Notices by iona 🐝 (iona@social.coop), page 52

@ghost_bird I used to bake my own bread all the time but then I moved within walking distance of a Lidl where they do freshly baked actual bread for like 79p a loaf and I couldn't justify turning the oven on for that.

@ghost_bird Here is a tip someone (an actual miller who still works in a water mill!) gave me for bread making that has never gone wrong.

Put your dough in the microwave to rise (don't turn it on obvs). It's one of the few places in a modern house that's airtight and confined.

@epilepticrabbit Those look like the literal worst thing you could have in an office. Now, as well as the perennial "windows open/shut" and "heating on/off" fights, you have the innovative and exciting new "lights at 1/2/3/4 or red/green/blue/white" fight.

@samtoland Derry for a week and then off to the tourist traps of County Kerry :)

@samtoland I am off to Ireland for a couple of weeks and taking a bit of an internet break so get ready for the quality to go ⬆

@cute_weeds After 1987 we didn't have any coalmines or we'd still do it

@ghost_bird I am not personally convinced that Brexit is going to happen. There is too much money locked up in companies that rely on being able to move stuff to and from Europe, and money is power.

There will be much wailing from the right-wing press as 2019 approaches and slides by without anything being done, but I think most people - even a lot of people who voted out - will be quietly relieved.

We were misinformed of the consequences of a Leave vote and the risks were played down.

When did Conservative change from the perfectly reasonable "let's not change too much, let's try and keep things on an even keel and not be too radical socially or economically" to "let's burn everything down and run off with the money while also being generally unpleasant to minorities"? It seems that conservatism nowadays is not very conservative at all.

@ghost_bird Thing is, Britain is going to start losing people.

Anyone with eyes and half a brain can see that we are getting a rubbish deal compared to people in our neighbouring countries. People with in-demand skills are already leaving.

Who is going to be left - folk who haven't got the money or the skills to find employment or start businesses in more viable locations.

@ghost_bird A bit like the way they constantly have to bring the various rail franchises in and out of private ownership when they fail, or the private operator gives up.

In the case of railways, an awful lot of the private rail operators here are state-owned rail operators from European countries. Northern Rail passengers are directly subsidising the cheap fares Germans pay, for instance - NR is owned by Arriva which is directly owned by German state railways.

@ghost_bird It feels like the increased tax is going into a black hole. I have no objection to paying a higher level of tax if they say "we'll charge you more tax but we'll stop cutting people's benefits and we'll fix the roads and make sure people don't have to use food banks".

Instead, it's "we're charging you more tax but services are going to keep disappearing, no one will fix shit and we'll lean on volunteer pensioners to do what were highly trained jobs a few years ago".

@ghost_bird Ours are all volunteer run now

@ghost_bird Like the French outfit where I worked for a year, whose main contribution to the NHS was forgetting to send out thousands of doctors' letters (test results etc) on behalf of trusts.

It's a UK-wide issue, but particularly in the North I feel like we pay Western European levels of tax and living costs for what increasingly feels like a US level of public services and social safety nets.

Where all the money is going, I don't know. I don't object to paying tax, but I do object to paying the same kind of tax that they do in Germany or Sweden for far inferior services. Someone is getting wealthy here.

Major incident on Northern Rail - thousands of cancelled trains for weeks and no end to the chaos in sight.

It has been dreadful for years. I don't know anyone in the North who commutes by train who hasn't either lost a job or been threatened with disciplinary action for lateness and non attendance.

If the service was in the South there would be acres of newsprint and hours of BBC coverage devoted to it.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/northern-rail-emergency-timetable-cancellations

Announcing my new web service, GutHeb.

@cathal @gc I use an outfit called Bytemark - they (and their servers) are based in Yorkshire, they pay their staff at least the living wage, they have a good diversity policy and support free software projects financially and with hosting.

Much easier than trying to host at home, with the high cost of power in Britain and the dynamic IPs and slow upload speeds we suffer (100Mb down/6Mb up for me!).

I have a Pi as an internal server but it doesn't host anything accessible to the world.

@gc What about reliability? Data centres tend to have much more reliable power supplies and internet connections than domestic premises.

Additionally, sharing a large server with a bunch of others is greener than everyone running a tired old shitbox at home.

There's also a privacy implication - if you home host, you're exposing your home IP, which can give away personal location data. You can hide behind eg. CloudFlare, but at that point you may as well use a VPS or cloud instance.

@gc Power in most countries costs an awful lot more than in the USA. You can host quite a bit of stuff in 'the cloud' for the cost of running (especially old, inefficient) boxes on a domestic electrical supply.

@Graham_Mitchell @gc What do the Tameside group do? That one is particularly interesting to me - more so than Brighton (already full of wealthy tech people) and B4RN (a fairly well-to-do rural area).

It's areas like the fairly low-income outskirts of cities and the suburbs that are struggling with a limited choice of internet connectivity at present, and where there doesn't seem to be the will or the money to change things.