Re: So why'd you do it then? @Rich 2
so one wonders whether this may end up being an own goal!
Wouldn't be the first time.
Posts by Graham Dawson
2678 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2007
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UK political parties fall over themselves to win tech contractor vote by pledging to review IR35
Royal Bank of Scotland IT contractor ban sparks murmurs of legal action
Wednesday 20th November 2019 00:12 GMT 
Re: Life goes on
The construction and civil engineering industries run on contractors. Skilled specialists who are mobile between clients and can command top rates as a result. They're about to be fuvkef by ir35, right when the gov is gearing up to throw a bunch of infrastructure projects at the country to try and float the economy.
Tuesday 19th November 2019 22:06 GMT
Re: Add expenses to the mix...
Again, you're conflating evasion and avoidance. Avoidance is not paying taxes that you do not owe.
The partner in question is certainly doing work for the company and drawing a salary as a result of that.
My wife did work for my company when I was a full-time contractor. Mostly filing, for which I paid her a wage. She and my company paid NI and tax on that wage appropriate to the wage earned, no more, with an appropriate tax code to avoid paying tax that she didn't owe.
Tuesday 19th November 2019 21:34 GMT
The point of contracting is that you're not tied to a single employer and can end the contract whenever you like, without losing accrued benefits (because you're employed by your own company, not the client). Permies start on probation and have to accrue holiday and other benefits over the first year of employment. Imagine having to start that over from nothing every six months.
Close the windows, it's coming through the walls: Copper Cthulu invades Dabbsy's living room
Sunday 24th November 2019 22:47 GMT
Every socket has 3 pins, but opening them up shows them to have only 2 wires - live and neutral, with an additional wire joining the ground and neutral pins.
Technically this can appear to work,because neutral is grounded to earth at the substation, so any fault current will also run to ground that way. It causes problems because neutral is still a supply, so if you do get a fault, you get a potential 480V drop instead of just grounding out. Things go bang.
The more I read of your comment, the more I think I might actually have the better situation...
Sunday 24th November 2019 22:43 GMT
Re: Sounds like a "prefab"
It's still standing, certainly.
I was a little hyperbolic with the description, but nut by much. It's concrete walls and floor with steel joists, and with a brick outer skin. Pretty sound, structurally, but an absolute bugger to keep warm. The rest is about right, though: random wires coming out of concrete from god knows where, strange, rubbery things holding parts of the building together, and god-awful light positioning.
Saturday 23rd November 2019 23:46 GMT 
I can beat this. The house I currently occupy was built in the 70s, as a series of concrete slabs held together with glue and rubber. The wiring is largely original (right down to the wylex in the porch that I upgraded with late 70s-era push-button fuses only because it was threatening to explode every time I ran a shower), and cannot be replaced for one simple reason. It's embedded in the concrete.
I assume there must be ducting in there somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can find it, and I don't want to risk trying to pull new wiring through in case it disappears into some parallel universe along the way. And it may already have done that, because the way everything is wired up makes very little sense to the average mind. There are three floors - it's a townhouse, so we get an extra floor with a garage on it - and two lighting circuits.
The first lighting circuit feeds the porch, the bottom of the second flight of stairs, the front toilet, the kitchen and the front bedroom. There's a double switch by the front door. One turns on the porch light. The other turns on a random wire that goes nowhere that I can see.
The second circuit feeds the top of the first flight, the living room, the kitchen, a back bedroom, the upper bathroom and the garage. There's another double switch for the top of the first flight in the living room. One switches the light. The second switches nothing. A third pair of wires also emerges here; both are live, either by inductance or just because. I have no idea where they go either.
There's a third feed that doesn't appear to be wired into the fuse box, but is live in the space that used to hold a narrow chimney and a gas fire. There's another lighting circuit that feeds somewhere into the back yard. The loft lighting is spurred from the electric shower (or was - I disconnected it because I don't want to die).
All of the ring mains in the entire house are on a single 30 amp fuse. A second 30 amp fuse feeds two sockets in the kitchen, and only those two sockets. I'm assuming it was for a water heater, because it's not for the cooker, which is only attached to the gas supply but still somehow manages to have a sparking lighter. I think there's a peltier charging a battery on the back.
Sometimes the garage floods, but that's an aside.
There's an external security light. As far as I can tell it isn't connected to anything, but it lights upevery time someone drives past on the main road a quarter of a mile away. It has a switch on the skirting board by the TV aerial.
The shower has its own separate fuse. The wiring was green when I examined it, because whoever intalled it decided it would be ok to just connect a few strands to the fuse, and then bypass the fuse itself with a thick piece of copper so that it would keep going even if it was loaded with more than the rated 40 amps, because life just isn't worth living.
Half the lights are connected with flex coming out of random holes in the concrete, instead of 1.5mm protected pair as you'd expect. CPC is an afterthought. Some of this wiring is just dangling bare in cavities.
Help.
Huawei's first Google-free phone stripped and searched: Repair not too painful... once you're in
Welcome to cultured meat – not pigs reading Proust but a viable alternative to slaughter
Saturday 16th November 2019 14:54 GMT
Texture is the problem with lab-grown meat, same as with the imitation "meat" in things like the impossible burger. Compared with the sad slabs of cardboard you get in a maccas or burger king you might be able to say the imitation is similar, but the moment you compare to a real, decent burger, or a decent steak, there's just no competition.
The difference is, the plant based stuff can't really solve the problem; plant matter and plant fats have a distinct texture and taste that can't be disguised completely. The cultured meat stuff can. They need to find some way to simulate muscle movement, some way to twitch the muscle fibres so that they gain the texture of meat, and introduce fat layers to round out the flavour profile. Until they do that, you're just getting beef-flavoured slurry. Once they figure it out, you're getting something indistinguishable from the real thing, because it essentially is the real thing.
And imagine the side-technologies that would come of it. If you perfect the ability to grow muscles in a vat, you can extend it to other parts of the body. Skin would be an obvious one.
Labour: Free British broadband for country if we win general election
50 years ago, someone decided it would be OK to fire Apollo 12 through a rain cloud. Awks, or just 'SCE to Aux'?
NASA boffins tackle Nazi alien in space – with the help of Native American tribal elders
I've had it with these motherflipping eggs on this motherflipping train
I'm still not that Gary, says US email mixup bloke who hasn't even seen Dartford Crossing
When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences
Saturday 9th November 2019 00:24 GMT
Re: Beautiful
Oddly enough, this was the policy at Manchester city council back around 2004 or so. I had a data entry job in the adult education department. Everything was administered through rdp, with no local storage whatsoever, and each session close cleared and reset anything that wasn't stored on the user's network partition. The sysadmin in my office spent most of his time sleeping behind his desk.
Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?
Tuesday 5th November 2019 18:22 GMT
Each socket appears isolated and I dividualiaed, with a switch that allows it to control the flow of energy and a clear sense of differentiation from it's neighoura. This satirises the contemporary illusion of endless choice all sourced from the same overarching monoculture, whilst also skewering the related belief that power is distributed amongst the plurality of people, when it can all be traced back to a single, or very few centres of distribution.
IT contractor has £240k bill torn up after IR35 win against UK taxman
Monday 4th November 2019 23:49 GMT
Re: I cannot understand why HMRC pursues contractors so much.
I dodge tax too. I don't pay the top rate of income tax, because I don't earn that much. Wish I did... I avoid paying the extra sales tax on new yachts, because I don't buy yachts. Avoidance - not paying what you don't owe - is not evasion - not paying what you do owe - and equivocating them even in the slightest is dishonest, to say the least.
Reaction Engines' precooler tech demo chills 1,000°C air in less than 1/20th of a second
Register Lecture: Is space law 'hurting' commercial exploration?
BOFH: The company survived the disaster recovery test. Just. The Director's car, however...
Not a death spiral, I'm trapped in a closed loop of customer experience
Saturday 12th October 2019 11:09 GMT
Re: TV Licence
It doesn't. I bought a license a few months back to cover some temporary telly watching and I've been trying to get a refund on the remainder and cancel it since April. The form to cancel it tells me that it is the wrong form for what I want to do and to contact customer service. Customer service tells me to use the form.
I bought it on a cc so it won't automatically renew. I'm expecting an accusatory visit when it runs out.
Mission Extension Vehicle-1 launches to save space from zombie satellites
£99,999, what's your emergency? Paramedics rush to OAP's aid after shock meter reading
The mod firing squad: Stack Exchange embroiled in 'he said, she said, they said' row
NASA Administrator upends the scorn bucket on Elon Musk's Starship spurtings
The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future
UK taxman wins tribunal case against BBC presenters
700km on a single charge: Mercedes says it's in it for the long run
Tuesday 17th September 2019 13:04 GMT
Re: 350kW!!!!
Regs for substation installation in urban areas are very different to rural, particularly on matters of cable routing and grounding. Even ignoring that, there are minimum separations required between a substation and surrounding infrastructure that would be extremely difficult to meet in any reasonably built up area.
On a more general note, the electrical infrastructure in this country is in dire need of upgrade all over.
Just what we all needed, lactose-free 'beer' from northern hipsters – it's the Vegan Sorbet Sour
Opal Fruits, Princess Diana and... PowerToys? Microsoft is dragging Windows 10 back to '95
Let's recap reCAPTCHA gotcha: Our cunning AI can defeat Google's anti-bot tech, say uni boffins
Disgruntled bug-hunter drops Steam zero-day to get back at Valve for refusing him a bounty
RIP Danny Cohen: The computer scientist who gave world endianness meets his end aged 81
Data cops order Ireland to delete 3.2m records after ID card wheeze ruled to be 'unlawful'
You'll soon be fragging noobs on Kubernetes with Google's cloudy take on game servers
Thursday 1st August 2019 18:58 GMT
Re: Is this new?
Maybe some fancy Stockholmer could get that speed, but most of Sweden is still stuck with copper or fttc, and even then it's only larger towns that get any reliable high-speed internet. Of that list, only Singapore has universal high speed coverage, and only because it's a single city-state.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
