Posts by Like a badger

Fewer than 3 in 10 register for HMRC's Making Tax Digital shake-up

Re: It's more work, more expense, marginal benefits at best

I wonder what discipline most people at HMRC trained in.

There's few accountants, few people with business experience. Most staff will be junior EO/HEO grades, who will have some knowledge but varying levels of tax training and expertise. Tax inspectors have more training and experience and tend to be SEO/Grade 7s. Some of the tax inspectors have encyclopaedic knowledge of tax, some don't. Perhaps only 5k FTE across all of HMRC who have real in depth tax expertise, and they'll be fully occupied doing tax investigations and audits.

Also, worth noting that the accountants aren't any keener on MTD than business:

https://www.tax.org.uk/mtd-out-of-control-say-tax-professionals

Admittedly dated, but nothing has changed.

Re: MTD = Making tax difficult

Isn't it five submissions? AIUI the annual return is still required as well as four quarterlies.

And for those who haven't been paying much attention, although businesses have to put up their tax details on those five submissions, MTD won't mean they're paying tax more frequently. Government still intend to collect business tax yearly in arrears. Perhaps some future chancellor will decide that SME business should pay their tax quarterly, but that isn't the plan now, so MTD is purely about giving business more homework, in the hope that tax diddlers will find that so burdensome they'll come clean and pay a lot more tax or around £800m a year by 2028 IIRC.

Not much of a business case really.

Re: MTD = Making tax difficult

Fundamentally MTD has the admitted primary intention of increasing the tax take from smaller businesses. Why expect Amazon, Microsoft or Facebook to pay their share when you can hound small companies and unincorporated traders? From HMRC's view, small businesses are all serial tax dodgers, and more frequent digital reporting will make tax avoidance and evasion far more difficult.

Part of the Labour party's core strategy of Britain taxing its way to prosperity, although to be fair, the Tories were doing the same, and were the initiators of MTD.

Britain's biggest nuclear site skips competition, hands SAP £33M to start ERP switch

Another unique ERP instance

I wonder how many ERPs are being run by central governments and their quangos? Let's not get into the horrific duplication and mess in the local government space.

OpenAI puts Stargate UK on ice, blames energy costs and red tape

Re: All for the grift.

I wasn't sure if there was a missing /s there. Net zero economic activity is certainly where these policies are heading.

Nvidia understands that gamers are their core long-term market

Gaming won't sustain the new Nvidia. Before AI and before coin mining, say 2012-15 Nvidia was a company routinely selling about $1bn of product per quarter, almost entirely to gamers. The emergence of coin miners doubled that to around $3-5bn a quarter from 2016-18, and they preferred higher spec cards, so "business" users became the bulk of GPU profits around 2017-18 (I'd guess from top level financials). Since the whole LLM malarkey kicked off, those numbers have been forgotten, with most recent quarterly revenue (per Macrotrends) of $68bn. I'd guess gamers aren't even contributing $1bn of that. There's been no decent Nvidia gaming product at the £200-300 sweet spot for five years or more, and that's specifically because at that price point the company only want to sell old tech or crippled newer cards because the business buyers will happily pay top dollar for any decent rate of FLOPS.

What Nvidia want is that AI continues to suck up processing power, and they are probably praying that when that tops out (or bursts) some other purpose emerges for GPUs. It'll become pretty ugly in the hardware sector for a few years when that happens. Jensen has zero intention of seeing his $4.5 trillion company shrinking back to shipping out GPUs to gaming nerds for $1-2bn a quarter. Time will tell if he can avoid that.

Re: All for the grift.

100% this.

The UK's incredibly restrictive planning and environment rules, and its exceptionally high business energy prices have been a known condition for decades. Nothing on that front has changed recently, and despite government promises nothing will change materially in the future. So building a data centre in the UK has never been a sane idea unless there's some other security or latency requirement that overrules the delays and costs aspects.

Although at least there's a tiny, tiny upside: Any scumbag US AI company would expect and get vast subsidies to build here, grid preference, preferential planning and the rest. Politicians eager for a press release would ensure it. So I'm pleased Altman's Folly won't be built here.

Unless our appalling and gormless government suddenly come up with some bribe to change Sam's mind. After all, there is no cure for the condition of stupidity + venality that Britain's political classes suffer from.

UK.gov's top tech jobs pay more than prime minister earns

Re: Managers win again

Those ferries don't pay for themselves, you know.

Investors are going nuclear to keep UK's AI datacenters fed

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

Having worked in the energy sector and alongside some pioneering technology projects, the main problem with long term storage isn't technical feasibility, it's economics. And there's no cutting edge research that will change the laws of economics and business finance.

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

Yes, we have strong expertise, but unfortunately the UK regulatory system is designed to stop almost anything being built quickly or at good value, and especially to screw over nuclear, with thousands of design changes required by the UK authorities on the Hinkley EPR, compared to the French version.

Separate to that, government have screwed up the electricity system by spending £400bn to date on renewables which are an appalling bedfellow for nuclear, and these are not only on long term index linked subsidies, but they get paid if they're used or not. That's not a promising environment for financing any other type of power plant. Decades of government idiocy have gifted us the most expensive electricity system in the world, and despite that it's insecure, and wholly reliant upon foreign technologies and upon imported power from France. There's plans to build a modified EPR at Sizewell (can't have any standardisation, you know), then another new design the Hualong One at Bradwell, then we have all this "lets have loads of SMRs" bollocks, and at the same time Milliband is continuing to carpet bomb the countryside with subsidised solar power plants that are the worst choice of any technology for the British grid, plus of course grand schemes for new wind farms.

The core problem here is that most energy ministers are fuckwits, they understand nothing about the energy industry, how the system works, what the technologies and costs are, and they don't want to learn anything about it. As a result we have humanities graduates like Milliband and so many before him who make persistently poor choices, and serially fail to create a coherent, long term affordable energy strategy. But why would they? Government makes policy, takes all the big decisions, but the overwhelming majority of the costs are simply heaped on bill payers, rather than being government spending.

Well, Toshiba did us a favour by taking Westinghouse off our hands a few years back, didn't they? Otherwise it would have been the UK taxpayer picking up the $9bn tab for US losses.

UK's grand plan to fuel AI with public data faces uphill battle

Re: As below, so above.

"and if they're serious about cleaning this up the only realistic answer is an absolute army of civil servants doing it by hand. It'll take decades,"

It might not take as long as you think. Much of the data referred to is of high quality and assured by qualified statisticians (I work with some of these people in a different context), the problem with it is often finding it, and understanding it. Often you need to know what exists to be able to find what you want, or it may be that you need to get lucky with search terminology because the document or file title isn't what works for normal people or indeed LLM. Data in large collections often has file names that are fine for regular and technical users, but for normal people aren't so helpful, and what's more there's no consistency across government. The people who maintain each data set, THEY know what exists, where it is, what it pertains to, where the data came from etc etc. So much of what's needed is some sort of naming or classification system that LLM can use, and that shouldn't take too long to design and then apply - if there's the will of course.

White House seeks deep NASA cuts as Artemis II breaks spaceflight record

An easy fix for Flump: Require pensions funds to in "low risk" assets. By conventional wisdom that puts domestic government bonds at the top of the shopping list.

A trick already tried and tested by the c*nts of the British government.

This is democracy in action. 49.1m US voters voted for an anti-science party led by a criminal, liar, and sex pest, and 85.9m didn't care either way. Both groups have now got what they wanted, which is the defunding of science, of health care, the systematic dismantling of the USA's reputation and status, the looting of the state by a small bunch of criminals, and a war that's now left those same 135m berks railing at the unfairness and horror of $4 a gallon for petrol.

Vote for stupid things*, get stupid things.

* Or abstain on the matter.

US cybercrime losses pass $20B for first time as AI boosts online fraud

They could reduce this by 90% in a few weeks

Most of the payment platforms used are US owned, who happily transfer funds to untraceable offshore accounts. Simply make the payment platform liable for losses to fraudsters, they'd very quickly find fixes, such as blocking all transfers to unvetted accounts in dodgy jurisdictions, and applying financial penalties to platforms in the last traceable intermediary country, as well as sanctions to overseas individuals simply on reasonable suspicion.

The reason that $20bn a year of theft hasn't been sorted is because the US political classes don't care, not because it can't be stamped on in weeks. The same is true for our feckless, lazy and incompetent government here in the UK.

Brits are falling out of love with posting every thought online

I know others have different experience, but I've never found LinkedIn to be of any use even for jobs, and as a result of my experience, I've not updated my profile for a good few years. I only keep it live for occasional "what are they doing now" snooping, but other than that the whole of Linkedin has zero entertainment, educational, contact making or job-finding benefit.

In every possible reading, Linkedin is just Facebook for Suits: Dull, full of advertising drivel, spewing boring user posts at users relating to subjects nobody really cares about, a means for talent free recruiters to boost their book numbers, and a waste of time for all people who truly haven't earned their oxygen that day.

'Uncle Larry’s biggest fan' cut by email in early morning Oracle layoff spree

Re: The US employment hellscape

But we were all silently humming or singing along to even two lines of lyrics. Surely that counts for Burt to get his credit?

There may be other options than a guaranteed income, but regardless the problem is that most governments aren't even thinking about this, other than wet dreams in which AI about reduce the cost of providing public services and get rid of pesky public sector employees. It'll come as a complete surprise to all Western governments if AI does replace human labour, and the first they'll notice will be high unemployment counts, high benefit claims, and massive falls in tax revenues.

Politicians have learned NOTHING about how the West undermined its own industrial base through a combination of hugely expensive domestic regulations and near enough open trade with countries who didn't have those regulations. And so, as we enter an era when nit is feasible that AI could bring in a further generational shift of mass unemployment, said politicos are doing what they always do, which is nothing other than feathering their own nests.

Japanese shipper MOL wants a floating datacenter, and Hitachi just climbed aboard

Re: solves a lot of problems

I suspect that spare berths will become the limiting factor, and the main driver of cost. Think where a berthed DC vessel might be useful due to high onshore costs - say Rotterdam, London, Hamburg, and those tend to have very busy ports where ship space is limited. Those aren't the locations you'd choose to lay up a vessel for storage, and conventional port charges aren't set for this type of use. I'd guess the berthing cost would be set by reference to the average revenue they can make from a cargo vessel in such a berth. A quick browse of Port of Felixstowe accounts shows that they make an average of £10,000 per ship visit, and that'll be for 1-2 days, I'd imagine it's the same in the US and Japan.

I'm guessing there's a very tiny sweet spot where this idea works: A location with very high onshore development costs, high onshore energy and cooling costs, high local demand for low latency DC services, and a port that's got an excess of infrastructure and is willing to offer long term berths at low cost.

Mars coughs up another maybe-life clue in the form of nickel compounds

Enrico Fermi would like a word.

Artemis II countdown begins as NASA prepares for crewed Moon flyby

Re: Communication

But if you are doing a free-return trajectory (Artemis II) or even a full orbit, then you absolutely will be back in communication with Earth at a predicted time.

The aliens know this too, and they'll snatch the crew module when it's out of contact. The crew will have to hope that it's just for some regular alien anal probing, rather than as an intergalactic snack for the monsters.

Re: Send Trump to the moon instead

What about Zuck? I suggest they tie a seat on the outside, and strap him to that.

Google is to journalism what Vikings were to monks. Now their man will run the BBC

Re: What's really sad is...

The BBC hasn't been good at journalism for a very long time. They do nothing in the vein of nationally important investigative journalism, rarely do anything that represents a scoop. There's a prevalence of trivia stories, and at this instant the top story on their news page is that the BBC have sacked one of their own radio presenters, evidently there's nothing more important than that. Locally it's no better, with pathetic coverage of local government and democracy issues.

Motivations

The selection of a new DG is a political choice, and the question arises in my mind of what his government sponsors expect by way of outcome. Those sponsors are entirely committed to the BBC continuing as a non PAYG or subscription service, but they're worried about falling audiences especially amongst the young, and the unpopularity and cost of the TV licence*.

Since the politicians are all amateurs with no experience of large scale organisation management, I'm confident that they earnestly believe the new DG will be able to wave a magic wand of private sector efficiency, Big Tech automation, and suddenly introduce a whole load of new and appealing programmes in a time scale before the charter needs to be renewed.

Some of that could in theory be done, but I suspect the desire for the BBC to be all things to all people, and the sheer inertia of it's self-obsessed, cliquey, easily infatuated management (in short, its culture) will be beyond one man, even if he appoints a few newcomers to be his team. Changing organisational culture takes commitment from the top, it takes courage to face up to what the current culture is, and intelligence to recognise what needs to change, to sell that vision across the organisation, perseverance to stick with the programme for about 4-7 years, and ruthlessness systematically root out the refuseniks and naysayers. So I imagine when the charter comes up for renewal, audiences will have continued to trend down, the reputation of the BBC will be unchanged, as will its culture, values and behaviours. Brittin will still be in place, but neutered by his own orgnisation.

* Yougov research indicates that 63% of people polled think the TV licence is poor value for money

Anthropic struggling with Chinese competition, its own safety obsession

Re: Wine and Dine

The great thing about a conspiracy theory is that it is self-proving for believers.

"You see! You're denying it! That proves that either the conspiracy has worked to hoodwink you, or that YOU are part of it!"

Microsoft takes up residence next to OpenAI, Oracle at Crusoe's 900 MW Texas datacenter expansion

Re: W texas

No need to speculate, there's plenty of articles to be found confirming this, including a planning application for a natural gas power plant on site. But the Abilene locating tells us all we need to know - this approach can consume many tons of gas, but if they generate on site they will avoid paying electricity grid charges, and avoid most of the gas transportation costs that would be incurred elsewhere in the US.

https://io-fund.com/renewable-energy/data-center/ai-data-center-expansion-gas-pipelines

AI companies lick their chops as FCC proposes forcing call center onshoring

Re: The only thing worse than an offshore call centre is a chatbot. And that is what we will get.

The favoured solution for any company that can, may be to withdraw from dealing with the public. Moving to a wholesaling model, so someone else carries the can.

To an extent that's what outsourcing and offshoring customer service is. Imagine an energy supplier that offshores customer service: No customer service headcount, systems, or operations to manage. What they're left with is a feed into their stub CRM that aggregates all the individual bills, then they undertake the wholesale side of energy procurement, hedging, balancing and settlement. When things inevitably go wrong, management will blame the outsource provider and conclude they carry the can. The only flaw is that the customers don't see it that way.

There's a lot of talk of cost savings and "labour arbitrage" when a company outsources, but my key point is they only ever outsource things they don't like doing themselves. And for many big companies that is dealing with their own customers. Curiously they don't ever want to cancel their own brand and let somebody else run all of that. Why? Think like a corporate senior manager here: It's a lot of fun spending tens of millions with ad agency and creatives, playing at marketing, planning ad campaigns, talking knowledgeably (well, not) about click throughs, conversions, planning grandiose partnerships with Amazon, Netflix and Google, lots of visits to the palatial London HQ of Bartle Boondoggle Shortskirt to listen to very detailed presentations they don't understand from blokes with no social skills wearing big pink framed glasses, oggle all the very attractive secretaries, and then have a slap up lunch at a top London restaurant paid for by BBS.

Re: Yechhh

Assume AI agents can do a half way competent job with routine.

It'll be interesting to see if an AI chatbot can converse at any level of accuracy with anyone possessing a Scouse, Glaswegian, Norniron, or Geordie accent, or indeed many of the deeper parochial tones found in some rural patches around Britain, not to mention various imported accents.

Does anyone have both a strong accent, and any relevant AI chatbot experience - obviously excluding simple speech recognition systems?

Not until some bright spark realises it would be a USP.

From my experience working for several very large companies with huge customer bases and a big customer contact element, better customer service is something everybody agrees they will pay more for if asked (either in person or in surveys and research) but when their money is on the line very, very few will. If a company can do great customer service AND low price, that's much better, but very difficult and customers still churn away for pitiful savings. Typically better customer service costs more, and that equates to a niche position.

Think UK supermarkets, Waitrose offer a better service proposition, but at a higher average price, that gains them 4-5% market share. A big utility I worked for spent five years trying to turn round its woeful customer service (all onshore incidentally) and still lost market share to cheaper competitors with worse reputations. Awful companies like TalkTalk still have millions of customers after years of dreadful headlines and dreadful customer service.

Iran war drives urgent need to counter underwater attack drones

Re: Here's my revolutionary, never-been-tried-before solution:

Since for much of the country the civil war was the height of their patriotic identity. It would be the one thing to heal the political divide and bring left and right together in the one thing they can agree on, enjoying killing Americans.

I second that!

Today they are the Disunited States of America, and they're all prepared: Around 24 million individual private citizens own an assault rifle, even divided between two sides, US assault rifle owners form two corps each about the size of the entire Russian military at the end of WW2. And then there's about 450 million handguns and rifles in the US, so enough for every man, woman and child to have one, and still a hundred million looking for somebody to pull their trigger. Nobody needs miss out, the most inclusive civil war ever! And they've also got about 45 million pickup trucks just begging to have a heavy machine gun bolted to the loadbed. Even the ratio of 7 combatants and a babby to each pickup looks about right.

So there we have it, American civilians are the biggest, best armed infantry the world has ever seen, just itching to start popping off at each other. We know the lines of division and several of the flags. What are they waiting for?

Re: Where's my money?

Dear silent_count,

thank you for your underwater drone defence proposal. Our technical assessment showed this had the highest score of all proposals in terms of defensive outcomes, achieving 100%. However, it scored very low on three critical elements that have equal weighting with defensive outcomes:

i) Money making opportunities for the elite. Your score, zero

ii) Kill rate of incoming drones when tested. Your score, zero

iii) Epstein smokescreen value. Your score, minus 100%

Accordingly we will not be taking your proposal forward to the second round, although in line with the competition rules we have taken ownership of the concept and all IP inherent within it.

Thanks you for your interest,

Love,

Darpa

China's not thrilled its AI experts want to leave the country

Re: What can they do about it?

What, like another leading country in the AI field?

AWS would prefer to forget March ever happened in its UAE region

Re: Nobody's fault-tree analysis includes "building hit by drone."

As we were based near Weston-Super-Mare , we didn't need the section on earthquakes, or tornados, and their plan for 'Civil Disobedience' wasn't really applicable, as none of our employees had their own personal firearms.

Did it include tsunami and storm surge? Rare though they are in that part of the world there's a bit of history.

Re: Kinda dumb, really

Never mind the threat of conflict to civilian DCs, your army secretary Dan Driscoll is publicly quoted on the idea that in addition to building military AI data centres regionally including outside the US, he's stated "in a contested environment, we can actually go build a lot of these things in the theatres where our soldiers are”.

So I'm guessing modular AI DCs, and your politicians think they can transport these to wherever they're at war with brown people. Hardening, point defence, cooling and power supplies should keep a few people busy, and I'm sure nothing can possibly go wrong.

https://www.ft.com/content/332c1134-18c4-4e80-a9c3-06aa0c20513e?syn-25a6b1a6=1

Link should work - FT is paywalled, but unless you've exhausted the handful of free articles per month (or nuked cookies) you should have access to the article.

Re: Nobody's fault-tree analysis includes "building hit by drone."

But isn't the solution in the Amazon case that the customer fails over to another AZ or region?

That's what the marketing pitch will have said, yes. And that's what gullible customers believe.

Amusingly, if you look on AWS landing page for benefits they offer, there's a tile for "Reliability", but when you click on it takes you to the "What's new" page that has nothing on reliability. Fair enough.

UK government admits Capita pension portal was crapita at launch

Re: So, Due Diligence (DD)?

The other thing is that government is as clueless as big corporates when outsourcing, in that they don't ask themselves where, how, and when does the provider make their profits.

As a result they wilfully overlook cheaper-than-cost bids, they encourage companies to backload costs, and they miss the obvious vast profit generator that is every future change that isn't in the original contract, and every non-standard service request where routine activities were not included in the billing rates. It seems bleeding obvious to me to want to know how much it costs a vendor to do the job being asked, how much various types of reasonably guessable change will cost (increase/decrease in volume, change in contracting entity, mergers/demergers, change in interfaced systems etc etc).

And if I was government procurement, I'd be looking to aggregate all government experience with each bidder, and score them on that.

Remote or not, workers are drifting back toward the city

Re: Driving doesn't scale

Why the fuck can't we go back to inches (I'd even take cm) for chest size?

Still won't help much. I'm a 34" waist in some shop's trousers, 36" in a rival. When it comes to shirt neck sizes, some are sold as 17", but meaning to fit a 17" neck, others actually have a 17" collar, meaning there's no way they'll be wearable around a 17" neck.

We could standardise and regulate, but who'd want that? We'd all end up in one colour Chairman Mao suits, and they still wouldn't fit.

Nothing screams casual career pivot like joining the UK Ministry of Defence for a cool £162K

Re: Only for the pension?

You're wrong so many times in that bitter and abusive rant that I can't even be arsed to start correcting your errors, or indeed elaborate on my relevant experience. I will restrict myself to avoid name calling, but my opinion of you based on that load of old codswallop has gone down remarkably. I'll settle for saying that it's rather brave trying to speak up as a man of the people, suggesting that £131k gross is somehow not enough. I and most of the people I've ever worked (and indeed the overwhelming majority of the population) have come nowhere near that, and we still manage holidays, mortgages, electronic goodies, online services et al.

At the very lowest salaries, I'll accept people don't have much disposable income (despite one of the highest minimum wages in the world) but as we go up the income curve pretty soon they do. UK citizens spend almost £200bn a year on holidays, booze, junk food, and gambling each year. Employee pension contributions are about £25bn a year. In fact, consumer spending on mobile phones is about the same value annual as employee pension contributions, streaming and TV subscriptions isn't far off, either. Nothing wrong with people spending their money on any of those things if they want to, but these figures show where priorities lie. Pensions are boring, and offer the most delayed gratification of any spending; people routinely CHOOSE quicker gratification on things that could be reduced, stopped or deferred, but they still make that choice.

Anyway, away with you, back to your £131k a year lice infested hovel, your sackcloth and ashes (and probably your high blood pressure)

Re: Only for the pension?

Well, yes, but changed for the worse.

The 2.32% of the current mainstream CSPS is on what is actually earned each year, and that's typically going to be less than people would get with 1.25% of a final salary scheme across a career, and of course that final salary scheme was back in the day of annual increments (done away with now). Also, as I recall, back in the day London weighting was pensionable, so any civil servants within striking distance of the Smoke would be looking to take a job in London for the last couple of years and add a bit more to their pension through that route.

Depends on when you joined, what salary was earned, and how much progression was made, but in overall terms the current scheme is cheaper for the taxpayer, and on average worse for the scheme member.

Re: Only for the pension?

@Like a badger, if you click through to the job ad it says: A Civil Service Pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%

With respect, I'm a civil servant, I'm a member of the CSPS scheme, and I do know how my pension scheme works. I agree the ad says "employer contribution", but the CSPS is entirely unfunded. Taxpayers pay the benefits to scheme pensions, but don't have to pony up the employer contributions up front, and that's why I said benefits are notional. It's all paper money and promises, and that claimed 28.97% simply isn't paid to anywhere. Even the employee contribution of 7-8% isn't saved anywhere, it simply means the Treasury (and thus taxpayer) pay the employee less each month. The purpose of the indicated employer contribution is to try and evidence to employees roughly what their total package is worth. That notional employer and employer contributions together are about the level that you'd have to find to buy an index linked annuity of that value.

To contribute £47k a year yourself into a SIPP or equivalent is well beyond the realms of what most people can afford to do.

Hold on, that £47k is for somebody with a £150-250k package, and they certainly could easily afford that. In most private sector jobs at that level of base pay there's bonus potential in the 30-40% range, sometimes up to several hundred percent potential - based on my experience of working with execs at a range of blue chip UK corporates. But let's take the £162k cash element as all that's at stake, they'll be paying a staggering 45% marginal tax rate, and that means to put £47k into a pension they only need to pay in £30.5k because of tax relief. Now, if you were on £162k gross, and then took off 30, that's say £131k gross, and you're telling me these poor, poor people can't survive on that? Hands up everybody here who can't survive on £131k gross? C'mon, there must be somebody here living a life of sackcloth and ashes, eating gruel because they're trapped in £131k poverty a year?

There's also an important difference that if a private sector employee were choosing to putting extra money into a tracker, they'll beat inflation by quite a lot, and in the longer term compounding makes that difference worth far more. Meanwhile the CSPS merely keeps pace with inflation. Last five years the FTSE100 has delivered total returns of about 84% (as at August last year), and that compares with inflation of around 32% over a similar period.

And a little off-topic diversion: You can open a pension at any age, including on behalf of a child. If you've got the money, put £4k in a tracker/pension fund as a gift for a family newborn, they will get tax relief at standard rate (20%), so that's worth £5k, by the time they're 55 that'll be a pension pot worth about £100k, by age 65 it'd be £160k. You (and I) will be long gone, but imagine you had a relative had done that for you? Every grandparent ought to be thinking that they can't take it with them....

Re: Only for the pension?

"At this point it becomes "worth it" only just, and still absolutely only for the pension"

Hold on, that pension contribution is notional, the CSPS is a defined benefit scheme. Pension benefits accrue as 2.32% of salary per year, and accrued benefits are CPI linked, as are eventual pension payments. So what that means is that each year the post holder banks £3770 of benefits into their pension pot, and that is then protected against inflation. If they do this job for five years that's a pension of £18,850 a year, payable from 67. A quick search shows that an index linked annuity of that value would cost around £300k for retirement at 67, not bad for five years service. But, for those who are about to whine, I'll point out that this is part of the deal we civil servants have: Shit salaries, no perks, no bonuses, but good pensions.

However, consider if a private sector employee chose across their career to take home a civil service equivalent salary and paid the rest of their salary and bonus into a pension scheme every year plus the usually modest company contributions, and that was all invested in a tracker fund, then (a) they'd actually have a much bigger pension than any civil servant, and (b) using a SIPP they could retire at 55 and take their benefits flexibly. This means going without earlier in a career, and other than a tiny, tiny handful of people, nobody in the private sector chooses to do that, instead they spend their disposable income on fancy car leases, moving to bigger houses, designer clothes, flashy holidays, kitchen refits and the like.

Forget drones – the US Army just took delivery of a self-flying Black Hawk helicopter

I think the likely use cases are things like uncontested field logistics, rather than high risk field ops. Quite often the limits on military flight operations are crew availability so having a helo that goes and gets another pallet of "burgers and fries" flavour ration packs without using up a skilled pilot seems logical up to a point.

Re: Stupid idea

Not just a monopoly on stupid ideas, but a monopoly on routinely contrived bacronyms. I suppose the US is so fixated on bacronyms there must be an entire government department that has to come up with names to fit a selected word - I wonder what they call themselves?

NASA sets 'impossible' ground rules for relocation of 'flown space vehicle'

Re: Isn't This The Point?

It would seem to me that Discovery certainly can be moved intact, the only real obstacle is money and collateral property harm along the route. People seem to be overlooking the fact that the petulant orange toddler is determined to have his own way, and there's nobody holding him to account, no financial cost that will dissuade him, no piece of heritage or reputation that he won't trash (anyone remember the East Wing the White House used to have?)

Hot on the heels of spending (reasonably guesstimated) $25bn so far on a pointless war to distract from Epstein revelations, I don't think that a vast cost to move the shuttle intact will be any deterrent. And if the private sector won't do it, what's to stop him commanding the army Corps of Engineers to do it?

Australia to datacenter operators: BYO energy, pay your way, build green, or stay home

Re: BYO Power, etc

Meanwhile, here in Britain our Government of All The Morons are working on plans to give data centres priority access to our already severely strained energy system.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-tackle-speculative-demand-grid-connection-requests

Microsoft: Removing some Copilots will improve Windows 11

Re: No mention of forced cloud logins

It is, just not to anybody around these parts.

He didn't say how many people care deeply about Windows. My guess is only those people whose jobs depend upon it, in which case "what came through" was the opinions of the people who have made W11 the mess it is, and what didn't come through was the voice of the majority of people who probably don't really care, and the minority of technically informed who might know a thing or two (eg Reg readers).

The drone swarm is coming, and NATO air defenses are too expensive to cope

Drones are cheaper than angry men

Are you sure? In any well populated but undeveloped or undemocratic country, angry men are usually free, available in ample numbers, require little training, and regarded by their "leaders" as entirely disposable. Think Russia's meat grinder tactics, the Iraq-Iran war, the regional bloodbaths that seem to be endlessly popular in Africa, or even the South American drug cartels' foot soldiers. For these purposes military logistics simply don't exist (steal what you need), the cost of AK pattern rifles is in the $100-200 range, there's no body armour or other kit, and maybe a few grenades or basic explosives.

Whereas an Iranian domestic model of Shahed drone costs about $20-30k. Admittedly the drone has a range of say 1,500 miles, and offers disruptive fire and forget capabilities, but it doesn't seem to have helped Iran much, nor has it caused Ukraine to surrender to Russia. In many ways like the V1 of WW2, more a sort of random terror weapon than an effective military tool?

CMA dithers on cloud probe as Microsoft's meter runs on taxpayer dime

"AI investment is central to the UK's growth strategy"

"That, in my opinion, is a sensible and necessary direction."

Well, there's a surprise given that the article author is an insider to the rotating doors between government and the tech sector who are busy reaming it out. Most businesses are struggling to show any positive return on AI investment, government will be no different. I work for government, I use AI daily because it's being pushed down from the top, and it's like a wayward graduate trainee - saves no time over doing it myself, but occasionally I get lucky and it does some drudgery I'd rather avoid doing personally, or creates a draft of an answer that's not usable, but is a good foil upon which to build a proper solution.

This and the previous government wring their hands at Britain's lacklustre growth, yet every policy decision they take is to frustrate growth. Selecting AI as some US-supplied magic sauce that will drive growth is simple idiocy. Even if AI can be made to work and generate a return it will be a recipe for increasing unemployment. How does the author think that sucking up to the US AI firms will create jobs in Swansea, on Humberside, in Sunderland, in Birmingham, or higher wages across the UK? What compelling problem will AI solve that will leave Britain better off?