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Comment Re: Twitter too (Score 1) 29

in the uk you can have a free sim card delivered to you from most providers - you're expected to top it up with money but you don't have to. you can receive a text on the sim, validate the code on the website, and then bin the sim. wasteful, but it'll get you back into your account without twitter having any useful information. here is an example link https://www.three.co.uk/Suppor...

Comment Paying to use instead of to own... (Score 1) 241

In the UK it's very common to rent a car using a weird loan called a PFI. You pay a deposit, and then a monthly amount to the car dealer, maybe £200. After 4 years you must give the car back(it's not owned by you at any point); 90% of people immediately take out a new PFI, are given a new vehicle, and continue paying the £200 a month. 200 divided by 31(days a month) divided by 24(hours a day) = approx £0.27; A lot of people in the UK are paying 27p per hour to never own their car, whether they are actually driving it at the time or not.

The huge benefit to the dealer happens because if you paid off your car loan and owned your car after 4 years, and it had been reliable, you might keep it a few more years without buying a new one, and without having to pay a car loan amount every month. With PFI that's not an option.

Stuff like this is why Volkswagen reckon they can introduce a fee for hourly self-drive.

Comment it's not a practical option. (Score 3, Informative) 77

You have to transport the alkaline industrial waste to where the carbon dioxide is, or the other way around. Lorries, trains, so extra carbon dioxide is used to bring the ingredients together. An industrial plant must be built where the waste and CO2 are combined, using concrete, creating more pollution. So finally you have the CO2 trapped in a mineral rock form, which must be taken away and buried, again more transport and waste.
So the idea is lovely, but it's not practical in real life except in a few edge cases. Sorry!

Comment Re:herd immunity may not be possible (Score 1) 389

This is dead right! No country actually has a viable strategy. The chances of a successfully tested vaccine being developed and mass-produced in time are slim, and if a promising candidate is released early it may not have been fully safety checked. Because covid's death rate is less than 1% if a vaccine caused harm in that many patients it could easily be statistically missed in a rush. Without a vaccine the policy is ...... hide, until we have one. That could be many years! difficult, and i'm really hoping I'm wrong :-(

Comment Re:How do we harvest it? (Score 1) 90

I did some "back of an envelope" calculations, using UK electricity prices. The amount of an energy in a bolt of average size would be worth about £50 if you could convert it all into electricity and put it into the national grid. That means, if I wanted to buy that electricity domestically; I generate power using solar cells and would get less than half that amount if I tried to sell it. so for 100 strikes you'd get £2500, I imagine you couldn't build a harvesting kit with a reasonable payback time for that amount :-( can anyone confirm my figures are in the right order of magnitude?

Comment Re:Why would you want any other way ? (Score 1) 403

Go to bank? That's a 40 mile round trip right there for me. Not a good start! I can post a cheque to my bank, but i must use special envelopes, and a special credit slip which must be correctly filled out. Then i have to pay for a stamp, and find a postbox (only a mile, yay). Finally, delay while the cheque gets to the bank, and more delay while it clears. No, thanks!

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