The butler informed me Kinder Eggs don’t make a nice pyramid, Lindt doesn’t stack and suggested I would offend her ladyship if I tried Heroes.

I have the staff practicing making a house of cards using After 8’s, the butler thinks its something those terrible colonialists would try but he sees no other option

One type of sweet!

Candy is the generic American word for sweets. American’s think chocolate should include stale milk and use Fructose! (cancer causing, obesity driving) Fructose in everything.

One could easily argue American candy has nothing in common with UK sweets (have you tried an American Kit Kat?).

Its like serving a German a Richmonds sausage, they’ll get confused.

Using real world applications is changing the problem (what are you trying to solve).

My issue is teaching how you solve the problem.

As an example the indian method to teach multiplication is to draw lines equal to the first number, then perpendicular lines equal to the second and then count the points they bisect (e.g. draw 3 horizontal and 3 vertical lines and they cross 9 times).

Lastly I coach people in Agile (its a way of delivering stuff). An Agile team is brought together because a Product Owner has a problem and a vision on how to solve it.

The biggest factor in motivating a team and getting high performance is the product owners passion for their vision. You can have the most interesting problem in the world, if the product owner doesn’t care neither does the team.

I suspect the same is true of teaching

Not really.

There are multiple ways to approach and conceptualise multiplication, division, simultaneous equations, binomial distribution, probability, etc…

I have met a few maths geniuses and we teach Maths the way they think and conceptualise Maths.

In my last job I was viewed as a superstar because I could take the algorithms the data scientists produced and explain them to non data scientists.

I didn’t change the underlying maths, I tailored what to explain and examples to use based on my audience. This tended to get people really excited at what the data scientists had done.

Its the same with teaching, people need to understand and conceptualise a problem in a way that makes sense to them.

The issue is we only teach one method for approaching Maths so if you don’t get it, tough.

In primary and secondary school I always struggled with Maths. During university I spent most of my energy reverse engineering the maths lessons so I could understand them.

Years later my sister was struggling with her Maths GCSE, I spent one evening explaining how I solve each type of problem. She went from a projected D to getting an A.

I was explaining this to an ex maths teacher who started asking how I approached things. Apparently I used the Indian method for one type of problem, the asian for anouther, etc…

The idea a student was struggling with one way of solving the problem and teaching them alternative methods never occurred because it was “outside the curriculum”.

These days I quite like Maths puzzles.

Python’s public API changes subtly, so minor changes in Python version can lead to massive changes in the version of dependencies you use.

A few years ago we developed a script to update Cassandra on Python 2.7.Y. Production environment used Python 2.7.X (it was 5 patch releases earlier).

This completely changed the cassandra library version. We had to go back 15 patch releases which annoying resulting in a breaking change in the Cassandra libraries API and wouldn’t work on the dev environments Python.

Python 3 hasn’t solved this, 2 years ago I was asked to look at a number of Machine Learning projects running in docker. Upgrading Python from 3.4 to 3.8 had a huge effect on dependencies and figuring out the right combination was a huge pain.

This is a solved problem in Java, Node.js has the same weakness but their changes to language spec are additive so old code runs on new releases (just not the inverse). Ruby has exactly the same issues as Python

Because the Tories have upset everyone internationally, so it isn’t really an option. If you’ve been paying attention the EU has been playing a bunch of jobsworth type games with the UK.

Notice how he will do this in 2025, when the current agreement is up for renewel rather than immediately.

You also have the fact rejoin isn’t winding the clock back to 2016, firstly we would loose all of our opt outs, things like the rebate, the euro, etc… I don’t think the reality would actually be popular.

Secondly the UK blocked a number of things like the EU Army (personally I think its a terrible idea, countries that don’t spend enough looking to combine to “save” money) so it isn’t the same EU.

Lastly see above mentioned jobsworth behaviour, I would not be surprised if the EU demanded the UK to complete all the paperwork of a new joiner and drag the process out as long as possible (it takes ~10 years for most countries).

Far better to put the UK on a stable footing and then ask if EU membership is something the UK still wants. It took the 13 years to get to this point, so its unlikely everything will be fixed during the next government. So why bring something like rejoining up?

Both the US and UK define a biscuit as a small unleavened cake.

For some reason US folks call all but one type of small unleavened cakes “coookies” which is a specific type of biscuit.

It would be like calling all beer “stout”.

Thats just national pride talking,

Personally I think Plymouth’s Pasties are superior to all other pasties (Ron Dewney for the win) and love them. But a pasty can only be so good and I accept people wouldn’t put it in a S tier for food.

Another example is Americans claiming Jack Daniels is the best whiskey.

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The issue is the state pension was raided in the 1980’s to allow for reduced taxes and so now an increasingly large chunk of the national budget goes on state pensions.

If you factor in the majority of the NHS budget goes on geriatric care or elder social care you end up with more than 50% of the annual budget is to support the elderly.

Its not sustainable.

I think the easiest approach would be to means test the state pension by using tax thresholds. If your household income (excluding state pension) exceeds the free tax threshold (£12,500) then you don’t qualify for a state pension.

Ideally we would increase minimum wage, the tax thresholds and state pension to align with the living wage foundation recommendations.

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From a business perspective, you need to assess the impact of the regulation on your profitabiity and then consider if investing business funds elsewhere would lead to greater profitability.

WhatsApp have a single product and have market dominance due to first mover advantage (e.g. everyone is on WhatsApp, so everyone uses WhatsApp). Due to the nature of the business pulling out doesn’t make sense unless they only have a limited development team and having them work on UK legal requirements prevents them working on EU requirements, however they are largely similar… (e.g. opportunity cost).

Many ‘BigTech’ products were developed by small teams, the biggest barrier for entering the market isn’t technology but user adoption (KBin, Mastodon, PeerTube & Lemmy demonstrate this, all were developed by 1-2 people in their spare time).

So a ‘BigTech’ company exiting would be giving up the market in that country and any profit and creating an opportunity for a new small company to grow and eventually compete with them. For example if Facebook pulled out, I’m guessing people would switch to NextDoor, if Twitter quit people would move to Mastodon, etc…)

The US Technology sector is filled with Libretarians who get upset at the idea of regulation. I’m not sure Shareholders/Venture Capitalists would react well to them making decisions for those reasons.

I think they mean Woolworths.

Fun story…

Plymouth’s Woolworths was the largest in the country with the largest revenue (and profit). For 5 years it had no regional manager because no one from head office wanted to trek that far. As a result it was completely ignored and not refitted or supported.

During that period head office made us all do an employee survey. One of the questions was “Do you think Woolworths will still be here in 5 years”. The store manager got shouted at because our store of 100 all said “no”.

After much consideration we were all made to redo the questionaire, this time without the question.

Just as I left a regional manager was appointed who dictated floor layout changes. Being months from finishing university I told him his changes defied how shoppers acted and would cost the store thousands. He told me I was just a shop worker and knew nothing.

A week later on daily revenue of £10k-£20k (Saturday was £100k) the store was down £50k for the week. Apparently he forced more changes and it got worse.

Everyone I talk to in retail has similar stories, all of it is terribly managed.

Politicians usually don’t know anything about the domains they are put in charge of.

Their role is to provide leadership and direction based on the views of the people they represent.

When dealing with domain specific decisions they should refer to subject matter experts to seek advice and understanding of the available options. The ministries/departments exist to provide that advice and support its implementation.

A ministers job is to use the advice provided by their ministry/department to select a path forward that aligns with the direction the minister has set.

A minister ignoring advice of the ministry/department tells the department the leader doesn’t respect or value it. This is really bad leadership.

It also means the minister isn’t operating from a position of strength or knowledge. This means your more likely to make poor decisions which move you away from your goal.

I am not saying that aren’t wider factors, but you expect the ministry/department to account for that as the minister should explain those.

The EU keeps attacking the UK through petty vindictive actions like this.

The EU spokesperson clearly knew using Las Malvinas would be perceived as support of Argentina’s claim to the island which would upset the UK.

He justified it as the UK isn’t a member any longer, so no one was there to object. However in Geopolitics the point of statements is to send a message to the world stage and they knew it would upset the UK.

Considering none of the Islanders want to to be Argentinian and “winning” would be subjugation and possibly genocide of its people. Someone really should point out to Germans and East European’s that in their zeal to punish the UK, their leaders have directly endorsed such actions

I supplied the costings for everything and £2k doesn’t change the realities that air source heat pumps are currently a rip off.

Air conditioning is significantly cheaper

I am currently getting quotes for that, the point of my post was to point out the cost of an air source heat pump is greater than switching your entire house to air conditioning.

We use radiators because every house had a gas line for heating, boiling water and cooking. Radiators were more efficient than gas fires.

Most residential gas boilers are 20-35kwh, air source heat pumps (£4k-£5k) are linked to compression cylinders which provided 11kwh of heating and cost of £9k each, with the need for a water tank, etc… and then installation cost.

Putting air conditioning in still requires the heat pump with a unit (£500-£1k) for each room, plus installation costs.

If you take a 3 bed room house, you are looking at ~£15k for an air source heat pump vs £9k to put air conditioning into every room (it gets worse for air sourced heat pumps the bigger the property).

Once you move to air conditioning for each room you don’t need radiators. This means your hot water supply is dishwashers, washing machines, taps, baths and showers.

Dishwashers and washing machines boil their own water (for efficiency).

Taps and showers have electric solutions. The price difference between the two is so great you could buy a hot tub to replace your bath.

Air source heat pumps don’t make sense

It isn’t surprising.

I tried to replace my gas boiler in 2020 (it failed), I reached out to 8 companies to get an estimate for a ground or air sourced heat pump. 5 didn’t pickup/return emails. 2 told me they don’t do residential.

The last qouted £21k plus installation costs, then told me if I had a gas boiler that would be cheaper to maintain/run.

I have just met someone to qoute for air conditioning, they told me you can use it for heating. The initial estimate is the same as a gas boiler.