Positively buoyant
Clegg is proof that shit floats.
84 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Feb 2012
Perhaps you're being micro-managed because you are pretending to work. And a post-work swifty is basically a British institution. You clearly don't like to socialise, but has it not occurred to you that some people do, and may go to the pub to have a laugh with eachother, not because they want a pay rise?
Maybe I'm one of the lucky ones, but:
- I love my commute. It's a 10 mile cycle ride through north London, so hardly a pootle through the Cotswolds, but it wakes me up and means I do at least an hour of exercise every day without even thinking about it. And, apart from the cost of tyres, chains and cake, free!
- I love working in the office. My actual job is slightly better than tolerable, but the people are a friendly, interesting and funny bunch.
- I hate working from home. I don't have a home office, but I do have two very young kids. It breaks my heart to tell them I can't play with them, because my laptop is more important than they are for ~7 hours of the day. Being at home is great. Adding work into the equation sucks.
So, for me, having an office to go to is the deal-breaker. Obviously, I like the flexibility of being able to work from home when I really _need_ to, and I really couldn't care less what my reports do, as long as they are productive. But WFH is rubbish for many people and, in my experience, largely enjoyed on a full-time basis by misanthropes and lazy feckers. Flame me.
It's a good analogy, but they have managed, in the past, to make pizza that a billion people enjoyed.
Then they started to ask people who will eat literally anything what they want on their pizza, and they said they'd prefer it without any cheese, oh and if it could be shaped like an amphibious landing craft, that would be really cool. And they listened.
I've got six of these discs and only noticed what they were up to when I had cause to log into Pi Hole. I'd been wondering why Google kept asking if I was a robot.
BT's response is pathetic. This is fourth generation bork. Access points shouldn't care about internet connectivity. Doing a DNS lookup is a stupid way to test internet connectivity. Doing a DNS lookup for a domain you don't own is a stupid way to use a DNS server to test internet connectivity. Doing a DNS lookup once per second for every client on the network is a stupid way... etc etc.
The discs still point at Pi Hole for DNS, but ufw drops their requests. They don't complain.
IT NO MAKE ANY SENSE
Given the laughable customer service I've experienced from Virgin Media, who had to pay me compensation after I took them to independent arbitration when they lost the cancellation letter of which they'd previously acknowledged receipt, and Virgin Experience Days, who seem to go out of their way to make it difficult to actually spend one of their vouchers, I don't think I'd throw any money in VG's direction even if I had a spare hundred grand knocking around.
I'd advocate a simple rule that a company director may not take a dividend larger than their salary.
Tax take would increase, there's no ambiguity and no need to change working relationships.
But, one man band contractors would still be able to undercut the big boys providing Apprentice contestants for two grand a day. Hence the IR35 sh*tshow.
I don't understand why they think IR35 is a good way of making contractors pay more tax. It's complicated, vague and full of loopholes. They should have just created a rule along the lines of "companies with 5 or fewer shareholders may only pay out 25% of profit as dividend" or somesuch. Same effect, no getting around it, no nonsense about "personal service companies" and "deemed payments".
One man's "offensive" is another man's "assertive". I'm not sure what you mean by "offensive". Taking the lane? Flicking Vs?
You ascribe a single riding style to all cyclists. That's untrue and nonsensical. If you ride dangerously, you die. In London, even if you ride safely, you can still die. There are morons using all modes of transport, however the data shows that cyclists are about 8 times more likely to also have a driver's point of view than vice versa. Your point about cars being more deadly than bikes means what? That riders should just allow themselves to be bullied off the road?
"I ride a bike too" is the new "Some of my best friends are black." It tends to be used by people who pootle around the park with the kids on a weekend, then get in their cars and punishment-pass those of us using a bike as transport, on the roads.
The problem you'll find is that, unless you want to share your production credentials (I assume you don't, as you'll be on the hook for anything that uses them), everyone who wants to use your script will also have to demo it to HMRC, get it approved and get their own credentials - oh and they'll need to register as a data controller with the ICO and pay the £30 annual fee.
Not quite; you have to save your LibreOffice spreadsheet in Excel format - you don't even have to have Excel installed, as the web app reads the file.
But I digress - yes, it was a pointless thing to automate, especially given that the stated aim is to reduce fraud, which MTD VAT does nothing to mitigate.
It's just a REST API so you could just send a few HTTP requests in from Postman or whatever - if HMRC would give you production credentials following your demonstration to them of your approach, which they won't.
If you don't want to install anything and want to keep using your existing spreadsheet, web-based Excel bridging software is available from people like me for not much money (i.e. a tenner a year). I don't think I'm allowed to advertise on here though, so shan't leave a link.
Developer of a cheap Web based VAT filer for Excel fans here.
The MTD go live has been a total clusterf*ck. HMRC's API returning false data, returning payloads that don't meet their own spec, blaming everything on us software vendors but refusing to deal directly with us to rectify their issues because GDPR.
The support model is a mess. Their technical team can't access the data they need to troubleshoot, but the data team don't have the technical knowledge to investigate issues properly. On top of all that, there's a 30+ minute wait on the user helpdesk line, and those users who are lucky enough to get through just get told it's the software vendors' fault.
Amateurs is too kind a word.
I've come to the conclusion that HMRC are a bunch of amateurs. I've dealt with them for my personal taxation, I've dealt with them for my business taxation and, now that my company markets a product that uses their Maxing Tax Digital API, I've dealt with them as a developer (if you want a laugh, take a look at https://github.com/hmrc/vat-api). So it comes as no great surprise that they do not understand their own tax code.
Apple have now killed off my favourite laptop form factor (the old Macbook Air) and now my favourite phone form factor (iPhone SE)
I'd have paid good money for a retina Air with 16GB of RAM, and I'd pay good money for a smaller phone with up to date specs, but Apple won't make them. Shirley I'm not alone...?
This isn't even a story; it's part of RFC 822. I use this gmail feature all the time and find it very useful. Some use cases:
- Abusing offers such as "10% off your first order when you sign up to our mailing list".
- Managing multiple accounts on the same website, for example several personas on a single social media service.
- I recently had a website refuse to forget an old billing address that I couldn't change or delete, which meant my card payment wouldn't authorise. Support was useless, so I just created a new account, with an extra dot in my email address.
- Throwaway email addresses without having to use another service (mye.maila.ddre.ss@gmail.com)
What's happened is that a developer who thinks he's too clever to fall for a phishing scam nearly fell for a phishing scam, so he's looking for anyone other than himself to blame.
"Since when was no-platforming neo Nazis wrong?"
Congratulations, you've made my argument for me. Gab aren't neo Nazis. The majority of people no-platformed by people calling themselves liberal aren't neo Nazis either. To simply call someone who disagrees with you a Nazi is to lose the argument.
We used to have a thing on the internet called Godwin's law, you know.
The "alt-wrong". Very cocksure for an anonymous coward.
It's this no-platforming, refusal to engage in debate, dismissal of any argument as simply "alt-wrong" that has led to an increase in genuine extremism. The branding of any and all opposition to so-called liberalism as alt-right/fascism is the death of genuine liberty.
Google have a monopoly on Android app distribution. Apple have a monopoly on iOS app distribution. To deny this is to support corporatism.
@DougS - I agree; my point was more that the long sabbatical is much more prevalent than it was even ten years ago. We're /on the way/ to working fewer hours, but I'm not sure whether a legal, cultural or economic impulse will usher in the 4-day week.
I would suggest that most office-based staff already do a 4-day week by dint of long lunch breaks, copious web browsing and the odd day "working" from home, but it would be nice not to have to pretend.