Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
The problem I see with this is that if the prevailing legislation doesn't meet GDPR requirements and something like the proposed public body data sharing comes into play then it might be impossible to claim GDPR compliance.
Never mind, companies can just set up an EU subsidiary to do what would otherwise have been done in the UK, or even just move the whole business to the EU. In the meantime the UK remains the best place in the whole world for something or other. What was it? Ah, yes: taking back control.
If the EU decides that the new legislation is no longer sufficient to support adequacy then at best companies might have a lot of additional hoops to jump through to do business with EU residents.
A Schrems style situation might even become a Schrems plus. Whilst the consumer rights side of the EU pushes GDPR etc the trading side doesn't really want to avoid doing business with the US and keeps inventing new fig leaves for Schrems to tear down. They might be less inclined to do the same for a country they regard as uncooperative.
GDPR is written into the current UK Data Protection Act, give or take a little wriggle room for HMG to indulge in its data fetish. That means it applies in the UK anyway.
The scope is a little different to what you say, however. The restriction would be on forms of business that involve collecting personal data so business to business transactions might not be affected nor consumer cash transactions. OTOH GDPR applies to EU citizens as a whole, not just Irish citizens.
A specific point about Irish ancestry, however, is that it can grant citizenship to those not born in Ireland so that my grandchildren have dual British and Irish (and hence EU) nationality despite being born in England by virtue of the fact that their mother was born in Belfast (not even in the RoI).
It's well documented that one's own writing is the most difficult to proof-read because what is "read" is what's intended to be there rather than what is actually there. I'll rely on a spell check for words such as accommodate (yes, missed the double m again) and recommend (got it first time!) but the pairs have to be known.
The point at issue is that there are words which have only a minor difference in spelling, stationary and stationery for example, which mean quite different things. The spillchucker won't help with those, you need to make a personal* effort to distinguish between a shop that's the opposite of mobile and one which sells envelopes.
* As opposed to personnel.
The market is affected as much by who says it as by what was said. If he says something that gets interpreted as an attempt to weasel out of his bid or reduce the price it makes no difference whether it was true or not. Then let's consider your assumption that it was, in fact, true...
"Gordon Brown was worried that the same thing would happen before any entry to the Euro"
Had it been Gordon Brown instead of Lamont he'd just have sold off the gold reserves instead of foreign currency.
At the time the UK had had a long-running problem with interest rates. A rate that would avoid inflation in one part of the country would cause depression in another. Brown's solution was to partially wash his hands of the situation by handing it over to the BoE and then specifying that they aim at 2% inflation but carefully eliminating most people's biggest purchase, their house, from counting towards the measure of inflation. No inflation here, just a wildly overheating housing market.
"Is there a point to team building with people you are unlikely to ever meet again?"
Yes. It pays good money to the snake-oil salesmen who run the events and the hotels or whatever that host them. A point for the company you work for? Why would you expect that?
As a variant of that, vary occasionally I would have to visit crime scenes in extremely dodgy areas. I would have an armed escort, sometimes RUC, sometimes army, sometimes both. I've never worked with them before. Woah! I'm trusting my life to the protection these guys are providing, I've never met them before and I can do this without even a team building exercise? Im Possible!
Well, actually I expect them to look after my safety, they expect me to do my job efficiently so we can remove ourselves from the dodgy neighbourhood ASAP. We're all professionals at our respective tasks. What more do we need?
(OK, let's gloss over the fact that a combined operation once took me to the wrong address in Twinbrook.)
"suddenly WFH is a beautiful thing"
As is retirement.
One IT managert seemed to believe in murder mystery evenings for team-building (obviously a lack of judgement on her part). I think she shied away from trying to involve me. I was looking forward to being asked so I could refuse on the basis that I don't do amateur nights*.
*Ex-forensic scientist here.
"Not all sales bods have this practical attitude. There are courses where you learn how to talk complete bollocks."
My experience of most salesmen is that (a) they don't need the course and (b) would be too arrogant to accept that they needed a course for anything.
I agree that not all salesmen talk bollocks. The exceptions were selling Leitz microscopes and HP kit back in HP's glory days.
It didn't take Dunning & Kruger to see what was perfectly plain already.
The most succinct statement of it I've ever read was in Tracey Kidder's "The soul of a new machine" when the project leaders had decided to staff the project with recent graduates (who by now, of course, are probably retiring). Having done this they started to worry about whether their new staff were as smart as they'd represented themselves in interview: "Are they so full of shit they don't know they're full of shit?"
In that case, of course, the answer was no.
"64 percent of companies surveyed already having suffered an attack, but more worryingly, that executives seem to believe that paying the ransom is a reliable way of addressing the issue.... In contrast, among those that have not so far suffered a ransomware attack, only 67 percent would be willing to pay, and they would be less inclined to do so immediately."
Which way does that causality run?
Is it that those who have been attacked had and still don't have anything in place to deal with it other than paying ransom and those who haven't been attacked have not yet seen that particular version of the light?
Or is it that those who haven't been attacked haven't escaped by chance but, being less inclinedt to pay, have put in place stronger protections?
