https://forums.contractoruk.com/ vBulletin Forums en Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:33:55 GMT vBulletin 60 images/misc/rss.png https://forums.contractoruk.com/ https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151163-how-much.html Tue, 07 Apr 2026 07:44:32 GMT A first class stamp now costs £1.80 - an increase of 10p - while a second class letter has risen by 4p to 91p."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mj4mkk94mo

This looks like some sort of demand - price spiral. The price goes up, demand goes down, so the price goes up again to maintain margin at the reduced demand level. Meanwhile, costs go up - more addresses, fuel costs, labour costs.

I'm sure I'm not alone in now sending almost no letters; Christmas cards sent by post are a thing of the past.

Can this even survive as a service?]]> General Protagoras https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151163-how-much.html https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151160-subprime-is-back.html Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:39:51 GMT ]]> General willendure https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151160-subprime-is-back.html https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151159-monday-links-from-the-easter-bunny’s-secret-underground-lair-vol-dcccxlix.html Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:39:34 GMT It’s a sunny day, it’s a Bank Holiday - what better way is there of spending the time than reading stuff online! :) The Buffalo Raiders (https://magazine.atavist.com/2026/buffalo-raiders-vietnam-draft) - ”When the men from the Army arrived outside her house, she knew why they were there. She...

• The Buffalo Raiders - ”When the men from the Army arrived outside her house, she knew why they were there. She knew what they were going to say even as she waited for her husband to come and receive the news with her. Paul Good was killed in action outside Saigon on June 19, a few months shy of his twentieth birthday… Jim is in his eighties now, and he can’t say for certain how many government offices he broke into following his brother’s death. But it all began in Buffalo, New York.” The story of the anti-Vietnam War activists who took direct action by attacking the bureaucracy that supported the draft.
• Artemis II Tracker — Live Mission Control - ”This tracker aggregates publicly available data from NASA and JPL. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA, JPL, or the Canadian Space Agency.” Trump's cuts to NASA's funding mean that this Canadian project is your best source for realtime data about the ongoing mission around the Moon. It even has an indicator light showing whether the toilet's operational or not! Details of the data sources used can be found via the "Credits" link at the bottom
• Reversing extinction - An essay on the implications of reviving extinct species: ”Technologies of preserving and reviving organisms are already redefining the meaning of life, death, and extinction itself.”
• When Coupled Volcanoes Talk, These Researchers Listen - ”Around the world, volcanologists are following the path of magma as it travels between connected volcanoes, in an effort that could lead to improved eruption forecasts.” The volcanoes are conspiring against us!
• The Space Race’s Forgotten Theme Park - ”Preserved documents and photographs trace the rise and fall of an ambitious space-themed park born of 1960s Space Race optimism.” Misplaced optimism, it turns out: we ended up with Disney World instead
• Stewthius: The Stew's Journey - ”346 days. 427 ingredients. One legendary pot. Here's what's cooking.” Zak has been maintaining a perpetual stew for nearly a year, adding ingredients suggested by his followers on TikTok. This site is a dashboard collating live data about the stew and its evolution
• Reporting the General Strike - It's the 100th anniversary of the General Strike in May, and Warwick University Library have brought together a wealth of archive material and other resources about it: ”Read more than 550 documents relating to the 1926 General Strike, including strike bulletins, transcripts of radio broadcasts and internal reports produced by the strike co-ordinator, the Trades Union Congress.”
• Why Vampires Live Forever - Machiel Reyneke has a theory about those billionaires who seem to be obsessed with bodily fluids and longevity: ”I recently wrote about what the longevity experts don’t tell you. Since then, I’ve been thinking about why so many of the people in this space are obsessed with blood transfusions specifically. It seemed like a strange fixation — until I looked at the evidence properly. I think they’re vampires. Not metaphorically. I think the modern longevity movement is a vampire disclosure program.”
• The Year Without Sunshine - A story by Naomi Kritzer about a neighbourhood working together in the face of gradual societal collapse: ”During one of the much smaller disasters that preceded the really big disaster, I met a lot of my neighbors online. I can’t remember if we set up the WhatsApp group because of the pandemic or the civil disorder or both… When the Internet and cell phones went down, my next-door neighbor to the north, Tanesha, built a little booth in her yard out of plywood, with corkboard inside and a roof, and painted WHATSUP on the outside, so people could leave each other messages inside.”
• The Surreal World of Glen Baxter - A look back at the work of Glen Baxter, who died last week: ”For those who have the misfortune to stammer, certain words and letters can induce dread. Strategies are developed and this is how I began to circumvent the everyday trauma of trying to achieve fluency of speech… This was the world I took with me to art school, where I discovered that this fitted in perfectly with André Breton’s description of Surrealism. I was happy to discover I was not alone.”
  
  

Happy invoicing! ]]> General NickFitz https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151159-monday-links-from-the-easter-bunny’s-secret-underground-lair-vol-dcccxlix.html https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151157-boomed-at-last.html Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:00:29 GMT
Honestly thought I might have done my last full time gig but an opportunity came up through my network and it's working at a company I really like where I've done a previous gig.

3 months to begin and it's FTC for the first time ever but potential for extension/other roles/perm opportunities (which I would consider now).]]> General edison https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151157-boomed-at-last.html https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151156-carolina-reaper.html Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:44:34 GMT General NotAllThere https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151156-carolina-reaper.html https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151155-state-pension-affordability.html Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:49:56 GMT
At a discount rate of 5% (roughly the long term UK interest rate) the PV of employee contributions at state pension age will only be £170.4k. With full state pension entitlement I reckon I need to reach about 80 to break even on the employee NI payments.

Now I realise that this is a sample of one, but given that I've not included employer contributions this hardly looks unaffordable to the treasury if NI contributions had been invested. Ah, but they're not invested, they're treated as current revenue, aren't they?]]> General Protagoras https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151155-state-pension-affordability.html https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151154-premium-bond-income.html Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:39:58 GMT
Of course even 4.6% return is well below inflation. I'm reluctant to invest in stocks given volatility and have enough exposure for now.

Not many good options unless I can benefit from advanced notice of tomorrow's speech by some 'great leader' or other.
]]> General Protagoras https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151154-premium-bond-income.html https://forums.contractoruk.com/accounting-legal/151153-new-questions-on-2025-26-satr.html Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:22:26 GMT
]]> Accounting / Legal ladymuck https://forums.contractoruk.com/accounting-legal/151153-new-questions-on-2025-26-satr.html https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151152-layoff-experiences.html Wed, 01 Apr 2026 09:27:23 GMT After reading today that Oracle have laid of 30k people by 6am email I am curious about the layoffs you have experienced or witnessed. The worst I have seen was when working at (what was then) a UK supplier of news and financial information. Rumours of redundancies had been in the air for a...
The worst I have seen was when working at (what was then) a UK supplier of news and financial information. Rumours of redundancies had been in the air for a while. I was always first into the office at around 7:30am and one morning was surprised to see the department manager loitering by the door. As others started to arrive some were approached by the manager and sent to a conference room which slowly started to fill up employees everyone new were low performers or slackers. The thing is some people always arrived a lot later than others so people were kept waiting in the conference room for nearly two hours before all those who were being let go had arrived. The manager then let them have the bad news and they were escorted from the building. 30 minutes later the manager was then summoned by HR and was let go himself. We met up with the lot of them in the pub at lunchtime and they had all twigged what was happening the second they were diverted to the conference room.

I also used to work for a US bank and one of my responsibilities was maintaining the access lists to trading and risk systems for traders, sales, back office and technology. These access lists were reconciled several times a day against corporate windows credentials and discrepancies would be flagged.

We knew almost immediately when people had been let go. Sometimes you would see them answer the phone and walk off to a meeting never to return. Other times they were escorted to their desk to collect belongings with a stunned look on their face. One time someone received a call whilst on the train telling them to come back because dismissed the wrong 'John Smith'.

Personally I would rather receive a 6am text/email telling me not to bother coming in.]]> General TheDude https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151152-layoff-experiences.html https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151151-are-professional-references-pointless-now.html Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:32:10 GMT Honest question. When you finish a contract, does your reputation carry forward in any real way, or does it basically reset to zero each time? Been thinking about how broken the reference system feels. Employers give good ones to get rid of people, candidates list mates as former managers, and...
Been thinking about how broken the reference system feels. Employers give good ones to get rid of people, candidates list mates as former managers, and everyone just goes through the motions.

Curious whether you guys feel the same or if I’m missing something.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​]]> General elliotw1990 https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151151-are-professional-references-pointless-now.html https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151150-farewell-ispe-community-forum.html Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:11:38 GMT
I see that the 'Community Forum' (not much used in recent years) is now closed to new posts although apparently there's some alternative online community available.]]> General Protagoras https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151150-farewell-ispe-community-forum.html https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151149-monday-links-from-the-gap-between-teams-meetings-vol-dcccxlviii.html Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:54:26 GMT Spring continues mostly grey and dull, but this doesn’t matter of you spend all your time online instead of going outside :) A bookkeeper stole $7.6 million from her employer. How did no one notice? (https://macleans.ca/society/true-crime-fraud-theft-sherri-lamarche/) - Canadiamns, it seems,...

• A bookkeeper stole $7.6 million from her employer. How did no one notice? - Canadiamns, it seems, can be a little too trusting: ”She had her boss’s unquestioning trust—even as she pilfered millions from the Halifax real estate empire she helped him build.”
• Power Transfer to a Human during an Electric Eel’s Shocking Leap - Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water: ”Electric eels leap from the water to directly electrify threats, including humans. Even small eels impart substantial electrical power to their target.”
• How the Great Alaska Earthquake Shook Up Science - ”Sixty years ago, the largest earthquake in U.S. history shocked geologists. It’s still driving scientific discoveries today.” A lot of people apparently didn't believe in plate tectonics until this
• Evidence of a Massive Thermonuclear Explosion on Mars in the Past, The Cydonian Hypothesis, and Fermi's Paradox - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this hypothesis that life on Mars destroyed itself: ”On Mars, the nearest Earthlike planet in the cosmos, the concentration of 129Xe in the Martian atmosphere, the evidence from 80Kr abundance of intense 1014/cm2 flux over the Northern young part of Mars, and the detected pattern of excess abundance of Uranium and Thorium on Mars surface, relative to Mars meteorites, can be explained as due to two large thermonuclear explosions on Mars in the past.” This is just the abstract, but the full PDF can be accessed from the link on the right
• For particle physicists working with neutrinos, almost nothing is everything - ”The Standard Model that they have painstakingly developed to describe all of nature’s particles and forces explicitly says that neutrinos have no mass at all. Yet observations have established that neutrinos do, in fact, have a very small mass. This is an annoying and critical exception to the standard rules of physics.” The good news is that they think they'll have it all sorted out soon
• From Robert Mueller to Stringer Bell: How the Post-9/11 FBI Drove The Wire - This one came via David Simon, creator of The Wire, on Bluesky, and he confirmed that it's all essentially correct: ”Simon began pitching HBO on The Wire in June of 2001. Casting was underway by early September. Then 9/11 hit, and it appears that Simon sensed exactly what impact the terrorist attacks would have on U.S. law enforcement and, hence, his new HBO show.”
• The Graveyard That Made Me Kiss a Frog - ”A surreal field in rural Wisconsin holds hundreds of giant fiberglass molds—an accidental archive of roadside Americana where art, industry, and imagination collide.” This reminded me of the huge fibreglass dinosaur that used to live in a park on the outskirts of Milton Keynes which turned up years later in a scrapyard adjacent to the Midland Mainline near Wellingborough, looking over the fence at the passing trains
• From laboratory to mountaintop: Creating an artificial aurora in the late nineteenth century - ”There existed a tradition of mimetic experimentation in the late nineteenth century, whereby morphologists sought to scale down sublime natural phenomena to tabletop devices in the laboratory… This paper analyses a closely allied but different kind of imitation. Between 1872 and 1884, Professor Karl Selim Lemström (1838–1904) attempted to reproduce the aurora borealis in all of its complexity atop four mountains in northern Finland.” Go big or go home
• The rise and fall of IBM's 4 Pi aerospace computers: an illustrated history - Ken Shirriff on the computers that made things fly, float, and sink: ”Introduced around 1967, the System/4 Pi family was a line of compact, powerful computers designed for avionics roles. The military used these computers in everything from the F-4 fighter and B-52 bomber to submarine sonar systems and the Harpoon anti-ship missile. Other computers in the System/4 Pi family played more peaceful roles in the development of GPS and fly-by-wire flight controls. In space, System/4 Pi computers controlled Skylab, the first American space station, as well as Spacelab, the reusable laboratory flown by the Space Shuttle.”
• Railway dogs and Station cats - The animals that made the trains run on time: ”Our furry friends have been, and continue to be, a key part of the railway workforce. Sometimes they are officially recruited to carry out tasks, sometimes they choose the station as their home and livelihood.” This is Jack, who based himself at Lewes station and took trains all over the place but always managed to catch the last train home
  
  

Happy invoicing! ]]> General NickFitz https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151149-monday-links-from-the-gap-between-teams-meetings-vol-dcccxlviii.html https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151147-aws-profits.html Fri, 27 Mar 2026 09:50:22 GMT HMRC hands £473M Fujitsu migration deal to AWS

There was a time when we invested in our own infrastructure and I can't believe we've lost the skills to still do so although the government is intent on deskilling the UK. Half a billion is a lot of money for some disk space and a few servers


]]> General tazdevil https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151147-aws-profits.html https://forums.contractoruk.com/accounting-legal/151145-anyone-else-being-checked-by-magnit-for-jsl-compliance.html Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:37:47 GMT
If yes, how it going?

For me it's going slowly and I don't have great confidence that the Magnit team (who seem to be offshore) has any clue. I am compliant, but whether they will accurately assess that is a point of quite some concern for me. I don't use an umbrella, I am not an umbrella, I'm just a one-man company who operates PAYE under IR35 (chapter 8 in my case if anyone cares). My supply chain is Me -> Magnit -> Client.

Thanks!





]]> Accounting / Legal Platypus https://forums.contractoruk.com/accounting-legal/151145-anyone-else-being-checked-by-magnit-for-jsl-compliance.html https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151140-freeagent.html Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:05:47 GMT
Once she's scanned in receipts and invoices etc, does she still need the originals ??

TIA.]]> General TestMangler https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151140-freeagent.html