Posts by Scott Broukell

There's hope yet.

Many years back I knew of a local building supplies company where the sales office was inside a large wooden hut. Sat upon the big desk inside the terminals / cash registers were continually put upon by a barrage of plaster, sand, cement dust and fine grit etc. I kid you not each one of them looked ten times as bad as the probe in the photo does and yet, somehow, they continued to operate. I can therefore only assume that someone at the company either had the good foresight to order Mil-Grade equipment, or that maybe they were in fact conducting tests for NASA.

Here we go again!

This is like hanging baubles on the dying stump of an Xmas tree. There is little or no healthy foundation of growth and development left on the desiccated remains of the tree (NHS) and yet those in high office deem it a suitable moment, despite financial pressures from all sides, to distract attention away from a very dire situation and proceed with applying some costly shiny shiny decorations instead of getting the bedrock fundamentals back into shape first!

It is so obviously a complete dereliction of duty and care towards the populace and our most treasured public health facilities in order to take attention away from the utter crapfest that mires the current holders of that high office as they continuously prioritise ways of directing funds towards their own ilk, rather than towards the delivery of such services that the majority of the populace rely on!

Be clear and honest about the matter please, just for once! Do you want to run the NHS into the fecking ground and force us all to pay into private care packages, with personalised health apps on our phones and all our personal health data, and more, passed into the hands of private companies? - asking for a friend, or two, or a hundred or many millions!

Somewhat like a playground the internet would seem overly full of shouty, immature individuals who have determined for themselves and themselves alone, that the internet is a forum where everyone must pay attention to them and to the bile that they very often espouse. Much to the detriment of more considered thought and expression, which is sadly often drowned out my the former. Imho, this is all the proof that is needed to see that mankind, as a whole, is nowhere near intelligent enough for such technology and hasn't been for about 100,000 years.

A Mrs. Trellix of North Wales may have something to say about this! Or, she may not have a clue.

NHS Efficiency

(Sorry, me again) There is only one sure way that you can, at the very least, increase some efficiency in the NHS and that requires the full-time services of a regiment of trained snipers using high velocity, hollow-tipped rounds with 100% head-shots guaranteed. At least that way you can get rid of the old and demented, the druggies and highly dependant alcoholics etc.

One size does not fit all in a public health service. Imagine you ran a car plant producing a range of five family saloon cars. Then one day you get a letter from the department of transport insisting that you also produce; buses, tractors, tanks, fire engines, diggers and HGVs all from the same single manufacturing plant that you use for your saloon cars. Oh, and you won't be told in advance how many of each type are needed each week either. That's what the NHS is like - there is no way on earth that you can tell what size, shape and age the problems are going to be and yet they continue to walk in through the door 24/7!

You can't just say oh look demand on the renal unit is down 40% in the last month, well then, we can shift half of the ward and equipment over to maternity, they seem to be constantly dealing with babies over there! There is very little if any predictability to work with.

The NHS is a bit like a prism - the white light of constant patient demand that streams in through the front door is then separated out into a broad spectrum of complaints and dealt with accordingly. So what looks like a single line of uniform customers actually represents a whole gamut of things that need fixing.

Of course if you want to increase efficiency further down the line, in the output stage, you could provide well funded, well staffed and well trained NHS community outreach services for say drug and alcohol dependency units. Success in that area would almost certainly release some resources in other public facing areas, such as policing, probation and the courts etc. Those released resources could then be re-directed to more urgent policing matters etc.

So it is an almost impossible task to achieve efficiency in general. That's not to say that you can't spend resources carefully, with hindsight and juggle rotas/be flexible with agency staffing etc., but in the main the demands still require constant flexibility and there is always a cost to that. Then again, you can push that flexibilty too far and, guess what, it breaks!

A big Green Lake of dollar bills perhaps! One that some of the 1-percent can swim in etc. But seriously, my thoughts are with those underlings instructed to migrate the system(s) across and keep it all secure and running 24/7. Please make it all work nicely!

But, did the events actually take place or not, were they totally imagined or virtual and, more importantly, were they socially distanced events?

Low hanging fruit

Is this not just the low hanging, if rather risky, nuclear fruit? By which I mean several things;

1)-Right now we have no scalable/workable energy storage solution for wind and solar, sadly (although efforts to devise such methods are on going).

2)-It gets us towards lowering emissions more quickly than getting 68M+ people to adjust their life style choices to eat very little if any meat, give up jetting off abroad twice a year for hols and giving up on ICE powered vehicles.

3)-It has the potential to be a nice little earner for some!

Whilst I am not entirely against the concept of SMRs, this development should not be seen as a silver bullet such that we loose track of the tremendous effort still required looking ahead at least 50+ years in order for us to even start to see some re-balancing benefits. The harder tasks and solutions will still need to be dealt with as well in order to add to what is proposed here.

So by all means pick some low hanging fruit but we had better be building the ladders (technology) that are urgently needed to get us to the prize fruits higher up!

A Rhyme

Old Bill Shat(i)ner space ship as it soared up high,

in Zero-G he pressed the flush and the captains log went floating by.

M ulti-billionaire

E gotist

T inkers

A round (the edges)

Like him or loathe him, he did play a part in shedding light on some pretty serious matters. But from a purely humanitarian perspective he sure as hell puts himself, and those close to him, through the mill over his beliefs!

Personally I would not wish any harm, psychiatric or otherwise , upon him.

My hope is that this can be swiftly resolved to the satisfaction of all parties involved. Seemingly endless retribution would seem not to achieve a great deal either way in this instance.

There is always going to be misinformation everywhere, greatly enhanced by the existence of the internet and, in particular, by sites such as Facebook and Twitter, it is available to everyone who ever wants to seek it out. Subsequently we find ourselves in a feeding frenzy for the reaffirmation of our personally held biases, however minor they may seem to us as individuals. The landscape of social media sites reflects our inadequacies back at us, but we are blinded to that by simply seeking out reassurance - an internet playground where you seek out a group of people to cling to and either ignore or pour scorn on other groups, if you are so inclined and believe me, group behvioural pressure is very powerful (look at history). So we have an internet playground with all the bullying and hatred that occurs in almost every school playground - but crucially amplified up to 11 if you really want it that way! - which effectively drowns out any alternative voices. All that is sold to you as shiny and glittery goodness does not have a heart of gold and is not the promised land of the internet - because human nature cancels that bit out rather quickly. For those like Zuckerberg, to have the vision in order to turn all this into hard ca$h and monetize the basest aspects of human nature must surely display both brilliant foresight and a true understanding of human behavior.

So that's what MFD stands for! I could have sworn it stood for: Mal-Functions Daily!

Build Back Better British Bit Bothering Bots!

Pro Tip - -> WD40

<see title>

OMG! I have just been for another regular beauty augmentaion therapy treatment appointment and when I came out two hours later, looking a tad like I had just been through six rounds with Tyson Fury, the facial recognition system in my brand new car would NOT allow me to start my own vehicle! It said "Driver could not be verified"! Just how am I going to get back home to my exclusive prestige condo?

I think, therefore I am, waiting for an update to complete, please do not turn me off whilst the update is in progress.

Let us suppose that an AI system were to be granted a patent, my question would be: What should happen to the assignment of that patent ownership if/when said AI system undergoes an update/upgrade procedure which changes the nature of the underlying programme code such that it is no longer recognisable as it's former instance and no longer behaves in a manner entirely equitable with it's former instance/system?

Has the Competition Monopolies and Mergers Board been informed of this potentially hostile takeover? Questions need to be asked!

I read that as "Clown Commercial Service", but don't worry, I feel sure that all our important personal big data will be perfectly safe, even when and/or if it is all sold off and/or hacked! Perfectly safe /s

". . disintegrated to dust and there was no solid core to collect. "

That's it! Mars is made entirely out of dry-wall/plaster board! Some alien, planet bothering / diy enthusiasts, must have put it together just for a laugh millions of years ago!

"Oh what a tangled Webb we weave" - said everybody in the final payload preparation team (probably).

Sponsorhip Deal

I can't help thinking that the marketing folks at Greggs missed an opportunity for adverstising / sponsorship here - I mean think of all those pies, amiright!

"report naughty songs"

I thought for a brief moment that I was reading the outline of an hitherto unseen Monty Python sketch.

NHS Stealth Secretary

Well I'm rather glad he's gone at least. But if NHS Digital want to engage with the public over this, then I would suggest that the best way is to; (1) Opt Out all individuals from the start! (2) Write to all individuals, explaining clearly what is intended and how their personal health data is to be used and by whom. (3) Back that all up with a comprehensive TV / Internet information campaign. (4) Then ask people if they would still like to sign up to it - with the option of reversing that decision at any time in the future.

I think any loss of trust should be directed towards ministers and their cronies, not what is left of the NHS as a whole.

My own awareness, of this and earlier related stories, came about through this worthy web site and it's many contributors!

Roundness

Perhaps Microsoft should have called it: Windows O

It is high time that we all have permanent QR codes tattooed onto our foreheads is it not! The gubermint has missed a trick in recent times by not insisting such indelible markings be done when administering a vaccine! Otherwise the QR roll out should be started at birth, or soonish thereafter. By implementing this cost effective and simple, low tech solution, the scanners, databases and cameras would all start to work flawlessly! Or, at least, better flawlessly than wot they do at present! I commend the motion to the house. Ain't it the truth tho - just a thought /s

AI - Farcical Recognition

So, in order for this all singing all dancing wonderful AI technology (that is going to make all our lives so much better), to work - we need to re-introduce segregation!!! Yeah - go human advancement!

We can at least be grateful that the cameras were not, as yet, attached to mini-gun auto turrets - that will perhaps be a future update!

"An eclectic mix, even for the era."

Of course they was all bleedin eclectic! All computers are eclectic - they either plug in the wall or run off batteries aint it!