Posts by John Watts

I think that coastal defence in the distance is this: https://www.worldwar2heritage.com/en/page/9069/198/Mulberry-Harbour-Phoenix-Caisson-Thorpe-Bay-Southend-on-Sea

Sellotape

The only thing I miss about ball mice is being able to put sellotape over the hole and watch colleagues scratch their heads and crawl under the desk to check whether it was plugged in.

So he was awarded piles of cash?

The worst exemption ever

I really don't get why political parties should be entitled to this exemption when a company selling widgets isn't. A political party is trying to sell you their vision of a brighter tomorrow and the widget company is trying to sell you the best widget for you. At least with the widget you have some rights if you've been mis-sold; with political parties you just get to be disappointed again in another half a decade.

If anything parties should be banned from using personal information more strongly than anyone else. They should succeed or fail on the strength of their beliefs and policies. All this will do is legitimize what was scandalous behaviour by CA. Swing voters are going to be bullied and harassed by all of the parties at every election, not just online with insidious adverts but also on their doorsteps.

One final consideration, maybe you're a young gay male who's keeping it secret from his family who happen to be of a very conservative religious background and the newly formed Gay Party show up on your doorstep to see if they can count on your vote.

Giving parties a right to process personal data so they can tailor their lies to you precisely is just about the worst exemption that could be put on the books.

Bacon - smoked streaky or green back.

Fried egg(s) runny yolk.

Sausages (Lincoln, Cumberland or pork).

Black pudding.

Toast (must be buttered - no marge).

Mushrooms.

Baked beans (but only if they've been cooked in a sauce pan - no microwaved beans).

The wildcard - kidneys.

Two things that will happen ...

Somebody will install Debian.

Somebody will run Doom on it.

Maybe she should move back a few steps to where the ideas that end up on YouTube come from - Saudi Arabia; the country that's spent $10 billion on exporting its own fundamentalist version of Islam across the world. Now, we all know that nobody's going to upset them because of the oil supply but how is it that Saudi Arabia's two main regional enemies Iran and Syria are supposed to be our mortal enemies?

Best case scenario - Facebook says "no, we'll just withdraw WhatsApp from UK users"; Joe Public goes mental and tells their MPs they'd rather take the risk on terror attacks so they can get WhatsApp back.

Maybe Taobao is different but AliExpress doesn't seem to have that much in the way of fake stuff. Unless you want "fake" Lego (which goes under a different brand but is basically a copy). What you can get from AliExpress is a watch delivered for less than it would cost you to buy the padded envelope and post it to the next town using Royal Mail. The straps are rubbish but watch parts are fine. That's where the real risk to American (and Western in general) industry lies - pay the postage and get the product free.

They've missed a trick - they should have tried to patent the format. They'd have got that no problems.

The equation editor is really useful for me as I'm doing an OU course.

I'm sure it's useful for anyone who wants to put a nice looking formula into a word processed document without having to fire up another application just to create it.

Theresa May said Article 50 would definitely be triggered. The last time I remember a PM saying something would definitely happen was David Cameron saying he definitely wouldn't resign if he lost the referendum.

The only time a politician says something in black and white terms is when they know it's not true.

Thus spoke the contractor

Unless I've missed something there's a very big flaw in this idea and it seems that it comes from not thinking outside of the contractor box. For the purposes of planning and workforce management there are advantages to knowing how much leave your staff will be taking in a given year and the ability to dictate at least to some extent when they can take it.

Imagine you run a call centre and you can in theory at least forecast the number of calls you expect to take and by some mathematical jiggery pokery determine the number of bums on seats you need to answer an arbitrary percentage of those calls. If you know the figures you know how many staff you need to employ and if you know how much leave they're entitled to you can work that into your equations.

Since you're paying for the leave you can set limits on the number of people that take leave at any one time so that you can still meet your target for the percentage of calls you want to answer by ensuring that you will always have enough people to take those calls.

In Worstall's-World everyone's a self-employed contractor and so can chose when they want to work as long as they accept that they're not going to get paid for it. When the school summer holidays arrive as they do every year your contact centre is going to be empty because 90% of the women that work there (which is usually well over 50% of the workforce) take the six weeks off to look after their children or their grandchildren. For the parents especially, not being paid isn't a massive problem because the cost of childcare is on a par with what they earn every day. Most people will decide that the small effective decrease in available income is worth taking given that you get six weeks off work. Work seven hours a day for an extra £20 a day, £8+ of which is spent on travel or parking or whatever or have those seven hours plus travel time to yourself? For most people in a household with another income it's an easy enough choice to make.

So if we want to run our contact centre efficiently we're going to have stipulate the days we want our contractors to work when we agree the contracts and given that we'll be using the same criteria for deciding that we'd be using if we were allowing paid annual leave, the employee is in pretty much the same situation as they were before but they now have to set aside the money they need to take holiday out of their normal income. That's easier said than done when you're on a contact centre wage. Not a problem when you earn two or three times as much as a contact centre worker but not easy when that extra 10% you'll be getting paid isn't that much. Add to that, that the contractor will have plan their leave in advance when the contracts are agreed and the so called freedom of the contractor is gone. The employee loses flexibility and so does the employer; if the forecasts were wrong and it's actually quieter you can relax the leave limits and people will take the leave reducing the chance you'll be paying them for being at home when you needed them at work.

The other option is that contractors come to work when they feel like it which is no good for a business that needs to plan its staffing levels. If as a business you pay people for leave then you're generally buying yourself some workforce stability; most people take some leave before they've accrued it and so if they leave employment they have to pay it back. If Joe Bloggs owes two weeks' leave then Joe Bloggs is less likely to leave on a whim because Joe Bloggs will only get half a month of wages when he does.

If we also consider the school summer holidays again (and the easter holidays and all the others) then what about teachers? They don't have a choice about when they take their holiday so how does being a contractor benefit them in that respect?

Being a contractor is great if you get paid a contractor's wage but for the average person on an average wage it's not as great as a contractor thinks it is. For most people it would mean either less freedom and flexibility or intolerable uncertainty.

Maybe this would be a viable alternative to pig stomach:

http://www.sausagemaking.org/acatalog/Natural_OX_bung.html

Apparently it's ideal for making haggis.

Thank you

Thank you for an interesting and informative article.

won't somebody please think of the children!

"For example, it can be used to identify a child who has threatened over social media to commit suicide."

I'd argue the information on their profile would be a better and quicker way to identify them.

KT PRICE

Kill The Payload Reliably In Case of Emergency

or, if we're being strict ...

Kill The Payload Reliably In Certain Emergencies

Alternatively ...

Oracle do databases.

So do Google.

Oracle would like to use some of Google's technology or patents.

Oracle will shut up if Google lets them do x y and z.

That is all.

It all becomes clear

So that's where they get all the shit to fill the 600 pages of search results that you don't need once you've tried the first five results.

It's not just us

Every country has a state run TV channel don't they?

So the people in those countries must pay for it. The difference is that here you can choose not to.

I think it's fair to say that the money that the BBC gets paid benefits the country more than the cost in straight taxes, even if you don't watch telly.