Did you know?

The term 'Woke' literally means to be aware of social issues that need addressing.

So when conservatives are complaining about new "woke" people and politicians destroying the country, they're admitting that their own political parties aren't doing their own job.

By the definition of the word- it is _literally_ the job of a politician to be woke.

Good job guys, really showing your intellect and research capabilities, there aren't you?

What's Marriage For?

Marriage is a thing that’s so important to our culture and media that you’ll see it in an embarrassing quantity of everything. Setting aside media genres that are just dedicated to some version of it (and yeah, a lot of those ‘romantic’ things people are making are really just just about marriage things), there’s still stuff in our language and everyday common existence that speaks of marriage. If nothing else, consider we have a mode of address that specifies whether or not a woman is married, and asking to not be treated with that language is seen as a different dispensation. It is, to the audience of most of this conversation, a thing that The Empire tells us

What does it mean to be ‘married?’

In the context of our world, western European world, marriage is a simple idea with complex surroundings. The idea is that two people who are married are people who have agreed upon sharing their lives and assets. All the permutations of it, from signataries, name changes, the ceremony of a wedding, inheritance, offspring and property rights, oh and divorce law and all its stuff, that’s all things that flow from ideology in our own world about what marriage is and how our lives work.

It’s all built on our own base assumptions. It’s been changed, in your lifetime. It used to be that wives didn’t have legal rights for protections from their spouses, which were men. If you’re younger than that, it used to be that marriage had to be between men and women only. If you’re pretty young, you might even be born around the same time as Ireland legalised divorce – 1996. There’s a lot of things about marriage that are directly reflecting the ideology and history of our own reality, which you might notice are based around ideas like patriarchy and capitalism. A woman is titled as a married woman to indicate not that she should merit more respect, but rather to signal to everyone around her that she is not an unmarried woman and therefore there is no reason to treat her as if she is unmarried.

Our vision of what a marriage is, and therefore, what flows from that, is about property and control.

Is that necessary for your world?

This isn’t about the different rites. Rites are ways of representing arrangements. A marriage in Korea and a marriage in India and a marriage in England are all going to have very different rites, but it’s not an unreasonable comparison to say that to some extent those rites follow on from the actual action, which is a committed unified action about the you know, the capital stuff. I don’t even know if it’s how things worked in those countries now, but sometime in oh say the past two centuries, some culture did a whole mass colonialism thing and then another culture kept doing it, so a lot of what culture is going on in the world is kinda stamped with that.

The point is, the coloniser created the default and now we all get to operate under it, and that means, if you’re building a world, you have the opportunity to construct this idea without the pre-existing assumptions about what it means. To that end, I’m not actually going to try and tell you about how you should do marriage. I’m going to, instead, present examples of different approaches to marriage from another culture I’ve used in Cobrin’Seil, and how I built it out based on cultural assumptions about what they don’t care about.

The one I’ve written the most about is the culture of Orcs in Cobrin’Seil. These Orcs don’t have an idea of privatised property; there’s the personal property, but to an Orc, personal property is your immediate stuff; you don’t own things that aren’t enclosed by your personal sphere. If it’s something too big for you to carry off, it’s not a thing you own. This relationship to property means that Orcs in general don’t have a problem with unasked borrowing, either; if you cohabitate with someone and they use something of yours without asking, it was clearly happening because you weren’t holding it. This absence of an attitude towards property means that marriage isn’t really a thing for needing public declaration.

What Orcs do have public rituals about is child-rearing. Someone has a kid – from birth or adoption or a raid – and then they negotiate a couple or more rearing the kid. This is a thing that tells the community ‘hey, we won’t be contributing to group resources as much,’ and that’s its purpose. I guess there’s also an element of consideration of how Orcs lack the idea of familial ownership – you know, the idea that parents own their children.

(“They don’t,” you may say but trust me, look at how parents talk about their children and the legal rights of those children, and uh, you own your kids more than you tend to own the house you’re raising them in.)

The lack of private propery plays into the way orcs regard children. You don’t need children because they’ll take care of you in an ongoing capitalist drain on your resources. You don’t need children because of investments of worth, you take care of kids because kids are kids and someone needs to take care of them. It’s not a matter of imprinting legacy or having enduring influence. And there’s more here of course; orcish society has some degree of kyriarchy to it in that classic ‘bigger punch wins the conversation’ way that comes up in heated moments, but as a rule orcs don’t have the prebuilt bias towards patriarchal structures we do and the assumption of things like birthright and blood lines.

These are all deliberate choices! Orcs are independent, Orcs are tough and when I say ‘independent’ I mean an individual orc is likely to overproduce things they use, and leave those things in caches for other Orcs. To have orcs do marriage rituals about shared ownership and obligations and like, tax law, that’s strange. That would imply things about Orcs that don’t make sense for the setting.

Don’t think you need to reinvent marriage from the ground up in your setting. Worldbuilding is not the task of creating a coherent alternate reality ex nihilo, it’s the task of considering what differs from your norm in order to help engaging with the world embracing the different space. But it’s also a thing worth examining and asking the question of if this ritual, if this practice, is similar to how it is in our world, then it probably indicates a similarity in the history of your world to the history in our world.

You can do this backwards too; you can start with the idea of ‘here are the things I want a ritual to include because I think they’re dope,’ then work backwards to what those things represent, and how they inform ideology. Remember, that cultural behaviour is not agnostic to the culture it’s from. Right now, we have gay marriage and interracial marriage, and divorce and financial independence but those things needed to be bolted onto another system. You can bolt on other things or even open it up and clear out stuff from under the hood!

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

Nobody does class solidarity like the rich. In May 2020, Baroness Dido Harding, a Conservative peer and wife of Conservative MP John Penrose, was appointed to lead the UK’s privatised Coronavirus Test and Trace system, a programme later described by doctors as ‘an utter shambles’. Four months later, she was made interim chief of the National Institute for Health Protection, a body designed by management consulting firm McKinsey to replace Public Health England. The National Institute for Health Protection is overseen by a board including executives from the likes of Waitrose, Jaguar and TalkTalk – the latter of which Harding was previously chief executive, overseeing a period in which over 150,000 customers found their personal data stolen in a data breach.

Harding had never been through a standard recruitment process when she was appointed by the government. Nor had Topshop boss Sir Philip Green when he was selected as David Cameron’s efficiency tsar in 2010, or venture capitalist Adrian Beecroft when he was commissioned in 2012 to provide a review of employment law, in which he suggested that workers might like to trade in their rights for business shares. Nor, for that matter, had Matthew Taylor (CBE) of the Taylor Review. Property developer Richard Desmond also faced no such inconvenience in 2020 when he was allegedly able to influence planning decisions by being rich enough to make a £12,000 donation to the Tory party. No amount of incompetence or negligence is a match for solidarity within the upper echelons of power. Money and influence speak louder than science, evidence, compassion or common sense.

Eve Livingston, Make Bosses Pay: Why We Need Unions

you know what yall get my discord rant about the yassified constantine ya thing. [<-is edits->]

I'm just speechless[spoiler: i find my voice p quick] on the whole yasstantine ya thing and by speechless I mean disappointed to the bone and very close to cussing the house down. Also the story is so shite? like he has a mum and is part of a magical lineage but in a weird not John way? Like there's a good post about how two panels show the massive difference between the two. Also? How can u wright John Constantine without his mum dying as he was born? Like it affects sooo mutch. It's like rebooting Spiderman and not killing uncle Ben. It's the catalyst of all catalysts.

Also I'm not saying John ain't pretty when he's young, because he's decent looking in the first hellblazers, but he's scruffy there, also he's[yasstantine] a poser. Like John ain't a poser. Idk how to explain it but making John pretty and airbrushed and ticktoc alt is fundamentaly opposed to who the actual charecter is. Like they look at all the reasons ppl like him and changed them. John is a queer northern man who had dealt massively with childhood trauma and abuse as well as poverty, and stripping him of that is something I wish I could be surprised about DC doing but given how DC are already trying to downplay and flatten him

(don't get me started on the king shark thing or the flirting w batman. John may not have self respect but he does have a burning hatred for the rich and batman is not an exeption and the "oh John's such a slut he even fuked a shark" fuck off.) Ok speechless was a lie ^ pissed of queer and punk Londoner who has to many opinions on John Constantine and to many fights they want to pick with dc.

John is an inherently political charecter and that's where he is best. And you can't strip him of his context as a British punk queer man who lived through the aids crisis and Thatcher and the coalminers strikes and section 28. But DC want to strip him of his politics and so put him in America. No! John's story is important and speaks of things the government want to ignore. Issue 3 of hellblazers cover was taking the piss out of Thatcher. Hellblazer isent just a comic its a comic that calls out the bull going on in the world, and sits you down and forces you to empathize with people, and to show how bigots are pathetic. I read hellblazer and I can point to the things my parents have told me about, and more. Hellblazer is political, hellblazer is important and hellblazer tells me my history. Hellblazer is about people that I could know, and the horrors I have to face. Idk how to say it but hellbazer and John Constantine are so important to me in a world where most English language media is American. Where you learn all about America. And we have alot less media telling it how it is. England has a massive issue with putting old horrors under the rug.

And it's hard to explain to some people that didn't grow up with the horrors, or there parents didn't warn them if the horrors they lived thru, about the council estates, about section 28, about the privatisation of the verge, about all the British issues shoved under the bloody carpet. I read hellblazer and it tells me that these horrors do exist, the wounds that scar us still do exist, but people survive and people are good. [note- by horrors i mean the real life horrors, that are either played straight or allgorised]

Also from a story point of view, disregarding context, disregarding charecter, John's story is so fuking British. "The Americans want someone to succeed where they haven't, the English want someone to fail where they have," is a p good summary of the difference between the two countries media [i am heavily generalizing the common trends of american vs british media please dont @ me w outliers] We [brits] like watching someone else go through the shitter like us, to show that were not alone. We don't get happy ending. We know. We like morally complex arseholes who make bad choices. We don't want superman. We want our gritty hope that we may not be happy, but we can make choices that matter. We want to see people like us suffer and be absolved and be punished. We want the truth that is glossed over. We want to know that life sucks, and we take delight in watching other people go through the shit we do. Witch is why u need a British writer, not just because of knowledge of the context, but because the story is fundamentally different to American stories.

… ok I have alot more feellings and opinions on that than I thought

Tldr I hate it but it's inline w DC's attempts to de politicize John and in doing so showing they fundamentally don't understand the character and why people like him, and then ruin him in an attempt to make him "popular" when at the core of his character he is at his best when he isent popular with everyone [john is a character that should piss large groups of people off, and hellblazer is a comic that should make large amounts of people uncomfortable, but dc want to remove the discomfort, and defang the comic and character, selling out john. no the irony isent lost on me]

Will of the people or will o’ the wisp?

“The question is, will the House of Lords understand the country’s frustration, see the will of the elected house and move as quickly as we have to support this legislation so we can get it on the statute books and then get flights up and running?”

According to Wikipedia, “In folklore, a will-o'-the-wisp, will-o'-wisp, or ignis fatuus (Latin for 'foolish flame', is an atmospheric ghost light seen by travellers at night, especially over bogs, swamps or marshes.” How appropriate is that as a description of the plea made yesterday by the unelected Prime Minister, Rishi Soontobetoast, to the unelected House of Lords?

Speaking for myself, I think the House of Lords will indeed understand “the country’s frustration” but not in the way Rishi Soonotuptothejob thinks they will. My reading of the public’s mood – and don’t take my word for it, check all the latest polls – is that it is very frustrated but that its frustration is with not being able in this fake democracy to get rid of a government of incompetent, lying, self-serving fools who have been the performing dogs in the manger of British politics since 2010.

What the House of Lords may be less quick to understand is why Rishi Soupforbrains thinks the general public wants them to bless a poorly conceived and executed piece of nonsense like the Rwanda Bill.

“Get the flights up and running”, he says. We are talking here about 400 forced deportations at most (at a cost to the taxpayer of hundreds of millions – significantly more than it would cost to provide housing and life support in the UK for these people, most of whom would be proved, if allowed to prove it, to have a perfect legal right to be here). Four hundred: that is just one jumbo jet. Flights? Pull the other one.

“The country’s frustration”, he says. All the evidence is that the country’s frustration lies with his continuing to pretend to prioritise the expulsion of 400 people over sorting out the faltering NHS, the crumbling schools, the exploitation of the ordinary people by the privatised energy companies and water companies, the failure to hold to account those who, with Government help, robbed the Exchequer blind during the COVID crisis and the elevation of sleazy grifters to jobs for life in the nation’s legislature.

But what about this “will of the elected House” claim? That is just a sick fantasy. Wednesday’s vote to pass the Rwanda Bill on its third reading had nothing to do with any expression of will, beyond the will of the Tory Party whips office. It resulted in a small majority of cowed “Conservatives” voting to stave off their own annihilation for a little while longer.

It is hardly even a debating topic whether such a thing as the Conservative Party still exists as an effective political force. For thirteen years, successive “leaders” of the shambles formerly known as that Party have committed themselves to submitting to a small band of wreckers who owe loyalty only to their frenzied, delusional ideologies. If any of these unelected leaders had had an ounce of backbone or moral courage, they would have seen to the expulsion of this terrorist fringe rather than the deportation of 400 legal asylum seekers. The cuckoo in their nest, and ours, is an handful of UKIP castaways and their constant and egregious kowtowing has simply resulted in the handful’s undemocratic domination of Parliament.

In short, what we saw on Wednesday was not a demonstration of the “will of the elected House” but the next act in the calculated perversion of that will; and to serve what? To serve a rabid rabble of rancid racists.

Ignis fatuus. A foolish flame. How much more apt. May they burn in hell.

Thess vs Talking Points

I know that the UK doesn’t get all that much play in international news. I don’t blame anybody. The US tends to dominate, and for international news there’s generally Ukraine to focus on. So I don’t go running around screaming WHY ISN’T ANYONE TALKING ABOUT THIS?!?

I just talk about it.

I talk about how much profit the electric companies are raking in while we try to set up ‘warmth banks’ in libraries and the like but can’t because over a decad of Tory austerity is making it impossible for those libraries to stay open under normal circumstances, never mind get enough funding to have the heating on. How food banks are shutting down not because they’re not needed but because people can’t afford to donate to them, and how those that are open are having to turn away donations of far too many things (root vegetables, in the main - some of the cheapest healthiest ways to eat) because people turn them down for not being able to afford the energy needed to cook them. About how PM-to-be Truss keeps saying that corporate tax cuts will benefit everyone by encouraging corporations to keep their prices low, when we all see how they use tax cuts not to make their goods or services more affordable but to do stock buy-backs and enrich themselves at our expense.

Speaking of PM-to-be Truss, I talk about how she’s not exactly giving specifics about how she wants to scrap labour laws, but has stated that she plans to “deregulate aspects of the economy” because she insists that “UK workers are the laziest in the world” and “we need to be competitive in the global market”. When you consider that we already have the stingiest workers’ rights in Europe, you can imagine how much worse it can get. I see scrapping the 48-hour work week and holiday entitlement, because she’s already hinted as much. I see further reduction of maternity and paternity leave, and even stingier rules about paid sick leave, and probably stingier statutory sick pay too. I also see a crackdown on the labour unions, because she’s outright said that’s what she wants to do. While she says it’s all about “not disrupting things for normal people”, what she means is “people being unable to get to work costs our rich corporate donors money and meeting the strikers’ demands would cost them more money so let’s shut this shit down so that the plebs will sit down, shut up, and eat the shit we’ve given them”. Given that Truss has literally said that it’s entirely fair to prioritise the most well-off in society when it comes to tax cuts and economic graces ... you can see where the people rate in her view.

I talk about the Elections Bill. I talk about how we’re going to have voter ID introduced, and yet we still have heard nothing about how to apply for the free voter card we’ve been told we can have. About how senior railcards are seen as valid photo ID but student railcards are not. About how expensive passports are and how slow and backlogged the passport office has been since the end of the Brexit transition period - not to mention how they’re using the state of the passport office to insist on it needing to be privatised.

I also talk about the Elections Bill in the context of “it puts the Elections Commission more closely under government control”. Presumably because the Tories watched Trump try to get people to throw the election in his favour and were smart enough to set the legal procedures in place to do it properly.

I talk about the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act. About how most forms of protest have been outright criminalised. About how they can legally shut down protests for any reason, up to and including, “You’re annoying someone”. Which is, the last time I checked, the point of a protest. It also ignores data protection and confidentiality rules by demanding information about everyone (including victims and children) from whatever sources they deem fit, whether or not it’s applicable. Also gives the police greater stop and search powers - anywhere they want, any time they want, for whatever reason they want to make up. Also basically makes Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller encampments illegal. Not to mention the whole thing about forcing trans women to be incarcerated in men’s prisons, and vice versa.

I talk about the treatment of trans people in general. While a lot of people are pretty much okay with the whole concept, the government is not. The government that more or less controls our access to trans-affirming healthcare (and are behaving a lot like some US states about it). The government that insists so strongly that “biological sex is all-important” that they argue with the phrasing of “people who have ovaries” on a piece of advice about diagnosing and treating ovarian cancer. The government whose prime minister at the time (and technically still is, the rumpled pile of medical waste that he is) was proud to go on record as saying that trans women shouldn’t compete in women’s sport, and was backed by most of his government. This is the country that shaped JK Rowling; do not forget that. (Let’s face it, however much a poor single mother she was when she wrote the first Harry Potter book, she went high-octane Tory the red-hot minute she had enough money to sit on like a dragon on its hoard.)

Now, a lot of this goes against international human rights law. So I talk about the fact that the UK wants to entirely quit the European Court of Human Rights and make its own human rights laws. Given the above, how do you think that bill of human rights is going to look? We’ve already had our rights whittled down to the point where more than a few organisations are looking our way and going, “Um ... you know this is bad, right?” If we’re ever in a position where the ECHR doesn’t apply, everyone but the very rich in this country is fucking doomed.

Not that we aren’t already.

This is the country in which I now live. It terrifies me a little more every day. I don’t expect everybody to be talking about it. It’s not like anyone who doesn’t live here can do anything about it anyway. But I talk about it. I have to talk about it. I know it’s bad in other countries. I know that the US varies from state to state in how much bullshit they’re forced to eat regularly. I know Canada has its problems and Alberta’s the worst of a bad lot. I know the situation in Ukraine, and brewing issues in Taiwan, and Argentina, and Somalia, and... You get the idea. I do not diminish any of their situations. Thing is ... sometimes I just need to talk about mine. Because honestly I don’t know what else to do.

I am femme nonbinary in a country where the gender binary is all, so I’m afraid to come out. I remain in the closet about that, and about my sexuality or lack thereof, because it doesn’t feel safe. I am disabled in a country whose health service is being deliberately eroded to encourage a sell-off and turn to an insurance-based US-ish model. I have dietary restrictions that make cheap food literally impossible for me to eat, since they thicken everything with wheat flour and the last time I did a personal gluten challenge, I ended up with an upset stomach for a month and dangerously low vitamin D levels. (I must actually have coeliac, given that one of the things coeliac does is interfere with vitamin D uptake). It is only my insane pain tolerance (which allows me to work at least part-time) and the support of my parentals that allows me to survive, and also to not completely lose my shit.

This country hates me. This country hates me and everyone like me. And the Conservative party have stacked the deck so much in their favour that I have a horrible feeling that this is only going to get worse, because they’re not going away. We’ll try - gods, how we’ll try - but when they make it so hard for those without money to vote, and have the Electoral Commission in their hands ... I struggle to see how we’re going to succeed. And with protest largely off the table, I look to the future and see riots. Then again, is that really worse than the alternative - which at the moment is apathy and terror?

I’ve talked about this as much as I can, I think. Sometimes it has to be said. It just can’t be dwelled upon either. I can’t take to the streets with a Molotov cocktail and a brick. All I can do is talk. And when it gets to the point where I feel the tears threatening, I have to step away. I am of no help to myself or anyone else if I am a sobbing ball of nervous breakdown in a corner.

Just ... if you have a spare second, please send kind thoughts to the people of the UK. It isn’t a major talking point, I know, but there are a lot of tired, angry, terrified, drained, and miserable people on this little spit of land in the North Sea. They could all probably use a virtual hug. I know I could.

Questions to Consider

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice, and I am not a financial professional. Before making any important financial decisions, you should consider consulting a qualified professional.

In any given financial system, there will always be components that present systemic risks in the event of failure. This is simply a consequence of how any system works. Some parts are critical to the system. Other parts are not.

The first pertinent question is therefore how to determine which parts are so important that they cannot be allowed to fail. Determining which parts are critical relies on a thorough understanding of the system, particularly its foundations and the manner in which the different parts are interconnected.

In simple terms, the critical parts of the system are those that will cause the system to collapse if they fail. This can occur both directly (i.e., failure of the part will lead to immediate failure of the system) or indirectly (e.g., failure of the part will lead to additional failures that together will eventually lead to failure of the system).

It is often difficult to determine which parts of the system are truly critical. This is because allowing the system to fail will result in unacceptable damage. In the case of the financial system, this translates to economic, social, and political damage. If, for instance, the financial system that underpins the United States were to truly fail, the resulting economic, social, and political carnage would dwarf any other crisis of the modern economic era.

For obvious reasons, therefore, actually allowing the system or important parts of that system to fail is not considered an acceptable outcome by many.

If the system cannot be allowed to truly fail, then we are left with informed conjecture. We must rely upon past experience, economic theory, and simulations to determine which parts of the system are truly critical. Over the past several decades, it has become accepted that, generally speaking, banks and other entities above a certain size cannot be allowed to fail.

The ‘too big to fail’ idea has been used to justify bailouts and other support for a variety of troubled entities across a number of different crises. Perhaps most notably, the United States Government intervened during the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis and offered assistance to several entities that were identified as key pieces of the financial system. Such intervention is often referred to as a bailout.

If we accept bailouts as necessary, then a wise second question revolves around preventing the need for future bailouts. Ideally, a bailout would come with conditions, namely, governmental oversight and legislation that would prevent the need for future bailouts, particularly from similar circumstances. In practice, the oversight required to prevent future problems has not always been put in place, and the legislation that might prevent future recurrences of the same problems has not always been enacted.

The reason that governmental oversight and legislation is so important is that if an entity knows that it is too big to fail and will receive bailouts whenever it is in trouble, it may take risks that it would not otherwise take. For example, if a large bank knows that it will never be allowed to fail, then it may adopt riskier practices in a bid to generate greater profits while assuming that the government will step in should any of its mistakes endanger its survival.

When people talk about ‘privatising profits and socialising losses’, they are referring to this style of thinking. An entity making risky decisions will happily pocket the increased profits it makes while demanding to be bailed out in the event of failure. For obvious reasons, such thinking should be discouraged.

Moreover, entities that have been identified as ‘too big to fail’ possess a powerful competitive advantage over their peers. Consider the situation in which a customer must choose between two banks that offer similar products. However, one of these banks is considered critical to the financial system and will never be allowed to fail whilst the other is not. Which bank do you think the customer will choose? All things being equal, it makes sense to choose the bank that will receive government support in the event of a crisis. Yet when extended beyond one customer to the public and corporate world at large, this will result in the ‘too big to fail’ bank growing larger and larger. It will become increasingly important and increasingly critical to the financial system. This is not necessarily a good thing.

Setting aside determination of criticality and what to do after a bailout has occurred, a third question comes to mind. If certain parts of the system continue to require assistance, is the system itself flawed? In other words, if the government is repeatedly forced to step in to deal with systemic risks, should action be taken to ensure that such risks cannot occur in the future?

This line of thinking has led to suggestions that any entity (e.g., a bank) that is too big to fail is also too big to exist. That is, no entity in the financial system should ever be allowed to become so large that it presents a systemic risk to the rest of the system. Unfortunately, the financial system is highly complex, with many different levels and types of interconnectedness. Simply breaking up the largest entities will have a host of consequences, not all of which can be anticipated or mitigated.

Still, the question remains. If certain parts of the financial system continue to pose repeated systemic risk that needs to be addressed via government action, what are we to do? The safest course of action is better government oversight and targeted legislation designed to prevent the behaviour that has so far led to problems. Of course, this has been known for decades, but a combination of political skulduggery, corporate influence, and other factors have resulted in sub-optimal outcomes.

So what is to be done?

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. The modern financial system is too complex to be perfectly simulated, and the consequences of fiddling with it in real life can be measured not simply in billions or even trillions of dollars but also in homes forfeited, jobs lost, and economies left in shambles. Even if an ideal solution were to emerge, it is doubtful that the present political climate would allow it to be enacted.

>be the afternoon before I was to leave for home over Easter

>recall that my smartphone doesn't draw power from its cable

>assume this to be a problem with the smartphone

>remember a friend telling me that the library has many smartphone chargers, including wireless ones

>however, library desk guard says they are temporarily out of order while being replaced (and the librarian who has the keys was apparently showing prospective students around that day, and would not be back until tomorrow), and recommends I try the student information desk

>think "oh, good, now I have solved this and need not worry any further"

>several hours later, I have eaten and finished packing my things, and go to the desk in question

>tfw they are closed

>panic somewhat

>on way back, see a security guard patrolling the grounds

>ask him where one might find a wireless charger around here

>he takes me to many places I did not know about within the university, each one closed, then says "aha! we can try the lost property"

>he speaks over his walkie talkie (his codename is Sierra and his accomplice's is Bravo) and meets up with the one who has the keys to it

>we walk over to it, on the way the original guard receives a dispatch and leaves

>the new one receives an inquiry over the walkie-talkie as to how it is going, he looks me over briefly then refers to me as "they" and "the person" in his response (I am wearing a kilt and thermal leggings underneath it)

>no wireless charger has been lost there as of late, but he suggests that I blow into the port and try one of their wires

>sceptical but desperate, I do so, and it seems to work

>return to my flat, to find it had in fact been my wire that was the problem the entire time

>use flatmate's wire, however it charges exceedingly slowly, realise I will not make it for the traln

>learn that another flatmate of mine is leaving the subsequent day, and decide to join her

>on the day, we leave together, to catch the bus

>unfortunate combination of red traffic lights and the driver taking an unexpected diversion causes us to very marginally miss the train

>I have an all-day ticket, she only has one valid for that particular train

>she visits a support desk and is told it will cost her £25 to have it exchanged

>"I'm going to need to think about it"

>I tell her to board the train with me

>"but what if I'm caught"

>"I once had a ticket valid for the next day accidentally, I was caught but adamant in my refusal to pay anything more, eventually the inspector let me off when it became clear that continuing our argument would mean letting other passengers go uninspected"

>"I don't know, I'm going to call my mum"

>her mother is not responsive, her brother gives her the advice of blaming her missing the train upon the ticket-printing machine rather than the bus

>we board

>ticket inspector approaches

>she runs away shortly before he reaches us while he is occupied with scanning someone's ticket, assumedly she goes to the bathroom

>move her luggage to my side of the table and let him scan mine

>she does not return before I exit

>message her tlater o find out what happened

>"I didn't get caught 🫢"

(this was entirely ethical since it is an exorbitantly overpriced railway company that would not exist had the line not been privatised in 1997)

My elderly mother, secret deregulated telecoms entrepreneur? : 2014 : Virgin Mobile

“Just putting you through, dear.” Thousands of calls received each day demanding telephone numbers of businesses and individuals across the country. Shelves of phone directories and ‘Yellow Pages’ for every area of the UK. Banks of phones with operators wearing headsets sat at desks, staring into flickering screens. An impending deal with the Caribbean island of Nevis to ‘offshore’ customer service to a new call centre opened by the country’s premier where staff could be paid as little as £300 per month. My mother was doing all this?

From the early days of telephony, Britain’s ‘directory enquiries’ service had been a successful ‘public service’ available free by dialling ‘192’ to speak with a helpful human being until … Tory government dogma forced privatisation of the country’s phone system in 1984. You can tell Sid that Thatcher’s promise to Britain’s financially illiterate population that they could sit on their sofa and ‘get rich quick’ by merely purchasing a few shares in former public utilities was an outright lie. In 1991, users of ‘192’ started to be charged for the service, despite British taxpayers having contributed billions since 1912 to build the country’s public telegraphy system. Why were we now required to pay shareholders for the privilege of using a service that generations had already paid for?

A Labour government in 2003 opened up the previously singular ‘192’ service to ‘entrepreneurs’ who were permitted to charge an arm and a leg for a brief call to request a phone number. The government regulator did nothing to control this legalised extortion until 2015, by which time there were 200 competing private ‘directory enquiry’ services, all allocated phone numbers that started ‘118’. How on earth were the public expected to choose between so many companies charging varying prices for exactly the same information? What had once been a universal free ‘192’ service had been transformed into a costly logistical nightmare for consumers in the name of ‘market choice’. Unsurprisingly, the number of callers to directory services fell by 38% PER ANNUM after 2014.

Visiting my mother’s home, I saw no signs of a ‘directory enquiries’ start-up business in her tiny terraced house in the Home Counties. In fact, her landline phone rarely rang at all and quarterly bills I received listed few calls. Neither was there space in her postage-stamp back garden for a ’home office’ shed. No computer was visible in the house either because, in the 1980’s, her workplace accounts department’s upgrade from handwritten ledgers to huge concertinaed computer printouts had traumatised her, necessitating me to help interpret and reconcile them on our kitchen table. Despite this overwhelming lack of evidence, nothing could convince Virgin Mobile that my mother was not operating a ‘directory enquiries’ business on her phoneline … whose number happened to begin ‘0118’, as did all landlines in the Reading area. It started like this:

• 6 December 2014 @ 1600. I phoned my mother’s landline on my Virgin Mobile phone, its roaming function enabled, to let her know I had arrived safely in Spain. We spoke for 11 minutes. • 7 December 2014 @ 2004. I phoned my mother again. We spoke for 3 minutes. • 9 December 2014 @ 1841. I phoned my mother again. We spoke for 13 minutes. • 14 December 2014 @ 1708. I phoned my mother again. We spoke for 16 minutes.

I tried to use my mobile phone later that week and found my account had been suspended. I logged in online and was surprised to find that Virgin Mobile believed my maximum monthly credit limit had already been exceeded. The four calls to my mother were bizarrely billed as “Roaming Directory Enquiries” with amounts of £30.15, £9.30, £36.90 and £44.76 respectively (plus VAT at 20%). I had regularly called my mother from abroad, where I usually worked, and never encountered this problem previously. Her phone number had not changed. Evidently, a fault must recently have been introduced into Virgin Mobile’s billing system. I expected it to be quickly fixed once I explained the mistake. For heaven’s sake, who would call a ‘directory enquiries’ number and talk for 16 minutes?

I was so so wrong. I am sufficiently ancient to recall a long-gone era when ‘customer service’ meant listening to a client’s problem and then doing the utmost to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. I am evidently a dinosaur. Call a helpline now and you might speak with someone in the Philippines whose purpose is to never admit corporate liability for any mistake, to direct you to a non-existent web page and to read a lengthy on-screen script (pre-approved by lawyers) that has zero pertinence to your issue. Having been a customer of Virgin Media for more than a decade, I had already suffered pain trying to get the simplest problems fixed. On one occasion, my wife became so angry with its ‘customer service’ that she had demanded the mobile number of its departmental boss and, phoning it, he answered only to explain he was presently aboard his yacht. How the other half live!

I persevered anyway, phoning Virgin’s customer service to complain twice on 18 December and again on 5 January, calls for which I was charged £12.62 because I was abroad. I was attempting to avoid my impending 6 January invoice being mistakenly inflated. I was lied to, told that my query would be investigated and I would be called back within 24 hours. I was disbelieved, told that I must have forgotten that I had used ‘directory enquiries’ to call my mother, even though her landline is ex-directory. I was fobbed off, told that the issue could not be investigated until Virgin had dispatched my next monthly invoice. I was told I could pay the overcharged amounts immediately so as to restore my credit limit, enabling me to make further calls. I was even told that, because my mother's UK phone number started with '0118', she MUST be a ‘directory enquiries’ service. Remarkably, one customer services person admitted that a previous customer services person I had spoken to had lied to me when having promised to resolve the problem.

Virgin’s invoice arrived and included the overcharges, forcing me to submit an online complaint on 9 January. I received an automated confirmation but no response. I sent the same complaint by letter to Virgin’s complaints department in Swansea. I received no response. I was forced to let Virgin take the £145 overcharge from my bank account or my mobile service would never be resumed.

Now I was unable to call my mother for fear of incurring further crazy charges. Though she had a mobile phone my sister had bought for her, she habitually left it in a drawer uncharged. I added cash to my Skype account but 99% of attempts to call her landline failed as I was told her number did not exist, had been disconnected or was permanently ‘busy’, none of which were true. I had to resort to using phone booths in Spanish internet cafés or calling my sister’s mobile when I knew she was visiting my mother, neither of which enabled frequent communication. To my frail mother, it must have seemed like sudden ‘radio silence’ from her eldest son.

By March 2015, having received no response from Virgin, I registered a formal complaint with ‘CISAS’, the organisation arbitrating customer complaints against Virgin Mobile. In April, it responded that “we have received confirmation from the communications provider that they are settling your claim in full” and it “now has 20 working days to provide you with everything you claimed”. That should have been the end of the four-month affair … except that Virgin Mobile did not pay!

You might imagine CISAS would chase Virgin Mobile for payment on behalf of the customer. You would be wrong. My subsequent correspondence with CISAS to inform that Virgin had still not paid was met with indifference: “We note the points and concerns you have raised and will be contacting the company. We will revert back to you promptly…" Except it never did.

In June 2015, I wrote to CISAS again: “You have failed to “revert back to [me] promptly”, as stated in your correspondence below. It is more than a month since I sent my e-mail to you noting that Virgin Mobile had failed to execute any of the agreed remedies from April 2015. It is more than three months since I submitted my complaint about Virgin Mobile to CISAS. You have failed to address the questions raised in my e-mail of 13 May. I continue to be making expenditures as a direct result of Virgin Mobile failing to remedy the billing problem I initially raised with them in December 2014…”

By July 2015, having received no response, I lodged a complaint about CISAS’ inaction to a related organisation named ‘IDRS’. Although I had been informed in March by CISAS that Virgin Mobile had agreed to settle my claim in full, it appeared that, after refusing to pay, Virgin wished to open up a new attack front on my complaint which it suddenly wanted to pursue to the bitter end. There followed a completely bizarre, intense correspondence in which I had to provide a detailed ‘defence’ to Virgin’s accusations in correspondence with an IDRS employee named “Jean-Marie Sadio BA (Hons) Bsc ( Hons) ACIarb” [sic].

Tellingly, Virgin Mobile now claimed to have sent me a letter dated 10 March 2015 in which it had mentioned the value of compensation I was seeking, a value I had not calculated until nine days later when my complaint to CISAS was submitted. Perhaps Virgin’s litigator had been dozing during Law School lectures, daydreaming that ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ was a reality movie. The reason I had never received Virgin’s letter was because it was evidently a work of post factum fiction.

Another of Virgin’s fictions in March was its assurance that it had “take[n] action to prevent future overcharges” when I called my mother’s landline. Strange because a short test call I made to my mother on 4 April 2015 was still charged at the exorbitant ‘directory enquiries’ rate. At any point during this gigantic waste of time, all it needed was for one of Virgin’s thousands of employees to have called my mother’s phone number in order to verify that it was not in fact a ‘directory enquiries’ service. I am certain my mother would have been happy to give the Virgin staffer a forthright piece of her mind, had they requested the phone number of the nearest pizza takeaway.

Happy ending? Not really. Later in 2015, I did eventually receive the compensation amount from Virgin Mobile I had been promised in March, but only after this ridiculously long and exhausting struggle. What a way to run a railroad!

However, what was not returned to me was the ability to call my mother’s home phone from my mobile without incurring further massive expenses. Skype was still rejecting 99% of my calls to her number, despite attempts every few days. In Spain, the waiting time to install a home landline was more than a year. As a result, between December 2014 and the tragic episode when my mother contracted COVID whilst waiting to be discharged from hospital after a successful minor operation then died at home in March 2021, my ability to communicate with her from overseas had been reduced to almost zero.

In my mind, Virgin Mobile looms large over memories of the final years of my mother’s life. In this brave new world where global communication is supposed to have been made so straightforward, nothing can replace the loss of personal contact I suffered during her last days. COVID travel restrictions conspired against my presence during her final months on Earth and at her funeral.

By • Olalekan Fagbade JUST IN president Tinubu stops electricity tariff hike President Bola Tinubu recently stopped the implementation of a hike in electricity tariff and insisted that subsidy be paid on power consumed nationwide, the Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, revealed on Wednesday. Adelabu also stated that the Federal Government would investigate the legality of the five-year licence extension given to privatised power distribution and generation companies, stressing that the operating licences of the firms would have expired on October 31, 2023. The minister, who spoke at a press briefing in Abuja, further stated that he would sack any non-performing chief executive in agencies under the power ministry, if their non-performance would make him lose his job as minister. Speaking on the call for a cost reflective tariff, which would lead to a hike in the amount payable for power, Adelabu said, “The power sector is an industry that is very sensitive to any leader. Vox Naija: Nigerians Lament Poor Circulation Of New Naira Notes “You cannot jump overnight and implement the cost reflective tariff. I can tell you that till today the government still subsidises power. Tariff should have been raised months back, but Mr President said until we are able to achieve regular and incremental power supply we can’t touch the tariff. “So the there is a gap between the cost reflective tariff that we are supposed to charge and the allowed tariff. That huge gap the government is still handling it as subsidy. This affects liquidity in the system, investments and causes so many constraints.” He noted that the non-implementation of this was actually causing liquidity crisis in the sector, but stressed that the President had refused to allow a raise in electricity rate. “Now, I never said that it is not yet time to charge cost reflective tariff. Rather, I said cost reflective tariff is supposed to have been implemented months ago because it is the source of liquidity to the system. “But for political reasons and empathy, you cannot cause additional burden on Nigerians. We just had the removal of fuel subsidy, we are talking about exchange rate skyrocketing, galloping inflation and so many others that bring hardship to the people. “And Mr President is trying to relieve this hardship through various forms of palliatives. So it is not politically expedient and reasonable to now implement a tariff that is more like dumping the existing tariff. “We are now paying about N70 (per kilowatt-hour), and it can never be less than N130 or N140 at the exchange rate of today if we are to implement a cost reflective tariff. Because part of the reasons for an increased tariff is the price of gas, which is paid in dollars,” Adelabu stated. He explained that as at today, 75 to 80 per cent of Nigeria’s power was from gas power plants, “and their raw material is gas. So, once exchange rate goes up, the cost of gas also goes up and it affects the tariff.” He, however, pointed out that tariff would be increased at the appropriate time, which would be after a lot of sensitisation and communication with the public, adding that there must also be an assured incremental and regular supply. The minister said the about 4,000 megawatts power generation in Nigeria was shameful and unacceptable, noting that efforts were being made to increase this.

UV Gullas College of Medicine

UV GULLAS COLLEGE OF MEDICINE INTRODUCTION Since 1977, the UV Gullas College of Medicine has worked to improve public health by pursuing its four-fold purpose of teaching, research, patient care, and public service. UV Gullas College of Medicine is situated in Banilad, Mandaue City, Cebu, in an environment that is most conducive to study and scholarship, and it has grown to become one of the foremost medical research institutions in all of South Asia. At UV Gullas, we combine pedagogical strategies that encourage critical thinking and active learning with earlier clinical experience, more advanced clinical and basic/population science experiences, and a research project that will enable each student to design a unique path to a medical degree. In addition to teaching medical practise, UV Gullas College of Medicine has excelled at developing the best qualities in its pupils. Through a curriculum based on the study of cutting-edge biomedical science and clinical experience, a rich diversity of degree programme choices, and a history of innovation that has led to our graduates working all over the world in various respectable positions as doctors, surgeons, and researchers, UV Gullas College of Medicine prepares students to excel in the quickly changing landscape of modern medicine. ADVANTAGES OF STUDYING MBBS IN UV GULLAS Philippines' medical research is well-known throughout the world. The majority of medical universities in the Philippines were privatised because it happened quite early there. • Compared to other nations, the USMLE is easy to pass because the medical curriculum follows US patterns. • The World Health Organisation (WHO), MED of ECPMG, and similar organisations recognise the value of medical education. More than 55 countries send students to study in the Philippines. Additionally, there are students in the Philippines from the US, Europe, Singapore, India, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. • The UV Gullas Syllabus follows the US style, and classes will focus 80% on practicals to give students an in-depth understanding of the material. • The UV Gullas College of Medicine's pricing structure for its MBA programme in the Philippines is highly convenient because the university consistently provides all benefits to its international students. • The dormitories of the Gullas College of Medicine are completely secure.The hostels are located on the university campus. Both boys' and girls' hostel accommodations are provided separately. UV Gullas Authorized Admission office You can speak with the office of admission for international students directly to apply for admission to UV Gullas College of Medicine. MBA programmes in the Philippines are one of the many incredible advantages for Indian students that the education experts will ensure you receive. At UV Gullas College of Medicine, study medicine to easily fulfill your dream of becoming a doctor. You can reach us at +91 9444666890 or +91 9444777890 for assistance with admission. Walk right in there as well. International Students Admission office #50, Shree Towers, 100 feet road, JNR Salai, Vadapalani, Chennai-600026. Tamil Nadu, India. For more visit https://www.uvgullas.com/ Also watch https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0gU15uv6nDyn0STcX24_QA

Time for a personal rant and reminder about why, as good as private healthcare looks right now (compared to the state the NHS is in at the moment), we need good quality healthcare (less than good is insufficient) to be free for all.

The emergency doctor I saw yesterday at my local GP (who was a dr I'd never met before) prescribed antibiotics for my ear, but my ear was blocked so he couldn’t tell if the problem was just the wax, or also an infection, or something else.

But I don't have any other symptoms or signs of ear infection like I normally get and I'm not gonna use antibiotics unnecessarily because 1. antibiotic resistance and 2. I often get a stupid fungal infection afterwards (cos it kills the good bacteria that help keep your immune system in shape as well as the bad bacteria… I really hope big pharma is at least working on ways to develop antibiotics that can be more targeted?!)

privileged enough to have a sister who gets work perks like free private gp appointments, I had a TWENTY MINUTE phone call with one of them today and it was so much more thorough and useful than the 5 minute appointment I had yesterday (the only useful thing about that was getting my ear looked at).

After explaining everything from how my symptoms have developed since last week, what I think triggered it, my ear health history, etc - we came to a very different conclusion (where he basically agreed with me that I don't think this is likely to be an infection). He thinks that as well as the earwax I may have a blocked eustachian tube, which could definitely have been triggered by the sore throat I had for a couple of days last week (which I think wasn’t due to any infection but from temperature fluctuations i experienced the day before). 

So one doctor’s quick conclusion was antibiotics. The other doctor’s conclusion was: use the steroid nasal spray i already have leftover from when covid gave me post-nasal drip and take some antihistamines. and he explained WHY (reduce inflammation to help unblock the eustachian tube), and he went into the detail of HOW to use them all - which included some nasal spray tips i’d never been made aware of previously even though i’ve been prescribed nasal sprays before.

I’m so glad I’m knowledgeable enough to be able to suspect some things in the right direction, but also grateful that I'm privileged enough to get a second opinion that corroborated this and taught me even more. But healthcare is a human right, so everyone should be able to get healthcare (not being diagnosed/treated sufficiently is not healthcare - that’s negligence) without having to pay or have any privileges.

If I took those antibiotics when I had no bacterial infection to treat, it would’ve not only been a waste of medicine, it would create complications for my immune system that would take even longer and more effort to treat - and the original problem with my ears would still need treating as well.

I’m old enough to remember when NHS GP appointments were long enough to explain yourself in full detail, heck even back when I was 5 years old they did home visits if you requested it! 

Problems are often complex when you have health conditions and when you are aware about certain kinds of things pertaining to your health, so you want to give your doctor as much relevant information as possible so they can make the most informed choices about what will be the best treatment for you. Short appointments are insufficient and can therefore be damaging. The NHS needs FUNDING, RESOURCING, and much more effective forms of MANAGEMENT than it currently does. The last thing the NHS needs is cuts and privatisation, both of which have  led to mismanagement, inefficiencies, consequences for patients, and therefore worse health overall for the population.

I need everyone in government and corporate who is working on sabotaging and privatising the NHS to be stopped. Speaking of which, these guys are trying to do just that: https://everydoctor.org.uk/ 

Good morning! I hope you slept well and feel rested? Currently sitting at my desk, in my study, attired only in my blue towelling robe, enjoying my first cuppa of the day. Welcome to Throwback Thursday and welcome to June! Yep, five months gone!

Many thanks to everyone that contributed to WEDNESDAY WORDS yesterday. There were some very cool submissions. Really beautiful words. And we managed to inspire a few old faces to come out of the woodwork to contribute!

On this page, ‘Throwback Thursday’ is about memories. So, what do you remember? If I was to say the word FIGHT, what immediately comes to mind?

This wasn’t so much a fight, just a single punch, but it’s the closest I’ve ever come to a fight. I’m non-confrontational. I avoid fights! The Trouble said something very interesting the other day. She said, (and I’m paraphrasing) “Isn’t it amazing that you can just be living your life, minding your own business, not saying or doing anything to anyone but, despite that, someone (somewhere) is affected by something or nothing and, suddenly, they feel a way about you.” It’s true. As we speak – trust me - someone is reading this and seething! Seething about what I do not know! Some kid punched me in my eye once. My dad went round to his family house and confronted the boy. “Why did you punch my son?” he asked. The boy replied, “He’s always so happy!” So, there was I, minding my own business, and somebody over there was getting riled-up just because I was happy. Amazing, innit?

So, on this Throwback Thursday, what kind of memories does the word FIGHT conjure up for you?

Al Pacino having a child at 83? He will struggle to keep up with that little one! Lucky for him, he has the money to hire a nanny!

I had two young guys knock on my door yesterday, looking for me to give money to a charity. I said to them, “I give enough money to charity already.” I didn’t feel guilty. Look how much I give every year to the tax man, my local council, the oil companies and the privatised utility companies! I am helping to feed poor, deprived millionaires. I keep thinking of their sad, little faces. They need my money!

On Wednesday night, we had dinner with The Trouble’s best male friend from her secondary school. Known him more than 40 years! He lives local, with his wife, so the four of us ate local and bloody delicious it was too; an award-winning Indonesian/Thai/Malaysian restaurant called Jakarta in Colindale, of all places. We ordered too much, so we brought it home in a doggie bag and I’ll be eating it tonight! These friendships of 40+ years are priceless, aren’t they? The Trouble and I are both blessed to have some reliable, rock-solid friends that love us when they see us and love us when they don’t.

Is it nearly my favourite day? I think it is. I am quivering in anticipation. We have another fun-packed weekend ahead of us. The days are so stuffed with events and parties, I haven’t even got space for a Hove weekend in June! Might have to visit Lady Wesker mid-week?

Have a throbbing and thrusting Thursday (with hopefully a few thrills through your thoroughfare?) I love you all.

Osinbajo presents discharge certificate to Transcorp

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, on Monday, in Abuja, said it would take serious private sector investment in Nigeria’s power sector to meet the country’s rising energy needs. Osinbajo made the observation when he presented the discharge certificate to the Chairman of Transcorp Ughelli Power Limited – the core investor in the Ughelli Power Plant -, Mr Tony Elumelu. The discharge comes one month after the National Council on Privatisation approved the recommendations of the Bureau of Public Enterprise that Ughelli Power Plc be delisted from routine monitoring, having satisfied five core post-acquisition requirements, namely: available capacity, capital expenditure, human resources, health, safety and environment and corporate social responsibility. Commissioned in 1966 with an installed capacity of 972MW, the Ughelli Power Plant, whose capacity had dropped to 300MW, became an asset of the Transnational Corporation of Nigeria Plc in 2013 under the company’s power subsidiary, Transcorp Ughelli Power Limited. Since its acquisition a decade ago, the Bureau of Public Enterprise has carried out post-acquisition monitoring and evaluation on the facility, the BPE Director-General, Alex Okoh, revealed at the meeting. Speaking at the State House, Abuja, the VP said, “The power needs of our country are grave. And we strongly believe that the right approach is the privatisation of the power sector to enable serious-minded private sector players to invest in the provision of public power and ensure that they are efficient while they make a profit at the same time.” He called on other private sector players to follow suit, saying, “We hope that this will not be the last in the series of private power companies that are taking over power plants that are unable to meet the expectations of the post-evaluation plans.” The Vice President also described the routine evaluation and monitoring of the power-generating company as an essential feature of the post-acquisition plan by the BPE. “It has covenants and deliverables which the enterprise is supposed to live up to. And we found, in this case, that Transcorp Power PLC has done exactly that. We have been able to ensure compliance with all of the deliverables and, in some cases, even exceeding the covenanted deliverables in the PAP,” the VP added. He commended the management of Transcorp Power, urging the company to “continue in that path and to do even better.” On his part, the DG BPE explained the discharge certificate became necessary after an evaluation showed that UPP’s generation capacity under Trancorp Power grew by 227 per cent in a decade. He said, “Following a capacity determination and validation of Ughelli Power PLC by the consultants engaged by the National Council on Privatisation, it was determined that generation capacity had increased by about 227 per cent from the operational status of 300 megawatts at the point of handover in 2013. “The company has achieved an available capacity of 680.8 megawatts, which surpasses the minimum performance target of 670 megawatts. Capital expenditure totalling N58.6bn was the covenant established for phases one and two of the post-acquisition plan, while actual investments made by the current investor were in the sum of N83.85bn. All the agreed benchmarks on human resources, health, safety and environment and corporate social responsibility have also been achieved. “Your Excellency, having exceeded the minimum performance targets and having fulfilled all the agreed obligations, the National Council on Privatisation at its meeting on April 4, 2023, considered and approved the recommendations of the Bureau and its requests that the company, Ughelli Power PLC be approved for delisting from routine monitoring.” In his remarks, Mr Elumelu revealed that the company’s indigenisation plan has ensured that the Power Plant is managed and run by Nigerians alone. “Mr Vice President, let me also say that in addition to the criteria set, we actually are doing a very strong indigenisation of Transcorp Power Plc. I’m proud to say that our power plant is managed and operated 100 per cent by Nigerians. “We at Transcorp Group recognise the importance of improved access to electricity. We know that with improved access to electricity, people can go to school, hospitals can function well, businesses can operate very well and most importantly can empower the industrialisation of our country. “This is why we invested in power and continue to invest in the power sector because we know it holds the key largely to the success of our country,” he said. Read the full article

hello!! i just finished the latest chapter, and as always, it didn’t disappoint!

i have so many thoughts regarding the latest chapter. i know that Miriam and Toto have tried their best to privatise george’s hospitalisation, but people are bound to notice his absence.. right? i wonder if anyone on the paddock would notice - or even the media. oh god.. what would happen if there was a media frenzy of some sort regarding it.. i wonder how toto and george would react to this.

speaking of george, i feel so bad for him. no matter what happens - he always seems to blame himself. he deserves so much better. it broke my heart reading about how he’d rather just die.

another thought i have is regarding george’s eating disorder. i wonder how toto reacted to miriam telling him about the eating disorder.. would he care? would he be angry at george? i have so many thoughts and questions !!

by the way, since i’ve commented a couple times on this blog before - i was wondering, could i claim an emoji? would 🎀 be okay? i plan on staying for a while since desecration has me hooked! i look forward to the next chapter!!

Hi there, thanks so much!

So, this is an aspect I never thought of covering. I think I might havw become too tunnel visioned like my characters to consider such aspect lol. It’s the break so I thought he could just disappear without problem but you are right. We can make this more complicated for them!

Well for George, he just discovered a new low for himself and we are all going to suffer a little! He just cannot wrap his little head around the fact that sometimes, things are other people’s fault. And now he is looking for solutions in all the wrong places, that fucking muppet.

Toto is very inconsisten regarding his treatment of George. He could be the nicest or the worst thing ever but I cannot see if he would be driven by guilt and be nice or he would just scold George again. But I think he would care because more than everything, he sees George as his property and he cannot have a such thing!

I am so happy that you are planning to stay! Emoji added to the pinned post and I hope you enjoyed the chapter!

https://lnkd.in/eyc8iPbm https://lnkd.in/d-TrAXB3 Show this thread  MOTHER OF GIRL WITH CYSTIC FIBROSIS REBUKES BARCLAY OVER NHS STAFF PRESSURES

The mother of a three-year-old girl suffering from cystic fibrosis rebuked Steve Barclay over NHS staff working conditions as he visited a London hospital.

The Health Secretary was confronted by Sarah Pinnington-Auld when he met her and her daughter Lucy during a visit to King’s College University Hospital in Denmark Hill on Monday.

During a conversation beside Lucy’s hospital bed, Ms Pinnington-Auld, a teacher from Bridge, Kent, could be heard telling Mr Barclay that staff are “absolutely amazing” but pressures on the NHS are affecting the care for her daughter, whose recent bronchoscopy had to be delayed due to a lack of beds.

“The damage that you’re doing to families like myself is terrible,” she said, adding that the recent disruption to her daughter’s treatment was “agony”.

“The doctors, the nurses, everyone on the ward is just brilliant considering what they’re under, considering the shortage of staff, considering the lack of resources,” she added.

“And I think, for me, that’s what’s really upsetting actually, because we have a daughter with a life-limiting, life-shortening condition and we have some brilliant experts and they’re being worked to the bone, and actually the level of care they provide is amazing, but they not being able to provide it in the way they want to provide it because the resourcing is not there.”

The 43-year-old told Mr Barclay that the UK is “so lucky” to have the NHS as she expressed concerns about its privatisation.

“I’m so scared about my daughter’s future, thinking about what you guys might do to the NHS and what that means in exact terms for the length of her life, because if you don’t prioritise the NHS, I don’t know what chance she has for a longer life,” she said.

Speaking to the PA news agency about the conversation afterwards, she said: “I wanted to make it clear that the NHS staff are absolutely amazing.

“They’re so hard-working and incredible and are doing an absolutely brilliant job under such intense pressures like underfunding and understaffing.

Rebecca Speare-Cole 19 December 2022