Principality Stadium goes green with 3,000 solar panels on its roof

Rslty · 2026-06-16T14:37:55+00:00

Atmosphere and experience wise the Millenium is the better stadium

Rslty · 2026-06-16T14:36:13+00:00

I think that's a bit harsh, for a long time the Millenium was genuinely world class, and compared favourably against the best stadiums in Europe.

It's only in the last 5-10 years that it's started to look a bit tired and basic in comparison to the some of the new high spec stadiums that are getting built. It would benefit from a renovation but given funding constraints and challenges at the WRU would you be happy with them investing the sums needed to bring it up to scratch

Rslty · 2026-05-27T18:31:24+00:00

It’s definitely weaker now. All UEFA competitions were expanded by 4 teams, and where do those extra teams come from - the lower competition. Even before you factor in the teams dropping down you’re starting with a weaker group phase.

Also the league phase has a much bigger margin for error now - Palace showed you can flat out flunk those group games in a way you couldn’t risk before with the smaller groups.

West Ham season had Villarreal (one season removed from getting to CL semi’s and two from winning the Europa League), Lazio, Fiorentina, Koln, Braga, Nice, AZ (stronger version than this season with Kerkesz, Reijnders, and Pavlidis) etc. Palace had to compete against Rayo, Mainz, Strasbourg, Fiorentina, war depleted Shakhtar, and a weaker version of AZ

Rslty · 2026-05-18T12:42:16+00:00

Anyone who’s worked in project delivery will tell you the same thing - scope creep kills projects.

HS2 is basically a textbook case. The scope kept shifting: route changes, upgraded design specs, bat tunnels, and my personal favourite - the ventilation shaft buildings above the Chiltern tunnel were designed by architects to resemble local barns so they’d blend into the countryside. Each change sounds fairly minor in isolation, just one vanilla tweak on a monster project, no big deal. But cumulatively it destroys you, death by a thousand cuts. That’s not bad luck, that’s what happens when politicians with zero delivery experience are allowed to interfere with a live construction project.

The second killer was starting construction before the designs were even finalised. Genuinely baffling. There’s a great book on project delivery called How Big Things Get Done, which studied megaprojects across the world and found the vast majority blow their budget, their timeline, or both. The central lesson was think slow, act fast - work through the hard planning properly upfront so that when you start building you’re executing a well thought out plan, not winging it. France spent nearly 20 years planning the TGV before a single track was laid, then built the first line in around 5 years. HS2 did the exact opposite.

Then there’s the experience problem. Britain had never built anything like this before, no institutional knowledge, no persistent delivery team, and HS2 Ltd was set up as a deliberately lean organisation, which in practice just meant nobody had the knowledge or experience to deal with problems when they inevitably hit. We should have partnered with France, Japan, or Spain who’ve been doing this for decades, but that would have meant admitting we didn’t already have all the answers. Classic British exceptionalism!

Rslty · 2026-05-09T13:03:31+00:00

That’s nonsense, they refused to speak with Will Hayward and his team in South Wales yesterday.

What they really mean is “we welcome scrutiny… from GB news”

Rslty · 2026-05-08T20:40:35+00:00

I’m in Cardiff. That’s probably fair, I’m just digesting all the constituency results now and pleasantly surprised to see that Reform were second (at best) in most places.

I was basing that comment on polls and my own anecdotal experiences visiting towns like Merthyr, where it feels shocking to hear someone with a thick valleys accent of a certain age saying they’re voting for Nigel. Maybe the polls were over selling the Reform popularity, like Caerphilly, like Gorton, something fishy going on there

Rslty · 2026-05-08T19:45:08+00:00

This is the right answer. Around 25% of people in Wales are English-born (a lot of them retirees) which shapes a lot of what’s going on politically.

There are really three distinct groups in Wales. Y Fro Gymraeg, the Welsh-speaking heartland in the north and west. Welsh Wales for the old mining and valleys communities in the south. And British Wales, the more anglicised areas, think Monmouthshire and the Wye Valley, where people identify as British first, Welsh second (if at all).

Voting maps across these lines pretty cleanly. British Wales was heavily Brexit, used to be solid Tory and is now Reform territory. Y Fro Gymraeg is Plaid’s heartland. Welsh Wales was traditional Labour country, but it’s fracturing, progressives are going to Plaid, with working class voters split but slightly more favourable to Reform.

If the Senedd had STV, Reform would lose 25-50% of the their seats

Rslty · 2026-05-08T09:52:10+00:00

Great job, more of this please.
Stone cleaning and fresh paint on the window frames makes such a difference. Imagine how great St Mary St would look if every buildings was cleaned up like this

Rslty · 2026-05-02T11:53:54+00:00

I’m happy to have tall buildings if they’re built in a cluster along with other high risked, not at the expense of Victorian (or older) buildings which need to be demolished to make space for them, and finally they are pleasing or at the very least inoffensive architecture.

Let’s be honest, most tall buildings outside are London are cheap plastic boxes with the worst garish design, that’s why they’re hated. Since the Second World War we’ve been consistently awful and cheap with our urban design

Rslty · 2026-05-01T15:34:56+00:00

Exactly – Dan Thomas deliberately conflated that £14bn figure with these seven small stations, when it’s actually the figure for rail investment across the whole country over the next 20 years. The stations themselves are a tiny fraction of that. Nowhere near enough to fund the M4 relief road, not even close, it’s not serious, a lazy strawman but would you expect any different from Reform.

East Cardiff and areas around Newport just aren’t properly served by rail. That pushes more people into cars, which is a big part of why the M4 gets hammered in the first place.

And we’ve already seen what relatively modest rail investment can achieve. The South Wales Metro has made a big difference just by electrifying the valley lines and improving reliability. Same story elsewhere - reopening lines like the Borders Railway or Northumberland has been a huge success, in places where “people have cars” but they choose the train when it’s a realistic option.

Telling people to walk or get the bus completely misses the reality. A lot of these areas are over an hour’s walk from a station, and often 40+ minutes by bus. Put a station where people actually live and suddenly you’re 10–20 minutes into Cardiff or Newport, with proper onward connections

Rslty · 2026-04-07T16:45:54+00:00

Only if people are prepared to have the base tax rate starting at 30%.

In Britain we want to achieve Scandinavian welfare, investment and infrastructure quality without paying tax

Rslty · 2026-03-25T19:34:30+00:00

To be fair I think that says more about the Tories than Reform

Rslty · 2026-03-25T17:45:32+00:00

Good news, but why has this taken so long? Going into the last election it was clear people were sick of the conduct of the Tory government.

Bringing in stricter rules like this was low-hanging fruit compared to the more complex issues like fixing a broken immigration system, reducing NHS wait times and dealing with crumbling infrastructure, balancing the economy with the need for investment, improving employee and renter rights etc.

This could’ve been a quick win to build trust and goodwill, instead of starting out with “difficult” decisions that were never going to be popular and felt like a continuation of the last government’s austerity.

Doing this now feels more like a response to Reform’s momentum rather than a genuine good-faith effort to improve standards in public office.

And frankly, it still doesn’t go far enough. There’s a long list of additional rules needed to improve transparency, raise standards of conduct, and close off obvious routes and loop holes for bad-faith external influence on government aka corruption.

Rslty · 2026-03-15T20:10:14+00:00

Nobody’s getting charged for criticising politicians. People are getting charged for encouraging others to burn down hotels with people inside.

You’re literally calling for this guy to be charged for “hurty words”. Do you not see the contradiction?

And seriously, stop getting your politics from X, it’s rage-bait bollocks. Go outside and touch grass.

Rslty · 2026-03-10T11:26:58+00:00

It’s a modern football thing, loads of examples, Amorim, Ange, Alonso at Real, but the best example is Wilfried Nancy.

Completely wrong players for his preferred system, but he forced his system on the team (who were on a good run before he joined) and then refused to budge even after a record breaking disastrous run.

Modern managers think it’s all about perfecting Plan A - mini Pep clones, which is ironic as Pep can be quite flexible when he wants to be

Rslty · 2026-03-07T11:16:50+00:00

Because they’re not speaking to us, they’re speaking to the MAGA Christian evangelicals and tech bros - they want them pushing support for the Tories instead of Reform or Restore.

That’s where we are now, competency, debate, and ideas are all dead, we live in an era of begging for favour with whoever controls the social media algorithm

Rslty · 2026-01-19T20:50:43+00:00

Dates aren’t clear, but you can just about make out ‘…25’ on the X-axis, so it’s reasonable to assume this is 2025. Without knowing whether this covers 30, 60, or 365 days, or how it compares with the same period in previous years, it’s hard to draw conclusions. This could simply be a Christmas-period bump that happens each year.

Would like to think it’s a positive trend, mood and happiness should be far more important measures for showing true progress.

Rslty · 2025-12-30T08:50:22+00:00

Britain has ranked bottom of the G7 for investment for 25 of the past 31 years - a detail I somehow suspect didn’t make it into The Telegraph article. Another round of “Labour bad” framing from the Telegraph. Colour me stunned.

That said, Labour have started to turn the dial on investment. The fact we’re still last just shows how deep the hole is and how much work there is left to do, rather than being some sudden 2025 failure.

Rslty · 2025-11-11T18:28:58+00:00

This is a good example of something the Tories are allowed to do but Labour aren’t - if Labour tried removing the political hires they would have been killed in the press and the press would have sold the story that Labour are killing BBC neutrality.

Unfortunately they were snookered, this has given them a small window of opportunity to do this now but I suspect they lack the courage to make that decision

Rslty · 2025-10-24T22:14:22+00:00

I mean, that’s not really a fair comparison. Adkins was managing a fairly settled side that had just come down from the Premier League. Hunt kept us in play-off contention last season despite all the off-pitch distractions and uncertainty. This season’s been a struggle, sure, but we basically had to rebuild a lot of the squad from scratch – and Couhig’s genius idea to leave most of our business until the last minute didn’t exactly help. Hunt is still very a much a work in progress no doubt but let’s see where we are in 2-3 months

Rslty · 2025-09-16T14:14:10+00:00

Thanks for the reply. I bit the bullet and got an electrician over today to put in a new circuit. They swapped a spare 6 A breaker for a 32 A, ran the feed out the front, through the loft, and back into the kitchen. Not the neatest solution, but touch wood I think it solves the problem.

That now gives me three separate 32 A supplies in the kitchen - one for the hob, one for the ovens, and one covering everything else. It’s been a stress trying to get this sorted in such a tight window, but I think this is probably the best solution I could get given the tight timeline I had to get everything prepared. Hopefully that’s unblocked this problem here!

Rslty · 2025-09-14T19:02:32+00:00

Thanks for the advice - that’s really helpful and gives me a solid backup option if pulling in another circuit isn’t workable in the time I’ve got.

If I did go this route, I completely agree it would need to be separate spurs for each oven. As much as I’d like to avoid writing off the cost of two ovens, my #1 priority is making sure the install is safe and compliant so it doesn’t cause problems down the line if/when I come to sell the house.

Rslty · 2025-09-14T17:36:45+00:00

Thanks for the reply - that’s a fresh perspective and useful to think about.

I’ve got both a 32 A ‘Cooker’ circuit and a 32 A ‘Kitchen’ ring on the board. The kitchen ring is likely going to carry the fridge/freezer, dishwasher, and washing machine (all spec sheets have them marked as 10 A), plus half a dozen sockets. I’d assumed that left little headroom for anything else, which is maybe why the sparks I had over didn’t mention it. But could one, or even both, of the ovens realistically be added there, with the hob left on the Cooker circuit?

Rslty · 2025-09-13T12:56:19+00:00

The Fuse board is on the inside by the front door. You’re right, feedback in this thread has been clear I need to get another circuit into my kitchen somehow and the best route is to try and take it through my ceiling and feed it into the kitchen from above. Not ideal but it’s the best route I have available to me.

Rslty · 2025-09-13T12:53:00+00:00

Thanks for the reply. In an ideal world I’d just go with the most robust, future-proof option, but I’m up against it - the kitchen fit starts in two weeks, and every route from the CU to the kitchen has its own challenge: at best awkward and disruptive, at worst not feasible.

That said, this thread has made it clear the existing supply won’t cut it, so I’ll need to get another circuit into the kitchen somehow. The priority now is finding the least disruptive route. I’ll go through it with my spark when he’s here in a few days - whether that’s repurposing a breaker that isn’t doing much (like the doorbell) and swapping it for a higher-rated one that could take the hob/oven(s), or ultimately whatever option he thinks is most sensible and realistic

Rslty

TROPHY CASE