On 2014-04-28 08:34, Graeme Wall wrote:
On 28/04/2014 07:41, Hils wrote:
On 2014-04-26 18:47, d wrote:
On Sat, 26 Apr 2014 07:33:21 +0100
Martin Edwards wrote:
It is not widely known that, while the rest of the Civil Service is
headed by people from many universities, the Treasury is almost wholly
Oxbridge.

Doesn't surprise me. Most of the chinless wonders seem to float to
the top.

Patronage and nepotism.

I wonder if any of them actually have economics or maths degrees or its
just a swathe of useless liberal arts degrees.

It doesn't much matter, it's only a jobclub for the aristocracy's
surplus offspring. (See also banks, BBC.)

What's it like living in 1910?

Perhaps you missed the study showing that there was more social mobility
in Britain in the 12th century than there is in the 21st. Perhaps you've
missed Piketty's surprise best-seller saying much the same thing.

From a summary of Piketty's work in today's Guardian: "those who have
family fortunes are the winners, and everyone else doesn't have much of
a shot of being wealthy unless they marry into or inherit money. [...]
No one else can ever catch up."

Actually a few people can catch up, by using laws intended to protect
wealthy families: primarily property parasites and bankers.

Another recent study shows that almost all laws enacted in the US favour
very wealthy individuals and corporations. In Britain such laws have
been in place for centuries.

On 28/04/2014 09:42, Hils wrote:
On 2014-04-28 08:34, Graeme Wall wrote:
On 28/04/2014 07:41, Hils wrote:
On 2014-04-26 18:47, d wrote:
On Sat, 26 Apr 2014 07:33:21 +0100
Martin Edwards wrote:
It is not widely known that, while the rest of the Civil Service is
headed by people from many universities, the Treasury is almost wholly
Oxbridge.

Doesn't surprise me. Most of the chinless wonders seem to float to
the top.

Patronage and nepotism.

I wonder if any of them actually have economics or maths degrees or its
just a swathe of useless liberal arts degrees.

It doesn't much matter, it's only a jobclub for the aristocracy's
surplus offspring. (See also banks, BBC.)

What's it like living in 1910?

Perhaps you missed the study showing that there was more social mobility
in Britain in the 12th century than there is in the 21st.

Wasn't so much society to be mobile in back then.

Perhaps you've
missed Piketty's surprise best-seller saying much the same thing.

From a summary of Piketty's work in today's Guardian: "those who have
family fortunes are the winners, and everyone else doesn't have much of
a shot of being wealthy unless they marry into or inherit money. [...]
No one else can ever catch up."

Lovely piece of selective quoting.


Actually a few people can catch up, by using laws intended to protect
wealthy families: primarily property parasites and bankers.

Another recent study shows that almost all laws enacted in the US favour
very wealthy individuals and corporations. In Britain such laws have
been in place for centuries.


Again,lovely piece of misdirection.

--
Graeme Wall
This account not read, substitute trains for rail.
Railway Miscellany at http://www.greywall.demon.co.uk/rail

On 2014-04-28 10:45, Graeme Wall wrote:
From a summary of Piketty's work in today's Guardian: "those who have
family fortunes are the winners, and everyone else doesn't have much of
a shot of being wealthy unless they marry into or inherit money. [...]
No one else can ever catch up."

Lovely piece of selective quoting.

I'm happy for interested readers to read the sources and make their own
conclusions, but here's a snippet from Piketty himself:

“It’s very difficult to make a democratic system work when you have such
extreme inequality” in income, he said, “and such extreme inequality in
terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and
information. One of the big lessons of the 20th century is that we don’t
need 19th-century inequality to grow.” But that’s just where the
capitalist world is heading again, he concludes. [...]

He favors a progressive global tax on real wealth (minus debt), with the
proceeds not handed to inefficient governments but redistributed to
those with less capital. “We just want a way to share the tax burden
that is fair and practical,” he said." [1]

[1]
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/bu...karl-marx.html

On 28/04/2014 10:56, Hils wrote:
On 2014-04-28 10:45, Graeme Wall wrote:
From a summary of Piketty's work in today's Guardian: "those who have
family fortunes are the winners, and everyone else doesn't have much of
a shot of being wealthy unless they marry into or inherit money. [...]
No one else can ever catch up."

Lovely piece of selective quoting.

I'm happy for interested readers to read the sources and make their own
conclusions, but here's a snippet from Piketty himself:

“It’s very difficult to make a democratic system work when you have such
extreme inequality” in income, he said, “and such extreme inequality in
terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and
information. One of the big lessons of the 20th century is that we don’t
need 19th-century inequality to grow.” But that’s just where the
capitalist world is heading again, he concludes. [...]

He favors a progressive global tax on real wealth (minus debt), with the
proceeds not handed to inefficient governments but redistributed to
those with less capital. “We just want a way to share the tax burden
that is fair and practical,” he said." [1]

[1]
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/bu...karl-marx.html


You do have to realise he is primarily talking about the USA, though he
does expand to notionaly cover the "English Speaking World" That, in
itself, is something of a French construct as it should cover such major
economies as India and the Dominios. Also, to a lesser extent, African
and other Commonwealth countries. However the French regard it as
referring to the UK, USA and those bits of occupied Canada west of
Quebec. The more advanced may have heard of Australia.

--
Graeme Wall
This account not read, substitute trains for rail.
Railway Miscellany at http://www.greywall.demon.co.uk/rail

So your point is the same as mine, that it really sucks that you have to
notice these problems yourself before anything gets done?

4 issues in the entire lifetime of the Oyster scheme, 1 would have been fixed automatically if I had done nothing, one was my own fault. The other two were delays taking the journey over 2 hours.

That's far fewer issues than with paper travel cards which neeeded replacing at least once in their lifetime if not twice.

Things go wrong with any system, give me Oyster any day.

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 10:47:36AM -0500, wrote:

I think you exaggerate somewhat. The gates that tell are easy enough to with
minimal delay. Most in central London don't give out the information though.

I do not.

I've decided to use Oyster for a month to see whether it's cheaper than
a Travelcard. This morning, I made a point of checking what the gate
said at Thornton Heath.

It said, when I entered the station:

Exit

number (number)

And this was displayed very low down so I could only see it clearly if I
stood back.

--
David Cantrell | Nth greatest programmer in the world

In Victorian times, when every man wore a beard the size of a yew,
Britain ruled the world. In the early 20th century, when the beard
was trimmed to a moustache, we scraped through two world wars but
lost an empire. Today, when Mach3 Turbo multi-blades are the norm,
our national pride derives largely from beating the Swedes at
Olympic cycling.

Grow a beard. Your country needs you.

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 02:52:00PM +0100, David Walters wrote:

The older pneumatic gates should have a display on exit like the one
in http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ter-Reader.jpg

Such high contrast! So close to the eye-line! That huge text!

--
David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

I hate baby seals. They get asked to all the best clubs.

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 01:26:55AM -0500, wrote:

Go through a gate that opens in front of you and discover the touch hasn't
been registered, giving an unresolved journey. My wife got two out of two
from King's Cross to Westminster and back in 2011.

That's happened to me twice in the last coupla weeks now. The first
time, TfL seem to have needed me to phone them, the second they seem to
have magically worked it out anyway despite it being far less obvious
what I actually did:

Thu 24 Apr
19:06 touch in, Aldgate East, cost: GBP5.10
19:23 touch out, Victoria tube, refund: GBP2.95
19:25 touch in, Victoria NR, cost: GBP2.95
[no touch out]

so my touch out at Thornton Heath went missing. But my journey history
says:

19:06 - ???? Aldgate East to [No touch-out], cost: GBP5.10

Which is apparently the right amount.

So they can figure out, presumably based on my previous journeys, that I
ended up at Thornton Heath, despite there being no record of this, and
despite it being entirely possible that I got off at, say, Clapham
Junction (which would have been cheaper) or East Croydon (which would
have been more expensive). That is, they can make educated guesses about
what I actually did when their* equipment failed.

But presented with a journey history like this:

Touch in Waterloo tube
[missing touch out]
Touch in Balham NR
Touch out Thornton Heath

They can't automagically figure out what is obvious - that I changed
trains at Balham, from the Northern line to Southern. That they can
resolve one of these but not the other makes no sense.

* let me pre-empt the annoying pedants and their "wah wah wah it's
Southern's equipment, not TfL's". I don't care. It's "the Oyster
system". You know, the thing marketed at us as being a single
single payment system made of unicorns and pixie dust.

--
David Cantrell | Official London Perl Mongers Bad Influence

Sobol's Law of Telecom Utilities:
Telcos are malicious; cablecos are simply clueless.

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 07:55:11PM +0100, Richard wrote:

Then I'll add another item to my "requirements", something I thought
of today and David Cantrell mentioned: make sure that NR stations can
do basic Oyster operations.

I've been banging on about this for years. Having them only available
from shops that aren't open when you need to travel and which can't be
seen from the station (and which also can't fix problems) is just silly.

There is, I think, only one system that
can, predictably the one made by Cubic. In its last days, APTIS could
do Oyster with the right extra hardware, but most of its replacements
couldn't. Fixing an unresolved journey and undoing a journey that was
started in error are the least NR should be able to do. Alternatively
give us a smartphone app to do it!

When I put in the refund claim that started this thread I could have
done it through a browser, as long as that browser didn't use Webkit. So
you can already do it if you have a crappy smartphone. There are
probably Oystery apps that have this feature too, although the one I use
for checking my journey history doesn't have it.

--
David Cantrell | A machine for turning tea into grumpiness

Just because it is possible to do this sort of thing
in the English language doesn't mean it should be done

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 08:45:00PM +0100, Mrs. Invalid-Address wrote:

Now, when a card is rejected for any reason, there is a different bleep
and an error code is displayed ...

Bleeps that are impossible to distinguish from the constant bleeping of
the other gates nearby. Error codes that are very hard to see because
they're low contrast, low down, and may be obscured by the hand and arm
holding your card.

I'm not sure this is all the fault of Oyster ...

The user interface problems above most certainly are. You need a clear
signal that your gate, and not either of its neighbours, is saying "you
shall not pass". And even then people will still just walk into the
barriers, and then be let through by the person behind them, because
90+% of the time it works properly and so people aren't prepared to
stop, look, and only go if the gate opens.

That people seem to think that Oyster is a contactless system when in
fact you need to place the card flat on the reader for a non-negligible
time if you want to have any hope of it working reliably is, if not a
fault in the Oyster system, at least a fault in how it has been marketed
to users.

--
David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

There is no one true indentation style,
But if there were K&R would be Its Prophets.
Peace be upon Their Holy Beards.