My wife is one of those who left.

Yes, a lot of it is to do with the over worked and under paid, but not all of it - a lot of it is also due to the unbelievable stress of the responsibility heaped on you as a doctor, coupled with the diminishing respect for being a doctor by pretty much everyone.

For example, GPs being told that they have to open in the evenings and weekends, despite not having enough staff to run a 9-5 Monday to Friday service already - and your budget is being taken by the pharmacists who are doing random pointless examinations or reviews on anyone who comes through the door (because the pharmacy makes money that way, but they can charge the GP for doing it). And if you refuse to, then a GMC complaint is raised.

How about being rung up by the police at 6pm and told to do a wellness check on a patient, despite it being the police’s responsibility and not yours - but because you have now been told, you have a duty of care if anything happens. Which means a GMC complaint being raised.

How about the physicians associate refusing to take your guidance, and putting in complaints if you have any feed back at all which isnt glowingly positive, despite them being under your license and insurance. Which means a GMC complaint being raised.

How about having to spend £100,000 and two years of your life defending your license because someone thought you had too much to drink at the staff party and thus must be an alcoholic, with no evidence at all.

How about the government dictating how much you pay into your pension fund each month, how much you will get back, the pension fund being massively in profit to the point where the government gets £6Billion in rebates from it annually, and STILL requires you to pay more in and take less out

How about patients coming into your consulting room clutching the Daily Mail, complaining that you get paid too much because thats what the newspaper says and ranting for 20 minutes, and then still complaining that you are running behind.

How about the only way to get a specialist training position is to have an interview on one specific day of the year, but your current training program absolutely refusing you the ability to go to it?

I can go on and on.

... which, to be clear, is a good thing. Working around the compiler is dangerous and a code smell, so it shouldn't be something that is easy to do. It usually indicates that either the compiler's capabilities aren't sufficient to meet your needs (in which case, a better solution would be either a better compiler, or to re-evaluate the wisdom of your approach), or that you are doing something the wrong way and should find a way to do it that works with the compiler, rather than around it, so that you get the benefits of the compiler's co-operation.

That made sense if you saw the Apple product line which had dozens of computers at many different price points all with subtle variations all meant to satisfy some niche.

Jobs knew Apple could not sustain such a product line. Restaurants in trouble often have sprawling menus for the same reason - some small percentage of the customer base likes one menu item, and now the menu bloats to dozen pages with dozens of dishes on each.

The call to simplify was required because Apple had no business with dozens of variants of a computer to the point a customer didn't know what they want. Many were also superfluous - you had a model with X and Y, and one with Y and Z, and a customer didn't know which to choose. (In reality, a model with X, Y and Z might be easier, and cheaper).

Jobs understood the illusion of choice - having dozens of choices is often worse than having a very limited set of choices.

By cutting choice down, it meant Apple had a simpler product matrix they could handle with dwindling resources, and customers no longer had to go to a department store to look at one line of computers, a computer store for another line, and an electronics store for a third line, all of which are subtly different and with confusing price points. Jobs simplified the menu at a time so Apple could concentrate on making a small range of products that fills the widest possible market - even if it meant the one configuration perfect could not be fulfilled. This simplified menu turned away customers, but it meant scarce resources could be used to maximum returns. Once Apple was on more solid footing, they then expanded their catalog of products, but also observing to avoid needless overlap which only adds confusion.

When struggling restaurants get overhauled, their menu is often simplified from the huge book to a single page listing at most a half dozen dishes they can concentrate on doing really really well that causes customers to come back for more. Once the restaurant is back on solid footing, they can start to expand the menu - by adding a dish, and being ruthless about cutting out underperformers.

Seems to be happening more often these days.

Antibacterial soap doesn't contain antibiotics... At least, it never has in any country I've lived in.

Their properties are supposed to be chemical in nature, not medication based - the fact that they haven't exactly stood up to scrutiny isnt surprising, but they arent adding to the current antibiotic-resistent problem...

It will live on on the various worlds of Alastair Reynolds books...

I generally agree with you, but I dont think the OP works at SpaceX, they are just a fanboi dissing on anything else - and they are the target of my comment.

It probably makes more sense given their scale for them to have their own power generation -- solar, wind, and battery storage, maybe gas turbines for extended periods of low renewable availability.

In fact, you could take it further. You could designate town-sized areas for multiple companies' data centers, served by an electricity source (possibly nuclear) and water reclamation and recycling centers providing zero carbon emissions and minimal environmental impact. It would be served by a compact, robust, and completely sepate electrical grid of its own, reducing costs for the data centers and isolating residential customers from the impact of their elecrical use. It would also economically concentrate data centers for businesses providing services they need,reducing costs and increasing profits all around.

A few things to note...

Over the past couple of decades, more and more roles within the British healthcare system have become able to prescribe - pharmacists (as noted in the summary), nurse prescribers, physicians associates (who technically should be under the supervision of a GP, but the way the NHS has that set up its very much a "PA prescribes, GP actually has little say")...

The role of doctors in the British healthcare system is being deminished and replaced by lower paid, lower trained positions, and GPs are particularly hard hit by it - which is why GPs are retiring or moving overseas at record rates, far beyond the ability for the current GP training schemes to replace them.

The UK is actively doctor hostile these days, and British doctors do not want to be part of it any more.

There are two ways to do this. First is to feed AI slop into AI - this ruins the training models and is actually one of the biggest problems in AI right now - everyone is using it and posting slop all over the internet. But it also means when you crawl for data, you're ingesting that slop as well and it's corrupting your models

The other thing to do is to poison the well by posting non-slop that's deliberately wrong. If you give a command or code example, hide in ways that are destructive or don't get the job done. Things like today's equivalent of "rm -rf /" (which doesn't work since "rm" actually requires a couple more parameters to do it - but make it appear it's a normal argument to rm). Non-slop that's wrong is just as harmful - people are using it without thinking so if they're blindly following AI commands to do a task and it wipes their machine, well, that's a goal as well.

If you run a mailing list, have a hidden archive of AI slop generated archives that look a lot like the real thing and make it harder to sort the real from the fake

Your post is about encountering municipal bureaucracy when you had it in mind to do it yourself in the first place.

I'm no fan of bureaucracy for its own sake. But there's a reason you need to jump through some hoops when you want to change something on your property. Those trees you want to cut down might be crucial for flood mitigation. That room you want to turn into a spare bedroom might be a fire-trap if it lacks a window or quick access to an exit route. Digging on your property might disrupt buried pipes or cables.

Like it or not, we do need rules, even though sometimes they may seem silly to you.

Oddly, I don't think that's ever been an issue because DIY is happening all the time, and that's why those regulations are there because someone dies and people find out it's because an unauthorized renovation happened that created a firetrap.

So no, it's not a deterrent because it's happening all the time. It's made worse by house flippers because those people are cutting corners to save money (i.e., make more profit), who you know aren't taking time to get permits, do inspections, or even bring things to code. By the time the flawed renovations are discovered, it's too late and the buyer is basically left with their house falling to pieces.

So I don't get get the claptrap that DIY is illegal - because if it was illegal, substandard construction and renovation work wouldn't be happening. There's probably a small fraction of the unpermitted work done properly to code (or better - remember code is just a minimum) and you'll never know until decades down the line when someone tries to renovate and discovers no permit was ever taken out. It's just it was well constructed, well built that no one needed to do anything. But that is far from the norm, and DIYers are basically the reason for the regulatory hell.

Also why "house flipping" should be an immediate rejection of a house - it looks pretty but the pain is likely concealing a load of issues you won't find out until later.

For Africa, the situation is different. The government led projects aren't happening not because of regulations, but because corruption and other things are basically draining the resources. Building an electric grid even without regulations we have (basically it's the wild west outside of Western nations) still costs money and effort, and enough palms get greased that no money makes it down to do the work. That's why it's not happening. And having electricity is better than not, so even the shadiest and lousiest of DIY gear you can get off Temu makes your life way better than trying to get it done the right way. Electrification rates in Africa are disputed because if you have a house with a single LED light that provides light for a few hours after dark, you're considered to have electricity.

Even the most basic DIY solar projects in Africa provide that, but also power to charge cellphones and provide Internet connectivity (during the day - there are batteries but they provide the lighting) - when the sun is out the battery charges and runs an inverter so you can run a computer to get Internet (usually via cellular network). This is often enough for farmers to access trading networks and get weather forecasts which is why it exists and is considered an important resource. And while the sun is out, cellphone charging is done.

No doubt you're right, but it would be lovely to see the people who squawk about subsidies for renewable energy held to the same standard they demand of everybody else, even just for a little while.

Been a while since I've flown a budget airline. On the normal flights I've taken, there's always a few people (usually older people) with paper boarding passes.

Not really. Plastics require hydrocarbons that can be sourced from anything, including coal or wood. Oil is just the most convenient source, but it's certainly not the only one.

And anyway, only 6% of oil is used for plastic production. Even increasing the demand for plastics won't materially affect oil consumption. Fossil hydrocarbons are also used as a feedstock for other industrial processes (fertilizer production mainly), but adding up all these uses accounts for just about 15% of global production.

Chinese can deliver finished electronic assemblies for less than we can buy the parts. It a combo of scale and funny money the west can’t compete with.