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I was really surprised how easy it was, it takes maybe 10 mins if you have the information and logins to hand.
Honestly I can't think of many ways to improve the UK's online accounting process from either an employer or employee's standpoint because I already spend less than a day total per year on it.
The UK system is very smooth as a small business owner.
When an employee leaves a job they are given a P45 form to hand to the new employer, which contains a summary of any pay to date for the current tax year along with a tax code.
All I have to do when hiring is enter this information into the accounting software and everything just works. National Insurance, Pensions and Student Loans are calculated monthly and taken via Direct Debit, as are VAT payments and returns. Employees are automatically emailed payslips with breakdowns of their pay and deductions.
Any relevant information is submitted to HMRC (the UK's IRS) by the accounting software, so it takes me ~10 mins a month to complete payroll for 5 employees. When an employee leaves, creating a P45 for the next employer takes a single click.
The gov.uk website is exceptionally well organised and contains detailed lists of everything an employer or employee needs to do at all stages in the process.
The US self-assessment system seems opaque, inefficient and ripe for abuse in comparison. It also places the stress of reporting taxes onto every individual rather than just the employers.
That's not entirely true - veganism has made massive strides in the last few years simply because more information is becoming available about the environmental, ethical and (arguably) health issues surrounding our heavy meat consumption.
Millions of people are already voluntarily reducing their consumption and now virtually every restaurant in the UK has vegan options, making it easier for more people to switch.
I live in the outskirts of a relatively small, low-income industrial city and there are signs outside small shops and restaurants everywhere promoting their new vegan menus. A traditional pub near me has no fewer than 14(!) plant-based main courses.
I'd love to see tax incentives that reflect the damage that the meat and dairy industry are doing (ending the massive government subsidies would be a good start), however the changes I've seen in the UK give me hope that the grassroots level can sway public opinion without forcing people to change via legislation.
The reason it's 'key' is because adopting a plant-rich diet and reducing food waste are pretty much the only items on this Top 10 list that any individual regardless of location can decide to act upon right now.
Given that agriculture generates ~24% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions including ~48% of global methane emissions, it's a good start that gets individuals thinking conciously about their impact and encourages more action at the grassroots level.
Of course the other issues are just as urgent but those are altered by innovation and governments through taxes and legislation, which can be pushed along with the support of a more climate-concious society.
That data is only for the US where transportation and energy usage is likely higher per capita than other nations. It may also not take into account food that is imported.
On the same website the EPA global stats show that agriculture and deforestation (largely due to clearing land for cattle grazing) contributes 24% of global greenhouse gas emissions. [1]
I agree that we should be considering all areas of emissions, however diet is something that every individual can decide to take responsibility for immediately without having to lobby huge industries or pass new legislation. Other choices like moving to removable energy and reducing our reliance on transport have a lot more economic and social inertia behind them.
Millions of people are already voluntarily reducing or eliminating their meat intake, and there are plant-based options at virtually all restaurants/chains here in the UK. It's a trend that we should all be encouraging in my opinion, as it demonstrates that society can willingly change its behaviour on a wider scale when presented with reasonable alternatives.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
I was worried about all of the above when switching to Arch (Manjaro KDE) from Windows as a web developer/CGI artist/graphic designer, however it's been easier than expected and I've decided to stick with it. Maybe these programs are worth your time:
DaVinci Resolve for video/audio editing on Linux, which has a great free version and may be the best editing software on the market for any platform. I've done a few professional jobs with it and greatly preferred it to Adobe Premiere/After Effects/Audition. Highly recommended.
Krita is great for photo editing/digital painting and Inkscape does a good job of replacing Illustrator for most uses. GIMP is still unbearable for professional use. This is the biggest gap in quality software for me - nothing can truly replace Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator or InDesign yet.
Figma is perfect for UI design/wireframing/prototyping and has a fully featured web app.
Blender is insanely powerful for free software these days (see Next Gen on Netflix for a feature-length movie created entirely in Blender) and Octane/Redshift render engines are available for industry quality 3D images.
VSCode handles all of my web development and native Linux terminals are much, much faster than WSL when installing and running tools like Webpack, Gulp etc.
LibreOffice covers 99% of use cases and looks pretty slick with a good theme, however I use Google Docs or Office 365 to ensure compatibility with clients' machines.
Our small design firm has used Figma a few times on large apps with hundreds of screens, and we prefer it to Sketch.
It's smooth in the browser, although we use the desktop version which runs remarkably well on Electron. Files auto-save instantly and you can do all of the fancy animations and effects that Sketch offers.
The killer feature for us is inviting clients or other designers into the document whilst editing it in real-time like Google Docs. Clients can lock themselves to your viewport so you can talk them through the design (huge win for me, the clients love it), or they can browse around freely and edit the document if you allow them.
Figma should have more market share IMO.
Same here - Illustrator absorbed a lot of Fireworks features and offers decent optimised JPG/PNG/SVG exports for web, but over the last few years it's become excruciatingly slow while not really adding any new functionality.
Even with a 24 thread CPU and 1080Ti it drops frames constantly, even when the document contains just a single circle. It regularly hangs for a second or two when zooming or adding new shapes or text to the document. After Effects & Premiere are even slower for video editing and are the cause of much swearing in our office.
If Sketch and Figma can smoothly display 100+ populated screens with plenty of functionality then more power to them, we're definitely due competition in the graphics & video market.
That's fine for jQuery, Bootstrap etc, however most modern frameworks are bundled into a single package with all of the templates and logic, making a shared CDN useless.
It would be interesting to see some benchmarks of a cached CDN Angular file and non-cached template/logic file, however lots of other sites would have to jump on board to get the cached file into users' browsers reliably.
It's something like this: https://i.imgur.com/0cXRPGB.png
My CPU is actually the 12 core / 24 thread version, which I got for £340 on a flash deal during a meet-up event. My case is also better than listed, but was the same price as part of a weekly deal.
Note that it's pre-VAT price (£1499), because it's a business computer. The Macbook was ~£3100 pre-VAT, and this thing shreds through video exports maybe 4-6x faster than the laptop. I do miss the MacOS terminal for web development though.
I had a similar experience with a top spec late 2016 MBP, which I switched to from a PC for web development. It was my first and last Apple product.
After opening the lid one day there was a loud crackling noise and the speakers were both blown. To repair it, the Apple store had to replace the entire top case (top half of the chassis including keyboard, trackpad, speakers) and also replaced the battery, which would have cost ~£500.
I got it back two weeks later after dealing with a smug 'Genius' who treated me like an idiot. He also claimed that the software diagnostics were clean, so there was nothing wrong with the laptop. I had to drive 1 1/2 hours each way to the store for a second time during business hours just to argue in person with them, because the speakers were clearly broken.
The exact same problem happened twice more over the next year, taking two weeks to fix each time. The final time was outside of the 1yr AppleCare warranty, and they wanted to replace the top case, battery and logic board for ~£800.
Coupled with the useless touch bar, 16GM RAM cap, awful display scaling issues/confusion when external monitors were attached, sluggish performance for video editing and OS updates that broke the machine, it convinced me to avoid Apple products completely.
I got a full £3100 refund after 18 months under EU consumer law and build a powerful desktop PC (16 core ThreadRipper, 32GB RAM, 1080ti) with £1500 left over.
If you like Hypernormalisation you should definitely look into his other documentaries, especially Century of the Self.
It explores the rise of advertising in the 20th century, revealing how it emerged from propaganda during the wars and deeply wove itself into social norms. It might be the most powerful documentary that I've seen, because I watched it as an advertising undergrad and it unnerved me enough to move away from the field.
For example, it wasn't socially acceptable for women to smoke until the 20's, when the American Tobacco Company paid a group of suffragettes to prominently light up cigarettes whilst on public display during the Easter Day Parade. They positioned smoking as a display of independence for women, piggybacking the feminist movement and calling cigarettes "Torches of Freedom". There are several examples like this in the documentary, along with interviews from their creators.
It's shocking how easily public opinion can be swayed, and the techniques are far more powerful now through the Internet and social media. If I could ask every human to watch a documentary, it would be this one followed by Hypernormalisation.
You can watch most of Curtis' work for free at https://thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/
It takes 29 hours for a single CPU core (or thread?) to render one frame, which is reasonable for Pixar-quality scenes.
Big Hero 6 was rendered using 55,000 CPU cores in parallel, which would bring the final render time closer to 70 hours for 144k frames (assuming maximum efficiency and ignoring all the tests and overhead).
For reference you can download a production benchmark scene (https://www.blender.org/download/demo-files/) from the Blender team's short film and try to render it at 1080p — my 16-thread Ryzen CPU takes over an hour to finish one frame.
Also feature films are rendered in 4K or above which quadruples the render time over 1080p.
This is why I love my 15-year-old Honda S2000 dashboard.
http://www.performance-car-guide.co.uk/images/L-Honda-S2000-...
Minimal interface with just 2 dials for vents and heating and 2 rockers for volume and fan speed, which are impossible to miss. Everything is tilted towards the driver so there's no reason to ever take your eyes off the road.
Everything else just gets out of the way.
I drive it daily without choosing between 8 suspension settings, 5 sport modes, the perfect climate control temperature, heated seats, driver position profiles, voice commands, cruise control, awkward bluetooth pairing or proprietary navigation systems, and I haven't missed any of those things during the last 3 years with the S2000.
Touchscreens are a lazy solution to handle (or hide) the insane arms race of features imposed upon the UI designers to compete with the market. More settings in the 2019 model? Just add another tab! The Tesla Model 3 is a prime example - a super minimal car in every respect, until you use the touchscreen.
There's zero consideration whether stripping features out would actually make a better car overall, so I can only see the trend continuing.
Seneca - On the Shortness of Life
Although it can be read in an hour or two, it completely rewrote the way I approach life – particularly by reframing procrastination and idleness.
"You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire"