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Comment Re:EVs Will Only Kill Humans (Score 1) 370

I half agree with you, and I fully agree with you for all of the part where you're saying that Musk is just a billionaire that's playing us.

But EVs now will get better. The batteries will get lighter and cheaper and there are places where the grid is shit but everyone has started installing solar and batteries at home because it means more stability. But BE cars and trucks are hugely heavy, destroy the roads, and require an upgrade in DRIVING infrastructure. Turns out a 9000lbs BE Hummer is too heavy to be stopped by conventional guardrails at 100km/hr. Forget about the cost to upgrade the grid, we're already so far behind on keeping the roads in good repair and BEVs are NOT helping.

Honestly, the best solution for the environment will be electric bicycles. I've seen a couple analyses done, and you can make a good argument that the lifetime emissions of an electric bike are LESS than those for a conventional bicycle when you take into account the diet of the rider. Turns out electric motors are so good for that sort of thing that you have to be a very small vegan to have any chance of out-performing the electric bike.

And at that point, the stability of the grid will be even less of a concern. Electric vehicles are the future, I just hope it's mostly bikes.

Comment I switched to a different provider (Score 3, Informative) 86

I hate basically everything about gmail. Other than the reliability, the UI and filters are honestly terrible. I'm forced to use it at work (in the web interface), and good luck getting it to filter multiple exact strings, and it definitely can't filter anything based on X-header information. It's a wonder to me that it can be so bad and still be so ubiquitous, but it's big and free and has momentum and it does have extremely good uptime.

I had their free hosting for many years, and I'm glad I pay someone else to do it now. People are so used to how bad gmail is they don't realize that life can be better. (That said, I don't know what the other free options are like; I presume that they have similar limitations.)

Comment Re: Talent visas but not in-house training (Score 2) 47

Look at the salaries for generally competent software developers of any experience level in the UK. Now look in the US. It's not hard to see why our industry lags in the UK.

Look at the tax system that applies to employees in the UK. The scale in effect has massive increases in marginal tax rates part way along the curve that mean it's not a progressive system, for no sensible reason. It's even worse if you have kids, when at some points on the curve a huge proportion of any pay rise never actually reaches you in practice, or in extreme cases you can even be worse off after a pay rise, because of the strange ways that various allowances work.

Now look at the massive increases in effective taxation that have been applied to founders and owner-operators of small businesses in recent years. We're talking about 10-20% more of your revenues getting eaten by taxes before you get to keep any profits. In many cases you can now give up all the security and benefits of full-time employment (which are much better in the UK than the US, remember) and potentially invest your own money into bootstrapping your business, but then even if it works out modestly successful you end up paying higher tax rates than someone else taking a salary. Again, not hard to see why we're lacking in entrepreneurs.

Look at the flexible workforce. Contractors and freelancers in the UK live under a perpetual sword of Damocles called IR35 that has all but killed off the real flexible labour market in recent years and means even "contractors" are really being treated as disguised employees by default and again would probably be better off taking a permanent salaried position to get the extra job security and benefits. And given the difference in salaries as mentioned above, obviously some of the good people are then going to take their skills elsewhere.

None of this is news but successive governments have just stuck their heads in the sand and ignored the problems affecting smaller businesses, not just in tech but across other industries from healthcare to logistics as well. It's like they haven't noticed that there are 1,000 SMEs for every enterprise giant and collectively the SMEs create more jobs, pay more taxes, make more useful products... And then someone in government acts all surprised that our tech industry is lagging. Well, duh.

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