Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
Knowing a lot of 18 and 19/20 year olds, all of them have been worn down by the relentless drip, drip drip of lockdown, exam results by random number generator, work options....
S'ok - Robert thinks they are a hardy lot and IIRC, @Ishmael_Z pointed out that children went through worse in WWII.
So we're fine.
I'm sure they've been worn down by lockdown.
But I'm equally sure that graduation ceremonies are one thing they'd happily miss.
Apart from your own experience I seriously have no idea on what basis you could assert that for the nation's children. And your own experience is not relevant because you hadn't gone through 15 months of a global pandemic.
So soz but I'm going to have to ignore your assertion.
Children need as much normality as possible and the end of school/uni years ceremonies and activities are a vital part of that.
Children also need: - end of term discos - residentials - school trips - birthday parties - sleepovers
Basically, they need to live. Their lives need highlights, colour. They need to spend time with people who aren't their parents. Putting all this on hold for three weeks in March 2020 was disappointing but seemed forgiveable given the circumstances and the unknowns. Still being in this half-life 15 months later now we are basically out the other side is a tad vexing. It's difficult to see whose benefit this is for.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
"COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD" eh?
And shouting. Hmm, I think this discussion is moving in my direction.
And again, the graduation ceremonies, which you may or may not have enjoyed are absolutely an "ESSENTIAL RIGHT [sic] OF PASSAGE" for children. As is all the end of school/uni activities. I said at the beginning "End of term activities". Including graduation which formally marks the end of the era of schooling or uni.
You are simply wrong on this and quite why on the one hand you say lockdown has had an impact and on the other you are unable to see that a critical component of lockdown people are cheering at goodness only knows. I can only imagine something happened at your graduation that was unpleasant otherwise your response is irrational.
I apologise for shouting and calling you names.
I just remember the utter misery - both as a parent and a child - of sitting through assemblies - particularly ones where people go up to the front to be presented with a worthless bit of paper. Every time I've thought "this is two hours of my life, two hours of utter tedium, I will never get back."
Tony Blair, fwiw, agrees with me. He never actually turned up to graduate from Oxford, and therefore is technically not a graduate.
As my edit says not to worry at all about the shouting - it's all part of PB.
I still disagree, that said. In normal times I would have scooped my own eyes out with a soup spoon to avoid going to speech days, graduation ceremonies, etc. Because they were a bore compared with everything else going on. I don't think my sister ever "graduated" from Oxford either.
But now look at everything else going on. They are a beacon of normality and socialisation, which I believe children desperately need right now.
Great leadership skills there, Boris! Tell the mass of the population they don't create any economic benefits and therefore they don't deserve any perks, any more than you'd let them inside the quad at Eton.
All they do is sit on their arses, consume food, spread disease, and think the world owes them a week's hedonism every year in Ibiza. If they're not grateful you've let them go back down the pub, just be obnoxious right in their faces - that'll show 'em.
"Swing, swing, together!"
Got to wonder how long this guy can stay in office. Two years he has managed so far. One day he'll make a "gaffe" there's no coming back from.
In a very strong field, Linked In is the worst, the very, very worst, website known to man. It is quite spectacularly bad - for example, they send out emails saying X wants to connect with you: then when you go on to the website, you can't find the invitation from X but you get screenfuls of utter garbage of zero interest to anyone. It even makes Microsoft Teams look well-designed, something you would have thought was impossible.
Why hasn't a decent competitor emerged to cater for this market? Is there some kind of natural monopoly or barrier to entry?
Yes, it’s a natural monopoly.
And given the way it supports the entire labour market, it should be regulated.
And yes, it’s got increasingly badly designed and unfocused in recent years.
It isn't a natural monopoly. There is definitely a niche for a business directory and contact management product that is not LinkedIn. It could integrate a mobile app with tap to share business cards. It also do a great job of verifying peoples histories.
There's a huge opportunity to do something really cool.
I prefer the other answer which suggested that it is a natural monopoly by virtue of the network effects acting as a barrier to entry to competitors.
See also Google, Facebook, and probably Amazon within appropriate definitions of the retail market.
The new entrant you described would have to build its network from scratch, or piggyback in another’s - ie Google or Facebook.
It's amazing how many natural monopolies turned out not to be, though.
Internet Explorer had a monopoly due to being installed by default on people's computers... until Chrome came along.
Windows was a monopoly... and now it's not.
Etc.
None of those have network effects though. If you look at all the social media launches since Facebook they all go for a particular niche and expand from there. Take instagram, tik tok, even discord. All focus on a particular niche (albeit in the case of Discord, one MS will be seeking to steal with the consumer / cutdown version of Teams within Windows 11).
Look, you wouldn't try and take LinkedIn on head-on. You'd choose a niche (industrial lubricants, for example) and then you'd tailor some industry specific functionality, and then you'd get everyone in that industry to be on your platform too.
And you'd go from there.
I'm not saying it's easy. But LinkedIn is very far from a monopoly.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
Knowing a lot of 18 and 19/20 year olds, all of them have been worn down by the relentless drip, drip drip of lockdown, exam results by random number generator, work options....
S'ok - Robert thinks they are a hardy lot and IIRC, @Ishmael_Z pointed out that children went through worse in WWII.
So we're fine.
I'm sure they've been worn down by lockdown.
But I'm equally sure that graduation ceremonies are one thing they'd happily miss.
Apart from your own experience I seriously have no idea on what basis you could assert that for the nation's children. And your own experience is not relevant because you hadn't gone through 15 months of a global pandemic.
So soz but I'm going to have to ignore your assertion.
Children need as much normality as possible and the end of school/uni years ceremonies and activities are a vital part of that.
Children also need: - end of term discos - residentials - school trips - birthday parties - sleepovers
Basically, they need to live. Their lives need highlights, colour. They need to spend time with people who aren't their parents. Putting all this on hold for three weeks in March 2020 was disappointing but seemed forgiveable given the circumstances and the unknowns. Still being in this half-life 15 months later now we are basically out the other side is a tad vexing. It's difficult to see whose benefit this is for.
100% agree.
Some loon on WatO saying long covid..can't be sure..variants..
We'll be here for ever if that thinking takes hold.
In a very strong field, Linked In is the worst, the very, very worst, website known to man. It is quite spectacularly bad - for example, they send out emails saying X wants to connect with you: then when you go on to the website, you can't find the invitation from X but you get screenfuls of utter garbage of zero interest to anyone. It even makes Microsoft Teams look well-designed, something you would have thought was impossible.
Why hasn't a decent competitor emerged to cater for this market? Is there some kind of natural monopoly or barrier to entry?
Yes, it’s a natural monopoly.
And given the way it supports the entire labour market, it should be regulated.
And yes, it’s got increasingly badly designed and unfocused in recent years.
It isn't a natural monopoly. There is definitely a niche for a business directory and contact management product that is not LinkedIn. It could integrate a mobile app with tap to share business cards. It also do a great job of verifying peoples histories.
There's a huge opportunity to do something really cool.
I prefer the other answer which suggested that it is a natural monopoly by virtue of the network effects acting as a barrier to entry to competitors.
See also Google, Facebook, and probably Amazon within appropriate definitions of the retail market.
The new entrant you described would have to build its network from scratch, or piggyback in another’s - ie Google or Facebook.
It's worth remembering that the core detail we wanted access to LinkedIn data for wasn't to allow people to identify potential customers, it was to tell the CRM system that ABC had left company XYZ and you needed to identify who the new person appropriate person was.
Facebook did have a corporate version project - I think it's died a million deaths...
Yes. I went to some career counselling workshops when I was made redundant in 2012. At the LinkedIn workshop, the presenter said that "Facebook Jobs" was in the pipeline and was going to kill LinkedIn.
In a very strong field, Linked In is the worst, the very, very worst, website known to man. It is quite spectacularly bad - for example, they send out emails saying X wants to connect with you: then when you go on to the website, you can't find the invitation from X but you get screenfuls of utter garbage of zero interest to anyone. It even makes Microsoft Teams look well-designed, something you would have thought was impossible.
I stopped using Linkedin years ago and hate Teams with a passion. Zoom rools OK
LinkedIn and Teams are bad for the same reason - they are both trying to be some kind of all-purpose Facebook/iOs substitute, so they've piled in masses of garbage, rather than actually doing what you want them to do - in the case of Teams, video conferences, not 'creating channels' or integrating apps or saving files or running a Wiki.
As for Zoom, why the hell did their designers think it was a good idea to make it impossible to set up and test your video and sound before you start the meeting? (Teams has the same 'feature', except it's easy to get round by starting it and left-clicking on the icon in the taskbar).
Yours, frustrated of Sussex.
You can on Zoom....Click your profile picture, then click Settings.....Video....
No, you just get 'Join a Meeting' or 'Sign in'. If you've received an invitation and don't have an account - which applies to most people - you can't access the settings until you click 'Join a Meeting'. That is completely insane.
You can make the free account by logging in with Google. It gives you all of the settings options.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
Ummm: I'm in LA County and I haven't seen any reintroduction of a mask mandate. And the LA County Covid page has no mention of it (http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/media/coronavirus/). Also, LA County seven day case numbers are still heading down.
So, not sure what your source is.
If the mask mandate remains, it's not freedom day, and won't be presented as such.
I was merely pointing out that @HYUFD's claim that a mask mandate had been reintroduced in LA County is incorrect.
Los Angeles County public health officials are now "strongly" recommending everyone to wear masks in indoor public places, regardless of vaccination status, due to an increased spread of the Delta variant. https://abc7.com/los-angeles-masks-delta-variant-indoors/10841712/
That's not a mask mandate, that's a recommendation.
So exactly what I originally said then 'LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant'.
Obviously I couldn’t give a fuck about the DUP, although it’s objectively bad for the Union on several levels.
The DUP likely originally hoped Brexit would lead to a restoration of a hard border with Ireland and had the whole UK gone to No Deal that is what would have happened. Although on that I think they were wrong, a hard border with Ireland would have led to greater demands for Irish unity than is the case now
The DUP are possibly looking into a meltdown as they have essentially had all their cake and eaten it with the 2017 -19 deals which have now come to fruition.... The UUP possibly scent blood and further pressure from loyalists may see DUP support fragment away - the new leader of UUP Doug Beattie is not to be underestimated, the DUP may paradoxically be the biggest losers from BREXIT in NI
Utterly stupid idea - what idiot came up with that?
What counts as "significant economic benefit?
Why would the other parties want to meet with you anyway - I would refuse a face to face in those circumstances
Against that I has a US client who is looking to invest £50m in the UK care homes sector. Really needs to be here in person to iron out the last details with his counterpart. But he’s not been able to come despite being double vaxxed so the project has drifted.
“… invest £50m in the UK care homes sector”
Any investigative journalists around today? Charlie boy has a story for you.
Mr. Eagles, that's useful (on LI spammery). Been thinking of looking for more work/making a profile.
Freelance writer, incidentally, for anyone after such.
You should definitely have a profile. It is a good shop window for services such as yours, but you need to work at it. If you write content for people it would be good to keep posting articles or examples, particularly if they have business interest and then connect like crazy with people that might want to use your services
"The camera was originally installed to point towards a glass door and balcony with sweeping views outside his ministerial office, which was considered a security weak point. But somebody turned it around so that it pointed instead to the internal doorway where Mr Hancock was caught kissing and fondling his aide Gina Coladangelo.
An internal investigation is seeking to discover if the camera was moved accidentally during renovations or whether it was repositioned by the leaker to spy on the couple. Insiders are convinced that it was done deliberately."
------
occam's razor.....nobody would know in advance he was going to be snogging his mistress right up against the door, he could easily of done it elsewhere (and probably did).
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
Knowing a lot of 18 and 19/20 year olds, all of them have been worn down by the relentless drip, drip drip of lockdown, exam results by random number generator, work options....
S'ok - Robert thinks they are a hardy lot and IIRC, @Ishmael_Z pointed out that children went through worse in WWII.
So we're fine.
I'm sure they've been worn down by lockdown.
But I'm equally sure that graduation ceremonies are one thing they'd happily miss.
Apart from your own experience I seriously have no idea on what basis you could assert that for the nation's children. And your own experience is not relevant because you hadn't gone through 15 months of a global pandemic.
So soz but I'm going to have to ignore your assertion.
Children need as much normality as possible and the end of school/uni years ceremonies and activities are a vital part of that.
Children also need: - end of term discos - residentials - school trips - birthday parties - sleepovers
Basically, they need to live. Their lives need highlights, colour. They need to spend time with people who aren't their parents. Putting all this on hold for three weeks in March 2020 was disappointing but seemed forgiveable given the circumstances and the unknowns. Still being in this half-life 15 months later now we are basically out the other side is a tad vexing. It's difficult to see whose benefit this is for.
Johnson's decision to suspend education in January was a catastrophe of the first order.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
"COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD" eh?
And shouting. Hmm, I think this discussion is moving in my direction.
And again, the graduation ceremonies, which you may or may not have enjoyed are absolutely an "ESSENTIAL RIGHT [sic] OF PASSAGE" for children. As is all the end of school/uni activities. I said at the beginning "End of term activities". Including graduation which formally marks the end of the era of schooling or uni.
You are simply wrong on this and quite why on the one hand you say lockdown has had an impact and on the other you are unable to see that a critical component of lockdown people are cheering at goodness only knows. I can only imagine something happened at your graduation that was unpleasant otherwise your response is irrational.
I apologise for shouting and calling you names.
I just remember the utter misery - both as a parent and a child - of sitting through assemblies - particularly ones where people go up to the front to be presented with a worthless bit of paper. Every time I've thought "this is two hours of my life, two hours of utter tedium, I will never get back."
Tony Blair, fwiw, agrees with me. He never actually turned up to graduate from Oxford, and therefore is technically not a graduate.
I've five, my wife and children two each. None of us have ever been to a graduation.
In a very strong field, Linked In is the worst, the very, very worst, website known to man. It is quite spectacularly bad - for example, they send out emails saying X wants to connect with you: then when you go on to the website, you can't find the invitation from X but you get screenfuls of utter garbage of zero interest to anyone. It even makes Microsoft Teams look well-designed, something you would have thought was impossible.
Why hasn't a decent competitor emerged to cater for this market? Is there some kind of natural monopoly or barrier to entry?
Yes, it’s a natural monopoly.
And given the way it supports the entire labour market, it should be regulated.
And yes, it’s got increasingly badly designed and unfocused in recent years.
It isn't a natural monopoly. There is definitely a niche for a business directory and contact management product that is not LinkedIn. It could integrate a mobile app with tap to share business cards. It also do a great job of verifying peoples histories.
There's a huge opportunity to do something really cool.
I prefer the other answer which suggested that it is a natural monopoly by virtue of the network effects acting as a barrier to entry to competitors.
See also Google, Facebook, and probably Amazon within appropriate definitions of the retail market.
The new entrant you described would have to build its network from scratch, or piggyback in another’s - ie Google or Facebook.
It's amazing how many natural monopolies turned out not to be, though.
Internet Explorer had a monopoly due to being installed by default on people's computers... until Chrome came along.
Windows was a monopoly... and now it's not.
Etc.
I have some sympathy with this, but the returns on capital are simply insane, have been for a full generation, and are getting insaner.
Google et al exist because our society allows them to; not the other way round.
One of my (actual in-person) customer meetings last week. They brought their IT manager in to talk systems, I showed him some stuff and then he said "is that a Chromebook???"
I think that there is a whole industry of IT managers, systems providers, software engineers who were raised on and make their living off trying to make things work on Windows. It is a happy synergy - Microsoft make money developing shit software full of holes and a client industry makes money filling the holes.
We are welcome in France if we have had 2 jabs as they cover all the main variants = good sense. If we have had 2 jabs, we have to isolate on return from France to UK = no sense. French @UEFA official comes to UK and does not have isolate = 2nd class citizens in our own country. https://twitter.com/LiamFox/status/1409865988103983109
My son is seven (today, actually...) and probably missed seven months of school. Teaching him was hard, but in some ways I'm glad I did it: I learnt a great deal about teaching, what he knew, and how he wanted to work. Thankfully, I know just about enough about the three R's to teach a six-year old, and he has thrived.
However, he is an only child, and socially he has suffered. He missed his friends, and he missed playing with other kids. He also gained a little weight during the last lockdown, despite daily exercise - showing how much running around he must do at school. Fortunately he has now burnt that off. (I blame the winter weather.)
But we were lucky. I know one kid who was allowed into school with the children of key workers, as his mum (who is lovely) freely admits to being incapable of teaching him. I know another girl who has problems and was behind before lockdown. Now her school says she is two years behind. At age seven. The little 'un met up with her this weekend, and it is obvious that she's much more backward socially than she used to be. We've known her since she was a baby, and it's been obvious since she was two or three that she education issues - but they've never really been investigated. Lockdown's been really bad for her.
So lockdown hasn't been too bad for our son. He is seven, and will recover. But I'm all too aware that for other kids his age it's been very bad, and many older kids will not have time to recover.
In which the irresistible force and the immoveable object are once again kicked down the road. (I can't make entire sense of TC's 6th point. Can anyone elucidate?)
This is an important concession by both parties.
The EU has conceded a further extension of the current exemptions.
The U.K. has conceded: a) that it was/is in the EU’s power to deny an extension b) that the extension is there to allow Northern Irish retailers to source locally or from the Republic, in preference to U.K. supply chains.
The U.K. is slowly conceding the reality of a customs/regulatory border between GB and NI, long after have conceded it legally.
The DUP are going to go stark raving bonkers over this. Tesco Ballymena will stock Irish beef and Irish milk and Irish market products and all the other stuff that you don't get in Tesco Barnsley. "WHERE IS OUR BRITISH BANGER" - thats got to be worth a march with a sash and one of those little bowler hats all by itself.
The DUP have been comprehensively and continually cucked by the U.K., or rather by Boris Johnson and the Vote Leave administration.
Well, they went through the lobbies in solidarity with Mark Francois, Steve Baker, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell at el, in order to torpedo Theresa May's plan for avoiding a border in the Irish Sea, so they really are not in a position to blame anyone else.
They voted for the Leopards Eating Faces option and now wonder who to blame for having no face.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
Knowing a lot of 18 and 19/20 year olds, all of them have been worn down by the relentless drip, drip drip of lockdown, exam results by random number generator, work options....
S'ok - Robert thinks they are a hardy lot and IIRC, @Ishmael_Z pointed out that children went through worse in WWII.
So we're fine.
I'm sure they've been worn down by lockdown.
But I'm equally sure that graduation ceremonies are one thing they'd happily miss.
Apart from your own experience I seriously have no idea on what basis you could assert that for the nation's children. And your own experience is not relevant because you hadn't gone through 15 months of a global pandemic.
So soz but I'm going to have to ignore your assertion.
Children need as much normality as possible and the end of school/uni years ceremonies and activities are a vital part of that.
Children also need: - end of term discos - residentials - school trips - birthday parties - sleepovers
Basically, they need to live. Their lives need highlights, colour. They need to spend time with people who aren't their parents. Putting all this on hold for three weeks in March 2020 was disappointing but seemed forgiveable given the circumstances and the unknowns. Still being in this half-life 15 months later now we are basically out the other side is a tad vexing. It's difficult to see whose benefit this is for.
100% agree.
Some loon on WatO saying long covid..can't be sure..variants..
We'll be here for ever if that thinking takes hold.
Jonathan Ashworth was making exactly the same vague points for the Labour Party yesterday. The government has not had a good pandemic. And at every turn the Labour Party seems to have been at pains to demonstrate why it would have been worse.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
"COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD" eh?
And shouting. Hmm, I think this discussion is moving in my direction.
And again, the graduation ceremonies, which you may or may not have enjoyed are absolutely an "ESSENTIAL RIGHT [sic] OF PASSAGE" for children. As is all the end of school/uni activities. I said at the beginning "End of term activities". Including graduation which formally marks the end of the era of schooling or uni.
You are simply wrong on this and quite why on the one hand you say lockdown has had an impact and on the other you are unable to see that a critical component of lockdown people are cheering at goodness only knows. I can only imagine something happened at your graduation that was unpleasant otherwise your response is irrational.
I apologise for shouting and calling you names.
I just remember the utter misery - both as a parent and a child - of sitting through assemblies - particularly ones where people go up to the front to be presented with a worthless bit of paper. Every time I've thought "this is two hours of my life, two hours of utter tedium, I will never get back."
Tony Blair, fwiw, agrees with me. He never actually turned up to graduate from Oxford, and therefore is technically not a graduate.
I've five, my wife and children two each. None of us have ever been to a graduation.
Its not a prerequisite to attend graduation to become a graduate.
One of my (actual in-person) customer meetings last week. They brought their IT manager in to talk systems, I showed him some stuff and then he said "is that a Chromebook???"
I think that there is a whole industry of IT managers, systems providers, software engineers who were raised on and make their living off trying to make things work on Windows. It is a happy synergy - Microsoft make money developing shit software full of holes and a client industry makes money filling the holes.
When someone opts out they don't like it.
With Azure it's even worse.
Companies that used to have resilient on-prem services migrated them all to Azure.
What happens if we can't get to Azure for any period? Can we recover somewhere else?
In which the irresistible force and the immoveable object are once again kicked down the road. (I can't make entire sense of TC's 6th point. Can anyone elucidate?)
This is an important concession by both parties.
The EU has conceded a further extension of the current exemptions.
The U.K. has conceded: a) that it was/is in the EU’s power to deny an extension b) that the extension is there to allow Northern Irish retailers to source locally or from the Republic, in preference to U.K. supply chains.
The U.K. is slowly conceding the reality of a customs/regulatory border between GB and NI, long after have conceded it legally.
The DUP are going to go stark raving bonkers over this. Tesco Ballymena will stock Irish beef and Irish milk and Irish market products and all the other stuff that you don't get in Tesco Barnsley. "WHERE IS OUR BRITISH BANGER" - thats got to be worth a march with a sash and one of those little bowler hats all by itself.
The DUP have been comprehensively and continually cucked by the U.K., or rather by Boris Johnson and the Vote Leave administration.
Well, they went through the lobbies in solidarity with Mark Francois, Steve Baker, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell at el, in order to torpedo Theresa May's plan for avoiding a border in the Irish Sea, so they really are not in a position to blame anyone else.
They voted for the Leopards Eating Faces option and now wonder who to blame for having no face.
The psychological benefit that such types have is that they are predisposed anyway to blame others for everything.
It’s always one of: 1, the EU 2, the “metropolitan elite” 3, judicial “sabouteurs” 4, “remoaners” 5, Cameron or May.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
"COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD" eh?
And shouting. Hmm, I think this discussion is moving in my direction.
And again, the graduation ceremonies, which you may or may not have enjoyed are absolutely an "ESSENTIAL RIGHT [sic] OF PASSAGE" for children. As is all the end of school/uni activities. I said at the beginning "End of term activities". Including graduation which formally marks the end of the era of schooling or uni.
You are simply wrong on this and quite why on the one hand you say lockdown has had an impact and on the other you are unable to see that a critical component of lockdown people are cheering at goodness only knows. I can only imagine something happened at your graduation that was unpleasant otherwise your response is irrational.
I apologise for shouting and calling you names.
I just remember the utter misery - both as a parent and a child - of sitting through assemblies - particularly ones where people go up to the front to be presented with a worthless bit of paper. Every time I've thought "this is two hours of my life, two hours of utter tedium, I will never get back."
Tony Blair, fwiw, agrees with me. He never actually turned up to graduate from Oxford, and therefore is technically not a graduate.
I've five, my wife and children two each. None of us have ever been to a graduation.
At the risk of labouring the point, did any of these graduations occur after 15 months of disrupted life when you were prevented by law from associating with your friends or from going to the shops or away for a weekend or...or...
Can you say that you missed your graduations in anything like similar circumstances to the people missing their graduations today?
Utterly stupid idea - what idiot came up with that?
What counts as "significant economic benefit?
Why would the other parties want to meet with you anyway - I would refuse a face to face in those circumstances
Against that I has a US client who is looking to invest £50m in the UK care homes sector. Really needs to be here in person to iron out the last details with his counterpart. But he’s not been able to come despite being double vaxxed so the project has drifted.
Why can't he go to the UK? He'll have five days of doing Zoom meetings, which - if he lands on Friday morning - means he'll be able to do in person the following Weds.
That's a lot better than for me and the US. I simply can't enter the US from the UK (despite being double vaccinated) without going via Canada or Mexico for two weeks.
He’d be bouncing off the hotel room wall after about 40 minutes…
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
High school graduation… in England?!?
It’s gone full circle now. You lot are de facto the 51st state.
Including "Proms" that teenagers seem obliged to attend these days for fear of life-long social exclusion.
In a very strong field, Linked In is the worst, the very, very worst, website known to man. It is quite spectacularly bad - for example, they send out emails saying X wants to connect with you: then when you go on to the website, you can't find the invitation from X but you get screenfuls of utter garbage of zero interest to anyone. It even makes Microsoft Teams look well-designed, something you would have thought was impossible.
Why hasn't a decent competitor emerged to cater for this market? Is there some kind of natural monopoly or barrier to entry?
Yes, it’s a natural monopoly.
And given the way it supports the entire labour market, it should be regulated.
And yes, it’s got increasingly badly designed and unfocused in recent years.
It isn't a natural monopoly. There is definitely a niche for a business directory and contact management product that is not LinkedIn. It could integrate a mobile app with tap to share business cards. It also do a great job of verifying peoples histories.
There's a huge opportunity to do something really cool.
I prefer the other answer which suggested that it is a natural monopoly by virtue of the network effects acting as a barrier to entry to competitors.
See also Google, Facebook, and probably Amazon within appropriate definitions of the retail market.
The new entrant you described would have to build its network from scratch, or piggyback in another’s - ie Google or Facebook.
It's amazing how many natural monopolies turned out not to be, though.
Internet Explorer had a monopoly due to being installed by default on people's computers... until Chrome came along.
Windows was a monopoly... and now it's not.
Etc.
I have some sympathy with this, but the returns on capital are simply insane, have been for a full generation, and are getting insaner.
Google et al exist because our society allows them to; not the other way round.
One of my (actual in-person) customer meetings last week. They brought their IT manager in to talk systems, I showed him some stuff and then he said "is that a Chromebook???"
I think that there is a whole industry of IT managers, systems providers, software engineers who were raised on and make their living off trying to make things work on Windows. It is a happy synergy - Microsoft make money developing shit software full of holes and a client industry makes money filling the holes.
When someone opts out they don't like it.
Actually, I'd argue MS are brilliant. The array of different hardware they have to target is amazing, with a great deal of backwards compatibility, and it mostly works.
It's hard enough when you control the hardware you're targeting.
'Obviously I couldn’t give a fuck about the DUP, although it’s objectively bad for the Union on several levels.
The DUP likely originally hoped Brexit would lead to a restoration of a hard border with Ireland and had the whole UK gone to No Deal that is what would have happened. Although on that I think they were wrong, a hard border with Ireland would have led to greater demands for Irish unity than is the case now
The DUP are possibly looking into a meltdown as they have essentially had all their cake and eaten it with the 2017 -19 deals which have now come to fruition.... The UUP possibly scent blood and further pressure from loyalists may see DUP support fragment away - the new leader of UUP Doug Beattie is not to be underestimated, the DUP may paradoxically be the biggest losers from BREXIT in NI'
Under Poots that was certainly the risk, Donaldson will likely steady the ship as an experienced hand.
However the general point is correct, the DUP have been leaking moderates to the UUP and hardliners to Traditional Unionist Voice
My son's primary school has cancelled the Year 6 junior prom and Year 6 pupil-led end of year theatre production, just, er, because, y'know, covid.
The fact that the entire year has been sat next to each other every day, no social distancing, playing sports, and mingling daily seems to have passed them by.
Utterly stupid idea - what idiot came up with that?
What counts as "significant economic benefit?
Why would the other parties want to meet with you anyway - I would refuse a face to face in those circumstances
Against that I has a US client who is looking to invest £50m in the UK care homes sector. Really needs to be here in person to iron out the last details with his counterpart. But he’s not been able to come despite being double vaxxed so the project has drifted.
Why can't he go to the UK? He'll have five days of doing Zoom meetings, which - if he lands on Friday morning - means he'll be able to do in person the following Weds.
That's a lot better than for me and the US. I simply can't enter the US from the UK (despite being double vaccinated) without going via Canada or Mexico for two weeks.
He’d be bouncing off the hotel room wall after about 40 minutes…
Fair enough
Personally (and I am of course completely biased), I think the rule for the double vaccinated are too tough. I also resent the fact that you can travel freely between the US and the UK and I cannot.
Which is probably also adding to my irritation levels this morning.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
High school graduation… in England?!?
It’s gone full circle now. You lot are de facto the 51st state.
All that means to me is Carrie getting slopped in pig's blood, going crazy and wreaking havoc.
No Mount, no Foden, no Grealish....shakes head. Park that bus. How the hell do England create any chances with a two in midfield, both of known are really known for their defensive qualities.
In a very strong field, Linked In is the worst, the very, very worst, website known to man. It is quite spectacularly bad - for example, they send out emails saying X wants to connect with you: then when you go on to the website, you can't find the invitation from X but you get screenfuls of utter garbage of zero interest to anyone. It even makes Microsoft Teams look well-designed, something you would have thought was impossible.
I stopped using Linkedin years ago and hate Teams with a passion. Zoom rools OK
LinkedIn and Teams are bad for the same reason - they are both trying to be some kind of all-purpose Facebook/iOs substitute, so they've piled in masses of garbage, rather than actually doing what you want them to do - in the case of Teams, video conferences, not 'creating channels' or integrating apps or saving files or running a Wiki.
As for Zoom, why the hell did their designers think it was a good idea to make it impossible to set up and test your video and sound before you start the meeting? (Teams has the same 'feature', except it's easy to get round by starting it and left-clicking on the icon in the taskbar).
Yours, frustrated of Sussex.
Absolutely agreed. They are all – pretty much universally – total garbage. Terrible design, and lots of additional 'features' that nobody wants and nobody ever uses. I cannot wait for the day to come where my weekly team meetings can again be done face to face.
Videoconferencing is shit. Anyone remember Zoom 'parties'??
You should have had a health warning on that last sentence
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
"COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD" eh?
And shouting. Hmm, I think this discussion is moving in my direction.
And again, the graduation ceremonies, which you may or may not have enjoyed are absolutely an "ESSENTIAL RIGHT [sic] OF PASSAGE" for children. As is all the end of school/uni activities. I said at the beginning "End of term activities". Including graduation which formally marks the end of the era of schooling or uni.
You are simply wrong on this and quite why on the one hand you say lockdown has had an impact and on the other you are unable to see that a critical component of lockdown people are cheering at goodness only knows. I can only imagine something happened at your graduation that was unpleasant otherwise your response is irrational.
I apologise for shouting and calling you names.
I just remember the utter misery - both as a parent and a child - of sitting through assemblies - particularly ones where people go up to the front to be presented with a worthless bit of paper. Every time I've thought "this is two hours of my life, two hours of utter tedium, I will never get back."
Tony Blair, fwiw, agrees with me. He never actually turned up to graduate from Oxford, and therefore is technically not a graduate.
I've five, my wife and children two each. None of us have ever been to a graduation.
At the risk of labouring the point, did any of these graduations occur after 15 months of disrupted life when you were prevented by law from associating with your friends or from going to the shops or away for a weekend or...or...
Can you say that you missed your graduations in anything like similar circumstances to the people missing their graduations today?
I think a graduation gathering is rather more of a social occasion than listening to people make speeches and collect pieces of paper.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
"COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD" eh?
And shouting. Hmm, I think this discussion is moving in my direction.
And again, the graduation ceremonies, which you may or may not have enjoyed are absolutely an "ESSENTIAL RIGHT [sic] OF PASSAGE" for children. As is all the end of school/uni activities. I said at the beginning "End of term activities". Including graduation which formally marks the end of the era of schooling or uni.
You are simply wrong on this and quite why on the one hand you say lockdown has had an impact and on the other you are unable to see that a critical component of lockdown people are cheering at goodness only knows. I can only imagine something happened at your graduation that was unpleasant otherwise your response is irrational.
I apologise for shouting and calling you names.
I just remember the utter misery - both as a parent and a child - of sitting through assemblies - particularly ones where people go up to the front to be presented with a worthless bit of paper. Every time I've thought "this is two hours of my life, two hours of utter tedium, I will never get back."
Tony Blair, fwiw, agrees with me. He never actually turned up to graduate from Oxford, and therefore is technically not a graduate.
I skipped mine at Imperial. It was in the Albert Hall but I didn't fancy it.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
"COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD" eh?
And shouting. Hmm, I think this discussion is moving in my direction.
And again, the graduation ceremonies, which you may or may not have enjoyed are absolutely an "ESSENTIAL RIGHT [sic] OF PASSAGE" for children. As is all the end of school/uni activities. I said at the beginning "End of term activities". Including graduation which formally marks the end of the era of schooling or uni.
You are simply wrong on this and quite why on the one hand you say lockdown has had an impact and on the other you are unable to see that a critical component of lockdown people are cheering at goodness only knows. I can only imagine something happened at your graduation that was unpleasant otherwise your response is irrational.
I apologise for shouting and calling you names.
I just remember the utter misery - both as a parent and a child - of sitting through assemblies - particularly ones where people go up to the front to be presented with a worthless bit of paper. Every time I've thought "this is two hours of my life, two hours of utter tedium, I will never get back."
Tony Blair, fwiw, agrees with me. He never actually turned up to graduate from Oxford, and therefore is technically not a graduate.
I've five, my wife and children two each. None of us have ever been to a graduation.
At the risk of labouring the point, did any of these graduations occur after 15 months of disrupted life when you were prevented by law from associating with your friends or from going to the shops or away for a weekend or...or...
Can you say that you missed your graduations in anything like similar circumstances to the people missing their graduations today?
I think a graduation gathering is rather more of a social occasion than listening to people make speeches and collect pieces of paper.
In a very strong field, Linked In is the worst, the very, very worst, website known to man. It is quite spectacularly bad - for example, they send out emails saying X wants to connect with you: then when you go on to the website, you can't find the invitation from X but you get screenfuls of utter garbage of zero interest to anyone. It even makes Microsoft Teams look well-designed, something you would have thought was impossible.
Why hasn't a decent competitor emerged to cater for this market? Is there some kind of natural monopoly or barrier to entry?
Yes, it’s a natural monopoly.
And given the way it supports the entire labour market, it should be regulated.
And yes, it’s got increasingly badly designed and unfocused in recent years.
It isn't a natural monopoly. There is definitely a niche for a business directory and contact management product that is not LinkedIn. It could integrate a mobile app with tap to share business cards. It also do a great job of verifying peoples histories.
There's a huge opportunity to do something really cool.
I prefer the other answer which suggested that it is a natural monopoly by virtue of the network effects acting as a barrier to entry to competitors.
See also Google, Facebook, and probably Amazon within appropriate definitions of the retail market.
The new entrant you described would have to build its network from scratch, or piggyback in another’s - ie Google or Facebook.
It's amazing how many natural monopolies turned out not to be, though.
Internet Explorer had a monopoly due to being installed by default on people's computers... until Chrome came along.
Windows was a monopoly... and now it's not.
Etc.
I have some sympathy with this, but the returns on capital are simply insane, have been for a full generation, and are getting insaner.
Google et al exist because our society allows them to; not the other way round.
One of my (actual in-person) customer meetings last week. They brought their IT manager in to talk systems, I showed him some stuff and then he said "is that a Chromebook???"
I think that there is a whole industry of IT managers, systems providers, software engineers who were raised on and make their living off trying to make things work on Windows. It is a happy synergy - Microsoft make money developing shit software full of holes and a client industry makes money filling the holes.
When someone opts out they don't like it.
Given the choice of Google and Microsoft - I personally would trust the latter way more than the former - to Google everything is a dataset that they will try to make money out of... Oh and be aware that Chromebooks have built in obsolescence dates in the way that Windows and co don't.
As for using the cloud (Azure, GCP, AWS) it offers some benefits but with those benefits come a whole set of cons of which a significant one is money.
My son's primary school has cancelled the Year 6 junior prom and Year 6 pupil-led end of year theatre production, just, er, because, y'know, covid.
The fact that the entire year has been sat next to each other every day, no social distancing, playing sports, and mingling daily seems to have passed them by.
Who exactly benefits from this irrational idiocy?
Boys.
Otherwise they'd all be standing around the edge of the dance floor looking embarassed. Now they can go round their mates house and play PlayStation instead.
In a very strong field, Linked In is the worst, the very, very worst, website known to man. It is quite spectacularly bad - for example, they send out emails saying X wants to connect with you: then when you go on to the website, you can't find the invitation from X but you get screenfuls of utter garbage of zero interest to anyone. It even makes Microsoft Teams look well-designed, something you would have thought was impossible.
Why hasn't a decent competitor emerged to cater for this market? Is there some kind of natural monopoly or barrier to entry?
Yes, it’s a natural monopoly.
And given the way it supports the entire labour market, it should be regulated.
And yes, it’s got increasingly badly designed and unfocused in recent years.
It isn't a natural monopoly. There is definitely a niche for a business directory and contact management product that is not LinkedIn. It could integrate a mobile app with tap to share business cards. It also do a great job of verifying peoples histories.
There's a huge opportunity to do something really cool.
I prefer the other answer which suggested that it is a natural monopoly by virtue of the network effects acting as a barrier to entry to competitors.
See also Google, Facebook, and probably Amazon within appropriate definitions of the retail market.
The new entrant you described would have to build its network from scratch, or piggyback in another’s - ie Google or Facebook.
It's amazing how many natural monopolies turned out not to be, though.
Internet Explorer had a monopoly due to being installed by default on people's computers... until Chrome came along.
Windows was a monopoly... and now it's not.
Etc.
I have some sympathy with this, but the returns on capital are simply insane, have been for a full generation, and are getting insaner.
Google et al exist because our society allows them to; not the other way round.
One of my (actual in-person) customer meetings last week. They brought their IT manager in to talk systems, I showed him some stuff and then he said "is that a Chromebook???"
I think that there is a whole industry of IT managers, systems providers, software engineers who were raised on and make their living off trying to make things work on Windows. It is a happy synergy - Microsoft make money developing shit software full of holes and a client industry makes money filling the holes.
When someone opts out they don't like it.
Given the choice of Google and Microsoft - I personally would trust the latter way more than the former - to Google everything is a dataset that they will try to make money out of... Oh and be aware that Chromebooks have built in obsolescence dates in the way that Windows and co don't.
As for using the cloud (Azure, GCP, AWS) it offers some benefits but with those benefits come a whole set of cons of which a significant one is money.
At least AWS allows you to have near bare metal virtualisation: it's not hard to move an AWS server to a dedicated one.
Utterly stupid idea - what idiot came up with that?
What counts as "significant economic benefit?
Why would the other parties want to meet with you anyway - I would refuse a face to face in those circumstances
Against that I has a US client who is looking to invest £50m in the UK care homes sector. Really needs to be here in person to iron out the last details with his counterpart. But he’s not been able to come despite being double vaxxed so the project has drifted.
“… invest £50m in the UK care homes sector”
Any investigative journalists around today? Charlie boy has a story for you.
No Mount, no Foden, no Grealish....shakes head. Park that bus. How the hell do England create any chances with a two in midfield, both of known are really known for their defensive qualities.
Maguire will hoof it straight to Kane and he'll try and win a free kick.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
High school graduation… in England?!?
It’s gone full circle now. You lot are de facto the 51st state.
All that means to me is Carrie getting slopped in pig's blood, going crazy and wreaking havoc.
Utterly stupid idea - what idiot came up with that?
What counts as "significant economic benefit?
Why would the other parties want to meet with you anyway - I would refuse a face to face in those circumstances
Against that I has a US client who is looking to invest £50m in the UK care homes sector. Really needs to be here in person to iron out the last details with his counterpart. But he’s not been able to come despite being double vaxxed so the project has drifted.
Why can't he go to the UK? He'll have five days of doing Zoom meetings, which - if he lands on Friday morning - means he'll be able to do in person the following Weds.
That's a lot better than for me and the US. I simply can't enter the US from the UK (despite being double vaccinated) without going via Canada or Mexico for two weeks.
He’d be bouncing off the hotel room wall after about 40 minutes…
Fair enough
Personally (and I am of course completely biased), I think the rule for the double vaccinated are too tough. I also resent the fact that you can travel freely between the US and the UK and I cannot.
Which is probably also adding to my irritation levels this morning.
In a very strong field, Linked In is the worst, the very, very worst, website known to man. It is quite spectacularly bad - for example, they send out emails saying X wants to connect with you: then when you go on to the website, you can't find the invitation from X but you get screenfuls of utter garbage of zero interest to anyone. It even makes Microsoft Teams look well-designed, something you would have thought was impossible.
Why hasn't a decent competitor emerged to cater for this market? Is there some kind of natural monopoly or barrier to entry?
Yes, it’s a natural monopoly.
And given the way it supports the entire labour market, it should be regulated.
And yes, it’s got increasingly badly designed and unfocused in recent years.
It isn't a natural monopoly. There is definitely a niche for a business directory and contact management product that is not LinkedIn. It could integrate a mobile app with tap to share business cards. It also do a great job of verifying peoples histories.
There's a huge opportunity to do something really cool.
I prefer the other answer which suggested that it is a natural monopoly by virtue of the network effects acting as a barrier to entry to competitors.
See also Google, Facebook, and probably Amazon within appropriate definitions of the retail market.
The new entrant you described would have to build its network from scratch, or piggyback in another’s - ie Google or Facebook.
It's amazing how many natural monopolies turned out not to be, though.
Internet Explorer had a monopoly due to being installed by default on people's computers... until Chrome came along.
Windows was a monopoly... and now it's not.
Etc.
I have some sympathy with this, but the returns on capital are simply insane, have been for a full generation, and are getting insaner.
Google et al exist because our society allows them to; not the other way round.
One of my (actual in-person) customer meetings last week. They brought their IT manager in to talk systems, I showed him some stuff and then he said "is that a Chromebook???"
I think that there is a whole industry of IT managers, systems providers, software engineers who were raised on and make their living off trying to make things work on Windows. It is a happy synergy - Microsoft make money developing shit software full of holes and a client industry makes money filling the holes.
When someone opts out they don't like it.
Given the choice of Google and Microsoft - I personally would trust the latter way more than the former - to Google everything is a dataset that they will try to make money out of... Oh and be aware that Chromebooks have built in obsolescence dates in the way that Windows and co don't.
As for using the cloud (Azure, GCP, AWS) it offers some benefits but with those benefits come a whole set of cons of which a significant one is money.
At least AWS allows you to have near bare metal virtualisation: it's not hard to move an AWS server to a dedicated one.
Only if you are using EC2's which really are just a virtualised machine with software based networking - the real benefits come from the more specialised areas (even if it's just AWS lambda functions) but by that point you are really stuck in AWS with little way of escaping.
For the stuff I'm currently working on we've gone back to actual hardware - it's 15% of the equivalent AWS price for a equivalent EC2.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
"COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD" eh?
And shouting. Hmm, I think this discussion is moving in my direction.
And again, the graduation ceremonies, which you may or may not have enjoyed are absolutely an "ESSENTIAL RIGHT [sic] OF PASSAGE" for children. As is all the end of school/uni activities. I said at the beginning "End of term activities". Including graduation which formally marks the end of the era of schooling or uni.
You are simply wrong on this and quite why on the one hand you say lockdown has had an impact and on the other you are unable to see that a critical component of lockdown people are cheering at goodness only knows. I can only imagine something happened at your graduation that was unpleasant otherwise your response is irrational.
I apologise for shouting and calling you names.
I just remember the utter misery - both as a parent and a child - of sitting through assemblies - particularly ones where people go up to the front to be presented with a worthless bit of paper. Every time I've thought "this is two hours of my life, two hours of utter tedium, I will never get back."
Tony Blair, fwiw, agrees with me. He never actually turned up to graduate from Oxford, and therefore is technically not a graduate.
I skipped mine at Imperial. It was in the Albert Hall but I didn't fancy it.
Me too. Shelling out for a fancy dress costume to sit in a hall for hours while folk droned on didn't appeal somehow.
"The camera was originally installed to point towards a glass door and balcony with sweeping views outside his ministerial office, which was considered a security weak point. But somebody turned it around so that it pointed instead to the internal doorway where Mr Hancock was caught kissing and fondling his aide Gina Coladangelo.
An internal investigation is seeking to discover if the camera was moved accidentally during renovations or whether it was repositioned by the leaker to spy on the couple. Insiders are convinced that it was done deliberately."
------
occam's razor.....nobody would know in advance he was going to be snogging his mistress right up against the door, he could easily of done it elsewhere (and probably did).
DJL's razor: strange no-one noticed the balcony camera no longer showed the balcony, which suggests it had been deliberately moved.
One of my (actual in-person) customer meetings last week. They brought their IT manager in to talk systems, I showed him some stuff and then he said "is that a Chromebook???"
I think that there is a whole industry of IT managers, systems providers, software engineers who were raised on and make their living off trying to make things work on Windows. It is a happy synergy - Microsoft make money developing shit software full of holes and a client industry makes money filling the holes.
When someone opts out they don't like it.
With Azure it's even worse.
Companies that used to have resilient on-prem services migrated them all to Azure.
What happens if we can't get to Azure for any period? Can we recover somewhere else?
Ummm, no...
No no, thats not a drawback, thats a feature. When this was extensively* tested in Redmond that kind of secure locked away can't get your files but neither can anyone else feature is what everyone wanted.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
"COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD" eh?
And shouting. Hmm, I think this discussion is moving in my direction.
And again, the graduation ceremonies, which you may or may not have enjoyed are absolutely an "ESSENTIAL RIGHT [sic] OF PASSAGE" for children. As is all the end of school/uni activities. I said at the beginning "End of term activities". Including graduation which formally marks the end of the era of schooling or uni.
You are simply wrong on this and quite why on the one hand you say lockdown has had an impact and on the other you are unable to see that a critical component of lockdown people are cheering at goodness only knows. I can only imagine something happened at your graduation that was unpleasant otherwise your response is irrational.
I apologise for shouting and calling you names.
I just remember the utter misery - both as a parent and a child - of sitting through assemblies - particularly ones where people go up to the front to be presented with a worthless bit of paper. Every time I've thought "this is two hours of my life, two hours of utter tedium, I will never get back."
Tony Blair, fwiw, agrees with me. He never actually turned up to graduate from Oxford, and therefore is technically not a graduate.
I've five, my wife and children two each. None of us have ever been to a graduation.
There is a great Viz cartoon about the agony of attending Children’s Nativity plays as a father
"The camera was originally installed to point towards a glass door and balcony with sweeping views outside his ministerial office, which was considered a security weak point. But somebody turned it around so that it pointed instead to the internal doorway where Mr Hancock was caught kissing and fondling his aide Gina Coladangelo.
An internal investigation is seeking to discover if the camera was moved accidentally during renovations or whether it was repositioned by the leaker to spy on the couple. Insiders are convinced that it was done deliberately."
------
occam's razor.....nobody would know in advance he was going to be snogging his mistress right up against the door, he could easily of done it elsewhere (and probably did).
DJL's razor: strange no-one noticed the balcony camera no longer showed the balcony, which suggests it had been deliberately moved.
You are presuming the bloke in the CCTV control room actually cared about such things.
I think we have found out now that security isn't exactly a top priority, given they use Chinese CCTV cameras....and as I typed this..
Government security procedures are clearly an absolute joke. Although the Guardian overplaying the "what about foreign states getting hold of it"....I mean if they don't know it by other means, they are really crap at spying. You only need to get access to a journalists phone who will have them or have a mole in the phone companies, or basically anybody who ever has to phone government minister.
My son's primary school has cancelled the Year 6 junior prom and Year 6 pupil-led end of year theatre production, just, er, because, y'know, covid.
The fact that the entire year has been sat next to each other every day, no social distancing, playing sports, and mingling daily seems to have passed them by.
Who exactly benefits from this irrational idiocy?
'er, because, y'know, covid' has become the mantra of the age.
My year 6 daughter's school is better than many in this regard but, so much is being missed. They are doing a Year 6 production but it is going to be videoed and sent out on DVD rather than have parents watch it. To add to my irritation, the subject of the play appears to be the pandemic of 2020/21. From what I can glean it is a particularly state-sanctioned view in which the likes of Sage are the good guys and the heroes are the NHS first, then 'scientists, then anyone else who worked for the public sector, then food delivery workers.
Meanwhile her senior school has cancelled its induction day - where she would have got to meet her new classmates - in later July, er, because, y'know, covid. The assumption seems to be in the state sector that freedom day will not happen. Largely, I think, because they don't want it to. They are addicted to being the good guys in their own story.
In a very strong field, Linked In is the worst, the very, very worst, website known to man. It is quite spectacularly bad - for example, they send out emails saying X wants to connect with you: then when you go on to the website, you can't find the invitation from X but you get screenfuls of utter garbage of zero interest to anyone. It even makes Microsoft Teams look well-designed, something you would have thought was impossible.
Why hasn't a decent competitor emerged to cater for this market? Is there some kind of natural monopoly or barrier to entry?
Yes, it’s a natural monopoly.
And given the way it supports the entire labour market, it should be regulated.
And yes, it’s got increasingly badly designed and unfocused in recent years.
It isn't a natural monopoly. There is definitely a niche for a business directory and contact management product that is not LinkedIn. It could integrate a mobile app with tap to share business cards. It also do a great job of verifying peoples histories.
There's a huge opportunity to do something really cool.
I prefer the other answer which suggested that it is a natural monopoly by virtue of the network effects acting as a barrier to entry to competitors.
See also Google, Facebook, and probably Amazon within appropriate definitions of the retail market.
The new entrant you described would have to build its network from scratch, or piggyback in another’s - ie Google or Facebook.
It's amazing how many natural monopolies turned out not to be, though.
Internet Explorer had a monopoly due to being installed by default on people's computers... until Chrome came along.
Windows was a monopoly... and now it's not.
Etc.
I have some sympathy with this, but the returns on capital are simply insane, have been for a full generation, and are getting insaner.
Google et al exist because our society allows them to; not the other way round.
One of my (actual in-person) customer meetings last week. They brought their IT manager in to talk systems, I showed him some stuff and then he said "is that a Chromebook???"
I think that there is a whole industry of IT managers, systems providers, software engineers who were raised on and make their living off trying to make things work on Windows. It is a happy synergy - Microsoft make money developing shit software full of holes and a client industry makes money filling the holes.
When someone opts out they don't like it.
Given the choice of Google and Microsoft - I personally would trust the latter way more than the former - to Google everything is a dataset that they will try to make money out of... Oh and be aware that Chromebooks have built in obsolescence dates in the way that Windows and co don't.
As for using the cloud (Azure, GCP, AWS) it offers some benefits but with those benefits come a whole set of cons of which a significant one is money.
I don't get the "ah but Chromebooks have built in obsolescence dates" argument (and it isn't a dig at you as I've heard it a lot).
For 7 years you get a device where the OS receives regular OTA updates as does most of the software run on it. At the end of that your device is still perfectly usable with an OS that runs quickly, you just lose the OTA updates.
We have a 10 year old Chromebook that is fully functional and as quick as it was when we first got it, and if you want to you can install a 3rd party OS that directly replicates the original OS and gets OTA updates.
Alternately I have a 10 year old PC which is now far far too slow for the huge load required by the latest updates of Windows 10. I could restore it by installing Windows 7 (or XP!) but its hardly comparable as a computer that still works as intended.
In a very strong field, Linked In is the worst, the very, very worst, website known to man. It is quite spectacularly bad - for example, they send out emails saying X wants to connect with you: then when you go on to the website, you can't find the invitation from X but you get screenfuls of utter garbage of zero interest to anyone. It even makes Microsoft Teams look well-designed, something you would have thought was impossible.
Why hasn't a decent competitor emerged to cater for this market? Is there some kind of natural monopoly or barrier to entry?
Yes, it’s a natural monopoly.
And given the way it supports the entire labour market, it should be regulated.
And yes, it’s got increasingly badly designed and unfocused in recent years.
It isn't a natural monopoly. There is definitely a niche for a business directory and contact management product that is not LinkedIn. It could integrate a mobile app with tap to share business cards. It also do a great job of verifying peoples histories.
There's a huge opportunity to do something really cool.
I prefer the other answer which suggested that it is a natural monopoly by virtue of the network effects acting as a barrier to entry to competitors.
See also Google, Facebook, and probably Amazon within appropriate definitions of the retail market.
The new entrant you described would have to build its network from scratch, or piggyback in another’s - ie Google or Facebook.
It's amazing how many natural monopolies turned out not to be, though.
Internet Explorer had a monopoly due to being installed by default on people's computers... until Chrome came along.
Windows was a monopoly... and now it's not.
Etc.
I have some sympathy with this, but the returns on capital are simply insane, have been for a full generation, and are getting insaner.
Google et al exist because our society allows them to; not the other way round.
One of my (actual in-person) customer meetings last week. They brought their IT manager in to talk systems, I showed him some stuff and then he said "is that a Chromebook???"
I think that there is a whole industry of IT managers, systems providers, software engineers who were raised on and make their living off trying to make things work on Windows. It is a happy synergy - Microsoft make money developing shit software full of holes and a client industry makes money filling the holes.
When someone opts out they don't like it.
Given the choice of Google and Microsoft - I personally would trust the latter way more than the former - to Google everything is a dataset that they will try to make money out of... Oh and be aware that Chromebooks have built in obsolescence dates in the way that Windows and co don't.
As for using the cloud (Azure, GCP, AWS) it offers some benefits but with those benefits come a whole set of cons of which a significant one is money.
At least AWS allows you to have near bare metal virtualisation: it's not hard to move an AWS server to a dedicated one.
Only if you are using EC2's which really are just a virtualised machine with software based networking - the real benefits come from the more specialised areas (even if it's just AWS lambda functions) but by that point you are really stuck in AWS with little way of escaping.
For the stuff I'm currently working on we've gone back to actual hardware - it's 15% of the equivalent AWS price for a equivalent EC2.
There were several clouds that featured real hardware alongside virtual machines, but they disappeared because "the market" massively favoured VMs on AWS and similar. Ironically, the hyperscalers are now moving to offer more-or-less dedicated hardware options.
I'm tight. I don't like spending money. Therefore for personal use, I prefer to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice - at least since I've not been working and can't get someone else to pay for Office.
But LibreOffice is annoying. During lockdown, when my time was really tight, I stole a few hours to do some of my own work. I created a spreadsheet that was a few hundred rows deep, by five columns. Cells were coloured according to a criteria by hand (no macros).
I saved the work (autosave was on anyway). I wanted to print it out, so I set the page format to landscape, and reduced the point size slightly. It crashes, taking out the autosave and the main save. So I checked I'm running a stable version and not a beta, got an older copy, did the changes, then altered the font size.
It crashed again. I'd found a reproducible bug whilst doing a really basic task. The old me would have written up and submitted a bug report. The new me, pi**ed off at having lost a couple of hours of precious time, just went online and got Office.
And you know what? It works. In fact, it works really well. Yes, it's cost money, but at least I haven't had the experience of it ****** well corrupting my work. It also 'feels' much better than LibreOffice as well - and I've used both extensively.
Sometimes you just want things that work. MS generally does that.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
"COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD" eh?
And shouting. Hmm, I think this discussion is moving in my direction.
And again, the graduation ceremonies, which you may or may not have enjoyed are absolutely an "ESSENTIAL RIGHT [sic] OF PASSAGE" for children. As is all the end of school/uni activities. I said at the beginning "End of term activities". Including graduation which formally marks the end of the era of schooling or uni.
You are simply wrong on this and quite why on the one hand you say lockdown has had an impact and on the other you are unable to see that a critical component of lockdown people are cheering at goodness only knows. I can only imagine something happened at your graduation that was unpleasant otherwise your response is irrational.
I apologise for shouting and calling you names.
I just remember the utter misery - both as a parent and a child - of sitting through assemblies - particularly ones where people go up to the front to be presented with a worthless bit of paper. Every time I've thought "this is two hours of my life, two hours of utter tedium, I will never get back."
Tony Blair, fwiw, agrees with me. He never actually turned up to graduate from Oxford, and therefore is technically not a graduate.
I skipped mine at Imperial. It was in the Albert Hall but I didn't fancy it.
Me too. Shelling out for a fancy dress costume to sit in a hall for hours while folk droned on didn't appeal somehow.
It's really all about the honorary degrees anyway.
I'm tight. I don't like spending money. Therefore for personal use, I prefer to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice - at least since I've not been working and can't get someone else to pay for Office.
But LibreOffice is annoying. During lockdown, when my time was really tight, I stole a few hours to do some of my own work. I created a spreadsheet that was a few hundred rows deep, by five columns. Cells were coloured according to a criteria by hand (no macros).
I saved the work (autosave was on anyway). I wanted to print it out, so I set the page format to landscape, and reduced the point size slightly. It crashes, taking out the autosave and the main save. So I checked I'm running a stable version and not a beta, got an older copy, did the changes, then altered the font size.
It crashed again. I'd found a reproducible bug whilst doing a really basic task. The old me would have written up and submitted a bug report. The new me, pi**ed off at having lost a couple of hours of precious time, just went online and got Office.
And you know what? It works. In fact, it works really well. Yes, it's cost money, but at least I haven't had the experience of it ****** well corrupting my work. It also 'feels' much better than LibreOffice as well - and I've used both extensively.
Sometimes you just want things that work. MS generally does that.
I like OpenOffice. Used it a lot in the past. But it no longer runs under MacOs Big Sur.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
High school graduation… in England?!?
It’s gone full circle now. You lot are de facto the 51st state.
Including "Proms" that teenagers seem obliged to attend these days for fear of life-long social exclusion.
The Americans are forever making us change the words for perfectly well established British traditions. I'm surprised we're not talking about the Euro Soccer championships. There have been end of 6th form "balls" for decades. I remember going to our school's which was the unusually named "Austro-Hungarian Society summer ball" (don't ask), and in some cases they've been called debutante balls or debs, but they seem suddenly to have become high school proms in the last few years.
My children talk about going to the shopping mall (what's wrong with shopping centre or precinct?), and one of my nieces even refers to playing ball games "in the yard" - her large, lawned back garden.
What they now call high school graduation is essentially speech day.
The problem for the DUP is that they have been demanding the end of the Northern Ireland Protocol.
So indeed have the UUP.
But the UK govt has now conceded that the Northern Ireland Protocol is here to stay.
It’s not clear what a coherent Unionist position might be. The only way to “remove” the protocol, short of the Assembly itself voting it down, which ain’t going to happen, is for the UK itself to move much closer to the EU so that much of the need for customs and regulatory checks are obviated.
But this requires the DUP to advocate for a closer trading relationship with the EU than the bare bones negotiated in the TCA, and I doubt they have the intellectual ability to do that.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
"COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD" eh?
And shouting. Hmm, I think this discussion is moving in my direction.
And again, the graduation ceremonies, which you may or may not have enjoyed are absolutely an "ESSENTIAL RIGHT [sic] OF PASSAGE" for children. As is all the end of school/uni activities. I said at the beginning "End of term activities". Including graduation which formally marks the end of the era of schooling or uni.
You are simply wrong on this and quite why on the one hand you say lockdown has had an impact and on the other you are unable to see that a critical component of lockdown people are cheering at goodness only knows. I can only imagine something happened at your graduation that was unpleasant otherwise your response is irrational.
I apologise for shouting and calling you names.
I just remember the utter misery - both as a parent and a child - of sitting through assemblies - particularly ones where people go up to the front to be presented with a worthless bit of paper. Every time I've thought "this is two hours of my life, two hours of utter tedium, I will never get back."
Tony Blair, fwiw, agrees with me. He never actually turned up to graduate from Oxford, and therefore is technically not a graduate.
I skipped mine at Imperial. It was in the Albert Hall but I didn't fancy it.
Me too. Shelling out for a fancy dress costume to sit in a hall for hours while folk droned on didn't appeal somehow.
It's really all about the honorary degrees anyway.
Is it true that everyone gets either a first or a 2:1 now? No-one gets a Desmond anymore?
I'm tight. I don't like spending money. Therefore for personal use, I prefer to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice - at least since I've not been working and can't get someone else to pay for Office.
But LibreOffice is annoying. During lockdown, when my time was really tight, I stole a few hours to do some of my own work. I created a spreadsheet that was a few hundred rows deep, by five columns. Cells were coloured according to a criteria by hand (no macros).
I saved the work (autosave was on anyway). I wanted to print it out, so I set the page format to landscape, and reduced the point size slightly. It crashes, taking out the autosave and the main save. So I checked I'm running a stable version and not a beta, got an older copy, did the changes, then altered the font size.
It crashed again. I'd found a reproducible bug whilst doing a really basic task. The old me would have written up and submitted a bug report. The new me, pi**ed off at having lost a couple of hours of precious time, just went online and got Office.
And you know what? It works. In fact, it works really well. Yes, it's cost money, but at least I haven't had the experience of it ****** well corrupting my work. It also 'feels' much better than LibreOffice as well - and I've used both extensively.
Sometimes you just want things that work. MS generally does that.
I like OpenOffice. Used it a lot in the past. But it no longer runs under MacOs Big Sur.
I guess an update will come in the future?
All the dev work is now happening with LibreOffice, which works fine with Big Sur.
The OpenOffice fork (which was run by IBM I think) is effectively dead.
"The camera was originally installed to point towards a glass door and balcony with sweeping views outside his ministerial office, which was considered a security weak point. But somebody turned it around so that it pointed instead to the internal doorway where Mr Hancock was caught kissing and fondling his aide Gina Coladangelo.
An internal investigation is seeking to discover if the camera was moved accidentally during renovations or whether it was repositioned by the leaker to spy on the couple. Insiders are convinced that it was done deliberately."
------
occam's razor.....nobody would know in advance he was going to be snogging his mistress right up against the door, he could easily of done it elsewhere (and probably did).
DJL's razor: strange no-one noticed the balcony camera no longer showed the balcony, which suggests it had been deliberately moved.
You are presuming the bloke in the CCTV control room actually cared about such things.
I think we have found out now that security isn't exactly a top priority, given they use Chinese CCTV cameras....and as I typed this..
Government security procedures are clearly an absolute joke. Although the Guardian overplaying the "what about foreign states getting hold of it"....I mean if they don't know it by other means, they are really crap at spying. You only need to get access to a journalists phone who will have them or have a mole in the phone companies, or basically anybody who ever has to phone government minister.
I gather a lot of mobile phone billing is outsourced offshore. That will tell you (the foreign spy) not only what Raab's phone number is but, far more significantly, who phones him and whom he calls.
I despair of governments of both colours who seem to have no idea what foreign spies want to know. For instance, New Labour wanted to have income tax processed in America. Now we are putting "anonymised" health records up for sale.
And that's without Linkedin (earlier in this thread) and other private companies getting hacked. Or HMG routing Cabinet meetings through China.
I'm tight. I don't like spending money. Therefore for personal use, I prefer to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice - at least since I've not been working and can't get someone else to pay for Office.
But LibreOffice is annoying. During lockdown, when my time was really tight, I stole a few hours to do some of my own work. I created a spreadsheet that was a few hundred rows deep, by five columns. Cells were coloured according to a criteria by hand (no macros).
I saved the work (autosave was on anyway). I wanted to print it out, so I set the page format to landscape, and reduced the point size slightly. It crashes, taking out the autosave and the main save. So I checked I'm running a stable version and not a beta, got an older copy, did the changes, then altered the font size.
It crashed again. I'd found a reproducible bug whilst doing a really basic task. The old me would have written up and submitted a bug report. The new me, pi**ed off at having lost a couple of hours of precious time, just went online and got Office.
And you know what? It works. In fact, it works really well. Yes, it's cost money, but at least I haven't had the experience of it ****** well corrupting my work. It also 'feels' much better than LibreOffice as well - and I've used both extensively.
Sometimes you just want things that work. MS generally does that.
"The camera was originally installed to point towards a glass door and balcony with sweeping views outside his ministerial office, which was considered a security weak point. But somebody turned it around so that it pointed instead to the internal doorway where Mr Hancock was caught kissing and fondling his aide Gina Coladangelo.
An internal investigation is seeking to discover if the camera was moved accidentally during renovations or whether it was repositioned by the leaker to spy on the couple. Insiders are convinced that it was done deliberately."
------
occam's razor.....nobody would know in advance he was going to be snogging his mistress right up against the door, he could easily of done it elsewhere (and probably did).
DJL's razor: strange no-one noticed the balcony camera no longer showed the balcony, which suggests it had been deliberately moved.
Strange NewsCorp publishes emails someone trying to flog it to them. All that suggests to me is the opposite, they had a hand in it because the affair, which came as a shock to the PM was known about inside NewsCorp.
The Sun and The Times will have to close down if true.
The number of new doses administered yesterday is 265,276
The simple "day gap" has moved down to 73 days now though. That assumes 100% return which won't be the case. The long crawl to ~ 90% by ONS vaccinated begins.
I'm tight. I don't like spending money. Therefore for personal use, I prefer to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice - at least since I've not been working and can't get someone else to pay for Office.
But LibreOffice is annoying. During lockdown, when my time was really tight, I stole a few hours to do some of my own work. I created a spreadsheet that was a few hundred rows deep, by five columns. Cells were coloured according to a criteria by hand (no macros).
I saved the work (autosave was on anyway). I wanted to print it out, so I set the page format to landscape, and reduced the point size slightly. It crashes, taking out the autosave and the main save. So I checked I'm running a stable version and not a beta, got an older copy, did the changes, then altered the font size.
It crashed again. I'd found a reproducible bug whilst doing a really basic task. The old me would have written up and submitted a bug report. The new me, pi**ed off at having lost a couple of hours of precious time, just went online and got Office.
And you know what? It works. In fact, it works really well. Yes, it's cost money, but at least I haven't had the experience of it ****** well corrupting my work. It also 'feels' much better than LibreOffice as well - and I've used both extensively.
Sometimes you just want things that work. MS generally does that.
That's true. MS Office just works. Be careful to stay within the data limits, though, or you'll find yourself silently truncating the national Covid incidence data.
I don't get the "ah but Chromebooks have built in obsolescence dates" argument (and it isn't a dig at you as I've heard it a lot).
For 7 years you get a device where the OS receives regular OTA updates as does most of the software run on it. At the end of that your device is still perfectly usable with an OS that runs quickly, you just lose the OTA updates.
The issue is where in the lifecycle you buy. It's not 7 years from date of purchase, it's 7 years from date of design. If you buy it in year 6 you get 1 year of updates...
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
"COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD" eh?
And shouting. Hmm, I think this discussion is moving in my direction.
And again, the graduation ceremonies, which you may or may not have enjoyed are absolutely an "ESSENTIAL RIGHT [sic] OF PASSAGE" for children. As is all the end of school/uni activities. I said at the beginning "End of term activities". Including graduation which formally marks the end of the era of schooling or uni.
You are simply wrong on this and quite why on the one hand you say lockdown has had an impact and on the other you are unable to see that a critical component of lockdown people are cheering at goodness only knows. I can only imagine something happened at your graduation that was unpleasant otherwise your response is irrational.
I apologise for shouting and calling you names.
I just remember the utter misery - both as a parent and a child - of sitting through assemblies - particularly ones where people go up to the front to be presented with a worthless bit of paper. Every time I've thought "this is two hours of my life, two hours of utter tedium, I will never get back."
Tony Blair, fwiw, agrees with me. He never actually turned up to graduate from Oxford, and therefore is technically not a graduate.
I've five, my wife and children two each. None of us have ever been to a graduation.
Didn't bother with BSc, but the MBA was a party not to be missed!
I'm tight. I don't like spending money. Therefore for personal use, I prefer to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice - at least since I've not been working and can't get someone else to pay for Office.
But LibreOffice is annoying. During lockdown, when my time was really tight, I stole a few hours to do some of my own work. I created a spreadsheet that was a few hundred rows deep, by five columns. Cells were coloured according to a criteria by hand (no macros).
I saved the work (autosave was on anyway). I wanted to print it out, so I set the page format to landscape, and reduced the point size slightly. It crashes, taking out the autosave and the main save. So I checked I'm running a stable version and not a beta, got an older copy, did the changes, then altered the font size.
It crashed again. I'd found a reproducible bug whilst doing a really basic task. The old me would have written up and submitted a bug report. The new me, pi**ed off at having lost a couple of hours of precious time, just went online and got Office.
And you know what? It works. In fact, it works really well. Yes, it's cost money, but at least I haven't had the experience of it ****** well corrupting my work. It also 'feels' much better than LibreOffice as well - and I've used both extensively.
Sometimes you just want things that work. MS generally does that.
As a (mostly) Linux user for the past 15 years or so, I have to agree re Office. I think the LibreOffice issue is that it's (even more than MS Office) a hodge-podge of different cooks over a number of years, including Sun for whom there was no problem that couldn't be made worse by adding a bit more Java and IBM-Sun trench warfare was clearly more fun than fixing up the code. There's also the fact there's not actually that much demand for a better office suite on Linux - commercial users are mostly not using it for desktops and if they are it's pretty basic word processing and spreadsheets and real freetards use LaTeX even for letters to their mum and R/python for adding up a restaurant bill. Those after a free office suite on Windows are also not, generally, doing hugely demanding things.
Mind you, I do also hate Word and Excel a fair bit. Luckily I do very little in Excel, but I do have the pain of Word for writing up papers with colleagues. But even Word is much better than it was - equation editor doesn't crash it every time now
No Mount, no Foden, no Grealish....shakes head. Park that bus. How the hell do England create any chances with a two in midfield, both of known are really known for their defensive qualities.
That suggests Walker in a back 3? I prefer back 4 with Rice as screen and Phillips advanced ball winner that saw off Croatia.
The route to a Wembley Final does not look so difficult as it could be, but it doesn’t matter as much as are England good enough to seal the deal?
Is this team, and the players individually good enough?
Mentally I think they believe in themselves, I don’t have a problem with that part of equation.
Are they knock free, match fit enough to produce close to their best? Are they not too jaded after Prem Season to produce close to their best? They don’t have the excuse Wales had, playing away and travelling hitting performance, but they still need a fair amount of luck.
Tournament form probably means nothing if chasing trophies, just that you got through the stages not how you did it, however, in the matches so far England started brightly and ended bogged down in the trenches unable to get back on top, so we can expect a similar pattern.
Back 3 will invite German possession in front our defence, rather than pushed up by a defensive high line. So would be a mistake for the lack of creativity you explained, but also defensively.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
"COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD" eh?
And shouting. Hmm, I think this discussion is moving in my direction.
And again, the graduation ceremonies, which you may or may not have enjoyed are absolutely an "ESSENTIAL RIGHT [sic] OF PASSAGE" for children. As is all the end of school/uni activities. I said at the beginning "End of term activities". Including graduation which formally marks the end of the era of schooling or uni.
You are simply wrong on this and quite why on the one hand you say lockdown has had an impact and on the other you are unable to see that a critical component of lockdown people are cheering at goodness only knows. I can only imagine something happened at your graduation that was unpleasant otherwise your response is irrational.
I apologise for shouting and calling you names.
I just remember the utter misery - both as a parent and a child - of sitting through assemblies - particularly ones where people go up to the front to be presented with a worthless bit of paper. Every time I've thought "this is two hours of my life, two hours of utter tedium, I will never get back."
Tony Blair, fwiw, agrees with me. He never actually turned up to graduate from Oxford, and therefore is technically not a graduate.
I skipped mine at Imperial. It was in the Albert Hall but I didn't fancy it.
Me too. Shelling out for a fancy dress costume to sit in a hall for hours while folk droned on didn't appeal somehow.
It's really all about the honorary degrees anyway.
Is it true that everyone gets either a first or a 2:1 now? No-one gets a Desmond anymore?
95 per cent at Oxford. Hull might have maintained its academic standards.
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
"COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD" eh?
And shouting. Hmm, I think this discussion is moving in my direction.
And again, the graduation ceremonies, which you may or may not have enjoyed are absolutely an "ESSENTIAL RIGHT [sic] OF PASSAGE" for children. As is all the end of school/uni activities. I said at the beginning "End of term activities". Including graduation which formally marks the end of the era of schooling or uni.
You are simply wrong on this and quite why on the one hand you say lockdown has had an impact and on the other you are unable to see that a critical component of lockdown people are cheering at goodness only knows. I can only imagine something happened at your graduation that was unpleasant otherwise your response is irrational.
I apologise for shouting and calling you names.
I just remember the utter misery - both as a parent and a child - of sitting through assemblies - particularly ones where people go up to the front to be presented with a worthless bit of paper. Every time I've thought "this is two hours of my life, two hours of utter tedium, I will never get back."
Tony Blair, fwiw, agrees with me. He never actually turned up to graduate from Oxford, and therefore is technically not a graduate.
I skipped mine at Imperial. It was in the Albert Hall but I didn't fancy it.
Me too. Shelling out for a fancy dress costume to sit in a hall for hours while folk droned on didn't appeal somehow.
It's really all about the honorary degrees anyway.
Is it true that everyone gets either a first or a 2:1 now? No-one gets a Desmond anymore?
95 per cent at Oxford. Hull might have maintained its academic standards.
Hull, looks like they might have improved them a bit, they have managed to crack the top 75 in the country....
One of my (actual in-person) customer meetings last week. They brought their IT manager in to talk systems, I showed him some stuff and then he said "is that a Chromebook???"
I think that there is a whole industry of IT managers, systems providers, software engineers who were raised on and make their living off trying to make things work on Windows. It is a happy synergy - Microsoft make money developing shit software full of holes and a client industry makes money filling the holes.
When someone opts out they don't like it.
With Azure it's even worse.
Companies that used to have resilient on-prem services migrated them all to Azure.
What happens if we can't get to Azure for any period? Can we recover somewhere else?
Ummm, no...
On the other hand you have lots of companies with badly maintained and supported on-prem services migrating them to Azure and not losing the entirety of their systems if a single cable breaks.
I'm tight. I don't like spending money. Therefore for personal use, I prefer to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice - at least since I've not been working and can't get someone else to pay for Office.
But LibreOffice is annoying. During lockdown, when my time was really tight, I stole a few hours to do some of my own work. I created a spreadsheet that was a few hundred rows deep, by five columns. Cells were coloured according to a criteria by hand (no macros).
I saved the work (autosave was on anyway). I wanted to print it out, so I set the page format to landscape, and reduced the point size slightly. It crashes, taking out the autosave and the main save. So I checked I'm running a stable version and not a beta, got an older copy, did the changes, then altered the font size.
It crashed again. I'd found a reproducible bug whilst doing a really basic task. The old me would have written up and submitted a bug report. The new me, pi**ed off at having lost a couple of hours of precious time, just went online and got Office.
And you know what? It works. In fact, it works really well. Yes, it's cost money, but at least I haven't had the experience of it ****** well corrupting my work. It also 'feels' much better than LibreOffice as well - and I've used both extensively.
Sometimes you just want things that work. MS generally does that.
Excel is the big beast of MS.
Excel just works and is easily the best version of the software out there in my experience - and to be frank its all that most businesses really, really care about. The rest of Office is not that special, but Excel is the gold standard.
I'm tight. I don't like spending money. Therefore for personal use, I prefer to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice - at least since I've not been working and can't get someone else to pay for Office.
But LibreOffice is annoying. During lockdown, when my time was really tight, I stole a few hours to do some of my own work. I created a spreadsheet that was a few hundred rows deep, by five columns. Cells were coloured according to a criteria by hand (no macros).
I saved the work (autosave was on anyway). I wanted to print it out, so I set the page format to landscape, and reduced the point size slightly. It crashes, taking out the autosave and the main save. So I checked I'm running a stable version and not a beta, got an older copy, did the changes, then altered the font size.
It crashed again. I'd found a reproducible bug whilst doing a really basic task. The old me would have written up and submitted a bug report. The new me, pi**ed off at having lost a couple of hours of precious time, just went online and got Office.
And you know what? It works. In fact, it works really well. Yes, it's cost money, but at least I haven't had the experience of it ****** well corrupting my work. It also 'feels' much better than LibreOffice as well - and I've used both extensively.
Sometimes you just want things that work. MS generally does that.
I like OpenOffice. Used it a lot in the past. But it no longer runs under MacOs Big Sur.
I guess an update will come in the future?
LibreOffice* is supposed to work on Big Sur.
*If you want to read about the People's Front of Judea type situation with OpenOffice verus LibreOffice then you'll be able to find plenty on Google. If you want something updated more quickly and likely a bit less buggy (was the case shortly after fork, but I haven't tried OpenOffice in years) then LibreOffice is probably the way to go.
The problem for the DUP is that they have been demanding the end of the Northern Ireland Protocol.
So indeed have the UUP.
But the UK govt has now conceded that the Northern Ireland Protocol is here to stay.
Why is that a problem? It gives unionism a long-term political raison d'être.
I suppose that could be true, but it’s a futile endeavour and therefore a road to irrelevance for unionists.
They also have no answer to the question, “What replaces the Northern Ireland protocol”?
It's only futile if you think Brexit will inevitably lead to the relative economic decline of GB. If this doesn't happen then it makes unionists more relevant than they've been for a long time.
Just turned on the cricket....was whoever in charge of cutting the wicket drunk? You can see where they cut the strip and it bends all over the place.
You're not wrong - that looks distinctly like the standard of cutting i used to do in my groundsmen stints!
Reminds me as a youth my parents went away and left me at home and Dad asked me if I could just do one thing, cut his lawn for him....he was very particular about the stripes.
I was strangely never asked again, they got a gardener in the next time they went away.
On the other hand you have lots of companies with badly maintained and supported on-prem services migrating them to Azure and not losing the entirety of their systems if a single cable breaks.
You can combine the two
Have your globally available Azure auth service dependent on a single on-prem device through express-link, with some kind of bug...
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
I'm tight. I don't like spending money. Therefore for personal use, I prefer to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice - at least since I've not been working and can't get someone else to pay for Office.
But LibreOffice is annoying. During lockdown, when my time was really tight, I stole a few hours to do some of my own work. I created a spreadsheet that was a few hundred rows deep, by five columns. Cells were coloured according to a criteria by hand (no macros).
I saved the work (autosave was on anyway). I wanted to print it out, so I set the page format to landscape, and reduced the point size slightly. It crashes, taking out the autosave and the main save. So I checked I'm running a stable version and not a beta, got an older copy, did the changes, then altered the font size.
It crashed again. I'd found a reproducible bug whilst doing a really basic task. The old me would have written up and submitted a bug report. The new me, pi**ed off at having lost a couple of hours of precious time, just went online and got Office.
And you know what? It works. In fact, it works really well. Yes, it's cost money, but at least I haven't had the experience of it ****** well corrupting my work. It also 'feels' much better than LibreOffice as well - and I've used both extensively.
Sometimes you just want things that work. MS generally does that.
Excel is the big beast of MS.
Excel just works and is easily the best version of the software out there in my experience - and to be frank its all that most businesses really, really care about. The rest of Office is not that special, but Excel is the gold standard.
Everybody knows real men (and women and non-binary people) use Python with Pandas....or perhaps R if you really like to be out there.
In a very strong field, Linked In is the worst, the very, very worst, website known to man. It is quite spectacularly bad - for example, they send out emails saying X wants to connect with you: then when you go on to the website, you can't find the invitation from X but you get screenfuls of utter garbage of zero interest to anyone. It even makes Microsoft Teams look well-designed, something you would have thought was impossible.
Why hasn't a decent competitor emerged to cater for this market? Is there some kind of natural monopoly or barrier to entry?
Yes, it’s a natural monopoly.
And given the way it supports the entire labour market, it should be regulated.
And yes, it’s got increasingly badly designed and unfocused in recent years.
It isn't a natural monopoly. There is definitely a niche for a business directory and contact management product that is not LinkedIn. It could integrate a mobile app with tap to share business cards. It also do a great job of verifying peoples histories.
There's a huge opportunity to do something really cool.
I prefer the other answer which suggested that it is a natural monopoly by virtue of the network effects acting as a barrier to entry to competitors.
See also Google, Facebook, and probably Amazon within appropriate definitions of the retail market.
The new entrant you described would have to build its network from scratch, or piggyback in another’s - ie Google or Facebook.
It's amazing how many natural monopolies turned out not to be, though.
Internet Explorer had a monopoly due to being installed by default on people's computers... until Chrome came along.
Windows was a monopoly... and now it's not.
Etc.
I have some sympathy with this, but the returns on capital are simply insane, have been for a full generation, and are getting insaner.
Google et al exist because our society allows them to; not the other way round.
One of my (actual in-person) customer meetings last week. They brought their IT manager in to talk systems, I showed him some stuff and then he said "is that a Chromebook???"
I think that there is a whole industry of IT managers, systems providers, software engineers who were raised on and make their living off trying to make things work on Windows. It is a happy synergy - Microsoft make money developing shit software full of holes and a client industry makes money filling the holes.
When someone opts out they don't like it.
Given the choice of Google and Microsoft - I personally would trust the latter way more than the former - to Google everything is a dataset that they will try to make money out of... Oh and be aware that Chromebooks have built in obsolescence dates in the way that Windows and co don't.
As for using the cloud (Azure, GCP, AWS) it offers some benefits but with those benefits come a whole set of cons of which a significant one is money.
I don't get the "ah but Chromebooks have built in obsolescence dates" argument (and it isn't a dig at you as I've heard it a lot).
For 7 years you get a device where the OS receives regular OTA updates as does most of the software run on it. At the end of that your device is still perfectly usable with an OS that runs quickly, you just lose the OTA updates.
We have a 10 year old Chromebook that is fully functional and as quick as it was when we first got it, and if you want to you can install a 3rd party OS that directly replicates the original OS and gets OTA updates.
Alternately I have a 10 year old PC which is now far far too slow for the huge load required by the latest updates of Windows 10. I could restore it by installing Windows 7 (or XP!) but its hardly comparable as a computer that still works as intended.
I used to have the original Cr48 chrome proof of concept demo. It worked well for a very long time. (Before it was stolen.)
Those undertaking activities with significant economic benefit have always had favourable rules during this pandemic.
Remember the you can meet up with people in a restaurant if it was for this. Or travel, the plebs can't go on holiday, but business people have been able to travel basically unhindered throughout.
Given Freedom day is only 3 weeks away, I am not sure it will make a lot of difference.
I am not sure it will be full Freedom Day, with even Australia restoring lockdown in some states and LA county reimposing a mask wearing request because of the Delta variant I would imagine masks will still be required to be worn in shops and on public transport, the biggest events will still have a capacity limit and quarantine will still be required for visits to red list countries and for the non double vaccinated to amber countries even from the middle of next month.
I think this new government exemption would therefore certainly be very unpopular if executives returned from a red list country without quarantining
How can it be freedom day when it is still mooted that children will be kept from school if there is a positive test in the class. While literally hundreds of thousands of people go to sports events, the pub, etc.
What exactly does no more restrictions mean? It means restrictions the govt decides to keep. Plenty of them. Some idiot on R4 just now saying well children...long covid...can affect them....
Vanishingly small probability of a child suffering from Covid. Otherwise, given that it has ripped through schools and unis these past few weeks, we would be hearing reports of children dying by the bucketload each day. Doesn't seem to be happening.
Isn't freedom day also the end of term?
Friends and bush telegraph tells me that end of term in many instances is being curtailed a matter of weeks early as everyone self-isolates. Whole rite of passage experiences just not happening for tens of thousands of children.
End of term is a rite of passage without which we'd all be scarred?
You and @contrarian seem to have a very low opinion of the mental resilience of the average 18 year old.
End of school or uni year or of school or uni itself absolutely is a critical rite of passage.
And as for the mental resilience of the average 18-yr old, I suggest you listen to some of the news items on the radio in the UK today. Children on anti-depressants = up, children with mental distress = up, children missing on average 115 hours of face to face teaching, children simply going missing from school.
So yes, Robert and great vid on stopping illegal immigrants, btw, but absofuckinglutely yes, childrens' mental health is being fucked with.
Do you have children? Do you remember what it was like to be a child?
Literally the worst time of the entire school year was an enforced assembly while people trooped up to the front.
The bit that was fun was meeting up with your friends outside of school. Which is - ummm - completely unaffected.
(It is also worth remembering that "graduation" is a very modern concept. In the old days, you went for study leave and never came back. Which I guess explains why everyone over the age of about 50 is mentally scarred.)
Robert the instances of damage to children's mental health is being documented today as we speak on just about all news outlets. I won't google it all for you because I'm sure you will be able to do so.
And after a year or several years of school I could take or leave prize giving and speech day and what have you. I'm sure you the same and if it turned out that your May Ball was cancelled well not to worry your internship at GS was about to start. All perfectly charming.
But the last 15 months have been hell for hundreds of thousands of children perhaps not so fortunate as you or me or perhaps just as fortunate. And during this time school has often represented an oasis of normality. And people are being denied as I said a rite of passage that is part of growing up.
You're completely missing my point.
I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU REGARDNG THE IMPACT OF LOCKDOWN ON KIDS HEALTH.
I THINK YOU ARE A COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD IF YOU THINK GRADUATION CEREMONIES ARE SOME ESSENTIAL RIGHT OF PASSAGE THAT KIDS ENJOY.
"COMPLETE FUCKING RETARD" eh?
And shouting. Hmm, I think this discussion is moving in my direction.
And again, the graduation ceremonies, which you may or may not have enjoyed are absolutely an "ESSENTIAL RIGHT [sic] OF PASSAGE" for children. As is all the end of school/uni activities. I said at the beginning "End of term activities". Including graduation which formally marks the end of the era of schooling or uni.
You are simply wrong on this and quite why on the one hand you say lockdown has had an impact and on the other you are unable to see that a critical component of lockdown people are cheering at goodness only knows. I can only imagine something happened at your graduation that was unpleasant otherwise your response is irrational.
I apologise for shouting and calling you names.
I just remember the utter misery - both as a parent and a child - of sitting through assemblies - particularly ones where people go up to the front to be presented with a worthless bit of paper. Every time I've thought "this is two hours of my life, two hours of utter tedium, I will never get back."
Tony Blair, fwiw, agrees with me. He never actually turned up to graduate from Oxford, and therefore is technically not a graduate.
I skipped mine at Imperial. It was in the Albert Hall but I didn't fancy it.
Me too. Shelling out for a fancy dress costume to sit in a hall for hours while folk droned on didn't appeal somehow.
It's really all about the honorary degrees anyway.
Is it true that everyone gets either a first or a 2:1 now? No-one gets a Desmond anymore?
Not quite true, but the are arguably far too many getting firsts and 2:1's. having been involved for the last 10 years or so, its not hard to see why. Students on my course spend ages accumulating good grades in course work, where they can dedicate 5 or 10 times the amount of time we expect them too, and this makes up for generally lower marks in set piece exams. We reference performance back to previous years, but its easy to have a drift up of 1 or 2 % a year translate into many more students getting the top two grades. In many ways the ranking as a cohort is a better system, but I would perhaps retain the grade and include where the student came in their cohort.
Of interest in Pharmacy is that most students take an assessment in 3rd year that is external to the Universities. This is a national competition where students are ranked top to bottom across the piece in order to allocate pre-registration training places. The idea is that the highest ranked gets to choose their first pick and so on. Very revealing for comparing different uni's.
The problem for the DUP is that they have been demanding the end of the Northern Ireland Protocol.
So indeed have the UUP.
But the UK govt has now conceded that the Northern Ireland Protocol is here to stay.
Why is that a problem? It gives unionism a long-term political raison d'être.
I suppose that could be true, but it’s a futile endeavour and therefore a road to irrelevance for unionists.
They also have no answer to the question, “What replaces the Northern Ireland protocol”?
It's only futile if you think Brexit will inevitably lead to the relative economic decline of GB. If this doesn't happen then it makes unionists more relevant than they've been for a long time.
No, it’s futile because the Unionists will not and cannot muster a majority in the Assembly to scrap the Protocol.
Has nothing to do with the success or otherwise of a Brexit.
The relative decline has already started anyway; see the IMF’s latest assessment of U.K. GDP.
The number of new doses administered yesterday is 265,276
The simple "day gap" has moved down to 73 days now though. That assumes 100% return which won't be the case. The long crawl to ~ 90% by ONS vaccinated begins.
A month or so ago, IIRC the vaccine minister sead that 94.5% or 95.4% (I cant recall which) of people who had had there first jab where terming up for the second, at the right time, it may change a bit since then, but probably not a lot.
I think there is a 2 day delay with the Vaccine numbers so todays numbers refer to Sunday.
I did predict a few days ago that next weekend or sooner we would run out of people to Vaccinate, or more prissily that it would drop to a trical. the 30-34 year olds stopped coming, or more accurately dropped to a trickle whence 60% of them had been jabbed. The 18-24 year olds are just a few days from that level now.
Utterly stupid idea - what idiot came up with that?
What counts as "significant economic benefit?
Why would the other parties want to meet with you anyway - I would refuse a face to face in those circumstances
Cover for going on holiday of course
Hey....there are a load of poor "social media influencers" who can only facilitate the real money making part of their business face to face...literally...
The problem for the DUP is that they have been demanding the end of the Northern Ireland Protocol.
So indeed have the UUP.
But the UK govt has now conceded that the Northern Ireland Protocol is here to stay.
Why is that a problem? It gives unionism a long-term political raison d'être.
I suppose that could be true, but it’s a futile endeavour and therefore a road to irrelevance for unionists.
They also have no answer to the question, “What replaces the Northern Ireland protocol”?
It's only futile if you think Brexit will inevitably lead to the relative economic decline of GB. If this doesn't happen then it makes unionists more relevant than they've been for a long time.
No, it’s futile because the Unionists will not and cannot muster a majority in the Assembly to scrap the Protocol.
Has nothing to do with the success or otherwise of a Brexit.
The relative decline has already started anyway; see the IMF’s latest assessment of U.K. GDP.
The IMF is predicting that the UK will recover faster than the Eurozone. You don't know how the relative economic position will look in a few years' time. A lot of people's credibility depends on the UK being seen to fail, but there's no guarantee this will happen.
Comments
- end of term discos
- residentials
- school trips
- birthday parties
- sleepovers
Basically, they need to live. Their lives need highlights, colour. They need to spend time with people who aren't their parents. Putting all this on hold for three weeks in March 2020 was disappointing but seemed forgiveable given the circumstances and the unknowns. Still being in this half-life 15 months later now we are basically out the other side is a tad vexing. It's difficult to see whose benefit this is for.
I still disagree, that said. In normal times I would have scooped my own eyes out with a soup spoon to avoid going to speech days, graduation ceremonies, etc. Because they were a bore compared with everything else going on. I don't think my sister ever "graduated" from Oxford either.
But now look at everything else going on. They are a beacon of normality and socialisation, which I believe children desperately need right now.
All they do is sit on their arses, consume food, spread disease, and think the world owes them a week's hedonism every year in Ibiza. If they're not grateful you've let them go back down the pub, just be obnoxious right in their faces - that'll show 'em.
"Swing, swing, together!"
Got to wonder how long this guy can stay in office. Two years he has managed so far. One day he'll make a "gaffe" there's no coming back from.
And you'd go from there.
I'm not saying it's easy. But LinkedIn is very far from a monopoly.
Some loon on WatO saying long covid..can't be sure..variants..
We'll be here for ever if that thinking takes hold.
At the LinkedIn workshop, the presenter said that "Facebook Jobs" was in the pipeline and was going to kill LinkedIn.
Obviously I couldn’t give a fuck about the DUP, although it’s objectively bad for the Union on several levels.
The DUP likely originally hoped Brexit would lead to a restoration of a hard border with Ireland and had the whole UK gone to No Deal that is what would have happened. Although on that I think they were wrong, a hard border with Ireland would have led to greater demands for Irish unity than is the case now
The DUP are possibly looking into a meltdown as they have essentially had all their cake and eaten it with the 2017 -19 deals which have now come to fruition.... The UUP possibly scent blood and further pressure from loyalists may see DUP support fragment away - the new leader of UUP Doug Beattie is not to be underestimated, the DUP may paradoxically be the biggest losers from BREXIT in NI
Any investigative journalists around today? Charlie boy has a story for you.
An internal investigation is seeking to discover if the camera was moved accidentally during renovations or whether it was repositioned by the leaker to spy on the couple. Insiders are convinced that it was done deliberately."
------
occam's razor.....nobody would know in advance he was going to be snogging his mistress right up against the door, he could easily of done it elsewhere (and probably did).
I think that there is a whole industry of IT managers, systems providers, software engineers who were raised on and make their living off trying to make things work on Windows. It is a happy synergy - Microsoft make money developing shit software full of holes and a client industry makes money filling the holes.
When someone opts out they don't like it.
https://twitter.com/LiamFox/status/1409865988103983109
My son is seven (today, actually...) and probably missed seven months of school. Teaching him was hard, but in some ways I'm glad I did it: I learnt a great deal about teaching, what he knew, and how he wanted to work. Thankfully, I know just about enough about the three R's to teach a six-year old, and he has thrived.
However, he is an only child, and socially he has suffered. He missed his friends, and he missed playing with other kids. He also gained a little weight during the last lockdown, despite daily exercise - showing how much running around he must do at school. Fortunately he has now burnt that off. (I blame the winter weather.)
But we were lucky. I know one kid who was allowed into school with the children of key workers, as his mum (who is lovely) freely admits to being incapable of teaching him. I know another girl who has problems and was behind before lockdown. Now her school says she is two years behind. At age seven. The little 'un met up with her this weekend, and it is obvious that she's much more backward socially than she used to be. We've known her since she was a baby, and it's been obvious since she was two or three that she education issues - but they've never really been investigated. Lockdown's been really bad for her.
So lockdown hasn't been too bad for our son. He is seven, and will recover. But I'm all too aware that for other kids his age it's been very bad, and many older kids will not have time to recover.
The government has not had a good pandemic. And at every turn the Labour Party seems to have been at pains to demonstrate why it would have been worse.
Companies that used to have resilient on-prem services migrated them all to Azure.
What happens if we can't get to Azure for any period? Can we recover somewhere else?
Ummm, no...
Can you say that you missed your graduations in anything like similar circumstances to the people missing their graduations today?
It's hard enough when you control the hardware you're targeting.
Ohers may differ.
The DUP are possibly looking into a meltdown as they have essentially had all their cake and eaten it with the 2017 -19 deals which have now come to fruition.... The UUP possibly scent blood and further pressure from loyalists may see DUP support fragment away - the new leader of UUP Doug Beattie is not to be underestimated, the DUP may paradoxically be the biggest losers from BREXIT in NI'
Under Poots that was certainly the risk, Donaldson will likely steady the ship as an experienced hand.
However the general point is correct, the DUP have been leaking moderates to the UUP and hardliners to Traditional Unionist Voice
The fact that the entire year has been sat next to each other every day, no social distancing, playing sports, and mingling daily seems to have passed them by.
Who exactly benefits from this irrational idiocy?
Personally (and I am of course completely biased), I think the rule for the double vaccinated are too tough. I also resent the fact that you can travel freely between the US and the UK and I cannot.
Which is probably also adding to my irritation levels this morning.
Pickford
Trippier
Walker
Stones
Maguire
Shaw
Philips
Rice
Saka
Sterling
Kane.
No Mount, no Foden, no Grealish....shakes head. Park that bus. How the hell do England create any chances with a two in midfield, both of known are really known for their defensive qualities.
🤮
(first coffee down the hatch I presume?)
As for using the cloud (Azure, GCP, AWS) it offers some benefits but with those benefits come a whole set of cons of which a significant one is money.
Otherwise they'd all be standing around the edge of the dance floor looking embarassed. Now they can go round their mates house and play PlayStation instead.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57649546
Edit: After 50 sideways passes, obvs
And I have to quarantine on my return
For the stuff I'm currently working on we've gone back to actual hardware - it's 15% of the equivalent AWS price for a equivalent EC2.
I absolutely despise Microsoft.
I think we have found out now that security isn't exactly a top priority, given they use Chinese CCTV cameras....and as I typed this..
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/29/dominic-raab-mobile-number-freely-available-online
Government security procedures are clearly an absolute joke. Although the Guardian overplaying the "what about foreign states getting hold of it"....I mean if they don't know it by other means, they are really crap at spying. You only need to get access to a journalists phone who will have them or have a mole in the phone companies, or basically anybody who ever has to phone government minister.
My year 6 daughter's school is better than many in this regard but, so much is being missed. They are doing a Year 6 production but it is going to be videoed and sent out on DVD rather than have parents watch it. To add to my irritation, the subject of the play appears to be the pandemic of 2020/21. From what I can glean it is a particularly state-sanctioned view in which the likes of Sage are the good guys and the heroes are the NHS first, then 'scientists, then anyone else who worked for the public sector, then food delivery workers.
Meanwhile her senior school has cancelled its induction day - where she would have got to meet her new classmates - in later July, er, because, y'know, covid. The assumption seems to be in the state sector that freedom day will not happen. Largely, I think, because they don't want it to. They are addicted to being the good guys in their own story.
For 7 years you get a device where the OS receives regular OTA updates as does most of the software run on it. At the end of that your device is still perfectly usable with an OS that runs quickly, you just lose the OTA updates.
We have a 10 year old Chromebook that is fully functional and as quick as it was when we first got it, and if you want to you can install a 3rd party OS that directly replicates the original OS and gets OTA updates.
Alternately I have a 10 year old PC which is now far far too slow for the huge load required by the latest updates of Windows 10. I could restore it by installing Windows 7 (or XP!) but its hardly comparable as a computer that still works as intended.
I'm tight. I don't like spending money. Therefore for personal use, I prefer to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice - at least since I've not been working and can't get someone else to pay for Office.
But LibreOffice is annoying. During lockdown, when my time was really tight, I stole a few hours to do some of my own work. I created a spreadsheet that was a few hundred rows deep, by five columns. Cells were coloured according to a criteria by hand (no macros).
I saved the work (autosave was on anyway). I wanted to print it out, so I set the page format to landscape, and reduced the point size slightly. It crashes, taking out the autosave and the main save. So I checked I'm running a stable version and not a beta, got an older copy, did the changes, then altered the font size.
It crashed again. I'd found a reproducible bug whilst doing a really basic task. The old me would have written up and submitted a bug report. The new me, pi**ed off at having lost a couple of hours of precious time, just went online and got Office.
And you know what? It works. In fact, it works really well. Yes, it's cost money, but at least I haven't had the experience of it ****** well corrupting my work. It also 'feels' much better than LibreOffice as well - and I've used both extensively.
Sometimes you just want things that work. MS generally does that.
I guess an update will come in the future?
My children talk about going to the shopping mall (what's wrong with shopping centre or precinct?), and one of my nieces even refers to playing ball games "in the yard" - her large, lawned back garden.
What they now call high school graduation is essentially speech day.
So indeed have the UUP.
But the UK govt has now conceded that the Northern Ireland Protocol is here to stay.
It’s not clear what a coherent Unionist position might be. The only way to “remove” the protocol, short of the Assembly itself voting it down, which ain’t going to happen, is for the UK itself to move much closer to the EU so that much of the need for customs and regulatory checks are obviated.
But this requires the DUP to advocate for a closer trading relationship with the EU than the bare bones negotiated in the TCA, and I doubt they have the intellectual ability to do that.
The OpenOffice fork (which was run by IBM I think) is effectively dead.
I despair of governments of both colours who seem to have no idea what foreign spies want to know. For instance, New Labour wanted to have income tax processed in America. Now we are putting "anonymised" health records up for sale.
And that's without Linkedin (earlier in this thread) and other private companies getting hacked. Or HMG routing Cabinet meetings through China.
The Sun and The Times will have to close down if true.
Mind you, I do also hate Word and Excel a fair bit. Luckily I do very little in Excel, but I do have the pain of Word for writing up papers with colleagues. But even Word is much better than it was - equation editor doesn't crash it every time now
The route to a Wembley Final does not look so difficult as it could be, but it doesn’t matter as much as are England good enough to seal the deal?
Is this team, and the players individually good enough?
Mentally I think they believe in themselves, I don’t have a problem with that part of equation.
Are they knock free, match fit enough to produce close to their best? Are they not too jaded after Prem Season to produce close to their best? They don’t have the excuse Wales had, playing away and travelling hitting performance, but they still need a fair amount of luck.
Tournament form probably means nothing if chasing trophies, just that you got through the stages not how you did it, however, in the matches so far England started brightly and ended bogged down in the trenches unable to get back on top, so we can expect a similar pattern.
Back 3 will invite German possession in front our defence, rather than pushed up by a defensive high line. So would be a mistake for the lack of creativity you explained, but also defensively.
They also have no answer to the question, “What replaces the Northern Ireland protocol”?
PS, got 6-1 so topped up and a small bet they win tonight.
Excel just works and is easily the best version of the software out there in my experience - and to be frank its all that most businesses really, really care about. The rest of Office is not that special, but Excel is the gold standard.
*If you want to read about the People's Front of Judea type situation with OpenOffice verus LibreOffice then you'll be able to find plenty on Google. If you want something updated more quickly and likely a bit less buggy (was the case shortly after fork, but I haven't tried OpenOffice in years) then LibreOffice is probably the way to go.
Edit to add (not at all partisan) LibreOffice blog post on this issue:
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/12/08/openoffice-crashing-on-macos-big-sur-try-libreoffice/
Fired by Bot at Amazon: ‘It’s You Against the Machine’
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-28/fired-by-bot-amazon-turns-to-machine-managers-and-workers-are-losing-out?sref=leQ3i2ya
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/06/keir-starmer-s-labour-desperately-needs-stand-something
I was strangely never asked again, they got a gardener in the next time they went away.
Have your globally available Azure auth service dependent on a single on-prem device through express-link, with some kind of bug...
Of interest in Pharmacy is that most students take an assessment in 3rd year that is external to the Universities. This is a national competition where students are ranked top to bottom across the piece in order to allocate pre-registration training places. The idea is that the highest ranked gets to choose their first pick and so on. Very revealing for comparing different uni's.
Has nothing to do with the success or otherwise of a Brexit.
The relative decline has already started anyway; see the IMF’s latest assessment of U.K. GDP.
[ducks]
I think there is a 2 day delay with the Vaccine numbers so todays numbers refer to Sunday.
I did predict a few days ago that next weekend or sooner we would run out of people to Vaccinate, or more prissily that it would drop to a trical. the 30-34 year olds stopped coming, or more accurately dropped to a trickle whence 60% of them had been jabbed. The 18-24 year olds are just a few days from that level now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/world/asia/india-coronavirus-oxygen.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes