Posts by LucreLout

Re: we have already reduced 2,600 roles

in English: we have fired 2600 people

Yup. The statement should more correctly have read "we have already reduced 2,600 proles".

Re: Legality

The Washington, DC, Metro has rules against eating in its stations or on its trains and buses.

The UK doesn't yet, but since I often have to sit next to sweaty cyclists who haven't showered, whatever I may be eating is frankly not the most unpleasant part of the journey.

Re: Here we go again...

One aspect of this is dealing with those that break the law, the other side is making sure organisations can still operate.

It is, but unfortunately the ICO has been asleep at the wheel for decades. Primarily it seems to exist to prevent people suing companies that break the act directly in small claims court. Not once have they ever fined an organisation I've complained about despite the legal & health ramifications being quite significant. The CPS deliberately chose to ignore the DPA in my case, said as much in writing, and still only got a telling off by post. The NHS ignored my request for almost a year until the ICO got around to telling them they couldn't, after which they provided mealy mouthed excuses & lies, but still no GDPR fine.

There's no point in having both the GDPR and the ICO as the latter makes the former impossible for individuals to enforce.

Re: Why a 3D printed gun?

I suspect the ten years in jail (UK law) if caught with it probably would have a deterrent effect though.

And yet it doesn't. People still get shot in London all the time (24 last year), by proper guns and converted blank firers or historic weapons too. I can't really see why if the threat of jail time doesn't deter folk from that that it would with a plastic gun. Maybe not carried every day, but collected and deployed when intended to be used.

And contractors will "get things done", as they know they generally won't be kept around unless they are adding value.

That's the idea but that's not the reality. There's two types of contractors - those that have a very strong skillset and can get things done quickly, and the second type which basically can't hold down a permie job. In my 25 years experience, the latter vastly outnumber the former.

Those with the skillset are usually extremely good to work with and would be able to command even higher rates were it not for the latter type soaking up so much cash.

Oh, and when business slows down you don't have to think about redundancy payments, you just shrink your contractor workforce. No hard feelings, and thanks for all the fish.

Not very likely in finance. What we do is cut rates by 10% thereby keeping all the output but trimming the input costs. There's an exceptions list usually for each managers best contractors, but you can only put one or two names on it so you have to be choosy.

I'm afraid you're confusing intelligence and reason

I can see why you'd think that, but no.

With only a below average intelligence, a person would not be equipped with the faculty to reason about complex issues - which is why you get political strongholds that are utter shitholes but have voted the same political party for 100 years, as an example.

If only the stupid were dogmatic there would be no problem, nobody would listen to them...

Neatly dovetailing into the politics example I gave above. Their vote is the same as your vote and has to be listened to equally. Which should transparently obviously be a problem, if we're worried about electoral interference. If its a genuine problem, swapping Pravda for Facebook won't solve it - only restricting voting and reshaping society to value intelligence would accomplish the task, but that would condemn half the populace to limited life choices and disenfranchisement forever.

This is one of those times where there are no easy options that change anything. The only easy option is to change nothing and live with the interference. Everything else quickly becomes a hard choice if anything is to be accomplished.

Re: No problem

>Home of the Brave

Scotland?

They wish.

Scotland repeatedly elects a political party that brays on almost exclusively about independence and has achieved nothing constructive in its whole history. The one thing it did a achieve was a once in a generation referendum, which it then lost mostly because too many Scots were frightened of change.

Sorry, but that isn't brave, its paralysis, indecision, and fear. And I say that as a Northerner who quite likes the Scots & Scotland.

Re: its 2019

Lady Hale has long argued that the judiciary needed to become more diverse so that the public have greater confidence in judges. I think wearing spider broaches instead of silly wigs makes that point.

I think the point would be better made having the senior judiciary made up partly of people attending Northern comps, or who had prior careers to solicitor/barrister. How that could be achieved I have no clue, but frankly, whether you wear a dress to work or not isn't really the kind of diversity that adds any value.

The vast majority of the judiciary, and indeed the legal profession as a whole, is made up of the ineffectual middle classes who cannot comprehend the lives of an ordinary person raised on a council estate, or a factory worker, or other such person. The disconnect is what causes the problem, not the clothing.

Normal working class people are simply not represented in public life - the labour front bench are all millionaires, many with tax efficient family trusts, expensive second homes, and whose idea of proper behavior is for Lady Nugee (Emily Thornberry) to take the piss out of a working class bloke who's put England flags on his van during the world cup. If Thorbers thinks that's acceptable from the self styled "party of the working classes" then who is supposed to represent them?

Most people consider the purpose of the law and the criminal justice system is to provide them with justice for transgressions. Lawyers love of the law as a thing in its own right, quite separate from justice, compounds the problem. Taking shit away is the job of the toilet; most people are happy with that without marveling at the toilet itself.

The whole thing is rotten to the core, and that, that is why most of the public have less than zero confidence in the judiciary, the law, or the people who make them.

Re: Depends if decent efforts at data security made by Morrisons

And if as if oft the case your pay role system does not have an inbuilt function to assess pay rises and create a mail merge to print letter for each employee for their revised remuneration?

Replace the system for one that does. Its relatively cheap and easy these days, especially compared to the size of a GDPR fine. Most systems are perfectly capable of applying a cost of living rise to most employees. There's no reason to extract the data to a spreadsheet to add 1 or 2%. Employees can get a login to go view their comp page.

And yes printing physical letters for such things is still a requirement, in some cases because of what is written in union arrangement

Then either kick out the union or force them to modernise. I don't want my data leaking because some dinosaur hasn't realised the 70's ended and the world is digital.

not all of your employees will have an email address or at least not one they wish to share with their employee

Set one up for them and assign it as their communication address. Simples. Leaking everyone's data because maude doesn't want to work email/computers or paranoid pete thinks he's smart playing games will only lead maude, pete and a whole other staff to the redundancy queue when the employer gets their balls sued off for perfectly avoidable breaches.

Re: Beautiful

The user had been told many times that the company policy was that all files had to be stored on the network and any local files would be lost in the event of a disaster.

We have this policy and even have a corporate OneDrive, and still, still not a week goes by where I don't hear some colleague shouting into the phone about lost product.

Yes, the nuke from orbit approach does convey a lack of understanding as its more often than not possible to rectify the issue without formatting or re-imaging, but yes, it does happen and it does sometimes have to happen. Right, wrong, doesn't matter - surely by now everyone knows its what IT support are likely to do and it's not like they haven't prepared opportunity for you to mitigate the consequences.

Re: "Microsoft scammers"

If I've the time and in the mood I like to string these people on for as long as possible. I take the view that while they're talking to me they're not scamming someone more vulnerable / gullible.

I do the same.

My folks got scammed by these scum a few years back. Took me ages to unshaft their computer and get their credit & debit cards changed over.

My proudest moment was being escalated all the way to engineering with a very senior manager also trying to help me become a victim. They worked really hard to solve the problem of why we just couldn't get the scam to work on my machine. Eventually I cracked up laughing and asked them exactly how dumb they thought I was - it took them a full minute to realize they'd been played and not only was there no payday coming, but their details were getting forwarded to action fraud etc.

Re: Surely

What you disparagingly call the meat sack has parallel processing capabilities that vastly outstrip whatever is driving your Johnny Cab.

They may well do, but if they aren't looking out of the window they won't see the hazard, they won't assess its risks, they won't form alternative action plans, and they won't take correct and timely action. They'll just plough them down, as was the case in the matter at hand.

Re: I cannot understand why HMRC pursues contractors so much.

Given that you control both sides of that transaction.The licence fees can be anything from zero, to some number conveniently made up to be just below last years profit. That's the complaint.

The relative value of the IP can be considered in simple terms as "Would the transaction have happened without the branding/IP?" In most cases, the answer is no. If I could have use of the Coke brand for a few weeks I could make a fortune selling alternative drinks, many many times what I could make selling the same drink without it. So is it the drink or the brand that the sale derived from?

Most companies using IP transfer keep to sensible levels - Starbucks (I believe though haven't checked in a while) remits about 3% of revenue for the use of the mermaid logo.

The real dodge comes from the transfer pricing - buying the coffee used by SB UK from SB Wholesale at significant markup from what wholesale coffee sells at. Now there's always a markup no matter what you buy from whom, but yes, some companies (I'm not suggesting Starbucks is one before their dogs of law attack) do use it more for avoidance than operational effectiveness.

However, people seem to think words like "fair" or "moral" apply to taxation when they don't. They don't even really mean anything, sort of like "ethics" as a concept. International companies don't give a toss what your local road looks like or whether your diversity is sufficiently coordinated. No matter how much moaning people do about it, you, we, all of us, are in a global competition for their tax revenue which they can realistically assign almost anywhere with very little to stop them. The least worst answer is to compete, rather than get none of the revenue because you didn't want to try. You can downvote that all you like but it won't change the facts in reality.

Might this also be an indication of how poor many UK companies are at the continuing education of their staff?

Lots of places I've worked take the view that the employee is responsible for their continuing education. They simply clear out during the annual culling anyone who doesn't continually upskill themselves.

That's not to say I agree its solely the employees responsibility, but really, if you aren't looking after your education, who exactly should be? So it's definitely mostly the employees responsibility.

The bank I work for will spend a (very) small amount of money on certs/training, but that's dwarfed by the amount of money thrown into the diversity or health & safety holes.

Perhaps also how seriously that staff believe they might even need continuing education?

Not continuing to upskill yourself is a very time limited concept. Literally everyone I know who took the view that their employer had to do it or they wouldn't has had patchy employment over the last 10 years (which has been tech boom II). Come the recession next year they're really going to struggle - the era of more jobs than coders is all but over for this cycle, competition for roles is going to come back in a big way over the next few years. If you're not ready now, make yourself ready ASAP.

Re: A bit out of date?

I see the Petrolheads are out in force today.

It seems that any post supporting EV's is downvoted almost into oblivion.

I'm a petrolhead and I love EVs, not as much as I love V8s, but I do love them. I will have one at some point. They've basically ecotard proofed one of my favourite hobbies. And, ludicrous as this will sound given that we now have something like 250 years worth of oil on line thanks to tech and prices, if the oil was to run low, EVs mean we have somewhere to go for rapid transport.

Oh, and even on long trips, my running costs are 4-6p/mile. Can you get that out of your dino-guzzler?

You do realise that with the premium price of the EV, you're basically pre-purchasing about 10 years worth of fuel, right? Unfortunately, they don't run on smugness alone.

The tyres on most EV's last longer than on ICE's and because of the regenerative braking (using the electric motor as a generator) I need to hardly use the brakes.

You seem to be overlooking the amount of tyre wear due to cornering. Its not all about acceleration and breaking, though in terms of torque being available immediately in an EV, tyre wear could quite conceivably rise with like for like driving.

Those facts mean that the amount of pollution coming from an EV in normal use is miniscule when compared to ICE cars.

No it doesn't. The pollution used to create the batteries for an EV far far outstrip any CO2 emitted from an ICE in its working life. You're in the hole before you leave the showroom, and that's assuming you run it on pollution free electricity, which no matter what your supplier may tell you, isn't CO2 free. All you do buy insisting on it, is defray your pollution onto the rest of us because there's not enough "green" energy to go around.

Have an EV, love your EV, by all means. Just lose the smugness, because that's borne mostly of ignorance than facts. And I speak as an EV loving petrolhead.

Re: Google is laughing all the way to the bank

I'm over 40. I go for an interview. Inquire after the interview. "Another person was a better fit." That's all they have to say. The victim has to prove the offense. The words used keep the employer from being sued.

Simple grouping by role and age, with a count of each group will reveal any age bias. Daily fines until it doesn't. Simple, fair, and leaves nowhere to hide.

Re: Unsurprising

AFAIK this isn't a huge problem in the UK as the tax man can go after directors and/or shareholders personally if the company folds but hasn't paid its tax bill.

The reason people used to do it was to convert revenue into capital gains, for which there is a separate allowance and lower tax rate. The rules on this changed (again) a few years ago so it's not as common as it once was.

Re: So the people who were sent to prison were benefitting finacially from sharing ...

I for one still cannot see how copyright infingement without financial gain can be anything other than a civil case.

I expect it was because of the financial loss to the copyright holder, rather than gain to the person offering the content for piracy. A civil recovery case would be difficult as you'd need to know who downloaded the material. IANAL.

Re: This surprises who, exactly?

It seems that Hollywood and the TV people are partly to blame. They portray military, LEO and Feds as "cool cowboy" types with lost of slang in their speech etc. and so many have grown up with that, they think it;s real. And it has become real.

Stone did the same thing with Gordon Gekko. He'd intended him to come across and an asshat and as a condemnation of his behavior; instead he created a template that pretty well every trader has wanted to follow ever since. Literally, the character defines what success looks like for that role.

Be careful what you make seem cool, because you just might make it the default. My wife still thinks my working day looks more like the Wolf of Wall Street than Clerks. Either of which would be a genuine improvement!

Re: Autonomous driving is months, years, or decades away

Autonomous driving is decades away, imho, if we talk driving in a rural Italian village, mere months away if we talk on the highway.

I don't think it's coming, at least not to ancient and populous capital cities like London.

Most cars & commercial vehicles follow most rules most of the time, and that's about as good as it gets. At the other end of the predictability spectrum are cyclists and toddlers who generally do whatever they feel like in the moment with scant knowledge of what the rules actually are, much less an intent to obey them.

Absent strong predictability, a self driving car has absolutely no chance of getting things right most of the time. Banning cyclists and putting railings up to deal with dogs/toddlers entering the road randomly would be more politically difficult than simply not approving the use of self driving cars.

Politics rather than technology is what will hold back autonomous vehicles over the coming decades.

Monitoring an investigation into yourself? That should be career-ending, surely?

I'm pretty sure it will be - they'll just be following their disciplinary process to protect themselves from scum, sorry, to protect themselves from lawyers. I meant lawyers. Scum.

Re: "People that have figured out how to make money do so, and those who haven't do not."

Well, luck and... larceny, as well as not a small measure of lying, cheating, threats and intimidation

Yes, because nobody ever got rich by working hard or being smart. Wait, what's that on the horizon? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a fact which rather obliterates your world view.

https://www.standard.co.uk/insider/alist/the-worlds-richest-selfmade-billionaires-and-how-long-it-took-them-to-make-their-first-million-a4156456.html

There's a world of difference between the founder of a business and someone who simply works for it, at least in terms of contribution to the success or otherwise of the business.

She's grimly hanging on.

It's a waste of time. The best revenge is to move onwards and upwards in a better job with a better company for a better comp package.

In the City, you might get a doughnut one year (no payrise / bonus), a second back to back doughnut is known as a Bond (double-O) and is the clearest signal its time to leave the bank, your career there isn't going to blossom. Managers will try their very hardest to pretend to your face that it isn't the case, but it is, and everyone knows it.

While salaries are generally set at replacement level rather than some chronology or inflation based oddity, if the company doesn't think you've moved up the value proposition in 24 months then they'll never respect you.

I worked for a very shit bank once and tried very hard to get paid out, but they made it clear it was simply never going to happen - I had a job for life but I had that job for life, which wasn't what I wanted. Quit and move on - C suite ineptitude isn't personal - they simply don't know or care that you exist.