Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE

Cambridge Liberal Democrat. Techie. One time pilot.

Profile picture: street furniture - I take pictures of interesting street furniture when travelling. In this context it *is* appropriate for the street lighting columns to be gold plated.

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Last Notes

2024-04-25 07:34:59

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@npub1g0t…tvm4 I'm slightly curious as to why they think railways are higher up the list than water.

2024-03-31 21:32:13

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@npub1g0t…tvm4 Because ... but I'm sure you knew this ... universities tend to be full of people who don't vote Tory.

2024-03-24 00:04:58

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@npub1j8m…v5r7 When I visited (a long time ago) we were told that people had to go to Cyprus to get married if they didn't have any religion. Has that changed?

2024-03-18 17:05:07

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@npub1g0t…tvm4 Well, this household is not doing tourist things like we used to because covid.

2024-03-17 11:32:30

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@npub1g0t…tvm4 If anyone ever wants me to switch to public transport they'll have to offer guaranteed zero covid journeys.
(Apart from eg boats where you can ride outdoors yada yada yada ...)

2024-02-29 22:27:08

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@npub1g0t…tvm4 I can assure you that at least some landlords have no desire at all to kick out good tenants and risk long voids and/or bad replacement tenants.

2024-02-24 10:21:13

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@npub1g0t…tvm4 Last time I saw a statement from this from the Grauniad it was IIRC that their policy was "online first".

2024-02-23 11:55:44

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@npub16v8…aq0e @npub1g0t…tvm4 I question the usefulness of loading extra bureaucracy onto landlords.
The good landlords will jump through all the hoops, and recover the extra costs from the tenant (the only source of money in the tenant-landlord-council system). But this is of no benefit to the tenant, because the good landlord was already a good landlord to start with.
Bad landlords will simply ignore any new rules or laws just as they ignore existing ones.
So the net effect is just to put up rents.

2024-01-26 09:10:41

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@npub1g0t…tvm4 I was under the impression that the courts weren't too keen on those clauses. They might agree to prevent employment by a direct competitor for around six months but not much more than that?
Apart, for some reason, for footballers. I still don't get how the existence of "transfer fees" fits with employment law.

2024-01-13 22:00:25

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@npub1hq5…qqsd @npub1kpa…kn20 @npub1ccn…czwu My history O level was, I think, in 1971.
(It was the only O level I failed. Because the marking scheme was one mark per name and per date, and zero marks for actually understanding stuff and explaining what was going on, and I was rather better at the latter than at memorising disconnected facts.)

2024-01-13 18:56:30

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@npub1ccn…czwu Does it also leave out the bit about the disciples being communist?

2024-01-08 08:42:54

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@npub1g0t…tvm4 Anyone who feels "disgust at the choice" could fix this by standing themselves.

2023-12-24 10:10:20

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@npub1g0t…tvm4 Conventional wisdom when I was in the planning business was that if you discouraged business from investing in one place then yes, that was something you could do, but what you *couldn't* do was force it to move to the other place that you wanted it to.
So, this idea on a smaller scale was to discourage investment in Cambridge (by buggering around with planning policies) so that the economy of Fenland, not that many miles up the road, would be boosted. Which we thought was nonsense, because if a business couldn't locate in Cambridge we thought it'd look at Poona, the Riviera, Silicon Valley, ect ect, loooong before it considered Fenland.

2023-12-22 15:01:49

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@npub1g0t…tvm4 And on BBC Radio 4 today this chopping and changing and unknown future increments were spun as "bringing certainty" to the policy. This utter nonsense was completely unquestioned, of course, by BBC "journalists".

2023-12-15 11:03:20

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@npub1g0t…tvm4 I got a loan towards the deposit from my grandma (my parents couldn't have afforded it!). In the 1970s. This was perfectly normal then, as was renting out bedrooms contrary to the mortgage contract - the mortgage lenders knew perfectly well that this was endemic but turned a blind eye as the practice increased the chances that their mortgages would actually get paid.
What *has* changed is that mortgages were limited to three times salary, so that's what houses cost.

2023-12-06 22:41:43

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@npub1g0t…tvm4 A "work anywhere" policy can be, I'm told, extremely difficult (and expensive) to get right, as it requires the employer to know at least something about the employment and tax rules (and possibly immigration rules) for every territory from which an employee wishes to work.

2023-11-22 17:42:37

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@npub1c5l…llq0 Unions are also of value to employers. You can, for example, spend less on HR if you've got a good union!

2023-11-12 14:07:06

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@npub1u5l…8d8e @npub1ccn…czwu @npub1wsj…swju I don't know whether I am an "atheist" or not. It maybe depends a bit on whether an "atheist" is
* someone who doesn't believe in a god
or
* someone who believes there are no gods.
But I'm not sure I can answer either of those unless I hear a definition of "believe" and a definition of "god" that I can make sense of. This hasn't yet happened.

2023-11-10 13:04:05

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@npub1wyu…t407 @npub1g0t…tvm4 GDP is known to be a bonkers measure. If for example repairing cars broken by potholes costs more, ie causes more economic activity, than mending the potholes, then mending the potholes will DECREASE GDP so, from that point of view, would be a Bad Thing.
This has been known in the business for decades. The trouble is, I was told by someone in that game[#], that GDP is an internationally defined metric and it just isn't practical to get any change through the approval process, even if anyone could come up with a useful replacement in the first place.
[#] The director of the Bennett Institute whom I once met at a college dinner or somesuch https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/

2023-10-06 15:29:54

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@npub1cfp…94fe A by election being caused by the disgrace of the former MP doesn't *usually* stop people voting in a replacement from the same party.

2023-08-24 21:39:26

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@npub1g0t…tvm4 Except that the promise was explicitly made to the curry trade that it would be easier for them to import workers from the subcontinent ... which has, I've read, turned out to be yet another lie.

2023-08-21 19:29:12

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@npub1nqz…838y "The Christian Right is on the march."
There is no such thing as "the Christian Right". You can be Christian or you can be a fascist, but you can't be both.
Anyone who claims to be both is lying. They may be mostly lying to themselves, but lying they are.

2023-07-13 07:29:25

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@npub1600…jh8r @npub1r49…m5c8 @npub1g0t…tvm4 The one efficiency saving that *would* be real - "if only we didn't have to spend all this time reporting on targets to central government we might be able to get on with the day job" - never seems to be on offer.

2023-04-12 18:07:35

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#[0] I know that, you know that, I'm just saying that most users of Google Groups probably don't.

2023-04-12 18:03:12

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#[0] Maybe. Google sort-of took over Usenet - most users of Google Groups probably don't know where it came from.