billyruffian

Funnily enough, I stumbled on this data[0] for Ireland, 2016, total revenues booked by nationality of parent company:

China: $2.44bn

Luxembourg: $2.74bn

Italy: $5.86bn

Japan: $8.38bn

France: $18.67bn

Ireland: $77.95bn

US: $364.77bn

I know there other European states and microstates with interesting corporate tax rates. Would be interested to seem a similar comparison.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/07/13/bidens-tax-p...

Boredom as a technique for pruning staff. https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/21/boredom_rooms_japan_e...

Rural person here from Wales where sonic booms from military aircraft were moderately common.

Animals panic when they hear the boom: they tend to stampede, fall off cliffs, break legs, trample each other, lambs get separated, break through hedges and into traffic.

The booms were severe enough to occassionally shatter the Royal Doulton in the house, much to my mother's disgust.

The gherkin language that cucumber uses for its specifications, written well, are brilliant at distilling what the customer wants, what the developer is going to build and how the QA is going to assert that acceptance is measured. But it has to be written collaboratively by all of those together and by the end of it you get a shared understanding. This is the most important part.

The glue code behind it is a different fish, and needs someone with software engineering trainging to build it and love it.

My org has mixed teams. We find devs are terrible at being QAs. This is not through lack of willingness but they're always either overtesting or undertesting and usually missing the test boundaries. So we use the SDET model, software developers trained in testing to build out the automation and high quality QAs with lots of domain knowledge to do the static and exploratory testing.

In my experience (hiring manager for QAs), there's no way I can get SDETs for anything like the price of a journeyman dev. I'm probably looking at a 20-40% premium right now for someone decent.

I'm studying for another batchelors with the Open University in the UK. It's a good institution and I completed my computing masters with them a few years ago. I'm studing for fun, not for career. I'm so disappointed to see my peers spend most of their time discussing how to get grant funding, which parts of the taught course they can safely skip and how to formally complain about a tutor that has given them poor feedback for poor effort is just depressing.

Why is the hatch hinged in the most awkward way possible? If the hinges were on any other side, it would be so much more accessible, there must be a reason for this?

The UTC abbreviation was made as a compromise between french and english[1] rather than bloody-mindedness from any one nation. This was back in the day when such compromises could be reached without rancour.

For an example of the daft amounts of human life expended on examples of such trivialities, look at the amount of effort spent on arguing if the Concorde airplane should terminate with or without an 'e'.[2]

[1] https://www.space.com/what-is-utc.html

[2] https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinet-office-100/the-s...

Again, for clarity, the Crown Dependencies are the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. Bermuda is a BTO.

Bermuda has been self-governing since 1620. Britain has very little in the way of exerting any pressure on them short of imposing direct rule (which it seems to have done only twice: on Anguilla in 1968 after it was invaded and only partially on the Turks and Caicos in 2009-2012 due to systematic corruption).

EDIT: punctuation

Just for clarification, British Overseas Territories are not part of the UK. They set their own laws and manage their own internal affairs while their foreign relations and defence are managed by the UK.

Paraphrasing 'Yes Minister', civil servants are in government, ministers are in politics.

> It irks me that there are no links to the laws or even the actual name to look them up

This is because it's the Queen's Speech: it's what the government of the day intends to pursue as legislation for that session. It's essentially advertising what the government's priorities are (and just as importantly, what they are not). Sessions usually last about a year and not everything in the speech always makes it through to legislation.

At this point, the legislation hasn't been drafted let alone gone through any readings in either chamber.

You use the dispute mechanism built into the treaty. You don't blockade an island economy.

What's outrageous? A french minister threatening to cut power to the island, french trawlermen blocking the landing of fish caught by british fishermen and to blockade the island of Jersey or two fisheries protection boats being dispatched to make sure the island's ports remain open?

The cause? Asking seventeen (17!) french fishing vessels for evidence they've fished those fisheries in the last 5 years.

I don't think I'm finding outrage in the same thing as you are.

> Country: United Kingdom

> In EU?: true

How very 2019.

Partnership (well, joint venture) with Acorn, not subsdiary.

> Usually you can be over a month late before the water company actually goes to the trouble of sending someone out to turn off your water.

What? You can be disconnected from water because you're a month late? That's barbaric, what the hell are you supposed to do in that situation?

I don't think you quite get how Ofcom works.

Ofcom received a complaint in Feb 2020[1] which it investigated -- taking a year to reach this conclusion is not 'sudden'.

The request to transfer the licence to another entity didn't supply all the required information for the transfer[2].

Ofcom operates with a bias against meddling[3] -- you've got to try quite hard to get them riled but not complying with broadcasting law is definitiely one way to do it.

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0025/212884/...

[2] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/media/media-rele...

[3] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/policies-and-guidelines

The UK regulator's (Ofcom) move was because GCTN wasn't apolitical. There was a similar run-in with Russia Today[1]. When it comes to news channels, Ofcom's job is to prevent the Foxification of news.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_UK

Let's not forget the Lords Spiritual, the 26 bishops who sit in the Lords -- we are still, just a bit, a theocracy.

'Effeminate' is an adjective of demeanor.

The Belgian investigation into the production facility with the manufacturing problem: what did it evidence? I'm curious because I've not come across what the result was or if there was any evidence of dissembling from AZ.

I vouch for this approach 100%. You could set your clock to the 4am sweat panics that would always wake me up with my head spinning from minor problems that I couldn't put away.

I try my hardest to do one hour's vigorous walking a day when I can, audiobooked and podcasted to the max. When it's raining cats and dogs I'm doing some yoga (I'm using my free trial of apple fitness but there are loads of similar programmes) and it really helps me. It's 100 times more effective than self-medicating.

I still wake sometimes but less often and when I do, I'll get out of bed for 10 mins (cooling down seems to help) and, daft though it sounds, repeat to myself that I'm in control of what I feel.

Anxiety is absolutely horrible and I think you've got to experience it to realise how awful it can be.

it's worth pointing out, for sake of completeness, that the UK has delivered nearly 500K second dose vaccines.

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations

> nobody who actually lived in London wanted Brexit to happen

40% of the London vote did[1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/912939/brexit-major-citi...

> "Most objects are passsed (sic) by reference"

be careful, ruby uses pass-reference-by-value which is subtly different. See this great article: https://robertheaton.com/2014/07/22/is-ruby-pass-by-referenc...

I agree. An interview is a like a date, both parties have to be happy with the other and these questions are impossible to answer except from a positon of weakness. I thought we'd consigned this nonsense to the bin ages ago. And people wonder at the lack of diversity in hires and pay diffences by personal characteristic.

I'm a software engineer working in the UK Civil Service for the last 5 years after a 15 year career in the private sector (including a few short stints in Menlo Park). You are right, the money is far, far from the best I could earn but then on top of the 8 days of public holidays I get 30 days leave (plus an extra day for the Queen's birthday, gawd bless 'er), flexible working hours, a pension that's worth way more than I accrued privately and a cultural abhorrence workhouse practices I've experienced in the private sector.

Best of all, I get to work on systems which touch entire populations.

I guess Type-X personalities need not apply.

I remember discovering Randi while I was at university and I credit him for really strengthing the skeptic in me. I wish we had more public figures who encourage people to think this way and rather less of the screaming consipiracy set. Scientific and rational thinking should be a huge part of education. I wonder if it is and just doesn't stick or if people find comfort in clinging to easy, yet clearly bonkers, stories.

So X pays Y for a service (shredding devices). Y takes the cash, doesn't complete the service and flogs the devices instead. Y hasn't bought the devices and doesn't own them.

> But many recyclers have figured out ways to erase the phones of all their data so that they can be resold.

Great, I trust that (sarc.)