Posts by Pen-y-gors 3782 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2010
I live in Wales, and health is a devolved matter. OK, so it's develved to a UK Labour govt, so our waiting times are even worse than England, and there are a raft of scandals and problems. Friend was recently rushed into A&E, no blankets or pillows, but plenty if sheets.
When it works the NHS is wonderful, but it needs resources, which it won't get if the tories sell it off piecemeal.
Setting aside the questions of partiality, and Kuensberg's doe-eyed looks of adoration whenever she sees her beloved Boris...
There are many, searching questions that I would like to ask all politicians - of all parties. I am unable to do that in person, so I expect political journalists to do it for me. They should not be allowing some of the politicians an easy ride and a chance for a free party political broadcast, with their claims and lies unquestioned.
I expect our publicly-funded journalists to challenge every claim made by every politician. To raise their record when they make promises.
Impartiality means challenging every lie, not ignoring them all equally (or unequally)
That's why I'm pissed off with the BBC
"To me, this is no different from refusing to recognise an infirm eldster unless they throw aside their stick and walk, oh yea to the lord. Nope, sorry, I don't recognise that quadruple amputee. Turf him out of his wheelchair so I can get a better look, would you?"
Isn't that the basis of the Dept of Work & Pensions 'fit to work' reviews?
If we can't keep our .orgs, how about we get a new TLD set up, which will be legally (and unbreakably) tied in to the non-profit ethos (hah! No, not that Ethos))
It needs to be similar to .org, and carry the message that it is quite like .org - can I suggest .org-y or, if hyphens aren't allowed in TLDs, plain .orgy - I think it could attract a fair bit of traffic.
TalkTalk were planning on installing 3 million 'full fat fibre' links for 1.5 Bn. That wouldn't perhaps be in nice easy-to-reach urban areas? Cherry-picking? Leaving the rather more expensive rural stuff to Openreach. And then complaining that Openreach are expensive. If Labour (or anyone) are serious then they should require than everyone should offer a service everywhere, then leave them to fight about who lays the fibre and how much they charge each other. Or have a publicly-owned network? Turn Openreach into a not-for-profit community interest company?
And of course, Welsh Water / Dŵr Cymru is a brilliant model for the way ahead - it's now a mutual, owned by the customers. When Corbyn and his fans go on about 'nationalising' water, he can keep his dirty hands off our water.
Anyway, in a few years, after Independence, it won't matter - as we'll be setting the price of the water that we sell to England, and the price will be going up. We don't care if it's a private company or a public one that buys, so long as you have the readies!
I stopped counting the cost of Labours planned nationalizations when it passed £1.5 Trillion. There's not actually the money in the country to do it
Well, they could do what the Tories do and borrow? (Just kidding) Remember, Tories have added £0.9 Trillion to the National Debt in 9 years, which is quite impressive given how they've been slashing expenditure on everything worth having.
Yep, YMMV. It's a postcode lottery!
I'm lucky - after years of pretty crap service, promises of Fibre (which eventually reached our exchange in the next village, but not our village!). But sometimes it's worth waiting. A couple of years they got round to us, and because the local cabling is pretty crap they went straight to FTTP. I went wild and went for a souped-up package, and I have a fairly stable 300/45Mb connection, plus landline, anytime calls and mobile for about £75/month. I think the guarantee is 150Mbps down.
Is that what Corbyn will be giving everyone? If not, how much extra will I have to pay to get the same as I have now?
It's a nice idea, but I'm not sure it's the best use of an extra £15-20Bn. Obviously if he axes HS2, Trident and Brexit then it will just be small change!
"Skelton, an auditor for the supermarket chain, had authorised access to its entire payroll while KPMG was auditing the company accounts"
Given that auditors are generally assumed to be trustworthy, and it's quite tricky to properly audit a company without access to its 'books' and data, what the heck were Morrisons expected to do? Have two auditors from another company physically standing at Skelton's shoulder 24/7 until he had finished and had his access revoked?
Or maybe they should have provided anonymised and filtered data to Skelton? Who could not then trust the data, as the person preparing the secure extract may be the one fiddling the books?
What 'honesty' checks did the audit company do on their employees?
Skelton was a crook. He abused trust. He goes to jail. That's it.
What's next? Home-owners liable for burglary because they installed breakable glass in their windows?
I'm sure I read somewhere that the intention is to make them non-reflective in the future. Did that happen with this batch? (Although would the solar panels make that tricky? Or would they always be oriented away from the Earth? Or maybe not? I'm confused. Can you have non-reflective solar panels?)
some very sturdy victorian brick
Wimp! REAL houses are like Welsh cottages - 18 inch thick rough stone walls, inside and out, with a rubble/earth/crap fill in the cavity. Rough plaster on the inside. Almost impossible to drill holes in the stone where you want to put a rawlplug, chasing out is totally impossible, so it's surface mounted socket boxes and cables.
Brick? You don't know you're born!
Visibility is an issue. Why did they go for bronze instead of white? Position too - I once lived in a house where all the sockets and lightswitches were at waist level. Odd at first, but made sense for disabled access. Could also switch lights on with a knee is holding stuff.
Yeah, better too many than too few, but this is OTT!
When I rewired the house some years ago I started on the basis of a double in each corner of each room, plus a few extras where needed (by the TV/video/stereo area etc). These days I'd probably specify that a lot of them have a USB power socket as well. I hate having trailing cables and extension socket bars - they are the things that can be really dangerous. Kitchen has plenty above the worktops so I can plug the kettle/toaster/microwave/food mixer in where they are wanted, without trailing cables through the food.
300 miles is about 90kWh, based on current EV technology. 90kWh in 10 mins means delivering 540kWh in an hour.
That means a 3-phase 400V feed pulling 1350 Amps. It's the equivalent of running 180 3-kW electric fires at a time. Fire one of these up and the lights dim for miles. You'll need a 2-in diameter copper wire to feed it.
Typical UK home uses about 3000 kWh per year. Switch to a car doing 15,000 miles a year, and you add another 4000+ kWh per year to that. Can our present grid infrastructure handle that? Not in a lot of rural Wales it can't. Sub-stations are already close to maxed out. How many billions to upgrade the grid? When? And who pays?
Topping up at a motorway services? Okay, there will be fewer people using them than for petrol at present, as we assume they're all full when they leave home. But they'll probably want to plug straight in to their private pylon, or have a small nuke station in the car park.
This is the elephant! The approach of having everyone use EVs with Li-Ion batteries for long range is not feasible. They're fine for local commuting - max 100 miles a day, charged at home (if you can). But don't try and replicate the current usage pattern.
Don't know if anyone else follows the amazing @BootstrapCook (Jack Monroe) on Twitter? Writes amazing cookbooks for those who can't afford fresh truffle oil, avocados and pulled jack-fruit, and instead live on tinned stuff. But foodbank users shouldn't have to live on cold baked beans. She knows, she was one at one stage! Hence her book "Tin Can Cook".
Anyway a couple of weeks ago her Paypal got hacked and she was relieved (temporarily) of £5000. Pah I thought, she should have used 2FA. She HAD! The usual 'send a text to my phone' version, but some toerag had contacted her mobile phone operator, given her date of birth (high security, it's on her Wikipedia page!) and got them to send out a new SIM (or similar) effectively stealing her phone number. So 2FA code goes to the bastards.
The moral? Don't use SMS for 2FA - use an application. I immediately changed my a/c to use the Google Auth app. Safer, but I'm sure some cunning shit will work out a way through that.
I must admit I'm a bit of a nasty sod. Bod turned up to fit one a few years ago. I let him get on with it, and went out to watch when he came to testing. No mobile signal. I knew that. He didn't ask. So he had to remove it and install a new old-style meter, which shouldn't need 'high maintenace costs' for many years yet.
@Loyal Commenter
Or on a programme of free home insulation
This is an area where some lateral thinking often pays dividends.
I remember a calculation many years ago, something along the lines of "It would cost £xbillion to properly insulate every loft in the UK, the same costs as building 3 nuclear power stations. But it would save the energy produced by 5 nuclear stations!"
And there was the situation in the US some years ago when some electricity companies were giving out free low-power light-bulbs. Strange? Why would they want their customers to use less electricity? Well, demand was rising, so they were going to need new capacity, and at the time the only real option was a new nuclear plant, which was a) unpopular (this was after 3-mile Island) and b) would bankrupt them!
There is a lot to be said for providing free energy-saving things - bulbs, insulation etc, and just adding the cost to electricity bills, treating it the same way they would the cost of a new power station.
Combi gas boilers are very common in the UK
And for those outside the reach of mains gas, there are oil combi-boilers. Fill your tank over the summer and it's often cheaper. Or watch the international oil prices.
Or, as we do locally, set up an oil-buying syndicate. Bunch of people in a village get together. Several times a year we are asked how much oil we want. Organiser adds them up, phones round the suppliers and asks for their best price on e.g. 20,000 litres. Tanker then turns up full, trundles round the village, and leaves empty. Everyone is happy. Typically we save about 4p/litre compared to charges for a single delivery.
@AC
Isnt that the goals of extinction rebellion?
Nah. They tend to go for the vegan approach (amongst other things) to saving the planet so no farm animals to cwtch up to. Dogs not so clear. You'll pry my cats from my cold dead paws.
Still, we can all sleep under a nice warm pile of leaves like in Babes in the Wood.
Of course advisors shouldn't be elected - and they should be paid for out of the advisees salary, not the public purse, unless they are clearly neutral civil servants.
But surely the point is that advisors give advice, they don't make rules. It is up to the advisee to reject that advice if it is stupid and against the national interest. Oh yes, and sack the advisor.
May is to blame for any red lines. The buck stops there.
48% want to to stay, and 52% want to leave
Wrong tense... wantED to... but since 2016 many Leave voters have died, young Remainers have joined the electoral register, some people have changed their mind (usually from Leave->Remain)
How about we ask the voters NOW what they want?
@Jimmy2Cows
we can't leave the club and still enjoy the full benefits.
But that was exactly what the Leave campaigners promised during the referendum, with Canada++, Norway+++, remaining in the SM & CU. Remember? No-one mentioned "Eating leaves but not quite as bad as Mad Max without insulin"
Time for another vote between what we have and what is actually on offer, without the rainbow unicorns in every pot.
Polling means nothing. 5 or 10 years ago very few people in the UK (apart from Farridge and his rich chums) gave a tinker's cuss about the EU. It wasn't a problem, it wasn't an issue. But several years of constant lies via the media and enough people are convinced that blue passports will save us from the baby-eating alien slavers in Brussels.
Foolish, yes. Gullible, yes. Unable to think clearly, yes. So they failed to notice that the baby-eating alien slavers are the Tory party, and are now in Downing Street.
No, it basically makes sense. Many geographic/country level domains can only be registered by entities with some sort of strong connection to the country, such as a registered address in the country, or a strong trading presence etc. e.g. .fr, .ie - others don't care (e.g. .uk, .tv)
The .eu is in the first group, so not unreasonable to say no new registrations by non-eu entities, but it would be nice to allow existing registrations to continue (perhaps with a notice appearing on any website to emphasise that the company is not in the eu any more)
What is the point of reporting crime to Action Fraud, or even your local police? Take hours filling in forms and explaining to then how email headers often contain useful info, and nothing happens. Last time I reported an attempted fraud to my local fuzz (the usual, send money to bitcoin a/c X or I release the videos) - I didn't even get a reply. And their reporting form wouldn't let me send the email headers anyway.
There's a message here - closest approach is EXACTLY the same as the diameter of the Earth's orbit - they want to be certain we get the message. Next time it's one radius, then the third time it's Extinction time! Time to shut down all our space activity and worship our new interstellar overlords.
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