Posts by rg287

This is how Elon's Department of Government Efficiency will work – overwriting the US Digital Service

There won't be any cost savings.

Oh yea of little faith.

It's amazing what you can do by deferring maintenance and renewals - leaving a tidy little mess for the next lot to clear up. But this year's books look great.

Re: While I'm asking questions ...

So a bit odd for a South African that came to the US via Canada?

And was born in 1971, some 29years after US schools stopped using it. So no American born after about 1935 could have any excuse for "oh, sorry, just an old habit from school".

Re: While I'm asking questions ...

Giving Nazis "the benefit of the doubt" is how they thrive.

The ADL are - unforutnately - not merely concerned with anti-semitism but are historically extremely Zionist and pro-Israel. Given that the Prime Minister of Israel is a borderline fascist, facing international charges of war crimes, and the ADL have been deemed "generally unreliable" on the topic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (such as labeling pro-Palestinian activists as antisemitic), we have to take the ADL's position with a pinch of salt as they have allowed their credibility to slip via a series of unwise proclamations. This is just the latest.

The ADL attacked Trump remorselessly in his first term, but seem to have softened their stance given that Trump is backing Israel's campaign of genocide (apparently they consider carpet bombing neighbourhoods to constitute a "precision strike"). Just yesterday Trump revoked sanctions against Israeli colonialists who had settled land on the West Bank through force. I was under the impression that colonialism was bad. But the US and Israel have decided otherwise.

It's weird how people continue to give Britain grief for the undoubtedly dark actions in the days of Empire but - rather than taking a way a message that slavery and genocide is bad - then turn around and say "well anyway, watch this!".

Re: While I'm asking questions ...

You think America could have defeated the Taliban with only 19 carrier battle groups, rather than 20?

Clearly they needed at least 21 since they didn't defeat the Taliban - just drove them into hiding for a decade.

Re: While I'm asking questions ...

Military spending significantly influences the U.S. economy.

Indeed. It hides the USA's social welfare programmes, which subsidises private industry's unwillingness to invest or train their staff.

Can't afford college? Join the military and they'll put you through a degree.¹

Become a signaller and get stacked with your <Vendor> networking certs ready for a career in the private sector. We can't expect private enterprise to train their staff or pay for CPD after all.

Just don't join the infantry.

Plus, lifetime socialised healthcare through the VA!

Service means citizenship!

_{1. Success may very with trade and branch}

---------------------------------------

Of course, the US could spend that military budget direct on education and healthcare. There's no real need to make people join a bloated military as salaried personnel to access those opportunities. They could work as productive private sector workers and still access those benefits, reducing cost to the taxpayer. Or we could spend it on infrastructure, by hook or by crook. A canny president - recognising the need for better rail connectivity across the US for freight and passengers - could order the Army Corp of Engineers to design and start construction on such a network for defence purposes, in the same way they manage other - dubiously military - civil engineering projects like Mississippi flood control. The fact that those lines would then be predominantly used by civilian Amtrak services, making use of free space when the military aren't shifting materiel - would be a complete coincidence.

This would all benefit the US economy (because public spending makes the private sector work - since all money ultimately comes from the government/Fed, unless it's counterfeit!). It doesn't need to be military to benefit the economy. Infrastructure, healthcare and transport would also work.

Re: Once a lap-DOGE ...

Something Elon is probably well qualified to do.

Elon is patently unqualified to oversee massive migrations of legacy data and infrastructure, having only ever worked in new-build environments on a "Move fast and break things"/"Fail rapidly" basis.

It is very weird to suggest that he has any meaningful expertise in migrating legacy government systems from (say) a creaking and inflexible - but highly reliable - mainframe infrastructure to something more modern, distributed or with more scope for a better user/public-facing services.

Even sober and planned migrations like that of TSB and HSBC (Eyes passim) can go badly wrong.

The idea that such migrations will happen on Elon time-scales (and after he's sacked half the staff) is laughable.

Except it's not laughable, because it's easy to rip stuff out and much harder to put it back together. Elon could wreak havoc in 12 months that will take a decade (and $B) to put back together.

Oh, Deere! FTC sues tractor maker, alleging decades of monopolized repairs

Re: Sowing the seeds

I disagree with your assertion about different paint jobs

There are basically three major players... Deere, AGCO and CNH. Within those, pick which brand/colour scheme you want.

For yard tractors and dairy there's a tonne of choice - and the small players like Kubota, Yanmar and (more recently) TAFE come into play.

But for >150hp (i.e. most US arable), it's an unholy triad - and AGCO don't make the big quad-trac stuff that Deere and Case do, so really a duopoly. The biggest Massey (AGCO) is 425hp. The Fendt 1100 (two-track) is cool, but still not quite up there with a 715hp Quadtrac or the biggest Deere 9RX (Rated 830hp, Max 913hp).

Re: Sowing the seeds

So is there an amendment to the constitution that is forcing farmers to buy from Deere John? A quick gooooogle seems to indicate that Fiat, Case, Caterpillar , Massey Ferguson, Lamborghini, and one or two other manufacturers also offer tractors.

Obviously those tractors need to be suited to the work - there's a difference between small-holder and "yard" tractors, row-crop, and then the mid-west quad-trac monsters. For the largest stuff you have a choice between the Deere 9R(X) series and the Case Quadtrac/Steigers. Noone else makes that monster stuff. For yard work and dairy (<150hp), there's more choice. So it depends what you farm.

Two points:

1. There's less competition than you think - most of those brands are under a handful of parents.

- You can't buy a Fiat-branded tractor. Fiat Group owns Case New Holland (CNH) and folded Fiat Trattori into that business a couple of decades ago. They churn out largely the same tractors in your choice of red or blue.

- Massey is part of AGCO and is a stablemate of Fendt and Valtra.

- Lamborghini is an SDF brand with Deutz-Fahr and SAME (and Hürlimann, who make weird alpine vineyard tractors). But they're barely distributed in the US anyway... so no.

So your question is really "Do I have a Deere/CNH/AGCO dealer?". That's your actual three-player marketplace, not the many brands. There are some low-cost Indian and Chinese brands making inroads as well, but they're only really <100hp yard tractors, not suitable for drilling thousands of acres of mid-west corn.

2. Cartel activity and local monopolies. There's a remarkable lack of geographic overlap between dealers for competing companies/brands. Sure, you can go out-of-state to find a non-Deere dealer. But then support, parts, deep dealer-required service? On your own. This is not an accident by the way.

Not that having a "local" dealer is always helpful because they usually don't employ enough service techs to keep up with their choke-hold on maintenance, so a breakdown can take a couple of days to get a slot - unacceptable in harvest.

Blue Origin reaches orbit with New Glenn, fumbles first-stage recovery

Re: another source with ball park accuracy

According to Tory Bruno, a new rocket costs about $2B to develop including $1B for the engines.

It costs ULA/Boeing $2B (and it apparently costs Blue Origin a hell of a lot more over the cost of 20 years, since they were founded before SpaceX).

But SpaceX had Falcon 9 operational before they spent their billionth dollar. RocketLab were going to orbit (with a much smaller vehicle) for well under a billion.

Tory Bruno is right about what the industry tends to spend - but this is not an immutable rule of thumb, and more reflective of the way that "old space" tends to do business (and BO seem to have been run in the old-space style).

New Space of course is not easy, and not always the right path either (and you have to be willing to tolerate a bunch of explosions along the way). But it can offer significantly faster development and lower cost in the right circumstances.

Is it really the plan to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal? It's been a weird week

Re: "it is all about the money"

The antidote to that is of course more support and more personal and financial security via collective provision - the neoliberal European model.

Neoliberalism is the cancer that is eating away at what's left of Keynesianism and is generally associated with privatization, deregulation, laissez-faire free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending - as popularised by Reagan and Thatcher.

Whilst highly regarded institutions within European states persist (such as the NHS and social security, which give people the confidence to be entrepreneurial, knowing there is a safety net), they have come under repeated attack from neoliberalism and it is coming time for a new round of neo-Keynesianism in which governments stop fearing fiscal deficit and face up to the deficits of good jobs,¹ good education and quality transport - the latter being frequently overlooked in people's rush for education and healthcare, despite being fundamental to people's ability to access those services.

1. UK unemployment statistics are currently garbage. Notionally we have pretty steady unemployment ~4%. However, this masks the fact that at least another 4% are underemployed, which has major knock-ons. For instance, many students (not counted as unemployed because they're in FTE) would like to do some work - maybe a few hours a week retail or bar work. They can't because a lot of other people are doing that work, and are simultaneously claiming income support because they'd like 40hours/wk but can only get 20. A large tranche of the population are under-employed, and they in turn are locking out a block of people who don't appear in unemployment stats, but are actually unable to access work that they would like to do. This is clearly indicative of problems in our economy and gives a hint as to why our national productivity is low, despite a notionally sound unemployment rate - people are "employed" but not actually working full time. Take your pick as to root causes - lack of investment in skills, manufacturing and the erosion of workers rights, zero hour contracts, etc.

To take it to absurd levels, we could reduce unemployment to zero by giving every claimant an hour's work a week for minimum wage. We would technically not have any unemployment then - but self-evidently, we also wouldn't have a high-productivity economy. This illustrates the problem we have, which is masked behind the stats quoted in headlines.

the situation in the UK is that it is politically impossible to raise the revenue needed for the public services that are necessary to ensure economic growth and that's pretty close to game over.

In straightforward (naive) fiscal/economic terms it's very straightforward to raise this revenue (or borrow via gilts) to invest in infrastructure (tax like it's the 1960s... when the UK had vast growth and improvements to standards of living!) - or alternatively the markets would have no problem lending money for trains, hospitals and schools.

Politically however, we are still under the shadow of Thatcher's "TABS" policy and this idea that a national government should balance it's books like a household or a local council - which is just patent nonsense for a bunch of reasons (Clinton ran a surplus for several years in the 1990s and was asked to stop before he created a recession - just like when Andrew Jackson paid off the USA's national debt in 1835 and - by restricting private sector liquidity (spending less back into the private sector than the Government collected in taxes) plunged the economy into a recession in 1837.

Government red ink is our black ink. Trying to run a government surplus makes us all poorer.

Re: speech is apparently free

Canada and the UK are siding with USA. It’s delusional to think otherwise.

What are you smoking and where can I get some?

In the UK we remember too well Chamberlain waving Britain's greatest Pre-war joke (the Munich Agreement) around and declaring "Peace for our time".

"This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler Herr Putin, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine."

I think not.

I'd say its more about getting navy ships from one side to the other and not cargo.

Trump has mentioned "excessive" tariffs on naval vessels. I'd be intrigued to know just how much of that needs to go on given the USA's extremely large navy and distinct Atlantic/Pacific (and Indian Ocean) fleets. As you say, the new carriers are too big anyway. Indian Ocean fleet can come back "either way" as suits.

At least naval vessels are built tough and can take on Cape Horn weather more readily than some of the super-sized cargo vessels. Or they can follow an ice-breaker round the top.

Trump's obsession with Panama is very strange. People dress it up as "national security", but those people have apparently not noticed that the Panama Canal is running out of water. Within a decade, there's an even chance that the Canal will be closed to all shipping for a couple of months a year until the water levels start rising again. You'd think they'd be more aware of this looking at domestic water crises like Lake Mead.

If Trump wants to act in the interests of national security, he should build a new TransAmerican railroad - a modern coast-to-coast freight line paralleled by a high speed passenger line. This would mean that in the event of problems in Panama, ships can unload on one coast and containers can be zipped cross country, all under the total control of the US. Not that unloading in SF, railroading to Baltimore and then reloading onto a ship is ideal - but it's a better option than going all the way down to Cape Horn.

Of course polar ice will be melting so badly by then that shipping through the Artic Circle may also be an option.

Nonetheless, an electric high speed line would also reduce dependence on oil, giving resiliance in the event of avgas shortages. Of course most people don't want to travel coast-to-coast, but a 200mph line could provide a neat NYC-LA sleeper service in about 14hours (which is not far off what you spend flying, arsing around in airports and getting transfers at each end, whilst offering a proper lie-down bed and a more comfortable experience generally). And of course being able to travel Chicago-St Louis, St Louis-Nashville or San Antonio-Houston in 90minutes beats the heck out of 3-6hours driving (or 90minutes flying, plus airport time, plus transfers).

But obviously that won't happen. The idea that you could improve national security through domestic infrastructure investment is nonsense. Security comes through strength and imperialist aggression/acquisition.

Re: Money talks

Zuk is a psychopath (and if that conjures up images of axe-wielding loons then I encourage you to go and look-up what the word actually means)

All billionaires are sociopaths. I say this without malice or judgment as such - it's a simple clinical observation. If they're not a full on diagnosable sociopath then they exhibit sociopathic tendencies.

Most of us - if we found a niche and started a successful business - might sell out when it hit a few million. After all, £15m is more than enough to retire to a nice house and buy a boat, go sailing or skiing, race cars or make cheese - indulge your passion. Maybe you do really well. Maybe you fork Signal and sell it to Meta for a cool billion.

But after that? Billionaires are literally wired differently. They're the half who didn't become serial killers. They're the ones with a love of money (root of all evil). For a billionaire there is no such thing as "enough". They have a narcissistic and sociopathic tendency to always prove themselves - they're fundamentally insecure. They can't look at a billion quid and go "Nice, now I can relax". They have to go on to the next thing and try to turn it into two billion. Or two hundred billion.

And it's not like "being successful" or "working hard" is a bad thing, but to have as much money as Bezos (who could give $100,000 to each of Amazon's one million US workers and still retain half his fortune!), or even "minor" billionaires like Anthony Bamford or Richard Branson (<£10Bn) and not have thought "I'm just gonna go have fun now" is a bit weird, and a bit sad. I guess business is their idea of fun. But we have to remember that all of them - without exception - have engaged in criminality along the way. Whether it was Branson's tax fraud and screwing over business partners (shades of how Jobs treated Woz), or Lord Bamford's anti-competitive practices (to say nothing of Gates/Microsoft). And as for Elizabeth Holmes... well she made the mistake of defrauding other billionaires. The patient fraud charges were not upheld, just the defrauding investor charges. Dear America - sort yourselves out.

You don't get to be a billionaire by being ethical. You can be rich, but not a billionaire. Look at James Timpson - worth ~£200m. When Covid rolled around, he told his staff "We will look after you. Noone is getting sacked. We're getting through this together". Meanwhile JCB made a thousand people redundant instead of simply furloughing them (and sacked off their line staff, who are in large part employed via an internal agency so that they can be disposed off without redundancy proceedings - actually employing people is so gauche, with NI and pensions and all that palaver!). On paper, Bamford is a more successful businessman than Timpson, but we know which one history will treat more kindly. Which one displays sociopathic tendencies and which naive fool is only worth millions...

UK prepared to throw planning rules out the window for massive datacenters

A data centre or two won't matter, lots of data centres will certainly start to tax our increasingly meagre generation capabilities.

Not even generation - it's transmission capabilities. Hence why they keep shutting down wind farms in Scotland when generation exceeds local demand, and the ability to transmit surplus down to England. Scotland could be basically 100% wind powered by now (with a bit of hydro and pumped-hydro buffering) but the Grid can't keep up and shift power to the right places.

Re: "an overly complex planning system that has lacked clarity"

The current Government is just out of control when it comes to granting development. We have 1000s of acres of solar farms on prime agricultural land approved since they came into power. What is utter insanity on this is there are 1000s of acre of commercial roof space with nothing on them. We blindly turn greenfield sites into concrete then separately cover them in solar panels.

The Ag land isn't really an issue. It's generally grazing land and continues to be dual-use with livestock and solar panels, generating a useful income for the farmer.

Agree entirely however that the lack of solar on commercial roofing is insane. There are some collosal warehouses built on the edge of our town recently and at best there's a handful of panels in one corner. Given the low price of panels and the recent fluctuations in energy prices, even just panelling out to 50% of your own demand (i.e. every Watt generated will be consumed locally, not exported to grid) you insulate your business against energy pricing. If you're in the business of putting up quarter of a million sq.ft of warehouse, you can finance panels as a sensible investment - the payback is barely 3-4years at this point.

And just as a little anecdote, some people will line up and say "ah well, if it was worth doing, businesses would". But this assumes businesses are well run. A friend of mine took a job as a "sustainability officer" at a property-management company who owned an estate of office space and also leased some buildings/floors to sub-let. Their general remit was reycling programmes, getting lighting to LED, coordinating on renewals of things like heating plant to ensure the new system was "good practice" and the CEO could boast about it in the annual report.

The first day he went to accounts and asked "How much do we pay for electric and can we get on a green tariff?".

The answer was "we have no idea", in a lot of cases they were on a default tariff and paying through the nose for energy. It took him a week of digging through accounts paperwork simply to find out who the suppliers were for some sites. Building management hadn't poked accounts, accounts weren't paying attention. The lights hadn't gone off so noone thought about it - bills just got paid as they came in.

He got the buildings they managed onto sensible tariffs (in some cases green tariffs turned out cheapest) and saved the company £100k/yr. That was his first fortnight... some businesses are run efficiently. Some look like they're being run efficiently but actually they could cut their energy bill by 25% if someone spent a couple of hours changing supplier. Sometimes it's the little things that make the big difference, and something like solar panels on the new warehouse would totally make sense except it's noone's specific responsibility so noone makes it happen, or there's some perverse incentive in the corporate structure to keep CapEx down even at the cost of OpEx and TCO.

Court docs allege Meta trained its AI models on contentious trove of maybe-pirated content

Re: Writing stuff down

Or could be because they were WFH. Why, I guess, there's so much pressure to RTO.

Not being able to have an off-the-record watercooler chat is one thing. But putting stuff in writing is nothing new. Zuck put in writing that FB's very generous (in terms of $/user) valuation for Instagram was basically because most insta users at the time were disaffected FB users, and he wanted to recapture them into the FB group (now Meta), even if they weren't on the FB platform. This was a written admission of probably-unlawful monopolistic/anti-competitive behaviour and the idiot put it in writing to his execs.

Sadly, the US anti-trust regulator is so feeble that this was never acted upon. Rinse and repeat across all sectors and the result is modern day America.

I say "idiot" of course. He's no such thing - he knows that laws don't apply to billionaires and he will bear no consequences for anything he does.

The channel stands corrected: Hardware is a refresh cycle business now

Re: Money dear boy

Money is one aspect. The other is the partial death of on-prem IT.

Once upon a time you might have a server room. If you were a big company wanting to run SAP on-prem you might use a suitable channel partner to provide and service certified hardware. Maybe you maintain some stuff yourself but channel partners help with more specialist gear.

Now you rent a certified config in Azure - and MS buy hardware direct from supplier, not the channel. Likewise M365/Google Workspace - there are MSPs who resell that, but most people do it themselves.

If you run anything on-prem it's commodity storage servers or stuff that you look after yourself, and outside that you're basically left with desktop and laptop support, which they don't need partner support for - just call Dell/HP/Lenovo and order x00 of the required spec.

Of course the death of on-prem is overblown and plenty of places maintain on-prem gear. But the shift outlined above is easily sufficient to account for the drop in channel sales where a reseller needs to add some value (e.g. specialist/certified hardware, or providing a neck to wring).

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Re: At that price...

That's not what the Pi is about.

Well no. But that's somewhat the point. If you want to play with LLMs or some form of ML, then an x86 processor with fast RAM is going to be head and shoulders above a Pi - even a 16GB RPi 5 with an "AI" hat (which will run you £60-120, putting a total system cost >£200).

RPi benefits from GPIO and the hobbyist ecosystem around it. In truth, it's hard to see many applications for the Pi 5 at any RAM level - the original "coding"/educational angle (a Pi for every child, a resource in school labs) has largely fallen by the wayside, leaving it split between hobbyist use and industrial. Some people might use it as a light desktop, but a refurbed uSFF desktop is highly competitive there.

In truth there's not really much that a 5 will do that the 4 wouldn't. Better performance on some computer visiony type stuff for sure, but what else?

This is where I think people get a bit confused - for the vast majority of hobbyist applications (robotics, SDR, Home Assistant, PiHole, etc), a 3B will suit. Heck, I've got an original 1B running PiHole. If you're playing with running lots of containers or LLMs, then in honesty an N100 box or Ryzen NUC type thing will blow the pants off a Pi for £200-300 (i.e. about the same price point), and still top out at 20W.

It's hard to see the market for any of the Pis over about £50. I can only assume the 16GB Pi5 already has a business/industrial customer with a specific requirement that made it worth developing.

Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics

Re: A week is a long time in politics…

Probably as they reenforce your worldview.

Or the fact that having independently verified their findings for a sample of stories, I trust them to be generally decent.

That's the thing about facts - they're true whether you like them or not. It's sad that Democrats have told fibs. But I accept they do it, albeit less frequently then the Reps, and usually in a manner which doesn't incite hatred or violence against minority groups.

Re: A week is a long time in politics…

Yup. We've been wasting billions on 'Net Zero' and I'd rather our dear leaders invested instead in things like building more ships for our Navy.

Good idea. Get rid of the green crap and go back to being reliant on Mother Russia for gas. Who needs energy security? Always weird how discussions of national security seem to start and end with military spending, when things like "OPEC have no power here because we don't need their oil" would also be very effective (for everyone except BAE shareholders).

That being said, we could do with building more naval vessels. The question is... are you also proposing conscription? National Service? The Navy have a lot of trouble manning the ships they've got.

Minister acknowledges Royal Navy 'recruitment challenges'

Royal Navy: Armed forces recruitment falls as calls to support 'chronically depleted' military grow louder

Armed forces recruitment falls short of targets

We should of course acknowledge the good work within the MoD to secure UK supply chains and actually take matters seriously - they've just bought back the Married Quarters Estate from Annington (~36,000 homes) - although estimate that the taxpayer spent £8Bn more than it needed to during that dalliance with the "efficient" private sector, who efficiently rinsed the MoD of millions per year in rental costs whilst failing to update, renovate or de-mold the properties.

They also bought Sheffield Forgemasters to secure domestic access to specialist castings. Military procurement is typically lumpy and the public sector can tolerate a £20m loss one year evened out by a £20m profit the next (literally a rounding error on UKGov's annual budget of ~£1Tn). When one understands how government spending works, something that provides a national security function whilst basically breaking even(!) over a time horizon of more than 6 months is a no-brainer. Also brings into perspective how Cameron scotched the "unaffordable" £100m government loan to SFIL in 2010, which would have allowed them to tool for nuclear reactor casings and bid on Hinckley Point/Sizewell work. But the MoD are now investing an apparently-affordable £400m for defence-critical plant and infrastructure.

If only the rest of Government would catch up and purge the private sector from dodgy PFI schemes that allow them to rent fixed assets like hospitals back to the public sector in perpetuity (TCO always works out cheaper to own over a 40-year timespan, which a government can happily finance - no private firm can ever borrow cheaper than the Treasury).

Re: A week is a long time in politics…

Now? It always has been.

It was always a foreign platform, but I'm not sure the owners in San Fran were behind various Russian disinformation campaigns. In fact they went to some efforts to stop that sort of thing.

Of course they undoubtedly turned a blind eye to any US-based propaganda, but all that was quite a way from the owner and CEO actively trolling foreign leaders.

Just like with the 'fact' checkers. You check the 'facts' in accordance with whoever is paying you.

None of the major fact checking outlets - Politifact, FullFact, Factcheck.org or even Snopes can really be accused of political bias. It may be that they debunk more "right-wing" material than "left-wing", but this is hardly surprising when the overwhelming majority of Anti-Vax, Holocaust-Denial, burn-the-5G-masts nonsense comes form the far-right.

Nonetheless, Factcheck.org's "Whoppers of 2024" is remarkably even-handed. They write:

Several of Trump’s biggest falsehoods over the last 12 months were about immigration, including his bizarre claim that Haitian immigrants were “eating the pets” of people in an Ohio community. In addition, he incorrectly blamed “migrant crime,” as he coined it, for the not-at-all “Worst Crime Wave in History!”

He also took historical revisionism to new levels...

But Trump wasn’t alone in misinforming the public. His political foes did so as well.

Our jaws dropped when President Joe Biden claimed that the annual rate of inflation, which spiked during his administration, already “was 9%” when he took office. And the Democratic presidential ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz kept calling the conservative Project 2025 playbook Trump’s “agenda,” and Walz falsely claimed that it calls for a federal registry to monitor “all pregnancies.”

The problem is that social media has been accepted as a 'town square' for communications by so many companies, governments and government agencies that leaving them will cut off vital communications with millions of people. Its simply too late.

Quite. It's the same basic story as shopping malls in the US. There was an era where people said "We'll meet by the fountain" or "at the food court". They had a feel of a town square, but they were never a public space - it was always private domain, and you could be kicked out by security at any time if you said the wrong thing, looked the wrong way or had the wrong face.

Social media is the new shopping mall. It looks and feels like a high street, but it's not. Under the old management, it went unnoticed because Twitter went to some effort to deal with actual racism, hate speech, and address botnets. Under the new - less benevolent - management, people are starting to figure out that it was never theirs. They were welcome for as long as the hosts chose to entertain them.

Re: A week is a long time in politics…

There's no law against saying civil war is inevitable. And surely it's better he be allowed to say it in public, so we can all see how little he knows - than to give him the false cachet of having his statement banned?

Not sure KittenHuffer was necessarily suggesting that Xitter should be banned - merely abandoned. Starmer can - and should - instruct the Cabinet Office to abandon all UKGov accounts. Stop updating them.

Twitter was a useful social platform. Now it's the personal political vehicle of a foreign national, seeking to influence UK politics. There's literally no reason for UKGov or senior politicians to carry on using it, any more than they should feel obliged to use Baidu, VK or Truth Social. If Starmer nuked enough political Xitter accounts, it'd break the network effects for the Westminster politics corner of the Xitterverse and pretty much force people elsewhere - press releases, gov.uk, BlueSky, etc. Musk could scream into the void but we wouldn't be listening. Just as I'm welcome to write whatever I like on a personal blog but nobody is obliged to read - much less respond - to it.

My biggest objection is the conduct of the media, who breathlessly report all this and therefore enable Musk. At what point did we decide that the leaders of European nations should be obliged to answer daily questions about the musings of a private South African/US/Canadian citizen? Musk is at liberty to predict civil war - that doesn't mean our dear leaders are obliged to dignify it with a response. If I start a blog, should political editors quiz Starmer on my opinions too? I do at least have a UK vote!

Re: A week is a long time in politics…

A day is a long time in politics.

Starmer could end this today by simply putting out word that UKGov no longer uses Xitter and that departments should stop updating their accounts (if he wants to ghost Musk. Or delete entirely if he wants to be a bit more on-the-nose). A similar edict to Labour MPs (or at least senior MPs/Cabinet) would torpedo the Westminster-politics corner of Xitter. It would suddenly become much less useful to political journos, who would have to pick up other channels (Facebook/Bluesky/websites/press releases/actually talking to and interviewing sources(!)). This in turn would starve Fromage and 'eau de Musk of UK attention.

Seal the deal by resolutely ignoring any question that starts with "What is your response to the recent comment by Elon Musk that...?", or responding with "Sorry, do you have a relevant question? We're discussing the <NHS/education/whatever> today, and the investments we're making to improve the lives of British people."

Shaming journalists is a tricky business, but in this case I'm happy for Starmer to challenge them with "Why are you asking me daily about the personal opinions of a private foreign individual who has no involvement in UK affairs?"

DEF CON's hacker-in-chief faces fortune in medical bills after paralyzing neck injury

Re: Ouch

In an optimal situation, but I doubt it. For example my family member who had a stroke and it was ignored and she was put on a covid ward (didnt have covid) and took ages to be moved and treated.

I can't speak to your specific circumstances, but my family member with a suspected stroke (yeah, 2024 was a year, toasted it the fuck away on NYE) was escorted around their various tests by a dedicated doctor. I suspect it must have been an unusually slow day for them, but you'd not have had better care if you were private. It's very regrettable that your family member didn't get that.

There will always be variation across the country unfortunately, but as a general rule NHS seems to handle urgent pretty superbly. And in the reported case, if doctors wanted an MRI (which they did), then he'd have been wheeled down to radiology for one. Even if there was a queue, there'd have been no question about it being done eventually.

The problem is they've got A&E/Trauma down pretty good. Time-limited things like maternity are pretty decent, along with oncology.

But outside of that, you get the "Good news! It's not cancer. But we don't know what it is. We've referred you to <dept> on a non-urgent basis. Expect an appointment in 3-4 working years".

Re: Ouch

I wonder how many of these commenters are in the UK. On the NHS you would probably have a chat with your GP (when you can get one) who may then refer you to the hospital (weeks wait) who see you for 10 minutes to decide if they will do anything. Then after referring you to a 'specialist' department (weeks) you might get seen eventually and if they dont try to kill you off maybe try to do something.

Under the NHS he would have had an MRI when he presented at hospital, to rule out the risk of spinal injury.

The break would have been detected and he'd have been admitted on an urgent basis to the spinal unit.

Non-urgent referrals in the UK can be dreadfully, dreadfully slow (ask me how I know). Turn up with something urgent though and you get seen (provided you don't arrive at the same time as a major incident. These things happen). Likewise if you present with anything that might possibly be cancer if you squint a bit, they shove you on a cancer pathway and you'll get a battery of tests within 10 days (I know two people this has happened to in the past year), because they know that cancer gets rapidly more expensive to sort the longer you leave it (up to the point it becomes impossible to sort), with correspondingly diminishing clinical outcomes.

The more unfortunate thing is a postcode-lottery of GP surgeries. I had a fall and my arm still had limited mobility after 10 days. Called the GP with the vague hope they could refer me rather than taking a ticket in A&E, and they said "Pop down this afternoon to see our bone and muscle specialist". Makes sense with an aging population that more GPs will have an osteo bod in-house. But you won't get that everywhere.

Re: "his insurance will only cover the first of three required weeks" of six months

Most of Europe has cost effective high quality universal healthcare.

There are indeed very good quasi-private systems in the EU - many of which revolve around a health-insurance scheme which is regulated into the ground. Germany for instance has private healthcare, but everyone has to buy mandatory insurance from a government-run insurer, so it might as well be a tax - you could call it "National Insurance" for instance. I'm just spitballing here. The private providers toe the lines set by the monopsonist insurer (or don't get paid).

In the general analysis though, whether you run it privately or publicly, or some hybrid like the NHS (e.g. contracting out GP services to private practices), it doesn't seem to make a huge difference to overall cost. They're all "fine". Just don't do what the US does.

The problem the NHS has specifically is not one of public ownership, but of the private sector being shoe-horned into places they add no value and extracting disproprotionate cash. The NHS is highly competitive with European private providers for the actual cost of providing a procedure - assuming you ignore building/facility costs. PFIs of various forms have screwed us over. A public sector body with capital investment funded by Treasury Gilts will see a lower lifetime cost by building their own hospital, compared with renting one in perpetuity from a private provider who has no incentive to cut costs - the Trust can't exactly pick up and move to a new building down the road every 5 years if they fall out with their landlord - not with things like MRI machines and faraday cages built into the fabric of the place. Whereas a private hospital must control their building costs because (at least in cities or relatively populated areas), a patient can go down the road to a different provider, or a national insurer can put them over a barrel and refuse to pay them until they sort their shit out.

The whole public-versus-private question is somewhat overblown. Full privatisation is clearly bad - see the US. Basically any European system (including the UK's) works *fine*. The problem we have is a dollop of Americanism being shoehorned in since the 1980s.

The other major problem the NHS has is being a provider-of-last-resort for services which have been cut elsewhere - see the social care crisis and bed-blocking by pensioners and the homeless who should be discharged to more appropriate care facilities which Cameron/Osborne shut down. European providers don't have to put up with this shit because their governments don't shy away from funding local authority social workers and social care.

Re: "his insurance will only cover the first of three required weeks" of six months

neither am I going to extol the virtues of a solely taxation funded healthcare system (for example the NHS) because, well, there aren't many. In fact, as with almost all publicly funded entities it's become inefficient, bloated, expensive and self-serving with costs rising while the availability & quality of care has declined sharply.

I'd love to know what bloat there is in the NHS. Much like British Rail in the 1990s, succesive cuts and the new sectorised org structure had turned it into a fairly lean, mean transport machine. This was amply demonstrated when the new "efficient" RailTrack PLC found there weren't really any levers left to squeeze "more efficiency" other than "defer maintenance", which is the polite way of saying "kill passengers". Strange how the number of passenger deaths on the railways is consistently lower under public ownership than private.

For that matter, the number of preventable deaths is successively lower under the NHS than under the USA's peak capitalist system.

The NHS is currently starved of cash for front-line services, despite their substantial £150+Bn/yr budget for England & Wales.

Readers of the Daily Zeig Heil will attribute that to "paper pushers and immigrants". Of course the NHS has one of the lowest paper-pushing rates in the world - only 2% of staff are management, much lower than many European countries. Arguably they need a bit more paper-pushing to allocate resources effectively. It's insane to expect skilled clinical practitioners to also manage their own professional services. Even one-man-band businesses get an accountant to file their taxes. I'll concede that it's very inefficient and bloated to pay trained nurses to perform admin work.

The reason the NHS under-delivers is largely because they're stuck in unaffordable PFI contracts which we all knew were garbage in 2005 - lifetime cost of renting a hospital for 40 years is way higher than building it yourself. But it keeps the capital cost off the government books this year (or this term) and lets them talk bull about bringing down borrowing (which is irrelevant - they can run as much deficit as they like for capital infrastructure. Noone can borrow cheaper than the Treasury). As a result, we have "health" spending running into the pockets of private developers rather than services.

From Thatcher to Sunak, they've all done it - sell your assets for a one-off income, and then rent them back forever. The only ones taking this seriously are the MoD - securing supply chains with their acquisition of Sheffield Forgemasters and buying back the Married Quarters Estate after 30 years of mismanagement by Annington (I remember UK consumer affairs show "WatchDog" reporting on that in the 2000s where sites lost their local housing manager and handyman who knew the estate and residents, replaced by a call-centre and an indifferent centralised "maintenance" service who did no preventative maintenance and needed to clear all the way up the tree to spend any meaningful money, allowing minor problems to become major problems).

As always the "can it go bust?" rule applies.

If something can't go bust without being bailed out by the government, then it probably ought to be under public ownership to start with. It's highly unlikely you will ever be able to add real value to the sevrice by adding layers of shareholders, or raising capital at commercial rates rather than at BoE Gilt rates.

The vast majority of NHS facilities and services fall into this class.

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

Re: a whole bunch of changes designed to "get back to our roots around free expression"

and could find no mention of users now being allowed to refer to £women as household objects or property”. Can you detail where exactly that is stated?

Their policy seems to have a "today" tab, which is what you were looking at, and then previous versions. In the "Policy Rationale" section of the 7 Jan 2025 tab, they state "We remove define a hate speech attack as dehumanizing speech, allegations of serious immorality or criminality, and slurs."

The dehumanizing speech bit was what you're after. They also seem to be washing their hands of responsibility for republishing libel by removing the definition of "allegations of serious immorality or criminality", which to be fair is a bit odd in "Hate Speech", but ought certainly to be a Tier 1 "don't f-ing do that" matter for any sort of responsible platform.

If you click back to (say), the 29 Feb 2024 version it includes wording that covers "dehumanizing language" which was a "Tier 1" hate speech definition:

Dehumanizing speech in the form of comparisons to or generalizations about:

*Certain Inanimate Objects and Non-Human States:

** Certain objects (women as household objects or property or objects in general; Black people as farm equipment; transgender or non-binary people as “it”)

This has now been removed. Referring to women as household objects is no longer considered problematic. Black people as farm machinery is still in - it's moved down the page to "Harmful stereotypes".

How datacenters use water – and why kicking the habit is nearly impossible

Re: So why not locate by rivers, lakes or the ocean?

If you get the river too warm, algae gets into its groove, then wipes out pretty much all aerobic life in the river when it dies off. It’s not pretty.

Algae is bad. Loch Neagh in Northern Ireland (the UK's largest freshwater body, which provides 40% of fresh water in NI) has now basically undergone total ecosystem collapse.

In 2023 the fly went, the eels are dead, blue-green algae rendered the lake largely anaerobic, and a year later things are looking no better.

The Loch Neagh collapse is not specifically due to warm industrial outputs.¹ Nonetheless, it is a very visible reminder of what environmental science has been warning of for decades.

1. A variety of factors are at play, including general water management, sewage discharge and some agricultural runoff - not that the latter is as bad as often made out, because fertilizers are f-ing expensive these days and farmers don't apply more than they need - not like the days of arbitrarily spreading manure both as fertiliser but also to get rid of it! In 2022 Nitrogen spiked from £200/tonne to >£1000/t. Ukraine makes a lot of fertiliser.

Re: Just assuming

In politics, the common solution to any problem (real or imaginary) is to throw money at it.

Unless there's some risk of it achieving some useful objective - like building public transport, improving school facilities, or ensuring that teacher's pay keeps up with inflation (or paying them a living wage to start with, and providing classroom supplies - instead of expecting teachers to buy supplies out their salary, which is apparently a thing in some places!?!?).

If it's something useful, then it all sucking of teeth and "difficult decisions". But if Lyle Lanley comes along with a slick presentation about hyperloop, then suddenly there's hundreds of millions to spend on feasability studies when what cities actually need are some trams and buses!

Re: just a thought

The "biggest heat sink on the planet" has a finely balanced ecosystem contained within it.

Indeed. There are places that play with it - there is a district heat scheme in Copenhagen which uses the harbour as a water-source heat pump - extract heat in winter and cooling in summer. However, historic harbours are not known for their biodiversity;¹ it's relatively small scale and they take heat back out in winter (of course tides and the mixing of water means this is not quite equivalent to storing heat in boreholes, nor environmentally benign, but they get away with it at small scale).

If we decided that we should put dozens of new AI datacentres east of London and dump gigawatts of heat into the Thames, it would rapidly degrade the marine and coastal habitats, which would really give Packham something to complain about (weird that he gets so het up about HS2 when the Lower Thames Crossing damages more woodland in it's 20miles than the full HS2 Y-Scheme, and impacts RSPB wetlands as well! Yet not a peep).

There's a very simple answer here - fuck AI. Silicon continues to develop at a pace. Watts/instruction are at an all-time-low. A 2020 6W chip will outperform a 95W chip from 2011. It seems hard to believe that genuine compute demand should consume more power (or water) than it did 10 years ago. At least not in Europe or the US. Our populations have not grown by an order of magnitude since then. There are many old telecoms buildings which have pivoted into data operations because as the electro-mechanical exchanges went solid-state, the floor-space and electrical requirements shrunk to a fraction of their former size, and they've let that space out for servers. Undoubtedly, useful compute - messaging, email, file hosting, webhosting - have all gone much the same way. Moore's Law has seen enormous growth in what you can do per U, along with growth in storage tech. Aside from on-prem data rooms going into "the cloud", much of the net demand for extra rack space seems to be analytics compute (of greater or lesser usefulness), and then the crypto and AI grifts.

Much of this amounts to make-work from an industry wedded to the concept of infinite growth, and then fads like AI which consume unfathomable resource for no real benefit. Christ, if you could point one of OpenAI's training clusters at Folding@Home for a couple of days you'd flatten years of crowd-sourced compute - and achieve something useful, like help cure cancer (same goes for the crypto clusters which were/are soaking up GPUs for years).

1. More the layers of pollution - oil and sludge on the bed. Go take some cores out on Southampton Water and off Fawley refinery in particular. A fun morning of poking stinking black anoxic layers of tar, compared with the marginally less smelly brown oxic layers you get from a healthy estuary.

Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI

Re: Wetware filters are usually sufficient.

"But the free/cheap models have no control over "temperature", and it's never zero. I have no idea why"

Because if people put the same prompt into a chatbot and got - word for word - the same deterministic response, then it'd break the spell that there's some sort of "intelligence" going on. It would immediately look like a more primitive chatbot with a decision tree and pre-written responses that you could reliably loop back to if you asked the right questions in the right order.

By putting a little bit of fuzz around the edges it seems more human - ask someone the same question that you asked them a month ago and they might use a different turn of phrase, present arguments in a different order or otherwise vary their response. They're trying to fuzz more "natural language" responses out of their otherwise deterministic model.

Remember, half the people in the world have below-average intelligence. The proportion of people who have any sort of technical understanding how LLMs work is vanishingly small. It's all being sold on "woo" for execs and MBAs to think "this is amazing, lets pump billions into it". "Temperature" is one layer of the curtain hiding the fact that the "wizard" is just a guy with a bunch of levers.

Doctor Who theme added to national sound archive to honor innovation, longevity

Re: Modernized

(find it quite ironic they keep tweaking the music when its a series where main protagonist can travel through time so no need for the music to be modernized)

Each iteration of the protagonist brings something new to the character, so just as the TARDIS console changes, it's not ridiculous that the theme gets a facelift for... the new face. Each Bond film gets it's own theme reflecting both the film and the Bond, even if they all keep Monty Norman's basic riff threaded through it.

Nor am I against episodic rearrangements for specific purposes. Capaldi's Rock theme was quite cool (and as much as I wasn't overly taken by the writing for Capaldi, I did respect the attempt to cast his iteration as basically struggling with PTSD in the aftermath of the Time War. He wasn't going to be able to carry on Smith's "Space Imp". Each Doctor has to carve their own path).

Not that you'd want them habitually fiddling with the theme per episode, but Murray Gold's lush orchestral arrangements - whilst losing much of the creepy vibe of Derbyshire's original arrangement - do carry a sense of pace and urgency that the original lacked. They do also - as has been mentioned - bludgeon you a bit. Listening to a compilation of all the versions back-to-back, it does sound a bit like hearing the loudness wars on fast-forward, and there are moments of "just because you could, doesn't mean you should". But they all have their place, although I'd hazard that Gold and Akinola's versions really did go a bit too "family-friendly jaunty-adventure" for my tastes and a lurch back towards something a bit slower, creepier and stripped back would not go amiss. I'm sure it'll happen eventually - everything old becomes new again.

Police arrest suspect in murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, with grainy pics the only tech involved

Re: Funeral benefit?

Yes, unless you're doing something that is built from the ground-up to be suppressed (like the Welrod or de Lisle carbine of SOE/OSS fame), all it's really doing is muffling the crack and suppressing the flash. Just screwing a suppressor on a conventional pistol makes it sound different rather than necessarily quiter - it could be more easily mistaken (from a distance) for a car backfiring or some other noise.

In this case it's been suggested that subsonic ammunition was used, and a suppressor can do quite a lot with subsonic ammo (but this could have just been dodgy witness reports that the shot was muffled, which obviously it would have been).

Re: I wonder

They're not all criminal masterminds.

Oh no. Quite. But as I say, this is right up there with the very best examples of "they did what now?" that you've cited. I'm not suggesting that it's a fit-up, but you can see why people might be sceptical - especially after the apparently thorough planning of the shooting itself, the efficient getaway and apparently leaving very little in the way of evidence at the scene.

To then be (allegedly, he's not convicted yet) caught with all the evidence on his person a week later is quite mad.

Not that I would ever encoruage or condone violence. But it is a remarkable observation that in a country with regular acts of violence and relatively trivial access to firearms, this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. It's amazing that of all the (non-trivial number of) formerly-middle-class-who-sold-their-house-to-pay-their-hospital-bill people, none of them have taken... "direct action" towards the CEOs of hospital chains or insurers.

I suppose that's one reason noone in power argues about the Veterans Health Administration. Make sure the people with actual military training are looked after!

But then this is a country which is fundamentally broken, where insurers won't pay valid claims (and who's going to make them?) whilst hospitals code level 1 visits as level 5 and levy bills of $11k instead of $500 - they call it an administrative error, but "admin errors" this widespread and regular basically amount to systemic insurance fraud. This is to say nothing of the armies of lawyers employed by both sides to argue the toss - leaving sick people in no man's land. Burn it all to the ground.

Re: I wonder

If he'd disposed of the incriminating evidence, if they would've had enough to hold / prosecute him?

By incriminating evidence, do you mean the gun, the cash (including foreign currency) or the 3-page handwritten manifesto?

Not that I want to suggest this is a fit-up, because that would be conspiracy theorising. But this is remarkably convenient for Police given the apparent careful planning, evasion of NYC surveillance and general dearth of other evidence they were developing (beyond a couple of grainy cctv images).

I half expected them to present a signed confession before hurriedly tucking it away "wait no, we haven't questioned him yet."

Not dumping the weapon is a rookie error, but then he's an amateur. Carrying the manifesto? I suppose he maybe thought if he got shot by Police then he wanted his reasoning to be known?

To have a suspect turning up with a murder weapon, cash and documentation on their person a week after the shooting... luckiest of lucky breaks for Police. And yes, quite a few cases have been broken by lucky breaks. But this takes the biscuit.

Beijing wants Chinese outfits to seek alternatives to US silicon

The Longsoon CPU is apparently comparable to a 2020 era Core i3, so for 99% of home or work use they sound like they have more than adequate performance. Doubly so if not running Windows 10.

My current work-supplied PC is a 2014 era HP Prodesk tower...

Quite. Work updated me this year to an M3 Macbook Air from a 2014-era Retina iMac, which was still chugging along, although it needed more RAM and bottlenecked on storage as it had one of the short-lived "Fusion Drives" (SSDs were still violently expensive).

The M3 is spankingly fast, but in everyday usage the most noticeable difference is the massive drop in power consumption.¹ This is rather nice when one is WFH and paying for electricity.

But really, for normal desktop usage, anything from the last 5-10 years is "good enough". If you're a hyperscaler crunching big data or training "AI" models, then you'll suffer on older hardware (time and/or power efficiency/electricity cost), but for everyone else... eh? It's good enough.

1. A quick google suggests the iMac had something like an i5-4690, with a TDP in the 85W area, whereas the M3 (4x the CPUMark, and double the single-thread perf) makes do with just 20W flat-out (and much less most of the time on the Efficiency cores. Idle states are probably lower power than the i5s were as well). The new (Dell Ultrasharp) monitor is probably rather more power efficient than the old retina as well - display tech having moved along somewhat in the last decade.

Re: Rare earths ban isn't that big of a deal

As far as I know rare-earth materials aren't rare at all, they're quite abundant in Earth's crust. The problem isn't mining rare-earth materials but treating them to form usable half-finished products.

My understanding was that China did all this because they got set up to do it, and for the volumes required it was cheaper to just buy from them. But outside of the physical lead time taken to construct refineries, there's no real impediment to doing it in the West. We have the chemistry and the tech (some of the early procedures for purifying REEs were developed during the Manhattan Project).

Taken in reverse, what do you do with thousands of tons of rocks that contain 0.5% of usable stuff ? We in Europe would be completely at loss to do it today, even if we mined the rocks.

This is basically true for most mining applications - whether copper, gold or "other". Plenty of minerals are better than 0.5% but plenty aren't. The usual answer is to just pile it up. REEs are mostly found in hard rock. With a bit of thought, the spoil may well be useful in construction applications (such as concrete), depending on the specific mineralogy of the ore - just as we've been using fly ash in concrete for years. If this can displace virgin mining of aggregates than that's no bad thing.

Fujitsu does not trust Post Office in use of Horizon data in future third-party prosecutions

Re: You'd think

This is all true, and why the Post Office should be a public body. I mean really - even the USPO is run by the government (for the time being). What sort of country can't run it's own postal service FFS? They provide many important services.

But as far as EPOS goes... most of those things are just a service. You hae a button for "notarised passport" as a service, same as "B4 envelope", and it charges £12.75. Done. The staff need training, but any old EPOS could process the payment for it. The only thing that might be tricky is things like processing cheques, cash withdrawals, and pension services. But if needs be, the "financial services" could be on a parallel terminal from postal services or general sales.

Logging packages and parcels for things like Signed-For or special delivery options are a bit specialist, but nothing that every other courier doesn't also do.

Proper future planning so that a 40% cut doesn't translate into a 40% cut immediately

A 40% cut will always translate into a 40% cut unless you have reserves to spend or you sell assets (to paraphrase Mrs T, "The problem with conservatism is that you eventually run out of public assets to privatise").

Modest cash reserves are no bad thing, but if you were keeping that sort of cash swilling around, people would ask why you weren't investing in local improvements or infrastructure (like the renewals you proposed!). It'd take 15years to build up that sort of money running a 3% budget surplus. Even if you had 40% of your annual spend stashed away, that either lasts you a year (in the face of 40% cuts), or two years if you do 20% cuts.

I'll give you an example of how local authorities are fucking numb.

The point you're making is not wrong. But you are utterly wrong to direct your ire at the councils. Many local authorities would fucking love to do what you've proposed. They know how inefficient it is to do things in dribs and drabs.

Three problems:

1. They're not usually allowed to run their own highways department, which means every pothole gets itemised as a separate job to a sub-sub-contractor. At one point Private Eye were investigating a hospital cleaner who was trying to get £45 of unpaid wages. There were four separate entites involved - the NHS Trust, the PFI/building manager, the cleaning agency and then the employment agency (because the cleaning agency wouldn't want to do anything so grubby as to employ people, with NI, paid sick leave, holiday or pensions). The coffee drunk at the meetings that were convened to sort out this embarrassing failure probably cost more than £45. This is all dictated by Whitehall. Not the Trust (or local councils).

2. Expenditure over a certain amount will require ungodly levels of approval, or go to a separate "strategic refurbishment budget" instead of them just being able to spend the £89 and get it filled next week/month. So you can get a sort-of-okay job done soon, or the proper job done in 18months.

3. They literally don't have the money to do the big thing. They'd like to, but they're so starved of cash that they can't do any more than the quick fix. Yes, this is basic Boots theory (GNU Pterry).

To give you an example of the madness of how local authorities have been straitjacketed into privatisation, I worked for a company in a lovely old (listed, victorian) building owned by the council - library on the ground and small business units above for rent. We needed a lightbulb changing (near a high ceiling. You could have got 2 mezzanine levels in there).

* We logged this with the council bod who looked after the building.

* He told Kier Building Services (yeah)

* Kier sent two guys in suits(!) to look at the lightbulb and ascertain that it did indeed need changing.

* The suits sent a guy with a ladder, who walked in and said "Jaysus, I can't reach that. They didn't say it was that high".

* Two weeks later he came back with a mate and a collapsible platform that got them up there. And they just changed the one bulb because that was all that was on the sheet.

Occasionally the boiler would trip off and we'd freeze for a day because there was asbestos in the boiler room and they needed a specially trained guy to push the reset button (and having watched the process from the door... all you had to do was hold your breath, walk in, push a trip and come back out. And the room was fine. There was asbestos sheet on the wall which would only have been hazardous if you went at it with a hammer).

Now, if the council just employed a caretaker/custodian, they'd know all the foibles of the building. They'd have a platform and the right bulbs in stock. They'd do all of them whilst they had the platform up. It would be efficient. And when things were a bit slow, they could touch up the peeling paint in the stairwell, or do some preventative maintenance (which is usually cheaper than repairing something after it's broken).

The council bod wanted to do that. He really did. But the problem was that Kier were ever so slightly cheaper than employing someone full time, and central govt dictats prohibited him from doing that.

Tories and accountants will look at that and say "ah well, but it's cheaper". Sensible people will say "yeah, but you're getting a bare minimum service because every little thing is a billable item and so they only do repairs or big, budgeted renovations" - not things like touching up paint, changing all the bulbs whilst you're up there, or preventative maintenance, which you get when you have a "sunk cost" full time custodian floating around (or even part-time, split between a couple of buildings).

Happily, this trend is reversing. I know a couple of sparkies employed directly by the NHS in a hospital. They moved over from a contractor. Better benefits, pension and job security - and cheaper for the trust overall. But until central government give the councils the money (or revenue powers) to do the efficient thing upfront, they're stuck doing the bare-minimum to scrape by.

But if you laid a new surface 2 years ago when the budget existed

Lol. Firstly, you're pretending that any council has run at a substantial surplus since Thatcher. Even if some councils had a good run under Blair, they've been under starvation rations since 2010. So whichever way you cut it, all those roads with a 10-15year lifespan are now up for renewal, however hard they've been patched. But they've had 14years of budget cuts. When on earth were they supposed to do the renewal?

And you're presuming that they're not doing proper renewals - they will be, but in the really urgent places like trunk roads (probably not outside your house). Every residential street in your town is probably much the same as yours - and they definitely haven't got budget to resurface all off them. So they patch here and there, renew where they can and focus on core arteries.

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

Re: damn shame

The economic payback of simple upgrades, maintenance, dualling up some lines where necessary is 5x HS2.

Citation required. I see this a lot. Nobody saying "just improve the legacy lines" can ever point to a credible scheme for unblocking Birmingham New Street, or reopening mothballed stations without building a new bypass line and new stations to segregate the non-stop services.

It is true that the economic return from unlocking local services is far higher than the economic benefit from high-speed intercity services. But you need that bypass line to unlock the local services.

Re: damn shame

We have roads. They exist. We have railways. They exist. If we were pegged to the transport infrastructure we had in 1970, then it is inconvenient, no more. I lived in 1970, and it was absolutely fine.

* With a much smaller population.

* 50 years ago, urban planning hadn't destroyed our walkable mixed neighbourhoods in favour of isolated housing and business estates where everyone gets in the car to drive between them at 8am and 5pm, and you need to drive off-estate just to get a pint of milk.

* Bully for you. Plenty didn't find it "absolutely fine". In particular low income workers, the disabled and 16-year-old apprentices (who at least had more comprehensive buses back then).

HS2 is, as the name suggests, a project whose entire spend is dominated by the requirement High Speed.

Lol no it isn't. No planning document for HS2 has ever made that claim. You don't believe every bit of political marketing bumpf do you? Just because Westminster politicos can't take their eyes off the shiny doesn't change the underlying engineering considerations.

The railway needs to be super-straight, which causes some bizarre and expensive land-buying and construction decisions.

High Speed running does limit your alignments and mean you clip some more expensive land in places. It also means you buy less acreage than a wiggly (longer) railway would need to. The land acquisition all washes out in the end. Moreover, building a straight alignment leaves room for upgrades in future decades instead of painting yourself into a corner.

It's a shame people have forgotten the wisdom of Joseph Bazalgette:

Basing his calculations on the most densely populated areas of the metropolis (and allowing each citizen a generous intake of food), he came up with a number and doubled it, saying: “We’re only going to do this once and there’s always the unforeseen.” This foresight meant that a century later the system still had the capacity to accommodate the mushrooming of London’s population created by the advent of the mid 1950’s residential tower block ‘building boom’. Says the ICE: “If Bazalgette had used the smaller pipe diameter, the city’s sewers would have overflowed in the 1960s. Instead, they’ve coped into the 21st century.”

The same railway, carrying the same number of people can be build for less than a fifth of the price if it weren’t High Speed.

Citation required. Trump/Muskian levels of optimism here. The marginal cost of 120mph vs. 200mph running is inconsequential compared with basic cost of surveying, CPO, land-buying, planning process and passing supporting legislation. The Arup claim that their stripped back version of HS2 Phase 2 could be 40% cheaper has been laughed out the room. Where are you finding 80%?!? Laughable.

Re: damn shame

My question would be if rail service would be better off by spending that money on a larger scope of upgrades rather than one line.

Short answer: No.

HS2 provides massive capacity relief for the West Coast Mainline, the Midland Mainline and the East Coast Mainline.

Running mixed traffic is inherently inefficient. It is extremely common for two or three local trains to all come in 25minutes and then you have to wait 35minutes for the next one, it's because they send off all the slow trains in a block, then wait ages for them to get a headstart down the line before they dispatch the fast trains in a block (and then more slow trains behind). This creates big gaps where no trains are running - a massive waste of perfectly good railway.

If you segregate the services onto an express line and a local line you can dispatch trains every few minutes if you want. You gain capacity for 3-4 local trains for every fast train you shift onto the fast line. It's a huge multiplier. So HS2 is not merely about the new capacity it adds to the network - it allows the legacy lines to improve their utilisation. Now yes, you can do a bit with passing loops and stations, but you're always fighting the maths that fast trains will run into the back of slow trains unless you leave big headways (or put in so many passing loops that you might as well... build a new line for the fast trains).

Literally noone who has called for them to "spend it on local services" has been able to propose a way of tripling local services and unblocking the bottlenecks on the three existing mainlines for £100Bn. It would cost way more than that to add new express tracks to those lines.

HS2 also removes a national bottleneck in Birmingham New Street. By offloading long-distance services like Brum-Glasgow to Curzon Street, you unblock huge gobs of platform capacity at New Street, which will allow them to run many more trains down to Plymouth, Swansea and Aberystwyth, as well as increasing local cross-city services.

It would certainly benefit more people since the funding is coming out of everybody's taxes and if they don't see a direct benefit, they aren't likely to support it.

Everyone in England and Wales benefit from HS2 (even though it doesn't go to Wales). This has not been well communicated however because politicians have tiny brains and can't get past the "Ooooh, shiny, 200mph".

I'm in the US and one of the things that frustrates me is the lack of secure parking at most trains stations.

The UK has enjoyed periodic upgrades at many existing stations and parking is not an issue in most places. The problem the UK has is simply that the WCML is full, and in places where you could notionally (re)open a branch line, there's no platform capacity at the central stations to accept more trains. The fastest and cheapest way to improve capacity for all users is segregation of services (in the same way you don't see local buses setting people down on the side of a 70mph freeway, and in fact, this is the entire point of the inter-states network - to segregate through-traffic and stop it clogging up city centres).

Re: damn shame

the U.K. is short of about 1.2 million social housing homes.

Indeed. There are also 600,000 empty homes right now, of which 250k are long-term vacant (>6months). I've reported two across the road to the council (both years empty)... but their Empty Homes officer has moved on and they haven't re-filled the post yet. So whilst housebuilding is important. We could knock 20-30% off that number quite quickly if we funded council action to prod, cajole and CPO extant empty homes. And it'd cost a lot less than £300Bn!

Actual build costs would be around £250k each (ignoring land cost). For just three times the cost of HS2, we could solve *the entire housing crisis for the whole of the U.K.*, rather than just save 50000 middle-class people an hour on their commute time.

So why don't they fund it then? Borrowing for infrastructure or housing is cheap and easy for government. We can actually do both (up to the resource limit of the economy where we start creating demand-pull inflation. But we're nowhere near that. And our "modest" unemployment figures are masking huge amounts of underemployment, and people stuck in low-end or casual labour who would prefer a better full-time job, which would open up those casual jobs for students and others who are currently reporting themselves as wanting to work but unable to get a job, but not technically turning up in unemployment stats).

Building a million houses without building corresponding public transport infrastructure for those settlements would be mad.

rather than just save 50000 middle-class people an hour on their commute time.

Don't talk nonsense. We both know that the entire point of HS2 is to segregate non-stop ICE traffic from the legacy lines, meaning you can reopen stations like Polesworth, Barlaston, Norton Bridge and Wedgwood (and others in the East Mids), creating massively improved local rail routes in some of the UK's most deprived cities.

You could achieve the same effect with a new 100mph line. But obviously these are the 2020s, not 1820s and the standard base speed for ICE trains is 200mph. The cost is in design, planning, land purchase and consultation - the final fit and finish is inconsequential. You can go slower and switch from fancy slab track to cheaper ballast track - but that lower build cost comes with massively increased lifetime maintenance costs and inhibits future upgrades. More than 7tph and the TCO goes in favour of slab track (as IT Pros, we all understand TCO right?). People get so fixated on the headline speed bcause we don't have 200mph in the UK yet, but it's simply not the point - and never has been (and this is not me being revisionist. It's all in the 2009-10 business case studies, if people could be bothered to read them).

You can also do the station work necessary to support reopening lines like those to Leek, Newport and other significant towns (>15,000 people). You could open those lines today but again, they couldn't get a train into places like Stoke because there's no platform availability... but damn me for trying to make people's lives better.

Re: damn shame

but you're baking in the assumption that it has to be either or - which may well be true in the UK right now, but is not the case everywhere - see Japan and wider Europe.

They are. But the UK is in a much better situation than Europe right now because we have our own currency and our own central bank. We have far more control over our ability to set interest rates, issue gilts (borrowing), etc than Germany, France or Greece does. The fact we're not on the Euro also means that a Greek-style debt crisis *cannot* happen in the UK. Not just "it's very unlikely because our economy is more industrialised, etc, etc". It's literally¹ impossible. If you ever hear a pundit on TV talking about the risk of us going the way of Greece, you can immediately discount their opinion (which you probably already did when they were introduced as being from Tufton Street²).

To quote John Maynard Keynes "Anything we can actually do, we can afford".

1. A correct and accurate use of "literally" btw. I mean literally. A Greek-style run on state debt can't happen in the UK, USA, Japan, Canada or anywhere that they borrow in their own currency (Weimar and Zimbabwe's hyperinflation was caused because their debt was denominated in other currencies and they flooded the ForEx markets with Marks/Zimbabwean dollars trying to buy USD/Sterling/Francs to service the debt).

2. Any of the TaxPayers' Alliance, Civitas, the Adam Smith Institute, Leave Means Leave, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, BrexitCentral, the Centre for Policy Studies or the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Re: damn shame

The NHS (and social care) is budget-limited, not needs-limited. If the NHS had more money, it could save more lives, or make those lives more bearable, it really is that simple.

1. Capital investment is not funded the same way that annual spending is. I gave that example merely to give a sense of the order of magnitude. And I bet if I said "The NHS spends £160Bn/yr, and over the next 20years we're going to spend £160Bn on capital improvements" then you'd be nodding along sagely and saying "ah yes, a 4-5% rate of capital investment is very healthy. We must have new wards and the latest diagnostic gear". Perhaps another comparison would be to say "The NHS annual budget lasts a year. HS2 will last a century or more, during which time the NHS will have spent ~£16Tn (2024 money). A couple of billion per year on new infrastructure is actually inconsequential to the UKGov's >£1Tn annual budget.

2. Unfortunately I've had to visit hospitals more times this year than in the past decade (not for myself, merely the ones I love). Parking is terrible because everyone tries to drive. And that's because public transport is abysmal. Quite how a pensioner who can't drive any more is supposed to get there is beyond me (answer: they call 999, and clog up the ambulance service). Or people with disabilities, or who simply don't have access to a car for economic reasons, or who can't afford to learn and take their test. Poor public transport directly inhibits access to education, employment and healthcare. And you have the gall to talk about "cruel"?! Goodness.

3. Road transport makes up 25% of UK carbon emissions (not transport emissions. Total carbon emissions - energy, industry, the lot) and results in a disproportionate number of hospital admissions from collisions (trauma), increased respiratory illness and other factors. It would be a very fine thing if urban areas in North Staffordshire or the East Midlands were given their railways back to use for local and regional services, reducing car dependency, congestion when the M1 or M6 is closed and general hazards to the general public.

If you want to improve access to healthcare, the two big things you do are (1) improve funding for local authority social care (to get the bed-blockers off wards and into assisted living until they can go home) and (2) improve public transport (which both reduces demand on the NHS and improves patient access).

When the bores say "why don't we spend the money on fixing our local lines", I point them to the stretch of WCML through Stoke on Trent with 3 closed stations and Stone (<1 train per hour). You can refurb those stations, but you won't be able to run a train to them until the ICE trains are socked off to a separate line. They weren't closed for lack of demand, but because you can't schedule services to there without having an express train running into the back of you. It'd be like having a bus pick up passengers on the side of the motorway. And nor will you be able to schedule a train to the proposed new station at Meecebrook (a big garden-village home-building scheme in Staffordshire). Lack of transport infrastructure is directly inhibiting home-building programmes. It's never been about speed (except in Boris' head). It's all about segregation of service patterns.

This is why large infrastructure projects, relative to social and health service, are not just immoral but really *cruel*.

This is an insane take.

1. HS2 is not "large" relative to £600Bn/yr in health and social welfare.

2. WE CAN DO BOTH. Different pots of money. Go read some Keynes, or Krugman, or Kelton. Do you know what's cruel? Telling people they're not urgent enough to warrant an ambulance (there are lots of urgent but not "bleeding out or cardiac arrest" scenarios) but - oh sorry - there are no trains and the buses stopped at 9pm. Maybe you can wait 8 hours for the next one? That's cruel. And it harms people. And it's not just access to healthcare. It means low-income shift workers are walking home at midnight along the former bus route. Or teenage girls stuck in bus shelters waiting for a connection that may never come.

3. Don't come at me about cruelty. I see cruelty every day in people who can't accept a job offer because it's on a business park that's only accessible by car. Or who just struggle to participate in civic life because they're trapped on an estate with no transport. And that feeds into healthcare, but it also feeds into literally every aspect of life. That's cruel. Really cruel. And it's easily fixable - but we won't, because we're too pent up about the budget deficit (which economists agree is inconsequential) instead of the deficits in jobs/working conditions/mental health (which are very much not).

Arecibo telescope might have failed because of weak sockets

Re: Failure in 3,2,1...

Wow. Science needs to be Culturally Relevant and Inclusive? Science just is.

Science has always been incredibly politicised, because humans are politicised. It is true that just as 2+2 = 4, so the world will get on and science will happen without us. Humans do not need to believe evolution or gravity for it to be true.

Nonetheless, it is a fallacy to believe that science as done by humans is neutral, objective or apolitical - the canonical extreme example being the pseudoscience of the Nazi's Racial Theories, which claimed (via many papers and journals) to have observed a strict and scientific hierarchy of the human race. Or the historic persecution of "unacceptable" science by the Vatican. The Catholic Church was always a major patron of science and engineering - provided you didn't challenge religious orthodoxies (like the Earth being the centre of creation). Such persecution resulted in self-censorship and the suppression of research.

Or we could consider the way in which women have been traditionally excluded from the sciences - forced to publish under male pseudonyms, or having credit taken by male colleagues. Not to mention the inherent racism in mid-20th century science where European and American scientists ignored science from Asia or Africa as being inferior, despite there being a deal of seminal work done. The Jantar Mantar astronomical park in Jaipur was easily on a par with 18th century European naked eye astonomy (notwithstanding that they didn't have the lens grinding technology for telescope astronomy).

And now we're about to watch Trump implement Schedule F for any civil servant whose face doesn't fit, defund NOAA, privatise the National Weather Service, "drill, drill, drill" in the Arctic and generally inhibit any science he doesn't like.

The fact that this center is in the buildings that formerly supported a world-leading scientific instrument which was allowed to fall into disrepair by political indifference should surprise noone (the fact that it's collapse was not met by immediate and bi-partisan calls for rebuilding in Congress is a damning indictment of US discourse. Someone should tell Trump that China has a better one - that might get his interest!).

I agree entirely though that even if what you're doing is outreach to kids and encouraging participation by minority groups - particularly in environmental sciences (highly culturally relevant to small Caribbean islands) and "human-centered computing and data science", it's a fucking dreadful name. Utter word soup.

Singapore to increase road capacity by tracking all vehicles with GPS

Re: Tracking people

Plenty of middle class people there have cars.

Not to really disagree, but at best some of the middle class. Singapore has 6million people and 600k cars (a chunk of which are taxis/limos). So 1-per-10-people, which is fantastically lower than (say) the UK with 35m cars between 70m people.

There are 1.5m households, so it's roughly a car for every third household. So not the super-wealthy, but cars are certainly a discretionary luxury, and (outside the super-rich) mostly only one-car-per-household rather than per-adult.

People do have cars, but there is perhaps a much more healthy relationship with cars akin to the Dutch (with similar car ownership levels to the UK) where they have a car for IKEA runs, heavy shopping trips or whatnot but then get on their bike/bus if they're going into work carrying only a laptop and lunch. Which - as we seem to agree - is as it should be in a city state with fantastic public transport.