Posts by Doctor Syntax 42400 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Was Aluminium used in power distribution outside NZ?"
Yes. I think the main conductors are copper but there's a wire wrapping which is aluminium and the neutrals connect to that. Our neutral developed a resistance of several ohms and an instant response from Northern Powergrid when I reported it This is very much antipodean to NZ.
It was also used at one time for telephone wiring providing a constant supply of faults there as well as in power lines.
It also makes no sense to be making hydrogen from methane as it simply dumps the CO2 content which is what we're trying to avoid.
Electrolysis/combustion cycle is like any other energy transfer system. You put energy in (electrolysis) and get it out again (combustion) less any losses. The choice depends on what particular characteristics you want - storage, temperature at the output, & so on. If the losses of one method are greater than those of another the matching of characteristcs to requirement might balance that out in terms of overall utility.
Much as it grieves me to say it, geography may be mildly useful. My impression, gained in the late '60s, was that they were apt to move into some existing discipline and confuse matters by introducing a new vocabulary rather than adopting and supplementing what was already in use.
"The fact that new houses today are still being installed with microbore pipes that cannot be used by heatpumps should be a scandal."
A lot of new houses today seem to be being built with heat pumps installed. It'll be interesting to see how those work out before spending well over £10k to retrofit our older houses.
"It is pretty trivial using the Sabatier reaction to add CO2 to hydrogen to make methane"
That's an old friend. We used in the first Belfast carbon dating system using ruthenium as the catalyst. The sample was burned in a stream of oxygen, the carbon dioxide was converted to methane. That was cleaned up (need to remove the water) and then used to fill a 1.5 l counter. For trouble shooting the vacuum system we used a rubber tube attached to the hydrogen cylinder and wafting it over the pipework. If there was a slightly leaking joint hydrogen would go through it more faster than air and the change in note of the vac. pump would let you know when you'd found it.
But it does require heat and pressure which leads to the question of overall efficiency. Also, the objective of pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere is to bury it in a carbon negative operation, not to recirculate it.
Thanks. That's one question answered, at least to some extent. I'd be worried about that "briefly" in practice as it's going to chill the central heating.
Looking at the one place where I could install a heat pump it faces the direction from which we get most snow. I'm not sure how it could be sheltered and having seen pictures of installed heat exchangers they don't seem to be sheltered. Maybe that comes later in light of experience.
I don't remember houses exploding with any sort of high frequency or regularity back when most of the UK used "town gas"
It did give so-inclined school-boys opportunities to do interesting explodey things with balloons and fuses... We were also quite keen on the possibilities of sodium chlorate.
If the grid can guarantee to deliver all that electricity all the time, fine. We have had quite a number of power cuts of varying duration and, given the fact that our road's underground cable were installed in the age of aluminium I expect more, and that's without considering the wider area failures.
Now it's true that when the electricity fails so does gas-fired central heating. However we have two gas fires. We also have a gas hob so that it's possible to make hot drinks and hot food even when the electric kettle and oven aren't working.
Decarbonising energy supply makes electricity a common point of failure for domestic heating, cooking and, soon, telecommunications. Do any of the plans make provision for improving resilience?
The boiler also produced domestic hot water without need for a storage cylinder and header tanks. Does the LG heat pump. If it does, fine. If not then it's going to involve some reinstatement in older properties like mine - the cylinder was taken out along with some of the pipework but the original cupboard and header tanks remain. In newer properties it would to involve quite a lot of work to retro-fit these or else the addition of supplementary electric heaters.
"I'll answer in good faith"
I accept your good faith and wish others had it. The whole history of IT freelancing in the UK is that of the Treasury, Chancellors and HMRC not having good faith.
The plumber may come round for an hour or so (BTW, one reason I originally mentioned plumber was that my boiler was being serviced as I wrote) because a plumber's job takes an hour or so. An IT developer might come round for 3 months because an IT developer's job might take 3 months or so. The fact that a plumber will undertake many one hour jobs in 3 months shouldn't put him in a different category from an IT developer undertaking one job in that period. Bad faith is used to penalise the one and not the other for taking as long as the job needs to perform it.
"For example, losing your contract and losing your job don't feel all that different to me."
As an employee, at least in the UK, you would have some employment rights that would have to be met. As an employee you'd be harder and probably more expensive to fire than a freelancer*. That's why it can be preferable to hire contractors for at least part of a project that could be cancelled.
Being more expensive to fire would also make you more expensive to hire as there'd be more HR hoops to jump through. This also fits with project work - the manager who needs to staff a project right now can do so by engaging freelancers who are currently available. Providing immediate availability is a cost to the freelancer and is a reason that freelance rates are higher than salaries even taking into account that the freelancer rate has to cover costs which, with an employee would be additional to salary.
* I'm assuming without just cause. Even with just cause if you wanted to make a fight of it at a tribunal you could make it fairly expensive. This is all assuming we're not in a hire at will jurisdiction.
"Beyond that, it is up to the contractor to decide how a project gets done, using what methods, what tools, what manpower, exactly daily scheduling, etc. Sure, the person employing the contractor can make requests or demands but the contractor is not obligated to follow those"
The client will have standards to work to, possibly even regulatory. On delivery the product is going to have to fit into the wider environment of the client and to do so may have to have been completed using the client's preferred methodology. None of this should determine whether the contractor is an employee or not - it's just a matter of meeting professional standards.
The correct test to meet is whether the contractor is acting as a business. As long as you look at the conditions and ask if they fit with being an employee but not also asking if they fit with being a business then you will get a biased answer. What has happened is that there is a lot of case law, at least in the UK, about recognising an employee which has arisen out of people seeking to be treated as employees. There are, of course, criteria for being a business - registered company and registration for VAT but they don't really count because legislation has been drawn up which allows that to be disregarded. What's needed is case (or statute) law which looks at how the putative business is conducted - is it really being operated as a business - which take into account a right to be in business on one's own account. If such tests existed then it would be possible to judge on an unbiased balance of probabilities as to whether a contract was of service or for services. It would, I think, be very likely that the grey areas which allow for many gig economy jobs to be non-employment would lergely or entirely disappear.
If your "freelancer" is being lorded over and told exactly what to do, when, and how
If the freelancer is engaged to develop a piece of software to meet a particular specification, to meet a delivery date and working to the engager's corporate standards and within their corporate methodology being lorded over or are they being engaged to provide a professional service?
Does it make a difference if they're employed by their own registered company; do they become employees of the engager for the duration of the cotract?
If you think it amounts to being lorded over and hence an employee of the engager are they still being lorded over by the engager if they're employed by the likes of Capita; do they become an employee of the engager for the duration of that contract?
As it happens I've worked for the same business as a body-shop employee, as a direct employee, for 6 months as a freelancer and very briefly as a freelancer engaged by a software supplier. From my point of view - and, I'm sure, the business's - these were each under distinctly different conditions.
"If your plumber is spending 80% of their year servicing your boiler you probably need a new plumber!"
The period over which the 80% is reckoned was not specified.
In fact it is critical. What's a reasonable length of task for a plumber falls far short of that for the sort of task for which an IT developer, for instance, might be engaged on a project.
If you define the measurement as being over a month, or a quarter, or a year - you will arbitrarily turn some tasks into employment and some into business contracts. 80% of such periods might sound a reasonable criterion, especially to the individual legislators who will recognise the need for a jobbing plumber's services but wouldn't see themselves as employers in such circumstances. They won't, however, envisage circumstances in which they'd engage someone for the longer periods which are the basis of a jobbing IT developer's life.
"I'm not sure of the details of German law, but it's pretty obvious that such an 80% limit would be based over a longer timespan than a year or a week."
Exactly. But how do you define the timespan? The average MP or equivalent can envisage having work done by a plumber or a gardener. A timespan that's substantially larger than those sort of jobs that would seem OK to them, not least because they can engage tradesmen without the slightest risk of being seen as employers in such situations.
But it comes down to the timescale of the job. What's long enough to span multiple jobs for the sorts of things they can envisage isn't necessarily long enough to span even a single gig working on a development project.
This whole issue of IR35, gig-workers etc. springs from a failure to define work being done as a business. The tests in IR35 are based on "do these circumstances look as if they could be employment?" without asking "do these circumstances look as if they could be a business arrangement?". If there were clear tests to define work being done as a business then it would be possible to turn things around - if the test fails it's a contract of service and the worker is an employee with full employment rights (and obligations on the employer to deal with tax), if it passes then the contract is a contract for services and there are two separate businesses neither owing the other anything except what the contract specifies and each dealing with TPTB about their own tax.
"One of the main criteria is if over 80% the income is from one "client" then you're actually employed."
I doubt it's as simple as that. On that basis if a plumber comes to service your boiler then unless he's somehow simultaneously getting at least a quarter of the amount you're paying him from somewhere else he's your employee at the time. If a jobbing gardener spends a whole day working on your garden is he getting the equivalent of quarter of a day's gardening pay somewhere else?
Like you, I doubt this sort of legislation would be introduced in the UK. The equivalent already exists here: it's called IR35. It means that HMRC can take their pound of flesh from the individual worker, no need to take on larger businesses who might be better equipped to fight back.
"and ten routers needlessly consuming power in a cupboard somewhere."
The skinflint manglement probably insisted on those being the ISP's routers. In that case they could be remotely managed at the whim of the ISP. Been there with my home router the one time I used the ISP's box instead of my own. I needed to make some changes to the DHCP pool I'd set up & found that since the last set-up they'd locked local management.
On my Yorkshire lane 1 to 4 are all in one block on one side of the road and 1A and 1B are some way back on the other. None of the other houses have numbers, they just have names (as do 1A & 1B) except one whose owners have renamed their house to a number on no obvious arithmetic grounds. They could just about achieve it by making a few assumptions like pretending 1A & 1B had individual numbers. It's true that Street View shows that number opposite the house but street view seldom shows numbers that correspond to the door numbers. in this case it shows the same number opposite at least three others and most of the rest of the lane is shown as 1.
"This sort of thing should be mandatory training for everybody"
Mandatory training can still go in one ear and out the other without encountering a brain between the two. Email clients have a lot to answer for here as in other respects. They should default to using BCC rather than CC.
