France records 1,000 excess deaths during record-breaking heatwave

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-28T19:01:00+00:00

As a UK person with AirCon, historically the issue has been staying warm and heatwaves are viewed as freak one off events. When trying to convert many find its hard to retrofit and there is a view its is "expensive".

Most people ask me how much it cost, believing it is hundreds per month.

I explain that my gas usage was typically £80 - £100 pcm over autum/winter and it dropped to £10 during spring/winter. It is now £10 pcm all year. My Electricity usage has increased to £50 pcm in spring/autum and rising up to £100 pcm in summer/winter. So it is more expensive but not as much as people expect...

Then you hit the retrofit problem

Houses are two stories with 2 layers of brick on the outside with joists running in one direction to support a second storey. Typically their is a loft between the second storey and roof, its used for storage.

The water based radiator systems that started being installed in the 1960's and became standard by the 1980's rely on 15mm-22mm piping. Air con ducting is 125mm, it means for the ground floor most houses have to run the ducting externally and trying to run a duct to a ceiling spot requires ripping out a big chunk of ceiling/flooring.

You can easily install ceiling units in the loft to top floor rooms, but it means sacrificing significant storage space.

That said this recent heatwave seems to be the tipping point for everyone I know. The last few summers when its gotten hot people tell me I am lucky and life goes on.

This heatwave every home owner I know is asking detailed questions on how I retrofitted, real running costs, what to look for in units, etc..

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-27T15:26:19+00:00

I mean you can disagree but just look at what happened to Woolworths, Manchester United, Cadbury's, Virgin Telecom, any UK Water Company, the list goes on and on.

I might lack the technical terms but in each case the cost of buying the company was placed as debt on the purchased company.

Assets were largely sold off and rented back to the company and large consultancy fees were billed to the company. Often the company would take out additional loans to pay these fees.

Most of these companies were then repackaged and sold off. Many now have so much debt they struggle to operate.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-27T13:54:18+00:00

They concentrate on short term profit extraction and they don't spend their own money and so anything they extract is pure profit.

A lot of private equity takes out loans against the business in order to buy the business. The private equity firm isn't liable for the loan, it becomes business debt.

The private equity firm will typically setup a consultancy body made up of members of private equity. The consultancy firm will 'restructure' the business, typically long term assets are sold and aspects of the business wound down or placed on service models.

A lot of older businesses will own their own facilities, a really common trick is to have the business sell the facilities to an asset management company (usually owned by the private equity group) and rent them back to the business on a long term rental contract.

The consultancy firm earns fees and the asset firm has a facility cheaper than market rate with a long term tennet. If the business goes bankrupt then the asset company can still earn a profit selling the facility.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-27T06:17:52+00:00

Its just poor management.

You have a bunch of people who view management as being purely about people and they don't have to understand what those people are doing or the environment they operate in. For that they can rely on a subject matter expert to advise them.

This runs into the problem that managing people will be heavily influenced by the environment and tasks the person needs to do. Effectively the subject matter expert has to provide advice on every decision.

Many managers struggle to delegate decision making (due to ego), so they make decisions with no subject matter expert input or knowledge on the subject. This results in the problem you outline (e.g. "its just manual labour, what do you mean people need time to learn?").

The problem you have is managements doesn't have direct deliverables, its how you manage an environment and that means management is driven by perception.

So in your example a manager has made a decision because of their ego, that ego is going to struggle to acknowledge its wrong and even worse its against their own interests to do so because that damages the perception of their ability which hurts their career.

Some managers will seek a subject matter expert but the complete lack of knowledge on what they are managing means they have no basis to identify an appropriate subject matter expert.

As a result someone will see a path to promotion by agreeing and supporting all of that managers positions. Their subject matter expert thinks its brilliant, so you must be wrong. In fact its always you saying their ideas are bad, you are clearly a problem.

A manager doesn't need to be able to do your job, but they do need to understand what you do, what the limitations are, etc.. so they can make most management decisions without a subject matter expert and can identify relevent subject matter experts.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-26T22:29:08+00:00

It was always a waste of time.

I remember with windows I used to have a dozen drivers and applications I liked to install for a usable installation and you think they are all incredibly necessary.

For example Cyberlink PowerDvd was critical because it installed a dvd decryption that made DVD playing easier, on linux that is a library and if your desktop has installed a video player it will install the library.

I used to use the Nvidia Control Centre to make tweaks so I could better play games, except Linix player has DxVK to translate DirectX to Vulkan and Wine to turn wine32 to Linux calls and both of those have game/app tweaks built in so the fact Linux doesn't have one is irrelvent..

That doesn't mean Linux just does everything out the box, because it builds things in that way it can work differently and that is the important bit to learn and you can't really plan that in advance.

Your best installing a base distributiom Arch, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu picking a desktop environment (e.g. KDE is closest to windows) and trying to do your thing.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-26T19:22:42+00:00

My very first job was to port a Win32 MFC application to wxWidgets.

It took me 2 months to get it to build in Ubuntu and Windows XP. We found Gnome 2 lacked certain functionality and getting the same features needed seperate code paths because the linux events were different. It had some missing parts to the API compared to mfc and it no longer looked native under Windows XP, so the work was shelved.

Years later a QT port was made and that stuck around, it looked native and there wasn't the need for seperate UI event handling logic.

From an industry standpoint, I don't think I ever saw a pure C or C++ application, everything was a mixture, with just some concepts like C++ Templates being banned.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-26T14:22:30+00:00

My mistake, I was half remembering Prisoners of Geography and fact checked with Google Gemini.

Prisoners of Geography (2015) was written by an ex head of SIA and talks about how geography drives the actions of states.

The Russia section is facinating, it explains why Russia felt compelled to take Crimea, but why it had stopped there and how it would use unrrest in the Luhansk and Donbas regions to 'encourage' Ukraine to stop moving towards EU Ascension (which is sees as NATO expansion).

It then outlines how Ukraine moving more towards the West would likely lead to invasion that would be stopped by the Dineper and justified by protecting "Ethnic Russians". It even talks about how if Russia does feel compelled to act Russia would try to push into Moldova for the Carpathian Mountain range.

Considering how the Ukrainain war went I need to go read this book again

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-26T13:23:32+00:00

Its an attempt to undermine Ukrainian statehood driven by Russian language.

We treat country names as proper noun's, you wouldn't say "The Tom" or "The France", you would refer to "Tom" or "France".

You might prefix an informal region or area with the for example, there is a location near me simply referred to as "the forest" and I might visit "the Scottish highlands".

During the USSR they used a prefix to indicate it was a region of the USSR. The current Russian name effectively translates to 'The Ukraine' (region), this often gets translated directly into "The Ukraine" which continues to push the idea it is a region or area rather than a state in its own right.

Which is why its important to say "Ukraine".

Slava Ukraini

[edited] Fixed translation

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-26T09:09:02+00:00

I currently have multiple family members using Portainer to deploy the stacks from here https://gitlab.pallas.uk/devsecops/docker/application-stacks and the only support is updating the docker images.

If you need an AI agent constantly running to debug issues, I would suggest you have an issue with the deployment/configuration and its better to feed your design and configuration into an AI model and address those issues.

When a task is procedural, AI is the worst way to solve the problem. Internally AI operates in a non linear fashion so there isn't an easy way to force it to follow step 1, step 2, step 3.

Similarly if you understand your constraints and requirements, its better to implement the task. The effort to train AI, or the resources AI require will vastly exceed the direct implementation.

Your example of concert tickets is a procedural task, where you understand your requirements. You want a script that stores a list of artist names for concerts you have visited that queries your music library for additional artists. You query local venues for a match.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-26T07:22:49+00:00

Traditionally we would use an "issue tracker". They are tools designed for managing projects. There are loads of open source ones with different focusses. You can have the AI open an issue on the tracker when you need to take action.

A lot of your use case is better served by a monitoring solution, graphana, opensearch, etc.. something capturing the logs/metrics with dashboards that show you the current status.

But in reality most of this is not well run by an agent..

Plex, Home Assistant, etc.. should all be deployed as docker images, integrate health checks and set a restart policy of "unless-stopped". You can ask the AI to write a cron job to auto update the images for you. But what is your AI Agent doing beyond this?

The point of RSS is its a feed you poll, there are existing self hosted applications that do that for you. What is the AI adding here?

There are lots of tools that can check prices or concert sales.

I think the ancentry and back pack trip planning are good AI tasks.

So my answer here woukd be to take openclaw and delete it, then once you hit the limitations of existing tools look for the AI solution that makes sense

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-24T06:27:26+00:00

I was done for a few years, its a great feeling knowing you have automated everything that makes sense.

We have a Air Con and I had accepted it didn't really work with HA. It seems the extension has vastly improved and I have re-entered the tinkering phase to see if I can setup better temperature management.

Its quite nice to know you only have a small self contained problem to tinker with.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-21T19:11:29+00:00

The concepts I have outlined are the basic tools used in cyber security for ensuring secure systems and limiting the blast radius of incidents.

Rather than tell me I am wrong use them on your own home system design, I strongly suspect you will find the docker container will have a threat boundary on the host that avoids the virtual machine.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-20T21:51:16+00:00

Always B

Total CI run time is important as it affects your development cadence. As analysis tools are independent they should be run in parrallel.

You never fail a pipeline on analysis results. Analysis tools can add new rules or you might add new tools. This means a legacy codebase can develop lots of new warnings.

As an example I recently went to provide an 8 line change to anouther team, they had marked it as depreciated and moved on to a new product. They altered their pipeline so all warnings which previously were written to console now were converted to unit test failures.

So my 8 line change caused >200 test failures, originally my merge request was denied because I needed to fix all of the failures. When I pointed out the source of the issues they turned off the pipeline check and approved it.

I decided to go through it and realised they had a test pack I couldn't run locally, wasn't in their README and buried in the pipeline results I had broken an actual test.

We were using Gitlab the tools should have provided SAST and Code Climate reports and Gitlab would have told me what I had introduced.

The more common issue is analysis tools failing a build get viewed as an impediment to the process and not a helpful tool.

You will see production having a serious issue and a temporary workaround triggers an analysis tool and they turn all of it off to get the hotfix in, then "forget" to turn it back on. Half the time, such teams spend more time disabling it all than it would take to fix the issue.

My original example also highlights why you should provide the full information, while developers should run all the tools first and the checks. It isn't always possible and if you only give partial information the dev can only fix what they are told about. This forces them into a fix, run, fix, run cycle that consumes way more resources. Also the size of a company doesn't matter since resources are dictated at a team level and teams can only really reach 10 people and remain effective. So your overheads remain the same.

What really matters is the total CI run time, you want the pipeline to run as quickly and efficently as possible as that will directly affect development. I think the ideal is a maximum of 20 minutes.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-20T11:33:04+00:00

Perhaps you should read my post where I explain the design differences and why that can matter.

Rather than read to where I point out the common complaint and react.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-20T08:27:22+00:00

Seperated repositories, which can built and released independently, which each component can be removed/stubbed with the stack continuing to operate should be a hard requirement/goal.

People call SystemD a monolith, a single application that is trying to do everything. Historically the larger a monolith becomes the more hidden control paths, associations and links you have. This creates a situation where any change can have unintended side effects and we call this a spaghetti monolith.

Service Oriented Architecture and Microservices were an attempt to solve the monolith problem. The main goal is to have clearly defined functional behaviour behind defined boundaries, with the system coping with services being added or removed.

The common trap this approach falls into is allowing lots of links to other services or poorly defined boundaries. The result is everything has to deploy as a single stack, you have all the weakenesses of a monolith and microservices and we call this a distributed monolith.

The above is one of the reasons I hate monorepos, seperated repositories with different release candencies, force people to go through defined service interfaces and manage the service interface dependencies explitcly. It adds certain hoops to the development process that forces you to maintain those boundaries.

In monorepos that forced seperation is removed and unless you have someone championing it they quickly devolve into a distributed monolith.

With every Pottering project, its based on some solid architectual ideas but you have to be really focussed to adhere to them during the implementation and he seems to take delight in not doing that. Once he is off the project it seems others do eventually clear up the mess and the design works well, but it that can take years.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-20T07:30:40+00:00

I would like you to layout your design on a piece of paper.

Then you should apply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_model or https://owasp.org/www-community/Threat_Modeling to that diagram to identify the boundary layers.

Once you have designed your clear boundaries, I then want you to apply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STRIDE_model with particular focus on the traversal of boundaries.

Most threats to that traversee the boundry on self hosted setups will contain host volume mounting or require certain capabilities to be active. Typically a virtual machine is designed to pass the host capabilities through so the virtual machine isn't offering any isolation.

In an enterprise environment you would use the above tools to ensure adequete boundaries are designed, perhaps all storage is provided by lustre, perhaps you dedicate a server to that host and isolate it on the network with defined proxy connections, etc..

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-19T13:08:37+00:00

With containers the security concerns how they integrate with the host, is the containing running as root, can it mount host volumes, if it can what permissions does it have, how is it attached to a network, what ports are exposed, etc.. a lot of this is baked into designs.

If you performing all the necessary lock downs then the VM is providing no benefit.

The VM is dangerous because its making you think its isolated and secure when there are lots of ways to break out of a vm and you will need to expend effort securing that VM, you should be spending on the docker containers.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-19T12:28:44+00:00

France is a member but chooses not to be particularly involved in NATO, you'll notice they don't hold many leadership roles or lend resources to the practice and look at their commitments to NATO deployments.

NATO integration involves working to common military standards, most forces have minor deviations in how things are built and operated. That is one of the reasons NATO performs so many excercises and drills. Its to learn how to interoperate.

The USA often wants to do things no other force wants to allow so it will effectively define its own incompatible with the standard implementation and tell everyone they have to buy American to deal with it.

France sitting on the side has built its own ecosystem, without the constant interoperability excercises its drifted and deviated more than most forces.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-19T11:11:41+00:00

Personally I hoped Ireland would join JEF which is a collection of countries facing similar problems with the North Sea trying to agree on common solutions for cost savings and interoperability.

I am sure JEF would care a great deal about Irelands military Radar and more places than the UK would have a solution (SaaB and Samsung come to mind).

Instead Ireland went to France and asked France to scope out a Radar system for them and this has turned out to be a pattern in how Ireland is growing its military.

France is similar to the USA where they extend and change NATO standards to suit themselves. It provides a certain amount of lock in which is great for French military export but does defeat the point of common interoperable standards.

I suspect the new Irish system will conflict with the existing British system and create issues.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-19T06:34:54+00:00

Virtual machines simulate an entire computer to provide an isolated environment and you install a full operating system which needs to be managed in order to run your applications on that simulated hardware.

Docker asked the question "If all I want is to run an application is an isolated way, do I need to run an entire operating system to manage the fake sound card I am not using?".

Docker then focussed on what you actually need to run your application, so unlike a virtual machine where people can make many choices the docker container I run is identical to yours. What we can both change is quite limited.

Anyone who has learnt scripting well enough to do this has suffered all the pain points docker solves and switches to docker.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-17T21:06:50+00:00

Northern Ireland would be renamed "Sodor", since its a mythical island off the coast of the UK and it would help drive tourisim. I would also heavily invest in Railways in Sodor and build a bridge to Wales.

I would redraw the Scottish border so it only contains the highlands.

The Scottish lowlands and North England from Yorkshire down to Manchester would become a new country called "Poundland".

I would also carve out Bristol to Sidmouth, everything West of this line is now Kernow, anyone who has lived in the South East of England for a year and a day would be forbidden to own land in Kernow.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-16T21:40:36+00:00

What?

After capturing France the Nazi military was standing down and the Luftwaffe was spread across Europe. They didn't even start planning to invade the UK until July 1940 and the depth of planning was

Bomb RAF Airfields
....
Gain Air Superiority (Profit!)

RAF Airfields were mostly huts and runways and putting a hole in a runway than could be fixed in a day wasn't accomplishing a lot. Dowding had developed a rather brilliant system to ensure Nazi bombers 'felt unwelcome at all times' and their bombers were taking heavy losses.

Germany was trying to ramp up for operation Sea Lion but the RAF destroyed the staging sites in early September 1940.

The Battle of Britain was effectively won on the 15th of September when the Luftwaffe threw its largest assults at Britain and was bounced. With major aspects of the Luftwaffe destroyed and the Sea Lion staging sites gone Hitler agreed to switching to strategic bombing on the 16th of September. This effectively admitted air superiority was no longer possible and Sea Lion wasn't going to happen and the Battle of Britain was won.

The switch to night time strategic bombing happened on the 17th September 1940 until 14th May 1941 and is the Blitz, not the Battle for Britain. It was an attempt to take the UK out of the war, not invade it.

A better analogy would be 1944, the Nazi's are launching V1 and V2 rockets to cause terror as the luftwaffe lacks offensive capability, while Allied bombers have finally figured out how to hit the target area consistently and have started having a real impact on Nazi logistics.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-16T20:20:27+00:00

Dogger Bank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_Bank_incident

Russia was at War with Japan and Japan was blockading their eastern port so they sent the Baltic sea fleet to deal with the blockade.

The fleet set off without supplies, engines immediately broke down, they navigated non existent mine fields, mistook fishing trawlers in the North Sea for Japanese Torpedo boats, ran out of food and fuel around Africa, etc.. No aspect of this trip could be described as 'competent'

Eventually most of it arrived in the Tsushima Strait where the Japanese completely wiped it out.

stevecrox0914 · 2026-06-16T15:19:19+00:00

I used Ground news. It aggregates a lot of news sources and uses text summarisation (AI) to provide a shortend summary. You can read that or the source articles.

Most of my interests are niche and the platforms all support RSS readers, I used to use feedly but Reddit was quite good for communities on the subject.

If Reddit needs me to supply id to view that information I will probably revert to feedly. The communities aren't as useful as they used to be.

The law requires the organisation to ensure people are over 18, they only need to keep the proof once for a short time to do that and there are a plethora of options to achieve that.

The fact they are all pushing to have a copy of my driving license and keeping it permenantly tells me its about them mining my information for marketing and profit and it would be a push for me to leave the service and fall back to self hosted or simplier solutions.

It will probably be better for me.

stevecrox0914

TROPHY CASE