Underground tanks are a lot more expensive per cubic metre than above ground tanks and a suitable lined bund. Carrying out a leak inspection on an above-ground tank is a lot cheaper than doing the same inspection underground. There's probably a depressing advertising reason that fuel stations (but not, I noted, the railway) have underground fuel tanks. Probably the customers and neighbours don't like to be reminded there are so many tens of cu.m of flammables near to their supermarket. Or house.

If there were underground fuel tanks, you'd see vent pipes from them up to about 4m (this may not be regulated) above ground, so that any plume of vapours from the tank will have dispersed below the LEL (lower explosive limit) by the time they get to hot-exhaust pipe level.

10cu.m of underground tank would probably accommodate the contents of a standard road tanker. So you'd want 4 (diesel full, diesel empty, petrol full, petrol empty) per fuel station. Or you get an even more complex fuel distribution network problem if you're going round topping up 2 cu.m here, 3 cu.m there in smaller tanks. I'd ask the delivery driver, but that's really likely to get me answering questions from the terrorist police.

I have done before, which is why I know they're a bit dense. I installed a pond and a fountain pump (a tiny thing), which is apparently notifiable because it's outdoor, but not it turns out if you put a plug on the end of the cable and plug it into a socket.

Portable equipment as opposed to permanently wired equipment. That rings a bell. Which is why my garden socket actually leads to an RCD plug into a (buried in a cupboard) wall socket.

It's a bit of a slog if you're new to it!

Maybe that word "experience" in job adverts means something.

How many months do you think it will be until there is a moderate fatality (say, 8) incident using some piece of equipment designed by an AI which obviated the need for "experience". Or weeks, not months?

No, but I do remember the great beer bottle fiasco of 1996. My colleagues on LEP were not happy because they lost a lot of beam time.

I'm not the one arguing that electronic computers have not replaced any low level jobs...or as you claim you wanted to write...only a few specialities. If you had any sense, let alone common sense, you'd know how daft that statement is. I mean the list is huge: in addition to human computers and secretaries they have replaced travel agents, switchboard operators, bank tellers, cashiers and so on.

At this point either you are just trolling or frankly you are only a few steps away from joining the flat earthers.

Making more things per person than was possible before. For example, in the past you might have had say 10 people doing spot welds on car bodies making 100 cars/day. Today you can have those same 10 people monitoring and maintaining 100 robots making 1,000 cars/day.

Sorry but since mindreading is not yet possible I can only read what you wrote and, even this attempt to justify it frnkly fails. Computers have replaced millions of jobs worldwide and many of those were mental e.g. there are far, far fewer secretaries now than there were due to computers replacing them. Computers regularly monitor and oversee a huge variety of industrial processes reducing the number of people who would otherwise be doing that etc. Also the number of human computers was not as small as you suggest because those who did need them needed a lot of them.

Trying to claim that low-level mental work has never been automated is just stupid: computers have been doing that for year. What is different now is that higher-level professional and low-level creative jobs are starting to be replaced. If you'd tried to argue that you might have had a point.

If that is the really case then the medical profession have clearly defined the range that counts as typical far too narrowly and are treating what is actually a perfectly typical human as somehow "divergent" which leads to wasting medical resources.

However, I suspect your later reason is correct: people cannot correctly self-diagnose themselves. My brother was offically diagnosed with dyslexia when he was a kid and the doctor who made the diagnosis told my parents that it was uncommon for her to find someone who was really dyslexic. Apparently most of the kids she saw were not dyslexic, they were just not very bright.

Yep. Food safety regulation of farming in general is generally considerably tighter in the EU than is the case in America, TTBOMK.

With recent incidents like the ~£6 billion foot-&-mouth disease outbreak in Britain (ascribed to one illegal shipment of illegal un-pasturised Argentinian beef, which then went to a swill farmer who didn't boil the swill for the required period), we've learned (been reminded) why there are regulations.

Food safety regulations are nothing to do with animal welfare regulations.

Bloody hell I'm going to have to read the regs aren't I?

That is what they were written for - for people to read and follow.

But I disagree with your reading. [If you're qualified OR you hire a (qualified) electrician ] AND [the work is major (e.g. involving one or more complete new circuits)] you don't need to get authorisation from Building Control. But if the work is NOT major AND you don't know one end of a screwdriver from the other, you don't need authorisation from Building Control.

Which is why I re-used an existing 30A circuit (for a cooker, on which I replaced the CB with an RCD, and punched the cable through the wall (before tiling everything) from where the previous cooker JB was, to connect the cable into the shower unit. No new circuit, minor works ; no Building Control Warrant needed.

It was good enough to get past a surveyor's inspection. Though that was a while ago (10 years difference?). I think "Part P" was in the production line, but wasn't in force when I did it. Past history.

Current rooftop solar installs void warranties because they are done after the original build.

If you have a building warranty. Any warranty on my house (or for that matter, Dad's house) was probably out of date before WW1 - which is nothing unusual in Britain. (Mine was probably additionally voided when the factory alongside was bombed in WW2 ; I'll not bother writing to "A Hitler, Chancery, Berlin" to demand recompense.)

OTOH, if a building does have a warranty, then there should be some specification in that for managing who does repair, maintenance or upgrade work to the premises. For the first few years, it'll typically revert to the building company. Beyond that it may be "individual negotiation, case-by-case, before work starts", or it may be "any builder who is a member of the Master House Builder's Federation" (I had dealings with them, if I've got the name right, over re-modelling the bathroom in a 1988-ish house, 3 or 4 addresses ago. There are other similarly named organisations ; YMMV, a lot.) And if the warranty has expired (20, 25, 30 years is the normal sort of range) - pfffft.

In general, if there is a warranty, the advice starts with "talk to your warranty provider before any plans are drawn up, if not sooner". Changing things by erasing a line on a plan and drawing it elsewhere is normally easier and cheaper than doing the equivalent in bricks and mortar.

This idea solves the main problems with rooftop solar by firstly making it much cheaper

Well, you'll amortise the cost over the lifetime of the mortgage, whereas a commercial loan to retrofit the same equipment is likely to only be over 10 years.

and secondly ensuring that it's included within the housing warranty.

If the warranty has any value at all - which is not a uniform thing. Almost every time you hear about warranties, it's because they're not being honoured for some reason. If I were buying a property new enough for one to be relevant (very unlikely) I'd be very dubious about assigning it any value at all, until I've read it cover-to-cover myself. I could imagine circumstances where a warranty has negative value.

AleRunner has got the point. As the children chant at daily school Assembly "C'mon you Reds, and Never Buy The Sun!"

What is it - pushing 40 years? (~ 2 generations ; IANA football fan) and the Sun still doesn't sell in Liverpool. Shops won't stock it - it's not worth the hassle. There are still policemen worried about going to jail for what they did on that day.

If you're more careful when cutting, that doesn't happen

That's not a reasonable expectation. No matter how careful, mistakes will happen.

And when the inevitable does happen, you don't continue the shift and hose everything down with bleach at shit-change [tyop : I mean "shift change"]. You stop that machine (line, section) divert the production line to the other segment (or segments) and start to clean down the segment's machinery, now not later. And the contaminated product goes into the "waste - dog food" bin, not scooped off the floor and back into the "human-food" line.

Which requires more parallelism of the production line, from design, through to separating walls and cross-over points. Which marginally increases costs, but results in a considerably lower law-suit and dead-customer rate. (Since lawsuits matter to American businesses while the dead customers matter outside America.)

we can assume that the disease is spreading across entire factory farms due to those farm's poor sanitation practices

Why can we assume that?

It's not an assumption. It's measurements taken when American companies have been trying to sell their produce and equipment over here. Their bacterial (and other pathogenic) levels are too high to be considered "safe for human consumption". It probably would struggle to get into the dog-food bin.

European food safety officials have been reporting on widespread pathogens in the US (human) food chain since at least the 1970s (when I first encountered the issue) by taking samples and measuring them. It got boring by the mid-80s, and coloured the EU's approach to farm legislation - don't do it like Americans do. Generally, the farms (and food processor factories) have to prove their product is better than the industry average for [important measures]. Which yes, means that next year's industry average will be harder to achieve than last year's. It's a feedback loop by design.

Which is why, in most of Europe, health authorities treat food poisoning as a notifiable disease (like TB, or some forms of VD), and each case must be traced back to it's origin, and effective corrective action taken. Food poisoning is not considered an accident, but the result of someone's error - which must be corrected. Which they can do because food poisoning is a rare event in the cooking industry. I gather the rates in America are much, much higher.

"Cover"? It was blatantly and explicitly part of the agenda - just not the first thing you talk about when trying to recruit.

you sound like an American, all this trying to make out some nebulous hidden monster called "Socialism". In most of the world, we're proud to hold our red flags high.

getting traction in the anglophone world.

You're doing that oh-so-typically American thing of taking one of your concerns (in this case, your well-justified fear of socialism - yes, we are out to destroy your world view and drag you kicking and screaming out of the 18th century) and assuming that it applies to everyone in the world. Specifically, you're assuming that because you can only speak your dialect of English, that everyone who speaks any form of English agrees with you. I've met some high-grade Australian Leninists, and Norwegian Communists with impeccable American accents (from growing up there). You could assume the share your point of view. But you'd be wrong.

Don't let me slow you down. Someone who incorrectly thinks you're one of "their group" can be as helpful as a paid-for traitor. Often more reliable.

You leave your known-compromised phone at home when you're going away (be that 100m, or 10,000km) to do the business you're worried about. If you're likely to need numbers from your compromised personal phone for use on the burner, carry an address book - which may not look like an address book. Say, edit the "Our list of international dealers" page in a relevant manual to include the appropriate numbers with hints. (That idea has been burned ; don't use it.) It's vulnerable to checking, but is it likely to be checked?

Where do I get a secure phone in SE Asia?

Sorry, no idea. I applied for jobs in SE Asia, but never got assigned there. Ditto Australia and South America (well, I did some desk work for Venuzuela).

If it were Seoul, you'd probably be OK buying a phone with cash in one of the multi-story indoor markets for electronics - from "lucky cat waving" machines to that one-armed-bandit thing. Assuming they don't require your ID card number instead of/ as well as your credit card details. Otherwise ... sorry, can't help.

OH - PAYG ("pay as you go") payment updates on the burner - cash only again 9if you can, or laundered through something like an iTunes gift card (itself brought with cash. Plenty of people have let their tradecraft discipline slip for a routine thing like buying more phone credit, and one connection the spooks can draw is enough.

At least in Asia, you are unlikely to attract any attention by wearing a hygienic mask. Hat and different glasses to your normal too, of course. Jacket off or on when changing public transport vehicles. The usual.

I have proton but that only works if they have proton

Isn't that a US provider? Do you CC all your emails to NSA@gov.us ?

Can you get to a (cash-only) internet cafe ("IC")to set up, say, a half-dozen Yahoo (or some other big provider) accounts for use on less vulnerable devices next year? They'll (Yahoo, whatever) almost certainly log your IP on setting up the account (and on use, every time, too) and keep it permanently (or just send the details to the NSA) but if the IC re-uses it's security/ surveillance tapes (hard drive space) every 3 months you may be OK there. Cash for the internet and the coffee. That has caught people before.

It's a shitty situation if you don't have people you've got confidence in. I had colleagues in the trade union movement who'd been harassed and repeatedly sacked for decades before I met them, and did had learned to trust no-one a long time ago. As well as never meeting US embassy officials without 3rd party witnesses who you didn't introduce to them.