Which is why the solution is to FUCK THOSE ORGANISATIONS OFF out of healthcare.

There should NOT be profit in healthcare. In fact there should be "loss" on a spreadsheet. Huge losses. Because the gain is not spreadsheetable, but from a generation of healthy people who can all "afford" to go to a doctor.

America's one of the few places in the world where people would ask this question intending to "prosper" from their medical skills.

I want a doctor who wants to help people, not make a profit.

So they reinvented nVidia Optimus?

Keep buying into the cult, Sheapple.

Do something?

I mean, it's not that any individual wields any particular amount of power but have you, say, given up a firearm, convinced others to do so, rethought your firearm requirements, etc. etc. etc.?

The UK had one single school shooting 27 years ago.

People literally CHANGED THEIR BEHAVIOUR. We were not a gunless country, never have been and still aren't. There are 1m firearms in the UK.

But what we did is handed weapons in, decided whether we really needed them, tried to do something about stopping it, even if it was only a token gesture unlikely to actually prevent another such shooting.

We now have a reputation for being "gun-less", because it was so effective.

And there hasn't been a school shooting in 27 years. ONE shooting, and we said "enough", we handed back weapons that we had no need for and some that we had a need for but found other ways.

I know three people who were gun-owners at the time. They all voluntarily gave in their weapons then or shortly after.

Such that - in my lifetime - I have never seen, held, or fired a weapon and don't know anyone who has one.

If you don't *DO SOMETHING*, even small token personal gestures, or large legislative changes, literally nothing is ever going to get changed, and the situation will only deteriorate further.

I work for a school and was discussing an access control system over a video conference the other day with the US manufacturer to resolve some technical issues. We were talking about what happens if someone loses their card, what if a door closes behind a child, what happens to the doors in a fire, etc.

They went on to talk about lockdown. I had to explain that - though it is a legal requirement for us to have a lockdown procedure - we are not obliged to ever actually lock down and I've never been in a genuine lockdown. Our requirements for a lockdown were very lax and most of what they were trying to make us do and configure wasn't at all necessary. I had to get them to factor in that our most likely usage of such a facility is actually probably a dog loose in the playground.

I mentioned the "27 years since our only ever school shooting" to the programmers and support people that I was talking to. They didn't believe me and had to google it. They were shocked.

Train your dog, take them for walks.

Or don't have a dog.

Countries where available land is limited don't have large open car parks that aren't multi-storey in the first place.

"Team is working with vendors in procure-to-pay in different projects related to digital transformation of procurement."

I've read that three times and I still don't understand what you guys do.

You're certainly suited to management, by the sound of it.

If it's gas and you're in the UK it's literally illegal to tinker with it.

Don't.

Call a certified (Gas-safe) plumber.

You can't afford a £10m lawsuit if you damages your neighbour's house.

P.S. the flame should NEVER burn orange. It means it's burning incompletely and is a carbon monoxide risk.

Get a damn plumber.

Just fitting a cat doesn't bring the emissions into that range for the ULEZ.

And the range for MOT and ULEZ are different, otherwise every car on the road would be able to pass through the ULEZ, wouldn't they?

The ULEZ is a stricter set of measures for the given area, and that means that some older cars - even those with cats - won't be able to pass under that bar.

Same way that for years diesels would have passed, but since we realised what their ACTUAL emissions are, they don't qualify.

It's to do with actual recorded emissions, not age or technologies involved.

>The reason houses and cars are so expensive is because people are willing to borrow immense amounts beyond their means to have huge/luxurious instead of basic

I think you haven't seen the basic housing costs of something very, very, very far from luxurious.

People want to enjoy their lives, not spend them in a cardboard box, a tiny single room, a single town, or even in a roomshare with others.

If you want to own a home, you need to get into debt. The biggest debt that you'll ever have, and a debt that virtually everyone in any developed country has had. It's that simple.

Cars... it's nothing to do with that. A cheap car is a cheap car and that's great if you're prepared to maintain it yourself, pay for continued maintenance, risk not being able to get to work, etc. etc. I spent my life with £200 cars. It's okay, you can get along, but it's a life full of shock expenses, having to cancel work occasionally (fortunately I had very understanding clients/employers), hassle, stress and trying to rapidly buy a replacement once something goes wrong.

I bought myself my first ever brand-new basic model car in my 40's. Yes, it was damn expensive. It was a pure luxury, that I expected not to ever have it pay back in value. But I haven't had to worry about tests, safety, extraneous costs, etc. for the last 7 years of owning it. It starts first time, every time, guaranteed. I don't have to worry about bits falling off or whether it's going to fail each year. I have had precisely ONE BULB blow on it, in terms of potential test failures. In those 7 years, I've spent less on my car than I have on cars previously. Hell, one car I owned ended up costing me more in oil than it had cost to buy!

And that's the most expensive way I could have bought a car, but it still ended up working out. When you're paying several thousand for a small second-hand hatchback, just enough to get to work, yes, some people are going to need a loan, finance, etc. to do that. That's MONTHS of earnings just to operate the basics and in many parts of the world, even in many parts of highly developed countries, that cost would be far more trying to arrange public transport etc.

I couldn't afford a season ticket into London each year on public transport, for example. It would cost more than my car has cost me over the last 7 years to do so. Employers in London often have to give employees a season ticket loan where they pay the bulk price of the annual ticket, and the employees pays it off each month from their salary. And, no, it's not always the case that just working in London (which is a HUGE CITY, not just a tiny high-earnings area) will earn you enough to compensate for that. If anything, I'm moving and working further and further away from London as my salary increases... because I can and because it's better value to do so!

The reason houses are so expensive is because in many countries government isn't building enough of them, and there will always be a constraint on how many you can build in a given area. There will even come a crunch point where you CAN'T BUILD ANY MORE to accommodate those who might want them safely.

The reason cars are so expensive is that cars are literally allowing you to do an incredibly dangerous activity safely and they allow you to greatly increase the range of everything from your shopping to your employment to your leisure activities. I know of families who couldn't operate without a car - they wouldn't be able to get their kids to school, they certainly wouldn't be able to take them swimming or to the theatre, they wouldn't even be able to get anything more than the most basic of groceries (nope... not even delivered!), and they would be unemployed or on pathetic wages working locally.

Almost every single person I know is in "debt over their heads"... because almost all of them have a huge multi-hundred-thousand £ mortgage that literally relies on them having to go to work every single month in order for them to sustain that. And that work, more often than not, requires a working vehicle for them to get to it, or huge expense on public transport.

The two things you cite as examples are the two unavoidable expenses in almost every working person's life.

Also, that one day that you desperately need an emergency $10,000 and you can't get it out of savings quickly, or when you lose your job and your savings are depleted but you need to eat... you'll stick it on that credit card that you have with a huge credit limit.

The banks don't care about people like this guy. They don't hate him, he costs them absolutely nothing whatsoever. All he's doing is promoting continued use of credit cards, paying them money (whether he realises it or not) for a sliver of plastic and tiny, tiny, tiny portion of their computing power, and putting himself in a position where he could accidentally or deliberately turn into a "normal" customer for them at any moment.

Laughs in UK English.

30+% credit cards are advertised everywhere.

Currently holding a 22.5%, an 18% and just closed a 26% I think. (I pay no interest on any of them, they are held purely for delaying payment to spread cost of large items or for deals where I profit).

A quick Google on a private window (so these are the rates they are ENTICING people with):

John Lewis 21.9% APR

Capital One 34.9% APR

HSBC: 23.9% APR and another of 29.9% APR

Barclaycard: 22.9%

Barclays: 33.9% ("Credit building".... such a scam) and 75.0% ("Rewards").

Knew a guy once who worked in that same job.

He was later arrested for drug-dealing.

Definitely something amiss there. I'm not sure why having an addiction would lead you to want to be around other addicts, so I can't imagine that it's that way around.

It must be that being around addicts makes you want to try it.

(For instance, if you were a paedophile, say, I could understand the logic of you wanting to work somewhere you could get close to children... a school or a youth club or a church or whatever. But just working in those places wouldn't *make* you into a paedophile, at least as far as the statistics go).

The chip might be one part... but now consider a dual-processor setup, plus fans, plus cards (RAID, multiple 10Gb/40Gb networking, GPUs for some loads, etc.), plus storage (e.g. a server with 12+ drives in it is pretty standard, nowadays NVMe is pretty standard but the internal storage is often still 12 x 15K spinning disks), plus a TON of RAM (the last servers I bought have 32 DDR5 RAM slots - 16 per CPU - and can take several Tbytes of RAM).

Plus PSU losses, redundant PSUs (again... never completely idle), etc.

Dual NVMe boot drives + multiple 10GbE SFP ports + internal RAIDs on the order of 10Tb is pretty much standard "small school / office" hardware for servers nowadays.

And then you have multiple of them, usually in multiple locations, and that's just your on-premise stuff.

The small school I work for has 10Gb leased lines.

A blade server I had used to pull 3KW under average load. Full load required 4 separate 13A 220V mains plugs. It would literally "dial down" if you only had 2 or 3 plugged in.

But even that just ran off four normal 13A sockets in two double-sockets that were installed in an office ring main.

Generally you don't have servers unless they're pulling power... or entirely idle. Even a redundant server is churning along doing everything the same, ready to take over at a second's notice if it needs to. 800-1000W draw isn't unusual for a single server, 1400W if it's being stressed (and all servers get old enough to be stressed, when you then start trying to pitch for upgrades).

Hell, I have network switches that individually pull 700W during operation (usually PoE switches powering phones, cameras and wireless points).

A small rack of basic networking equipment can easily max out two 13A 220V plugs (don't forget, you'll have a UPS on that, so it's only 90% efficient before you even start).

As an IT guy in the UK, that makes me laugh.

We regularly plug in servers with 1400W dual-PSUs, multiple of them, on an ordinary test bench in an ordinary workplace, no special provisions required, or a rack running off a couple of ordinary wall plugs and a PDU (which is basically just a giant extension lead).

Hell, on my workbench at the moment is some 3.8KW of servers, just plugged into the same sockets we would plug our USB chargers or laptops into.

My employers spend their life explaining that THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS.

Idiot companies operate such policies because the middle-managers want to constantly keep upping their budgets to look important, so they have constantly growing budgets, that nearly overrun all the time, to make it look like they don't have enough. Then some idiot above them just approves more money.

The same kind of middle management is also after money on their own pet projects, so when you come in £10k under-budget on one thing, they will want to spent that £10k elsewhere on something they care about. You've now "lost" that £10k permanently. Thus the only way to combat such idiotic financial management is to always use up the budget each time so they can't justify cutting it.

In any company with an ounce of common sense or financial management, that's not how it works. Many of my employers over the last few decades have had to actually announce regularly that that's just not how it works, because people come in from elsewhere with the natural *impression* that that's how it works everywhere. It's not true. And, unchecked, it will repeat even in workplaces that don't practice such idiocy because of people expecting it to work like that.

I manage several budgets in the 6-figure ranges, I basically go out of my way to make them as cheap as possible without compromising on anything. It's usually easy to do so, because there's a lot of nonsense wastage like this everywhere I go. I sometimes do "deals" too - look, I will cut out this £10k piece of equipment that was budgeted, replace it with a £2k thing that does everything we need but, and this is important, I want £5k of that saving to go on that thing you denied the other day because we didn't have any money for it. Agreed?

More often than not the employer gets what they need, they get a saving AND I get the thing that my department's been after for years. I just started at a new workplace and have already done this twice.

Because they actually LIKE people who can cut their budget and say "Well, yes, I'm sure that's a lovely piece of kit... but we don't actually need that level of equipment, we can do everything we need to do with a cheaper version without compromising on time or quality."

When I was self-employed many years ago, I would promise my clients that I would save them AT LEAST as much money as it cost them to pay me... and I always did so. Because there is just so much unnecessary wastage because of nonsense like this.

Budget-holders have a responsibility to have a low cost, but also to fulfil all their needs - present and future - from that cost. You also have a responsibility to know what's necessary and what's not because you hold the budget and therefore you should know... because the people above you DO NOT KNOW.

Padding your budget is fraud, as far as I'm concerned, and customers and even your colleagues are paying for that. Every penny wasted is more money that doesn't end up in your pay packet, eventually. Even if that's just in the form of "Hey, Jeff, you saved us £50k this year! Have a £500 bonus!".

Places that operate like this often don't know that it's happening, don't want it to happen, or limited to only a layer of middle-management that do it for their own status-symbol gain (e.g. saving money to then spend on vanity projects and sucking up to the boss). It's partly the upper-management's fault for not keeping it in check, but also they can't micromanage every budget and have to trust budget-holders.

But nowhere where there's any actual sense of budgetary control is it actually "official policy".

That's why I use condenser washer-dryers that exhaust through the water drain.

They don't ever get "dry", only the clothes. And though they have a filter, it's in a water drain pipe, so it's never dry. Even the rubber-seals that hold onto every piece of sock-fluff, they are wet at the end of the cycle even if the top of the seal is dry, the clothes dry and hot, and the metal drum hot-to-the-touch.

I looked at "normal" dryers that have those huge air-vents that clog with inches of dry lint in hot air and said "Nope".

Condenser washer-dryers is the way to go. One pipe with water in, one pipe with water + waste out. No vents, no dry air, no dry lint filters, nowhere for lint to collect and heat up.

Nothing to do with feelings or habits.

Claiming this is ecologically more friendly than a single managed forest is ridiculous.

This is a measure to clear up *city litter*, not help the planet.

Yeah, the price is to pollute the water basins with harsh chemicals, after paying to heat and spray the water, rather than throw a tiny piece of biodegradable, recyclable, recycled and easily-replenished paper away.

I've been on many such courses as I work in schools, and I'm now technically a "fire warden" in one.

Let me tell you what we're taught, every year for about the last 20+ years:

GET OUT.

Raise the alarm.

GET EVERYONE OUT.

Don't fight the fire unless absolutely necessary.

GET OUT.

That fire extinguisher won't do crap against an established fire.

GET OUT.

Don't stop for anything.

GET OUT.

The official line is that the "extinguisher" is not an "extinguisher" but to help you secure your exit if you're entirely trapped by the fire. That's it.

We're told - by ex-firefighters who specialise in the training nowadays, know we deal with tiny little tots, and have seen horrors of all kinds - to not try, to get out, and anything larger than a wastepaper basket... forget it. Just get out.

The "hands-on" demo is an exercise in disappointment. Water ones you can piss more water on the fire, and from further away! CO2 ones are going out of fashion and don't really do very much and can be dangerous to you (they're being replaced by modified foam powders). Powder ones just make a damn mess and you better hope you covered every single inch of the fuel with the limited amount you have or it'll just reignite.

Basically, as a fire warden, in a school, where there's the most critical usage of equipment, the most expense spent on fire equipment, lots of training on fire equipment, things like design and technology labs with CNCs, laser-cutters, etc., swimming pools with chlorine and other chemicals, science labs with all kinds of lovely flammables, propane, gas heaters and boilers, cooking rooms with all kinds of fire hazard, everything you can imagine... as a FIRE WARDEN, we're told to just get out, and get everyone else out.

They're not for you to fight a fire, that's completely the wrong terminology. They're to put out the very, very, very beginnings of a fire that you could do in a thousand more effective ways, like "taking the burning bin away from other flammables" or "closing the oven" or just letting it burn out.

I've been doing this for 23 years in schools - some of them specialist behaviour schools where kids would try to set the school on fire. I can name real incidents - a candle left to burn in an unoccupied room that a member of staff was living in (boarding school), a cardboard box left on top of a stove, a grease-fire in a canteen kitchen hood. Each time the alarm was sounded within seconds, automatically.

The worst was the latter - actual flames going up out of the hood and visible outside the school, and we evacuated the whole building in under 2 minutes. NOBODY in their right mind was going to tackle that fire.

In all that time, I've never picked up or used an extinguisher except in the training you mention, and nor has anyone else.

Extinguishers aren't for what you think they are. If you're not willing to use it on candle just seconds after the flame gets big (which means you'll piss off a lot of people putting out fires that were likely going to burn out anyway), it's not worth using it at all.

If you ever have to stop to think "what kind of fire is this, what kind of extinguisher should I use", it's likely too late for that extinguisher to do anything.

Just get out. Every time.

Raise the alarm, get out, get everyone out.

The extinguisher is for when there's a kid stuck in a room, surrounded entirely by fire, no way to get them out, and you're literally willing to sacrifice yourself to try to get to them THIS INSTANT rather than hang on a little for the professionals. Even then, fuck that. I've seen them. They won't work like you think. You can put out a small wastepaper basket, that's about it. In most instances a fire blanket is actually far more useful.

You want to train your kids? Train them to evacuate, raise alarms and to check and fit smoke alarms correctly as they get older. A well-trained school has a THOUSAND CHILDREN, from toddlers to stroppy teenagers, adults, guests, staff and visitors, all out of danger and accounted for within 2 minutes. TWO MINUTES.

Just get the fuck out. Everything else is property, objects, things. You burn or get overcome while trying to put out a fire, someone's got to risk THEIR life to come get YOU out.

And anything you COULD have put out? It'll be out by the time you're outside OR the professionals will get it out, no problem. With 10,000 times the water in seconds.

All these stories here about "X caught fire, and I used this extinguisher" ask yourself the questions: Who called the fire in? Who got everyone else out? Who set off the alarm? Why would you not do that FIRST? Because if the extinguisher hadn't worked (and it won't on anything non-trivial), you just cost yourself over a minute of your evacuation time and now people are caught off-guard and an exit is blocked, and STILL nobody knows about it outside the immediate vicinity.

Yeah the big sealed metal box that's expressly designed to get hot is the best fire extinguisher of them all.

It's why you should have a cooker cut-off switch away from the cooker so you can turn it off without risking yourself and then just let it burn out.

How many other patients was the woman's husband also dealing with that day?

Could you add a tsunami stat for how large a resultant wave would be if it landed in the water?

Hydrogen needs to be stored at 10,000 psi to come anywhere NEAR the energy density of a conventional fuel.

Though you can get more energy per kilo of hydrogen, you can't do that without basically compressing it to enormous pressures or taking up a ton of room, or using up lots of chemicals and energy to lock it into other substances (which add to the mass).