Nick
@nick@shore.me.uk
179 following, 254 followers
Electric vehicle drivers are likely to be hit with a new “pay-per-mile” tax in the forthcoming budget, amounting to an extra £250 a year on average. The scheme, which would charge EV motorists 3p per mile on top of other road taxes, comes amid falling fuel duty revenue as more people switch from petrol to electric.
@kibcol1049 how will they know how many miles are people driving per year?
@Disputatore Good question. Who knows how they propose to do it. 🤔
Apparently its from estimates of individual drivers mileage (presumably obtained from MOT for older vehicles or maybe self-declaration similar to applying for insurance (the govt could get this data from insurance companies/MIB, or even from manufacturers for vehicles still in the dealer servicing network with active telemetry)
But this is only going to fuel the conspiracy theories of the paranoid, and could even stall the wider adoption of EVs (especially as the easy customers with at home charging have already been cherry picked and there seems to be little effort to make it easier for those with on street parking)
@vfrmedia @kibcol1049 @Disputatore Think it's a silly way to do it. Why not just have a vehicle tax rate like they do for other vehicles?
@UkeleleEric @kibcol1049 @Disputatore
Its *on top* of the £195 VED for normal vehicles, hence why its a daft idea which could well put folk off getting an EV - if you can't charge at home you are at the mercy of various public charger operators with higher levels of rent seeking and data harvesting and at present less reliability than just buying petrol/diesel, and at present there seem to be 0 attempts to improve this situation (which won't change if left to the market alone)
@kibcol1049 Surely a better idea for ICEs and EVs would be to charge road tax through fuel prices for ICEs and charging sessions for EVs and therefore abolish road tax altogether. The more you use the vehicle or the bigger/less efficient the vehicle, the more you pay.
@nick @kibcol1049 VAT on EV chargers as well as VAT on the electricity?
@ninkosan @nick @alexlomas Ah hold on - is this the one that needs either the compatible car or charger? If so, I have neither.
@ninkosan @nick @alexlomas ah yes ok ... "intelligent go" versus just "go".
@nick @ninkosan @alexlomas My problem is I want to use a Victron EV charger, which will be locally smartified. And with other Victron kit; Cerbo GX, Quattro 15K and several MPPTs. So I'm kind of going to be a victron shop. And that means none of the best pricing.
As you know, we got shot of our faulty gas boiler and replaced it with a heat pump. Anecdotally I do think the heatpump is slightly cheaper to run at the moment, than the gas boiler used to be, even on a "any time flat rate" tariff for electricity; in my case 21.89p per kWh and a 62.22p per day standing charge.
I was paying 5.69p per kWh and 27.86p a day for gas.
So this is vaguely impressive.
1/2
2/2
So now I only have electricity and my tariff is up for renewal. And holy wow the price has gone up.
Unit cost for electricity rises from 21.89p to 26.44p = 4.55p per unit. Ouch
Standing charge falls from 62.22 to 43.66p = 18.56p a day
Mysteriously I think had I still had gas, my gas unit price would have actually fallen too!
I'm not entirely blaming Octopus but we are told electricity pricing is based on gas pricing. So how is gas kWh pricing falling, and electricity kWh pricing rising?
Additional thought (3/2)
We have two EVs and a heat pump. And we also run stuff like a hot tub. As a consequence of this our annual usage is like 12,000 kWh of electricity. Rather a lot.
That's a bit of a guess based on former gas usage translated to electrical usage.
But because our usage kind of can be any time, I still don't think we're better to go on differing kWh by time tariffs UNTIL we get a storage battery.
Long term, storage battery + solar, and near zero bills. But just now, oof.
@bloor we don't do any load-shifting, but have a tariff that's cheap(ish) for a few hours early morning and mid afternoon - in the current weather, the biggest draw we have is for hot water, and that's scheduled for the cheap times and saves a fair bit (especially when it's a dull day!)
Depends on provider, but Good Energy make it very painless to shift tariffs on a whim, so it's easy to tinker...
@bloor Try an app like Octopus Watch or OctoAid - they can do tariff comparisons on your actual usage.
@alexlomas I am wondering if in practice it is probably safe to assume we use more energy at night, simply because it is generally colder at night. Same with hot tub heating. And therefore, could a 2 rate tariff help.
My issue is that all my numbers are kind of new-ish and not perhaps maximally representative due to our recent killing of gas.
I'll look into those apps though, thank you.
@bloor Agile tends to be spendy at this time of year at peak hours but there have been a lot of very low prices lately as well.
@alexlomas Once we have battery, I'll go onto the tariff that has a 6 hour window at like 8p a unit and just fully charge always at that price...
@nick @bloor @alexlomas we’re on tracker. No EV, ASHP, et al. Nonetheless, this has saved us more money than anything that we’ve actually spent money on! 🤔
@nick @alexlomas Is that Octopus? If so, they seem to have reduced that to 5 hours not 6 for new customers.
Rate is 8.5p per kWh I think
@bloor Can you time shift stuff like water heating and appliances ?
We did go battery and the works but the best single RoI on my spreadsheet once you factor in the costs and depreciation of equipment was actually simply doing shit between 00:30-05;30. The second was insulation and the battery itself was far behind (although of course it's kind of an enabler)
@bloor My experience of solar plus battery so far is that I’ve managed to about halve our electricity bill.
28Kw battery, 3Kw of south facing solar, 1.5Kw of north facing solar (yeah, but better than nothing). Annual usage in the first full year including about 600Kwh of car charging, 7500Kwh. We don’t have a heat pump for the house though, we have electric radiators and a forced air system with heat reclaim.
To zero it entirely would require more storage (l double to cover max winter use in a day) and a lot more solar (which will be the limiting factor). And there are days in a row where we get low - very low - solar so actually it’ll never be zero for us. Contemplating an extra 14Kwh of battery but not sure it’s really worth the investment at the moment.
@gulfie my outline plan at the moment involves 32 kWh of battery and getting up towards 20 kW of panels. I don’t plan to feed back into the grid, but I think I will get zero usage costs for at least three quarters of the year. Roughly roughly.
@bloor Maybe Octopus Cosy would be worth a punt?
Day rate
29.07p / kWh
Cosy rate (04:00 - 07:00, 13:00 - 16:00 & 22:00 - 00:00)
14.26p / kWh
Peak rate (16:00 - 19:00)
43.61p / kWh
Peak rate is painful, might be an issue for cooking.
@bloor it's extremely hard to tell given the ridiculously warm weather, but we feel to be comfortably breaking even.
Digging through our LPG receipts, it looks like we ate around 21MWh of gas annually so as long as we hit a COP of 4 or more, we're in profit I think?
To be honest though, the monetary value of *not* trying to get gas delivered in the depths of winter is almost incalculable.
Vital piece of investigative reporting from Sky. They've uncovered the X algorithm which feeds users extremist right wing material from the moment they join the site. It is a far-right radicalisation engine, by design. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...
Many have already taken advantage of our early bird pricing for the #MikroTik Professionals Conference but it may be prudent to buy your tickets before the price goes up at the weekend! 😉 We are also very interested in hearing from anyone who wishes to present a MikroTik related topic. https://mtpc.world/ #MTPC #Conference #Prague
MS is having DNS issues. So the Dutch railways are having issues. Critical national infrastructure should not be on cloud systems owned by foreign companies. This is resiliency 101.
@quixoticgeek
actually shouldn't be on Cloud at all.
A National railway can afford its own servers.
@raymaccarthy
Not so sure about that with the Dutch Railways.
@quixoticgeek
@reinouts @raymaccarthy NS should be able to afford it. Whether they choose to, that's a different question.
@quixoticgeek @reinouts @raymaccarthy they can definitely get it at a couple of national hosting companies for a reasonable and predictable price.
@wsslmn
Well I know for a fact that they are heavily invested in Azure. Whether they can afford to switch, if they would want to, is dubious: NS are making structural losses since COVID and have had to make tough choices.
@quixoticgeek @raymaccarthy
@reinouts @wsslmn @raymaccarthy NS shouldn't need to make a profit. The purpose of public transport is to transport the public. It's a choice by the sole shareholder of NS, the Dutch government, to operate this way.
@quixoticgeek
I couldn't agree more. Yet, the reality is that budgets are tight for NS.
@wsslmn @raymaccarthy
@reinouts @wsslmn @raymaccarthy artificially. They don't need to be.
@nick @quixoticgeek @reinouts @raymaccarthy people often underestimate the actual cost of cloud services until something starts to use a bunch of resources, or your setup is so complex that moving away becomes impossible.
@reinouts @raymaccarthy @quixoticgeek To be clear, running a server is, *relatively speaking* not that expensive. Especially when it's serving a relatively limited area. (It isn't as if they have to have their servers handling traffic across the world.) It can seem a bit prohibitive to us end users, but even for a struggling government a basic server setup isn't *that* big.
That said, anything as fundamental as a railway should be considered fundamental and be required to be self-sufficient.
@quixoticgeek in finance we have DORA legislation for digital resilience (you need to have a backup plan to stay running during such an event), but where are the same requirements for other infrastructure?!
@quixoticgeek so uh. As someone trying to do this for critical infrastructure: it actually probably should otherwise it will be down a lot more. At least in the current environment.
We should probably ask ourselves how to get out and still have the uptime, but it would need a far more honest look at our tech and how we fund it.
I cannot see that happening.
@Di4na as someone who's built a career out of building resilient computer systems. It can be done. But you need to have the knowledgeable staff to make it happen. And quite frankly. Those skills have atrophied across the industry.
@quixoticgeek i think they have not atrophied. We never had them that much. Because at no point in the past did we really handle that scale for so many different systems.
This is all new and we never built it.
And I have seen the results of the people telling me it can be done. Their uptime is not better, etc.
@Di4na the reality is that most organisations are not "that scale". So so so many companies massively over complicate everything.
@quixoticgeek
The Scottish Parliament has had to suspend business.
Literal democratic process is being affected.
@quixoticgeek my train is also delayed, wondered if it was the same issue for a second but it turned out to be a much more Devon reason of livestock on the line
@quixoticgeek The Microsoft sales person probably promised it would be but it was more profitable not to keep that promise because they'd never check.
@quixoticgeek I predict it will selectively list, authoritatively, all members of a disapproved class as "not citizens", who then get deported without due process.
New version! #MikroTik RouterOS 7.20.2 is available in the Stable channel https://mikrotik.com/download
Implemented more scopes to match other ActivityPub implementations (public, unlisted, followers-only and direct message) (contributed by byte).
New icons showing instance and actor failures.
Mastodon API: Added remote accounts follow metrics and statuses when viewing profiles (contributed by Stefano Marinelli), fixed post deletion.
Fixed outbox collection (contributed by byte).
New file FEDERATION.md (contributed by andypiper).
Updated Czech, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese translations (contributed by pmjv and daltux).
Fixed manpage typos (contributed by r-ricci).
If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.
And thanks to byte, @stefano@bsd.cafe, andypiper, pmjv, daltux, r-ricci and any others I may have missed for their contributions to this release as well!
I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' snac to 2.84 here:
https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/29810
1 out of 3 of GitHub's Continuous Integration checks passed, which is a good sign the other two will pass as well.
It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.
#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit
I just discovered how good MikroTik routers (all devices in general) are.
RouterOS 7 looks amazing and the web UI is clean, powerful, and fast. Can’t believe I wasted money on cheap TP-Link and Cudy routers that broke when I tried to install OpenWRT. MikroTik gives you real control, pro-level features, and solid firmware right out of the box.
Wish I knew about them earlier. 🥹
@nick Already using it. They also have a mobile app called Mikrotik Pro. It has the same features as the winbox app!
“People are the most annoying people.”
-Kemi @shitkemisays
The grid is bursting with green power this weekend, and you know what that means…Free Electricity Session Move any heavy power activity into that hour; be it laundry, tumbledryer, extra electric-heat. The power you'd typically use costs the same. If you’re an Read the
Friday 24th October, 9pm - 10pm UK
AND
Saturday 25th October, 12 (noon) - 3pm UK
The hastily crafted (without checking with the product team first 😇) GreyNoise IP checker tool — https://check.labs.greynoise.io/ — was received pretty well at work today, so I spiffied the CSS up a bit and gave it proper opengraph tags and dark mode support.
Shld be a friendly way for anyone, including non-cyber folks, to see if their home IP or work NAT IP was found in GreyNoise.
Might be a good idea to visit it when you're doing on-site family/friend IT support during the upcoming holiday season.
@Geri 🤞
@sodslawyer I watched #BbcQuestionTime last night. Mad Nads was representing #Reform. The audience was laughing at her.
Thinking about it, I do quite like the terminal.
Not quite ready to abandon the gui entirely, but for git, using ssh to access remote systems or plain distraction free writing in base Vim there's nothing like it.
I prefer simplicity because I want the spare brain cycles for other stuff.
My computer should be under my control, not another source of anxiety or pain.
@onepict totally get you but terminal still such an alien environment for my brain. Maybe a computer solely running some music software would be the way to go.
@inpc I think it does depend on what you're using it for.
Like I started on the command line, then windows 3.1 and personally I think after excel 5 the computing revolution went downhill.
But then I used to use WordPerfect as a secretarial temp. So even word was a huge annoyance.
But then I am a grumpy old crone yelling at the cloud. 🤣
@onepict I always think the terminal gets the power relationship between person and computer right: you tell it what to do, it does it or tells you why it can't. You may need to formulate what you want, but there isn't that game of hide-and-seek, where did they put that setting, does it still exist, can you change it that you get with GUI.
I dunno, I feel like "Computer says no" is more of a GUI thing.
@toxy @djm62 yeah I remember in secondary school we learned to type on Amstrad processeurs with orange on black screens and those weird disks that weren't five and a quarter or three point five inch floppies.
I always preferred the green on black.
I remember being really annoyed at uni with the Unix systems terminals being configured in light mode.
@djm62 @onepict I think that has more to do with GUIs being the common mode of interaction for mass-market products, rather than being some innate property of them (or conversely, of terminals). Terminal users are just less likely to tolerate such patterns, and less likely to be catered to by those putting in dark patterns etc.
@joepie91 @djm62 yeah like computers for a long time were accessible to very few folks.
Access to computers when I started with terminals, you needed to have cash or easy access to one.
Whereas with the mass market the interface is what you're given.
Having a device you can control and replace parts with is still an expensive thing.
![[?]](https://cdn.masto.host/sauropodswin/accounts/avatars/109/300/578/355/719/354/original/9db26c12c87e5a62.png)
myrmepropagandist [she/her/lady/ma'am/That One/Mrs.] » 🌐
@futurebird@sauropods.win
Struggling with vibe coding? You just need to get better at prompting. Here is a six video series "course" to teach you how to write the most effective AI prompts and get the most out of vibe coding!
(Do you ever wonder what it would be like if there were some special language for giving commands to computers... a kind of prompting language so they would do *exactly* what you wanted? Maybe someone should invent that.)
@futurebird After reading this post, I've decided to flesh out the ideas a little. And I think I may have conceptualised the future of vibe coding!
First, the problem of inconsistencies in how AIs respond to prompts.
We need better predictability!
So let's create a standard syntax for prompts, so when you enter a given prompt in a particular way, the machine will always respond in a standard way.
We'll call these next-gen prompts "commands".
As long as you know this simple "language" of commands, the machine will always do what you want!
Now, on to the problem of needing complex prompts for complex vibe coding jobs.
Let's take away the guesswork.
Instead of trying to precisely enter one complicated long prompt, let's instead have a series of simpler commands that get executed one after the other.
A "program" of commands, if you will.
So you don't have to re-enter your program on prompts, let's invent a physical media for storing and loading these programs.
Now, the next big elephant in the AI room is resource use.
Let's solve this issue so that the command interpreter "AI" software runs with very few resources. I know this is a stretch goal, but perhaps even an 8-bit microcomputer with just 64K of RAM?
And to really make this catch on, let's make this AI vibe command programming language so simple, even an 8-year-old can understand it.
A "basic" programming language, if you will.
Now I know this "Basic" programming language AI vibe coding system sounds extraordinary.
But I promise you that for just $10 billion in VC funding and total indemnity against copyright infringement, I will happily deliver a 64K 8-bit microcomputer with the BASIC programming language preinstalled!
This is the future of AI folks! Feel the singularity approaching!
boostedHow big of a fuck-up is going to need to take place for people to realise that putting lots of things all in one place and nebulously labelling it as "the cloud" isn't the best way to architect an "inherently reliable" Internet, from an end-user's perspective.
I don't even begin to see the tide turning.
It didn't turn at any of the fuckups that happened at fastly, cloudflare, etc had.
It hasn't turned with any of the amazon ones.
There have been others.
1/3
boosted2/3
At no point do I see any movement towards "is this such a good idea? Should we, I don't know, mad idea, host our own shit?"
Because every time, the forgetfulness happens rapidly thereafter.
"Oh it's working again!"
"Well, let's not forget the outage!"
"What outage? It's working again!"
3/3
What I have seen is a possibly increasing number of home users no longer wishing to rely on the cloud; people bringing back in house their NAS, or their home automation. But this is niche/hobbyist folks mainly. I really don't feel the same is true of businesses, generally.
@bloor Leaving quite a few people around the world unable to do any work so far today. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c5y8k7k6v1rt
@TimWardCam @bloor my opinion cloud is good for bursting or short lived workloads.
It still doesn't make sense for stuff running 24/7 at least not at hyper scaler pricing
@TimWardCam @bloor I can see the appeal of stuff like managed databases through if you don't have th expertise in house.
You will pay for the privilege of db as a service though
@bloor Then there are the "local systems" which won't allow you to do anything until after they have successfully checked for updates..Oh, the update server is AWOL? Good luck turning your lights on!
@bloor This is certainly something I'm seriously considering.
I'm not quite on the geek/hobbyist scale, but it doesn't scare me either
@bloor I think a lot of the businesses are happy to deploy the someone else's problem field to the issue. Blaming Amazon for the outage and accepting this. I've seen this type of outage be a vehicle to get discounts on hosting costs going forward as well through sales channels.
@bloor my experience is if you tell modern software developers things like that they look at you strangely and shoo you into the corner... "OK, grandad, go play with your vintage computing or something whist we Run Fast And Break Things like proper software engineers".
Also: "But then we would have to pay someone to do that! That's so dumb."
looks at cloud computing bill that is higher than an OK salary for infrastructure I could manage with probably under 20% of my time (Not that I actually want to do that with my time TBF, but you could hire a whole competent full time person for less!)
Of course the killer argument is then: "but what if we need to scale to Facebook size overnight!?" 🤷
Cannot win.
@bloor 1/x
There's an element of 'no one gets fired for buying IBM' in this - AWS is a 'safe' default that most customers don't need you to justify using.
The managed services (the CDN, DNS, database, queues etc) are honestly quite solid and need a lot less in-house expertise than running your own.
Cost *is* more than some racks in a DC + hardware, but to do that you need someone to spec it, someone to install it, someone to look after it if drives die in the middle of the night, etc...
@bloor 2/2
It also means you don't need to plan capacity in advance or be trapped trying to run a service on limited resources until you can get hardware - and getting hardware isn't as predictable as we'd like these days either.
There *are* advantages to cloud, but I do agree that companies running their own hosting is overlooked these days.
@bloor I think more of a focus lately is how the Americans have proven conclusively - at great speed, no less - that they can no longer be relied upon, and so there is more interest - particularly among government bodies - to repatriate data away from US interests.
Part of that will hopefully include a reckoning about whether or not 'cheapest' is a wise purchasing decision, but I doubt it.
@bloor for a lot of companies their uptime on managed clouds is vastly higher than they could achieve locally. It also appeals to managers because if it breaks it's someone else's fault
@etchedpixels @bloor > for a lot of companies their uptime on managed clouds is vastly higher than they could achieve locally
That's a good point that I think is often missed in the criticism that follows incidents like this. Everything goes down for an hour or two at some point. If all the services affected today had gone down for twice as long but one at a time on different days, nobody would be talking about it.
A lot of skills for IT management/system administration in small to medium size companies in the UK have been lost, and very few of these companies are prepared to hire staff just to "look after computers" (many even baulk at getting maintenance contracts for the equipment they do have, just using commodity PCs and cloud services such as MS365 or similar)
@vfrmedia @mansr @bloor lost ? In many cases they never had them. Cobbled together IT held together by random people in the company who did computery stuff at home, and now and then bodged up by a consultant or two.
For a lot of businesses customer facing IT was always a non critical afterthought and always remotely hosted. It just moved from small co website/email hosting to big cloud aggregation.
And on a cost and returns basis totally rational not an underinvestment IMHO
For many its only recently become more critical due to the use of online banking and/or various types of cloud-based EPOS terminals as well as accounting software and staff scheduling services (which previously more often used to be run on local machines) - and its often not even that the business /couldn't/ go back to older methods, but they required more "slack" time away from the core business which smaller businesses no longer want to spare (especially as entry level jobs like office juniors have increasingly disappeared)
@penguin42 @beasts I would hazard a guess that the customers of @beasts are sufficiently clueful to not make them a single point of failure. The implicit rejection of big cloud and use of @beasts I think is a barometer of this.
@penguin42 @bloor most modern stuff seems to be engineered for MPOF (multiple points of failure). We once came across a static webpage that depended on five different CDNs for dynamically loaded resources.
Some time ago I posted my rules of DIY.
Rule 1 of DIY: if you're struggling, you're likely doing something wrong. Wrong tool, wrong method, wrong idea.
Not to be confused with the other Rule 1 of DIY: however long you think something will take you, bank on it taking at least twice as long.
And of course there's Rule 1 of DIY: some jobs are best left to professionals.
Now, I am not big on DIY, but I will engage in it when necessary. Also, my hobby has enough DIY aspects anyway, and I quite enjoy those. But I am fundamentally lazy, and that means when I do a job, I want to be able to do it with the least amount of friction and hassle.
So today, for no particular reason, I am going to add Rule 1 of DIY: look after your tools. Keep them clean and maintained. Otherwise they'll fail you when you most need them.
I've just received this text message. The names are correct and the sender's number matches the name, but the sender isn't somebody who would use this language/tone or even contact anybody this way at all - I don't believe this is anything other than a scam for a moment, but I'm struggling to see what the angle is here. What are the odds on me receiving another "please send money to..." or similar text shortly? Or does this scam work a different way?
![Hi all, my son and his Girlfriend had a really bad accident last week in their holiday in Portugal, [redacted] is bruised and battered and [redacted] is on life support after [redacted] pulled her from a burning car. Any help would be gratefully received as they have lost 90% of their belongings. I am with them in Portugal. If you could share this as wide as possible I would so appreciate it - thank you.](https://mastodon.me.uk/system/media_attachments/files/115/378/120/099/307/737/original/27b45f5351067c79.jpeg "Hi all, my son and his Girlfriend had a really bad accident last week in their holiday in Portugal, [redacted] is bruised and battered and [redacted] is on life support after [redacted] pulled her from a burning car. Any help would be gratefully received as they have lost 90% of their belongings. I am with them in Portugal. If you could share this as wide as possible I would so appreciate it - thank you.")
Alt...
Hi all, my son and his Girlfriend had a really bad accident last week in their holiday in Portugal, [redacted] is bruised and battered and [redacted] is on life support after [redacted] pulled her from a burning car. Any help would be gratefully received as they have lost 90% of their belongings. I am with them in Portugal. If you could share this as wide as possible I would so appreciate it - thank you.
@NAB I suspect they're waiting for you to respond in some way
@CatherineFlick @Floppy You're both probably right, but if that's the case, it does mean that the scammers must have stolen my contact's phone - which would also explain how they knew the name of their son and his girlfriend. I've sent a message to their partner to make them aware... we'll see what happens.
@NAB
My guess (no more) is that you're right - a request for cash will quickly follow. And they've got your number.
Curious about the details though.
@NAB I reckon you'll only get the link if you reply... otherwise they'd have sent it straight away. There's probably some people who would fall for this and reply that *would* be alerted by the inclusion of the link.
Confirmed as a scam **SEE BELOW** (as if we didn't already know). Interestingly, it seems that my contact still has their phone, so I wonder if it's a dodgy app or something else...
**EDIT** Not confirmed as a scam. Not confirmed as anything yet.
@NAB so weird. Sometimes they're those scams that are just fishing for any response, seeing if they can get anyone to even reply.
Oh great. Texted my contact's partner, letting them know what was happening. They told me they'd let them know. Just received another message from my contact saying "It was from me". Clearly their partner has just texted them with my message. 🙄
@NAB Maybe I’m being paranoid, but would their partner not know and be able to confirm what had happened?
Now this is just getting weirder and weirder.
Probably don't need to redact as much info as I did before, so...
Just had a reply from my contact's husband (who is also the father of the son in the original message):
"Hi Nicholas, have just spoken with XXXX and she did send this message to her contacts on her phone, she has also put a post on FB"
So, he's the father of the man in the car crash, his wife has flown out to Portugal and he never thought to mention any of this before.
Plus I sent him the text of the original message and he's not commented on that either.
I'm still thinking scam, but this has become very very weird. Maybe his phone was stolen/compromised too.
@nick None that couldn't be controlled by their phones (WhatsApp, FB etc.)
@NAB If this was me (in the position of the initial message sender) I don't know why I would be messaging my contact list asking them to spread this sort of news far and wide?
Is it actual SMS text messages, or from some kind of messaging app? I don't recognise the UI (but also I haven't had an Android phone in a long time).
@missiongiraffe I agree. Text message. I thought the same, but the number for both her and her husband match what I've contacted them on before.
@NAB I'm really invested in this now. I hope it is a scam because the real situation sounds awful, but I don't understand what they are gaining from this, unless it's going to lead to some kind of 'gofundme' type link at some point?
I wouldn't be worrying about anyone's lost belongings though when someone is on life support in a foreign country!?
@missiongiraffe And guess what.... There's a GoFundMe link.
Tried calling him. Slight pause before it rings and after a few rings, AI "Sorry can't take your call" message. Suspect calls diverted elsewhere.
@NAB It’s a lot of effort to go to this isn’t it, crikey.
A friend of mind had something similar, someone took over her phone number, they think by going into the relevant phone shop and passing off ID, who didn’t follow checks properly.
I wonder how many members of the house of commons would be able to pass an A level in English...
@quixoticgeek Disablist as heck too. We already had to backtrack on forcing everyone to pass English and Maths GCSE before they were permitted to stop trying age 18 and leave education cos it just didn't work.
This is another spiteful dogwhistle way of blocking people bringing their families to the UK with them. It's vile.
@nick @NatalyaD @quixoticgeek right?! Really not equivalent. Unless there's an English-as-a-foreign-language A Level.
And do they mean a full 2 year A level? Or A1/AS (I'm old)?
B2 is really only a small step up from B1.
@quixoticgeek just read the article and it says B2. Um.
Yeah no. It's not A Level. If B1 is considered GCSE... I mean yes B2 is a step up but not that big! And there's a chasm of a difference between English subject A level and English as a foreign language A Level (not even sure that exists?).
I mean, I don't think the Spanish language A level is equivalent to an English A Level.
I took a B1 German test to get citizenship. I could have done B2, but I really didn't fancy risking not passing.
@quixoticgeek they mean equivalent fluency to an A-level in Spanish or German, not the English A-levels that native speakers take. None of the news articles mention this, though.
You can't even get an A-level in English as a second language, it's just based on CEFR equivalence.
@neil tata consulting will no doubt claim that they already are, and that what they built for jlr coop m&s etc already was and yet…. ????????
@nick @neil it’s usually much more stupid than this
Put things on the internet
Sack (sorry… “rightsize”) any in house expertise
Award ongoing management to cheapest bidder, who either don’t get told to do a full audit or get told it’s too expensive and that the documentation is “definitely up to date”
Don’t update things facing the Internet fast enough (or at all)
Get pwned
Make shocked pikachu face and ask for government help, I guess
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