Ross_audio
@Ross_audio@lemmy.world
- Comment on Make this thread look like it's your first day on the internet 1 month ago:
*Holds up Spork"
- Comment on Royal Mint to stop making overseas coins after 700 years 6 months ago:
“On 31 December 2009, rather than being fully privatised, the mint ceased to be an executive agency and its assets were vested in a limited company, Royal Mint Ltd. The owner of the new company became The Royal Mint trading fund, which itself continued to be owned by HM Treasury. As its sole shareholder, the mint pays an annual dividend of £4 million to the Treasury, with the remaining profits being reinvested into the mint.[58] In 2015, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced a £20 billion privatisation drive to raise funds, with the Royal Mint being up for sale alongside other institutions including the Met Office and Companies House.[55]”
“Then in 2016, the mint announced plans for Royal Mint Gold (RMG), a digital gold currency that uses blockchain to trade and invest in gold. Operated by CME Group, the technology is to be[out of date?] created by technology companies AlphaPoint and BitGo.[69]”
Bring it back into public ownership. It’s been partially privatised and the vultures are extracting what they can.
It’s not completely nonsensical for the government to lose a small margy on making currency. It’s useful and the harder it is to counterfeit the better.
But both “New Labour” and the Conservatives have a lot to answer for when it comes to our national assets being lost.
- Comment on Fake stamps circulating in the UK are originating from China, lawmaker says 6 months ago:
It would also negate the point of the legislation that means they have to accept stamps in the first place.
You should not have to visit a post office in person or online to post a letter.
There are letter boxes in walking distance. If you’ve bought a book of stamps everything you need is in your desk.
That’s the system we have and it would never be designed by a business that way. But it’s a business that’s taken on that system alongside the I infrastructure for it.
If you genuinely depend on the post accessibility to it is important. It could be modernised but it was working before, modernisation and cost saving are not the same thing.
- Comment on Why do Americans measure everything in cups? 6 months ago:
Fl. Oz are actually nothing to do with weight. They are volume.
For each fluid oz. use 30 ml
It’s only approximate but the official measurements for nutrition actually do it in the US so it’s not a real unit anyway anymore.
- Comment on Fake stamps circulating in the UK are originating from China, lawmaker says 6 months ago:
Stamps no longer have a face value. They are 1st or second class.
As they put up the price each year it’s becoming common to buy stamps before the price rise and sell them after.
The margin on the last rise was ~13% on 2nd class stamps, 8% on first class stamps.
13% has been roughly the average every year since 2005.
So you can absolutely buy stamps at less than “face value”. Someone who bought them 4 years ago could easily give you a 20% discount and still make a profit.
As stamps are not allowed to expire (or have to be replaced if they do) this is a safe investment.
Royal mail have encouraged this to inflate sales in the short term and are suffering from those valid stamps still being available now with no further revenue.
Taking the face value off stamps is what’s caused this problem.
There was never an investment opportunity in buying a 90p stamp that was still worth 90p postage years later.
But buying 1000 2nd class stamps that are always worth 2nd class postage has been an inflation beating purchase.
- Comment on Fake stamps circulating in the UK are originating from China, lawmaker says 6 months ago:
Or they go close to bust and get renationalised.
If Labour are smart about it they’ll keep the USO in place and when it’s shown the business isn’t profitable take the assets back into public hands at a reasonable price.
The key problem with the new stamps is there’s no way for someone to check the validity themselves.
It’s also just a barcode, so a fake stamp that gets used with that barcode first doesn’t get stopped and the legitimate one does.
- Comment on Are you turned on? 6 months ago:
So to disappoint. This is a shopped title.
But the real thing isn’t much different.
discogs.com/…/16531551-Lil-Richard-And-His-Polka-…
Anyway, here’s the title track.
- Comment on Are you turned on? 6 months ago:
So to disappoint. This is a shopped title.
But the real thing isn’t much different.
discogs.com/…/16531551-Lil-Richard-And-His-Polka-…
Anyway, here’s the title track.
- Comment on 400,000 species 6 months ago:
Just as an interesting point, not to make any judgement,
You aren’t the only one who thought exactly that.
“During the case, when asked why he chose to kill John Lennon, Chapman stated “because he was famous”. Chapman later claimed that he believed Holden Caulfied would have killed John Lennon because he was a “phony”.”
- Comment on Don't forget! 6 months ago:
Once out of curiosity.
It’s usually an ad ridden article with AI vomit to make it really long that eventually tells you there’s a point update in iOS.
- Comment on How Much Would You Pay to Make Sure You Never Sawed Off a Finger? 6 months ago:
This is like saying we should more than double car prices and insist they’re all carbon fibre tubs for safety reasons.
If it moves the product price by such a large margin, you’re only talking about profit motive when trying to exclude products without the parented feature.
- Comment on Social acceptability 7 months ago:
Human papillomavirus HPV is responsible for warts on feet.
So genital warts, mostly HSV (Herpes). Not nice but not particularly harmful most of the time. Cold sores and genital warts. Mouth, genitals. Won’t look nice but you won’t die.
HPV - cancer.
Further investigation on the evidence may be required but social acceptability chart above may be justified.
If you have a foot fetish get vaccinated against HPV everyone.
- Comment on Why did we give up on insulation? 9 months ago:
It’s more that construction has been incredibly short-termist for too long.
A huge amount of housing was built post the second world war. Very quick and not of high quality. We needed a lot of it and we needed it cheap because we were pretty close to broke.
High rise social housing came along and was again, prefabricated concrete with a short design life. Expected to be used for at most 50 years then replaced. After all, the 60s expected tomorrows home to be better, why build to last 100 years when it will be advantageous to build again.
Public sector building existed up until the 70s but it was about volume and designed to get us to the next point where we upgraded that stock.
Then the 80s happened and we never upgraded the stock. It was instead sold off to the private sector and when they rebuilt it, they were also deregulated.
Any house today has a design life of 25 years, the length of the average first mortgage.
We’re even echos with austerity starting in 2010. Schools built as a quick fix in the 60s, with a 30 year design life, slated late for replacement in 2010, then the funding removed due to cuts by our current government.
Turns out they’ve got RAAC roofs which cave in without warning when they’re more than twice their design life.
Grenfell is a disaster caused by taking a building built to the lowest bidder as a quick way to provide housing. Then tacking on insulation to the outside. Our construction sector is so deregulated this insulation was highly flammable and hundreds died as a result.
The result is we choose older buildings because survivorship bias means the crap built in the 1930s and before has already gone. If we buy old enough we get well built homes designed to be heated by fires and stoves.
Fires generally kick out more heat than is needed to heat a room, so insulation to keep that in just made the house too hot to have a lit fire in the UK. Originally they were insulated enough to leak the correct amount of heat.
Retrofitting these old houses with more controllable heating and insulation is difficult.
But buy a newer house designed with a newer heating system in mind and you’ll find it’s trash quality. Possibly even dangerous and completely worthless when a revelation about building materials comes out.
TLDR: British people aren’t stupid. Houses from the 1700s, 1800s and up to the 1930s were built to last as long as possible. Newer property wasn’t.
Left wing governments built cheap and got voted out before renewing stock. That’s all end of design life now built 1945-1979
Right wing governments from 1980 deregulated construction so very little built since then is of good quality. Some of it simply dangerous and now worthless.
STLDR: We understand insulation. Our governments don’t.
- Comment on Why do some websites have a "Continue Reading" button? 9 months ago:
You lose backwards compatibility with web browsers if you do that.
It also doesn’t help reader apps or plugins, SEO or various other things to have the site stream the text instead of just loading it.
Basically it moves you from standard thing everything understands to non-standard thing which might break. It’s just not worth it.
- Comment on Many players have become "patient gamers". What are games people might miss out on by waiting for sales? 9 months ago:
The patient Nintendo gamer has to wait for an emulator and raise the Jolly Roger.
In all seriousness Nintendo games for previous gen (Wii U) are roughly half current gen. In the current gens store. Go back further and they just don’t support it.
The real problem now is all console companies just close the store on their old consoles so physical media is the only purchase route that lasts if you want to stay legal and that has scarcity value in the end.
- Comment on My phone's dictionary thinks the word "expanse" only exists as a show title 9 months ago:
All it is is whether a compound word is common enough.
It starts in speech when the words are repeated next to each other often enough they start being thought of as one word. But can’t be shortened.
If, in context, every time we said farmer we ended up saying dirt farmer. It would become compound. But in reality we’d just end up saying “farmer” when the context makes it clear. You’ll see this in writing about farming all the time, initially stating the type of farmer then just saying farmer.
Flag pole started out separately, but in some conversations it would become one object. Every time we talked about the flag pole it would be one word, flagpole. But saying just “pole” would be ambiguous. There are other poles around.
It trends towards shortness, if context allows us to drop a word altogether we will, if it doesn’t it gets compounded abbreviated.
No formal rule for this at all, but that’s the way it happens. People try to say things more efficiently without confusing meaning.