, its 7 and one from Southampton, with much shorter and fewer car journeys each way? Trying to save the planet by refusing new runway construction would be like removing 2 lanes from either side of the M25 to reduce car journeys.