Index

I just discovered something horrifying. Energy Performance Certificates, which (nominally) measure how energy-efficient a house's thermal management is and which the UK government requires be listed for all rentals and probably homebuying transactions, are based on the estimated cost of energy at the time the certificate is made, and are held for ten years. The spec does at least normalize them based on energy prices, but changes in relative fuel prices will only be factored into new EPCs. EPCs also contain an estimated cost, and I don't know whether the government website updates that.

Train internet connections are annoying because they only work enough to lull you into a false sense of security. I hear ScotRail is switching to Starlink, at least.

Renting is bad because it makes you (loosely) short property prices wherever you live, and these often go up. But buying a house exposes you to the other side much more than is probably optimal (especially since your income is positively correlated with local property prices), and has very high transaction costs. A clean and elegant* solution: homeowners could take the short side of swaps on an index of local property values while renters take the long side ("physical" ownership of houses adds complexities). Who's building this?

UK government documentation often has a unique mix of absurd pedantry and strangely vague, almost existential statements: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/identity-proofing-and-verification-of-an-individual/how-to-prove-and-verify-someones-identity

It's a weird fact about, I suppose, mathematics, that you can create a basically-unforgeable identity and exchange secrets using simple maths which fit onto less than a page (asymmetric cryptography - DSA, RSA, Diffie-Hellman), and even fit public keys into 32 bytes (X25519/Ed25519) with more complexity - unless decently big quantum computers are practical, in which case one of the two useful algorithms they can run breaks everything and you have to move to much scarier maths and put up with much larger signatures and keys.

WiFi 6E is the marketing name for WiFi 6 with 6GHz support, but 6GHz support is optional in WiFi 7, and there's no "7E" name. I don't know how I would deal with this if I didn't obsessively read spec sheets.

Spheres are inherently untrustworthy objects. If a product is a sphere, it probably means somebody wanted to make it appear especially friendly regardless of what it does to functionality, and they're probably compensating for something.

Finally, music which is positive about the industrial revolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RCIdOp5GHg