Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!” ― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts

The Project Sandstone series from RUSI digs into various techniques smugglers and sanctions busters use to hide or mask illicit activity at sea.

[0]: http://architecturethehardparts.com/ - book on the way, the training course is excellent

I'm a big fan of Mark Richards and Neal Ford's emphasis of architecture being about trade-offs. No one thing is a silver bullet.

The student rental market 12 or so years ago was definitely full of horror stories about getting deposits returned, knowing which letting agents to go with useful insider knowledge. The Scottish deposit security scheme is only a few years old and has definitely helped improve the situation. The rental market is one in which there can be significant power/information imbalances and where some protections make absolute sense.

For the rest I use Charge Place Scotland - it's a scheme where you pay £20 a year and get free unlimited charging at various locations around Scotland, they do have some separate locations you have to pay, usually for faster charging. Certainly amongst my friends with electric vehicles it's a point of pride to never pay for charging beyond that £20.

Business locations can acquire visitors by offering them, and there's all sorts of upsell benefits. A garden centre that has one might get me to stay and visit their cafe if I know I'm going to be there for an hour for instance.

Then there is also the question of fees, if the fund is beating the S&P by 1-2% after fees, and their fees are 2 and 20 then the strategy is significantly beating the market. The problem is that there is so much money chasing PE, and that leverage means they don't need that much in client funds, that there isn't a push to lower fees that you see in the equity market.

If you're operating in a financial services world with audit requirements and other large scale organisation joys this could be well worth a look.

https://github.com/BBVA/mirrorgate

This stuff isn't that hard - but those of us doing it see the mad things that people do when they're given blanket, even time bound, admin access. They're the ones dealing with the support calls when then every SQL Server installation has been done differently with no details of what specifically was done. IaC works.

The credit crunch destroyed government revenues, in response the Government ballooned the deficit rather than impose massive cuts. They've spent the past decade not growing spending so that GDP growth has caught up - in the process massively increasing the national debt.

It's great that young people are getting involved in politics. One can't but help think of the much attributed quote: if a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.

The best asset managers charge low fees, they make up for it very comfortably in volume and long term holdings. Warren Buffet famously doesn't sell, he doesn't need to make thousands of deals a year to eke a small profit from each, he needs to judiciously pick fewer things that are going to do well in the long term. All too often people don't want to properly invest however, they want to speculate.