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UK Student Loans – SB or BS ?

UK Student loans, and more particularly the repayment of them, is a hot topic in the news at the moment.  The student body, both past and present, are all clamouring for more favourable terms, given Reeves' recent threshold freeze, the burgeoning cost of living, and progressive rises in student fees. There are particular concerns about the affordability of the legacy (i.e. Plan 2) scheme which still applies to all loans taken out between September 2012 and August 2023. The majority of outstanding loan balances currently fall under this plan (5.8 million loans taken out under the scheme in total), and the terms of this scheme has resulted in crippling interest rates due to the built-in 3% surcharge above RPI for anyone earning over £50k. The prolonged threshold freeze will also ensure that virtually everone will end up paying off both the loan and the interest, unless they are permanently on benefits. The recent and quite prolonged spike in inflation, which resulted in interest ...
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Universal Vaccines – The Lowdown

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An interesting news item on universal vaccines appeared last week in the BBC News Health Section....  As someone with an active interest in vaccine development it certainly attracted my attention, and I think it merits wider discussion as a possible 'game changer' in our approach to preventing human disease…. The concept of a ‘universal’ vaccine has been on the minds of those in the vaccine development field for many years, but the recent announcement is the first suggestion that such an intervention might actually be possible…and effective. I should add straight away that the Stanford research project alluded to in the above linked article is still very much in its early stages and positive results have only been shown in lab mice to date. The methodology is nowhere near entering human trials yet, and this will be the only way to demonstrate whether a more universal approach to vaccination would be viable in humans. Acquiring and maintaining immunity is a lifelong proce...
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Windows 7 to Windows 10/11: To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade ?

  Microsoft (MS) withdrew support for Windows 7 way back in 2014 in line with their general policy of planned version obsolescence. By all accounts, there are still a considerable number of older pcs running Win 7; their owners have either simply not been able to afford the cost of an upgrade, or have heard of the obstacles to upgrading, and are quite reasonably reluctant to risk trying to upgrade an older pc with a new OS that it may not be able to cope with. For anyone actually brave enough to try upgrading a Win 7 pc,   MS have thrown an additional spanner in the works by no longer offering   downloads for Win 10 or Win 11 installation on pcs they detect are still running Windows 7 or XP. Users are therefore effectively   prevented by MS from using either of the more recent OS versions......the very versions that MS were originally prepared to let you upgrade to for free. This is an obvious ploy to force users to replace their old (but still serviceable) pcs wi...
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On The Perils of Pill-Boxes...

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Despite the rather arresting title, anyone expecting an exciting cautionary tale about the dangers of World War 2 fortifications faced by over-adventurous offspring from this blog article will, I’m afraid, be disappointed.... The pill-boxes I refer to are those clever little inventions many of us now use to ensure we remember to take our medications as prescribed, i.e. at the right time on the right day . Some younger readers might think this is a task that should be easy enough for anyone of sound mind without external aid; they may even go so far as to scoff at the need for something so pedestrian and 'low tech', given that the only medication they ever need is the occasional paracetamol or ibuprofen for a headache. What we need to remember, though, is that the average age of our UK population is increasing rapidly, and its general health is continuing to decline in the face of a failing health service, (which is now, sadly, forced to ration its care by availability)...
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