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I guess the name is intending to evoke the "batteries included" metaphor, but it seems pretty terrible to me.

If we're sticking with the crates/cargo metaphor, surely this should be called a "pallet".

NIMBYism and BANANAs are certainly a problem, but this is the planning departments themselves acting capriciously , failing to even apply the law correctly, or having extremely onerous requirements. This applies to individual householders as well as large infrastructure projects. Just look at the lower thames crossing, where we spent £1.2 BILLION pounds of taxpayers money on pre-construction costs and compare that with the original Dartford tunnels and bridge which cost £191M TOTAL in 1990. It's just bonkers.

Great site. This data should really be more accessible. Planning in the UK is a total crapshoot, subject to the whims of the planning authorities. In our case, a simple rear extension and dormer loft conversion, similar to hundreds of thousands across the country, we ended up having to appeal which added 2 years and tens of thousands of pounds in costs to our extension project. Our area shows up as a high refusal area, which tracks.

It would be good to add appeal data in (also a public gateway) to show which councils are just being unreasonable.

I personally think the planning regulations in this country are the cause of many ills, including the housing shortage. It just costs so much to get through planning these days, it is often just not worth it. Data like this could help us get that changed.

I wrote streampager a few years ago to scratch a similar itch. It works well enough for my own uses (and is/was used in library form as the built-in pager for sapling and jj).

I think it still needs some work for more general use which I unfortunately don't have time for at the moment.

I don't believe demand for labour has increased. We used to force children as young as 6 to enter the labour force, and people used to work 6.5 days per week. Demand for labour has been in free fall since the 1970, evidenced by stagnant wages in most of the developed world. Furthermore capital is accumulating at the top as the capital owners use their position to extract it from the people below them. AI will only accelerate this. We are in for some interesting times for sure.

I don't know about mainland Europe, but in the UK it really was exclusively about CO2 emissions per distance travelled, to the extent that Vehicle Excise Duty (the annual tax you pay on a car) was defined in terms of g/km of CO2 emitted. This happened in 2001 and wasn't changed until the wake of the emissions cheating scandals [1].

[1] https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-tax-rate-tables/rates-for-cars-re...

The visual IDEs of the 90s (MSVC, Borland Delphi, heck even MS Visual Basic) were way more tightly integrated, performant and usable than anything we have today, despite running on hardware with a fraction of the power. It seems so bizarre how much we've regressed.

Or DNS.

I think the article is just nonsense.

The love for diesel came from a catastrophic misunderstanding and the resulting belief that CO2 must be reduced at all costs. Diesel engines of the past produced slightly less CO2 per km than petrol engines in exchange for much worse overall emissions. The fact that they were slightly more efficient in terms of fuel consumption helped with the sales pitch, too.

I think this was just more of a function of technology. Good quality capacitive touchscreens only really started to become available in the mid 2000s, and even the early ones weren't that great (e.g. no multi-touch). Without this you're forced into using keyboards if you want to have any kind of usable interface for typing, or you do something like the graffiti writing system that psion PDAs had in the 90s.

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that the "middle class" was a fiction invented by the capital class to divide the working class in two and pit them against each other. If you or someone in your family has to work so that you can survive, you are working class.

We only know that they're good enough to be used for free, so all we can assert that their current value is $0.

It always reminds me of the shade Apple threw at Windows Vista. Chickens came home to roost. https://youtu.be/8CwoluNRSSc

When the smell-cartridge runs out, the audio and video mute too.

Unless those are actually padded to 32 bits in the VM or something.

They are.

They conspired with a rogue hashtag

ChatGPT thinks # is called "hashtag"? :(

If they could get away with paying 10-20% less, don't you think they'd do it now in a heartbeat?

Why would any insurance company insure against an inevitability?

The legal limit for the security deposit is five weeks (or six weeks when the annual rent exceeds £50k).

source: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/security-deposit-cap-redu...

No. And that's basically the point of the concerns everyone has.

There was also the Icelandic bank collapse, which was multiple banks totalling tens of billions of euros. I personally lost a large chunk of savings in that, and was eventually bailed out by my own government (i.e. my own tax money).

For me it was the flashing terminal cursor.

If we're talking TCO we need to calculate the TCO of coal and gas as including the cost of the destruction of the entire planet's climate.

The real word here is "monopolisation".

You also don't need to pay it to own a vehicle. You are allowed to own a vehicle without paying this tax as long as you promise not to drive it on the road (SORN). So by that logic it's not a vehicle tax either.

Also, bicycles are vehicles. So surely they should pay Vehicle Tax as well?

A more accurate name would be the "Using a Motorized Vehicle on the Public Road Tax". Let's abbreviate it by dropping all but the last two words. :)

"Road tax" is a _tax_ you have to pay in order to use the _road_. It's the most natural name for it, which is why people call it that.

Despite the words they use, it's not a vehicle tax: you can own a vehicle without paying it as long as you declare that you will not use the vehicle _on_the_road_ (a.k.a., make a Statutory Off Road Notification). It's a tax for using the roads. A road tax.

That the government don't ring-fence it to use on road maintenance is irrelevant.

Issues of standards are not really depending on funding

This is clearly not true, otherwise we could just cut all the funding and maintain the standards as they are.

Phone charger regulations were based on the need to reduce e-waste caused by every phone having a different charger.

I think the same principle could be applied here. Heated seats that can't be used are causing increased emissions as the car needs to move them around without actually providing any benefit to the owner, and so should be regulated.

What's the one for third-party apps? How different is the wording?

Automatic triggering seems like a recipe for disaster. My car has a version of this that shows the current speed limit on the display. It is frequently wrong. A road near me shows up as 20mph despite being 30 or 40 in different parts. Other times it sees signs for access roads or side roads and misinterpret them as for the current road (sometimes saying 20mph in a 60mph zone).

It's a nice idea, but the tech really isn't there yet. I guess a few high profile incidents and they'll be forced to fix it.