tankplanker

@tankplanker@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Poll reveals the amount of Brits who would take weight-loss jabs for free on NHS⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This is using BMI, which while the vast majority of these people are at the very least overweight it will be missing all the unhealthy skinny fat people.

  I wish they would switch to a system that takes account of waist/hip ratio as if you do not have a narrower waist than hips (with a bigger differential if you are a woman) you are carrying more fat than you should be and are also at a risk of a variety of “fat” people illnesses such as heart attacks, diabetes, etc. despite your weight being in a normal range as you lack the muscle mass and/or skeletal mass for your height

  The actual number of people who need to sort out their diet and exercise is just shocking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thousands of UK farmers protest against inheritance tax hike⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I already covered over priced areas in my previous post, and the south west squarely falls into that category.

  Frankly if you have 500 or more acres in that area and you aren’t already making bank from farming then you would be an utter, complete moron not to sell for the £10m+ that you would net from the sale. You could even buy a similar sized farm in a cheaper area and bank half of it. Plenty of farmers selling up as they have no family who wants to take it on.

  Taxation on the rich should be both on salary and on assets, especially assets that appreciate like land, otherwise we end up with the rich owning everything. The rich have massively larger purchase power than everybody else even if they were taxed fairly. We have to start somewhere with reversing that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thousands of UK farmers protest against inheritance tax hike⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Assuming you aren’t living in the Cotswolds or other areas dominated by hobby farmers who over pay and under produce while have significant competition for the price of large houses that pushes up the cost per acre. £5m out side of these areas purchases a good few acres. At £10k an acre (roughly in the upper third for cost) that’s about 500 acres with farm buildings.

  Even in a shit year with the wrong sort of production you should be clearing £250 per acre per year, or about £125k for 500 acres. Well run farms who pick the right crops for that year clear double that. £40k is significant but its not going to leave them in the poor house, particularly when you can stagger the payments to allow for inflation and also for poor yielding years.

  That doesn’t include the various subsidies, which while even shitter than ever, they are hardly zero if you pick the right crop. Nor does it include any diversification, which any sensible farmer would already be doing. I don’t doubt this is going to result in a number of farms being forced to sell, but then were they ever actually viable in todays market?

  The zero inheritance tax rule has to change because of people like Clarkson who have freely admitted to only buying their farm to avoid inheritance tax. Its pushed up the cost of farms as now you are competing against hobby farmers like Clarkson, or those who use a tenant farmer who is now priced out of the market to buy their own farm, or even worse, the farm just notionally farms with tiny herds.

  I particularly dislike Clarkson and others pretending that its going to hit 96% of farmers, when the majority are well within the £3m, and with careful planning using the revised gifting rules you can extend it much higher than that. Most of those that are worried have their kids living and working on the farm, by carefully arranging how you hand over their property and some of the land, if done early enough, you can extend that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thousands of UK farmers protest against inheritance tax hike⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They get ten years to pay it, its not subject to payment in one lump sum. Its also half the usual rate of tax, and only on anything over £3m if married and using all the allowances. On a £5m farm its about £40k a year for 10 years, not insignificant but inflation over 10 years will reduce the sting of it and you can even end load it by only paying back 1% initially and more at the end to further let inflation do its thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thousands of UK farmers protest against inheritance tax hike⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s 3m of you are married and use all the allowances. Even then it’s only on the cake over that and at half the usual rate, then you get ten years to pay it back.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kemi Badenoch announced as new leader of Conservative Party⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Amazon Echo graveyard⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Harvest in England the second worst on record because of wet weather⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Worth noting that lower UK production, either caused by climate change such as the article talks about, or farmers either turning over fields to non farming uses such as solar or housing as farming is no longer profitable for them, means increased inflation for food. It also means we are less resilient to further food inflation if other countries have their own climate changed farming issues as we saw a little while ago.

  Failure to invest in farming now means small savings today but higher food prices tomorrow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Climate tipping points' could 'wipe out' UK crop growing, report warns⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s the cost to transition, it’s different equipment such as tractors for vines are different from tractors for cereal crops, it’s the other facilities, field layouts, soil composition, training for the farmer that they will need support with. Plus picking fruit currently requires people in much larger numbers than harvesting traditional cereals.

  With the bad weather we are getting for winter crops with the heavy rain ruining planting, climate change is already here for UK farmers. We have to do something, even if it’s just funding to improve drainage for those who can.

  The real problem is the lack of appetite from government as it needs actual planning and money, something lacking so far.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Keir Starmer pins economic growth hopes on British Hollywood with new tax relief⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Pinning your hopes on tax relief on Hollywood when Hollywood is perfectly fine pushing the absolute limit of whats legal with their finances seems as daft as his carbon capture scheme. Hollywood is quite prepared to cancel or delete even expensively made content because it will make them more money as a tax rebate than with residuals or marketing costs.

  Even if they don’t out right cancel it, we end up subsidising bombs like the $50m tax break wasted on Ant-Man and Wasp or $55m for Marvels that lost Disney $300m ish.

  Giving them more tax rebates is also dumb because you are competing any number of other places for who can be the cheapest to work at with the largest tax breaks, its not a sustainable marketplace. Its much like the countries who offer Nike incentives to come build a factory there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I avoid enshitification of my keyboard and mouse⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If it runs QMK I would port to vial over via any day of the week, cannot stand via. Granted I need to run the app when I want to adjust the key map (and only then), but it removes the need for WebHID or any similar problems. I have been able to replace my custom mapping and macros then compiling my own custom QMK firmware and uploading it to the keyboard workflow with live editing of the map and macros.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Electric Boat Costs 40–50€ to Cross Baltic Sea, vs 750€ Refueling Gas Boat⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Big part of this would be that its a foiling boat and that massively reduces drag from the water. Keeping weight and drag down are the secret to improving efficiency for EVs be they boats or cars. Any decent marina its easy to get multiple 22kw shore supply as well, it can be expensive and metered but you aren’t going to be waiting that long to recharge your boat.

  Electric makes the most sense on sail boats as they already have a green source of energy, and thanks to hydro they can convert some of that motion generated by the wind into charge for the batteries. Couple with solar and you start to look at a decent amount of energy generation.

  Sail boats also tend to have far less powerful ICE than your average motor yacht, so you need less powerful EV motors to achieve the same speed, and in the right conditions you only really need the motor getting in and out of the harbor so your battery bank is smaller and lighter. Plus you could make the batteries do double duty as the house batteries as well.

  The trick will be to get the super rich out of their shitty super yachts that burn a couple of thousand dollars of fuel per hour, they could already have sail boats but choose not to for the increased living space that they can get out of the same length of boat due to being able to build much higher due to no masts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk’s Tesla is promising to sell a humanoid robot. It could be the first of many.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A horse, that he wanted to offload anyway as he had a surplus of them from the ranches he purchased to cosplay as a rancher

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rachel Reeves paves way for cuts and tax rises to fill shortfall left by Tories⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I like the economist drawing the conclusion that its the same size hole as the national insurance cuts, almost like the Tories willfully set everything on fire on their way out of the door.

  Massively dumb of Labour to commit to not raising general taxation when it was evident that the Tories likely hadn’t funded the national insurance cuts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EU accuses Microsoft of antitrust violations for bundling Teams with O365⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They used it to give away Teams to existing customers then force through price rises later by adding functionality behind additional licenses. They also leveraged Teams to sell a significant amount of conference room equipment that was running Skype Teams. Its likely Microsoft will start to use the embedded Teams usage to push up prices of their core M365 licenses, E3 and E5.

  Its also heavily tied into Entra, Exchange, and SharePoint Online as its really three raccoons in a trench coat so its hard to fully use Teams without using those products, which must also be licensed, usually via a E3 or E5.

  The timing of it being coincidentally when COVID hit meant everyone wanted a chat and meeting product, so good fortune paid a part as well. Also a lot of organizations wanted off Skype right around this period, so really fortunate timing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK Retailer GAME To End All In-Store Video Game Sales⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty sure he pays cash or close to it rather than a traditional leveraged buy out. He normally only buys struggling or collapsed brands he can get cheap like Wiggle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK Retailer GAME To End All In-Store Video Game Sales⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ashley wants two main things out of his purchases, the brand name to slap on a web store with any head start it can give into running a business in that sector, and the retail space. Any decent retail space he wants to flip into retail property while stripping any fixtures and fittings of any value, anything else will be gone or rebooted into the lowest common denominator for that area.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK state pension age will soon need to rise to 71, say experts⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This wouldn’t be quite as bad if they didn’t keep pegging when you can take your private pension off the state pension retirement age, this would up it from 57 to 61 assuming they keep the same difference, but lock stepping private pensions with state pensions is a dick move designed to trap people working.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Penny Mordaunt says Boris Johnson's Covid WhatsApp messages went missing⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It isn’t perfect by a long way but they are already licensed for Teams. Teams with the right settings can prevent named users such as MPs from deleting or editing any messages and messages are stored centrally. It can properly backup chats to a secure archive as well.

  Obviously they can then get a tame techy with the right permissions to Teams and Purview to remove the messages but that’s going to apply to any system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trains were designed to break down after third-party repairs, hackers find⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And again, I don’t see that it applies at all to what is a parts tracking system, its not a maintenance plan, a direct safety system, operational guidelines for engineers or anything else you are falsely trying to make it.

  You keep describing the maintenance schedule, which is again, irrelevant to tracking the history of parts. Age of the system is also irrelevant to the problem here, a system outside or inside its operational life span can still have shitty black market parts fitted to it making it more unsafe than using the correct part.

  The airline industry in particular has been hit with a number of planes being fitted with bogus parts, this is despite all of the things you talk about, they have not worked for tracking parts and proving their provenance. Hence, a more robust system is needed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trains were designed to break down after third-party repairs, hackers find⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I am intentionally not accounting for it, as its irrelevant to an end to end parts tracking system.

  Your difference is only really relevant to the standards that the part is made, the safety systems the vehicle needs to have including redundancy, and the frequency and depth of the maintenance schedule.

  Both need to be able to prove that shoddy third party parts haven’t been fitted, that the parts have been replaced on schedule, even if the quality of the parts and the frequency of replacement is completely different.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trains were designed to break down after third-party repairs, hackers find⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  While parts don’t need to be made to the same standard nor do you need the same depth of safety components, I completely disagree that we should not be applying the same hygiene to part province and maintenance schedules. Obviously this should apply to track side components such as signalling, the track etc. as well, just like it should for the parts of an airport that a plane will interact with.

  Avoiding utter maintenance shit shows like the train crash in India that killed 300 people seem just as attractive to fix as they do with planes. Or the toxic spills that America has had that may not have killed as many people but are still expensive and hugely disrupting.

  Part of getting maintenance schedules followed properly and using quality parts is right to repair, part availability, and being able to prove part provenance and quality. A method to audit a part is essential for this, if we do whats needed by allowing 3rd parties to make parts to original spec for a reasonable cost, like we should to lower cost. Lower cost, more chance companies will avoid cutting corners, particularly if there is a proper audit trail for the part and you can actually prove that it is the *part *as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trains were designed to break down after third-party repairs, hackers find⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The article is about right to repair, third party parts, and systems designed to block both of them, which I applied to an existing problem that applies to planes for certain and almost certainly other forms of public transport. Even a shit idea can be repurposed to improving the common good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trains were designed to break down after third-party repairs, hackers find⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Agree with you about the level of standards, there needs to be some for train and bus parts but not to aircraft standards.

  I also agree any part manufacturer to be audited to which level they are working at and prove a chain of custody for that part. They grey and black markets need to be squeezed out as much as possible, obviously you have to give the end customer, airlines, rolling stock owners, etc. a cost incentive with right to repair to honor the system. As any system can be hacked or broken with enough of a cash incentive.

  I think the OEM having to license, at a reasonable cost, the exact spec and design for a part to third parties is an important part of any right to repair. You cannot self repair if you cannot get replacement parts for a reasonable cost.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trains were designed to break down after third-party repairs, hackers find⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Its not hypothetical, its a widespread issue for aircraft: independent.co.uk/…/airline-scandal-fake-parts-sc…

  and did you even read what I wrote?

  Dont get me wrong, I want a full right to repair enshrined in law and using a system like this just to prevent it is clearly wrong,

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trains were designed to break down after third-party repairs, hackers find⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  With the fake parts scandal for airplanes I wonder if this should be mandatory for parts that impact public safety for public transport like trains, buses, planes and so on.

  Dont get me wrong, I want a full right to repair enshrined in law and using a system like this just to prevent it is clearly wrong, but if it could be adapted to allow for critical parts to be made under license by third parties and helped prevent fake parts then may be a small amount of good can come from this shitty practice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There is a significant scalp market for the limited release Porsche and other premium cars in the UK. Its not uncommon to double your money on some cars just for sitting in the queue for the car for 12 months or so from using a small deposit of say £5k.

  Hard part is getting on the list to buy one, you need to be in good standing with the dealer from purchasing a lot of cars, which most scalpers are. You can then sell the place on the waiting list, or finance the car, run it for a short period if you want, then sell it for a big profit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EV battery swaps will be tested with the Fiat 500e in 2024⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Its also a terrible way of reducing charging time for anything that doesn’t have an enormous battery like an electric Lorry/Semi. Even then its like 30 minutes for 70% charge for the Tesla Semi, which is roughly the same as a mandated break anyway for the driver.

  What is more useful is making sure all EV batteries are easily swappable by third parties as this will massively extend the lifespan of EVs if you do not need to go back to the main dealer for a much marked up battery replacement when the cars battery stops holding a useful amount of charge past the 10 year mark.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don’t EVs have standard diagnostic ports—and when will that change? | OBD-II was implemented to monitor emissions, but EVs don't have tailpipes.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes I am aware of that, however the current way that is being looked at addressing the problem is moving the cabling to further within the car, which is just pathetic, like thieves wont just adapt to that.

  Encryption really isnt as big a performance impact if it is done correctly, sure it is not cost neutral but ask Range Rover how much reputational damage they had with their piss poor security. They are still having 1 in a 300 brand new defenders stolen after adding what is pretty a traditional immobiliser and tracker.

  As an example: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/…/012071

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don’t EVs have standard diagnostic ports—and when will that change? | OBD-II was implemented to monitor emissions, but EVs don't have tailpipes.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The existing standards OBD-II and CAN Bus just aren’t fit for purpose for ICE cars let alone EVs. Too many keyless cars get hacked by the thief hacking into either system and overriding the lack of a key, even if it means cutting a hole in the boot lid to expose the CAN Bus connection as with some Range Rovers.

  Its become a significant problem for a lot of cars. It used to be that they would break into your house to steal your key, then steal the car but now they do not need to do that. It can be done in a couple of minutes on some cars that do not properly protect the CAN Bus cable.

  What we really need is a proper public/private key pair for the cars so that all comms is only authorised via the physical key fob. This needs to be touch authorised to prevent snoop attacks. Sticking it on the key would then mean right to repair is not blocked, if the main dealer has it then its a big blocker for right to repair.