One Login is an "authentication" system, an oAuth provider with identity added on. This means you can prove your identity once (to various levels of confidence, as defined in GPG45 [1]), and use that same verification across different government services.
When people talk about a national ID system, they're often talking about some form of "authorization", i.e. proving that you are entitled to certain things.
There currently isn't a system in the UK that can definitively prove that you have access to every service. For example, even being a British citizen and having a British passport doesn't automatically entitle you to access the NHS.
No I get that but you could eg link your passport to the One Login and it'd make the UX much better for many services. For example, if you linked passport, driving license and NI/tax account, then I think for 99% of services you wouldn't need to fill anything in.
FWIW I was impressed with the DVLA driving license process, where you can type your passport number in and it pulls your photo from the passport. Very smooth. Could be even smoother if it could link automatically your passport.
Go back far enough at London was 01 and the rest 02-09. London, Birmingham, Manchester and a few others were 7 digits (041 xxx xxxx for Glasgow)
Then London changed to 081/071, then all changed to 01xxx (eg 0564 to 01564, 081 to 0181), then finally London, Southampton, Belfast and a few others mixed to 02x and 8 digits.
03 became national geographic numbers and things like 0345 and 0500 were phased out, 0800 remained free but not always with mobiles, 0845 was “local” but was basically premium, 0870 was even more, 0898 was super premium etc
But as phones took off in the 00s everyone just had 07 with 9 digits. Not sure when that will fill up, but it feels like a billion numbers is enough for now.
A trick is to know which brands you need. Marriott's Residence Inn is a big reliable one (for multiple "rooms" and kitchen/laundry) that exists almost everywhere in the US. It's a part of the whole Marriott system and often in tourism lulls in various cities has deals that keep it comparatively well priced with other Marriotts in that city and will let you use Marriott points to further defray costs.
Hilton and IHG both have similar brands, but their exact names escape me at the moments. The search keywords are "extended stay" and "apartment hotels".
Depends where you are. Maybe in expensive cities where space is at a premium. But suite hotels (with various levels of kitchenette/kitchen) in the US are not, in my experience, notably more expensive--though often have simpler facilities--than more conventional hotels. (Bedroom may not be actually a different room from living room area but is often at least somewhat separated. So may not help with kids. Stay in this type of hotel in the US a lot.)
The charity you’re raising for sets up the infrastructure to do the activity. Charities, for example, have spots in marathons which are hard to get other wise.
So if you see a friend is trying to do some personal achievement, and you think the charity is a worthwhile one to donate to; why not combine the two and help your friend achieve their goal whilst also raising money for a good cause.
I expense all my work travel, and get to keep delay repay payments for myself.
My number one trick to getting the payments: get the tightest connection possible.
For the journey I take frequently, the train arrives into the main station at 8:52pm, my connection is at 9pm; picking up just 8 minutes of delays means I'll miss the connection. The next train is at 10pm, which triggers delay repay.
Maybe I've underestimating the amount of money we are talking about but I'd much rather be where I'm headed on time than travel for free, especially on a regular basis.
Depending on when you travel, it can be very expensive. If I want to travel at peak time (arriving into London before 10am, and out before 7pm), then we're looking at around £400
When the key criteria for leadership selection is alignment with a specific ideology, and that ideology is defined by a specific person, it's almost tautological that said person will end up in charge for as long as they'd like to be.
Any elections in the People's Republic of China occur under a one-party authoritarian political system controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
It's not the same, and as a consequence of being one-party; means (like the parent suggests) they can be more long term focused, which seems to be working.
There is some low hanging fruit, like the ticketing system.
Might be possible to improve satisfaction without costly infrastructure upgrades by ensuring you have a seat for long trips and being more aggressive with discounts at quiet times.
Plenty of times I’ve been one of like 30 people on a 12 car train despite the ticket having cost £60. The train is going to run anyway, so may as well price more aggressively.
I mean there’s pretty low hanging fruit mentioned in the article. If rail strikes are frequent enough to feature in the formula, end the strikes by paying the workers well.
And the average UK citizen seems to have a huge problem with that, but seems to be completely happy with private train company executives getting paid obscene amounts and train companies paying out huge dividends when the services are so bad.
Why do people resent train drivers getting paid well?
When train workers demanded inflationary pay maintenance the highest train driver pay was splashed all over the media in an attempt to get workers to hate one another and ignore the execs and shareholders walking off with all the money.
There shouldn't be any money to walk off with whilst services are more expensive and less good than most other countries.
Creating a market for a natural monopoly like train travel should always include simulated competition against other remote geographies (ie. France), and financial penalties for losing that competition.
There was a social network called Path, that was this concept, you could only have 50 friends on the network.
It was a really nice app, but they just couldn't make it work.
I have an idea kicking round the back of my head... when I was a teenager I ran a php forum on a shared server. I shared it with my school friends, and we had about 30 regular members on it. It turned into a full blown social network, we'd have our own memes, we'd talk about who's going to the school disco, make jokes etc...
It was really nice, there was no monetization, no ads, the "feed" was chronological, no bots, or spammers.
I also used it to learn programming, reading and modifying the code to add our own features.
My idea is an open source social network. Completely customisable. It wouldn't be designed to scale up past a couple of hundred users. You'd host it yourself (on aws, heroku or similar), and would be completely in control of the instance.
You can do that already with many open source tools, disabling federation from those using activity pub and blocking new sign ups once the user number has reached you desired limit.
The reality is things do not work like that, even to maintain a small community forum you need a small but constant influx of new users as people regularly just disappear/leave as in any social group.
The real challenge is to let decent human people join without the trolls, bots and scammers.
It does seem like a confusing lineup, in terms of current gen models you've got, in ascending order of price
iPad ($349)
iPad Mini ($499)
iPad Air 11" ($599)
iPad Air 13" ($799)
iPad Pro 11" ($999)
iPad Pro 13" ($1299)
So from a pricing perspective, it does kind of make sense. The naming is all over the place though.
The iPad Mini is more expensive and better specced than the iPad. And then the Air sounds like it should be a light version of the iPad, but is actually better specced than the iPad.
My guess is that non technical people don't care about things like names and spec, but buy iPads based on pricing. And if people are buying the entry level iPad, why drop it?
When people talk about a national ID system, they're often talking about some form of "authorization", i.e. proving that you are entitled to certain things.
There currently isn't a system in the UK that can definitively prove that you have access to every service. For example, even being a British citizen and having a British passport doesn't automatically entitle you to access the NHS.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/identity-proofing...