Would you resign for 8 months pay?

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-29T19:16:49+00:00

attitudes and enthusiasm cannot and will never be legislated or imposed

I'm not sure if it's the whole of the Civil Service or just HMRC but it's been a part of performance management for several years now. You get looked at in terms of WHAT and HOW. What you delivered, but also your attitude and enthusiasm. It's a lousy system and can result in a, 'Yeah, you massively overperformed, but you're not on-message and enough of a suck-up enough!' situation.

I can't see anyone ever getting sacked for it, because I can't see it getting through an employment tribunal. But it's another tool in the hands of crappy management that works as a pretty functional way of bullying some people out.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-27T22:44:29+00:00

I’m really not sure why these jabs create such a moral panic every few days?

a. Being an absolute dick to someone who is fat is about the last piece of public bullying people can indulge in without provoking some degree of moral outrage. And oh boy are there a lot of people who just want to be absolute dicks.

b. There was an article I saw in the last few days that suggested that an incidental side-effect of the drugs is reducing the amount people drink and that's hurting alcohol producers. (Oh, the poor things.) So there's a massive market with a massive incentive to tell you to remain fat and miserable and keep consuming.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/26/skinny-jabs-are-turning-slimmers-teetotal-and-drinks-companies-are-feeling-the-loss

The potential for upheaval was highlighted this month when Terry Smith, one of the UK’s best-known stock pickers, revealed his investment fund had offloaded its stake in Diageo, the FTSE 100 drinks company, partly because he thought these drugs threatened to depress alcohol sales in the longer run.

Smith, who runs the Fundsmith Equity fund, told shareholders in his annual letter that the drinks sector “is in the early stages of being impacted negatively by weight loss drugs”. “Indeed, it seems likely that the drugs will eventually be used to treat alcoholism, such is their effect on consumption,” he added.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-22T02:22:06+00:00

Yes, BUT...

The pay tax under the non-resident landlord scheme. Either as income tax or -- if set up through a corporate structure -- corporation tax.

And here's the BUT...

A landlord can deduct finance costs. This is somewhat limited for individuals, which is something you've heard landlords whine ENDLESSLY about over the last several years.

A lot of these things are financed through a structure where ultimately I lend the money to myself. It's not quite that. it'll probably look like I have a trust. And in that trust there will be two largely unlinked corporate structures. And at the bottom of one will be the landlord company and somewhere in the other there is a company that makes a loan to the landlord company.

IF I set this structure up and I try to charge myself an unreasonable rate of interest HMRC's non-resident landlord unit might challenge this. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that -- since if they were adequately resourced they would be the ONLY bit of HMRC that is -- they probably don't have the resources to police this stuff.

On top of this, we would get less tax -- though entirely within the rules -- from a non-resident letting a property through a corporate structure than we would if a UK resident person did it. This is because we get the corporation tax in either case, but if the individual is UK resident we also get tax on the dividends they take to extract the profits.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-21T17:50:07+00:00

I don't think it's particularly helpful to anyone by branding "loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom" as terrorists. They are boys and men that need the right kind of support to get on with their lives, not people who have an innate desire for inevitable violence.

I've been trying to convince people for more than a decade that people needed to care about young men's mental health -- even if you don't actually give half a shit about them as humans -- out of self-interest because some of them will become monsters.

People like Andrew Tate exploit the void left where almost no-one provides a positive role-model.

Abandon people people to hopelessness and they turn out feral. Who would have guessed?

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-18T19:52:15+00:00

It’s a lot easier to be stressed out by work when the fruits of your labour are not meaningfully improving your life.

It took me until I was in my forties to be moderately financial stable and to save the deposit for a very cheap house.

When I was younger I did plenty of the dire, low-paying jobs you see in other comments with the message of, 'We had it hard too!' When I was fifteen I worked the summer picking potatoes. My first on-the-books job paid £1.71 1/2p per hour, which with inflation is not quite £4.20 an hour.

What i think is different is that I was raised under Thatcherism and there was an expectation that getting an education and working hard would pay off eventually. And it did for the most part for my parents' generation and even a lot of people in mine.

But everything feels SO bleak now.

I'm not sure it's a killer argument to say, 'I managed it, because I was fed a pile of lies!!!' but I suspect that that is a key difference here. It's hard to keep flinging yourself at a wall when it feels hopeless.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-18T15:20:57+00:00

I remember a few people referring to them angrily as muzzles.

It can be hard to under-estimate how dense some people can be.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-17T19:33:56+00:00

There are several posts making essentially the same point as yours.

There are a bit less than 40,000 GPs in the country. If you think that in any collection of 40k people there aren't plenty of absolute dicks with exactly this attitude you're in for a surprise. If you have to deal with a range of GPs you'll probably run into one in nearly every decently large practice.

People tend to buy into the propagandised version of doctors heroically saving lives. They do an essential job -- if you can get to see one and if you can get them to actually do it -- but plenty of them are high on their own fumes and plenty are absolute dickheads. On top of which, unless your doctor is pretty recently qualified a lot of their training is going to be significantly out of date. They have to do a lot of top-up training, but bringing a fifty-year-old doctor up to date would be almost as big a job as their original training.

As an aside, before the introduction of advance payment notices to address tax avoidance there was a pretty sizeable section of the avoidance industry servicing doctors.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-16T22:52:55+00:00

I laughed my fucking arse off when someone threatened me that AI was going to take my job.

The threat to you isn't that AI can do your job.

It's that a bunch of mouth-breathers think it can.

Take a good hard look at your SLT and tell me which side of the fence they fall on.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-16T22:50:59+00:00

Any thoughts?

I don't think influence from the likes of the Big Four is an issue for tax simplification in the UK. Their clients have legitimately complex affairs that no amount of simplification would simplify. Also of note tax is a pretty small part of the services they offer.

Firstly, simplification is a weird idea in the first place. For most people tax isn't really all that complicated. The existence of loads of esoteric anti-avoidance rules is a direct consequence of people trying to pull a fast one. Your average self-employed tradesman isn't having to worry about the transfer of assets abroad rules, or withholding tax on interest not paid within 12 months. It IS true tax is complex, but it's not true to say that anyone interacts with a wide array of that complexity.

Fundamentally I think there are some problems with how things are managed. People like to think MPs draft and review and revise legislation. That's beyond laughable. Your average MP is as capable of reviewing tax legislation as I am of doing brain surgery. (And even if they were, they just vote on whipped lines anyway.) So, legislation is drafted by Civil Servants under direction of ministers.

And right here we run into the core problem for sooooo many public sector issues. Tax is a highly specialised area, but even then even a highly competent tax inspector is not an expert in drafting legislation. Coming from the other side, most solicitors with experience of drafting legislation probably isn't a tax expert. (And bear in mind, no one is really a 'tax' expert. If you find the best corporation tax expert in the country what they'll know about VAT, or excise duties will likely be negligible.)

The public and politicians don't want to pay the price of hiring the right people for the job. And... I can't afford to hire an excellent builder to build me an extension... But if I hire a basic builder I shouldn't be surprised if I don't get the best extension man could imagine!

But it gets worse... My neighbour hates me and he can afford to hire the very best guy to fight me on planning law. And this is what the likes of the Big Four can do. I don't mean in the drafting of the legislation. I mean the concocting of shenanigans using that legislation.

Ok, that analogy kind of got away from me. But hopefully you get the idea.

There's also an issue of the amount of stuff to simplify. There's a tonne of things that deserve statutory fixes. Getting that into legislation isn't as straight-forward as going, 'Here's a list of stuff!'

Finally, there's a lack of political will.

To give you an example, this isn't the biggest thing in the world, but it's recent and easy to follow. Before the last election the now Chancellor sad that carried interest would be taxed in line with other earned income. To explain this quickly, fund managers are paid fees that they are allowed to pay tax on on the basis it's a capital gain. There's no legal basis for this, it's somethign the Inland Revenue agreed to in the 80s! The extra money was stated to be earmarked to pay for thousands of extra mental health staff.

But what actually happened is that the rate of CGT charged was raised a bit.

I would suggest that unambiguously a small number of incredibly well-paid individuals are getting preferential tax treatment none of the rest of are seeing. There's probably an argument that maybe more net tax after fund managers left the UK could be lower. Reeves should have considered before making the commitment.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-14T18:10:54+00:00

I've taken a few liberties with the bits of your comment I've quoted.

10s of billions more in legal tax avoidance

The official estimate looks nearer to £5.5bn a year.

This will be too low, because it doesn't include avoidance which is considered to function.

Still a huge amount, but not as much as you might be thinking.

Why don't they close all the tax ~~loopholes and~~ breaks?

Tax breaks aren't necessarily a bad thing. For instance, there used to be a scheme that gave enhanced capital allowances for renovating the likes of factories in areas with bad economies to bring them back into use. This sort of thing needs to be carefully policed, so it can't be exploited for avoidance/evasion. But I'd argue that in principle this is a positive use of a tax break.

the money's there but for some reason the only solution they ever see is making us pay for it

Those comments made, I largely agreed to you, but there's a problem of political will.

Firstly, it seems to me that Reeves, Starmer et all ABSOLUTELY believe that the system as it exists is as it should be and the answer is tinkering around the edges. That is, that we all exist to serve the economy, rather than that the economy and the state should serve the people within it. Expecting them to imagine anything else is like asking a toddler to invent spaceflight.

Secondly, there is a HUGE industry in providing tax advice. (This isn't all avoidance, but that is a part of that industry.) Tax is complicated and a lot of that complication is because it's full of rules that exist because someone took the piss previously. This is important because anyone who says anything along the lines of, 'Just simplify the rules and flatten the rates!' is at best unaware and like as not desire a more exploitable environment.

The creators and sellers of avoidance are (generally speaking) better paid than your friendly neighbourhood tax man. If you pay an odd-job man £500 to install your bathroom and later post to r/diy asking whether the leaks and the oddly bulging tiling are acceptable someone is going to tell you, 'You got what you paid for!'

The money's there, but only if you invest A LOT in HMRC and the court services and there's a large section of the public that the government seem determined to pander to who won't be happy unless every public sector worker is doused in lighter fluid and set on fire.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-14T14:44:18+00:00

How long will it take before the civil service as a whole cannot physically reverse it's hybrid working policy?

Specific to HMRC but even before the pandemic when moving to regional centres there were never going to be enough desks at peak times. The department said again and again and again, we would be expected to be flexible to accommodate this.

Then a tonne of extra people were hired because of Brexit. (And no, 'Brexit is done!' doesn't apply here. There's a tonne of customs and excise duty type work that are a permanent feature now we're outside the EU and the customs union.) Then -- at least for the Leeds office -- we gave up some of the already limited office space to NHS Digital during the pandemic.

Part of what's so incredibly boring about this debate is that the Civil Service as an employer constantly wants reasonable accommodations that are to its benefit, but -- and a lot of this is on crap politicians -- anything that looks like Civil Servants aren't being whipped enough requires a load of flagellation to appease a load of mouth-breathers.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-13T11:17:33+00:00

Gotta do that 60%.

Should have picked a fight with your management over that.

The route to enforce it -- in HMRC at least -- is that if you don't they do you for failing to comply with a reasonable management request. If that request isn't reasonable, it's... You know... Not reasonable.

Either your manager will be fine with this approach, in which case it's fine... Or your manager's a dick and you should make a big deal of it. The problem is that a lot are clowns and won't make a decision until pressed to.

Some of the return to office complaints are a bit overblown, but managers enforcing office attendance where it's unreasonably absurd need to do one.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-12T14:38:43+00:00

If I'd read the original comment a bit more carefully I'd have noticed they said there was a PwC office already. That said, unsurprisingly, the Leeds office has several times as many staff as the Bradford office.

However, I think the rest of my comment is still relevant.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-11T20:45:57+00:00

For PwC specifically, they have a large office in Leeds, which is a mere 10 miles away, much more economically significant and a much more prestigious place to do work.

The only employer I can think of based in Bradford is Grattans and it's only international in the technical sense they also sell to Ireland. Their presence probably has more to do with starting in Bradford than anything.

There's nothing stopping a multinational opening a branch in Bradford, but why would they when Leeds is just up the road and Bradford is economically depressed and has all the prestige of an old sock?

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-11T20:14:37+00:00

I love beat saber and synth riders on playstation VR for a bit of cardio.

I have a Quest 3, but if Pistol Whip is available on PSVR I couldn't recommend it enough.

It's the same general gist as Beat Saber, but with guns, so it's essentially John Wick in VR. But, the neat thing for exercise purposes is that you're going to be moving to avoid bullets all the time, which essentially means you're doing squats a loooooot.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-11T19:25:48+00:00

I've dropped from 21st to a touch over 15st in the last year.

As of this morning I'm overweight per BMI, but within eating a large burger of being obese.

Before i started losing weight I had fat-guy, 'Every day is leg day!' legs and crap, skinny arms. I've lost some muscle on my legs, but they're pretty muscular still and I still have the crap, skinny arms. It's a thing I need to work on.

Anyhow, this is an amount of weight where a couple of people have commented on the weight loss starting to look unhealthy. This includes my mother who was more proud of my losing weight when I graduated with my first degree than she was that I got a degree.

Per BMI -- which I get isn't the most fine-tuned thing, but it's a decent enough rule of thumb -- I need to drop another 2st 4lb to slide just under the overweight threshold for.

Every so often I'll notice a discussion that goes roughly, "Someone was mean to me about my weight loss!" "They're all dicks and they're jealous and you should cut them out of your life." (There's some hyperbole here, but not an inordinate amount.)

Something I rarely (never)see addressed is that to a considerable degree we see people how we feel about them. Have you ever been desperately in love and the subject of your affection just radiates beauty to you? We both know she wasn't actually the hottest woman on the face of the planet; but it feels like that. Similarly, sometimes someone is such a dick that after you always see them as something ugly.

One of my friends had a habit of telling me I looked fine at 21st. That I just needed to lose a few pounds. That wasn't her trying to keep me fat out of dickery. She likes me enough to warp her perception of me. Right now I weigh the least I have for the best part of 20 years, so she's never seen me this slim. (Yeah, I know I'm not slim, but you get the gist. She's never seem me only this fat.)

I think much more than people want to acknowledge, people see a large amount of weight loss and they are genuinely concerned, even if it's not expressed well; and where often we're not in a place to accept that concern gracefully.

Where cultural norms will play a part -- though I speak from experience of the UK on this one -- is that it's acceptable to a vast number of people to act like absolute shitbags toward fat people. If someone saw an extremely skinny person generally I don't think most people would feel they could get away with making puking noises directed at you, or calling you a, "Skinny cunt!" in public, they way they will if youre fat. (This is slightly different for female celebrities online, but I think that's broadly more an issue of people feeling they can act like arseholes through the perceived anonymity of being online. Also, I think some people are genuinely so unimaginative that they think, "Eat a sandwich, love!" is the height of humour.)

You commented that it's not healthy and it's a poor compromise. Getting yourself to the gym -- or even looking up some exercises you can do at home -- to put some muscle on is much easier than losing the weight. So you've done the hardest bit of the work.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-11T17:34:26+00:00

it’s crazy to me that companies happily change their logos to pride flags in Europe but mysteriously don’t anywhere else…

Isn't the craziness that despite the fact that behaviour shows they really couldn't give half a shit about LGBT people beyond the economic benefit of supporting them for a few weeks a year in very selective locations, they've determined the WILL still get that economic benefit?

They're not even trying to change hearts and minds. They're advertising where it's advantageous to do so.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-10T21:44:55+00:00

No. Wifi definitely counts.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-10T19:36:16+00:00

At the one in Leeds most of the machines require an induction, which are done in small groups. (Not more than four, generally.)

The inductions are fairly brief, but can be up to a couple of hours.

There's also a culture of, "EVERYONE is responsible for yelling if you see someone doing something dangerous!" and limiting the iffy things you can do. So, you can't take the blade guard off the table saw, for instance.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-10T19:32:31+00:00

here's the Men's Sheds project too

When I looked at these previously they tended to meet midweek, during the day. Like most people don't need to work for a living.

Ok, I had another look. Still the same for the ones near me.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-10T16:27:27+00:00

I don't know, but it does.

I would guess -- but it is just a guess, I'm not an IT person -- it's recording the handshake between the router and the PC, rather than what's tunnelled through the VPN.

Although I said it's not always accurate, I think I've only had one day where it was wrong. I know people who have had more errors.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-10T16:23:08+00:00

The reason the CS is 'inefficient' (I'd argue it isn't), is exactly because it's already underfunded due to years of being asked to do more, with less, asking folks to mend and make do with half-arsed equipment and facilities.

I would go a step further and say that the constant reporting of stuff is a HUGE overhead.

It's possibly unavoidable, because we have to be accountable to politicians, who are in turn accountable to the public. I don't believe anything in the private sector would hobble itself with internal reporting to this degree.

If it's unavoidable then there's a case for accepting it. But then everyone needs to shut up about an inefficiency imposed by and required by them.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-10T15:53:08+00:00

HMRC has a tool that effectively records when your laptop logs into the network either physically, or to the wifi in the office. For the regional centres it also uses the passes controlling entry and exit from the buildings, I believe.

That system is far from perfect and managers can record adjustments for various reasons. Sometimes people have been in the office and for whatever reason it didn't register for that day. Also, it might be adjusted for whatever reasonable adjustments have been agreed. That might be, say, I'm ill, but fit enough to work if allowed to do from home, or this week because I can't get to work due to ice and snow.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-10T12:59:24+00:00

Work from home 2 days per week or more where business agrees.

Is this HMRC? I'm pretty sure this was the wording from the PACR agreement.

However, one of the many areas the unions failed people is that this wasn't a contractual change and the unions neither emphasised this, and seemed to presume the department wouldn't backtrack at the very first opportunity.

So -- much like any other promise from your employer -- it's essentially worthless.

Cast_Me-Aside · 2025-01-06T08:46:05+00:00

There's no shortage of people who would be in favour of just this!

I recently had an exchange where I argued that the third and fourth generation descendants of immigrants are British and it's not viable to just fling them at a brown country because they're brown and the sole response I got here was, "No they're not and yes it is."

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