cs02rm0

There are visa options where you don't need someone else to sponsor you.

Starting every day with a swim in the sunshine does go a long way.

The list of reasons really is too long to include. From the continued worsening of individual bits of tax legislation such as IR35, dividend allowances, employers NI, corporation tax, etc. to the stalling of real GDP per capita combined with an increased population and the consequentially stretched hospitals, transport, etc, the draconian policing of social media... it's pointless me trying to list it all really.

Dubai is a bit of a trigger for some people. Others I know are going/gone to Portugal, Malta, Cyprus, the US, Aus, Can, NZ, Singapore, France. Your mileage may vary - people leaving can generally give you similar lists of why, but where they go seems varied.

I used to live in Saudi for a time (25+ years ago), and actually really liked much about it then and it had changed markedly when I've been back more recently. I've visited Iraq, I've been detained in Oman under suspicion of espionage and still see virtues in the place. Dubai is positively liberal by comparison and becoming more liberal, while the UK is becoming more authoritarian and despite the official crime statistics, I'm not sure it's as safe as it once was.

Strange to see this here, it's quite delayed.

The Henley data was poor, but this criticism was too. I don't think we have the data and I fear the Henley data actually underestimates the reality.

FWIW, anecdotally my peers with the means are all looking at leaving and some have gone. I've closed down my business, my wife is looking at keeping hers running remotely because of the staff in it.

And I'm typing this from a Dubai hotel room while I spend a couple of months seeing if I can set something new up that I can do from here. I don't relish saying that, but the UK is not in a good place and there's no light at the end of the tunnel.

It is, but again I'd caution that it will go and do things you don't want it to.

For instance, I've been working on an app recently with some social share icon logos in svg.

Whenever I get it to tweak bits of code elsewhere in the same file, 80% of the time it goes and changes those svg icons, completely corrupting some of the logos, curiously consistent in how it does it. Several times I've had that slip through and had to go and undo it again, at which point it starts to feel like the superfast junior dev you're using has malign intent!

Here's one source, I checked a couple, the numbers varied between sources curiously but they seemed reasonably consistent.

They do show drops in the last year or two, but I find it hard to attribute that to Brexit when they're still much higher.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/293277/study-related-vis...

How did international student income drop with Brexit, when the UK now have 4-600k student visas granted in each of the last few years vs 2-300k pre-Brexit?

AI produces code that often looks really good, at a pace quicker than you can read it.

It can be really, really hard to tell when what it's producing is a bag of ** and it's leading you down the garden path. I've been a dev for 20 years (which isn't to imply I'm any good at it yet) and it's not uncommon I'll find myself leaning on the AI a bit too hard and then you realise you've lost a day to a pattern that wasn't right, or an API it hallucinated, in the first place.

It basically feels like I'm being gaslit constantly, even though I've changed my tools to some that feel like they work better with AIs. I expect it's difficult for junior devs to cope with that and keep up with senior devs, who normally would have offloaded tasks to them instead of AI.

It's not great here. Send help.

I think this sounds a little like it's viewed through a lens of survivor bias.

If the UK had made a success of HS2 (difficult to imagine with governments in much of living memory, but let's sidestep all of that) then it could have been claimed, perhaps with some merit, that the UK was able to do something with rail infrastructure that the Swiss could never because they were hamstrung by their approach.

To online safety for children? The same as offline safety; parenting and education. There's not much money in those though.

https://x.com/moo9000/status/1950866445186818209

It's a slightly mixed picture. Knife crime is one area that's been trending up for 10 years now. Shoplifting is at a 20 year high. Fraud is up. Firearms offences are roughly level.

But criminal damage is down. Of course, if you call the police for criminal damage, everyone knows they won't turn up and you'll just get a crime number, so unless you're claiming on insurance you're probably less and less likely to report it.

We shouldn't be aiming for London (with 200 phones stolen every day as it is) to reach the level of the worst European or American cities.

> Speaking as a Brit, I wish Wikipedia would just go black for the UK. That might focus some minds.

Likewise. People (organisations/companies), as far as possible, shouldn't be pandering to this stuff, it's not the answer, it doesn't help them or us.

>> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone".

>Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some.

Does it even do that?

That's interesting. I've ended up writing a React app using tailwind with python backend, partly because it's what LLMs seemed to choke a bit less on. When I've tried it with other languages I've given up.

It does keep chucking shadcn in when I haven't used it too. And different font sizes.

I wonder if we'll all end up converging on what the LLM tuners prefer.

That's sort of what I mean.

I looked up an Arai Tour X5, thanks for the link. It gives four stars and some colours for different zones at set impact speeds in m/s in a lab. It tells me it meets standard UN ECE REG 22.06 with a double D ring retention system and composite fibre materials. Super objective and necessary.

But I've read a lot of similar information and, somehow, seeing the results of a person being dragged down the road, for some unknown amount of time, which is pretty super subjective, still feels (perhaps wrongly even) as though it gives me a better understanding than just reading numbers/letters/colours.

I was terrified for his head. Great review though, as someone who's been mulling over getting a bike licence and struggling to wrap their head around gear ratings, this was eye opening.

Theres only so much efficiency you can squeeze out though if, say, you're using AWS Lambda. I can see this helping mitigate those cold start times.

Annoyingly, Brave has disabled support for this.

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/41164

You can do that for the odd small tool, but you can't launch GreatNewThing™ without having it's own full domain!

Except it never gets any users.

I suppose the plus side to spending months rather than days on projects that never go anywhere is I have fewer domains. Only 7 here. Sigh.

And that's just to be seen. Once you're seen, you're in for another long wait.

I think it would, once you put in place mechanisms to move your income down to below £100k, you can and probably should tweak them further to reduce your tax bill even further.

This may be slightly chicken and egg; it's the 95th percentile of salaries partly because no one wants to take a salary above that. Instead they use salary sacrifice, pensions, dividends, capital gains, leaving money in personal service company, etc. anything to avoid having a personal paper income above that threshold.

I suspect it's nowhere near the 95th percentile of earned wealth.

It's hard to recommend anywhere generically, there's so many facets to it and it depends what you're trying to get out of life.

Cost of living and wealth inequalities aren't key concerns for me personally. It's more quality of life for my family, safety and economic opportunity.

I've written software used across the NHS previously, and a lot for national security purposes since. It wasn't the only option on the table, just one that I was mainly using to ensure cost of development couldn't be used as a reason to reject and so that there was a strawman architecture on the table to help generate discussion.

It certainly wasn't even my preferred option, I'd have been much happier if they said they had a team that could run with it.

> I think it's wonderful that you offered to do that but it simply isn't realistic. Who is going to support this software in the long term? How are you handling privacy concerns? What guarantees can you offer about server security? Who is paying for and maintaining the servers in the long term? What happens (to be blunt) if you die the day after the software is delivered?

Good questions, but the quickest way I can answer them all is to say that my company had delivered software for national security purposes to central government departments. This really was nothing.

It certainly wasn't my preferred option. The offer was mostly a tool to ensure that cost of development could not be used as a reason to reject.

Personally I've known people moving to Portugal, Malta, Cyprus, Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain, the US, Singapore. There's obviously a variety of factors that go into the choices people make and certainly no perfect choice.

For me, it'll be the UAE. Instinctively, some people will probably attack that choice, which is fine. I've lived in the Middle East previously, it's not perfect to say the least and I have some personal history with that, but I understand the choice I'm making. One thing people won't like is the headline tax rate, but I probably won't come out ahead there initially as cost of living is quite high - it'll cost me about USD 70k just to put three kids in school. Accommodation is also quite expensive, private healthcare also needs paying for, but at least you get what you pay for then.

Where the tax situation is appealing though is that then I'll be incentivised to earn more beyond those high living costs, where I just don't feel I am in the UK. Sun and swimming works for me too. Job adverts there are absolutely rammed with literally thousands of applicants and I'm hearing from recruiters that a lot of people from the UK and wider Europe are trying to head in the same direction. I'll be working for myself though.

I likely won't see out my days there. I'd imagine we'll retire to somewhere on the Med, my wife would prefer NZ but I don't think that works for me. The US is perhaps desirable, but it seems quite hard for a Brit to get into unless they happen to have a job with a company there. We'll have to see.

FWIW, they did not say that. Yes, the words "good riddance" where there, but you've grabbed the wrong end of the stick I'm afraid.

Either, both.

I'm afraid there are people who cannot tolerate NHS criticism, you may not be aware of them until you've tried to see a change in the NHS. Some of them would even describe their very existence as a strawman, but it's not a strawman to the people they've blocked from seeing the NHS improve.

Yet private healthcare is a strawman, I've never argued for it.