Posts by Azamino 139 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2019
I had cameras on my bike when I commuted daily to the City and back and they came in handy more often than you would have thought and not just in relation to road users. People act differently when they think that their words are being recorded, they are fair less tempted to cut corners, exaggerate or fob you off.
There are times and places where such monitoring is unsuitable but don't write off the tech because of a couple of edge cases.
I appreciate that money doesn't grow on trees but c'mon!
eMerlin was sponsored primarily by UKRI and if you run their details through Claude you will find plenty of investments in frankly dubious research projects. All large funds will have some seemingly frivolous beneficiaries of their largesse but actionable science should be prioritised over hobby horses.
Your definition of 'petty' is different to mine. Shoplifting can have serious consequences, for example Lidl closing their Camden store because persistent theft made it uneconomic. Most staff should have been transferred to nearby stores but some will have lost perfectly good jobs, while others now have more time-consuming / expensive journeys to work. If putting thieves in prison stops regular working people from losing their jobs then I am all for it.
When I worked for Sainsbury's theft was recorded under the 'Shrinkage' category. We had our regular thieves who were a fair spread of the mentally ill, alcoholics and downright criminal (on pay day I would see them selling their hauls outside the local pub). The difference today is the brazenness and the attitude, no attempt to hide the theft just fill a rucksack with bottles of wine and walk out! As an ex-employee I worry about safety too, I received the odd threat while collecting trolleys but nothing like today. People have been approached at bus stops and told to turn a blind-eye or face consequences, as happened in Ilford, Essex.
You don't need to be a wannabe MAGA fan to know that shop theft is out of hand or want it addressed.
Who cares anymore? I gave up and went perm’. I pay everything above the tax free allowance into my DC pension and live off the remainder, making ISAs withdrawals as required. I preferred the flexibility and the variety of contracting but I have to live in the present.
The above is not a perfect solution, my pension contributions are capped at £60K and in a few years time the government will start taking NI payments after the first £2K paid in. I suspect that there are a lot of people living off their savings while maximising their pensions. Fine for the older folk but how are youngsters expected to get ahead?
The constables in Kentish Town have avoided all accusations of two-tier policing by the simple expedient of not doing any policing! Seriously, I am signed up to Cuppa with a Copper and just about every story involving an arrest (as opposed to those condemning victims for having nice things in the first place) starts with a description of an officer nipping out for food and happening across a security guard wrestling with a shoplifter.
... working at sea on a modern cargo vessel is no fun, automating it away is a good thing. It may have been a romantic dream once but now it's hitting the trifecta of boring, dangerous and poorly paid. Post-containerisation, you don't even get to head up country while the cargo is landed / loaded.
That is a very good point. I know that in much of the country provision has not matched the increase in the number of blue badges issues. There are already over three million in total and that number will only grow until the mental health crisis in this country is properly addressed.
Crap by the council and a warning to anyone interested in flaws in their operating procedures and patterns of behaviour. If they cock-up something this straightforward what else are they doing?
I am mystified as to how one poor person thought that "most people in her life were unaware she held a Blue Badge" though. The first clue is the disability, the second the bright blue badge with your photograph and hologram sitting on your vehicle's dashboard. Are the people not very observant or do they all park like idiots and assume that everyone does the same?
Your definition of trivial could use some work. Just how fine a tolerance are you willing to risk?
Because sure, "With basic tools and enough time, brass strips can be shaped into cartilages.." but just what do you count as basic? The latter part is possible though, a marriage of poorly made ammunition and a shoddy 3D printed gun could well result in brass entering bits of your cartilage (via other body parts).
The UK had fewer than 400K civil servants in 2016 and it has now climbed to more than 500K (full-time equivalent roles = 520K but the actual number is a bit higher thanks to job-share etc). I do not have the expertise to judge if we are getting value for money or not, but it is very expensive and in departments such as the MoD we have to question how it needs over 55K civil servants to support 180K members of the military (including reservists).
The victims of Operation Midland will dispute your statement that White and suited individuals are invisible to the police!
For non-Brit’s Operation Midland was an investigation into a former Prime Minister and a number of MP’s, judges, high-level businessmen etc based on the fantastical claims of Carl Beech. It put the accused and their families through the wringer for more than a decade and the taint lingers long after Carl Beech was released from prison. Think how much suffering could have been avoided if just one tenth of the effort put into Operation Midland had been directed at the northern grooming gangs.
@botfap In the UK it is not obviously possible to identify an organisation using a tax code. The most you can say is that they have another source of taxable income. So how did your colleague’s other employer identify your firm, or vice versa?
I think that you are missing an option. Look for something better but in the meantime cut out the unnecessary expenditure, save your money to a global tracker until you have enough savings not to be dependent on one employer.
You do not need to wholly financially independent, just a year or two of expenses saved up will give you options.
"The fake banter from workers who’d be fired if they said what they actually think." Tech pays well, so there is no excuse not to be shovelling money away until you are not wholly dependent on the firm's dime. It would be more accurate to say that workers prefer their toys to the option of saying what they really think.
Without wishing to sound paranoid you have to be very careful after in-person viewings too, check for bolts drawn back on doors, windows pushed closed but with the handle left in the open position etc. All of which could be innocent oversights or the act of a thief hoping to make a nocturnal return.
Knocking out the work in a day rather than two weeks is great but in a business where billable hours are king clients are going to want to see significant savings. Consultancies will try to swing the billing justification away from total hours worked to value generated but will their customers be convinced?
The amount that you can charge for advice is related to the effort needed to create it. If partners think that they can reduce their costs with AI and still bill top dollar there will be a rude awakening just around the corner.
Who says that El Reg doesn't do levity any more?
If this is true " like all modern government departments, .... its dedicated staff can carry out their duties ..." then we only have old gov't departments.
TBF I did briefly work for the public sector myself, I applied for a permie job which I didn't get but ended up going back to that role as temp'. The poor sod they hired had received far too little training and disappeared on some variety of leave of absence. The hours were fantastic, I left on time every day etc and, hard to believe as it was 1994 not 1894, we had a tea lady with a trolley!
"How do you explain magnetic fields around a helical filament to people who dispense bowling shoes for a living? " Yeah, that's the condescending, smart Alec, tosspottery that I remember from working in the early 90s. Tech guy turning up to fix a problem without stopping to explain the cause so that when the error was repeated they could score another easy ticket.
BTW - They may not be up to speed on physics, but the guys slinging bowling shoes still have a job. Can the same be said for the armies of service tech's that used to exist?
@ the anonymous former contractor. Yes, the company pays tax on profits as it is the legal entity etc but as a one man band who owned, operated and delivered the services sold by said company…. it’s not a stretch to say “I would be paying “.
We lost the battle on IR35 but I have given up on raging about it. I went PAYE, slashed my hours back and took to being a permie like a duck to water.
You have got to be trolling us with a Gary "Best Trader at Citi" Stevenson video!
Rebuilding infrastructure is expensive and if the Gov't borrows too much money to fund it then the bond markets will hit them with higher interest rates which could lead to crippling inflation.
As far as taxing the rich goes, well in 2024 the top 1% of income tax payers accounted for 29% of the income tax raised. Investment income is treated differently but if not in an ISA or SIPP wrapper you are going to pay hefty taxes too. If I was still contracting I would be paying 25% corporation tax and then another 8.75% (basic rate), 33.75% (higher rate), and 39.35% (additional rate) on any dividends.
Address the core UK problem of low productivity, stop choosing cheap labour over investment in automation and the economic outlook might change.
I contracted for one of the larger European banks in the noughties and once a year we would schlepp over to their Business Continuity site on a weekend to practise failing over from the 'live' site in the City. We would make live a handful of BBG terminals, connect to DataStream and have a bunch of juniors login to PC's and run thru' a tick list of tasks. The senior management didn't really engage and their running joke was that it was an elaborate scheme on our part to generate some easy overtime (and to be fair it was pretty tasty day rate).
Very good shout, his Cabin Pressure series is back on BBC Sounds. I remember listening to the series as Benedict Cumberbatch's career rose in parallel with his character Captain Crieff's, it was a marvel, and rather touching, when his character headed off to greener fictitious pastures while the actor became a Hollywood star.
The land will still be there, no one is going to buy up Ambridge and ship it overseas! If land is sold it will give those tenant farmers a chance to buy it and own their futures for a change, rather than living hand-to-mouth, sweating the land with chemicals to maximise yield at the expense of its long-term health.
If your return on investment (ROI) is less than 1% you don't have a business, you have a hobby. Maybe a great hobby, a really useful one that helps other people, but its still a hobby.
Despite the poor returns farmland is incredibly valuable and you do not need to be Adam Smith to work out why!
In every organisation you will have a mix of 'drivers' and 'passengers' and people will move between the two archetypes. Fingers-crossed that the fickle hand of fate will land on the third category, the 'stowaways', who only exist to add friction to every process.
Not that getting the push early is necessarily a bad thing, back in the Dot Com days those let go early tended to get the enhanced payouts while the poor slobs who poured heart and soul into a sinking start-up got statutory payouts.
My shop offers a 'coffee shop' wifi network for staff to use with personal phones and client equipment. It is blocked from the corporate network and has the usual restrictions on gambling sites etc and 12ft.io but otherwise pretty open. Reception hands out passes that last 24 hours to visitors, sounds like it was something similar that the author found in the bins.
I would be happy not to read stuff like "hijack the amygdala", distracting bored office workers really isn't that difficult.
I decided to call it a day and wound up my limited company just before IR35 was expected to kick in (COVID knocked it back, but I was living several time zones away by then). Every year since I have received an automated email asking if I need to fill in a self-assessment, I give the same answer and no one ever responds... until the next email a year later.
If there is any kind of penalty for missing an SLA then folk are going to game the system. When, or if, the ticket winds it's way back to them the clock gets reset, giving them have a second chance to fix it within the agreed service level. Obviously bouncing tickets around like this is deeply inefficient but that is what ITIL has left us with.
Working at Sainsbury’s in the late 1980s we had a lady pop in every Saturday afternoon (when the store was at its busiest) to demand a refund or exchange on a bottle of corked wine. Obviously the bottle was empty because she ‘had poured it out for all her friends’.
The first few times we gave her a bottle to get her out of our hair but then grew wise to it. It always struck me as petty and not a great use of their time.
If I hire an electric scooter in Bath the speed is capped depending on where I am, the same tech' should be applied to more dangerous vehicles.
Driving can be fun and if you especially enjoy speed book a track day and see how you compare to the track record for your age, vehicle class etc.
Be very wary of exaggerating the impact of the cost of labour in manufacturing. Automation has led to ever fewer tasks that require a persons input on the production line. Ford's plant in Dagenham for example directly employs fewer that 3,000 people yet generates over £2.5 Billion in exports (Ford's own figures). With the exception of the rag trade* numbers employed will only go down.
* 15 years ago there was a very promising German idea of using glue that replicated stitching, but it didn't come to fruition.
I was TUPE'd twice in the very early 2000's and while core benefits were respected our conditions diverged sharply from those who remained directly employed, ie no pay rises until our salaries matched those of our new colleagues. I did not hang about at the first firm but the new job went the same way with the same bloody outsourcer!
