Tim

I’m in Romania, and I have never heard of Blik. Maybe it’s behind Revolut’s instant payments or something?

There is a domestic instant payment solution - RoPay - but I’ve never actually used it; my bank does occasionally remind me it exists but I’ve never seen a merchant that accepted it. I would say Revolut’s solution I have started to notice - I’ve used it to pay for flights with WizzAir, for example.

“Possibly replacing the sheet metal entirely” tells me you’ve never been to the UK…

The fuse plug offers no protection because the average modern electronic (not electric - hairdryers etc.) appliance needs a much smaller fuse. 3A (the smallest UK plug fuse) is about 700W, at which point most things short of a kettle are already toasted. (That said, it’s not really clear what “protecting the appliance” means - you can’t push current, only pull - so if the appliance is drawing more than it should it’s probably already toast. What you actually need to do is hopefully stop any components in a broken appliance which may go pop and start a fire doing so - and transistors and the like can go all twisted-firestarter at 10s of mA, let alone 3A at 240V.)

Let me try to reiterate more clearly: The purpose of the socket fuse is the same as the purpose of ringmain wiring: to allow saving copper on cheaper cable.

The ringmain has a big flaw - unbalanced loads can overload the in-wall wiring, because it uses cable rated less than the breaker protecting it. Fuses in plug sockets help make it harder to unbalance the ring (because the most you can draw from any one socket is 13A, no matter how many extensions you string together.) In “radial world”, you have a 16A breaker on 16A wire, and all that happens if you trail extension leads together is you trip the breaker - so no need for a fuse in the plug.

Another flaw of the ringmain is that 32A breaker. If a device fails with a short, it can draw more than 7KW without the breaker tripping; that’s enough not just to burn the cable, it’ll weld the pins in the plug and socket. The fuse in the plug mitigates this - again, with radial wiring, no need, because the most you can draw is the 16A the socket is rated for without tripping the breaker.

The third helpful feature of the plug fuse was it allowed for cheaper appliance cable; think old-school lamps with essentially bell-wire cables. In the olden days in the UK there were dedicated lighting sockets (with round pins) for these, on a dedicated lighting circuit with a lower rated fuse in the distribution board - the house I grew up in still had a few of them - but with the move to BS1363 as standard, there needed to be a way to safely fit the new plug to those old lamps without burning the house down - the replaceable fuse allowed for this. It’s not a coincidence that the other (than 13A) common fuse sizes are 3A and 5A - those were the ratings of the two different round-pin lighting plugs which the new plug & socket replaced.

None of these purposes of the plug fuse is actually protecting the appliance; they are all about protecting the ringmain and the cable. The fuses in the plug are simply too coarse (3A, 5A and 13A, of which even the lowest is far too much for modern electronics short of gaming-rigs,) and the fuses too slow-blowing.

No, the implication was that the in-wall wiring was at risk.

The fuses in BS1363 plugs specifically are not intended to protect equipment, btw. They are there to mitigate the risks of ringmain in-wall wiring, and to protect the appliance cable from catching fire in a short. (That’s why devices without a cable - e.g. wall-warts - don’t have the fuse.)

Appliances always need their own internal fusing if they are to be protected. A 3A slow blowing fuse in a BS1363 plug offers no protection at all to modern electronics (and even that assumes the householder didn’t just stick a 13A in because it was all they had to hand - the normal case.)

Because you can drop a few people with parachutes who can move the large heavy things? Plus it’s a lot quicker if you’re not expecting any warning.

Isn’t that what I wrote?

It’s an imperfect mitigation, though - the typical fuse in the plug is 13A, so you only need two fully loaded sockets and you’re already in trouble. Fortunately these days nobody is plugging in 3-bar electric fires or immersion heaters, and it’s quite hard to find those kinds of loads outside the kitchen, so it’s less of a practical issue, sure. (This is also why UK electrical code recommends that any load greater than 2kW should be given its own radial instead of being plugged into the ringmain. It’s not unusual for the kitchen to be on a dedicated radial (or two) even if the rest of the house is on rings.)

(You could instantly make UK wiring a lot safer by just eliminating the over-rating of the breakers - i.e. if you have a 24A ring, put a 24A breaker on it. In the olden days that would probably have caused nuisance trips (3-bar fires and all,) but these days I doubt anyone would notice.)

The UK though has the added spice of the uniquely unsafe ringmain wiring standard, in which 24A cable in the wall is protected by a 32A breaker at the distribution panel. It’s only “safe” if the load is evenly balanced around the ring, and the ring isn’t broken (that’s why UK plugs need fuses in them - to make it harder to severely unbalance the ring by pulling 32A out of a single socket, and equally to try and protect the appliance cable if a short or similar tries to.)

I’ve not sat down with a pen and paper to work out how having a generator somewhere on the ring affects things - presumably the authorities have…

Hey, don’t knock the UK’s traditional recipes. The British should learn to be far more proud of their food.

People who will dismiss Shepherd’s Pie (a tremendous dish when made well) will then go weak-kneed at a bloody moussaka or beef ragu because they’re fancy and exotic… There’s nothing wrong with a steak and kidney pud, or a bloody good roast with all the trimmings, or a corned-beef hash, or a cornish pasty, or a good kedgeree made with leftovers or… Well, point is there is loads of amazing food in the UK culinary tradition. That most of it doesn’t involve salad leaves artfully balanced on top of a cherry tomato owes more to climate than cuisine; nobody wants that shit when it’s winter outside 11 months in 12.

I swear the whole “British cuisine is bad” thing is just a conspiracy cooked up by the French in order to distract everyone from the fact they’ve elevated overcomplicating otherwise thoroughly unremarkable dishes to an artform. If you’ve ever worked in a French factory and had to chew on horsemeat with the texture of a car tire in the canteen, you’d know the caraffe of cooking wine isn’t there to provide a touch of exotic class, it’s to try and numb the tastebuds. (The Italians though, they get to judge tbf.)

The British diet may be awful, but it’s not because British cuisine is awful, it’s mainly because of shovelling junk food - mainly US in origin - instead of the traditional food.

I hate to break it to you, but the diaeresis (two-dots diacritic) is, in fact, a standard part of modern English orthography.

But yes, I was lazy when writing. I’ve slapped myself on the wrist.

TIL six year olds use Lemmy.

The Turkish Government decided that they’d like the English translation of their name to be Turkiye, and asked the world nicely.

The world, for whom it is absolutely no inconvenience whatsoever, went “fair enough, sure.”

If the majority of people are now writing Turkiye, it just means the majority of people are not utterly wearisome bellends; consider this a rare good news story.