* Posts by Kenno

33 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jan 2010

Ofcom probes BT over fibre pricing after repeated gripes from TalkTalk

Kenno

The problem with British companies is

the snowball effect of costs.

Because of the high taxes, charges and costs of doing business in the UK, all this snowballs into higher costs.

Because there are higher costs, the cut they want (the profit) has to be added ontop of these higher costs.

Because of these higher costs employees of such companies demand more money, which increases costs.

Hell look at Witherspoons they pay £17 in taxes and charges for every £1 profit they make.

Study suggests US companies use overseas workers to cut wages

Kenno

Re: It's not the number . . .

Sure except what you learn today becomes obsolete tomorrow. Even if it is bleeding edge right now.

While you can constantly retrain and retrain and retrain, you can only do it for so long before it starts to outrun you and you fall behind.

I remember the late 90s and early 00s, work do an 10 hour day job, then it was a case of study, if you were lucky your boss would send you to a training provider. If you weren't you'd have to buy a text book or pay for your own training. You can only keep this up for so long as all this study and work means this mythical thing called life, relationships etc suffer because of it. Even if you're good at your job doesn't mean you won't get fired either.

Liberator: the untold story of the first British laptop part 2

Kenno
FAIL

Work + Civil servant HAHAHAHAAA

fellow civil servants more productive in the office and out. Electronics giant Thorn EMI has agreed to manufacturer the machine, which will eventually be called the Liberator and become Britain's first laptop computer. Thorn has

You must be kidding work and civil servant do not go in the same sentence unless used in the negative sense!

Hong Kong plods turn RoboCop with strap-on vid cams

Kenno

There is a MASSIVE difference between the HK police and the UK police though.

Having lived in HK for several years, the police there on the whole tend to be more polite and less accusing.

Granted they DO racially profile and go after the darker skinned folks more, but the times myself and friends have been stopped they are very apologetic about it. Though it is perhaps more to do with the culture tbh, as drinking yourself to oblivion and getting into fights is not exactly a common sight in HK.

Secondly the HK's version of the IPPC the ICAC actually has teeth and a number of police officers have gone to prison.

Their names do not immediately come to my mind but one was a cop who pulled a gun a civvie who embarrassed him.

Another was a guy taking bribes.

Finally a cop rapist. All went down.

However they are still sometimes deeply embarrassing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfm5dtDtsIo

That was the worst acting I've seen outside a Keanu Reeves movie.

At last! A use for Blighty's phone-boxes: Free Wi-Fi hotspots

Kenno

Already in Hong Kong

As per the title. This is already in operation in Hong Kong via PCCW. WIFI comes out of public pay phones, namely because everybody has cell phones they had to find a reason for them. Its useful for some mountain areas without 3G. Ma On Shan for example paragliding mountain. Its a cell phone tower deadzone because they don't want to stick a mast up this hill. But there is a pay phone up there.

And yes they do come out of lamp posts. My dad's village has a WIFI lamp post just out of range of his house. Which requires I go out of his house about 20 yards.

If you give them your telephone number and an email address, you can get a password which stays active for ten days. Considering everybody has disposible PAYG and disposible email addresses, PCCW spam the hell out of this email address. But never call you considering it costs money in HK to ANSWER a phone call. It works well.

Google KNEW Street View cars were slurping Wi-Fi

Kenno
FAIL

$25,000 fine eh?

That'll teach 'em good

China goes green with rare earth plea

Kenno
Mushroom

Re: kettle calling pot

OPEC, De Beers, Microsoft, apple etc etc.

When you've got a monopoly you can abuse it however you want for your own benefit.

Kenno
WTF?

Won't work. China for one is absorbing massive inflation the west is producing. Money printing etc.

Our CPI baskets are filled to the brim with cheaper Chinese manufactured goods. Which is used to suppress inflation.

Take that out and boom, you'll probably stick an easy 20% onto inflation stats just like that. Thats assuming you believe the official 3.6% inflation figure. What with substitution principle and hedonics to massage inflation.

You reckon the BoE / FED will even dare to raise interest rates to crush inflation? When millions can't pay their mega mortgages at 0.5%

Official: Britain staggers into double-dip recession doom

Kenno
Thumb Up

What we actually need is for companies to start hiring. This would start an upward spiral as more people had more to spend. As things stand (and with media, politicians and my next-door-neighbour-and-his-dog scare-mongerring) things will be slow going because so many have no money to spend.

THIS

The problem is, the money in people's pockets/demand problem. Is currently covered with a somebody else's problem field. Therefore companies trim jobs hoping to be cutting other peoples throats but not realising they are cutting their own throats.

Roger Ford's Lights in the tunnel (freebie ebook) has some extrapolated future outcomes of all of this. It isn't pleasant reading either.

Kenno

Re: Well, this was inevitable

Nay.

The problem with Britain is that it is a democracy (stop laughing at the back) which means politicians are scared of making 'right decisions'. That is letting the economy collaspe properly so that all the dead wood is cleared out of the system. So you can rebuild sooner.

The problem with this reset is that is loses HUGE numbers of votes.

Japan has been papering over the cracks for about 20 years now because they are afraid to press the reset button.

Of course there are big loses in a reset. But if you do not reset everybody loses!

Right now boomers and the public sector are torching the youth to keep their 'wealth' unearned or not. Because they vote the government is scared of them. So they keep crushing the younger workers in a ponzi scheme. Eventually the younger folks say sack this and down tools.

Kenno

What a load of balls

We never came out of recession in the first place.

But with 325bn of Zimbabwe style money printing...I mean QE

An engineered petrol painic

AND the Olympics construction

AND finally a whole load of fiddling

they STILL only fiddled it to a negative,

Killers laugh in face of death penalty threat, say US experts

Kenno

Re: Just an opinion

Albert Pierpont is a prime example of this.

He was anti death penalty. Which is ironic as he served as the last British hangman. He quickly changed his tune when one of his friends was murdered. He suddenly changed to being pro death penalty.

Kenno
Trollface

Re: I'm reminded of the Life of Brian "Jehovah" sketch

Depends.

On an absolutely brutal usefulness sense. A person after spending 50 years in the nick.

What use to society is he or she going to be ? They are a net drain on limited resources and forever will be.

Changing room spy cam sparks privacy tsar blast

Kenno

Its Hong Kong

And HK bosses are completely mistrustful of their employees.

It is why self service check outs will never catch on in China as bosses are so mistrustful.

TBH such things are pretty normal, you go walk through some halls in the Chungking Mansions and there are huge forrests of cameras everywhere.

GCHQ code-breaking challenge cracked by Google search

Kenno
Happy

Well think about it

Its a 25K job in the MIDDLE of LONDON. Peanuts/ Monkies

Pickles plans curry colleges to halt Indian immigration

Kenno

Its not just that

Its a case of wage arbritage tbh, they sleep ten to a room and then take the money home and even though what they can buy here is bog all. Back home they can buy a lot.

Anyway working in hot food CAN be lucractive and being a chef hand was a doorway to bigger things. My dad was a migrant from Taiwan in the 1960s. He worked as a chef making crappy food for people for low wages. By 1975 he opened his own, then golden age between 1980-2001(when racism had died down) and business was good with little competition.

If biz conditions are good, usual thing low competition you can still make a shed load of money off it. Place down in cornwall. Pulled £9000 a week through selling hot food. It was almost total monopoly though

Kenno
Alert

Hot food is extremely hard physical work

Because catering is absolutely back breaking work. I run an 'English' Chippy (I'm not ethnically English) and it requires about 70 hours of input from me and 40 hours labour input through various staff I hire (not at min wage either).

It is also kind of risky, chav robberies and abuse is frequent, lots of prepared stuff goes to waste and someweeks business simply evaporates. This week for instance I'm set to make a loss. The same customers are coming in but are buying considerably less.

Add in the uber high business rates and rent I need to find £19000 in rent business rates and various other things like insurance before I even open for one hour.

Enormous orbiting solar raygun power plants touted

Kenno

Rockets?

TBH I don't know why a giantic magnetic rail gun / catapult into space to shoot things up there hasnt been built yet. It would make such things (after the initial and horrendous building costs of the darned catapult) somewhat cheaper than sticking things into orbit now,

Anyway such stories are common place in Sci FI, in gundam 0083 they had the Solar System II mirror array. This was used in an attempt to stop a colony drop though.

World's only twin jet-engine bike drives onto eBay

Kenno

It's been run.

Its on the olde tube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb2Cl03E3t4

He got it up to about 70mph, you can see that he throttles back after a very short run presumably because his balls ran out. Tbh its something different, the noise alone is ....different

Eggheads crack open web troll brains

Kenno
Boffin

As somebody who lacks self control

I do fit some of those categories. But sometimes is it absolutely justified because companies will do the reverse.

They will actually astroturf and promote their products which do not deserve promotion and they will manage agressively their image in a not so nice way to present themselves in a better light. Eventually the users of such things find out and leave on their own accord but they still grabbed your money for a while until the person wised up. I mean just look at Amazon, I would place a good bet that a large % of the reviews on there are astroturf fake reviews.

I feel the vengeful hate comments on review boards are just a counter balance to the company astroturfing . And they are useful, if the company is proactive they will remedy the bad experiences which made the person who wrote the review comment negatively. If not they'll just astroturf some more.

Saying this is just another excuse and another weapon to use against people who have some REAL concerns and beef with companies. I was nearly killed by the negligence of a company recently. Yet they spread around that it was me being a hot headed kid who was useless.

Unfortunately for them nobody believed them because a huge number of 'hot headed kids' were going to other places to skydive and their attempts to blacken my reputation on them backfired as it convinced even more people to go else where. Who were again labled hot headed kids.

UK slashes red tape in apprenticeships scheme

Kenno
Mushroom

Fake apprenticeships

Meh this is just a way to circumvent the NMW..... check out jobcentre and fish4jobs there are tons of fake apprenticeships.

Apprentice cleaner

Apprentice sandwich artiste

Apprentice office admin.

Meh......

Nobody has any idea about new pension thing happening

Kenno
Happy

I prefer Sovs

As Sovs have no CGT on them.... I;ve a stack of them since Sovs were £130 each, they are now £290 each....

Sovs and gold are 100% inflation proof as you cannot printy printy the purchasing power away..... like you can with paper money and electronic money...

Kenno
Thumb Down

And where do I get this money from?

I'm not exactly well paid.... my job has been outsourced multiple times and salaries are absolutely static and have been for years. So all this put 2K aside a year doesn't really work as rent is cripplingly high as is cost of living and my wages aren't great either.

Kenno
FAIL

Pensions don't pay back

Seriously they don't..... you need 20 to 40 times the amount of your pension pot vs the amount of income you want.

So you want 10K? you need about 400K in your pension pot.

You reckon you'll have 400K in your pension pot?..

This forgets inflation. Go ask your dad how much a beer cost or a loaf of bread cost 30 years ago. £10,000 in 2050 or 2060 when you retire will be WORTHLESS....

My dad paid massive amounts into his pension when he was young. In the 70s and 80s he was promised about 130 a month a lot of money they.... 2011 he gets 130 a month. Which buys bog all compared to the purchasing power he put into it.

China mulls further social-network controls

Kenno
Mushroom

Obviously taking a leaf out of the British government's stance

Re the riots...

But tbh this is a sign that the PRC can't do whatever it wants anymore. Its too big of a beast to keep closed, since prior propaganda campaigned and censorship didn't work. And increasingly cause a Streisand effect. Like Li Gang. And the My Dad is Li Gang cover up which failed.

Bury council defends iPads for binmen

Kenno

Well paid? Not anymore

Erm binmen aren't paid 28K...

A few years ago Bury council after losing the equal pay case for women, cut almost ALL salaries under 44K

http://www.burytimes.co.uk/news/burynews/3576565.Council_workers_facing_massive_wage_cuts/

The chiefs were exempted from this though..

Anyway binmen in Bury are not paid 18-20K. However they are paid above min wage £6.02 an hour. you can see the jobs advertised on the job centre website every so often.

Green energy and jobs will cripple the UK economy

Kenno

Will the last person to leave turn out the lights?

Oh wait we won't need to turn out the lights.....

Bulgarian airbag absorbs semi-automatic rifle round

Kenno
Happy

joke

And later she was quoted as saying:

"Well when a bloke usually shoots at me tits I normally just wash it off,"

DNA pioneer lambasts government database policy

Kenno
Dead Vulture

Hill walking?

He best not go out on hill walks anytime soon eh?,

AOL hits into rough with painful independent fourth quarter

Kenno

Yeah well

Unfortunately they are one of the few suppliers in my area that offer one month contracts, I could jump over to another but only one other firm serves my area (which is way out in the stix) that does short contract So they are useful sometimes. (I want short contract to be ready to move at any time)

ID minister promises virtual immortality for all Britons

Kenno

well well

Well if the climate change systems are anything to go by they will 'lose' the data after 20 or so years.

UK.gov shutters half its websites

Kenno
FAIL

Job centre

One of the webpages that was shut down was the job centre website which has been merged into direct gov much like the DVLA website.

Its a tad ironic that the job centre website was shut down and merged seeing that there is mass unemployment going on. The new fangled farkled website has less search options than the old one and truely ancient jobs are being posted on there. Admittedly it wasn't the best place to look for jobs but many online sites are not exactly great anyway.

My search this morning I found jobs from 2008 being posted as recent...

A cynic might suggest that this is purposeful to hide the lack of jobs around as my prior Manchester jobs searches usually garnered a single page of results before changing to locales such as London or Cornwall a bit far on the commute.

But many of those jobs were fake CV harvesting jobs anyway...

Taoist truck driver guilty of unlawful sex

Kenno
Heart

Well such things can be overturned.

Sillier law in South Korea was recently appealed and overturned... in that up until September 2009 it was illegal for a man to get sex by promising marriage.