They actually lost thrice - in 2017 TFL pulled their PHV licence because Uber London Limited wasn't considered to be a 'fit and proper person', Uber thought they could brazen it out only to find that TFL is beholden only to the Mayor and they ended up having to come back on bended knee, and then it was further refused in 2019 but returned on appeal - https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Uber-v-T...), which lists significant failings by Uber that they had since remedied.
The third outing with the Supreme Court was about employment rights - were the drivers workers, or genuine independent contractors for whom Uber are merely acting as a booking agent (which the Uber model relies almost entirely on).
The Employment Tribunal, The Employment Appeal Tribunal, The Court of Appeal and finally the Supreme Court all said "nah fam, you ain't fooling nobody" and the original ET was especially scathing:
> It seems to us that the Respondents' general case and the written terms on which they rely do not correspond with the practical reality. The notion that Uber in London is a mosaic of 30,000 small businesses linked by a common 'platform' is to our minds faintly ridiculous. In each case the 'business' consists of a man with a car seeking to make a living by driving it.
Aye, it's been interesting (by which I mean highly entertaining) to watch them run face first into the pole repeatedly since their attitude of "We got away with this elsewhere" worked until it didn't.
They did get away with it in London. They broke laws, argued unfaithfully in court, got denied a license, got an extended probationary period from a magistrate, and finally are operating in the clear.
Very very few other businesses get to act so brazenly and dangerously, then get an extended period of time and support to do the bare minimum to qualify as compliant.
Nonsense. I've just installed PV in the north of England and my payback is in the order of five years, even with the gloom of our seasons.
Large swathes of the US have hours of uninterrupted sunshine all year round. With a battery, a residential owner may never need to pay an electricity bill for the lifetime of the system.
You'll have to be a bit more specific - is it export restrictions, or connection limits or what?
Even if you go for something that isn't grid tied then you're still breaking even within years if you spec it right.
Obviously if you've got grid electricity that's almost too cheap to meter than I wouldn't bother but for most of the western world the economics to not install solar simply aren't there.
Email is, given the issues with connectivity, something you can justifiably make someone else's problem.
There's no reason not to have your own domain though. I've been using Migadu and the amount of flexibility that gives you is ridiculous. The only downside is the lack of push notifications, but if your email is so important that you can't wait for a refresh then I can't help.
I've had a cooling/heating heatpump fitted. Adding a couple of wall units bumped the price by about £1500, although the whole thing was softened by the grant for getting rid of an oil fired boiler.
While our house is relatibvely small and we kept the units (which also do heating as well) confined to the main living space, it wasn't especially burdensome. The bulk of the work was installing the behemoth of a hot water tank!
Did you consider going with instant hot water at the sink/basin/shower/bath? My house is also relatively small and has little room for a huge hot water tank.
Belatedly, no, but I think our installer may have (possibly as a result of the free money!) wildly overspecified the tank which I suspect we will never empty even if we actually tried.
Daikin (and presumably others, but they're the ones we went with) do have integrated tanks/heatpump internal units. It might be worth having a think about your actual needs and it may be that there is a solution.
My experience with electric hot water taps is that they've been universally awful and only a last resort, but equally the state of the art may have moved on since I last looked!
Original comment mentioned £ so they are in the UK. It's possible and not super uncommon to have electric showers in the UK because the 230V provides enough power for water heating unlike the US.
I'm currently investigating options for kitchen sinks and such. It feels quite silly to have a long length of pipe leading from a central source for a small amount of warm water to wash my hands.
Boiling water taps like Quooker and similar are pretty good.
There's a limit: you can fill a medium saucepan with boiling water, but large/industrial-kitchen pans will exhaust the boiling water and you'll need to wait for the next batch.
If you give the public access to ANPR they're going to spend 30 seconds googling the cops and then they're going to go to town on wives, husbands, exes, stalking victims etc. etc.
Housing is out of range for most, but hopefully regulations will change to allow for balcony solar, which means that renters would be able to buy a tiny bit to offset their costs, and move it to their next place.
This is an area where Mastodon ought to shine. Departments/organisations can create their own instances, with named users. Interested constituents follow those users with their client of choice. Direct following means you avoid the federation dramas.
No algorithim means that people get the updates they want when they're posted. Users get a familiar-looking client to bang out the quick updates.
Obviously the issue is someone will need to run it, but if you're not open to public signups then the moderation burden doesn't exist and it's just a case of keeping things updated.
Like email, I sign up for a Mastodon account on a server that suits my tastes. I then follow other accounts, on other servers, using a client - I use Ivory on the mac & iPhone (because it's made by the same company who made Tweetbot) - and those accounts show up in my feed in chronological order, like Twitter in the old days.
They didn't say the Confederacy wasn't really about slavery, they said it was much more than that. And it's those more abstract ideologies which have persisted through American politics, as traced in the history podcast episode I posted in a sibling.
The third outing with the Supreme Court was about employment rights - were the drivers workers, or genuine independent contractors for whom Uber are merely acting as a booking agent (which the Uber model relies almost entirely on).
The Employment Tribunal, The Employment Appeal Tribunal, The Court of Appeal and finally the Supreme Court all said "nah fam, you ain't fooling nobody" and the original ET was especially scathing:
> It seems to us that the Respondents' general case and the written terms on which they rely do not correspond with the practical reality. The notion that Uber in London is a mosaic of 30,000 small businesses linked by a common 'platform' is to our minds faintly ridiculous. In each case the 'business' consists of a man with a car seeking to make a living by driving it.
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