Posts by LucreLout

Re: Bonus Payouts

And there is no point looking for a particular responsable person as the person that is ultimately in charge is the Managing Director, end of story.

Sorry, but that's not right. "Managing Director" is just a corporate title in the City - it's a pay grade effectively. Large banks have literally thousands of MDs.

As long as managers bonus payouts are not affected then nothing is ever likely to change.

This is true. But then they persist with outsourcing everything they can to the cheapest offshorians they can find; so its no surprise to most of us when things fall apart.

Good people cost money. Cheap people are cheap for many reasons, and not just geography.

Surely that means that if Labour win the stock market will fall and the cost will go back down?

Nope, because the asset is valued on nationalisation day at market rate. A labour win would for the first time in history, produce a stock market bounce in utilities, because the betting (and in this instance it would be betting) would be that the EU courts would force them to compensate at prevailing market rate at a minimum.

The rest of the market would crash because of their plans to steal progessively more of the shares and dividends from them for any listed company.

Re: Cuts for Christmas

If you wait until Jan/Feb, they often have a massive credit card bill from the festivities and are then told their income to pay it off is about to evaporate.

I was more thinking we should have flagged this as happening a couple of months earlier, allowing a gradual transition as they find other gigs, which would make life easier for the contractors and much easier for me and my remaining permies.

Announcing it with a 3 week hard stop is .... difficult, for everyone.

Why not just make a proper determination of their IR35 status and keep them then, and structure their terms as outside IR35? Unless you are saying they were inside IR35 all along...

I'm saying its a global megabank and senior though I am, I'm structurally far too junior to have any say in such matters.

The fact is the law on these changes won't settle for a couple of years while cases make their way through the courts setting precedents, and in the mean time the bank continues to accrue exposure to back taxes. That may be a small risk, but all risks come with prices attached and RO's to manage them. Ours has decided it's less of a risk and cost to the business to do away with all our contractors across the board than the cost of capital to hold cover in reserve. That I may disagree with that is no more important to the people making that decision than if you disagree with it as an outsider.

It's a harsh reality for me & my guys, but it is what it is.

I mean, that's demonstrably not true, but whatever keeps you happy.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/10/sajid-javid-five-year-labour-spend-plan-near-12tn

You're using the wrong costings, which is why you've got this completely backwards.

That was before he pledges, for instance, £100bn to nationalize OpenReach on top of existing spending. As the stock market has drifted higher over the month, due to expectations of a Tory majority, the cost of these pledges has risen substantially.

Labour are making commitments to spend billions more on a daily basis with literally no clue as to where the money might come from to pay for it all. It's no good you coming here with links that are days old when they're comitting £100Bn before breakfast on a daily basis.

@Gordan

Is that because of dictat from above that there are to be no contractors?

Yes, I'm afraid it is, I had no choice and no leeway.

I've spent a lot of time and effort on my recruitment and where I've made a mistake and got a type 2 contractor (contracting because they couldn't get or keep a permie role) then I've moved them on. My contractors are at the ninja end of the skill/effort set.

I'm actively persuing other roles for them in my network of contracts and doing the best I can to see them in new gigs ASAP. Doing what we're doing is fine - it's part of business, but I don't personally agree with this sort of thing right before Christmas.

IR35 is a real mess. Let's hope the next government scraps it ASAP.

They won't.

If its a Conservative government, well, this is sort of happening on their watch already. If its a mostly red coalition of chaos, they've already committed £1.5 Trillion pounds that they do not have in extra spending to nationalizing near on everything, so no way will they watch "their" tax income sail on by. If it were reversed under labour while taxes shoot up for permies, then you'd see everyone jump ship to contracting and they'd have to target it.

I've already had to wave bye bye to my best contractors. We know they won't go perm (I've done my level best to find opportunities for them regardless), and we don't have the budget to offset the increase in costs. This is likely to pick up speed next year as more and more firms come to the same conclusions, which may make it difficult for some of the departing to attract other gigs.

2020 is going to be a bumpy year for contracting, which is dissapointing as I was hoping to do that next.

Re: There are an estimated 4.6 million contractors in the UK.

A lot of them are registered in Isle of Man, which doesn’t have any legal tax benefits unless you actually move there

Sorry, but you have that wrong. Very wrong. You don't have to live in a place to pay tax there.

No CGT. No IHT. Top tax rate of 20% and taxes are capped at a £120k - after which its impossible to be taxed further.

It is applied on Max Sourced Income, in other words your pay from the UC, thereby allowing you to leverage dual taxation treaties to avoid paying again onshore, leaving your surplus income there to invest tax free.

The division I work in does this sort of stuff in great quantities, so I know a thing or two about it.....

Re: When it gets as far as a tribunal ruling

That depends on company policy. The bank I work at won't engage with any form of tribunal short of legal action, thereby forcing the employees name into the public domain and thus tarnishing their career. Many many application forms require you to tick a box if you've ever sued an employer.

Only releasing to public record cases which former employees lose and where the case can be shown to be vexatious would be the single biggest positive change to workers rights, yet nobody is proposing it. Not domestically, not in the EU. Nowhere.

Re: I have it on good authority ..

You might want to inquire where all the hundreds of billions the Tories borrowed has gone while they've been cutting public services to the bone.

YAWN. There have been NO CUTS. Its a union myth and a lie. Public spending has risen year on year every year - that is a fact. There's no more left to spend, contrary to what your labour candidate may tell you.

Where has the money gone you ask? It's gone where it always goes - on public sector pay and pensions. Where it now also goes is on interest payments on the national debt, which is really just money we spend on what we 'want' today that our children pay back for us tomorrow.

Re: I can only assume that the stalkage etc moved into legal/crime territory

You missed this bit then: "The four just so happened to be involved in labor organizing at the internet goliath"?

While I saw that and have few doubts its played it's part, it is in every way trumped by this part:

"They argued on Monday that a section of the corporation's code of conduct that says Google employees should “speak up if you see something that you think isn’t right” provided ample justification for tracking and scrutinizing their colleagues."

Sorry, but data my employer keeps and retains about me, my work, and pretty well anything else, isn't provided so colleagues who feel morally superior can snoop through it at leisure for whatever ends they feel is morally justifiable.

The division I work for at the bank is popular with some, and unpopular with others (an equal mix of envy and ideological objections), and my colleagues have absolutely no right to track me. If you don't like a legally permissible project the company is pursuing then you need to leave: you don't get to raid my data and use it for your own ideological ends.

Did they leak the data? Who knows. Frankly it doesn't matter. They had no business using it for ideological purposes when that was not the reason for which it was provided to the company or for which it had been retained.

Rights and laws, including the right to privacy and the law regarding data access, apply to everyone, not only to those deemed worthy by those who consider themselves societies morality police. This might not be a popular view, but think it through. I decide I'm morally superior to you so I decide to track you using data supplied to your employer for legitimate aims - I've made all the decisions and you bear all of the consequences, yet I've not actually been permitted or authorized to do any of what I did, I just decided my morals are superior to yours and then did as I pleased. That, in a nutshell, is their defence.

Surely a hacker is someone who hacks things together (hardware or software). A cyber-criminal is someone who breaks into someone's computers.

I'd just add "without contractual permission" to that. I break into other peoples computers from time to time, but only on their specific prior request and with their full knowledge of what I'm up to along the way.

holding him in largely single isolation in a high security prison is not an acceptable situation for someone who has skipped bail

And yet I find it entirely acceptable. He has a history of absconding and thumbing his nose at the nation, so frankly he ain't getting an open prison.

he's not exactly a remorsless and likely to repeat murderer

Well, he is remorseless. Literally, he still thinks his actions are just peachy. As to the latter part, well, did anyone die due to his actions, and was that predictable ahead of time?

Re: Stating the obvious

Now we'll simply never know.

^^^ This. If you don't show up to court you can't clear your name.

This will taint anything and everything he or his group do for the rest of his life.

Why doesn't anyone ever have a handle like "The Dork Overlard" ?

Because if I used the same name online as my wife uses for me at home then it'd not be much of a pseudonym.

This idea aside you're voting for further deaths, be it Grenfell again or homelessness or Universal Credit or the NHS being sold off.

Socialism and communism have killed more people than anything else last century. Socialism is the last great evil of the last century and it must be extinguished for our children to have any future worth the name.

The NHS already kills more than 30,000 people a year due to mistakes, and frankly is way past its best and in desperate need of modernization. This canard of the left that the NHS is the only way to provide universal healthcare is dishonest in the extreme. It's become a bottomless money pit which we cannot hope to fund into the future without a ground up rebuild with a focus on efficiency and patient care rather than as a means of income provision and a job for life.

Re: Bad premise

They won't be taking broadband away from anyone.

You could only possibly believe that if you totally disregard the 1970s. The unions will strike so often your service will be patchy and unreliable at best. Nationalization does not, can not, and will not work.

Re: Marx would be proud

But the thing is, supposing you can raise 20 billion

It's not £20 billion, its £100 billion, which is again a huge amount of money this country does not have.

This morning alone Corbyn knocked £760,000,000 of just one company with this morally and fiscally bankrupt commie rhetoric. That's a lot of money in the real world. That's the entire annual income tax from almost 250,000 average tax payers gone in a puff of smoke all before breakfast.

No sane person with the faintest grasp of economics can possibly justify voting for Labour. No person with a shred of decency could either given the rampant anti-semitic views held by most of the party.

Re: "Labor is pro-remain, right?"

It must be mandatory for the result to be respected

^^^

This.

For democracy to work, with any parties and on any subject, the losers MUST capitulate and accept defeat. The will of the majority MUST be enacted or democracy no longer works.

Democracy is literally the tyranny of the many over the few. The alternative is actual tyranny.

We really ought to pay more attention to the people who effectively said 'this is too silly to participate in'.

If you don't vote then you have agreed to side with the winner, whoever it is and whatever the vote was about. That's how it works. What you can't have is the losers adding them to their side and saying "only 34% voted for this", well, no or the vote wouldn't have passed.

The only workable alternative to that is to entirely discount those that didn't vote, because either they didn't give a stuff about whatever the issue was, or they were too slow to make up their mind.

Re: Marx would be proud

Issuing bonds isn't quite the same as printing money. Because they have to be paid back.

Yes but where it becomes the magic money tree is that they simply print new bonds to pay back the old. Think about it - when did any labour government ever leave the power with more money than when it came to power? The answer is never. Labour governments end when they bankrupt the country - they literally all have.

Something they can't afford on day one is only going to be affordable on their last day if they've completely trashed its utility.

However doing QE and having the bonds directly bought from government by the Bank of England is directly printing money - and they also plan to do that.

The problem is that the interest payments on the debt the last labour government ran up now cost more than national defence. We literally can't afford another one because we're still paying for the last one.

I'm not sure it's true that Labour's northern support are leave-voters.

Well, my town voted 83% leave. I'd say that's fairly committed given that's more people than voted labour, even in the Socialist Peoples Paradise of Sunderland.

most leavers are either Conservative voters or traditional non-voters.

That's only true in the south. Up North and in the midlands most leave voters were labour voters; they had to be because there weren't enough Conservative voters to deliver those mandates - many many brain dead red constituencies.

Though it's also true that I think Labour held most of the top ten remain voting constituencies in England in 2015 - as well as most of the top ten leave ones.

Yup but the remain ones are mostly London(ish) with a high percentage of youngsters, which was my point. Northern heartlands Vs young south - the party is trying to play each off against the next in a blind pursuit of power with absolutely zero idea how to reconcile that once they're in #10, which is all they actually care about.

Though as you say, none of this privatisation can be legal if it reaches the ECJ

Legal or not they simply can't afford it. Parliament can't set the prices because those firms are owned in the main by private sector tax payers in their pensions. Nationalizing them at anything less than full market rate would be theft of our pensions, which simply won't wash.

The country gets one lowest common denominator broadband provider and no competition as they will have all died out.

You won't even get that much of the year as the unions will be on strike whenever:

1) They want to blackmail more money out of us

2) England play football

3) The weather is nice and they want a BBQ

Re: Marx would be proud

BT will receive bonds for a chunk of the company I and many others have shares in.

Labour literally don't understand that issuing bonds IS printing money. The last election McMao was blathering on about not printing money but issuing bonds instead, as though the two were somehow different.

Their apparent policy is to negotiate a better Brexit deal which they'll then put to a referendum where they'll campaign against it.

That's not a policy, its fear. Their party is split between their Northern heartlands who demand Brexit, and their younger southern voters who think Corbyn is cool, who want to remain. We can't do both (leaving with a deal is the only available compromise over leaving without one or remaining in) so they're desperately hoping the "brain dead red" parts of the country will wake up on polling day and follow family tradition. After all, nobody really knows why great grandad voted labour, but its what the family have done ever since.

My home town (Sunderland) is, to be frank, a shithole. It's been a shithole through blue governments, and red. But every election they vote "red or dead" with seemingly no clue that in order for things to change, they have to change who they vote for. Swing seats get investment, 100 year baronies do not. Labour treat my home city with utter contempt and yet still, still the locals can't see past a red rosette. It's all very sad.

Re: Paranoid, moi?

And of course we're all going to trust a broadband network run by the government, aren't we.

I stopped counting the cost of Labours planned nationalizations when it passed £1.5 Trillion. There's not actually the money in the country to do it, even if it were a good idea, which of course it isn't.

However, the problem comes when investment is needed and the economy is tight. Where does the government of whatever hue spend its money? Health, education, gas & leccy, rail, mail, and cat pictures all become competing concerns. Something has to lose out, which is why we got the chronic under-investment in utilities and rail that we're only now seeing the end of the backlog of work.

Re: 600 bots

It's being positioned that a single unit of 'bot' is equivalent or comparable to a human worker, but the measure of the chatbot software's capability is actually incredibly vague.

I'm not sure they are positioning it as such.

600 bots, 2600 people. Its very likely a single chat bot can replace whole call centers. In McDonalds they may need more screens as people are slower at ordering than staff were at entering them into the tills, but the cost of each screen is probably £2k so for the cost 1 staff member they can have at least 15 screens.

Good or bad for people depends on what you believe will happen next - scrap heap of life, or opportunity to get a better role. I expect there's no universal outcome......

Re: Odd pattern...

Christmas reductions, anyone?

See, for all people bang on about employment rights, when they focus on shit that really doesn't matter, while this sort of thing does.

Why can we not have two simple changes:

1) Employees name to be kept confidential in employment disputes unless the employer wins - you can't enforce your rights in court if it's going to damage your ability to get your next job(s), and in many professional industry's it does.

2) No RIF between 1st Nov and 31st Jan unless the whole C-suite forgo pay, benefits, and stock during that timeframe. My bank routinely culls in the run up to year end and it's effectively locking people out of their next job until Feb/Mar when budgets get signed off. Can these people not plan ahead more than 3 months? Really?

Cutting heads in the run up to Christmas is pretty merciless, and I say this as quite possibly the Reg's biggest capitalist.