The cost of family immigration to the UK

I had mentioned our family visa fees. To give a clearer idea of how much the process costs to bring a family member to settle here in the UK, the full route from initial application to citizenship costs well over £8k in fees and well over £5k for NHS access during that period. That's per person, so tripled for R. and two kids. We get a bit of a discount because R.'s youngest is under eighteen but we're still looking on the order of £40k in total, and that's without legal fees which, if we were using a solicitor's team for the process, would probably increase it by half again. Of course, it doesn't cost the government anything like that much to process the applications, the equivalent process in the US is very much cheaper. Still, it strikes me that ability to pay the fees at all should be sufficient evidence of ability to support ourselves without resorting to public funds.

Health and jobs

My weight remains much higher than it should be, indeed much higher than it was when I lived in Eastern Tennessee, but I am grateful that it at least seems to be remaining stable. In time, as I improve my diet and exercise, it may thus drift back downward. Also, on a health note, we just got our influenza vaccinations, paid for by the family medical coverage from my employer, Addepar. Somebody from Spire Global reached out to me to see if I'd like to work on a project there but, while I'd love to be working locally in Rust on space systems, they pay less and don't appear from the outside to be as pleasant a place to work at this time. With Addepar, at least I am getting to learn a little of complex financial instruments which is differently interesting.

My work is sometimes entertaining in further overloading the acronyms in my head. Recent examples include:

acronym	what I first thought	what it meant
AMA	against medical advice	ask me anything
PTSD	post-traumatic stress disorder	position time-series data
UVF	Ulster Volunteer Force*	unit verification failure†

^*I was born into 1970s Britain, the Troubles were in the news
^†for instance, how much stock someone owns today should be what they owned yesterday plus buys less sells, we check that's so