Annoyingly, Brave has disabled support for this.
2,777 karma · joined November 21, 2012
<https://gotform.co.uk>
<https://thepeopleschamber.co.uk>
Except it never gets any users.
I suppose the plus side to spending months rather than days on projects that never go anywhere is I have fewer domains. Only 7 here. Sigh.
I suspect it's nowhere near the 95th percentile of earned wealth.
Cost of living and wealth inequalities aren't key concerns for me personally. It's more quality of life for my family, safety and economic opportunity.
It certainly wasn't even my preferred option, I'd have been much happier if they said they had a team that could run with it.
Good questions, but the quickest way I can answer them all is to say that my company had delivered software for national security purposes to central government departments. This really was nothing.
It certainly wasn't my preferred option. The offer was mostly a tool to ensure that cost of development could not be used as a reason to reject.
For me, it'll be the UAE. Instinctively, some people will probably attack that choice, which is fine. I've lived in the Middle East previously, it's not perfect to say the least and I have some personal history with that, but I understand the choice I'm making. One thing people won't like is the headline tax rate, but I probably won't come out ahead there initially as cost of living is quite high - it'll cost me about USD 70k just to put three kids in school. Accommodation is also quite expensive, private healthcare also needs paying for, but at least you get what you pay for then.
Where the tax situation is appealing though is that then I'll be incentivised to earn more beyond those high living costs, where I just don't feel I am in the UK. Sun and swimming works for me too. Job adverts there are absolutely rammed with literally thousands of applicants and I'm hearing from recruiters that a lot of people from the UK and wider Europe are trying to head in the same direction. I'll be working for myself though.
I likely won't see out my days there. I'd imagine we'll retire to somewhere on the Med, my wife would prefer NZ but I don't think that works for me. The US is perhaps desirable, but it seems quite hard for a Brit to get into unless they happen to have a job with a company there. We'll have to see.
Yet private healthcare is a strawman, I've never argued for it.
I'm not anti-NHS, I've no agenda to see it privatised, I just want it to be better. I tried many, many private routes first. I tried NHS England, NHS Digital, the Innovation Service, AHSNs (many sections having since been renamed/reorganised). About 20 different contact points over two or three years, most of which seemed inappropriate but I made sure if anyone told me it was someone else's responsibility I checked with them.
The problems had already been recognised through public inquiries and yet were still ongoing.
I even offered to build the software for free, which, hopefully, for an individual dealing with an organisation with a budget into the hundreds of billions, falls under supportive. But as far as I could see, offering support was getting me nowhere.
I just had people acknowledging the issue and then shrugging their shoulders, pointing fingers at everyone else. So I wrote a book on it, spoke about the issue publicly and within months it was decided to spend tens of millions on sorting it.
Selfish? I'll take that. I'm choosing to put the future of my children ahead of those who couldn't care less about them in any respect.
Many years ago now my sister turned down the chance to go to an international conference held in the Netherlands, when I asked why, she said it was because the NHS was the best in the world and had nothing to learn from other healthcare systems. I'm still stunned, and she still doesn't know anything about other healthcare systems.
This is exactly what I'm saying. The NHS are seen as perfect by some. All criticism is digs that are wrong.
I'm pro-NHS. But this perspective that it's infallible is beyond all reality.
On the NHS, I tried for years to push for improvements to switch to digital cancer screening invitations after they missed my mother (offering to build the software for free), which is now happening, but suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here. My sister who works in NHS DEI hasn't spoken to me since publishing a book on it.
Every time someone with the finances, vision and ability leaves I think the situation gets a little bit worse, it increases the proportion of people remaining willing to put up with all of it. Anecdotally, many of my friends have already left, some of the older generation want to leave but feel tied in. My flight out is in 6 weeks. Good riddance, no doubt.
There are people offering their services to find kidnapped children, I struggle to see that as a bad thing. Private investigatory work has a long history in the country of Sherlock Holmes (or at least Dr Joseph Bell). You have figures as far back as Harry Philby flirting with foreign governments after their time within the UK government.
They're not offering government services, they're offering their own capabilities.
Intelligence agency staff leave their roles, just like anyone else does. Unregulated? They're as regulated as the rest of us. Then you have the article casting aspersions on them for doing so, it must be about money and malign foreign influences. Of course foreign states use proxies; so does the UK. Why's that even mentioned as if it's implying ex-intel staff are the proxies - which as far as I'm aware, they're not?
Should we ban these people from working again, or ensure they only flip burgers for the rest of their lives for daring to leave the public sector?
Sometimes I want to hunt it down and erase the lazy, lying, gas-lighting **** from existence.
The gist of it is, it's a simple piece of JS that can be included to harvest feedback from users, categorise it and then based on those categories send it on. So, dev requests to Jira/Github, sales requests to a Trello list say, cyber security to Asana, support requests to Slack, whatever the breakdown is.
So I'm really targeting organisations that are small enough that they still use an email address for contact but are large enough to have multiple job roles.
If anyone would be kind enough to try it (and even dog-food it by clicking the lightbulb at the top of the landing page to send any feedback), you can get 30 days free with the code LB30.
Thanks all.
That the percentage of people who can read (and do read one book per year) is higher, clearly isn't translating to more book sales, so people are reading, or at least buying, fewer print books.
I remember listening to that as a kid and thinking it must be wrong because we still had radio, we even had books everywhere as far as I could see. Of course we still do, but it's not just literary fiction suffering; book sales tend to go down (pandemics excepted) while the numbers being published goes up.
Anecdotally, I followed an interesting ex-MI6 bod on Tiktok (@theenglishspy) who had ~50k followers and admitted, maybe a few months after publishing a book he'd been pushing, that he had sold less than 100 copies. I had my own go [1] at narrative non-fiction for a cause and also didn't manage to break 100 copies.
Perhaps it's a good thing; the market's saturated, while overall demand for books is falling it's because there are more instant, engaging formats that people are seeking to invest in finding stories. If the internet ever goes down, those books will still be there, we'll just have to find a way to order them.
I feel I have to reply, but I have no idea what to say.