Re: Not surprising
Does it count as conflict of interest if you are a fire marshal and your interest is not having the building you work in catch fire?
936 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
"The way that smart meters save money for consumers is because you get away from "estimates" and terrible metering policies, they can't profit from the interest on your held credit"
As far as I can tell, for most tariffs, the energy company makes an 'honest' estimate of your yearly usage, divides it by 12, then charges that fixed amount every month.
Somehow this always results in them profiting from the interest on your held credit.
There have been a few "cloud isn't always shit" articles recently, which shows the way the wind is blowing.
The cloud isn't always shit, it makes sense for stuff everyone uses, like emails, or stuff almost nobody uses, like a hyper-specialist product that only one company can supply. But there are so many uses cases where it's the wrong solution.
"a Google spokesperson suggested Topics is a better alternative than either the paywalls that would inevitably cordon off the web in the absence of content-funding interest-based ads or than the privacy-harming cookie substitutes other marketers would no doubt propose."
Interest-based ads? Like contextual advertising? With no need for any tracking?
"If you have regular working hours, probably programmable thermostats would be enough, they don't have to be connected ones."
And if you have irregular hours, take your coat off a bit later after you get home.
(And set the night time temperature to 5 degrees celsius so the pipes don't freeze)
"our competition watchdog hasn't been doing its job very well"
That depends on whether their job is to prevent monopolies (which they haven't done in this case), or to ensure that is there is a monopoly then it does no harm (which it is trying to do here - arguably too late)
Looking at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/competition-and-markets-authority/about I'm not sure which they are supposed to focus on
"The largest share of workers with IC income are those in the top quartile of earnings who primarily receive wage income."
This is meant to imply that independent contractors are doing well, but looks like a desperate attempt to twist some figures.
Is it that those on wage income, as opposed to salaried, tend to be poorly paid, so that if you have waged income topped up by independent contracting then you are somewhat well-paid compared to other poorly-paid people?