111–120 of 127 posts
This one is painful to read. What was their option here? Calling WP Engine to take it offline?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of this is a product of the UK's political culture where expenses for stuff like this are ruthlessly scrutinised from within and without. The idea of the site hosting such an important document running independently on WordPress, being maintained by a single external developer and a tiny in-house team would seem really strange to many other countries. Everyone is so terrified of headlines like "OBR spends £2m up…
It's not an easy call. Sometimes, one or two dedicated and competent people can vastly outperform large and bureaucratic consulting firms, for a fraction of the price. And sometimes, somebody's cousin "who knows that internet stuff" is trousering inflated rates at the taxpayer's expense, while credentialed and competent professionals are shut out from old boys' networks. One rule does not fit all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The fact that they were elected as a 'change' government and have barely done anything that really faces up to the scale of the challenge the country faces? They have done a lot. But they haven't even stopped the runaway train yet. And the fundamental mistake they have made is not explaining to people clearly enough, during the election campaign, that it would take the first three years just to stop it. Then you ha…
> They have done a lot. I really don’t agree. Look at the first year of 1997 Labour: * Good Friday agreement signed and referendum * Introduction of Minimum Wage * Human Rights act introduced and passed * Scottish and Welsh devolution set out, Parliament voted on it, referendums passed * Bank of England independence A government coming into a mess of a country on a platform of change cannot just fiddle around with mi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This suggests that the downloader knew that the OBR was going to make this mistake, and they were polling the server waiting for the file to appear. I think most of the tech world heard about the Nobel Peace Prize award so it doesn't seem that suspicious to me that somebody would just poll urls. Especially since before the peace prize there have been issues with people polling US economic data. My point is strictly…
How does the Nobel Peace Prize figure into this? I seem to be on the other side that didn't hear about the award. Which is not surprising as I don't follow it, but also I haven't worked out query terms to connect it with OBR.
It relates to OBR because it's another scenario where people just by polling the site can figure out information that wasn't supposed to be released yet. And then use that information to profit.
Since a recent event of polling was in the news the idea of polling isn't really evidence of an insider trying to leak data versus somebody just cargo-culting a technique. Plus polling of financial data was already common.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TBF there is some scrutiny on existing plugins, the team is just extremely understaffed (it’s ran by volunteers after all). I got involved in a plugin that ended up getting de-listed for some minor ToS violations after several years of being “fine”, they re-reviewed the plugin with the same rigor as a new submission.
Kudos to these volunteers, but as long as one single company continues to insist on owning all the resources of the plugin and theme directories, I don't think they deserve to continue profiting from volunteer labor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I largely agree, expect I think my expectations were lower than yours to start with. The ruling class all think alike regardless of party. They have pushed ahead with the Tories Online Safety Act. Legislation I have looked at or that affect things I know about such as the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act is terrible. There is a lot of smoke and mirrors. For example, if you assume the justification for the "mansio…
No, it's designed to maximize what they can raise without pissing off too many voters. Even as it is, it's going to raise barely half a billion pounds, which is relatively insignificant in a budget worth hundreds of billions; but it's something, and something they (think they) can sell to their core electorate as a bit of token redistribution, when in reality it's just a cash-raising exercise. If they'd targeted the…
Taxes on property are something they cannot avoid though.
One of the reasons the rich are able to find means to avoid taxes has always been government reluctance to stop them. There are many deliberate tax breaks for the rich - think of how long it took to get rid of non-dom status, so I really do not think the government has ever tried very hard to stop avoidance by the rich.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I largely agree, expect I think my expectations were lower than yours to start with. The ruling class all think alike regardless of party. They have pushed ahead with the Tories Online Safety Act. Legislation I have looked at or that affect things I know about such as the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act is terrible. There is a lot of smoke and mirrors. For example, if you assume the justification for the "mansio…
No, it's designed to maximize what they can raise without pissing off too many voters. Even as it is, it's going to raise barely half a billion pounds, which is relatively insignificant in a budget worth hundreds of billions; but it's something, and something they (think they) can sell to their core electorate as a bit of token redistribution, when in reality it's just a cash-raising exercise. If they'd targeted the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> WordPress is a nice piece of software, but the plugin situation is getting worse and worse The plugin situation is a mess largely because Wordpress isn't a nice piece of software. It's popular, and functionally it's great, but the codebase is really showing its age. Wordpress has never properly rearchitected because it would break plugins on a scale that would endanger its dominance.
> the codebase is really showing its age. It's not age, it started very, very bad. If they'd fixed the horrible schema and the code a decade and a half ago, plugins would have been a lot easier to write (and a lot safer.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They have done a lot. I really don’t agree. Look at the first year of 1997 Labour: * Good Friday agreement signed and referendum * Introduction of Minimum Wage * Human Rights act introduced and passed * Scottish and Welsh devolution set out, Parliament voted on it, referendums passed * Bank of England independence A government coming into a mess of a country on a platform of change cannot just fiddle around with mi…
This is an unfair comparison. The economy Blair inherited was very different, thanks to Ken Clark's preoccupation with eliminating the 'Public Sector Borrowing Requirement'. The pressure on public finances we see now, in part because of privatization under Blair, wasn't there in 1997.
The planning reforms of Labour have been held up largely by their own MPs. I don't particularly care about it but House of Lords reform seems to have been abandoned. Their 'charter for working people' has been largely unworkable and they're arguing internally an enormous amount. Lots of these don't have a huge amount of bearing on them based on the economy at all, they're largely cost neutral to the government itself.
Instead we've had (a) more bungs to pensioners via the triple lock which they're too scared to deal with at nearly a 5% increase this year (b) getting rid of the cap on benefits for more than 2 children, which is terrible optics for everyone working who can't afford more than two kids and doesn't get any support (c) a rise in employer NI which has hit hiring and pay rises massively for anyone working (d) a rise in employee NI to pay for all of this via stopping salary sacrifice, which only hits private sector employees.
For those of you not closely following UK politics: the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) mistakenly published their Economic and Fiscal Outlook (EFO) document 40 minutes early, pre-empting the announcements by the Chancellor. This is being treated as an incredibly big deal here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd74v35p77jo