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Brixton news, rumours and general chat: Autumn - Winter 2018-19

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Gramsci said:
This did start out with how crap the energy market is.

My view is that publicly owned democratically controled energy company should have been put in place in London as Sadiq promised.

Its being done in other parts of the country.

Whether I want to put my postcode into a price comparison website or not isnt the issue. I dont want to have any part of this energy market. For reasons Ive already posted up.
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I would love to see a publicly owned energy company. At the same time, the kind of people putting this in place would be the same types of people responsible for putting together another system like Universal Credit, which we all know is a clusterfuck. What you are talking about is an ideal - I would love to see that too, but under the current ways we do things that ain't going to happen.

One of the reasons there is so much leakage attributed to Thames Water is that when it was publicly owned, nobody invested in it.

So many small 'ethical' energy companies fuck up because they grown too fast and don;t have the systems to deal with the influx of customers. It's quite common. I don't know how the Co-op energy are performing now because I left them 4 years ago because the implemented new systems, creating massive customer accounting issues and huge demand to their call centres that they couldn't cope with. In the end when I left they ended up taking £200 from me but couldn't detail why. I gave up in the end.

I'mm not saying that in favour of privatisation, but I suspect that in this day and age, with what the public sector is paying, a really effective and cheap public energy company is going to take a loooong time until it starts delivering for the entirety of the region. But I agree the current system (and don't get me started on the trains) doesn't work for the greater good long term.
 
discobastard said:
I would love to see a publicly owned energy company. At the same time, the kind of people putting this in place would be the same types of people responsible for putting together another system like Universal Credit, which we all know is a clusterfuck. What you are talking about is an ideal - I would love to see that too, but under the current ways we do things that ain't going to happen.

One of the reasons there is so much leakage attributed to Thames Water is that when it was publicly owned, nobody invested in it.

So many small 'ethical' energy companies fuck up because they grown too fast and don;t have the systems to deal with the influx of customers. It's quite common. I don't know how the Co-op energy are performing now because I left them 4 years ago because the implemented new systems, creating massive customer accounting issues and huge demand to their call centres that they couldn't cope with. In the end when I left they ended up taking £200 from me but couldn't detail why. I gave up in the end.

I'mm not saying that in favour of privatisation, but I suspect that in this day and age, with what the public sector is paying, a really effective and cheap public energy company is going to take a loooong time until it starts delivering for the entirety of the region. But I agree the current system (and don't get me started on the trains) doesn't work for the greater good long term.
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Other Councils have set up energy companies. Its not just an ideal.
 
discobastard said:
One of the reasons there is so much leakage attributed to Thames Water is that when it was publicly owned, nobody invested in it.

m.
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Thames Water given maximum £8.5m fine for missing leak target

Privatised water has been fined for not dealing with leaks.

There never was a free market in water industry. It got sold off and profits were made from it. Not for good of joe public. It was one of the early privatisatons yet still gets fined years later for waste of water through leaks.
 
editor said:
Oh FFS. That is the king of fallacious arguments. I've never said such a thing so stop being such a deviously twisting and dishonest bullshitter.

Not breathe deeply and read carefully.

Of course online scamming/data harvesting is a fucking problem but unless you - or anyone else - can provide proof of it happening here regularly, then it is totally irrelevant, particularly to the Brixton forum.

Mr Retro - who you're so keen to defend - specifically framed the argument in the context of it happening on these boards, lambasting users for being 'shockingly naive' for posting up information which he asserted could be used to (a) work out someone's real life identity and then (b) scam the fuck out of them.

But it hasn't happened. Online scammers do not have the time to spend months trying to work out the identities of random people posting on bulletin boards when there's far softer targets out there. He was talking bollocks and now you're trying to defend it.
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You seem to be continuing to ignore what I am saying, i.e. whether it has happened on these boards or not. I'll put it in shouty terms so you can ban me or something.

WHO CARES WHETHER MR RETRO FRAMED IT IN TERMS OF HAPPENING ON THESE BOARDS. IT IS RELATIVELY EASY TO HARVEST INFORMATION ABOUT MANY PEOPLE WHO POST HERE. WHETHER IT HAS HAPPENED OR NOT (WHICH YOU DON'T KNOW ABOUT), ISN'T RELEVANT - THE POINT IS THAT IT CAN HAPPEN AND THERE IS PLENTY INFO AVAILABLE HERE THAT MIGHT FACILITATE THAT. I AM NOT SUGGESTING IT WILL, BUT SIMPLY POINTING OUT THE RISK, RATHER THAN CRITICISING YOU, THE BOARDS, OR ANY POSTER THAT CHOOSES TO REVEAL SOMETHING ABOUT THEMSELVES.

If discussing risk about revealing personal details on these boards, in your mind, is not worth a conversation, then just say so. But you're chucking the baby out with the bathwater.

Perhaps he did reference it a little too harshly but its still something worthy of comment. And we're all a little guilty of going over the top sometimes when arguing something we have opinions about eh? You're certainly quite passionate about yours, and that's good, sometimes.

So there may be softer targets, yes, but that shouldn't stop people being cautious. And *my* point was that it is actually very easy to gain a lot of personal info about people from reading these boards. Is that a point not worth making?

You can answer that honestly or you can just go back to telling me that nobody on the boards has ever been scammed. Do you get that?
 
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Gramsci said:
Thames Water given maximum £8.5m fine for missing leak target

Privatised water has been fined for not dealing with leaks.

There never was a free market in water industry. It got sold off and profits were made from it. Not for good of joe public. It was one of the early privatisatons yet still gets fined years later for waste of water through leaks.
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I agree about the privatisation. And Thames Water have not excelled themselves. And at the same time, they inherited a water network that was utterly fucked through public sector lack of investment. And a pipework infrastructure that was built in Victorian times that can't cope with the massive increase in population. And so the funds available to the private sector cannot fix everything all at once. Most of the pipes in central London have been leak-proofed but there is still more to do.

Ofwat are a political organisation even though they would say that they are not. They set targets, and water companies get fined. The fines are used as incentives to do a certain amount of work. look up Outcome Delivery Incentives on the Ofwat website to explain how the regulation works. There is also an 'economic level of leakage' at which point it becomes more expensive to fix leaks (which gets passed on to bills) than it is to just accept them. And in some places, leakage works, because it feeds trees etc. Not saying missing leakage targets is ok, but it is far more complicated than is reported in the media. And I know you are somebody that does not accept everything they read.
 
Gramsci said:
i said Sadiq the Mayor not Lambeth promised it.

Whose the "We"?
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So...

Not sure what the 'we' refers to.

ETA: oh, you mean 'do we think they could succeed?' - sorry if I offended but lumping us together. Do *you* think they could succeed? If that's what you meant.
 
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Gramsci said:
You said they are an ideal and it aint going to happen in post 121. Now you are saying you are fully aware of them.
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It's a great ideal, but I can't see it happening in the short to medium term - that is my opinion. And I am also aware that some councils are doing this. Those views are not mutually exclusive.
 
discobastard said:
IT IS RELATIVELY EASY TO HARVEST INFORMATION ABOUT MANY PEOPLE WHO POST HERE.
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Except it's not, and that's why you can't provide instances of online scammers successfully doing this supposedly 'relatively easy' task to users here - even the ones whose real life details are VERY easy to find - i.e. people like me.

And that's the end of this discussion. I've seen enough CAPS LOCK ranting for the night.
 
discobastard said:
I agree about the privatisation. And Thames Water have not excelled themselves. And at the same time, they inherited a water network that was utterly fucked through public sector lack of investment. And a pipework infrastructure that was built in Victorian times that can't cope with the massive increase in population. And so the funds available to the private sector cannot fix everything all at once. Most of the pipes in central London have been leak-proofed but there is still more to do.

Ofwat are a political organisation even though they would say that they are not. They set targets, and water companies get fined. The fines are used as incentives to do a certain amount of work. look up Outcome Delivery Incentives on the Ofwat website to explain how the regulation works. There is also an 'economic level of leakage' at which point it becomes more expensive to fix leaks (which gets passed on to bills) than it is to just accept them. And in some places, leakage works, because it feeds trees etc. Not saying missing leakage targets is ok, but it is far more complicated than is reported in the media. And I know you are somebody that does not accept everything they read.
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I dont follow this. You say you agree with me about privatisation. Then post about why privatised water cant be expected to sort out leaks.

They had years to do this.
 
I wish there was a forum where arguments could be diverted to so that squabbles don't wreck this place. It should be an open forum so that everyone can pile in and express themselves. But please let's get the bickering out of this place. This is probably one of the threads which new residents read, and no way will they stop lurking and start posting unless the tone changes dramatically. I often despair of this place and leave it well alone for weeks or months. Then I pop back because I have something I want to share. And then a barney starts up and I think 'wtf am I doing wasting time here?'
 
David Clapson said:
I wish there was a forum where arguments could be diverted to so that squabbles don't wreck this place. It should be an open forum so that everyone can pile in and express themselves. But please let's get the bickering out of this place. This is probably one of the threads which new residents read, and no way will they stop lurking and start posting unless the tone changes dramatically. I often despair of this place and leave it well alone for weeks or months. Then I pop back because I have something I want to share. And then a barney starts up and I think 'wtf am I doing wasting time here?'
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Couldn't agree more.
 
And back to actual Brixton news, there's a good free bill at the Dogstar tonight:

ese-effra-social-brixton-01.jpg


lui-peng.jpg


Brixton Newschool showcases upcoming talent for free tonight at the Dogstar, Thurs 22nd Nov
 
editor said:
This is absolute nonsense. He was taking about online scammers. Are you really suggesting that they'd go to the lengths of looking up all the posts by an anonymous poster across multiple threads here, carefully make notes of any place they've mentioned in passing and then start hanging around in those pubs/cafes/workplaces in the vague hope that they might be able to put a face to Mr Wibblehead? And then what would they do? Try to sell them a pyramid scheme?

It's an utterly ridiculous proposition. Farcical.
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i completely agree with you, it’s entirely possible that gchq could take every one of someone’s posts and using clever software figure out who posters are. However they could equally do the same the traffic analysis which would be much cheaper.

Online scammers buy databases of 100000 email addresses and passwords, and search them for “home address” and “national insurance number”, and scam in bulk because that’s where the money is.

No one trawls message boards piecing together random info and then scams with the info, the economics don’t add up.

Alex
 
It’s
David Clapson said:
I wish there was a forum where arguments could be diverted to so that squabbles don't wreck this place. It should be an open forum so that everyone can pile in and express themselves. But please let's get the bickering out of this place. This is probably one of the threads which new residents read, and no way will they stop lurking and start posting unless the tone changes dramatically. I often despair of this place and leave it well alone for weeks or months. Then I pop back because I have something I want to share. And then a barney starts up and I think 'wtf am I doing wasting time here?'
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I couldn’t agree more
 
alex_ said:
i completely agree with you, it’s entirely possible that gchq could take every one of someone’s posts and using clever software figure out who posters are. However they could equally do the same the traffic analysis which would be much cheaper.

Online scammers buy databases of 100000 email addresses and passwords, and search them for “home address” and “national insurance number”, and scam in bulk because that’s where the money is.

No one trawls message boards piecing together random info and then scams with the info, the economics don’t add up.
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Exactly. It's a preposterous notion. Scammers always go for the easy path and trying to work out people's identities on these boards to the extent where they could somehow successfully go on to scam them would take a phenomenal amount of work, with little guarantee of any return. Or any reason for doing it in the first place.
 
Anywhere else here abouts to buy a fairly cheap radio, apart from Curries and Argos?

The DAB one I bought from curries a few years ago is almost usless now, and it wasn't that cheap if I remember correctly, but at the time I thought they were going to turn off FM soon. Is that even happening now?
 
alex_ said:
i completely agree with you, it’s entirely possible that gchq could take every one of someone’s posts and using clever software figure out who posters are. However they could equally do the same the traffic analysis which would be much cheaper.

Online scammers buy databases of 100000 email addresses and passwords, and search them for “home address” and “national insurance number”, and scam in bulk because that’s where the money is.

No one trawls message boards piecing together random info and then scams with the info, the economics don’t add up.

Alex
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If that were the only threat vector then yes, I'd agree. But it's not always about scamming money, sometimes it's personal. As with the example I posted upthread, if someone took exception to that individual, they now know exactly who that person is, where they live and work etc. I think people should just generally be more aware about what they post online. If nothing else, it'd be one less pointless argument to have on here :thumbs:
 
David Clapson said:
I wish there was a forum where arguments could be diverted to so that squabbles don't wreck this place. It should be an open forum so that everyone can pile in and express themselves. But please let's get the bickering out of this place. This is probably one of the threads which new residents read, and no way will they stop lurking and start posting unless the tone changes dramatically. I often despair of this place and leave it well alone for weeks or months. Then I pop back because I have something I want to share. And then a barney starts up and I think 'wtf am I doing wasting time here?'
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As this was after my post I hope you arent referring to me.

Ive put up with a fair amount of grief in last few pages and think Ive kept my posts sounding reasonable.
 
friendofdorothy said:
Anywhere else here abouts to buy a fairly cheap radio, apart from Curries and Argos?

The DAB one I bought from curries a few years ago is almost usless now, and it wasn't that cheap if I remember correctly, but at the time I thought they were going to turn off FM soon. Is that even happening now?
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In March 2018 the BBC said it will continue to use FM for the forseeable future. Bob Shennan, director of radio and music “We need to do more in the UK before we consider a switch-over and for that to be genuinely led by the audience."

There maybe a Christmas commercial frenzie sale type thing on a radio in Morleys - perhaps worth a look.
 
friendofdorothy said:
Anywhere else here abouts to buy a fairly cheap radio, apart from Curries and Argos?

The DAB one I bought from curries a few years ago is almost usless now, and it wasn't that cheap if I remember correctly, but at the time I thought they were going to turn off FM soon. Is that even happening now?
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you can sometimes pick up radios at the saturday street market outside Rec.

As ricbake says FM isnt going soon.

I have old Roberts radio I found and reception for FM is fine. Old Roberts radios are good quality

I use DAB radio to get world service. Also get it on my TV freeview.
 
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