It isn't like I would be rushing to upgrade anyway but the refusal to cater is tiresome

That it is! It will require an actual change to the societal contract to resolve as best I can tell - and it remains unclear to me what direction the change will take.

Focusing on one thing here, for convenience. The problem remains that costs are up far in excess of budgets - austerity be damned! We are forced to prioritise, cutting the generally useful but "non-essential". (There is often a legal duty to the essential things)

https://ifs.org.uk/publications/how-have-english-councils-fu...

Is a great breakdown. To illustrate my argument see Table 1. Real-terms spending per person by service area, various years (2024–25 prices)

> Within total service spending, per-person spending on children’s social care services [] increased by 11% in real terms. Spending on adult social care [] was also relatively protected, falling by only 2%. This meant much larger cuts to other services: more than 40% in the case of housing, culture and leisure, and highways and transport, and nearly 60% cuts to planning and development.

We cut what _could_ be cut, and that's a prioritisation call.

edit: now in https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/fixing...

Great rabbit hole for my Wednesday morning! :D

- Ruler who is unrestrained by law or constitution

- A usurper of sovereignty

- Ruler who uses power oppressively or unjustly

Obviously b) is not applicable as per GP. He has also been constrained by the supreme court and others multiple times in this term, which suggests a) is a stretch. c) probably a fair accusation, though I'm not sure I would agree.

Again, this isn't going to beat someone who knows you've got something to hide, they can physically deconstruct/analyse the drive, but at least it's not going to be found by automatic scanning/software etc?

I generally suspect folks would be a lot happier if they'd had a few more crap jobs as a baseline!

I think my lowest point was vacuum packing smoked salmon. It wasn't dissimilar in some ways (repeat simple task endlessly), but the real crux was the absolute inability to evade the smell. It came home with you and lingered hard. The greasy aroma of kitchen fryers had nothing on this.

Now we know to set the whitelist up but I see in the server logs people regularly try to get on with appropriately "wEwIlldESTroYyOOurSvr" tags etc

To be clear, it is currently costing the taxpayer said thousands of Euros. Time spent by government workers on FoI requests is meaningful and not free. That does not make them a bad idea, but we should be clear that passing costs on to the requester isn't precisely nefarious?

I am fine with ulez, but it is really important to be clear that people do suffer for it. Not out of towners. Real Londoners - especially with the extension to the outer boroughs.

As a rule most people with a ~10 year old car which runs fine at low cost are going to be frustrated at an extra tax on their vehicle. (It is not like the manufacture of a new electric car is green.)

Ordinary People always were going to have to suffer to migrate off fossil fuels. Expecting them to like it is somewhat hopeful!

This is backwards, companies do not choose where employees live. Employees do. That they choose to live with long and unpleasant commutes (typically in exchange for more space, cheaper housing etc) is in general terms on them not the company. I'll allow that the rowback of wfh from a previously fully remote job is on the company - but certainly outside of that I have little agreement.

That's a more useful estimate than merely the flight costs, agree - though the fixed operation costs don't change much in an 1800 vs a 2100 callout scenario.

> Still an order of magnitude less than the commercial US operators.

It's wild!

You'd do as well to hope that people wake up and stop opening the damned sites

Those numbers made me blanch somewhat! Having been in a helicopter (aka Air Ambulance) in the UK, all of which operate as charities iirc, I was curious about their costs.

> The average cost of a helicopter mission is £4,748* and the average cost of a critical care car or rapid response vehicle mission is £2,054*[1].

https://www.airambulancesuk.org/about-us/facts/

eesh

Game updates can take a lot longer if you need them (ie multiplayer) to play. idk

Say, for example, my job is allocating capital across the S&P 500. My work is picking the stocks, the fruits of my labour are excess returns.

Are those excess returns not work? What are they?