Posts by anothercynic

Re: Idiocracy

Oh absolutely! This is the argument that many people in neighbouring towns make and it seems to fall on deaf ears. :-/

Re: We have expensive real estate.

To be fair, being able to ask questions this way and getting the info you require quickly by zipping round the office is helpful and often more effective.

But, if they just stand around asking for the sake of asking or dwelling or not wanting to go back to their cubicle, yes, that's annoying (and I've been guilty of that).

Re: Idiocracy

@Santa from Exeter, that's what the concept is meant to change... change back to having smaller shops (like Tesco Express and Sainsbury's Local, or a Budgens or a Co-Op Food) nearer the neighbourhoods where people live, rather than the massive out-of-town retail parks that everyone has to spend 30 minutes to drive to and drive around in just to get parking...

Take Oxford. Not a huge city, but it has a variety of suburbs (Botley, Summertown, Jericho, Headington, Rose Hill, Blackbird Leys, St Clements, Donnington, to name the most well-known ones). Each and every one of these will have a 'local' high street. Inevitably they will, just like your neighbourhood, have the cheap charity shops, hair dressers, but many of them also have at least a doctor's surgery nearby (maybe not on the high street, but close), they'll have a supermarket of some sort or description, maybe a few takeaway joints. But, those are the essentials that you shouldn't need to drive anywhere for. But, at the same time, Oxford is also littered with several retail parks that are a pain in the arse, but nonetheless rammed on the weekends with people doing their weekly shops.

Where I live, I have a Tesco Extra 20 minutes down the road (if I power walk, or 5 minutes by car). Do I use it? No, because I have a Co-Op literally 200 yards from my doorstep. There's a Tesco Express 10 minutes' walk away. I can get what I need in my neighbourhood. But I also appreciate the fact that I chose well when I moved here, because I don't own a car, and I knew I'd need things in walking distance. Other people don't have that privilege of being able to pick and choose, which is why things like a council decreeing that things will be a certain way from now on also rankles me (because I know not everyone is that lucky).

Re: We have expensive real estate.

More like "If we force our employees back into the office, we can actually justify the real estate expenses to our shareholders, who no doubt are watching and wondering why we're wasting money instead of giving it to them in divvies".

There are probably some leases that are either horrifically expensive to get out of (which them makes it justifiable to maintain them) but it's easier to blame the employees for their existence in the organisation...

Re: Idiocracy

FGS, you're not buying into the 'Oh, 15-minute cities bad and dystopian! 15-minute cities are there to imprison us all!' trope, are you?

1. 15-minute cities (or rather, 15-minute neighbourhoods) are not a bad thing. Why do you need to drive everywhere? In smaller towns, you can *walk* 5-15 minutes to the nearest shop, or the pharmacy. Same in the cities where your "local neighbourhood", let's take Tribeca in NYC or Islington in London, is the exact example of a 15 minute neighbourhood. Can you find a bodega or an offie within 15 minutes? Yep. Can you find a Tesco Express or a local shop run by the friendly Puerto Rican within 15 minutes? Yep. Do you frequent them? I bet you do!

2. 15-minute cities are not there to 'imprison' you (like some idiot conspiracy theorist nutcases want you to believe). Specifically, all this comes from Oxford's desire to encourage people not to drive somewhere or use neighbourhoods as rat runs by turning things into low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs). I will say (given I live near Oxford, I know WTF is going on there) that the local council has not covered itself in glory in the way it has implemented things. Trying to implement LTNs (or discouraging people from driving across town by using bus gates) without taking into account that Oxford's road network is hub-and-spoke-shaped and addressing that, is madness and will only upset people (and surprise surprise, IT HAS! Hence the nut cases coming out of the woodwork). Implementing bus routes that mimic the likely traffic flows across town without going *into* town would probably encourage people into buses more than fining people. Right now, pretty much the majority of bus routes in Oxford end up in the city centre.

3. Owning nothing doesn't really have anything to do with the above, but it has *everything* to do with the fact that the billionaires got richer during the pandemic while everyone else got poorer. And people moving out of the cities, taking their city-sized salaries with them to buy in the countryside has also had the effect that real estate prices are pricing the locals out of the market - Cornwall being a prime example, and ditto the Cotswolds (which happen to be within an hour's or 90 minutes' drive from London). Surrey's already been priced to yazoo (ditto Kent, Essex and Sussex), so spreading into the Cotswolds is just natural progression (much to our dismay).

*makes the famous Lucille Ball expression*

If I could upvote this more than once, I would!

(ICYDKI: https://giphy.com/gifs/1172G00AYkL9ra)

Re: Isn't it seeing triple now?

Not really, does tend to include counties like Lincolnshire and Rutland at times though, rather than as part of the 'East Midlands'.

Northumberland is North East proper, Humberside is... I dunno, North East too? That's like East Yorks like York & co, innit?

Re: Where's next?

Wasn't the police though.

Re: Captain paranoid

Organisations can look at the time it takes to gather the data, then work out how much that is in cold hard cash, and if it's over a certain limit, decline the request on the basis of cost and effort. They *can* charge you up to a certain amount for the FOIA request too, but if the amount exceeds the limit, they tend to turn it down.

For example, a few years ago I made a request to Thames Valley Police about the number of accidents along a certain stretch of road, but because of the way the information was recorded, they couldn't provide exactly the information I requested because it would have cost too much to go through every single case recorded to get it (which is understandable). However, rather than refusing the request, TVP wanted to provide *something*, so they bracketed the request with provisos by saying "there are X number of cases in our system along the entire stretch of the road we're responsible for, but we can't tell you whether those cases included fatalities or injuries or not. They can include breakdowns, etc, effectively any report in which the road is mentioned".

That's helpful to a degree, and the poor person having to go through every one of those cases to see if it was an accident or not, and whether it was in that specific stretch or not, probably cost more per hour than the information was worth.

Only for Oracle to say "No, go away"?

I get the distinct whiff of an Oracle machination here... Rocky Linux had their plan, is that now off the map with this OpenELA thing?

Re: The X sign is now an ex-sign

If I recall correctly, he threatened to move his gigafactory to Texas or something if they didn't let him reopen.

Given Alameda County is mostly Democrat, they couldn't (didn't want to) lose the tax dollars his business provides, so... rock, hard place.

But yes, I agree with you, the dickhead should've faced repercussions.

Sadly your colleague is correct. If there was no reasonable chance of a child being able to reach the weapons (i.e. there would never be any kids around), a flimsy drawer is fine according to the California gun laws. Ditto for trigger locks.

This is arguably one of the more fun ways of doing a wedding, as either everyone on a table know each other, or they don't at all (there's always a table that's for the "don't know where to put you" people), so the photos might come out spectacularly good or funny, or absolutely abysmal.

Re: Nobody in charge

Yeah, Parson's Pleasure is not listed as one. Wolvercote Mill Stream is, as is the Wharfe in Ilkley.

The water on the Tideway is absolutely disgusting. The rowing clubs on the Tideway monitor the outflows closely, and they get very vocal about the outflows when Thames Water doesn't notify river users of the outflows being used. Over the last year there've been several cases of rowers (both junior and adult) being very ill soon after being out on the river, and some clubs have posted pictures of the state of their boats after returning to their boat house showing sewage scum leaving a lovely brown line down the boat. That's what infuriates folks.

But hopefully around 2025 the 'native flowers' of the Tideway (i.e. the countless wet wipes that get caught in the undergrowth on the tidal stretch) will disappear as all the gunk ends in the tunnel instead.

Re: Nobody in charge

Partial reasons for these changes were the European regulations that required water companies to do this to clean up the environment (i.e. beaches that people would visit). Of course, rivers in the UK are not generally registered as 'bathing water' (right now there are two sites, one in Oxford, and one in Yorkshire, on rivers with that designated status). That's why there's a big stink (no pun intended) about TW pouring 'storm water outfall' into the Thames upstream of Oxford (because it threatens the Port Meadows with sewage pollution), and also into several chalk streams (which are a rarity in nature and several of which are being polluted by TW sewage).

Of course the biggest problem with recent years has been an increase in building housing, which in turn puts pressure on the sewage works to process more sewage, plus increased tarring/concreting over of land that would usually absorb water instead of run-off into storm drains (which then in turn mix with sewage to be funnelled through the sewage works). The water companies have not invested enough in appropriately adding capacity into their sewage works (some are constrained on site, so it's understandable that in those cases they can't do much). I've looked at planning applications and it doesn't look like Thames Water (or any other utility) is usually named as a respondent. It's usually Environment Agency, Highways England, the local authorities, local residents. Utilities seem to be assumed to be able to cope. Maybe they need to be listed now to say "sorry, but we can't have 8,000 more homes built without significant investment into/relocation of our sewage works, so we need to object to this planned development".

Re: someone please explain

TW has not paid dividends in years. What is described as 'dividends' is transfers of money to the holding company Kemble, who are the entity loaded up with debt and who handle the debt repayments. It's described as such in their investment materials and accounts.

And yes, I'm very much in favour of district heating because it makes sense. But, as @blackcat said, there are problems with how district heating in the UK is managed. It's a) (mostly) unregulated because it doesn't fall into the classic gas-and-leccy concept of utility, and b) people don't particularly like the idea of being wedded to a single supplier for decades.

Implementing district heating the European way would most certainly have benefits given that the government is trying to sell everyone on heat pumps. District heating is just like a heat pump, just bigger.

Re: Usual rip off

Water meters are definitely a good thing. Ask anyone in Africa how much it makes you realise how much water you waste. :-)

This bizarre standing charge concept that an entire street/town is charged on the basis of everyone's usage combined divided by the number of homes in it is mad. Why am I as a single person paying for the water usage of the average 4-person household in the rest of my street? I should only be expected to pay what *I* use, nothing more. If you're a wasteful family of 6 who run baths every day, washes their cars every other day, runs a washing machine load every day, has a swimming pool and a pond with water feature, etc, *you* should be paying for that usage, not your neighbours too by proxy.

Much of the 'clean' water piping is still positively Victorian. There are ways to line old pipes that will a) strengthen them (so less of the massive water mains bursts that flood countless homes) and b) reduce the leaks to almost nil. But that involves a material everyone likes to hate these days (plastic).

Black/grey water is as you described, and unfortunately, people's bad habits (like flushing wet wipes that are not to be flushed, or liquid fat that then congeals into 'fatbergs') ruin even Bazalgette's best intentions.

Re: Beware apologist Commentards

This took planning, smart planning. Smart planning often is ignored for the cheap and cheerful "we always built it like this in the fifties, what's wrong wi' it now!" kind.

Re: someone please explain

A couple of things (not that I don't disagree with your sentiments):

1. District heating has not been a thing in the UK like... ever. To implement district heating in areas where data centres exist would cost money. It would require investment, digging up roads and implementing things that were never planned for. You're right that large buildings (like many sky scrapers in Canary Wharf and the City) would benefit from district heating (and cooling, ironically), but because there was no provision made for such infrastructure, the chances of retrofitting this would be nil because the costs of retrofit would exceed the benefit from it.

In Germany and other countries, district heating is still a thing (hence notably New York still having major steam pipes running under the streets to feed the big buildings). You are charged by the therm you 'extract' from the steam feed.

And yes, the waste water could have heat extracted from it. Here's a paper about it: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2021/ew/d1ew00411e

2. Brackish water from the Tideway is not really suitable for cooling. All kinds of pollution in it makes it unsuitable. *However* treated effluent (i.e. treated sewage water) is because it's been cleaned for the most part, and could most certainly be used for that. See 1)

That said, there's a *lot* TW could do, but it requires investment, which, notably as per recent news reports, they can't really make because they can barely afford their debt payments.

Macquarie has not been the owner of Thames Water for several years. They sold to OMERS (the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement Scheme) and USS (the Universities Superannuation Scheme) with some other shareholders (I think the Kuwaiti sovereign fund is another shareholder).

But I will agree with you on your view of the company. They definitely extracted their pound of flesh from TW while they had it, loaded it up with debt (when they bought it from Germany's RWE) and now leave the two pension funds to shoulder the additional investment needed now.

Thanks for the great explainer, Raj! That's a great way to recycle what you already have in orbit around the moon. :-)

Re: Meanwhile at Twitter

Exactly this, Flocke. And also making sure that *her* exit contract is rock solid in the case she's shoved over the edge because Elmo doesn't like her back chat.

Re: As much political as technical

Same here... I had several opportunities to travel on Concorde and every time turned it down because it went to New York, not Chicago where I was going. I still regret never having flown it today.

Re: As much political as technical

Those babies are still around today as the Avro RJ. I believe the Formula 1 management use one to fly staff from/to races.

Re: As much political as technical

I should've been clearer, apologies. Yes, I meant the Soviets.

Re: less-noisy maybe but still un-sound

Incorrect. It was a commercial development from the beginning. HOWEVER - Some design features (like the cockpit sitting above the main deck) came from the military freighter design competition that Boeing lost to Lockheed (which spawned the C-5 Galaxy).