TBH I'm glad companies stay away from my data if they don't know how to get consent, store data securely, or even what those things mean.

Words like “reasonable” and “legitimate” in the law are not something it is safe for a layperson to reason about. They have specific meanings depending on the nuances of case law, judicial understanding of legislative intent, ideological leanings of the judge you happen to draw, etc.

No company is competent at this, some just have enough money at stake and enough to spend on lawyers that they’re willing to risk it.

The law is not like code. Thank god.

I really don't get the fear mongering over this.

Where are the examples of companies following the spirit of it getting punished regardless?

The law is clear that enforcement is primarily done via helping companies correct mistakes, not immediately handing out fines, and that's what has been happening.

And that's if you can get said legal minds to take a firm position in the first place, instead of the more usual five - six figure "maybe"

It's very much more healthy (and lawful) than just mucking on, stuffing data into limitless digital vaults and then not having a clue when all that data gets leaked.

In the good old days, paper records had the good manners to take up physical space. It was clear when you had too many records because it was a serious inconvenience to your business.

https://gdpr-fines.inplp.com/list/

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

If you know how to get a company fined, could you please share, so I can report and have action taken against companies that violate and misuse personal data?

(1) https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

That to me sounds like they're most likely to sell the data, since they don't know how to use it themselves. Better these companies have less data, not more.

As an example, let's say I want to launch a blogging platform. You need some basic tables (data) like User, Posts, Tags, etc. I'd consider this data the business needs for core business. Does there need to be some GDPR compliance thing?

Anecdotally a dumb app I built I was worried about EU visitors and just wanted to block them instead of figure it out (yea yea maybe that's not the right approach but I'm sure the sentiment is common).

Yes. GDPR is about data protection. If you want to do business in its jurisdiction, then you need to know the laws.

In general, GDPR states that you cannot store anything that isn't strictly necessary, unless you outline what you want to collect and what it will be used for in your data policies. You are not allowed to use it for anything else and once its no longer needed for the outlined use, it must be removed. Personally identifiable information has some additional rules (and its important to note that anything could become PII if combined with something else, that would, together, allow for someone to be identified).

My own (EU-based) country's data protection websites states:

1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.

2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned, or some other legitimate basis laid down by law.

3. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.

4. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority.

This means that every individual is entitled to have their personal information protected, used in a fair and legal way, and made available to them when they ask for a copy. If an individual feels that their personal information is wrong, they are entitled to ask for that information to be corrected.

Sounds like you have to learn something before starting a business.

We all really enjoyed the days when we could throw together a project and focus on the fun parts. Then came all of the other things we should worry about -- security and scaling, which are at least technical problems, but then things like privacy, moderation, and even legality.

It's fun to put up a file-sharing service; it's less fun to think about the fact that it can be used to share child porn. It's fun to have a new chat site with no filters. It's less fun when people use it to plan crime.

We don't want to face that. We want to make it Not Our Problem. And here, now privacy is another one. We used to just gather up user data and we didn't plan to sell it or lose it so why did we care?

The Internet is a lot less fun than it used to be. Or rather, we just managed to ignore a lot of the problems, usually because we weren't the ones affected by them. And so we didn't fix them ourselves, so laws got passed instead, which are never as good as what we'd have come up with ourselves.

So yeah, it's time for people to learn stuff before starting a business. That's no fun. Too bad.

It wasn't always like this, but it is now and for very good reasons.

I'm pretty sure that everyone doing our (b) is not compliant at all. The problem is that GDPR isn't being enforced very well.

It does mandate something to that effect: the user should not have to spend more effort to disagree than to agree.

The GDPR applies to all processing of all personal data regardless of whether that's pieces of paper in a filing cabinet or an entirely online social network.

Insurance? Private doctor? Youth services? Family (or any other) court? Pharmacy (in most of Europe)? Police (even in the most trivial of cases, and without judicial approval, and of course without verification or recourse)

Worse than that: the exception goes further than merely keeping data as well. Insurance company wants to change/add to your medical record? Immediately? Doctor? Court? Police? All can change your medical file, both adding and deleting (sometimes limited to what they added themselves). YOU want to change it? Not possible!

Weird since insurance company access to your data, and "the right to be forgotten" was one of the main selling points of this legislation, but since insurance companies are semi-government in almost all of Europe these days, a lot of them fall into the blanket exception.

And of course, you yourself ... cannot access this data. You cannot see it (sorry "you can, unless there's a reason not to let you see it", wanna bet there's always a reason?). For particular parts (espectially names, for example which doctor put something there about you are kept secret from you). Thankfully these institutions hate eachother, so there is some protection left because if anyone wants this data, they have to file requests in 5 different places. But there is no more legal protection against this happening.

It is now far easier, in the Netherlands, to get a serious crime stricken off your judicial record than, say, getting a doctor or pharmacist's claim that you falsely came in for a heart problem out of your medical file, say to threaten or attack them for painkillers, or even just getting the name of which doctor put that there (and of course such misleading information can kill you if you ever really do have a heart problem, and god help you if you need pain killers or ...)

GPDR protects you from Amazon offering you gift ideas for your kids' birthday if you object to that. You want a mental health stay 40 years ago to not be used in a family court case against you? THAT it makes MUCH easier. Faking such a thing and using it in a court case against you, that, too, it makes a lot easier.

Purely anecdote, but zero companies I know in Germany, Italy or France are doing this. (The ones in Switzerland are.)

There is a cosmetic fix that produces an email so there is something to show a regulator if they come knocking. The logic being investing anything more than that is a crap shoot, given nobody knows how each of the EU’s 28 data regulators will interpret the rules.

In France in particular the right to access/change/delete any and all data a company has on you was there long before GDPR (by decades) so most serious company are well used and prepped for it.

They range from start-ups to national champions, but I won't disagree with you on the poor organization of most European companies point. Everyone one re-papered existing systems to some degree of compliance. Given nobody agrees on what full compliance is, they're all right in their own ways.

With Blizzard it went a bit different. They do have online automated tool to download your own data, but with a twist: they refused to provide what they consider security risk information. They did provide a lot of data (even years old chat logs) but did not provide the information I was looking for: list of processes running on my PC, which they scan periodically, as an anti-cheating mechanism. I went further and filed a GDPR infringement complaint to the national office but it failed. Last option was to sue, but I gave up.

Both Epic and Blizzard are US based.

But from what I have seen, most of that time was spent on the legal and policy site, not on actually implementing the technical changes required to properly handle, store and delete data.

I can absolutely guarantee you that the overwhelming majority EU companies could not properly carry out a GDPR deletion request.

Spirit of the law is great. Implementation and end result is a typical bureaucracy mess, with not much benefit for end user, that functions mostly as a way for government to have a leverage over companies for non-compliance, whenever they want to put pressure on them.

People focus mostly on the cookie popups, but forcing companies to delete data after the user stopped using the service for too long, or even giving a legal stand on users requesting their data to be deleted wouldn’t have happened any other way I think.

In a lot of european countries GDPR came on top of other existing customer protection, but it helped make companies think about compliance as needed for continued business, instead of something akin to properly filing random local paperwork.

Which is why you NEVER comply: you get exemptions.

In the short term it may sound great that a lot of companies are erring on the side of caution and not using the data, when perhaps they could.

But if there's no enforcement this gives a huge competitive advantage to companies who just don't care at all. They might crowd out the former set. If such companies were not erring on the side of caution, and using some data in a natural way like they used to rather than avoiding it like the plague, they may provide competitive pressure against this dishonest set.

It is a lot like paying taxes. If I am an honest small business owner who pays my taxes but my competitors in the field are known for underhanded cash schemes that dodge tax, I'm not going to last long. I need the law to go after them or I'm done unless I start playing the same game. After dabbling in a small business compliance can be a real killer and it's my honest opinion a lot of people just play it dumb except where they know it matters, and hope for the best.

The law itself says that the default option should be to opt-out. Any site that doesn't have precisely equally prominent "agree to all" and "deny all" buttons violate the GDPR.

The problem seems to be in the complete lack of enforcement.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P

Konqueror even had "confirm cookies" as default for a while back then.

I don't know if that was the case before gdrp but we have to centraly clarify if and when we store user data, what we do with it and we have to show that we can delete user data if requested.

Not sure how far small companies go through this thow.

I know of small companies that before GDPR didn't really consider the implications of private data at all. They'd just let their SQL databases grow forever (mark as delete and have "script to actually delete the data" as a TODO that never happened), had random backups lying around on dev machines.

GDPR forced them to actual define policy, start deleting old data that was no longer relevant, strip private data from developer test sets.

It was a bit more work, and adds a small bit of friction, but these are still important things!

Forcing cooks in restaurants to wash their hands after using the bathroom also adds friction to the process but is similarly important.

That is the theory. The reality is that many small businesses don't even know the GDPR exists. Others are not complying because they think they will get away with it, and they are probably right. The rules are so ambiguous in some important ways that even those who do intend to comply might not actually be compliant and won't find out until a regulator intervenes. And all of that together means that a small business that does try hard and become compliant is at a significant competitive disadvantage.

To be clear, I am a firm believer in strong privacy protections, and my own businesses seek to be in the latter category. But the GDPR is flawed in important ways, and future regulation deviating from it is not necessarily a bad thing. Obviously it depends on whether the deviation is of the selling-out or the fixing-problems variety. Though admittedly, with the current UK government, I fear the former is much more likely.

As another example, there is a new subject right to erasure of their data, though again this isn't absolute. Several potential complications were discussed about this right. One is how to handle copies of that data in back-ups, archives or retired equipment. Another is how to deal with data held in deliberately tamper-proof formats, some of which will already have existed before this right to erasure was introduced by the GDPR.

Another important way is the compliance costs, and in particular the disproportionate costs to small businesses. For example, it cost mine many hours and thousands of pounds to understand the new requirements, take advice, and update our documentation to be compliant, yet the actual data processing we did was always very light and so wasn't affected much by the new rules either. In other words, it cost us a significant amount of time and money without really benefitting anyone.

Related to that is the enforcement mechanism and penalty regime. Regulators are all-powerful, and again, while they can impose some heavy fines on big businesses, those are meaningfully capped. In contrast, the rules allow them to impose penalties high enough to literally destroy any SME. The practical safeguards are the limited resources of regulators and the idea that those regulators are supposed to work collaboratively with data controllers and impose proportionate penalties for any compliance violations that can't be resolved, but this is awfully close to relying on personal judgement and good will, not what is actually written in law.

Then there is the reality that the GDPR doesn't actually do that much to protect against some of the biggest threats to personal privacy. For example, I would argue that two of the biggest risks in our modern "big data" world are excessive collection and processing of personal data supplied by third parties and excessive collection and processing of data by governments. The GDPR has done very little to curb either of those things. Every time I go out, I'm still potentially being listened to or photographed by countless other people's devices, which may then be uploading that data to big tech firms along with time and place information. Countless people have probably handed over my phone number or email address to big tech firms by allowing apps to scan their address book. We still see ever more intrusive monitoring of normal people's daily lives by governments, with tech like facial recognition cameras or mass surveillance of communications routinely infringing on personal privacy, and the authorities pushing for these things are entirely unrepentant and rely on the usual vague justifications about security and what a dangerous world we live in.

In short, the GDPR imposes significant burdens on data controllers without being clear about what their obligations or how to interpret key details in practice, introduces a penalty regime that hangs like a sword of Damocles over data controllers and represents an existential threat to smaller controllers, and yet at the same time hasn't actually been very effective at reducing the big risks to data subjects or increasing their control over how data about them is used and by whom.

None of these concerns is new. All were discussed extensively around the time the GDPR was introduced. But, perhaps because it was a law meant to improve individual privacy and that's a cause many of us support in principle, sometimes people get very defensive of it instead of looking at it critically and asking whether it actually achieves what it set out to do and whether any costs it introduces are proportionate to any benefits it offers.

Being filmed in public, having your data handed to third-parties, facial recognition and mass surveillance are precisely some of the issues the GDPR has addressed, and it has already had massive impact; especially on tech companies (I’ve seen it firsthand). You talk about burdens but maybe you’re just angry you wasted money on a consultant? I honestly haven’t seen the bad side of it.

We didn't hire a consultant. Those guys were charging thousands per day, and no business our size has that kind of money to spend. We did take real legal advice from a real lawyer, but the main cost was our time understanding the new rules and updating things to be seen to be compliant. I am irritated that a lot of my own time, as a founder and at that time lead technical person for a business, was wasted on a bureaucratic exercise, and likewise for other key people. That hurt us, and once again, it benefitted no-one. Not our customers. Not our staff. Not our suppliers. Literally no-one was better off because, for example, we rewrote our documents to provide information in some new format that was specified by the GDPR.

Personal irritation aside, even if you just took the cost to us and scaled it by the number of businesses in the country to estimate the economic impact, that would mean billions in lost productivity as a result of the new rules. And that's clearly an underestimate, as the costs were running into millions for a lot of large organisations. A law that is going to cause that kind of economic hit should be justified by a greater benefit to society in some way, but I just don't see that "massive impact" you mentioned. There have been a few incremental changes here and there, but there hasn't been a big change in culture.

The attitude at bigger organisations is still often about how they can tick the required boxes while continuing to do what they want with the data. Just look at Facebook's resistance to even disclosing what personal data it has and how it's been using it, for example, despite data subjects having a clear right to that information under the GDPR.

Tracking is still going on everywhere, and if anything it's getting worse as the technological capabilities increase. Ironically, it's recent actions by Apple, not the GDPR, that have started to make some significant improvements in this area for users on their platform.

Small organisations are still often ignorant of their obligations under the GDPR and not compliant anyway. Governments are still encroaching further into individual privacy all the time. Individual privacy hasn't been improved at all in these kinds of situations.

This will be my last comment on this thread, because HN tends to downvote any comments critical of the GDPR, even if based on direct personal experience of implementing it, and that doesn't encourage open and constructive discussion. But I hope the above helps to explain why I have reached a different conclusion about these issues to you.

If a model box only has "I consent" and "Learn more" buttons, then I don't consider clicking on "I consent" to mean freely given GDPR consent. Since it's the only reasonable way of viewing the website, and the GDPR doesn't permit a consent-wall, it's non-consent, and any use of my personal data following that event remains illegal.

It's not a problem with the GDPR; it's a problem with the ICO failing to put a stop to this.

That way I never gave any consent.

Nowadays I have browser plugins that do that for me, but same idea.

In any case I block cookies on all sites except for a few whitelisted ones so big "ha" to them if they think they can cookie me up. "Functional cookies" my ass. The sites work just fine without them.

Obviously, it comes from the user's machine so it can be modified before being sent to the server. Unless you're doing something custom/fancy like signing that data you shouldn't trust that it hasn't been tampered with.

GDPR regulates, among other things, how information is stored and deleted on servers. I have worked at multiple companies in both Europe and the US who take this very seriously and has definitely altered their practices based on this.

For example, pre-GDPR, we would "mark as deleted" but not delete. Now we delete.

GDPR covers way more requirements regarding data management. You need complete control over the lifecycle of sensitive data, exhaustive documentation of data transformations, you have concrete obligations regarding disclosure of incidents, data removal, limitations of for what data is used, user consent management, and the obligation to have people personally liable (which is big, just look at AML regulations to see the effect when not only the fuzzy concept of "the company" is liable).

“Storing data securely” and “getting consent” are both wildly different from full compliance with the onerous requirements of GDPR. You can do both of these things in absolute good faith and still be in violation. Unless you have a team of legal scholars working for you, odds are that you are in violation of at least one provision of this massive, unwieldy legislation - no matter how respective of user privacy you are.

That is why the UK is abandoning it. GDPR, as written, is a business-killing mess.

GDPR has been in place for years, which businesses has it killed?

Do you have an example of a company that you consider was not doing anything wrong in your personal opinion but still got a GDPR fine?

Does anyone else?

American-like but with no negotiating leverage and having burned all the bridges to the other economic unions.

This comment seems to be borne out spite more than any kind of logic.

- The EU exit was, among other things, accused of being a way to relax regulation and legislation to degrade product standards to a US-like level. Chlorinated chicken was a big item on everyone's discussion agenda a while back. This is now evidently happening.

- The government is severely underfunding the NHS, despite paying it lip service. Some accuse the government of doing this as a form of sabotage, so that the service quality degrades and the private sector can swoop in as the saviour. This is controversial because:

a) Brits are very proud of the NHS as a nation (or at least that's the dominant narrative in my news bubble)

b) The privatisation of British rail has been a disaster - ticket prices have skyrocketed, and service quality took a nosedive in some areas.

Train company profits count for about 2% of the total cost of the ticket, and (pre covid) the network carried more than twice as many passengers as it was under BR - nearly 2 billion journeys a year vs a steady 800m in the 70s through 90s. in terms of distance, pax-km

1970 36b 1980 35b 1990 40b 1997 42b (end of BR) 2010 64b 2018 81b

Since 1997 that's a 90% increase.

France has increased 40% since 1997, Germany by 60%.

Fares have increased, but this is a reflection of the cost shifting to the passenger and away from the taxpayer. In 2009/10, franchised train operating companies were paid £275m to run the services (and another £3b was spent on the network those trains run on)

By 2015-2016 that operating subsidy had gone, and instead the TOCs paid £1.2b/year to operate their trains (some areas like Northern and West Midlands were still subsidised, but South West trains and Southern were paying their operating dues and paying for the tracks they run on)

It doesn't make sense to justifiably complain about overcrowdning (high demand) on one hand, but complain about high prices on the other. There is competition to rail if the price was too high -- driving, coaches, flying, not traveling, but the fare is obviously at the right level to result in record levels of travel and relatively low subsidy.

https://fullfact.org/economy/how-much-does-government-subsid...

Government subsidies have tripled since privatisation and fares have risen by 20% after inflation.

That doesn't seem like a win for efficiency. And of course it's the customer who bears the cost - which aren't just economic, but also social, because good public infrastructure reliably offers many-multiple ROI for economic activity in general.

And the question remains - how would BR have fared (ha...) with those generous subsidy levels instead of the very constrained resources it was forced to operate with?

Not only has privatisation been very expensive and poor value in real terms, it also destroyed one of the UK's biggest engineering employers and R&D development cultures.

The HS125 is still one of the most popular trains today. Experimental APT tilting technology was given away to European companies and then sold back to the UK in the form of foreign-built tiling trains.

Those could easily have been designed and built in the UK. There were also losses in signalling research - essential for maximised efficiency - and in network integration.

So it absolutely does make sense to complain about overcrowding and high prices when a nationalised network would have been cheaper to run, better value, and also more advanced technologically.

Of course this ideologically unpossible. Even so. Ideologues need to explain why jobs were lost, safety was trashed, engineering and R&D skills were off-shored in addition to higher subsidies and uneconomic fares.

Note this importantly doesn't include Scotland, Wales, Merseyrail (public) or TFL (public)

Rail subsidy jumped after railtrack was replaced with nationalrail, and the legacy of decades of underfunding in rail under BR was apparent. That underfunding is obviously going to happen under a tory government interested in cutting short term costs. You can see that as of 2015 subsidy per passenger mile was about the same as it was in the 80s and 90s[0]

Rail subsidy is split into two parts

1) Track costs 2) Service costs

Your figures are including major capital expenditure - specifically HS2 and Crossrail, so not really comparable with subsidies in the 70s and 80s when there weren't massive capital programmes and expansion.

I'm less concerned about track maintenence costs or track capital costs -- that's like the government paying for road maintenance or new motorways - it's good. It's the service subsidies that interest me. Basicalyl how much is the taxpayer using to subsidise rail travellers (who tend to have higher income and higher wealth than average), and during the 6 years I have data on, those dropped by £1.4 billion.

Remember that under BR there were competing sectors - intercity, regional railways, network southeast, all of which were shit. Now there are competing franchisees, some of which are shit, but we often get a choice (Virgin vs Chiltern vs London Midland for London-Birmingham, XC vs TFW for Crewe-Bristol, etc. This means more choice and cheaper fares for me, the passenger).

In 2015/16 the franchise "GTR (Thameslink etc)" pays £278m for the privilige of running trains through central London. Meanwhile Northern, which have very few routes that pay their way, get paid £122m from central government. You could argue that Grant Shapps would be better running these services, I'm not convinced.

Effectively Brighton->London commuters are subsidising rural travellers in Yorkshire. You could argue this shouldn't happen, and those commuting into London for high paying jobs should have cheaper fares, at the expense of fewer services in the North. That's a very Thatcherite view, but that's ok, everyone's entitled to a view.

APT predated privitisation by 2 decades so I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. Virgin ordered the class 390s.

It sounds like you don't like the state of the rail industry in Britain in the 80s and 90s, which is reasonable. It's hardly the fault of privitisation didn't start until 1993 and didn't begin operation until about 1997

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

Considering that this is about the same as inflation and less than the usual annual ticket price increase which is decided in part by the government, I strongly suspect that this number is an accounting exercise more than anything else.

There's also the profits made by the trains leasing companies as many TOCs lease their rolling stock

> There is competition to rail if the price was too high -- driving, coaches, flying, not traveling

There's no real competition for most commuters around London at least. The trade-off is rather with the cost of housing.

It makes perfect sense to complain about overcrowding for that reason and because pay a lot of money for their tickets, indeed.

People commute by train because it's the least bad option and/or the only viable option. That does not mean that it's good or that there is real competition.

If the number of trips has been increasing I think that the main drivers are the concentration of jobs within London and the booming housing costs: People live further and further away and have to commute by trains.

I'm no fan of the franchise system - especially when companies like Virgin East Coast get out of the obligations if they don't make enough money, but rail is stronger now (well 2019) than it has been since before the motor car was created, and the strength coincided with the franchise system coming in.

> People commute by train because it's the least bad option and/or the only viable option. That does not mean that it's good or that there is real competition.

We haven't seen the same growth in other European countries though. And it's not just commuting into London -- long-distance travel has ballooned too - hence the need to build HS2.

In cities like Paris, public transport has huge capacity and is cheap (and in Paris employers have to pay half your season ticket).

Lower growth there does not mean that we're doing better, it means that we're starting from lower... And the UK has had a robust population growth as well.

That sounds awful - so I effectively get a paycut if I walk or ride to the office?

If you buy a season ticket (at least a monthly ticket) to commute between your home and office you send a copy to HR and they have to refund you half of it.

What seems to happen now is the manufacturers e.g. Hitachi lease the trains to TOCs complete with maintenance plans built it.

Think Eurostar was the first model of this in the Uk

Privatisation has not been perfect, but only someone who does not remember the old days of British Rail in the 1980s and 1990s would consider it a disaster. It's true that fares are high, but service levels and passenger numbers are both far above the British Rail days. (UK rail passenger numbers reached an all time record in 2019)

Prior to Covid, many of the busiest lines were operating near their capacity limits, so setting fares any lower would just cause even more severe crowding. And fares, of course, generate revenue to reinvest into expanding capacity.

In any case, UK rail operators are now de-facto nationalised due to Covid. This has been recognised by the ONS, with rail operator's debts now counted on the government balance sheet.

ONS recognises full nationalisation of the UK railways: https://www.ft.com/content/1baa6b50-47ba-416e-b172-90a77a34c...

TL;DW revenues and passenger numbers are demonstrably lower with privatization than when nationalized. Unlike other industries, the UK's franchise privatization model is not subjected to free market forces, allowing rail companies to win contracts by underbidding only to fail to meet their targets.

This isn't the vindication of privatisation you seem to think it is. Passenger numbers (and fares) are hitting records, and the operators are still using the exact same rolling stock as in 'the old days of British Rail'. Privatisation has led to massive corporate profits at the taxpayers' expense, without providing the investment the railways need.

How is it that half of the UK's private operators are subsidiaries of other countries' nationalised operators? When the East Coast Mainline was renationalised (after the franchise holder claimed it was impossible to run profitably), it jumped from the most expensive line with the least customer satisfaction to the line with the highest customer satisfaction.

The 'bad old days' of British Rail were because of persistent underfunding, not the ownership structure. The UK state spends more on railways today under a privatised system than they did when the entire system was nationalised.

https://www.bringbackbritishrail.org/

I'm not suggesting it is. I'm saying that privatisation has not been a disaster, which was the OP's claim. If privatisation was a disaster, passengers would not have flocked to the railways in record numbers.

> "the operators are still using the exact same rolling stock as in 'the old days of British Rail'"

This isn't true in the vast majority of cases. With very few exceptions (like a few remaining HSTs), you'd be hard pressed to find any train operating into London that dates back to British Rail. Many routes have been through multiple rolling stock upgrades since the BR days!

But note that rolling stock is not something that the operators have much control over anyway. Upgrades are decided/determined by the Department for Transport as part of the franchise terms. So if you do find yourself on an ancient train on some regional route, that's really the government's fault, not the operator's.

> "How is it that half of the UK's private operators are subsidiaries of other countries' nationalised operators?"

Nationalised operators tend to have low costs of capital, so can potentially bid lower for franchises than private competitors who are likely to be paying higher interest rates. They also already have management experience in running large railways, which helps to support their bids.

> "The 'bad old days' of British Rail were because of persistent underfunding, not the ownership structure."

I think this is partially true.

> "The UK state spends more on railways today under a privatised system than they did when the entire system was nationalised."

Yes, but again, passenger numbers have increased dramatically in that time. In 2019, the UK's total rail subsidy (including Network Rail spending) was 3.97p per passenger mile. That's just about as low as it's ever been since at least 1980.

Some are, some aren't - Cross Country had plenty of new rolling stock when they were Virgin owned, and GWR have replaced many of the 125s in the last 5yrs

There are a couple of other reasons:

The Lansley reforms were about increasing non-NHS provision. They mostly failed because private providers simply can't do the job for the money the NHS gets paid.

Where we see private provision (for example, specialist commissioning in mental health services, or learning disability and autism services) we see terrible standards of care. Winterborne View, Whorlton Hall, St Andrews, are all non-NHS providers. Cygnet Health have had a bunch of inadequate CQC reports.

Indeed, you seem to admit that here, when you state that you got your views of what British people believe from your "news bubble". For example you think everyone else thinks the NHS is awesome, because left-wing journalists told you that's what everyone thinks. One day you'll talk to a Brit outside of that bubble and get a real shock to discover they aren't enamoured with the NHS at all. Remember, nobody has copied the NHS model. Nobody! The rest of the EU looked at it and thought the UK was crazy to do that, they all went with far greater private sector involvement. The NHS is a socialist anachronism and plenty of people would love to move to a more standard social insurance model, but even expressing such an opinion results in nasty, vicious attacks by the left, so people quickly learn to just stay quiet about it.

Quite possibly one day there will be a referendum on this and the same sorts of people whose minds were blown by Brexit will have their minds blown a second time by the degree to which people vote against the NHS.

Likewise for rail. The UK just had a vote on that: Corbyn had very few identifiable policies but re-nationalisation of rail was one of them. Voters rejected that agenda on an a-historic scale. Again, if it ever became a topic of serious political debate like the EU did before the Brexit referendum, you'd be shocked at how little support nationalisation would end up having. Ridership was in decline for decades before privatisation. The moment they were privatised that trend went into reverse and ridership started climbing again, until it reached new records pre-COVID. Ticket prices were rising because the newly privatised railways became so popular (limited supply+growing demand=rising prices).

Regulation: Whilst the US is not a low regulation zone by international standards, the EU is even worse. I love this headline, UK leaving GDPR. Hell yes. Another brilliant move by the UK post-Brexit, the latest in a string of them. GDPR is a disastrous "law", in quotes because it barely qualifies as a law at all in the traditional sense when you read it. Laws are meant to explicitly state what they disallow but the GDPR is so vaguely worded it could be interpreted to mean almost anything. Just on basic constitutional grounds, junking it is a smart move.

But there are practical benefits too. GDPR imposes staggering costs on businesses to deliver dubious 'benefits' which approximately nobody outside of the reflexive "it's EU so it must be good" bubble actually cares about. There has been no mass migration away from US tech firms at any point, GDPR implementation changed basically nothing about the online experience and the EU's various attempts to legislate tech firms away from domestic markets just made it impossible to create local competitors. Beyond being banned from some local US newspapers and forcing yet more privacy popups everywhere, GDPR has been largely impact-free.

I would say that most people will not vote against the NHS though. They may vote to reform it or get it more money, but they will not mostly vote to get rid of it.

The NHS is an upside down version of the US healthcare system. In the UK the political system is hijacked by the population to keep doctors wages low. In the US the political system is hijacked by the healthcare industry in order to keep healthcare wages high.

Or because 87% of Britons polled said that they are very proud of it.

>you'd be shocked at how little support rail nationalisation would end up having.

56% in favor. 15% actively against. Majority support even by members of the party that was most against it.

>The NHS is a socialist anachronism

This is a popular view among investors & high net worth individuals. The US system is extraordinarily profitable as a mechanism for parasitic wealth extraction and UK based investors are not blind to this. They want some sugar too.

Nonetheless even UK right wing papers owned by those very people shy away from this view. 87% is above the threshold where they feel comfortable contradicting the popular view.

Rail nationalisation was below that threshold and the barclay brothers owned telegraph, for instance, would attack the idea with savage abandon of a rabid dog.

FWIW, I think we should keep the NHS and have it free at point of use. However, I don't really care how that service is provided - government employees, private, whatever - as long as the service is good.

Overall costs have not been going down much but various parts of the service are given to contractors who do a worse job at a higher price and take a fat cut. Richard Branson notably has done this. The PPE fiasco that caused much of the spread of COVID was largely because of this - much of it was bought and didn't arrive: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ppe-scandal-procur...

Nonetheless people's emotional impressions of the service tend to have a lag. Your Mother's cancer treatment from 9 years ago will have a much bigger effect on your impression of the institution than statistics about how well it is doing now.

Eventually it will be privatized entirely as a "fix" for the problems caused by privatization and the costs will skyrocket.

Just like the cost of my railway season ticket to London or a trip to the doctor in the US.

And let's not forget Tony Blair put in place some internal market reforms as well.

Do you have a source for this? How does it stack up against other countries? Is it possible a greater share of people were hospitalised and thus the number of infections at hospitals was higher as a result?

I believe the NHS funding and operational model is similar to that used by military veterans in the US.

They're exposed to investor dogma like yours on a daily basis from most of the investor owned media (telegraph, the mail, etc.). It isn't quite as vehement as yours because they know the limits of what their audience would accept but their owners views are broadly in line with yours.

It's a bit hard to attack an institution that cured your readerships' mother's cancer, for instance, and not lose their trust. They learned this lesson the hard way.

>For instance the left will happily imply that any criticism of the NHS (a bureaucracy) means hatred of nurses

They'll state that a below inflation pay rise does that because it does. They tried to supplant it with a weekly "clap a thon" instead. Cringeworthy.

Although, it's not strictly nurses investors and the investor backed government hate it's nursing unions, among other impediments to parasitic US-style profit driven value extraction.

> All that poll says is that people tend to answer "proud" (whatever that's interpreted to mean) when asked about institutions which they frequently interact with and are rarely exposed to any criticism of.

You just wrote above:

> One day you'll talk to a Brit outside of that bubble and get a real shock to discover they aren't enamoured with the NHS at all.

> plenty of people would love to move to a more standard social insurance model

Probably should choose one: either people have an bad opinion of NHS, or they don't.

2) left wing journalists? For what newspaper? The UK newspaper industry is dominated by right wing papers. I think international readers may get there wrong idea about it because they see the guardian online... because the guardian is free it gets shared a lot. If you want to see a typical British newspaper try the Daily Mail (Don't take this as a recommendation!)

3) The idea that the Corbyn election defeat was mostly about rail nationalisation is one of the most absurd things I have ever read.

4) The businesses I work with spent trivial sums on GDPR.

  >The NHS is a socialist anachronism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan

"Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community."

I'm rather sure your Labor party (at least Corbyn) was constantly attacking EU/Brussels and often dutch for neoliberalism.

If your political position is re-nationalisation then it's easier to do it outside the EU unless you think the Conservative party stays in power forever.

Have you ever known any government departments that don’t howl about being underfunded? The NHS is the 4th largest employer in the world, 1.3 million employees to provide healthcare to a nation of 67 million.

The Labour Party is currently claiming that NHS spending will be cut next year... because the emergency funding for the Covid situation won’t be made a permanent part of its budget!!

Yet taxpayer funding for health per head of population in the UK is lower than

France

Germany

Sweden

Switzerland

And get this -- THE USA

In 2009 - so before Obamacare came in, the US government spent $3,700 per person on healthcare. Not per person covered by medicare and military, per citizen.

The UK spent $2,700, and everyone was covered.

Brexit mostly was and remains a domestic issue which is why it's such a touchy subject on HN where there is probably a significant number of Britons commenting.

As someone from the continental Europe, this is not at all my experience, but I'm sure this depends on the specific social bubble I'm in. There are plenty of people around that had their lives complicated because of it, enough that most people I know have very strong feelings about it.

But mostly, no one cares.

The barbarians are good, loyal and brave. They don't spend their time with cultural frivolities like theater, bathing and running a shop.

Note that it's morning in Europe, and as such there will be lots of British/European people around, for whom Brexit is a bigger deal.

"I think it's hilarious that Britain will fail. Who agrees?" is not really what I consider a good seed comment. It's fine to think Britain will fail, but at least provide something for people to discuss with you.

#2 The UK has departed from the trading bloc it does 60% of its trade with. It desperately needs new trade deals outside of it. Since America is the biggest economic bloc outside of Europe and because they're big and we are small they have the leverage and that means we start abiding by their rules.

#3 There were plans leaked on how this would be done with the NHS (e.g. deliberately hamstringing the NHS's ability to negotiate drug prices). They kept them secret from the public.

To be frank, your comment seems borne out of a kind of appeal to moderation rather than particular knowledge of UK domestic politics.

Nonetheless you can measure each country's contribution to the Iraq War as a rough proxy for how much they supplicate. The UK contributed by far the most of the three while Canada's involvement was minimal.

For as long as I can remember, the Irish government has been quite deferential towards the US, e.g., allowing the use of Irish airports (mostly Shannon, a civilian airport – but also Casement Aeorodome, the headquarter of the Irish Aer Corps) by US military to carry troops, weapons and – quite possibly (aircraft were never inspected) – victims of “extraordinary rendition”. Every year, our Taoisigh (prime ministers) are always eager to have a photo opportunity with the US president on St. Patrick’s day.

I’m guessing that this is mostly to attract Foreign direct investment into Ireland from US multi-national corporations as can be seen by our notably low rate of corporation tax – and the government’s unwillingness to accept the tax income that the EU considers to be owed to us by Apple. Neo-liberalism has been the dominant political ideology over the past few decades with one former Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) famously declaring that Ireland was (ideologically) closer to Boston than Berlin. This dominance left Ireland particularly vulnerable when the 2008 financial crisis eventually hit us – without the widely touted “soft landing”.

However, the relationship isn’t all bad: a number of US administrations – particularly Bill Clinton’s – helped to bring about the end of armed conflict in Northern Ireland. That was probably the most important political achievement in the recent history of Britain and Ireland (one that Brexiteers, sadly, don’t seem to care about or have forgotten about).

Ireland is officially a neutral country but, as you correctly point out, has a long history of allowing the US to use Shannon as a de facto US Airbase. And, as you also correctly point out, has almost built its entire economy in recent years on providing tax incentives and other bribes for US mega-corporations to set up [nominal] HQ there. The phrases "House of Cards" and "They don't love you back" immediately spring to mind.

That unfortunately means sending kids to die in Vietnam.

(In my mind: I am just a person on planet Earth, trying to get from position A to position B, less than 5 metres away).

Having now lived in the UK and Netherlands for over 10 years, I feel this would never happen here. I would expect this in the US though (so I rarely jaywalk on the few times I have been there).

I tell this anecdote as an example to my friends when I try to describe how Australia has a mix of influences from both Europe and the US.

I remember when there was a law who passed thru in Australia where every small company could fire anyone on the day (it wasn't the case before, i think there was a 3 month period or something).

The law passed and the only comments I could get from colleague at that time (not from you dan ;)) was "humm okay then"

In france there would be riots for months and years if such law passed.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it does seem unusually French.

From what I can tell the workers rights situation in France really does dissuade some companies from setting up there.

I think there would be a lot of noise in the press about it here, but I don't think riots in the streets would be part of it!

It wouldn't happen in the UK because jaywalking is not a crime in UK.

Quiet Australians accept authority moreso than UK folk.

This is so far from my stereotype of Aussies that I feel sure it must be a troll, designed to bring out a legion of shirtless, shrimp-barbecuing cobbers, turning the air blue with their feelings about authority.

It's definitely true. Australia loves the smack of firm government and is quietly very, very authoritarian.

There's an Aussie term "Wowsers" [0] which is fascinating, as there is no British equivalent term. It often feels like the Wowsers and the Larrikins [1] are fighting an endless battle for Australia's soul. The Wowsers always win.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wowser [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrikin

* Lockout laws

* Jaywalking laws

* Weaker environmental protests than UK, despite Aus lagging the rest of the world on environmentalism.

* Mandatory helmet laws.

* Illegal to perform DIY electrics, e.g. change a plug.

* International travel currently banned. To leave Australia at the moment would require either exemption, or I relinquish citizenship.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Cronulla_riots was the last riot involving shirtless shrimp barbecuing cobbers. Not a proud moment.

??

As someone moving to Australia in a few months, I feel like this is something I ought to know about...

> International travel currently banned.

This is the same in many countries, including the UK right now.

Arduino is fine.

> This is the same in many countries, including the UK right now.

Yes, true in UK during the past 1-2 months of national lockdown?

Aus's has been the case for 12 months.

Current lockdown started on the 4th of Jan, and the travel restrictions came in then. We also had lockdown part 2 back in November, for the whole of November, lockdown part 1 from April-June last year, and various degrees of lockdown in between with regional variations...

I've lived in Aus before, and I agree it's great for many reasons, am looking forward to being back.

On the electrical thing, I know there are some restrictions on what you can do in the UK - putting in new circuits, adding new lighting circuits etc. I've pushed the boundaries a bit here AFAICT by fixing a lighting circuit* and swapping a few single sockets for doubles. Other work like putting cat 6 in the walls I did myself without a thought. Looks like I need to take a look at the regs.

( * the light switch in our bedroom somehow flicked between "one bulb on" and "two bulbs in series", with no off setting )

(oh wow, you're right, I can't change a light fitting, or even legally change a plug from UK -> Aus without breaking the law. Will have to buy new cables where I can, maybe change one or two plugs before I leave!)

> This is the same in many countries, including the UK right now.

It isn't really. Many countries barred non-resident non-citizens from entering but only a couple went to the extent of attempting to prohibit their own citizens from leaving. The latter restriction is far more draconian.

OK then, but the UK is currently one of those places. Without good reason it's currently prohibited.

ANd I honestly don't have a problem with it, we're in the midst of a pandemic. :shrug:

By all means, protect your own country by preventing people from going in, but people should be free to leave to a different place with more relaxed rules at their own risk.

Preventing your citizens from coming back is worse.

I think what happens is they just get told one day to target it, when they'll stand around and catch people, otherwise they just don't care unless they take a personal dislike to you. I have heard of times they'll descend on Sydney CBD intersections like this in mobs to send a message. The rest of the time, jaywalking is generally very casually done here and not really a big deal like in some US movies.

Weird, as I met a dutch woman in Australia, from Maastricht, who was deathly afraid of crossing the road at the wrong time because where she was from she could get in trouble for that.

Whereas I lived in WA for a couple of years and never saw anything like it.

You speak in the past tense but this hasn’t actually happened and shows no signs of happening in terms of banks relocating jobs and capital. If anything London is getting stronger.

Let’s hope that the NHS gets properly funded and doesn’t get privatised. Because the US vaccination rollout is a shambles.

Japan: You guys have vaccines?

In all honesty, this statement is fairly close to being hilariously wrong. The US vaccinates more people per day than any other country in the world. The reason why the UK has a higher per-capita vaccination rate is A) there's less of you to vaccinate, and B) the UK isn't doing two doses. The former makes the rollout easier - there are countries like Israel where they're close to vaccine herd immunity as they simply needed fewer doses. The latter is a calculated risk only somewhat supported by the available medical data. I don't expect every country to adopt First Dose First, especially if they've already given two doses to high-risk populations that would benefit from getting half their protection sooner.

Trust me, there's plenty of other things you can harangue the US about all day - vaccines aren't one of them.

I trust "the math" that shows a better population outcome there, even though individuals will have higher risk profiles this way.

(I'm aware that all sounds quite America-like already)

The basic premise of the "it's an establishment stitch up" argument is that Britain will be weaker and poorer, but the establishment will end up with a much, much bigger slice of the smaller pie such that they gain overall. It's not clear to me how that's supposed to work though. How is this pie-grab supposed to work as the pie itself shrinks? Some people might manage to pull it off, but the whole establishment class as a group?

Anyway, this whole premise flies in the face of who we know voted overwhelmingly for Brexit - ordinary British voters, many of them up north and from working backgrounds - even as the actual political parties, majority of MPs and most business leaders were arguing against it. The evidence for an establishment stitch up rests on a few very specific data points, like the fact that Jacob Reese Mog and some of Nigel Farage's hedge fund friends have already and will continue to do quite well out of it. They're hardly "The Establishment" as a whole though. They're just some of the people I was talking about trading on volatility, and hardly representative of the financial sector as a whole that is getting screwed over by losing passporting.

The vast majority of the city and other business leaders where asleep at the wheel - what they should have done is had a quiet word with Harry Peirce (MI5) at the club about these dangerous subversives.

I have always wondered how true this is. It is certainly a common claim, but anecdotally I know several small business owners who I am fairly sure voted Leave because they didn't agree with EU-style regulation such as the subject of today's discussion. And this is in the Cambridge area, which overall was literally the most pro-Remain place in the entire country. Most of those people did not talk much about their views on Brexit in public because of the peer pressure, which I think was unfortunate. Even if few minds might have been changed in either direction, it would have been better for the issues to have been properly debated.

This is false, because every time it was presented for a vote Leave won. If the majority were Remain, Brexit would necessarily not have happened.

As for the alleged ordinary voters, what did they want out of it and what are they actually getting out of it?

The Conservatives have a majority and are there any Remainers left in that party - I thought most of them had been purged before the last election?

My MP still has posts on her blog about how ardently pro EU she was and how she believed staying in the EU was the best idea. Not long after the referendum and May coming in, she was fully behind Brexit and ready to do whatever it takes. A lot of Tory MPs will just go with the prevailing wind on everything and this is also how they stay in power because being progressive is not a vote winner in a broadly (small c) conservative country.

And the ones that didn't were purged

Interesting guy, my opinion of him changed (for the better) when I found out he presented a regular Jazz show on the radio.

I'm really not sure about that. I agree that may be the case with some of those ruling individuals. My impression is that Johnson doesn't believe in anything, except his personal interest and profit.

Others in that cabinet, however, really appear to be true believers.

> Others in that cabinet, however, really appear to be true believers.

My impression is that they all have those same beliefs - their personal interest and profit.

(Clarification: I'm exaggerating for rhetorical effect. The UK won't become impoverished or really stop being an advanced-economy, but it's still going to be far poorer (in a total GDP and PPP sense) than it would be had this whole Brexit business never happened.

Debatable. But even if the EU was - or was not - a tightly integrated federated state, I'm far more concerned about the UK withdrawing itself from the world's largest free trade bloc. I see it heading towards either economic protectionism (bad in the long-term) or getting into a race-to-the-bottom (potentially even worse).

That's a strange thing to say. Globalisation is usually criticized as a race to the bottom. The opposite of that is protectionism, which you say is bad. So which one are you in favour of?

Take the UK for example: at the time of its accession to the EU it had a sizeable manufacturing and mining economy. Globalisation directly led to those factories and mines closing, but being in the EU meant the UK could specialise in emerging sectors and immediately export to the rest of the EU for free (e.g. service-sector, information economy, banking, finance, media, etc).

Globalisation and economic-interdependence is also the main driver for world-peace. I’d rather be unemployed because someone in France does my job but cheaper than be fighting in a war against France for some sense of “national pride”.

Globalisation needs a friendlier face, yes. And we need better ways of managing the local negative effects, like better unemployment income for plant closures - but I don’t believe the sentimental negatives in any way outweigh the long-term benefits.

A bit like a supercritical fluid, where transition between liquid and gas occurs spontaneously.