Another vote for France, used Yelloh village at a couple of locations and enjoyed both of them

Just had a yellow warning for rain pop up on my phone from the met office, so guess that is that

Russia has already said as result of these actions it will now consider rolling out S300 and S400 to regional powers, be interesting to see how that won’t escalate tensions if they roll it out completely to Syria, Iran and Lebanon.

Had a great weeks holiday a couple of years ago in llanbedr, between Barmouth and Harlech. I think if you go even more mid Wales it will be much quiter

It’s not actually wrong to bypass parliment though is it, that’s just a recent convention rather than a legal requirement

All this does is reinforce that international law isn’t important if you are acting on moral grounds, which is a trap as what’s moral for me, isn’t what’s moral for you necessarily

Password reset isn’t working, just sticks you in a loop of enter your email if you have forgotten your password, sends you am email which take you back to the enter email if you have forgotten page

I like how we have to retaliate to uphold the sanctity of the chemical weapons convention but things like UN authorisation to launch an offensive strike is a non issue

Currently enjoying working through this series

https://youtu.be/LszdW4E1PhQ

Iohan Gueorguiev for brilliant cycling travels

Thomas Heaton for some landscape photography

Your mum’s house for the chuckles

If we can get CA to share date with Experian they can give us all a social score and let us be rated like we are in a black mirror episode or China

http://The tyranny of algorithms is part of our lives: soon they could rate everything we do https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/05/algorithms-rate-credit-scores-finances-data?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

Yeh Lenovo tab, which ever Argos are seeking cheap on eBay

Id be on a plane to Majorca

Yep, snow finally settling in Derby after a day of half hearted flurries, drive back to the south coast tomorrow now looking more spicey

Yep, got hit with 25 pop ups just now, lovely

If you give credence to what Craig Murray has to say, the medium article I posted back a page is worth a read

Putin just needs to get reelected and then pull a Xi Jinping to remove term limits, how he has engineered that I can’t fathom

Apparently it was Israel after all

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-british-governments-russia-nerve-agent-claims-are-bullshit-a69b4ee484ce

The majority of UK water companies still use dowsing, although one has just got a new dog to sniff them out and others are now using satellite imaginary and drones, interesting mixture of old and new

In Brighton and need to get to derby by early Saturday, currently deciding if to chance it tonight or hope the forecast is wrong and go tomorrow night

Just read this, what a fantastic piece. Only finished listening to endurance last week about Shackleton, so was very timely

You ever fancied being a magicians assistant?

http://www.radiolab.org/story/match-made-in-marrow/

Hope it works out

There’s a very useful word – “woman” – which does the job for you. It is certainly better than “lass” and much less awkward than “female”, which suggests you don’t really come into contact with any. One of my wife’s major gripes is when  men call women “girls” is also one of my wife’s major gripes.

Using girls in this sense is one I was/am guilty of but a female colleague always picked me up on it and makes me cringe when I hear myself say it now although how it differs from calling adult males lads, I’m not sure but am happy to adjust to not cause offence

I grew up with my devon mum calling young women, Maids, as in, when you gonna find yourself a nice maid to settle down with, when I moved to the midlands I quickly learned that maid was not a term appreciated by all…

Interesting few phrases you use “avoidance” ? we are informed by our supplier of the possibility of a TRIAD so react accordingly as it cost our firm £600,000 a few years back for 1/2 hour we ignored.

I understood it to be us helping out NG on not overloading the grid or we got shafted but your implication is its just a pure money grab?

There has been at least 1 TRIAD peak this year at 7pm which is past what I would consider usual commute time, I get that a huge swathe of the population works 9-5 so can cope with middle of the night charging

Avoidance is the correct term but it’s in no way dodgy as in tax avoidance, any energy manager worth his salt will be undertaking triad avoidance and the financial benefit is large versus the effort. It isn’t really doing the grid any favours though, the charge is there to discourage usage at that time and fund investment in the infrastructure required to deliver maximum demand, so avoidance leads to underfunding national Grid if you only cut load on triad days and it isn’t representative of your peak load at peak time. This is why they are reviewing the charging mechanism and currently in court fighting to get triad export revenue removed. From next year it looks like you won’t be allowed to use diesel generators for TRIAD avoidance, so that will force industry to adapt to better cutting load or boost grids income.

That 7pm triad call was a pain to say the least but will no doubt be more common in the future

I always find it odd that people think the cost savings will be past on to us the consumer and not just make the corporation more profitable, seems to me that robots and automation will just accelerate wealth transfer from the many to the few rather than liberate us to pursue a life of leisure and unburden us from work

Been listening to a playlist of his material on YouTube all morning due to this thread, really been enjoying it

The Sheffield story is an abomination

Not sure why they are calling it UBI when it isn’t universal, sounds a poor half way house

Could you tell me where this “enough generation capacity” is as due to TRIAD periods we have been regularly shutting down our factory since the beginning of November when a TRIAD is called as if we don’t instead of paying £0.11 per unit we pay £46 per unit!

I don’t imagine many people will be charging at peak time due to commuting at that time and Triad is under review anyway as it’s no longer working for national Grid due to the amount of avoidance now being undertaken. Futures is all going to be about flexible usage and shifting load to match Grid requirements, triad behaviour will become daily in industry and not just at peak time

As for others saying about end of life batteries, we are already able to buy multi MW batteries at work that are built using end of life EV batteries and i know some companies using these to generate a revenue supporting national Grid for demand side response

Get a copy of this, it will really help you understand these three important factors you are asking about, is a good book

understanding exposure

JRE
Some Tim Ferris
Infinite monkey cage
Rapha podcast
Hardcore history
Radiolab
Revisionist history
The bike show podcast
The guardian long read
Bicycle touring pro
Freaknomics radio

Always paid cash

No one else feel the urge to stand way too close to the platform edge when a train is passing through?

Couldn’t find a local one that was taking on new patients so joined the one in the local Sainsbury’s, £99 a year for two check ups and two hygienists visits. Most of the prices are only marginally more than NHS with the exception of root canal and crown. Have found them to be a massive improvement over any NHS dentist I have had.

Had fun in 2002 in Tibet, despite a hellish 68 hour bus ride to get there, you can just get a train now

Would love to go back one day with a bike

Carcassonne, Catan or ticket to ride

Don’t know how much it has changed but as a civils grad ten years ago, most of us didn’t go looking for work as all the major contractors and consultants came to us, either in evening presentations or careers fairs, so might be worth trying that with the local uni.

We have several dozen Spanish engineers at work as we couldn’t recruit in the UK, so went to Spain to fill the vacancies

Currently trying to buy first house, so I imagine it will be a 30 or 35 year term from the new year

Yeh I agree crypto’s are here to stay and have a benefit but at the moment it appears no different than playing at Forex

Am interested in the P2P returns people are getting as never dabbled in that