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This is exactly how it works in the UK for purchases worth £135 or less which are shipped directly from outside the UK. The retailer has to charge UK VAT as if it were a domestic sale at the point of sale, and there is then nothing to pay at customs so no hold-up for that. It's only consignments worth over £135 where it ends up being stopped for payment at import.

On top of that, Amazon and other large online retailers also have a huge distribution and warehouse network domestically in the UK already so for higher value items mostly they import themselves to their warehouses before sale and then sales are purely domestic.


> ”It's only consignments worth over £135 where it ends up being stopped for payment at import.”

But why only under £135? This seems like an arbitrary number, and a very low limit.


The partial closure of parts of the criminal justice system during COVID led to a backlog which in turn appears to have pushed the system to a point it has been unable to properly recover from - there are some very interesting statistics here [0].

As to why that is - the explanations I've seen generally feature incompetence amongst various parts of the system and a degree of underfunding (or perhaps poorly managed funding) - including the fact that there is a shortage of criminal barristers due to poor pay. Juries themselves don't seem to be cited as a huge problem.

0. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/criminal-court-sta...


Driving too fast for the conditions (but within the limit) would usually be considered Driving without Due Care and Attention even if you don't crash (although the likelihood of anyone being around to enforce it on a deserted country road is pretty low).


That's not the purpose of that law. That's just the pretext they use to get the useful idiots to endorse it. The purpose of that laws is if you do something stupid but below the speed limit and not violating any other specific laws they've got something to nab you for.


The slide feeder is good but it's worth being aware that if you have slides mounted on cardboard (I had a lot of old family photos like this I used it for) it will often grab a couple at once. You can fix that by clipping eg a driver's licence in the right place to narrow the gap it pulls the slides through, but it will still need some manual supervision.

If you get one, have a look at VueScan on the software side - the original software needs (I think) a Windows XP virtual machine to drive it.


Yes this is all true but it works well when you know how to deal with these issues. I suspect aging slides would be an odder for any automated system.


All businesses used to get votes in local elections in England and Wales (by virtue of being ratepayers) and boroughs/cities had separate Aldermen and (Common) Councilmen. The City of London (ie the square mile, not the metropolis) retained the old system when it was abolished elsewhere (in favour of only residents voting and a single type of councillor) because the number of residents in the City then was absolutely tiny by comparison to the number of people who use the City daily (after much of the residential population left, partly due to war damage during WW2).

What changed more recently was the allocation of which individual people get to exercise those votes - "business votes" became "workers votes".

The election of the Lord Mayor and the Sheriffs is separate though. This is still done at Common Hall (and the franchise is still Liverymen), but that election is very very rarely contested.


Not sure but I think I read a while ago that they were removed due to unreliability (it's a while since I've been there myself).

It was very clever how they did the acceleration/deceleration - the "tiles" of the walkway fit together in such a way that each could slide on top of the next one, and at the two ends the tiles would gradually slide closer together (decelerating) or further apart (accelerating).


They were still there pretty recently when I was there. All escalators are a pain for maintenance though. Sure it's cheaper to force people to walk but that's not the point.


At least some of the problem is the level of costs which are spent on admin activities instead of teaching (research is supposed to be separately funded although in reality it's messy). That's where I'd start.


The admin staff are very much underpaid in comparison to academic staff, and it would be impossible for the academic staff to manage without the admin staff. Also, there is fairly little admin staff at the school level compared to academic staff. When you get to "central" staff, then yes it's pretty much 100% admin/directors/c-level/etc. staff and I don't know what they do that's not being done by the hard worked school staff.


> To work legally currently you need an NI number

More than this, employers are already required to verify right to work when they employ someone, either by physically seeing a passport or by means of an existing government system which allows them to verify visa status with an online "share code". They can be fined if they don't.

There's zero reason to believe employers which currently ignore this requirement (and likely minimum wage etc as well) will suddenly start complying because there's a "digital ID" instead.


Currently enforcement is expensive, because in order to prove that somebody is/isn't allowed to work, you need to first identify them. Without any way of identifying workers, how could the government make the case that a company is employing people illegally? Generally crime incidence is higher when chances of getting caught are low, so as long as the government cannot practically enforce these kinds of laws, employers are more likely to continue breaking them.


The companies breaking the law aren't going to be putting employees through the current or next system.

Since the Tory gov you have to supply various ID to work in (legitimate) businesses or rent from (legitimate) land lords.

The only extra kind of enforcement this enables for these cases is demanding ID cards off people where they live or work.


The physical card is sufficient to prove you have permission to drive. This code is for them to check how many points you have on your licence and what for. There used to be a paper counterpart to the card which showed this which they withdrew a few years ago.

In reality I've never been asked for the code when renting cars (outside the UK), the physical card seems to generally be sufficient for the hire companies.


I think you've missed a big part of maths - yes knowing those things is necessary. But then you also need to be able to see how a difficult or complex problem could be restated or broken down in a different way which lets you use those techniques. Sometimes this is something as trivial as using the right notation or coordinates, sometimes it's much more involved.


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