United Kingdom

Kind of a kick in the nads if you're paid less than jdocs both elsewhere in the UK, and in ROI.

Then the employer turns around and says that there is "no scope for a pay offer to be tabled for this year".

The UK is cosmopolitan because it doesn’t overthink

The chair of NatWest has claimed it is not “that difficult” to get on the property ladder, despite the number of first-time buyers with a mortgage falling to the lowest level in a decade.

“I don’t think it is that difficult at the moment,” Sir Howard Davies told the BBC.

Pressed about this assertion, he added: “You have to save, and that is the way it always used to be.”

His comments to Radio 4’s Today programme follow a report published earlier this week by Yorkshire Building Society, which found that the number of first-time buyers who bought a home with a mortgage fell to the lowest level in a decade in 2023.

The number of new cars registered in the UK has jumped by nearly 18% but electric vehicle demand is flatlining, prompting the industry to call for a VAT cut to stimulate sales.

Annual figures released by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) on Friday show 1.9m new cars were registered last year, well up on the previous year’s figure of 1.6m and the highest level since the 2.3m registrations of 2019.

The increase is a boost for the automotive industry after the pandemic led to supply chain problems and a shortage of vital computer chips that slowed production.

Across the year, 315,000 new battery electric vehicles were sold. That was 50,000 more than 2022, but the number being bought as a share of total registrations failed to grow as expected. They represented just 16.5% of the total, slightly down on last year’s 16.6%.

The leader of Britain’s police chiefs’ organisation has become the most senior serving leader to say that policing is institutionally racist, as he called for a fundamental redesign of national policies and practices to eliminate discrimination.

Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), said black people should no longer experience disproportionate use of force, and that too little progress had been made to reform policing, with some leaders slow to accept the size of the challenge.

Stephens – elected by his fellow chief constables to lead their representative body – emphasised it was his personal view that discrimination in policing operated at an “institutional level”.

Just wanted to drop a quick message in to say thank you to those who put in the news articles here... I was getting frustrated with the poor journalism across different mainstream news and really appreciate your efforts summarising everything here.

I felt like just a stat for websites like BBC news clicking up views to then guide them on what news stories to focus on publishing, and what to not publish... First world censorship at its finest. At least now I can just read the content here.

The autotldr bot also saves a lot of time from having to read extra non-value text that journalists pump in to make stories longer.

I do wonder what happens if feddituk is shutting down, hopefully this community and these news articles continue... I'd hate to have to actually go to the BBC news site again 😳

Thank you to you and all those growing Lemmy 🙏 2024... the year of everyone migrating to Lemmy.

The amount of electricity generated by the UK’s gas and coal power plants fell by 20% last year, with consumption of fossil fuels at its lowest level since 1957.

Not since Harold Macmillan was the UK prime minister and the Beatles’ John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time has the UK used less coal and gas.

The UK’s gas power plants last year generated 31% of the UK’s electricity, or 98 terawatt hours (TWh), according to a report by the industry journal Carbon Brief, while the UK’s last remaining coal plant produced enough electricity to meet just 1% of the UK’s power demand or 4TWh.

Fossil fuels were squeezed out of the electricity system by a surge in renewable energy generation combined with higher electricity imports from France and Norway and a long-term trend of falling demand.

As the Post Office (Horizon/Fujitsu) scandal is getting more coverage this week, I thought this accountancy blog (which talks about an accompanying video, for those who like video) might be of interest. I've been following this story for years but this is the first thing I've read that gets into the detail of what went wrong with the software.

The Post Office trial is one of the few cases where an in-depth examination of system failures is made public and so it’s a valuable lesson to learn from. Even simple problems like maintaining a stock balance become complex when part of a distributed system. Techniques like ACID transactions can reduce the likelihood of errors but real implementations will sometimes fail. When a system processes a large number of transactions, this small probability of failure can add up to frequent errors. I hope that the presumption that computers operate correctly is revisited, and the factors revealed by the Post Office trial are taken into account when doing so.