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graememcc

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github/twitter: graememcc gmail: cutchy11

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The source data does not support his (and by proxy, your) points.

The bulk of the growth in claimant count came from Feb 17 to Mar 20 - it nearly doubled over that period, when conditionality of benefits was in full swing. It simply does not follow that conditionality reduces claimant count.

In any case, conditionality was reinstated in July 20, and unless you or Fraser can precisely define how conditionality was "not properly restored", I'm going to take the government's word on it.

Per his tweet, https://twitter.com/FraserNelson/status/1530206631195201536/..., we can see in his computation of those on out-of-work benefits he includes pension credit (what demographic receives this, I wonder?), and 1.7M people on INCAP - the various disability allowances, the majority of whose claimants will, due to the closure of the old schemes to new claimants, be on the modern ESA benefit where eligiblity is assessed by an independent healthcare professional. For example, as my mother withered away in her final months, bedbound with oesophogal cancer, she became eligible for ESA, and contrary to one of your other comments to another poster about the 5 million, she most assuredly was dying.

Note also that UC is in turn becoming a replacement for ESA. He did not avail himself of the facility on Stat-Xplore to breakdown those aggregated UC figures into the "out-of-work" and "no work requirement" figures - they are 2,103,346 "out of work" and 1,399,843 "no work requirement" - no work requirement being defined in https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dwp-statistical-s... as "those who are not expected to work at present, such as those for whom Health or caring responsibility prevents claimant from working or preparing for work"

Thus, the 5 million figure is inflated by a mere 3.1 million people who are either retired or who have been assessed as having some inability to work.

I would suggest critically examining the source stats instead of uncritically accepting the interpretation of right-wing journalists with an agenda, though I fear you share said agenda...

If your company declares itself insolvent and makes you all redundant by reason of insolvency, then you would be able to claim missing salary, pension contributions, holiday, redundancy pay and (if applicable) pay in lieu of notice from the Redundancy Payments Service, albeit with the payment for each element being capped. From recent experience, once you've made your claim, they pay out pretty promptly once a liquidator has been appointed.

Unfortunately that does require your company to take that step, which it sounds unwilling to do. (It is normally an offence for directors to continue trading a company whilst technically insolvent, but that has been rescinded temporarily due to coronavirus).

If you weren't still employed by them if/when they do declare insolvency, then I suspect you would be treated like any other unsecured creditor with regards to your missing payments.

The blog is called "The Morning Paper". Each article aims to summarise an academic paper, and the paper in question is linked in the first paragraph. The article content doesn't necessarily represent the author's own opinions or their understanding.

Losing it All 11 years ago

Initially, I was convinced I hadn't done enough to be a convincing candidate. Recently, more prosaic reasons: no mobile phone, no website (can't afford the hosting), can't afford a haircut or suit dry-cleaning for attending interviews...

Losing it All 11 years ago

This will be me soon. I have to move out of my flat in 3 weeks, and have nowhere to go. The future's not bright. It's my fault, the result of determined head-in-sand burying. No sympathy is due.

I've been living off my savings, with the aim of pivoting to a programming career after years post university stuck in under-employment. My aim was to build up a folio of work in lieu of the paucity of experience on my CV.

I continued to contribute to various pieces of Mozilla: if you're running Firefox, you're running code I've written, and I managed to build an internal web app that is now considered a fairly critical piece of their internal infrastructure. Other successes included micropolisJS, my SimCity 89 in Javascript port. Others like my functional library funkierJS and my fresh rewrite of V8Monkey/SpiderNode I've not yet managed to get over the finish line.

But as my savings dwindled, I refused to accept it, and focussed on how I'd easily claw my way back out when I landed a good position.

Even in the past year, when I've been barely hanging on, I stupidly refused to accept reality. I've lived on one meal of lentils for about 9 months or so - shedding 6 stone has been nice; it would have been nicer if it had been in a healthy controlled manner. The mobile phone is long gone, and with it my world, and my friend's list shrank considerably. And still I wouldn't accept the position I'd dug myself in.

And now, here we are. My landlord's patience is exhausted. No wonder. In 2 and a half weeks, I become the perverse dual of the homeless guy who learned to code: I know how to code but have sank the other way. There's no friend's sofas or family to bail me out, though that seems fair - I should face the consequences. At best I might get an emergency hostel with the heroin addicts and alcoholics, although my city has a reputation for failing to meet its legal obligations to the homeless.

And I did this to myself, the architect of my own demise.

Apologies for the wall of text. It was, at least, a little cathartic.

I'm the author of micropolisJS. No. I did not strip the GPL license. I am not the "culprit" as you put it above.

Look at my Github repo: the LICENSE/COPYING files contain the GPL, and it's mentioned in every other file. The correct license has been in place since my initial commit in 2013.

I was pointing out that 3D.City, the version linked up top, essentially lifted the simulation code straight from micropolisJS. It is the copy/adaptation of my code in 3D.City that had the GPL License stripped.

The simulation work is also really impressive -- and a lot of work.

The simulation is from my own micropolisJS (http://micropolisjs.graememcc.co.uk and https://github.com/graememcc/micropolisJS) just stripped of the GPL License headers and attribution.

micropolisJS in turn is a port of Micropolis, the open-source release of Sim City 1989 for One Laptop Per Child.

Edit: edited the link. You'd think I should get links to my own site correct!