Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: Without Whisper....

Curing cancer is rubbish! What we need to know is if Brexit increases house prices.

And did the EU kill Diana. Oh sorry, that’s the Express. But we all know Selmayr used to drive a Fiat Uno.

And remainers is an anagram of mein arse. Mumble, mumble, mumble extra r...

Re: Anybody fancy a game of...

Radio 4 Extra got Big Finish Productions to play around and produce a version of Shada. Wasn't that one of Adams' Doctor Who's killed by 70s strike action?

I'm still amazed by the fact that someone thought it was a good idea to put Douglas Adams in charge of getting other writers to get their Dr Who scripts in on time. Particularly given that Simon Brett only got the script for the pilot of HHGTTG out of him by locking him in a hotel room!

The radio Hitch Hikers is my favourite thing Adams did. After that, I think I prefer the Dirk Gently books, as they turned out, not as the Shada thing I heard done later on the radio. Although Radio 4 did do a rather brilliant adaptation of those too - with Harry Enfield in the title role.

Radio 4 also did a nice program called The Workins' of Perkins on Geoffrey Perkins and the great stuff he produced. Listed in iPlayer, but not currently available sadly.

Re: Anybody fancy a game of...

I prefer Brockian ultra cricket myself. Far more civilised.

Ow! Who did that?

Re: Am I missing something ?

Alan Brown,

Washing machines in the kitchen are fine. All standard washing machine valves have a built in check valve to stop the taste of the rubber hose getting back to your drinking water - and any CE marked washing machine must have a double check valve built in.

The risk or washing machine water is a Fluid Category 3 risk - which can be dealt with by double check valve. Food waste is the highest category Cat 5, hence your sink tap gap being required to be twice the pipe diameter between the bottom of the tap and the top of the sink. So washing machine water going into is is less dangerous than the purpose it's already designed for.

The point about bathrooms being a floor above is simply that gravity means if supply pressure is reduced, then the kitchen tap can be fed from water higher in the pipe, due to gravity. Position is therefor irrelevant.

Whether bathrooms can be above kitchens, I've no idea. Though I thought UK building regs also required 2 doors between kitchen and toilet. We don't have those rules on laundries - but then I'm not sure that output from the dishwasher is any safer than from the washing machine. Both are Fluid Category 3 - and that should be the same across the EU, given that our Water Regulations are based on a common EU framework.

The risks you are worrying about are lower. What I'm talking about is poo coming out of your kitchen tap. But you're talking about it possibly dripping from the ceiling - which hopefully you'd notice and suspend cooking until any leak was fixed. Or from common drains, but your sink is already considered contaminated by the Water Regs - so they're designed to protect the mains from backflow and the house from cross-contamination. The Water Regs are a statutory instrument based on the 91 Water Industry Act - whereas what you're talking about is building regulations. Weirdly Part P is electricity and Part L is plumbing. Never got that myself...

Re: Am I missing something ?

If the hose is from the supply pipe then it's illegal here. Should the kids ever drop it down the bog and there's a temporary drop in supply pressure, it can siphon water from toilet to any other outlet in the house. Be that your shower, or kitchen tap.

A double check valve makes that safe, if not legal. And a riskier kind of safe, because you can't check if the check valve is working very easily - but as the problem is low probability but high risk - it's probably a sensible trade-off.

Or I can sell you a unit for £2,400 (ex VAT) to give you 2 minutes of warm water at 40°C that complies with the regs. Or you can do it yourself with a £100 break tank, a shower pump and your own controls.

Telephone directories are rubbish now. When they were important, they were great. Because with all the numbers and adverts they were thick enough to make perfect monitor stands. The ones you get nowadays are barely a hundred pages thick...

It's like the glory days of Computer Shopper and PCW magazines in the early 90s. 120 pages of content, 500 pages of adverts - and a free AOL CD coaster on the front cover.

Re: Am I missing something ?

However, and who'd 'a thunk my knowledge of the Water Regulations would come in useful on here? You bog is often on the floor above your kitchen tap, and sometimes shares the same supply pipe. So a bit of precaution might be in order.

The legal requirement is that you must have Fluid Category 5 protection between your bum and your glass of drinking water. Which means that a spray arm inside your toilet is a contamination risk - as is a shower head that can be accidentally dropped down the pan. Cat 5 means 2 pipe widths gap above the top of any vessel - i.e. your kitchen sink taps being high above the top of the side of the sink and old-school bidets having the taps above the top of the bidet pan with a spray nozzle to direct the flow down at your arse.

Some of the sprays can be fed via the toilet cistern - which is already Cat 5 because of the fact it's supplying the toilet. Others come direct off the mains, which is both illegal and somewhat dangerous. Obviously a lot of regs are overkill, but in my opinion not this one - because all the risk is small - you really need a drop in water supply pressure to cause backflow (or back-siphonage from shower hoses) - the health risk if it does happen is very high.

The law requries a break tank with AB air-gap, which then needs a pump, or to be high enough to give you water pressure via gravity (say in the attic). But that's because it's the highest risk and these are fail-safe. The fail dangerous option that's affordable and easy to fit is a double check valve on the final supply to whatever you're using. At lot of families where I live are of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, and a lof of those have shower hoses fitted off the mains cold water - and there's no way a lot of them can afford to do it legally. But it would be good if their plumbers would at least fit a £5 double check valve as a bit of insurance.

Sorry, digression over.

I think the point was to save money, by persuading kids to only poo at home...

On the other hand, I had a rather embarrassing conversation with a friend about this scam. She'd had the email, and because it had her password she believed she'd been hacked. I explained about the Experian leak (and others - but she was signed up with them) and how her password and email had got online for hackers to exploit.

What I didn't say was, "what have you been doing while using your laptop that has you so worried?" Because that's not a converational avenue I wished to get involved in. But of course it was always there in the background, and she's not at all comfortable talking about sex. So I was trying to think before I said or asked anything. Normally I just like to open gob and shove both feet in.

So I diverted into a riveting conversation about password security and why you should only re-use passwords on unimportant sites - and to change that password on any account it was still on. While checking it wasn't one she used for anything important.

However on the camera issue - if you're being naughty online while using an iPad in landscape mode - the camera might be a bit more explicit - depending if it's on the right or the left side of you I suppose. And whether you're an ambidextrous wanker...

Re: Some people lie, some people cheat, ...

It's nothing to do with austerity. The police have never dealt well with scammers. The police are there to keep law and order - but it should really be called "order and law". Because it's the public order they're worried about most, then violent crime, then everything else.

The fact that they're not equipped to deal with the modern world as it now is, and how important online stuff has become, is probably more to do with the fact that government and politics is quite cumbersome - and tends to react to social change very slowly.

Re: I think they did the right thing

We didn't give RBS anything. Well at least, not yet.

We lent them something huge, which I've forgotten, which they paid back within 3 years. That was money printed by the Bank of England and since destroyed - as all the banks were given short term loans.

We also bought a controlling interest in the bank for some more money - which money was used to prop up the bank. The government still owns those shares, and will presumably sell them off soon. They've already sold the stake in Lloyds TSB at a profit.

So the net cost of that bail-out should be low to zero once it's all unwound.

Re: Black Prince

There was no bit of the program useable for ballistic missiles. We decided that land based missiles weren't very safe for us. We only wanted a minimal deterrent - which meant fewer missiles - which meant being vulnerable to first strike. We're also closer to Russia, for planes as well as missiles to be able to reach them. And we didn't have large stretches of wilderness we wanted to site them in.

The submarine launched missiles (Trident and Polaris) are solid rockets, not liquid fuelled. So once the decision was made to go sea based nuclear, most of that technology was irrelevant.

Re: Black arrow is red and silver?

A work colleague once bought a pair of electric blue patent leather boots at lunchtime. Then complained to me that she hadn't got any clothes to go with them. I guess now I'd have been able to point her to some lipstick at least...

Re: To Infini

That section sound very like the usual:

" we didn't support this wholeheartedly enough in the begining, and because of that we should completely stop all funding and withdraw support at the first opportunity..."

No it doesn't. What he's saying is that we're producing the minimum number of rockets we possibly can, because we don't have any use for more. We could spend loads-a-money on improving the rockets to make launching less risky and prove the vehicle safe - but we've got limited use for it and industry doesn't either. So should we bother?

We can't sell it to foreigners without spending loadsa money on proving it - and is there enough demand for launches anyway? Given we only want to launch a satellite every couple of years.

Re: Hmm

One problem is the driver has one hand on the wheel, and the other on the CD player. Plus they're smoking a cigarette and drinking a massive coffee. And talking on their mobile phone, and to their children on the back seat.

And in this case, the driver is the electorate.

I'm a political anorak/nerd. But most peole aren't. And I know a lot of people who maybe watch the TV news once a week. Fortunately this means they miss quite a lot of the lies - and they're more taking a gernal impression of their politicians. But does mean if a lie sticks, it's bloody hard to shift.

On the other hand it also makes analysis hard. I can give you a thought out reason for most of my political views. It might be wrong, but it'll have some internal logic, and I'll be able to either come up with some facts or know how to Google them - to back it all up. But that's because I enjoy political debate. However that doesn't mean I came to all my political views by long conscious deliberate thought, it just means I can argue them as if I had. Sometimes, when I've come to do that, I've seen the flaws in my own opinions and gone off to think about them. I'm afraid that to my shame, I've never admitted that at the time...

But most voters don't talk about politics a lot - and so don't have the language at hand to say what they believe or why they believe it. So just borrow a slogan that fits. I don't think that's because they're stupid, I think it's because they're not part of the debate club. But it can easily make it look like people are falling for whatever the latest slogan is. If you probe a bit deeper with people, in a non argumentative way, about what they believe politically - they tend to sound a bit more sensible.

Although it was Churchill who said if you want to lose faith in democracy, just spend five minutes with the average voter.

I do think social media is a bad influence. But papers like the Guardian have fallen a long way from the levels of honesty and quality they were at even 15 years ago. And the whole political class have become lazy and self-indulgent - rather than trying to argue properly. Although the media haven't helped that, by promoting interveiwers like Paxman who won't let them even finish a sentence.

Re: Eh?

The mainstream media do need to sort their shit out - before they can start complaining about social media. The Guardian has given up any relationship to truth now. It's really sad. Anything they don't agree with is automatically "Tory lies". Anything anti-Tory they can find is automatically re-gurgitated as facts from experts.

I mean, for fuck's sake! Gove didn't even say "we've had enough of experts." He said, "we've had enough of so-called experts who keep getting it wrong." And was referring to all the people like the CBI and such that said not joining the Euro would be a total disaster - and suggested that their forecasts on Brexit might be equally poor.

Of course, the great thing about economics is that nobody can know anything. We regularly re-state our quarterly GDP figures by 1 percentage point, which means on average they're probably out by about 20%. And that's forecasting the past!

So we've recently had a bunch of economists telling us that Brexit has cost the UK economy something like 2-3% of GDP. And yet the UK economy has outgrown most of the Eurozone since the Brexit vote - so to do this they've been forced to include higher growth figures from Canada and the US - who were growing faster than us before the Brexit vote too.

Covering those uncritically, because you agree with their political direction, does not lead to accuracy and trustworthiness. There must have been a Brexit cost - because if nothing else it lead to a fall in investment and caused uncertainty. Plus a fall in the exchange rate, which has more mixed results.

Sadly the qualtiy of current political debate is pisspoor. But there are loads of people to blame. There are way too many reports commissioned to generate headlines, with numbers deliberately picked to suit whatever political argument is desired. The unions, think tanks, charities, indsutry groups and political parties are all guilty of doing this. This is where we need more programs like Radio 4's 'More or Less'. To cut through the bullshit.

Politics needs to get a bit more boring. But the media can't pull politicians up for bullshitting - when they're as busy doing it as the politicians are.

Re: "clarified once the uncertain situation caused by Brexit has been resolved"

What proroguing Parliament so that there would be a Queen's speech after the usual break for the party conference season. Meaning that Parliament would be suspended for 4 extra days than normal. Oh fetch the smelling salts! The shock!

It's almost like people were using obscure Parliamentary procedures to try and get an advantage in a constitutional crisis...

We had an election. The Conservatives won. We're stuck with them for five years, so long as they can command Parliament. There'll be an election in 4-5 years time as normal. They may well win it, with a reduced majority - or maybe not. It's unprecedented for the party in power to grow their vote and number of seats so much, after so long in power. But then it's unprecented for the opposition to stick with such an unpopular leader.

Our system has been called an elective dictatorship before, for a reason. It can be very depressing if you're sitting on the wrong end of a large majority - because the government has quite extensive powers to do stuff you don't like. Any Conservative can tell you that having to put up with the insufferably smug and over-bearing New Labour administration - and anybody who lived through 1983-88 on the Labour side has equally sad memories of their time in the political wilderness. The answer is not to piss the electorate off so much that they hand the other side a landslide.

Johnson isn't even close to Donald Trump, let alone your silly allusion to Hitler. Johnson is part of the "metropolitan liberal elite", he's just been seen as hideously right wing because he disagrees with the consensus on the EU. Supposedly he called himself, "a Brexity Hezza" in a cabinet meeting. And I heard Heseltine (on the left wing of the Conservative Party) agree, in an interview for Radio 4. Saying that they were usually in agreement on economic and social policy.

Johnson is a gobshite - and worse than many politicians at saying what they think people want to hear. But these childish statements that he's about to overturn a few hundred years of democracy, are quite frankly ludicrous. We have an unwritten (except Erskine May, the Ministerial Code, the Human Rights Act etc.) constitution - this means we have minor constitutional crises all the time. Leaving the EU was quite a major one. Pretending it's the end of democracy is silly. Stop it.

Re: "clarified once the uncertain situation caused by Brexit has been resolved"

The thing often forgotten about the Good Friday Agreement is that it's supposed to be symmetrical. So it offers closer ties to Ireland and cross community (and cross-border) institutions. But it also has to protect the border with the rest of the UK. Trying to pretend that putting up a border between the rest of the UK and NI is fine, while one between NI and Ireland is bad - is utterly ludicrous. In order to protect peace, both communities had to be reassured. And the EU deliberately forgot this in order to pursue a negotiating advantage.

Johnson sailed close to the wind with the agreement he made, but by agreeing that NI would be in the UK market and (to some extent) the EU Single Market we've created a fudge that could bridge the negotiating gulf. If the EU continue to insist that "they won" and that all compromise must be on the UK side - then the process will break down and we'll have to negotiate something else. Or a majority in the Northern Ireland Assembly will vote to leave the agreement.

Compromise is a two way street. We voted to leave the EU, and that causes problems. We should therefore have to do more of the compromising. But not all of it.

I'm sure the EU don't like what they signed up to in October any more than Johnson did. But that's tough shit. You can't always get what you want. There is no perfection in the Single Market as it exists, and a bit more realism and a bit less childish rhetoric is needed from both sides.

Re: ECJ as JCPC?

Yes, the Privy Council has ruled on death sentence appeals in Jamaica. Not that I remember the details any more, and it was before we'd passed the Human Rights Act that outlaws the death penalty in this country - so I've no idea what the situation would be now.

There's a bit in Richard Crossman's diaries where he said he was summoned to a PC meeting (late 60s perhaps?) because someone had buggered up and the Council had failed to renew the legal code of somewhere like the British Virgin Islands. My copy is at home and a quick Google for details doesn't help...

Re: "clarified once the uncertain situation caused by Brexit has been resolved"

Killing Time,

Negotiation is a two-way street. The EU are now negotiating with Boris Johnson because they repeatedly and continuously shat on Theresa May. She was the one being restrained and careful in her language - they were the ones doing the megaphone diplomacy. Obviously there were Tory backbenchers making rude comments from the sidelines, but in general her government was reasonably disciplined as to it's message - at least for the first 18 months.

May offered a deal with level-playing-field terms in exchange for a limited tarriff/quota free trade deal. This was the so-called multiple trade baskets deal - which meant close alignement retained for areas of complex joint supply chains and less but some access to us into the market for services. It got round the Northern Ireland problem by having the kind of zero border infrastructure and checking scheme that Barnier at the time said was "literally impossible". And then they agreed it with Johnson in October last year. The EU have since admitted they didn't even do studies of this deal before rejecting it. It's like the sectoral deals that the EU has already agreed with Switzerland - which is why May selected it as a model. They rejected it.

So May suggested the so-called Chequers deal. Which split her cabinet. But again solved the Northern Ireland problem by basing a deal on the EU's existing deal that they'd already agreed with Turkey. So we would be a partial member of the customs union - but have much less freedom to trade in services. The EU rejected this. They didn't say what they'd prefer in its place, simply telling May to go and think again and offer them something else they might like better. While also saying that there was always the worse option of the free trade deal like Canada - if NI alone stayed in the Single Market.

So Johnson said, OK, we'll take the Canada deal on offer. We'll agree a deal where Northern Ireland stays in both the Single Market and the UK market - with processes yet to be agreed to make this possible. But with the Northern Ireland assembly able to withdraw at 2 years' notice - and NI able to benefit from UK trade deals.

And now the EU are saying that no, the Canada deal was never really on offer. When we said that we didn't quite mean it, for "reasons". Even though NI is now permanently in an arrangement similar to the famous backstop - it's just that now it's not permanent - and the NI agreement is totally not nailed down because the EU refused to negotiate on it until literally the last month - and then agreed something that's going to be impossible to implement in the year left of the transition period.

So the UK government has offered to take 3 different versions of what the EU has agreed with other third parties, in descending order of closeness of relationship - Switzerland, then Turkey and now Canada. And each time the EU has said no, given few reasons or alternatives and acted as if they've been insulted by the very suggestion!

And now the EU, who openly laughed at the non legally binding political declaration to the Withdrawal Agreement, are saying we must stick to that political declaration. The thing they stressed noisily and repeatedly was non-binding when they tried to use it to reassure May on the Norther Ireland backstop she couldn't get through Parliament. Well now the fucking chickens are coming home to roost aren't they! Now it's the EU who are demanding that we should do a new custom deal and that the UK can't select the off-the-peg deals the EU have already done with others. Despite the fact that basing their offers on stuff the EU have already agreed with others was the basis of May's negotiating strategy!

So no, I'm no fan of Johnson. He's a mouthy git, and negotiation needs level-headed people who guard their words. But hey! The fucking EU haven't been adhering to that, and being sensible and moderate destroyed May's political career. So why don't they expect the UK government to learn from the way they've behaved and do the same?

Statesmanship is often required on both sides, because both sides are under considerably political pressure. But May's government bent over backwards to try and accommodate the demands of the EU - even when they didn't actually make any. They simply rejected all offers she made and tried to make out that it was only them that were being grown-up and sensible.

Well now they reap the consequences. Because now even a shallow trade deal that's in both our interests looks almost impossible. Even though the UK are ready to agree it. And remember it's us who have a £90bn trade deficit in goods - and we're not even asking for much access for our services exports to them in exchange. They're already being offered a good deal for them, because for us the cost of avoiding disruption is worth doing that deal.

Even now a deal could happen. If we agreed as much level-playing-field as the EU has put into it's deals with Canada or Japan. But if they insist on us taking their regulations within out market, and their courts to enforce it and us having to comply with new laws they haven't yet written - then of course we're going to say no! Given our laws and standards are currently the same, a system that costs us in trade advantages to change stuff, if they believe the changes to be reductions in standards is perfectly reasonable - but the problem is they don't like the sectoral agreements they've already made with Switzerland that work like that - and would like to replace them with one overall deal. Which the Swiss won't agree.

It's a two way street. And any attempt to say that it's just the UK that are being unreasonable is bollocks of the highest order. I agree negotiating with Johnson is hard - would you trust him? But they just destroyed the political career of the trustworthy Prime Minister they had to deal with by being totally unreasonable. So tough shit!

Re: 1% mortality

The death rate will be hard to work out because some people that would have died of other causes would die of Coronavirus first. Particularly as the unreliable figures we've currently got have the lowest death rates being in the 10-18 group (quite surprising that) - and the risk going up quite high for people over 80 - which obviously isn't surprising. But you'd expect death rates to be lower in more organised countries where governments aren't trying to cover things up - as happened in the last big ebola outbreak - where some countries got the death rate below 20%. I think the average death rate for that is 30-40% - the worst outbreak ever was 90%!

According to the worst case assumptions of a government report from after bird flu they were talking about 50% of people getting the new flu/coronavirus (those were the two the report was most worried about) - but about half of those getting it having no symptoms.

Some of the large numbers of people being off sick will be for quarantine, rather than for being ill.

The idea is to slow down the spread so that the disease peaks for 4 months, rather than 1-2. Making treatment more manageable.

Re: No thanks, I'll go live on my boat...

Italy had temperature checks. We didn't. Italy were the first country in Europe to have a major outbreak, so little good it did them.

According to a government report on preparedness from after the Bird Flu thing, checks at airports and stopping flights at best would delay the outbreak in the UK by one week. That's from modelling, so take with whatever large grain of salt you prefer. However they also say that with our large global connections - we'd likely be one of the first countries to get infections anyway. So they don't expect to do general controls at airports.

Re: Government Guidance

There's a US company going to human trials on a vaccine in April. And I've seen vague reports of a Chinese company also looking at trials as well.

Obviously early stages though.