> Because you've had 4 opportunities to answer my basic question and can't?
No. It is because you've been rude several times to me without cause, you don't seem to actually read anything I say and therefore I no longer wish to talk to you.
44 karma · joined September 29, 2025
No. It is because you've been rude several times to me without cause, you don't seem to actually read anything I say and therefore I no longer wish to talk to you.
This is an issues with the employer not following the checklist, which I posted in my first response to you.. That is not the fault of the legislation. The checklist is easy to understand and straight forward.
I do not have a passport (for quite a long time) and have no once had a problem proving my right to work with an employer.
> I'm just pointing out how a mandatory Digital ID system, designed to prove right to work as a way of tackling illegal immigration (and thus illegal employment), could also benefit groups who aren't well-served by the current system.
No that isn't true. You original claim was that it was "excessive". I took umbrage with that as it is a complete misrepresentation. It just isn't true and your scenarios that you presented are either unrealistic or not to do with the legislation itself.
Combine that with you being preoccupied about my supposed "privilege" as tactic to deflect from the point being made and making snarky backhanded comments, I no longer wish to talk to you. I am going to leave it there.
If you do not have a permanent address (I didn't for many years). You just need someone with a permanent address where these things can go e.g. friend or family member or you can pay a small amount for a letter box with a key (which is what I did).
Failing that, there are other support mechanism in place provided by charities, family, friends and even the state itself, in the unlikely event they are that are completely destitute.
None of this says anything about whether I am privileged or not. You know nothing about my personal circumstances or family background. The only reason anyone uses this line of argument is an attempt to shut people up or as a shaming tactic. Neither of which will work with me.
It also doesn't make any of the checks "excessive". It merely means that they may cost a relatively small amount of money.
As for the ability to produce basic documents, there is nothing privileged about being able to produce basic documents. What you are showing is simply a "bigotry of low expectations".
> Read it again: they're skipping the checks and just using the one they know (passport) because they don't know if other legal forms of documentation are good enough. I know this is going to blow your mind but plenty of employers have no idea what the laws are. You might say "well that's on the employer," but it's the person who needs the job who suffers.
I read it fine the first time thank you.
What you are describing now I would imagine is discriminatory and thus illegal. However IANAL. In this scenario the problem is with the potential employer in this circumstance. That isn't a problem with the right to work checks, and is a problem with the employer.
TBH. It really feels as if you are inventing reasons why right to work checks should be considered "excessive" to shoehorn in your own personal politics.
Also what is wrong with being middle-class?
This is not an argument, and is merely a way to shut someone up because you don't like them disagreeing with you. It is quite a loathsome tactic.
> A new passport costs over £100 for a paper application. That can be prohibitive for people.
I agree that it is expensive. However you don't require a passport though and you can use a Birth Certificate and something that shows your NI number.
> These are additional costs, it's also an extra £3.50 to find it (taking 15 days), and possibly another £38 to get it quickly.
Ok. So £15. This is not "excessive" cost. Like with many things if you want something done more quickly you are required to pay extra.
If you are looking for work you really should make sure you have these documents as you should know that you are going to need them.
> So yes, these are all costs that add up to exclude people from partaking in society.
It may surprise you that a good number of things require monetary payment in some form or another to partake in society.
It is perfectly reasonable for the government to require basic checks to be carried out before you employed.
> And all of this assumes your employer knows what the hell they're doing. Given the fines are painful, it's entirely possible your employer refuses valid documents "just in case" and sticks to the ones they've relied on in the past.
I am not sure what you are trying to say here.
That to avoid fines an employer would break the law and not do right to work checks? Or that they are doing a right to work check and do additional checks?
I never said that you required a driving license. I said that at driving license was photo-card ID.
You need a passport or birth cert and NI number as a British Citizen for a right to work check. Most employers also want proof of address, so bring a utility bill.
I've been through this process about 3 times in the last 5 years. It isn't difficult or onerous.
> For shits and giggles, I just looked up the checker on the UK Gov website and… if you don’t have a passport or easy access to your birth certificate, you don’t have enough evidence of right to work.
I actually posted the checklist. I am quite aware what is required.
You can literally order replacements for a birth certificate easily. A replacement birth cert can be got for £12.50 and takes 4 days to receive.
https://www.gov.uk/order-copy-birth-death-marriage-certifica...
Nothing about this is "excessive".
> Is this possible for most people? Yes. Does it leave groups excluded? Absolutely!
People that can't produce basic documents it excludes.
You were claiming that the right to work checks were "excessive". Producing one or two documents that you should have is not "excessive".
Also you don't have to insert your personal brand of politics into every discussion. There is nothing outrageous about the list of professions of counter signers. All they are wanting is someone that can be identified easily in a community.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68b6b7e7536d6...
> If you don’t have a passport, for instance, it’s much harder for a UK citizen to prove their right to work in the UK, for which your employer is liable if they get it wrong.
No it isn't. You need a Birth Certificate and a previous paycheck and something that has your NI number on it, and usually something to prove your address e.g. Utility Bill.
No that isn't the case. The are substantial problems in the UK around the the various hate speech and terrorism laws. Pretending there isn't by hand waiving away concerns and pretending that them being found not guilty later after having their life turned upside down (the process is the punishment) is quite honestly disingenuous.
I really don't know what to say with this statement. Obviously there were very few doing so, and trying to evangelise others into doing so. I think I made that crystal clear.
It seems you are getting hung up on the difference between "I've encountered this very rarely" and "none". If that is your complaint you are simply nitpicking. Which is what I suspect you are doing.
> That is a very clear contradiction. Clearly a lot of designers were writing CSS otherwise they wouldn't write about it...
No you cannot draw that conclusion. If there were already at the time "a lot" they wouldn't need to try to evangelise others to do so would they? There is no contradiction at all. Again this feels like you are angling for something that not there.
TBH from my interactions with you so far, It feels like you're wilfully misinterpreting my statements for gotcha. So I would rather we would leave it there.
Running things on AWS is just foolish IMO. You data is locked and infra is locked into their platform.
- Designers were not working with HTML and CSS (this was about ~2008-2011). I met one "designer" who would do HTML and CSS back in about 2015. I met another woman that could do it in 2022. I've worked in a bunch of web agencies and corps.
- Some designers due to emergence of smart phones had started experimenting with using HTML 5 and CSS 3 to create responsive designed.
- There were articles in online publications and blogs where people were extolling the virtues of it, trying to convince others.
- This ultimately didn't happen. People are still using Photoshop if they are not using Figma. You have dedicated front-end devs and/or teams in most orgs if they actually care about the UX/UI quality. Otherwise they just just use a bootstrap/tailwind theme and call it a day.
I stopped doing frontend dev primarily back in 2023 after I realised I was still fixing the same stupid iOS bugs from a decade before hand.
I have worked in large corps and smaller agencies as a full stack / front-end dev for about 18 years.
This wasn't just the case in my part of the world. There were prominent online publication that were extolling the virtues of designers embracing creating their designs in CSS and HTML and moving away from using Photoshop.
> It is also true that since the introduction of modern frameworks we see significantly fewer designers who know CSS.
None of these people knew CSS at all. I am talking pre-2012. Bootstrap version 1 or 2 was out at the time and 960 grid css was only out a few years before.
I wouldn't trust them in young LibDems in Bristol either. Doesn't matter if they seem nice or not. Lots of young politicians have nice ideas and over time they either end up as bad as the ones they are replacing, they are forced out or leave of their own accord and then complain about it on a podcast.
You are making the assumption that any politician or government is "well meaning" or started out as such. I am in the UK and I look at the politicians and the state apparatus with absolute contempt.
I suggest you listen to some of Dominic Cummings interviews about his experience with Whitehall (UK) during COVID. There was one situation that he described which really stood out to me. There was particular situation early in the pandemic where the NHS was going to run out of a key medical supplies in about 2 weeks and as a result thousands could die. These supplies were shipped from China and it took about 3/4 weeks (I forget the exact time frame).
For some reason it was written into law that they had to be shipped. He had the Prime Minister sign a legal waiver so they could be air-lifted, explained this to key officials in Whitehall. Everyone agreed what needed to be done and then nothing happened for 3 days. These people had to be threatened with losing their jobs and their pensions otherwise they wouldn't do their job, they fully understood the consequences of not doing the job (thousands of people might die) and still did nothing. It is an apathy of evil.
This behaviour is commonplace in ossified organisations unfortunately and I wasn't surprised one iota when I heard this.
As for mechanisms that reduce state power as prevent totalitarianism. No one thing will prevent it. It would be a combination of things.
It is similar to how running Linux (or any alternative OS) won't by itself stop the strangle hold of large tech players over most of the tech/online space. It will at least help you reduce your dependence on these large companies. Combine that with self hosting and/or using alternatives at least you can be somewhat free from the worst of it.
> I think the left wing in the US likes to frame suspicion of those kinds of things as silly preparations for a future that won't happen, and the right frames roadblocks to government power as being in place to make that bad future harder to bring about.
Silly partisan politics is going to have both sides pretending that the other side doesn't have any merit in their positions. I would just ignore the noise and actually read the facts about things and draw your own conclusions.
I believe that most of the politics you see is really theatre. It keeps people squabbling over things that are ultimately unimportant.
So someone wrote a bunch of server code (backend) and then handed off for someone to style the frontend. This is what happens now in most teams. The person styling the frontend was never referred to as a "designer".
> Sometimes there would be more interaction to have the code output things in a form more amenable to the desired design, but a lot of the time it was really that simple - the designers worked in CSS and the exchange format was divs with well-defined classes. You can do a lot with a workflow that simple.
I am aware. However that isn't the norm in most places. What happens is that the best dev that can style stuff is lumbered with doing all the frontend work and most of their colleagues don't understand it.
Larger orgs have dedicated frontend/backend teams.
> I imagine it's a bit harder if you're using a modern stack where your code is separated from what's actually rendered to the user by a dozen layers, but designers are quite capable of working with CSS rather than Photoshop.
This are actually simpler than they were back then and there is better separate between the frontend and backend. So it actually easier IMO.
This was never the case and in fact a rewriting of history. My first "proper" job in web development was taking a PSD from a designer and turning that into a XHTML template. Quite a lot of the time the designs looked nice in Photoshop but were almost impossible to implement (at least in CSS 2).
I've worked in several since then and most were using Photoshop to create designs or design guidelines to pass over the developers. I used to "cut up the design" and then implement into XHTML template and controls. This was pretty much the norm everywhere if the company cared about how the website / webapp looked.
There were some frontend designer types that would write code, but I've met actually two of them during my career as a dev that was heavily front-end focused until 2023.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45432347
The often cited YouGov polling, I think sampled a few thousand people. There are almost 2.5 million signatures on petitions between the OSA and Digital ID.
You can get any result you want by asking leading questions on polling. This was of course satirised by Yes Minister.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
I can counter any of the iffy polls by simple point to the official online petitions service. There were a huge number of signatures to revoke OSA and two million signatures to abolish the plans for the Digital ID. While the Digital ID is technically a separate issue, many of the same privacy concerns are present.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903?pubDate=2025...
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194
The number of people that signed these petitions is far more representative than any polling.
On top of that, recently I've seen reportrs of both the Liberal Democrats and Reform (the two largest parties after the main two) recongising the OSA as unpopular and are likely to suggest reforming/removing it.
On top of that. The labour government and the conservative government that proceeded it which created the OSA were/are both deeply unpopular.
So any notion that there is a popular mandate for this is nonsense.
If you are wanted in the Western world and the US wants you, you are likely to be got.
Realistically unless you are doing something absolutely unforgivable it will be forgotten about in a few days/weeks. At worst you will become a reaction emote.
Also going viral is a huge opportunity. Some viral people have ended up in commercials, podcasts etc.
Lets not pretend it is all negative.
> Then in the early 00s, the experience of going a little viral (just within your college Facebook community, before the word ‘viral’ was a thing) was actually pretty common and this started to make people just a little more guarded about being photographed. So those who got filmed doing something drunk/dumb would be more likely to go more viral, as it was now a rarer sight. And so on.
No this is a rewriting of history. What happened is that employers started looking through potential hires and/or current employees and quizzing them about getting drunk at a party a few years ago. This seemed to happen in the US more than other places, or maybe it was reported there more.
Then everyone with any sense made their profile semi-private (friends only) on Facebook.
Also a lot of the stuff that went viral was often clever marketing. There are advertising agencies where they have case studies detailing how they have done it.
Also there is a whole genre of streaming where people literally act outrageously in public, called IRL streaming. People have gone/are going to prison in hopes of going viral.
> It’s a recursive effect that made us all duller and more image-conscious and anxious in public. This process took a couple of decades to end up where we are now.
This is absolute nonsense. I am old enough to remember how people acted before social media in is largely the same while out in public. In fact I would say it was actually the opposite of what you claim.
My favourite one though is "Fire in the Sky". I saw it years ago and thought it was a decent movie, but I laughed when it said "based on a true story".