Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"There's a concern of a cornered market."
I don;t know about the US but in Europe there's a good deal of regulatory stuff that new vehicle designs need to pass. Regulations about the isolation of safety-critical systems need to be added to this. That would avoid problems with future designs but getting it made retrospective might be difficult. With such regulation in place there'd be no issues about cornered markets; non-compliant vehicles wouldn't get into the market and manufacturers would have to start paying attention to introducing security at the design stage.
Back in June I had a letter from the GP to make an appointment giving one of three possibilities
Went onto the site & put in the credentials. Not recognised.
Phoned the 0345 number instead. Amazing! They could get onto the system. Made an appointment & a few days later an appointment letter came followed by a cancellation in the next post saying another appointment would be made.
Last week, having heard nothing I phoned the hospital.
They explained the appointment had been made with the wrong clinic but couldn't log on to make another.
Rung back today & told there were no appointments available as yet.
As another hospital had been included in the original list I went back online to see if I could rebook with that. Amazing! I could get online!
System then told me that a completely different clinic had been notified & they should have been in contact by several days ago. Name and address of clinic given but only the choose & book general phone number.
Went back to the GPs secretary. She finds that the clinic is on answerphone...
NHS should really concentrate on getting its essential IT services running properly instead of playing with trendy Big Data.
After all the fuss they've walked into by now you'd have expected them to have learned some lessons. But no.
Experience is a dear teacher but there are those who will learn by no other. It's time to start making things dear for CEOs & the like. For their own good, of course. It will help them learn.
At the local filling station the other day:
One slot was occupied by a big, unattended SUV - I think it may have said Jeep on the back but not being interested in mobile bricks I didn't take too much notice. The slot continued to be occupied by it; nobody came out of the shop to drive it away. When I went in to pay I asked the attendant what was happening. It turned out that the driver had put in the wrong fuel and consequently (maybe because the engine wouldn't run) the handbrake couldn't be released.
"Then we started acquiring "related companies" and things spiraled out of control. They merged our systems and ended up with us hosting them and fielding all service calls. The problem was that our systems and programs were many and varied and dealing with support was a struggle."
It looks as if the costs of integration should have been considered before the acquisition and allowed for in the price paid.
"we're still trying to get a number, it's non-trivial"
I'd have thought more or less impossible. How do you put together a set of control events with which to compare? That's a problem which is plaguing surgeon league tables.
What's really concerning is the fact that they seem to have had problems in getting adequate accounts, a problem clearly exacerbated by liability questions: it's going to impede improvement. Where life is clearly at risk - something which would apply to medical devices more generally - there needs to be a mandatory report/analyse/modify feedback loop.
In my day that used to be referred to a taking the piss and, because of that, suspected of being an open invitation to the IR/HMRC to carry out an IR35 investigation.
Having been through the full cycle (assisted to some extent by having a pension from early retirement elsewhere) my experience was that company income paid:
- Regular reasonable salary incl. NI. and pension contributions.
- Smaller salary etc to Comp Sec (Comp Sec no longer required for small companies but back then had legal liabilities and taking on those deserves payment).
- Computer hardware & software.
- Travelling and accommodation for gigs away from home.
- Training which includes not only the cost of the course but travelling, accommodation and loss of fees during the course.
- All other expenses including phones, ISP, accountant, insurance and PCG membership.
- Dividends at less frequent intervals than salary.
- Continuance of salary etc. during time off sick (taken to hospital from site experiencing irregular heartbeat, off work for a fortnight).
- Continuance of salary etc. whilst "available" (clue: typical agency call is "Are you available on Monday?". Availability costs money.)
- Continuance of salary etc. for some time after the last contract.
- Eventual lump sum, I can't remember if that was within CGT limit.
"I run a small company"
You don't say in what capacity. As an owner or as an employed manager? Is it a limited company?
If your company is limited and you own shares then you should be able to take dividends from it.
Those sole contractors should also be making provision for sick leave, time on the bench etc. Ideally they should be making a larger provision than you as their income may be more volatile than yours. They should also be making provision for training in new skills. If they don't make such provisions they're idiots - of which, admittedly, there is no shortage.
Depending on your turnover you might have had a disadvantage to sole contractors of being on the main rate of corporation tax or else an advantage against larger businesses if you were on the small business rate. However, those rates have converged over the last few years.
I suspect your main disadvantage is actually overheads. You don't say how many non-fee-earning staff are involved but there seems to be at least one: yourself. Sole contractors are 100% fee-earners (when working) and larger consultancies may be able to take advantage of scale and spread the cost of each non-fee-earner over more fee-earners. The big consultancies are probably also able to get away with larger fees. You're caught in the middle.
"Regarding the Professional Contractors Group, now called the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed, many contractors believe this organisation no longer serves their interests."
That's sad to hear. I was a member in the early days until I retired & served a term on the CC. The name change suggests it's widened its remit so it might have gained a larger membership at the expense of focussing on contracting issues.
They may not know less than you. They may know that "contracting" isn't the same as "contacting". They may know how to spell "paid" and "wad". Such knowledge helps with putting together CVs that don't get filed in the round container.
They may also know that out of their contract rates they have to pay not only income tax and employees' NI but also employers' NI and make provision for being "available" in due course. If they don't know that they'll find out the hard way.
"Try being a public sector IT worker!"
Been there. At least sort of except I was in science and at that time science grades were definitely the bottom of the pile. I think IT would have come under PTE which rates were jacked up because of recruitment shortages. We had wage freezes back then, they're not new. I eventually jumped into IT and the private sector and later into freelance.
'" they do not receive company benefits such as pensions and employment benefits including the right to redundancy payments."
I'm a contractor and it really pisses me off when people trot out this type of statement.'
I think you're misreading the article here. The context is that contractors don't receive these from the engager; they have to make these provisions for themselves along with paying both employers and employees contributions. Bryce was making the exact same point as yourself.
"As an IT contractor for 17 years, the only thing I have in common with the permies around me is that my technical skills are similar."
Maybe not even that. It's not unusual to be engaged as a contractor because there's a sudden need, either by virtue of a new business requirement or a resignation, for a skill none of the permies currently have. The attitude to training is a factor here.
"Why arn't dividends taxed at the same rate as any other income?"
The core issue is who pays for business risks, in this case employment risk. If you're a manager you may have a predictable work-load for business as usual but you might well have an unpredictable workload for project work and you will have a less-predictable-than-you'd-like workforce (sick leave, parental leave, resignations etc.). At any one time you could find yourself with insufficient staff to meet requirements or you could find yourself paying for more staff than you currently have work for. This is the risk. What do you do?
You could do nothing. This leaves you with more outgoings at some times whilst accepting that at others stuff which should be done can't be done.
You could recruit permanent staff when you have a shortage and make them redundant when you have an excess. This is going to cost extra in redundancy payments.
Alternatively you can off-load the risk onto someone else. Someone who takes the risk that their work and therefore income will be erratic. The someone else could be any size from a large body-shop to an individual freelancer. Taking risks like that is called business and one of the ways of recognising those risks is by taxing the returns from business somewhat less than those of employment.
Unfortunately there now seems to be an extra way, zero-hours contracts, shuffling all the risk onto employees who have slim advantages of employment and no chance of operating as a business. And that, in my view, is wrong.
"Are deer a reasonable proxy for (libertarian) sheep?"
I don't know. Do they balance on the tops of wall & then suddenly jump down in front of you?
This was one of my first encounters after passing my driving test. Fortunately the suddenness was relative; I realised it was preparing to jump & acted accordingly, but would an autonomous car?
"It was a requirement for complex graphical applications, including DTPs, vector and bitmap graphics, CAD, etc."
Would you include video in this? In my household TV is vary rarely watched directly but via MythTV. Because of the constraints of a domestic environment this runs on an old fan-free Intel mini-ITX board with just standard Intel graphics simultaneously shuffling multiple streams from the receivers (note the plural) onto disk and the watched programme off it.
I don't have many requirements for some of the other stuff you mention although LibreOffice & PDF viewing works quite well under KDE on the Debian laptop on which I'm typing this.
But I believe that another Unix-derived system is quite popular for such complex graphics. You may have heard of it. It's called OS-X & comes from a little company called Apple. As they use a Mach-style kernel where the principle is to shove as much stuff as possible into userland I'd be surprised if it handled fonts or the like in kernel space and I'm sure there are plenty of folk here can give chapter & verse on that.
"That's why Linux is used ... mostly by people who don't go beyond an SSH shell to a server."
This is a new and ingenious one. Is this your own material or do you have a script-writer?
Back in the day I did use Windows for more or less this purpose. The first example was when Visionware in Leeds did a nice package which included Windows/286 or 386 (look it up - it was a thing) and an X-server; it was a very good way of getting multiple sessions from a PC.
'BTW if I don't watch commercial TV stations; can I claim back the TV advertising portion of every product I buy?
Is that a "No" I hear?
It would seem then, that I am paying for a service I don't use/want. In which case it's a worse tax than VAT. It's such an unfair tax!'
Even worse, you're paying VAT on that portion.
I suspect the actual situation is something like this:
It's not economically feasible to staff front line support with people skilled and/or empowered to deal with everything so for a lot of stuff they depend on escalation.
Weekend escalation teams are on weekend rates which makes them more expensive so that there are few of them. Consequently the first line are under orders to escalate to the weekday team if possible, otherwise more weekend teams have to be added at greater cost. Note that turning it over to the legal team counts as escalation and having legals on weekend rates is going to be very, very, vvvveeerrrryyyy expensive indeed.
At the point where the customer threatens to go legal the front line does a quick triage to find out what the possible costs are. If it's a domestic line or a small business, say a restaurant taking phone bookings it's probably well enough to say "see you in court". In this case the customer falls into a category potentially putting the company on the hook for loss of customer's business during the outage, compensation to the customer's customers and loss of reputation. Maybe also there's an SLA being breached. Maybe even the loss of the phone company's billable traffic is high enough. Whatever, it now becomes clear that it's cheaper to turn it over to the weekend escalation team than to fight it.
It's just money - whichever's the cheapest response.
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