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Camrath posted:Just got in from a lovely weekend away exploring our soon-to-be neighbourhood and local area, and found out Rosa has gone into heat. She’s trying desperately to seduce Digby, who is A. Neutered and B. Four times her size and weight. He’s just confused and has no idea what to do. Awwww she looks so much like my old cat Lucky.
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Aug 17, 2020 06:50
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Let's see what the Ofqual take on the current debacle is: Roger Taylor posted:Roger Taylor Ahh, I see. It's very fair, quite so. (warning, paywalled torygraph link, but the paywall doesn't really have anything more interesting) Ofqual chief: 'This is the fairest way to award grades without exams' e: Here's some more choice quotes from the colossal twat: Roger Taylor posted:“It [using predicted grades] would create a perpetual unfairness between this year’s grades compared to past and future generations,” Mr Taylor said. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Aug 17, 2020 |
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Aug 17, 2020 08:50
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Surely mr taylor is not suggesting that having an exam grade erroneously assigned would translate to people getting employed unfairly? Because, surely, if that were the case the market would determine after the fact that they were unsuited to the job and a more capable candidate would be appointed instead? Surely mr taylor is not suggesting that exam grades are arbitrary and not indicative of a person's actual work ability, such that someone who would get a C could do the job of someone who would get an A if you merely told people that the C grade person had an A instead?
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Aug 17, 2020 09:00
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Trickjaw posted:Quick question for those on happy pills: Has anyone any experience of taking Mirtazapine 15mg? Most anti depressants I've taken before either turn me insomniac or do nowt. I'm pretty allergic to Citalopram too. Biggest problem imo is that they have literally the worst withdrawal that I have ever experienced. At the higher doses, a single missed dose will absolutely gently caress you up, & even on 15 sleeping without it is p much physically impossible. It actually works for me so is better than the alternative, just for the love of god make sure you try to build up a bit of a stash by ordering repeats early in case of difficulties getting to a pharmacy, get in the habit of always having some with you in case you stay over somewhere (I keep a strip in my car), if you go anywhere & forget it then just turn around & go get some, and accept that it will take a very very long time to come off it (I very gradually reduced mine over about a year, still couldn't do it).
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Aug 17, 2020 09:05
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Private Speech posted:Let's see what the Ofqual take on the current debacle is: If I didn’t know better I’d have thought he was deliberately put into his post because he’s obviously so stubbornly bone idle he’d make an ideal scapegoat
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Aug 17, 2020 09:08
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Out of interest, what's the status of bypassing paywalls in here, allowed or  ? I do it with Graun links as those aren't paywalled,they just require a registration for reasons.
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Aug 17, 2020 09:19
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lol,I put BBC news on this morning (I know, I know)..... Literally the guy they have on being interviewed "the system was designed to avoid exam inflation, but if you look at independent schools in subjects like Latin, their grades are much higher than previous years". The entire thing is a massive farce. GCSE results day, will be the first day, I ever plan on getting drunk on.
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Aug 17, 2020 09:21
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Chat was a few pages back but I was meaning to ask: Why is gas absurdly cheap compared to electricity in the UK? Right now the rates I'm paying for gas/electricity are: Electricity Unit Rate: 13.020p per kWh Gas Unit Rate: 2.431p per kWh Standing rate for both is 14.7p/day Which means if I didn't give a poo poo about the environment It'd be much cheaper to boil water on the hob rather than turning the kettle on. While I was in Switzerland I was paying: Electricity: 18p/kWh, no additional standing charge as this is included in the per kWh Gas: 11p/kWh, 13p/day standing charge So electricity was a bit more expensive assuming you used more than 1kWh /day but gas was about 3 times as expensive. I can kind of understand the logic in the relative price differences since getting gas to Switzerland involves going through pipelines from somewhere over land full of mountains, and electricity generation is historically cheaper to make there than it used to be here (also the eco-laundering they do of buying nuclear excess from france and pumping water uphill when it's cheap) but it came as quite a shock since it meant my bills have almost doubled since moving.
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Aug 17, 2020 09:22
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I assume it's to try and prop up the gas/oil extraction in the north sea.
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Aug 17, 2020 09:26
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Eararaldor posted:lol,I put BBC news on this morning (I know, I know)..... Small cohorts (<15) weren't put through the algorithm, they were just given the grade their teacher was paid to give them.
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Aug 17, 2020 09:26
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Basically the answer to that question is "the North Sea" plus a lack of capital investment in big electricity generating projects (for example goons in the Pacific Northwest near hydro dams talking about how every house has underfloor electric heating because electricity is dirt cheap)
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Aug 17, 2020 09:28
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Lungboy posted:Small cohorts (<15) weren't put through the algorithm, they were just given the grade their teacher was paid to give them. Yeah I know, "because public schools have smaller class sizes so this is a way to exclude them from the algorithm", but is there an on-paper reason, or are we just in full mask-off territory?
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Aug 17, 2020 09:35
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Lungboy posted:Small cohorts (<15) weren't put through the algorithm, they were just given the grade their teacher was paid to give them. Having done some time in independent schools (did some of my teacher training in one), I can tell you now, that 95% of classes in the independent schools are <15.  I was actually offered a job in an independent school (for much higher pay). But my younger self wanted to make to "make a difference" and aimed for a Community school. 
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Aug 17, 2020 09:39
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StarkingBarfish posted:Chat was a few pages back but I was meaning to ask: Why is gas absurdly cheap compared to electricity in the UK? *dons the It's My Job Hat* Because with electricity you have to pay for the fuel to get to the plant for conversion, for maintenance on the grid to store the power, and for infrastructure to bring the electricity to the socket. With gas, there is no additional infrastructure beyond the pipes - it just comes straight to you as fuel. E: in Switzerland gas is more expensive because as you say, the infrastructure (while minimal) is more expensive to build and harder to maintain. So it's not that gas is cheaper here, it's that it's more expensive there. Jedit fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Aug 17, 2020 |
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Aug 17, 2020 09:45
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The most guardian headline I've seen for a while. ‘There’s no way we’d go back’: will Covid-19 end free wine tastings forever?
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Aug 17, 2020 09:55
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Jedit posted:*dons the It's My Job Hat* Makes sense. It also really blows my mind that we have an electric shower and oven here, whereas in Switzerland the shower was off the central heating and the oven was gas. I have a minor panic attack looking at the smart meter when I'm making a pizza or after taking a shower in the morning. E: Any advice on what to do about that? I don't want to be a shithead to the environment but was thinking of ripping out the shower module and getting it plumbed into the CH hot water...
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Aug 17, 2020 09:56
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Borrovan posted:Why? Apparently there's no statistically rigourous algorithm that works on sub 15 person sets. They also didn't apply it to new schools as they had no historic data to use. This of course means that everyone else's marks are dragged down because the government says grades can only go up by x% across the country and if private schools and new schools have gobbled up a huge chunk of the allowed increase, other grades have to be dropped to make it all fit. Lungboy fucked around with this message at 10:03 on Aug 17, 2020 |
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Aug 17, 2020 10:00
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Clapham Omnibus posted:The most guardian headline I've seen for a while. Hard to truly enjoy a wine tasting when you've mysteriously lost your senses of taste and smell
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Aug 17, 2020 10:00
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StarkingBarfish posted:E: Any advice on what to do about that? I don't want to be a shithead to the environment but was thinking of ripping out the shower module and getting it plumbed into the CH hot water... There's the argument that the electricity grid is also subbed in with some nuclear and wind power as well, but if you have a utilities provider with a carbon neutral gas promise (which is a few fractions of a penny more per kWh, or sometimes cheaper than some of the big six energy providers' lovely packages) then you're effectively doing the same thing by offsetting the gas used.
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Aug 17, 2020 10:09
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Jedit posted:*dons the It's My Job Hat* Also (I assume, with them being landlocked) there's no way for them to import bulk LNG so they've a much narrower market to buy from and are reliant on high-pressure gas pipes (considerably more expensive to build and maintain) to get gas into the country. Did Switzerland have gas lighting/heating before electricity like Britain and Germany, as a matter of interest? A big reason why we still use so much gas is that by the time we discovered shitloads of it lying around just off the coast we already had a century of Town/Producer Gas being one of our main domestic fuels, which certainly saved a huge amount of money on rolling out new infrastructure for it (even if old people still moan about having to replace the burners on their cookers), and of course all that cheap gas in the North Sea meant we had a big incentive to roll out improved infrastructure over the intervening years.
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Aug 17, 2020 10:09
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Lungboy posted:Apparently there's no statistically rigourous algorithm that works on sub 15 person sets. They also didn't apply it to new schools as they had no historic data to use. This of course means that everyone else's marks are dragged down because the government says grades can only go up by x% across the country and if private schools and new schools have gobbled up a huge chunk of the allowed increase, other grades have to be dropped to make it all fit. Have you got some links to this? I would love to read more into this.
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Aug 17, 2020 10:09
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This is from last year about the ofqual guy https://twitter.com/ClaireBardner/status/1294934470093680640?s=19
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Aug 17, 2020 10:16
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ToxicAcne posted:Hey sorry, random Canadian here. I've asked before on the CanPol thread about why our version of Labour(the NDP) never supplanted the Liberals, so I wanted to ask the other side; How did Labour supplant the Liberals in the UK? I was writing a long post about the history of the rise of Labour but to be honest it can be summed up in a sentence: World War 1 happened and caused a massive rift in the Liberals that let Labour in. They were a party of free speech & free trade & freedom of conscience & all of that went out the window as the war dragged on, pacifists & conscientious objectors ended up imprisoned, chunks of the economy were centralised, conscription was brought in, censorship of the press, & the Defence of the Realm Act allowed for those speaking out against the war even to be thrown in jail. There's also the backdrop of Ireland, Liberals generally supported homerule for Ireland but the House of Lords continually stymied that & then WW1 happens & Ireland gets forgotten about until Easter 1916. The Liberal government collapsed in 1915 & needed the backing of the Tories, that coalition lasted 18 months until David Lloyd George stabbed PM Asquith in the back to become PM with the backing of the Tories. Asquith went into opposition & lead a majority of Liberal MPs, in the post-war election DLG continued to lead the government despite Tory MPs out numbering Liberals 3 to 1. By the 1922 election which happened after the Lloyd George ministry collapsed on the back of many complaints (some legit like him selling honours & titles, some less so. There was upcry that there weren't enough men from the "great" public schools for fucksake) the Liberals were still split & that allowed Labour to end up with over 120 MPs, in 1923 the Liberals reunited & ended up with 123 MPs but Labour had 191, Asquith decided to support a minority Labour ministry hoping it would prove Labour incompetent, this was a fine example of shooting yourself in the foot as the relationship lasted 10 months before a vote of no confidence was called by a Liberal MP & in the '24 election Labour lost 40 seats but the Liberals lost 118. And that's really it until the SDP split off from Labour in the early 80s, eventually joining with the Liberals to form the Lib Dems. A combination of the war, Ireland, the clash between Lloyd George & Asquith & a good dollop of hubris.
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Aug 17, 2020 10:17
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Eararaldor posted:Have you got some links to this? I would love to read more into this. The small cohort thing is from the Ofqual documentation, page 7: https://assets.publishing.service.g...PRTTnPT1lF7uNNM The marks impacting on other schools is cobbled together from various interviews and government policies interacting, so no direct source (unless it's also in the Ofqual document, i only looked for the small cohort thing and didn't bother with the other 318 pages).
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Aug 17, 2020 10:30
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Lungboy posted:Apparently there's no statistically rigourous algorithm that works on sub 15 person sets. They also didn't apply it to new schools as they had no historic data to use. This of course means that everyone else's marks are dragged down because the government says grades can only go up by x% across the country and if private schools and new schools have gobbled up a huge chunk of the allowed increase, other grades have to be dropped to make it all fit. That’s a pretty good summary of the problem. The civil service has approximately zero operational competence in deep statistics; machine learning algorithms and so on. it’s gonna be like two fresh PhDs with managers who don’t understand a word they say, and somewhere up top Cummings who watched a TED talk once. They tried to solve a hard but potentially doable and even worthwhile job; teacher assessments are racist and classist as hell, using them un-filtered would not have been great. But not only was the solution not the best, The results went through a political filter. Someone asked ‘is this a problem that will affect Tory voters and donors? If not, well we are all a tight and inflexible deadline”.
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Aug 17, 2020 10:33
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StarkingBarfish posted:E: Any advice on what to do about that? I don't want to be a shithead to the environment but was thinking of ripping out the shower module and getting it plumbed into the CH hot water... Guavanaut posted:A condensing combi boiler for producing heat for hot water is probably a more efficacious use of gas than using an electric water heater powered by a CHP gas power plant. A good condensing combi like a Viessmann is around 98% efficient at getting heat from gas into water, so to get 1kWh worth of hot water you'd have to burn 1.02kWh worth of gas. Let's say for argument's sake an electric water heater is 100% efficient. It isn't because some heat is lost through the casing, but that's negligible, so we can pretend you're only using 1kWh of electricity. The national grid, at this moment, derives 54% of electricity from CCGT power plants burning natural gas in gas turbines and using the exhaust to raise steam, so your 1kWh of electricity consists of 540Wh worth of gas derived electricity. A CCGT plant has a best case real thermal efficiency of around 64% for latest generation plants, in reality that's more around 60-62%, so to make that 540Wh of electricity 885Wh worth of gas has to be burned. Until the grid stops relying so much on burning gas there's only 13% or so difference in gas burned, depending on the time of day. Yesterday evening at about 7.30pm it was 56.5% being generated by CCGT and about half a percent by shitt OCGT so that's even less difference, about 9%. tl;dr: you're burning about the same amount of gas either way and it's Thatcher's fault. Hopefully offshore wind changes that and make heat pumps cost effective but in the meantime you can offset it with a gas supplier with a carbon neutral commitment. e: Forgot to account for the efficiency losses by the generators and transmission network, you're actually burning more like 1.05kWh of gas to get your 1kWh of electricity at your house, so the condensing boiler is better, and "we should use less gas" is a systemic network problem not solvable by the individual using electric. Guavanaut fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Aug 17, 2020 |
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Aug 17, 2020 10:42
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I don't know if this is news, but the Northern Irish Government has decided to use a different take on the GCSE's. https://twitter.com/thejournal_ie/status/1295258349701861376?s=19 I suspect that this might put a cat amongst the pigeons. I will say that I'm glad my daughter has only just gone into Scottish Second Level's thus year and not had to do any big exams this year. My heart absolutely goes out to all the kids who did do GCSE/A Levels/ Junior Cert/ Leaving Cert this year.
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Aug 17, 2020 11:05
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While the thread's talking about energy, any goons know anything about solar? I had a 1.4kw array put on my house some years back - and have regretted it, because A: I'm p sure I was massively ripped off on the cost, and B: I've now had two inverters pack up. The first was replaced under warranty, but the second is well past its date. I'm losing money because I'm not getting anything back from the home generation scheme, which was meant to cover the installation cost (spoiler: it never would, even if the system worked perfectly). How much would it cost for a new inverter (current one is a Solariver, which turned out to be notorious for relay failures), and can anyone recommend a brand/model?
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Aug 17, 2020 11:12
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forkboy84 posted:I was writing a long post about the history of the rise of Labour but to be honest it can be summed up in a sentence: World War 1 happened and caused a massive rift in the Liberals that let Labour in. It's also worth remembering that the rise of powerful, effective trade unionism in the UK (British industry post a ridiculous amount of hours to strike action in the UK before 1914) plus the suffragettes' small but growing domestic terrorist campaign (which by the start of the war had escalated to rail station bombings) made the government terrified that the material worsening of conditions during the war would lead to revolution (with Russia serving as an object warning). This led to the Representation of the People Act 1918, which offered universal male suffrage and limited female suffrage, expanding the franchise in a way that was highly beneficial for Labour.
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Aug 17, 2020 11:18
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Borrovan posted:I've been on mirtazapine for over a decade, all the way up to 45mg, tried to come off it completely last year but currently sticking at 15. For me, it's the only one that worked, & it sorted my insomnia right out. You'll probably find a massively increased appetite though (hence the weight gain, but you can just lift a bunch of weights & get swole instead), & you might be a bit drowsy in the daytime. If you're a morning person, just take them a while before you go to bed & it works out fine. Thanks guys. I think I'm going to hold onto my stash, the risk of being like some alzheimer's ridden soul with a 48" waist scares me slightly, and the difficulty weaning from it seems arduous. I don't expect some wonder drug, but if one thing seems essential, it is weighing up the repercussions and seeing if I'm prepared to accept them. I'm very glad for the people it helped, though. Trickjaw fucked around with this message at 11:24 on Aug 17, 2020 |
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Aug 17, 2020 11:21
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Trickjaw posted:Quick question for those on happy pills: Has anyone any experience of taking Mirtazapine 15mg? Most anti depressants I've taken before either turn me insomniac or do nowt. I'm pretty allergic to Citalopram too. Convinced my GP it wasn't doing anything and came off it after a year. No increase in anxiety, but I did get Brain Zaps for a while, which feel loving weird. Oh, and probably too much information but it took about a year before the anorgasmia went away. That was extremely fun.
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Aug 17, 2020 11:28
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The Question IRL posted:I don't know if this is news, but the Northern Irish Government has decided to use a different take on the GCSE's. I doubt it. That would require there to be Tory MPs who actually care about what happens in Northern Ireland.
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Aug 17, 2020 11:37
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And the last one of them retired last year (bye Kate).
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Aug 17, 2020 11:50
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StarkingBarfish posted:getting it plumbed into the CH hot water... I read this as meaning "plumbed into the Confoederatio Helvetica hot water" and was picturing a very long insulated hose running across Europe.
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Aug 17, 2020 12:01
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It's a pretty good font but I don't know if it needs its own confoederatio.
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Aug 17, 2020 12:02
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kingturnip posted:I doubt it. Radio 4 had some interviews from grammar school heads this morning asking for it to happen in England as well. While still doubtful, it's seems to be causing some noise from the Tory back benches.
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Aug 17, 2020 12:06
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goddamnedtwisto posted:So what (if anything) are we to make of the (apparent, because obviously there always has to be a massive disclaimer) situation in the States where despite a massive surge in reported cases hospitalisations and deaths are - while ticking up - aren't tracking with this? There's a lot of graphs running around purple-face Twitter purporting to show this and TBH I'd expect at least once southern city to be showing New York levels of deaths by now, but apparently not. There's a few things going on at once here. First is that the early wave had massively massively more cases than tested positive, there just wasnt the capacity to actually test people at the time. If you had actual data of cases you'd have far more infected than what tests showed. Something like a fifth of NY has had it from antibody studies. Second that treatment of COVID-19 has progressed a lot, far less people who turn up to hospital die than previously. Thirdly a lot of deaths were from it absolutely tearing through care homes, the second wave is primarily among (relatively) younger people. The reduced initial viral load is largely supposition. It might be a factor but there is no real proof of it yet. The whole immunized by sunlight attenuated virus is garbage.
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Aug 17, 2020 12:08
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There's some significant indications that viral load correlates with mortality even when accounting for other factors, but yeah afaik we don't have a good dose-response model yet, other than existing data sets from SARS/MERS studies.
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Aug 17, 2020 12:29
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crispix posted:all the children should be back at their school and we should bring back beatings for to give them all a good beating like in good old days my day, not sit at home play internet nintendos and getting fat Powerfully ditto, Northern Ireland grammar schools hurrah
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Aug 17, 2020 12:35
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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I think one of the grimmest realisations has been looking at houses. There are an absolute ton which 'need modernising' and have no forward chain, and when you look at the photos, there are things like ability assistance mods and dated decor everywhere. This one even has 'Harry + Vera' scrawled on the wall, which is as 'lovely old couple who died of covid' a sign as is possible to see.
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Aug 17, 2020 12:41
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