Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I want to know who's paying for all these "views" and "clicks".
In general, advertisers. In particular the budgets of the advertisers' sales and marketing departments. authorised by the depertments' executives.
Are they not aware that just short of 100% are fraudulent!
Where "they" are the executives, I don't think you'd be easily able to prove they know. Whan a man's salary depends on it etc.
There is, of course, scope for differentiation by providing better service. It only takes one business to do that in any market and they will gain customers simply as a result of losing fewer to churn than their competitors. It may take money. However, as it would have the same result as advertising is intended to, and probably with better results, the money can be taken from the advertising budget.
The appropriate response would be to permanently revoke the licences it needs to operate, ditto for all directors and senior office holders for their right to work in the finance industry and make clear this will be mandatory for any other bank that has the same experience. And just to avoid avoidance - failure to report such breaches within 4 hours will be a criminal offence for all directors and senior office holders.
That should spread the word that this stuff has to be taken seriously, day by day, day after day.
Best to treat them as fast prototypes/demonstrators. Set up sonething quick and very dirty with only about 60% of functionality needed. "This is very rough and ready but is it the sort of thing you were looking for? We could put something together properly in about $ESTIMATE".
"Why in heaven's name is there not a standard solution that any and every council in England and Wales can't just adopt?"
Because it's more profitable to pick them off one at a time.
Getting together to commission a development of a common system would probably be outside their remit and possibly, in consequence, illegal. I wonder if getting together to develop a common, properly tested specification would be OK Probably not feasible as councils of different political persuations would spend their time falling out with each other.
Ostensibly IR35 was somehow supposed to eliminate this situation. There's no way it could ever have done so, being simply a means of increasing taxation of real independent contractors who the IR didn't really recognise as being businesses. This was an easy sell to the new New Labour government as independent contracts were by nature resistant to the lure of the usual trade unions. Ironically, it prompted us to form our own trade association which was never likely to become part of the Labour movement. At the same time it did nothing to serve the lot of those who were expelled from regular employment into pseudo-independent gig workers.
What's sorely needed now is a more clear cut differentiation between independent contractors and casual employees whereby the former are treated as businesses and the latter have full employee rights.
The reality is more along the lines of negotiate.
However, there is possibly an opening here for a rival "algorithmic" service which will negotiate on behalf of the gig workers. It would depend on most if not all of them in an area subscribing to it, put in counter offers to the job offering service, starting with one too high to be accepted and then reducing to a point at which it's accepted and then offering it to whoever has set their minimum price at or closest below that level.
"Short term gain is foolish"
Short term gain means bonuses for senior manglement and a great addition to their CV. The CV will then enable them to move on to another victiim employer to pull the same trick there. Their replacements will have to deal with the consequences and probably discover it's too late to reverse it by switching back to the original terms.
I wouldn't envy the load in its economic in-tray either. We have two self-inflicted wounds - the long legacy of Brownomics that stopped productivity growth dead and Brexit. Trussonomics can be discounted as a short-lived blip. Covid and Ukraine are a problem shared with other governments but those two are our own.
"In addition, an optimal solution should not impede secure communications disproportionately"
Whne working out what might be disproportionate it should be presumed that most communications will be innocent as this is, indeed, the case.
"the only alternative ... is to issue a European Investigation Order but responses for these can take up to 120 days"
So the appropriate solution is to straighten out existing procedures.
"We have a Victorian bellows-style camera as an icon for speed cameras"
Which "we" is that? I've never seen that in the UK.
There are still a few professional photographers using bellows cameras for large formats (the sort of people who consider Hasselblads to be a miniature format). A non-collapsible full plate camera would be a bit of a pain to carry about.
"Oak gall inks would probably last a bit longer"
They can fade quite badly. Indian ink (carbon black) lasts far better.. I know of a C18th document with both on it and the blue-blakc (oak gall) has faded to a light brown while the black ink is fine. The paper is also discolouring to a light brown but as the two have not yet converged the faded ink can still be read.
I see it not so much "accessories must diverge from their upstream GNOME bases" as upstream GNOME diverging from everything else. Maybe some of the old apps will be forked to remain at Gtk3. The UI of pdf shuffler or whatever it's called now isn't just looking out of place on my KDE Devuan, it's disappeared entirely. Fortunately I found a Java equivalent; it also looks a bit out of place but it works.
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