Posts by notyetanotherid 38 posts • joined 15 Jan 2019
> Nevertheless, it was entirely clear to everyone that leaving the EU meant leaving the Single Market and the Customs Union.
Official campaign Vote Leave said: “Britain will have access to the Single Market after we vote leave”
A July 2016 Comres/BBC poll of British voters found that 66 per cent said the government should focus on “maintaining access to the single market so Britain can have free trade with the EU”.
> If the boot were on the other foot, i.e. 52/48, you would be screaming for another referendum, and I would reluctantly have to agree. But if it's 48/52, you are shouting "we won you lost get over it you remainiacs"
Indeed, Farage specifically said before the vote that a 52/48 win for remain would be "unfinished business". https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nigel-farage-eu-referendum_uk_576e6585e4b08d2c56393f12
And let's not forget that the question was "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?" Nowhere was leaving the Single Market mentioned. The Leave campaign sold Brexit on the basis of continuing to trade freely with our European neighbours.
> Just a cursory look at a Gooooooogle captchas show how little thought has gone into them - not least the absolute US bias in the images
E.g the assumption that a taxi must be yellow. Got that one yesterday with two photos of yellow taxis, but it needed me to click on a third photo which was just a regular yellow hatchback parked at the side of a road, but it did have a glass sunroof, which presumably their crappy AI identified as the Taxi sign.
And then there is the annoyance of captchas on a mobile - nine grainy photos, three of which are off the right edge of the screen in portrait orientation and you have to guess which ones might contain e.g. a (leftpondian) hydrant.
I think, IIRC, Private Eye reported that Deloitte charged out interns at £290/hour. In which case, simply recruiting the same people off the dole directly into civil service, would have cut the staffing cost to a fraction of what the taxpayer ended up paying...
Top-heavy, yes. Utterly dysfunctional, seems pretty harsh; look at the covid vaccine rollout, which despite ministers regularly attempting to take the credit for, was left to the NHS to organise.
Folks can't get a GP appointment because despite repeated promises to recruit more GPs, numbers continue to go down while the population goes up, yet sectors of the media seem intent on painting them as work-shy. https://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/analysis/cover-feature/whats-the-next-big-recruitment-plan
I suspect that a lot of the problems in the NHS are the result of successive health ministers' desire to be seen to 'reform' the NHS, with yet more internal markets and dogmatic 'competitive forces', each of which just serves to add yet another layer of bureaucracy and management overhead, instead of focusing on clinical needs.
As far as I can tell, Covid testing was never actually the responsibility of the NHS; billions of pounds were instead shovelled to Deloitte to run test and trace, setting up and expanding subcontract private labs instead of ramping up capacity in existing NHS labs, but without requiring the testing data to be shared with the NHS. And of course the 'trace' element was subcontracted to Serco and G4S instead of putting it in the hands of the existing experienced public health contact tracers, with further sub-contracting, price gouging and MUC fraud rampant.
Where the army was brought in to assist with testing, I imagine that it was because the Deloitte partners were too busy counting the taxpayer cash rolling in to their already inflated bank accounts to worry about the shit job that was being done in the name of the NHS...
Indeed, we use a product every day that officially supports Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. When a feature does not work properly in Edge, Firefox or Safari...
Me: X happens when run in [Firefox]
Helldesk: does it work correctly in Chrome?
Me Yes.
HD: We suggest you use Chrome, we develop for Chrome. (ticket closed)
Me: (ticket reopened) But your stated browser policy is to support Edge, Firefox and Safari, so please fix it...
@Martin an gof,
> You can do the electrics yourself under Part P
I know that you can, it was just that immediately after Part P came into force (I started the project a month too late), I could not find anyone willing to certify an installation that they had not done themselves (kitchen electrics require certifying). Indeed, IIRC, at the time NICEIC was specifically recommending their members not to certify anyone else's work. I even half-considered becoming Part P registered just to fill that gap in the market....
Was having the kitchen re-done, everything stripped back to bare brick. Was just after Part P came in so I could no longer legally do the electrics myself. The sparkies nailed the capping through the cables. Fortunately, I spotted this just before the plasterer arrived to start re-plastering the walls...
@codejunky
> I certainly hope you havnt seen cars/vans/trucks jumping the curb at traffic lights
Was the 'at traffic lights' especially important? The big metal pole in the pavement make it less likely for 4+ wheels there, but as my walk to work anecdote shows, car drivers are more than happy to use the pavement as an extension of the roadway when it suits their convenience.
> The difference is huge however as the motor vehicle gets reported by its reg plate and someone gets fined or worse.
Evidence for this assertion? Sure, a reg plate makes it easier to trace an offender, but prosecution more than likely ain't gonna happen unless the police are there (or have a camera) to see it happen. I could film my walk to work (if I wasn't busy dodging the cars) and send it to the police, but would anything happen as a result?
>Basically a law unto themselves.
Just as, I expect, a similar proportion of car/van/truck drivers are. I have certainly encountered motor vehicles doing all of the examples you give for cyclists.
Every morning as I walk to work, I pass a local primary school on the opposite side of the road ... having to dodge the cars driving along the pavement (thankfully, towards me) so that they can park that little bit closer to the pedestrian crossing, presumably so little Timmy/Flossie doesn't have to walk more than 50 yards.
> (= 0.0008 NHS Budgets)
You may need to try that conversion again.
Reg standard NHS budget is ~£118bn, or ~$155bn at current exchange rate, so I reckon 10 NASA budgets is around 1.5 Reg-standard NHS budgets.
Of course the Reg-standard NHS budget is woefully out of date; the budget for 2022/3 is £178bn, which I think makes it pretty much the same as 10 NASA budgets.
I suspect that cold water straight from the mains is at around the 10°C mark, which would bring the BBC kettle size down to around 2.6l.
Then you would need to account for the heat loss to the walls of the kettle and surrounding air.
And the energy required to drive out the dissolved atmospheric gases in the water.
And the latent heat of vaporization for the steam produced before the rest of the water reaches boiling...
And the government is awarding contracts to consultants to help them ramp down the use of consultants...
https://www.civilserviceworld.com/news/article/dhsc-spending-40000-a-week-on-consultants-to-develop-business-case-for-new-health-body
https://www.consultancy.uk/news/26222/cabinet-office-asks-consultants-to-help-lower-reliance-on-consultants
For some reason turkeys and Christmas spring to mind.
> (as long as you don't chop it down and bung it into Drax)
(as long as you don't chop it down, chop it up and process it into pellets, pack the pellets onto an oil-burning freight ship and transport it across the Atlantic and *then* bung it into Drax, all the while banging on about being on the path to 'carbon negative' and receiving £800m a year in government 'green' subsidies and tax breaks)
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/23/green-groups-dispute-power-station-claim-biomass-carbon-neutral
You are right that this was a problem of the government's own making. It seems to be the normal way of government in the UK:
1. Media publicises an issue
2. Knee-jerk political reaction to increased media coverage
3. Rushed sticking-plaster legislation
4. Unintended consequence
5. Rinse and repeat
IR35 was a massively unwieldy sledgehammer to crack a nut. A nut nevertheless; when I was a contractor in the 90s most associates paid themselves a pittance of a salary and took all their income as dividend to avoid paying National Insurance contributions. When IR35 was announced, that nut was already about to shrink considerably because the national minimum wage came in in 1999; assuming enforcement was planned it would have been harder to pay yourself ~£60 a week while billing the client for 35 hours. Why successive governments have remained wedded to IR35 is a mystery to me. There must be simpler solution, for example a punitive tax on dividends which exceed a threshold based on the salary bill of the company?
But likewise there appears to be a nut now: e.g. MUC scams utilising the £4000 Employment Allowance. Imagine you are a contract services company and you win a contract to supply 1000 short-term staff for, let's say, a 'track and trace' system, if you set up 100 unrelated mini umbrella companies with a Filipino sole director, employing 10 staff each, claim the Employment Allowance for each company, then you have basically made a cool additional profit of £400K (minus expenses) on the contract at the expense of the taxpayer, and as a bonus your 'employees' have no comeback against you (or indeed anyone) if they don't get paid, etc. I suspect that this revenue loss to HMRC is the issue that is prompting the latest knee-jerk...
"Carpenter notes that the videos and images depict the woman wearing what he and his colleagues believe are flame-retardant gloves, which in conjunction with her goggles, he argues, represent "evidence of intent and planning to engage in activities that could potentially hurt her hands and/or eyes, including arson.""
... or perhaps she thought that there was a good chnce the cops would be lobbing tear gas at the protesters?
Would this be the same Samsung that let the SSuggest.com domain lapse, thus potentially exposing to miscreants millions of Galaxy mobile users with the non-removable SSuggest app, https://brownglock.com/library/2017/06/21/samsung-lets-domain-ssuggest-com-lapse-and-exposes-millions-of-phones-to-potential-hackers/ ?
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