vivweb01

Update 17.4.26: The recent announcement of Miliband's long-awaited Warm Homes Plan sadly does little to inspire confidence that government is anywhere near getting onto the right track regarding domestic energy supply.... Although the fine detail of elegibility and scope of the measure isn't yet clear, it's obvious from what has been published that this will be yet another scheme to 'Rob Peter to pay Paul'...as you might expect from a socialist government obsessed with redistributing our wealth....and making stringent economies to try to cover its frequent and lasting policy errors.  It's obvious that heat pumps are an expensive item which commit the owner to much higher electricity bills, and are not affordable for the majority even with a sizeable grant . Feedback from those unfortunate enough to have suffered the disruption of an installation, and the consequences for their power consumption after the event, amply confirm this. As we'll see later, the rap...

Editor's Note: As a frequent local bus user, I was inspired recently to write a brief guide  for my website's travel page  on how to get the best out of our bus and train networks . Herewith a copy for the blog...it now includes some additional info on local UK air travel....  ------------------------- Our UK public transport network has come a long way on since the days before the internet became widely available in the late 1990s..... Working out how to get from A to B without major trauma during those somewhat simpler times relied on having a good sense of direction, a detailed knowledge of bus/train timetables, some decent maps, a knowledge of how to read them....and being reasonably mobile.  Timetable information was usually only available from tourist information offices, bus and train stations, etc., and only in paper form. It was quite often already out of date by the time you got hold of it. There were no digital bus signage boards for guidance, and few...

  The expression ‘The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread’ seems to be on everyone's lips in the UK media nowadays, and has even been adopted as the title of a documentary radio series on Radio 4.  Whenever I hear it used to describe yet another ‘wonder-product’, I find myself wondering where on earth it came from…. As it stands, the phrase implies that the process of slicing bread during its manufacture really does represent an improvement over ‘prior art’ (presumably this would have been un -sliced bread). The nearest I’ve come to an explanation for this somewhat inexplicable enthusiasm in the past for sliced bread as a ‘new and revolutionary' product, is that housewives* in the 1950s were so fed up with having to slice their loaves themselves that they couldn’t wait for someone else to do it for them. To my mind, slicing bread as part of its manufacturing process has some notable disadvantages – let’s take a look at a few of them: 1)       1)  The slic...

    Social Media and Mental Well-Being The large increase in mental health referrals in the UK's younger age groups since the end of the pandemic has finally got the UK government worried…so it should, and not before time. Why ? Apart from the more obvious consequneces of excessive screen use, which we'll conider shortly, we have at least 1 million young people in UK classified as ‘NEETs’ (i.e. Not in Education, Employment or Training); this is a shocking indictment for any 1st world society, particularly one that prides itself on its sense of 'fair play', and is still the 6th richest in the world, despite recent economic mismanagement by successive governments.  A significant proportion of these NEETs are likely to be in this category because of mental health issues. More and more of our youngsters, including even some under 5s, are also being diagnosed with some form of mental health issue, and not all of this is likely to be due to the 'over-diagnosis'...