“What if we built a private water distribution system, that took priority over regular people’s supply, then charged for access during wildfires?”

Aha, so that’s how we win the ex-pat gammons over to rejoining the EU…

At this point, what’s left to cut?!

BIzzare, no idea why it didn’t populate. Fixed, anyway, thanks :)

Everyone has done a cracking job of the questions, so all I’ll add is:

ISPs:

Most ISPs are nationwide.
Almost all fixed lines have no data caps.
If you’re in a standard area, go with a provider that costs a little more, but have good customer service, and know their arse from their elbow.

Zen are good imo. https://zen.co.uk/
If you already know your address, their site will check what you can get, and how much it will be.

If you get a friend to refer you, you also get a £25 love2shop voucher.

Fixed line contracts are usually for 12-18 months.
You can get one month ones (give me a shout if you want them pointing out), but you may be better off with a 5G dongle for short term accommodation.

Further detail:

Most ISPs use the same physical wires/fibres owned by OpenReach, or an altnet, which go from your house to the nearest exchange.

You normally cannot speak to the wire/fibre provider directly, any maintenance request has to come from your ISP.
So if there is ever a problem, you’re relying on the ISP doing the legwork. So good CS is critical, imho.

You pay the provider, they pay the cable owner to get it to them, then provide the backhaul.

There are some area based exceptions, like single-provider fibre.
And there is also Virgin. But I wouldn’t go with Virgin.

What’s the pricing like on these normally?

It does look a lot more solid, and less nickable!

A very quick glance at the internet put it around £700 for their home one, a fair chunk more than the Reolink one (£70 ish when I last looked).

I’m impressed that the hospital was able to put time into a proper investigation.

I think that public paths through farms are great.
I’m on the walking side of things rather than the farming side, but I know that the cows are often keen to hang around places they know people are passing.

Plus I bet it has advantages for keeping rural crime down.

Also a high probability they have a 3D printer and are super excited for something useful to do with it.

This is roughly what we have in the UK.

For electricity, the standing charge is 61.6p/day, then 23.3p/kWh.
And gas is 29.6p/day, then 6.1p/kWh. (The numbers vary, and you can choose to lock rates for the duration of a contract).

There has been some discussion of it in recent years (after it doubled, thanks Putin).
Whether it is fair for people using less energy…But in reality, everyone has similar 100 or 60A connections to the grid.
There are tarrifs for very low users, where the standing charge is combined with the first kWh.

Once I’m off the gas boiler, and on a heat pump, I may get my gas disconnected to save the standing charge.

On a tangent, as you may be interested, we now have the option of flexible electricity pricing that tracks the wholesale rates for the day. Usually, it’s cheaper, sometimes even negative. Link.
However, this week there has been a lot of expensive energy, so it’s been butting up against the £1/kWh limit!

“How do I get this working in 22.04?”

“Previous question answers this.” Tagged as best answer

“No, the previous question answers it with a method that was removed in 22.04”

silence

You’d probably get better coding advice in the comments.

Gas power stations absolutely cha-ching-ing it tomorrow.

We should build more power stations like this, it’s clear they pay for themselves in bullion alone!

I like https://agilebuddy.uk/latest/agile
You can also see that yesterday, it almost hit the £1 cap.

The prices are set at a certain time, and they then publish the prices up to 2300 the following day.

So if you see a plunge price for the next day, you can set the 3 bar heater on a timer, and help shed the load 🫠

C&D sounds like a good way to scare someone who was wasn’t previously a Barrister, Bencher, Director of Public Prosecutions, and didn’t have a knighthood for services to law and criminal justice.

Purely a guess, but maybe a combination of cold, dim, and the wind dropping off.
Then as somebody else mentioned, when the estimates came in, gas stations absolutely rinsing it.

Things happen, and we’ll gradually get better as storage improves.

Too late for me, unfortunately.

#JAM

It’s more of a re-hash.