Robbo said "The farm hands of a century ago were replaced by the tractor which freed their descendants to attend uni."

Its like back in the day when everyone changed from horsies to vehicles BECAUSE vehicles were just better, easier, more efficient etc. No one went around shooting all the horsies to force everyone to move to automotive power!

However we have the exact opposite of that happening today. Everyone is going around shooting the horsies to force everyone to move to something that is just sh1t and will leave everyone worse off than before!

Robert/tomo; yes, that talk was very enjoyable and informative. It's a shame he didn't take a couple of minutes to incorporate a bit more of her background as she was clearly a "character".
I'm a member at Brooklands and was interested to learn that she was the second of only 3 women to lap the track at over 100 mph, in 1934 (wiki). The track was notoriously rough, as witnessed by the famous picture of John Cobb at speed in the massive Napier Railton with all 4 wheels off the ground! It must have taken some bravery and not a little strength to ride a 1930s bike around there at high speed.
Wrt to the Merlin carburettor, clearly there was a degree of "not invented here" at play. However I would also speculate that the negative g issue was seen as a mere irritant by the RAF until they encountered injection engines. Prior to that, any practice dog-fighting would have been against similar aircraft so there may have been an in-built assumption that all planes behaved in the same way.
The Bendix carburettor was - speculation again - probably developed for the very high altitude performance required for the American bombers and, later on, the accompanying fighters. Despite extensive reading about WWII aviation over many decades, I've never seen mention of the difference between Packard-engined aircraft and those with RR Merlins yet it must have been very noticeable to pilots who flew both. Packard Merlins were fitted to some marks of Spitfire so it must have been noticed.
Thanks again to tomo for putting me on to Douglas' book (the Secret Horsepower race) which is quite the best book on WWII aviation that I have read. We will always wonder what difference a fuel-injected Merlin would have made.....the technology had been developed in Britain well before the war, mainly by Ricardos.

tomo,
Beatrice Shilling talk was very enjoyable. I suppose we can take some comfort from the all too familiar bureaucratic blob behaviour. They got by, so maybe we can too.

One of the questions put a bit of a damper on the engineering brilliance when it turned out that the Americans just popped an off-the-shelf Bendix carburettor into their Merlins, which apparently did the trick.

Starmer thing was something to behold. Can someone please wake up all the political class to the fact that wealth is in the *consumption* of energy, not its production. The farm hands of a century ago were replaced by the tractor which freed their descendants to attend uni. Now those educated halfwits (can leave off the first three letters if you like) are pushing "abolish the tractor for green new jobs".

Jo Nova is covering more "green new jobs" today as a hailstorm takes it toll on a large solar farm in Texas. Lots of work to clean it up. Economists talk about creative destruction, but sometimes it's just destructive destruction.

tomo; thanks for the Schilling link.
It'll be a good watch if it's anywhere near the standard of his book.

A state-owned, taxpayer-funded company "investing" in tax-payer subsidised infrastructure. What could possibly go wrong.

One of the few things more stupid than a vote for the 'Conservatives' is a vote for Labour. We're stuffed.

Labour, will give us more forms of energy production that do not work AND cant tell us what a f98king woman is.

What you see happening up in Scotland and Ireland with their hate speech laws will come this way very quickly once we get our Labour overlords in power.

And we have Rishi and the other limp wristed vegetables to thank for that.