They've been abysmal and borderline criminal since the start.
They randomly withheld £20k from a business I was involved with for no stated reason and no direct means to talk to a human about it. It took months to resolve.
Why would you keep any money on PayPal. It’s just a pass-through to your bank account, accepting payments without giving your bank details to strangers on the internet.
Once you start doing frequent business through PayPal, they begin 'holding' some of your money to form a buffer against chargebacks and fraud. This doesn't happen often at the consumer level, but dominates within the small business world.
PayPal isn't a bank. They're a processor. People run afoul when they keep large amounts in their processor account instead of doing free nightly sweeps. They also run into trouble when they do weird things - like new accounts receiving large funds from international sources, etc. PayPal (and all processors) are required to investigate those instances until you have an established relationship with them - and they'll temporarily hold the suspicious funds while that happens. Business accounts have predictable, established patterns.
99% of the horror stories you hear fall into one of these categories, or both: 1) New Account 2) Unusual Account Activity
PayPal processed millions in annual payments for my previous company, without any issues.
> They randomly withheld £20k from a business I was involved with for no stated reason and no direct means to talk to a human about it. It took months to resolve.
If only there was a regulatory framework to turn that into an extremely simple court case, and to also punish attempts of PayPal to ban users who stand up for access to their money.
If they’re a near-monopoly they shouldn’t be allowed to set their own rules.
Exactly treating companies with huge market shares more like utilities that can't just refuse to do business with people for arbitrary reasons and have to follow due process would provide a natural pushback against monopoly building - much more effective than antitrust litigation could ever be.
It's always funny when people say these big companies can't provide a good service because that "wouldn't scale" as if their ability to scale is a god given right and not something that should be pushed back on itself.
(Not recommended at home kids) use a key (or, safer, an upside down UK Earth pin) in the Earth hole to open the Live/Neutral shutter - then insert the EU prongs. The width of the EU prongs is handily the same as the UK holes.
Touring musicians do it if venues don’t have convertors.
Doesn’t work if the EU plug needs a live earth of course.
Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.
This is a mischaracterization of what happened. The economics got bad because of regulatory pressures, and regulatory pressures increased because of anti-nuclear sentiment, and …
… Anti-nuclear sentiment is directly downstream from organized campaigns by organizations like Greenpeace, yes, but also left-aligned political parties that, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, decided make killing nuclear their entire reason for existing.
The fossil fuel industry quietly funneled money to these groups to discredit nuclear which competes with gas/coal for base load. Solar/wind only partially compete because at times they produce nothing so the grid still needs base load (usually "natural" gas these days).
Thanks for all the extra greenhouse gases, Greenpeace!
this is nonsense. Take german plants - zero subsidies for operation, plants were built mostly by private sector.
In France - no CFD's for existing units, plants were constructed by govt for about 150bn. In comparison Germany spent on EEG subsidies double of that and you can see the result in emissions...
Really? Which private sector built nuclear power plants in East Germany? In West Germany most plants were constructed by state-controlled enterprises and there were no expectation of them to ever reach profitability.
it wasn't fully state controlled enterprises in the west - state was a partial owner. For example PreussenElektra, when it built plants was a publicly traded company and during Grohnde state mostly divested from it. Plants not only reached profitability but were cheapest firm power in german merit order bringing huge profits to the owners
According to Wikipedia, PreussenElektra was a subsidiary of VEBA, a state owned energy company. You have to cite your sources here because I don't want to have to rebut made-up stuff.
I do note that you have changed your argument from "plants were built mostly by private sector" to "it wasn't fully state controlled enterprises in the west". Closer to the truth, but still incorrect.
I stand corrected. VEBA was state owned at that time. On the other hand RWE was 50/50 private-municipality owned in the same period.
Still, no CFDs were given to them. So it's not about state reducing subsidies. Nor was it about environment regulations.
The high costs of recent western projects are more related to depleted supply chain and poor designs of the plants. We'll get a chance soon to observe how Canada and Korea will build in Europe. Both have much better supply chain and both want to build (Czechia- apr and Romania -candu). If both will have the same cost blows as flamanville then it's clearly related to EU itself. If not- then the problem was EDF incompetence specifically here and Westinghouse incompetence in US
As I said, cite your sources. You claim RWE was a public-private partnership "in the same period" but don't even state which period. Your claim about CFDs is a complete non-sequitur as I never claimed that the subsidies were in the form of CFDs.
Subsidized capital mostly. When you go to a private bank and want to borrow billions of money the bank will ask you "what for?" You tell it "nuclear, might generate profit in 25 years" and it will quote you an interest rate. The rate will be insanely high due to the risk. So you borrow the money from the government at a much lower interest rate.
And yet China is building new nuclear plants just as fast as it's building solar and wind. It's almost as if the "grinding halt" was political in nature.
what has installed capacity to do with price? Check recent chinese solar parks prices and power. Normalize that power with chineze weather capacity factor. Do the same for their nuclear which is roughly 2.5bn/unit
China does expand ren more than nuclear but the reason is not economics but the capacity to scale (as well as inland ban)
430 GW a year on 20% (which it is not, as china has lots of desserts with no clouds) would still be a way bigger number than 110 GW that are planned to be reached in a few years.
Then here I might stand corrected, but it does not change the basic equation nore the invalidation of the claim above, that china is building nuclear like it builds solar and wind. It does not. Not even close.
Isn't this a consequence of Linear No-threshold, a model that most policy is based on, that says that the bad health consequences of radioactivity are linear wrt the amount of radiation, and that there is no threshold whatsoever under which the radiation is harmless?
A model that is not based on science, given we know that cells have repair mechanisms? Jesus, even bananas are somewhat radioactive, so why are they being sold if any radiation is bad?
Thankfully, it seems the winds are changing in the US, where LNT is being replaced by science based models by regulatory bodies. I hope the rest of the world swiftly follows. The amount of deaths and damage and suffering and money that could have been avoided is mind boggling. If I imagine an alternate history where starting 70 years ago (even just some of) the money invested on fossil fuels or used to subsidize them had been directed to nuclear, and what the state of science today could be, what the state of the air could be, the number of floods, tornadoes, lung cancers that could have been avoided, forced displacements that could have been avoided and subsequent depressions and suicides (see Fukushima), my blood boils. It truly is a mistake of disproportionate scale, and a matching shame.
Trolling/Not Trolling. Imagine if we spent the money we did developing nuclear on photo voltaic and batteries instead. Because seriously we spent next to NOTHING on PV solar and batteries.
I do see how France and Sweden have lowest GHG emissions in EU by building both nuclear and renewables. I see other countries like Denmark/Germany who decided to go with ren alone. Germany spent on EEG double than entire french nuclear fleet. We can see the results. There's no race here. There's no imagine if. We already have historical data. We already have results on hand
Yeah I too long for a future (or a present, I guess?) where entire fields and mountainsides are covered in glass on top of the natural landscape, instead of a football field sized building used to hold rocks close together to boil water.
Sorry is the idea here that we’d cover the Sahara in PVs? The Sahara desert, in Africa, the most dysfunctional continent on the planet. And, what, we’d lay a billion miles of transmission lines? You can’t keep reliable electricity running in those countries today because of how frequent copper theft is. You think building a solar farm is going to work?
This is the problem with PV boosters. It’s just fantasy about a supranational government doing mega projects, when in reality you can just build reactors today for an order of magnitude less in complexity and real estate. “Would I live next to a reactor” of course I would, because if I had that option my electricity would be free. Asking me if I’d want to live next to a uranium mine, well would you live next to a lithium mine? Disingenuous environmental activists have been using this bullshit argument for 30 years now, it doesn’t work on me.
You are really lucky. I broke several screens and my wife also (on 2nd day of iPhone 6s it fell into concrete). Since then I’ve never been without a screen protector and I break it at least 3 times a year. Maybe the screen wouldn’t have broke and the SP did ? I won’t take the risk given the price of the SP vs the pain of changing a screen.
The last time I tried to go naked the 13 pro max fell from my pocket because there is zero grip and I had a dent on the border
Sorry I meant the border of the screen protector and the frame as well in the fall. Maybe the screen would have survived but phones are so slippery that without protections it’s a big risk
I also discovered that dehydration was a migraine trigger for me. I tend not to get big headaches now but get quite intense visual aura / disturbance.
Interestingly I also discovered that electrolyte supplements were also migraine triggers for me.
Leading me to think that electrolyte imbalance was the actually trigger. Caused by too little water increasing the concentration or added salts increasing it.
I tend not to feel thirst very strongly and think I do often confuse it with hunger.
I pay loose attention to urine colour as a gauge and make sure I drink plenty, kinda robotically when playing sports / walking in heat etc.
Well clearly it is complicated as this comment thread shows. Many people don't feel thirst because of age or other reasons or confuse thirst with hunger.
They randomly withheld £20k from a business I was involved with for no stated reason and no direct means to talk to a human about it. It took months to resolve.
And as for their actual website...