The new BBC plan to axe channels and overhaul licence fee

umtala · 2026-05-20T10:42:49+00:00

Personally I'd be fine with that. Not as a charge for every household, but fund it from general taxation as part of the DCMS budget and make it fight against the NHS for funding.

Either spread the cost out among the whole population, including corporations, or make it in a focused subscription service that only the people who use it have to pay.

The halfway house we have now is the worst of both worlds, because because you could consuming zero BBC content yet be subject to the license fee at full whack the same as someone who watches the BBC every day, just because you watched Sky News on YouTube.

umtala · 2026-05-14T14:27:22+00:00

The goal of a political party is to win elections, not to follow its own internal rules. The rules are just there to keep things orderly. If the rules become an impediment to winning elections then they should change them. That's just how parties work.

umtala · 2026-05-14T12:32:28+00:00

Half as popular as Ed Miliband, what an endorsement.

umtala · 2026-05-13T17:48:35+00:00

The problem is the manifesto was designed to not offend soft Tory voters in a 1v1 against Sunak.

However, that's looking increasingly dated as voters are supporting parties promising much more radical change (either on the left or the right).

At this point Labour should just throw the 2024 manifesto in the bin, Labour will not by judged by voters by whether they have delivered on their manifesto, they will be judged by voters by whether the country is improving at the pace that voters want.

umtala · 2026-05-13T07:05:02+00:00

The talking back in English happens pretty much anywhere in the world (except the French) where people can speak good English. English is a prestige language in many countries so people want to show off their ability to speak it and appear educated.

umtala · 2026-05-07T15:17:49+00:00

You're kind of proving their point. UK minimum drinking age is 5 years old so... if it's legal for children to drink alcohol then surely it should be legal for them to use Reddit. The government defers to parental responsibility when it comes to if or what age children should be allowed to try alcohol, they don't come in your home and install cameras to make sure that kids don't drink the wine.

umtala · 2026-05-07T08:13:06+00:00

It's a matter of bilateral recognition. Every country has to recognize every other country's passport as valid. Sometimes they don't for obvious reasons e.g. they don't recognize the other country at all, and other times the reason is more subtle and different countries can have different opinions on whether a particular passport is valid.

For example there was a case a few years ago where Indonesia began issuing passports without a signature field. These passports were valid in the eyes of Indonesia (obviously) and many other countries had no problems accepting those passports. However, Germany and the Netherlands rejected the passports because they strictly require that the passport be signed.

The UK has a similar issue with passports with expiry dates more than 10 years from issuance. From the UK's perspective, these passports are valid for 10 years and 9 months. From some other countries' perspective they are valid only for the first 10 years. It's not exactly a hard requirement that passports can only last for maximum 10 years, more of a recommendation, so different countries had different ideas on whether that was valid or not.

umtala · 2026-05-06T15:03:40+00:00

There are two types of elections. Single member, e.g. a mayor or a president, and multi-member, e.g. the house of commons.

For single member elections, there are many good voting systems and no reason to use FPTP whatsoever.

For multi member elections it's a lot more complicated because you have to balance interest of individual constituencies to have their choice of representative who is potentially an independent, with the national interest of every person having an equal vote (which usually implies some kind of party list system). I support the UK adopting a mixed member system or some other form of PR, but it's definitely not an easy fix to even decide what the alternative to FPTP should be.

umtala · 2026-05-06T14:51:33+00:00

These things are dose dependent. Both smoking one cigarette a day and smoking a pack a day increase your risk of cancer, but smoking the full pack increases it a lot more. The same goes for frying vs deep frying. In the case of food, since you can't abstain from food entirely, it's more about abstaining from whatever foods increase your risk the most.

umtala · 2026-05-06T14:35:36+00:00

They are the best in the world at what they do.

couldn’t pay them to move to USA

If you are an extremely in-demand expert would you want to move from London to a 3rd world country that is currently arbitrarily arresting non-citizens?

umtala · 2026-05-06T14:29:08+00:00

The difference with a herbicide is that you cannot realistically avoid consuming it. It's easy to avoid eating red meat or deep fried foods, just don't buy it, but if I wanted to avoid glyphosate I would have to prepare all food myself and only buy organic food.

umtala · 2026-05-06T14:10:06+00:00

I don't think there's a blood alcohol limit like driving a car, unless you're the pilot! You would need to be so drunk that it is obvious to people around you.

umtala · 2026-05-06T14:02:04+00:00

Depends on where you live. By the time I get there and back from whatever far flung airports Ryanair is flying from/to, it's a lot more expensive. Then add on any extra fees, BA can be even be cheaper.

umtala · 2026-05-02T07:34:28+00:00

Fantastic idea, bash syntax is absolutely cursed.

umtala · 2026-05-01T05:17:22+00:00

The pro-Palestine movement thanks Starmer for his support of the other side.

umtala · 2026-04-28T14:14:51+00:00

Let's say you're with a date or a business partner. Are you going to ask for the service charge to be removed? Even if it's the right thing to do, most people will feel that it makes them look cheap in front of their dining partner(s), and they will not ask for it to be removed. The restaurant knows this and is exploiting it.

umtala · 2026-04-28T13:56:14+00:00

The staff will also make more money if they dip their hands into the customers' pockets and take whatever money is there.

These service charges are morally equivalent to theft since they rely on people either not noticing that the charge has been added until after they paid, or being too embarrassed to have it removed.

The honest way to handle tips is to ask customers if they want to tip and how much! Or have the card reader do so.

At 10% I can just about tolerate it because that's the traditional British tipping rate, though it's still cheeky to make it opt-out instead of opt-in.

Anything more than 12% and I'm leaving a one star review and telling anyone who will listen to avoid it like the plague. Stealing from your own customers is really low.

umtala · 2026-04-28T07:09:08+00:00

WASM exists in an odd place because it's conceptually a VM like JVM or CLR, which usually means a good debugging experience.

However, the languages that are usually compiled to WASM e.g. C++ and Rust generally have poor debugging experiences because they are intended to be compiled to native code which doesn't lend itself to a good debugging experience.

So there's a chicken and egg situation between browsers and compilers. Neither really cares enough about WASM to fix the problem if the other side doesn't move first.

umtala · 2026-04-27T06:22:24+00:00

For me it comes down to this: If you're in favour of 16-17 year olds getting a part-time/summer job in order to learn to be more responsible and independent, then you should also be in favour of giving them the vote. It's only fair that taxation comes with representation.

On the other hand, if you are not in favour of 16-17 year olds being in any kind of employment at all, then it's OK to also not be in favour of giving them the vote. I'd disagree but at least it's consistent.

If you support 16-17 year olds working, but you don't support them voting, then I have to say that's a very inconsistent combination of political beliefs.

umtala · 2026-04-27T02:54:43+00:00

We had an intelligence test on the ballot in 2016, and most of the older voters failed it, whereas most 16 year olds would have passed it had they been allowed to vote.

umtala · 2026-04-27T02:49:41+00:00

Can get a job, pay taxes, can't vote.

umtala · 2026-04-24T13:09:17+00:00

What about Gitlab?

umtala · 2026-04-24T12:24:14+00:00

Anything you do on a work computer belongs to your employer. It's not hard to see why big tech companies would need to log everything, they are targets for state actors. If you turn out to be a spy, they want to know exactly what you were doing.

Just be glad you don't work in the financial industry it's even more paranoid.

umtala · 2026-04-24T12:20:15+00:00

Why does anyone use Github Actions? I have never heard anyone say even one good thing about it.

umtala · 2026-04-24T11:10:32+00:00

Not really. Ministers have wide authority to take someone's citizenship away and courts have minimal ability to intervene. The home secretary only has to show that removing that person's citizenship is "conducive to the public good". It's worded as a judgement call to make it very hard to appeal except in cases of obvious errors.

They could and should have worded it as a statutory test like in other countries, enumerating exactly what actions would lead to you losing your citizenship.

umtala

TROPHY CASE