It’s a legal requirement of SOLAS. They would be in the shit if they didn’t, and the people later died. As the cruise ship has AIS, there would be proof that they were the closest vessel.

Oh that sucks as it starts to kick in for two parents both on full time min wage.

Are they adjusting the thresholds as that’s the worst part of it?

Are they going to put up the maintenance loan up as well? Or at least moved the threshold for when ti starts cutting off to account for fiscal drag?

I get that the student loan book is wildly out of control, but it just becomes ladder pulling if you don’t address funding for those at or near the bottom of the ladder.

The proper way to address the student loan books’ massive gap between what will be paid and what won’t be paid back is to significantly reduce student places. It’s hugely unpopular, but this debt time bomb can’t just be left to fester while they tinker round the edges.

It’s the fact that she weaponises it, often using herself as an example of why something isn’t needed, such as DEI or maternity pay, ignoring that she ended up in an incredibly privileged position even before becoming a MP.

Couple that with her bloodthirsty desire for revenge on anybody or anything that annoys her, such as her statement that a quarter of civil servants belong in jail means if she did ever get in we would have ideocial purges worthy of any of the most nutty dictators.

I absolutely do not buy her defense that it was just a jolly jape, that’s the defense of the far right when they fail to land enough support for whatever hateful shit they just spouted.

I would like them to try to go to Mars this coming January. I am sure with enough fuel one of Elons rockets can get it moving in the right direction, they can wing everything else as they go.

I’m fairly broad for my height and need a taped waist on tops so I’m a bit of an outlier.

I won’t buy clothes now that doesn’t put the actual measurements of the clothes on the listing for the item because otherwise, I have no idea what the fit is actually like.

If you buying more expensive trousers then you can have the waist tailored to reduce it. I typically buy 40" and have them reduced to a 34". Obviously, this isn’t worth doing if you buying half a dozen for £50 from h&m or similar budget trousers.

A more mundane one, but people on reasonably normal incomes living in a house that’s at least one order of magnitude more expensive than they could ever afford even if they purchased it twenty or thirty years ago. Its particularly bad in things set in expensive areas like London or New York or Tokyo. Like being able to afford a house in central London rather than renting a flat with three other people takes substantial money, you aren’t going to be afford that if you work in a supermarket.

Unless you are buying your beans from somewhere like Starbucks they should not be that oily that the grinder needs its burrs cleaning. If you are buying Starbucks (or similar) beans then the single biggest upgrade you can do is to start buying quality beans from a specialty roaster. Its not as hard as it was a few years ago to get dark roast from a proper specialty roaster when the fad was for almost under roasted beans, thankfully that trend is drawing to a close.

Dark roast only I would only consider conical personally. The best flat burrs for dark roast just emulate the output you getting by default from most conical burrs, so why not just get the ones made for the job in the first place?

I am not sure what your budget is but something like a Helor Flux would be similar pricing to the DF83 and the Flux comes with immense 73mm Mazzer burrs that are hard to beat for dark roast. Only downside is that its a hand grinder, and take about 45 seconds to grind an espresso sized set of beans. I hand grind both espresso and pour over when I am not at home and its manageable if you are not doing too many shots back to back.

Otherwise the bigger conicals with a motor tend to be a lot more than the DF83. I would really stay away from the Niche Zero (and its bigger brother), they are overpriced and just not good value in today’s market. I used to own a Zero and its frankly disappointing for its price point, I sold mine and made nearly enough money to buy my (secondhand) DF83 with the upgraded burrs.

Something like a Femobook A68 would be around the same price as the DF83 and is motorized. I have not personally tried it, but it has decent reviews. I quite fancy getting one as another grinder (I have a Timemore 078 as well for pour over) for home for when I want dark roast as my setup is very much tailored to light/medium-light.

So what grinder you choose should be shaped by what brewing method and then what roast level you mostly brew with. For you thats espresso and what, medium to dark roast?

I have a DF83, one of the early ones, but with the SSP High Uniformity burrs that are an expensive but worth while upgrade for light to medium light roast beans. I would not recommend these burrs if you prefer a darker roast, as those flat burrs I have are the exact opposite.

The DF83 produces great results but the early DF83s do need constant care over retention as they can get blocked if you don’t. The DF83V solves a lot of the problem with my one, while still enabling a large number of suitable replacement burrs.

I would consider a similar price point conical burr grinder if you prefer mouth feel/more soupier coffee and plan on sticking with darker roasts.

I have gnome installed and setup as a backup, plus I use its greeter, but I am another who does not really want a full DE and instead using Sway as my WM day to day.

I have two 32"@4k monitors so normal manual floating window management just annoys me, I greatly prefer tiling window management to auto sort my windows for me. Its extremely rare that I need to full screen anything on monitors this large to fit everything I want in width wise so I want multiple apps per monitor.

If all of this is managed dynamically for me, and I am not manually sizing or overlapping stuff, all the better. Couple that with easy use of multiple workspaces for different tasks (I typically use three per monitor), rarely do I have a need to manually resize anything. I have it setup to open my common apps on the right workspace for me, and each workspace set to the right layout for that set of apps, so much less faffing.

My (40%) keyboard(s) run QMK and are setup to enable most of my common combos, such as switching workspace, moving apps around are never more than two keys. The more I can do without moving my hands from the keyboard, the better for me.

Final thing is that Sway is wayland and for me extremely stable.

I just use my Google Home Max for timers, it’ll display three timers at once on the screen and I can get the status of any or all with voice at any point. Plus it’ll do all the usual assistant stuff of conversions, cooking temperatures, and has a big enough screen for me to read recipes or follow along with a recipe video. Bonus feature is that its a reasonable loud speaker as well so I do not need a separate radio in the kitchen.

Sure its not as pretty as the clock but its a whole lot more useful for cooking.

He got caught by his own trap of lowering NI twice to create this black hole for labour to sort. Once he set that trap, as amateur hour as it is, he was committed to this path.

He’s the sort of person who gets both his legs stuck in the same trouser leg.

Probably, but I presume they are there to operate whatever equipment NK sold to Putin as the Russians cant even comprehend inside toilets let alone poo flinging drones.

So Blade Runner, Alien, and Predator franchises are linked, but I also a believer that the Terminator franchise is linked into the same, shared universe. Obviously Terminator has many different endings depending at which film you look due to timey wimey shenanigans, but if you pick one of the ones that the war is averted (I pick T2 as the sequels are not my favorite), it kinda makes sense. In this universe Dutch is the special forces ace that is picked (probably unknowingly) to be the model for the T800.

I’ve been using it for a while now, its been robust and extensible. I think its only real downside is that its too extensible as out of the the box not much comes as standard that you might expect if you coming from something like gnome, such as a control panel, auto tiling, a lock screen, or screen capture (although this release seems to fix setting that up now). This should be expected as its a WM not a DE.

Both my kids have had Zoes, one of the original model and one of the latest one. They have been great cars, particularly the newer one that my son has, he does about 15k a year in his. Reliable, great economy, although my daughters replacement Fiat 500e for her Zoe gets a higher miles per kWh but it has a smaller battery.

However Renault can be an absolute pile of crap to deal with. Our local dealer is so bad we would never buy another Renault as they are the only dealer within a reasonable distance (nearest alternative is 25 miles of traffic heavy city driving).

Renault UK can be pretty shitty about denying expensive warranty claims as well from what I have seen. Anybody looking at buying any car should be checking out the reputation of their local dealer before buying but especially for Renault IMO

We are looking at a MG EV4 to replace his Zoe next year, more range, more space, and cheaper than the Zoe/5 with a longer warranty.

Loading it up with debt is an intentional strategy as you point out you can’t not let an essential service disappear so you either have to nationalise it or bail it out with taxpayer money.

You gain money to pay dividends, you make money on the interest, and then you make money when the company finally goes bust and has to be bailed out and the loan is refinanced.

We’ve had three EVs for a few years now and they been great, had four in total and replaced the first one a bit over a year ago as its lease expired, so no regrets.

Lengthy road trips aren’t a problem if you plan out your route in advance I get not everyone wants to do this so if this you then wait till there are more charging stations for your region. We plan stops based on charging stations that have a lot of high speed chargers (over 100kw) so we are never waiting more than 20 minutes and never waiting for a charger. It is faster to charge twice to around 80% on one of these than it is to charge to 100% once due to how much charging slows down as the battery nears completion. I would not even consider a car that does not have a 800v architecture due to the slower charging speeds if you plan on road trips.

We have done 1200 mile round trips, probably small fry for Americans but a lot for us, especially as we towing for all that. Its achievable with planning in most western countries. I want to stop at most every three hours as I want to use the loo, are people who are driving 6 more hours non stop peeing in a bottle or something?

Cost per mile is stupidly low as we charge at home when not on trips over 280 miles, 8p per kwh, with a monthly cost between the three cars of £40 for around 2000 miles a month (more in summer, about that in winter). Good luck doing 2000 miles on £40 for an ICE car. Charging when out is more expensive the faster you want to charge, ultra rapids work out about the same per mile as high economy petrol ICE, rapids or lower a bit cheaper but nothing significant. Its only going to be cheaper if you can charge at home and your energy provider has a suitable EV tariff as we do.

Absolutely zero chance I would buy an EV right now as depreciation is already horrendous and the rate of change for EVs is rapid unless you know the car will meet your log term needs and those will not change. We lease so that all the cost of the risk is with the leasing company and we know we want the improvements.

Edit: Plug in hybrids are fucking useless BTW, you are either doing a ton of miles and using the ICE all the time, or you are using the battery all the time and very rarely the ICE. It means carrying around both a full EV setup and a full ICE setup, so you have more than twice the complexity of either and more weight than an actual pure EV with the same battery that impacts both EV and ICE economy. Plus recent studies have shown that hybrids are far harder on the ICE part than a pure ICE, which is fucking awful for long term ownership.

They were only ever meant as a stop gap until battery prices dropped, which they have and its now possible to get EVs with over 400 miles of ACTUAL range not just promised range.