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You can get a 4/5g SIM with no contract, but then you need to buy a suitable router up-front (unless you have a spare phone you can use to set up a hotspot)

I don't remember having to sign up for or redeem anything to get an Apple watch delivered, when I bought one as a gift in the past.

I just checked, and last year I got a "we're processing your order" email, followed by dispatch notification, and an invoice. Nothing else.

Are you buying this direct from Apple?

That's fair, it's just the explanation I've settled on for journalists choosing the AI angle on every story with even a sniff of it.

Journalists are obsessed with LLMs for the understandable reason that a lot of their low-grade listicle-writing and press-release-rephrasing jobs are at immediate risk.

And there's nothing journalists love more than writing about journalism and things that affect it.

if I'm doing anything wrong...

It's really down to individual risk appetite, so very hard to say. I have mostly equity index trackers in my ISA, some UK but various outside for a bit of diversity.

In practice market-cap weighting means this still ends up being massively over-weight US tech and their overseas suppliers, finance and pharma in terms of sector risk.

This is on top of various SIPPs from ex-employers that are mostly in lifestyle things similar to the one you have already, although they're at various stages of drawing down from equities to fixed income since I'm older.

Yes: there was more variety, but I agree it wasn't in a healthy state.

I just don't think it was derelict, or necessarily agree that the only way to improve the market was to halve its size and build a branch of fucking Giraffe

Spitalfields is a good example, it’s not perfect but the project took a derelict part of London

It wasn't derelict, there was a market in there. They just upgraded the market to make it warmer and more tourist friendly, and of course to convert half of it into shops and chain restaurants.

No, the something we're discussing is a pile of money - the NCQG - which is intended to underwrite renewable transition projects, subsidize the closure of coal plants and/or protect carbon sinks like forests, and pay for mitigation and adaptation (ie, flood defences).

If the countries that are going to find themselves underwater don't think they can afford the necessary flood defences, why shouldn't they complain? Why shouldn't they walk out, or negotiate however they choose?

Yes, it could be the case that some leaders are padding their costs to skim some off. It could also be the developed world are low-balling them.

I don't know, and I doubt @Ben689908 does either. Half a flood defence is not, in many cases, any better than no flood defence.

I never actually said this

No, but that's the only way I can explain

Are the developing nations better off walking out with nothing or walking away with something?

If the "something" isn't enough to achieve its stated aim, why would you help the donor countries get their greenwashing press release?

Unless you're convinced the "something" they're turning down is enough, based on some carefully costed scheme you're just choosing not to share.

Perhaps that your stated conclusion doesn't seem to follow from everything else you've said.

The poorer developing nations, which are generally disadvantaged by lack of resources and/or colonial history, are being asked to skip the only development path any existing country has ever successfully followed, directly to a utopian carbon-neutral future that no existing rich country has achieved despite vastly greater resources.

This unprecedented great leap forward is, apparently, "their bit".

The fact that it's all based on importing technology from China or the developed world, who coincidentally emitted most of the carbon that made this necessary, is no reason to negotiate for more money, right?

It's more important to know their place and act grateful than it is to ensure that enough resources are allocated to actually achieve anything.

That study sounds like absolute rubbish. Who stands all day if they don't have to?

The study is discussing people who spend at least 2hrs standing still. I'd bet the people standing that long are mostly security guards, cooks or shop staff. It's not at all obvious that this applies to sit/stand desks.

I notice if I spend too long standing at my desk - except on a video call - I just end up leaning against it. And then I sit down again for a bit.

If you're near Carbon Kopi, you're not too far from Antipode on the Fulham Palace Rd either.

They were still decent last time I went in. Always used to be Square Mile beans but I don't remember if that's still the case.

Surely that cost is only gonna come down? Certainly in terms of time required.

Systems almost never get smaller, but keep accreting new features.
So, typically the cost is only gonna go up, as more stuff comes to depend on the bodge and the precise details of all those dependencies are slowly forgotten or mis-remembered.

And while you could use AI to fix individual bits of code, that's never the bottleneck. You can't use it to analyse all the dependencies & their partially-documented functional requirements, plan and run integration tests, or figure out how to manage upgrades around whatever else is going on, and it won't help you figure out who needs to agree and get them all in a meeting.

My understanding is that strength training gets the best overall results if you're at or heading towards full range of motion, particularly on the eccentric part.

If you don't use that part of the range in some sport, you can still use the greater strength it got you.

If everything is an atrocity then nothing is an atrocity.

I don't really see the point of blanket statements like this unless you're trying to justify your plan for an Oryx & Crake-style reset.

Sometimes I use single-use plastics. It's not ideal, but I'm not going to call it an atrocity when objectively much worse things are happening.

98% of human activity isn't reported in the news at all, probably including 98% of parliamentary activity unless you're reading Hansard and keeping up with all the committees.

Maybe atrocities make up 98% of what gets reported, and that you notice and retain, but that says more about what grabs your attention than it does about what is happening.

"abirdin" sort of works, phonetically

I'm surprised Trading212 would over-charge: I suppose it does say "Market Buy", but I wouldn't expect a retail app to use market orders for exactly this reason.

It's figured out what fraction it expects £20 to get you, and then just asked the market for that quantity irrespective of cost. I think the only time I've used market orders as a retail customer is FX, and you have to confirm the trade after you know the price.

I don't suppose you can just change the order type to limit?

It wasn't the ETF, because that's trading at about eighty quid, and you can't buy fractional shares.

The US Equity Index Fund (VUSEIDA) is an OEIC, and claims to have no entry/exit fees. The minimum 1-off payment is listed as £500, but I think that's waived if you're doing it through a Vanguard ISA.

Do you know exactly what you bought?

I've tried a bit just recently, starting by breaking it down into bits.

Front squats to get comfortable with that receiving position, strict press, and hang power cleans.

Will slowly drop modifiers off the cleans and then hopefully bring all the parts together.

My first guess would be that Halifax are idiots and that the problem is in their internal systems.

Credit bureaux are in the business of selling credit reports to lenders, not making them mysteriously inaccessible.

BTW you can see your TransUnion report for free on CreditKarma.

You can always have front-to-back rather than side-to-side rails, telescopic or otherwise.

... would they then be willing to be given placebos?

You're talking about a double-blind trial, which is the gold standard, but is obviously not always feasible for medical situations where it's pretty obvious whether the procedure has taken place.

Where a double-blind isn't possible, there are other sort of trial that can also give good results - they just need potentially more care given to the statistical analysis and potential confounding factors.

It's in a plastic box, so unless there's a ground contact on the PCB (which there won't be if it was designed for a 2 prong plug), there's no need to connect an earth.

If it came with a UK plug it'd be one of those with a plastic earth prong.

You're presumably using Windows. Microsoft keep sending updates to Windows, which take up space on your C: drive.

These updates are some combination of bug & security fixes, which you probably want, and "new features" (like embedded advertising) that you might not.

Whenever you restart (or let Windows restart itself if it's been nagging you), the updates it downloaded in the background are applied, but the old version (of whatever was updated) is kept around in case the update breaks something.