This is a solution that hopefully will cease to be relevant as soon as the remaining infrastructure is finished.

Unfortunately I'm needing to run a lot of batch compute jobs (for which the hyperscalers are just insanely expensive - even to have a machine that outclasses a nice laptop becomes silly very rapidly)

I'm considering buying some machines and racking them in a colo but it feels like buying right now is also insane because of current pricing.

Does anyone else have any suggestions for competitive pricing for this kind of thing (e.g. batch jobs)? Was this applied retrospectively to existing customers?

I personally have lots of batch jobs like CFD simulations that could easily run on a fleet of phones with no real reliability issues, and I’d love to reuse old hardware and give it a second life. I’m already considering running old servers from e.g ETB but the cycles per watt on a phone are probably much better.

So much wealth is tied up in pensions and it’s folly to let it all go to supporting the U.S. and eschew local investment altogether.

You make three applications with those fees divided slightly differently each time.

That’s without any legal fees if you need someone to help you prepare your application which will be ~£2k per application.

If you have non-British children or stepchildren (which is generally quite rare) it’s approx those fees per kid as well.

For most other European countries including Ireland the fee is <€500.

Pretty much all forms of permission to stay in the UK other than asylum can only be granted from within the country if you hold an existing long term status. So if you're visiting as a tourist you can't then decide to apply for a spouse visa or even a working holiday or student visa without leaving the country first. If you're already on a student visa or a work visa or similar you can change categories without having to leave.

The graduate visa is essentially an extension to the student visa with slightly different permissions - it makes sense that you can only apply to extend if you're in country and you view it from that lens.

The historic reason behind all this is that there used to be a substantial difference between being granted "leave to enter" and "leave to remain" (out of country vs in country applications). Leave to enter used to be granted by embassies etc and the foreign office, but leave to remain was granted by the home office. Now the home office handles everything in the UK centrally so the distinction is not significant.

It's very true that retirement means losing many of the fun perks associated with a high-flying career, but you have to have those perks in the first place.

Even here on HN, many of us are living fairly ordinary lives, perhaps working on cool technology, but I think even in our fairly exclusive club, not all that many of us have PAs and frequent high-class work travel, even at the apex of our careers.

For those who have all those things and lose them it can be very profound. For a lot of people in that position they spend almost all of their time working in some sense or other, and retirement ends all that. I think that's why people in super successful careers often end up doing advisory work or ending up on boards, so they can keep some of the perks with less of the commitment.