Why can’t I get a UK roaming tariff?

You can – it’s called Anywhere Sim and works really well. It’s v expensive though.

redstripe – depending how crap your broadband is this might work (sounds mad but should work)

1. get up on the roof of your property and check if you can get a 3g signal on any of the networks
2. If so, buy a Cel-Fi to create a strong 3G network indoors
3. If not, buy a fishing rod, heavy duty plastic bag, 20m usb extension lead, 3g/4g dongle, a bag of silica gel and some zip ties. Connect the dongle to the lead, place in bag with silica gel and zip tie to top of the rod
4. Attach rod to highest part of your house / property and then connect to the dongle with a laptop. if it gets a good signal you’re in business and can bodge it further to create fast broadband indoors.

Something like this would work as well:

My Automated Home: Nigel Giddings – Installing Broadband in a Rural Location

Something like this would work well:

If you keep a lookout EE do a 50gb for £25 mobile broadband sim offer every month or so.

Don’t forget that a good chunk of the revenue booked by Apple in Ireland actually originated from sales in the UK.

Apple (like Microsoft and other largely US headquartered companies) make extensive use of EU laws service companies in order to book revenues where they see fit anywhere they can and get away with not making any contribution to the running of the countries they operate in so despite making £billions in profit from UK sales they have largely avoided paying the tax due.

I’m only getting a banner advert at the bottom of the page with offers from CRC that include a £3184 jacket in their sale.

More of the “new politics” in today’s papers..

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/corbyn-hit-by-electoral-fraud-row-g2x0ld52b

Still, let’s call for Branson to be stripped of his gong and maybe people will get distracted by that..

It’s not surprising that Corbers has complete contempt for Branson or anyone else who has started a business – despite spending his whole adult life as a professional protester he’s got £600k in property, earns £137k a year and has a pension pot already worth £1.6m

Hilariously Corbers doesn’t consider himself wealthy though which will come as news to all of the “rich” people who earn less than he does.

Wow. Who knew a company could do a formal briefing and an off the record one at the same time. Imagine if that ever happened in politics….

By the way the spitting isn’t just confined to the Labour conference – even Labour’s own members have been abused and spat at – see below article for quote from the secretary of Tottenham Labour Party.

Labour council leader speaks out after ‘takeover’ of Brighton and Hove party by Corbyn supporters

Presumably Tottenham Labour party are also part of of the conspiracy against Corbyn.

Sources close to the company warned that the short notice it was given and previous incidents at the event, including staff being spat at and verbally abused, made it impossible for G4S to accept the offer.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/25/labour-left-humiliated-after-g4s-turns-down-last-ditch-plea-to-p/

G4S have provided security to the Labour Party annul conference for the best part of 20 years. They actually turned down the work this year because of the abuse dished out to their employees at the conference last year – as well as verbal abuse the staff were repeatedly spat at by the Momentum ambassadors for the new kind of friendly respectful politics sixth formers

he might’ve *appeared* to stage an event, but the question is did he *actually* stage it? Questions like this is where the political debate goes off the rails imo. We want the country run competently for the benefit of all. If he can do that, I don’t give a shit where he sits on trains.”

Maybe the facts can help us here – the video and stills show:

1. He walked past unreserved empty seats
2. He sits in the vestibule and does his video
3. He walks to a seat and spends the next 2 hours sat in it
4. He arrives in Newcastle and talks about not having anywhere to sit on the train

We are also told (this may not be a fact) that he actually had a reserved seat.

If we can’t answer the simple question of whether it was staged or not we’re a bit ****. Can we really expect a leader to run anything competently when they are spending their time reportedly making things up?

Molgrips – how important is it if video evidence is released that appears to show the leader of the opposition “staging” an event?

Is it better or worse that he was on his way to a leadership debate conducted on the principles of a gentler honest kind of politics where he then made political points about the “problem” he encountered?

Most people would be fired for this sort of stuff at work. Is this conduct any less excusable because the person doing it is an MP?

Turns out that “busy train” where Corbers had to sit on the floor due to lack of seats not only had seats but there was one reserved for him. More of the “new politics” we were promised I guess.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/23/revealed-jeremy-corbyn-had-a-seat-during-train-journey-he-claime/

Edit: beaten to it

This might work – try setting the DNS on the PC and Mac to use google’s DNS 8.8.8.8

do you have a relative of the Moleman of Hackney living next door?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7348949.stm

Unfortunately Jeremy was a bit busy doing something else at the time to be bothered with any of that nonsense. What? Who knows…..?

He was on a walking holiday.

Come on Binners, tell us what you really think.

Expenses from 2010-2015 exclusive of office costs:
Jeremy Corbyn £5,618
Angela Eagle £57,943
Owen Smith £150,681

And?

Corbyn lives 6 miles away from the House of Commons, Smith lives in South Wales so has the cost of travel and accommodation for the nights he’s in London.

I don’t have any time for Corbyn or Smith – both are equally useless, but even a cursory review of Smith’s expense claims suggests they are reasonable. The £155K also includes Constituency Office costs and phone calls.

http://www.mpsexpenses.info/#!/mp/32

You’re going to struggle in getting a provider that doesn’t include a landline as part of the package.

No – that’s exactly what you get with Vodafone. It’s one charge of £28 a month and that’s it – so about the same for the whole service as BT charge for broadband only. You still get a phone number with Vodafone, there’s just no separate charge for the line.

Option E:

– confirm with the CEO what problem needs to be solved i.e. if it’s performance, how big is the gap? Is there anything else that requires improvement? Invite the CEO to meet with you an the team later (see below)
– get Voice of the Customer / insight into why customer behaviour has changed (if relevant) and get them to articulate what they value most… do your products / services no longer fully meet their needs / what are the unmet needs? If necessary encourage your CEO to meet existing customers and those that you’ve lost business with to hear directly what value they attach to your products / services.
– get the team together to root cause on the root causes of the above and then work on solutions. If customer behaviour has changed also look at competitors and the value they offer in the eyes of customers.
– work through what help is required to implement the solutions (could be resource, investment, training, removing “blockers” in the org structure – or a multitude of other things)
– Ask the CEO to attend a meeting to discuss the root causes you’ve identified and the ideas for improvement. Then ask him if he will assist you in fixing the problem via support for the help you need.

vodafone are worth a look now – they have dropped the separate “line rental” charge and now offer their fastest / unlimited fibre broadband for £28 a month all in.

is this the same Andy Burnham who as Junior Health Secretary repeatedly refused to meet relatives of people who had died unexpectedly at Mid Staffs, rejected 81 separate calls for a public inquiry, and also presided over £80B+ of NHS PFI deals despite subsequently claiming he has always been vehemently against the privatisation of the NHS?

Maybe it’s a different Andy Burnham as surely Labour supporters wouldn’t forget his conduct / judgement in the last significant office he held – would they?

And it’s an absolute disgrace, that Cameron’s wife’s hairdresser gets a gong, with hardly a murmur in the mainstream press, yet a lifelong campaigner for Human Rights is vilified.

But surely the vilification (if that’s what’s happened) is due to the fact that lifelong vehemently politically neutral human rights campaigner was asked to investigate anti-semitism in the Labour party, accepted a mandate to do so that specifically excluded the events that most concerned the public (Naz Shah, Ken Livingstone etc) and then almost immediately announced she was joining the Labour party despite spending the last 20 years telling us she was A-political?

There’s also her conduct in the select committee where she was passing notes / coaching Corbyn on what to say / not say – hardly appropriate given that Corbyn was supposed to be answering serious accusations himself:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/jeremy-corbyns-companions-told-passing-8349793

It’s hard not to conclude that there’s a complete lack of judgement on her part even before the gong was offered and accepted. Indeed, only 2 weeks ago on TV she was on Newsnight telling us that she hadn’t been offered or accepted the honour.

None of this should distract us from the hairdresser honour though – that and many of the other honours in recent years bestowed by politicians on their staff are an insult to the members of the public who work tirelessly in their personal time to volunteer / help others for decades only to get the same recognition that many political helpers and civil servants get just for doing their jobs.

Yeah… I know…. you’d think the leader of the labour party might have something to say about it. Apparently not. Still… maybe once they’re back, at least Comrade Abbott won’t have to get her kids privately educated next time?

Or Stephen Kinnock – who “spoke out” during the run up to the last election to deny his daughter had attended a £29K a year private school in Denmark but apparently forgot that his daughter was at that point attending a private sixth form college in South Wales.

It’s surprising that many of the Labour MPs who are so passionate that every child should attend a non selective state school are the first to make the decision to send their own kids to private schools.

So why might that be happening?

Because there’s a global race (with arms) between various factions each of whom is seeking to be more pious / pure to the written word of their religion than the others.

And this is resulting in increasingly extreme acts to prove said purity – and anyone who objects is automatically judged to be less pure / a less committed believer. This is why there’s a consistent pattern of increasingly extreme violence across most of the middle east and increasingly Africa – in upwards of 50+ countries now.

The parents / older generations are complicit in this in many European countries by setting the expectations that their children should norm to the “traditions” of their original homelands / places the kids have never been to in many cases rather than norm to the society in which they now live.

I have a number of friends who have experienced this sort of family “tension” and it’s extremely difficult for the children to deal with without falling victim to “honour” issues, being ostracised. In many cases they can’t maintain any kind of contact with the world outside of their religious community unless this takes place without the knowledge of elders.

one tip for the OP – be sure to confirm all account numbers used in the transaction with your solicitor by phone or better still in person…agree with the solicitor up front that they should not respond to any requests for account number changes received from you by email.

There have been a significant number of “man in the middle” frauds this year in which written / email communications between solicitors and clients have been intercepted and agreed account numbers replaced with bogus ones – the sums stolen are up to £1m or so and by the time the recipient realises the money hasn’t arrived it’s nearly always too late to recover it – the money is moved very rapidly to overseas accounts with no scope for recover.

http://www.lawsociety.org.uk/news/stories/scams-targeted-against-solicitors-firms/

yes but in the example of the USA the original 13 states joined together in order to achieve a break from being controlled by an unaccountable overseas state.

highlandman – even after the “cuts” HMRC has nearly 5 times as many staff (when adjusted for the number of employers / individual tax payers) as the equivalent IRS in the USA. Both process / collect individual and corporation taxes.

1. They’ve always been slow – or at least that’s my experience of doing self assessment for the best part of 15 years – and they’ve been changing their minds on what people owe for a good deal longer than that
2. They haven’t been “culled to the bone”. More assessments are done on line / automated so the number of staff has reduced in line with the reduced need for processing of paper based returns.

On the “rich” the facts are somewhat wide of the “osborne has helped his mates avoid tax” line:

– the top 1% of earners (45% tax bracket)earners now pay a record amount of tax – rising from 24.4% under Labour to 27.5% under the current government – and are scheduled to carry on rising until they pay 34% by 2020.
– The top 10% pay of earners (anyone who is in or above the 40% tax bracket) now pay around 60% of all tax
– The majority of working adults make no net contribution to the running of the state, with half of adults paying no tax at all.
– Prosecutions by HMRC have risen more than 5 fold since 2010

Obsorne needs to keep pulling the money in to pay for the “austerity” – the DWP spent £4B more on a small number of benefits including working tax credits, Disability Living allowance and JSA last year than 2013/2014.

This isn’t “another nail in the coffin”, it’s a sensible and long overdue reform of NHS land use.

Successive governments have tried and failed to encourage the NHS to release some of its redundant real estate for redevelopment. One of the major constraints on tackling the shortage of housing in cities is the lack of access to land / sites by developers – something Labour have also recognised per the recent pronouncements by Sadiq Khan amongst others.

Dealing with individual PCTs (as was) was a complete non starter for most developers – many NHS “Estate Managers” have little / no experience but view themselves as would be commercial property developers and are either unable to negotiate terms to release land or enter into contacts that are very poor value for the public. This is why 13% of the available land was put under one single body to try and speed the process up and make it easier for developers to find land in the first place.

Some random trivia:

– The NHS owns more land than the space occupied by the City of Derby
– In London the NHS owns land equivalent to 3 x the size of Hyde Park
– Between 15% (acute trusts) and 20% (mental health) of all the land owned by the NHS is unutilised
– Space utilisation is poor by international comparators – with savings of up to 30% in the estate that the NHS does use
– The NHS has amongst the highest spending on estates / buildings in Europe but the lowest spend on medical equipment

It’s also worth noting that length of stays are dramatically shorter for many conditions that 30-40 years ago when many Hospitals were built – so we need less hospitals and less beds in hospitals. As a society we have quite a simple choice – either carry on wasting money maintaining buildings that are underused and cost a lot to run and maintain, or remove this spare capacity and return the funds to the NHS for long overdue capital investment.

Anyone who has toured NHS hospitals won’t have failed to notice that most have large single story car parks. The fact that the NHS can’t even organise multi story parking to free up land is symptomatic of the lack of accountability for one of the most valuable land banks in the country – the other good example being Network Rail.

Plenty more here:

http://www.londonhealthcommission.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Unlocking-the-value-of-NHS-estates-in-London-.pdf

http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/sites/files/kf/field/field_publication_file/perspectives-estates-nhs-property-nigel-edwards-jul13.pdf

“after the closures they started to release them on 5 yearly trends, you know to help smooth out any increases. I wouldn’t trust any figures released by our management any way, they are always manipulating how the deaths are recorded, our management are without conscience and up to their nuts in Boris’ guts.”

The source data for fires seems to be readily available and also contains a count of monthly incidents not trends – it’s updated every six months so another update should be available very soon:

https://files.datapress.com/london/dataset/fire-and-rescue-services-incidents-attended-borough/2015-11-19T11:51:23/lfb-incidents-month-borough.xls

The OP might be right though – maybe we can’t trust the data.

Agreed. All of the people standing for Mayor this time round are also claiming they can fix the problem when it’s quite obvious it’s not fixable as things currently stand. But I suppose the electorate don’t want to hear that.

They are therefore all as bad as Boris, albeit slightly less so on hairstyles.

just use backblaze – back it up before leaving the UK and then it will catch any incremental file changes in India. I think it’s about £40 for a year of unlimited backups and it works really well.

DrJ – there’s obviously an easy solution to the homelessness problem then so what is it?

Your inputs for London are as follows:

* 3,500 people are arriving every week (possibly double that based on the rate at which NI numbers are issued) and expect accommodation. All of these people expect to be housed.

* You can pay people to leave london and return to their home country but they will probably come back in a matter of weeks and a proportion of these also have the sort of alcohol / substance misuse problems that makes it very difficult for them to be housed in communities.

* 100,000+ families in London are already living in temporary accommodation.

* Nearly all of the B&Bs and short lease properties are full – to the point councils are now having to rent “luxury” properties in order to discharge their powers. Councils are also “broke” trying to fund properties for people who’ve turned up in London and know the councils have a statutory duty to house them.

* Any major developments of land take 5-10 years prior to construction starting because of the need for consultations and endless judicial reviews.

* The supply chain for construction has no excess capacity – the skills aren’t there to build any faster – and at the moment there’s a shortage of cranes and scaffolding as well.

* Any new construction has to be funded at a time when the surplus is still rising.

Please can you tell us how you would solve the problem?

Personally I’d scrap the office of the Mayor and save the money – the office simply doesn’t have the powers or budget needed to solve the problem.

Out of that list above:

Massive increase in homelessness – is largely down to migration. More than 3,500 a week are moving to London and there’s simply no way of housing them. Additionally a significant proportion of the rough sleepers and those with alcohol problems have come from abroad – large numbers have had their return trips home paid for by London taxpayers only to return a few months later. It’s quite a noticeable problem in many parks and public spaces now and there’s very little any Mayor can do until legislation changes.

Massive increase in public transport fares. Not sure on this – one of the changes is that part time workers no longer get stung by season ticket restrictions. Much of the TfL budget goes on staff and with endless industrial action leading to above inflationary pay rises it’s not a massive surprise that the travelling public have to pay more. The fare rises have also funded long term infrastructure projects like Crossrail and Crossrail 2 – by contrast the Labour Candidate for the Mayor election has a plan to slash long term capital investment to freeze fares. Don’t pay now / don’t get the service later – great for political expediency but just storing up problems down the line.

Massive increase in housing crisis (and total failure to meet house building targets). See above. Around 6,000 affordable housing units are built in London each year. We’d need to build that every 3 weeks just to keep up with current migration. Unfortunately young people aren’t interested in working in construction and many of the older more experienced trades left the industry in the recession. So even if we wanted to build 2,000 homes a week the supply chain for it no longer exists. The size of the problem can also be seen in the plans by the 15 largest social housing developers – between them they have committed to 93,000 new homes in the whole of the South East over a ten year period. Again, that doesn’t even mop up the new demand in London in a 6 month period.

Increased pollution levels. Which is down to NOX and the EU deciding that everyone should be driving in diesel cars despite the manufacturers completely gaming the Euro 4/5/6 standards. Additionally the EU has sought to accelerate the shift away from Petrol engines to reduce C02. So should the mayor (of any party) be accountable for what turns out to have been very poor policy / science?

Lying about not closing Tube ticket offices. Most of the offices have now closed. The sky hasn’t fallen in yet and the doom laden predictions of the unions don’t seem to have manifested. See previous complaint on cost of travel going up.

Causing transport disruption by refusing to listen to transport workers. See above. Workers want (a lot) more pay, strike to get it and fares have to go up. It’s all linked. Either the public support TfL or the striking workers – but can’t support the latter and then complain when fares go up.

Failure to deliver ‘no-cost’ cycle hire scheme. It costs an enormous amount to run as-is. Why shouldn’t the people who use it contribute to the cost?

etc etc.

Most of these things are linked and treating them as a separate complaints is very easy but ignores the interplay of policy and limitations to the powers the Mayor really holds.

Pilots earn significantly less than Doctors and are mostly on pretty poor pension schemes as well. Nearly all of them already work 7 day 24 hour rosters – so it’s unlikely many graduates considering medicine would see Aviation as a more rewarding career alternative.

I’m sorry what are you trying to say here?

Maybe the OP’s trying to say that Doctors still have amongst the highest average earnings of any graduates 10 years after graduation, will continue to enjoy lifetime earnings of £4-5m and will also continue to retire with pension pots of £1-1.6m.

Many doctors are also the children of doctors and marry other doctors – putting them very firmly at the top of the list of wealthiest families – there’s some truth in the adage “ever met a poor doctor?”.

It’s also worth noting that the position of many of the JDs is that unless they get paid more for saturdays (despite other workers in the NHS not getting this, and most other comparable highly skilled jobs also not getting this e.g. pilots), they will move to Australia and New Zealand.

Both of these moves are apparently principled moves by JDs but it’s kind of ironic that their peers in these countries not only have to pay for their own education but in NZ have been scheduled on 7 day 24 hour rosters for the best part of 20 years, something the BMA continues to maintain is not possible here due to “safety”.

there was something in the news a few weeks back about a curry restaurant where the “chef” had a jar of poo water from cleaning his backside in the food prep area but there have been others as well:

Poo found in kebab – http://www.bathchronicle.co.uk/Human-poo-kebab-shop-food/story-27862052-detail/story.html

Poo found smeared on walls: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/6933904/Chicken-shop-shut-down-after-poo-found-on-walls.html

The only common element is abysmal standards of hand hygiene in many takeaways. Our local environmental health seem to shut down a couple of curry restaurants a month for this sort of stuff to the point I never eat restaurant / takeaway curry any more.

It depends what “back on track” actually means…

– reduce scope to hit original milestones
– increase resource to hit original scope but with cost increase
– reduce testing / quality control with view to fixing faults after release
– re-prioritise the deliverables of people working on aspects of the project to deliver on time at expense of BAU

The first thing I’d do in the OPs situation is to start with a conversation with the sponsor and then then play back in writing what I’d heard on any of the above points. After that I’d do a detailed sit-rep and use programme governance to make some decisions.

So my number 1 tip is start with a good discussion at the top level of accountability for the programme.

uestions have been asked and answers provided but Goldsmith continues to blow Lynton Cosby’s racist dog whistle.

“I think Sadiq Khan is using a smokescreen to hide the fact that he has associated with a lot of people who support terrorism and I think that does raise questions about his suitability to be mayor of London and especially when terrorism is such an imminent threat to the UK.

He has never denied that he has associated with these people and it’s also a fact that those people have supported terrorism.

Now the question is why, and on what basis, was Sadiq Khan associating with them.

And I think this is an area for legitimate scrutiny, it’s not Islamophobic or racist to ask questions and to ask Sadiq Khan to provide answers and it’s not.. he can’t hide behind these slogans of racism or Islamophobia.”

The above quote is from Atma Singh,Ken Livingston’s former aide and Labour Labour Party adviser.

It’s also worth noting that it was Sadiq Khan’s former aide Shueb Salar who claimed the brutal murder of Lee Rigby was fake, and that Khan himself was reported as recently as February to still be “following” ISIS / Daesh cheerleaders on Twitter (Majid Freeman and Hamja Ahsan).