This is because their JS implementation is a wrapper around WinRT rather than anything close to what anyone else is doing. It also isn't very JavaScripty. WinRT is a particularly odd creation.
They should do this in the UK. From observing the locals, the maternity grant (until yanked by the government) was used to buy designer gear for the mother, cigarettes and some expensive fashionable buggy for the baby (usually topped up by the baby's grandparents).
Having done a little research the grant is £500 available to parents receiving an income related benefit (including some in work benefits) [1].
It was changed a couple of years ago to apply only to first children rather than each child which I presume is the yanking referred to.
Essential stuff being forgotten. That happens there is a lot to learn quickly being a parent. Can you show that reckless spending caused necessary items not to be affordable when the error was realised?
"Expensive fashionable buggies" can easily cost more than £500, pushchairs are unsuitable for very young infants, those on low incomes are unlikely to have cars and may need a better buggy than those only nipping out of car although I'm sure there are solutions well under £500 especially if you look at 2nd hand.
I do agree that a universal box would be a good idea even though I'm not comfortable with your lazy tabloid stereotyping of "the locals". It may be that the box should be supplemented by a cash grant (of a reduced amount) for those currently entitled to the grant.
2) that those you see were even eligible for the grant (it is only for those receiving income related benefits).
Note while not the nicest area of London suburbs the Job Seekers Allowance claimant rate is only 3% [1] with another 5.5% on Incapacity Benefit or Employment and Support Allowance. The vast majority of JSA claimants have been claiming less than 6 months rather than long term. [2]
There are particularly deprived pockets though but I question your ability to identify by pure observation outside a supermarket real income sources.
Not everything needs citation in the form of a survey or scientific paper. I doubt the results of it would be honest as the people who they would be surveying have an interest in lying about the things they have purchased with it.
Some things are blatantly obvious if you peel your eyes occasionally and observe humanity.
No, but in the UK there is a wind of judgemental tabloid nastiness in this area. Lies like this are made up daily, based on a very small minority, and huge chunks of people are tarred with the same brush.
So, yeah, where is the research?
Well, there is none, because apart from tabloid smearing lies, there is none.
What is "obvious" is how nasty people are in the UK towards the poor working classes, who are under constant attack.
What I see when I stand outside ASDA are a bunch of normal people, and then some poor people who struggle to buy food and pay their rent. I don't see fancy clothes and designer pushchairs, I see old tracksuits and second-hand pushchairs, I see people who don't have jobs and feel bad about themselves.
Demand for food-banks in the UK has soared. But if only they didn't spend it on fags and wide-screen TVs they'd be able to eat.
> The problem is not specific to one traditional "class".
Except it is, because it is only a problem by the implication that signs of wealth means that insufficient money must have been used on what is needed for the infant
Firstly it's not a fantasy unless you make it one. As someone brought up on a shoestring budget in one of the worst bits of London, I can assure you that in the real world, class is entirely irrelevant and ethics and morals are. There are people earning a quarter of what I do and three times what I do living either side of me and we're all on the same page, have the same ideals, hopes and goals.
There are no classes other than in the media.
Secondly, health is more important than purchasing branded and luxury goods. That is universally accepted as to shortcut ones health is to cause harm and the "golden rule" backs that up. To observe both signs of wealth and signs of poverty at the same time has certain obvious implications.
> I can assure you that in the real world, class is entirely irrelevant and ethics and morals are.
I believe you in your claim that ethics and morals are independent of class. But that is entirely irrelevant to the argument over the existence of classes.
> There are no classes other than in the media.
So everyone have the same economic means and same influence over their life? The owner of a factory and the worker of a factory's interests are directly aligned with each others?
> To observe both signs of wealth and signs of poverty at the same time has certain obvious implications.
I'm not quite so sure the implications are as obvious as what you claim. But that is in any case irrelevant, as individual observations are still just that.
I know the differences, probably more than you realise.
I presented a hypothesis, which you can turn into a theory by sitting outside ASDA for a bit with a clipboard and a copy of SPSS. My suggestion was that you should try it.
Your original statement was "the maternity grant (until yanked by the government) was used to buy designer gear for the mother, ..."
That it's happened at least once, I have no doubt. But I think you mean to use the phrase "was used to buy" to mean that it happens often enough to base a policy decision upon.
The useful questions are "how often does it happen?" and more importantly "did yanking the policy lead to overall improved infant mortality rates?"
Those cannot be answered by "sitting outside ASDA [in Feltham or Hounslow] for a bit." As an extreme example, even if 100% of the people in those two places immediately pop into an off-license, use the money to buy liquor, walk outside, and pour it down the drain, you would need to see if that pattern is the same across the country.
In this extreme example, it might be that 0% of the rest of the country misuses their funds. There are 254,00 people in the London Borough of Hounslow. There are 62 million people in the United Kingdom. If no one else misused those funds, then an overall misuse rate of 0.4% across the entire country is rather good, and the appropriate policy decision would be to understand what is special about Hounslow and how that one region might be improved.
Thus, doing as you suggest would not provide sufficient information to establish an answer for my first question, much less my second.
While you write "Some things are blatantly obvious if you peel your eyes occasionally and observe humanity.", it's very hard to "peel your eyes" and see things when you aren't there.
Others in this topic's comment page made observations to the contrary. Thus a discussion can go no further without more information. That's why you were asked for "citation referencing these problems."
You responded with an extreme, which was disingenuous, I agree.
In any case, any Hofstader fan knows what you mean now. Thank you for confirming that you agree that there is no meaningful basis for your opinion that the UK government should change its aid policies, and that your personal observations of the matter are not relevant.
Then you should know that your hypothesis remains unsupported by any data until that is done, and that it's not the job of people who doubt your hypothesis to do so.
Apart from that, the location itself would introduce a bias, and I'm curious how exactly you would recognize women in the process of spending the maternity grant.
Yes it is unsupported. I admit that. But it's clearly observable. I'm sure many people here observe it regularly.
You specify the problem the wrong way around.
The women got pregnant because the maternity grant was offered as is a cosy council house and a career of being pregnant. That's how it works here.
When you have three children like myself you spend a lot of time around parents and maternity units and the general consensus of the particular social stereotype is that a baby is a meal ticket and the £500 would go nicely on some Uggs and enough Silk Cut to get you through the first 9 months after it's born.
You can see the results of the maternity grant spending at ASDA which is basically the decked out in designer brand children being pushed around in their expensive buggy but the mother is buying £50 worth of cigarettes and her other three children are consigned to economy grade processed meat wrapped in breadcrumbs and some reconstituted potato product and some panda pops as their entire diet.
It's not down to poverty: just selfish idiocy, apathy and a complete lack of morals and ethics.
Sorry, but you are simply trotting out right wing UK tabloid lies. Please stop it. As a Brit, I find you and your lies crass and offensive. You see what you chose to see, and assume it applies to all. Mean while, you are Mr Perfect, right?
You and your attitude disgust me.
Sorry, HN, this is the first time I have had to post here like this. But I cannot let this "person" get away with such garbage. Not here.
I try to live a life which is entirely ethical and I treat people with respect where earned. I will not be an apologist though and if I find something morally reprehensible I will exercise my right to mention it as you are exercising your right to criticise (which I accept).
Your comment by nature is to demote the "right wing" which means you are playing to typical partisan political ideologies.
My using the "observable" trump card, I could claim that it is usual to hang around billionaires all day and spend the working day sailing. I've observed that first hand.
But without evidence of frequency, it is a meaningless observation that is more likely to say something about observational biases than society at large.
I'm sorry, but since your comment is entirely unsupported by a citation explaining philosophical fallacies or similar, your criticism remains unsupported, and hence it's not the job of the person you're responding to to satisfy your demand.
What a vicious circle we create by demanding citations for any claim.
1. I think things that are desirable are easy to offer citations for because there is a motivation to promote the desirable.
2. Conversely, things that are not desirably are not researched by people who do not desire the result.
So the citation is moot if either way it is biased. If you ever read any medical papers, they are a fine example. Look at the efficacy of Seroxat/Paroxetine for a fine example. GSK papers = utterly wonder drug. Independent researchers = suicide pills.
Which is where we stand on everything more complicated than basic scientific issues.
Applying that to my point, there is nothing citable as the result is probably not politically desirable.
Really? In "most cases"? My wife and I, and all our friends who have kids (which is the majority of our friendship circle now) used the baby bonus(es) to buy, you know, stuff for our babies. Like clothes, sleeping gear, safety stuff for round the house, prams (one for the first and a dual P&T when the second came along ... both off gumtree). We used it to pay for the ridiculously high electricity bill caused by having a heater running all the time to keep the temperature optimal so our baby would sleep properly in our shitty rental house in winter. We used it to pay for proper car seats, to have those seats properly installed, to install a metal grate so crap doesn't fly from the back of the car into our children's faces when we stop suddenly.
Whilst there were some pretty high profile cases of misuse (especially when it was given as a lump sum payment when it was first introduced as pork barrelling measure to gain ground amongst "Howard's Battlers") I think your claim that it was misused in "most cases" only goes to show that you don't have kids.
In Portugal, it's the same for most 'grants'. The day after they are payed, there are more drunks in the streets (Wife works in an ambulance, calls for drunk people laying in the floor are 3-4 times more in the days following pay than in the rest of the month)
It took me 9 months and 45 calls to support to get a relatively simple regression in IE9/ClickOnce fixed and all we got was a fucking registry fix that we now have to ship to 2000 clients.
Basically they broke ClickOnce in IE9 for launching via scripts due to the new download prompting stuff.
Neither the framework team or IE team wanted to take responsibility leaving my poor support rep to reverse engineer both products.
To be honest I dragged a 1.5MLOC .Net 1.1 Web Forms and SQL 2000 application up to 4.0 and SQL 2008 R2 last year.
It wasn't that much of a problem. It took about 3 days and most of that was fixing deprecation warnings and porting the in house test framework to NUnit.
The real problem in the process was getting the build tooling and all the associated crap surrounding the solution up and running. This was also only because the muppets who wrote it originally put it together with sticky tape and string.
The Windows kernel is C++. From what I've seen (shared source), it's mainly C-style C++ though. I didn't see a single template or a class in my travels.
Agreed. This is similar to the generalist sysadmin that can step into a startup to handle all aspects of test/dev/production infrastructure. They don't need to know everything, but they know enough about how it works and can figure out what else you need.
C is easy to get right. Its also easy to get wrong.
To be honest, most holes I've seen over the years are above the level of the language and are down to the implementation or design being flawed. For example SQL injection, silly business processes, elevation flaws, bad maths etc.
Even my old Lenovo T61 had most of the parts stamped Foxconn.