AnyOldName3

They still need making and putting up, and they’re more obtrusive than a swift brick as they stick out instead of being embedded in the wall itself.

There’s kind of need for them everywhere and this is a pretty practical way to ensure they end up everywhere and will stay there.

It might also be completely unusable if it’s going to be touched by human hands, as hands get sweaty, and sweat is salty water.

Drax often bids more for waste wood than the lumber industry would get for selling timber, so there’s already an incentive to declare any wood they can unsuitable. As long as there’s a way to get wood to Drax, the industry will find and exploit it.

Magnets from Temu were probably just loose in a bag or some bubble wrap with no warning label. People should know they’re not food anyway, but defying a warning label wasn’t the particular flavour of dumbness exhibited here.

I don’t know if this is the same loophole used in NZ as in the UK and EU, but in the UK and EU, lots of things are banned from retail rather than completely illegal. If they’re imported and the importer sells them without demonstrating that they’re safe, the importer has committed a crime. If the importer keeps them for personal use, that’s fine, though. In theory, people ordering things from outside the EU and importing them are supposed to be aware that they’re importing things and that the stores aren’t necessarily only selling CE-marked goods, so they’re responsible for checking that they’re safe themselves, but in practice, people just see an online shop and don’t make a distinction from a domestic online shop except the price and delivery time. The EU is working on a law to close this loophole in some way.

Planking was just lying down on things, so hardly an instance of teenagers endangering themselves.

The tide pod thing wasn’t exactly what it seemed to be. Some children with learning disabilities and some people with dementia had died from mistaking laundry pods for food. At some point, some media outlets decided to sensationalise it by leaving out the bit about learning disabilities. That meant that there were teenagers who thought other teenagers had died from eating them, so they could make videos pretending they’d done that, just like teenagers have staged videos to make it look like they’re doing dangerous things that they aren’t really doing ever since people have let them have cameras. Some of them decided that the easiest way to pretend was to put a real laundry pod in their mouth, pretend to chew it and swallow, pretend to die, and then cut the video and spit it out. If they checked the relevant warnings on the packet, they just said not to eat them and to rinse their eyes if they got any there, so this plan might seem safe. However, laundry pods are so corrosive against mucous membranes that putting one in your mouth and spitting it out immediately because it starts to burn immediately can still be fatal or cause permanent injury. The media reported the deaths and injuries as if teenagers were intentionally eating laundry pods, rather than pretending in a way the packet implied might be safe, so most people weren’t learning that pretending was also deadly and that the warnings on the packet weren’t exhaustive, so it just made fake tide pod challenge videos even more tempting. If the reporting had been more responsible, then most people would have first heard even pretending to eat laundry pods can kill rather than teenagers are eating laundry pods.

If something’s fully biodegraded in fifty days, it’s probably weakened and full of holes to the point of being unusable after much less time than that, so you might only have a week to get a product from the factory into the hands of consumers, then used, then disposed off. Plenty of perishable foods are inedible after a week or two but take several months to fully biodegrade.

The article was updated a few hours ago but when it was originally posted and accumulated its first slew of upvotes, the fine hadn’t been rescinded yet and the only statement from the council was that their enforcement officers had acted appropriately and the fine was appropriate.

Also, in much of the UK, the surface water and foul water drains both go into a single combined sewer system, with areas that have been built up for centuries like this one being most likely to still use that old approach.

I’ve seen plenty of news reports say that combined sewers are nearly ubiquitous, but now when I’m googling it, I’m seeing some sites back that up, and other sites saying it’s only about a fifth of the country, so I don’t know which to trust. I can see Ofwat and some of the water companies say that the rules changed (potentially in 1991) so new developments after that point have to use separate sewers, and that wouldn’t be that much of the UK, as most building is redevelopment of existing sites where existing sewers can be reused, rather than new developments, and most things haven’t been rebuilt in the last thirty years, so I’d be surprised if it was 80% separate if it’s only new stuff using it, but less surprised if it’s just the Victorian sewers that are combined (and areas that still use Victorian sewers that have been spilling foul water into waterways) and things have been gradually switched over for more than a century. Do you have a source that explains the incompatible figures?

Even if nationalised, our water infrastructure still needs hundreds of billions of pounds investing in it to bring it up to an acceptable standard, and the government doesn’t have the money and has other priorities to spend it on if they magically got a surprise pile of cash. The only financially viable way to fix the problem in a hurry would be to seize past dividends from water company shareholders to cover the cost of doing the things the water companies were supposed to be doing (which would conveniently tank the share prices and make nationalising the water much cheaper), but lots of pensions are propped up mostly by water shares, so doing that would plunge lots of pensioners into poverty, which isn’t politically viable as the government’s already in enough trouble for perceived being mean to pensioners, and they can’t afford to support more impoverished pensioners.

It’s only not treated because the UK has a massive problem with not treating sewage. In the UK, storm drains flow into the same sewers as toilets and go to the same waste treatment plants, where everything gets pumped out the same emergency overflow pipe into open water because there are millions more people in the UK than there were fifty years ago, and sewage treatment capacity is virtually unchanged because it’s cheaper to pay the fines for emergency overflow than to build more treatment plants.

The UK only has one type of sewer, so the storm drains flow into the same waste processing plants as the toilets. However, those waste processing plants then declare an emergency due to unexpected high volumes and just dump everything into open waterways if it’s rained within the past week, which, as it’s the UK, it almost always has. There are multiple issues at play here, and they’re all dumb and foreseeable if you assume companies will do whatever is most profitable without breaking the law, and none of them are this person’s fault.

It’s the UK. It’s a big scandal at the moment that most of the drains lead to rivers, lakes and the sea with only a small fraction of sewage actually being processed before being released from the processing plant. The fines for not processing the sewage were smaller than the costs of building and running treatment plants, so the water companies have just been paying the fines and giving all the money they were paid to build the treatment plants to shareholders as dividends. As no one’s broken any laws they haven’t already nominally been punished for, there aren’t any realistic and politically tenable solutions unless billions of pounds can become magically available.

That will be in large part because of the changes to the non-dom tax rules, where (broadly speaking) you could live in the UK, but opt out of the UK’s tax system and pay tax somewhere else where there wasn’t any tax. The people who left will largely be people who weren’t paying a meaningful amount of tax anyway.

The UK has a lot of ethnic Indians because of the empire and encouraging immigration to replace people who didn’t survive WWII. The Labour Party has about as many people with Indian heritage as would be expected given population demographics. It’s probably just more than in Canada, so it seems like a lot to you.

This is untrue. I can’t do this because I can’t convince the verification tool that my phone really has a camera, so I can’t show it Norman Reedus.

Originally, that was from Dave, which is owned by the BBC.

It could still be to cover up war crimes that the BBC team hadn’t got quite close enough to discover yet, but the IDF were concerned that they might have if not scared away. It could just be for opsec, but them having been competent at stopping the BBC seeing whatever it was they were hiding isn’t proof that the thing being hidden was benign.

Solar’s a little bit less killy than nuclear (people die when mining raw materials and from falling off rooftops when installing panels) and wind turbines are a little more dangerous than nuclear (mining raw materials, falls during installation/maintenance and people burning to death during maintenance), but hydroelectric power is much more dangerous than nuclear (mainly from drownings after dams burst). Until very recently, nuclear was the safest means of power generation by a wide margin, so if safety is the main concern, there should be a lot more of it.

A big reason for this is that a single nuclear power plant can power a city despite having the same footprint as a small village worth of wind turbines or solar panels and running for decades off a wheelbarrow of fuel, so there’s much less for construction workers and miners to do and fewer opportunities for them to die. It only kills when there’s an accident bad enough to make international news and remain in the public consciousness for decades, and accidents that bad have only happened a handful of times.