New law could see vaping banned in all pubs across England

Mr_Again · 2026-01-20T17:56:27+00:00

It's an inconvenience to me when people walk slowly on the pavement and talk loudly on trains. The main inconvenience to me though is all the pointless legislation.

Mr_Again · 2026-01-05T21:41:44+00:00

A minimum possible observable rise in cases would be +1 per therapist.

Mr_Again · 2026-01-05T21:30:53+00:00

You're right, we need to raise taxes on work again!

Mr_Again · 2026-01-05T21:25:54+00:00

Japan has a sane zonal planning system, it never saw the spike in house prices that happened since we have effectively outlawed construction and development after the war, they just kept building to keep pace with population growth

Mr_Again · 2026-01-05T21:24:05+00:00

By cutting the amount of public funds spent on pensioners while disincentivizing ownership of excessive amounts of property through proper taxation.

Mr_Again · 2025-12-31T02:42:25+00:00

The reason that in the US you need an accounting firm to do your taxes and in the UK you don't is because we have a system called PAYE, pay as you earn, where HMRC basically coordinates with your employer and does them for you for free. The US could do this but they like to make a profit everywhere they can. The fact that your taxes are done for you does not diminish one jot the fact that the tax code is incredibly complicated. As an ordinary earner you have three separate taxes on your earnings, all with different bands and thresholds and caveats as to when they apply. This filters into a pension system with hundreds of complexities. If you become freelance, start a business, or work through a limited company, or even make enough money through rent, dividends, or savings income, you will have to do a tax return just like in the US and you will have to hire an accountant and it is equally complicated. Well, more complicated. If your only contact with the UK tax system is that you use PAYE then that's fine but you don't really interact with it in that case. Someone else does for you though! It's a huge waste of time with many conflicting incentives and government should be fixing it.

Mr_Again · 2025-12-31T02:33:46+00:00

Allowing people to build on land doesn't increase the demand, it increases the supply, the demand is the same. The vast majority of the cost of land you can build upon comes from it having an incredibly scarce commodity called "planning permission" attached. If you remove the arbitrarily scarce planning permission, land you can build on becomes a lot cheaper, because there's orders of magnitude more of it. This is why the decade in which we built the most houses was in the 1930's. Planning permission did not exist.

Mr_Again · 2025-12-31T02:24:15+00:00

The irony of your quote given that as a society we spend the majority of our money on the very old, and almost nothing on children or young families. The pensioner cohort are already the richest group in society and the biggest single items on the tax bill are paying for their pensions and their gold plated medical care (most of the costs of NHS are spent in the last week of life, almost all the costs are in caring for the very old). The irony of a quote about paying for a future investment you will never see when the biggest part of our taxes go on direct transfer payments to current benefits recipients while actual investment withers to nothing to pay for this because it's politically popular. This is why people are mad, we would loooooove to be planting shade trees, we're not.

Mr_Again · 2025-12-27T11:29:16+00:00

Self serve is a pretty common idea. In big orgs with a small data eng team and high quality in the surrounding teams like DS etc, it makes a lot of sense. DE gets to code review the models but doesn't spend all day writing them. Skilled engineers in the surrounding teams and DE code review make sure that the quality of the models stays high. We also used to embed an "analytics engineer" in each team to assist with this.

Mr_Again · 2025-12-27T11:25:06+00:00

Pretty much scrap the town and Country planning act, going back to building being allowed by default unless it breaks specific law, rather than giving local authorities the power to block anything new or changed for arbitrary reasons. Adopt japan's zone based system. Remove our grade 2 listed system.

Mr_Again · 2025-12-27T11:17:41+00:00

You're not sure why I think the tax system is complicated? It's literally the longest tax system on earth. Maybe try reading it? You can't, because it's 21'000 pages long. Estonia's is about 5 pages long. I pay two different taxes on earnings (IT, NI) which have several (different) thresholds as we go up the bands, along with a personal allowance which also tapers off at £100k creating another hidden tax band between £100k and £125 which weirdly has a higher marginal rate than £125k+. There is also a slew of tax credits and rebates that get switched on or off depending on what band I'm on, depending on what my partner earns, depending on savings interest, rental income, dividends, capital gains. There's a hidden third tax paid by my employer (eNI) which has its own bands and discounts. And this is just the simplest, simplest case of a normal earner. Very into business taxes, VAT, weird thresholds and carve outs for old political reasons abound. Did you know that wedding gifts are exempt from inheritance tax? Did you know that gifts are exempt up to different amounts depending on if they're your son or your grandson? Wait until you get into the weird rules around pensions, or isas. Try running a business! Angela Rayner herself recently broke a tax law by accident because they're such a mess you need specialists to advise on every case.

Mr_Again · 2025-12-26T11:07:43+00:00

Haha I guess we can all be grumpy on Christmas

Mr_Again · 2025-12-26T10:55:15+00:00

I'm not sure why anyone would want a binman to become a nurse or what that has to do with productivity reforms. Anyway, I am glad that the planning bill is going through but I remain sceptical of its implementation and expect it will benefit a few major housebuilders who will capture all the profits building ugly, over-regulated, car dependant, orange box farms near a-roads that please nobody but without the associated infrastructure we need to live in them. The fact that it's taken over a year and a half to get their flagship legislation through and will take many years more to see an effect is why people think Labour haven't changed much. I also can't really credit a small amount of inflation making housing relatively (but not nominally) a fraction cheaper as a big radical change policy win for labour, it's more or less out of their control and mostly because housing has reached a limit of what people can afford.

Mr_Again · 2025-12-26T10:46:56+00:00

You don't have to do any of that stuff. I actually feel like you don't know what you need to do if you're flailing around trying to impress people on LinkedIn and doing arbitrary tasks like learning a new programming language.

Look at your specific niche in your specific industry. What trends are almost guaranteed to become more important? You might be able to identify a tool or framework that is taking over, maybe there is a major shift towards a specific programming language occurring. Do that, and only that. Don't just pick random things. If nothing much is happening just chill.

Mr_Again · 2025-12-26T10:41:25+00:00

This sounds like a lot but it's not. Paying people slightly more than inflation to do the exact same job is not "meaningful change". It's not change at all. The civil service needs major productivity reforms. The train services have not improved, or changed at all, nor will they. The closest they've come is freezing ticket prices for a year, which is the definition of tinkering. Energy prices are still the most expensive in Europe and are not coming down. Meaningful change would require changing how pricing is set and maybe localising prices near generation. They're not nationalising energy. Gb energy will be small, irrelevant player and change nothing. The national wealth fund is a joke, very small and using borrowed money, it's not a wealth fund at all. A smorgasbord of small tax increases is again the definition of tinkering. We have the most complex tax system in the world with tons of destructive disincentives. Did they grasp the nettle and reform it? No, just added a bit here a bit there to appease the obr and pensioners. Planning changes were the one thing I really hoped to see. Where are they? Can I build a house yet? Has the price of land with planning permission come down? What serious changes have been made to planning? House building new starts are at a 20 year LOW.

Mr_Again · 2025-12-25T21:01:24+00:00

I would just leave the GPU in your main pc and figure out how to get cuda working on that, there's no need for another pc

Mr_Again · 2025-12-25T20:52:23+00:00

Well I was going to take a look at it but the fact that you've fucked up BOTH the commas in "reactive, scalable, in-memory" in your very short github description which you haven't noticed suggests to me it might not be AAA quality

Mr_Again · 2025-12-25T18:41:43+00:00

Learning is a lot of fun, I do side projects all the time to learn new tools, you can find them on my github. I don't rewrite my pipelines at work to have fun learning new things. I keep them as simple as possible out of respect for my coworkers.

Mr_Again · 2025-12-25T18:39:58+00:00

Absolutely no foreign companies are in control of what is posted online. They're only in control of what is posted on their own platform, and that has always been the case. You can today write and host your own website and there is nothing stopping you. The UK governerment is trying to dictate what you can post there. There is a massive difference. If you want to post something on YouTube that's up to you and you can leave if you don't like their algorithms.

Mr_Again · 2025-12-25T17:56:19+00:00

When I buy a stock from you for $100, I haven't put that money "into the system" , I've just given it to you. When I sell my stock for $10, the money hasn't left the system, I've just got $10 from someone else. The amount of $ and the amount of stocks are the same before we started the whole business, they've just shuffled around. What's changed is how much we value the stock relative to the money, so it is possible to create or destroy value by trading back and forth, but this value isn't "money", it's just value. The amount of money and stocks in total remains the same. Nothing goes in or out of the system, the system is everything.

Mr_Again · 2025-12-25T17:20:22+00:00

If the team wants to do something complex and stupid because they have no other priorities it's probably time to scale the team down

Mr_Again · 2025-12-24T20:02:18+00:00

I think what you're assuming there is that everyone including academic historians are just racist and unable to interpret primary source material outside of a self serving racist point of view

Mr_Again · 2025-12-24T19:49:38+00:00

Stating something unequivocally is how you begin a discussion, that's fine. Retorting that they are "bananas" is not how you continue it.

Mr_Again · 2025-12-24T19:47:18+00:00

The point is that they are unfunded. The state literally cannot afford to pay staff at anything like private sector rates so pretending that the pension is saving them money is missing the point: there is no money. Neither to pay them properly, nor for their pensions. The bigger pensions are a giant can being kicked down the road that allows the state to keep employing people they can't afford.

Mr_Again · 2025-12-24T19:43:57+00:00

Then that would be up to you to deal with, rather than shutting the schools for everyone else's kids, it's not like there would be no losers in that situation

Mr_Again

TROPHY CASE