Viewing profile — acatnamedjoe

I have a personal current account, a shared current account with my wife, and several savings accounts. It is frequently necessary to move money between these accounts. Also, here …

In Britain we have quite strong employment laws and a bit less of a ruthless corporate culture, so in many sectors it's fairly uncommon for people to be terminated for poor perform…

"Firing" is becoming a bit more common in Britain, but still sounds like an Americanism to my British ears. I would use "sacking" for performance related termination, and "losing o…

Unlocking trolleys with a coin is normal in Britain too. I'd never considered that this might be unusual. Is this not a thing in other countries? How do they get people to return t…

Can't America fine them? Surely this is illegal there too?

I think the argument is less that inequality has increased overall, and more that the country is increasingly stratified by geography - with greater concentrations of wealth in the…

> quite possibly the most spirit-crushingly tedious town in Kent. This is an extremely high bar to hit in a county that also contains Ashford.

I was curious - what was the angle on Hythe in the book? These days Hythe seems like a posh seaside town with a Waitrose, a nice canalside park, a cute steam railway, lots of bouti…

They have something to give away because they have power, which is the only thing that matters in the final analysis. It doesn't matter who created the value - it's who controls it…

It seems like this is more about the semantics of what we mean by athleticism then? It sounds like for you, being a top athlete simply means being very good at a sport. I've always…

That's only because a capitalist economy uses the circulation of currency and goods as a way to multiply wealth, while motivating the people who generate the wealth. Sufficiently a…

Focusing on the state misses the point. The state is a relatively modern abstraction for society. Society, state-based or not, has always been dominated by class of elites and gove…

> He’s the most successful player in the most competitive position in the most competitive league in one of the most competitive sports on Earth Isn't it exactly the point of the a…

>The main character isn't complex at all. There's no depth at all to Winston. Of course everyone has their own response to any piece of art but I find this criticism very surprisin…

So many critiques of 1984 seem to boil down to "I'd really like 1984 to be a political treatise in favour of my ideology, but it isn't!" All of the things this article says are bad…

I don't think Orwell was ever a "man of ideas" and I don't think he would have seen himself as such either. His writing is partly journalistic, partly literary.He's never really tr…

As an English person my first instinct is to add "sorry" to virtually any user-facing text!

I don't think it's funny because it's "strange". It's funny because it reminds people that they can have very different inner worlds to people they share their life with.

Did you also guess what the article was about based on just the title?

But in all of those cases presumably someone needed to figure out what needed doing? (In your case maybe you're savvy enough that you knew what the issue was and just needed a cert…

I see the plumber/electrician thing a lot. But talking to my friends who do these jobs it always seems like it would be even more vulnerable to AI than programming. Experienced ele…

This isn't really true. The article talks about apprenticeships. While traditionally apprenticeships in the UK were mostly for blue collar work, these days you can do apprenticeshi…

To be fair, technical skills training in the UK is currently mostly delivered through apprenticeships. The model is 80% "on the job", 20% "off the job" training. So, in theory at l…

Do you have any evidence to support the statement that this is "the rule in the UK"? Anecdotally (in the UK) I've only ever known managers of technical teams to have risen from tec…

"Regarding the complaint of not moving decisions forward with a disengaged manager, if you plan to be absentee you must delegate" I took the OPs point on this to be that, at a cert…