anothermouse

The NHS makes a huge difference. As a single entity it can pivot in a way that I wonder if other countries can come close to.

My daughters dentist commented yesterday that all her surgeries (and her team usually do 50 a week) had been cancelled. The reason? All the anaesthesiologist had been requisitioned as they will be required to do ventilation. All elective surgeries had been cancelled, and her paeds specialists sent on refresher courses for adult patients.

We're in uncertain territory here, the NHS's response may not be 100% perfect and a lot of people will argue that some minutiae could be done better, but I believe it has the huge advantage.

I wonder if other countries, and particularly the US, can manage such a coordinated healthcare response?

I'm married to a US citizen. My children have inherited US citizenship via this route. We have to spend thousands preparing tax returns reporting no income each year for three people (the children have bank accounts).

  If you buy a house, things are going to be complicated.
  If you have a workplace pension from your job, you're probably screwed. State pensions have screwed people too.
  If you invest in stocks, or mutual funds, you'll pay more in tax preparation than you'll make.
  If you set up your own company and are not paid as an employee but as the owner, you will be screwed.
  Rent out a property, screwed.
  Fail to declare every account that you're a signatory on? Prepare to pay up to 125% of the contents. 
  If you're children are beneficiaries of a trust set up by their non-american grand-parents? Totally screwed.

Almost every American expat I've spoken to has had a shock when they find they totally didn't understand their commitments. The only ones who didn't were employees of big banks/hedge funds whose employers paid a big 4 accountant to take care of everything.

Mostly because the majority of people living there wish to be remain part of the United Kingdom.

There is huge variation in Dairy! French Milk (was) terrible, only UHT widely available, though fresh is now quite common. US milk is nothing like as good as British milk for freshness/flavour (though the latter is subjective).

US eggs are refrigerated, as salmonella is so prevalent. Not so in UK, where they are guaranteed salmonella free (nowadays 'thanks' to Edwina Curry)

And Cheese? Really - I'm fairly sure there is no equivalent of a nice ripe epoisses widely available in the US. Sure, cheap cheddar is just like Monterray Jack, but....

I have lived in the US for 8 years, France/Luxembourg for 2 and the UK for the rest.

You've never tried Hershey's then.

  If you buy a house, things are going to be complicated.
  If you have a workplace pension from your job, you're probably screwed. State pensions have screwed people too.
  If you invest in stocks, or mutual funds, you'll pay more in tax preparation than you'll make.
  If you set up your own company and are not paid as an employee but as the owner, you will be screwed.
  Rent out a property, screwed.
  Fail to declare every account that you're a signatory on? Prepare to pay up to 125% of the contents. 
  If you're children are beneficiaries of a trust set up by their non-american grand-parents? Totally screwed.

Almost every American expat I've spoken to has had a shock when they find they totally didn't understand their commitments. The only ones who didn't were employees of big banks/hedge funds whose employers paid a big 4 accountant to take care of everything.

Xfce calls it shade window. I believe it is still there, and can be configured to be double click, or whatever you'd like.

I bailed on KDE overnight at KDE 4.1. You couldn't have an NFS mounted home dir, as they had made mysql a requirement for Akonadi, without which kmail and everything else failed to work.

Suddenly KDE was no longer 'enterprise' ready, as no enterprise I've ever worked for has offered anything but NFS for home directories.

Occasionally I come across a coworker who uses konsole, as they like the tabs. But I've never seen it in use widely again.

Have they removed this limitation?

20K bankers to shortly find themselves working in a regional office and wishing they could relocate back.

Passporting doesn't require moving your employees wholesale, you just setup a subsidiary within Europe and trade with that legal entity for European trades. A skeleton office is all that is required.

I've been watching this happen like a scheduled car crash for years. Every 2 years, another open source project succumbs to the problem.

As far as I can tell, when software is open source, the barrier to people contributing is lower. And that leads to a sort of brownian jitter in the system. Once great systems, (kde in general and amarok in particular) suffer from contributions of new features, which add features but decrease reliability. Or they exist for so long that no new exciting features exist to be added, so the inevitable re-architecture death march begins (I'm looking at your kde4. You killed kde as a corporate desktop, so that you could add semantic search?).

Whatever the cause, be it the accretion of "features", or the inevitable "rinse, re-architect, repeat" cycle some project are on, it can only drive people away. But a project that is widely used collects developers, and it is difficult to say no to contributors - a common problem in volunteer projects outside software.

Surely Sim City be classed as being based around a crafting mechanic?

  > So your argument is basically this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUTnNKhF-EU

s/your/their/.

It is not my argument, I'm a Tory voting, skilled, financial sector worker, who voted remain.

But I'm being an idiot arguing with you. I don't think dismissively posting a clip of southpark has advanced the discussion. This subject never got the detailed and grown up discussion it deserved as one side continually dismissed the other as racist xenophobes (which you are underhandedly implying they are here) and the other harped on about '350 million a week' continuously, even thought that was thoroughly debunked.

There were real substantive issues to be discussed and we failed to do it meaningfully. Kind of like this thread.

Historically labour voting workers have been displaced from their jobs by low skilled immigrants. Don't just take my words for it:

https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/brexit-wins-an-illusion-di...

"Britain has voted to leave the EU. The reason? A large section of the working class, concentrated in towns and cities that have been quietly devastated by free-market economics, decided they’d had enough.

[...]

Neither the political centre or the pro-remain left was able to explain how to offset the negative economic impact of low-skilled migration in conditions of (a) guaranteed free movement (b) permanent stagnation in Europe and (c) austerity in Britain. "

Were you think physically displaced, rather than "taking over the role of" displaced?

Please elaborate, as in the Northeast this is exactly what happened. Do you agree or disagree, or are you just saying "wow" as youngtaff has opened your eyes to how many members of the tradition labour vote outside London view Europe?

For those of you outside the UK, please realise that this was not a xenophobic vote. Just because there were racist scum in the crowd voting brexit, doesn't mean all brexit supporters are likewise.

There are many reasons why people voted to leave but the journalism covering this seemed to only be able to cover the sensationalist parts of the debate in the most childish fashion. This needed a serious discussion amongst adults, with a lot of thought and we didn't get it.

So if it wasn't some racist backlash to immigration, then what was it? While I can't speak for all, here is a piece that explains many of the issues that people actually have with Europe, delivered in the serious manner that I wish more of the debate had been.

http://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2016/02/david-davis...

You are mistaken. Immigration from the EU cannot be regulated as the EU guarantees the right to free movement for all citizen. Therefore anyone in 28 member states can immigrate, and the UK government may not impede that.

You appear to be confusing border control and EU immigration. We control the former and not the latter.

A CPAN author, former tech journalist, hugo award winner. His works are so on the intersection of economics and scifi that apparenly even Paul Krugman has reads him.

http://crookedtimber.org/2009/01/27/stross-on-development-ec...

You're wrong, and while it might seem harsh, I'm going to have to say you just don't know what you're talking about.

My non working US wife has completely jeopardised my family's financial well being, purely through being american. She has been out of the country for 10 years, and she would be expected to pay 125% of our life savings as for over 5 years our joint bank account held the deposit for our house? She has no income, and didn't file. No FBAR -> 25% of the balance in fines per year for 5 years == 125%.

An incredible number of american's come out of the woodwork saying "there is no problem", because it wasn't hard for them. You don't prove a negative result with one data point!

Expat: one of ours over there.

Migrant: someone not from here, living not where they were born.

I think you're over thinking it. To Somalians they're just somali expats.

My other comment (in reply to another comment) shows how I, a brit, have gotten myself into a problem with far more that 100K, without having any idea.

The best option would be same country exemption for FBAR and FACTA. Or stop taxing non-resident citizens.

The problem is not that I made a profit in selling my house, it is that my wife had money in a bank account at all.

As she didn't file, she didn't know that you need to file an FBAR annually for each foreign account. And the penalties for not doing so are those mentioned above 25% of the balance a year for 5 years.

and there are plenty who do file who don't know to file an fbar too.

You are, seemingly deliberately, failing to understand that this isn't a 1% problem. The 1% have tax advisors and CPAs paid to take care of this for them.

This is affecting expats and accidental americans in their daily lives, even if they have no income. I am not the first to suggest it, but reread the article, and image that you earn $30K and live in france, and for some reason you're account is being closed, and you need to spend 1K post tax a year filing for a country you don't live in.

I am British, and am married to an american. My wife moved to the UK and has never worked since. I had no idea about her obligation to file anything. She's been here for over a decade.

Like a lot of people we use a joint bank account. My salary, and anything else goes in there.

A couple of years ago I sold my flat in central London, and had 400K (600K USD) in there at various points. I have no idea how to bring my wife into compliance, as if I do, she will be expected to hand over 25% of the maximum balance of this account for every year it was undeclared to a maximum of 5 years. I.E. 125% of the maximum balance!

She remains unaware, and I don't file for her. We'd risk losing our house (brought with the proceeds of the previous sale), if I attempt to fix this. I live in absolute dread of the IRS, and what they may do to our happy family.

Very nicely done, and you seem to be selling almost everything - and strangely you're mirroring our plans. We're planning to move to the bay area in March, also from N1!

How did you create the page? I'm sure I'll be needed to do the same in february!

I don't know why so many people are saying that it needs to be made clear that this is in China, and that it doesn't apply elsewhere.

I'm a programmer in Finance in London, and a good day rate for a Senior contractor is 600GBP/day. I have a good friend who started out doing "grilled chorizo in a ciabatta bun" at a London market, and easily made 1000GBP his first day. Now he uses employees to man that stall, and has moved on to the next idea, at a different locations doing something different to allow him to do something that appeals during different seasons. By now I imagine he is easily making double what I do.

My go to solution to this problem, back when I needed one, was as soon as the girl in question asked "what do you do?" I'd reply directly with "I'm a computer programmer - what do you do?" and should they say they are a musician or whatever I'd jovially reply instantly with "Oh well, I guess we have nothing in common then", and pretend that the conversation was over. They were always very interested to talk then, and the conversation was firmly on a flirtatious footing.

Writing this now, I realise that there is an corner case I hadn't covered in this plan. Solving it is left as an exercise to the reader, but I'd suggest something along the lines of "Emacs or vi?"

That will be what you earn at your first job.

Don't tell the people hiring you of course, but if you leave after 12-24 months with some good experience, you'll get a big bump. If you skillset pays 60K with experience, you'll get there or beyond by your second or third job.

Just be sure that it is in an area you're interested in, and you'll do fine. Just beware that working on (VBA/testing/C++) often leads to more (VBA/testing/C++), and of those c++ pays the most.

Experience of finance is required, or you had better be cheap. Experience of a product or a platform is better, but you can't understand those with out the financial knowledge . They will teach you both if you go permanent.

Typically, you need a specific skill, and they hire for that. The more exotic the better. Java? no. C++ on unix? more so. Front Arena or Murex? Easy.

Back office jobs most likely won't give you the financial market/product exposure, but closer you get to front office the less coding happens (and you won't get close without experience.)

My "in" to the industry was having perl as well as their other requirements, which made me unique amongst the other applicants (perm role). I gradually transitioned to being a c++ guy as that paid more and I was optimizing for cash.

How to get there from where you are? We'd need to know "where you are". as cjbenedikt says, what do you do, know etc?

"Inside London, those devs who are working in finance are getting paid £45k+, big bonus..."

As someone working in finance in London, this seems way too low. I'm on 97K and bonus has been 50% for the last 4 years. Contracted before and made more after tax.

I can't believe that startups hope to attract talent with 35K + bonus? But I also doubt you're right about 45K jobs in finance being anything but entry level.

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/london/c++%20developer.do

(me? c++, perl, python, unix, front office, could price an option with Hull open, or an IRS, but not going to try anything like a Vol swap without Quant Assistance. There, another vague datapoint).