Renewing my Driving Licence; and Linda

LOL. Not only that, but it's frowned upon.

An air of depressed oppression will get you far further than an attitude of gay abandon.

In today's DEI obsessed world, nothing succeeds like failure.

Well its a fine line between paying for customer support or for a product that doesn't need it.

E.g. We used to buy a lot of corporate computer servers, and run SCO Unix on them, not Windows,

One day, one simply refused to work. Its seemed to have a faulty graphics card. We took it to the supplier who said 'funny: it works on Windows' which it did. We swapped it for another brand and it was AOK.

The sheer quantity of mildly out-of-spec hardware and software out there is staggering, but as long as the customer just says 'funny, what happened?', and reboots it and it works sorta, but does not send it back...who cares?.

Only if its gold plated MIL spec is it tested to its limits and guaranteed to work. And even that is rare., I don't suppose that more than 99% of the drones flying over Russia and Ukraine actually work properly, but its cheaper to just send another one...

Now I pay more for an ISP who provides decent support, or used to anyway. But if you are penny pinching and pick some major brand like BT or Tesco or whatever, because its cheaper, you only have yourself to blame when the service is s*it.

Likewise you CAN buy a Miehle washing machine at three times the price that has a ten year guarantee on it, but it will cost three times as much as the one that fails every two years.

Manufacturers sell the products and services that people buy. If you don't like 'em, don't buy 'em

And so long as you buy the one that's advertised on the telly, and not the one in the brown cardboard box qt half the price with a ten year guarantee on it, they will continue to sell you a dream inside a pretty coloured package whose functionality is not really relevant to the sale.

Well it has some meaning when considering central government.And its rôle in economic management.

Where you may consider that the voting public are in fact the shareholders.

I admit that under the Labour government it is a meaningless term.

Indeed. Labour governments always seem to run out of other peoples money. And, TBH, the recent Tory ones have been no better.

Which is why an awful lot of people are voting Reform

I get a regular supply of self administered medication from a third party company subcontracted by the NHS (they can reclaim VAT - the NHS can't) ...I have dozens of texts telling me to 'download their app' to 'book a delivery time'

There isn't space on my phone for another 'app'.

Yesterday, Bank holiday Monday, they, or someone purporting to BE them, phoned me to make the appointment. (We are a medical services company: We work 24 x7)

Why don't they just make parking free with a tow-away service for cars left there more than a week?

Who knows?

Essentially the last effective Tory government, Thatcher or Major probably

I found it impossible. Since the bank had frozen my account due to low usage.

The telephone service asked so many stupid questions that I abandoned that as well

I went into the bank itself. Armed with driving licence passport and bank card. "We can see you are who you claim, so this will take just a minute, What account do you want the balance transferred to?" - hand over another banking card. Job done

As I said the reasons they froze my account were the same reasons they wouldn't let me close it.

On another account, there was no way to close it. Barclays share trading account. I simply transferred all the money to another share trading company. I still get a bi annual trading and tax statement with zeros in it. I can't access the account any more to close it. And I don't think the website ever had the option either.

But Barclays are s**te anyway., I keep meaning to change, but lloyds were s**te when I moved to Barclays. HSBC let me down with a corporate account.

IME there's an awful lot of people with smartphones, especially iPhones, who have very little idea of how to use them properly, and that includes younger generations.

Being a bit older I am more comfortable on a big screen on a desktop. I can read what's there, have visible windows open and don't end up closing, deleting, moving something inadvertently because one application swipes left to mark read and another swipes left to archive or close.

I avoid financial apps on my phone because it I feel more secure fixed on my laptop which is a bit harder for a bike rider to snatch. But I understand there's a whole tranche of people who don't have a desktop and the smartphone is their computer.

The worst part is so many systems and sites are hell bent on making access smartphone friendly end up making computer access awkward.

And too many systems are not robust, often anything to do with government.

I'm certainly not "younger generation", but I hold my hand up to that. I bought a (second hand) iPhone as a distress purchase to deal with the "You must use 2 factor identification - and it must be on a mobile phone" situation (long story, too boring even for me).

Having learned how to do the things I intend to use it for, I have no interest in spending countless hours discovering all its wonderful features.

I have watched the odd YouTube video, in which someone gives a breathless description of all the newest goodness in the latest version of the iOS.

Give me a break!

No idea what either of you are talking about.

I'd imagine 10 minutes leafing through the Mail or watching GB News might get me in the ballpark.

Common misconception - UK law requires directors to 'have regard' to, for example, employees, the environment, and direct and indirect consumers. This is a primary duty - not secondary. Larger companies (over 2000 employees) have to produce a 's.172' statement setting out how this is achieved.

That's not to say that some companies and their regulators play fast and loose

- water for example. Penalties for non-compliance are generally dwarfed by value extracted from director and shareholder bonuses.

Well you certainly wont get near the truth reading the Guardian

I'm not talking about "newest goodness", but basic things like bookmarking sites, closing tabs in the browser, the difference between an app and a website, getting a new app etc.

One almost might manage to sympathise with elderly technophobes if they didn't want to compare their plight with a totally imaginary class of ethnic minorities, single mothers and refugees living in the lap of luxury with huge benefits and free houses.

Ah! Any use of a browser on a mobile is an act of temporary necessity, and I can fettle it just about well enough for that. As for curating a list of bookmarked sites etc. etc. I CBA.

Those imaginary groups are vital if the storm of indignation and grudge is to be kept alive.

Pah. Which is why I rely on:

LOL! Peak Russian hard left propaganda!

I thought they went out of business 25 years ago,

Interestingly, last year’s summer-long protests weren’t about “…ethnic minorities, single mothers and refugees living in the lap of luxury with huge benefits and free houses”, but violence against women and girls. The bussed-in rabble from the far left couldn’t shake the protesters message, even when escorted by the police to the very front of the demonstration, contrary to the usual police tactics.

The arrest records show that many of the protestors where quite in favour of violence against women and girls when they were committing it themselves. It was just small numbers of foreigners doing the same that exercised them. And blaming all foreigners for that happening.

I don’t recall any of that being used against the protesters by the rentamob left that confronted them, it was more the “refugees welcome here (although we don’t live here)” placards and the hackneyed chants of “racists!”. Perhaps the left hadn’t had time to industrialise the production of placards bearing the “When did you stop beating your wife or girlfriend?” jibe.