Posts by Intractable Potsherd 4068 posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Whilst I'm very much in the "if you're not a woman, you don't get a say in abortion" camp, I do think that any discussion about abortion laws needs to take into account time-limits and reasons. I personally think that the law in England, Wales and Scotland has it just about right (ironically, given my open statement, proposed, written and passed largely by men!)
About 3 years ago. Honestly. Between looking at the phone at 10am,abd looking at it again at about 11am, the SIM turned into a price of plastic with a boring gold-coloured pattern on it. The help desk at whoever I was with at the time were a bit surprised!
"Place at the top of every page the following:..."
I have a strange sort of word-blindness - anything like a title or a header very rarely registers with my consciousness, especially if it is in a different font or colour without underlining. Underlining says to my brain "this is important", but boxes not so much.
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If i was that uninformed about something, and unable to understand the answer but unwilling to admit it, I'd appreciate a simple response like that. It's a reset - the context becomes clear immediately. The owner was clearly an arsehole who didn't appreciate either being talked to as an a) adult, or b) child. There was no way he could have been addressed that would have suited him, as evidenced by "Do you know who I am?" - always the response of idiots with more status than substance.
I have difficulty with this situation. I definitely don't think that there was any "espionage" - Assange and Wikileaks were acting as journalists uncovering acts that were in the public interest. The rape accusations (innocent unless proved guilty) appear coincidentally beneficial to the USA, and there are some apparently strange aspects to it. However, JA's actions regarding those accusations do not make any objective sense at all. He placed himself in harm's way by remaining in the UK, clearly broke the law by skipping bail, and pissed everybody off by staying in the Ecuadorian embassy, losing a lot of sympathy he might otherwise have had. I really don't think he should be extradited to the US "justice" system - there is as much chance of getting a fair trial as there is of gravity reversing - but he is the architect of his own downfall.
Unions are very variable in their performance. I've been a member of Unison (through one of its predecessors), the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), and the University and Colleges Union (UCU). Of those, only Unison was sufficiently responsive to both local and national issues (this back in the 1980s). I can't remember why I left them to join the RCN, but they were hopeless at both local and national level, as are the UCU. The last branch of UCU I was involved with were, and still are, actively avoiding getting involved in supporting members in a culture of harassment and unlawful discrimination on multiple counts. Once I thought about it, I realised that the union subs would buy a really good legal expenses insurance package (essentially all I need from the union), and cancelled my union membership.
Mrs IP, originally from a mainland European country, still can't get used to the British habit of walking wherever we want on pavements, regardless of direction. She regards it as very messy. When we visit her home country, I regularly get grumbled at because I don't observe whatever arcane rule applies at any given time.
It's not the same thing at all. Clothes are temporary external adornments with thousands of years of evidence of no ill-effect (though I did read a hypothesis years ago that syphilis went from being a common skin disease to a venereal disease because of clothing). Vaccines are internal and permanent (or at least long-lasting). Compulsory vaccination is a serious interference with the bodily integrity of people, and should only be enforced by governments. It is not for private business to insist on what goes into people's bodies.
In the introduction to one of my Czech language textbooks, the authors claimed that the Czech language was the ultimate secret weapon and the reason that the country had never truly been conquered. They cited the (not quite accurate) example of most textbooks for foreigners not including the verb "to say". Nonetheless, it is a very difficult language to learn, and contains many shibboleth (in the original sense)!
Yep! Until recently, we lived in a fairly rural part of Scotland. Many well-used roads were (just) two modern cars wide on average. My terror was always seeing a Range Rover/Discovery/soft roader coming towards me - always 18" to 2' from the unkerbed edge of the road, and no deviation to the left in case the tyres got dirty.
That is indeed the current situation, but the question is whether it ought to be. There are very good reasons for having cash retained as at least a back up - it maximises resilience, as demonstrated in this case. Cards/electronic payments are a significant point of failure in a number of different ways. Cash doesn't fail in anything like as many ways.
I had a friend (RIP) who was a professor of accountancy. His opinion of accountants was that every single one of them has forgotten what accountancy is for, and that the lot of them should be fired... from a large howitzer. He was very big on business ethics, something that and I agreed was an oxymoron, but something to strive for. Business is about much more than making money.
"... take advantage of not having to pay for the engineers to sit around for large periods of time."
And there lies the problem. So few companies (or anything else) build in a bit of extra capacity for the times that things go wrong. If three companies employ one outsourcer, then there will be fewer than three solutions available when, say, a storm knocks out large chunks of capacity. If all three companies had the staff "sitting around" (which is a lie of monumental proportions anyway), then they'd be up and running much quicker than waiting for the outsourcer to provide the relevant work based on whatever priorities they have.
My belief is that outsourcing is fine for short-term things that are widely outside the competence of the organisation - this might include electric work, vehicle maintenance, setting up servers etc - but, beyond a certain point it is a false economy. There is often a perverse incentive for an outsourcer to do a bad job so that more work comes in, for example. Companies need to keep their core functions in-house if they are to run effectively.
Public phones are a public good, and should be retained at as many locations as possible. As you've mentioned, Danny, claiming that "most people" have mobile phones doesn't cover all the situations. Leaving aside the coverage/battery/credit issues, mobile use can be monitored. I'm not particularly talking about tracking, even though we know it can be done relatively trivially, but simply by looking at call logs and Internet history. I know women whose male partners went through their phones every day to see who they'd been calling. These women desperately wanted to be out of the relationship, but couldn't use their phones to call support organisations or the police. Easily accessible public phones would have saved them anxiety and beatings. Children have similar problems, but they may not have a mobile at all.
Public phones should be much more accessible than they are now. As someone down-thread mentions, they don't necessarily need to be in ornate boxes. Shops and fuel stations would provide some protection from vandalism, for example, and would probably see regular usage because if the number of people passing through. This isn't an insurmountable problem, and we can roll back the post-Thatcher assault on civil resilience.
Maybe I'm missing something (my life isn't quite as complicated as yours!), but Google Calendar suits me well for the different groups I inhabit. One general one shared with Mrs IP so we know where each other is due to be at any given time, then one for work purposes, one for my motorsport activities, and one for wider family, with access on a need-to-know basis. For those that use other calendars, there is a handy export function. Many's the time people have tried to convert me (or insist on me using) the abomination known as Outlook, but none have yet succeeded.
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