Posts by I ain't Spartacus 10171 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009
It tries to push you to make or use a Microsoft-Cloud account, which can still be avoided using "x@x.x" as username and "x" as password so after it failed, and not before, will offer to use a normal local account.
Can you still get it to let you use a local account by turning WiFi off on the computer while you set it up? Alternatively turning off your router or pulling the ethernet cable also worked with Win 10.
The out-of-the-box experience describes the Schreodinger's-cat's-eye-view of any system. This means that fifty percent of the time you've got a black screen, the cat being dead and therefore unable to see anything. The other half the time the experience is filled with the ineffable joy of survival, added to the excitement of being released from a dark and scary enclosed space containing a poison capsule and a radioactive source. Hence the cat is too high on endorphins to care how poor the actual user experience is.
The premise of my comment is not incorrect. It's dead on accurate.
The Central Scrutinizer,
Did you even bother to read my post?
but fucking the Internet by demanding link taxes is fundamentally stupid.
This isn't a link tax. It's a fee for using copyright material.
The point for Google and Facebook is they want you to stay on their website, seeing the adverts they post. Not going to the news company's website to see theirs.
As one of your downvoters I'll try to answer. It's only fair, after all.
Firstly, Google and Facebook aren't just sharing links. They're cutting snippets from articles as well. In a lot of cases with news you don't need more than a couple of sentences summary of a story, unless you're particularly interested. So the premise of your comment is incorrect anyway.
But ignoring the rights and wrongs of this case, society has a problem. If you want to operate a democracy bigger than a city state you need some sort of independent media. If that's going to happen, you need journalists. To get journalists, you have to pay them. Historically this has been done by a mix of subscriptions and using the content to sell advertising. If Google and Facebook manage to break that model by hoovering up all the advertising revenue on the internet - then who's going to pay for journalism? I've heard estimates from recent years that they were capturing over 90% of all the extra online ad spend in the UK for the last few years.
Now admittedly the media were stupid, and gave their content away free online at the beginning, and set expectations - making it harder to sell. But they weren't expecting to lose the advertising war so badly. Also their response to falling revenenues has been to cut quality, rather than to raise prices - because they've felt that would be suicidal in the current market.
But society needs a broad-based and mostly independent media to function properly. Google and Facebook appear to be doing most to fuck that up. Both are monopolies. Both are therefore an easy target to try and keep the current model limping along, rather than trying to solve the problem in other ways.
The Russian government chose its economic isolation. And knows exactly what it can do to reverse it.
Admittedly when I say the Russian government, Russia is now basically a dictatorship. It used to be much more complicated than that, but this war represents a disaster for Russians as well as Ukrainians. In that most of the scope for alternative views and alternative centres of power has gone from Russian society. It's Putin that has turned the clock back 50 years, to about the late Brezhnev era - such is the kit that the Russian army are now digging out of their long-term storage sites to send their conscripts to the front in - and soon society will be in about the same poor way. No ideology to believe in, just repression and sullen obedience to force.
Do you, perhaps, have some sort of emotional investment in Twitter that has been somehow trodden on by Musk?
I think a lot of journalists have both a financial and emotional interest in Twitter. It's become a pretty important place for them to get easy quotes for stories.
But it's also become a research tool. For example I came to Twitter to follow the war in Ukraine. The media have got rid of most of their knowledgeable defence correspondents - and a lot of the coverage was poor, superficial or both. Now on Twitter you can find an awful lot of the same, and even more deliberate misinformation as well as plain wishful thinking.
But lots of niche communities have found Twitter a useful way to communicate. Like professional military analysts. And amateur ones too. Some of whom are extremely high quality. Find a few of the right people to follow and suddenly you start to see what they're looking at, then you can explore that and mine it for useful info too. Pretty soon you can be following a lot of people who post a couple of interesting things a day that you might not otherwise have come across.
If everyone just moves to something like Mastodon, I presume it's no huge problem. If those communities fragment, then you've lost access to a very useful research tool. If you've also built up emotional attachments to some of those communities as well - then you're going to be even more annoyed.
A bit like the Millennium Dome got continuously terrible press because on New Year's Eve, when they launched it, they invited al the media editors along and then stranded them on broken trains for an hour or two. It can't have been that bad, as it was the biggest single tourist attraction for the year, and got lots of repeat visitors - but never got positive coverage in the press after that.
Define cheap enough, I guess.
Volume lowers prices. But the difference between ordering 100 and 150 isn't all that much. Although if you've amortized the cost of the R&D over the first hundred, then that's maybe $50m less on the price of the 101st. Other costs, like tooling, are also already accounted for. But even $600m a pop seems awfully expensive, given that would get you three quarters of a squadron of F35s. Although the operating costs of multiple aircraft are going to be higher than those for just one, even if the B21 has the same issues with coatings the B2 does. But at least the option will exist, while the production lines are open - and ordering a small number of extras can keep those lines open for a while if the production rate isn't too high. I don't know if there's too much regret they didn't make more B2s - but I'm sure the Air Force wish they had a few more F22s.
Ken G,
How many more manned warplanes will there be?
I don't think anybody knows. That's why you hear about stuff being "optionally manned". So you can have it pilotless on very easy, or very dangerous, missions - if that tech pans out. But fly it when you have to. Which might be all the time. Seeing as we don't yet have the capability to fly such complex systems reliably autonomously - and neither do we want to give full firing authority to the computers.
If the enemy can block your communications, for example, then your autopilot is completely on its own, and you can't update mission parameters after its taken off.
One of the things we've learnt about drone-use in Ukraine is that electronic warfare is extemely effective. It's just that it's very patchy. Russia keeps finding that their own EW is screwing up their own systems, just as much as it buggers up Ukraine's. Worse, in the early days of the war they found that their own electronic warfare once turned on, couldn't be turned off. Because unless commanders were physically able to reach the EW units, they couldn't get through to them, to tell them to turn it all off. This speaks to a lack of practice.
Since even NATO rarely train using our full spectrum of EW, I doubt we're sure how we'd fight under those conditions. One thing that's worked when the EW is turned on is to use cheap drones in dumb mode, where they just fly a pre-planned route, and bring back their footage for analysis. Rather than directing artillery strikes live, which is the much sexier footage the Ukrainians like to post online.
Plus an aircraft that's expected to last for 30-40 years is going to undergo a lot of changes in use, due to changes in circumstances.
The next generation of Western fighters are all being designed in tandem with unmanned aircraft. These will fly with them, and act as force-multipliers (and/or sacrificial victims) for the manned fighters. Thus the fighter crew will direct them tactically, but they'll fly themselves. I doubt even these programs know what will come out the other end of them.
The UK-Italian-Swedish (soon to have Japan joining by the looks of it) Tempest is supposed to be flying by 2030 and replacing Typhoon by the middle of that decade. But Tempest is only a part of the FCAS program, which should be include unmanned aircraft.
I get the impression the Franco-German-Spanish FCAS program is prioritising the unmanned stuff first, with the idea that some of it might fly with current jets and then the main aircraft will be their replacement for the Rafale and the Typhoon. That's if the French don't sabotage yet another joint European aircraft project, and the Germans and Spanish don't end up fleeing and joining ours. Although both programs may have some drone tech in service first.
The US future fighter project is doing the same things.
Of course in reality we already have autonomous firing. The Brimstone missile (some of which we've given to Ukraine) can be targetted with lasers or on coordinates. But can also be told to go and hunt in such and such an area until it sees a tank, then kill it. It has a database of enemy combat vehicles, so you can even select it to only kill artillery pieces. At the moment, in the presence of multiple missiles, later fired ones will delay their attack until they see whether previous shots have destroyed their targets, so they don't all hit the same thing. But the next generation will have full swarming capability, where they can communicate with each other in real time.
Geez Money,
The B1 got used because they had it. But I'm not sure how suitable it was for its eventual role. They're keeping the B52s for the job of carrying unfeasibly large numbers of bombs and being an overhead intelligence asset (with modern comms forward air controllers can actually watch footage from the aircraft above on a tablet so they can designate the correct targets).
The B21 is way more expensive, but also way more capable in a contested environment. But I think the general idea is that you use a few waves of attacks by stealth aircraft to degrade enemy air defences sufficiently that you can then use your other stuff in relative safety. So while I'm sure they'd always like more, even the USAF have limits to their budget.
I think the B1 was on the way out anyway due to age. But Congress get upset if a capability is retired, without being replaced. So why not say this replaces it, when really it's a replacement for the B2?
And I wonder if each plane will have big enough fuel tanks to get to (and fly back from) Moscow, Beijing or anywhere else?
The B2s almost exclusively live in the USA and get to their targets by using mid-air refueling. The USA has an awful lot of tanker assets scattered around the world.
I don't know what the range is on internal tanks alone, but modern jets are pretty efficient at high altitudes, and that's where this is probably intented to fly. That is assuming it's still subsonic, like the B2. It's quite a big aircraft, so should have thousands of miles of range. Which is extended yet further, if it's launching missiles with the actual nukes on.
I haven't used Facebook in about 5 years, but when I was a user almost all the ads I saw were dodgy in some way. I was only on there for family party invites and photos, so obviously not a valuable user to be targeted by legitimate brands. I provided very little info for them to use.
But when I looked most of the adverts were for obvious scams, like you are the millionth person to see our advert and have won a free iPad. Or they were for "dating" sites to meet unfeasibly attractive Russian girls - presumably for the purposes of obtaining money or a better passport in exchange for the obvious.
As a legitimate advertiser that would put me right off using Facebook. I wouldn't want my expensive brand advertising sat next to that lot. Although I don't recall ever seeing any advertising from any company I recognised, so maybe Facebook do a good job of segregating their good accounts from the bottom-feeder ads, and then just show the really cheap crap ads to the low-value accounts and bots for those vital extra pennies they can make?
that one in the corner,
I think you may have missed an important variable from your equation.
Obviously there is an inverse relationship between my idea of what's fashionable, and what is actually fashionable. Although there was one brief period in the nineties when the waistcoat became a fashion item, about 6 months after I'd started wearing them. Thus proving that there's an exception to every rule...
However we also need to account for the negative coolness effect. Thus, if by some miracle, I were to correctly deem an item to be cool that the fashionable also found to be so. The sudden imbalance of trendion and anti-trendion particles in this area of the universe would cause a local spike in the emissions of Ratner radiation - thus draining the item in question of cool and leading it to become unfashionable. This effect would be incresed even further should I chose to actually purchase said item.
That's sure a lot of money to find that out. Why couldn't they have paid me, and I'd 'a' told 'em.
If you leave a couple of trillion tonnes of cheese out in the Sun for a few billion years, things are going to get a bit messy.
The real question they should be asking is: What happened to all the giant space cows?
Or is the Moon actually made of goats cheese? If so, that would also explain why the Golgafrinchians had to flee their planet in giant space arks, in order to avoid a giant mutant star goat.
Part of the reason for that is that central banks will lend out money for banks to handle runs like that
There are two reasons for this. One, the banks are regulated. They have to have capital reserves and cash reserves of certain sizes in order to be allowed to trade.
This also means they have actual, tangible assets which can be pledged as collaterol against massive loans from the Central Bank. Well-rated corporate bonds or government ones, or debt secured against property. If you can't produce collaterol, then you've moved from being illiquid (not enough cash on hand to meet your outgoings and so worth saving) to insolvent (bankrupt). Central Banks aren't supposed to bail out the insolvent, but might forcibly nationalise them in order to save some of the pieces - and to prevent chaos.
Crypto doesn't really have any secure assets. But also doesn't have Central Banks. Nor does it have regulation to ensure that exchanges only trade with their own resources and don't trade with client funds. Or that organisations keep capital reserves, so they can survive taking large losses. Most British banks have to maintain between 10-14% of their loan book in assets owned by the bank, so they can survive an extremely deep recession with no need to raise any more capital to cover losses. But they are required to carry much less cash on hand, as they have assets they can turn into cash, or they can borrow from the Bank of England at a slightly higher than market rate (as a disincentive to end up in that position).
Who's going to read out the checklist, while the flying pilot pushes the buttons? Will it be an automated voice on an iPad? Who runs the radios while the pilot is flying the thing?
How much money is going to be wasted by planes screwing up in the airspace around airports, because the single pilots have to manage talking to ATC and going through the landing checklists while also working out what holding pattern they're in.
Not to mention splitting up the tasks during an actual emergency.
If we're going to do this, we should at least have every airline ticket entered into a free prize draw. The prize being that passenger gets to be copilot for the journey. They can at least keep the poor pilot company, if nothing else.
Like removing the incentive for high-frequency trading, which itself becomes a tax on transactions for non HFT transactions, and short term price manipulation
Anon,
The problem with HFT isn't that it's become a tax on transactions. HFT has been beating out the old traditional market makers because it's cheaper that the service they used to provide. In fact, that's one of the few good points of HFT, that it tends to lower transaction costs.
If we come to the conclusion that we don't want HFT to happen, which is something I do think (but I don't know enough about the markets to feel certain), then it's easy. We just ban HFT. Job done.
Introducing a Tobin Tax creates other problems. You'll notice, for example, that the Swedes introduced on in the 80s, it didn't raise anything like the amount expected and vastly reduced trading, and they scrapped it in the early 90s. Also the EU looked at it after the 2007 crash. 11 (then 10) countries were going to try one, under the "enhanced cooperation" system, as the whole EU wouldn't agree. The Commission went off and researched it, and from memory the figures were that the tax would raise €30-35billion a year, but cost 0.2% of GDP to the economy overall. From memory, because I used to have a link to the EU Commisison reasearch on this, but they deleted it from their website. The costs came out at several times the amount raised in tax.
But the other problem was that this was for having a tax on both trades in shares and bonds. And they were deeply worried about damaging the market in government debt, right during the middle of the Euro crisis.
Reading the above two posts I'm reminded of a number of others that I've read. When you manage to beat your way through the obfuscated jargon it seems that the whole point is to allow the traders to make more money.
I didn't think I'd used any obfuscated jargon. Please tell me where I have and I'll de-obfuscate it.
The purpose of a financial market is for people to make money.
And I mean this literally. The whole purpose of a financial market is that some people want money, in order to do stuff. That stuff might be starting a new company, buildling a factory, investing in some new piece of R&D, expanding into a new market.
So they can ask people who've got money to lend them some. This is done in various ways. But that's what it boils down to. And those people lending money are taking a risk of losing it, so want a reward. You take a small risk by putting money in a bank's savings account, so you get a small amount of interest.
Or for a little bit more you can buy government debt, or a corporate bond off Apple.
Or you might take more risk and buy shares. If this is an IPO (a company issuing new shares) then you're investing directly into a new-ish company (or one that wants to expand) and probably taking more risk, for the expectation of higher rewards. Or you might buy shares in a safer bet, again say Apple. Who've had their explosive growth phase, but make nice juicy profits you can share in. In that case you're not funding investment - but nobody would buy shares in new companies if they didn't eventually have a hope of selling them. So there has to be a market in shares willing to buy (liquidity) or nobody would invest in new companies. Venture Capital takes a stupidly large risk by early investing into a tech startup - you get to own a percentage of the company. Most of the time it goes bust and you lose everything, but maybe 1 in 20 times your bet will pay off and you'll own a small percentage of Google or probably something a bit smaller but still profitable.
This kind of investment wouldn't happen if there weren't people wanting to take stupid risks to make stupid profits, like say Softbank. But also then share markets for them to sell their few successes to, so they can cash out buy yachts and fast cars. And nobody would invest in those IPOs unless they had a chance to sell their shares to ordinary low-medium risk investors (like pension funds). It is complex, and there's no way to avoid that. But it also works. Most of the time.
A lot of the people who manage the money don't actually own it. They're doing it for other people. That's our pension funds, for example. Or insurance companies. They need to make a certain amount of return on the money they're investing. So they'll invest some in boring, but safe, government bonds. And try to make higher returns with some - because that's their job. To try and grow our pension pots.
There's a concept in economics called the agent problem. Which is that the people you hire to do stuff for you have their own interests, which may differ from yours. So as a shareholder you want regular dividends and a company growing in a nice predictable manner. But the CEO might want to get rich quick at the expense of long-term steady growth, or show what a genius he is by making some flashy deals and getting on the front pages all the time. Or a pension investment manager might be more interested in his bonus than he's worried about fulfilling your cat food needs in 40 years time. This causes problems, and it's almost impossible to devise pay and bonus structures to keep these people on the straight and narrow. So regular scrutiny is required, from investors, shareholders and government regulators.
The problem being we want to incentivise them to take controlled amounts of risk in order to grow our money (if we're lucky enough to have pensions or life insurance) without going mad and risking everything in order to make their next bonus stupendously huge. A balance that is impossible to strike perfectly.
If we take away the markets, then our only route to the investment that leads to economic growth is the banks or the government. The banks are no better at it than the markets, but more risk averse, so we'd certainly lose out on companies like Google and any kind of new business that's highly innovative that the bank manager can't understand. Government has a mixed record in business investment. And again, tends to be risk averse. So government investmtent banks can work brilliantly, in both Japan and Germany after the war for example. Because they were investing in known industries to build up their national economies. But then all but one of the Landesbanks in Germany (controlled by the State governments to invest in local industry) went bust in the 2008 crash and had to be bailed out. Only Bavarias was still being well run by that point. Similarly almost all the Cajas in Spain, regional semi-publicly owned savings banks, needed bail-outs in 20010-12. And the UK has a sad history of nationalising companies and then the government running them incredibly badly - with some exceptions.
Financial markets do some incredibly useful things, with annoying side-effects. And so far, nobody has found a reliably better way of doing it - and we've had modern (ish) style banking for 600-odd years and modern (ish) financial markets for 300.
Well obviously the exchange has to keep data. But it doesn’t have to be in the live database, after a certain period of time. A blockchain is keeping all data ever. An exchange could dump data after ten years if it wanted to. But, as you say, storage is cheap. Data can be sold for research.
Pseu Donyme,
How would your scheme provide more liquidity?
The point of allowing people to make small amounts of money off short-term trades is that this profit incentivises them to do that very thing. If they don't exist, then the only people interested in buying are going to be holding for longer periods of time. There are going to be fewer of those, and if supply doesn't meet demand in the short term, you will get much larger fluctuations in price because of it. Just based on whether someone wants to be holiding a few £ million of say Apple stock this week, or doesn't want it for another week or so.
Sometimes you may want to hold stock for a long time, but need the money for something else urgently, and change your mind. If you can't do that, then you will be less willing to buy. This is going to be particularly true for less traded stocks.
HFT may be a problem that needs solving. Maybe we should be going back to the old days of market makers, or something new entirely.
Also, trading is price discovery. The less frequently trades happen, the more you risk price volatility.
Basically giving profits to those willing to risk money in very short term trades is the price you pay for liquidity.
It's like people complaining about futures markets. That nasty old finance companies use them as a venue for gambling on the future price of wheat and this does no good for society and so should be stopped. The point is that there are people with money who want to buy risk - because they hope to turn that risk into profit. And there are say farmers growing food who don't like risk, they'd like to sleep at night. So are willing to forgo the possibility of future potential profit in order to have certainty of the price they're going to get for their crops. Speculators can be put to good use by other people, and that's one of the things financial markets can do.
Def,
But isn't the point of a blockchain that it's a permanent record of all transactions? And an ever growing one too.
Whereas the point of a database of share or bond transactions, is to record current ownership and then the price/turnover history. Which is a lot less data.
Decentralisation seems a very odd decision for a stock market to pursue. Your very existence, your income and your customer lock-in all stem from the fact that they have to come to you. Push yourself out of the process, and eventually somebody might start asking awkward questions like - seeing as we're running all our transactions on the blockchain, what do we need an exchange for?
Plus there's the obvious security problem. If people can find ways to muddy the ownership of shares, then they might be able to steal them.
To be fair, there is a killer application that blockchain will be great for in financial services. If it ever works. And that's assets pledged as security. This can be for loans, short-selling, whatever.
Let's say I have a government bond that earns a small amount of interest. I want to keep earning that interest and also make some more. So I borrow against it to get money to trade with. I still own the bonds, and I've got money to try and make profits with, and at a set time I've got to give the people I borrowed from that money back (plus interest) or give them my bond. Maybe my bets go bad, or just my company is in financial trouble. Perhaps I got to a second bank and borrow some more money, secured on that same government bond. Now we owe money to two different people, secured on the same bond. Naughty. But the incentive is there for companies in trouble to double down, break the rules and take some extra risk in the hopes of salvation. Their collapse then risk huge ripple effects as those debts that should have been secured, turn out not to be. This is why the inter-bank lending system broke down in 2008 - which could have killed a lot of banks if the Central Banks hadn't stepped in. Trust broke down, and nobody was sure if they were the only ones who'd been promised particular assets as collaterol. Made much worse by the fact that people no longer trusted each others' valuation of mortgage bases assets - so only really high quality bonds were acceptable, and everybody only had a limited amount of that. Central banks lowered their standards on what they'd accept as collaterol to cover this problem too.
If you could set up an asset register on a blockchain, you could stop this happening. Which means if an institution collapses, there's much less risk of a cascade of failures taking out other institutions, because money they've borrowed will get paid off with the promised assets. Secured creditors get first dibs on the assets.
The amount of work required to make this work though would be immense. As you'd need a trustworthy asset register in order to make the blockchain. So would that mean government detb, shares, even blocks of mortgages, would also have to be on a blockchain? I know the Bank of England are doing research on this, but I really can't see it happening without decades more work and large changes in how financial markets are run.
I court the downvotes here. But doesn't this report have a point?
Google still make about 90% of their profit from putting adverts next to search. A market they've totally dominated for 15 years now.
They make an OK amount of money from Android, and the marketplace. Though nothing close to Apple or Samsung. But it was still an important investment, because they needed a strong position in mobile to protect their search engine monopoly. And also having billions of data collectors (phones) around the world gives them vast amounts of information that improve search, maps etc.
I'm sure they make something from G-Suite and cloud computing.
But they've invested tens of billions over the years, probably hundreds of billions now, into various other ideas and side projects, and not got much in the way of products out of it. Waymo has some clever technology and might be the future of self-driving cars. If self-driving cars can ever be used in anything other than very limited circumstances and if Google can capture a good part of that market - which are two big "ifs".
Given Google's lack of success in the last ten years at making money from side projects. And its many failures in hardware and consumer tech, perhaps management would be better being more focused - rather than having fun playing at tech investing with other peoples' (their shareholders') money? That's the thing about doing an IPO and getting rich. You've sold your company. It's no longer your personal trainset, that you get to play with however you like. You've sold it, even if you're still being allowed to run it. Unless you can pull of the trick Zuckerberg has, where his special shares still get to outvote everyone elses', even though they've put in billions to buy them and he doesn't own anything close to a majority.
Maybe they'll come up with something brilliant. Or even several somethings. But so far, their track record is that they're brilliant at monetising search and the rest of the time they're more a company that develops interesting technology, waits a few years with it in beta, and then abandons it.
What they're saying there is that their figures might not be accurate because a manufacturer might currently be breaking the rules.
Also I guess there's going to be problems with detection, threshholds and reporting. How serious does an event have to be to define it as an accident, and even if you can agree on that, are the cars capable of detecting and reporting that. Plus if the owner has disabled all communications on the car, it can't report back to base what just happened.
Which is incredibly infuriating. When governments were trying to respond to a genuine emergency and get Covid apps out the door quickly we had Google and Apple grandstanding about what great defenders of privacy they were, and refusing to allow those apps. So we had to wait many moons for everyone to get together and get something designed.
As if Google gave a fuck about privacy...
But apparently they're happy to let Qatar bung its dodgy shit into their app stores for... Reasons. Possibly large numbers of foldable ones kept in brown envelopes...
A huge part of the price rises is due to the giant inflationary pressure that governments worldwide induced during covid by 'printing' shitloads of their respective fiat currencies.
jmch,
This is true. Central banks weren't fast enough to destroy more of the money generated with QE. There's a possibility that they couldn't have been without invoking a market collapse - if you remember the "taper tantrum" from back in 2013 - when the Fed started to reverse QE and then had to slow down because of adverse market reaction.
I believe a lot of the theoritcal work on QE was based on Japan using it successfully in the 1930s depression. It worked well, but they didn't provide a good example of how to reverse it - because a lot of effects of the 1930s depression were ended by the biggest economic stimulus effort in history. World War II.
However to criticise central banks for this, one needs to remember that they saved us from a global depression in 2007. And while it's necessary to remember the dangers of inflation, most people aren't aware of the far worse risk of deflation. When that sets in, you get decades long depressions, that are incredibly hard to recover from.
Whereas a lot of the people who designed Crypto built deflation into the design. Because they were either too ignorant to realise the risk, or it didn't matter because crypto wasn't supposed to be about running an economy, but a technical experiement. Or a way of avoiding paying taxes or law enforcement stopping you from trading in drugs...
So yet again the crypto fans get to watch yet another of their exchanges explode. With massive knock-on effects on other crypto companies. But apparently their answer is still that having regulation and central banks who can stop this kind of thing from happening, or dampen the effects when it does, are bad m'kay. Government bad. Regulation bad. Random internet thieves good, because they talk clever! Ooh look, they stole all our money again! Oh noes! But at least our money isn't being devalued by inflation...
Is this the right crowd to go all pedant and point out that only some of the above are acronyms? If you can pronounce it, e.g. NATO, then it's an acronym. If you can't, NFN (Normal for Norfolk), and just say the letters, then it's an initialism.
[checks post for inevitable spelling and grammatical errors]
Elon has repeatedly confounded industry "experts" and people embedded in legacy systems. I'm sure he has no idea how to design and build cars or rockets. What he does do is listen to disruptive engineers, who typically come from outside the industry and then give them the authority to tear-up the "rulebook"
Which may or may not work. Depending on whether the industry consensus is in fact correct, or whether his disruptive engineer from outside actually has a clue what they're talking about.
So, for example, Tesla's big failing for the last few years has been in manufacturing. Which they've been shit at, and had consistent problems of bottle-necks and slow production. Hence they've had long waiting lists of customers, which means they're leaving profit on the table that they should have had. Long waiting lists are inefficient, because they show that either your price is too low, or your manufacturing process is too shit. Either raise prices to capture that extra profit, or ramp up production, or both.
And that's possibly because he got in outside experts - when actually the motor industry has done pretty well at solving the problem of efficient manufacturing. The problem in the current industry is probably complexity of supply chain and lack of stock - which makes the system very efficient/cheap, but highly vulnerable to governments (and political/diplomatic events) changing what they're allowed to do - as well as economic shocks.
The car industry has also produced many perfectly acceptable electric cars. So in the case of Tesla, the triumph has been much more about good marketing and hype management than about technology.
And some of that hype has gone into the so-called "Autopilot" - where I don't care how many fucking disruptive outsiders you call in - self-driving cars are still not possible and will still kill people if allowed under anything other than highly controlled conditions.
SpaceX however have done genuinely innovative things. In an industry that had become so focused on mining government pork, to the exclusion of almost anything else, that they were ripe for a damned good kicking from an outsider.
Had Musk had the cash to buy ULA he could have done a lot of the SpaceX stuff, but maybe not all, as his customers were also likely to be risk-averse. And less incentive, because of all the lovely profits rolling in from fat government contracts. Had he bought a functioning car company though, he probably could have had Tesla producing a million cars a year ten years ago - if he'd been able to do the marketing effectively enough to sell them. Whereas I think they only achieved a million produced last year and it took them from 2008-2020 to build their first million cars.
Roj Blake,
A hereditary head of state
A quick Google tells me that 43 countries have monarchies. Many of them democracies, and some with proportionally elected parliaments (seeing as that's important to you). In Europe alone there's the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein as well as the smaller stranger ones like Andorra (with two rulers one of them the President of France). And then of course Commonwealth countries that haven't bothered to get their own President / King.
Elected presidents are also not that common. Many are chose by countries' Parliaments, rather than by public election. At least if they're serving as ceremonial (and powerless) heads of state - in the same way that constitutional monarchs now serve for most European democracies. Including the UK.
An upper house that includes the 7th Earl of Minto, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and a bunch of bishops
Loads of countries appoint their upper houses. Or large parts of them. The only elected members of the house of Lords are in fact the heriditary peers. As 90-odd of them are elected by the rest of the chamber. This is because many of them were doing a good job when Labour wanted to reform the Lords - so some were kept as a compromise. Rather fittingly odd, given the way our constitution has evolved over the centuries.
A lower house that is not proportionally elected and which allows the selection of a new head of government without consulting the electorate
This though shows your utter ignorance of how democracies vote.
Israel is the only country I can think of where the Prime Minister was directly elected by the voters. Separate to the votes for MPs. And that was only a brief experiment in the 90s, that was supposed to give more stable governments - but didn't. So they got rid of it.
Most countries that have proportional parliaments don't have two party systems. This means that not only do electorates get no say in who their Prime Minister is going to be - they don't even necessarily know who it's going to be after the election. Because a coalition will have to be formed and there may be several large leading parties who theoretically could lead it. So the PM will be decided by the coalition negotiations after the election with zero input from the public. And also no way for the public to get rid of a Prime Minister they don't like - seeing as a party could lose loads of seats in a subsequent election but might still stay on with the same coalition partners after the election and keep the same PM. Equally a coalition can break down and a different one be formed, without having a new election.
Presidential systems may also have proportionally elected parliaments. But in a presidential system the President needn't necessarily have a parliamentary majority at all.
There is no such thing as a perfect democracy. All systems are imperfect and have their problems. Counties with constant coalition governments may have less change in policy but that could just be because the country gets run according to the establishment groupthink that a majority of parties might subscribe to. See German Russia and energy policy for the last 50 years, as an example of how that can go rather badly wrong.
But proportional systems do give louder voices to smaller groups of the population, who find it easier to get national representation. This again can be both a good and a bad thing. In Israel if often gives disproportionate power to the most intransigent "settler" parties - who've often ended up as the swing-voters in coalition forming. But in most countries makes for a more pluralist political culture.
However the downside of small parties being needed to form coalitions is the big negative advantage of a constituency voting system. You can kick the bastards out! If enough of the population decide to gang up on one party, they can outvote that party's core support and get loads of their MPs kicked out in all but the safest seats.
To take a German example again, say you hated the FDP. They've always been a minor party, never usually getting more than 10% of the vote and often hovering around the 7% mark. And yet they were in government from 1949-1957 then from 1963-66 then from 69-98. So in the 51 years of post-war governments they were only out of power 9 of them. They've governed with both the CDU and the SPD - so in the late 20th Century it didn't matter who you voted for - you got the FDP. This isn't a major disaster, it's just a flaw of systems that encourage coalitions.
So be in favour of the system you believe in. Argue for it. But understand it. And don't claim that the system you don't like isn't democratic and then cite reasons for that which also apply to the systems you favour.
Perhaps they're a bit embarrassed by the fact they've been launching from Wallops Field? It's a pretty silly name.
Although it's now known as Wallops Flight Facility. Maybe it always was?
Or also possibly they changed the name in embarrassment after they blew up most of the launch facilities with one of their earlier ISS launches. I can't remember if it was them or SpaceX who had a cargo launch explode containing all the astronauts' and cosmonauts' Christmas presents one year. I know both had had one payload go bang.
We will need a new phrase for “getting it up” as there is no up in space!
Getting the rocket to the tower.
Or perhaps - Nominal position achieved. We are go for docking!
I'll get my spacesuit. The grubby one in the corner there, with the big pockets...
Confidential is still not to be released outside government without permission. Leaking a bit of it might not get you into that much hot water. Selling lots of it, on the other hand...
One of the things Guy Burgess (Cambridge spy ring) tried to do when at the BBC in the 1940s was to get official access to confidential Foreign Office telegrams. Nothing secret mind, just confidential stuff to make the BBC's foreign reporting better informed.
And of course because the KGB had asked him to leak it all to them. Not that the information would be all that useful individually. But some of these might be enciphered on the same systems as the secret stuff from embassies. And that would give the Soviets a crib in order to aid in their attempts to break British codes. As well as being extra information to plug into radio traffic analysis (sometimes a very powerful intelligence tool even if you can't decipher the messages) and increase the size and scope of their overall intelligence picture. Who in an embassy is talking about what also tells you what they're interested in, and what they're trying to find out. Plus what they might already know.
He was also the founding producer of 'The Week in Westminster'. The longest running program about politics in the world.
Brazil has a very long delayed project to build its own nuclear submarines. Based on French technology though, and I believe the French were squeamish about passing over nuclear technology for reasons of either security or the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
So maybe they looked like someone who'd be willing to pay? Except the US use highly enriched (weapons grade) uranium for their subs and the French don't. Which means I'm not sure how compatible the designs would be anyway? Which might explain why Brazil weren't interested.
I don't think badges gave any special privileges other than minimal HTML capability in the comments. Unless you gold-badge users still have the ability to killfile other commentards (the utility of which I question).
jake,
I think we got the edit button and the ignore list first. But I thought both were rolled out to everybody? There's a little grumpy face icon next to every username, which puts them in your ignore list.
As you say, a singularly pointless idea. My forum mod experience is that they're for idiots to dramatically announce that they're putting their forum-rivals onto ignore! Only to then instantly reply to their next post, and all subsequent posts, with the announcement that they've specially taken them off ignore, just to answer this one heinous post with the appropriate levels of venom. All while toys go flying from various prams, and dummmies are spat.
I have a loyalty card with a supermarket. So they literally know everything I've bought from them in the last decade. And yet, they insists on spamming me (seemingly bi-weekly) with offers for pet insurance. But not travel or home insurance - which I actually do have with someone else. I may have bought dog food once in the last decade, either when shopping for Mum during lockdown or one of the times I've dog-sat for her. But any pet that I might be feeding will long since have starved to death, on which I'm sure the insurance company would refuse to pay out. And yet they know from my address that I live in a flat - and yet can't make me offers for home contents insurance. Literally all the work is done here, and it would just take some intelligent setting up from the marketing department. Stop laughing at the back there!
They've also failed to notice that I now shop with them once every 6 weeks to pick up a few bits that nobody else sells and have abandoned them for cheaper prices elsewhere - although the real reason was they cut a bunch of the stuff I usually bought from their range. Or at least if they did notice, they made no attempt to try and bring me back with special offers when I went from shopping there 5-6 times a month, to twice a month, to even less now. It doesn't fill me with confidence that even if you gave the ad people all the data they could possibly want, they could actually craft a sensible personalised advertising policy out of it.
Finally, a beer seems like a very good idea. Now that the weekend is here. Cheers!
jake,
I don’t think they made any more gold badgers. The forums died a natural death, and only the article comments remained. I don’t think there were resources, or anything more than vague plans, for what to do with the commentards. In some ways a useful resource. I keep coming back here because of the articles, but also the often excellent posts in the comments.
The Guardian used to have a great resource in its commentards. Though nothing close to the relaxed and mostly pleasant atmosphere round here. But it was bringing a lot of engagement and thus selling a lot of ads. However their new editor, Viner, has gone way more campaign-y, and click-baity than the Guardian ever used to be. And also the paper clearly espouses some quite extreme views on social issues compared to its readership. Particularly on gender issues. So I think comments were inconveniently against the editorial line, plus moderation is expensive for such a popular site. And now barely any articles allow comments. I wonder if the extra clicks generate much income? For either El Reg or the Grauniad?
Is there software that mines a users' comments to try and target forum ads at them anywhere? Is there any targeted ad system anywhere online that even vaguely works as promised?
The problem isn't the capitalism or the people who want to make their lives better, it is that externalities like CO2 emissions, coal ash going out smokestacks or future issues like long term storage of nuclear waste aren't properly accounted for in energy prices.
This is the one thing you need to do, to change the incentives of the capitalists, so they'll do what you want.
Tax carbon emissions. Then money will flow to making alternatives cheaper. Also applications that we think are important, but can't be done well in a low carbon way will become more expensive. Incentivising us not to do them, or if we must, to at least pay for the damage we are causing.
The best thing is that we have to raise taxes anyway. So this way we can move our already unpopular taxation to do something useful, and reduce taxes on other things.
It's not really simple at all of course. Because you push emissions-heavy industry to foreign countries where you can't tax them. So short of global agreement we may end up with carbon pricing at the border. Which is going to be very hard to distinguish from protectionism.
But we've at least made a start.
Freedom is pointless when the safety of everyone is at risk from environmental catastrophes, driven by capitalism.
Two points amongst all the hysteria.
Climate change isn't caused by capitalism. Climate change is caused by people's natural desire to make their lives better for themselves and their families. Capitalism is just part of the way that the most successful states in history organise their economies. With a few changes of incentives free market capitalism can be (and in fact is being) harnessed to make technology that is less harmful to the environment.
Other types of societies, from hunter-gatherers to communist empires, like the Soviet Union have done devastating enviromental damage to themselves - basically because people want stuff.
Also destroying peoples' freedom now is incredibly dangerous to those people right now. Whereas climate change is dangerous to them in the future. Which also changes priorities to, for example, defending that freedom now and worrying about future stuff later.
Addressing climate change is important. And, it should be pointed out, is happening. Lots of improvements are being made. But it won't be solved tomorrow, or the next day. And it will be harder to do if people think the ones suggesting it needs dealing with are dangerous lunatics who want to lock up the people who disagree with them.
The problem (i.e. one of the problems) there is, the governing structure is unable to admit a mistake and must continue with whatever inept decision was taken in the first place.
China's pre-Xi Xinping governing system was better fitted to this. Set up by Deng Xiaoping after the death of Mao was this system where about every 5 years the Party would change its leadership at the Party Conference. New Prime Minster and change some Politburu members, then old PM becomes President and previous President retires.
This was really done because almost everybody in the Party hierarchy had been purged and/or imprisoned by Mao at some point in their carrer. Including Deng (and also Xi's father). So this way stopped any one leader from having too much power - and incentivised them not to piss off too many people, as they'd eventually be retiring themselves.
It also has the advantage that it naturally creates a space for politics. The Prime Minister is not in charge now, but will be next. Which gives them independent power from the President, and forces them to consult. There's also jockeying to be on the next slate of candidates promoted to the Politburu, so you naturally have to quietly campaign and this way there's always policy battles being fought with the personal ones. It's not the greatest system, but it allows flexibility. There's a group of people associated with a policy and if it fails, they probably lose out.
In extreme cases the party can disavow some policy disaster when the President goes by blaming it all on them, and moving on.
I've no idea what possessed the rest of the Party to hand back total power to one man again. But the inflexibility and purges are back too.
Once a policy is identified as Xi's policy it's very tough to change. When Covid cover-up first failed in late 2019 / early 2020 - Xi could personally step in and say he was taking over. But now his policy of Zero Covid is failing, he's nobody to blame. And if he's not infallible, then what's the point of him being dictator for life? This is how dictatorships ossify. After which they usually start to deteriorate.
Is that because the pharmacy is now part if some giant chain that has the political muscle to make sure the NHS adapts to its systems?
Doesn't seem to be. My Mum's local pharmacy is an independent with a single shop. It's in a small parade of shops 30 seconds walk from the local GP surgery. She's been doing her repeat prescriptions from it for years. Or she could use some other pharmacy in town - but having one 2 minutes' walk away is better.
What's not to like about "specify the destination and press send" as a UI?
Do you want a list?
1. The UI isn't that easy. The other end might not pick up, might be busy, or you might have the phone number instead of the fax. The machine then tries it 3 or 5 times and gives up. You come back to the machine an hour later, nothing's been sent.
2. Your machine might decide to malfunction and chew up your original (and maybe only) copy.
3. Your original might have a dirty scanner, and so cover half the page you sent in black. Seeing as you don't get to see what was sent, you don't know unless you're told.
4. The receiving machine may have a dodgy printer and do the same.
5. The receiving machine is out of ink, so just pushes some blank pages through and then tells the sending machine all is fine.
6. The receiving machine is out of paper. Hopefully it has memory, and when someone puts new paper in it next week, it'll print out your fax amongst 200 others. Or only have memory of 30 pages and so miss yours entirely.
7. The receiving machine is randomly crap in some other way you can't control and have no way of knowing.
8. The receiving machine is in a locked room with a sign on the door saying, "beware of the leopard." Nobody has entered said room for 50 years.
9. The receiving machine has been placed on top of a filing cabinet. Don't argue, it always has. A massive, heavy, metal thing that you could use to block the door in case of a zombie apocalypse. If you could actuallly move it. The paper tray on the fax hasn't had the little thing pulled up to stop the paper just sliding down the back of said immovable object. Your fax is now somewhere between the wall and the filing cabinet, along with 100 other sad, missing faxes now lost to history.
AAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I fucking hate faxes! I danced a happy jig the day I left the job where I had to use the damned things all the time. Back in the 90s, when lots of people in offices still didn't have email - even fewer had access to a scanner to digitise something they didn't already have on the computer, and men were real men. And small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri...
Shame on El Reg for using the phrase much loved. Boooooo! Resign!
Breathe... And relax... Rant over, I am heading off the corner to whimper quietly until the flashbacks go away. Don't mind me. Feel free to poke me if I start screaming again.
I'd like Elon Musk to take a page out of the Chinese book. Keep the Falcon 9 rockets reusable, just make life more fun by having a flightpath randomiser module fitted. So they zoom up diddly up up, launch their payload, then perform a few random burns and drop out of the sky. Then the challenge for the rocket is to find the flattest place it can, and try to land on that.
Rockets landing on motorways, in parks, on people's patios. And I'm especially looking forward to the landing radar getting confused and trying to do a Thunderbird 1 and land on a swimming pool...
These are all 'yellow peril' racist talking points rather than reality. (The Uighur oppression is horrific, but it isn't genocidal. Yet, at least. They are wiping out the culture, not the people.)
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Locking at least a million Muslim Uighur people in concentration camps and imposing political education on them for months until they accept that they are no longer Muslim but good Chinese communists in order to be allowed out, is genocide by the above definition.
You don't have to set out to kill a population, you can also just force them to move, as the Soviet Union did under Stalin to the Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tartars and others. Or you can do like Putin (who also forced a bunch of Crimean Tartars out of Crimea in 2014) - who's sent teachers to occupied parts of Ukraine and burned all the school books so the kids can be forced to learn that they're not really Ukranians, but actually Russians. Oh and learn that all in Russian. With Ukranian banned from schools. At the same time threatening their parents, that if they're not sent to school, they'll be kidnapped and farmed out to Russian families for adoption. And unknown number of Ukranian children have already been so kidnapped and adopted in Russia, mostly the kids of parents killed in the war, or separated from them. Plus sending tens to hundreds of thousands of Ukranians through "filtration" camps, where they were interrogated, some tortuned and some deported to remote areas of Russia. That's also genocide. Russia is committing genocide in Urkaine, as well as all the other war crimes.
In both cases this is about language and culture, not extermination.
It's not some fucking "yellow peril talking point". It's deadly serious and we should be doing more about it.
This is like believing Spain is about to invade Gibraltar.
Have you looked at how many amphibious landing ships China has been building in recent years? For a country with no history of expeditionary warfare. Did you notice the virtual naval blockade of Taiwan, just for inviting Nancy Pelosi over for a visit? Have you not seen what just happened in Ukraine? Use your brain man! Maybe President Xi isn't planning an invasion of Taiwan. He just says he is and is spending vast quantities of time and money on preparing to. But it would be catastrophically fucking stupid to act on wishful thinking like that. You might not think it's a sensible thing to do, but unless you can read Xi Xinping's mind - that's no help.
I just did a quick Google. China has 3 helicopter carrier, landing craft docking ships (LHDs), plus another three bigger ones on order - the new ones equivalent in size to a US Wasp class.
8 x LPD - (Landing platfrom dock) again for transporting troops and landing craft then launching them. But not the full flat deck for helo operations, just landing pads.
29 x LST - Landing Ship Tanks. The allies did D-Day with 23 LSTs from memory. They'll each hold about a company of tanks / armoured vehicles - so that's enough for an entire armoured division!
11 x LSM - medium landing ship.
Most LHDs hold about a battalion, more if you squeeze them in because you're not going far. So that's 2 brigades worth, plus maybe the same again on all the other stuff?
D-Day was 3 divisions of paratroopers dropped and about 2 divisions per beach on day one. Plus overwhelming naval and air superiority but Portsmouth to Cherbourg is 93 miles - so not much less distance.
China has specialist assault landing ships for lets say 4 infantry brigades and 3 armoured / mechanised brigades. Plus what you can get on ro-ro ferries and bring in to a port (once you've captured it) plus troops on the rest of the fleet and in cargo ships that can be moved by helicopter. So it's no D-Day, but it isn't much smaller than the landings in Sicily and then Italy.
It's not enough to conquer Taiwan. But enough to hold a bridgehead while reinforcements are brought in from China. Assuming enough shipping can survive multiple trips across the Taiwan straight. Not a given.
Final point. Taiwan's defence budget is about $14bn. China's is $230bn. Any capability they don't have now, they might have in ten years.
Oh and real final point. Stop calling people you disagree with racist. Engage with the points they make.
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