Posts by Squander Two

Trickle-down economics works: SpaceShipTwo is a prime example

Re: Not Trickle-down economics...

> You've missed my point. It's the technology trickle-down that brings the benefits, not the (supposed) economic trickle-down.

They're the same thing. What do you think the economy is?

Re: Great article

> it's a rich toy, no use for putting stuff in Orbit or into deep space.

I heard a British space industry expert on the radio on Monday morning (sorry, forget his name) saying that, actually, they're all very keen on getting satellites into orbit with spaceplanes, and certainly believe it's doable. That may not be Branson's aim, but still a lot of the discoveries his team make will contribute to this goal.

> Funny, I seem to recall the first attempts to develop space vehicles being down to governments. Kind like how the first electrical computers weren't developed to be sold as playthings for the rich either

Both were developed as parts of major war efforts. I don't think anyone claims that war isn't a great motivating factor. In the absence of war, spending by rich people works pretty well. Safer, too.

It is perhaps worth pointing out that both free markets and wartime are manifestations of the same thing: competition. Most of the time, nations compete a bit. During war, that competition is ramped up to insane levels, and we see all sorts of wonderful new inventions. But no-one is interested in non-military applications of those inventions. Look at how NASA's funding has been slashed since the end of the Cold War. Famously, after WW2, a British government committee was formed to look into non-military uses of this new computer thing Turing had developed, and they concluded that, over the next fifty years, British industry would need three of them. Outside wartime, we need rich people spending money on toys if we want development not to be driven by those sorts of short-sighted dunces.

RBS faces biggest ever fine for THAT huge IT meltdown – leak

Re: Yay, lets fine the victims...

Thank you very much, Non-Spartacus. It's been six years, and that's actually the first decent defence of the bailouts I've seen.

Re: Yay, lets fine the victims...

> only a single banker was prosecuted after the crash. Just the one. And he wasn't even a high level executive.

Please explain which executives should have been prosecuted, and which laws they had broken. Then we may consider your complaint properly.

Re: Its not overly harsh

> Indivual members of staff can be done over for all kinds of misconduct already - mainly financial such as insider dealing and money laundering.

Insider trading and money laundering are both deliberate actions. I don't think there's been any suggestion that the employee in question screwed up the batch job on purpose.

Three UK fined £250,000 for customer complaints cockup

What is the point of customer service?

Surely the key way to assess a company's response to a complaint is to look at whether the customer is satisfied with the result. But that doesn't seem to be what's happened here.

The communications watchdog said that Three UK failed to handle some subscriber gripes in a "fair and timely manner".

Ofcom added that, during the regulator's investigation of the company, Three UK had wrongly closed unresolved complaints on its system – while some calls passing through the operator's customer service team had not been officially logged.

....

Ofcom also noted that, although the investigation identified certain shortcomings in Three’s complaints handling processes, the harm to consumers was mitigated due to the efforts of frontline customer service staff.

So Three have, according to Ofcom, actually dealt with complaints perfectly well from the customers' point of view -- but their complaint-logging processes have been crap.

I have worked in customer service. I've worked for companies where good staff are trusted to sort customers' problems out and everyone's happy if the customer's happy, even if it's all dealt with in five minutes and there's no official record created; and I've worked for firms where the really important thing is logging every detail of the customers' comments, even if they're even more pissed off after contacting you than they were before.

Speaking as a customer, I give much less of a damn about complaint logging than I do about complaint resolution.

Re: More fool you

When I got a Vodafone phone with a brand new number, I got a cold sales call -- and an obnoxious one at that -- within five minutes of turning it on.

Do they still insist on that annoying thing where there are two different Vodafones and you can never tell which one you have to ring for service and they act like you're an idiot for not knowing? I forget the details, but I haven't gone back.

Re: never had a prob with three

Same here. Tried them ten years ago and immediately cancelled because they were utter utter shite. Been back with them for the last three years and they're superb.

It's always nice to see a company recognise a problem and fix it.

Would you recognise the Vans shoes logo? Neither would Euro trademark bods

> some shoes clearly have different wavy lines on them. ... The lines down the sides are similar, but not the same.

Been and checked this now. Also went and checked Nike's and Reebok's sites. In all three cases, the logo is different on different shoes, variations on basically the same shape. I could certainly understand any decision that said "THIS version is your trademark and variations on it are not", but only if it applied to everyone equally.

Also, Nike put their squiggly line on all their shoes (that I saw), but both Vans and Reebok have a lot of models without their squiggly lines.

So, whatever you may think, I doubt either of those criiteria are the basis of the ECJ's decision.

> this wavy line they are claiming isn't on most of the clothes and shoes they make.

And? Why would you even begin to think that was relevant to trademark law?

In fact, most clothing manufacturers don't put their logos on most of their clothes (unless you count the internal label). Putting a logo on the outside has become popular in sportswear circles, but, for instance, Next make shoes, put their logo on (I believe) zero of those shoes, and still have their logo recognised as a trademark.

Re: "Squigly line logo"

Yes, it is unique to Vans. I've always thought it's a pretty crappy trademark myself, but I did use to wear skate shoes a lot and when shopping would instantly recognise Vans thanks to that mark, which is surely the point of it.

Thinking about it now, that wishy-washy logo is one of the main reasons I've never bought Vans. It helps their shoes look bland and dull. Not the effect Vans are hoping for, presumably, but still a distinctive and recognisable mark informing my buying decisions.

Greeks best in the world – at, er, breaking their mobile phones

Re: Just sayin'

Apple keep going on and on and on about how wonderful it is that their devices are encased in aluminium. But this is marketing nonsense. The bit of the phone that is protected by being made of strong aluminium is the case -- the one bit that doesn't matter. The very fact that it takes an impact so well means that it is transferring the force to the screen and the internal components. Drop a plastic phone, and the plastic absorbs the impact. But it looks less shiny and expensive.

Over the last few decades, drivers haven't been made safer by using more and more rigid metal in the construction of cars' bodywork.

Apple to PROTECT YOU from dreaded TROUSER EXPLOSIONS

Consider this an official complaint.

This article is simply not up to the standards I expect of El Reg. I mean, honestly, you write:

Apple's invention has "excellent flame retardancy, electric insulation properties, and crack resistance, and produces only negligible amounts of toxic substances during incineration, if any at all".

....

However, it seems that even sitting on a mobe can cause a fire. Basic physics would suggest a larger bottom might make this more likely, as a bigger behind exerts more pressure on anything carried in the back pocket.

Why the hell has the phrase "crack resistance" not been worked into the latter paragraph?

Happiness economics is bollocks. Oh, UK.gov just adopted it? Er ...

Re: Econimics as a fashion item?

> Only an idiot would ever say such a thing.

Like the Buddha, you mean?

White LED lies: It's great, but Nobel physics prize-winning great?

You can lead a horse to English, but you can't make it parse.

> Pretty unequivocal in what it is saying. Add a blue LED to a Red one and a Green one and you can get a white "bulb".

Really can't be arsed giving a point-by-point breakdown of the piece, but you maybe need to learn the difference between "and" and "therefore", and note that Tim was explicitly writing about both bulbs and screens.

> Half your selective quotes don't refer to the LED work, but instead to other uses of GaN - not part of the Prize award. What was your point?

So what's your point now? You claimed that the whole article was completely dismissive of the scientists' work -- because it cast doubt on points made which you also insist are nothing to do with their work. I point out that the article is full of praise for the work. Even if half the quotes are irrelevant (because they relate to some of the work's broader applications rather than just LED bulbs), so what? They're still praise. I can't see even a smidgen of this derisory contempt for the Nobel-winners' work that you claim saturates the article. You're reacting to something that isn't there.

Re: It's a PHYSICS award

> RTFA

I have, twice. I can see why you might think that it says that you can only get white light by mixing red, green, and blue, but it really doesn't. One might even say that it has been carefully worded to avoid saying that. RTFA.

> instead it comes across as trying to downplay the significance of the Prize.

Oh, yes, I see what you mean:

It's an excellent piece of work, enabling a whole new ensemble of energy efficient lamps and colour LED screens, and fully deserving of the prize. And yes, it might well change society in wondrous and wonderful ways. ... whatever happens in the world of lighting, gallium nitride has already changed our world. It's the basis of the higher density we can now achieve in optical storage. ... this is a good example of basic research that got commercialised very quickly. Blue lasers are still (just about, depending upon which generation of them you want to talk about) in patent and that's why the portion of the research done at Nichia Corp was so valuable to the company.

Yeah, it's practically dripping with bile-laden derision.

Re: Time to roam the technical journals

> It's not just about better light. The invention of usable blue LEDs, and the race for efficiency that followed, launched a broad range of new technologies.

From the article:

But, before we go there, we should point out that whatever happens in the world of lighting, gallium nitride has already changed our world. It's the basis of the higher density we can now achieve in optical storage.

> I would call it a world changing invention.

From the article:

And yes, it might well change society in wondrous and wonderful ways.

Re: It's a PHYSICS award

Oh, and also, the Nobel Committee did write:

As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth’s resources. Materials consumption is also diminished as LEDs last up to 100,000 hours, compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights.

Re: It's a PHYSICS award

> The first 4 or 5 commentards already did a neat job.

Their explications were certainly very interesting, but they were writing in response to an error that was not in fact in the article.

> Its a "could fill 4 football stadiums" moment. ... That then gets cherry picked by the Guardian, who push a pro-renewables editorial agenda.

So... what? Therefore no-one must respond to it? I don't get it.

Like I said, that pro-renewables agenda is accepted by our governing classes and is the basis of legislation that affects us all. It doesn't seem that unreasonable to write about it.

> By which point we are so far away from the fact that it's a Physics prize, awarded for some bloody good work that the Nobel itself is irrelevant to the meat of Tim's article.

Again, so what? The Register had already covered the news of the prize here. So what's your point? The Register may publish one and only one article about each piece of news? When one piece of news brings a particular related issue to public attention, The Register may never write about that related issue? Again, I don't get it. Just how fucking boring do you want this website to be?

> "Worstall on the Weekend - Will the LED revolution be all it's cracked up to be?" would have been far more apt and pissed me off far less.

You do know writers don't write their own headlines, right?

Re: @ scatter

> Well it results in the same illumination levels for longer periods of time.

I.e., more lighting.

> The thrust of the article was that there would suddenly be a big increase in illumination levels

I've just reread it in case I missed something, and nope, sorry, you've projected this onto it; it's just not in there. The article points out that, when light gets cheaper, we buy more of it. It doesn't go into specific details about exactly where that spending occurs.

> it's always rolled out by people trying to diss energy efficiency in lighting.

I don't see any of that here either. I don't think that pointing out that increased efficiency may not have the effects some people claim it will is the same as opposing efficiency.

Re: actually.....

> We did start to light up more stuff immedeately

I don't think the article suggests at any point that we didn't.

> I think if you take all those lumens into your equations you'd get quite a different figure.

I think you're mistaken about what that figure is. It's not money spent on things that happen to emit light; it's money spent on lighting.

And even if you did take those things into account, the result would be that we're spending more resources on lighting, not less.

Re: It's a PHYSICS award

> I don't really understand that Physics stuff, so what I'll do is have a stab at explaining it, get it wrong

Whatever you may think of Tim's article, he has at least explained the economics he's presented. Unless you explain the bit Tim got wrong, you're not exactly outdoing him, are you?

> focus in on a small quote from a commentary surrounding the actual awarding of the prize

Hmm. A quote from an eminent physicist explaining the societal importance of the prize in a way that is both representative of what lots of other people are saying about it and is also illustrative of the basis of current legislation. It's hardly some obscure immaterial point, is it?

Apart from that, you seem to be angry that a writer has used something that is currently prominent in the news as a springboard to talk about something that is closely related to it. But surely that's a completely normal everyday event.

Re: @ scatter

> I'm sure there'll be some rebound through people leaving lights on longer ... but that's quite a different thing to adding lots more lighting to increase illumination levels within the home

Leaving lights on longer is adding more lighting to increase illumination levels within the home.

Re: What if energy comes from clean sources? Does it then matter?

> One thing this author seems to have ignored, is that energy, sooner or later is going to stop being from fossil fuels, and from cleaner sources.

By "ignored" do you mean "written about the other day"?

Re: Let there be light!

> The curious thing is why local government think they are in such desperate economic times.

They don't. They're pretending they do in order to blackmail the public. "Nice library you've got here. Be a terrible shame if something were to happen to it. Like, for instance, Westminster threatening my gravy train."

Re: Apologies, typo here

> Does it get more complicated given the ambient light cast off by the myriad devices in our lives like computer and TV screens and the dozens of other devices with luminous displays even if it's just a green led on the router, a red one on the switch and a blue one on the modem?

Depends what you're measuring. If you're measuring the actual cost of bringing your home up to a certain level of litness, yes, that all complicated matters considerably. But if you're measuring the amount that humans spend on lighting, it doesn't. A router may throw a bit of light into a room, but that's a side-effect; when someone spends £50 on a router, they never think "And 30p of that comes out of my lighting budget."

Bono apologises for iTunes album dump

Be fair

I thought a lot of the backing was rather good -- special mention to Adam for playing some interesting bass for the first time in his life. Where it all went wrong was every time Bono opened his mouth. The melodies are just so twee.

Where the leprechauns are

> I've never even heard of a leprechaun outside of:

> 1-US cartoons

> 2-English people on St. Patrick's Day

Clearly never been to Dublin Airport, then.

Nokia Lumia 735: Ignore the selfie hype, it's a grown-up phone

Two or three columns

Older users may also regret the inability to use the phone in the old two column view – it uses three column view by default (meaning smaller tile text) and it isn't possible to reset it to a two column view, an accessibility snafu.

Either the 735 has a special version of WP8.1, or this is wrong. I can certainly switch back and forth between two or three columns on my 1020.

Settings > start+theme

Want to see the back of fossil fuels? Calm down, hippies. CAPITALISM has an answer

Re: Here is what I don't understand

I have often said that, regardless of the arguments about the economic justification for subsidising alternatives to oil in order to cut pollution, there is a decent justification for spending some of the defence budget on them.

I believe that's also Sarah Palin's argument for drilling in Alaska.

Same with agriculture, actually. We currently pay farmers to produce food we don't need because of some romantic idea that no farmer should ever have to change career, which seems like a collosal waste of money. Surely it would make more sense to spend some of our defence budget on farmers in order to ensure that we always have the expertise and infrastructure to produce our own food, just in case.

Re: Capitalism is hoping it wont catch on.

> There are too many vested interests to allow a truly disruptive technology like renewables catch on.

A list of truly disruptive technologies that overturned (or are overturning) massive and powerful vested interests:

Personal computers

Railways

Radio

Email

The Web

Automobiles

Nuclear electricity generation

Gas electricity generation

Mobile phones

Downloadable music

The telegraph

The Suez Canal

The telescope

Mechanised looms

It's an incomplete list.

Re: Economic sense isn't enough

> far fewer people than you expect will rush out and buy it.

How do you know how many people Tim expects will buy it? And why specify that they buy it promptly? All he said was "then people will buy and install it". Economics happens at the margins, so that's all we need.

Re: Tim's hopes for solar and wind are doomed

> It's also wrong. The Sun does shine at night.

That was, in fact, my point.

Re: Is your money where your mouth is?

Since the whole point of carbon taxes is that they make fossil fuel more expensive in order to increase the incentives to develop alternatives, we are all of us paying through the nose for the development of alternative energy. Almost every thing we buy is more expensive as a result of those taxes.

Re: Tim's hopes for solar and wind are doomed

> the sun does not shine at night

I am duly impressed by your level of technical expertise.

Re: petrochemicals -- just, not fossil fuels

> We stopped finding things to burn in 1965. (by which i mean that the rate at which new oil fields are discovered peaked in 1965. We've found less and less every year since

We stopped finding things to burn in 1965. (By which I mean that we did not stop finding things to burn in 1965.)

FTFY

Re: Good point

> neither of those two methods change the amount of energy available.

Obviously not, but they do lead to changes in the techniques we use to harness the available energy.

The amount of energy available is the same as it always has been: inconceivably huge, more than we could ever need. Availability doesn't matter; harnessing matters.

Inequality increasing? BOLLOCKS! You heard me: 'Screw the 1%'

Re: @ecofeco

DougS,

I think you are mistaken. You're arguing on the assumption that The One Percent are the top 1% of society, either by income or by wealth. But they're not. "The One Percent" is a catchy marketing term used to mean "those fucking bastards with their cigars and their top hats and their private jets who are to blame for everything wrong in my world." The idea that 1% in this context indicates some sort of fraction -- a hundredth, say -- is frankly naive.

Re: Piketty is all about wealth distribution. This is all about income distribution.

Of course they have something to do with each other, but they're nowhere near as closely correlated as you seem to think. As I mentioned elsewhere, I'm in the UK's top 10% by income and bottom 10% by wealth. And I am not remotely unusual in that respect. Most people with mortgages, for instance, have negative wealth.

Re: You seem to be misunderstanding.

Employment follows demand in aggregate. Changing career can still be very difficult for individuals.

Slavery

> western capitalism has had all of the wealth stolen from damn near everyone else in the world, including the mind boggling wealth generated by the enslavement of hundreds of millions of africans for 200 years (yeah, i am looking at you too America)

Slavery was the normal way of humanity for millenia. What distinguishes Western civilisation in history was not that it participated in it just like everyone else but that it stamped it out, completely unlike everyone else. America was a bit later than the British Empire in that regard, but they still got there in the end.

There is some reasonable debate about just how much wealth slavery actually generated. Slave owners at the time certainly thought that they needed it, but the fact is undeniable that productivity has increased massively since it was abolished -- and the British Empire reached its height after abolition. Worth remembering, too, that very few Africans were enslaved by white Europeans; they were mainly enslaved by other Africans and then sold to white Europeans. So, if enslavement generated so much wealth, we should be able to see a lot of that wealth in Africa, especially in the Arab states.

I know some historians argue that what really killed slavery was mechanisation, the simple fact that machines work better than slaves and so destroyed the economic argument for it. Certainly, all nations that industrialised became rich, whilst not all nations that used slavery did.

Re: Ditch the white cat, please @ecofeco

> Or did you forgot about some recently failed government IT projects? Defense contracts? Insider trading? Market gaming? Rate rigging? Let us know when one these sounds familiar.

You seem to be implying that, because some rich people are corrupt and/or criminal, they all are. That's the same as saying that all poor people are burglars.

>> No, they invest it.

> Oh they do, do they?

> From FT. You know, that bastion of lefty ideologues.

I honestly have no idea what point you're trying to make there. There's certainly nothing in that FT piece suggesting, for instance, that Asian billionaires refuse to use banks. In fact, it says:

Yet, one of the common characteristics of the world’s billionaires is their entrepreneurialism.

So that's job creation. And:

Billionaires increased their holdings of cash and cash equivalents such as shares or bonds in the period to an average of $600m each from $540m last time. ... Wealth-X and UBS said the level of cash held signalled that many are “waiting for the optimal time to make further investments”.

So they've invested lots of money and are intending to invest even more.

What did you think the article said?

Re: Life is just a ride..

> As a country we hardly produce anything to trade.

That's wrong for two reasons. Firstly, we produce quite a lot of expertise, which is very tradable. Secondly, even if you insist that that people's time and effort and knowledge don't count for some reason and that the only produced things that matter are solid objects, British manufacturing has been steadily increasing in output for decades. When people talk about the death of our manufacturing industries, they are referring to the fact that we no longer emply a lot of people in manufacturing. But that's for the same reason we no longer employ half the population of the country in agriculture: we've got much better at it. We didn't stop doing it.

> Fractional reserved banking keeps the majority working "more for less" in debt paying interest hence the social inequality. ... I am pointing out that if a system is to work it has to include all.

You are implying that jurisdictions in which banking is not available to the masses are preferable for the poor. The evidence is against you.

Re: income inequality AFTER TAX is reducing

> Many of the studies are done on pre-tax and pre-redistribution incomes.

Funnily enough, that is now known as Worstall's Fallacy.

Re: RE: Identify Generally correct

> Any industry can be turned into 'a success' if government money is thrown at it

People who claim that subsidised renewable energy firms are a success very rarely claim that the bailouts of 2008 showed how successful our banks were.

Re: Ditch the white cat, please @ Matt Bryant

> The use of such high-end luxury goods is a staple misdirection of the Lefties intended to focus attention on 'the excesses of the rich'.

Exactly. And I don't think these people realise what the 1% are actually like. The demonic Lear-jetting, whore-quaffing fat cats they envisage are probably more like the 0.01%. Most of the 1% are a bit more normal, I find: they have very nice cars and big houses, but they drive the cars themselves and the houses have mortgages. And a lot of them are Guardian-readers.

Course, that's 1% by income, not by wealth. Which is fair enough, since that's what this article is about. That's the other thing: the anti-one-percenters don't seem to even be aware that there's a difference between income and wealth, just bandying their favourite number around without thinking about what it means. Personally, I'm in the top 10% in the UK by income and the bottom 10% by wealth -- I have negative wealth -- which just goes to show how silly it is to conflate the two.

> How about chocolate - do we really need chocolate, even for 'that time of month'? No, if we are to only focus humanity's efforts on the noble goal of producing 'what is best for all' then chocolate appears to be a frivolous luxury item.

Funnily enough, that's what the law actually says in the UK: biscuits are VAT-free, but chocolate biscuits, being luxury items, are taxed. Our lords and masters at work.

Re: Ditch the white cat, please

> If there is one thing the post-Reagan era has taught us, it is that trickle-down economics do not work.

I see lefties make this claim from time to time (usually verbatim, interestingly (is there a manual or something?)), and find it frankly baffling. What we've seen in the post-Reagan era is more of the planet than ever before drag more of its people further out of poverty than the wildest dreams of our ancestors ever envisaged. (OK, maybe not the very wildest. Some of our ancestors were crazy.) And it's not thanks to Communism, is it?

> What actually happens when the very rich get more money, is that they hoard it.

No, they invest it. They may well invest it out of pure selfishness, because they want it to breed more money, but that doesn't matter to those who are invested in, does it?

There may well be a handful of crazy super-rich people who convert all their money into cash or gemstones or whatever, place it into big wooden chests, then bury it. I agree that such people's wealth is not trickling down (unless a poor person finds one of their maps). I don't agree that such people are representative of the economy or significantly influential on it.

Re: Life is just a ride..

> Money does not exist, it is not based against any earth resource for example redeeming the notes for gold like it used to be

Can you explain what makes what you think of as money valuable and why what I think of as money isn't valuable?

What's so great about gold? It's just stuff. Why should it be worth more than a person's time and effort? Or, more precisely, why should some solid stuff have a more "real" value than a person's time and effort?

If I ask you to build me a new house, and I pay for all the materials and your food, will you do it for free because you won't be giving me any earth resources?

Re: Fine up until the last point...

> the rich happen to run the political discourse that affects everyone

Oh, so that's why they're so poular.