Burbage

That's a very good, if very depressing, point. If I'm consoled at all it's that, if only for a moment, I managed to forget that our legislation is usually drafted by lobbyists.

I can only think of the Mobile Recycling Centre, a van that once appeared like magic in a random car-park at 10am on the fourth Wednesday of every month. But, now I do think of it, that doesn't seem to exist any more, presumably having died of the pandemic, shame, or the economic climate. However, the Law has now changed so that everywhere that sells electricals is required to take them back for recycling. In theory, that should apply to all electrical retailers (which includes the supermarkets any supermarket that sells kettles) regardless of whether they sold the things or not, so cheapskates shouldn't have to worry about being turfed out of Sainsbo's for carrying Morrison's lamps. Retailers being what they are, however, it's not quite as simple as that, as Sainbury's passive-aggressive green-washing page sets out. In some ways, that's an accurate reflection of the legislation, but in other ways it's not, and those of a curious turn of mind and/or aren't very easily bored, can compare and contrast at their leisure: https://help.sainsburys.co.uk/help/terms-and-conditions/phc-recycling https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/3113/part/5/made The key term in 42(1) of The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Regulations 2013 is "very small WEEE". That, though Sainsbo's has chosen not to tell us, means "items of waste electrical and electronic equipment that are less than 25cm on their longest side". * Which for those still using Imperial, includes most lightbulbs. So, as far as I can tell (and I am neither a lawyer, retailer or government scribe), that means any large Sainsbury's (or Tesco, Asda, Lidl, Morrisons, Aldi or anywhere else that's got more than 400 square meters and sells lightbulbs) is obliged to take them in for recycling. And that seems to hold whether or not you buy replacements there, or can provide proof of purchase of same. That doesn't mean you won't have to argue the toss at the Customer Service Desk, but if you believe the planet's worth more than the temporary dismay of a sub-assistant under-manager, then you won't be wasting your time. * See under "distributor obligations" at https://www.gov.uk/guidance/regulations-waste-electrical-and-electronic-equipment

This is right. Though, of course, Royal Mail isn't Royal Mail any more. It's now International Distributions Systems (IDS), which is a holding company. One part of which just happens to be Royal Mail. And it's Royal Mail that's subject (unlike the more profitable parcels business) to the Universal Service Obligation. This "restructuring" follows a time-honoured tradition that's been in place since ever limited liability was a thing. The key is that a parent company is not liable for the liabilities of its subsidiaries. So the trick in any "restructuring" is to take the toxic stuff (all the bits that are unprofitable, or are heavily regulated), and put them in one subsidiary, and put all the nice profitable bits in another. In the case of the bank crisis, that was done to separate toxic loans from lovely long-term mortgages. In the case of IDS, it might be to separate the business of taking postcards to Auchtermuchty from the business of hauling fancy dogfood round Canary Wharf. Once that's done, then the toxic side can simply be shuttered, and all its debts and obligations disappear. The parent company might have to hand it to administrators who can (very rarely, and only if there's recent evidence of egregious behaviour) claw back a little money from parent-company shareholders, but if it can be argued it collapsed because the profits weren't there to be made (the Universal Service Obligation is a great help there), then they can't. So IDS's job may have been a tricky one - it would take a lot of tedious juggling to invisibly separate the two sides of Royal Mail. Splitting accounts, assets, payrolls etc., and stripping the property assets, without affecting the appearance of business-as-usual, can't be easy. So it would be hardly surprising if side-issues, such as industrial relations or delivering post, were forced to take a back seat. But if that's what they've done, then can then trickle along to Parliament and ask for the Universal Service Obligation to effectively disappear, on threat of shuttering Royal Mail. Parliament will then have to decide what to do. It might, indeed, do away with the whole idea of post, as we know it and, as in some parts of the world, decide it's sufficient to have a community mailbox within a few miles of any address and deliver whenever it's "practicable" (which might be an improvement on the nothing we've got now). Or it mightn't wait for Royal Mail to shutter itself, and renationalise it, instead. Or as is more customary these days, hand it to an offshore concern along with a juicy sweetener (see much of the "British" steel/car/battery industries and, in all likelihood, Thames Water again), and let some other government sort it all out. But, either way, the institutional shareholders (less than 20% are private investors), will get to keep a nice money-making business, and all the dividends they've pocketed along the way, as well as at least two parcels of mine.

I think they're still taking "soft plastics" - e.g. the bags apples and porridge come in. They tend to hide the bins a bit, but they're usually near one of the exits, somewhere behind the checkouts (it's the same at the Catford Tesco's, though I'd rather not say how I know that). However, it's true that they don't do the general recycling now (paper, tins, bottles etc.) and the bunkers that once lurked at the end of the car park have vanished without trace, stains aside. There are doubtless commercial reasons for that, possibly including the drop in volume (and thus value) of the stuff collected, as most households now have general recycling collected from home, which wasn't the case when they started. And so it's probably just easier to tick their responsibility box by writing a cheque to some rubbish-offsetting scheme (as they do with electricals) than to clutter the car-park and manage a large, multi-site contract with a rubbish contractor whose margins are being squeezed. I can think of a few other reasons, too, but the laws of libel favour only those who can afford to have them written. This isn't just a Sainsbury's thing - most non-council sites that used to take recycling seem to have stopped and even the shade of the mobile recycling van, a multi-borough investment that was once rumoured to haunt bits of Southwark on damp Wednesdays in Martober, has trundled even out of folklore. Still, some traditions manage to persist, and I gather many in this pointy end of the borough continue to smuggle their garbage to Lambeth or Lewisham, where the facilities are sometimes more welcoming, and I couldn't think of better places for it. But, for the moment, the less adventurous of us will just have to bear the ignominy of having to waddle to the streetside once a week rather than presuming on a drive-by dump at the grocer's.

That only works if sqw103 has proof of the posting which, as they're the recipient, seems unlikely. And also proof that it arrived "three or more working days after the due date" (unless they happen to be busy, when it's four working days). Which is not particularly easy. The easiest way to get proof of any of this is if the sender gets a "proof of posting" slip from a Post Office when they post it. That will give a date and a time, to which you have to add a day. That's because Royal Mail cunningly deems the "last collection" time on any day to be 7am, safely before Post Offices are open. So the first day becomes the next day and, for first class post, the third day becomes the "due date" as that counts as the next day. Unless, as I said, it's a busy time of year. Then we need to add to the third day the three working days after the due date. Perhaps an example would help: Say someone posts something to you first thing on a Monday. That means it's posted on a Tuesday, and the due date is a Wednesday. Three working days after that is Sunday, which doesn't count, meaning that if it hasn't arrived by the following Monday, you can see if you feel lucky and make a complaint. So now we've got a "next day" service, for which compensation can be had if it arrives a week later, unless they can find an excuse (bank holidays, weather, busy times of year). But only if you can persuade the sender to retrospectively get a proof of posting, send that proof to you and indisputably prove that the postie didn't shovel it through your flap beforehand. If you can get all that together, and navigate their online claims procedure (a breed of "go away machine" that customers of utility firms and GP surgeries will be familiar with) within three months then you might, after a suitable length of time, receive a "book of first class stamps" for your trouble, safe in the knowledge that it'll have cost them a lot less than the fiver it might have cost you. The only consolation is that, useless and futile than it might all seem, it's been smiled on by the Regulator, an actual Government Agency that is, at the very least, the best we can possibly hope for.

I've just had another email telling me that services are being disrupted, which means I've had more emails in the last three weeks than I've had deliveries. They don't say why, of course, but that presumably means it's mismanagement. I've been wondering what to do about all this, given that our councillors and MPs haven't made a dent in Royal Mail's nonchalance, and nor has Ofcom or the government, even though the Royal Mail's CEO seems to have lied to them all and, by extension, to me. I take that very personally, and so cheerfully agreed with the Commons' BEIS committee's inquiry report, which came out in March, when it stated what all of us will already know: "We believe that Royal Mail has systemically failed to deliver against parts of its Universal Service Obligation. We recognise the challenges of both the pandemic and ongoing industrial action, but the evidence we have suggests this systemic failing has been taking place before, between and during these events". They also noted that Royal Mail's board had excluded regulatory requirements from consideration when it came to remunerating managers. Which makes sense from their point of view, as that would reward the wrong sort of activity. There's plenty of money to be had from selling postage, but delivering post is purely a cost and if it's possible to do the one without the other (which it very clearly is), there are bonuses to be made. Still, Parliament isn't in the business of doing things, so it handed its warm words to Ofcom, with a recommendation that they think seriously about considering setting up some sort of inquiry, to see if there was any good reason why an obligation shouldn't be an obligation, and whether Ofcom should be the people not to do anything about it. Their published report also found its way to Government, which responded with a couple of letters along the lines of "if this happened, we might be shocked". Ofcom, which is sort-of part of government and likes to keep cosy, added its ha'pennyworth to the response, announcing two months later that Royal Mail had confessed to failing to meet its obligations and that, as a result, Ofcom had started an immediate investigation into "whether there are reasonable grounds for believing that Royal Mail has failed to comply with its obligations". They think that might take them till Christmas. So that's where we are. The regulator's doing nothing and there's no prospect of Parliament doing anything either. While the Royal Mail board, though it's allowed its chief exec to step down at a time that's yet to be specified, hasn't done anything, too. So my advice would be this: Nail shut your letterbox, let out the dogs, learn to use e-mail, walk to the shops, don't buy stamps, give up your birthday, go buddhist for Christmas and never take in anything for the neighbours. Don't fall for the "Postman Pat" propaganda, but give the scuttling minions of a rapacious bunch of asset-stripping chisellers all the respect they deserve, and never forget that even if they haven't personally taken our money, vanished our property, cost us fines and risked our health, they happily take their orders from those who have.

They've done this for a lot of postboxes, if not most of them, already. And, as you suggest, it's a smallprint way of delivering a second-class service at first-class prices, while saving Ofcom the trouble of having to hand Royal Mail its customary annual fine and, entirely coincidentally, boosting sales of the highly profitable premium services that keep its griftily indolent managers in yachts and bacon. However, it might have broader implications. For example, the Ministry of Justice, the Court of Appeal and, by extension other courts, currently harbour the quaint 20th-Century belief that: "The court will assume a document was served.. where it was posted by first class post or equivalent, the second working day after it was posted." Or, to cite one of the examples from Practice Direction 6A of the Civil Procedure Rules: "Where the document is posted (by first class post) on a bank holiday Monday, the day of deemed service is the following Wednesday (a business day)." Which means that, should anyone post anything that matters by first-class post, the courts will presume that it arrived on the second working day after it was posted, regardless of whether it did or not, and it may be up to you to prove that it didn't, with all the no evidence you've got.

The drawings that were consulted on are at: https://consultations.southwark.gov.uk/environment-leisure/wood-vale/ The consultation summary report, and a sort-of timetable, are at: https://www.southwark.gov.uk/transport-and-roads/improving-our-streets/live-projects/street-improvements/wood-vale-improvements

Jersey Tiger Moth. As the name implies, they live in Jersey but have been around in SE London for the last 30 years or so, seemingly growing in numbers each year.

Rockets Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > But 22,500 drivers have not missed a two 20mph > signs in a 6 week period. You have to admit that > those numbers suggest that something isn't > working. The RAC's Report on Motoring 2020, contains this: "On roads with a 20mph limit, compliance is also improving with nearly four in 10 (39%) admitting to speeding, down from 44% last year" and "Meanwhile, 11% of limit-breakers have driven above 40mph in a 30mph zone while 10% have exceeded 30mph in a 20mph zone. In the case of the latter, 45% of those who speed at least occasionally say this is because they believe the limit is ?inappropriate? for the area or stretch of road in question." I think that tells us exactly what's not working.

TfL 'tentatively' aspires to commence work on the Lordship Lane/Dulwich Common junction (aka The Grove Tavern junction) in 2020. Though, given the government's just getting started on another round of austerity and spectacularly raised the bar in terms of dismissable deaths, I strongly doubt they're doing much more than waiting for the money to run out. It is, after all, a fairly expensive project as it doesn't just involve nailing a button to a lamp-post but building four separate staggered walkways which are necessary, I gather, if pedestrians aren't to get the impression that their time is as valuable as anyone else's. We have, after all, been here before, with an approved, and fully-funded, improvement project all signed and sealed and teetering on the brink of actuality until it all magically evaporated when our dear friends and neighbours chose to elect Johnson as our mayor. A surprising number of people, it seems, would prefer children not to access nature until they've had a good chance of being killed or injured first and, perhaps unsurprisingly, their arguments seem to hold weight in all the best corridors of power.

Artclub Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Now, I'm just wondering, if you don't have some > immunity after it, how will a vaccine work? > Hopefully someone with proper knowledge can > explain it to me. The way a vaccine works is to give your immune system something 'like' the virus - an inactivated version, perhaps, or just some fragments of the molecules (often 'spike' proteins) on its surface - so that it learns how to produce antibodies to it. Then, later, if you meet the real thing, the immune system will be ready to respond to it more quickly. The antibodies, incidentally, work by sticking to the surface of the virus - as they stick, they slightly change their shape, making their sticky-out ends look very tempting to passing immune cells who eat them all up, and the virus along with them. It normally takes around five days for your immune system to start producing specific antibodies. Before that, it will try to fight the infection using more general tools, like lots of tiny sledgehammers to crack lots of tiny nuts. Those tools tend to provoke symptoms, such as inflammation and fever, and can kick off unhelpful chain reactions that can be dangerous. In many ways, serious covid cases are us much to do with that as to the virus itself. Our immune systems differ a lot, not only in how they react, but what they react to. If a vaccine can prepare our immune system for the virus then, hopefully, they'll all behave in the same way, by producing antibodies more quickly, and so avoid the symptoms by skipping the sledgehammer phase. However, not all vaccines work, or work for long. That can be because viruses change (or mutate). The good news is that viruses that attack humans can only change in some respects. They can't change the bits of themselves that latch onto human cells by very much, or they simply won't be able to latch on. Another bit of good news is that coronaviruses are "RNA viruses", meaning they don't have any error-correction mechanisms. That means that, even though they mutate rapidly, each mutation is a game of russian roulette. Measles is also an RNA virus, and the vaccine for that has worked for decades. The bad news is that 'flu viruses are also RNA viruses. But 'flu is a bit different. One major difference is that it can merrily live, and jump between, a whole bunch of different hosts, such as humans, pigs and birds. That gives it many more chances, and is one reason why there a good few strains exist. At the moment, we don't know if the covid virus is more like 'flu or measles in that respect. It might have evolved in bats (which seem to tolerate viruses well), jumped to pangolins and then to humans. Or it might have evolved in a human exposed to both bats and pangolins. At the moment, we don't know. But because pangolins are fairly rare, and most people don't spend much time with bats, covid is more likely to behave like measles than 'flu, so a vaccine should work well. So a vaccine should work, in theory. In practice, it's more complicated. To make a vaccine, we need to choose the right bit of the virus to tease the immune system with. That's usually fairly easy. You just take one of the 'spike' proteins on the virus' surface that latches onto human cells. There's often more than one of those, though, and some are very similar to proteins you have in your body already, so that needs to be carefully chosen, or it mightn't work. And then we have to find ways to make it. There are a few ways to do that - but mostly it's done by forcing e.g. hen's eggs or bacteria to produce that protein, either by infecting it with a 'harmless' version of the virus or genetically engineering it. The problem with that, though, is that mutations can happen there, too, so what you put into production isn't always exactly what you get out. And there, once the protein has been produced, you need a way to purify and store it in a way that doesn't change it. Those problems are solvable, but they're one of the reasons why trials need to be done, and why sometimes trials fail. In this case, we have an advantage, in that lots of groups are working on lots of different potential vaccines, but it does mean delays are likely and 'promising' solutions don't always work out. So that's vaccines. But it doesn't answer your question of why infection doesn't necessarily make people immune. Mostly, we don't know. But natural immune systems won't necessarily always choose the same bit of the virus to recognise as vaccine-producers will, and some bits will be more changeable than others. If so, then immunity gained by infection mightn't last as long as immunity gained by vaccination, or work at all against just a slightly different version. I hope that helps. I can't guarantee it's wholly correct, or that I've not forgotten something vital, but given there's nothing in it than most of us can do anything about, it won't make much difference. Corrections would, nevertheless, be very welcome.

FlatStanley Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > it?s better if we all > just call these people out immediately rather than > tarring every jogger with the same brush. I too > should grow some balls and call them out rather > than internally curse their ignorance Or carry a full-size umbrella. They're about a metre long and so, held at arm's length, will helpfully indicate the appropriate distance to any wheezing narcissist that happens to be approaching.

If you can't find yeast, there are two workable alternatives. The first, low-rent, option involves bicarbonate of soda and some sort of acid (lemon juice is best, but if vinegar is all you've got, it'll do the job). The second option is to cultivate a sourdough starter. It'll take a few days but, once you've done it, you'll be able to give it a name, call yourself an artisan and drone on about it for a decade. Just follow these links for instructions: https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2019/11/04/soda-bread-recipe-2/ https://boroughmarket.org.uk/recipes/sourdough-starter

keano77 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Old arguments I know but valid points Remainers > cannot get around. They're old arguments, but they're not valid. For reasons amply covered elsewhere, and touched on in my first. In short, the money we 'send' to the EU is our contribution to collective projects, from the grubby bureaucracy of labelling regulations and toy safety standards, to global issues such as fishery management, climate change adaptation and the treatment of refugees. Those last, incidentally, are governed not by the EU but by UN agreements that require us to cooperate, politically, practically and financially, with our neighbours. The EU's provision of development aid to deprived UK regions happens mainly because the UK distributes funds unfairly in the first place. UK governments, since the 1970s, have shown no aptitude to do a better job (because their electoral incentives are distorted by first-past-the-post). A little electoral reform, and a lot more devolution, would balance things up very nicely. But that's for us to do. It's not the EU's fault that we keep voting for grasping shysters who keep selling the future for votes.