> This has led to a growing colony of Oyster cards that haven't been used for at least a year - about 82m of them - and passengers' cash in the coffers of Transport for London (TfL) totalling more than £550m.
I would assume that TfL is investing that static £550m. Even at a 1% gain annually, that's a nice chunk of profit from sitting on Oyster cash
I don’t know how many people know this, but the balances on Oyster cards are refundable[0], so it is possible that they would indeed need to pay it out.
Sort of. Before February 2020, most (but not all) Oyster cards had a £5 deposit. However, Oyster cards issued since then do not have a deposit (there is instead a £5 fee for the card).
For older Oyster cards that have a deposit, you can still reclaim that £5.
Oh interesting, thanks for the correction. Will be interesting to see if I start to notice them when I (and people who might drop them) are out more.
The fee/deposit payment is part of it (prevention, it not seeming a disposable item) but with a deposit (there's no good way to say this..) there's also the incentive for the homeless or otherwise desperate to clear them up, since there's some guaranteed value. (Which could be a bit less than £5 due to negative get-me-home-at-night balance, but I don't think it's allowed to go as far as -£5, so a card with a deposit on it is always an asset.)
Even so, the proportion of refunds paid because someone requested one, vs. the number of cards that were lost/destroyed in the laundry/fell through the cracks means that they could keep some fractional amount on hand for those potential payments, and transfer the rest as "found money" to an operating account.
It’s probably not ideal tbh. You can whitelist stuff that’s blocked, but it involves logging into the admin console and whitelisting either manually or via a recently blocked request, easy enough for techies but I wouldn’t back it for non techies.
I use a fairly aggressive Pihole list that breaks stuff reasonably often, there may be less strict lists which are “safer” in this regard.
Some sites breaking was a complaint my wife had when I set all devices on our network to use the pi-hole.
To solve this I setup a Shortcut on her iPhone so she can simply say "hey siri, stop pi-hole" and it will turn off the pi-hole for 5 minutes using a simple web request. The pi-hole turns itself back on after 5 minutes.
A bookmark works just as well but she prefers to use Siri as she never remembers where the bookmark is lol. It is mostly on her phone anyway that something doesn't quite work right so Siri was the best solution.
I also have Wire Guard setup and our phones configured to connect to it always for mobile data and unknown wifi so all our connections are routed via our home internet connection and via the pi-hole. As I have stupidly fast home internet (10Gbit EPON with free.fr) it works fantastically.
I found the most frustration came from links in emails not working as intended. For some reason many companies, government agencies, and schools use metrics tracking on emails.
Pi-hole has a nice temporarily disable blocking feature on its dashboard to help in those cases. Simple click to whitelist is also available.
Well, the icons are just terrible, utterly insipid and lacking in power. It needs labels rather than icons, and better names for “zapper” and “picker” too (something like “remove elements from this page” versus “block elements from this site”).
I’m not sure if browsers apply height limits to these popups, but if not, almost every time there will be oodles of space for full labels and replacing the two single rows of buttons with columns. And even if scrolling is introduced, that’d still be better.
At least they now have tooltips - I remember when choosing "Advanced mode" (which you need for a lot of features) just disabled tooltips in the UI, on the theory that advanced users shouldn't need them! I (and likely many others) argued how crazy an assumption that was, that just because we understood how HTML and JS worked, we should remember a bunch of icons and what the dev decided they meant. Thankfully they were willing to listen and change the decision, and the UI is a lot better for it.
If you have some pull here, it would be really nice to have popups added to the grid in the middle of the dropdown where the colored boxes are. I use these very rarely and can never remember which column of colored boxes do what.
They could; or they could just generate static pages and serve from a nginx reverse proxy rather than fetching from databases, etc. The price is very different
The NY Times does this for election day results because they fully expect that to get hit hard. They re-publish a static page every few minutes
"HEPA filters capture pollen, dirt, dust, moisture, bacteria (0.2-2.0 μm), virus (0.02-0.3 μm), and submicron liquid aerosol (0.02-0.5 μm).[8][9][10] Some microorganisms, for example, Aspergillus niger, Penicillium citrinum, Staphylococcus epidermidis, and Bacillus subtilis are captured by HEPA filters with photocatalytic oxidation (PCO). HEPA is also able to capture some viruses and bacteria which are ≤0.3 μm."
"Eleven particle-size-segregated samples were taken to investigate the particle-size distribution of perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) using two five stage impactors in parallel. ... Particle-size distribution varied between perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and other perfluoroalkyl sulfonates (PFSAs), perfluorooctane carboxylate (PFOA) and other perfluoroalkyl carboxylates (PFCAs) and n-methyl-perfluorooctanesulfonamido ethanol (MeFOSE). Whereas PFOA and MeFOSE were predominantly observed in smallest size fraction (<0.14 μm), maximum PFOS mass fractions were observed in the coarser size fractions between 1.38 and 3.81 μm."
Hold on, that is very much the opposite of my interpretation.
HEPA filters are typically designed with 0.3μm pores this is mostly a legacy of medical applications (i.e. to guarantee they catch bacteria).
Submicron performance (< 0.3μm) is kind of down to luck. You need the submicron particle to travel on a larger liquid particule for it to adhere to the filter lattice.
The PFAS is a group of substances, the article is specifically talking about 6:2 FTOH (one of many PFAS substances) that is found in carpets etc.
6:2 FTOH specifically is a sub-micron compound, from the GP article the closest particle to it is PFOA which is <0.14 μm. So unless your 6:2 FTOH compound is travelling on a moisture particle it is unlikely it would be filtered.
To answer GGP question, a high MERV rating filter will probably catch some of these compounds but not the totality. Open your windows frequently (if outside air pollution allows wherever you live) and make sure you understand what products you have in your house.
> You need the submicron particle to travel on a larger liquid particule for it to adhere to the filter lattice
That's what intuition would suggest, but intuition turns out to be wrong when dealing with filters for microscopic things. There are at least four mechanisms by which a filter can trap particles, three of which work on particles smaller than the pores [1].
Briefly:
1. Big particles don't fit between the fibers of the filter. Think fish in a fish net. This is called sieving.
2. Particles too small for sieving but heavier than the surrounding flow don't make the turns as well as the surrounding flow when the flow goes around the fibers. The particles can get embedded in the fibers. This mechanism is called inertial impaction.
3. The smallest might be too small to actually be affected much by the flow of the surrounding fluid through the filter. The move by diffusion, and many will randomly hit the fibers and get stuck.
4. Particles too big for diffusion but too light for inertial impaction still can run into fibers and get stuck. This is called interception.
The effectiveness of sieving, inertial impaction, and interception all follow S shaped curves that start out low for small particles, then at some point start rising, and then level out. The sieving curve's rise is almost vertical. The rise for inertial impaction is steep but not nearly as steep as it is for sieving. The curve for interception's rise is much more relaxed.
The effectiveness for diffusion goes the other way. Much more effective for very small particles, then above some size drops down and is low from then on.
When you put all these together, you get a curve that is effective at the small end, and at some point as size goes up effectiveness drops, reaching a minimum, and then rises again to reach high effectiveness for particles above some certain size.
There is also a fifth mechanism in some filters where electrostatic attraction between the fibers and the particles catches some particles.
I don't claim to know one way or the other. I was basing my interpretation on GGP's quotation from Wikipedia, which seems to indicate that HEPA filters can capture down to 0.02 μm. I note now, however, that it then goes on to suggests that HEPA filters don't reliably capture some other categories of larger particles, which is consistent with your comment. Edited accordingly.
Regular HEPA filters should be able to filter these, but I'll admit I don't know what size these particles are. If they're single molecules it may be a problem.
Sure, but for someone who has already /survived/, it's worth knowing the value of those antibodies. And it's worth knowing that governments should not attack those survivors further for "not getting vaccinated" when they already have antibodies.
Worth noting that I'm not anti-vaccine but there's not enough focus on natural immunity. And I'm not encouraging people to forego vaccines and to go lick doorhandles
Considering Theranos' board (powwerful males) decided to remove her, but she somehow convinced them to NOT remove her, but also to give her more authority, then the defense can argue she was not coerced. Rather she is the coercer
