notaspy posted:

Has Jones quit The Guardian as well?

Private Speech posted:

At that point we're in fantasy socialism land, mass housebuilding wouldn't be nearly as difficult to do - but it would absolutely gently caress over house prices, since the only thing holding them so high is scarcity.

If there were plentiful houses - even worse, plentiful well-built houses - nobody would pay you a cool million for your shoebox semi in London.

Endjinneer posted:

Pension funds cannot own residential property. There's some quote about how the worst landlord isn't a faceless corporation with thousands of houses, it's the little old lady who used her widow's pension to buy a townhouse split into three flats, and ekes out a life off the rent.

Tesseraction posted:

2024, another lovely Orwellian dystopia.

suck my woke dick posted:

just have a forever moratorium on mortgage related evictions and let the banks eat poo poo

OwlFancier posted:

E: I know Sweden doesn't technically build commieblocks but those do look a lot like the prefab soviet designs.

NotJustANumber99 posted:

I can't believe ofwat has done this

domhal posted:

I think they mean "special circumstances" where the government takes over for a while, presumably getting things out of total poo poo-fest mode before handing it back to shareholders, as opposed to something good.

Terrorists strike again posted:

Relentless direct action has secured another victory in the fight against Israel’s arms trade, as Elbit Systems are forced to sell their ‘Elite KL’ factory in Tamworth.

The company had previously manufactured cooling and power management systems for military vehicles, but was sold on after stating that it faced falling profits and increased security costs resulting from Palestine Action’s efforts.

After the sale was completed last month, Elite KL’s new owners, listed as Griffin Newco Ltd, confirmed in an email to Palestine Action that they will have nothing to do with the previous owners, Elbit, and have discontinued any arms manufacturing:

“Following the recent acquisition of Elite KL Limited by a UK investment syndicate, the newly appointed board has unanimously agreed to withdraw from all future defence contracts and terminate its association with its former parent company”.

Tesseraction posted:

His Divine Shadow posted:

I re-learned cursive using 100 year old textbooks, also to write it right handed (I am left handed, now ambidextrous). I think cursive is kinda cool and I see why it was in use, so quick to write with. I now have a quasi-cursive handwriting with my right hand, texting with my left.

e: lol what a snipe, I would give you a cat, but you get my current project instead:

feedmegin posted:

You aren't wrong, but the last Labour lot did try that and it went bang:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28166675/

Massive, centralised IT projects from the Oracles and IBMs of this world have a tendency to fail horribly, it's not even government specific. So not optimistic about this new wheeze either.

fuctifino posted:

Can't they just import all the databases into a single large spreadsheet?

Jaeluni Asjil posted:

Make sure it's a .xls then there can only be a maximum of 65000 cases on it - hurrah - NHS is saved. Always would run better with no patients.

NHS data horrors:
In the late 80s/ early 90s we were required to set up an asset register of all items in the NHS that had a value of £10 or more. But if, say, a collection was normally found together eg 3 stacked filing trays - you had to count them too. DoH refused to recommend a system, so many HA's were trying to use the Works Information Management System which was entirely cumbersome and each item required 4 pages of data entry and if you got to the bottom of page 4 and found you were missing a bit of data then you had to abort the whole lot.
Also, there was NO budget whatsoever for this.

Anyway, I was temping there as PA to the District Building Officer in the Works Dept and they said "she can do it" - put me on as permanent staff Works Officer scales.

I built the asset register in Supercalc using string functions to construct codes, persuaded medical physics to give me all their data on an export file (naturally they had a totally different system), and then imported it all into the back end of WIMS (Dataflex system) and overwrote the control file.

I also was able to get a temp finally to input all the stuff which we didn't already have any sort of computerised records for and after going through stuff which we did have values etc for, told her to put anything she didn't know what it was down as £2344 value.

So the auditors came and said haha a cruet £2344 (my temp was Irish and they do stuff like call cupboards 'presses' or think 'presses' are cupboards not big ironing machines and she had no idea what a cruet was - it wasn't any old cruet, it was solid silver communion set from the chapel). Anyway, I then showed them the name of some piece of kit from the pharmacy that had lots of zs and ys in its name and said 'ok what's that then'? Oh they said. Dunno. "So what value?" I said. "Erm, £2344?" they said. And I prioritized top down where 700 assets (including land & buildings!) were the value of 91% of the nearly £600m estate value (this is over 45 years ago now so that was a LOT in those days). So when the DoH suggested making even more refined categories of stuff like ball point pens or whatever I wrote a bit of a rant about it being a complete and utter waste of time & money.

We were one of the first, if not THE first to pass audit with our Asset Register - let alone complete it on time. Everyone was telling the PTB that their asset registers were nearly complete then I would go on conferences etc & because I was a mere slip of a girl, quite a few 'fessed up that their asset registers consisted of piles of paper in the bottom of a filing cabinet.

Oh and after insisting on the £10 and also insisting that Ward 'Sisters' could go round listing all the 450V sockets etc, measuring 6" curbstones etc, about 2 months before the deadline, they changed the bottom limit to £250 after so many places had been counting their paperclips.

Pistol_Pete posted:

Yeah, my company's been running a project to migrate our data and processes onto a new system. It covers the financial records and dealings of about 15,000 customers: it's been unbelievably complex, unforseen problems have cropped up constantly, each of which have required careful thought followed by a solution being designed, tested and integrated, the budget's spiralled through the roof and the project is currently 18 months behind the original completion date, with a fresh delay looking extremely likely. Getting the whole of the NHS onto a single integrated system is technically possible, in the same way that it's technically possible to count every grain of sand around the UK coastline (assuming infinite amounts of money, manpower and equipment); neither of those things are going to happen though.

forkboy84 posted:

I think you'll find they belong in a plastic bag hanging from the branch of a tree actually

Mebh posted:

More likely is someone is going to suggest feeding it all into a generative AI and they'll do it. Then you'll be able to ask chatGPT what meds to give your Nan and it'll answer in uncompilable python code.

feedmegin posted:

In about 1985 maybe. The non-Dem Liberals also exist and are weird iirc.

quote:

I don’t feel sorry for myself at all.

smellmycheese posted:

Fox isn’t going to have much cash left for those 3 weekends a year Billie lets him see the kids

quote:

Fox disputed some of Piper's claims. He also said that the pair had been to court many times since their split and criticised the family court system as biased towards the mother.

OwlFancier posted:

The physical shape and functionality of the iphone leads directly to lovely infinite scroll vertical pane web design.

Like I've had to use mobile devices for work for the past 11 years and I will continue to assert that the proliferation of touchscreen devices have only made it worse because you spend far more time dealing with lovely touchscreen interfaces for everything and the dickheads who dictate the tasks expect you to do a bunch of extra stuff that mobile devices can do, but do badly because they do everything badly, so you have to spend even more time doing them instead of it simply being "no you can't do that without a desktop, so it isn't getting done"

The theoretical ability for a device to do something encourages people to try and make doing that thing a requirement or a key feature, even if it does it poorly, and so people end up spending more time working with fundamentally bad tools that are aggravating to work with.

Nothingtoseehere posted:

Boeing assassins can now... make you develop pneumonia and fight for your life for two weeks?

kingturnip posted:

Wow, a genuine "believing in human rights is for terrorists" quote.
That 'senior Labour source' needs to be named and shamed. And then drowned in a var of piss.

Private Speech posted:

But anyway I sure am glad that Britain now has a law declaring Rwanda to be a safe country regardless of how many human rights conventions they break.