Posts by Like a badger 1763 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2024
They don't need to cover up corruption. The hard core MAGA voting base as so stupid that they can't see it, but deny it anyway if it is explained in single syllable words. And the lying felon is going to issue pre-emptive presidential pardons to himself, his equally disgusting family, and his equally disgusting cronies. With the blatant gerrymandering ahead of the mid-terms there's no assurance that the popular vote will be able to limit the felon's abuse of power.
The main reason for the concentration on London is proximity to the stock exchange.
I hear this often, but is it true? Thanks to decades of shit-headed policy making, LSE is now a backwater, with its largest and best companies systematically taken over by foreign corporations. All the real volumes of equity trading are the US exchanges, or Euronext.
Not sure you'd get many GW of compute onto the Thames. Has to be somewhere rich people can't see it, needs to be clear of Tilbury docks and the cruise terminal. Can't be near Rainham Marshes, Cliffe Pools, and much of the northern Isle of Grain because all the tree huggers would object. The north shore of the Thames estuary is already taken up with London Gateway container port and Canvey Island oil terminal. Might be able to build into the Medway, but that would then have all the fearful panickers up in arms over the Richard Montgomery (and the tree huggers of course).
Britain is a nation that has pickled itself in aspic, constrained by over-valuing both the good and bad of its heritage, and adopting a fearful and almost religious approach to "preserving the environment". Any excuse or complaint is a reason not to do something, or to do it a worse way, at greater cost and with huge delay. Overall that's a really bad thing, although it might yet reduce our national exposure to the AI bubble.
Whatever reasoning process is driving this, it isn't obvious.
Checkout the laughable "Modern Industrial Strategy" from your government. There's some good intent for advanced manufacturing and life sciences that they'll mis-deliver on, the usual lies and claptrap about being a "clean energy superpower", some stuff that positions our arts and creative sector as an industrial sector, and then multiple references to AI as one of the UK's highest potential sectors. There's no real insight to the fact that at best AI might shrink our professional services sector and further harm broader white collar employment, no recognition of the un-sustainability of the vast energy demands that AI makes for f*** all useful output, no recognition that AI is almost exclusively owned and operated by tax dodging foreign corporations, nor the challenges of US control and abuse of data handled by their corporations.
The problem is the usual one: Politicians have crap humanities degrees and zero business, technology or science experience or interest, but they're the people "picking the future winners".
Where is the money going?
Mostly to expensive renewables contracts (see LCCC register for details), and grid changes to enable renewables. Which is a good thing for people who think that renewables are a necessity irrespective of cost, and a bad thing for anybody who thinks that the most expensive electricity in the world is less than ideal.
They've simply not found a way to make live streaming from 'spoons profitable. Given the parlous content on daytime TV, I'd have thought they should get in touch with some of the shite channels, and offer live coverage for ten hours a day from one of their more lairy establishments. It'd be more entertaining than Bargain Hunt, or A Place in the Sun (2016), and much cheaper. The only cost would be a droll-voiced commentator, maybe with soft Mancunian accent.
I doubt that hackers are the biggest threat. In those locations where the internet is subject to close government control and free access is limited, those states have economies that aren't reliant upon the web in the way that many Western nations now are, and would have little to lose by initiating destructive agents on the West's public internet, should they feel so inclined.
And there's always the risk of overspill from the various regional conflicts that have a cyber dimension.
The FAA came in for significant criticism when it was found they’d allowed Boeing to do all sorts of things they really shouldn’t have. Hoping that’s been fixed.
Doubt it, back to BAU, and Boeing marking their own homework:
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/after-months-safety-review-faa-allows-boeing-resume-issuing-certificates-new-airplanes
Although much of the stuff in the pipeline is designed for at scale server farms. If you want to run Doom 3D on a six foot tall 42U rack then you may well be in luck. For gamers hoping to buy a 64 GB DDR5 RAM kit maybe less so for a couple of years after the bubble pops. And don't forget, that bubble can keep on inflating as long as dodgy corporate finance can keep adding the "investments" to unwitting insurance or pension fund balance sheets, so it may still have a couple of years to run (or just a couple of days, who knows).
A nice sentiment, but it won't be them who pay. The big tech sites are believed by their customers (advertisers) to be THE places they HAVE to be, and all the tech companies need to do is agree to pay taxes, hike prices to cover that, and ultimately the price is paid by everybody in direct proportion to how much we spend with companies that choose this form of advertising. Obviously we can avoid those companies, but it takes some effort unless people are happy to buy exclusively and carefully from local markets, and it will usually be more expensive.
Excepting the fact that the whole semi industry is intensely cyclical, and is already looking at a massive slowdown. Put simply, the demand growth of the past few years cannot be sustained by the real world and end-user payments. There's an immensely interesting (although very finance-speak) analysis that you can find by searching on the terms groundbreaker peak cheap AI boom. I'm fairly finance literate and still struggled, but skim reading it and you'll get the gist, which is that growth waves break when their rate of acceleration slows, and that's because the rate at which supply chain capacity is added creates inertia and over-capacity, even though at first appearances the market continues to grow.
Elsergio is right, it is madness to be adding vastly expensive fixed capacity at this time - not only is there a certainty of slowdown because nothing grows exponentially forever, but the supply chain on the semi capex side is also stretched, meaning that the cost of new additions is far more expensive now. Look at how tech stocks are going lower as investors realise that the growth rates of the past few years can't continue - both SK Hynix and Samsung share prices have cratered. This really is an unwise time for big corporates to commit to massive new capex.
Policy makers are in love with hydrogen fuelled anything, because they've been told that burning hydrogen produces only water. Even if we had a source of green hydrogen, then as you and others have said, it makes no sense as a fuel, but it could be easily converted to methane or more complex hydrocarbons by mixing in a bit of process-waste carbon, or even atmosphere-recovered carbon. A previous employer experimented around this to see what worked and might scale. There's certainly no point in trying to reinvent the gas turbine to run directly on hydrogen, but synthetic jet fuel from green hydrogen would be easy enough - sadly there isn't anywhere near enough green hydrogen now or any decade soon.
Electric propulsion for aircraft might work for a drone-style air taxi, but beyond that it's a non-starter for the next few decades because it would require new wings, airframes, propulsion, and it would need electrical energy storage and charging technology that doesn't yet exist and may not ever exist. Take a 737 - to cover a reasonable range of short haul destination it needs about 8 tonnes of jet fuel, producing around 280,000 MJ, say 78 MWh. Even at very advanced battery energy densities (that may not be suitable for aviation duty), that's around 300 tonnes. Given that a 737 has an empty weight in the 40-50 tonne range, it may be obvious that batteries aren't going to be a major part of air transport in my lifetime.
Fundamental problem for battery aviation is that it doesn't scale. For drones, model aircraft, even a demo single seater, it works. But for commercial air transport the energy density of all current battery technologies is over an order of magnitude too low. Not only is the challenge both volumetric and gravimetric energy density, equally important the landing weight of a battery aircraft is the same as the takeoff weight. That would of itself use more energy on a flight than a gas turbine powered aircraft, but also the aircraft would have to be engineered to land at maximum takeoff weight, making the airframe and undercarriage heavier too.
"because they were in slow overcongested cells. Those are becoming less and less common"
Not in the UK. Our network coverage is poor despite generally favourable terrain. Spent a few days in Norway, and 5G offered near universal coverage of anywhere I could get in less than a day's hike from a road, and coverage extended all the way through some very long road tunnels. Come back to Blighty and it's back to notspots and network congestion.
Unfortunately, our proletariat are not very savvy, and will suck up whatever marketing lies the networks offer about 6G (as an when available) and continue to buy advanced technology that won't fix the problems of the previous generation.
Long haul is often worth the misery for the delights at the end of the journey, but I don't think there is a "best way". Every aspect of air travel seems to be purposely designed to be as inconvenient and passenger unfriendly as possible - and the ground side especially so, but even the best aircraft (A380) are still no fun at all. My perfect long haul flight would be to be sedated, boxed, and loaded as cargo. It'd be a bit Dracula-esque climbing out of the box in the Kingsford Smith recovery lounge, but I could cope.
Either that, or Singapore Airlines share the magic dust that enables their cabin crew to be as perfectly turned out and charming at the end of a long flight as when it took off, whereas the passengers go from vaguely presentable to "cast of the Living Dead" in the same flight.
YouTube never expected to win this. A tiny, tiny chance the court might have accepted their argument, but in all realistic probabilities they knew they'd lose. But winning wasn't the purpose here. The primary purpose is to make it as difficult, complex, and resource intensive as possible for the regulator, in order to dissuade them from challenging the company in future. I work for a regulator in a different country and sector, but we have dealings with some of the big US tech companies, this is how they all think and behave. The secondary purpose was to delay having to comply in the many related examples of the same behaviour so as to profit from the wrongdoing as long as possible.
In the past that was certainly true, but pension liabilities are only a consideration for private sector companies offering defined benefit schemes, and they're rarer than hems teeth now. The civil service scheme is currently a "notional defined contribution" scheme, whereby government deducts an employee contribution from salary and makes a generous but notional contribution as employer that (if they were made and invested) would drive a scheme that worked out at the same value as (from memory) about 35-40% of career average salary. The specifics are all public, but ICBA to go and check them. However, because it's notional, government just take the employee contribution as a lower net cash salary cost, and the employer contribution doesn't exist. With the five year maximum outlook of our politicos, they're not worried about that, in the same way they aren't worried about the spiralling benefits bill, and the escalating cost of triple lock.
We need a national programming service. Base it out of a few universities so you can offer placement years to promising students too.
Let's start them on a FOSS local government ERP, to try and stop idiots like Birmingham City Council (and many others of all political complexions) from throwing away hundreds of millions on poorly designed, poorly implemented systems.
It wanted to reduce headcount
A very common tactic in both civil service and business. Doesn't matter if costs go up, because in the short term either CEOs or a minister can stand up and announce headcount reductions and "savings", knowing that the "savings" will never be sufficiently accounted that the audience can check that they are real enduring savings.
In the case of the civil service, there's a challenge that the Cabinet Office (who effectively run the CS) have themselves had their headcount slashed, and have no idea now or in the past what the size of the shadow civil service is. By shadow civil service, I mean civilian employee FTE doing work that is paid for by government. So that's all staff working on government paid contracts, regardless of work type or location at Crapita, Fujitsu, IBM, et al, consultancy FTE at PA, Accenture, BCG etc, delivery work like prison staffing, transport, food, young offender support, Citizens Advice, facility management companies, MoD aircraft maintenance, ASR helicopter staff. Arguably, because both rail and energy are entirely controlled by government policy departments including the prices they charge, those sectors should also be included.
But nobody knows what this number is, and that's quite convenient for some.
"UK PLC used to be good at so much stuff, but, unfortunately, successive ministers are increasingly gullible to the sales pitch of "look how much you'll save" from the sales teams of all these outfits."
Speaking as a current civil servant, but with 40 years private sector experience, there's little difference between public and private sectors in the gullibility of senior leaders, and if there's a balance on honesty and integrity, the civil service wins hands-down, although a toss up between ministers and business c-suite. In terms of the use of outsource service providers, the private sector make far more use of them than the private sector. But there's a reason for this gullibility, and despite all the bitter, poorly informed whining up-thread about "lazy, fat, corrupt civil servants" from know-nothings, it's simply a question of information asymmetry and decision support asymmetry. I've been round the block on services in-source versus outsource, I've run benchmarking exercises for one of the world's largest companies, I know how much various functions cost, what the range of costs between companies is, what the service considerations are, so read on and find out.
Consider a first time outsource review could be IT, or back office support functions. Doesn't matter whether the prospective client is public sector or private, the mechanics are identical.
As it's a first time, there's already an in-house team. These are seen purely as a cost, because most companies leaders are cynics who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. In the case of ministers they will likely have zero organisational management experience. The in-house function will be tightly resourced so service standards are so-so. The functional leader is at best a lower level senior manager, maybe even a middle manager grade. That their boss (a higher senior or board level) is even considering an outsource decision says the boss perceives some downsides to the current approach, and benefits of some sort in outsourcing. Put another way, the starting position is they don't have confidence in their own team. The board/ministers making any decision are very time poor, and will be able to spare limited time to properly review the case, so everything is in play.
Let's start with the outsource vendors, and invent one called CrapIT-Fershitshow. C-F will already have played a long game, cultivating senior level relationships, inviting client decision makers to conferences and international "fact finding" site visits, they will be on first name terms with any senior leader that they can entrap. When the opportunity comes to make a pitch, they will deploy very smartly dressed, eloquent sales people with grand sounding job titles on big salaries and huge incentives; these people will interact with client leadership as peers. They - like you - do much the same job day in day out, and so they are good at their jobs which for them means exuding calm confidence, gravitas and experience. Their job is persuading senior leaders to outsource. They will come supported by a small posse of attentive boot-lickers posing as functional experts, push glossy "white papers" at the prospective client that name big company success stories, knowing that the client aspires for their company to be mentioned in the same breath as <insert any well known very large company here>. The pitch will start with plenty of prattle about "best practice" and sector expertise, accompanied by a rich side dish of FOMO, claiming that outsourcing is what all modern companies need to do, so they can concentrate on their core business - you know it makes sense...etc. The bootlickers will present beautifully crafted Powerpoint presentations that lull the client into a hypnotic stupor of believing that C-F have some magic sauce that will enable them to do the same job better, yet so much more cheaply that they can charge the client 18% less* than current costs and still make the 20-30% gross margin that a services outsourcer expects. Clearly that's bollocks, but it doesn't matter, because that's the prosecution team and case, its proven, it works. Now think about the defence team and case.
The defence team is at best a nervous functional manager, wholly unused to presenting their function as a case, and selling anything is outside their experience. They won't be wearing a tailored suit, they won't have a team of bootlickers, they won't speak to the board with confidence and gravitas. And all of the facts (as in costs) are already known so they can't spin them like C-F do. In fact, chances are the functional manager won't even get to speak to the board. More likely a dull CFO will sit in the corner and read off what the YTD costs of the function are, without conviction, without any real knowledge of the benefits of insourcing, and compare that to the mendacious promises of C-F. Even the client procurement team are pathetically outgunned by the vendor team - how often do they outsource or resource a back office service? Once every two-five years perhaps, compared to day after day after day for the vendor sales team. The procurement team will likewise be paid less, and have very poor incentives. they aren't paid to be challenging a make versus buy choice, nor to challenge the vendor's made up business case, they're simply there to turn the handle and pretend that a discount was screwed out of the vendor (who had that priced in from the start anyway). Nobody will analyse the business model of the vendor and find they routinely bid low and then back load the margins through out of contract changes, resulting in much higher overall costs; Nobody will take up proper references from prior customers (who may be unable to unwilling to give a true account anyway); Nobody will consider the consequences of what happens when the in-house team have been TUPE'd and then quietly terminated, and the service is provided by cheap staff who don't know the client and don't care about the service; and nobody will consider that the vendor will be world class at writing easily met SLA, and evading the penalties if they don't meet their own SLA.
It's not a difficult decision for ministers or the board. No bribery is needed, for them it is a simple, logical decision because they don't have sufficient time, and they don't seek and respect a broad enough base of internal advice..
* 18% is a magic figure when promising outsource savings - low enough to sound vaguely plausible if the client doesn't think too hard, but not high enough to immediately set alarm bells ringing.
Oh, you're correct in all of that but there's even more loose bowel movements to lace over the shit sandwich: The software selected for Matrix is Workday, a package I've never, ever seen a good word about. And with five different "clusters" all running variants of shared services packages, there's five fold duplication across government, added to which I daresay nobody has mandated that all data remains in portable formats against future consolidation.
100,000? According to Minister Burke, it's 875,000 jobs. Nominative determinism in action, perhaps?
https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/news-and-events/department-news/2026/june/20260602.html
Or for an alternative take on the value of Ireland-based DCs, try this:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/28/irish-datacentres-household-bills-electricity
You have a valid point, that the demand and production curves are increasingly less correlated, and the old concept of cheap off reliably timed peak power is at risk of fading away. Overnight or flexible demand like EV and industrial battery charging in particular are challenging ideas of baseload, whilst intermittent renewables can push peak time prices up or down hugely. The overnight/baseload changes are only just starting to become apparent in data, but the impact of renewables on day time power use and prices has been obvious for a decade or more, and is growing.
Can't we just build a load of base load generating capacity (SMRs?)
If you know of a shop that's got some working product with availability this decade and a low price per MWh then I know some other nations might be interested.
and bank the profits?
Profits and nuclear power are not concepts that one sees routinely associated. In essence the Irish government would need to underwrite the nuclear risk, and the programme risk even though nuclear power appears to have no popular support in Ireland.
Actually, many of them are building their own gas turbine power plants, albeit with the potential for export to the Irish grid. Ireland is already a net importer of electricity (via Scotland, Wales and England, but as GB is a net importer, that in turn is largely balanced by GB imports of French nuclear elec). Ireland's natural energy resources are a fair bit of wind, but most on-island generated and despatchable power has to be fueled by imported gas or oil. Because the grid is at risk from these huge amounts of power being needed, DC developers currently have to promise to bring their own power, that simply means a gas turbine in a shed, and at a national level emissions go up.
So from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, in 2025 16.3% of Irish electricity was imported, 40% of domestic generation was down to gas, and 82.3% of gas was imported. Wind power output increased by 3.2% year on year - but as per the article DC demand grew by 10%.
This gives Ireland relatively expensive electricity compared to most of the EU, although if you were a tax dodging tech company then the higher price of power will be offset by avoided taxes. Ireland has dramatically reduced CO2 intensity by phasing our peat, coal and oil, but that reduction looks likely to have stalled if they keep using gas to power new DCs.
Probably not. If (a) a transgression of rules can be found, and (b) it is serious, repeated and threatens people's safety, then there's a process for forcing a temporary suspension of a service. I doubt that doomscrolling will pass the second of those tests.
Had the EU not had its head up its arse and thought about what drives a business, they'd have given them the powers to ban the sale and display of advertising of ad-funded companies. That would instantly cut off the cash supply, and concentrates business minds. The UK energy regulator has handed out hundreds of millions in regulatory fines (which scared nobody), but in one or two cases it enforced a short new-sales prohibition. That scared everybody in the industry shitless, unfortunately neither regulator nor government realised that they had such a powerful tool at their disposal, nor did they learn that they should wield it more widely.
The surge team will consist of any single person limited companies that they can sweep up.
The surge capacity isn't IT work, and the resource is existing civil service staff being taken off their current work and assigned to try and bail our Crapita's mess. The request from the Cabinet Office was that Crapita pay the costs of those people. There won't be any markup on the costs, and given CS salaries it won't even cost that much per FTE.
But still that's too much money for Hernandez to want to commit to. What a turd.
Forget the £9.9m withheld, as per the article Crapita have had to 'fess up to investors that the CS pensions screw up will reduce their operating profits this year by £25-40m. That's a biggish number, especially on one contract that should have been bread-and-butter stuff. The impact on free cash flow is bigger, £35-50m.
I've got some small amount of skin in this game in that I'm a civil servant. Luckily I'm a few years off retirement, but I haven't seen a pension statement for a couple of years now, and might not see one until next year or beyond. I have a great deal of sympathy for colleagues trying to get pension statements to see if they are in a position to take voluntary severance, or those who actually need their pension to be paid. I've also got former colleagues from the private sector who joined Crapita, I know that the company do have some talented people, just not in senior management.
Despite all that, I'm glad Capita got the gig. Their fuck up has brought home to ministers and senior civil servants exactly how awful and incompetent Crapita are (and not that dissimilar to some other outsource services providers). Whilst it is yet to be proven, Burnham has been heard to mutter about in-sourcing a lot of government activity that's currently in the hands of outsourcers and this could be a prime candidate. I suppose we all have to be careful what we wish for, because "Death to Crapita" isn't of itself a useful outcome, and there's operational considerations like who owns the IP of underlying systems, and it is a generally accepted position that a service should never be re-sourced unless it is working well: There is a possibility that things could get worse.
I spent some years as a superuser in the VM user forum, trying to help other customers, and influence VM to behave properly. I achieved the first, not the second, and eventually got "demoted" for not toeing the company line, and gave up as soon as Openreach FTTP enabled me to get a decent connection from a different supplier. In my time as superuser I did strongly encourage all the many people who had problems leaving to report it to Ofcom, and take the case to the relevant arbitration service, so I like to think that a very, very tiny part of this £28m fine is down to my efforts.
However, whilst I'd always recommend avoiding VMO2, it does depend what you want of course.
1) Good service costs money, those companies charge more and don't offer deeply discounted customer acquisition deals.
2) If you want package deals including TV, broadband and maybe other offers, then there's only a shortlist of big, shitty companies to choose from.
No, that's the point, there is no digital sovereignty strategy. To an extent that's usually a good thing because most government strategies are shit and produce perverse outcomes. I daresay some half baked rush job on digital sovereignty is in the works over at DSIT, but it'll be full of waffle and they can't publish it now until the Parliamentary Labour Party have finished fawning over Burnham, anointed him PM, and he's appointed a cabinet. The new minister will likely be another know-nothing without any grasp of anything technical, and it'll take them many months to get even the vaguest understanding of their remit. Factor in the long, lush summer holidays that MP's take, and there's months and months of delay. And two weeks after the idle fuckers come back after the long summer holidays, they take another month off at your expense for "conference recess".
Fast forward to when it gets published, what can this strategy say? The British government have a software dependency of near 100% on big US firms, have stayed away from FOSS, and only have minimal European software adoption (somebody somewhere using SAP). Trump could turn off the British government's entire IT estate tomorrow if he wanted, can and probably does have access to all government systems and data, perhaps excepting the seriously encrypted stuff. There's no fall back plan, no corner of government that's seriously developed a FOSS or non-US stack, no government department running Open Office and other FOSS office collab tools etc.
And to fix this vulnerability, how long? Governments of many decades have intentionally ensured the Civil Service cannot pay for in-house digital skills, politicians and policy officials have asked the wrong questions or not asked the right ones. Anything they can outsource they do, without a thought. Government are also up to their eyeballs in shitty restrictive, long term exploitative IT contracts with the usual big outfits. The principles of digital sovereignty are not difficult and about half the people who read this forum could put in place a credible action plan for government digital sovereignty, although even using fist-on-table authority it'd take years to transition all UK government data onto new systems not at the beck and call of a foreign power.
Whilst I'm not sure there's a US angle, Crapita's incompetence in the civil service pension scheme is a prime example of how government manages to be shafted by its own suppliers. For amusement, read this, which at least shows harsh words being deployed, along with threats to hold the company to account:
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-07-06/debates/EC515563-D629-487F-A273-95E10BB646C6/CivilServicePensions
"That would be another good reason to hate your government and vote them out."
Well, the first part yes, I hate all politicians all of the time. I'm an equal opportunity hatist, and gender, ethnicity, race makes no difference.
The second part, well....replace them with who? There seems to be a global shortage of political competence, so it doesn't even matter which country you're in. No matter our good intentions, idiots always get in. At least the Yanks decided they wanted a stupid, lying, geriatric, racist, rapist, boorish, stealing, fuckwitted convict, and they've got exactly what they wanted and deserved.
Maybe you've close to the mark on that.
It'd be pretty easy for anybody nation or organised crime gang wanting to generate cash from captive tech labour to utilise this service. The Norks are under pressure on their "remote employee" scams, this and related activity would be a logical alternative, likewise the call centre slave camps in the badlands of SE Asia might need to move beyond straighforward hacking and scamming.
Amazon won't be taking any moral position, but if they get caught facilitating fraud or the various definitions of money laundering then that wipes out the margin they take.
@Charlie Clark: I'm guessing you're much like me and many of the other regulars, we've been around the block a few times. Surely like me you've seen otherwise very intelligent, very senior people at well resourced organisations make poor and even catastrophic decisions, so Tan may be astute, that's no barrier to epic car-crash corporate activity. I've personally seen a nice, smart CEO run a £3.5bn business into the ground on the back of one poor decision; I've been involved in £750m being thrown away by a blue chip utility trying an international expansion in a market it didn't understand; I've worked for a business that went from £200m market cap to zero market cap because the CEO and a few mates chose to modestly inflate the sales figures for a couple of quarters (and they got a spell of porridge for their troubles).
@ Charlie & Sproggit: It certainly looks like crude monetisation, but why do it in a way that appears to be destined to kill off the golden goose? They could have been far more subtle and gradual about it, and done well they might even have kept the scale and market share. Instead they've pissed everybody off, and opened the door wide to competitors and alternative solutions such that it's the talk of all relevant enterprise tech sites, "how to build VMWare out of your stack".
Who knows? Those who know won't tell, and will be handsomely rewarded, wined and dined, but we're outside in the rain, pressing our noses on the window of the Michelin starred restaurant, wondering why we weren't invited.
My guess is that Broadcom bought VMWare on a wave of C-suite ecstasy - the usual FOMO pressure as other tech companies spend billions, the fantasy of doing deals in the big league, wining and dining with investment banks and advisers, prattling on about synergies and strategic rationale. In short, they bought their own bullshit because building Broadcom organically through better products and services is a LOT more work than just splashing your own investors cash. Having woken up and the hangover worn off, they think "Jeez, we paid how much for this product?" Cue meetings with more advisers who (rightly or wrongly) tell the Broadcom clowns-in-chief that VMWare is a sunset product with a finite life (because, well because) but the good news is that for big corporates the cost of switching is high and take a long time, so Broadcom's best option is to treat VMWare as a cash cow, squeezing the customers until the pips squeak. In short, make as much money as you can as quickly as you can before (a) Broadcom investors cotton on that the directors are a bunch of talent free weasels, and (b) most customers have bitten the bullet and dumped the product.
I suppose the question to ask is whether corporate buyers who get stung will be vengeful against other Broadcom products, and VMWare adventure costs them dearly. I hope so.
When AI goes through it's inevitable correction, it will not drag the world back to the age of log tables and slide rules.
Don't believe that's what anyone is saying. However, they are saying there's a high likelihood of a major global recession, and the impact of that on the wider economy are job losses (even in non-associated sectors), damage to the value of investments (like your pension), a decline in average wages, higher household borrowing, a worsening government deficit et al.
I agree, but I'm not sure why they're squeezing so much in - seems to me that half of all UK DAB stations are just pretend local/regionals playing the same stuff in the same order, and owned by dull, fat arse corporates Bauer or Global.
I'll blame Ofcom: Who needs real local stations eh? Who needs media plurality?
He's already in line for a £120k pension payable the moment he leaves office, and I doubt he wants any gig that might involve real work.
I could see him stroking his ego with a nice peerage, swanning about in the Lords, enjoying the subsidised bars and restaurants, and clocking a further £361 each day he's in the building.
