411–420 of 659 posts
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Yeah, even policemen rarely have guns in the UK, allowing everyone to have one would be lunacy.
You know we can own shotguns and full power rifles (303) in the UK. Thankfully the armed police have very stringent training in the Uk.
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Data, did I comment on the wrong thread?
No, I don't think you did. Why didn't the EU prevent the UK from selling/sharing 1.6 million patient records in 2016? https://www.newscientist.com/article/2086454-revealed-google...
Consider me zinged. I knew you were setting me up for something.
‘too many businesses and organisations are reluctant to use data – either because they don’t understand the rules or are afraid of inadvertently breaking them’ TBH I'm glad companies stay away from my data if they don't know how to get consent, store data securely, or even what those things mean.
This is an illusion, only thing that happened is that you only get access to websites if you give away your GDPR consent. I love the ignorance of people over here thinking that GDPR is nothing more than just that accept button that people click in order to get access to the websites.
I don't know if that was the case before gdrp but we have to centraly clarify if and when we store user data, what we do with it and we have to show that we can delete user data if requested.
Not sure how far small companies go through this thow.
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The US is hardly some low regulation capitalist utopia. The US regulatory code is enormous. Plenty of self-proclaimed "Europeans" think it is, but in my experience they often know relatively little about the issues in question and are just parroting cultural talking points they picked up elsewhere. Indeed, you seem to admit that here, when you state that you got your views of what British people believe from your "ne…
>For example you think everyone else thinks the NHS is awesome, because left-wing journalists Or because 87% of Britons polled said that they are very proud of it. >you'd be shocked at how little support rail nationalisation would end up having. 56% in favor. 15% actively against. Majority support even by members of the party that was most against it. >The NHS is a socialist anachronism This is a popular view among i…
I believe the NHS funding and operational model is similar to that used by military veterans in the US.
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It's not inevitable, but the current government appears to move in that direction intentionally. - The EU exit was, among other things, accused of being a way to relax regulation and legislation to degrade product standards to a US-like level. Chlorinated chicken was a big item on everyone's discussion agenda a while back. This is now evidently happening. - The government is severely underfunding the NHS, despite pay…
The government is severely underfunding the NHS, despite paying it lip service Have you ever known any government departments that don’t howl about being underfunded? The NHS is the 4th largest employer in the world, 1.3 million employees to provide healthcare to a nation of 67 million. The Labour Party is currently claiming that NHS spending will be cut next year... because the emergency funding for the Covid situat…
Yet taxpayer funding for health per head of population in the UK is lower than
France
Germany
Sweden
Switzerland
And get this -- THE USA
In 2009 - so before Obamacare came in, the US government spent $3,700 per person on healthcare. Not per person covered by medicare and military, per citizen.
The UK spent $2,700, and everyone was covered.
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It's not inevitable, but the current government appears to move in that direction intentionally. - The EU exit was, among other things, accused of being a way to relax regulation and legislation to degrade product standards to a US-like level. Chlorinated chicken was a big item on everyone's discussion agenda a while back. This is now evidently happening. - The government is severely underfunding the NHS, despite pay…
> "b) The privatisation of British rail has been a disaster" Privatisation has not been perfect, but only someone who does not remember the old days of British Rail in the 1980s and 1990s would consider it a disaster. It's true that fares are high, but service levels and passenger numbers are both far above the British Rail days. (UK rail passenger numbers reached an all time record in 2019) Prior to Covid, many of t…
TL;DW revenues and passenger numbers are demonstrably lower with privatization than when nationalized. Unlike other industries, the UK's franchise privatization model is not subjected to free market forces, allowing rail companies to win contracts by underbidding only to fail to meet their targets.
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Why is it inevitable that the UK will become like America? There are plenty of independent Algo-States that are nothing like it. Australia, New Zealand, Canada for example. This comment seems to be borne out spite more than any kind of logic.
Mostly due to shock. The shock of their financial sector leaving. The shock of getting pitiful trade negotiating. Being unprepared with anything to offer for negotiating leverage. The domestic identity further polarizing and inability to form consensus.
You speak in the past tense but this hasn’t actually happened and shows no signs of happening in terms of banks relocating jobs and capital. If anything London is getting stronger.
‘too many businesses and organisations are reluctant to use data – either because they don’t understand the rules or are afraid of inadvertently breaking them’ TBH I'm glad companies stay away from my data if they don't know how to get consent, store data securely, or even what those things mean.
This is an illusion, only thing that happened is that you only get access to websites if you give away your GDPR consent. I love the ignorance of people over here thinking that GDPR is nothing more than just that accept button that people click in order to get access to the websites.
I know of small companies that before GDPR didn't really consider the implications of private data at all. They'd just let their SQL databases grow forever (mark as delete and have "script to actually delete the data" as a TODO that never happened), had random backups lying around on dev machines.
GDPR forced them to actual define policy, start deleting old data that was no longer relevant, strip private data from developer test sets.
It was a bit more work, and adds a small bit of friction, but these are still important things!
Forcing cooks in restaurants to wash their hands after using the bathroom also adds friction to the process but is similarly important.
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It's not inevitable, but the current government appears to move in that direction intentionally. - The EU exit was, among other things, accused of being a way to relax regulation and legislation to degrade product standards to a US-like level. Chlorinated chicken was a big item on everyone's discussion agenda a while back. This is now evidently happening. - The government is severely underfunding the NHS, despite pay…
> The privatisation of British rail has been a disaster Train company profits count for about 2% of the total cost of the ticket, and (pre covid) the network carried more than twice as many passengers as it was under BR - nearly 2 billion journeys a year vs a steady 800m in the 70s through 90s. in terms of distance, pax-km 1970 36b 1980 35b 1990 40b 1997 42b (end of BR) 2010 64b 2018 81b Since 1997 that's a 90% incre…
https://fullfact.org/economy/how-much-does-government-subsid...
Government subsidies have tripled since privatisation and fares have risen by 20% after inflation.
That doesn't seem like a win for efficiency. And of course it's the customer who bears the cost - which aren't just economic, but also social, because good public infrastructure reliably offers many-multiple ROI for economic activity in general.
And the question remains - how would BR have fared (ha...) with those generous subsidy levels instead of the very constrained resources it was forced to operate with?
Not only has privatisation been very expensive and poor value in real terms, it also destroyed one of the UK's biggest engineering employers and R&D development cultures.
The HS125 is still one of the most popular trains today. Experimental APT tilting technology was given away to European companies and then sold back to the UK in the form of foreign-built tiling trains.
Those could easily have been designed and built in the UK. There were also losses in signalling research - essential for maximised efficiency - and in network integration.
So it absolutely does make sense to complain about overcrowding and high prices when a nationalised network would have been cheaper to run, better value, and also more advanced technologically.
Of course this ideologically unpossible. Even so. Ideologues need to explain why jobs were lost, safety was trashed, engineering and R&D skills were off-shored in addition to higher subsidies and uneconomic fares.