Posts by Steve Foster 967 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Oct 2007
Nowhere did I suggest that the cumulative annual cost of a monthly bus pass had to be paid upfront (that would be very unusual). I annualised it for comparison with the BBC news article (which had annualised the existing spending).
If spending £60 weekly on bus tickets, it's a no-brainer to switch to spending the exact same money on a monthly pass instead. Save money from week 2 onwards.
It's no wonder people are poor when they fail to take simple obvious steps to avoid wasting significant sums.
I'll grant that it's possible there is an even better value annual bus pass option that might require payment of a substantial sum on day 1 that is probably inaccessible to those who could benefit most.
Not only that, but it's clear people fail to take basic steps to organise themselves.
A BBC news article about the lowered cap heavily featured a lady who said she'd benefit because she was spending £3k a year on daily buses.
Except that, in principle, she wouldn't benefit for the simple reason that she should be using a season ticket. And if she had a season ticket, she'd be spending a whole lot less than £3k per year in the first place!
A quick internet search suggested a suitable monthly pass would be around £60/mo (about the same as the lady said she's spending weekly) - so ~£720pa. An easy ~£2.2k saving is much better than that offered by the reduced cap (the article said £500).
I have all Play notifications apart from account and updates configured to off, yet Google ignores them and keeps telling me about games and "app of the week" and other such nonsense.
Unfortunately, I don't see any signs that the EU is picking up on or doing anything about such behaviour.
IR35 is an attempt to fix underlying problems with the tax system without actually fixing the underlying problems.
It's a classic "add more complexity" solution when what is really needed is a ground-up rewrite. But the politicians aren't up to the job as they fear it will be unpopular and make it less likely that they'd be re-elected.
But that doesn't help the engine makers profits (you're not the customer; the advertisers are).
In increasingly many areas of life, it's looking like a full-on complete and total ban on advertising and promotion of all products and services is possibly the most useful thing a government could do. We could ask EM to rename Starship as the "B" ark, fill it a couple of times over, and send it on its way.
I had one for years, and routinely ignored utility company bleating about replacing it (across multiple suppliers).
And then in mid-2024, my current supplier started telling me repeatedly it had to go because it wasn't going to work for much longer, and didn't stop until I let them swap it.
They installed smart meters (they did the gas one at the same time), which have been fine, other than there's a small glitch in that because they configured the electric smart meter as 2-rate, but they don't adjust the switch times to allow for GMT/BST (they run their off-peak rate on local time now, whereas my E7 hours stayed on GMT), the manual reading kWh figures for R1/R2 consumption are inaccurate and cannot be directly cross-checked against their billing.
Note the 2025 date on those references. A year ago. Because that _was_ the [re-]scheduled date for R4 LW switch-off. It was deferred (yet again).
The BBC have been trying to get rid of R4 LW for several years, fiercely resisted by a small number of listeners (who could be safely ignored) but also (and more significantly) the electricity companies because of RTS meter installations.
AIUI, they (the utilities) were given another extension last summer (until now), but told "this really is the last time".
Where, for N contestants, there will be N different solutions, all of which will produce plausible results that are actually incorrect.
Rerunning the contest 10 minutes later will produce another N different solutions (none identical to the first pass), all of which will also be incorrect.
When asked, CoPilot will staunchly defend all 2N answers, while advertising $1 pizza slices.
DVSA is the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, based in Bristol. They look after driving tests and instructors, HGV/PSV operators, vehicle safety and inspections (think HGVs, weighbridges and the like) and oversee the MOT system.
DVLA is the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, based in Swansea. They handle driving licences, keeper registration and VED.
There's obviously some overlap and the two bodies do interact, but they are distinct entities.
Proton do a free authenticator, available as a smartphone app (iOS and Android) and for computers (all of Windows, Mac and Linux). It lets you optionally sync across all the previous, so OTP codes can be generated pretty much anywhere you like.
I was astounded to find it's even recognised by the dreadful gov.uk "One Login".
I don't think anyone has claimed that Linux has reached perfection (or ever might).
It's more the case that MS' legendary unwillingness to consider QC as anything other than a nuisance [at best] has continued to scale new heights. Which combined with their new determination to let "AI" write all their code unsupervised is proving to be demonstrably awful for a lot of folks who have the misfortune to have to use MS software.
It used to be the case that making a purchase of a few hundred pounds on store credit was one of the most effective ways of doing that, as retailers finance arms/subsidiaries were traditionally a bit more willing to lend than banks (because it helped make the sale). I do not know if that's still the case.
Buying an Atari ST that way is what got my credit score established nearly 40 years ago.
It's not clear from the article if the overall NAO position on this is positive or negative.
But, from my armchair POV, it looks like the BoE has done far better than just about any other government project. A modest cost overrun (not the usual orders of magnitude increases), and they aren't beholden to external rip-off merchants for ongoing maintenance and support.
I wonder how the ~£40m annual running cost compares against the previous incarnation of the project.
Better yet, as this is the Civil Service, they should be running payroll and HR directly in-house, and not pissing taxpayers money away on private profits at all.
Of course, that modestly increases the total number of civil servants required, which is currently anathema to the British Govt (even though a broadly-similar number of workers will be employed just to service the CS contract), so simply cannot be countenanced.
Hmmm, since BT bought PlusNet quite a long time ago, it's surprising they've not been thoroughly gutted to the same level of incompetence as BT (yet).
If PlusNet are somehow keeping BT practices at bay (on the broadband side of things), maybe BT's best option would be to migrate all their broadband customers onto PlusNet.
"Because it costs less for them to maintain either an app or website than both simultaneously."
If cost is the primary concern, the solution is website only.
Maintaining an app normally means _two_ apps because there are two major device ecosystems, so they aren't saving money over just developing the website (just the opposite).
"Personally I find reading a bank statement easier on my 24 inch monitor than a phone so I can't say I agree with the status quo but here we are!"
Well, I've stuck with paper bank statements because they're generally even easier to read (though my annual mortgage statement is trying to prove the opposite by being printed at 8pt or 9pt! [for no good reason]). But yes, I find just about everything easier to read on a good-sized monitor than on my phone, and similarly it's much easier to enter text via a keyboard than with my fingers on 1/3 of a smartphone screen (which simultaneously shrinks the already too-small display or covers up crucial elements).
Why is there even an app? If there's a functioning website, they simply aren't needed.
I'm increasingly fed up with organisations killing off (or severely restricting) their website functionality - that provides pretty much universal accessibility - in favour of [cr]apps that require a specific device (ie smartphone).
"an ISO 9000 auditor"
ISTR I might still have one of those around somewhere too, but it probably says "BS5750".
I don't think it's shameful, as long as the limitations of that standard are understood: it's not really a quality standard, it's more a documentation/paperwork standard.
