Tyke02

That hot take didn't really age well, did it. London Mayor says yesterday was the London Fire Brigade's busiest day since WWII, with 42 homes destroyed. 1600 callouts as opposed to 150 on a normal day. South Yorkshire Fire Brigade needing assistance from other counties to deal with their workload. East Coast main line closed today due to fire damage at Sandy and Peterborough. Obviously not a real emergency at all.

Apparently the heat caused damage to the overhead wires - the rubber has stretched causing them to droop.

Perhaps you aren't aware that "major incident" has a specific meaning within the emergency services: "A major incident can be defined as any emergency that requires the implementation of special arrangements by one or more of the Emergency Services, the NHS or local Authority for: The initial treatment, rescue and transport of a large number of casualties. The involvement, either directly or indirectly, of large numbers of people. The handling of a large number of enquires likely to be generated, both from the public and the news media, usually to the Police. The need for large scale combined resources of the emergency services. The mobilisation and organisation of the emergency services and supporting organisations, e.g. local authority, to cater for the threat of death, serious injury or homelessness to a large number of people. Overall coordination of major incidents, other than those that are purely fire related, will usually be the responsibility of the Police."

I assume one of the programmes you said you recorded was "This is going to hurt". Having checked on IMDB there are 127 actors credited as appearing in the series. I can remember two of the characters being portrayed as gay. That's not too far from a representative 3% is it?

Truss was elected in 2010 - of the many "outsiders" about whom recommendations to constituencies were made centrally in that election. She probably wouldn't have been in a position to seek the leadership if she hadn't had that helping hand of positive discrimination aimed at bring in MPs who would be more attractive to the electorate than the reactionary rump of the party.

Was that "This is going to hurt"? If so the writer was asked why he had made the lead character gay. He replied that it was based on his own experiences, and he is gay.

Nothing to do with the flats above your shop then?

The impact analysis produced as part of the consultation process lays out the perceived financial costs and benefits of the changes to the smoke/CO regulations. You can read it here: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/domestic-smoke-and-carbon-monoxide-alarms/domestic-smoke-and-carbon-monoxide-alarms-proposals-to-extend-regulations#annex-b-analysis-of-impact

Your indignation is a little late, as private landlords have been obliged to fit smoke and CO alarms since 2015. These revised regulations merely make some changes to what was already required.

By the same logic as you used above, you can't KNOW how many would have died without attempts to control covid. Sure, you can do a calculation about the fatality rate and the population size, but the fatality rate was for people with access to required healthcare. That was not a given if it was just allowed to (or encouraged to) spread and the healthcare system was overwhelmed.

Your chart only runs to mid-February, before the Ukraine war, and shows prices having risen by 20p a litre. From then until the middle of June, prices rose by 40p a litre. That means the effect of the war is much larger, doesn't it? During the pandemic prices also did not exceed those of 2012 and 2013 as they have now, and is only a little higher than 2008/9, so if you take a longer view the pandemic effect is within previous fluctuations.

Wouldn't mini Justin know what he's been doing in class? You could ask him, couldn't you? Wouldn't more parents taking breaks in term time reduce the demand for school holiday bookings, and hence reduce the price? A lot of teachers are parents themselves, so pinned to school holiday breaks themselves anyway.

As luck would have it a consultation was launched yesterday into extending a similar 5 year EICR regime into social housing (and also owner occupied flats in social housing blocks). There is information on the proposals and the justifying rationale here: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/electrical-safety-in-social-housing-consultation-and-call-for-evidence/consultation-and-call-for-evidence-on-electrical-safety-in-the-social-rented-sector#call-for-evidence-mandatory-checks-on-electrical-installations-for-leasehold-properties-within-social-housing-blocks-at-least-every-five-years Now's your chance to put forward your case and try to bring some decision makers round to your point of view. Let us know how you get on.

Let's also not forget that most drivers are represented by ASLEF, and it is the RMT whose member's roles attract lower wages than drivers who have announced this potential strike action. The drivers have no skin in this game at present.

Think of it not as a value on life, but the cost of preventing (well, delaying) a death. Uncomfortable though it may be, in the absence of an unlimited budget countries providing healthcare (and all the other things that prolong life) need to have some mechanism of deciding how much it is reasonable to spend out of taxation to do that. There is of course the option used by some other nations of letting people decide for themselves how much to spend on healthcare, at least those people who have the money to choose.

There's quite a bit of debate on this that you could read up on if you wished. An average value of prevented fatality as mentioned is not unreasonable if you can't predict the age of the person affected by a particular hazard. Let me know if you can come up with any stats to support this assumption. I drew a blank, but from fire service reporting came up with the information that fire seems to be seven times as likely in rented versus owned property, and electrical faults are in the top two causes of fire in rental properties, so it might be higher than you think. In the report on the consultation process there isn't a breakdown of how different interest groups voted on the various proposals, but looking at the numbers it's clear that some landlords/landlord groups supported it. Perhaps they were doing this as best practice anyway, and so for them it was a cost they were incurring anyway, so didn't see why their fellow landlords shouldn't.

"Some people" think all sorts of things! The principle of putting a value on a life is however well embedded in official thinking, or more precisely how much it is reasonable to spend to prevent one death: - The Treasury values one QALY at £60,000 - NICE assesses new treatments and usually rejects those that would cost more than £20-30k per QALY - "Value of a prevented fatality" is used in many Government departments and is currently £1.8 million. That's true, there's going to be a need for value judgements in some cases, and for your pandemic example there are other obvious difficulties due to the uncertainties inherent in a fast developing situation. That's not true of the EICRs that we were talking about though. Even in those subjects where non monetary costs and benefits need to be considered the CBA approach at least provides a framework for discussion that helps avoid people focusing only on, for example, health impacts to the exclusion of social or economic impacts (or vice versa).

There has indeed been a lot of regulation to reduce risk over the last 150 years, and I suspect that's one of the reasons for life expectancy more than doubling during that period. It's unreasonable to suggest that all regulation is bad as it has delivered a range of benefits from water free from infectious diseases to lower injury and death rates in workplaces and on the roads. There may be disproportionate impositions in amongst the worthwhile ones, but claiming the whole thing is spinning out of control isn't going to change anything. Regarding personal risk and responsibility I think we need to establish whether taking on a personal risk has potential implications for others - if it doesn't then fill yer boots! These implications could be either directly when a risk taker's speeding car runs over them, or indirectly because enough people's risk taking leads to concurrent casualties that they can't all get a good standard of healthcare.

I find it surprising that somebody so invested in their point of view can be so defeatist. The legislative process includes some checks and balances, for example before the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020 came in there was a consultation (that included individual landlords and landlord organisations) regarding the proposals before they were implemented. That sort of activity does give you the opportunity to have your say, if you are switched on enough to know what is going on. A narrative that everything is awful and it will inevitably get worse is unlikely to change anything, and tends to come across as a litany of complaints. How about taking a more positive approach, for example campaigning for a requirement for proposals for new regulations to be supported by cost benefit analysis? I suspect you would find much wider support for that.

Is it inaccurate? You won't be doing that very effectively if you confine your activities to posting on a forum without very large numbers of active members, especially when your perspective comes across as pessimistic and fatalistic, and you don't suggest what people should do about it if they agree with you. Did you, as I suggested, ask him for the paragraph number in the Regulations that states the requirement? If he can't cite that, then he doesn't know. I seem to recall that annual gas safety checks and boiler maintenance have been a requirement for rental property for twenty or twenty five years, but is still just voluntary good practice for owner occupiers. The creeping extension of such requirements to all properties that you fear seems to have been very slow in arriving there. Why are you so sure that such change will be more rapid for electrical systems?

I suggest that you read the Regulations referenced earlier in the thread which will provide an authoritative answer. It seems unwise to believe vague implications from an electrical firm who may have an interest in drumming up business. When did you last have an EICR on your flats, and what did the electrician tell you about the requirements then? If it bothers you, why not join or start a campaign to influence what happens, rather than whining about it on a forum?

This is all I can find: "Later in the show, Clare Balding issued an apology for if 'anyone took offence' to remarks made earlier in the show."

You seem to be characterising all sexual offences as a smack on the arse when they include other things up to and including rape. This makes your binary question not worthy of a response.

I did say "apparently". What are you disputing? Men not wanting to appear weak might be what leads to so many injuries. Who'd have thought it? I stated that I was talking about sexual assaults. That doesn't mean the others don't count, but that doesn't mean that sexual assaults are meaningless, or indeed equivalent. I wasn't talking about victimisation, I was quoting a government statistical publication. If you want to know what the ONS means by victimisation I believe there is a glossary and further information in the link provided. Given that the report you quoted and the one I quoted are from the same source, how do you justify accepting one on face value and seeking to rubbish the other?

I have witnessed more instances of male on male violence between apparently willing participants than I have attacks on innocent bystanders. No idea where you would get statistics on that though. What is readily available is the separate report on sexual offences from ONS which shows a very different picture of the risks for males and females: "The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) provides the best measure of victimisation and estimated that for the year ending March 2020 there were 773,000 adults aged 16 to 74 years who were victims of sexual assault (including attempts) in the last year, with almost four times as many female victims (618,000) as male victims (155,000)." https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/sexualoffencesinenglandandwalesoverview/march2020