Drugs testing by The Loop

At the end of last week was the Secret Garden Party at which a charity offered testing of illegal drugs: basically, one waits a little while for them to run a sample through the spectrometer, then they let one know what they found and one can decide if one wants to keep the drugs.

I entertain misgivings about this service: surely a strong disincentive to taking such drugs at all is the risk of the supply chain's poor quality control, especially at a festival where its transience must decrease dealers' concern about the spread of bad reviews. Don't such testing services encourage people to try taking drugs at all? Further, people are notoriously poor at judging risks like, well, the last couple I had tested were good, so this probably is too.

I've been wrong about other things though: I had not expected the UK's ban on retailers selling large quantities of paracetamol (acetaminophen) to work as well as it has because I had guessed that the suicidal would have already ideated enough to have accumulated plenty of stock.

VoIP in the UK

In the US we stopped having a telephone landline back in 2004 when we switched to Vonage. Up to 2012 we were customers of Broadvoice: their box plugged into both our ethernet and a telephone handset and a low monthly fee allowed us to call the US and the UK (and other countries) anytime for no extra cost and also provided us a telephone number in both countries for incoming calls.

On returning to the UK our broadband took the form of ADSL over the telephone line. Now there appears to be capacity in our local fiber cabinet allowing us to upgrade. On switching to that I would favor dropping our landline and switching to a Broadvoice-alike for telephony. I don't know the local market but at first glance companies like sipgate look to be the right kind of provider. Which others ought I be certain to include in my considerations?