Posts by nobody who matters 457 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2021
Potential, yes. However, how often are the fines likely to be anywhere near their 'potential', and those organisations have sufficient excess monetary clout to be able to use interminable legal processes to contest the fines and effectively end up getting away with not paying them. We have actually seen this happening time and again where megacorps have been fined for other things.
The only part where a threshold of five employees is set is in the requirement for a <written> Risk Assessment and a <written> Health and Safety Policy - businesses with less than five employes are still required to do risk assessments for all aspects of the work involved, and have a Health and Safety policy, but do not have a specific requirement to have it in writing. In the event of an accident or breach of H+S regulations, they still have to show that they had assessed the potential risks, and a good many small employers do actually make a written assessment and have a written H+S policy anyway (I mainly work for businesses employing less than five individuals, so see that first hand).
There are other health and/or safety regulations where a threshold of five applies, but the actual Health and Safety Act applies to all regardless, and in the event of breach resulting in death or serious injury, the resulting action by HSE will be the same regardless of how many individuals are employed. The degree of action, prosecution or punishment will only vary due to the number of employees who were/are at risk and the seriousness of the breach. In the event of action needing to be taken, HSE will take the same course of formal warnings (improvement notices) prohiobition notice or prosecution as appropriate to the breach, and will take these courses of action irrespective of the number of employees.
How exactly? I can't really see it = a small forum that hardly anyone outside it has heard of, and those people won't miss it vs. a large well supported and well (and widely) known forum with a wide membership and a large amount of daily activity. I know which one I see as having the bigger PR impact.
The owner and members of any small forum may shout loudly for a short while, but I think they and their forum may soon be once again forgotten by the rest of the population.
,......."But, the corollary is that they can take action against anyone if they have a reason to. So "small forum with no problems" could be trolled & reported"....>
You just know that OFCOM will go after the small privately run forum because it is an easy target, they will meet little resistance and they can tick another box on their report sheet. Meanwhile, the big professionally run ones will see little if any enforcement because they will be difficult, will resist and it will cost OFCOM a lot of time and money (neither of which they have in the kind of abundance they would need), so they will write them a polite letter giving them a ticking off, and let it pass.
,....."I get the feeling that many non-UK websites may end up geofencing the UK so as to not have to worry about this legislation. And the UK websites will end up closing down......">
Whilst this is a distinct possibility (particularly bearing in mind the way some non-EU/UK websites effectively block those from the UK/EU rather than comply with GDPR), it also has to be borne in mind that there are a lot of web forums which appear on the face of it to be UK based, which in fact belong to a foreign entity - the main one that springs to mind is VerticalScope; based in Canada and over the last 10 to 15 years has bought up a significant proportion of UK forums, automotive related in particular.
<........"The corner shop buys the goods from reputable wholesalers and assumes they are responsible for the quality that they pay for"......>
If the goods turn out to be faulty, it will be the corner shop that will be first in the firing line. Any written guarantee from the wholesaler would be taken into account in their defence, but there is still a legal duty for the shop to ensure that the goods they sell are what they say they are and are "of merchantable quality".
However, the corner shop situation is rather different from that of a small amateur web forum with a small number of members, most of whom will rarely if ever actually post anything ;)
<......."The Health and Safety at Work Act applies to all organisations above a certain level of employees. The mantra being ' 5 or more or over 4'".....>
I don't know where you are getting this gem from, but if you are referring to the United Kingdom Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 (and its various revisions), then it is you who is wrong.
The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 applies to every employer, every employee and every self employed person.
Throughout the Act it repeatedly states "Every employer", and "Every self-employed person", and "Every employee". It applies to everyone in any workplace, and requires that everybody should have regard for their own safety as well as the safety of others working around them, and the safety of anyone present who is not part of the workforce (ie. members of the General Public).
There is quite definitely no threshold of it only applying where 5 or more people are employed. I think perhaps you may be confusing it with other pieces of employment legislation, some of which do indeed only apply where there is a specified number of employees, and yes that number is usually 5 or more.
If you don't believe me, have a read of the Act and point out to me where it says that the Act doesn't apply to businesses that employ fewer than 5 people: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1974/37/contents
No, they won't. The increasing use of technology to control the machines already means that any idiot off the street can operate a tractor and whatever implement it is hitched to, where those of us who started the job 30 or 40+ years ago had to learn the skills to make it all work (and the mechanical skills needed to repair things when they broke).
Cut to now, and increasingly it is only possible for a dealer technician to do many repairs in my experience because most repairs seem to be concerned with the various electronic systems and require skills which are not available on farm. Farmers are increasingly employing non-skilled non-agriculturally orientated workers and paying the dealers for the costly skilled technicians when they are needed.. There is also a trend for leasing machinery along with extended service contracts under which all servicing and repairs are covered by the contract with the dealer, so the farm has little need for expensive trained/experienced/skilled labour.
I've been doing the job on-farm since the start of the 1980s, I've watched it happening, and suffered the consequences having three times been made redundant in favour of the farms concerned employing cheaper unskilled staff.
No good downvoting - won't alter the inherent tightwad attitude of most farmers - in the UK we used to have an Agricultural Wages Board that set the rates for farmworkers. Whilst the rates were not especially generous, they were nonetheless reasonably decent (especially when most UK farmworkers were offered non-taxable rent and rates free housing on top of the wage). Since the Government in its wisdom saw fit to abolish the AWB for England and Wales, many farmworkers have seen their rate of pay gradually scaled back to little more then the statutory minimum wage, and most of the rest will have seen their wage increases fall short of increases in their cost of living. On top of which, very few farmers now offer a free house, and if they do, the Government now tax it as a benefit-in-kind.
As I say, the chances that any farmworker is going to see his wages suddenly increase by 2 or 3 times as a result of labour saving technology reducing the numbers of employees required or improves productivity sixfold are between slim and none-at-all.
If you think differently, then you clearly do not know much about UK farming.
<......"If a farm manager only needs to fill a few positions rather than hundreds, there's a savings there.".......>
Apart from the fact that there will not be hundreds to start with (apart from a small number of very high acreage vegetable producers in the Lincolnshire Fens, and they will be unskilled manual workers so s self driving machine isn't going to have much impact anyway), what it will mean in practise is 'there's more money for the farmers pocket there'. Most farmers are no different from the bosses of big corporations in that respect ;)
I think you misunderstand ;)
If you seriously think that most farmers will pay any higher rate of pay as a result of using technology to use one worker where previously they needed three, you clearly don't have much experience of the average farmer (and I would expect that American farmers are very similar to European farmers in this respect). Most of them are tight-fisted in extremis - almost tight enough that they squeak when they walk!
I've had over 40 years of experience and have actually gone through the experience of the workforce being reduced. Over my time farms that would have employed 10 full time men 40 years ago, now only employ one or two full time - I don't know of many cases where there has been any increase in wages for the ones who are left (other than as a result of having to work a lot more hours). Even where there has been extra pay offered, it was certainly a minute fraction of the saving i wages by making other workers redundant.
As I inferred, the idea that any farmer is going to increase the wages of any of his employees by a factor of three is hilarious. Simply not going to happen.
I think you are just being obtuse.
In the example I was referring to, you do not have either result. There is a driver in the seat who will grab the steering wheel and take control (if he is awake!) when the GPS drops out and the steering suddenly turns.
I am not talking about autonomous tractors in this instance, and I can't tell you what provision JD have made for failures in their autonomous fleet, but I would hope that they have set things up differently from the way that current autosteer works. I would expect they will have been programmed to slow down and stop, disengaging any attached implement in the process.
To be honest, just coming to a dead stop would be just as much of a pain - particularly when doing operations such as fertilizer spreading or spraying, it would need to be able to stop the spreader/sprayer before stopping the tractor.
The simple reality is that GPS isn't foolproof - EGNOS is a bit hit and miss (but free to use), but even when using a more expensive RTK system, it can still sometimes lose track of the satellites, or may hit a dead spot. It is an annoyance, but isn't really a big issue because it is only intended as a driver aid.
Autonomous machinery of the type referenced in the article will obviously need to have failsafes built in, so they do stop.
<...."GPS fails, the thing will not stop"....>
That is at least partly correct - as you say, current GPS steering systems don't actually stop the machine if the GPS fails or the signal drops out, but on all the ones that I have used, loss of signal results in the sterring turning fully in one direction, so the machine will continue to go round and round in approximate circles until the driver grabs the steering wheel.
They still require a driver to turn the machine around at the end of each run, and still mostly require driver input to initiate any auxiliary functions involved in the turn (lifting/lowering the implement in or out of work, switching auxiliary power take off shafts in or out of gear etc., but these functions are usuallu set up usinmg the tractors' own headland management system and once set up for all functions usually involves a single press of a button on reaching the end of the run, and another single button press once the tractor is aligned with the next GPS A-B line (which is programmed to the working width of the implement).
Apart from watching what the machine is doing and getting off to make adjustments (or for 'anciliary' reasons ;), once it is all set up and working as it should, the modern tractor driver doesn't have a lot to do, which (particularly when working long hours) can result in becoming inattentive or asleep, and then this sort of thing happens:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDsL4CwBEL4
That incident cut off ALL electrical power to the area around Grantham in Lincolnshire for about 5 or 6 hours whilst Western Power tried to re-route power around other routes, and the affected area stretched as far as Bourne
I don't know about the USA, but as far as the UK is concerned (and I have spent the last 45 years in UK farming) the reduction in the number of machine operators employed has decreased far more rapidly than the number of experienced and wannabee machine operators has. In short, there really isn't so much of a shortage of tractor drivers.
The shortages of labour in agriculture and horticulture are almost entirely within the bottom-end, minimum-wage manual jobs, principally harvesting of vegetable and flower crops (eg. brassicas, leeks and cut flowers) where the machinery manufacturers have so far failed to develop effective mechanical methods of doing so effectively, efficiently and without damage to the produce - probably in part because they have all been chasing 'the driverless tractor' vanity project.
<........"Given that 88% of your power is from Hydro and your national generation is pretty much self sufficient...."....>
Not just self-sufficient, when they have a surplus Norway exports electricity to the UK vis the NSL interconnector (and can import via the same link when the UK has excess generation from wind). As I write (at 22.25 on a Wednesday evening, Norway is providing slightly more than 4% of UK demand (source: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/).
[as a side note, and not relevant to this thread, it is perhaps also worth mentioning that fossil gas is currently providing 52% as we have a fairly windless evening and wind is providing only 7%]
Not really, the parties that have some realistic chance of being elected are usually a bit more circumspect in making their pledges (or at least more ambiguous at any rate), because they know that they are probably going to break them.
Minority parties have no such worries.
<....."... the Greens ........... they're the only party that gave real manifesto pledges, backed up by actual plans....."......>
Easy to to give firm pledges apparently backed by firm plans when you know you definitely won't have to actually put those plans to the test ;)
<...."So, if I understand correctly".....>
You don't.
Regardless (or possibly because of?) the reasons behind his failure to be re-elected, I would think it very unlikely that anyone else would have offered him a job as well remunerated as the one he took at FB/Meta. The report from the Guardian referenced by someone earlier which mentions the value of the shares in Meta which formed part of that just underlines how financially lucrative it has been.
Appearing to betray your country/religion/family etc doesn't seem to count for a lot of people nowadays - it is merely a case of 'look after number one'.
Apart from Norway not being an EU country, the actual figures for new EV sales across the EU as a whole in the last 12 months is less than 17% of the market, and only forecast to rise to between 22 and 23% this year.
Still a way to go yet, and it looks as though it will still be quite some time before second hand EVs become old enough to be within the affordability range of the those near the bottom end of the payscale and that also assumes that the issues with charging infrastructure and difficulties faced for home charging for those with only on-street parking have been successfully resolved.
There are still a good number of 20+ year old ICE cars going strong in the UK (where winter application of salt to the roads usually ensures cars go to the scrapyard sooner rather than later), and in southern parts of Europe where thay don't suffer the ravages of salt corrosion, similar vehicles are often still commonplace at that kind of age. Like it or not, there will still be a significant demand for liquid fuel for cars for at least the next 20 years, and of course it is unlikely that HGVs, heavy plant and large agricultural machines are going to be able to switch over to electric power anything like as soon as should be possible for cars and small vans.
<......""""Unless you're at death's door, you're going to see majority-EV on the road (not just new sales) in your lifetime, guaranteed""""""......>
Even if ones life expectancy is only another 10 or 15 years, I would suggest that a majority isn't enough to make a difference :(
<......."There are cable troughs that can be installed to be able to run a lead without creating a tripping hazard.".......>
Yes, that is one of the things I had noted that was being trialled, but until clarification is forthcoming about the legality of installing such things, most local councils seem to be taking the view that cross pavement charging isn't permissable.
The really big difficulties come with older housing within towns and cities - terraces which often front on to the pavement where on street parking is the only option, or semis similarly close to the road and with insufficient space between them for any kind of vehicular access. Much of this housing stock was built in the days before cars existed, and a very significant portion of the rest dates from a time (pre the mid 1970s) when a great many 'ordinary' people didn't own a car, so provision for a driveway was not even thought about.
These are the type of scenarios that I always think of where there is very often very little chance of being able to park outside your own house, and therefore no realistic opportunity for cheap rate home charging (compounded by the issue of running a cable across the pavement in the first place (there was one case publicised a few weeks ago where one EV owner in Oldham can't charge his car outside his house because the local council had forbidden him to trail a lead across the footway on safety grounds). Although possible solutions are being trialled in some places, there is no clear guidance as to whether any are legally permissable, or who foots the liability for any injury to pedestrians from them being a trip hazard or the risk from a cable getting damaged.
Nationally the UK is estimated to have an average 40% of homes without any kind of driveway (about 20% in rural areas, but rising to around 60% in some towns and cities, but still some people keep their heads buried in the sand and downvote anyone who dares to raise any of the difficulties that many face which challenge the possibility of EV ownership.
And lo and behold we have a downvote by one of the blinkered EV fans living in their own little utopian bubble who <still> can't open their eyes and see the real world problems.
Or perhaps it is wrong to point out that a large part of the population don't have a garage/driveway, often can't park a vehicle anywhere near their house, don't yet have local access to an economically viable charging point (and those people are more often the ones who simply can't afford to buy/lease an EV in the first place).
Do some people think that there aren't people in this situation, or is it (once again) a case of they are 'nobody worth bothering about'?
All this talk of needing two garages - a lot of people don't even have a driveway, much less the luxury of a garage. Home charging of an EV can't be factored in, much less worrying about the source of the power to do so ;)
This a very major factor that the most ardent fans of EVs repeatedly gloss over.
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