It seems ridiculous to me that in the same time period that the threshold has remained fixed (£12,570 since April 2021), the minimum wage has risen from £8.36 to £12.71 per hour; an increase of 52%.

That means in 2021 the minimum wage was £16,051.20 per annum, leaving people paying tax on £3,481.20 - or giving back £696.24 from their "minimum" wage.

But now the minimum wage is  £23,386.40, but people are paying tax on £10,816.40, or giving back £2,163.28 from their so called "minimum" wage.

So although tax remains at 20%, the "net" minimum wage after tax has gone from £8.34 an hour to just £11.75.

Tax is still at 20%...but people on minimum wage have gone from paying are paying just £0.38 tax per hour to a whopping £1.18 per hour.

Ever since "upgrading" to virgin 360 I have a permanent rolling virgin medi promotion running in a "picture in picture" window bottom right of my screen with full audio, and no way to turn it off. It is driving me insane. Either I find a way to stop it soon or the box goes out the window.

If I have a VPN on both my phone and my desktop PC, how do they interact?

If I turn on either of them, I cannot access my LAN printer...but I'm only "blocked" on that device...the other device connects fine. So am I right in thinking the "protection" is only for the device that it is running on? So when it says my network is "protected" on my phone...unless I install the client on my desktop, and turn it on, it's not really the wi-fi that's protected, it's just that phone?

Hope someone can confirm/deny/clarify.

Got my picture taken apparently doing 37 in a 30 zone. I am certain I wasn't. Checked the calibration record associated with the notice and though it's in date (November 2025) there's no trace of "Redflex Traffic Systems Pty" that carried out the calibration (they're in Australia). There's a UK number for them in Southampton but it goes to a company called "GHP" (possibly PHP, the message isn't very clear).

Queried this with the police and got redirected to another company, Verra, in Arizona.

As I said, I'm certain I wasn't speeding, which is why I checked the calibration. Companies who calibrate speed cameras have to be accredited to ISO17025 and a NAMAS laboratory standard.

If those laboratories no longer exist (bought out?) or can't be shown to have existed, what does that mean for the reliability of the speed camera? Is this worth pursuing or not?

*I accept any advice will be non-binding and will not hold anyone responsible if I follow it and suffer as a result*

What if studies showed, beyond all question, that they prevented more abuse than they caused?

There'll never BE such a study of course, because no researcher in any field can risk causing the abuse of a single child (even if they prevented the abuse of ten others).

But would you agree then that it would be better to make possession of drawn material legal?

In fact I think we'd have to go further. An individual using the drawings would have to be respected and applauded...otherwise they've got the same hate/shame/guilt spiral going on, and one point of the drawings would be to say "we can't let you fulfill your REAL desire, but we can give you a better, more respected life".

It might also encourage those who were considering offending to come forward. It could also be balanced with an increase in sentencing for real csam possession (life, no parole?). As it is now, increasing penalties has only limited deterrent effect (none, probably) which means we are left with punishment only. Which always leads to cries of "hang them"...but the price of every rope is one child's innocence, maybe their life.

We need a "zero-victim" solution.

One of my sessions with the agent produced a perfect model and the other the perfect pose. Is there any way to tell it to merge the two? I've tried using the pose doll but it seems to "snap" to unhelpful locations. I've seen comments about the "pose reference image"; is this talking about an ACTUAL image or just the image that is created from moving the pose doll?

Because originally it was just individual posts that could attract police attention.

Now it is children who can't be allowed to communicate freely.

But if you recall, it wasn't children who had to give over their image and passport or driving licence.

It's not going to stop there, because government doesn't want us talking to each other.

System Info

Processor AMD Ryzen 9 9950X 16-Core Processor 4.30 GHz

Installed RAM 96.0 GB (95.6 GB usable)

Storage 932 GB HDD WDC WD10EZEX-00BN5A0, 1.82 TB HDD WDC WD20EZRX-00D8PB0

Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti (16 GB)

System Type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Pen and touch No pen or touch input is available for this display

Edition Windows 10 Home

Version 22H2

Installed on ‎30/‎01/‎2025

OS Build 19045.6466

===============================================

For years I've been used to the top level of Windows Explorer being my windows username. Now for some reason it has "desktop" at the top level and my username within that.

An within that username folder there's also a desktop link.

In the same folder as my username folder, there's a "This PC" folder - which also has a link to desktop.

I feel like I'm going around in circles trying to fix this...can anyone help please?