nous

But while that is technically true how would you form a policy around it? If you can afford to pay for private school but not the VAT have it VAT free? But if you can afford the VAT then you must pay it? That would be very hard to enforce and ripe for abuse. A blanket VAT/no VAT on private schools is far easier and overall will be a positive even if some more students will drop down to the state paying for their education.

And yeah, having VAT exception rules for stuff children need to buy, like books cloths food etc is good. But why is that good? Because it applies to everyone not just a select few people rich enough to buy the best books, designer cloths and luxury foods. And public schools are already VAT free - by virtue of being free. This is not a blanket tax on all education, just the luxury side of it which only the wealthy currently partake in.

Pointing out the £7000 cost without putting it into context seems like an argument a conservative would use against this policy - even though there is an overall net gain with it taken into account. Yes we should take it into account but so should we the amount of money brought in. And that is how we decide if it is a good policy or not (and it seems like it will be).

The only real concern here would be if the government implements the tax and does not give that back to the schools - which TBH is a real concern. Though even if it is neutral - the government paying for the extra students but not giving extra overall funds I would still say it is worth while as it is a form, even a small one, of tax on the rich. So long as it does not hurt the public schools (which the government would have not pay for the extra students for that to be true - I am not sure they would go that far).

Education is a universally good thing, not unlike healthcare. Everybody should have access to as much as possible and society can afford.

Yes this is true. And how do we get everybody access to as much as possible? Provide good quality services for free to everyone. Not by encouraging a tiny fraction of of people that private schools are vastly better then public ones.

. And 2% tax on 7% of pupils in your county won’t change that or significantly impact public school funding.

VAT, which I believe this is what they where exempt from, is 20%, not 2%. It might still be a small amount overall, but why should that matter? Any more money towards public education is a benefit. I would like to see other efforts to increase that further from other areas but I am not going to be against this just because it is not a big enough difference.

So what you are saying is: abolish being rich.

Ultra super rich, yes. They don't need all that money and it could be used to better the lives of a lot more people. The wealth gap increasing does not improve the lives of people, just they few that are on top.

Because some members of society used to eat first so they are strong and defend the group. Not that today’s well fed members of society do that, but they should.

I mean yeah? That is my point. They should but they don't. So what benefit do they give us? There has been a big push for trickle down economics for a long time... but it does not work. All we have seen is an increased wealth gap and more people getting into poverty. We need to start taxing the rich and actually funnel that money to the people that need it - defend the group as a whole, which they are failing to do currently.

Fair point, would love to see the numbers on this. But it smells of trickle down economics to me. VAT is 20%, I assume this is what will be paid. And lets assume it is on the tuition that parents will now pay. Seems the average tuition paid is around £15k (rounded) for private schools. Which means about a 3k increase in the tuition. That would mean for every 3 students in a private school you could afford to send 1 to public school with room to spare. So to have a negative impact this policy would have to have a what 1 out of every 4 students to drop out of public school and return to private school? Or 25% of students give or take a lot.

But according to the article:

In October however, the ISC said some private schools reported a 4.6% drop in pupil attendance in secondary school uptake, which it attributed to parents now deciding against sending their children to private school.

Which is vastly less than 25% which should make this policy a net positive with loads of head room for my math crude back of the napkin attempt.

Thus, smells a lot like trickle down economics argument to me.

Would love to see a more concrete analysis of this.

I do use scripts for more complex things. But even then I have a few very frequent one liners in my history that are 3-4 commands chained together that I have not bothered to convert. It tends to only be when they start to have logic in them that I will write a script for. Or more one off commands that are easier to edit in a multi line editor then trying to get everything right in the shells prompt.

I used to know a guy that would put everything into aliases or scripts in order to avoid remembering them. It worked well most of the time but when something went wrong or was not covered by his scripts he would struggle a lot. He avoided learning the underlying commands and what they did and so could not adapt to things when circumstances changed even a little - which does happen quite a lot.

Which is probably another reason I don't use them. I don't like to set them up straight away while I am learning the tool and once I am comfortable with it a reverse history search is good just as good/quick as a true alias anyway and means I never forget what I am doing and can edit it on the fly easily when needed.

TBH, not quite the same. You have to know which one you want. If you don't quite or get it wrong you need to clear the line and start again. I quite like that I can reverse search and keep typing, or undo what I had typed and still see a list of the most recent things and can select from that list once I see what I want. This works for any command I have previously typed and dont need to setup specific key sequences for it - just any part of that command will find it again. Also works for complex chains of commands or pipes which I do not think aliases do work for.

That argument falls apart because state schools exist and 93% of children already attend. Which means private schools are not very popular despite their tax exempt status. So it is not encouraging many people to attend them and it is not like not going to a private school is not investing in your child's education since a free alternative that is not a complete shit hole exists. Turns out well funded public services can be a good thing and we don't need to privatize everything to see the best results.

In reality this seems more like a tax on rich parents who are the only ones that can afford expensive private schools in the first place all to hopefully better fund the free for everyone else state schools that most people already use.

And how did you, advanced Linux user, get to the stage your at now?

Incrementally over time by reading the documentation and/or manuals of the commands I need to run and looking up how others solve the problems that I need to get other ideas about things (even, periodically, for things that I already know how to do to see if anyone has found a better way to do it or if a new tool has come out that helps). And trying things out/experimenting with different ways of doing things to find out what works well or not.

I seem to be one of very few people that does not use shell aliases. I much prefer just using the reverse history search for previous commands instead. That way I don't have to remember what letter I picked for different things, just ctrl+r then partially type out the command and I can see what it will execute. Bonus that I don't need to set them up before hand and that I can edit them before executing them for those times when I need to do something slightly different.

Seems like a fair way to tax richer parent IMO. Given

Approximately 93% of children in the UK currently attend state schools, Phillipson said. Only the richest people are actually really attending private schools and most people are already priced out of them.

The money raised would go towards investing in state schools and teacher recruitment, Phillipson wrote in the Telegraph., external She added that £1.8bn would be raised a year by 2029-30.

That would be nice. But lets be real. Will the state schools see this money? Or will it be funneled to other things?

But the Independent Schools Council (ISC), which represents most of the UK's private schools, said the money the government claimed it would raise was an "estimate, not a fact".

Yeah, I can believe that as well.

"Labour's decision to tax education will mean thousands of hardworking parents will no longer be able to afford to send their children, including those with SEND [special educational needs and disabilities], to private school."

Oh no, a few thousand not quite rich enough kids will have to attend a state schools like 93% of other children. What ever will they do!?!?! Not sure about that call out for SEND specifically though... seems like fear mongering to me. Are there not already loads in state schools? Are state schools not equipped for this already? And will any of those extra funds be used to improve that situation at all?

becoming production capable and ready for prime-time use from Linux gamers to workstation customers and data centers.

I would bet on it being the boom in AI increasing demands for Nvidia GPUs in data centers which largely run Linux wanting better support. Bet they don't care at all about workstation users and Wayland support is a by product of making it work better with the kernel overall.

Huh? You seem to be arguing both ways? If the system drive is full you have problems well before you risk losing data and if the home drive is full you have problems saving data? Both of these things can happen in a split partition or single partition setup. The split partition just means you have to get the space correct or end up with long resizing options for juggling the size around. And with a single partition it gives you more places to free up space when you do run out.

Need to save a file but the disk is full? Clean out the package manager cache. You cannot do that if the partitions are separate. An update does not have enough space? Delete a steam game or clear out your downloads folder.

Ext also has a reserved space option which when there is less free space than that option it refuses writes to anything but the root user - which is meant to solve the issue of a user trying to use up to much space, there is always a reserved bit that the system can do what it needs to. Though I have never seen this configured correctly for a running system and root can blast past the default 5% on smaller drives with a simple update. Or some other process is running as root is already consuming that space.

Other partition types like btrfs have proper quotas that can be set per directory or user to prevent this type of issue as well and gives you a lot more control over the allocated space without needing to reboot into a live USB to resize the partitions.

People seem to think a split partition helps but I have generally found it just causes more problems then it solves and there are now better tools that actually solve these problems in more elegant ways.