Saw the first clip in the video and couldn’t handle watching any more. I’m all for allowing people the autonomy to take their own sensible risks and avoid over safety-fying things, but some people are ridiculous (and selfish in this context). If you’re going to go over a level crossing when the barriers are closed, at least have the respect to run across, knowing that you’re doing something risky, rather than casually stroll through the danger zone!
One of the points made quite astutely in the FT comments section mentioned that ofwat was also strongly responsible for this.
Apparently the regulatory model is set up in the following way - in order to encourage investment in infrastructure, the calculated amount that customers are charged is based on a ratio of how much money is invested into infrastructure. Supposedly Thames Water and other water companies in England wanted to invest more in infrastructure, however ofwat did not allow it as they wanted to protect customers from price increases. Furthermore because of the silly shell game of holding companies that were set up to move the debt around, ofwat didn’t understand just how much debt was being racked up and didn’t make any moves to stop it.
However what this all shows is that the regulatory model is absolutely broken. So not only is ofwat toothless in allowing a ridiculous corporate structure to be set up to obfuscate the silly financial leveraging going on, they are also operating on an entirely faulty premise.
What it all shows is that trying to set up a functional privatised system for water companies that incentivises investment and works for citizens is extremely difficult, is prone to regulatory capture, is still under pressure from meddling ministers and ultimately costs more for customers and the government than servicing the government debt that would be used to pay for investment under a nationalised system.
Just bloody nationalised it.
Not to say I fully agree with the author’s viewpoint, but this article is a good, non-sensational, explanation of the current Thames Water situation. Worth a read if you’re interested in what’s actually going on.
Yeah I think YSH can pipe around structured data. This wiki page has some details:
BNC connector, such a satisfying screw and click into place mechanism.
I can imagine a hacky way to anonymise voting would be to have a pool of fake user accounts on your instance. When someone on the instance clicks to up/downvote, a random fake account is used to make the vote instead. This would then kind of work like a vote tumbler and keep the voting anonymous but still work with activity pub.
Maybe activitypub is actually a bit crap and we should all be using something better like nostr though?
The two potential roads seem somewhat equivalent to me:
Both scenarios end in a large centralised platform run by Meta and a small community that want to avoid a corporate platform.
I think it’s also wise to separate the effect of large corporate instances in the fediverse between effects on Mastodon (where users follow users) vs Lemmy/Kbin (where users follow communities). In the case of Mastodon, the effects of EEE tactics will be strong due to a more powerful network effect because it’s important that a particular person is on the same platform as you (i.e. this is a similar situation to XMPP and gchat). In contrast, you just need some people to participate in a Lemmy/Kbin community to make it worth joining, but it doesn’t matter exactly who, meaning that membership can be small and sparse but the community still has a meaningful existence (i.e like niche forums).
Inverse of the classic: