Tim Blackwell

Rising minimum wage is popular with HMT because so much of the resulting increases in employer costs (often 75-80%) accrue to it via tax NI, and reduced benefit payments. (Stupidly, MW also sets the minimum income floor in universal credit, making small-scale self-employment less and less viable).

327% is just the central estimate - they mean 327% by July 2nd 2027+- 182 days.

Reform is the only party committed to awarding teenagers the big jobs.

Perhaps, but I think in terms of misery inflicted per pound ‘saved’, council tax localisation runs it pretty close.

In the 80s Casio calculators were programmable in Fortran too.

the immanentisation of Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Thinking about this, the content designers of early GDS could be pretty DOGEy at times. A Brahmin like caste who frequently appeared indifferent to facts and uninterested in understanding the needs of people who didn’t fit their pre-conceived notions of what a user should be.

The day the MCHLG website was dumped into .gov.co.uk I opened a bookmark to some arcane council tax support matter and was rewarded with a photo of Eric Pickles and a giant picture of a FUCKING house.

I guess structural annihilation might be a better term. Early GDS did the things it cared about well: infrastructure and smart answers come to mind. But the things it didn’t care about it did atrociously: fact checking, context, continuity - the sad joke of ‘no link left behind’.

Payment confirmation request showing 'Brighton' spelt 'Brigton' without the letter h.

My own council requires so much data to be entered that it already has (to pay council tax you have to copy and paste an ID number from one part of the site to the 'shopping basket' in the payments system) that you start to think you've been phished. Not helped by this astonishing typo:

If I wanted to issue a cheese-themed anthology, I would simply travel back in time a few decades and secure sponsorship from the Milk Marketing Board. My careers teacher had an MTB recruitment poster, a poem in itself.

KEEN ON MILK?

<image: cow>

JOIN THE MILK MARKETING BOARD!

You don’t need a fancy new system. You could just increase the tax rate, creating roughly zero new taxpayers.

Guessing high poverty rate due to standard PC amounts being below the poverty threshold applied - and the 100% income taper in non-savings credit cases. PC heating addition could be withdrawn from a higher threshold and with a lower taper as originally done for child tax credit family element.

Given about 1.5 million older people in households getting PC and c800k eligible but not claiming, that implies very roughly 11.5 million pension age people in poverty, which seems…high? I may have misconstrued this.

It may not be the better option, but it would be administratively very easy to have a means-tested fuel payment via a seasonal heating addition in pension credit. This would encourage PC takeup and should be relatively gently tapered. It avoids the cliff edges of both past and present schemes.

good point. I wonder if the govt will decide the energy suppliers can be squeezed further, and so claim that it's the companies that are funding the increase.

Better - if the allowance is not to be restored - to have a seasonal heating element in pension credit. Avoids cliff edge and easy to implement. The element should be tapered relatively gently, not reduced pound for pound by increased income (as most pension credit now is). Would improve PC takeup.

Top 5, ranked:
Annals
Hay
British
Quoof
Madoc

Madoc bobs up and down in the reckoning. Pretty sure the selection depends on my age and mood when I first read them.

Exactly. Much much more building control - photography of all work done - geotagging and phones make this pretty much costless - to be sent to bc and available prospective buyers. Easier planning permission with heavy and fearlessly applied penalties for failure to build.

I like them too, making that the closest thing to a PDF form that I've ever liked. I agree about the busy design - it would be more suitable for a poster where you're looking to attract attention, here I find it distracting.

PDFs are good for snapshotting, and decent as surrogate endpoints for paper publication, but mostly terrible to work with programatically. Because they’re so easy to store locally, they’re difficult to unpublish, which can be a great advantage for readers - if not publishers.

Very likely they’re trialling Grok updates with a subset of users.

Without wealth creation it will be unpaid care, which in both in its burdens and allocations is itself a source of of great inequity. But so much of what is described as wealth creation is wealth concentration or simple theft.

In 1945 when my mother joined the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, she was a 14 year old shop assistant in Sainsbury’s. It’s difficult to imagine what would inspire a young person to join today’s Labour Party, or what values such a person would adhere to.

With the heat turned low enough, that could work as a clunky, inconvenient template. A bit like using one's cybertruck to pick up groceries, instead of for its intended purpose: chasing giant cockroaches through the haunted ruins of irradiated cities, by the light of a grotesquely swollen sun.

Much better would be to add a heating element to pension credit in the colder months, tapering it relatively gently as income rises. This would be pretty simple to implement and avoids the present cliff edge where a tiny increase in income means you lose all your WFA.

there was also a laboratory supplies company called Oakes Eddon, who would sell almost anything to a smallish child.

No. My dad hoarded type, which he bought very cheaply from Paddy's market in Liverpool. He would go hang-gliding on a Sunday afternoon, which didn't interest me, so I would offer to 'tidy the garage' if I could stay at home, melting type purely for the alchemical thrill.

I had some asbestos sheeting when I was ten or so, handy when you're melting your dad's lead type in the garage.

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