Team work

Back in 2020 or so, we had an online meeting with various people involved with adult social care in Devon. A meeting which worked well enough, but which was a bit creaky.

Then yesterday, I had an online meeting powered by Microsoft Teams delivered through something called MyChart, my secure online health connection. This was a huge improvement. I had to do little more than click on a link that someone had sent me and off we went. There was a modest amount of clicking and waiting involved, but it was all well within my capabilities. I was very impressed with it all.

I was told later that Microsoft Teams is an integral part of the office world these days, to the point where it is included with my bundle from Microsoft. Clicking on it directly from my laptop resulted in a blank window popping up, but going in through Bing looks (snapped above) much more promising and, over the weeks to come, I shall try to fit in a bit of learning, if only to see what it is all about.

What is not so clever, was that I also learned later that our House of Lords, following the positive vote in the Commons, have raised more than 1,000 amendments to the Assisted Dying Bill. Leaving aside the merits of what to me is a long overdue reform, what sort of a country are we that this sort of procedural nonsense is the way forward? A sensible way to conduct debate?

From where I jump to the even bigger nonsense whereby the government of the day cannot bring itself to tell the electorate that the central costs of running this country have gone up and that income tax is going to have to be increased in consequence. Less money for foreign holidays and more money for things like health and defence. Instead, it is going for a plethora of fiddly tax increases at the margins, one of which, it seems, is a business rates hit on supermarkets, which will result in them increasing prices by a corresponding amount. A rather regressive form of taxation, hitting the less well off, for whom shopping in supermarkets accounts for a large proportion of their spending. And to think that the government of the day is the party who looks after ordinary people. 

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/dying-decision-day.html.

Reference 2: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3774.

Reference 3: https://www.dignityindying.org.uk/.