WhyIsItGlowing

I've had it happen to me quite literally; I've had two pairs of cheap boots not even last a month before the soles detached.

There's always a point of diminishing returns, but it doesn't really make much odds where that is if you've not got the money. If you've only got £20, it doesn't really matter that good long lasting boots can be bought for £50 not £300.

The USPS has a bunch of highly-specific requirements that they aren't willing to change, which makes an off-the-shelf van impossible.

These are things like: giant unpainted bumpers, sliding drivers door, the rear door has to be roll-up rather than normal doors, step through from front to rear, some size requirements.

One of the alternatives which was rejected when they signed the contract for the new vans was a customised Ford Transit.

Yeah, it's just the culture around it, with the US doing its pricing in $, the UK doing it in p.

The emissions weren't the issue; they just kept replacing the engine with newer ones - the Ford one they were using at the end had a Euro VI version so they could have kept using that.

The issues were more around safety (both passenger and pedestrian) and not being able to sell it in many countries because it can't have an airbag fitted (I think there was an ergonomics reason it wasn't possible).

The feedback loop has got ever shorter.

The approach now is to announce a non-feasible hard-right policy in the right wing tabloids, wait for The Guardian to react the next day, denounce that, then the day after forget the whole thing (like Liz Truss' civil service paycuts)

It's everywhere in job listings, just largely as a nice-to-have on jobs that are primarily in something else but need the odd script putting together here and there.

There's a big problem where social care got moved from the department of health to local government a few years ago.

Then, shortly after, the government cut local government funding massively. It used to be funded by a mix of local taxes and funding from central government that was about 50/50. This was part of a strategy to insulate richer areas from the impact of cuts, while poorer ones (which relied more on central funding) took the hit.

This means there's a huge problem with elderly patients who need to be discharged into social care not having the support they would need to go home or a spot in an old people's home to go into.

Which, combined with covid still being around and the fact that even before covid government obsession with efficiency meant that there were a relatively low number of beds which already had a high occupancy rate.

So there was no spare supply to begin with, increasing demand due to a growing and aging population and covid, and lots of people who are stuck in hospital because they need support to leave which doesn't exist.

> Back in 2004 when I lived in the UK, the NHS was really good. And I remember hearing at that time that it was nothing compared to the NHS in the 80s and 90s.

In a lot of respects, this isn't very accurate. It got pretty bad in the early '90s, anything that needed to go beyond the GP had really bad wait times, people stuck on trolleys in A&E, etc. By 2004 it was much better, so that anything which required a hospital visit would be dealt with much more quickly and effectively but the GPs were coming under more pressure from a growing and aging population so the first point of contact had a less personal touch.

It's worth clarifying that the issue with the government infrastructure is with the regulatory agencies, rather than the water infrastructure itself which is privatised.

There's also a good text article version; https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/04/sewage-s...