Prices of the electricity we use to charge

[saneagle]

View attachment 63217
house price is 76.800

Dickens > Quotes > Quotable Quote

(?)

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six , result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”

 

[saneagle]

https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/gold-coins/cgt-free-gold-coins/britannia-1oz-gold-coin/

there 100 pound coins legal tender uk so if my aunt gives me 8 of them at a cost of £20,520 dwp sees it as 100 pound coins so 800 quid.

i can only have 6k in savings on uc

Both gold and silver have gone down a lot this week thanks to Trump doing too good a job.

 

[Woosh]

Both gold and silver have gone down a lot this week thanks to Trump doing too good a job.

What good job? Do you mean him reducing tariffs on Chinese goods? Give it another week or two, the shelves at Walmart will be empty, the price will go up 30%. Trump is heading for defeat next year mid term election then third impeachment.

 

[MikelBikel]

Does anyone have a scanner that can test for the "radio kill switches" in these inverters? If they exist!
How much Karbon is produced building these roads, cutting down trees, and building the grid infrastructure, apart from that in the non-recyclable windmills?
Getting a blade stuck under one's bridge sounds painful!
(is that neutral and anodyne enough? Hehe ;-) )

 

[saneagle]

Does anyone have a scanner that can test for the "radio kill switches" in these inverters? If they exist!
How much Karbon is produced building these roads, cutting down trees, and building the grid infrastructure, apart from that in the non-recyclable windmills?
Getting a blade stuck under one's bridge sounds painful!
(is that neutral and anodyne enough? Hehe ;-) )

You can't scan for it. It's done over the Internet. All such household inverters are connected to the Internet. You can control them yourself from your phone or laptop. All anybody needs is the login credentials, and the manufacturers always have higher level credentials so that they can login and fix things when you forget your password.

The same applies to every smart device you have in the house - your car, PC, tablet, phone, heating system, cctv, router and everything that connects to it. They can all be switched off remotely by anyone, who can logon. In fact, you only need access to the router to switch everything off.

Have you watched Jim Browning get access to the routers in the foreign scam call centres? He can watch everything on every PC, change their messages, change their voices, watch what the bosses are doing on the cctv system, see all their bank details, payments and receipts, see their Facebook pages and family members.

 

[Ghost1951]

Both gold and silver have gone down a lot this week thanks to Trump doing too good a job.

I give you:

• Misattribution of Cause and Effect
• 
  
• Confirmation Bias

https://www.google.com/search?q=misatrribution+of+cause+and+effect&rlz=1CAMMGG_enGB1152&oq=misatrribution+of+cause+and+effect&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIJCAEQIRgKGKABMgkIAhAhGAoYoAHSAQg3NTcyajBqN6gCCLACAfEFBpBsD_r4iFI&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#:~:text=Confirmation%20bias%20(also%20confirmatory%20bias,one's%20prior%20beliefs%20or%20values

.

 

[Ghost1951]

Dickens > Quotes > Quotable Quote

(?)

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six , result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”

Yes - absolutely true.

 

[saneagle]

I give you:

• Misattribution of Cause and Effect
• 
  
• Confirmation Bias

https://www.google.com/search?q=misatrribution+of+cause+and+effect&rlz=1CAMMGG_enGB1152&oq=misatrribution+of+cause+and+effect&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIJCAEQIRgKGKABMgkIAhAhGAoYoAHSAQg3NTcyajBqN6gCCLACAfEFBpBsD_r4iFI&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#:~:text=Confirmation%20bias%20(also%20confirmatory%20bias,one's%20prior%20beliefs%20or%20values

.

Bloody Trump! He's got a lot to answer for. It all started the day he put his name down for president, when he changed from being the most popular guy in the USA to Hitler. If it weren't for him, we wouldn't have had to Brexit, and his people wouldn't all be so much better off at our expense. I've lost a fortune due to the price of gold and silver going down, and now all the USA tax payers are going to get a rebate.

 

[soundwave]

yet look at the gold price since 1970 silver used to be 70p a oz.

At its peak, the U.S. military was using around 100 million ounces of silver a year, and that number was expected to double to 200 million ounces! The demand for silver was so high that production couldn't keep up. In fact, global silver production fell short by a whopping 25 million ounces.

i only got a kilo

 

[AndyBike]

I think you are a carpenter, or cabinet maker. Maybe I have that wrong. I have always admired people with those kinds of skills. I worked in a different arena and came up against a lot of people who had a stupid snobby attitude towards craftsmen as if they were somehow less than managers and academics. I remember arguing with a boss who objected to my proposal to offer a good salary to attract the right level of technician to manage IT networks. He actually said, 'I am not going to pay money like that to a man with a screwdriver. I was taken aback by that. He had no idea how much we depend on the people who build and maintain our infrastructure and can turn raw materials into the things we need.

I think this kind of snobbery and undervaluing of hand skills by some is a product of the very divisive education system we used to have. The grammar school kids never had any contact with woodworking and metalworking skills at school, so they have no experience of those forms of knowledge, or what is involved in the trades. They were also taught by people who generally thought they were a cut above those kinds of workers, so the attitudes passed on, generation to generation.

My parents were far from wealthy so money was short ,and during my long university holidays, I worked on the building of a hospital, and on an elevated motorway, as a labourer. I cut and bent the steel rebar for three months for a steel fixing company. That was tough and quite dangerous work, humping forty foot, two inch thick, solid steel bars , cutting and bending them to specified shapes. The steel came in forty foot lengths and carrying it and working it was a two man job. it was crushingly heavy work even at the age of twenty. The machines we used to guillotine the bars were diesel powered and entirely unguarded. They chopped about once every five seconds and if you'd fallen into them, you'd be very messed up. They were at a perfect height for a person to fall into them.

I know how much effort and skill goes into making things, and can understand the value of it. How bad would life be without those workers efforts?

I worked on this inter-change shown below. My steel is inside these columns and bridges. Sad to say, some of the work by the fixers and inspectors was less than stellar and remedial work has had to be done to some of the columns where the steel was too near the surface of the concrete and over the fifty two years since it was built, water has penetrated to the steel and caused rusting and expansion and in parts, the concrete surface has broken away in places. A mile or so further down the motorway, an overpass has been condemned and will have to be demolished. I didn't work on that job though.

The steel fixer company were all Irish. It took three attempts to get them to take on this once scrawny student. I turned up and asked for a job three times; was twice refused. In the end I persuaded the boss by saying, if I can't do the work, don't pay me. It was the toughest work I ever did, but the pay was three times what I was getting in a factory that I had just started at. I worked in the construction industry every summer for three months during my four year, university course.

View attachment 63224

Once upon a time I had a hobby of trying to build stuff out of wood. It was pretty crude work - if you are a cabinet maker you'd be appalled by the rough quality of them. I designed and made a garden seat, a large wall mounted plate rack, and a rocking cradle for my first son who is now 46. That cradle was entirely fastened with glued dowels. Hard to imagine him in it now. He is about a hundred kilos! Apart from having a crude level of skill, I had problems in getting the right scale in the design. They often turned out much larger than they should have been. The rocking cradle was far too big as was an old fashioned settle come chest that I made. It was a chest with a seat back on it so it was dual purpose. The lower section of that is now a junk box in a shed. I'd seen something like it in a museum, but that was made of oak and mine was pine. I used dowels where I could to fasten things together - more authentic I thought....

Two of my sons about forty years ago on a rather weathered garden seat I hacked together.

View attachment 63221

A neighbour of mine who used to be a building site chippy and later a site manager and who ended up running training at the CITB before he retired, built these gates for my partner. I helped him saw up the timber from a big log and we hung them on the posts. Given my own experience of getting the sizes wrong, I was a bit worried about how they would fit, but he had a lot of experience in this sort of thing so it worked out fine.

View attachment 63222

View attachment 63223

I helped him cut the wood out of a huge chunk of timber he had. It was some sort of redwood. He had it stored under a tarpaulin in a big heavy squared off log about twelve feet long and about a foot square at the end. I helped him feed it through a band saw that he had in his workshop. It took a long while to slice it up and a lot of working out so we got the finished sizes we needed for the job. These gates will be around long after we are both dead.

(Cabinetmaker)
The gates are lovely, and indeed they will outlast all of us, as long as you replenish the finish once every few years.
As to the bench, it does the job asked of it and looks fine to me, and its also all a learning experience. Now you would do things slightly differently. different joints, assemble, glues etc
But as long as it works and doesnt fall apart in weeks, jobs a good 'un

 

[Ghost1951]

(Cabinetmaker)
The gates are lovely, and indeed they will outlast all of us, as long as you replenish the finish once every few years.
As to the bench, it does the job asked of it and looks fine to me, and its also all a learning experience. Now you would do things slightly differently. different joints, assemble, glues etc
But as long as it works and doesnt fall apart in weeks, jobs a good 'un

Too kind (the bench) It was quite bonny when I first made it, but that photo was taken in 1984 and it was maybe 8 years old and the varnish finish had broken down. I think some sort of clear cuprinol type finish that sinks in and prevents rot might have been better than old fashioned varnish which cracks up in the sunshine. I don't know if they sell that kind of oily curpinol these days - it might be a bit toxic. In the end the bench got neglected and tatty after about twenty years and was scrapped. Back in the day I was too busy to mess about with restoring the finish, so its outdoor life and weathering and fungal decay did for the cheap softwood it was made from.

I enjoyed making it and made others for parents and parents in law when they retired. Crude skills though - log cabin style carpentry is all I can do. None of your fine joints and router made accuracy. Bill who made the gates (we refer to him as 'Bill Gates' now) did a lovely job. Didn't charge enough - considering the quality of timber and all the hardware let alone his time. He wouldn't hear of us paying any more than he asked for. It wasn't enough.

 

[Ghost1951]

Bloody Trump! He's got a lot to answer for. It all started the day he put his name down for president, when he changed from being the most popular guy in the USA to Hitler. If it weren't for him, we wouldn't have had to Brexit, and his people wouldn't all be so much better off at our expense. I've lost a fortune due to the price of gold and silver going down, and now all the USA tax payers are going to get a rebate.

I think what was going to happen if he hadn't backed off on the tariffs was that inflation in America would have taken off like a rocket.

Anti dumping of state subsidised production in your country is one thing, but whacking great tariffs on foreign produce to encourage home production is another. India has done that for years. I think much of the EU policy towards certain imports is the same, but dressed up as something else - food safety rules for example. Nobody wants horrible dangerous food, but the EU use that ploy to featherbed their farmers. ALL of the EU punishment of the UK was just like Trumps worst tariffs. There was no need, or real legality under WTO rules. It was done to make sure no other EU sceptic population had the audacity to decide sovereignty vested in their own government should take priority over the EU power grab. I don't think our elected government should ever be instructed on what it can do by a foreign power.

I voted to join the Common Market and then again to confirm it a few years later back in the 1970s. I did not vote to see our government constantly over ruled later by the EU when Cameron asked for a temporary restriction on the number of people coming here when in some places the number of settlers was causing problems.

 

[MikelBikel]

Ye

You can't scan for it. It's done over the Internet. All such household inverters are connected to the Internet. You can control them yourself from your phone or laptop. All anybody needs is the login credentials, and the manufacturers always have higher level credentials so that they can login and fix things when you forget your password.

The same applies to every smart device you have in the house - your car, PC, tablet, phone, heating system, cctv, router and everything that connects to it. They can all be switched off remotely by anyone, who can logon. In fact, you only need access to the router to switch everything off.

Have you watched Jim Browning get access to the routers in the foreign scam call centres? He can watch everything on every PC, change their messages, change their voices, watch what the bosses are doing on the cctv system, see all their bank details, payments and receipts, see their Facebook pages and family members.

Yeah, sounds about right.
I did find this story which claims info came from via a Reuters investigation?

US uncovers hidden radios in Chinese solar inverters, sparks alarm

Experts uncover rogue devices in Chinese-made inverters and batteries, prompting U.S. and EU nations to review renewable tech security.

interestingengineering.com

From this story

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-machine-rogue-communication-devices-found-chinese-inverters-2025-05-14/

 

[saneagle]

Ye

Yeah, sounds about right.
I did find this story which claims info came from via a Reuters investigation?

US uncovers hidden radios in Chinese solar inverters, sparks alarm

Experts uncover rogue devices in Chinese-made inverters and batteries, prompting U.S. and EU nations to review renewable tech security.

interestingengineering.com

From this story

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-machine-rogue-communication-devices-found-chinese-inverters-2025-05-14/

It's not radios. That's just some news reporter, who doesn't have a clue. They're saying what I said, that anyone with the credentials can logon to the devices over the internet and make changes, which is the same for any smart device.

 

[soundwave]

Man narrowly escapes washing machine explosion caused by charger

A man in Spain narrowly avoided an explosion after a cigarette charger was left in the washer by one of the laundromat's customers.Nobody was hurt as a resul...

www.youtube.com

 

[Woosh]

It's not radios. That's just some news reporter, who doesn't have a clue. They're saying what I said, that anyone with the credentials can logon to the devices over the internet and make changes, which is the same for any smart device.

No need for any backdoor. Typical wifi passwords less than 10 character long can be cracked in 10 minutes or less with a laptop.
I use 25 character wifi passwords and QR code to save it onto a piece of paper.

 

[flecc]

No need for any backdoor. Typical wifi passwords less than 10 character long can be cracked in 10 minutes or less with a laptop.
I use 25 character wifi passwords and QR code to save it onto a piece of paper.

I just hard wire!
.

 

[Woosh]

I just hard wire!
.

We all take precautions but at the end of the day, we'll all have to balance fear against ease of use.
Manufacturers don't necessarily create backdoors in their products but how many genuinely close all the backdoors that they know of.
One of the products I fear the most is those public VPNs that people use for getting around Iplayer, Netflix geofence and the likes. I use tailscale to hopback to the UK.

 

[saneagle]

No need for any backdoor. Typical wifi passwords less than 10 character long can be cracked in 10 minutes or less with a laptop.
I use 25 character wifi passwords and QR code to save it onto a piece of paper.

That doesn't really help because the suppliers have their own password. I don't think you're getting what the issue is. Whatever smart device you have, somebody else needs a way to login and make settings in order to help you if you get problems. That login also gives the opportunity for remote control, whether you want it or not. It's the same with your banking, where they can reset your password so that you have to make a new one.

 

[Woosh]

That doesn't really help because the suppliers have their own password. I don't think you're getting what the issue is. Whatever smart device you have, somebody else needs a way to login and make settings in order to help you if you get problems. That login also gives the opportunity for remote control, whether you want it or not. It's the same with your banking, where they can reset your password so that you have to make a new one.

Large installations have airgap security. Even on system without airgap, you still need to cross the firewall before you can login. Some people can't resist the urge of making hay with Chinese backdoors. The USA ban TPLINK for example. The Reuter article mentioned two guys working in the industry claiming that they found mobile phone communications in the inverters. Without pictures, could be just propaganda.