Paul Brownjohn @Paulos_the_fog@qoto.org
Retired software engineer & woodworker.
Anglo-francophone.
Detest tories. Subscribe to green, leftish radical politics but not to any particular political party!.
Love the EU and all it stands for, moreover, I spent the last 10 years of my career working at an EU agency.
Enthusiastic photographer, especially wildlife and most especially butterflies.
Slightly knowledgeable gardener.
Atheist; loathe almost all religions and pity the people deluded enough to follow them. I make exceptions for Buddhism as it isn't really a religion in the strictest sense of the word as it doesn't postulate the existence of any god, and Jainism which is the epitome of peace.
For anyone who is interested, my header photo is of the most stupendous sunset I have ever seen. On the right is the waterfront of Vientiane, the capital of Laos, on the left is Thailand and in the middle, acting as the border between the two countries is the mighty Mekong river.
Joined Nov 2022
Love those sorts of shots!
This is my effort of the cliffs at Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters on a theatrically stormy day
Paul Brownjohn
boosted
This dude is Tim Nolan,Trumps campaign chair in Kentucky. Charged with 28 felonies,like Rape, human trafficking witness tampering prostitution and sodomy 22 victims 8 of them minors. He is one of the founders of QAnon who say Democrats are pedophiles
Fascist republicans fully revealed.
Making the interfaces unuseable on government websites seems to be a world-wide phenomenon!
Here in Luxembourg the user interfaces for all government sites including the one where you file your annual tax return appear to have been designed by fückin chimpanzees!
Is that variety "banana custard" by any chance?
Wisely, in Luxembourg, the government do not allow credit scumbags like Equifax and the rest to keep records on ordinary citizens - it's against the law here! If you fail to make a payment of money you owe, that fact is recorded by the Luxembourg Central Bank and you will not be allowed credit until you have satisfied the debt. Any other agency holding such information is committing a criminal offence!
I live in Luxembourg which I believe has the highest minimum salary in the world. Not only that, but the statutory minimum salary, like all salaries, benefits and pensions, is index linked to the rate of inflation . Every increase in prices of 2.5% results in a corresponding increase in the statutory minimum salary!
Even that is inadequate to live on so how people manage in countries where the statutory minimum wage is lower then here, I am not sure!
@Thebratdragon @Lassielmr @IndyRichard @ChrisMayLA6
The guy was a nurse and a quite talented amateur programmer, so he was trained, qualified and registered as a nurse but wasn't actually doing that. When the hospital where he worked discovered his talents with Excel and VBA, they put him to work doing that instead of nursing as that was a more pressing need.
The story has a sad ending for the NHS, at least; the last I heard of him, he had been head-hunted via the grape-vine by a firm in the City of London where Excel skills are in huge demand, where he was earning around 5 times what a nurse is paid and eventually was put in charge of the Excel team at the asset management company where he worked on £250,000 a year.
Paul Brownjohn
boosted
Brian Broome (on another platform) wrote:
"I was just reading the story about the woman who left 1,000 dollars in tips at a #taco joint because she thought she was gonna be #raptured.
When she wasn't, she went back to the taco joint and demanded her money back accusing the servers of stealing it somehow.
And I'm really hard-pressed to think of a better analogy for the state of American #Christianity."
@Lassielmr @IndyRichard @ChrisMayLA6
I believe you will find that many 'managers' are classed as administrators rather than specifically as managers. In one case of which I am aware, a guy developing Excel spreadsheets for various purposes in a hospital was officially on the payroll as a nurse to help keep the balance between medical staff and others tipped on the medical side!
The best way to deal with bureaucracy is not to employ more pen-pushers to avoid frontline staff being burdened with it but to slash the bloody bureaucracy at least 50% of which is most likely totally unnecessary!
As a software engineer, I have done development work both for the NHS and for many other large organisations that are household names.
I would like to think so. From what I have heard, many of the the problems stem from Edwina Currie's tenure at the Dept for Health. She considered that the NHS was "undermanaged" and insisted on everyone having a 'manager' on their backs to tick boxes to make sure they had done their jobs. Around that time I did some work for the NHS and one of my contacts who had formerly been a useful troubleshooter and extra pair of hands where needed, spent his days, in his own words, filling in forms and ticking boxes! He said that in the past, they had confidence in people doing their jobs conscientiously but since Edwina Currie introduced her reforms, everyone has to be managed by someone to make sure they carry out their duties properly! My current contacts in the NHS are scathing about the quality of people in the lower, dare I say 'largely unnecessary', tiers of management.
Whilst I am not in any way in favour of the privatization of healthcare services, the current privatization drive may nevertheless result in the massive slimming down of the hugely overweight bureaucracy currently absorbing a disproportionate percentage of the NHS budget!
Nevertheless be VERY careful with 'soi' animals of any sort. It is estimated that in some parts of Thailand 40% of 'soi' dogs test positive for rabies and it doesn't take much for it to spread from a dog to a cat!
I spent 3 years living in Thailand and was unvaxxed against rabies but if I went there again, I would have a rabies vaccine before going.
I didn't see any dogs exhibiting symptoms of Rabies in Chiang Mai where I lived but I certainly did when I was in India where feral dogs are just as common!
Yes, back in the 90s, I used to have to create documents with numbered paragraphs. As a particular job evolved, paragraphs would get inserted or moved or removed and the Word of the day was not good at maintaining the number in those circumstances. The answer was to created the document without numbers then apply numbering afterwards.
That worked out fine until we upgraded to Word 95 at which point the whole numbering function completely collapsed and has never worked in a coherent way since, so far as I know!
That's exactly the sort of thing I'd do - but then I'm not PM!
The American meat industry where standards of animal husbandry are so low and the use of chemicals damaging to human life so high that their meat is banned from the EU!
There is a MASSIVE difference between France and the UK!
In France you don't need a bloody mortgage to buy a train ticket! It's no use promoting trains unless the fares are reasonable - at the moment it's often miles cheaper to fly!
Retired software engineer & woodworker.
Anglo-francophone.
Detest tories. Subscribe to green, leftish radical politics but not to any particular political party!.
Love the EU and all it stands for, moreover, I spent the last 10 years of my career working at an EU agency.
Enthusiastic photographer, especially wildlife and most especially butterflies.
Slightly knowledgeable gardener.
Atheist; loathe almost all religions and pity the people deluded enough to follow them. I make exceptions for Buddhism as it isn't really a religion in the strictest sense of the word as it doesn't postulate the existence of any god, and Jainism which is the epitome of peace.
For anyone who is interested, my header photo is of the most stupendous sunset I have ever seen. On the right is the waterfront of Vientiane, the capital of Laos, on the left is Thailand and in the middle, acting as the border between the two countries is the mighty Mekong river.
Joined Nov 2022
