Barnacle Boiii

25. 🐍Software Developer & Certified Cool Dude.

[staysaasy @staysaasy]

Sometimes I’ll try to use Claude/Fable for a truly difficult, multifaceted task, and I’ll work with it for hours, prompting and refining.

And it will be so horrendously bad over and over that I’ll become completely convinced that we are sitting on the biggest ponzhi scheme fugazi make believe technology of all time.

[Toni Kroos @ToniKroos]

Football won

[Marl Karx @BareLeft]

I've worked in-office jobs where management designed seating plans to ensure people didn't talk to each other and would separate people as soon as a rapport with your neighbouring colleague got started.

[Malcolm Reavell @malcolm_reavell]

Now raise the tax threshold. Holding it at £12570 punishes all on fixed and low incomes. Raised by inflation it should now be £16000—£17000. The worst state pension in the developed world is now at the tax threshold.

[D @_Unknown_D_]

In my entire adult life I dont think I've ever experienced an economic boom in the UK. Graduated a few years after the 2008 financial crisis, and ever since then it's been either economic stagnancy or recession. I would love to see what an optimistic, booming economy looks like.

[Alexander @alexanderrX_]

UK edition.

Hire an engineer for £50k and give them £90 of tokens…

[Merryn Somerset Webb @MerrynSW]

Student loans. All the talk is of cutting the interest rate or the threshold. Won't help. This is a NINE percentage point graduate tax. Want to help? If you can't reform the whole system, cut the tax.. from a 9% marginal rate to something not so nasty and disincentivizing.

[Dr Luke Craddock @DrLukeCraddock]

Ah yes, "someone has to pay".

Nick went to university when it was free. It was fine for the state to pay for his education, but when it comes to my generation? We are the ones who have to pay.

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

A country that does this to its smart, ambitious young people deserves to fail. It’s no deeper than that.

The grim truth is large parts of the political and media class have hated young people for a long time now. Generation PAYE-pig.

[Ellen Pasternack @pastasnack_e]

I was told “borrow money to go to university and you can repay what you owe once you start earning enough”.

Not “go to university and later we will feel free to seize as much of your income as we decide to fund the state’s other spending commitments”.

[Michael @_britmonkey]

No deadly spiders
No deadly snakes
No scorpions
No earthquakes
No tsunamis
No hurricanes
Less average rainfall than Milan, Italy
No torrential snowstorms
No super-duper-melt-your-car-tyres heatwaves
NO MOSQUITOS

[Fuck You I Quit @fuckyouiquit]

If a job can be done remotely and that person wants it to be then for fucks sake let them work remote. It's a game changer for most people. If the job gets done, who gives a shit what location it got done at? Return to office mandates are simply about control, not productivity.

[Maurice Cousins @MDC12345678]

It is easy to dismiss this as snowflakery, but I think Oli Dugmore is on to something here. Young people in Britain today have been comprehensively screwed over for decades. They are unable to accumulate wealth in the way their parents and grandparents did. Housing is completely unaffordable, incomes are stagnant, and pensions increasingly feel like a mirage rather than a promise. Social mobility no longer exists.

But there is a far more serious issue at stake than intergenerational fairness. Britain is entering a new era of great power competition, and the conditions that sustained the post–Cold War settlement no longer apply. That settlement began to fracture after 2007 and is plainly broken today. National social cohesion should always have been front and centre of statecraft, yet it has been neglected for too long by Britain’s political elites (left and right).

Liddell Hart argued that the essence of grand strategy is peace, not war. I do not mean this in a pacific or sentimental sense. He meant that the purpose of statecraft is to secure a stable political order over the long term, which requires the alignment of military power, economic strength, domestic policy and social legitimacy even in peacetime. This is the logic behind the old maxim that if you want peace, you must be prepared for war. None of these foundations disappear simply when a war ends, nor do they suddenly come into being when one begins. That is why the talk of a “peace dividend” in the 1990s was so myopic and so foolish.

It is also why John Bew is 100% right to argue that Britain urgently needs a new political economy and a new social contract. Grand strategy is too often reduced to budgets, platforms, and force structures. But non-material factors such as national morale, legitimacy and domestic political culture are just as decisive as energy, industry and military capacity. Just speak to the Italians during WW2 about the importance of morale!

A society in which large swathes of young people are locked out of homeownership, economic security and any credible belief that effort will be rewarded is not a foundation for deterrence, resilience or long-term stability. It is a strategic liability.

[Ghost St Badmus @commando_skiipz]

401

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[BBC Radio 4 Today @BBCr4today]

Some graduates on so-called 'Plan 2' student loans are forecast to pay back more than they borrowed.

Graduate George told us he doesn't want a work promotion due to the higher interest it will incur on his loan.

Labour MP Chris Curtis also has a Plan 2 loan & speaks to #R4Today

[Oli Dugmore @OliDugmore]

Student loans are a lifetime stealth tax.

I am one of the first people to be bestowed the honour of paying £9,000 a year for uni.

Although, really, it cost me £14,120 a year, because of my maintenance loan, and the interest charged throughout my degree. I graduated with £42k of debt, in 2015.

By the time I was earning enough to actually reduce that debt it was 2022, and I owed £47k.

To be clear, I’d been making payments over the years in between but wasn’t paid enough to combat the interest I was being charged.

Unlike most other commercial loans, where a higher salary might command a more favourable interest rate, British student finance charges you more interest the better paid you are in order to slow down your ability to pay it off.

What’s more the govt can and has unilaterally changed the thresholds where these different interest rates kick in, and the interest rate they’re kindly willing to charge. Generally, RPI+3%. If a commercial lender behaved like that, you’d have a case for breach of contract, and we would call it loan sharking.

What’s more, if you were rich enough to pay your fees off up front or shortly thereafter, you’re not liable for any of this interest.

When it comes to student loans, the rich pay less.

They can opt out of paying 9% of their income to the Student Loans Company in perpetuity. It’s the opposite of how a fair tax system works.

For clarity, this hasn’t stopped me living my life. I’m married, have a kid, and own my home. I’ve got a well paid job and will carry on cracking on. I made a choice, agreed to the terms, and am happy with my life.

But for many, many others that’s not the case. The most common living arrangement for men in their 30s like me used to be with their spouse, now it’s with their parents.

If you wanted to alleviate the cost of living for a downwardly mobile graduate class, you could do a lot worse than wiping their student debt and giving them back 9% of their pay cheque. Would stimulate the economy, address mental health issues, and probably improve the birth rate.

Our latest cohort of grads will be repaying into their 60s.

And, just a thought, maybe education isn’t a commodity. Maybe it’s a public good.

[Barnacle Boiii @RumeeAhmed]

@khalidoncrypto @iyoushetwt Prolog one daaaaagshit lang

[Barnacle Boiii @RumeeAhmed]

@DanNeidle Why tweet this when it’s behind a paywall?

[𝖓𝖎𝖓𝖊 🕯 @atlanticesque]

You can get an m4 macbook for $750

There’s no good reason to buy any other laptop

[Jack @OrdinaryInds]

UDEMY COURSES GOT ME A SENIOR ENGINEERING JOB AT APPLE
UDEMY COURSES GOT ME A SENIOR ENGINEERING JOB AT APPLE

Seriously, fuck off with this shit. Let people learn the way that works best for them.