The Night Mail

[PhilJ W]

3 hours ago, SM42 said:

If not done properly, all cars made since around 2016 would suddenly become illegal to use. ( the use part of that legislation) 

Maybe that's the point ( tin foil hat at the ready) 

Andy

They can't change the law retrospectively but any such cars might be difficult to sell. Any construction and use regulations will only apply to vehicles registered after the C&U regulations came into force. 

[SM42]

5 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

My car is sixteen years old and has many features (it started out as a dealers demonstration model and is loaded with all the extras. Some I do like such as the automatic headlights but the automatic wipers I don't use. I also like the radio controls on the steering wheel, I have the volume low and only turn it up for the traffic news. It still has analogue instruments, the only digital item is the milometer/tripmeter.

 

If switch on  the TPS (?) function, the travel news is automatically louder, assuming the radio station sends out the required signal to tell the car travel news is on.

 

It does on mine at least. Don't use the function  though, find it rather annoying in a what's it doing now kind of way.

 

Andy

 

 

[SM42]

1 minute ago, PhilJ W said:

They can't change the law retrospectively but any such cars might be difficult to sell. Any construction and use regulations will only apply to vehicles registered after the C&U regulations came into force. 

 

They can if they don't draft it properly.

 

Many things in life have become illegal to own or use from a certain date, whether you had one before or not. 

 

 

Andy

[Happy Hippo]

6 minutes ago, SM42 said:

 

They can if they don't draft it properly.

 

Many things in life have become illegal to own or use from a certain date, whether you had one before or not. 

 

 

Andy

Firearms being a good case in point!

 

They just changed the law and made it illegal to own a pistol or revolver which would have required an FAC under the old law.

[polybear]

48 minutes ago, Happy Hippo said:

Any one who has been required to do the escape from a helicopter course will know how disorientated one gets when faced with a total immersion ,in cold water, low light levels and an unknown angle of inversion:  Is it facing down, up, on it's side or completely inverted?

 

 

Rumour has it that A Certain Bear was "privileged" to do that course on numerous occasions....

Being rotated from right way up to wrong way up whilst strapped into the rear cabin of a Lynx fuselage mock-up filled with six other victims (plus another two in the front) whilst submerged in water in total darkness isn't this Bear's idea of fun....

Oh yes, and us six victims in the back could only go out of one window - Bear went out as no.3, and I'd had enough by then; glad I wasn't no.6......

 

I did a similar course at a Maritime College in Fleetwood, Lancs - that was far, far better as it was much less rushed; the Yeovilton Guys always seemed to be rushing it thru' so they could buggeroff up the golf course in the afternoon.  There may be a Rant there....

[J. S. Bach]

3 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

Continuing on with the all digital vs analogue discussion (for want of better description) ...snip...

I have always preferred an analog meter; a digital one requires actually reading the display, an analog one I can just glance at where the pointer is pointing.

[45156]

22 hours ago, Oldddudders said:

Stewart that sounds hideous. 10 weeks in dock is a lifetime. I hope they have really got it right this time.

It was, Ian, it really was - We're not letting matters lie, as there were a number of mistakes in diagnosis of my condition - resulting in my discharge to a non medical ward while the encephalitis was active and winding up in A&E - in fact I nearly didn't survive - this was over Christmas, so you can imagine what sort of festive season 30747 had.   We have raised a complaint and will have no hesitation in seeking legal advice if we don't get a satisfactory response.

Edited March 11 by 45156

[Happy Hippo]

12 minutes ago, 45156 said:

It was, Ian, it really was - We're not letting matters lie, as there were a number of mistakes in diagnosis of my condition - resulting in my discharge to a non medical ward while the encephalitis was active and winding up in A&E - in fact I nearly didn't survive - this was over Christmas, so you can imagine what sort of festive season 30747 had.   We have raised a complaint and will have no hesitation in seeking legal advice if we don't get a satisfactory response.

When the 'beloved' NHS is working well, it's wonderful.

 

However, that is becoming a more rare occurrence when I read of, and speak to other people, who can tell some pretty horrific tales of medical neglect and downright incompetence.

 

 

[Willie Whizz]

Our recent experience with Lady Whizz having two quite major medical issues requiring surgery, and almost contemporaneous, plus another non urgent matter, suggests that when you actually get it the actual ‘care’ element remains usually pretty good.
 

What one might call the ‘admin’ element - getting you promptly in front of the right people, at the right place, at the right time, and then not having to lose an entire morning or afternoon hanging around for the different elements of what adds-up to a half-hour procedure to actually happen - is a very different story. It is these people and processes who get the NHS such a bad name, and I would tend to agree that many of them “wouldn’t last five minutes in the Private Sector” if there was any competition or proper measurement of ‘Customer Satisfaction’. 
 

The eternal cry of “More money!” is not the answer to that, in fact it merely allows poor practice to be perpetuated. 
 

[Rant Mode OFF]

[TheQ]

5 hours ago, SM42 said:

 

It would be an interesting change in the law. 

 

If not done properly, all cars made since around 2016 would suddenly become illegal to use. ( the use part of that legislation) 

 

 

Andy

Eerr no, vehicle regulations are not backdated, you can drive your 1901car without seatbelts, lights, brakes that work  and still pass the emission regulations cos there wasn't any.. just as well for my 1984 land rover.

[PhilJ W]

2 hours ago, SM42 said:

If switch on  the TPS (?) function, the travel news is automatically louder, assuming the radio station sends out the required signal to tell the car travel news is on.It does on mine at least. Don't use the function  though, find it rather annoying in a what's it doing now kind of way.

Andy

I've turned mine off and now I only get the national travel news on radio 2. The reason I turned it off is that where I live three local radio stations overlap, Essex, London and Kent and I could get any one of them. The only one relevant to me is Essex as I very rarely travel all that far from home.

[DenysW]

1 hour ago, Happy Hippo said:

However, that is becoming a more rare occurrence when I read of, and speak to other people, who can tell some pretty horrific tales of medical neglect and downright incompetence.

Absolutely the reverse for SWMBO, within the last week. She had symptoms v similar to previous outbreak of her Hospital-Acquired Infection, and phoned in to her GP to get a prescription-enabled Nurse out for same-again. No!. Come & see GP RIGHT NOW. Based on measurements GP produced documentation to fast-track A&E, within 6 hours (from initial call) in a cubicle in A&E with tests underway and intravenous antibiotics started. Released 5 days later (from a different hospital) with follow-up tablet antibiotics.

 

Secret (my opinion) medics really don't like it when you try to do the diagnosis for them, they abruptly become 110% thorough. But I could be wrong.

[PhilJ W]

35 minutes ago, TheQ said:

Eerr no, vehicle regulations are not backdated, you can drive your 1901car without seatbelts, lights, brakes that work  and still pass the emission regulations cos there wasn't any.. just as well for my 1984 land rover.

Like this one.

 

[AndyID]

7 hours ago, SM42 said:

 

Er no, she has a point.

 

Technology is  now very intrusive. 

It beeps, it steers it brakes 

 

It has no idea what it is doing half the time and is quite frankly, in all thoses cases, a dangerous distraction or function. 

 

Other things that used to be manual are electric and so flippin' inconvenient, like handbrakes

 

If I park too close to the house so I can't get the bin past on bin  day, I get in, take the handbrake off and roll forward a couple of feet. No need to start the engine, and all the rigmarole that is nowadays ( just in case you are incompetent) and run it for 5 seconds.

 

If it should break down,  it can be pushed / rolled out of the way.  Not with an electric brake.

The police turn up and close the road while they wait for the recovery truck to drag it  onboard, flat spotting the tyres in  the process. 

 

Basic controls are moving into touchscreen menus; want the wipers on? Too hot? Too cold?

 

Start scrolling through menus whilst looking at the dashboard not the road, or pull over to do it.

 

Buttons and levers are instinctive and can be operated  by touch, no need to look. 

 

Do I need the car to beep and tell me I've turned the wipers on? I know I have, I did it and I can see them moving. 

 

Some tech is useful and that is the unobtrusive stuff you talk of, tyre pressure monitors, reversing sensors and cameras, engine management and so on. All good stuff to assist in efficient running and safe operation of the vehicle. 

 

Suddenly jamming the brakes on cos you are going up a steep hill and it thinks you are about to collide with the road, steering into oncoming traffic  ( and then beeping frantic warnings) because the road is a bit narrower and you are getting close to the kerb to avoid that traffic, beeping to  warn you of the parked car you are passing, making you instinctively look down at the very time you should be looking up,  is not.  

 

It's some of the unobtrusive she doesn't want.

 

She likes a few simple buttons and levers to operate the basic controls.

 

Simple is good ( might explain why she married me 😁) too much technology is not.

 

Doesn't want cameras, Bluetooth and so on ( though I suspect she may convert with some of these once she starts using them) and certainly no TV in the dashboard. 

 

The more I see of modern cars, the more I'm inclined to agree with some of what she says.

 

Andy

 

6 hours ago, Northmoor said:

I heard something on the radio the other day saying that Construction and Use Regulations may soon mandate such controls being via separate switches and not through menus.  How they have ever been (a) permitted legally and (b) considered a good idea by an automotive engineer, is beyond me.

 

Speaking as a former digital engineer wot done that stuff I can tell you.

 

1. The bosses love it because it's much less expensive to manufacture.

2. It's much faster to design and requires very few engineers.

3. You can rush the development and get it "good enough" and if you cork it up you can always fix it with a software update.

[Happy Hippo]

I think some of the NHS issues boil down to where you are and what you're suffering from.

[AndyID]

5 hours ago, pH said:

Relevant experience yesterday, while resetting the clock in the car to account for the change to daylight saving time:

 

- As happens every six months, relearn the sequence, through several menus, to change the “hour” figure on the clock.
- Decide to try to do it ‘automatically’, by Bluetooth from a cellphone. Never done it this way before. Connect the phone successfully, but answer one question wrongly, don’t upload relevant information, time does not change, and I can’t find the way back to answer the question differently

- Go through the manual process (with several wrong turns as usual) to change the “hour” figure
- Due to the length of time since first starting the process, have to reset the “minute” figure too. 
- Success!

- Driving the car later in the day, realize that I’ve somehow managed to hide the digital speed readout during the process.

- Have to learn a new sequence, through a different set of menus, to recover the digital speed display.

- My wife suggests that next year, instead of changing the clock in the spring, I put a post-it note on the dash saying “add one hour”, to be taken off in the fall.

 

The Post-it note is a brilliant idea. We let them "autocorrect" in Spring because they are always on summertime.

 

That works really well for me when I go skiing. We are on Pacific Time here but most of the places I go to are on Mountain Time which is an hour ahead.

 

It's also a no-brainer for the two seater because it only comes out of the garage in summertime. 

[iL Dottore]

1 hour ago, Willie Whizz said:

What one might call the ‘admin’ element - getting you promptly in front of the right people, at the right place, at the right time, and then not having to lose an entire morning or afternoon hanging around for the different elements of what adds-up to a half-hour procedure to actually happen - is a very different story. It is these people and processes who get the NHS such a bad name, and I would tend to agree that many of them “wouldn’t last five minutes in the Private Sector” if there was any competition or proper measurement of ‘Customer Satisfaction’.

There is a huge amount of incompetence and CYA in the NHS - many of my (former) NHS colleagues have a very low opinion of much of the "support" that they were supposed to have.  One of more acerbic of my ex-NHS colleagues is of the opinion that this is because the NHS is a state run entity and like with many state-run entities it's incredibly hard to get rid of people who fail to measure up.

 

1 hour ago, Willie Whizz said:

Our recent experience with Lady Whizz having two quite major medical issues requiring surgery, and almost contemporaneous, plus another non urgent matter, suggests that when you actually get it the actual ‘care’ element remains usually pretty good.

For the best part of my career, British trained medics were renowned for being excellent diagnosticians, relying on fewer diagnostic instruments than their US counterparts. Now? they are definitely a mixed bag as (in the opinion of my "old school" NHS colleagues) Med School isn't as tough as it was.

1 hour ago, Willie Whizz said:

The eternal cry of “More money!” is not the answer to that, in fact it merely allows poor practice to be perpetuated.

Money is only part of the equation, although an important part. One of the reasons that Clinical Care and outcomes in Switzerland are (generally) better than what you have with many parts of the NHS is that in Switzerland everyone knows (from the receptionist to Herr Professor) that if you don't perform adequately patients will go elsewhere because they have a choice. Waiting 12 months for a hip replacement is simply unthinkable in Switzerland (OK, once I did have to wait three months for a patellary resurfacing - but this was so I could coordinate my calendar with that of the surgeon's and arrive at a mutually convenient date).

 

Yes, the Swiss system IS insurance based (and we do have to cover some minimal medical expenditures) but in Switzerland the health insurance providers are very tightly regulated. Everyone gets the care they need and no-one goes bankrupt because they get medical attention.

 

There's a very fundamental difference between the Bismark system and the NHS: to the NHS a hip replacement is a cost, using up NHS funds; in the Bismark system a hip replacement is income. So you want to maximize income by keeping operating theatres busy.

 

45 minutes ago, DenysW said:

Secret (my opinion) medics really don't like it when you try to do the diagnosis for them, they abruptly become 110% thorough. But I could be wrong.

Mainly because differential diagnosis is not something that the average bod can do, Dr Google notwithstanding. Take "chest pain" - without racking my brains I can think of half-a-dozen different diagnoses from transient and minor all the way up to life threatening. Having said that, the clearer and more precise you can describe what is afflicting you, the easier it is for the physician to come to the diagnosis. If you say that you have chest pain that has lasted for more than 20 minutes, that you are restless, your breathing rate has increased over normal, you are pale and feel clammy and you think that your pulse is "all over the place", then the clinician is going to (should) get an ECG and draw blood for serum cardiac biomarkers.

 

Even if you know the therapeutic area well, self-diagnosis is NOT a good idea - simply because you can't be objective about yourself and your own symptoms (but it doesn't mean that you can't arrive at a pretty good assessment of what is likely to be wrong with yourself - but that needs to be confirmed [or rebutted] objectively).

[SM42]

30 minutes ago, AndyID said:

 

 

Speaking as a former digital engineer wot done that stuff I can tell you.

 

1. The bosses love it because it's much less expensive to manufacture.

2. It's much faster to design and requires very few engineers.

3. You can rush the development and get it "good enough" and if you cork it up you can always fix it with a software update.

 

Big like the SUV. 

 

Cost the same as a saloon or estate to make but you can charge 30% more for it. 

 

"Everyone wants SUVs,"  they say. " It's all you sell we cry. "

 

If everyone really did want them why are there literally hundreds for sale second hand, but only a handful of large family hatchbacks, saloons and estates. 

 

No one is selling the latter, too useful with no prospect of a sensible replacement vehicle. 

 

Keep em going till the wheels drop off. 

 

Andy

[Hroth]

1 hour ago, PhilJ W said:

Like this one.

 

 

Very Mr Toad!

 

Nice, but...

 

• Its all very authentic but I'd like chain guards just in case a link parted while driving.
• It'd help for road use if there was a clip-on exhaust deflector
• Dismantle and relube the clutch after 150 miles???

 

There's simple and there's hair shirts!

 

 

 

[Winslow Boy]

May I enquire as to the good squadron leader as he seems to be absent without leave.

 

If he has been called back to active service by the MoD and is at the moment involved in some underhand skulduggery over Ukraine I shall understand, but perhaps an enquiry to confirm would put me at ease.

[bbishop]

I will never diagnose a patient - that is outside my competence.  My role is to keep the patient alive until the professionals arrive, take a set of accurate observations and obtain a coherent patient history.  

 

I can spot if an observation appears anomalous, hand it over with a verbal question mark and most times the professional replicates my observation.    It has taken a decade but we are now trusted by the professionals in London.

[polybear]

When "one of their own" is treated like this then things really are bad:

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-68435770

 

[Happy Hippo]

47 minutes ago, Winslow Boy said:

May I enquire as to the good squadron leader as he seems to be absent without leave.

 

If he has been called back to active service by the MoD and is at the moment involved in some underhand skulduggery over Ukraine I shall understand, but perhaps an enquiry to confirm would put me at ease.

He is on a secret mission with his dear wife to investigate the Northern Lights.

[Northmoor]

5 hours ago, SM42 said:

They can if they don't draft it properly.

 

Many things in life have become illegal to own or use from a certain date, whether you had one before or not. 

Since you can still legally drive cars without seat belts if they were built without them, I wouldn't worry too much.  If all cars older than eight years suddenly became unusable and unsellable, such a huge number of people would instantly become immobile (or thousands of car dealers would be bankrupted overnight) that MPs would have to go into hiding.

 

That's not to say that bad legislation can't sneak through.  Dad is a civil engineer and recalled how in the early 80s(?), a construction safety bill had passed through the Commons and was it's second reading in the Lords before someone on the committee realised it would become illegal to erect scaffolding.

[jamie92208]

7 hours ago, pH said:

Relevant experience yesterday, while resetting the clock in the car to account for the change to daylight saving time:

 

- As happens every six months, relearn the sequence, through several menus, to change the “hour” figure on the clock.
- Decide to try to do it ‘automatically’, by Bluetooth from a cellphone. Never done it this way before. Connect the phone successfully, but answer one question wrongly, don’t upload relevant information, time does not change, and I can’t find the way back to answer the question differently

- Go through the manual process (with several wrong turns as usual) to change the “hour” figure
- Due to the length of time since first starting the process, have to reset the “minute” figure too. 
- Success!

- Driving the car later in the day, realize that I’ve somehow managed to hide the digital speed readout during the process.

- Have to learn a new sequence, through a different set of menus, to recover the digital speed display.

- My wife suggests that next year, instead of changing the clock in the spring, I put a post-it note on the dash saying “add one hour”, to be taken off in the fall.

 

 

Beth's 6 Yr OLD clio is mainly digital.  The handbook, in French tells us how to change from Kph to mph.  After many failed attempts by both of us we took it to a dealer in the UK.  They also failed.  It appears that the feature is in the handbook but not in the software in the car.  We now use a post it note when in the UK for info on sped limits. 

 

47 minutes ago, Winslow Boy said:

May I enquire as to the good squadron leader as he seems to be absent without leave.

 

If he has been called back to active service by the MoD and is at the moment involved in some underhand skulduggery over Ukraine I shall understand, but perhaps an enquiry to confirm would put me at ease.

Offbouncing around on the Briney I believe. 

 

Jamie