flooow

It is quite instructive that the press have managed to damage the Tories' poll rating simply by pulling up the publicly-available list of MP registered interests and reporting them as the scandal they are and always were.

Why didn't they do this at any point in the past 10+ years? Because the press are owned and operated by the Tory party (sometimes once-removed, sometimes not) and understand that their primary function is to distribute pro-Tory propaganda.

So why are they doing it now? Because a) the opposition has been thoroughly defanged after the wholesale demolition of the left-wing Corbyn project and b) a lot of top Conservatives do not like Johnson because he makes them embarrassed at dinner parties, and would prefer someone like Gove. In other words, it's a Barclay twins vs Murdoch ruling-class squabble.

It is a shame that there is a law of economic nature which states that all billionaires must be dead-eyed psychopaths. Imagine if Rupert Murdoch or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg really wanted to do good. Any one of them could choose to buy up all the media in the USA and pump out 'good' propaganda, aimed squarely removing its utterly corrupt ruling class, and they might succeed. Instead the existing media/political ecosystem is supported and reinforced by the only people who have the resources to change it.

(Yes, yes, I believe in democracy and everything but it's too late for all that now).

Do people really think Rust isn't a replacement for C? For the work I do - optimisation algorithms that must run As Fast As Possible - it absolutely is a much-superior replacement for C.

I think what people mean is that Rust violates their perception of what C 'is' - 'simple, bare-metal, low-abstraction'. Well I don't think C is any of these things and Rust's memory model (borrow-checker) is a much more explicit and precise representation of the actual (implicit, undocumented) invariants of your C program. In that sense it is 'simpler'.

This has to be a key factor. Your average 20-something has terrible life-prospects. If they have a little political nous they will correctly deduce that their parent's generation stole their wealth and wellbeing (through a house price bubble, destruction of pensions, wages growing slower than inflation, climate crisis round the corner, student debt coupled with credential inflation, national debt, privatization, knee-capping of unions, a ruinously expensive military-industrial complex, etc etc).

Could you blame them for thinking that anyone who works for a living is a mug, paying for the lifestyle of kleptocratic boomers? Cryptocurrencies provide an emancipatory (and entirely false) narrative. Why not gamble, and try to defeat the system?

As a highly paid UK tech worker, this scab does not speak for me.

Sure. I just did a 12 month stint at £650/day. Assume 220 working days/year = £143K. Now you have a silly dance to minimise your tax.

- Pay yourself minimum wage (0pct rate) ~£9K/year. - You can probably write off around £10K against tax (lunch, transport) - Pay 19% corporation tax on the rest - Pay yourself a dividend up to upper rate, end up paying around 7.5% tax on that - ...probably some other tricks

Leads to a total tax rate of around 20-25% as long as you can survive on £50K a year. So net income something like £115K after tax. Say £9.5K/month, would require a gross salary of £194K [0].

This is why the government is trying to clamp down on IR35 abuse, but still plenty of contracts outside, at the moment.

[0] https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/lifestyle.php

If you want a high salary with minimum fuss (i.e. no management, no clawing your way up a corporate ladder), this is way to do it. I've been contracting in London for 5 years. Rates are in the range of £500-£700 per day, never had a problem getting work, post-tax salary equivalent to £200k PAYE. You can often take several months off over the summer too, if you like that sort of thing.