Posts by I'm Brian and so's my wife 178 posts • joined 29 Jul 2009
I saw a YouTube video that laid out some very plausible reasons for the invasion and the need to stir up trouble in Transnistria. In summary it relates to sizeable gas deposits off the Crimean peninsula.
The YT channel is RealLifeLore and the title is "Why Russia is Invading Ukraine", published on 26 Feb 2022
Check your passport and tell me if it doesn't say "European Union" anywhere on the front cover. If it does, then yes, I'd say you missed something.
As another example of the kind of suite of institutions that comprise the EU, you may have heard of the Common Fisheries Policy? The Council of Ministers was advised that the Treaty of Rome did not give any authority for the CPF to operate, yet they continued with it and failed to admit this to member states. This was only sneakily corrected twenty years later in the Maastricht Treaty.
No thanks.
When the next Euro crisis happens, the begging bowl will be out.
Euro army - they may respect our veto, but the begging bowl will be out.
Migrant crisis - the begging bowl will be out.
Our economy does better than the continent - the begging bowl will be out.
At some point they'll be suggesting harmonising tax rates (with no consideration of the consequences for individual countries), starting with VAT and with half a percent reserved for EU funding. The EU never, ever shrinks.
The harmonisation will move on to corporate rates.
Why stop there? Income tax rates next.
When a smaller group moves to completely integrate, we'll be left on the periphery anyway.
All of this will take place with the backdrop of increasing regulation, with Juncker having already stated that there was no opportunity for further reform or compromise.
I am a British citizen and want to remain a British citizen. I don't want to be a European citizen, so voting Leave was the only real choice. Of course I'm pissed off, they made me gamble my union for theirs!
If the issue was that important to people, they should have registered to vote earlier on. Only a small percentage would have been between houses / in a complicated situation, etc. Instead, so many left it to the last minute that the website crashed (yes, blame for that all around). They were then handed an extra two days.
For all the sound and fury north of the border, the Scottish turnout was pretty low - again, if the issue was that important to you, you should have bloody well got out and voted!
There is a quite widespread attitude that all one has to do to effect change is vote online or possibly phone in or text one's vote. What absolute balls. Get up off your arse and take your right to vote seriously!
Those pictures of unimaginably vast volumes of space, of structures and events many millions of years old... it leaves me pretty much speechless every time.
I feel humbled and, in some ways, filled with hope that we'll overcome our obsession with the various forms of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and live up to our potential and go interstellar.
That is absolutely disgraceful! When TT suffered a hack last year I moved my parents to PlusNet. It's more expensive and they had a couple of minor teething problems, but I was far (far, far) happier dealing with UK-based staff.
I'd never return to TT, nor would I recommend anyone choose them.
The ratio you seek is as good as impossible with mere mortals. That said, the amount of ancillary staff (as opposed to people who actually get on with tackling the task at hand) is ridiculous.
If I didn't enjoy dev work so much, I'd become a BA and then migrate to PM. Obviously I'd stay contracting and I'd see my day rates rise from £450-£550, to £500-600 and then £550-650+. A good BA or PM can really bring things together, but good ones are rarer than hen's teeth.
Do it. Do it. Do it. For crying out loud, do it.
Then set up the stocks in town squares across the country and provide rotten fruit & veg (obviously paid for by the offending/offensive companies).
Then fine them out of existence and put the directors on a list barring them from any future directorships.
I just switched my parents to PlusNet today. The cashback (I did it via Quidco) covers the overlap between the contracts - they had a month to the end of their contract.
I mentioned this latest breach as one of the reasons. They sounded ready to make all sorts of offers to keep the business. The one reason I didn't mention to them was that I wanted to support a UK-based business - it seemed a little too ranty to mention it to the overseas call centre operative.
I use one of these on my cycling commute (GoPro3). They last about 1h 15m I reckon, but I believe environmental conditions have a part to play: it's sometimes not lasted a slightly slower commute of 1h 5m (I'm normally 5-10 mins faster). I have it recording a rolling hour at 720p wide 60fps.
The first thing I do is to make sure it's left to charge off my PC. This is a major part of my defence on the road (yes, I obey the rules; yes, a minority of others don't; yes, they annoy me too, etc.) so I'd be interested to see how this new model operates in low light. Still, mine's working fine and I don't fancy forking out £350+(?) for a new one just yet.
That is a disgraceful situation and outcome.
There are plenty of injustices on a daily basis, but being a cyclist, I have a particular beef with drivers who kill and get 6 month suspended sentences and possibly a point or two on their licence. If they'd used a hand-held weapon, such as a knife, then they would probably be looking at a couple of decades in jail.
The fact that one has to engage in that split-fare bollocks to get a reasonable price seriously pisses me off.
I generally prefer free markets, but the kind of crony capitalism bullshit we seem to implement and tolerate over and over again (utilities, banking, transport) makes me wonder about alternative approaches.
I don't recall baulking at the price of train tickets when I was at uni 20 years ago and earning significantly less. I may now be older and more cynical/miserly/unrealistic, but like I said, just talking about it makes my blood boil.
Almost all of the comments here, including yours, point to poor-quality management that lets down permie staff over and over again. It's exactly that kind of crap that led me to contracting's warm bosom, where I happily reside now.
We also have a large number of off-shored staff and they aren't especially good. Probably the worst of the lot is a contractor they have out there. We regularly have to redo their work and the company is paying UK contractors' rates to achieve that - such foolishness on their part, but thanks anyway!
I'm not so sure about SameTime. I don't doubt that a significant part of my dislike may be due to the corporate setup (I think there's an overnight PeopleSoft extract that dumps info into Notes?) and there are doubtless others who think Active Directory is a conical pile of poo, but I liked using Lync. It was slow at times (corporate setup again?) but I found it easy to go from IM chat to teleconf to screen sharing / controlling as required. As a technical user (my specialties lie elsewhere) it worked pretty well.
That said, I didn't like the Lync/Outlook logging / tracking feature and I know I'm not alone in finding Outlook's limited space for mail rules a daily course in pure fury.
Honestly, email's been here a while: has anyone done the feature set really well across the board?
I'm going on the assumption that the downvote to your comment was due to an involuntary muscle spasm.
It hardly seems fair that I can only upvote you once. I hate Notes so much, but it does have one redeeming feature that I don't believe Outlook has: collapsible sections. But that's it. The address book integration is awful, the calendar and scheduling is awful, the ... sorry, I got a bit worked up, I'll leave it there...
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