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About regprentice
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Dubai cloud seeds its own flood?
regprentice replied to fellow's topic in House prices and the economy
i disagree.. controlling the weather is essential. i'be said before we should seize Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos wealth and companies and use them to attempt to control the weather. Better for mankind to spend a generation trying to control the weather and fail, than spend a generation trying to get to Mars and succeeding. -
UK job market doing poorly
regprentice replied to henry the king's topic in House prices and the economy
America is held up as the gold standard of productivity, yet the vast majority of jobs there are "non productive" - a far greater proportion of people paid to stand and stare into space than we have here in the UK. -
less discipline for children proposed at the same time as we see headlines like teachers 'fear going to work' as abuse on rise with pupils as young as seven turning violent and the number of suspensions from school per year doubling in the last 7 years link
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Not just London.... Also being reported as a problem for shared ownership properties generally as well. link She bought 30% of it (a flat in colchester) through the shared ownership scheme as an affordable route to home ownership, even if it was only partial ownership. But her enthusiasm started waning when after just six months, the housing association increased the building's service charges by 138%, from £85 to £202 per month. While she had anticipated small annual rises, this unexpectedly large jump was unaffordable Sky News has been approached by dozens of other shared owners facing soaring costs and other issues, including difficulty selling.
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Smart meters..................here it comes
regprentice replied to Maghull Mike's topic in House prices and the economy
That's slightly different. you know in advance what the price will be on a set day and time. With "pure" surge pricing the price is dynamically adjusted live. you might set off for alton towers thinking you've got the price of the tickets in your pocket and enough cash for a meal then find out you've gone on an unexpectedly busy day and you cant even afford the tickets. I've just come back from holiday and surge pricing is everywhere in the US now.... No idea how much things will cost and its often very odd amounts (ie £127.73). You would assume that if you went at a quiet time things would be cheaper.... but the "old" fixed price is now the "base" price and they'll charge as much as they can in excess of that at any given time as long as people will pay it. -
sounds spot on to me. I live on a council estate out my window i see a sea of sky dishes, but my wifes school has had to set up its own food bank, and clothing bank. I didn't see the full OP on mumsnet but it seemed realistic enough to me. Family on an IO mortgage sees their repayments more than treble (and certainly other bills including energy). Before that they "feel" rich, they think they clear £4k a month but that's probably before tax, the self employed husbands tax bills probably caught them out after he stopped working consistently. Sky will be one of the contracts they cant get out offor fear of damaging their credit rating further. Recently I've heard a lot about the "precarious middle class" and how they will suffer even worse than the working class in a future recession . The working class know how to "work the system" but the middle class don't, and to an extent don't want to. The middle class follow the rules to the letter. They apply for their benefits and wait , they don't lie or exaggerate their circumstances on the forms, they don't want to take any "extra" payments on offer for the really hard up. On the contrary the working class see the benefits system as a game to be played for the biggest prizes. For example when i was 19 i had a friend who would take out store cards. He would say to you "let me know if theres anything you want in debenhams, i'll buy it for you and you with this store card and you can pay me the cash- youll be doing me a favour". He would keep the cash and default on the card. i would never dream of doing that, not least because it would have hammered my credit score, but to him that was just a way to make store cards "work" in the most profitable way. Its a broad generalisation, but pushing down the middle class into the working class is like taking a tame animal that's been in captivity its whole life and setting it free in the wild. It has the basic life skills, but its doesn't have the nuanced skills that help it go from surviving to thriving in its new situation.
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If I'm in an Amazon store in the UK, and my biometric information is sent to and processed by a person in India, when actually I believe it's processed by "AI" on a server in Europe, that's a GDPR breach. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is in everything nowadays. I worked on a public sector project that hinged on AWS to share data between organisations. If you can't trust Amazon to keep you legal and compliant you'd have to ditch their services - easier said than done .... After slew of AWS deals the CDDO says current approach might weaken its position
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I'm in the US at the moment and frankly I'm amazed at the number of people paid to stand around and do nothing. Here "productivity" seems to mean throwing more and more unskilled people at a job to get it done. Often a job that could be done by a sheet of A4 paper is done by a team of people ( i.e. "This corridor is temporary closed") I can see that low wages, and a reliance on tips as a "guilt trip" to top up wages can mean they can overstaff even menial jobs. For example when having breakfast for 20 minutes I was asked 17 times by 4 people of I wanted more coffee. At a premier inn I'd see no staff and pour the coffee myself.
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I think this was a case of Amazon setting up a "manual" way of tracking sales and hoping they could standardise the process enough that they could pass it off to A.I. or maybe some more automated process. "Automatic baskets" is an old technology. Companies like Decathlon have used a similar technology at their tills a few years.
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I always thought one of the most important elements of a car was the superstructure. I.e. A rigid frame I see the body panels that provides the cars strength. I recall being in an accident where the car looked ok, but it caused my headlights to shine in two cockeyed directions. That was the evidence indicating the frame/superstructure had been knocked out of square by the accident to a dangerous degree. This feels 25k build seems to suggest a car with no solid central frame... Rather a car bolted together like a piece of Ikea furniture.
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Are we living in the modern Roaring 20s
regprentice replied to Grayphil's topic in House prices and the economy
There used to be a long running thread on here on this topic. It effectively predicted a run of "almost" collapses during the 2020s where TPT Manage to keep the plates spinning until it culminates in a "blow off top" in the late 20s or early 30s followed by a 2nd great depression