Well yeah, it’s quite easy to keep your energy prices low when you

• have a wealth of hydrocarbon sources in-country
• supplement them by bombing other nations until they give you there’s
• don’t give a flying fuch about the planet

Population of Sweden: 10.6 million

Population of the USA: 340.1 million

So the population density is very similar and I therefore don’t understand what you’re getting at.

I started trying to do this a while back and hit a bit of a brick wall… Key takeaways:

• You can just rip the video as-is, retaining quality, but at the expense of file size - BluRay uses quite light compression so you’re looking at potentially 40GB per 1080p film.
• So then you think “okay, I’ll re-encode it using a modern algorithm, maybe x265 or AV1”… Massive rabit hole! To get a good quality re-encode you need to have a lot of time on your hands. You can do it quickly (e.g. an hour) using a GPU but the results will be terrible. Good results take not just many hours to encode on a high end consumer CPU, but also often several iterations of this to get right. Some things (animation, new digital films) are manageable with some default settings, but anything that was originally filmed on real film and has noise is extremely difficult to get right.

In the end I reverted to finding a copy someone else had encoded if possible, or for rarer stuff I now just have a fat wallet full of the original disks.

Is a peacoat a coat soaked in pee?

The thing that really grinds my gears is the excessive use of “he/she”. Workplace training is a regular offender for this. Just use the word “they” FFS, it’s sat right there on the shelf for you.

Or don’t, just go with “he” or “she”, this fictional person in your ‘case study’ isn’t real, they don’t give a shit.

We have them in kitchens that need to serve a large number of people - big offices, big hotel breakfast areas, transport lounges, etc.

But a standard kitchen, I think it’s like someone else said in this thread: The time it takes to boil a 240V kettle isn’t much more than the time it takes to get the mug ready, so there’s no real benefit to going through the extra structural work to fit a boiling water tap.

Also I think most “boiling water” taps are actually like 95°C, not boiling, so if you’re a black tea snob that isn’t acceptable.

Heh, pretty much every kitchen in the UK - in homes and in offices - has a kettle that can boil a litre of water in 3-4 minutes. You can buy them in the supermarket for around £20.

And then there’s this beauty my wife treated me to a while back… https://www.sageappliances.com/en-gb/product/bke825?sku=SKE825BSS3GUK1

WTF is this slop… “Just minutes ago […] Former U.S. President […]” ???

I was very tempted, but the cost of their uncapped service was just a bit too much. You get what you pay for I guess, but I’ll take the occasional mild infuriation over around £35pm extra cost.

More of a famous quote I guess, but:

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Since I first heard it, I’ve been far less annoyed / paranoid about other peoples actions, at work in particular.

If the US gets a new president in 2029, I’ll be devastated if they don’t take the opportunity to do a major speach or something against the backdrop of a half derelict East Wing - it would be iconic.

I’m not sure these overlapping dots necessary represent the data so well… e.g. it gives the impression that London has only had about three terrorism incidents…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_London

Nice - thanks for this

Not my experience. I’ve had my X1C for a year now and have not had to ‘dial in’ a single thing.

Most of my prints are functional items in PETG of various colous. Some PLA for cosmetic parts. And I did some things in TPU earlier in the year. Probably been through like 10kg of filament on it.

Can’t think of a single serios print failure that wasn’t human error - e.g. forgot to clean the bed, didn’t support it properly.

My one gripe is that when changing PETG reels, it doesn’t always manage to wipe the nozzle very well leaving a few rogue stringy bits that usually just pull off.

And obviously I don’t love the closed-wall software situation, but their software is pretty good.

• In 2015, UK consumers spent approximately £1.5 billion on physical entertainment media, including DVDs, Blu-rays, and CDs.

• By 2025, that figure has plummeted to under £400 million, with DVDs and Blu-rays now representing less than 10% of total video spend.

• In 2015, streaming was growing but still secondary. Netflix had around 5 million UK subscribers, and Spotify Premium was under 2 million.

• By 2025, streaming dominates:

  • Over 90% of UK households subscribe to at least one video streaming service
  • Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and Apple TV+ collectively exceed 40 million UK subscriptions
  • Music streaming accounts for over 85% of music revenue, with Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music leading

2015: Physical Media ~£1.5 billion, Streaming ~£500 million 2025: Physical Media <£400 million, Streaming >£2.5 billion https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/multi-sector/media-nations/2025/media-nations-2025-uk-report.pdf
https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/Industries/tmt/research/digital-consumer-trends.html

But… America is literally Europe 2.0… so, you’re saying Europe is Europe 3.0?

Sorry, I oversimplified, I can’t use my router with Sky. 😞

Even having switched it over to open-source FW and having dug around inside it over SSH, I couldn’t find a way to get my Nighthawk R7800 to do the Option 61 thing.

It’s not a particular great router, but it otherwise does everything I need it to do and is all setup, so still I figured I’d put up with the white box for a year and then switch again… That was probably nearly two years ago now 😅

We were with Virgin for over a decade. The quality of the fibre service was very good. Probably had about 3-4 brief outages in that entire time. Left because I got fed up with the mid-contract price increases that the government specifically tried to outlaw and then they found a way around it again (it’s not a change of contract if we say in the contract we’re going to change the contract…).

So I rage quit and went with Sky Fibre a year ago, which is BT Fibre and is also very good. Sky were about the only BT Fibre provider when I looked that at least waited until the end of the contract before cranking the price up.

Downside with BT is they force you to use their massive white router, which shouldn’t be necessary.

I don’t think I’ve ever had particularly good customer service from either, but if you get something that is Virgin or BT Fibre to Premises then it should be good quality and hopefully you won’t need customer service too much.

FYI Ian Watkins was Welsh and was sentenced in Cardiff in 2013; the death penalty was effectively abolished in the UK in 1965.

I feel like a separate breakdown per lead source would be interesting - was one source complete junk?