MouldyCat

@MouldyCat@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Water companies in England and Wales explore ‘surge pricing’ during drought⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  mmm yeah the messy real world in which we live, the one that has no built-in justice or fairness, in fact the only unchanging law is that the strong have dominion over the weak. That real world, yes. It seems you are acquainted with it.

  We are not masters of it. We are very much at its mercy just like all the other creatures on the planet. Care and thoughtfulness is needed when attempting to design and implement public systems that deliver justice and fairness and are sustainable over the long-term.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Water companies in England and Wales explore ‘surge pricing’ during drought⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  yes sorry, I didn’t mean to say you did. I was just saying that a practical solution could be to make water and energy cost more the more of it you use. Right now, there is a tendency for the opposite to happen, mainly for companies, where they are offered better prices per unit the more they use.

  I also know people who are somewhat cavalier with their own water and energy use, while others who are less well off are scrimping and saving in order to keep bills low. It seems fine to me that the former are charged double per unit (say). It subsidises the usage of less well-off people and at the same time encourages people to be more economical.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Water companies in England and Wales explore ‘surge pricing’ during drought⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Why “reasonable”?

  Because we live in the real world unfortunately, so compromises are necessary if you want sustainable long-term solutions. Regarding water, desalination has come a long way in the last few years, but extracting drinkable water from the sea is still very energy intensive and it still makes far more sense to collect rain and spring water.

  You also mentioned food and energy, and right now these things take human labour to produce and deliver, which ultimately means you’re going to have to pay those workers. The government’s supply of money is limited, and it would not be cheap to nationalise water companies, farms, supermarkets and energy companies in order to allow domestic users free access to those resources.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Water companies in England and Wales explore ‘surge pricing’ during drought⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Making all domestic usage free sounds great but we do have to encourage reasonable water use. (And energy use.)

  Getting rid of the standing charge is an important first step IMO. At the moment it effectively means people with low water usage are subsidising those who use lots of water.

  I’d like to see pricing that gets more expensive the more you use. So if you only use what you need for your particular household, you pay a very low price per unit, if not entirely free, and the price per unit keeps increasing the more a household uses per person.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Water companies in England and Wales explore ‘surge pricing’ during drought⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  pumps are cheap enough but they probably increase the chance of blockage due to hair and so on. if you could get it using just gravity it would prob be better from a minimum maintenance viewpoint.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Water companies in England and Wales explore ‘surge pricing’ during drought⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I also looked at this recently as I thought that soap would be harmful to plants and/or microbes and the Royal Horticultural Society has done some investigation of their own into the use of greywater, and their advice is “plants can be watered with shower, bath, kitchen and washing machine water (from rinse cycles)”, finding that “soil and potting composts are effective at filtering out” the soap/detergent.

  I’m just echoing what @Denjin@feddit.uk with the RHS link, and I didn’t read the articles he linked but it wouldn’t surprise me if the RHS guidance is the source of those.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shopworker sacked for tackling suspected bacon thief⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  mate people selling stolen food (and any other goods) at a lower price than the producers themselves has been a thing since forever, it doesn’t say anything about anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'A significant moment': UK's latest floating solar farm powers up at Cheshire quarry⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  tldr: it’s a private installation which produces power for its owners, Bathgate Silica Sand. It is a 400kW floating photovoltaic (FPV) array of 650 floating solar panels on North Arclid Lake, an artificial lake at the Arclid Quarry in Cheshire.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nearly 500 seriously injured in e-scooter collisions in Great Britain last year⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve driven a little around Portugal, and their roads were the worst I’ve ever driven on. Not just potholes, but the roads were often wonky and/or not flat (think like undulations like waves as you’re driving along), missing road markings etc. The quality drop was really noticeable when you drove from Spain into Portugal. It was about 8 years ago so it’s possible they’ve really got their act together since then, but I’m skeptical about how reliable their data is if Portugal is listed as the country with the 5th best roads in the world…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam :: About the New York Attorney General lawsuit against Valve⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  stop it in physical games as well

  I think the connection to physical cards is pretty weak really - the crucial difference being that if you want to get some physical cards, you go out and buy them (or stay in and buy them I guess). You start with nothing except some cash, and you end up with some random cards, which may or may not be valuable.

  Loot boxes in F2P games are not like that - you play a free game, have fun and then end up with this “loot box” without having done anything to ask for it. It’s just there in your inventory, and it stays there until you fork over some cash and see what’s inside.

  It’s way more of a temptation than physical cards that you won’t encounter until you buy them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Anatomy of an Impossible Port: Bringing Dead Cells to the R36S⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  yes indeed - I had a go at decompilation a little while (wanted to get a mod working on linux) and while it was hella geeky fun, it was very slow and I could tell I didn’t really have a hope of achieving my goal. I can really see how an LLM could turbo-charge that process.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Anatomy of an Impossible Port: Bringing Dead Cells to the R36S⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  there’s nothing in this article that makes me think it’s LLM generated, no idea what that guy was on about. It’s very well written and readable, which I don’t think LLM can really achieve, not that I’ve ever seen anyway. And it wasn’t easy but I did manage to find a minor typo - “All my thanks to bmdhacks for keeping me informed through and of every step he took” 😁

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  my point was that currently the government is very sensitive about antisemitism and less sensitive about islamophobia

  Your “point” makes no sense given that Islam also carries out male circumcision. In fact, the vast majority of non-medical male circumcisions in the UK are carried out by Muslim parents.

  Does this change your view? Now you know this, do you now think that the government will actually implement a male circumcision ban after all?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  sensitivity towards Judaism at the moment

  Judaism and (some of?) its daughter religions - Islam also carries out this practice, and if anything Islam is even more protected by the state.

  As many know, Islam also carries out FGM, which is indisputably worse for the victim than male circumcision. Now, there is already a specific criminal offence for FGM, strengthened by the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003. This makes it illegal to perform FGM in the UK or to take a UK national or permanent resident abroad for FGM.

  In over 20 years, only a handful of cases have been brought to trial. The first successful conviction for FGM in the UK did not happen until 2019, and even now there are typically less than 10 prosecutions per year. There are thousands of cases identified every year, (but it’s not often clear how many of those are recent).

  My point is that while this suggested new law is welcome, it is unlikely to result in any significant reduction in religious child mutilation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does every commercial depiction of honey involve one of this things? Literally nobody has ever seen one of these in real life⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you got that backwards - the caveman is the one scared of the microwave and its spooky woo-woo magic that damages the water’s aura

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Patients clogging up A&E with hiccups, sore throats and niggles⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  ah so you were already paying to visit a GP? How much is that then?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Glamour UK has perfect response to JK Rowling’s complaint about its trans cover⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “Better luck next year Jo x.”

  Saved you a click!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cardiff is set to become the first city in the UK to introduce higher parking charges for SUVs⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I just slammed my balls in the rear door of my Range Rover a couple of times. Am I good now?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Only one in 50 bike thefts result in a charge, shocking figures reveal⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Better than Worcester police then. I had my bike nicked from a bike rack by a park & ride’s mini bus station. The guy working there spent a little while shuttling through the video and found crystal clear footage of the rapscallion arriving on a worse bike, messing around by my bike for a minute or two (cutting the lock), then riding off with it. You couldn’t hope for better evidence of the crime, and if he was known to police - he certainly acted like he’d done this sort of thing before - it would’ve been easy to identify him. The cops didn’t even bother to go in and see it.

  After several weeks, I got a call from our trusty boys in blue about it. Ah great, I thought naively, they haven’t forgotten, just backlogged. But it quickly became obvious, from his leading questions, that the copper was actually hoping to catch me out as an insurance fraudster and had no intention of doing jack-shit to actually get the thing back. I lost it a bit with him and I think he did end up feeling kind of bad - although not bad enough to send someone round to view the footage of course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An academic was aghast when her partner was accused of IRA activity. After his trial, he confessed⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This does sound like it might be a very interesting book. I am intrigued to find out more about Mary’s point of view. She says she almost dumped him when he came clean, not because of his direct support for the IRA but because of the deception:

  “I know Michael isn’t a terrible person, he’s a very good person,” she said. “He just didn’t put me first, and I don’t know whether I see that as betrayal. He didn’t intend it.”

  It seems there’s a wider question about when is it acceptable to keep secrets from a person you’re in a relationship with. It doesn’t seem like he was deceitful about his political leanings, just about details of his direct involvement. That kind of seems very forgivable, although given the circumstances I can see why she contemplated ending it at the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you pay $100 for a movie? Criterion and the 'second golden age' of physical media⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  best method I found to watch old movies

  especially as many public libraries loan out DVDs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than 40% of private renters ration energy use to afford bills, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  this is a really weird headline, with the use of “ration” like that.

  Who doesn’t “ration” i.e. restrict their energy use? i have always done this - I turn off lights in rooms when no one is in there, I turn off heating when I’m out of the house, I don’t turn heating on until it’s really cold and I’m maxed out on jumpers and woolly underpants. It’s not just to save money - aren’t we all supposed to be restricting our energy use, what with climate change and all that?

  So the article isn’t really about people having to restrict their energy use when before they didn’t, it’s really about a survey done by Citizens Advice to highlight the hardships renters endure thanks to poorly maintained and insulated houses. It seems that Citizens Advice were the ones who chose the word “ration” and to put the focus on people reducing their energy use to save money, but I don’t understand what makes them think that will make their survey results more powerful.

  Something straightforward like, “Latest price hikes unfairly hit poor people in badly maintained rental housing” would seem to me to be much better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chinese carmakers told to improve locking devices for UK market⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  higher levels of car theft than China

  this is what happens when you let thieves off without so much as 10 years hard labour followed by a bullet to the back of the head!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We should be allowed to carry swords for self defence⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sikh sect which carries swords

  According to wikipedia, all (male) Sikhs who choose to become Khalsa (and thus gain the surname “Singh”, meaning lion) are supposed to keep 5 special items with them at all times, one of which is a dagger - but it was originally a sword. All these 5 items begin with the letter K, and include a kirpan (the dagger/sword), the kara (a steel bracelet) and kesh (uncut hair, typically wrapped in a turban). I’m not sure, but KDE is probably recommended also.

  One thing I didn’t know - it’s forbidden for such Sikhs to eat “halal” meat. That can’t be easy in some countries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who decides when and where you work? The battle is raging in Whitehall, and the result may affect us all⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is and it’s not even about whether the work is being done well or not, it’s about showing fealty to your lords and masters. If you want to check the quality of my work and give intelligent and constructive feedback, I actually appreciate that and it helps me to gain confidence and do a better job (regardless of *where* I’m working from).

  Granted, based on my experience, it’s probably a minority of managers who actually possess the skills to constructively appraise someone’s work, so for most of them, just shut up, keep out of my way and let me get done what needs to be done.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Don’t call this racist’: row grows over motives behind England flag campaign⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’ll also see the national flag flying happily in France and Spain. Not everywhere, but it doesn’t have any negative connotation. In Germany however the national flag does have dodgy overtones. It seems to be related to whether your country has anything less than pleasant in its recent history.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dairy farmers say worker shortage is threatening UK food security⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This really depends on where you live. I didn’t realise how spoilt I was living in Berlin until I moved away. Vegan butter that is as good as actual butter is widely available there, at about the same price - albeit unsalted.

  I’m now in France, where big supermarkets often have a whole row of fridges dedicated to butter, and I’ve not as yet even seen one place selling any kind of modern vegan butter. I think it was the same story in Spain too, although I wasn’t staying in large cities there.

  I’ve tried a range of different vegan butters while I’ve been at home in the UK and they all just taste like margarine. France I can understand, as they have a big dairy culture (no pun intended - that would be cheese), but I’m at a loss to explain why the good stuff isn’t widely available in the UK as the demand is there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“When the fun stops, stop.” Addiction experts consider the rise of gambling in the U.K. a test case⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  That depends where you keep it surely

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Britons could soon install balcony solar panels in flats and rental homes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah I think you’d definitely want a battery. TBH I just threw that question about grow lamps in there to draw attention to how you can not only run low/medium power solar setups in Germany, but you can also grow a couple of weed plants for your own use.

  I think Germany might actually be the only country in Europe where you can do that fully legally? I used to think growing your own weed was fully legal in Spain and Portugal, but now after speaking to some of my family who live in Spain, I think it’s really just a grey area and not technically legal at all.

  Anyway, I’m not actually trying to grow my own weed or anything like that, I just think it’s a stupid thing to make illegal. So go Germany, we’re all counting on you!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨12 of England’s regional mayors back plan for ‘national active travel network’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  why would you rather people go by bus than by bike or foot? It seems everything is better about safe bike & pedestrian routes - they are healthy, produce less pollution (both noise and fumes), often quicker, safer and more agreeable for residents, not to mention cheaper to maintain.