There’s this one, just around the corner. Facade is onto a street (very not busy street) and then the long courtyard to the back entreance on the road around the edge of the village (also v not busy). No real garden but. Also, common walls both sides. But 5 bedrooms for under a quarter mil? 90 minutes (an agreesive 90 minutes, to be fair) to Faro Airport?
This might be better? One eighth of the price, for a start.
Near Braga, which means close to Porto airport for the in and out. Would need – at least – the purchase price spent again. That’s new roof to new foundations territory. You’d also want to cut most of those trees back – be v gloomy without that. Weather up there is – well, think Southern Ireland. Never cold but then not all that often dry either.
But closer to the desires for Schloss BiG, yes?
Someone on WhatsApp is using my name to sscam people. For the avoidance of doubt no, I do not run an investment group. Not on WhatsApp, not anywhere. This is an attempt to steal your money.
So, got the well cleaned out. Bought a sprinkler. The grass is looking a lot better. If I can track down the guy who installed the full sprinkler system and get him to correct it it’ll be great!
Except the well isn’t producing that much water. Hmm.
Finally I bother to think about it. The sprinkler has a number of different settings – different shaped holes etc. Gives a table of how much it delivers, in litres of water per m2, over how much area, for each shaped hole. So I finally start to think about that. Bit of mental maths. Major setting is 10something litres per m2 per hour over 100 m2. That’s, umm, a cubic metre of water an hour. So I’ve been running this for 90 minutes. Well’s 1 metre diameter. Forget circles and cylinders ‘n’ stuff, that’s 1.5 metres depth in the well.
Ah, no wonder it’s running out of water. OK, with Pir2 it’s less than that but still. Call it a metre among friends. -Ish.
It’s not the well, is it? That’s doing just fine.
A twitter thread – just a snarl at someone really – goes past 500k interactions or whatever it is. So, hmm, buy a blue tick, get ad money?
Back of envelop. Ah, to make a few hundred $ a month I would need to have one of these 500k threads *every day*.
Erm, no.
According to the code monkey – but that was when this blog moved to this domain and wordpress. It started on Typepad in, oooh, 2004 sometime?
Anyway, legal to have a drink now under either US or UK rulz……
The baby’s birthday can be contributed to here
Around here we’ve had 180% of our annual rainfall already and it’s only mid-May. They’re actually opening dams to let the excess out.
What you should have had we did – really, storms that should have hit you went further south and then hung about over us instead.
Just thought you’d like to know that as your hosepipe bans are imminent….
But for an increasing number of people, the financial gains are not worth the problems that are being thrown up. Canadian professor Kathy Nolan, who is head of mathematics at the University of Regina and also works on social justice and equality issues, has been researching this topic for nearly a decade and wrote a paper called Moving beyond child sponsorship.
“Child sponsorship is simply another legacy of colonialism,” she says. “We feel we know what is best for these children, but we don’t.”
Nolan is uncomfortable with the practice on a number of levels. “It makes people feel good and therefore they feel let off the hook and can continue with their privileged lives. What we don’t realise is that many of the benefits we have in the global north are due to structural issues that have caused the children these people are sponsoring to be suffering.”
Better that we all struggle against capitalist patriarchy than that we feed the hungry child.
Or, alternatively, Professor Nolan is a cunt who can go fuck herself.
As I’ve mentioned occasionally I write a column for a paper in Dhaka. The weekly cash from which (£25 or so) goes to a feed the street kiddies charity. About 20 pence into the charity ends up as a gut busting bowl of rice, veggies and eggs fed to a hungry child.
Best paid piece of work I’ve ever had and I see not a penny of it.
To remind, Professor Nolan is a cunt who can go fuck herself
So, I took a car off to a garage to get it fixed. 3 months back. Kept calling, asking for it back. Oh, I’m in hospital, I’m ill, I’ll bring it around etc.
Finally go to the police. No, not really reporting it stolen, not yet, but I’d like some help getting it back. Some back and forth (my Portuguese, their English, we got there) and why not, say, the police phone the bloke who has it and mutter something about really, time to return it.
So, they ask a bit more and I say it’s this fat Indian bloke, with a beard.
Ah, him! He’s living in a car behind Cafe P. We know him.
Cafe P is 1 km from my house. But in a little back street, you’d not see it without knowing what you’re looking for.
So, the Indian mechanic (he used to work for the garage I’d used before, the garage closed) had been living in my car for three months. While fobbing me off.
Ho well, there’s a lesson for Timmy. As it happens a bloke I know around here, vaguely, saw this going on, came over to chat. Drove me off to another local garage where we organised that the repair work will be done, the MoT etc. Drove me back, we picked up the key from the police who had got it from the Indian, flat battery. Another bloke raced off, got leads, came back, started the car up. Off we drove to the garage, dropped the car off, first bloke then dropped me home.
OK, etc, etc. Low trust society – the Indian. High trust, the local P.
Interesting little lesson.
Anyway, the last bit, and I swear blind I am not making this up. As I’m leaving the Indian leans over and says “If you need more work done on your car just let me know.”
No fucking shame about it at all.
No, not me actually in Iran. But as I might have mentioned before the only one of my books that has ever gone to a second printing was a translation into Farsi. This was done for the Tehran equivalent of The Economist – ish, -ish – for a little conference they did.
They caught me late on a Sunday night and asked for something immediately….
So, anyway, that’s what I sound like in Farsi.
Where we are at least. All the birdies are back. The storks have been nesting for a month now. And the housemartins (housemartens?) are back and pissed.
At least, the couple that nests in the alcove by our front door are pissed. Myself, I’m happy to leave them be, the wife less so. They raise two clutches which means two two weeks periods of a pile of bird shit by the front door. But a small enough price to pay for letting the little birdies etc. This might not be the majority view within this household.
Except we’ve got the man coming to paint the house next week. Which means having to make damn sure they don’t rebuild the nest we’ve just knocked down. They are not happy.
Ho Hum.
Still, spring, eh?
When Mark Zuckerberg announced an overhaul of fact-checking on Facebook this week, he was damning in his assessment of independent verifiers.
“Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created,” the billionaire said.
One of those little things. I’m known – well, as far as I am known – as a fairly online sort of guy with more than a touch of pendantry. In a couple of areas I’m an actual experts as well.
I’m also regarded as pretty right wing (which I’m in fact not but there we are).
So, in this factchecking boom of this past few years, as they scoured the world for people able to do the work. How often did I get approached to see if I might be able to help, or would be interested in doing so?
You’re right, not once.
Now, it could be I’m just not famous enough. Or, perhaps, that my views on whaty are facts doesn;t accord with those running fact checking organisations. I’d suggest, lightly, that one doesn’t have to be a total conspirazoid loon to think it might be that second reasons. A bit, maybe.
533,000 visitors
33,000 Potential Hacks
1.03M Pages Delivered over all
Whether that’s good or bad I don’t know. But that appears to be what this blog has done this year. Not bad for what I regard as the regulars’ corner of a decent pub – where fat gets chewed and grumbles made among sensible people.
Was just on GB News and has to be said, hanging around for 30 minutes in order to be one for 30 seconds might not be a future way of spending a morning….
Not sure what the specific problem was but apparently someone, somewhere, somehow, changed the DNS entry.
And, erm, well……..
” the DNS was changed overnight from numbers to
numbers”
Tim Worstall is a British economist
As it goes wrong by word 6 of the description perhaps we shouldn’t pay all that much attention.
So I ordered a selection of stuff online for the house. Bits and bobs, through Leroy’s (sorta, Homebase type place). Some coming direct and some from folk who use the platform to sell.
The first to arrive is the bit coming from Bergamo, in Italy. The furthest source arrives first, of course.
Ordering something off Amazon. And the bank insists that they can only authorise the payment via app on my phone.
I don’t want a bank app on my phone. Phones get lost. They’re not secure either.
UK bank demanded one for a debit card payment. Portuguese bank for a credit card one. Even though they’ve got my phone number on record and send me confirmation numbers for online payments for that. Still must have the app. Which doesn’t, by the way, work anyway.
Wise, now Wise still works with the SMS confirmation. So, I could put money into Wise, pay Amazon, confirm on SMS.
But this is insane, right?
These columns still feed the kiddies at the street kitchen.
Effectively, we have to remove politics from detailed control of the economy. Then those who would seek power or privilege through politics won’t even attempt to seek it because they’ll not be able to get it.
That is, a simple set of rules for the economy. Simple taxes, simple rules; taxes and rules that don’t vary. The other way of describing this is the rule of law. It’s the same for everyone no matter how many politicians you know.
To put it very cynically — why would anyone buy, bribe, or even befriend politicians if there was nothing that could be bought from politicians? So, the method to clean politics and a clean economy is not to allow politicians to have anything to sell.
True, it’s only about £80 a month but that’s something, right? Current costs seem to be about 20p for a gutbuster of boiled eggs, veggies and rice. Almost certainly the best paid job I’ve got in fact – when measured by meals that is.
Variously reported at 5.4, maybe 5.9. About 5.11 am this morning. Some way from us, 50 km out at sea from Sines – so, hmm, 130 to 150 km away from us.
Could deffo be felt but not hard – and heard. A proper grumble to it.
From what I understand it’s the same fault that set off the Great Lisbon quake (the real damage from which was the tsunami) which is nice and reassuring, eh?
And those tossers not allowing fracking because of 1.0 quakes can suck my…..well, you know.