d the the sending of an email which read ...You may recall the job to replace the offside rear window of my wife’s VW Beetle Cabriolet, registration WR05YKV, the repair of a boot-lid locking mechanism and the subsequent replacement of a driver’s door-mounted petrol flap unlocking switch.
The window rubber of said offside rear window has now come adrift from the bodywork and fallen a centimetre or so into the bodywork. It would appear that it has come ‘unglued’ and the glue looks quite old. Having agreed for the £700+ job to be done, regardless of the fact that a 50/50 arrangement was agreed with VW UK, the least that I would have expected is that, it would have been suggested that this rain deflection rubber should be replaced at the time of the job by a new one, in no dissimilar manner to a VW recommendation to fit a replacement water pump at the time of a cam-belt replacement. Or at the very least re-glue the old one in place to avert the no-doudt extensive addition labour now involved.
Instead of which, being £700+ lighter of pocket for the replacement window, a second boot-lock repair because the first one was not completed correctly and a replacement petrol flap switch - all driven from 'the driver’s side of the loom’ - I am back to square one with gaffer tape keeping the rain out of the car.
During the aforementioned repairs, I escalated my concerns to VW UK and was asked if on completion of the job, I would send an email detailing my complaint to Customer Services. I had two subsequent telephone calls from VW UK and I concluded with them that I was then happy. I am most certainly not a happy bunny now, following this latest incident with what I am beginning to believe is a £24K friday afternoon beetle, but will reserve judgement in this instance until next week when Tamara has booked the car in for 2 days.
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Added by Michael Grove at 12:33 on September 13, 2014
has so succinctly proposed in Human Universe:
‘If there are genes somewhere in the great database of life that allow wheat to grow with less water, and the climate becomes more arid, then those genes will be valuable to us. If we lose particular genes, then we lose them for good. Today, fewer than 150 species of crop are used in modern agriculture, and 12 of these deliver the majority of the world’s non-meat food supply.
The overwhelming majority of crop species used throughout human history are no longer cultivated. They are [thankfully] stored, however, in seed vaults, ready for use if needed’ and then the extreme importance of the Norwegian ‘Svalbard Global Seed Vault is [as] a back-up; our insurance policy, ensuring that even if countries lose their seed vaults through natural disasters, war or simple neglect, then irreplaceable parts of the great genetic database of life will not be lost with them.’
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Added by Michael Grove at 10:12 on September 16, 2017
d upside down to see what makes it tick, as it explores the most critical question of our time:
How do we become a sustainable civilization?
Water shortages, hunger, peak oil, species extinction, and even increasing depression are all symptoms of a deeper problem – addiction to unending growth in a world that has limits. GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth goes way beyond prescribing Band-Aids to slow the bleeding. This film examines the cultural barriers that prevent us from reacting rationally to the evidence current levels of population and consumption are unsustainable.
It asks why the population conversations are so difficult to have. Why it’s more important to our society to have economic growth than clean air. Why communities seek and subsidize growth even when it destroys quality of life and increases taxes.
Our growth-centric system is broken. It’s not providing the happiness or the prosperity we seek. But that’s good news; it means a shift to a sustainable model will be good for us. We’ll be happier and more prosperous!
Individual and public policy decisions today are informed by a powerful, pro-growth cultural bias. We worship at the Church of Growth Everlasting. Undeterred by the facts, we’re on a collision course powered by denial and the myth that growth brings prosperity. Before we can shift our civilization meaningfully, effectively, and substantially toward true sustainability, the world must be “prepped.” We must become self-aware and recognize the programming that keeps us hooked. GrowthBusters will do just that. We’ll hear from leading thinkers of our time – scientists, sociologists, economists – to help us separate fact from superstition.
We’re approaching the end of growth. Will we embrace it? Or go down fighting?
From Las Vegas to Atlanta, Mexico City to Mumbai, the White House to the Vatican, GrowthBusters takes us on a whirlwind tour of growth mania. It’s Wild Kingdom with a twist: the cameras are turned on humanity as our own survival skills are examined. GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth looks into the psychology of denial and crowd behavior. It explores our obsession with urban and economic growth, and our reluctance to address overpopulation issues head-on. This documentary holds up a mirror, encouraging us to examine the beliefs and behaviors we must leave behind – and the values we need to embrace – so our children can survive and thrive.
GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth will be completed and released in 2011. This film is a non-profit project possible only with the help of enlightened supporters like you. Please join the movement, and please make a tax-deductible contribution to help finish and distribute the film.…
, especially in certain artistic and scientific fields -
Dyslexia is a complex disorder, and there is much that is still not understood about it. But a series of ingenious experiments have shown that many people with dyslexia possess distinctive perceptual abilities. For example, scientists have produced a growing body of evidence that people with the condition have sharper peripheral vision than others. Gadi Geiger and Jerome Lettvin, cognitive scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used a mechanical shutter, called a tachistoscope, to briefly flash a row of letters extending from the center of a subject’s field of vision out to its perimeter. Typical readers identified the letters in the middle of the row with greater accuracy. Those with dyslexia triumphed, however, when asked to identify letters located in the row’s outer reaches.
Intriguing evidence that those with dyslexia process information from the visual periphery more quickly also comes from the study of “impossible figures,” like those sketched by the artist M. C. Escher. A focus on just one element of his complicated drawings can lead the viewer to believe that the picture represents a plausible physical arrangement.
A more capacious view that takes in the entire scene at once, however, reveals that Escher’s staircases really lead nowhere, that the water in his fountains is flowing up rather than down — that they are, in a word, impossible. Dr. Catya von Károlyi, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, found that people with dyslexia identified simplified Escher-like pictures as impossible or possible in an average of 2.26 seconds; typical viewers tend to take a third longer. “The compelling implication of this finding,”
wrote Dr. Von Károlyi and her co-authors in the journal Brain and Language, “is that dyslexia should not be characterized only by deficit, but also by talent.”…
made to the grandeur and magnificence of the lighthouse of Portus, which shone out to sea
right to the horizon. In the Vatican Gallery of Maps there is a fresco of the hexagonal shaped Portus
area, painted in 1582 by Antonio Danti after cartoons of Ignazio Danti; but the more recent
utilisation of more sophisticated satellite imagery techniques as well as Lidar has led to the
discovery of evidence of a much larger hexagonal shaped central harbour, catering for approximately
50 ships, at the core of a larger complex of port facilities, including an amphitheatre capable of
seating and entertaining a mob of 50,000 people,
a mob packed in as a giant communal celebration of conquest utilising slaves brought in from
defeated armies and occupied provinces and then slaughtered for the entertainment, again and again and again, of the citizens of Rome.
for the coming together of perfect order on one hand and terrible violence on the other; a powerful
combination which helped in the process of bringing the empire together. Portus was constructed as THE Port of Rome, connected directly by a grand canal rather than the
meandering river Tiber, and provided an icon of mind-melding control over access to the entirety
of its million square mile Empire of 60 million people; as well as inspiring an awe of Empirical
Existence, in the hearts and souls of those approaching Rome for the first time from the
extremities of the empire by way of the Mediterranean Sea. It is now known that the port was
constructed of a specially developed Roman Concrete, which strengthened with age, regardless
of whether submerged in water or not. The concrete domed roof of the Parthenon in Rome is
assumed to have been constructed of a similar material, and remains to this day the oldest
concrete roof structure on earth. All of this, in conjunction with a road network of 25,000 miles,
connected the entirety of EVERYTHING and EVERYONE in 'The Empire' together.
I have slept on this thought overnight and am preparing a piece which will focus [y]our
project on the juxtaposition of the NATURAL democracy of Athens and the MIND GAMES CONTROL
of Rome and its Empire. Any thoughts on this would be welcome.
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