|
I don't know exactly what a smart meter can and can't do, but my main concern would be whether it can send live readings. When (not if) the power company gets hacked, somebody can then essentially see remotely when somebody is or isn't home, since that correlates pretty well with power usage. Doing a bit of reading it does seem like (some/all?) meters allow you to specify how often it sends updates, between half-hourly and monthly, so I would choose the longest interval that I can.
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2021 12:34
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 12, 2024 04:13 |
|
|
StarkingBarfish posted:I saw some interesting analyses back in the day using half hourly data, where it could tell based on fingerprinting what the power consumption of your fridge, oven, kettle, shower etc was. This might be useful if you could then tell people eg: 'the fridge you have appears to be inefficient, if you bought a new one you'd actually save enough money over the next 3 years that it'd offset the cost'. Of course, that's hardly in the interests of a private energy supplier unless they get a kickback or whatever. As usual it boils down to nationalise everything. Electric grids are expensive to maintain and update though, I can see why energy companies might rather get a few quid less from consumers if it means they don't have to upgrade their networks
|
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2021 13:17
|
|
|
peanut- posted:I did the census yesterday and there was a bunch of questions about where you primarily work, with them making it very clear that you should answer based on your current setup (ie. covid-driven WFH) rather than where you work in normal times. A census is explicitly a snapshot of the current situation, it's not meant to have people guessing what they might be doing five years from now. I'm reminded of a Terry Pratchett quote along the lines of 'We are here and here is now, and anything beyond that tends to devolve towards guesswork'.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2021 11:26
|
|
|
Jippa posted:Some guy in falmouth saw a "superior mirage". Can someone smarter than me help me understand the article's explanation: quote:Because cold air is denser than warm air, it has a higher refractive index. In the case of the “hovering ship”, this means light rays coming from the ship are bent downwards as it passes through the colder air, to observers on the shoreline. Having evolved to keep things simple, the human brain is easily fooled. It assumes the light rays from the ship have travelled in a straight line, and so pictures the ship in a higher position than it really is – in this instance, above the sea surface. If it's just a trick of the brain, then how come you can capture it on camera?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2021 14:56
|
|
|
Communist Thoughts posted:i want a dog but my partner wants a cat so my plan is to get the worst cat they've got Get a fox, which is basically a dog-cat hybrid
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2021 17:30
|
|
|
MrNemo posted:The basic reason public departments (but also somewhat large corporates too) are semi-staffed by contractors costing 3x as much is simply down to how budgeting works for these orgs and laziness on the part of managers. Permanent staff require pensions, expected longer term costs as well as all the relevant job protections and thus senior management require a fair amount of justification for why they need to increase headcount. The basic 'perfect sphere in a vacuum' reasoning is many tasks in these orgs are project based and require somewhat specialised knowledge/experience, therefore you want permanent staff to do continual tasks but contractors to work projects - thereby achieving the ideal balance of minimising costs to hire and get rid of staff you need for specific stuff and minimising running costs of staff to do the actual work. It also makes sense for specific projects because your regular staff have day jobs and, from my experience, it is a lot easier to get budget to hire a consulting team who are 100% focused on a change project than overloading existing staff. I'll allow this needs to be managed well or you end up with a bunch of consultants coming in, setting up some fancy new system/tools and then disappearing without anyone really noticing and then a year later you have to explain why this new fancy system isn't being used by anyone. That is a failure of the consulting team and the client's management though rather than necessarily some vampiric conspiracy run by McKinsey (further caveat that if this is happening consistently enough there might not be a functional difference) A a consultant I think this is fairly accurate, though a lot of contracts we bid on are scored on both quality and price, usually 30-50% quality versus 70-50% price, depending on how much budget the client has. This is in environment/infrastructure consultancy though so we are expected to actually do work and deliver something tangible.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2021 12:45
|
|
|
bump_fn posted:what’s happening with eu citizens previously eligible to vote in local election? can they still post brexit Yes
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2021 19:16
|
|
|
learnincurve posted:Also yes on the discount supermarket cheese btw, I have a freezer full of: I love a block of proper null
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2021 10:42
|
|
|
namesake posted:BBC news at one finished off introducing a Syrian refugee who charted their journey over the water to get to the UK with 'they have described themselves as a Labour supporter' for no reason i can see other than attempting to bias the audience against them. Now that's what I call entryism
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2021 14:42
|
|
|
Can't help but feel that everything re: Liverpool was previously agreed between Starmer and the govt. As in, Starmer makes sure that the new mayor will be somebody they can control and who isn't a leftie, and in return the Tories only take over part of the council. What's with the Tories pushing for local council elections being all-out instead of electing part of the council every year or two years? I'm assuming it benefits them somehow but I can't really understand how
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2021 15:50
|
|
|
Failed Imagineer posted:Hard to think of a worse sex word than "rumpy pumpy", but I'm sure the thread can surprise me our duty to the Party
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2021 11:38
|
|
|
Junior G-man posted:Brand new podsode out for your delectation or abhorrence as we finally do the dreaded ScotPol: Thanks, for some reason ScotPol is what tempted me to give the podcast a try
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2021 13:50
|
|
|
Tesseraction posted:Triple posting because gently caress you https://twitter.com/PopulismUpdates/status/1376614879080153088 North London independence when
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2021 18:07
|
|
|
 Historical wrongs by the police and the state
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2021 16:31
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 12, 2024 04:13 |
|
|
Ravel posted:I managed to buy a one bed flat and the housing association who own the freehold have just given me and every other leaseholder in the building a charge of 30k to pay for further fire remediation. Is anyone else in this situation? There are, and the Tories are loudly telling them to gently caress off quote:A plan to protect leaseholders from the spiralling costs of fixing fire safety problems in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster has been rejected in parliament after the government headed off a cross-party challenge.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2021 17:23
|
|