nagrom

Except for your HN account, unfortunately.

It's not just France - the way that the NYT treats the UK has become a running joke e.g:

https://londonist.com/london/food-and-drink/until-recently-l...

https://unherd.com/2020/01/what-has-the-new-york-times-got-a...

This weird inability to reflect reality I see day-to-day coupled with the insistence on anti-patterns of behaviour for those cancelling their subscriptions has prevented me from taking out a sub to the NYT. That's a shame, as some of the articles are great.

Why wouldn't they cut the blade up in situ for transportation at the end of its working life? Seems better than having huge convoys to take them away for recycling.

I built an Alexa skill that sits in front of the local council's website (South Worcestershire, UK) and tells me which set of bins go out this week. Have already probably saved myself more time from looking up the website manually than it took to build the skill. Code at https://github.com/morgan-murray/bin-day

Well, there are very few projects where someone can make a real difference from day 2 or 3. But given that there are numerous permie developers who want either to be a) Product Owners, b) Software Architects or c)professional Youtube viewers, getting a contractor in means you can cut your losses at the end of a 4 week period if you want to and firms do. While it's possible, I've never seen a permie cut during the probation period.

What did you do instead? There is a wave of people looking to get out of contracting in the UK right now exactly because of the messes HMRC keep making.

You have completely misunderstood the UK market - note that the OP talked about London. Perhaps as a way to get past the recruiting problem, UK corporates pay a premium for exerienced programmers on the basis that if they cannot do the job, they are let go immediately without severance. Most contractors are 30+, don't want to be 'in charge' (at meetings, giving interviews, being trained in the latest corporate 'values') and are happy to be given a product to build or maintain.

Every contractor I know resigned from a permanent position in their early thirties to go contracting and make 1.5x-2x as much money as a contractor. Businesses regularly offer contractors full-time positions and are regularly turned down.

Contractors may not be particularly special technically, but they will focus on doing what they're told in the team and not attending training, seminars, workshops or HR meetings. I'd much rather build a product with a team of suitably incentivised and managed contractors than a team of permies.

In case anyone else is confused, the term "en banc" refers to a case which is heard before all the judges on the bench for that court, rather than just one. En banc hearings are generally made in cases deemed of extreme importance. As such, this is a fairly strong finding.

I suspect that this is a question of energy. At high energies, it's difficult/impossible to stop a particle, so you place a row of scintillators out, bend the charged particle path using a magnetic field and measure its displacement (and thus velocity and thus energy).

At lower energies, you can stop the particle in, e.g. an NaI detector which is known as calorimetry. Typically, of course, cosmic rays are quite high energy and given the low rate of muon interaction calorimetry is difficult/impossible. A HEP physicist may use both techniques, e.g. by using heavy-metal plates to cause an EM cascade and measure the resultant shower in a crystalline detector. But typically when one talks of scintillator devices (and almost certainly in the case of cosmic rays) one talks of tracking and measuring deflection in magnetic fields if wanting to measure the energy.

If you could find some undiscovered pattern in cosmic rays distributions, you'd be discovering something much more interesting than where to site your datacenter. If you could explain such an undiscovered pattern, you may be discovering what it's like to win a Nobel prize :-)

This won't work because all particle detectors are noisy. Pretty much all tracking detectors need to use multiple coincidences to determine that a muon has indeed passed by. Individual counts by themselves are not reliable. My past life as a particle physicist included design and build of muon detectors using scintillating plastic and (much more expensive) multi-anode photomultipliers to look at nuclear composition of volumes. Something like an underfunded British version of decision sciences http://www.decisionsciences.com/ :-)

Poverty is an extremely loaded term - a child in poverty is defined as a child living in a household with less than 60% of the national average income - it has no connection to specific material deprivation.

Foodbank use is up - but there is no measure of whether this is down to misplaced priorities instead of actual need. Flour and good quality fresh vegetables are the cheapest and most widely available they've ever been.

Clean water in Scotland is paid for by council tax so I count it as a publicly-provided good. I'd also argue that the framework for delivering the water and sewage systems are significantly connected to the government. Note that Tax Avoidance is not illegal, nor is it morally repugnant. A tax system that is reddled with loopholes and exceptions that can only be understood by the private entities making money off it is the problem there - perverse incentives rather than a nominally low rate. (Although the rate is not particularly low.)

Fly tipping may or may not have increased. But my local council runs several large recycling centres and collects refuse biweekly in addition. The fact that some people are breaking the law to avoid paying recycling charges has nothing to do with Brexit.

Public transport may be provided by private companies but these are often bidding to supply government contracts. Public transport has always been poor outside large towns and always will be - your neighbours should not be forced to pay for empty buses to drive about the countryside in case someone in a sparsely populated area wants to go somewhere.

Student numbers are up to the point where a lot of students are paying for degrees that they cannot use to get a job. International student numbers are good, which surely proves that universities are remaining globally competitive.

The unfeasible public commitment to paying old people using income from young people has problems - nevertheless, the government is meeting its commitment to pay retirees a state pension. Why should women get to retire earlier than men? They are equally capable of working and supporting themselves.

For the record, I don't believe that the NHS is a good system - anything that politicises something as important as healthcare is bad. I suspect that the French and German models are better (but still nowhere near perfect). But the NHS has, for as long as I can remember, had a funding crisis. There have always been headlines about funding problems and service unavailability - fifteen years ago the service was getting pilloried for leaving patients on carts in the corridor rather than providing beds. I'm not convinced it's getting rapidly worse. Mental health treatment has always been a disgrace - not just in the UK but worldwide. Nevertheless, the care provided for the money spent in the NHS is good - a lot of countries (e.g. US, Ireland) spend more and get less. The formal NHS budget will rise by £35bn in the period form 2009/10 to reach £133bn. Inflation (which the previous commenter claimed we shouldn't worry about as we will suffer deflation causing 'social collapse') will eat £24bn of that meaning that the NHS budget over ten years will increase at a rate of about 0.9% a year over inflation. No-one's lying and the total budget has not been cut.

"Austerity" has meant no overall cash cuts. Austerity has meant an increase in public spending year-on-year over the rate of inflation. There are lies going on about public spending but to imagine that public services are 'cut to the bone' is so nonsensical as to damage the credibility of anyone arguing thus.

That's been the theory behind decades of such experiments in many countries. Worked out great, we all can see how the money keep s"trickling down".

Do you have an example? I don't know of any serious economist that backs trickle-down theory except as a strawman, but many point to lower and flatter taxes that can be used to support market-based economics as enabling high productivity. The obvious country that backs this - the US - has done pretty well from it, as have a multitude of smaller nations (Hong Kong, Switzerland, Singapore, the UK, Canada, Australia).

Some countries with higher taxes but also based around a free market economy have done well - Germany is the prominent example and Sweden and Finland. Some have succumbed to corruption and are failing, or on the brink of failure (Italy, Spain, Greece).

The opposite - high taxes, lack of a market and extreme governmental intervention - has certainly been tried in many, many countries. Most (all?) have failed badly in a way that has destroyed generations of productivity (North Korea, Cuba, The Soviet Union, Venezuela, etc.) and really fucked-up their societies that way - usually accompanied by secret police squads, the crushing of liberties and very low quality-of-life.

That theory is actually very un-capitalistic: It assumes that only a few people know what is best for the majority.

That's actually very 'capitalistic' - the man with the capital makes the ultimate decisions as to where it gets invested. Perhaps you meant democratic?

I'm not convinced by the rest of your argument either. The capital owner usually employs many people to invest portions of the capital into smaller investment opportunities - it's not like Bill Gates has to invest all of his fortune into just one opportunity is it? If anything, this site is based around the idea of giving capital to the unexperienced to start businesses with promising ideas - that's pretty much the exact theoretical definition of angel investors, incubators and VCs.

One might argue that these institutions suffer from cronyism and don't do their job as well as they should, but their job is after all to re-allocate accrued capital to value-producers in a risk-balanced way across a broad portfolio which, I think, is what you seem to want to advocate.

Can Britain really afford to cut taxes ? It has already cut services to the bone, while running a large twin deficit.

Britain has absolutely not cut services to the bone - that claim in incredibly hyperbolic. More could be done, but in general no-one goes hungry, people are not homeless, garbage is collected, clean water is provided, the rule of law is enforced, the court system is healthy, public transport is good, schools and universities are doing fine, pensions are paid and health care continues to be rather good and excellent value for money. Cash budgets have increased every year in the past twenty. It's not perfect but don't let the resentful wailey-wailey nature of those who want more public spending from 'moral' conviction convince you that the UK is anything other than a well-functioning first world country with good public services and a well-educated population. Public services are about the best that they have ever been. That will continue to be true even if the rate of corporate tax is reduced.

Ireland can afford lower tax rates because its such a small country - Dublin is nothing like London and can survive on low investment, and Ireland does not have complex public health service like the NHS.

Other people have already told you that Ireland spends more and achieves less on health care. There are many large countries with lower taxes than Britain that are doing more or less just fine. There is much, much more to investment than tax-and-spend governmental intervention.

Also lower rates really doesn't mean anything if you are unable to access customers. What Brexit represents is a demand shock to British business, a kind of deflation that has caused the collapse of society in the past.

I'd love to have an example of British societal collapse in the recent past as a consequence of demand shock, but you won't be able to give me one because it doesn't exist. At worst, we have the union-backed strikes in the seventies causing a collapse of public services, but there was no revolution, no breakdown in law and order and no termination of any major political entity. The current global system is undergoing something of deflation with almost all major currencies undergoing 'quantitative easing' to attempt to address it. This is not a Brexit phenomenon and affects the Euro area and the EU worse than it affects sterling. That will likely continue to be true.

A market of 55 million people is too small for doing any serious 21st Century type globalized business.

In accordance with the rest of your claims, this is both subtly incorrect in fact and hyperbolic in claim. Your population figure is low by 15%, but the main point is that Brexit doesn't mean building a Trump-style wall around the island or pulling it into the mid-Atlantic. Cross-border trade will function just fine outside of the EU and Britain will continue to be a tier-2 globally trading nation behind the US, China and perhaps Japan, but on a par with or ahead of everyone else. Brexit does not mean a severing of all ties with the rest of the world and the breathless discussion of what it means really pisses me off. Some (not all) of the UK's interaction with European countries will change in some subtle ways. New accommodations will be reached. Predicting 'societal collapse' is chicken-little-style doom-mongering and hysteria - if you took the same approach to your regular life, you'd never go outside for fear of being hit by a meteor, catching SARS, being hit by lightning or some other flouncey, drama-queen, childish panic.

In short: Brexit - some stuff will change, but most of it won't be as bad as you think, and perhaps some of it might be good! :-)

Books, religion, university research, fashion trends and charities. Wars, lynch mobs, cartoons, traditions, village fetes, school plays, professional plays, business strategies and restaurant reviews. Newspapers, television stations, YCombinator, football teams and new political parties. Anything to which a multitude of younger, stupider people can claim allegiance for which to be nice or mean to their peers.

Germany, Denmark and the UK outside of London too, actually.

A reasonable number of my friends did particle physics PhDs in the States. None of them had their housing subsidised and one got very sick and had to sell her car to pay for her medical treatment so I don't think her health plan was great. I'm fairly certain dental wasn't included. And the ones I know worked 10-12 hours per day usually six days per week.

Some grad students do have better conditions from endowments that fund scholarships, but not many. And the supplementary work that they do as teaching assistants allow the taxpayer-funded undergrad programmes to run at a much lower cost than if they had to pay people actual wages.

There is an argument for saying that there's enough money in the further education sector - but the idea of grad students with cheap housing and great medical plans living off the taxpayers are not supported by any of the observations that I have made.

There's a certain amount of one-upsmanship, and gotta-catch-'em-all to travel discussions. I also find it very difficult to talk about things without coming across as competitive. I have no idea how to fix that though! If I could, I would :-)

That's funny because I had the same feeling originally about there being no normal. But, when I traveled more, I came to a completely different conclusion. Maybe you will too?

I've travelled extensively over the last decade before settling down about a year ago - I spent time in Europe (west and east), Russia, China, Japan, Australia, Subsaharan Africa, the Amazon and North America. What I find fascinating is that you can figuratively draw sets of what each culture cares about. The intersection is, more-or-less, what it means to be human.

Obviously you need a significantly large sample size, but broadly speaking everyone wants somewhere comfortable to sleep and family and trusted, non-familial companions. Everyone wants what they consider to be good food (although the definition of 'good' changes somewhat). Everyone wants to look after their kids and have some sort of ritual to pass on knowledge culture and usually possessions to their offspring. Most cultures have music and dancing of some sort - both participatory and as entertainment. Every culture wants what it considers impressive to be considered impressive by outsiders. Every culture I've seen is more open to outsiders when they smile - I've learned to smile, to use body language and to relax more in unfamiliar surroundings.

Once I started to see these commonalities, I realised what's unique about my own culture - I started to understand myself better, and see myself more in relation to the society in which I was embedded. I became kinder, and more understanding of people seeming stupid or ill-educated; I became less tolerant of people behaving aggressively or using status-hierarchies to dominate others. And, like you, I became more creative and outgoing. I suggest keeping a diary of your attitudes, if you can. Travel diaries are very cool :-)

As a Brit who lived in Germany for a while, a lot of Brits and Germans will fill each other's glasses before their own when sharing wine or water. Can't say anything about Americans though.

I believe that CINT started life as a tool for medical device development. I count that tool as one of the main reasons that physicists-by-training find 'proper' C++ so difficult to comprehend.

I'd sign up, but I'm in Edinburgh, Scotland. I guess that you only offer US-based deals?

Note that, at the bottom of that page, it is clearly stated that Earth pro is free for both personal and business use.

> "Apart from that, not too many wedge issues. Certainly not train ticket costs or anything like that (where are the people who want it to go up?)."

In charge, it would appear.

None of this screed justifies a group of men shooting dead (and continuing to shoot, even after death) a man who was not resisting in any way.

No-one doubts that police officers have a tough job. But that truth doesn't give the police the right to execute people, bomb houses and act as judge, jury and executioner. That scenario just makes the police the biggest, best funded gangs on the street.

Arguably, communism did. I certainly know a lot of ex-soviet scientists who have a much worse life than they did under party rule.

As someone who did a PhD and 6 years of post-doc in nuclear physics at a high status institution, I would disagree that tenure is difficult to get at a high status institution. I would argue that tenure at a high status institution depends on skills that are wholly orthogonal to scientific research. Yes, I'm bitter. And so are all my (ex)-colleagues.

Well, he would claim that he was anti-EU, and not anti-European. But if he has the figures wrong, you should tell him (and me!)

Your original comment was questioning why a 24% VAT is considered to be outstandingly high. It's the highest rate of VAT in the EU, and broadly speaking taxes in the EU are already higher than in nations of equivalent technological and economic development. So, it's not an unreasonable feeling that a 24% VAT rate is high.

That 30% tax burden for the US is from the same wikipedia page as the European tax burdens. I am assuming that the methodologies used to arrive at the figures are broadly comparable.

Same as Norway, indeed. But Norway has implemented just 5,000 pieces of EU legislation in the last 22 years, whereas the UK has, on average, implemented 3,000 pieces per year. [I'm sticking to Norway, because it is the region that I have facts and figures for - I don't know the figures for Switzerland.]

The claim the Norway and Switzerland are governed remotely by the EU is therefore not true - either that, or the Norwegian law somehow pre-empts EU law, and thus complies with it before it is passed? (Which makes it sound like Norway governs the EU, and not the other way around :p).

I'm not claiming that Norway is de-coupled from the EU, just that the claim that it is governed remotely by a body in which it has no say is false.

That's said rather often, but I'm not at all certain that it's true.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100194407/out...