Posts by Alt C

Big John - did you actually read the piece? He said the bloke had some good ideas but was being a bit of a dick about it - that's hardly auto-smearing in my book - it is what used to happen - taking a nuanced view of a person before America's IQ dropped and everthing had to be black an white with no shades of grey. He also pointed out the faults in Obama's approach too.

I also call pot calling kettle on your 'treating his supportes as not quite human' - your rants, insults and other vitriol against everything Obama and 'liberal' show you have been doing the same thing, kind of precludes you taking the moral high ground now.

BTW you do realise you don't have to read stuff you know will trigger you?

Nice try but how many choices do you have in any big city? from the comments here its still one, two maybe three if your lucky?

I live in a relativly small city and have at the last look 19 providers to choose from. From wikipedia (not the best source I know) I can see 80+ cities larger than mine in the US. I'd expect the 'free unregulated market' to be offering better choice in those areas where the population supports rollout of networks - which it doesn't appear to be doing.

N.B. yes even in the UK rural areas suffer and America has more rural areas so i'd expect those areas to not have the best of services.

Re: In simpler times

From the article that's what is being threatened in Europe - the UK with its less restrictive employment legislation (read crap) gets to endure losing all the jobs Europe is protecting - expect to see more of this in our new agile 'open for business' economy.

Re: More tax revenue?

Exactly what happened to me, after being told I would be caught by IR35 for a long term contract I was on I decided to go back to being permie.

Living in the back end of nowhere the combination of travel costs weekly accommodation and then IR35 just made the hassle of the contractor life not worth while.

Net result I finally found a job at home, now have a life and only earn 5K more than I used to pay in tax so quite a loss to the revenue.

I've heard from some fairly senior people, it's because if they admit their pick is an abject failure it reflects badly on their ability to select candidates for a post hence above a certain level people never fail because it looks bad on those that hired them and they never know when that person will be on a selection panel for a job they want

well private companies have been putting constraints on what people can say about them in their own time for donkeys years so no need to go all anti-gov on this one. Indeed companies have sacked employees for things they've posted on personal accounts even if there is no connection to the business

Re: Amazed

Total up all those subscriptions and compare and contrast the price for the BBC license fee.

I can't speak for HBO or AMC as to how much they show being original programs (never having subscribed to them) but netflix has 90 million(?) subscribers worldwide and produces enough original content to fill a week (maybe two) each year if you're lucky - the BBC has access to 27.1 million families according to the ONS (assuming every UK family paid) and they run 2.5 TV channels, a number of radio channels and local broadcasts - if they had access to netflix revenue streams and the need not to provide telly every day I suspect their quality might go up too.

Tip: try comparing apples with apples.

The BBC certainly isn't perfect but its much better than lots of the foreign TV I've seen.

Re: Services driven by open data ...

AC - what it did before self funding yes - I can see your point there and yes it would be nice but maps become outdated, it became a trading fund in 1999 (so we would only have maps from prior to that) and since 2015 it is a govco - so I'd guess it would be very reluctant to let its main revenue stream geographic data out into the world as open data - that of course wouldn't be such a problem if it had been retained as part of the core civil service.

As for the PAF well you hit the nail on the head there, when the post office was sold off I guess you must sell off all state investment put into it - I think there was an article on el reg somewhere indicating the gov was spending 2m? or 10% of what it got for flogging the post office to try and build its own PAF.

I've been hoping for the BBC to do the same thing too - sure flog the stuff overseas but do something like sky do - allow access from a few devices each tied to your license number to view their back catalogue

Re: "GDS has done this to great effect, such as when a 16-person team designed GOV.UK in 12 weeks"

The key word is 'designed' it took 16 people 12 weeks to pick a font that didn't work on all computers and restricted how gov departments could display their information.

it took the rest of the civil service a bit longer to translate all the web pages into the new format, GDS did very little of that.

Re: Bah!

So Laser focused he still thinks voter fraud on an unprecedented scale took place because he can't stand having lost the popular vote?

So Laser focused he took time out at a prayer meeting to discuss the ratings for the apprentice?

yup looks like he's totally focused on being a President and not massaging his own ego.