Maximus Decimus

Probably my biggest surprise is how much the heater takes off the battery, it's almost as much as the actual driving! Luckily, I can pre-heat the car which for some reason takes only a few miles off and then negates the need to use the heater for a while.

So I did find out something interesting yesterday, that I suspect many others aren't aware of. The charge points that advertise 22kwh on AC (which is a significant number of the chargers) can only do that for a small number of cars. The vast majority of cars will only draw a 7kwh or 11kwh from it. I was aware of course that if a charger advertises 350kwh on DC you'll get what your car can handle, but I was surprised by the lower number. Even that only accounts for a small amount of my frustration when in rural Wales. I was often pulling only 3kwh or at one point less than 1kwh from a similar point if they were working at all.

I'm guessing rural Wales isn't anything like where you went! One other frustration I would say, is that charging is a bit like modern parking where almost every new place seems to be on a different app. I'm confident I must have them all now.... Gridserve, Pod Point, Instavolt, Project EV, ClenergyEV, Electroverse, Evolt network... I suspect you can do it all through Zapmap but I find them so untrustworthy I wouldn't be willing to do it.

I think they measure them on a treadmill that is going downhill, in a vacuum with all the seats taken out. My old Ford Fusion I tested myself to get the result of 60mpg+.

The campsite did forbid it unfortunately. Also Zapmap is quite good, but not so much at telling you whether they are out of order or not, or whether the charge is accurate. What didn't help was the fact that the wife booked a campsite that was over an hour past Snowdon. Had we been camping near Snowdon, I wouldn't have had near any of the same issues. The Lakes should be OK. We're a lot closer to Scafell, and there are some big charging points just before we come off the motorway. Funny, I was listening to The Rest is Politics today, and they were talking about EVs and how the aim at one point was to have 300,000 charging points but we currently have only 55,000. I bet half of them are useless. I noticed a couple in Widnes I hadn't seen before that couldn't be worse positioned. They're on a one-way street that is notoriously hard to park on. Unsurprisingly, both spaces were taken up by ICE vehicles for parking .

Thanks for this. My car advertises a 200 mile range, and tbh it's pretty accurate most of the time and probably more accurate than I anticipated. On days like today, my 40 mile journey to work and back might even only take off 25-30 miles. I have a 7kwh Wallbox that was already at the house. I just keep it topped up (up to 80%) and it's great. You've hit the nail on the head with the reliability issue being the big problem. As I've never really had to charge outside of the house, I was so shocked to find that so many of them weren't giving anything like the advertised charge which led to it being stressful at times.

Recently, it came time to switch the car and usually my number 1 priority is fuel economy. I don't travel that far, but my commute is around 200 miles a week and you can definitely feel the effects of poor fuel economy. My first car was a Ford Focus that did under 30mpg, and I swapped it for a Ford Fusion (grandad car!) which did over 60 and since then I've been obsessed. Covid and the near £2 a gallon price didn't help. When it came to switch, I was thinking about getting a hybrid for this reason, especially a plug-in one (PHEV) as I already had a Wallbox on the side of the house when I bought it. I basically didn't find a car that beat the old Ford Fusion on mpg, and found the PHEVs to be the worst of both worlds. They generally only give you about 30 miles on the electric and then terrible fuel economy for the rest. Despite having had next to zero interest in EVs and suspecting I'd be one of the last to switch, I noticed they had a few at the place I was at and they were more reasonably priced than I expected. I decided to get one mainly because I was interested in what it would be like. I had some concerns about travelling longer distances and having to charge, but as I make very few trips like that I went for the punt. The wife also still has a petrol car so I figured it wouldn't be a big issue. On the whole, I've really enjoyed it. It's took a bit of getting used to and it does have some fundamental differences from a combustion car. My first 20 mile journey took 42 miles off the clock, but since then I've managed to get it down to as low as 13 miles off. Initially, like a petrol car, I would wait until the light was on before charging it but I realised there's literally no point doing this. I basically put it on charge it if it gets under 100 miles and top it up to 160 odd. The biggest difference is the cost. It's gone from costing around £120 a month in fuel, to as little as £25. I was at the point where I was saying I'll almost certainly never go back. However, this weekend I saw the first real downsides. We went on a camping trip to Snowdonia and had a campsite about 100 miles away. Like any car, when it is fully-packed going over mountainous territory the fuel economy will be affected. I was well ready for this, and probably got about 150 miles out of a full charge compared to 200 normally. Essentially, I was really disappointed with the ability to charge the car well in a rural area. There are a number of websites where you can see the local charge points so I was prepared for where I would need to go. In theory it should've been more than fine, but I found it frustrating and even a bit stressful at times. There were three main problems. Obviously, it being a bank holiday weekend, meant that you had a lot of people arriving in their EVs and not being able to charge at their campsites or hotels. The infrastructure wasn't adequate for the number of EVs especially for fast charging stations. There were 2 in Porthmadog that were 50kwh and they were almost always full. These were the only fast ones within a 40 minute drive. Worse than this, was the number that were not working at all that you would only find out after driving there, or giving off a much reduced charge to what was advertised. A lot of the advertised ones were 22kmh which is more than fine for what I would have needed. This equates to about 100 miles in an hour. However, every one of these that I tried gave off 7kwh (25 miles) or less. At one point, I found myself in Llanberis without enough charge to get home and plugged into a 22kwh charge point only for it to give me a speed of 3 miles an hour. Luckily, I moved to a different one that gave me 7kwh, which was good enough seeing as though we still needed to go and get food so had the time to let it charge. I'm planning on going up to the Lakes in May/June camping again, but it's definitely put me off a bit. I pretty much always charge at home, but now I think of it the charging point in Widnes Tesco is a 22kwh advertised point that only gives off less than 7kwh. My concern is that this is very common when it comes to non fast-charge points across the country. Does anybody else with an EV have experience of doing this? My thought is still that it's probably fine if you're travelling on a motorway as they seem to be very fast, but I probably wouldn't want to test it on a long journey right now.

I love a bit of table tennis, and I must say I was surprised and a bit saddened when I saw they'd gone to a best of 11 without thinking about the reasons why. Of course there have been misfires and there will continue to be. No doubt there will be game ruining disasters. However, they are an attempt to modernise in response to a particular direction of travel that seems unavoidable. I liken it to the way we consume media. We might lament the state of TV, and how if you are flicking through the channels there are so many repeats, game shows and a lack of high-quality drama on the main channels etc. The reality is that those of us who still consume media like this are dying out and the money in it is drying up. Not only do younger people not watch scheduled programming, they don't even watch that much on Netflix. They watch YouTube increasingly and some almost exclusively. They aren't going to reach 18, suddenly switch on BBC 1 and have a flick, they will consume media like they do now. The result is that even the shows that do exist, often try to cater to this online world and to create moments that might go viral. One of the ideas of bringing a show like SNL onto UK TV at this stage, is in the hope that a couple of the sketches will be able to get millions of views elsewhere. To bring it back to sport, I think many are trying to adjust their rules etc to take account of the changing attention spans of younger audiences. The reality is that the new generations that are coming through are not going to suddenly start consuming long-form sport when they hit a certain age. Take a sport like snooker where the average frame is 15-25 minutes, and some of that is quite pedestrian break-building. That's not a criticism, I've always liked snooker, but more a reflection of where things are going. I've been teaching for around 15 years, and I can honestly say I've never heard a child say they were playing or watching snooker or even that their parents do. Just as a comparison, darts has gone mad since Luke Littler. The thought arose, could this have happened with snooker and I'm not sure it could've done because of the nature of the way it is played; it isn't going to grab the attention in the same way. It seems to me like the sports that will survive into the next 100 years will be able to do one of two things: be able to produce highlight-reel moments for short-form content, or create enough hype through big events that are likely to be watched by millions. This RL ashes thing is about the first time I've seen RL manage anything like this at a time when the sport generally has a lower profile than it probably ever has in the UK.

I didn't know this despite watching the highlights. It was one of those RL sellouts, where there are still plenty of seats around... If Everton is like that, and I don't get a ticket, I'll be fuming!

Geez, exact same time. How weird.

They're announced less than 1,500 left on Monday for the Everton test. It's gonna be like Oasis for a RL game! In the same press release, they're announcing over 85k sold in total. With 21k at Leeds and 50k at Everton that suggests 14k sold for London give or take a couple of k for capacity differences? It was always going to the least likely to sell and of course with 6 months left it isn't a worry. When you consider that the only game people will be able to get to is that one once the hype starts ramping up, that'll no doubt boost sales. I wouldn't have considered it knowing I could go Everton. Now I probably can't, I'm more likely to be open to the idea.

I think we're probably not too far away in what we think. I only essentially think in an ideal world it is a given that they shouldn't. In a world where they could easily accommodate it, they should for the reasons I've outlined. Like with international football, it isn't questioning the integrity of individual referees to have a rule saying they shouldn't referee their home country. You make very good points about individuals. I might have a deep history of being a Widnes fan, with family roots etc but there might be a Widnesian referee who got into RL through a totally different route. It can also never be perfect. I've chanted some pretty fruity things at Wire over the years, so is it a conflict to referee them? The reality is also that it is a non-issue in the vast majority of games. The only real times it becomes an issue is when it is a game where the referee becomes a big part of the story, you have a big game with a few big decisions, and I think it's worse internationally. You add in cultural differences and rule interpretations and it is messier. Sorry to labour the point, but the issue I take is the referees are professional point. I hear it and think it's akin to saying RL players are professional and would never be affected by a crowd, or would never make a stupid decision that would cost their team. They are human and they are different person to person. I actually haven't watched much SL in the last few years, and have been watching more this year again. I've been very impressed with the refereeing tbh, it doesn't seem nearly as bad as it was at one point. The six again has helped a lot I think, as has making players go back and play it again. That has reduced a lot of the very frustrating penalties that used to happen.

This essentially is my point about optics. It adds another layer of scrutiny that is messy. If Wigan get more penalties, to some it's a fix, if they get fewer then they're overcompensating. They might of course be doing neither but it complicates things.

I was listening to the Rest is Entertainment the other day and thought of this thread. They were talking about sport in the modern world, and how basically they need to adapt to ensure survival. It was based on something to do with a change in the scoring system but they didn't go into it. The general idea was that to get broadcasting rights, they have to appeal to casual viewers. The idea being that it should grab your attention in 2/3 minutes and keep you watching for 40. Set play darts was seen as the perfect example of this. Basically the same thing over and over but with very regular moments of jeopardy to keep people engaged. The opposite was volleyball, but I'm not sure why. Looking at snooker, maybe cricket is a better example. The creation of much quicker forms of the sport, are what allow test cricket to continue. However, if it just stayed as test cricket, it would increasingly struggle. I quite like snooker at times, but sadly it isn't likely to appeal to younger people with shorter attention spans if it aimed itself at what the purists want. It perhaps also explains the appeal of football. I'm somewhat of a half-hearted fan, in that I follow it and stick on the odd game but I'll often reflect on how a sport that can be dull and pedestrian so often is far and away the most popular game. I watched KR-Wigan last night about an hour behind, with a view to fast forwarding through the breaks in play. I never caught up, not even close. In football I'd be caught up by half-time (do the maths...). I think the key is those instant moments of satisfaction or drama that football provides. It might be rubbish for 20 minutes, but then it can change in an instant.

Yes I meant outside of England and Australia. Do you think Morley's reputation in any way contributed to his sending off? Genuine question, not to prove a point. I've always thought 10 mins in that day especially, made more sense. If Ganson hadn't wanted to send him off, he absolutely could have. If it'd been an Australian player, with the control they have over the game, if he gave a controversial decision they didn't like, he'd have likely been barred from officiating another game like it. Whenever this question comes up, it is presumed that the issue is about refs favouring their hometown team. That's really a smaller issue. For me it's more about optics and the extra undue pressure it can put on specific points decisions. I'm Mr Sensible 2025, I'm a teacher and very straight-laced. I value fairness to the point it can often cause me conflict with people thinking I should be on their side. However, I also have many (ok some) happy memories of supporting Widnes, have a decent programme collection, all my family support Widnes and naturally my son is a Widnes fan. I wouldn't want to be in a position where one 50/50 decision wins Widnes a crucial game. I wouldn't want opposition fans thinking I'd cheated and I wouldn't want to think I'd face that backlash if I made a certain decision. I would understand if people argued that we didn't have the referee stock to be this choosy, and it isn't enough of an issue the majority of the time to make a rule of it. However, I really dislike it when people start trying to pretend it is a complete non-issue because referees are so professional that they are above outside factors. This just isn't how humans work.

You won't win on this one. There is a very much accepted opinion, that involves referees being professionals as if that is akin to bring a robot. It's not about the fact they might favour the team they supported as a kid, this is probably not much of a risk, it's about it making things unnecessarily messy. It reminds me of when you go to youth rugby/football and the coach's kid is on the team. There are a couple of scenarios that play out. Either the coach appears to plays them too much, or in a favourable position and gets grief from other parents, or more likely his kid gets taken off more than the other players because his dad is trying to play fair. Referees are of course influenced by outside factors: the reputation of past players/teams, the crowd, intimidating coaches etc. To say otherwise is dogmatic rather than realistic. One concrete example I've always used when this comes up, is when Morley was sent off in 2003 against the Aussies after 12 seconds. I don't think Ganson sends an Australian off in that same circumstance. Being British complicated that decision unnecessarily. Of course, the one justification is a lack of high-quality referees and that is a genuine problem in RL, especially internationally. However, we shouldn't use neutral refs purely because we're trying to prove a point, if it can be avoided it should be. After all, if it was England-Argentina in a World Cup final, and FIFA had appointed an Argentinian referee, I don't think it would feel like a good justification hearing that FIFA had appointed a professional.

I'm not saying it wasn't interesting, but I don't think labelling it as an alternative history is quite right. That is usually what could have been different but in a balanced way, and I clicked on it for that reason. This was more of a fantasy history, where RL took off in an incredible way. I personally don't think that was ever possible after about 1940. I used to run one of the old Rivals.net websites, and when I was setting it up I did a couple of filler pages that I recently came across. One was about the RLWC 2000 and it was talking about what had happened. It read very much like this. Record crowds, record viewing figures, the game exploding in Ireland etc. It wasn't plucked out of thin air, it was based on optimistic reports I'd read (selling out from the quarters onwards being one I remember). In an alternate world where the Aussies retreated after '95 and just wanted tours, there'd be people saying we missed a huge opportunity not going to 16 teams and if we had our World Cup would rival Unions. The world doesn't work like that sadly.

I wouldn't say this is an alternative history, more a wishful thinking history where every potential alternative decision became an excellent one. Take the mergers as one small example, they would have never worked. There's no alternative history where me and my brothers are travelling to the Halliwell Jones to cheer on Cheshire. Even in Australia where mergers happened in a less tribal and more positive culture, they haven't really worked have they? Manly-North Sydney is largely just Manly, St-George-Illawarra is basically St George and Wests Tigers are consistently one of the worst clubs.

Does anybody else enjoy/suffer through MAFs. For some reason, I've always quite enjoyed trash reality TV and this isn't one of the worst. A couple of things do irritate me though. 1) It goes on waaaaay too long. What happened to a reasonable 12 episodes a series? 2) The false justification for 'tasks' that are clearly invented to create conflict. One particularly egregious one has them ranking all the other women in the experiment based on attractiveness before placing your 'wife' in the same list. According to the so called experts, the emotionally intelligent thing to do is to put your wife first regardless of whether she is the most attractive or not. As you'd expect, this is easier for some couples to do than others.

A legend in the sense he played nearly 500 games for them. Despite having originally been a Hull KR fan, you'd have to suspect he'd be biased towards Saints if the opportunity arose. Again, I don't think he did for one second. There wasn't really any advantage to be gained from a Saints perspective etc. It's not like they haven't won anything for 20 years and one of the other semi-finalists is a Championship side. I think with my teacher hat on, I was just surprised to see something so open to potential criticism. If we were drawing something and parents had an interest in the outcome, we'd be making sure there was absolutely no chance a parent could call foul play.

He almost certainly didn't. He does pretty much the same thing when drawing the last ball. Didn't half look dodgy though!

I certainly thought at one point they might drop them.

Not at all. It always crashes just before something you need it for something important.

If it's anything like my random on Spotify, it'll probably try and throw up matches they think you're more likely to want to see.

Which is pretty much my point about how the draw was done. I was more gobsmacked that they hadn't considered the potential for controversy having an ex-Saints legend picking out a ball of a pretty open container.