You mean you want to tax me on unrealized gains and assets? Totally unfair, even though I can leverage loans off them and then pay myself with the loan to reduce/avoid taxes.

Interestingly the AI stories are voiced by real people, ractors. That would now be one of the first things cut, see James Earl Jones

UK. I get about 30 days plus bank holidays, pretty standard at my firm that people push it up to the max. Biggest perk I get is being able to work in between days off remotely, so I can be away for 3 weeks and work 5 days, so it would only cost me 10 days off. Its great for traveling.

Daughter is a teacher at a private school, she gets about 17 weeks or 85 days plus the 1 bank holiday that doesn’t fall inside school holidays. Thats after teacher training days, which are days the teachers have to be at school but the kids do not. I would kill for that allocation, but not the dealing with other peoples kids every day part.

Train Sim World, currently 5 but TSW updates are like FIFA or Madden so its not that different from previous versions. At least it was a free update.

Just driving a train around, especially if its somewhere I know is really relaxing. Really looking forward to the first Japanese route dropping sometime this year (hopefully).

I do like that you can chose to enable safety systems or not depending on if you want to play on easy mode or very easy mode. It has even less pressure than your average relaxed building game if you ignore the clock.

Downsides, steam engines are pretty bad in the game, I just don’t bother with them. Dovetail are pretty useless. Brand new routes are usually overpriced. Some of the routes are bad, really bad, or just plain boring. Very important to read reviews. Everything is DLC.

Upsides, there are frequent sales so if you stay away from the latest content it can be pretty cheap in comparison. If you get a route you like it has a fair amount of repeatability. Some of the DLC overlays nicely with other DLC.

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.

Simplest way is a Windows VM and screen capture in the OS running the VM. Obviously next step for Microsoft is to detect and block Windows VMs, good luck to them with that.

Buying less and buying for life as a priority when choosing purchases. It’s had a knock on effect thst I try to buy bespoke from small artisans as they tend to be higher quality and it supports small businesses rather than megacorps.

It used to be printers but I switched to a Brother laser printer about five years ago and its been trouble free while having reasonable print costs. You can even force it to print on empty for a bit longer, although you shouldn’t push any laser printer too far on empty as you can wreck them.

Toasters are my big gripe. Its been proven that they have massively reduced costs at the expense of longevity and toasting efficiency from what we had decades ago. I have an expensive toaster (from Sage), and I have still had to replace micro switches on the buttons. While it does a better job of even browning than a cheap toaster its still far from the level I expect.

I would buy one of those expensive Japanese toasters or a commercial toaster oven but I do not want that much counter top taken up by it. I would rather just cook my toast in a cast iron pan now, far better finish.

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.

So these costs do not appear to include the often massive marketing costs that can run into tens if not hundreds of millions for big blockbusters? Unless I am missing something.

Yeah making it optional for them to turn on because they are still entitled to privacy even though they are children is the key to building trust. Them trusting you as a parent is the most essential thing here, there is always a way around something, you want them being honest by choice rather than sneaky or you forcing “honesty” by coercion.

We always did that from when the kids were younger and my now adult daughter still chooses to turn it on when going on dates.

MFs who support this usually point to current UK private healthcare costs and imply it will still cost the same once the majority of healthcare is funded privately rather than via taxes. This is always completely ignorant that private healthcare costs so little in the UK compared to the US because its subsidized by the NHS, the NHS provides much of the more expensive services still, and private has to compete against the NHS on cost as best it can.

Once we have a free market for private healthcare costs to the end user will rapidly balloon.

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.

This will be hilarious if it goes through. Imagine the scenes when a certain pro Brexit demographic that has always been the priority for government policies suddenly doesn’t get preferential treatment at the airport for their month in Spain every winter yet “millennials” do.

(Yes I am are the youngest Millennials are 28, its part of the joke)

This has influenced my entire idea of spending money:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

Net is £2 a month for 6gb data and unlimited calls and texts from O2, although I never use those really. It should be £6 a month, but I get £4 discounted as two streaming services I would buy anyway I buy via them so I get a discount for each.

Most places I use my phone I have WiFi, data is only really used for background services and maps otherwise. You can purchase data add ons from them for reasonable fees for a month if I ever did need it for travel. Although I am more likely to get a local sim as it’s far far cheaper than roaming outside the EU normally.

The main reason I use O2 is that it also doubles my home broadband speed for free to 1gb up and down. That means having their phone line actually costs me -£6 a month.

I am looking to move my partners phone over later this year to O2 and thst should double the speed to 2gb up and down for the same price.