Jun 282009
From the Mail Online:
Parents warned to keep children indoors as Britain faces emergency heatwave warning
Parents were urged to keep babies and young children indoors this week as forecasters predicted temperatures to soar into the nineties.
…
The mercury could hit a high of 91F (33C) by the middle of the week – and temperatures are expected to remain a warm and sticky 64F (18C) at night.
Really? As high as the nineties? Wow. That’s… well, that’s not that high, really. Are they really freaking out over normal summertime temperatures? What’s next… panicking over keeping children out of the rain, because they might get wet? Making children wear goggles when handling Blu-Tack? Oh, wait….
15 Responses to “Oh, the horror! Part 2…”
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Scott,
we don’t get it that hot over here very often so we are not used to it – and my new baby is suffering from the temperature as my lack of sleep last night can testify to.
Regards,
Barry
> we don’t get it that hot over here very often
I’m probably going to spend the next two months ten to twenty degrees hotter than that… and my parents and freinds back home have spent about a month there, with two to three more to come with a heaping helping of humidity on top of it. It’s uncomfortable, but if a bunch of pasty Scandinavian descendants can deal with it, there’s no good reason for the British media to go bonkers over it. Just turn on the AC and you’ll be fine. Send the kids outside to play… it’ll wear the little bastards down and they’ll be less troublesome later. Just make sure everyone gets enough water to drink and takes showers.
And what with the Obamist “cap and trade” suicide pact just recently passed in the House… get used to even hotter temperatures.
>Just turn on the AC…..
we can’t, as it’s not standard equipment in Englandland houses, because, you’ve guessed it, it doesn’t usually get this hot…….
>Send the kids outside to play…
can’t do that!!!! Don’t you know there are hordes of perverts roaming the streets, just waiting to take our kids, and do unspeakable things to them…..
> it’s not standard equipment in Englandland houses
What, y’all don’t have Wal Mart? A window unit wouldn’t cost but a hundred Euros Sterling or whatever it is y’all use over there for buying cheap Chinese crap.
> Don’t you know there are hordes of perverts roaming the streets…
You Brits and your wacky soccer hooligans…
How long until they demand seatbelts and airbags be installed in their desks? Crayolas outlawed because they’re not digestible? Paper outlawed because it’s not eco-friendly? One looks at the world today and can’t help but shout “WTF???”
The fear of things that are not fearable is the classic weapon of “soft totalitarism”. Great article in “Weekly Standard”.
>What, y’all don’t have Wal Mart?
Funnily enough, we do, or ASDA, as it’s called over here, and no, they don’t sell aircon, yet, (or firearms, either…..)
You can get air-conditioning units, but they ain’t cheap, then when you add in the running costs, looks like we’ll have to keep on sweating.
> buying cheap Chinese crap…
we have to, since a previous Prime Monster, (very friendly with your President Reagan), allowed our manufacturing industry to be sold off abroad, in pursuit of a quick and easy profit,
now nobody makes anything here, anymore, hey even MG sports cars are made in china, now,
then again, with petrol at ONE POUND A LITRE, no-one can afford to run one.
Yes, one small problem – lack of money to buy an aircon and run it.
A window one would be problematic with the state of our windows. We keep asking our housing association when they are going to update our 23 year old single glazed windows to double glazed so all our heat in the winter doesn’t bleed out of them increasing our winter fuel costs. Also water for extra showers costs money as well. If I didn’t car share to work I probably wouldn’t be able to feed and clothe my family properly…cue violins!
Yes there is a lot of stupid legislation over here and idiot jobworths but this is a valid public health statement – for over here.
Regards,
Barry
> We keep asking our housing association when they are going to update our 23 year old single glazed windows…
That’s a phrase – “housing association” – that I keep reading in the British press but keep not understanding. Is it your house, or not? Are you just renting? If so, find someplace better. Long term it’s better to own than rent anyway. And if you own it, *you* swap out the windows for something better.
> Also water for extra showers costs money as well.
I’ve always been led to understand that Britain gets loads of rain. Just collect it and use *that*. Utah doesn’t get squat for rain, but I’ve still reworked most of the downspouts so that the water is actually used for some useful purpose, rather than just running off into the yard. If Utah got a large quantity of rain, it could be used for a great many things, not limited to showering water, toilet flushing water, car washing water, etc. Just rework your downspouts to run to a single large collection tank. Add a pump and you’re good to go.
now this is gonna sound crazy, but……
Here in Englandland, once the rain lands on something, the ground, your roof, or whatever, then _the water company_ owns it!!
you can’t collect it, you have to let it flow into the system, so that the water company can sell it back to you,
there have been court cases over it.
doncha just love capitalism!
> once the rain lands on something, the ground, your roof, or whatever, then _the water company_ owns it!! …. doncha just love capitalism!
That’s not capitalism, that’s fascism. If it falls out of the sky onto your property, it’s yours. You cannot be charged or fined for listening to radio or watching TV programs that are broadcast on open frequencies; a meteorite than busts through your roof and lands in your bed is *yours;* the sunlight that hits your grass, trees, windows or PV arrays is *yours;* the wind that blows through your turbines is *yours.* Rain that lands on your roof is *yours.*
If it’s not *yours,* then I suggest suing the shit out of the water company the next time rain, snow or hail causes any damage to your property. If they somehow claim ownership of the damned weather, then they are required to take *responsibility* for it as well.
Scott;
FWI, but the “people-in-glass-houses'” saying applies to this thread:
Note here that YOU don’t own, and technically “legally” can’t use the water from you’re roof :o)
State “water-rights” laws say the run-off from buildings is “public” water which means it goes into “public” sewer or run-off basin’s UNLESS your ownership documentation has SPECIFIC Mineral and Water rights attached to the deed.
Otherwise ANY diversion of rain-water is specifically illegal. Period.
On the other hand, until it DOES hit the ground and become part of the official ‘water’ which is deeded under the “Water-rights” clause, it’s technically NO-ONES so you can’t legally “sue” anyone for the damages that might be caused :o)
Now you CAN sue if someone does something REALLY overt like diverting their entire run off into your backyard or basement, but that is specifically for intentional damage to your property, and actually has nothing to do with USE of the water in question. Neither YOU nor the person who diverted the run-off may actually have ANY rights to the water in question at all!
This is actually a very old ‘hold-over’ from rain-water collection and use during settlement of the western U.S. Besides the idea of controlling water as a way to “control” an area, (farmers always use more water than ranchers so if a rancher had the area ‘water-rights’ farmers could be denied access and therefore driven away) ‘down-stream’ control of water meant that people, communities, even states could control development and growth of areas by blocking water access. This included daming creeks, rivers, etc, and building ‘harvesting’ basins to direct rain or snow-melt water away from its usual paths to deny that water to other areas.
Later “health-issues” were a major factor cited for control of water since a lot of the ‘artificial’ or re-directed water courses left large areas of still water as breeding grounds for misqitoues, and changes in house construction (especially roofing materials) leached large amounts of toxins into the run-off.
Now this IS changing, as most western states are slowly being “converted” to allowing run-off use but it’s a case-by-case process where the community, and state governments have to be convinced that the usage is not going to overtly effect the past several hundred years of “water” conflict resolutions that have managed to evade actual “shooting” conflicts for the most part over water.
Utah itself recently had to deal with this because of a car dealership in Salt Lake City which went ‘green’ and began harvesting rain water for use at the dealership. This is and was techncially illegal and everyone including the dealership knew it, but the State legistlators and city officials are backing the dealereships initiative and are “re-working” current water use laws to allow such usage. The dealership on the other hand had to build a new roof to aduquately control the run-off and certify that the run-off would not potable water.
And I should point out that neither the “sun,” “wind,” or “rain” that happens to LAND upon your property are truely in any legal sense ‘owned’ by the property owner it may land on or pass through. While you CAN harvest it AS it passes through you face consequnces for such actions such as your PV panels blocking the sun from someone elses “prize-garden” or spoiling their “view”, if your wind-turbine interferes with someone else’s turbine ‘down-wind’ or their TV signal or makes ‘too-much-noise’ etc, YOU have to ‘own-up’ to those “damages” as it were. But that means that YOU are NOT responsible for the hurricane force wind which pass’ through YOUR wind turbine and then tears off your neighbors roof :o)
So it’s NOT just a European ‘issue’ here though for the most part no state east of the Ol’ Miss has similar “issues” because they tend to get plenty of water either from the ground or the sky :o)
In Europe though, especially in England, EVERYTHING is “originally” OWNED by the “Crown” and that includes anything in, on, or under the land. Point of fact they ARE charged for, and can be fined for listening to a TV or radio they have not and are not currently paying a ‘tax’ on having. They also have to pay a ‘tax’ on each electrical socket and water tap in the house. Installing solar panels or wind generators would incur an additional “tax” which would usually mean they cost more to install than they are worth on an individual basis.
England and most of Europe don’t have a lot of ‘experiance’ with summer temperatures in the 90’s and they can’t simply “install” a window AC unit because of this fact. Window “AC” in Europe is equivlant to “Freezers” above the arctic circle: Sure they might be “available” but they will be few, far between and hidiously expensive because there is so little of a market for them.
Randy
> Note here that YOU don’t own, and technically “legally” can’t use the water from you’re roof
I’ve known a great many people who do exactly that, with no legal repurcussions.
> State “water-rights” laws say the run-off from buildings is “public” water which means it goes into “public” sewer or run-off basin
This would be silly, as there is no such thing as a water company or a sewer out here. Take the horse trough out back: there are two ways of filling it.
1) Pump the water out of the ground
2) Use rainwater from the roof.
I do both. Difficult to see where abandoning #2 would be of an advantage to *anyone,* since rainwater from the roof is simply going to soak into the ground and head towards the water table my pump is drawing from anyway.
> But that means that YOU are NOT responsible for the hurricane force wind which pass’ through YOUR wind turbine and then tears off your neighbors roof
WINDMILLS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!!! [/Morbo]
> Point of fact they ARE charged for, and can be fined for listening to a TV or radio they have not and are not currently paying a ‘tax’ on having.
Sufficient cause right there for revolution. If someone scatters leaflets into the wind, it hardly makes sense to charge people who pull said leaflets out of their bushes and reads them.
> They also have to pay a ‘tax’ on each electrical socket and water tap in the house.
So… none of these, then…
http://www.ironicsans.com/2009/06/idea_the_outlet_wall.html
> England and most of Europe don’t have a lot of ‘experiance’ with summer temperatures in the 90’s
Didn’t a whole Texas shitload of French folk keel over some years back due to a heatwave? And haven’t the press and politicians been yapping their heads off for fifteen years about global warming?
Point of fact they ARE charged for, and can be fined for listening to a TV or radio they have not and are not currently paying a ‘tax’ on having
This is the infamous ‘BBC licensing fee’.
Basically, this is how the BBC is funded, and comes from the days when they were the only broadcast network. The idea is that because the BBC is funded directly by a ‘tax’, there is no commercial pressure on the BBC to only produce popular programs, with the associated loss of artistic and political freedom.
An important thing to note is that despite being effectively state-funded, it is _not_ (overtly) state controlled.
However, since the development of commercial networks, and especially with the coming of digital, this model no longer works, and there are increasing calls for the license fee to be abolished.
> This is the infamous ‘BBC licensing fee’.
Yeah. My early college years were in the dawning years of Teh IntarWeb Tubes, well before Google was even invented. And so the “TV Detector Vans” that appeared on Monty Python and the like were a bit of a mystery until a Scottish exchange student (“You’re an Englishman in a skirt!” was a dandy way to start a fight) explained the basic process toa group of skeptical American students. It still sounds like insanity.
> An important thing to note is that despite being effectively state-funded, it is _not_ (overtly) state controlled.
It’s the “overt” that’s troubling… as is the notion of taxing people for receiving what is freely broadcast. If the BBC hooked up speakers to the outside of buildings, could they fine or tax people who happen to listen as they walk by?