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Drone_Fragger posted:Anti vaxxers are a form of domestic terrorism which is promoted by Russian and Chinese troll farms to weaken the west and its available manpower in the event of a war. People were being loving idiots about vaccines long before the internet, with basically exactly the same arguments:  (see also anti-mask protests in the 1917-1919 flu pandemic) Blaming it on Russia and China is just liberals killing two birds with one stone by saying that the perfectly spherical frictionless voter of their dreams exists, and also lets them keep up the military-industrial-espionage complex money printer, because the SCARY FOREIGNERS are why people are screaming about mole children, rather than it being the natural outcome of the last 40 years of politics and economics.
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Sep 1, 2021 08:05
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Niric posted:Colour it in and that's a Ben Garrison, unhinged rant and all Doesn't have a swole Trump.
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Sep 1, 2021 08:32
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Odd the thread should mention golden syrup, I went past the Tate and Lyle refineries today and noticed the storage tanks are no longer painted up like tins of golden syrup but just have generic branding on them, no wonder this country's going down the pan. (A quick street view check reveals they've not been painted like that for over a decade now, so I'm just going to blame Gordon Brown)
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Sep 1, 2021 15:56
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The invasion of Iraq was a dead cat to distract us from the true atrocity that Blair committed in 2003, recalling and scrapping every last Invacar rather than letting owners and collectors keep them.
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Sep 3, 2021 01:24
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feedmegin posted:Wikipedia suggests they were mostly government owned but privately owned ones are still around? Very few though, and they're all renegade, operating beyond the law, which makes them actually pretty cool. Lord help me but there's actually a mini-effortpost in this which I'll come back to this afternoon.
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Sep 3, 2021 09:14
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Failed Imagineer posted:Why isn't there a Formula series for little 3 wheel cars that just plays Yakety Sax for the duration of the race? Reliant Robin racing was a thing at Arena Essex and other banger racing circuits for a while. One of the most common performance enhancers was putting the baldest tyres you could find on them because if they had too much grip they'd just flip as soon as you went into a corner (yes yes that Clarkson clip, which obviously was extremely overstated, but was an actual problem if you steered too quickly even on the road).
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Sep 3, 2021 09:16
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Guavanaut posted:Why didn't they go with two steered wheels at the front with Ackermann geometry and one fat driven wheel at the back? The Robin geometry seems like the worst way of doing it, you still need a differential and you fall over. All of the "true" cyclecars (<250cc) were chain driven to a solid axle (or for the really cheap ones just to a single rear wheel) - the lack of a diff wasn't really a problem with the relatively low power, light weight, and tiny little wheels. This both reflects the original loophole they were exploiting (they were technically a motorcycle with sidecar rather than a car) and is also cheaper than a single driven wheel because you just use a motorcycle-style front end - a proper steering wheel and front suspension is a considerably higher component count than a live axle and diff. Specifically for the Invacar, a single front wheel allowed you to use handlebars rather than a steering wheel, which offers a much wider range of potential modification to suit disabilities.
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Sep 3, 2021 09:55
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If they're gonna call it an Ape, at least put an RSV4 engine in it (This is an incomprehensible joke to 99.9% of the thread and I don't care)
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Sep 3, 2021 11:03
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OwlFancier posted:I think there is at least one tank (possibly the T34?) that has no steering at all, and instead you have differential brakes on the tracks. To make the tank turn left you put your foot down on the accelerator and then haul on the left brake to make it drift left. This was easier than setting up a differential drive system. That was the majority of (internal-combustion[1]) tracked vehicles up to and through WW2, and is how even most modern tanks run[2]. It's actually really, really hard to set up a system to allow one track to reverse, and many of the WW2-era solutions were incredibly hard to use and maintain - stuff like having two gearboxes that had to be run simultaneously by the driver, manual reversers which took 10 or 15 seconds to drop in and out, leaving the tank paralysed while they did so, or weird planetary gearsets that detonate if you pull the wrong lever at the wrong time. Even today, most of the time, tracked vehicles are just steered that way in the majority of cases because it's much less wearing on the tracks and gearboxes to do so - that's why diggers and other heavy equipment still have turrets despite theoretically being able to turn in their own footprint, it's just cheaper and easier to do it that way despite the addidional weight and complexity. . Some lighter vehicles can actually bend the track somewhat and so can be steered like a car, but that's more for crew comfort and to not tear up roads than anything else. [1] The very first tracked vehicles were steam-driven and so could be run backwards and forwards directly, and the British and Germans both experimented with hydraulic piston-driven tracks to try and replicate this but again complexity and difficulty to maintain killed that off. [2] Most modern tanks use hydraulic torque converters which can't be instantly reversed - it takes a second or two - but the relative reliability more than makes up for it. The Yanks had one that used electric motors but if there's one thing that has a less-fun failure mode than high-pressure hydraulic fluid it's high-current electricity.
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Sep 3, 2021 15:13
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OwlFancier posted:I think I saw a youtube video of an old steam lorry design that reversed by literally just fiddling with the valve on the steam engine to reverse the piston direction. Yeah, that's how most steam engines work - running backwards is just a matter of reversing the valve timing so it can be done with a simple valve. For stuff like locomotives you turned that into a linear control so you could fine-tune the valve timing for high-speed running. Fun fact - the ease of doing this means that early steam locos and even road rollers only had a screw-brake (fnarr), basically like a handbrake to hold it in place when parked, you just chucked it in reverse when you wanted to slow down. e: There is, of course, a Tom Scott video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3woUopc1ZS4 goddamnedtwisto fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Sep 3, 2021 |
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Sep 3, 2021 15:39
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Apropos of nothing it's weird how all their branches are where bike and car dealers *still* like to congregate - I've never really thought about it before but they do always seem to crop up in little clusters, I assume because of some kind of planning permission thing.
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Sep 3, 2021 17:46
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Is it technically scabbing if I rock up at the bins depot and offer to drive the dustcart for free, fulfilling a childhood dream?
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Sep 3, 2021 22:45
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:As long as you don't empty any bins I think you're good No, but pushing the button that lifts the bins in was - I feel like we're going to get into one of those rabbinical arguments about what constitutes making fire on the sabbath.
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Sep 3, 2021 23:21
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Just saw my first poppy-day advert (from RBL) in the wild on Facebook. Isn't it over 2 months away? War Christmas comes earlier every year.
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Sep 4, 2021 07:38
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My favourite weirdly diversified bike manufacturer will always be Kawasaki - your one-stop shop for supertankers, bullet trains, and motorbikes with unconventional air intakes. Ducati are a close second only because they split fairly early on so the company that makes the generators and switching equipment for power grids only shares a name now with the one that makes automation equipment (the traffic control room featured in The Italian Job is actually based on the real Ducati automated traffic-management system in Turin which the Italians were *immensely* proud of), and the one that makes very red motorcycles. I think the nearest we got to that over here was BSA, which was a deeply weird company in a lot of ways but for the purposes of this discussion all you need to know is after World War I they realised they wouldn't need to make any more guns for quite a while so turned their factories over to making anything else made of metal with lots of moving parts - motorbikes, cars, power tools, escalators, bicycle gears, telephone switches, and dozens of other lines out of weird little sheds dotted around Birmingham. World War II meant they had to go back to making shootbangs (and military vehicles) but after the war they decided that the safest bet was just to make the two things that had been most successful between the wars, cars and motorbikes, because it wasn't like the Italians, Germans, and Japanese would be able to give them much competition, was it? This is why BSA's main business is now selling t-shirts with the BSA logo on them.
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Sep 4, 2021 12:38
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Guavanaut posted:Peen Spotter In his dream world this is the job Glinner would have, to keep changing rooms and toilets pure.
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Sep 4, 2021 12:40
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My primary school had two Portakabins in the playground which never made any sense because the school was small enough that there were just one class in each year which had a fixed classroom each. I think I once had a couple of classes in one because there was a broken window in my normal room, but apart from that they just sat there enigmatically taking up already extremely limited space. Then they got moved to the nursery school round the corner when it was "discovered"[1] that the original 1950s building was basically lead-enriched asbestos, where they're still somehow in use. [1] "Discovered" as in literally every parent, teacher, and local official knew about it but pretended not to until the big storm in 1987 slightly damaged it and no builder on the planet would go near it.
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Sep 7, 2021 00:36
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Miftan posted:Ambulances are apparently much easier to convert than most things since they have a lot of stuff like electricity already wired in. I dunno if it's still the case but they used to all be 24V electrics meaning literally nothing that wasn't original equipment or ripped out of a Chieftain tank would work in them[1] - there used to be a thriving little grey market converting the Bedford and early Transit ambulances into campers and everyone got excited when the newer LDV ones with the much bigger rear area started to come along, as obviously they'd be much better for that use, but the difficulty of converting them back to 12V killed that off. They *do* get used for burger vans because the shape is so convenient but they normally have a separate gas-powered generator for the fridge and other accessories, powered off the Calor gas for the burners, so you can just use conventional 220V kit for ease of install. [1] Well a lot of stuff designed for more expensive caravans, boats, and (particularly American) campers does run at 24V but that's all way outside the price range of the kind of person who wants to convert a 10-year-old ambulance into a camper.
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Sep 7, 2021 10:23
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sebzilla posted:Gas and electric going up 15% for me, wonderful. Whew, just 11% for me. Can't wait to find out how this is Jeremy Corbyn's fault!
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Sep 7, 2021 12:48
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Guavanaut posted:October 'firebreak' was going around news as a last resort option and twitter as a globalist plot a few hours back but apparently it's NOT happening according to the cabinet so it probably will. Right now hospitalisations and deaths are starting to nudge up a bit, but still spectacularly down on where they were per-case prior to the vaccines and the rate of increase has so far been both fairly linear. Of course schools going back are going to nudge that back up a bit, but the government (and the "opposition") are apparently more than happy to prop up the commercial property market with children's blood so it'd take something truly horrifying for them to be even discussing this, so either this is just the normal cycle of people making up something to get angry with or something really loving nasty - like Mu being able to completely avoid AZ - is on the cards and they're not telling us about it.
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Sep 7, 2021 13:01
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keep punching joe posted:Lol didn't realise higher income peeps pay less NI, just assumed it was flat across the population. I've been saying forever that any actual progressive party would have abolition of NI as the very item in their manifesto (settle down Crispix). Between the ridiculous taper, the exclusion for capital gains and dividends, and the ease with which it can be dodged, it's almost ridiculously regressive. Of course the people it benefits most are the HENRY types with multiple "jobs" like, you know, journalists and MPs, so it'll never get touched.
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Sep 7, 2021 13:12
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Gyro Zeppeli posted:Excuse me? There is a new variant, Mu, which is cropping up around the world at a speed that suggests it might be able to out-compete Delta. At the moment there aren't enough cases for anyone to (publicly) speculate as to whether it is deadlier than Delta or how existing vaccines work against it, but any variant that can easily evade the AZ vaccine is of *massive* concern to the UK because most of our most vulnerable people got the AZ jab and we don't seem to be too bothered about topping them up with an mRNA booster.
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Sep 7, 2021 13:15
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Private Speech posted:Remember how everyone sensible was making fun of the Brexit predictions that water treatment plants won't be able to get enough treatment chemicals. No, people were making fun of the specific claim that the UK would not have sufficient chemicals to treat drinking water[1], not that the Tories would let their chums in the privatised utilities go "welp" and dump raw sewage if they pinky swear it was too hard not to. Be better than the fubpees (and the Tories) who claim that this poo poo is because of Brexit and not because of Tories being Tories. [1] The concern was specifically about sodium hypochlorite because we import it all from Europe, and it cannot be safely stockpiled - except it *can* be safely stockpiled in dilute form, which is how it's used (you almost certainly have some of it diluted in your house right now as it's the main active ingredient of household bleach) and also we don't actually use it for treating drinking water apart from in certain circumstances, and other chemicals which we do produce in-country can be used in those circumstances.
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Sep 7, 2021 14:22
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Private Speech posted:I mean: Right but that's still got nothing to do with drinking water, which is what the big scare was, and also it's literally just giving the water companies a get out of jail free card for something they were gleefully doing in 2015, using the current general logistics problems as a fig leaf. FWIW chemical shortages just aren't the reason why sewage gets dumped into waterways apart from in periods of extreme drought. Almost all waste water treatment in the UK is by sediment filtering and biodigestion - the only time we need to chemically treat (domestic) waste water is if severe drought means that there's not enough rainwater coming into the sewage plants for those to work, then all you can do is dump a shitload of bleach in and hope for the best. The reason we're dumping sewage into waterways is because we're getting more and more extreme weather, we're concreting over poo poo, and the majority of our sewage system is at best Edwardian. When heavy rain has nowhere to go but a combined sewage system that's designed for a quarter of the population that actually uses it now, it's all got to go *somewhere* so off into the nearest river with it.
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Sep 7, 2021 14:43
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peanut- posted:They found a way to raise taxes that impacts effectively 0% of Telegraph readers, surprised they're so knives out about it. This is all part of the plan. The Telegraph are still Johnson's biggest cheerleaders and there's no way they're going to have put this front page up without it all being a pretty obvious setup for him to "regretfully" back down, then even more regretfully slash the NHS even further, and absolutely be broken-hearted about pulling up any opposition to the tax raise any time anyone suggests any kind of other tax raise or progressive policy. (heavily edited after the fact because my phone posting makes even less sense than my desktop posting) goddamnedtwisto fucked around with this message at 12:03 on Sep 8, 2021 |
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Sep 8, 2021 10:43
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The Question IRL posted:'Sup wiggidy wieners. They're not *zero*, but I'd say they're extremely remote. One complexity might be that Scotgov have previously enacted travel and gathering restrictions completely independently, but generally they've been more or less in line with rUK restrictions, just with different timing. If UKGov aren't talking about it it's very unlikely to happen at least in the next two weeks, and so far the most has been said is a general rumbling about maybe looking at it by half term in October if numbers in children go vertical.
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Sep 8, 2021 14:19
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Pistol_Pete posted:gently caress llamas: I'd have pulled the bloody lever myself. A) it was an alpaca, not a llama, you camelidist B) Alpaca (and llamas) are objectively awesome creatures.
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Sep 8, 2021 16:32
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilson A little light reading for you all of that special kind of idiot this country turns out from time to time. Bloke copes with the ennui of the interwar years by trying to climb Everest. Most of his preparation consisted of prayer and fasting and a bit of walking around Snowdonia, then he bought a plane with the intention of landing it somewhere on Everest and walking the rest of the way. I won't spoil the ending (other than to note he set off 20 years before Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay and there's no bits of the mountain named after him), just drink the whole thing in.
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Sep 9, 2021 00:16
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https://twitter.com/CouncilCulture/status/1436289376917540882 The opposite of an effortpost but of all the things to hate about loving pomo architecture, this relentless refusal to just have a loving right angle or an unbroken line is the worst and constitutes a clear and present danger to the innocent drinking population. (I didn't actually fall over but did have a hell of a wobble because none of the buildings moved right as I walked past)
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Sep 10, 2021 12:31
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nurmie posted:idk, to be honest this is far from the worst architectural disasters that i've seen, even in london It's the interaction between the weird rooflines and the way the panelling sort of works like camouflage to break up the verticals, combined with the curves on the building on the left, especially when framed by the perpendiculars of the buildings in the foreground and with the reflections of the windows of the further-away buildings behind - my brain kept trying to bend the rearmost building to be at 45 degrees to the one it was attached to or make it much further away. The fact that the windows don't actually go in straight lines really doesn't help. It would make more sense as a video but I was drunk and had just had my brain destroyed by architecture and frankly getting just that still was at the limits of my abilities. Admittedly it's nowhere near as evil as this piece of poo poo:  which is just outside Moorfields Eye Hospital for extra evil.
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Sep 10, 2021 13:48
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jaete posted:How often do you need to change the filter? How much do new filters cost? You shouldn't be drinking water (or using it for cooking) from any tap but the one in the kitchen anyway.
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Sep 10, 2021 16:32
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Trickjaw posted:Is that true? I always thought that was an old wives tale. Legally only taps connected directly to the main are "drinking water" and in most homes only the kitchen tap is connected to the main directly, the rest go via a cistern. Obviously there are loads of exceptions to this and even cistern water is probably fine as long as the cistern is covered and you use the water a normal (for humans, not for goons) amount for washing etc, but yeah strictly speaking the kitchen tap is the only one you can be sure is safe.
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Sep 10, 2021 16:44
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mediaphage posted:the hybrid tank/main system in parts of the uk was so hard for me to understand when i first read about it. Like a lot of UK building stuff it's a very clever solution to a very very narrow set of circumstances that ceased to exist decades ago but we keep on with it because that's How We Do It.
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Sep 10, 2021 18:53
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Oh dear me posted:Parties can be replaced pretty suddenly by a smaller party, as Scotlab has been and the Liberals were. Yeah, there's a credibility event horizon and once a party falls through it they're not coming back - however it does require another party to siphon off the voters of the dying one. The Liberals didn't just put up a Closed sign and bugger off, they lost the non-landowner vote to Labour because they took us into World War I and nobody's going to vote for a party that kills off a million (British) people, although the last few years has shown us that numbers in the hundreds of thousands are actually fine as long as nobody writes any poems about it. Right now Labour are losing voters to NIV, not any political party, but like all those very angry people keep telling me on Twitter this just strengthens the Tories. For some reason they never seem to go the extra step there - maybe if the pollsters were to start actually putting the Not Intending to Vote Party in their headline results they might get it (lol of course they won't, all they actually want is Tory policies but with just enough veneer of progressivism that they don't feel guilty stepping over homeless people on their way to Waitrose)
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Sep 10, 2021 20:12
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:I can see an increase in demand for the profession of dunnikin divers* in our post-brexit future. As always with Pratchett, heavily based on a real thing. Toshers (which of course he wrote a non-DW book about) were kids who would crawl through the pre-Bazalgette sewers looking for coins and other valuables dropped down there (the post-Bazalgette ones were generally free-flowing enough to make this not a particularly profitable endeavour, although the Metropolitan Board of Works did have to employ guards to stop them erecting nets and dams in the sewers to try and trap stuff). They were related to (and often the same people as) the mudlarks who would do the same job on the Thames foreshore (amazingly toshing was actually safer than mudlarking on some bits of the Thames - quicksands and a 4-knot tide meant that it was very, very easy to end up dead on the pre-embanked Thames) whereas sewers generally discharged at or above the high tide line so - outside of cholera season - the risk of death by drowning was considerably lower, while the chances of dying because you were rooting around in literal human poo poo was about the same because guess what a lot of that "quicksand" was made of? When times were hard they'd also turn their hands to nicking off boats on the Thames (including stealing nails, lead caulking and copper anti-fouling sheets off the hulls, rather safer than trying to get onto the boats themselves, although both included not only the drowning and arse-death risks of toshing and mudlarking but also the rather more real risk of the sailors or lightermen kicking the poo poo out of them - the formation of the river police was one of the few times that more police equalled less danger for the poorest people because the plod would at least take them to a magistrate rather than beating them up and chucking them in the river).
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Sep 11, 2021 00:23
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Guavanaut posted:It's not very efficient at public sanitation when the river stinks of rear end and anyone who drinks from it gets the shits and then the whole thing falls over. There's a (probably apocryphal) story about the sewage system in Cambridge. Cambridge is on the fens so is already susceptible to flooding and so the arrival of the flush toilet was even more problematic for the Cam than it had been for the Thames, and so they - like London - installed a load of interceptory sewers to try and intercept the poop on the way to the river and take it out of town. However the pumping engines were only specced for a normal amount of rainfall and heavy summer showers could easily overwhelm their capacity to empty the sewers, meaning - just as it does in London to this day - the combined sewage and rainwater just overflowed into the Cam. They only decided to change this (and incidentally install the first gas-fired pumping engines in the world, because additional steam engines, which took a day to get up steam, were pointless in the days when weather forecasting consisted of looking out the window) when Queen Victoria visited and asked why the river and it's banks were festooned with small squares of paper, to which the Mayor replied that they were "Notices prohibiting swimming, maam".
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Sep 11, 2021 00:42
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OwlFancier posted:Wait wait wait hold the loving phone. Yeah I know, but they did at least Britain it up a bit by pronouncing the name of the river completely differently to the name of the town.
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Sep 11, 2021 00:47
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Trickjaw posted:You really wouldn't live anywhere else, would you? Eh, as my dad was fond of telling me/somehow retroactively threatening me, had life gone a bit different I could have been born in Stevenage (and been called Malcolm), and I'm fairly sure I'd have ended up as ridiculously obsessive about the place, but just not have posted about it as much as I do about London because the stories wouldn't have been as interesting/strange/macabre. I mean I've got a shitload of stuff in my mental attic about Cornwall, Malta and the Orkneys, where I have a load of family, it's just opportunities to ramble about the Looe Valley, Skara Brae, and Grand Harbour come up much less often. I've also just realised that of my immediate family out as far as first cousins, only my brother doesn't live within 10 miles of a UNESCO World Heritage Site and I've absolutely no idea what to do with that info and what it might mean.
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Sep 11, 2021 02:22
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Hm... Cornwall - didn't King Arthur and Merlin hang out round there? And wasn't Malta something to do with Knights Hospitaler sort of like the Templars but without the swords, and as for the Orkneys and their ancient burial sites - all very suss and woo woo to me. The Hospitaliers still had the swords, but they didn't go in for quite as much mysticism as the Templars and also had the sense not to start looting Christian cities on the way home from the Crusades, meaning they never got shut down and just sort of hung out in the Med for centuries until someone finally twigged a natural harbour with massive fortifications more or less slap-bang in the middle of the Mediterranean was actually a pretty useful thing and just walked in and took it. The Knights aren't the most interesting thing about Malta though - the most interesting thing about Malta is that elephants and camels managed to make it across to there in the Messinian Salinity Crisis, when the Med partially or wholly evaporated (which is also interesting because the area would have been an utter hellscape and crossing it on foot would have been almost as difficult as crossing it by swimming) and then when the waters rose again, the mechanism known as island dwarfism - where animals confined to a small island evolve to be smaller to more efficiently use limited resources - meant that by the time the first humans got there by boat (and built the temples on Malta that are way, way older than Skara Brae) the place was inhabited by camels and elephants about the size of large dogs or small ponies, which must have been absolutely adorable, except my great*-uncles slaughtered them all for food within a generation or two. I want to reiterate this - we could have had pet elephants small enough to live in our homes (although maybe not sit on our laps, they weighed about 300 kilos), but we wiped them all out, and frankly anything nature does to humanity from this point on is richly deserved.
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Sep 11, 2021 11:19
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It wasn't the torture and gore that turned me off of 24, it was that every female character was Penelope Pitstop crossed with Olive Oyl, just blundering headlong from one thing that Big Brave Jack had to rescue them from into another. The specific moment I stopped watching was when his daughter - having been kidnapped/arrested/otherwise menaced half a dozen times already in the 30 or so hours of the show - manages to escape from a police car that had crashed... and then gets caught in a loving bear trap and kidnapped again.
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Sep 11, 2021 12:48
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