vivweb01

Just a brief update on live bus service monitoring online,  in case anyone else is struggling to see where their bus has got to - you're not alone. I'm located in the Midlands and have not been able to see any Arriva buses on Bustimes.org's live map local services since Sunday 18th May. All other service providers seem to be showing up normally. Looking further afield, some other regions do seem to have tracking on some of their Arriva services, so it does not appear to be a universal outage. Some further investigations yesterday and a chat with a helpful Arriva driver revealed that a) local drivers themselves use Bustimes.org in preference to Arriva's app, b) They had also noticed the dropout and, perhaps more revealing, they had enquired of their bosses what the reason was and been told 'they didn't know'. We can theferore only speculate. Arriva have been messing about with their timetables this month, and I wouldn't be surprised if they've done so...

I first published this mini-review in July 2022 - a 'lot of water has passed under the bridge' since then, with a new and highly unpopular government in place and already faltering.  The employment situation has worsened significantly since then due to the NI surchares leveled on Business in October 2024. I've recently updated it to reflect recent developments and the prospects for our economic recovery. There has been little or no progress on addressing our low productivity and high benefits dependency amongst the working age population. It's important for the sake of our economy and our children's futures that we address our poor productivity as a nation. We can only hope to do this if we make maximum use of our home-grown talent. It's important that we now include more of our older workers in our workforce, whether they have retired or not, and we can only tempt them out of their 'economic inactivity' by providing strong incentives. The following arti...

  Introduction We are living through a time of great change – and a challenge to our way of life. The fundamental reason behind this is a developing imbalance between the resources we are able to supply for our populations, and the demand they are placing on them. Our unrestrained world population growth over the past half-century has now caught up with us with a vengeance, and is rapidly outstripping our available resources. As far back as the 1970s , this imbalance was predicted to come to a head in the early to mid-2020s. At that time, the environmental movement was just a pale shadow of what it is today, and 'net zero by 2050' hadn’t even been considered. The arguments about whether climate change is actually occurring have largely subsided now in the face of the overwhelming evidence that the planet's atmoshphere is heating up, particularly in the polar regions; these have been replaced by disputes as to how much of a contribution man-made greenhouse gas emis...