This is about being able to charge more for Saturday delivery like most other “premium” delivery companies as they sure as shit wont be cutting the hours that they expect the Posties to work.

Because second class has a decent service level, even now, its possible to time your parcel delivery for a Saturday reasonably accurately for a low(er) fee. Drop second class then push up the prices for 1st class parcels.

Then when they can, with a more friendly Ofcom, they will stop first class on a Saturday and switch to a proper Saturday delivery tariff.

Train Sim World. Yes Dovetail have their problems, yes its expensive if you want a lot of the latest DLC (why, its not multiplayer so doesn’t decrease in popularity like multiplayer game DLC), yes its not a well optimised graphical tour de force. But damn is it relaxing to play with multiple levels of difficulty that are entirely optional. Its possible to get hundreds of hours of replay from a single route if that’s what you enjoy.

Phone use is meant to be detectable by the latest automated cameras, along with seat belt use that are on trial last I heard. If it works as good as they say they do then I suspect a lot of people will be facing a ban.

Any conversation around salary has to include their generous pension scheme (better than civil servants), significant expenses that they are allowed to claim for their lifetime in parliament, expensive freebies such as Taylor Swift or access to an Arsenal box, subsidised food and drink, and the opportunities offered for additional salary from outside jobs and lobbying. Oh and if they lose their seat the get a decent pay out, significantly more than statutory redundancy. And for the small number who might have a baby in office, six months full pay, far more than statutory again.

Just focusing on salary when its only part of their actual net income makes it appear meaner than it actually is. They should be forced to stick to statutory requirements as that would incentivize them to improve it quicker rather than yet another exception.

UK as an adult you often have to pay for this per request and there is a limit on the number you can request at once. As it can take weeks or even months to complete while you wait for your turn in the queue so it makes it very hard to stack requests.

As a kid I used to love this service as it was free without real request linits and a lot faster. I could just pre order books that hadn’t come out.

I stopped using my local library because of it as their planned fiction book selection is basically large print romance or war stories or westerns.

And I think that at some point enough people will have had enough that they take on production of that themselves via open source projects.

Sure, some will always be driven by cost, thats never going to change, but self sustainability will become more desirable as main stream brands, not just temu tat, drops in quality.

All of which is true but it doesn’t matter if the product is crippled by the designer. Whole point of my model is that you are the designer so its only shit if you are.

Open source devices will become more mainstream as a push back by consumers against enshitifcation, privacy invasion, disposable products, ever rising subscription costs.

Not just things like phones and laptops but things like mice, keyboards, headphones, even tvs and kitchen appliances. I know some of these are possible now, I use a ploppy trackball and qmk based keyboards but a wider spread of these across the home and more than just hobbyists like myself.

Large chunks will be 3D printed, moving the large component parts of manufacting to the local area. Plus things will be endlessly fixable and upgradable.

People will blame Nick Cleggs Lib Dems for this and yeah they play a big part in this, but the root cause is further back.

Tony Blair removed the cap on the number of students who could go to university which lead to introducing tuition fees. Before then you used to get a grant, I got three grand a year, to go to university.

Suddenly universities could massively increase the number places so they did. This lead to spiralling costs, which lead to fees going up and loans had to go up to cover this. They also borrowed heavily to expand.

David Cameron removed the cap on fees while increasing the money students could borrow with Cleggs backing (against a key Lib Dem manifesto pledge fucking the Lib Dems for years after) and Universities started getting properly greedy.

Inflation kicked in but the loans available to students didn’t because the government couldn’t afford to, majority of students never pay back the full amount before its written off. Student loan book is set to be a trillion pounds in about 20 years.

The whole situation is fucked because Blair said anyone could go, rather than being honest about what we could afford to pay for. Now we have a ticking timebomb that someone’s going to have to pay.

It would cost them votes with a certain group of voters who would make this a capital offence if they could.

It doesn’t really impact MPs, see the studies into drug use at the HoP or even this articles headline, so why bother risking losing important votes in swing seats? If the police started throwing MPs in jail for drug use then you’d see something done quite quickly.

Much like a lot of these wedge issues such as abortion there are a few nutters in the HoP who are rabidly opposed to it on moral grounds and a few whose husbands own legal medical cannabis farms who frankly don’t want the competition.

Yeah I have the same impression of it, although the volume of some updates, even when I update daily, can be a little off-putting.

I wont move unless I have a good reason to, inertia over the effort to change when bored is too high

I moved from Redhat when they started pulling the shit around getting paid for their source. I understand why they did it, but I disagreed with that choice and I moved.

I quit Ubuntu when I finally had enough of their insistence on their way for everything such as firefox via snap, sure I can and did work around their shit, but why the fuck should I?

I would move from Opensuse if they did something similar, if it became unreliably maintained, or if something much better came along.

Getting to a good university is only part of the battle and the real prize is the job afterwards. Having a big network is what helps with the latter.

Take law, even at Oxbridge only about 10% of students on that course at either university get into a training contract to become a solicitor. Its closer to 1% at normal universities.

Getting onto that training contract is knowing how to present yourself to the right contacts and go to the right events.

Many subjects are like this, especially for the top jobs.

They and the Torys are inveterate gamblers who every couple of decades win a huge number of seats as Labour did at the last election and that hope that they can win big every time rather than playing the odds properly.

This is coupled with wanting to lock out smaller parties like the Lib Dems, but that doesn’t really work for Tory adjacent parties like Reform when seat boundaries have been gerrymandered by the Tories to such a degree that a small shift in certain seats can win the election.

Yeah its a super paranoid process, I would just rather take a traditional person exam

Question difficulty makes no difference whatsoever with proxying, these are already long form questions in the main. The whole point of it is you are paying somebody else to take the exam for you, either directly by something like screen sharing or indirectly by relaying questions and answers. The AI voice assistant is another form of this, its higher risk as LLMs aren’t always right but its still proxying.

I personally know of half a dozen people who used Cheggs to indirectly proxy their engineering degree exams as they weren’t proctored and had 12/24 hour exam window. The uni was meant to require an in person defense of similar questions from anybody getting unusual results, something people who cheat simply cannot do, but because they had done it the whole way through they never triggered the flag. This is why proctoring is so important.

One of the reasons so many companies use Pearsons for their exams is because they have centers everywhere, they are by far the largest. If you cannot do it online then you have to go to your nearest center. Simply too much cheating is attempted otherwise. As always the actions of a minority ruin it for everybody else as rules have to be put in place.

Yup, exactly that. You are not allowed to proceed if you have additional devices including your mobile visible during the setup phase, you have to sweep the area with your webcam so they can see. When the exam is proctored if they see a phone or anything suspicious that you introduced into the frame you are generally fucked and have to go through a review.

Pearsons run a lot of different exams on behalf of a lot of different companies so the rules change depending on what that company wants and will pay for.

I know of one that you have to connect with your webcam and again with your phone camera so the phone can capture from behind you.This is one is live proctored by a real person throughout, it is pretty damn expensive so its not the norm. Many are just at the start and end, with AI triggers and random sampling to find cheaters.

I know of another than limits how many screens you can have connected to just one, this is principally to reduce the chance of a IP KVM being used for proxying. Its trivial for the software to detect how many displays are connected, same with number of HID devices.

I think you are underestimating how much cheating is attempted with these, and how much they have already been through the loop of being able to detect it.

Nope as you have to show the room before the exam starts andusing the second computer shows up in the webcam. It’s what the webcam if for.

So, in principle, I agree, but it doesn’t help with proxying, or for example, one I saw this week of someone using AI voice assistant to answer questions. Or people copying and pasting from online groups.

Their shitty software monitors all the connected devices, running processes, and webcam. That’s still needed for open book.

Does it have online exams? Pearsons shitty anti cheat stuff they use for proctoring is windows and mac only.

Having seen how much people cheat including using someone else using screensharing to proxy the exam for you I cannot blame them for wanting to do this, but I do blame them for not wanting to support Linux properly.