anothermouse

The NHS makes a huge difference. As a single entity it can pivot in a way that I wonder if other countries can come close to.

My daughters dentist commented yesterday that all her surgeries (and her team usually do 50 a week) had been cancelled. The reason? All the anaesthesiologist had been requisitioned as they will be required to do ventilation. All elective surgeries had been cancelled, and her paeds specialists sent on refresher courses for adult patients.

We're in uncertain territory here, the NHS's response may not be 100% perfect and a lot of people will argue that some minutiae could be done better, but I believe it has the huge advantage.

I wonder if other countries, and particularly the US, can manage such a coordinated healthcare response?

I'm married to a US citizen. My children have inherited US citizenship via this route. We have to spend thousands preparing tax returns reporting no income each year for three people (the children have bank accounts).

  If you buy a house, things are going to be complicated.
  If you have a workplace pension from your job, you're probably screwed. State pensions have screwed people too.
  If you invest in stocks, or mutual funds, you'll pay more in tax preparation than you'll make.
  If you set up your own company and are not paid as an employee but as the owner, you will be screwed.
  Rent out a property, screwed.
  Fail to declare every account that you're a signatory on? Prepare to pay up to 125% of the contents. 
  If you're children are beneficiaries of a trust set up by their non-american grand-parents? Totally screwed.

Almost every American expat I've spoken to has had a shock when they find they totally didn't understand their commitments. The only ones who didn't were employees of big banks/hedge funds whose employers paid a big 4 accountant to take care of everything.

Mostly because the majority of people living there wish to be remain part of the United Kingdom.

There is huge variation in Dairy! French Milk (was) terrible, only UHT widely available, though fresh is now quite common. US milk is nothing like as good as British milk for freshness/flavour (though the latter is subjective).

US eggs are refrigerated, as salmonella is so prevalent. Not so in UK, where they are guaranteed salmonella free (nowadays 'thanks' to Edwina Curry)

And Cheese? Really - I'm fairly sure there is no equivalent of a nice ripe epoisses widely available in the US. Sure, cheap cheddar is just like Monterray Jack, but....

I have lived in the US for 8 years, France/Luxembourg for 2 and the UK for the rest.

You've never tried Hershey's then.

  If you buy a house, things are going to be complicated.
  If you have a workplace pension from your job, you're probably screwed. State pensions have screwed people too.
  If you invest in stocks, or mutual funds, you'll pay more in tax preparation than you'll make.
  If you set up your own company and are not paid as an employee but as the owner, you will be screwed.
  Rent out a property, screwed.
  Fail to declare every account that you're a signatory on? Prepare to pay up to 125% of the contents. 
  If you're children are beneficiaries of a trust set up by their non-american grand-parents? Totally screwed.

Almost every American expat I've spoken to has had a shock when they find they totally didn't understand their commitments. The only ones who didn't were employees of big banks/hedge funds whose employers paid a big 4 accountant to take care of everything.

Xfce calls it shade window. I believe it is still there, and can be configured to be double click, or whatever you'd like.

I bailed on KDE overnight at KDE 4.1. You couldn't have an NFS mounted home dir, as they had made mysql a requirement for Akonadi, without which kmail and everything else failed to work.

Suddenly KDE was no longer 'enterprise' ready, as no enterprise I've ever worked for has offered anything but NFS for home directories.

Occasionally I come across a coworker who uses konsole, as they like the tabs. But I've never seen it in use widely again.

Have they removed this limitation?

20K bankers to shortly find themselves working in a regional office and wishing they could relocate back.

Passporting doesn't require moving your employees wholesale, you just setup a subsidiary within Europe and trade with that legal entity for European trades. A skeleton office is all that is required.

I've been watching this happen like a scheduled car crash for years. Every 2 years, another open source project succumbs to the problem.

As far as I can tell, when software is open source, the barrier to people contributing is lower. And that leads to a sort of brownian jitter in the system. Once great systems, (kde in general and amarok in particular) suffer from contributions of new features, which add features but decrease reliability. Or they exist for so long that no new exciting features exist to be added, so the inevitable re-architecture death march begins (I'm looking at your kde4. You killed kde as a corporate desktop, so that you could add semantic search?).

Whatever the cause, be it the accretion of "features", or the inevitable "rinse, re-architect, repeat" cycle some project are on, it can only drive people away. But a project that is widely used collects developers, and it is difficult to say no to contributors - a common problem in volunteer projects outside software.

Surely Sim City be classed as being based around a crafting mechanic?

  > So your argument is basically this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUTnNKhF-EU

s/your/their/.

It is not my argument, I'm a Tory voting, skilled, financial sector worker, who voted remain.

But I'm being an idiot arguing with you. I don't think dismissively posting a clip of southpark has advanced the discussion. This subject never got the detailed and grown up discussion it deserved as one side continually dismissed the other as racist xenophobes (which you are underhandedly implying they are here) and the other harped on about '350 million a week' continuously, even thought that was thoroughly debunked.

There were real substantive issues to be discussed and we failed to do it meaningfully. Kind of like this thread.