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Pissflaps posted:Pub quiz cheats are scum. Everyone cheated on it, it was more a contest as to which table did it the best (whether it was straight up texting answers home, sabotaging/bribing the other team, getting quizmaster Mandy drunk or shenanigans like falsifying answer sheets). To cheat was to play. We played to  I'm against the wall for other stuff anyway, as are most of my prolier than thou comrades- and quite right too. Nevett posted:Our office sandwich man stocks the roast ham and mustard flavour ones. You need to be careful not to breathe out through your nose while eating them. Owns. I sometimes find them or the beef ones, but when I were a wee lad they seemed to be in every corner shop... that fat jolly butcher on the front... calling to me...
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Aug 24, 2014 19:08
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Alecto posted:Do people know if the 40-50% for Labour among university students is lower than it has been in previous decades? Of course, willingness to vote Labour is far from indication of being left-wing, but hopefully most of them aren't total fucks. Might as well just kill myself now if things are only going to get worse. In England the increase in tuition fees has happened long enough ago to affect a huge proportion of students currently in university, so I'd be surprised if it didn't cause a huge shift to the right. Wasn't that the main motivation for it?
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Aug 24, 2014 19:08
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Guavanaut posted:If it can be simulated or logically proven that collective bargaining would work, but they're against it because it's somehow unacceptable, then that's the opposite of being over rigid in trying to apply scientific laws, it's deliberately ignoring any science that does not fit their existing ideologies. Yeah, you're correct, but the language of said cognitive dissonance is like how Dawkins supporters talk to religious people - 'religion is a virus' and all that nonsense. Basically by dressing it in psuedo-scientific language it appears to have legitimacy. These aren't people who can dissect The Spirit Level or any other pop-sci economics. Alecto posted:Do people know if the 40-50% for Labour among university students is lower than it has been in previous decades? Of course, willingness to vote Labour is far from indication of being left-wing, but hopefully most of them aren't total fucks. Might as well just kill myself now if things are only going to get worse. It really varies by department. I studied in the harder end of the social sciences (archaeology), where this sort of me-first bollocks is much rarer because there's absolutely no money in it. My original department was petroleum geology though, and that crowd are with some exceptions classic FYGM. As regards overall voting intentions, a shittonne of us fell for Cleggmania, myself included, and God only knows whether they'll ever vote again  That said Sheffield Hallam, Clegg's constituency, is seeing a massive shift to Labour as part of a 'gently caress you' from Sheffield students. If the Lib Dems are abandoned by this generation of students then you'd hope they'd go Labour, but there's no guarantee.(yes, I know, we shouldn't have made that mistake in the first place)
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Aug 24, 2014 19:08
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Obliterati posted:Yeah, you're correct, but the language of said cognitive dissonance is like how Dawkins supporters talk to religious people - 'religion is a virus' and all that nonsense. Basically by dressing it in psuedo-scientific language it appears to have legitimacy. These aren't people who can dissect The Spirit Level or any other pop-sci economics. Well in late 2008, they went to the Conservatives with a peak of about 42%. The Cleggmania kicks in, then tuition fees scandal, and its been Labour ever since, but declining in the last year (like the rest of the country). You'd think that sutdents would naturally stick to Labour, or at least the Lib Dems, when not driven away by the likes of Iraq, but there's no indication that these lot wouldn't vote for Hitler if he was the opposition. Oh and as a STEM student, gently caress STEM students.
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Aug 24, 2014 19:17
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Spooky Hyena posted:In England the increase in tuition fees has happened long enough ago to affect a huge proportion of students currently in university, so I'd be surprised if it didn't cause a huge shift to the right. Wasn't that the main motivation for it?
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Aug 24, 2014 19:22
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LemonDrizzle posted:That's, uh, a completely insane suggestion. Tuition fees were introduced in an attempt to reduce the cost of university education to the state, not as some kind of attempt at mass brain reprogramming. I didn't say brainwashing because that would be insane, I just said that one of the motivations for increasing the fees was to shift the demographics of higher education toward the right/rich.
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Aug 24, 2014 19:58
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LemonDrizzle posted:That's, uh, a completely insane suggestion. Tuition fees were introduced in an attempt to reduce the cost of university education to the state, not as some kind of attempt at mass brain reprogramming. It's just Gerrymandering.
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Aug 24, 2014 20:25
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From the sounds of things I'm going to be up against the wall multiple times. There may be no wall left by the time they're finished.
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Aug 24, 2014 20:43
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Spooky Hyena posted:I didn't say brainwashing because that would be insane, I just said that one of the motivations for increasing the fees was to shift the demographics of higher education toward the right/rich. The stated policy aim at the time was to increase university attendance to the point that 50% of school leavers would go. How on earth is that consistent with trying to "shift the demographics of higher education toward the right/rich" ?
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Aug 24, 2014 20:46
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LemonDrizzle posted:The stated policy aim at the time was to increase university attendance to the point that 50% of school leavers would go. How on earth is that consistent with trying to "shift the demographics of higher education toward the right/rich" ? I don't know what to say, do you really think more working class people in England applied for university because it was made more expensive? EDIT: Actually I just remembered that you were one of the people claiming free prescriptions was a right wing policy in the scotpol thread, so I don't think you really understand how private costs and right/left politics interact. Spooky Hyena fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Aug 24, 2014 |
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Aug 24, 2014 21:07
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LemonDrizzle posted:The stated policy aim at the time was to increase university attendance to the point that 50% of school leavers would go. How on earth is that consistent with trying to "shift the demographics of higher education toward the right/rich" ? Perhaps some horribly cynical people think the stated aims are different to some of those involved's actual aims. Also, the system does a not altogether terrible job of not making money an *actual* object (it still is, but not really any more than before), but often what's more important is whether prospective students think it's an object. However, the statistics of the last few years seem to show that it isn't keeping poor kids out any more than before. What it is doing is pushing students from humanities and other 'useless' courses towards courses specifically engineered to get you into a job ASAP (or appear like it) and STEM courses. Alecto fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Aug 24, 2014 |
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Aug 24, 2014 21:08
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Obliterati posted:A lot of my acquaintances are STEM grads and I can confirm this. Marketisation of universities has, unsurprisingly, produced a lot of bottom-line obsessed people who try and apply hard science laws to, you know, the real world. Unions are a good example: we've been raised in an age where unions have never been considered acceptable. I end up in arguments with people who admit that collective bargaining would work for them but it's somehow entirely wrong - the only occasion they'll argue that 'more money for me' is not a moral good, fwiw, as these are the same people who demand lower taxes for themselves and repost Daily Mail nonsense about the scrounging poors. The reaction towards the various lecturer strikes and so on has been appalling in some quarters. One guy from my uni course was a bit of a right-wing shite at uni (not a bad bloke, just suffered from very Incorrect opinions at times) has shifted so, so far left after he started working for National Grid. There's something about those old state companies which have been smashed to bits by privatisation which let you see the free market for what it really is. I know I shifted fairly hard to the left when I started working for the railway.
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Aug 24, 2014 21:14
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LemonDrizzle posted:The stated policy aim Are you sat down? Sometimes, politicians... lie!
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Aug 24, 2014 21:25
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goddamnedtwisto posted:I had a blazing row the year before last with someone I was managing at the time who said I and most of my colleagues were being "greedy" for asking for an inflationary pay rise (in a year our company made record profits) because other people were getting less. I mean how can you even begin to address that without using language that would get HR involved? I can understand jealousy making someone say "Why should <insert whichever group is being demonised at this point> get 2% when my boss only gives me 1%", but who the gently caress thinks they they don't deserve more money? People need to stop talking about 'pay rises' in relation to inflation. Any 'raise' (or lack of) lower than inflation is a pay cut. Each time a company does it, they are profiting more from your labour, and it's nothing but greed.
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Aug 24, 2014 21:59
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Richard Attenborough is dead 
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Aug 24, 2014 22:06
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Kegluneq posted:Richard Attenborough is dead
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Aug 24, 2014 22:20
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EvilGenius posted:People need to stop talking about 'pay rises' in relation to inflation. Any 'raise' (or lack of) lower than inflation is a pay cut. Each time a company does it, they are profiting more from your labour, and it's nothing but greed. That's exactly how I always work it out and describe it when talking to management. Of course even that isn't strictly accurate because assuming you're working full-time and the income tax floor isn't raised then at least a fifth of your raise goes onto taxes - I got a pretty good raise this year (5%) and even then I've only just come out ahead of the RPI.
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Aug 24, 2014 22:23
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Can anyone explain why universal credit has been such a complete cock up? Is it down to ministerial incompetence, civil service incompetence, contractors bilking the taxpayer or all three?
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Aug 24, 2014 22:42
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HortonNash posted:Can anyone explain why universal credit has been such a complete cock up? Is it down to ministerial incompetence, civil service incompetence, contractors bilking the taxpayer or all three? An incredible example of a career politician not having any idea what they're doing. Also if the civil servants aren't deliberately loving with it I'd be shocked. It's unlikely that it'd have gone this badly if everyone was onboard; everything about it was been incredible.
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Aug 24, 2014 22:46
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HortonNash posted:Can anyone explain why universal credit has been such a complete cock up? Is it down to ministerial incompetence, civil service incompetence, contractors bilking the taxpayer or all three? More detail than you'll probably ever need http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/editors-blog/2013/12/universal-credit-it-what-we-kn.html Also someone posted a story a while back that I can't find, but paraphrasing, there's a cross-party team working on the overall system, and they were explaining the issues and the lessons from previous implementation, and IDS was effectively ignoring everything they were saying and spouting inane ideas with no understanding or even interest of what would be required to make them work. There was a quote about them all looking at each other like he was mad. He's the absolute archetype of the worthless 'ideas guy' e- here we go quote:Labour politicians tell a story that captures both his vanity and his folly. A few years ago, Duncan Smith met Douglas Alexander, Rachel Reeves and Stephen Timms. He enthused about his belief in a universal credit that would merge taxes and benefits. He would free 6 million people from the poverty traps of welfare dependency and show them that work made them better off. baka kaba fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Aug 24, 2014 |
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Aug 24, 2014 23:06
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HortonNash posted:Can anyone explain why universal credit has been such a complete cock up? Is it down to ministerial incompetence, civil service incompetence, contractors bilking the taxpayer or all three? It's worth noting that successive governments have demonstrated their total inability to set up IT systems in general. Various attempts to do this for the NHS have been 'in progress' since 2002; failure has been down to a number of things, including poorly defined contracts with absurd cancellation penalties for the government, flat out lies from providers re: interoperability (the idea that a hospital system in York should be able to talk to one in Croydon or Lerwick, impossible as various contractors get different slices of the pie and have no motive to co-operate), politicised goalpost movement and downright corruption. On top of this, whistleblowers are routinely disciplined (although in the NHS that's not just over IT), so these failures aren't noticed up top until things are properly cocked up in the sense that they're installed, don't work, and have to be torn out. Figures vary on how much NHS IT failures cost us as they're hidden across a series of different categories depending on the year, government and depth of scandal, but we're talking tens of billions since 2002: Private Eye suggested an eventual sum of £40 billion as a high-end figure in 2007, when it was anticipated to be done by 2010 (the government's figure was just over £12 bil). Said system has not materialised. Even winding it down would entail massive payoffs to companies like Fujitsu and Siemens who achieved precisely nothing. Basically what's already been said. IDS came into it with a lot of ideology and no grasp of how to negotiate contracts or perform basic administrative tasks: to be fair, he is nothing special in this. He has some way to go if he genuinely wants to be a trend-setter in loving up IT implementation in public (for now) services. Spangly A posted:An incredible example of a career politician not having any idea what they're doing. Also if the civil servants aren't deliberately loving with it I'd be shocked. It's unlikely that it'd have gone this badly if everyone was onboard; everything about it was been incredible. Don't forget that civil servants have no love for IDS and co., given his routine public insults to their integrity and competence as well as threatening their jobs, and also that their commonly long tenure means they remember the days before such things were so overtly politicised.
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Aug 24, 2014 23:15
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HortonNash posted:Can anyone explain why universal credit has been such a complete cock up? Is it down to ministerial incompetence, civil service incompetence, contractors bilking the taxpayer or all three? The big bang. Simple put they bit of more than they could chew. UC was designed to happen all at once to everyone which unsurprisingly meant it was a huge undertaking with only a few companies in the world even vaguely able to take on. Which they weren't, but on;y the cynical among you would say that it was designed in such a way that only the biggest in world would be able to tender :inserts tongue into cheek:. What should have happened was breaking it up into smaller chunks, say one region at at time or 2 smaller benefits which would have meant that the entire market would have had a chance to tender, you know, get those efficiencies we all hear about going.
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Aug 24, 2014 23:25
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Spooky Hyena posted:I don't know what to say, do you really think more working class people in England applied for university because it was made more expensive? Alecto posted:Perhaps some horribly cynical people think the stated aims are different to some of those involved's actual aims. tooterfish posted:Sometimes, politicians... lie! LemonDrizzle fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Aug 24, 2014 |
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Aug 24, 2014 23:31
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LemonDrizzle posted:No, I think that university enrolment was increasing strongly and continued to increase strongly after fees were increased. This was putting the university funding system under a lot of strain because it was designed for a time when a very small proportion of the population went into higher education, so the government needed to find a lot of extra money to ensure that the expansion of higher education could continue. They chose to raise some of that money through fees and loans; in other words, the fee system was introduced so that universities would be able to cope with growing numbers of students. As for the stuff about prescriptions, I'm not sure why you're trying to bolster your argument by dragging discussions from one thread to another. However if you want to take another stab at explaining how giving free stuff to well-off people is a better use of government money than providing services to people in need, be my guest. You didn't bring take issue with the claim that the number of people in higher education wasn't increasing, no one made that claim. You said that it was out of the question that an increase in tuition fees leads to less lower-income students. And having a flat fee on healthcare does affect the poor (and sick) disproportionately, there's no way round it.
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Aug 25, 2014 00:32
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you need to think like a more like a third-way neoliberal to see the direction of policy and where it malfunctioned flat user fees are an effective way to raise revenue precisely because they are hard to escape through reducing use. unfortunately, they're also regressive. this presents a pickle if one desires progressive redistribution therefore, like any good third-wayist, they implemented both user fees and means-tested aid. it is the latter that contributed to increased public spending on higher ed, AFAIK to cry that the fee deters the appeal of university misses the point. The point is to deter the appeal of university, and then engineer the regressive redistributive impact away via means-tested redistribution elsewhere - this keeps the marginal disincentive on going to university, whilst (ideally) maintaining the absolute incentive. Now because the total funds dispensed as means-tested bursaries are smaller than the total funds raised via fees, the result is a net tax increase on those who do not qualify for these bursaries, that goes toward funding increased enrolment and thus expanding higher ed. very progressive. in typical New Labour fashion they hammered the politics in via empowering universities to handle the decisionmaking over dispensing bursaries, so the universities became de facto salesmen for the effectiveness of their individual bursary schemes. Unfortunately, universities in Britain are not very equal. Oxbridge can afford to offer bursaries that totally absorb the fee (and more). Other universities are less lucky. And it is not really realistic to expect competition between Oxford and Oxford Brookes for the best low-income minds when Oxford already has its pick of candidates and doesn't care to aggressively expand: in 1990 it accepted ~3.1k students, in 2010 it still accepted ~3.1k students. So the fee dynamic is probably not terribly effective outside of universities that offer larger bursaries. the more interesting point IMO is not the user fees (although that attracted the most attention) but the deferral of the payments. Effectively it is a concession toward an income tax funding higher ed, albeit an individual one rather than pooled by income group.
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Aug 25, 2014 02:56
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baka kaba posted:More detail than you'll probably ever need I had to laugh as soon as I saw Vodafone mentioned. Their bill payment service, web and telephone, hasn't worked properly in the seven years I've been with them.
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Aug 25, 2014 07:28
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Obliterati posted:It's worth noting that successive governments have demonstrated their total inability to set up IT systems in general. Various attempts to do this for the NHS have been 'in progress' since 2002; failure has been down to a number of things, including poorly defined contracts with absurd cancellation penalties for the government, flat out lies from providers re: interoperability There's a clue here too - one of the biggest struggles of working on an IT project is getting your client to agree on the statement of work. I'm sure it's more complicated on massive government projects, but essentially the SOW makes the client liable for non-delivery of key features; if they agreed and signed the SOW, it's not the developers fault that something is missing, because it was all laid out in front of you, and signed. You do get clients actively avoid the SOW, or try to design vague ones, so they can add things as you go along. These projects never end. I imagine this is a deliberate tactic employed by successive governments in an attempt to avoid embarrassment - their SOW will be nothing more than a headline, with the devs left to translate what is actually required, and what work is involved. The client thinks this benefits them, but it doesn't. It benefits the developers, because they get money thrown at them until it works (or it's cancelled). Of course this may benefit anyone who happens to have a stake in the company that's developing your IT.
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Aug 25, 2014 07:52
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In some vague defence of NPfIT it wasn't ALL bad, just mostly bad. It's mostly the behind the scenes stuff that went well. National PACS (for radiology images, mainly x-ray) GP IT system of choice (GPSoC), transfer of files between GP systems (GP2GP) and national patient demographics (PDS/SCRa - yes the clinical side failed, but the demogs bit is great) and even Choose and Book (when done well, by actual people using it and no just project managers*) Though of course contracts, the overall aims, management, etc was a complete bollock-up. Mostly because they purchased from big name solution providers (see how much poo poo BT does/providers) rather than actual tech companies ("No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" and all that). Thankfully this seems to be slowly changing now. Such as the new e-Referral System is being built by BJSS, who seem to have actual software developers that do actual making new things. If the NHS gets to live another 15-20 years, they might actually turn the boat around and get poo poo sorted out. *I might happen to do Choose and Book for a living, so I'm biased...
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Aug 25, 2014 09:55
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DroneRiff posted:
Are we discussing massive increases in NHS funding here, because otherwise they're proper hosed. Thankfully, the tories have an answer to NHS failings. Vote Sheepthief.
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Aug 25, 2014 12:20
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http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/aug/25/boris-johnson-britons-visiting-iraq-syria-presumed-terroristsquote:Boris Johnson has called for the presumption of innocence to be reversed in cases where Britons travel to Iraq or Syria ... Wot er legernd!
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Aug 25, 2014 13:03
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baka kaba posted:More detail than you'll probably ever need We already knew him as "that worthless IDS guy".
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Aug 25, 2014 13:08
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Froodulous posted:http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/aug/25/boris-johnson-britons-visiting-iraq-syria-presumed-terrorists Can't make up their loving minds. First it's go home, now you can't leave. Disgraceful.
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Aug 25, 2014 14:36
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Security services close to identifying jihadi killer of James Foley http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/24/security-services-close-identifying-jihadi-isis-killer-james-foley The Guardian posted:
Doesn't voice-recognition need something to compare the sample of 'Jihadi John' to? Presumably this is where the mass-surveillance and phone tapping the NSA and GCHQ have been doing will show everyone that having no privacy is totally worth it, right?
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Aug 25, 2014 14:53
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edit: oops
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Aug 25, 2014 15:01
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I saw an article which said he was from West London and was an aspiring rap artist.
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Aug 25, 2014 15:04
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It's great how despite not knowing anything about most of these people who have supposedly travelled to join up they can still give pretty precise figures about how many there are! Not at all scaremongering or anything.
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Aug 25, 2014 15:06
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Pork Pie Hat posted:Doesn't voice-recognition need something to compare the sample of 'Jihadi John' to? Presumably this is where the mass-surveillance and phone tapping the NSA and GCHQ have been doing will show everyone that having no privacy is totally worth it, right? The most optimistic spin you could put on it is that they're pretending they don't know so the ways they're detecting them aren't secured. I strongly doubt this is the case but it is possible. The problem is that the security services can't ever have effective public oversight because they can pretend all their mistakes were a cover.
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Aug 25, 2014 15:11
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I suspect they have no idea whatsoever who this guy is. They're bluffing to try and get him to broker a deal / slip up / turn himself in.
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Aug 25, 2014 15:11
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I haven't checked BMs site in a few days but wasn't he about to update with some details on the location and time? You can do a hell of a lot with a timestamp like that and one single informant.
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Aug 25, 2014 16:23
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Spangly A posted:I haven't checked BMs site in a few days but wasn't he about to update with some details on the location and time? You can do a hell of a lot with a timestamp like that and one single informant. Why not check bellingcat? edit - it appears to be down... Now my snarky comment makes me look like even more of a dick than usual. Yes, they worked out the location and time of day, although it seems pretty far from 100% accuracy. It's en educated guess though. Mr Cuddles fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Aug 25, 2014 |
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Aug 25, 2014 16:47
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