Monday, February 02, 2009

Some things going up, some things going down

Remember - if it's cold it's only weather, if it's warm it's Man Made Climate Change



Large swathes of the UK are currently draped in an ever thickening blanket of snow

Apparently, the country has virtually ground to a standstill


Daily Express readers will no doubt blame the fact that lots of people can't get to work on eleven years of 'ZanuLabour' misrule.


The alternative point of view is that quite a few people are secretly just a tiny wee bit pleased that they don't have to go in to work today and didn't try that hard


Including, I fear, the people behind this website...


...which attempts to monitor how well our national electricity grid is holding up at any given point in time


Here's what things were looking like last night at about 10pm...



There was me watching the needle gradually drop lower and lower ...when the bogging site goes off line

Boo


Spoilsports

-


When not sitting around waiting for the lights to go out, I'm also staring morbidly at the price of stuff going up, especially photographic equipment

I've been keeping an eye on the prices of a couple of lenses I was planning to pick up before heading off to the other side of the world and I've noticed a couple of things over the last few months...


- Suppliers, even the solvent ones, have been running out of stock because normal scheduled deliveries haven't been turning up. I'm guessing that's at least partly due to the much discussed collapse of the global shipping trade (I've had a dozen boxes sitting in a warehouse waiting to hitch a ride to the Antipodes for a month and a half)

- Thanks to the £ tanking, photographic manufacturers have started jacking up their prices; in Canon's case twice in a month, in Sigma's case only once, but by 40%


Camera gear is hardly one of Life's essentials but this doesn't bode well for the future pricing and availability of the slightly more essential


.

26 comments:

Anonymous said...

We're boned.

Stef said...

Milder and drier winter predicted

Thursday, 25 September 2008 12:48 UK

This winter will be milder than average and drier than last year in the UK, Met Office forecasters have predicted.

After a summer that saw high rainfall and the dullest August on record in terms of sunshine, the winter months will see relatively high temperatures.

That follows the trend of recent years, the Met Office said. Last winter saw an average temperature of 4.86C, compared to a long-term average of 3.7C..."


Politicized Feckin' Scientician C*nts

Stef said...

Meanwhile, how's that big flaming ball of gas that only has an incidental effect on mean global temperature doing...

yup, still zit free

Anonymous said...

I just bought me a Canon PowerShot A590 IS for 99€ss are they any good Stef?

Stef said...

yup

I have been known to fork out a Euro or two more for a camera but it's got a good, stabilised lens and manual controls if you can ever be bothered

Five years ago a digital compact like that would have cost £400

and, the way the £ is going, it probably will again

rob said...

Stef,
Is it not possible to blog from your new abode??we´ll kinda miss the crack and insight links info etc?

That was me about the camera.Its on offer at Amazon(Germany).They keep sending emails with offers of greatly reduced Items,,the German government by the way are offering 2000€s to anyone who buys a new car and SCRAPS the old one!stimulate the economy an all that.

rob said...

http://www.dynamicdemand.co.uk/grid.htm

Not Found

The requested URL /grid.htm was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Stef said...

Is it not possible to blog from your new abode??we´ll kinda miss the crack and insight links info etc?

hopefully, once I've settled down - it might take a while though

re. the camera

that's as good as you're going to get for that kind of money and what you get isn't bad at all

re. cars

Ford and GM hike car prices in UK

The £ has lost 30%+ of its value and our government is gearing up to start printing in earnest

There will be consequences

And, unlike the 1970s, it's very unlikely that wages will go up very much, if at all

Bender is wise

Stef said...

The requested URL /grid.htm was not found on this server.

My spooky psychic powers are telling me that the current state of the UK's immediate (i.e. tomorrow) energy reserves is far from jolly

Transport infrastructure has been shut down. Even stuff which could have kept running. People have been kept from work

Workers in the energy industry are taking the opportunity to put the boot in

Get the picture?

I don't think we're supposed to

Stef said...

Lord P's Super Spider Sense is also tingling

Stef said...

when I fixed my ticket out back in November I was cacking myself that by early February we'd either face...

a) some kind of catastrophic collapse of the retail banking system

b) a major energy crisis brought on by our atrocious infrastructure and my childish, naive faith in sunspots, or rather lack of sunspots as a general indicator of chilly times

For the last two months whenever the subject of my trip overseas came up with family and friends they have been consistently puzzled by me talking about it as if it were a possibility, not a certainty

I haven't elaborated as they think I'm potty enough already...

jon doy™ said...

as i was saying over at Lord Patel's just a moment ago, things are looking a tad scary :S in a wouldn't it be REALLY strange if our freedom hating enemies once again attacked us just when we were looking like we might start fighting for said freedoms

jon doy™ said...

...kind of way

Stef said...

The immediate concern I think, is not stroppy proles protesting about their jobs, but the distinct possibility, if this weather carries on for more than a few days, of the lights going out

Preparations are being made, quietly

Stef said...

more from Lord P. here

plus me hurling even more abuse at those politicized douches at the Met Office by way of comment

rob said...

meanwhile,

California, the eighth largest economy in the world, is broke. "People are going to be hurt starting today," said Hallye Jordan, speaking on behalf of the state Controller. "There's no money." Since state legislators failed to meet an end of January deadline on an agreement to make up for California's $40 billion budget gap, residents won't be getting their state tax rebates, scholarships to Cal Grant college will go unpaid, vendors invoices will remain uncollected and county social services will cease.

Anonymous said...

Apparently it means we're lazy if we didn't attempt to go to work today, and British construction workers deserve to lose their jobs to lower paid European counterparts. When I tried to argue against this logic, I was told that because Brits have left to work elsewhere in the EU we should let in more "hard-working immigrants".

Anonymous said...

I meant yesterday*

Anonymous said...

Might be of interest -
BBC abandons 'impartiality' on (global) warming

Anonymous said...

They use the words "raising temperature" when referring to protests in Europe too.

According to News 24 tonight, fresh snow is causing further disruption and casualties in the UK...

ziz said...

It seems to me there must be a flaw.

Snow

+

Global warming

=

Warm snow ?

paul said...

Warm snow ? = water, in which polar bears drown, being unable to evolve into plankton muching whales fast enough

Stef said...

@eris

It was thank you

Though I was unaware that the BBC ever pretended to be impartial on this subject in the first place

Ask David Bellamy

Anonymous said...

F*&*%@$ B$%£&*%!!

Anonymous said...

Whatever you do, don't eat the yellow snow.

VileVeil said...

Keep calm and carry on!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7869458.stm