Even the charges don't balance. It's positive on the left (1 plus) and neutral on the right (1 plus and 1 minus).
Posts by Simon Watson
44 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Mar 2012
Boffins with frickin' laser beams chase universe's mysterious trihydrogen
'No deal better than bad deal' approach to Brexit 'unsubstantiated'
UK.gov departments accused of blanket approach to IR35
Re: Stop taking the p***
"I'm sure the original poster would be more than happy as long as people pay the same amount of tax in the end."
Very true, and that was my point. I've got no issue with people earning more, if you can get it, good for you. What I take issue with is it being possible to structure your income, after expenses and provisions, in such as way as to pay a lower rate of marginal tax.
Re: Stop taking the p***
You headline with corporation tax, which means you're incorporated I guess.
Which in turn means all the other items you list (with the exception of personal taxation) will be expenses before tax, yes, therefore paid by money earned gross and untaxed.
So when you look at your bottom line, what you can actually take home, pound for pound, you'll pay less tax on it than would someone being paid that same amount and having those benefits provided.
Oh, and paying two lots of tax isn't paying tax twice.
Stop taking the p***
Contractors get paid more, they need to, to cover the fact that they face risk, regular gaps in employment and need to cover their own holiday pay and pension provision. Fair enough, I get that.
It isn't however, an excuse to pay less tax. If a permi and a contractor are getting paid the same, they should be paying the same tax.
As for off-books permis, you deserved everything you get.
Large Hadron Collider turns up five new particles
Three non-obvious reasons to Vote Leave on the 23rd
Re: Fixed
Say what you like about the honesty and integrity of the campaigns, I will not believe our democracy is so broken that the result will be rigged. Given that the government in place don't want to leave, they could have just not held the referendum at all. To rig a vote is a whole different ball game.
The fact that you don't know anyone who voted in doesn't mean those people don't exist, it just means you don't know them. I've been annoying the hell out of my Facebook friends over the last few weeks, even though I don't actually seem to know anyone who's voting the other way. I know those people exist, I just don't know them.
Contractors who used Employee Beneficiary Trusts are in HMRC's sights
Secret Service on alert after drone CRASHES into White House
Oi, idiot fanbois. DON'T buy this gun-shaped iPhone case, mmkay?
Re: Not good
There seem to be a few papers with differing opinion as to whether or not the Australian legislation had an effect on gun crime, gun accidents and gun suicides. All use sensible approaches to the analysis which obtain different results. The range is from there is an effect to no significant effect.
I suggest that when presented with a range of equally hard worked, sensible yet unprovable conclusions it seems likely that they represent a distribution over the true result. I think that's the general basis of medical meta-analysis. In this case it suggests that no effect is likely to be an outlier as it represents the most extreme result in the range from no effect to some effect.
Re: Not good
"Then you are wrong, but a lot of people get it wrong. Terrorists throughout ages have found things that go boom work better. If you want to kill a group of people a bomb works better. The gun is a tool, the problem is who is using it"
Not sure how we got onto terrorism, but hey. You are indeed correct, the problem is who's using it. That's what gun control is for.
Once you have effective gun control, the job of law enforcement becomes so much easier. I see a gun, it's unlikely to be lawful. I see a child with something that looks like a gun, it's unlikely to be real. Plus you don't create a huge pool of weapons that can easily be used for crime. The argument for everyone having guns is like the argument for everyone having nuclear weapons. I'm only safe if I can blow up the other guy. No, you'd be safer is nobody could.
I sleep far better at night knowing I'll probably never see a firearm except at an airport or on a farm than I would having a gun in my bedside table and knowing any idiot on the street might have one too.
Airplane HACK PANIC! Hold on, it's surely a STORM in a TEACUP
UK safety app keeping lorries on the right side of cyclists
This is what happens when a judge in New York orders an e-hit on a Chinese software biz
The wrong approach
People buy kitchen knives and then a small proportion of those are used in crimes. Should we:
1. Seek ever more ingenious ways to ensure that knives are only used for their intended purpose. For example we could require that a knife fitter deliver them to your home and chain them with a near unbreakable titanium chain to an immovable post driven into your kitchen floor. Make stab vests compulsory clothing. Put metal detectors every 100 yards in the street.
2. Address the root causes of knife crime and punish those that commit it.
HUGE Aussie asteroid impact sent TREMORS towards the EARTH'S CORE
Fraudsters make bank as exec wires $17 MEELLION to China
Is it humanly possible to watch Gigli and Battlefield Earth back-to-back?
US military finds F-35 software is a buggy mess
What do UK and Iran have in common? Both want to outlaw encrypted apps
ALIEN fossils ON MARS: Curiosity snaps evidence of life
TALE OF FAIL: Microsoft offers blow-by-blow Azure outage account
Single Point of Failure
I think when the outage occurred a lot of people were asking themselves how MS had managed to set up cloud infrastructure that obviously had a single point of failure.
I think by publishing this in such detail they have shown that they don't, but managed to simulate one very well by doing an entire platform upgrade at once instead of following their flighting policy and running the two configurations in parallel for a while.
What happened to MS could probably happen to any cloud provider if they made a similar mistake during an upgrade.
Blackpool hotel 'fines' couple £100 for crap TripAdvisor review
Million Mask March: Anonymous' London Guy Fawkes protest a damp squib
Tech talk bloke compares girlfriend to irritating Java tool – did he deserve flames?
Today's bugs have BRANDS? Be still my bleeding heart [logo]
Dropbox erects sueball shield with new T&C and privacy legalese
Limbaugh: If you hate Apple then you're a lefty blog-o-twat hipster
'World's BIGGEST online fraud': Suspect's phone had 'location' switched on
Planet-busting British space bullet ready to bomb ice moon Europa
Global warming still stalled since 1998, WMO Doha figures show
Event Horizon Telescope spots source of black hole jets
How politicians could end droughts forever But they don't want to
Re: Why not use solar-powered evaporation?
Because reverse osmosis is far more efficient a way to purify water than evaporation and condensation. The energy required to fully evaporate 1000L of water is on the order of 732 kWh (assuming the water starts at 10C). Yes you can get all that energy back when the water condense but you'd need 99.86% recovery efficiency to achieve the same energy usage as reverse osmosis.
Gov IT contractors hire staff in India to work on benefits system
Offshoring and Govt IT
My experience of working with off shoring software development is that unless the specification is done in excruciating detail is just doesn't work. Indian software development outfits also suffer from massive employee turnover and it's unusual for them to be able to develop significant project experience and expertise.
Govt projects are notorious for changing the spec again and again and again, which is why they often fail or only deliver with massively over budget.
24hour development is a myth in general as it's very hard to get different people/groups to work on the same functionality in an efficient manner. You might deliver quicker overall, put productivity is lower and costs are higher than developing at a single site.