The Night Mail

[rockershovel]

5 hours ago, Northmoor said:

Ricky Gervais may be "Marmite" to many but some of his work is excellent and thought-provoking satire on particular professions.  His series "Derek", set in a care home, wasn't perfect but the message was very clear; there are a lot of people doing thankless work looking after very vulnerable people, for pitiful wages (and often being asked to do it for even less) and while the cases of abuse rightly get attention, families are capable of being unbelievably mercenary with their elderly relatives. 

 

I find it eyebrow-raising how some relatively wealthy people will try all sorts of financial wizardry to get the state to pay for 100% of the care, when the elderly relative has an estate worth high six or even seven figures.  Even were they to be in the home for several years, the inheritance would still be substantial, but not substantial enough, apparently.

My daughter, who works in the NHS raised the point at the time, that for all the restrictions being enthusiastically pursued, the old age care sector operated throughout on a policy of an uncontrolled agency workforce moving freely from location to location - a classic transmision vector 

[J. S. Bach]

12 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

 ...snip... Hmmm. A Harley Davidson Electraglide or a Zündapp KS 750 with a MG42 on the sidecar? Decisions, decisions….

 

Go for the Hawg!

[J. S. Bach]

Night Owl from the Piedmont.

[AndyID]

1 minute ago, J. S. Bach said:

Go for the Hawg!

OK as long as you like a rubber-band transmission 😂

[polybear]

6 hours ago, AndyID said:

 

Just shows how little I know about bikes. I always thought the sidecar wheel was not powered!.

 

Many (the majority?) aren't - especially in the days when sidecars were often (usually?) a bolt-on accessory added to a standard bike.  As for now, when was the last time you even saw a combination being used on the road?

 

4 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

But isn't that the conundrum with the welfare state? If it is for everyone, then everybody pays in - regardless of income or wealth, but equally then everyone can take out - regardless of income or wealth. Once you start means-testing (which what the above really is) then it's no longer a welfare-state per se.

.

 

Wealthier people could rightly ask "why should I pay into something when I don't get anything back?"  A Certain Bear could (perhaps unsurprisingly...) gets a tad p1ssed when someone with ten+ kids "who's far too busy caring for them to work" (yet outwardly plays the "I'm actively looking for work so they get to claim the associated benefits") gets oodles in child support etc. etc.

A friend of Bear's who has a decent job has one son and is fully entitled to claim child benefit  (or whatever it's called) yet choses not to as he doesn't need the money.  Full marks.

 

[iL Dottore]

6 minutes ago, polybear said:

 

Many (the majority?) aren't - especially in the days when sidecars were often (usually?) a bolt-on accessory added to a standard bike.  As for now, when was the last time you even saw a combination being used on the road?

 

 

Wealthier people could rightly ask "why should I pay into something when I don't get anything back?"  A Certain Bear could (perhaps unsurprisingly...) gets a tad p1ssed when someone with ten+ kids "who's far too busy caring for them to work" (yet outwardly plays the "I'm actively looking for work so they get to claim the associated benefits") gets oodles in child support etc. etc.

A friend of Bear's who has a decent job has one son and is fully entitled to claim child benefit  (or whatever it's called) yet choses not to as he doesn't need the money.  Full marks.

 

One thing that does strike me about the UK is how reliant so many people are upon the state. Be it via child benefit, tax relief on mortgaged or "benefits". In Switzerland, despite the ID card "show us your papers"/rules for everything image, I find there's a lot more emphasis on self-reliance than on the UK.

 

Take, for example, pensions. Few Swiss solely rely on just the state pension, most have a combination of state, company and private pensions plus additional savings of various kinds.

[Compound2632]

2 hours ago, polybear said:

Wealthier people could rightly ask "why should I pay into something when I don't get anything back?"  

 

There is a general moral consensus going back at least two millenia that that is a wrong question and that the right question is: what should I be doing feed the hungry, clothe the naked, etc. 

 

With the decline of organised religion the responsibility for ensuring that the wealthy perform their moral obligations has transfered to the state and for the same reason the state finds that it has to act coersively.

[Tony_S]

2 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

tax relief on mortgaged

Only for landlords! Not for other borrowers since 2000 and even then it was only for an amount considerably less than many mortgage loans. 

[jamie92208]

7 hours ago, AndyID said:

I think I've finally cracked it 😄

 

Despite my career in digital electronics I'm not a big fan of DCC. DCC is great if you want to be the engine driver but for whatever reason I'd prefer the trains to respond to the signals.

 

It's really quite easy to make a DC controller that maintains speed by increasing track voltage to respond to changes in curvature, gradient etc. but the snag is it only works if the resistance between the controller, including the motor's resistance, is constant. Unfortunately rail has some resistance and fishplates etc only make it worse.

 

The idea is to determine the actual resistance of the circuit frequently enough to determine the motor's speed. Turns out that might not be so difficult. Small positive or negative changes in the supplied current will also result in a change in the applied voltage and from that it's not very difficult to determine the total resistance of the circuit. Good old Georg Ohm.

I'm only using DCC for a small isolated section of coal yard with a dedicated shunting loco.  I was converted to this after operating @bbishop 's German BLT at Warley one year.  The layout will always remain analog and is wired  two wire with feeds to every section of rail so as not to rely on fishplates.  The coal yard is now wired so that a main line loco can deposit wagons fir shunting then depart. Once the entry points return to normal a re, ay switches the coal yard feed to DCC and the shunting loco emerges from it's headhunt.  That is the theory, anyway. 

 

Jamie

[jjb1970]

I think most (though not all) people recognise the need for those who are able to help those less fortunate, and that doing this with taxation is sensible and efficient.  I have no issue paying taxes when the money is spent to good effect on reasonable things. Where it goes wrong is when people see money squandered in inefficient or wasteful ways, or spent on things which they object to. In that case people will quite reasonably look to minimise what they have to pay.

[jjb1970]

One of the things that annoys me about the DCC debate is the argument from a subset of DCC enthusiasts that it's all about sound and fancy features and that people not into that stuff should stick to analogue. I have zero interest in sound, smoke effects and other trick features but like DCC because I find slow speed operation much better with DCC.

[Happy Hippo]

8 hours ago, AndyID said:

I think I've finally cracked it 😄

 

Despite my career in digital electronics I'm not a big fan of DCC. DCC is great if you want to be the engine driver but for whatever reason I'd prefer the trains to respond to the signals.

I think the 'problem' with DCC is that it can give you all sorts of variables.

 

I use it in what I would call 'basic' form: On PN it provides, the much boasted about, two wire wiring, that powers the whole layout. The signalling is completely independent and it is not connected in any way to the loco control.  So if the down home is on, and the driver of the loco ignores it, the train can continue off down the line.  This mimics the real railways of the steam-diesel transition period.  I find that the DCC decoders can be fine tuned to give far better motor control, and with the addition of the capacitor stay alive option make, the loco unstallable.

 

I know others have much more apparently more complex systems where the signals and turnouts are interlinked through other decoders and the whole caboodle can be run off a wireless link via your mobile phone.

 

Personally, I feel that once you get to that point in your railway modelling, you spend so much time looking at the phone, you could easily be running a train of tennis balls.

 

Going back to making the trains respond to signals, the late Iain Rice drew up simple wiring diagram using a series of relays, which he called cascade control. In a nutshell, even if the track power was live, the train would not move beyond a specific location until the points had been set correctly and it was impossible to set the signals until the route had been set.  Drive a train through before the road was set, or a signal was at danger, and the train would come to an abrupt halt 

Edited yesterday at 08:00 by Happy Hippo

[rockershovel]

28 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

There is a general moral consensus going back at least two millenia that that is a wrong question and that the right question is: what should I be doing feed the hungry, clothe the naked, etc. 

 

With the decline of organised religion the responsibility for ensuring that the wealthy perform their moral obligations has transfered to the state and for the same reason the state finds that it has to act coersively.

.. but modern "progressive liberalism" is an organised religion in all but name; Christianity without Christ. 

 

It shares the characteristics of doctrinal infallibility, intolerance, persecution and denunciation of the infidel (for what else is the practice of "cancelling" someone for their opinions?); unthinking acceptance and chanting of liturgy ("you must be kind"). Evangelical movements burn brightly before being overthrown by others. 

 

It extends its blessings to those not of its faith and casts a rosy glow of self-righteousness over prosperous Phillistines who would appalled if their redistributive and globalist tenets were actually applied to them, rather than simply praying at their whited sepulchres and thanking Providence that they are not as other men are. 

 

This isn't a new idea. It dates back to the French Revolution (which attempted to introduce a State Religion). Methodism was a Christian religion with strong political aspects. Chartism was based upon the concept of the inherent Rights of Man.  Bolshevism demonstrated many aspects of a religion, not least among its Western apologists. 

 

In the modern age, look at the work of Lukac, Gramsci and others and you will find the concept explicitly discussed. 

 

[polybear]

2 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

One thing that does strike me about the UK is how reliant so many people are upon the state. Be it via child benefit, tax relief on mortgaged or "benefits". In Switzerland, despite the ID card "show us your papers"/rules for everything image, I find there's a lot more emphasis on self-reliance than on the UK.

 

Take, for example, pensions. Few Swiss solely rely on just the state pension, most have a combination of state, company and private pensions plus additional savings of various kinds.

A friend of Bear’s actively WON’T work more than 16 hours a week because they’ll simply stop money out of her benefits accordingly; trying to explain to her that the money has to come from somewhere just doesn’t sink in

😡

[Winslow Boy]

1 hour ago, jjb1970 said:

I think most (though not all) people recognise the need for those who are able to help those less fortunate, and that doing this with taxation is sensible and efficient.  I have no issue paying taxes when the money is spent to good effect on reasonable things. Where it goes wrong is when people see money squandered in inefficient or wasteful ways, or spent on things which they object to. In that case people will quite reasonably look to minimise what they have to pay.

I think the public have a great deal of difficulty in telling the difference between what is essential and what is in essence 'back room'.

 

I always remember encountering a so called campaigner, many years ago. He was expousing noisily how much waste there was in local government and how if there was an elected mayor he'd put a stop to it. This was when my part of Manutopea was deciding on whether to have one. Now normally I would just do the 'english thing' of smiling and go past. However having just been 'laid off' - on grounds of ill health, i was a bit raw. So I let rip and told him the days of two council workmen standing around watching one dig a hole, or words to that effect, hadn't existed for  quite some time. There is a lot of ignorance out there and not all of it due to a lack of intelligence.

 

Incidentally one of the Mayoral candidates who stood was a 'retired' - other words are available, gangster who was later gunned down.

Edited yesterday at 08:37 by Winslow Boy
The word 'ill' is not spelt 'i'll' computer.

[Happy Hippo]

9 minutes ago, Winslow Boy said:

Incidentally one of the Mayoral candidates who stood was a 'retired' - other words are available, gangster who was later gunned down.

So he was retired permanently.

[rockershovel]

3 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

One thing that does strike me about the UK is how reliant so many people are upon the state. Be it via child benefit, tax relief on mortgaged or "benefits". In Switzerland, despite the ID card "show us your papers"/rules for everything image, I find there's a lot more emphasis on self-reliance than on the UK.

 

Take, for example, pensions. Few Swiss solely rely on just the state pension, most have a combination of state, company and private pensions plus additional savings of various kinds.

The problem is that successive administrations have almost completely destroyed worthwhile employment in which a living wage is paid for adding value to a product which is then sold or consumed. 

 

They have also escalated living costs by allowing uncontrolled financial speculation in the housing markets, looting and destroying the Mutual Societies which acted as a governing mechanism on the housing markets, and allowing population increase to run amok so that whatever ridiculous, unrealistic building targets are promulgated, they can never be enough. 

 

If you cannot house and keep yourself and your family from the available employment, let alone achieve any degree of security, why try? If you are in an arena in which housing us granted freely to those who contribute nothing, and YOUR claim stands in jeopardy if YOU work, then where is your incentive? 

[rockershovel]

17 minutes ago, Winslow Boy said:

I think the public have a great deal of difficulty in telling the difference between what is essential and what is in essence 'back room'.

 

I always remember encountering a so called campaigner, many years ago. He was expousing noisily how much waste there was in local government and how if there was an elected mayor he'd put a stop to it. This was when my part of Manutopea was deciding on whether to have one. Now normally I would just do the 'english thing' of smiling and go past. However having just been 'laid off' - on grounds of I'll health, i was a bit raw. So I let rip and told him the days of two council workmen standing around watching one dig a hole, or words to that effect, hadn't existed for  quite some time. There is a lot of ignorance out there and not all of it due to a lack of intelligence.

 

Incidentally one of the Mayoral candidates who stood was a 'retired' - other words are available, gangster who was later gunned down.

I dont know that they ever DID exist. One thing I've learnt from involvement I the AMP schemes is that there is a stratum of minor works which are as resistant to being done effectively as ever there were; repairing a leaking joint outside my house took several months of Anglian Water's time and no small expenditure, much of it in 2 man gangs with vans or pickups waiting for someone else. 

[iL Dottore]

Well said, @rockershovel. There's an old Soviet era joke (recounted by Colonel Stok of the KGB in one of the early Len Deighton novels [one of the so called "Harry Palmer" books])

 

What's the difference between capitalism and communism? Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; whereas communism is the reverse.

 

I am very sceptical and cynical about "progressive liberalism", especially in the UK as far too many espousing (and pushing)  "progressive" policies are very well insulated - by wealth, power, position, privilege and (frequently) location - from the consequences of those policies.

 

And this equally applies to other movements - ecclesiastic or laical - that purport to have THE solution to all our ills.

 

Not much fracking or refugee camps planned for Highbury, Kensington and Islington, is there?

 

p.s. not sure what Compound2632 found funny in your post.

[DenysW]

28 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

Not much fracking or refugee camps planned for Highbury, Kensington and Islington, is there?

For the fracking, I suspect it's down to geology not politics. I believe the same reason is why the London Borough of Kensington & Chelsea is failing in its statutory duty to give have quarrying. For the refugee camps, I suspect they are in hotels.

 

However, if you want to campaign for the Kew Gardens area to revert to type (it housed Italians PoWs during WW2), feel free to start shouting.

[monkeysarefun]

11 hours ago, AndyID said:

The thing about being married to a nurse is one should not expect a lot of sympathy for minor ailments but when you do get a lot of sympathy you know you really have a problem 😄

My partner was a nurse, in charge of the sterilization or whatever its called that  keeps everything germ  free.

 

When she's around I have to wash  my hands about a million f*(*en times  a day!

Edited yesterday at 09:33 by monkeysarefun

[PupCam]

1 hour ago, jjb1970 said:

One of the things that annoys me about the DCC debate is the argument from a subset of DCC enthusiasts that it's all about sound and fancy features and that people not into that stuff should stick to analogue. I have zero interest in sound, smoke effects and other trick features but like DCC because I find slow speed operation much better with DCC.

 

I have to say I like DCC and it's very clever capabilities.       I do like the added dimension that sound brings (in the individual situation) although I've been involved with enough exhibitions that highlight how repetitive and tiresome it is to have multiple layouts all producing constant noise pollution*.    I also like the ability to operate "locomotive accessories" at appropriate times. 

 

The thing I really can't abide with DCC is the fact that you have to use something that looks like a scientific calculator AND remember that "F28 = the sound of the tagfidget snuffle valve closing".       Hence my experiments to produce dedicated to a specific locomotive, wireless controllers  which operate all of the features that would not be controlled by the crew (e.g. air compressors) automatically and have dedicated, specific controls to operate those that they would (e.g. Sanders, Whistles).   Plus of course to do so satisfies another desire "to do technical" from time to time now I've given up working for a living.   Now, I obviously realise that for those that have large fleets of locomotives having a dedicated controller for every one or even every type is not practical (however cheaply they could could be produced) but that isn't my situation.    If I ever weaken and procure a 7m Deltic I'll just have to build another controller 🤣

 

As for slow running, loco motion (including inertia simulation) that has come on so far in recent years it's amazing and I suspect a combination of superior motor technology and the benefits of forms of PWM control.    Things have come along way since my Hornby Dublo A4 and a CODAR controller complete with inertia module.

 

*  At one exhibition many years ago someone thought it appropriate to repetitively play a musical instrument behind a layout for most of the  weekend.  IIRC someone eventually told him TSTFU

 

2 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

I dont know that they ever DID exist. One thing I've learnt from involvement I the AMP schemes is that there is a stratum of minor works which are as resistant to being done effectively as ever there were; repairing a leaking joint outside my house took several months of Anglian Water's time and no small expenditure, much of it in 2 man gangs with vans or pickups waiting for someone else. 

 

In my recent "power supply to the house failure"    I had probably 10+ bods turning up over the 7 days it took to complete the task including bods to detect and determine the fault, rig up a temporary generator lift the block paved drive, dig the pavement up, put barriers up and close the road (the supply cable was under the pavement but apparently the locals can't be trusted to negotiate a small obstruction on the pavement which is funny as there are more than plenty  SUVs blocking the pavements around the village but that's a different rant), drive the mini-digger, unearth the suspect cable joint, replace cable and cable joints as necessary, remove the generator, back fill the hole, tarmac the pavement, restore the block paving, disassemble the protective barriers and final remove the barriers and debris from the scene.  All performed by separate trades of course ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Tony_S]

Morning all.

The forecast rain has gone somewhere else. I have had quite a few cups of tea and some buttered toast. 

I have been assigned a task well within my capabilities this morning. I have to hand over a parcel to our postie . Not a train, a cuddly, chewable toy for a baby. The baby is the granddaughter of my cousin, but I can never remember what sort of cousin that is. I only have one cousin so I just call all of her offspring “cousins”.  

I don’t think we are going anywhere today. I hope to do some more tidying/rearranging  the garage (it hasn’t been used for car storage for years ) . I have put my airbrush and spray booth on a trolley. I need to clear a path for the exhaust duct through bicycle storage. If I were sensible I would dispose of the bikes but still we think we might possibly use them again. When I was drilling holes through the garage wall at the weekend for security camera cables  I had to move our tent and camping stuff. I can’t see that being used again. It did amuse me to think that there are people who worry about our cameras being usurped by Chinese government agents. I hope they appreciate the view of the bins near our back door. 
So just another day in sunny estuary Essex.  Quite nice really here. 

[Craigw]

17 minutes ago, monkeysarefun said:

 

 

When she's around I have to wash  my hands about a million f*(*en times  a day!

 

Mine is a dental nurse. I am sure you can imagine what happens every time I pick up a toothbrush.

[iL Dottore]

22 minutes ago, DenysW said:

For the fracking, I suspect it's down to geology not politics. I believe the same reason is why the London Borough of Kensington & Chelsea is failing in its statutory duty to give have quarrying. For the refugee camps, I suspect they are in hotels.

 

However, if you want to campaign for the Kew Gardens area to revert to type (it housed Italians PoWs during WW2), feel free to start shouting.

Obviously you took this literally, rather than as a rhetorical device.

 

Point is: those promoting and pushing policies (no matter where they are on the political spectrum) are, more often than not, those least affected by such policies.