Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: To anyone pro-Brexit

EvilDrSmith,

Remember that people who care deeply about the EU are in a minority. Probably less than 5% of the electorate are actual federalists and maybe another 10-15% hard-core remainers.

And for 40 years numbers saying they want to leave the EU have hovered around the 30%-35% mark. With the odd move about of course. That leaves the other half of the electorate who are not huge fans of the EU, but can take it or leave it. They decided the referendum, and if enough of them change their minds might still be able to force a re-run.

So far most polling I've seen has shown not a huge amount of movement, and a majority who believe the referendum should be implemented whichever way they happened to vote. But those numbers are shifting a bit, and if happens in a major way, there's still time to do something about it.

Like-it-or not, if you have a strong opinion on EU membership, you're probably in a minority amongst the general electorate.

That's why it took 40 years to build up enough steam to get another referendum after all.

Re: To anyone pro-Brexit

EvilDrSmith,

To be fair, I think a reaonable argument can be made to re-run the referendum. If enough people think circumstances have changed, then that's politically acceptable. Despite a lot of cherry-picking of poll data, I'm not sure we're at that stage yet. I just don't think Parliament can do it.

Tactically it's awful, as it hands the EU negotiators the option to offer nothing, in the hopes that the decision will be overturned. But due to the way the Commission have run the negotiations so far, there is currently no acceptable option on the table. Even a lot of remain politicians don't think they can justify agreeing free movement without another referendum anyway, and I'd hope no serious politician would be willing to put up customs barriers between NI and the rest of the UK. So we're currently headed for hard Brexit, even though I don't think anyone but the head-bangers on either side actually want that. The Commission have over-played their hand in the hopes of forcing May to accept something like EEA status and full freedom of movement - and I don't think there's a majority in Parliament to agree that either.

There's still plenty of time to apply massive amounts of fudge though...

So I still see it as democratic to allow another referendum. Not ideal, but acceptable. But the cost to trust in politics would be massive. I also think that would lead to a permanent divide in our politics on EU membership - which would lead to us leaving in the long-run anyway. Once the rest of the EU decided that they didn't want to offer concessions for a re-run - I think remaining in the EU became almost impossible.

That's why leaving the EU is not like a divorce, or leaving a club. It's like a huge constitutional mess - but then so's staying in it.

renniks,

I don't see how Parliament can reverse a referendum result, without going back and asking permission first.

Obviously our constitutional position is that "no Parliament can bind the hands of future Parliaments" - so it's not unconstitutional. But it's politically unaccepable. Also our constitution works by precedent. We joined the EU without a referendum. But after a huge political argument, we had one on whether to stay in or not. So that sort of sets a precedent that the EU is now a decision for public vote. Particularly as we had an agreement from both major parties that we shouldn't join the Euro or sign the European Constitution without a referendum. Although admittedly they simply renamed that the Lisbon Treaty and pushed it through largely unchanged - and it's arguable that this was the breach of faith that massively increased support for leaving the EU and made leaving much more likely. I still don't think it would have happend without the Euro-crisis and a decade of unprecedentedly high net immigration though.

So I'd say we're stuck with referendums on major EU issues now. Our constitution changed by precedent. After all, each time we sign another EU treaty previous Parliaments were binding the hands of future Parliaments in that they were giving away their power to make decisions in major areas of policy to the EU.

There's a good argument that if we do want to stay in the EU we need a written constitution in order to protect us from EU mission-creep.

Getting back into the EU means joining the Euro. If it's possible to cancel Article 50, then that's viable and can be sold to the public. But joining the Euro is economically insane - unless you plan to have a much larger EU budget and use that money to make large economic transfers between the member states.

The current EU budget is about 1% of EU GDP. In order to make the Euro a viable long-term currency that's got to be increased dramatically, to something like 10-20% of GDP, and large chunks of it spent in the regions of the Eurozone that are suffering economically at that particular time. You can cut that amount by having schemes like jointly issued government bonds and a well-enforced common banking supervision and bail-out system - and obviously a large chunk of that spending could be common unemployment insurance - so it needn't require the EU to become the state and the countries just regions. But it definitely means much more political integration - which isn't even popular in the countries like Germany where a large minority of voters actually believe in a federal EU - let alone Britain.

Re: Remind me...

Depends what you want. Some people voted on immigration levels, some people voted on economic grounds, others political or constitutional. Remeber that UKIP were founded by economists and were originally about leaving the EU to do freer trade (as well as opposition to the Euro). It became a more socially conservative / anti-large-scale immigration protest party later.

That's why some people campaigned to leave the political bits of the EU and join the EEA, and others wanted to leave and have unilateral zero tarriff access allowed to anyone in the world and others wanted some kind of special deal that the EU were unlikely to offer.

The real answer is that a small minority believe strongly in the EU, and another small minority really disllike it. But quite a large majority aren't fans, and definitely don't like the political bits, and were willing to be persuaded on the grounds of whether it was more hassle to leave than to stay and put up with the bits they didn't like.

One economic forecast from the EU (also pretty much agreed with by the World Bank) was that if we'd stayed in, our population would have gone up to 85 million by 2040-2050 and our GDP overtaken Germany's by the early 2030s. Now I'm pretty sceptical of those kinds of long-term forecasts - but it's interesting to ponder that and wonder who the winners and losers would have been from that scenario. Personally I don't think that would be politically sustainable - countries who add 30% to their population over a couple of decades tend to suffer high instability and massive social changes, to go with the ecomic growth.

Re: £350 million a week

Well only somewhat a con. It's actually £280m a week from memory. The £350m a week included our rebate, which by definition we don't pay - so was clearly deliberately misleading. But the argument was apparently we'd "have control of" the money - as our net payment is only something like £120m a week ish - that's the actual cash we get back. Though obviously we can cut subsidies to agriculture, which is about a third of EU spending. In fact that's DEFRA's plan, with payments for holding farmland to be phased out over the next decade and a (presumably smaller) amount to be moved to support maintaining hedgerows, bio-diversity and the like.

Sadly the quality of the referendum campaign was shocking on both sides - although at least there's some good organisations out there now to give you a better idea of what the true numbers are. I recommend Radio 4's More or Less - who covered this extensively at the time - and do lots of number checking at election times.

I'm not sure if the most depressing thing is the tendency for people to just pick numbers out of the air and shout them loudly, or the habit of deliberately misrepresenting the other sides' argument in order to make things even more unpleasant and polarised.

Why can't we all just get along, and declare war on France. That and tougher sentences for geography teachers are both sensible policies, for a happy Britain.

Re: ESA & Copernicus

Please can we kill all the shit analogies. Leaving the EU is not like divorce, or leaving a club or any other bollocks. Leaving the EU is a bit like... Leaving the EU. It's a very unusual organisation that nobody's left before, unless you count Greenland - and their membership came via Denmark. Also wasn't that long enough ago to be the EEC they left rather than the EU?

Re: Give Russia's reputation for poor workmanship

What kind of manufacturing process for a spaceship requires holes to be drilled in it with hand tools? Surely everything's pre-drilled these days? I know they're basically hand-built, due to low volumes made. But as the design hasn't changed that much, you'd have thought there'd be tooling for banging out the individual parts.

Or is it like flat-pack furniture from the 80s. Where you got badly drawn instructions tellling you what sizes of drill bits and screwdrivers you needed, and you had to bodge it yourself.

At least Ikea put a stop to that - despite using the cheapest, greyest toilet-roll-iest paper and keeping the drawings impossible to read.

Re: Time to switch platforms

In my opinion the iPad is still the best value tablet, but the iPhone prices have got silly. Then again so are the top-end Droids.

Re: Margins

steelpillow,

That's true, but the Android sellers can't even double their margins, because there's always another Android seller in competition. And also because they, and their rivals, have so many cheaper models which are "good enough" and so cannibalise sales.

Apple have got this nice niche of customers who are happy with the UI, and don't fancy change. In the case of my colleague his last non iPhone was a Windows Mobile 5 device (HTC I think). Which was clunky and required a stylus (as smartphones did back then) - and I suspect his opinion of Android is coloured by how hard to use the first few iterations of Android were. Or maybe messy is better than hard to use? My experience of Android 2.3 was not entirely happy, and I've been through iPhone and am currently stuck on Windows Phone - waiting for the handset to die and test the waters of £200-£300 Droid.

People hold on tight to nurse

For fear of UI's horribly worse...

Re: Typical Apple

For the price of servicing a Rolex, I could buy another watch. I'm wearing a (very nice looking) 20 year old Tissot that I was given, that's probably about £200 to replace. All I've spent on it is £5 for a new battery 5 or 6 times. At the point it needs servicing, I'm probably best replacing it.

So the cost of ownership of a Rolex is pretty damned high - and though they don't plummet in value, I'm not sure they even keep pace with inflation, let cover their huge servicing costs.

Which is fine if you can afford it, and that's what you want. But I think it's a bit silly trying to jusitfy it as an investment.

There's a bit more reason to justify the purchase of an overpriced iPhone. Which isn't as massively overpriced as a Rolex, being only 5x the price of a good basic alternative and not even double the price of the top-of-the-range Droids. If you've got iPads and a family iTunes account, apps, and maybe some Apple music or video - then it's not ludicrous to pay more for the convenience of all that. And some people hate learning a new OS so much, that moving to Android would be quite disruptive to their life. I'm thinking of a colleague here who probably makes 30 calls and 50 emails a day on his iPhone - so for him it's an essential productiviy tool.

Myself I think any phone over £250 is over-priced, given that technology advances in phones have slowed down so much in the last 5 years. Apart from a Galaxy Note or Blackberry, if you need the specialist stylus/keyboard.

Re: drone ship

Because I'm not all that interested in Tesla, I've mostly missed Musk being an idiot. So have been able to enjoy the exploits of SpaceX in blissful ignorance.

But I was closely following the rescue in Malaysia - and couldn't ignore his rampant arseholery. The fact that he's gone all Trump and doubled-down on his bollocks since, rather than shutting up or apologising, is extra depressing. He's even made quite specific claims, suggesting he's done some research on the guy, only for journos to check them out and find them to be bollocks. It sort of takes the gloss of reading about SpaceX being successful at the moment, which is a shame.

Re: Given how expensive it is

Budgets are complicated. Remember that the hardware also has a limited life. See failed reaction wheels on the Kepler scope. Which is why they're burning their fuel faster than expected. It should normally only need its fuel for station-keeping, the reaction wheels are there for pointing purposes.

Also fuel tank capacity is a matter of both mass and volume. Even if you're not at the mass-limit of the vehicle, you may be at the size-limit.

And finally budgetting also has to account for the team to run the spacecraft on earth. So if you extend the length of the program, you also have to find funding for the team.

What that all boils down to is that none of this is predictable. And you can't know what will kill your project, hardware failures, lack of fuel or lack of budget.

Re: Send NASA to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave

Unfortunately some things just refuse to accept updates.

That's OK. As any engineer knows, if you can't fix it by turning it off-and-on-again, then you check the manual for the correct procedure - but if all else fails you hit it with a big hammer.

Re: @JuJuBalt

Pity Theresa May didn't have the balls to make that clearer at the start, indeed.

On that I disagree. The priority of the EU27 is the continuing integrity and success of the EU. Which is perfectly reasonable, and not something we should seek to disturb - even though we're leaving. Obviously the EU has major problems, mainly the Euro clusterfuck - but in general it's still a reasonably useful organisation, despite many drawbacks.

So going in all adversarial and trying to pit us against them was always going to fail as a tactic - and make compromise harder, not easier. Remember governments have to sell the deal to their populations, just as the UK did. This was why the Greeks were fucked when Syriza won. Varoufakis was actually making somer very sensible proposals, but the creditor countries weren't even willing to listen at the point, because their poplulations believed that the Greeks were lazy good-for-nothings who deserved everything they got. Now admittedly a lot of the reason for that is that the German government deliberately painted the issue that way, in order to avoid the first bail-out and to avoid admitting that the Euro is a continuing clusterfuck that needs to be massively reformed or abandonded... But I digress.

The point is that we probably should have been even more reasonable and fluffy. People like Johnson and Fox should have been told to be helpful, shut the fuck up or be sacked. We should have started with a generous offer and said that we can't accept full freedom of movement and that if they aren't willing to give single market access without it - then we'd like the closest relationship they were willing to offer within those terms.

I think the Commission have over-played their hand, in almost trying to force May to stay in the Single Market - while also trying to undermine her authority - despite the fact that she'd be the person that has to get any deal through Parliament. And I'm not sure if a generous start to proceedings would have made any difference, but in PR terms it would have made the Commission look as petty as they're actually being.

At the moment we're in a situation with no exits, because I don't think anyone can get full Single Market membership through the Commons, and the Commission have pushed so hard on the Irish border issue that we don't currently even have the option of no special deal, but just to leave and do a Canada style free trade deal. I suppose Corbyn might be willing to basically create an internal legal and customs border between two parts of the UK - but could he persuade the rest of Labour, let alone a numnber of Conservatives and the DUP?

Even then no deal probably means lots of little deals. There are lots of mostly non-political meetings going on about things like mutual airline recognition. I know it's a common remainer trope to portray May as utterly incompetent and the EU as great, but given we have the same legal code as when we were members and we've guaranteed EU flights continuing access to our airspace - would it really be us who were a laughing stock if next year the EU refuse to allow our planes into their airspace? Or would it be them who looked vindictive and incompetent?

It's not like they've got massive economic growth and us none, so deliberately massively disrupting our common trade is also not a good look. As well as risking a sudden recession. It might be worse here, but we don't have the handicap of the Eurozone. Pushing Italy into recession would be a really bad idea. So I'm not optimistic for a great deal, but I'm hoping that common sense means something will get cobbled together that isn't awful for anyone - even if it doesn't please anyone either.

Re: @JuJuBalt

No. We aren't paying to leave. We're fulfilling longterm commitments (if we have any sense of honour left).

The EU does its accounts in a very odd way. In that the Commission authorises a lot of speculative spending, which can in rare cases take over a decade to happen, or often not happen at all. They work on the same principal as airlines over-selling seats on fully booked planes, because some people always fail to turn up. So the Commission will authorise more spending committments than it has budget for, as the project can't go ahead unless their funding is matched in-country, and then wait to see what happens. Makes the budget a right old mess. This leads to a lot of under and over spends, which will hopefully net off against each other.

Anyway, the Commission's argument is that we're still on the hook for a bunch of these projects that were authorised while we were members. But we're not due any of the benefits from the things we paid for while members. Which is utterly illogical. Apart from the pensions of EU civil servants and the loan guarantees to Ukraine, I can't think of any other major financial committments we are morally or legally on the hook for (though I'm sure there are a bunch of smaller ones).

The EU has legal personality since the Lisbon constitution treaty. - so makes all its financial committments in its own name. Therefore if it's a club, we owe the fees while we're a member and not afterwards. Otherwise, if we owe ongoing fees, we also own our share of the assets. And should net our share off against our liabilities.

I think the legal position is very clear. And so, I suspect, do the Commission. Which is why they refused to even start to negotiate anything else, before getting a huge financial committment agreed.

So no, morally I don't think we're on the hook for £35 billion. Or legally either.

I wouldn't have done the negotiations like this. I'd have offered a settlement for EU citizens living in the UK (guaranteed whatever the outcome) and a large payment to cover this stuff at the beginning, and a couple of options/suggestions on the ongoing trade relationship and let the negotiations start from there. But actually it hasn't been the British government that have made the negotiations so adversarial - that's been pretty much all down to the Commission. They've been the ones doing the leaking (and what looks like some outright lies) on a regular basis, while May didn't stoop to that level (perhaps she should have?). It looks like pretty much the same playbook as in the negotiations with Greece. And they were the ones who started deliberatly with talk of a £100bn UK payment in order to be politically unacceptable and poison the atmosphere - when it was obvious to anyone that a payment could have been negotiated in parallel with everything else - on the simple grounds of no payment no goodies. Doing it simultaneously makes it a lot easier to sell, so it was pretty clear they were deliberaly trying to make political difficulties for May's government. Which may well have backfired - and led to a situation where no deal is now quite likely. Though the treaty is clear that the Commision does not have the comptetence to negotiate the exit deal, that is in the competence of the Council of Ministers, so it could just be a bit of good cop bad cop thing.

Oh, and you're wrong. We're not negotiating the aftermath of leaving. We're negotiating the exit. The Commission have refused to do that until the transition period - i.e. once we've actually left.

Article 50 states that the Council of Ministers shall negotiate a withdrawal agreement which takes account of the future relationship with the leaving country. But a future trade deal is entirely within the legal competence of the Commission, and they've refused to even discuss that until we're a third country. i.e. during the transition period. So what we're currently negotiating is all the nitty-gritty of how to leave and all the institutional fall-out from that. With an outline of the future trade/security arrangements to be agreed later. Then, after we've left, we negotiate the detail of that outline understanding - during the transition period. When we'll trade as if we're still in the EU, but not be part of it. Hence the security relationship now going titsup, because that isn't part of the transition agreement, but the Commission has barely even started talking to us about that and has surprised us with its initial uncooperative position. Given our current position is to offer full cooperation at no cost (i.e. a huge benefit to other EU members) and the Commission's current position appears to be to reject some of that free cooperation and demand we pay a cost to offer some of the other things we contribute.

I thought "no deal" was a 5-10% chance back in 2016. It's looking like 30-50% at the moment. But I'm seeing rumours of Barnier losing influence - so I wonder if he's pushed a bit harder than he was supposed to? We shall see. At the moment even a Canada style trade deal is off the table, which I do find a bit surprising.

Re: Gaileo was willy waving

Rupert Fiennes,

If there's one thing that both Tornado and particularly Eurofighter have proved is that European programs are a big failure.

Tornado can in no sense be called a failure. The program was started in the late sixties, and into operational deployment ten years later, which is perfectly reasonable. There was also a decent amount of development of the aircraft as time went on. Though admittedly not as much as if you've got something bigger-selling like the F16/F18. This is partly a problem as Germany and Italy are the two other biggest customers in Europe, and they won't spend that money. Which then means that other small European airforces choose to buy American - as that means their aircraft are kept current for longer.

But Tornado produced a good strike aircraft a decent air-defence supression one and an OK interceptor. For the UK role of defending the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap against Soviet long range naval aviation it was pretty good - you wouldn't want to dogfight in one though.

Eurofighter has turned out to be a decent enough aircraft. It could again do with more development spending, it's got the capability for variable direction thrust for example - but nobody will ante-up the cash. On the other hand, I suspect that dogfighting is over-rated, and is more for the Top Trumps school of aircraft selection. Had the partner nations not slashed their orders for aircraft, it would have come out decently priced as well. And it's not as if the planners were expecting the Cold War to end less than a decade after they placed orders for the thing.

France were even induced to join a successful and cheap scheme, which was Jaguar. Otherwise though they've been more noticeable for joining up, wasting everybody's time, then buggering off.

So I'm sure it could be done. With Eastern Europe now looking to replace ageing Soviet kit - there could have been a market for a decent European aircraft. But that would have needed willingness from Germany to open their cheque book, and pull their weight in defence terms. With Germany and the UK cooperating, it could have been done (even without France).

Re: Gaileo was willy waving

Rupert Fiennes,

The British and French have sufficient nuclear weapons (of sufficient accuracy) to use as counter-force against any similar sized or smaller force. So India, North Korea, Israel, Pakistan and China are perfectly possible. The Chinese have been pretty moderate in their nuclear posture - pretty much going for the same level of making it unacceptably costly to attack them as we did.

Only the US and Russia have gone down the total overkill path. They both have sufficiently large forces to be practically unstoppable. Although with the low levels of Russian military spending for the two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, you do wonder how much of their older stuff still works.

I understand that the fiction in UK nuclear planning is still that we target important military installations - even if those do just happen to be in/near major cities.

On the other hand, once the other side have some portion of their deterrent on a submarine, counter-force becomes useless, unless you can find the damned thing (and hold the contact until the correct moment).

Re: Gaileo was willy waving

Europe is perfectly able to build its own fighter. The problem is that there are no economies of scale. Total Eurofighter orders from the 4 partners were not much more than 400. The US Marines alone are buying about that number of F35s.

Also there's no money for Eurofighter development, as even when the RAF have cash, Germany won't play. It would be easier if France would join, or at least not leave in a huff when they can't get 60% of the build contracts... But with Germany unwilling to spend, and France unwilling to cooperate, NATO are left with only the US.

Re: @JuJuBalt

The gym argument is stupid. As is the divorce one. We're actually negotiating leaving the EU. It's a unique situation. It's as silly as all those car analogies for music piracy / copyright.

But two can play at being stupid, and there is another side to said gym argument. i.e. why would we pay a bill to leave the EU? The EU has legal personality - so technically is liable for its own bills. So there's no reason for us not to pay up to the day we leave the "gym" and then pay not a penny more? That is how membership of a club works, if that's the argument you want to make. As I understand it this is the actual legal position. Perhaps the Commission need to play a bit carefully on how they negotiate this?

I believe we did individually guarantee some loans to Ukraine, which will probably not get paid back in full, and I'm sure there's a few other wrinkles, where the UK government is directly liable for certain spending committments. But in general the EU is liable for what it's guaranteed to spend, and then responsible for collecting the required money from its member governments.

Re: Gaileo was willy waving

Doctor Syntax,

That's all very well - but without the military investment the satellite capablity is a joke. Only Britain and France have any serious deployment capability at all - and we'd both be pretty overstretched by anything large nowadays.

Since the Commission decided to start shitting all over our post Brexit security cooperation (will be interesting to see how much of that stands when the Council of Ministers do the final deciding), Europe's defence capabilities look even weaker. For example (going from memory here) 13 out of 14 EU military deployments have been HQed out of Northwood. But that's ending next year, unless minds change. As the Commission's current position is that once we leave the EU, and not even during the transition period, we not only can't run joint HQs for missions we've been running for years - but even if we commit troops, we'll be allowed no joint decision making in how they're used. Which pretty much is saying, "fuck off we don't want your help" - as that's a pretty much unacceptable positon to take for a country committing forces. Even to the sort of peacekeeping stuff that the EU mostly does. The surprise of that decision seems to have come down to the weird negotiating strategy, where the Commission decided that the one important bit of Brexit was that the UK pay over loads of cash. And all other talking should be left to the last minute.

Running a joint forces, multi-national HQ can't be all that hard, these mostly aren't that complex missions. But it is suggestive that there's almost no existing EU HQ capacity.

Then we get to one of the most sensible bits of EU defence integration. The idea that as most EU countries have lower defence spending, they each specialise in certain capabiliites. Which can then be shared at need. It's a great idea in theory, as you get much better capabilities for smaller investment, rather then countries trying to do everything badly, and on a small scale. Except that when France called on Germany during the Libya campaign, for air transport/tanker assets, Germany said no. Since when, France has been trying to get much better bilateral military cooperation going with the UK - as France have rarely been happy to work through NATO, and the EU route hasn't borne that much fruit. Remember that France and Germany have joint military formations, and were supposedly the big two committing to EU defence cooperation.

The German foreign minister (later publicly shot down by Merkel) and French President both said in speeches last week that Europe can't rely on the US under Trump. Which leads to the question, what to do about it? I suspect Merkel contradicted that interview because her policy is not to increase defence spending very much at all. Germany's current budget is that it rise from 1.1% of GDP now, to 1.3% by 2020 - then start dropping again - so my suspicion is that current German policy is to do little and hope for the best. Trump being a one-term President and Russia not upping the ante anymore.

But there is a worry in Eastern Europe about security. Them being closer to Russia and all. Especially if Trump does manage 2 terms, and carries on being so erratic.

Britain went into Brexit negotiations pretty much accepting that we couldn't bargain our security cooperation for a better deal. What I don't think we were expecting was for the Commission to take the initiative and make post Brexit security cooperation so hard. In the case of Galileo of course there's hi-tech jobs for France and Germany to nick off us, but the other stuff seems to be nonsensical. Will be interesting to see how long that lasts? That's actually as likely to damage NATO as Trump's stupid antics. I've no idea what will happen. A deal on Galileo seems perfectly sensible, we've paid a huge chunk of the costs so far - and I think the UK government were gernally surprised at the decision, on the grounds that this was the security cooperation the EU were begging us not to mix up with Brexit.

We have an MOD satellite comms system called Skynet. I think we should threaten to give this GPS capability and then start building robot soldiers with human skin over metal endoskeletons. That should get everyone worried...

Trident uses star trackers for navigation.

Couldn't we just make all the RAF's planes and missiles a teensy little bit bigger and more powerful, so they can just pop up into space - take a navigation fix - then pop down and do whatever bombing/delivering/snooping they were planning.

All we need is to get the Reaction Engines thingymajig to work, find an aircraft design that can cope with reentry heat, invent a new fuel that doesn't leak, kill everyone or weigh too much and job's a good'un.

I suggest nuclear powered aeroplanes.

[cue: Thunderbirds music]