Posted by alexbilbie 5 hours ago
The London Evening Standard was one of the last remnants of even slightly decent local writing, and that too has now been shut down in favour of a weekly lifestyle paper called "The Standard". But there's a small number of indie publishers who are trying to fill the gap: the Manchester Mill and Liverpool Post, Bristol Cable, Oxford Clarion, and so on. London Centric is an attempt by an ex-Guardian writer to do the same for London and I hope it succeeds.
Anyway, I’ve kinda bet the farm on making proper London coverage work, so every subscriber makes a massive difference. So please do give it a go, send any London tips you want investigating (my personal WhatsApp is on the site), and if you hate it… well please tell me why on the way out of the door.
We loved to take the piss but the Evening Standard at least existed and London deserves much more quality local journalism.
I would pay for local news, even about places that I no longer live, but used to live and still have a passing interest in. But perhaps I would want to receive it as XML feed.
Even events (concerts, readings, exhibitions, screenings etc.) are typically scattered across many smaller lists or mailing lists, depending on location. For example, there is way more going on in London than what is listed by Time Out: https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/london-events-in... Local communities may have their own sites or still rely on paper flyers.
Some facts of communal interest are published in government outlets that are still mandatated in some jurisdictions.
It would be wonderful if more of "what's going on" could be made available in curated digital form, for us to use and enjoy, and also to preserve it for future generations so that they can see what was happening in our age.
Most of my local papers have moved to a subscription model, often with paywalls so I currently pay for local news. Have your local papers not?
If London made transit free, they have to find an additional £7 billion a year to cover the operating costs (most of which is mundane stuff like keeping the trains working). Total London council tax (which is the only form of tax the London mayor can control), raises about £37 billion a year. So making transit in the city free would involve increasing council tax by an additional ~20%, and council tax is a notoriously regressive tax that disproportionately impacts the poor more than anyone else.
Additionally TfL is already extremely efficient, it was audited by the previous government in an attempt to find further ammunition to discredit the London Mayor, but it seems they couldn’t find any inefficiencies worth publishing. So there isn’t much wiggle room to reduce TfL operating costs.
Regardless of how you slice it, there isn’t a practical way to provide free transit in London, and certainly removing the cost of the bureaucracy for means testing isn’t going to move the needle on the simple economic facts.
If you don't accurately measure ridership you can't accurately serve that ridership. You'll waste money on useless services and you'll waste peoples time by not creating necessary services.
The system needs to exist.
It probably doesn't need to be outsourced. We're well past the internet revolution and it's time for these core competencies to be reabsorbed by government departments. Or it's time for private companies to be held liable for their complete and total failures to serve the public.
Ideally it should just be a system that lets you scan your identification card or drivers license. If you're of the correct age it should serve as a transportation pass. Simple. Compliant. Captures useful data.
I mean its not. If it was, they would have done it.
Wealth taxes are really fucking hard to do equitably, at least at first.
For example OAPs tend to live in very expensive hosues. take rotherhithe for example one could have bought a house in the 90s for shit all, and now its worth the best part of 1.4 million.
so now you're levying a 5% tax on a pensioner, or worse still a young couple mortgaged to the fucker.
Now, but what about the super asset rich I hear you say?
Well, they'll transfer all they own into a corporation. They can't tax assets like that on business because it'll crash the economy super quick.
Thanks for that. I've always thought that wealth isn't taxed heavily because it's the wealthy that make the laws. That still may be part of it, but this surely is too.
As a side note, I'm puzzled as to where this seemingly prevalent (here, at least) sentiment of letting people ride public transport for free has suddenly come from? It makes absolutely no sense, but is being said as if it's the most obvious thing in the world!
It has been there since public transport has been a thing. Its popularity ebbs and flows with the years, because it's fundamentally very appealing: dealing with tickets and tariffs is a huge annoyance, and everyone resents it for one reason or another. "Surely there is a simpler way!"
Alas, ticketing systems seem to be the less-worst thing, a bit like representative democracy as a system of government. Free-for-all attempts never survive an economic or budgetary crisis, and tickets are the closest thing to an objective method to raise funds for a service. Maybe technology (and politics) will eventually evolve enough to develop fairer means-tested systems.
Let's say you open a corner bakery that does very well. You are making $1m/year and paying the government $200k/yr in corporation taxes. That leaves $800k/yr in the biz. A perpetuity paying $800k/yr at 5% discount rate is worth $16m (obviously this is a bad proxy for the value of a risky business, but it's a starting point).
So the government comes along and says "ok you owe us X% of this business per year". Where do you get the money for this? You can't just give the government shares. But it's a corner bakery...nobody wants to go through the headache of buying 1% in a local business. And what happens next year when business drops, and the value drops, how do you prove to the govt what it's worth? It's a minefield, and probably not legal.
I get it. People want to eat the rich. It's easier to point to other people as the problem (even if they pay 40x more proportionately in tax than someone else) instead of saying "Christ, maybe we spend too much". But the ideas to kick the can are really getting silly.
Doesn't matter if the company is based abroad either, you'll still need to supply the companies balance sheet as part of your personal tax return. Last time I checked, the Swiss economy (unsurprisingly) has not come crashing down.
The purpose of a house or apartment should be shelter for a family, not a retirement plan or an investment for a corporation.
Case in point. No one's suggesting confiscating anything, yet some people can't contain themselves at the suggestion that maybe housing policy is broken.
hard yes
> affordable off-ramp to downsize,
I mean yes, but the hidden cost is moving outside of your support network. Downsizing is often very lucrative.
Rich people get to visit Hyde Park for free.
I've no problem letting them also ride the bus for free.
Given the license tracking already going on for bridge tolls the infrastructure may already be there.
The one basic tool that does seem lacking, however, is just basic network segmentation. I could understand a single system being hacked, especially an old system that is massively complex to replace but having to shutdown multiple systems including WiFi and office networks just smells like lazy "just connect all the wires together to make my IT life slightly easier". Having air gaps with separate computers, separate networks (even vlans) etc. is probably the most cost effective way to reduce your attack surface.
This is rubbish, public-facing websites being compatible with defunct browsers is not indicative of any security issue
This is your relative tax dollars hard at work.
It’s not like they’re outsourcing to some private organisation, every single organisation is either a state organisation, or a state owned company.
>Sadiq Khan’s office and the Greater London Authority outsourced their IT services to TfL this summer, meaning they were also badly impacted, paralysing services at the top of the capital’s devolved government.
Which means TfL is the one doing other people's IT in addition to its own, not the reverse.
It is also difficult to hire because wages are generally low compared to similar roles in private industry, yet they need skilled staff to manage these complex environments. A lot of services don't get the attention they need, not just patching and upgrades but development, requirements capture and usability all kept to a minimum cost to keep the sinking ship afloat.
All these constraints also lean to a culture of poor security, JFDI, rip and replace, insufficent hardware etc... just so the business can operate on whatever computer on wheels in the shipping depot or relatively expensive to replace electronic gate system with intergration to their custom fleet management software.
Government outsourcing to another related body has its cost advantages but the many domain administrator users, the huge flat VmWare estate and the hardware well beyond warranty doesn't dissapear.
Designed to serve immediate needs but without long-term maintenance or holistic design in mind. Outsourcing amplifies the issue.
:
This is your relative tax dollars hard at work.
I think you are underestimating the gross lack of realistic investment and corresponding demoralization and qualitative decline in some public services; which latter is then used by the decision-makers who've created the situation as justification for swashbuckling "transformation" projects - advised by and given to overpriced consultants - they can put on their CVs before hopping to the next gig.
That's your tax dollars at work.
> “The vast majority of Londoners would not know this attack has happened,” the TfL commissioner told board members including mayor Sadiq Khan. Lord later added: “Because it’s been so well-managed people didn’t understand the scale and impact.”
Are these people completely delusional? They've taken away passenger's visibility to see what they were being charged for; they killed all of the open data feeds (though a few of these have just now been restored in the last couple of days). Back in September, they disrupted all of their staff's productivity by locking everybody out and forcing them to try and do their jobs without any access to technology. And.. there's still no end in sight for a restore of the contactless portal.
The way they've managed the incident and the collateral damage suggests there were not nearly enough security controls present in the first place (in terms of containing the breach). How many weeks on are we now without service restoration? For a cyberattack perpetrated by one seventeen year old?
If it was an SME who didn't do anything technical and had been caught completely unprepared, I might be more understanding.
Total failure of management and governance at TfL and the British Library (which even had a “private sector security leader” on its board of governors for a decade or more before their total shitshow of a breach last year)
But as usual, there will be no consequences.
Unless they’re hiring inexperienced high-schoolers, it’s a failure of will and competence in management. And even that would actually be a failure of managrnent.
I’m guessing - based on historic contacts with TfL - that this failure of management is probably manifest in too many meetings and intermediate products valorised over and above culture, knowledge and tech improvements.
Avoidance of outcome-based monitoring and governance, and instead a focus on “process execution” like reorgs, agonisingly-slow checkbox actions and deckchair relocations is pretty common in low-ambition, low-performance orgs. Again, you don’t get this because you’re being cheap on security people.
I recommend "repercussions" ;)
For the vast majority of people, there little to no impact day-to-day. Sure the loss of live data is annoying, but trains still turn up every 2 mins, and busses every 5-10mins during the day. Even at night, busses still turn up every 15-20mins, so checking live data doesn’t give you that much of an edge.
This is just crazy, why not make public transport as cheap as peanuts to begin with? Why does everything have to be so damn expensive? Why the heck does a monthly transport pass have to cost, let me check, around 200 pounds?, what the fricking fuck?!?! Why don't the common people in the West rise up against this perverted shit? 2400 pounds per year just to have the privilege to take the bus/metro?
Looking at the TfL website, people on benefits get 50% rate discounts; students get 30% off; pensioners and children get completely free travel. It's really quite a good system actually.