Criticism of Sunak's shoes is bizarre. He's done so many bad things, this is a totally irrelevant issue and pointless. Leave the man alone, he can where what he wants.
He's at John Major (1995-1997) and Gordon Brown (2008-2010) levels of ridicule now... Though he has (so far) managed to avoid being turned into a lettuce, so that's something...
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
The penalties for obnoxious parking need reworking.
The strange thing is that this is one place in our area where semi-decent mobility infrastructure is going in, but the hospital which generates perhaps 4-5m trips per annum is not up to speed. On a lot of other things they are, and last time I checked were the best rated hospital trust in the East Midlands.
There are certainly some sensible policies coming from Labour, they're not "headline grabbers" as such but I think they seem good.
To credit the Tories, despite it going slowly BDUK for FTTP seems to be progressing well.
As I have said previously there are some in Labour who are pretty impressive. Reeves, Phillipson, Streeting and McFadden all seem to be pretty competent performers but also seem to have some good ideas too for when they come to power.
I then look at Annaliese Dodds and some of the other muppets and realise in some areas it is going to be an uphill struggle.
What is the issue with Dodds? She got demoted, I think of her as incredibly "meh" but not actively a problem?
Depends what position she gets. Woefully out of her depth as Shadow Chancellor. Every time she opens her mouth, or opines on something, she says little of any value or merit.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
There are certainly some sensible policies coming from Labour, they're not "headline grabbers" as such but I think they seem good.
To credit the Tories, despite it going slowly BDUK for FTTP seems to be progressing well.
As I have said previously there are some in Labour who are pretty impressive. Reeves, Phillipson, Streeting and McFadden all seem to be pretty competent performers but also seem to have some good ideas too for when they come to power.
I then look at Annaliese Dodds and some of the other muppets and realise in some areas it is going to be an uphill struggle.
What is the issue with Dodds? She got demoted, I think of her as incredibly "meh" but not actively a problem?
Depends what position she gets. Woefully out of her depth as Shadow Chancellor. Every time she opens her mouth, or opines on something, she says little of any value or merit.
Dodds isn't Shadow Chancellor? Isn't that why she got demoted for being distinctly "meh"?
There are muppets in the Labour Party certainly (although not in the Shadow Cabinet) but the worst in the SC are "meh" like Dodds.
Criticism of Sunak's shoes is bizarre. He's done so many bad things, this is a totally irrelevant issue and pointless. Leave the man alone, he can where what he wants.
He's at John Major (1995-1997) and Gordon Brown (2008-2010) levels of ridicule now... Though he has (so far) managed to avoid being turned into a lettuce, so that's something...
He is going to start being pitied rather than reviled.
On names. I’ve posted before that I have an extremely unusual first name, sometimes mistaken for a surname. It’s caused a lot of confusion, on occasion. And hilarity.
Both my sister and I also have my mother’s maiden name as one of our first names, and my father had his. I was told it was because in Wales naming the child with the mother’s surname gave the child access to the maternal grandfather’s estate. Might have worked for some people, didn’t for us!
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
Recognition of the need to change- that Mytown used to be famous for something and that something has died- is blooming difficult, though.
There must be examples of towns successfully reinventing themselves, but it's not a comfortable process.
Stockton-on-Tees is doing a great job. Steel and shipbuilding have long gone, but the old Teesside Development Corporation had the land redeveloped as houses and an office park - complete with a Durham University campus.
Go forward a few decades and the town was struggling - too much retail space. So the council have bought the 70s shopping mall and derelict hotel and has bulldozed them, to create a riverside park. The town theatre - a relatively big 4,000 seat one - was painstakingly restored and reopened, with a council-owned Hilton just round the corner.
The Tories hated all this of course - describing both the theatre and the hotel as "white elephants" as who will use them? Yet the theatre is booked out for a year at a time and the hotel needs a bigger car park. So it can be done, but you need council management who know how to get things done and political stability to get you through several rounds of elections. Had the Tories won, the plan was to halt the works and leave the town with more half-finished stuff which they would blame Labour for...
BIB (Bit In Bold) 1: Note the "Corporation": this had state involvement and functioned much better than the outsource-to-private-sector jobbies that are so fashionable.
BIB (Bit In Bold) 2: I think that's the best solution for places that can't be revived: knock them down and make a park out of it.
Bradford is taking a similar approach. The City Council recognised it had a) some very ugly buildings, and b) too many offices by some way. It's solution was to rationalise office uses into the attractive Victorian buildings (of which Bradford has many) and knock down the ugly 1960s buildings, leaving the spaces as public open space. A win-win - but something of a surprise that a council can, if it wants, do such a thing; why haven't other towns knocked down their ugly buildings and replaced them with public open space? It seems such an open goal, if it's possible to do.
There's a lot more wrong with Bradford than a few soulless office buildings.
The council has no money, either.
I'm sure that's true. But it's striking how relatively easily the city centre has been made more beautiful.
My office in Bradford was in a beautiful wood panelled building. I worked for a company called Tanks and Drums, our head office was the Grade 2 listed Bowling House on Bowling Back Lane.This is what a Grade 2 listed building looks like in Bradford.
I have only daughters, and I'm not bothered about seeing my own surname persist - I'd rather my daughters had the same names as their own family units if and when they marry. Makes their life mildly easier.
I'm not too bothered about the persisting the family name thing, but why the assumption that your daughters will change their name on marriage, rather than have their spouse take their name?
I don't think I've ever come across that happening.
There are certainly some sensible policies coming from Labour, they're not "headline grabbers" as such but I think they seem good.
To credit the Tories, despite it going slowly BDUK for FTTP seems to be progressing well.
As I have said previously there are some in Labour who are pretty impressive. Reeves, Phillipson, Streeting and McFadden all seem to be pretty competent performers but also seem to have some good ideas too for when they come to power.
I then look at Annaliese Dodds and some of the other muppets and realise in some areas it is going to be an uphill struggle.
What is the issue with Dodds? She got demoted, I think of her as incredibly "meh" but not actively a problem?
Depends what position she gets. Woefully out of her depth as Shadow Chancellor. Every time she opens her mouth, or opines on something, she says little of any value or merit.
Dodds isn't Shadow Chancellor? Isn't that why she got demoted for being distinctly "meh"?
There are muppets in the Labour Party certainly (although not in the Shadow Cabinet) but the worst in the SC are "meh" like Dodds.
I know she isn't Shadow Chancellor. She was shit at it.
I think the new labour intake seems to be being very well managed by Starmer to be of his viewpoint with a view to party discipline.
Criticism of Sunak's shoes is bizarre. He's done so many bad things, this is a totally irrelevant issue and pointless. Leave the man alone, he can where what he wants.
He's at John Major (1995-1997) and Gordon Brown (2008-2010) levels of ridicule now... Though he has (so far) managed to avoid being turned into a lettuce, so that's something...
He is going to start being pitied rather than reviled.
Yes, he's getting towards that level.
Makes you wonder why he, personally, wants to string this out until the end of the year doesn't it?
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
We gave both our girls classic, but not extremely common, names. Names that have suited people in every generation.
We gave our girls Sri Lankan/Indian names. Combined with my Anglo Saxon surname it means they have, as far as I can see, completely unique names. My son we gave a then not too common (outside top 100) traditional British first name. As a result, his name isn't unique, especially as his first name has rocketed in popularity since then! I think my youngest plans to go by her first name only when she achieves showbiz fame, a la Zendaya.
Better still, they can have unique email addresses without tacking a random number on the end.
My son has, I think, a unique name. Unfortunately, I tried to register a gmail account for him of the form firstname.surname@gmail.com before he was 13 and got the address permanently banned. So now he has a random number tacked on too, despite the uniqueness of his name. Annoying.
Purchase the domain of your surname.
You can then use it with Gmail to create an email address of
firstname@surname.com
In the early(ish) days of email one of the free providers had a range of domains for addresses including fullmoon.com
As a student, I was tickled to find that no one had claimed IAmAWolf@fullmoon.com and proceeded to use it for all all the companies I didn't want to give my real email address to.
I also have firstname.lastname@gmail.com, thanks to a friend's brother working at Google when it was rolled out invitation-only and not having an excessively common surname.
I find that a bit of a curse.
I have firstname.lastname@gmail.com and get various emails not intended for me from around the world.
I have applied to the court in Florida to have my convictions removed from the record, received invitations to sewage works in Warrington and am apparently also working in Sydney.
What trivial nonsense, even in jest. Who cares less what shoes he wears? Samba “fans” should get an effing life.
What’s funny is that these Samba “fans” are offended because they believe that the PM, especially a Tory PM, shouldn’t be wearing Sambas because Sambas are “cool” and therefore for “cool people” without realising that they are totally mainstream and nobody who is really cool is wearing them as they’ve moved on to the next look already.
So the complainants are not stylish but are just following the herd and about as original as Chinese car designs.
I hope Sunak's apology is a piss take of these utter knob ends.
Hence, I suppose, a 'fulsome' apology rather than a 'full' apology.
My wife and daughter are en route to Paris. There has been some anxiety about this: - will the taxi to the station turn up? - will Avanti cheerfully cancel the train to London? - will they be confounded by passport control at St. Pancras?
So she left plenty of slack in her schedule.
The first apparent hitch was a text at 5.30am to say their train to London had been cancelled. After a minor amount of faffing, she was able to rebook onto the earlier train at no cost, and rebook her taxi for 20 minutes earlier. On getting up again at 7, the cancelled train had been uncancelled. But as we were up it didn't seem worth rescheduling the taxi. Then, however, at five minutes past the due time for the taxi, there was still no sign of it. Wife phones the taxi company, who are in a panic - because it was Eid, most of the taxi drivers had at the last minute declined to work. (Are all taxi drivers Muslim, or is it just a Greater Manchester thing)? Anyway, drama was shortlived: a dodgy-looking Wolverhampton-registered taxi turned up only eight minutes late - well within the amount of slack for the day and no later than you would normally expect a taxi. They were well in time for the train they had originally intended to get, which got them to London on time. Short hop from Euston to St. Pancras, and straight to passport control, as we had been warned that since Brexit, queues take at least 90 minutes and sometimes up to three hours. But they were through in ten minutes, leaving them two hours to kill before their train to Paris. No complaint about this from me, wife or daughter - we are much happier being early with time to kill. So the journey up to the point of actually leaving London has gone surprisingly well, despite threatening not to at every turn. It hardly seems credible that three consecutive parts of the journey (taxi, London train, passports) have gone smoothly. We expect disaster at every turn, and indeed those operating the systems appear to expect it, but it hasn't yet materialised.
Eid wasn't definitely today, it could have been tomorrow depending on sighting the new moon, so the drivers might have wanted to keep their options open.
Our locall Hall has the same problem with Eid bookings.
I know she isn't Shadow Chancellor. She was shit at it.
I think the new labour intake seems to be being very well managed by Starmer to be of his viewpoint with a view to party discipline.
She was just very bland and not a good Commons or media performer. I wouldn't call her "shit" more "useless".
I guess my point is that she'll vote in line with what Starmer says, she doesn't have any strong or weird opinions as far as I can see, hence the "meh".
Criticism of Sunak's shoes is bizarre. He's done so many bad things, this is a totally irrelevant issue and pointless. Leave the man alone, he can where what he wants.
On the other hand, how refreshing to see a man's dress sense being questioned instead of a woman's. Women MPs have to put up with this crap all the time..
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
The penalties for obnoxious parking need reworking.
Obnoxious parking should be an offence dealt with in court only, if ticketed by police working to clear guidelines.
Where I live, unclaimed offences sit with the car, and the equivalent of the car tax can’t be renewed untill any outstanding fines are paid or prosecutions underway.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
We gave both our girls classic, but not extremely common, names. Names that have suited people in every generation.
We gave our girls Sri Lankan/Indian names. Combined with my Anglo Saxon surname it means they have, as far as I can see, completely unique names. My son we gave a then not too common (outside top 100) traditional British first name. As a result, his name isn't unique, especially as his first name has rocketed in popularity since then! I think my youngest plans to go by her first name only when she achieves showbiz fame, a la Zendaya.
Better still, they can have unique email addresses without tacking a random number on the end.
My son has, I think, a unique name. Unfortunately, I tried to register a gmail account for him of the form firstname.surname@gmail.com before he was 13 and got the address permanently banned. So now he has a random number tacked on too, despite the uniqueness of his name. Annoying.
Purchase the domain of your surname.
You can then use it with Gmail to create an email address of
firstname@surname.com
In the early(ish) days of email one of the free providers had a range of domains for addresses including fullmoon.com
As a student, I was tickled to find that no one had claimed IAmAWolf@fullmoon.com and proceeded to use it for all all the companies I didn't want to give my real email address to.
I also have firstname.lastname@gmail.com, thanks to a friend's brother working at Google when it was rolled out invitation-only and not having an excessively common surname.
I find that a bit of a curse.
I have firstname.lastname@gmail.com and get various emails not intended for me from around the world.
I have applied to the court in Florida to have my convictions removed from the record, received invitations to sewage works in Warrington and am apparently also working in Sydney.
Isn’t it more plausible that these are your multiple secret identities, forgotten due to amnesia?
Check under the floorboards for the cache of passports, firearms and piles of… cash.
There are certainly some sensible policies coming from Labour, they're not "headline grabbers" as such but I think they seem good.
To credit the Tories, despite it going slowly BDUK for FTTP seems to be progressing well.
As I have said previously there are some in Labour who are pretty impressive. Reeves, Phillipson, Streeting and McFadden all seem to be pretty competent performers but also seem to have some good ideas too for when they come to power.
I then look at Annaliese Dodds and some of the other muppets and realise in some areas it is going to be an uphill struggle.
What is the issue with Dodds? She got demoted, I think of her as incredibly "meh" but not actively a problem?
Depends what position she gets. Woefully out of her depth as Shadow Chancellor. Every time she opens her mouth, or opines on something, she says little of any value or merit.
But she isn't shadow chancellor, Sir Keir sacked her. So I really don't see your point.
There are certainly some sensible policies coming from Labour, they're not "headline grabbers" as such but I think they seem good.
To credit the Tories, despite it going slowly BDUK for FTTP seems to be progressing well.
As I have said previously there are some in Labour who are pretty impressive. Reeves, Phillipson, Streeting and McFadden all seem to be pretty competent performers but also seem to have some good ideas too for when they come to power.
I then look at Annaliese Dodds and some of the other muppets and realise in some areas it is going to be an uphill struggle.
What is the issue with Dodds? She got demoted, I think of her as incredibly "meh" but not actively a problem?
Depends what position she gets. Woefully out of her depth as Shadow Chancellor. Every time she opens her mouth, or opines on something, she says little of any value or merit.
But she isn't shadow chancellor, Sir Keir sacked her. So I really don't see your point.
I'd argue in this particular case it shows his ruthlessness, as he sacked "one of his own".
My wife and daughter are en route to Paris. There has been some anxiety about this: - will the taxi to the station turn up? - will Avanti cheerfully cancel the train to London? - will they be confounded by passport control at St. Pancras?
So she left plenty of slack in her schedule.
The first apparent hitch was a text at 5.30am to say their train to London had been cancelled. After a minor amount of faffing, she was able to rebook onto the earlier train at no cost, and rebook her taxi for 20 minutes earlier. On getting up again at 7, the cancelled train had been uncancelled. But as we were up it didn't seem worth rescheduling the taxi. Then, however, at five minutes past the due time for the taxi, there was still no sign of it. Wife phones the taxi company, who are in a panic - because it was Eid, most of the taxi drivers had at the last minute declined to work. (Are all taxi drivers Muslim, or is it just a Greater Manchester thing)? Anyway, drama was shortlived: a dodgy-looking Wolverhampton-registered taxi turned up only eight minutes late - well within the amount of slack for the day and no later than you would normally expect a taxi. They were well in time for the train they had originally intended to get, which got them to London on time. Short hop from Euston to St. Pancras, and straight to passport control, as we had been warned that since Brexit, queues take at least 90 minutes and sometimes up to three hours. But they were through in ten minutes, leaving them two hours to kill before their train to Paris. No complaint about this from me, wife or daughter - we are much happier being early with time to kill. So the journey up to the point of actually leaving London has gone surprisingly well, despite threatening not to at every turn. It hardly seems credible that three consecutive parts of the journey (taxi, London train, passports) have gone smoothly. We expect disaster at every turn, and indeed those operating the systems appear to expect it, but it hasn't yet materialised.
The key thing in your story is having slack and a little flexibility in the schedule...
What trivial nonsense, even in jest. Who cares less what shoes he wears? Samba “fans” should get an effing life.
What’s funny is that these Samba “fans” are offended because they believe that the PM, especially a Tory PM, shouldn’t be wearing Sambas because Sambas are “cool” and therefore for “cool people” without realising that they are totally mainstream and nobody who is really cool is wearing them as they’ve moved on to the next look already.
So the complainants are not stylish but are just following the herd and about as original as Chinese car designs.
I hope Sunak's apology is a piss take of these utter knob ends.
Hence, I suppose, a 'fulsome' apology rather than a 'full' apology.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
Fair enough, nor do I. I just use my phone universally. The cards just gather dust at home, they are completely pointless these days.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
The penalties for obnoxious parking need reworking.
I alarmed that a few of you are aware of Riley Reid and posting about her on Eid.
I was specifically enjoined from naming my boys Luke.
Also never hire somebody called Chardonnay.
Thoughts and prayers for me.
Not only was I forced to attend a mosque this morning my mother is hosting several families for an Eid party today.
I have to be an actual good Muslim today.
I did start with “Eid Mubarak”, before moving on several hours later to Riley Reid - although how a good Muslim such as yourself knows who she is, is a different question!
Have fun with your family, and Eid Mubarak to them 🌙
"Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto" applies.
Fares fair. The Paris transport company runs buses in London.
Doesn’t surprise me, it’s rained almost non-stop in the Seine’s watershed for the last several months. I assume they have similar sewage overflow issues as London.
Climate change is real, and we need to adapt. It seems that warmer wetter winters are our future. In Leics we have had hardly any frosts. The clay soil here is waterlogged. Better for planting rice than barley!
We’ve actually had a run of a few pretty dry winters (but warm). Until a few months ago large parts of Western Europe were in severe drought restrictions mainly because of winter deficits.
What is happening with a warmer climate though is more extremes, and rutty weather.
Record alert ! I do believe this is the earliest in the year we've breached we've passed an average of 8 Celsius for England (Central England data series) (Well since 1772 when the records began).
What - so it's currently unseasonably warm? Doesn't feel it here! Though I am aware that people's perceptions of what 'seasonable' is is way out from reality. What sticks in the memory is the periods of high pressure, in any season.
The last month to be below the 1961-1990 average in mean Central England Temperature was December 2022. Britain is certainly having an extended run of abnormally warm weather.
February 2024 was the second-warmest February in the entire record. Five of the monthly records are held by years since 2000. Won't be too long until all the records fall.
Fair enough. I'm extrapolating from 'what it feels like now' - and I am shivering. But March was warm, and last winter was warm, and Autumn was warm. It feels to me like last July/August was cold, but clearly not by historical standards. May and June was warm. Can't remember before that!
September was disgustingly hot. An absolutely awful heatwave that went on for days and led to me attempting to sleep in the garden. Miserable.
I remember it being quite pleasant for a week or so as the kids went back to school. But then, you're in London, I'm in Manchester. It gets disgustingly hot far more often down there.
On names. I’ve posted before that I have an extremely unusual first name, sometimes mistaken for a surname. It’s caused a lot of confusion, on occasion. And hilarity.
You're not the only one.
There are two of me with the same Forename Surname, one here and one in Germany. That's it.
Which was a hazard when I started doing online politics, as it was a common technique for some to report opponents or people not liked to employers and try and get them silenced or sacked, or to use that as a threat to shut someone down. So hence me going for a pseudonym, but not totally secret so that I had a defence against threatened outing ("It's public, duck. Foxtrot Oscar.").
It was also not unusual for local politicians to try and set the police on critics to silence them, Trans Activist style.
And mainstream media thought it an OK move to "out" people. Remember Nightjack and the Times/Sunday Times?
In some ways it is better now as we have a more established set of conventions.
Trying to post this so it does not out anyone: A relative of mine who has a house abroad has a common English surname that is also a name of job (eg Baker, Smith, etc). The pronunciation of that job name in the language where he has a house is exactly the same as his first name (also a common English name). The locals speak good English so translate what you say in their heads perfectly. It causes utter confusion with the locals. Every new introduction lasts about an hour going through what is his first name and what is his surname, confusing both and final bemusement that his first name is the same as his surname, which it isn't of course and half the time they don't get it. Too much knowledge can be a bad thing sometimes.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
The penalties for obnoxious parking need reworking.
Obnoxious parking should be an offence dealt with in court only, if ticketed by police working to clear guidelines.
Where I live, unclaimed offences sit with the car, and the equivalent of the car tax can’t be renewed untill any outstanding fines are paid or prosecutions underway.
In the UK of course we have the "Registered Keeper" system, where a notice is served on the keeper to reveal the driver, and not doing do is 6 points and a small fine for the keeper.
So for any more serious offences committed by the keeper driving it is common for the notice to be ignored so eg the keeper-driver gets 6 points not a ban or a more serious punishment.
My wife and daughter are en route to Paris. There has been some anxiety about this: - will the taxi to the station turn up? - will Avanti cheerfully cancel the train to London? - will they be confounded by passport control at St. Pancras?
So she left plenty of slack in her schedule.
The first apparent hitch was a text at 5.30am to say their train to London had been cancelled. After a minor amount of faffing, she was able to rebook onto the earlier train at no cost, and rebook her taxi for 20 minutes earlier. On getting up again at 7, the cancelled train had been uncancelled. But as we were up it didn't seem worth rescheduling the taxi. Then, however, at five minutes past the due time for the taxi, there was still no sign of it. Wife phones the taxi company, who are in a panic - because it was Eid, most of the taxi drivers had at the last minute declined to work. (Are all taxi drivers Muslim, or is it just a Greater Manchester thing)? Anyway, drama was shortlived: a dodgy-looking Wolverhampton-registered taxi turned up only eight minutes late - well within the amount of slack for the day and no later than you would normally expect a taxi. They were well in time for the train they had originally intended to get, which got them to London on time. Short hop from Euston to St. Pancras, and straight to passport control, as we had been warned that since Brexit, queues take at least 90 minutes and sometimes up to three hours. But they were through in ten minutes, leaving them two hours to kill before their train to Paris. No complaint about this from me, wife or daughter - we are much happier being early with time to kill. So the journey up to the point of actually leaving London has gone surprisingly well, despite threatening not to at every turn. It hardly seems credible that three consecutive parts of the journey (taxi, London train, passports) have gone smoothly. We expect disaster at every turn, and indeed those operating the systems appear to expect it, but it hasn't yet materialised.
The key thing in your story is having slack and a little flexibility in the schedule...
I'm professionally quite interested in the concept of slack. The amount of slack you build in to your journey is dependent on the reliability of the mode you are using, the back up options (i.e. is there one train per hour or three) and the importance of getting to your end destination on time. There are an awful lot of benefits you can realise by improving reliability and frequency: people need to build in far less slack to their journeys. This is very difficult to accurately quantify the benefits of however!
I'm working my way through the Cass Review. So far I am really impressed by the focus on the need to be evidence based and meet the clinical needs of the patient. My concern is that the cost will be enormous to facilitate the recommendations properly, so the NHS will fudge it. Horrified that the NHS adult gender services refused to cooperate in providing long term outcomes evidence.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
We gave both our girls classic, but not extremely common, names. Names that have suited people in every generation.
We gave our girls Sri Lankan/Indian names. Combined with my Anglo Saxon surname it means they have, as far as I can see, completely unique names. My son we gave a then not too common (outside top 100) traditional British first name. As a result, his name isn't unique, especially as his first name has rocketed in popularity since then! I think my youngest plans to go by her first name only when she achieves showbiz fame, a la Zendaya.
Better still, they can have unique email addresses without tacking a random number on the end.
My son has, I think, a unique name. Unfortunately, I tried to register a gmail account for him of the form firstname.surname@gmail.com before he was 13 and got the address permanently banned. So now he has a random number tacked on too, despite the uniqueness of his name. Annoying.
Purchase the domain of your surname.
You can then use it with Gmail to create an email address of
firstname@surname.com
In the early(ish) days of email one of the free providers had a range of domains for addresses including fullmoon.com
As a student, I was tickled to find that no one had claimed IAmAWolf@fullmoon.com and proceeded to use it for all all the companies I didn't want to give my real email address to.
I also have firstname.lastname@gmail.com, thanks to a friend's brother working at Google when it was rolled out invitation-only and not having an excessively common surname.
I find that a bit of a curse.
I have firstname.lastname@gmail.com and get various emails not intended for me from around the world.
I have applied to the court in Florida to have my convictions removed from the record, received invitations to sewage works in Warrington and am apparently also working in Sydney.
I get similar, but I still wouldn't replace my email with a new numbered one.
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
Recognition of the need to change- that Mytown used to be famous for something and that something has died- is blooming difficult, though.
There must be examples of towns successfully reinventing themselves, but it's not a comfortable process.
Stockton-on-Tees is doing a great job. Steel and shipbuilding have long gone, but the old Teesside Development Corporation had the land redeveloped as houses and an office park - complete with a Durham University campus.
Go forward a few decades and the town was struggling - too much retail space. So the council have bought the 70s shopping mall and derelict hotel and has bulldozed them, to create a riverside park. The town theatre - a relatively big 4,000 seat one - was painstakingly restored and reopened, with a council-owned Hilton just round the corner.
The Tories hated all this of course - describing both the theatre and the hotel as "white elephants" as who will use them? Yet the theatre is booked out for a year at a time and the hotel needs a bigger car park. So it can be done, but you need council management who know how to get things done and political stability to get you through several rounds of elections. Had the Tories won, the plan was to halt the works and leave the town with more half-finished stuff which they would blame Labour for...
BIB (Bit In Bold) 1: Note the "Corporation": this had state involvement and functioned much better than the outsource-to-private-sector jobbies that are so fashionable.
BIB (Bit In Bold) 2: I think that's the best solution for places that can't be revived: knock them down and make a park out of it.
Bradford is taking a similar approach. The City Council recognised it had a) some very ugly buildings, and b) too many offices by some way. It's solution was to rationalise office uses into the attractive Victorian buildings (of which Bradford has many) and knock down the ugly 1960s buildings, leaving the spaces as public open space. A win-win - but something of a surprise that a council can, if it wants, do such a thing; why haven't other towns knocked down their ugly buildings and replaced them with public open space? It seems such an open goal, if it's possible to do.
There's a lot more wrong with Bradford than a few soulless office buildings.
The council has no money, either.
I'm sure that's true. But it's striking how relatively easily the city centre has been made more beautiful.
My office in Bradford was in a beautiful wood panelled building. I worked for a company called Tanks and Drums, our head office was the Grade 2 listed Bowling House on Bowling Back Lane.This is what a Grade 2 listed building looks like in Bradford.
When Bradford was still a textile town, it was something of a tradition there, too.
My old man was from the rough end of Glasgow, and had many stories of the ways to get development past the planning process even in the ‘60s and ‘70s. “Went on Fire” was easily the best, as clearly they couldn’t preserve what’s now an unstable building, and unless the polis could somehow draw a very long line between a bunch of local druggie arsonists paid in cash or product, and the owner of the building, there was unlikely to be any comeback. Doubly so when the council were all up for the redevelopment.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
We gave both our girls classic, but not extremely common, names. Names that have suited people in every generation.
We gave our girls Sri Lankan/Indian names. Combined with my Anglo Saxon surname it means they have, as far as I can see, completely unique names. My son we gave a then not too common (outside top 100) traditional British first name. As a result, his name isn't unique, especially as his first name has rocketed in popularity since then! I think my youngest plans to go by her first name only when she achieves showbiz fame, a la Zendaya.
Better still, they can have unique email addresses without tacking a random number on the end.
My son has, I think, a unique name. Unfortunately, I tried to register a gmail account for him of the form firstname.surname@gmail.com before he was 13 and got the address permanently banned. So now he has a random number tacked on too, despite the uniqueness of his name. Annoying.
Purchase the domain of your surname.
You can then use it with Gmail to create an email address of
firstname@surname.com
In the early(ish) days of email one of the free providers had a range of domains for addresses including fullmoon.com
As a student, I was tickled to find that no one had claimed IAmAWolf@fullmoon.com and proceeded to use it for all all the companies I didn't want to give my real email address to.
I also have firstname.lastname@gmail.com, thanks to a friend's brother working at Google when it was rolled out invitation-only and not having an excessively common surname.
I find that a bit of a curse.
I have firstname.lastname@gmail.com and get various emails not intended for me from around the world.
I have applied to the court in Florida to have my convictions removed from the record, received invitations to sewage works in Warrington and am apparently also working in Sydney.
IRL I have a common first name and a not uncommon surname. Over the last few years I've started receiving emails, allegedly from academia.com, asking:
(firstname surname): did you write: (insert paper name) ?
Recently I've had the following papers mentioned; "Improvements in hard disk spindle and actuator motors control" "Third-trimester arterial blood gas and acid base values in normal pregnancy at moderate altitude" "Evaluability Assessment to Improve Public Health Policies, Programs, and Practices" "An empirical continuous positive airway pressure trial for suspected obstructive sleep apnea." "Day Medicine: An Urgent Internal Medicine Clinic and Medical Procedures Suite" "The Unlikeliest Source: The Historical Reality behind 'Thomas the Tank Engine'" "Altimeter estimates of wave period" "11th COASTAL ALTIMETRY WORKSHOP FINAL REPORT"
I've never written a scientific paper in my life. I've no idea if they think I have for some reason, or if it's some form of weird scam. If it wasn't for the possibility of it being a scam, I might try claiming one to see what happened...
Cass report to me from a skim, remarkably balanced and sensible. It seems to have annoyed both sides equally so probably a good sign that it is "in the middle".
I really hope this is the start of de-toxifying this debate and allowing us all to come to an agreed position that we can all live with.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
The penalties for obnoxious parking need reworking.
I think it's an issue we are seeing progress on even in England; there are plenty of options now available even with the last 6 transport ministers sitting on the fence like so many seagulls.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
We gave both our girls classic, but not extremely common, names. Names that have suited people in every generation.
We gave our girls Sri Lankan/Indian names. Combined with my Anglo Saxon surname it means they have, as far as I can see, completely unique names. My son we gave a then not too common (outside top 100) traditional British first name. As a result, his name isn't unique, especially as his first name has rocketed in popularity since then! I think my youngest plans to go by her first name only when she achieves showbiz fame, a la Zendaya.
Better still, they can have unique email addresses without tacking a random number on the end.
My son has, I think, a unique name. Unfortunately, I tried to register a gmail account for him of the form firstname.surname@gmail.com before he was 13 and got the address permanently banned. So now he has a random number tacked on too, despite the uniqueness of his name. Annoying.
Purchase the domain of your surname.
You can then use it with Gmail to create an email address of
firstname@surname.com
In the early(ish) days of email one of the free providers had a range of domains for addresses including fullmoon.com
As a student, I was tickled to find that no one had claimed IAmAWolf@fullmoon.com and proceeded to use it for all all the companies I didn't want to give my real email address to.
I also have firstname.lastname@gmail.com, thanks to a friend's brother working at Google when it was rolled out invitation-only and not having an excessively common surname.
I find that a bit of a curse.
I have firstname.lastname@gmail.com and get various emails not intended for me from around the world.
I have applied to the court in Florida to have my convictions removed from the record, received invitations to sewage works in Warrington and am apparently also working in Sydney.
Isn’t it more plausible that these are your multiple secret identities, forgotten due to amnesia?
Check under the floorboards for the cache of passports, firearms and piles of… cash.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
We allow anyone to apply for membership and do not discriminate on any grounds. We would like to include date of birth on the application form on the grounds of knowing the age profile of our members to maintain historical records that go back centuries. As there is no employment/discrimination issue, is this record keeping justification sufficient to ask for it (especially if we make it voluntary to provide the answer)?
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
We gave both our girls classic, but not extremely common, names. Names that have suited people in every generation.
We gave our girls Sri Lankan/Indian names. Combined with my Anglo Saxon surname it means they have, as far as I can see, completely unique names. My son we gave a then not too common (outside top 100) traditional British first name. As a result, his name isn't unique, especially as his first name has rocketed in popularity since then! I think my youngest plans to go by her first name only when she achieves showbiz fame, a la Zendaya.
Better still, they can have unique email addresses without tacking a random number on the end.
Indeed they already do! While my poor son has to put up with a number at the end of his.
His $3 billion fund is financed almost entirely from overseas investors with whom he worked when he served as a senior adviser in the Trump White House. He has taken money from government wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as from Terry Gou, a founder of Foxconn, the Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer, whose role in Mr. Kushner’s firm has not been previously disclosed.
In total, 99 percent of the money placed with him by investors has come from foreign sources, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in late March...
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I try to avoid cards in phones, as I don't want to lose everything if I lose the phone or eg drop it in water.
What trivial nonsense, even in jest. Who cares less what shoes he wears? Samba “fans” should get an effing life.
What’s funny is that these Samba “fans” are offended because they believe that the PM, especially a Tory PM, shouldn’t be wearing Sambas because Sambas are “cool” and therefore for “cool people” without realising that they are totally mainstream and nobody who is really cool is wearing them as they’ve moved on to the next look already.
So the complainants are not stylish but are just following the herd and about as original as Chinese car designs.
Sfaict most of the Sambas complaints were tongue in cheek, just like Rishi's response. I doubt many were actually offended.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
We gave both our girls classic, but not extremely common, names. Names that have suited people in every generation.
We gave our girls Sri Lankan/Indian names. Combined with my Anglo Saxon surname it means they have, as far as I can see, completely unique names. My son we gave a then not too common (outside top 100) traditional British first name. As a result, his name isn't unique, especially as his first name has rocketed in popularity since then! I think my youngest plans to go by her first name only when she achieves showbiz fame, a la Zendaya.
Better still, they can have unique email addresses without tacking a random number on the end.
My son has, I think, a unique name. Unfortunately, I tried to register a gmail account for him of the form firstname.surname@gmail.com before he was 13 and got the address permanently banned. So now he has a random number tacked on too, despite the uniqueness of his name. Annoying.
Purchase the domain of your surname.
You can then use it with Gmail to create an email address of
firstname@surname.com
In the early(ish) days of email one of the free providers had a range of domains for addresses including fullmoon.com
As a student, I was tickled to find that no one had claimed IAmAWolf@fullmoon.com and proceeded to use it for all all the companies I didn't want to give my real email address to.
I also have firstname.lastname@gmail.com, thanks to a friend's brother working at Google when it was rolled out invitation-only and not having an excessively common surname.
I find that a bit of a curse.
I have firstname.lastname@gmail.com and get various emails not intended for me from around the world.
I have applied to the court in Florida to have my convictions removed from the record, received invitations to sewage works in Warrington and am apparently also working in Sydney.
IRL I have a common first name and a not uncommon surname. Over the last few years I've started receiving emails, allegedly from academia.com, asking:
(firstname surname): did you write: (insert paper name) ?
Recently I've had the following papers mentioned; "Improvements in hard disk spindle and actuator motors control" "Third-trimester arterial blood gas and acid base values in normal pregnancy at moderate altitude" "Evaluability Assessment to Improve Public Health Policies, Programs, and Practices" "An empirical continuous positive airway pressure trial for suspected obstructive sleep apnea." "Day Medicine: An Urgent Internal Medicine Clinic and Medical Procedures Suite" "The Unlikeliest Source: The Historical Reality behind 'Thomas the Tank Engine'" "Altimeter estimates of wave period" "11th COASTAL ALTIMETRY WORKSHOP FINAL REPORT"
I've never written a scientific paper in my life. I've no idea if they think I have for some reason, or if it's some form of weird scam. If it wasn't for the possibility of it being a scam, I might try claiming one to see what happened...
I've got a very common name which needs frequent disambiguation, and plenty of papers to my credit, as well as colleagues with the same or similar names in the same fields. Yet I've never had an email like that from them. Odd.
My wife and daughter are en route to Paris. There has been some anxiety about this: - will the taxi to the station turn up? - will Avanti cheerfully cancel the train to London? - will they be confounded by passport control at St. Pancras?
So she left plenty of slack in her schedule.
The first apparent hitch was a text at 5.30am to say their train to London had been cancelled. After a minor amount of faffing, she was able to rebook onto the earlier train at no cost, and rebook her taxi for 20 minutes earlier. On getting up again at 7, the cancelled train had been uncancelled. But as we were up it didn't seem worth rescheduling the taxi. Then, however, at five minutes past the due time for the taxi, there was still no sign of it. Wife phones the taxi company, who are in a panic - because it was Eid, most of the taxi drivers had at the last minute declined to work. (Are all taxi drivers Muslim, or is it just a Greater Manchester thing)? Anyway, drama was shortlived: a dodgy-looking Wolverhampton-registered taxi turned up only eight minutes late - well within the amount of slack for the day and no later than you would normally expect a taxi. They were well in time for the train they had originally intended to get, which got them to London on time. Short hop from Euston to St. Pancras, and straight to passport control, as we had been warned that since Brexit, queues take at least 90 minutes and sometimes up to three hours. But they were through in ten minutes, leaving them two hours to kill before their train to Paris. No complaint about this from me, wife or daughter - we are much happier being early with time to kill. So the journey up to the point of actually leaving London has gone surprisingly well, despite threatening not to at every turn. It hardly seems credible that three consecutive parts of the journey (taxi, London train, passports) have gone smoothly. We expect disaster at every turn, and indeed those operating the systems appear to expect it, but it hasn't yet materialised.
The key thing in your story is having slack and a little flexibility in the schedule...
I'm professionally quite interested in the concept of slack. The amount of slack you build in to your journey is dependent on the reliability of the mode you are using, the back up options (i.e. is there one train per hour or three) and the importance of getting to your end destination on time. There are an awful lot of benefits you can realise by improving reliability and frequency: people need to build in far less slack to their journeys. This is very difficult to accurately quantify the benefits of however!
One of the ways they accommodated the vast increase in passengers on the railways post-privatisation was to increase service frequency. So a line that might have had one train every hour, would have one every hour. And one that had hourly trains, would get them half-hourly.
And they discovered that passenger numbers on each line grew much more than expected (in many cases, more then doubled): because the inconvenience of having to wait too long for a train was a great barrier to train travel.
Back on topic, listening to the people interviewed in Blackpool, the one thing that bound all of them together (even the Tory) was that the town is visibly crumbling all around them. Blackpool can't sustain chain shops despite tourist numbers, and when most of the shops are owned by non-UK companies there is little incentive to do anything other than leave them shuttered and hope values rise naturally.
Blackpool is unique in some ways and not in others. It has a real problem with former B&Bs that modern tourists don't want to stay in - what to do with them? Which is how so many have ended up filled with migrants and the very poorest, or left to rot.
The solution? Buy large numbers of empty buildings, bulldoze them, and build homes. Blackpool has a microclimate - you can drive down the M55 where there is drizzle in Preston and find Blackpool free of cloud. It has rail and motorway links, a small airport which could be reopened and a tourist industry. Its the kind of place that people could be drawn to, but it needs politicians with vision. And it has lacked them for a long long time.
I have little doubt that Labour will win the byelection, and then little will change. Unless we decide that we are going to modernise these places and reinvest in their next phase of development - rather than bemoaning that the old times have gone - then all of these decaying towns will just keep decaying.
Recognition of the need to change- that Mytown used to be famous for something and that something has died- is blooming difficult, though.
There must be examples of towns successfully reinventing themselves, but it's not a comfortable process.
Stockton-on-Tees is doing a great job. Steel and shipbuilding have long gone, but the old Teesside Development Corporation had the land redeveloped as houses and an office park - complete with a Durham University campus.
Go forward a few decades and the town was struggling - too much retail space. So the council have bought the 70s shopping mall and derelict hotel and has bulldozed them, to create a riverside park. The town theatre - a relatively big 4,000 seat one - was painstakingly restored and reopened, with a council-owned Hilton just round the corner.
The Tories hated all this of course - describing both the theatre and the hotel as "white elephants" as who will use them? Yet the theatre is booked out for a year at a time and the hotel needs a bigger car park. So it can be done, but you need council management who know how to get things done and political stability to get you through several rounds of elections. Had the Tories won, the plan was to halt the works and leave the town with more half-finished stuff which they would blame Labour for...
BIB (Bit In Bold) 1: Note the "Corporation": this had state involvement and functioned much better than the outsource-to-private-sector jobbies that are so fashionable.
BIB (Bit In Bold) 2: I think that's the best solution for places that can't be revived: knock them down and make a park out of it.
Bradford is taking a similar approach. The City Council recognised it had a) some very ugly buildings, and b) too many offices by some way. It's solution was to rationalise office uses into the attractive Victorian buildings (of which Bradford has many) and knock down the ugly 1960s buildings, leaving the spaces as public open space. A win-win - but something of a surprise that a council can, if it wants, do such a thing; why haven't other towns knocked down their ugly buildings and replaced them with public open space? It seems such an open goal, if it's possible to do.
There's a lot more wrong with Bradford than a few soulless office buildings.
The council has no money, either.
I'm sure that's true. But it's striking how relatively easily the city centre has been made more beautiful.
My office in Bradford was in a beautiful wood panelled building. I worked for a company called Tanks and Drums, our head office was the Grade 2 listed Bowling House on Bowling Back Lane.This is what a Grade 2 listed building looks like in Bradford.
When Bradford was still a textile town, it was something of a tradition there, too.
My old man was from the rough end of Glasgow, and had many stories of the ways to get development past the planning process even in the ‘60s and ‘70s. “Went on Fire” was easily the best, as clearly they couldn’t preserve what’s now an unstable building, and unless the polis could somehow draw a very long line between a bunch of local druggie arsonists paid in cash or product, and the owner of the building, there was unlikely to be any comeback. Doubly so when the council were all up for the redevelopment.
Or "Glaswegian urban improvement" as we call a sudden fire in the east of Scotland.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I try to avoid cards in phones, as I don't want to lose everything if I lose the phone or eg drop it in water.
Ways and means !
I wonder how many PBers still wear a wristwatch?
I do! And while I generally try to avoid cheap Chinese stuff, I'm very much a believer in a cheap Chinese watch. It does nothing measurably worse than a watch 100 times the price, and if I lose it/break it/drop it in the sea, I can get another one for about £4. And if I wonder what time it is at night it has a button I can press which lights it up. And the numbers are big enough for me to read without glasses.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I try to avoid cards in phones, as I don't want to lose everything if I lose the phone or eg drop it in water.
Ways and means !
I wonder how many PBers still wear a wristwatch?
I accidentally smashed my phone last year, got home and dug a spare old phone out of a drawer and once I updated all apps got my cards transferred across to the new (old) phone. When I got a new phone, it was easy to transfer them all over again. Its good as well for loyalty cards etc, got a load of loyalty cards loaded on my phone now too.
Actually bought a new watch (smart) last year when I started my new job. Its convenient to have a watch where I'm now working but before then I hadn't regularly worn one for a few years but now always have it on again. Not bothered loading my cards onto the watch, since I always have my phone anyway.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
The penalties for obnoxious parking need reworking.
Obnoxious parking should be an offence dealt with in court only, if ticketed by police working to clear guidelines.
Where I live, unclaimed offences sit with the car, and the equivalent of the car tax can’t be renewed untill any outstanding fines are paid or prosecutions underway.
In the UK of course we have the "Registered Keeper" system, where a notice is served on the keeper to reveal the driver, and not doing do is 6 points and a small fine for the keeper.
So for any more serious offences committed by the keeper driving it is common for the notice to be ignored so eg the keeper-driver gets 6 points not a ban or a more serious punishment.
Just another of our many loopholes.
Oh yes there’s loads of loopholes in UK traffic law that well-planned bad actors and their lawyers can use to take advantage.
TBF, as I understand it the police now have insurance, tax, and wanted databases available live, and are much quicker to have cars towed than they used to be. “My brother is a dealer, and I’m on his trade insurance” doesn’t wash any more.
If I (where I live) fly past a camera at 150mph, for example, I either need to admit to driving, pay the fine and take the ban; name the driver who was driving (including all his contact information I have); have my car impounded until this all gets resolved, or turn up in court (with a lawyer and possibly a translator, costs I’m not getting back) and argue that their camera was talking bollocks because I have video evidence to the contrary.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
I think it's lovely to see some creativity and originality in children's names. Far nicer than facing a monotonous wall of Marks, Davids and Bens, surely.
Alan appears to be very rare these days. And a certain sit-com means no-one calls their child Derek or Rodney any more.
Steve, Paul, Andrew and David have virtually gone too. 50% of male Gen X. Joe and Tom were ubiquitous at the turn of the millennium. Not many in Primary now. It's just fashion.
Edit. Chris has gone too. Luke was another that rose from nowhere and fell again.
I know several Gen Z Davids but maybe that's a Scottish thing.
My wife and daughter are en route to Paris. There has been some anxiety about this: - will the taxi to the station turn up? - will Avanti cheerfully cancel the train to London? - will they be confounded by passport control at St. Pancras?
So she left plenty of slack in her schedule.
The first apparent hitch was a text at 5.30am to say their train to London had been cancelled. After a minor amount of faffing, she was able to rebook onto the earlier train at no cost, and rebook her taxi for 20 minutes earlier. On getting up again at 7, the cancelled train had been uncancelled. But as we were up it didn't seem worth rescheduling the taxi. Then, however, at five minutes past the due time for the taxi, there was still no sign of it. Wife phones the taxi company, who are in a panic - because it was Eid, most of the taxi drivers had at the last minute declined to work. (Are all taxi drivers Muslim, or is it just a Greater Manchester thing)? Anyway, drama was shortlived: a dodgy-looking Wolverhampton-registered taxi turned up only eight minutes late - well within the amount of slack for the day and no later than you would normally expect a taxi. They were well in time for the train they had originally intended to get, which got them to London on time. Short hop from Euston to St. Pancras, and straight to passport control, as we had been warned that since Brexit, queues take at least 90 minutes and sometimes up to three hours. But they were through in ten minutes, leaving them two hours to kill before their train to Paris. No complaint about this from me, wife or daughter - we are much happier being early with time to kill. So the journey up to the point of actually leaving London has gone surprisingly well, despite threatening not to at every turn. It hardly seems credible that three consecutive parts of the journey (taxi, London train, passports) have gone smoothly. We expect disaster at every turn, and indeed those operating the systems appear to expect it, but it hasn't yet materialised.
Most minicab drivers round here are Muslim so yes, be careful about Eid and also Fridays when the ones not taking an hour off for Friday prayers have regular bookings driving others to the mosque for Friday prayers. On the other hand, I have had no trouble getting last minute rides across London on Christmas Day. Ramadan, depending on the time of year (are days long or short?) can see a sudden paucity of cabs as everyone nips home for half an hour's nosh at sunset.
Be careful in France as everyone is catching bedbugs in the Seine.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I try to avoid cards in phones, as I don't want to lose everything if I lose the phone or eg drop it in water.
Ways and means !
I wonder how many PBers still wear a wristwatch?
I accidentally smashed my phone last year, got home and dug a spare old phone out of a drawer and once I updated all apps got my cards transferred across to the new (old) phone. When I got a new phone, it was easy to transfer them all over again. Its good as well for loyalty cards etc, got a load of loyalty cards loaded on my phone now too.
Actually bought a new watch (smart) last year when I started my new job. Its convenient to have a watch where I'm now working but before then I hadn't regularly worn one for a few years but now always have it on again. Not bothered loading my cards onto the watch, since I always have my phone anyway.
I'm probably still using the spare old phone.
At a party at Christmas my relations counted how many versions of Android, and how many version of phone I was out of date - so I need a newer one.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I try to avoid cards in phones, as I don't want to lose everything if I lose the phone or eg drop it in water.
Ways and means !
I wonder how many PBers still wear a wristwatch?
I still wear a Swiss watch, at least when at home and not in Kiev or London, have my card on Apple Pay on the phone (way more secure and better for privacy than using the actual card) as well as in the wallet for when the technology fails. Usually keep a reasonable amount of cash in the wallet too, in case the tech really fails and I need a tank full or to pay for dinner
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
We gave both our girls classic, but not extremely common, names. Names that have suited people in every generation.
We gave our girls Sri Lankan/Indian names. Combined with my Anglo Saxon surname it means they have, as far as I can see, completely unique names. My son we gave a then not too common (outside top 100) traditional British first name. As a result, his name isn't unique, especially as his first name has rocketed in popularity since then! I think my youngest plans to go by her first name only when she achieves showbiz fame, a la Zendaya.
Better still, they can have unique email addresses without tacking a random number on the end.
My son has, I think, a unique name. Unfortunately, I tried to register a gmail account for him of the form firstname.surname@gmail.com before he was 13 and got the address permanently banned. So now he has a random number tacked on too, despite the uniqueness of his name. Annoying.
Purchase the domain of your surname.
You can then use it with Gmail to create an email address of
firstname@surname.com
In the early(ish) days of email one of the free providers had a range of domains for addresses including fullmoon.com
As a student, I was tickled to find that no one had claimed IAmAWolf@fullmoon.com and proceeded to use it for all all the companies I didn't want to give my real email address to.
I also have firstname.lastname@gmail.com, thanks to a friend's brother working at Google when it was rolled out invitation-only and not having an excessively common surname.
I find that a bit of a curse.
I have firstname.lastname@gmail.com and get various emails not intended for me from around the world.
I have applied to the court in Florida to have my convictions removed from the record, received invitations to sewage works in Warrington and am apparently also working in Sydney.
IRL I have a common first name and a not uncommon surname. Over the last few years I've started receiving emails, allegedly from academia.com, asking:
(firstname surname): did you write: (insert paper name) ?
Recently I've had the following papers mentioned; "Improvements in hard disk spindle and actuator motors control" "Third-trimester arterial blood gas and acid base values in normal pregnancy at moderate altitude" "Evaluability Assessment to Improve Public Health Policies, Programs, and Practices" "An empirical continuous positive airway pressure trial for suspected obstructive sleep apnea." "Day Medicine: An Urgent Internal Medicine Clinic and Medical Procedures Suite" "The Unlikeliest Source: The Historical Reality behind 'Thomas the Tank Engine'" "Altimeter estimates of wave period" "11th COASTAL ALTIMETRY WORKSHOP FINAL REPORT"
I've never written a scientific paper in my life. I've no idea if they think I have for some reason, or if it's some form of weird scam. If it wasn't for the possibility of it being a scam, I might try claiming one to see what happened...
It's not a scam, no. Academia.edu do this. The only question is why you have an account with them in the first place.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I don't like using my phone for lots of reasons: - the too-many-eggs-in-one-basket argument - the need to keep it charged - the need to find my glasses in order to do anything meaningful on it - a general distrust of apps (I only have about five on my phone apart from the ones like whatsapp that it came with, and I have removed many of those), stemming from: - I don't want to read a lot of terms and conditions before installing an app, but also I don't want to install something on a device which could hold so much information - including where, physically, I am at any one time - without reading the ts and cs. - when I do read ts and cs they tend not to be encouraging about how much information any given app helps itself to. - why do companies need to install apps on my phone anyway? On my home computer pretty much the only app I need is a web explorer. - even if apps are benign, it's going to be a PITA to port apps from one phone to another when this one dies.
I accept that there are inconveniences with using cash or bank cards too. But to me they are smaller and more manageable inconveniences.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
We gave both our girls classic, but not extremely common, names. Names that have suited people in every generation.
We gave our girls Sri Lankan/Indian names. Combined with my Anglo Saxon surname it means they have, as far as I can see, completely unique names. My son we gave a then not too common (outside top 100) traditional British first name. As a result, his name isn't unique, especially as his first name has rocketed in popularity since then! I think my youngest plans to go by her first name only when she achieves showbiz fame, a la Zendaya.
Better still, they can have unique email addresses without tacking a random number on the end.
My son has, I think, a unique name. Unfortunately, I tried to register a gmail account for him of the form firstname.surname@gmail.com before he was 13 and got the address permanently banned. So now he has a random number tacked on too, despite the uniqueness of his name. Annoying.
Purchase the domain of your surname.
You can then use it with Gmail to create an email address of
firstname@surname.com
In the early(ish) days of email one of the free providers had a range of domains for addresses including fullmoon.com
As a student, I was tickled to find that no one had claimed IAmAWolf@fullmoon.com and proceeded to use it for all all the companies I didn't want to give my real email address to.
I also have firstname.lastname@gmail.com, thanks to a friend's brother working at Google when it was rolled out invitation-only and not having an excessively common surname.
I find that a bit of a curse.
I have firstname.lastname@gmail.com and get various emails not intended for me from around the world.
I have applied to the court in Florida to have my convictions removed from the record, received invitations to sewage works in Warrington and am apparently also working in Sydney.
IRL I have a common first name and a not uncommon surname. Over the last few years I've started receiving emails, allegedly from academia.com, asking:
(firstname surname): did you write: (insert paper name) ?
Recently I've had the following papers mentioned; "Improvements in hard disk spindle and actuator motors control" "Third-trimester arterial blood gas and acid base values in normal pregnancy at moderate altitude" "Evaluability Assessment to Improve Public Health Policies, Programs, and Practices" "An empirical continuous positive airway pressure trial for suspected obstructive sleep apnea." "Day Medicine: An Urgent Internal Medicine Clinic and Medical Procedures Suite" "The Unlikeliest Source: The Historical Reality behind 'Thomas the Tank Engine'" "Altimeter estimates of wave period" "11th COASTAL ALTIMETRY WORKSHOP FINAL REPORT"
I've never written a scientific paper in my life. I've no idea if they think I have for some reason, or if it's some form of weird scam. If it wasn't for the possibility of it being a scam, I might try claiming one to see what happened...
academia.edu is definitely spammy but not officially a scam as such.
They are a non-free research respository.
It would be interesting to see if they took your word for ownership - though the actual writer might not be terribly pleased if their journal of choice drops them for breach of copyright.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Gratuitous misspelling is a scourge of our age.
Miss Pelling taught me at infants school....
My daughters at primary school have a TA called Mr Wolf.
You can probably guess the question he's asked many times a day.
I once worked with a Sandy Balls. Quite possibly - although I never asked/checked - shortened by the person himself.
In my working life I used to meet up with a Philip Green.
Better than P. Brain, I suppose. At uni we had a Chinese girl called Lo Y Kew. Not great.
You're best off with a very common name in many ways. I could have had one if my mum was my dad - since her maiden name is Smith - but as it happened I got landed with a surname that's unusual and always has to be spelt out to people. You get used to it.
I used to know a girl called Aliki, pronounced 'a leaky'
.@wesstreeting glad to see you are now openly critical of the gender ideology that led to the atrocities against children outlined in the Cass Report. I am open to accepting an apology from you. In 2008, when you were NUS President, I was no-platformed, alongside 5 fascist groups, for 'transphobia'. I contacted you and asked for your help. You gave none. I asked you to condemn those that had orchestrated the no-platforming, and you refused. Have you any idea of the reputational damage this caused me? How it gave others permission to no-platform, denounce and defame me? How it meant that I could be slandered by other organisations, and so many, many universities around the UK and elsewhere? If this sounds bitter then good, because I am.
If others have a terrible argument, then let that show and defeat it.
If you need to prevent others from speaking then maybe your own views aren't as strong as they should be,
To take an extreme example: if someone came on PB with clear Nazi or fascist views, and talked about how Jews were evil, awful people who controlled the world, and derailed every thread onto that topic, refusing to debate what he writes:
You'd be okay with that?
Is this genuine Fascist or Nazi views. Nowadays it seems to mean someone who disagrees with someone on social media. The terms are, almost, effectively redundant in some areas of debate as a consequence.
It's almost like somebody wrote an article about the difficulty of classification
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
We gave both our girls classic, but not extremely common, names. Names that have suited people in every generation.
We gave our girls Sri Lankan/Indian names. Combined with my Anglo Saxon surname it means they have, as far as I can see, completely unique names. My son we gave a then not too common (outside top 100) traditional British first name. As a result, his name isn't unique, especially as his first name has rocketed in popularity since then! I think my youngest plans to go by her first name only when she achieves showbiz fame, a la Zendaya.
Better still, they can have unique email addresses without tacking a random number on the end.
My son has, I think, a unique name. Unfortunately, I tried to register a gmail account for him of the form firstname.surname@gmail.com before he was 13 and got the address permanently banned. So now he has a random number tacked on too, despite the uniqueness of his name. Annoying.
Purchase the domain of your surname.
You can then use it with Gmail to create an email address of
firstname@surname.com
In the early(ish) days of email one of the free providers had a range of domains for addresses including fullmoon.com
As a student, I was tickled to find that no one had claimed IAmAWolf@fullmoon.com and proceeded to use it for all all the companies I didn't want to give my real email address to.
I also have firstname.lastname@gmail.com, thanks to a friend's brother working at Google when it was rolled out invitation-only and not having an excessively common surname.
I find that a bit of a curse.
I have firstname.lastname@gmail.com and get various emails not intended for me from around the world.
I have applied to the court in Florida to have my convictions removed from the record, received invitations to sewage works in Warrington and am apparently also working in Sydney.
IRL I have a common first name and a not uncommon surname. Over the last few years I've started receiving emails, allegedly from academia.com, asking:
(firstname surname): did you write: (insert paper name) ?
Recently I've had the following papers mentioned; "Improvements in hard disk spindle and actuator motors control" "Third-trimester arterial blood gas and acid base values in normal pregnancy at moderate altitude" "Evaluability Assessment to Improve Public Health Policies, Programs, and Practices" "An empirical continuous positive airway pressure trial for suspected obstructive sleep apnea." "Day Medicine: An Urgent Internal Medicine Clinic and Medical Procedures Suite" "The Unlikeliest Source: The Historical Reality behind 'Thomas the Tank Engine'" "Altimeter estimates of wave period" "11th COASTAL ALTIMETRY WORKSHOP FINAL REPORT"
I've never written a scientific paper in my life. I've no idea if they think I have for some reason, or if it's some form of weird scam. If it wasn't for the possibility of it being a scam, I might try claiming one to see what happened...
It's not a scam, no. Academia.edu do this. The only question is why you have an account with them in the first place.
I don't believe I do...?
(And yes, it was academia.edu, not academia.com, as you and @Flatlander pointed out. Apols.)
Biden needs the FED to cut rates but it’s unlikely now till later in the year , if at all.
One saving grace is that the mortgage industry is quite different from the UK and most are on long term mortgages . The problem is those seeking new mortgages .
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I try to avoid cards in phones, as I don't want to lose everything if I lose the phone or eg drop it in water.
Ways and means !
I wonder how many PBers still wear a wristwatch?
I wear one when constantly fishing out a phone is too much faff, as when cycling, hiking, on the beach (it's shockproof, waterproof to 200m and resin body/wristband).
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I try to avoid cards in phones, as I don't want to lose everything if I lose the phone or eg drop it in water.
Ways and means !
I wonder how many PBers still wear a wristwatch?
I accidentally smashed my phone last year, got home and dug a spare old phone out of a drawer and once I updated all apps got my cards transferred across to the new (old) phone. When I got a new phone, it was easy to transfer them all over again. Its good as well for loyalty cards etc, got a load of loyalty cards loaded on my phone now too.
Actually bought a new watch (smart) last year when I started my new job. Its convenient to have a watch where I'm now working but before then I hadn't regularly worn one for a few years but now always have it on again. Not bothered loading my cards onto the watch, since I always have my phone anyway.
I'm probably still using the spare old phone.
At a party at Christmas my relations counted how many versions of Android, and how many version of phone I was out of date - so I need a newer one.
What is this concept of spare old phone? I replace mine only when it's sufficiently broken to be unusable. So as far as I'm concerned - does it still work? (Yes). Then I don't need a newer one.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I try to avoid cards in phones, as I don't want to lose everything if I lose the phone or eg drop it in water.
Ways and means !
I wonder how many PBers still wear a wristwatch?
I accidentally smashed my phone last year, got home and dug a spare old phone out of a drawer and once I updated all apps got my cards transferred across to the new (old) phone. When I got a new phone, it was easy to transfer them all over again. Its good as well for loyalty cards etc, got a load of loyalty cards loaded on my phone now too.
Actually bought a new watch (smart) last year when I started my new job. Its convenient to have a watch where I'm now working but before then I hadn't regularly worn one for a few years but now always have it on again. Not bothered loading my cards onto the watch, since I always have my phone anyway.
I'm probably still using the spare old phone.
At a party at Christmas my relations counted how many versions of Android, and how many version of phone I was out of date - so I need a newer one.
What is this concept of spare old phone? I replace mine only when it's sufficiently broken to be unusable. So as far as I'm concerned - does it still work? (Yes). Then I don't need a newer one.
I am quite good at breaking them though.
A friend apologised that because his was out of action, he had borrowed his 9-year-old daughter's *spare* phone.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
That is antediluvian practice from Tesco's – quite extraordinarily backward!
If they do ever fight another large scale war, the lessons from Ukraine are probably worth every cent of military aid they've provided.
And even if they don't, the procurement lessons will save a great deal of wasted expenditure.
U.S. drones are failing to perform, The WSJ reports.
Hoping to attract business, U.S. startups have provided Ukrainian forces with drones. The drones have proven to be high in cost and low quality pushing Ukraine to turn to Chinese products. https://twitter.com/timkmak/status/1778047774925152718
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
The penalties for obnoxious parking need reworking.
Obnoxious parking should be an offence dealt with in court only, if ticketed by police working to clear guidelines.
Where I live, unclaimed offences sit with the car, and the equivalent of the car tax can’t be renewed untill any outstanding fines are paid or prosecutions underway.
In the UK of course we have the "Registered Keeper" system, where a notice is served on the keeper to reveal the driver, and not doing do is 6 points and a small fine for the keeper.
So for any more serious offences committed by the keeper driving it is common for the notice to be ignored so eg the keeper-driver gets 6 points not a ban or a more serious punishment.
Just another of our many loopholes.
All the fannying around with tickets does not actually prevent them blocking dropped kerbs, cycle lanes, bus lanes, pavements, especially when the fine is less than actually paying for legal parking.
Just insta-tow all the cars and take them to a depot miles away. Whoever actually drives the car can deal with the costs of getting it back. The private tow trucks here in Aus literally circle the neighbourhood like vultures - one car got lifted from a school street at 8 o'clock and 23 seconds. Brutal. Effective.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I try to avoid cards in phones, as I don't want to lose everything if I lose the phone or eg drop it in water.
Ways and means !
I wonder how many PBers still wear a wristwatch?
I accidentally smashed my phone last year, got home and dug a spare old phone out of a drawer and once I updated all apps got my cards transferred across to the new (old) phone. When I got a new phone, it was easy to transfer them all over again. Its good as well for loyalty cards etc, got a load of loyalty cards loaded on my phone now too.
Actually bought a new watch (smart) last year when I started my new job. Its convenient to have a watch where I'm now working but before then I hadn't regularly worn one for a few years but now always have it on again. Not bothered loading my cards onto the watch, since I always have my phone anyway.
I pay for most things on my watch, rarely even use the phone nowadays unless I'm charging an expense to my work card and thus have to be very careful to change the payment card on the device.
This is a very significant strategic problem, particularly since wet, warm and stormy winters are now likely to become the norm here.
Some agricultural land may need to be surrendered to extended flood plain, the EA will need to improve defences and drainage, and the government will need to give more support to farmers.
Has any of this been thought through?
Recent tory Environment Secretaries have included O-Patz, Truss, Leadsom, Ada Shufflebottom and "Big" Steve Barclay so, no.
Owen Paterson was actually quite a good one. And he did understand it.
His big flaw was scepticism about climate change, but understanding the countryside wasn't one of them.
Hmmm. Some mutual contradictions in there. If you want to ‘understand the countryside’ you do need to have an understanding of climate change as the latter is impacting massively on the former. And any plan for the future has to take it into account.
Unfortunately the current Conservatives have a tendency to equate environment with farming. There are overlaps, of course, but the two are not synonymous.
As someone close to me works right at the top of Government on this I could have expressed it a lot more rudely.
Yes, you're quite brilliant.
You teach, you travel, you pen books, you write music, you have friends at the top of Government, you have Tory friends who agree with you, you have time to go out on the streets and hear what people are saying..
It's a wonder you have any time to yourself at all.
It’s a shame this site gets dragged down by men like you being snarky. There’s really no need for it just because someone happens not to agree with your right-wing view of the world. You could learn to be a lot more polite.
NB I didn’t say the person was a friend. I said ‘close to me’. And it’s a long time since I did any lecturing / teaching. I’ve never written a single note of music. Did you misread when I mentioned going to the opera?
I don’t think it’s all that unusual for relatively younger people to have multiple portfolios these days. It’s quite a common phenomenon.
I think the most interesting of these remarks, stripping out the snarkiness, is the one about the tory friend(s). The fact that you dismiss it with such sarcasm is a neat illustration of why the Conservatives are heading for such a crushing defeat: failure to take the pulse of the nation. You will have a long, long, time in the political wilderness to reflect on these words.
I must say it takes some real chutzpah to be quite rude and add, "I could have expressed it a lot more rudely", and then, in almost the same breath, say, "you could learn to be a lot more polite". It's almost like you feel you're entitled to dish out whatever you like to those you perceive as your political opponents but equally to scream blue murder if you get it back.
Or, you're completely full of shit and just an early morning internet troll.
Just a thought.
Well I’m probably the 20th or 30th person you have accused of being a troll on here. It always seems to happen when you don’t agree with someone. You seem to get into a sharp spiral of anger. I’ve witnessed it so very often from you. And you throw very rude remarks in at the same time.
It’s true that I don’t frequent this site all day long, which is in some ways the very opposite of a troll i.e. an anonymous figure that sits under a bridge or stone all day long.
In your haste, I think you misunderstood the point about whether I could have expressed about the Government's environmental ‘policy’ more rudely. That wasn’t about you. It was about the, erm, Government’s environmental policy, or lack of it.
On the general point about people making claims about themselves, well of course if they wish to remain anonymous they can never be proven. I’m content with that and suggest that you stop allowing yourself to be angered by it.
The GOP (for now at least) no longer represents an ally if the UK.
Foreign Secretary David Cameron has seemingly failed to persuade Trump to support the $60 bln military aid package for Ukraine. After trying to convince him at a private dinner at Mar-a-lago, Cameron was then denied a meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson. https://twitter.com/timkmak/status/1778048397032767719
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I try to avoid cards in phones, as I don't want to lose everything if I lose the phone or eg drop it in water.
Ways and means !
I wonder how many PBers still wear a wristwatch?
I accidentally smashed my phone last year, got home and dug a spare old phone out of a drawer and once I updated all apps got my cards transferred across to the new (old) phone. When I got a new phone, it was easy to transfer them all over again. Its good as well for loyalty cards etc, got a load of loyalty cards loaded on my phone now too.
Actually bought a new watch (smart) last year when I started my new job. Its convenient to have a watch where I'm now working but before then I hadn't regularly worn one for a few years but now always have it on again. Not bothered loading my cards onto the watch, since I always have my phone anyway.
I'm probably still using the spare old phone.
At a party at Christmas my relations counted how many versions of Android, and how many version of phone I was out of date - so I need a newer one.
What is this concept of spare old phone? I replace mine only when it's sufficiently broken to be unusable. So as far as I'm concerned - does it still work? (Yes). Then I don't need a newer one.
I am quite good at breaking them though.
Phones are like haircuts - you don't realise you needed one until you've had (a new) one.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I try to avoid cards in phones, as I don't want to lose everything if I lose the phone or eg drop it in water.
Ways and means !
I wonder how many PBers still wear a wristwatch?
I still wear a Swiss watch, at least when at home and not in Kiev or London, have my card on Apple Pay on the phone (way more secure and better for privacy than using the actual card) as well as in the wallet for when the technology fails. Usually keep a reasonable amount of cash in the wallet too, in case the tech really fails and I need a tank full or to pay for dinner
I haven't worn a watch for years as I rarely need one. If I do I set an alarm on my phone. I do get quite surprised by the time sometimes. This means I have no jewellery whatsoever as I also don't wear a wedding ring which I think are daft.
As I worked from home for years before it became a thing I also used to get surprised by bank holidays, wondering why the family hadn't all left that day. I also usually have no idea what day it is either.
I do still use cards and so carry a wallet, but I don't carry cash, except for the 2 occasions I need it (haircut and dog grooming). Otherwise cash is a thing of the past for me.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
Yes, what is this bizarre thing called 'wallet' or which you speak?
Heathermitty is a leading expert on things and has friends in government, but needs to keep hot water in thermos flasks to save some pennies
It's almost as convincing as Ange's story about her living arrangements
Well, those opera tickets don't pay for themselves. In for a penny, in for a pound.
And one of the reasons I don’t sit around here is that, apart from being busy (aka having a life) it too readily descends into personal abuse from people like you.
I’ve lived, so far, what some of my friends consider a fairly interesting life. But from the generally good natured and rich seam of knowledge on here, I’d say that’s true of many pb posters.
There’s really absolutely no need for your personal rudeness, nor your snarkiness.
I leave it there. Not the first time I, and many others, have come against your nasty side.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I try to avoid cards in phones, as I don't want to lose everything if I lose the phone or eg drop it in water.
Ways and means !
I wonder how many PBers still wear a wristwatch?
You don't 'lose everything' though, it's all backed up to the iCloud. And you can have a watch that does similarly, so two devices on you that you can pay with. Try it. It's liberating. Lose the clutter!
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
We gave both our girls classic, but not extremely common, names. Names that have suited people in every generation.
We gave our girls Sri Lankan/Indian names. Combined with my Anglo Saxon surname it means they have, as far as I can see, completely unique names. My son we gave a then not too common (outside top 100) traditional British first name. As a result, his name isn't unique, especially as his first name has rocketed in popularity since then! I think my youngest plans to go by her first name only when she achieves showbiz fame, a la Zendaya.
Better still, they can have unique email addresses without tacking a random number on the end.
My son has, I think, a unique name. Unfortunately, I tried to register a gmail account for him of the form firstname.surname@gmail.com before he was 13 and got the address permanently banned. So now he has a random number tacked on too, despite the uniqueness of his name. Annoying.
Purchase the domain of your surname.
You can then use it with Gmail to create an email address of
firstname@surname.com
In the early(ish) days of email one of the free providers had a range of domains for addresses including fullmoon.com
As a student, I was tickled to find that no one had claimed IAmAWolf@fullmoon.com and proceeded to use it for all all the companies I didn't want to give my real email address to.
I also have firstname.lastname@gmail.com, thanks to a friend's brother working at Google when it was rolled out invitation-only and not having an excessively common surname.
I find that a bit of a curse.
I have firstname.lastname@gmail.com and get various emails not intended for me from around the world.
I have applied to the court in Florida to have my convictions removed from the record, received invitations to sewage works in Warrington and am apparently also working in Sydney.
IRL I have a common first name and a not uncommon surname. Over the last few years I've started receiving emails, allegedly from academia.com, asking:
(firstname surname): did you write: (insert paper name) ?
Recently I've had the following papers mentioned; "Improvements in hard disk spindle and actuator motors control" "Third-trimester arterial blood gas and acid base values in normal pregnancy at moderate altitude" "Evaluability Assessment to Improve Public Health Policies, Programs, and Practices" "An empirical continuous positive airway pressure trial for suspected obstructive sleep apnea." "Day Medicine: An Urgent Internal Medicine Clinic and Medical Procedures Suite" "The Unlikeliest Source: The Historical Reality behind 'Thomas the Tank Engine'" "Altimeter estimates of wave period" "11th COASTAL ALTIMETRY WORKSHOP FINAL REPORT"
I've never written a scientific paper in my life. I've no idea if they think I have for some reason, or if it's some form of weird scam. If it wasn't for the possibility of it being a scam, I might try claiming one to see what happened...
academia.edu is definitely spammy but not officially a scam as such.
They are a non-free research respository.
It would be interesting to see if they took your word for ownership - though the actual writer might not be terribly pleased if their journal of choice drops them for breach of copyright.
Any journal that tried to drop me for breach of copyright on my own article would be welcome to do so - I'd be quite happy to not submit to them any more!
Less of a problem nowadays with most things being open access and journals generally only own the copyright on the final typeset article, not the final submitted version. There was a US journal that tried to get me to assign all copyright about a decade ago - their standard agreement specified that - I refused and they decided that it wasn't a deal breaker for them.
Everything I have ever published is in an institutional repository; just about everything since 2012 or so is open access anyway (few exceptions are the occasional masters student who manages to publish and we don't have the open access funds for the article)
Heathermitty is a leading expert on things and has friends in government, but needs to keep hot water in thermos flasks to save some pennies
It's almost as convincing as Ange's story about her living arrangements
Well, those opera tickets don't pay for themselves. In for a penny, in for a pound.
And one of the reasons I don’t sit around here is that, apart from being busy (aka having a life) it too readily descends into personal abuse from people like you.
There’s really absolutely no need for it. Nor your snarkiness.
I leave it there. Not the first time I, and many others, have come against your nasty side.
He's generally a nice bloke. But (according to his posts here) has very young children who often don't sleep well so can be extremely rude and angry in the mornings. Best just to ignore him when he is in that mood, I doubt it is anything personal: he is the same with everybody.
I've read teachers on here discussing the dread caused by certain first names on new class registers
I've noticed two boys' names on envelopes recently that I think fit the bill: Jaxon and Rhylee
Yeah, I taught a Jaxon last year and it was as expected.
Jaxonn Teller, main character in Sons of Anarchy. The telly has a lot to answer for.
Though there is comedy good in naming a child after a character before the series ends.
{a whole flock of children named Daenerys have entered the chat}
My wife had a toddler in her Kindy class called Khaleesi! A family from the US, parents working for multinationals in the UK, so not what you'd typically expect the child of millionaire parents in an expensive private school kindergarten class to be called!
Isn’t it some social media / celebrity trend to give your kid a ‘unique’ name?
I’d do precisely the opposite, I’d choose something as close to John Smith as possible, that’s basically un-Googleable. If the child then wishes to be a public figure as an adult they can choose a stage name, as was always the case until recently. IIRC the actors’ union still insists on unique names in their database, so there’s a dozen actors out their with John Smith as their legal name who are better known as something else.
We gave both our girls classic, but not extremely common, names. Names that have suited people in every generation.
We gave our girls Sri Lankan/Indian names. Combined with my Anglo Saxon surname it means they have, as far as I can see, completely unique names. My son we gave a then not too common (outside top 100) traditional British first name. As a result, his name isn't unique, especially as his first name has rocketed in popularity since then! I think my youngest plans to go by her first name only when she achieves showbiz fame, a la Zendaya.
Better still, they can have unique email addresses without tacking a random number on the end.
My son has, I think, a unique name. Unfortunately, I tried to register a gmail account for him of the form firstname.surname@gmail.com before he was 13 and got the address permanently banned. So now he has a random number tacked on too, despite the uniqueness of his name. Annoying.
Purchase the domain of your surname.
You can then use it with Gmail to create an email address of
firstname@surname.com
In the early(ish) days of email one of the free providers had a range of domains for addresses including fullmoon.com
As a student, I was tickled to find that no one had claimed IAmAWolf@fullmoon.com and proceeded to use it for all all the companies I didn't want to give my real email address to.
I also have firstname.lastname@gmail.com, thanks to a friend's brother working at Google when it was rolled out invitation-only and not having an excessively common surname.
I find that a bit of a curse.
I have firstname.lastname@gmail.com and get various emails not intended for me from around the world.
I have applied to the court in Florida to have my convictions removed from the record, received invitations to sewage works in Warrington and am apparently also working in Sydney.
Isn’t it more plausible that these are your multiple secret identities, forgotten due to amnesia?
Check under the floorboards for the cache of passports, firearms and piles of… cash.
Sadly Helena Bonham Carter is nowhere to be seen.
She wasn't in any of the last 73 stories about former assassins-with-amnesia stories that appeared on TV either.
In fact TV seems to consist of that and reality TV shows about horrible people behaving horribly to each other. Horribly.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
The penalties for obnoxious parking need reworking.
Obnoxious parking should be an offence dealt with in court only, if ticketed by police working to clear guidelines.
Where I live, unclaimed offences sit with the car, and the equivalent of the car tax can’t be renewed untill any outstanding fines are paid or prosecutions underway.
In the UK of course we have the "Registered Keeper" system, where a notice is served on the keeper to reveal the driver, and not doing do is 6 points and a small fine for the keeper.
So for any more serious offences committed by the keeper driving it is common for the notice to be ignored so eg the keeper-driver gets 6 points not a ban or a more serious punishment.
Just another of our many loopholes.
All the fannying around with tickets does not actually prevent them blocking dropped kerbs, cycle lanes, bus lanes, pavements, especially when the fine is less than actually paying for legal parking.
Just insta-tow all the cars and take them to a depot miles away. Whoever actually drives the car can deal with the costs of getting it back. The private tow trucks here in Aus literally circle the neighbourhood like vultures - one car got lifted from a school street at 8 o'clock and 23 seconds. Brutal. Effective.
If insta-tow doesn't work, the fine should be at least 2% of the value of the car. At the moment the rich essentially have special parking rights across the UK.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I don't like using my phone for lots of reasons: - the too-many-eggs-in-one-basket argument - the need to keep it charged - the need to find my glasses in order to do anything meaningful on it - a general distrust of apps (I only have about five on my phone apart from the ones like whatsapp that it came with, and I have removed many of those), stemming from: - I don't want to read a lot of terms and conditions before installing an app, but also I don't want to install something on a device which could hold so much information - including where, physically, I am at any one time - without reading the ts and cs. - when I do read ts and cs they tend not to be encouraging about how much information any given app helps itself to. - why do companies need to install apps on my phone anyway? On my home computer pretty much the only app I need is a web explorer. - even if apps are benign, it's going to be a PITA to port apps from one phone to another when this one dies.
I accept that there are inconveniences with using cash or bank cards too. But to me they are smaller and more manageable inconveniences.
Re PITA that's not really a problem.
I have dozens or maybe a hundred plus apps, I don't count, and porting them is not a problem if that is a concern. If I get a new phone and this one is working I can update automatically and everything transfers from this one to the new one wirelessly.
If this one dies and is broken, then my phone backs itself up to the cloud regularly and automatically in the background when I'm on WiFi. So a new phone can choose the backup and restore itself automatically with all my settings, apps etc restored in full.
I don't have your distrust so that's not a problem for me. Don't use glasses, but even if you do, to do contactless payments I just swipe up from the bottom to load my card, then put my finger on the fingerprint image to do the security, so I don't need to read anything. Could do it without glasses.
Heathermitty is a leading expert on things and has friends in government, but needs to keep hot water in thermos flasks to save some pennies
It's almost as convincing as Ange's story about her living arrangements
Well, those opera tickets don't pay for themselves. In for a penny, in for a pound.
And one of the reasons I don’t sit around here is that, apart from being busy (aka having a life) it too readily descends into personal abuse from people like you.
I’ve lived, so far, what some of my friends consider a fairly interesting life. But from the generally good natured and rich seam of knowledge on here, I’d say that’s true of many pb posters.
There’s really absolutely no need for your personal rudeness, nor your snarkiness.
I leave it there. Not the first time I, and many others, have come against your nasty side.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I try to avoid cards in phones, as I don't want to lose everything if I lose the phone or eg drop it in water.
Ways and means !
I wonder how many PBers still wear a wristwatch?
I do - never occurred to me not to, as it's easier to glance at than fishing out my phone. I do notice that friends who don't wear one quite often ask me what the time is.
That said, it's common not to wear them. Here's a ridiculously detailed analysis of why people do and don't:
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
Yes, what is this bizarre thing called 'wallet' or which you speak?
Utterly pointless nowadays.
Wallets - where assassins keep the loose money left over from the briefcases of cash they get paid all the time.
Just 2 local by-elections tomorrow - but both interesting. In Highland there is a Lib Dem defence which given the Scottish election system is likely to see a loss to the SNP. In North Yorkshire there is an Ind elected as Lib Dem defence which could technically be a Lib Dem gain.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I try to avoid cards in phones, as I don't want to lose everything if I lose the phone or eg drop it in water.
Ways and means !
I wonder how many PBers still wear a wristwatch?
I accidentally smashed my phone last year, got home and dug a spare old phone out of a drawer and once I updated all apps got my cards transferred across to the new (old) phone. When I got a new phone, it was easy to transfer them all over again. Its good as well for loyalty cards etc, got a load of loyalty cards loaded on my phone now too.
Actually bought a new watch (smart) last year when I started my new job. Its convenient to have a watch where I'm now working but before then I hadn't regularly worn one for a few years but now always have it on again. Not bothered loading my cards onto the watch, since I always have my phone anyway.
I'm probably still using the spare old phone.
At a party at Christmas my relations counted how many versions of Android, and how many version of phone I was out of date - so I need a newer one.
What is this concept of spare old phone? I replace mine only when it's sufficiently broken to be unusable. So as far as I'm concerned - does it still work? (Yes). Then I don't need a newer one.
I am quite good at breaking them though.
Phones are like haircuts - you don't realise you needed one until you've had (a new) one.
I don't know and maybe it's just me, but I don't see any significant advantage between my current phone and the one before last. The main difference is that each one has got slightly larger and my current one is now just a bit too big, but despite that the screen is still too small for me to do anything useful on it easily.
I know she isn't Shadow Chancellor. She was shit at it.
I think the new labour intake seems to be being very well managed by Starmer to be of his viewpoint with a view to party discipline.
She was just very bland and not a good Commons or media performer. I wouldn't call her "shit" more "useless".
I guess my point is that she'll vote in line with what Starmer says, she doesn't have any strong or weird opinions as far as I can see, hence the "meh".
She's charismatic in meetings - we had her in a big local event and she left a very upbeat atmosphere. I suspect it's an example - not uncommon - of people who do better in the flesh than online.
Back from hospital with a hole-in-the-back. Uncomfortable but manageable; interestingly they made me wait for 20 minutes afterwards to be sure I was fine, with a cup of tea and custard creams.
Accessing the hospital was total chaos with ASBO drivers causing havoc everywhere driving in circles and parking all over the pavements; I parked in Morrisons and did a mini-shop afterwards. The last time I was there one who "had to get my wife to an appointment" had totally blocked the main pedestrian access by parking across the drop-kerb rather than use a free parking space 20m further away, so everyone using a wheelchair or mobility scooter would have to go back 100m and wheel up the carriageway of the main driveway.
There is no easy / secure cycle or mobility aid storage either, which I would have used 12-14 times in the last 12 months. Time to write a letter, I think.
An interesting cashless experience on the way home.
My post-pain treat was to be a Domino's pizza-with-everything, but they don't take cash for some weird reason. The assistant knew it was a problem, as he offered to pay on his card if I had the exact amount.
I didn't have the exact amount, so went to the excellent chip shop down the road instead.
Glad the procedure went well and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
Because I had left my phone at home by mistake, did not take a wallet when I was going to be in a hospital semi-surgical procedure, so only had my back pocket £20 note.
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
I haven't carried my wallet with me as a general rule since the pandemic, I don't take cash or cards, but always have my phone on me which has my cards on it.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
I try to avoid cards in phones, as I don't want to lose everything if I lose the phone or eg drop it in water.
Ways and means !
I wonder how many PBers still wear a wristwatch?
I accidentally smashed my phone last year, got home and dug a spare old phone out of a drawer and once I updated all apps got my cards transferred across to the new (old) phone. When I got a new phone, it was easy to transfer them all over again. Its good as well for loyalty cards etc, got a load of loyalty cards loaded on my phone now too.
Actually bought a new watch (smart) last year when I started my new job. Its convenient to have a watch where I'm now working but before then I hadn't regularly worn one for a few years but now always have it on again. Not bothered loading my cards onto the watch, since I always have my phone anyway.
I'm probably still using the spare old phone.
At a party at Christmas my relations counted how many versions of Android, and how many version of phone I was out of date - so I need a newer one.
What is this concept of spare old phone? I replace mine only when it's sufficiently broken to be unusable. So as far as I'm concerned - does it still work? (Yes). Then I don't need a newer one.
I am quite good at breaking them though.
Phones are like haircuts - you don't realise you needed one until you've had (a new) one.
I don't know and maybe it's just me, but I don't see any significant advantage between my current phone and the one before last. The main difference is that each one has got slightly larger and my current one is now just a bit too big, but despite that the screen is still too small for me to do anything useful on it easily.
I quite like the screen creep, as my eyesight gets worse it seems to keep pace.
Comments
Unless Labour has good intel that there will be a pre-summer election, this would appear to be yet another strategic mistake.
Starmer also leads on pub conversation and putting out a fire.
Sunak leads only on 'negotiating a discount' and 'solving an escape room'.
https://x.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1778024039899926836
Jesus, Starmer leads on pub chat? Are the British more boring than I thought?
Cashless businesses are commonplace nowadays – it's much cheaper and less risky for them. Why didn't you just pay by card?
There are muppets in the Labour Party certainly (although not in the Shadow Cabinet) but the worst in the SC are "meh" like Dodds.
Both my sister and I also have my mother’s maiden name as one of our first names, and my father had his.
I was told it was because in Wales naming the child with the mother’s surname gave the child access to the maternal grandfather’s estate.
Might have worked for some people, didn’t for us!
I think the new labour intake seems to be being very well managed by Starmer to be of his viewpoint with a view to party discipline.
Makes you wonder why he, personally, wants to string this out until the end of the year doesn't it?
I have firstname.lastname@gmail.com and get various emails not intended for me from around the world.
I have applied to the court in Florida to have my convictions removed from the record, received invitations to sewage works in Warrington and am apparently also working in Sydney.
Our locall Hall has the same problem with Eid bookings.
I guess my point is that she'll vote in line with what Starmer says, she doesn't have any strong or weird opinions as far as I can see, hence the "meh".
I would generally not take cards (unless maybe just one or two, certainly not all of them) on a night out in a city. Security reasons.
Where I live, unclaimed offences sit with the car, and the equivalent of the car tax can’t be renewed untill any outstanding fines are paid or prosecutions underway.
Check under the floorboards for the cache of passports, firearms and piles of… cash.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/fulsome
See also Shakespeare:
"It is as fat and fulsome to mine ear as howling after music".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_tPYrHTljw
There are two of me with the same Forename Surname, one here and one in Germany. That's it.
Which was a hazard when I started doing online politics, as it was a common technique for some to report opponents or people not liked to employers and try and get them silenced or sacked, or to use that as a threat to shut someone down. So hence me going for a pseudonym, but not totally secret so that I had a defence against threatened outing ("It's public, duck. Foxtrot Oscar.").
It was also not unusual for local politicians to try and set the police on critics to silence them, Trans Activist style.
And mainstream media thought it an OK move to "out" people. Remember Nightjack and the Times/Sunday Times?
In some ways it is better now as we have a more established set of conventions.
So for any more serious offences committed by the keeper driving it is common for the notice to be ignored so eg the keeper-driver gets 6 points not a ban or a more serious punishment.
Just another of our many loopholes.
The amount of slack you build in to your journey is dependent on the reliability of the mode you are using, the back up options (i.e. is there one train per hour or three) and the importance of getting to your end destination on time. There are an awful lot of benefits you can realise by improving reliability and frequency: people need to build in far less slack to their journeys. This is very difficult to accurately quantify the benefits of however!
(firstname surname): did you write: (insert paper name) ?
Recently I've had the following papers mentioned;
"Improvements in hard disk spindle and actuator motors control"
"Third-trimester arterial blood gas and acid base values in normal pregnancy at moderate altitude"
"Evaluability Assessment to Improve Public Health Policies, Programs, and Practices"
"An empirical continuous positive airway pressure trial for suspected obstructive sleep apnea."
"Day Medicine: An Urgent Internal Medicine Clinic and Medical Procedures Suite"
"The Unlikeliest Source: The Historical Reality behind 'Thomas the Tank Engine'"
"Altimeter estimates of wave period"
"11th COASTAL ALTIMETRY WORKSHOP FINAL REPORT"
I've never written a scientific paper in my life. I've no idea if they think I have for some reason, or if it's some form of weird scam. If it wasn't for the possibility of it being a scam, I might try claiming one to see what happened...
I really hope this is the start of de-toxifying this debate and allowing us all to come to an agreed position that we can all live with.
Only place I need to take my wallet to generally is if I plan to fuel up at Tesco's, since annoyingly their petrol pumps don't take contactless and rely upon inserting the card. Asda recently upgraded theirs to be contactless, so that made things easier there.
We allow anyone to apply for membership and do not discriminate on any grounds. We would like to include date of birth on the application form on the grounds of knowing the age profile of our members to maintain historical records that go back centuries. As there is no employment/discrimination issue, is this record keeping justification sufficient to ask for it (especially if we make it voluntary to provide the answer)?
As Kushner’s Investment Firm Steps Out, the Potential Conflicts Are Growing
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/us/politics/jared-kushner-affinity-partners.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jE0.ZNIH.RJ2IqNm014Ny&smid=url-share
Jared Kushner’s investment fund is not especially large by global finance standards. But as he gets it fully up and running, each step is bringing with it ethical issues that would only grow if his father-in-law, Donald J. Trump, should win another term as president.
His $3 billion fund is financed almost entirely from overseas investors with whom he worked when he served as a senior adviser in the Trump White House. He has taken money from government wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as from Terry Gou, a founder of Foxconn, the Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer, whose role in Mr. Kushner’s firm has not been previously disclosed.
In total, 99 percent of the money placed with him by investors has come from foreign sources, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in late March...
Ways and means !
I wonder how many PBers still wear a wristwatch?
And they discovered that passenger numbers on each line grew much more than expected (in many cases, more then doubled): because the inconvenience of having to wait too long for a train was a great barrier to train travel.
Actually bought a new watch (smart) last year when I started my new job. Its convenient to have a watch where I'm now working but before then I hadn't regularly worn one for a few years but now always have it on again. Not bothered loading my cards onto the watch, since I always have my phone anyway.
TBF, as I understand it the police now have insurance, tax, and wanted databases available live, and are much quicker to have cars towed than they used to be. “My brother is a dealer, and I’m on his trade insurance” doesn’t wash any more.
If I (where I live) fly past a camera at 150mph, for example, I either need to admit to driving, pay the fine and take the ban; name the driver who was driving (including all his contact information I have); have my car impounded until this all gets resolved, or turn up in court (with a lawyer and possibly a translator, costs I’m not getting back) and argue that their camera was talking bollocks because I have video evidence to the contrary.
Be careful in France as everyone is catching bedbugs in the Seine.
At a party at Christmas my relations counted how many versions of Android, and how many version of phone I was out of date - so I need a newer one.
- the too-many-eggs-in-one-basket argument
- the need to keep it charged
- the need to find my glasses in order to do anything meaningful on it
- a general distrust of apps (I only have about five on my phone apart from the ones like whatsapp that it came with, and I have removed many of those), stemming from:
- I don't want to read a lot of terms and conditions before installing an app, but also I don't want to install something on a device which could hold so much information - including where, physically, I am at any one time - without reading the ts and cs.
- when I do read ts and cs they tend not to be encouraging about how much information any given app helps itself to.
- why do companies need to install apps on my phone anyway? On my home computer pretty much the only app I need is a web explorer.
- even if apps are benign, it's going to be a PITA to port apps from one phone to another when this one dies.
I accept that there are inconveniences with using cash or bank cards too. But to me they are smaller and more manageable inconveniences.
They are a non-free research respository.
It would be interesting to see if they took your word for ownership - though the actual writer might not be terribly pleased if their journal of choice drops them for breach of copyright.
NEW: Labour leads SNP in Westminster voting intention for first time since indy ref
@yougov
finds.
Labour 33% (+1)
SNP 31% (-2)
Tories 14% (-6)
Reform 7% (+5)
LD 7% (+2)
Greens 5% (-)
While 66% of 2019 SNP voters still plan to vote for it, one in five (20%) now support Labour
https://education.christies.com/faculty/aliki-braine
Oh - its Scotland only!
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/01/07/classification/
(And yes, it was academia.edu, not academia.com, as you and @Flatlander pointed out. Apols.)
Biden needs the FED to cut rates but it’s unlikely now till later in the year , if at all.
One saving grace is that the mortgage industry is quite different from the UK and most are on long term mortgages . The problem is those seeking new mortgages .
I am quite good at breaking them though.
If they do ever fight another large scale war, the lessons from Ukraine are probably worth every cent of military aid they've provided.
And even if they don't, the procurement lessons will save a great deal of wasted expenditure.
U.S. drones are failing to perform, The WSJ reports.
Hoping to attract business, U.S. startups have provided Ukrainian forces with drones. The drones have proven to be high in cost and low quality pushing Ukraine to turn to Chinese products.
https://twitter.com/timkmak/status/1778047774925152718
Just insta-tow all the cars and take them to a depot miles away. Whoever actually drives the car can deal with the costs of getting it back. The private tow trucks here in Aus literally circle the neighbourhood like vultures - one car got lifted from a school street at 8 o'clock and 23 seconds. Brutal. Effective.
It’s true that I don’t frequent this site all day long, which is in some ways the very opposite of a troll i.e. an anonymous figure that sits under a bridge or stone all day long.
In your haste, I think you misunderstood the point about whether I could have expressed about the Government's environmental ‘policy’ more rudely. That wasn’t about you. It was about the, erm, Government’s environmental policy, or lack of it.
On the general point about people making claims about themselves, well of course if they wish to remain anonymous they can never be proven. I’m content with that and suggest that you stop allowing yourself to be angered by it.
Foreign Secretary David Cameron has seemingly failed to persuade Trump to support the $60 bln military aid package for Ukraine. After trying to convince him at a private dinner at Mar-a-lago, Cameron was then denied a meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson.
https://twitter.com/timkmak/status/1778048397032767719
The nutjob GOP Lake now opposing a ban after supporting it during the 2022 mid terms .
As I worked from home for years before it became a thing I also used to get surprised by bank holidays, wondering why the family hadn't all left that day. I also usually have no idea what day it is either.
I do still use cards and so carry a wallet, but I don't carry cash, except for the 2 occasions I need it (haircut and dog grooming). Otherwise cash is a thing of the past for me.
Utterly pointless nowadays.
I’ve lived, so far, what some of my friends consider a fairly interesting life. But from the generally good natured and rich seam of knowledge on here, I’d say that’s true of many pb posters.
There’s really absolutely no need for your personal rudeness, nor your snarkiness.
I leave it there. Not the first time I, and many others, have come against your nasty side.
Less of a problem nowadays with most things being open access and journals generally only own the copyright on the final typeset article, not the final submitted version. There was a US journal that tried to get me to assign all copyright about a decade ago - their standard agreement specified that - I refused and they decided that it wasn't a deal breaker for them.
Everything I have ever published is in an institutional repository; just about everything since 2012 or so is open access anyway (few exceptions are the occasional masters student who manages to publish and we don't have the open access funds for the article)
DPK poised to clinch landslide victory in general elections
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=372455
A potential 2/3 majority in the assembly could be *interesting*.
In fact TV seems to consist of that and reality TV shows about horrible people behaving horribly to each other. Horribly.
I have dozens or maybe a hundred plus apps, I don't count, and porting them is not a problem if that is a concern. If I get a new phone and this one is working I can update automatically and everything transfers from this one to the new one wirelessly.
If this one dies and is broken, then my phone backs itself up to the cloud regularly and automatically in the background when I'm on WiFi. So a new phone can choose the backup and restore itself automatically with all my settings, apps etc restored in full.
I don't have your distrust so that's not a problem for me. Don't use glasses, but even if you do, to do contactless payments I just swipe up from the bottom to load my card, then put my finger on the fingerprint image to do the security, so I don't need to read anything. Could do it without glasses.
That said, it's common not to wear them. Here's a ridiculously detailed analysis of why people do and don't:
https://www.luxewatches.co.uk/why-do-people-really-wear-watches/