The royals are a relic that continues to enable the upper class privelidge. Its silly people still think a modern society needs it. It should be looked upon as morally wrong as the days of the British Empire.

Yeah but the entire British legislature is written around a constitutional monarchy. You think Brexit is bad, it’d take a similar effort to untangle Monarchy from Government.

I hate to break it to you but it was £1.24 per person in the UK according to the link above for 2018-19.

Correct. An outrageous amount, I’m sure we can all agree.

Where was it specifically worded as income tax payers?

Do I need to link you to a dictionary definition of “imply”?

But yeah, whatever, forms of taxation aside my point is that the use of the phrase “taxpayers’ money” is intentionally manipulative. People read it and get cross because they believe that whilst they’re scraping away a living they still have to pay for housing improvements for really rich people. And that’s simply not true.

Again; tourists do not come to UK to spend time with a member of the Royal family.

I hate to break it to you (to coin a phrase) but money comes from sources other than tourism.

The royals are a relic that continues to enable the upper class privelidge. Its silly people still think a modern society needs it. It should be looked upon as morally wrong as the days of the British Empire.

That’s as may be. Personally I don’t have a dog in this race as I couldn’t really care less about the royals either way, if you hate them then good for you. But that’s just a distraction from this discussion and an entirely different argument.

I’m going to offer up the Big Four Consultancy firms.

Cornered the market by buying up smaller Audit & Consultancy firms, made the corporate machine abide by their rates.. moved in and have effectively written their own Bonuses ever since.

Do they provide a service, certainly. Is it effective, doubtful as I’ve personally seen the exorbitant invoices and signed off quite a few (plenty, many plenty) . Does the original contract to “come in, give us a quote for XX and YY” mean anything? No, because once they’re in they stay in and bring a load more of their organisation in to prop up what once was a simple ask and expand it into something unrecognisable from the original requirements.

Luckily the Mergers and Acquisitions body are looking into breaking the stronghold they have.

Who have they brought in to look at the situation?

One guess…🤷‍♂️

Jive honeyjive?

Airline check-in.
Flew from la to Gatwick on Sunday with Norwegian and it was an excellent flight.
But why oh why do you have to check in at a touch screen console entering all your details, passport, flight number etc then have to go to the frigging check in desk and repeat the whole process again.

Cougar

Subscriber
I hate to break it to you but it was £1.24 per person in the UK according to the link above for 2018-19.

Correct. An outrageous amount, I’m sure we can all agree.

Of course £1.24 a year is not a lot; but from every man, woman and child .. from 66 million people it accumulates into something more significant.

That’s as may be. Personally I don’t have a dog in this race as I couldn’t really care less about the royals either way, if you hate them then good for you. But that’s just a distraction from this discussion and an entirely different argument.

Would you be happy to agree to give Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his family £1.24 every year for the next few hundred years?

Mooman, Cougar. Do you guys need to get a room and thrash this out 😆

Big Four Consultancy firms

I saw some research (I think by Bristol university) that looked at the impact of consultancy on NHS efficiency. It found that spending £1m on consultancy services we associated with a drop in productivity/efficiency of £10k per year. That’s not a huge fall given the size of the NHS, but they’d just spend a million pounds to be made £10k worse so were £1,010,000 down overall.

#£250k a week, for 5 bods here..

At work they sell seven item breakfasts. You’re allowed 2 sausages, 2 rashers of bacon and a selection of non-meat sundries as part of the seven items.

However, while you can have 2 sausages and 2 bacon and 3 other things……you CANNOT have three bacon and 4 other things, as you are only allowed a maximum of 2 of sausages or bacon even if you don’t have any of the other one.

I once asked for a seven item breakfast (with 2 bacon and 5 sundries – no sausages) and an extra rasher of bacon.

They served the extra rasher of bacon on a second plate.

I work for an IT consultancy.

What tends to happen is the client goes ‘we want X, please tell us what you’d do and how much it’d cost’. So us techies go ‘certainly, you want to do this and that and the other’. Sales people go ‘right that comes to Y, that’s too much, how can we pretend it’ll be quicker and easier?’. This goes on at all the companies competing for the business, so we all end up with a proposal that’s unrealistic. The company chooses the cheapest one and then acts all surprised when the work goes over budget. But because they selected the rock bottom bid with all the cheap resources in it, it turns out that they don’t know what they are doing anyway.

In contrast, two of our German colleagues were hired as experts to work with their German client’s team, because we’re the experts. They paid our daily rate until the job was done. And guess what – everything worked out really well.

Meanwhile, the bargain bin UK project is totally crap, everyone hates the product, with the result that the whole lot will start again in 5 years. FFS. It’s generally not our fault (although sometimes it is). (I should point out this is hypothetical, not a real project – although the example of how the Germans work better is real)

If you haven’t already seen it, this is exactly how it goes:

It’s generally not our fault (although sometimes it is).

But if you end up supplying unrealistic proposals driven by your sales guys surely it is your fault?