Posts by Alan Brown

Re: The money has to come from somewhere

"the people running the Hedge Fund will make money."

or find themselves fired and their hedge funds owned by someone else (most likely the companies they borrowed Gamestop shares from in the first place)

Re: Reading the Runes in Between the Lines ... Karma Sucks Big Time

"Pension providers don't short. But they hold stock which isn't earning much and which they could lend to shorters for a fee."

In other word: facilitating figleaf shorting. They still get their fee and their shares back (eventually). They're not hedge funds but they might end up owning a few after this blows over

"Technically it's an abusive squeeze"

Naked shorting is illegal too, but the hedge funds have found a figleaf workaround

This isn't an organised squeeze or pumpn'ndump and in order to be absolutely covered all the the movers'n'shakers is ensure they're not going to financially benefit from setting a few hedges on fire (ie, by NOT buying gameshop stock, merely commenting on it and pointing out the figleaf shorting)

Re: The Big Short Squeeze

"I can't help but wonder if any of the short-sellers has the pockets and the nerve to sit this whole thing out to the crush and walk away with a nice profit and a smug face."

They could - IF they have unlmited borrowing time. If they don't, then they have to return the stock at the agreed time - and the fact that they have to go out in an overheated market to obtain those shares will momentarily drive the price to astronomical levels (which the hedge funds will have to pay) before the stock inevitably tanks

It gets even worse for the hedge fund if the shares aren't available to buy on the trading floor because it means they have to approach individual investors and buy at an agreed price

Personally if I was playing this game I'd set an automated sell at 4-5 times the current high figure, because when the return comes due, the hedge funds are going to be desperate

Re: The Big Short Squeeze

MOST of the small investors in this case are accepting they're going to lose everything when the stock inevitably tanks - BUT (and here's the thing) their individual exposure is small and when the shorts come due the hedge funds will have to buy what's available at whaeever price it's selling for at the time - meaning they might be approached to sell what they hold ffor whatever figure they care to name if there's a shortfall of actyal share numbers on the trading floor (this is unlikely to happen)

As long as people don't lose their nerve or attempt to cash out, the tanking only happens _after_ the shorts come due and hedge funds get wiped out.

The current high value is purely illusory because as soon as people start cashing out the stock will tank. As long as you accept that, and you bought low you can set a few hedge funds on fire for a low overall cost when the $70 (or less) stock drops to $5 from $700-$2400. Only a couple of greedy people can cash out and in all liklihood they eneterd the game late/paid high anyway.

There are specialist SFPs which will allow you to run higher speeds on OM1/OM2 (think: CWDM) - but they get pricy, quickly

If you're installing new, just put in singlemode. Multimode is good in server rooms but not for longer runs and as others have mentioned the price difference between SM/MM transceivers is no longer there

"I live in a 'standard size' 3 bed house, I need 2 APs to give reliable wifi to all the devices."

Once you start dabbling with home automation it's not at all difficult to have upwards of 50 WIfi or Zigbee devices. Things add up fast

Re: You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right?

> ...second electrician turns up, OKs my work, but insists that....

"If you want it done that way, that's find,, but for legal and insurance cover, I want you to put that demand in writing along with your reasons for doing so"

And then call in he local safety inspector later

Re: You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right?

" given the shoddy build quality of new-builds in the UK"

It's not JUST the poor quality of them, but that they're being built below minimum habitation standards for floorspace and natural light (enforceability in planning permission requerements on private dwellings was done away with in the 1990s, but it still applies to rental properties)

These places are legal to sell and for buyers to live in, but NOT legal to rent out as you can't contract out of legal minimums in a rental agreement (a numbe of buy-to-let landlords have been prosecuted over this ands there's the classic story of one of the "homebuilders" trying to sell partially built houses to councils in the wake of the 2011 crash only for the councils to discover they were "unfit for social housing purposes")

Believe it or not, average floorspace per house has decreased since these issues were publicised

Re: You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right?

"Including the roofers; they'd turn up, look at the state of things, cluck their tongues and tell the landlord that it needed replacing. And then he'd pay for them to patch it."

My landlord did that twise and it still leaked. He then went with a "Cheap" firm operated by a friend of his who "repaired" the roof and took the best past of 6 weeks to do so (scaffolding everywhere)

18 months later it was leaking again. This time a more professional outfit was called in and they retiled the entire roof (plus repointed the dangerously decaying chimney) for less than the previous cheap outfit, in about 2 weeks, complete with insulation replacement, etc

Re: You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right?

" When told that they had had the visit from BG, I immediately told them to open all the windows and doors, even though it was snowing outside"

You should have called the gas emergcny line too, even after making it safe (assuming you're not legally qualified to do so) Any fuurther problems could drop in YOUR liability lap

Re: You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right?

ON top of that I would have notified my insurance company what had happened - most of them will dig further into cowboy operators when notified of them, as getting them shut down is cheaper than paying out on the damage they cause

Re: You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right?

Yup - especially because mundane stuff like wiring gets shunted to the least qualified apprentice

It's a bit like oil changes in franchise dealers - Several Mercedes Benz UK drivers have experienced cars losing their sump plugs 2 miles out of the shop (after warranty service work) then been shafted when MB UK and the stealerships have closed ranks to shaft customers rather than admit their service staff might have screwed up)

"Or did this guy just like erasing drives and ran out of machines so stopped by? "

The digital equivalent of smashing windows and running away is widespread

Re: Staking out the culprit

We had security guards take it upon themselves to turn off server room airconditioning

"Nobody's in there, so it doesn't need to be switched on, saves power innit"

After the second time, the company providing such staff was terminated

Re: More Mystery Reboots

I could tell when calls were coming in on my old Motorola AMPS phones because they'd click a few times before starting to ring

After moving to GSM, a few people were apparently convinced that I was psychic because I'd pull my phone out of a pocket and look at it for a second before it started ringing. I never had the heart to tell them It was set to vibrate 6 seconds before audible ringing commenced

Re: Hands up who thought it would be the cleaner again

Even worse than that is when they DO find a socket to plug into and the motor startup surge kills the UPS

"room goes dead silent", cleaner scuttles out. no apparent cause....

Re: Hands up who thought it would be the cleaner again

"There are several types of 13A plug though, which are explicitly designed to be incompatible."

NONE of them are BS1363 compliant, walsall and friends are all proprietary

https://www.flameport.com/electric_museum/plugs_13A_non_standard/ - using these means "vendor lock in"

AS/NZS3112's variants are standardised meaning you can hopefully buy plugs from a different supplier in 10 years' time

https://www.morvantrading.co.uk/technical-as-nzs3112 (and the wikipedia page on the same thing, but this page has clearer diagrams plus better explanation on use)

Trivia: The AS/NZS3112 plug/socket is the oldest nationally standardised connector (predates the UK standards) and has been in continual use since the early 1930s (it's based on a proprietary NEMA Hubell connector from 1916, but NEMA plugs weren't standardised until the 1940s and most countries didn't write up national standard on connectors until the late 1940s)

Re: Hands up who thought it would be the cleaner again

It's an urban legend, but one rooted in practice:

At least city council one server room I dealt with in New Zealand had fitted BS1363 outlets on all the UPS fed circuits instead of AS/NZS 3112 outlets for this exact reason.

They got told off by electrical inspectors (not legal for permanent wiring) and forced to refit with NZS3112 "round earth pin" sockets instead (these won't take flat pin plugs, so job's a good-un)

These days you'd just use PDUs with C13 sockets

Re: Fluorescents...

The issue isn't the power draw, it's the extremely reactive load

If you're billed for your power factor, you want to get rid of the ballasts wherever possible

This is where electronuc ballasts could reduce costs in a large building without changing kWh draw at all - going from phi of 0.65-0.7 to 0.95 made power companies happy and reduced charge penalties

Re: Fluorescents...

"The output of LEDs tends to reduce over time"

ONLY if they're overdriven in the first place.

If you drive a 1W LED at 750mw there's virtually no dropoff at all, their efficiency improves by 20% and the lifespan is effectively infinity (not 15,000 hours, more like 150,000+++)

Even better, if you fit a 75p microwave body sensor on the pole, they can dim to 7% power (which is only about half visible brightness) until something moves under them - result: even more power savings AND the effect that n'er-do-wells skulking around the neighbourhood can be tracked by where the streetlights are brightening

You can get hallway luminaires for this application too

Re: Fluorescents...

"Even led to Kent aborting their "turn street lights of at midnight" programme, "

If you want to have fun with your councils over this one

Ask to see the costings and query whwther they've budgetted for having to replace tubes twice as often given that Flourescent tube are rated for ~1500 on/off cycles and they've doubled the cycling rate

(I wasn't popular when I did this.... and my projecion that increased maintenance costs would be more than double the power savings turned out to be spot on - it's not at all uncommon for people to fixate on "power savings" without realizing they might be killing a £5 lamp to save 20p in electricity)

Re: Fluorescents...

"Actually, the LED tubes require you to bypass the old florry ballast entirely."

Not all of them. There are some which will work via ballasts (they cost more)

It's better to replace the batten (and usually slightly cheaper) than to use retrofit tubes

Re: To be fair

1997 - linux desktop

left mouse, right mouse, Cirque Easy CAT glidepoint touchpad keyboard, Trackball - all connected at one, using whichever one was closest as needed (the glidepad was nice as you could mouse with your thumb without lifting hands off the keyboard)

The cat (who had discovered that if he sat on my input device, would get a scratch behind the ears before being removed) was peeved until he discovered he could sleep on top of one of the monitors and watch me instead

In a lot of vendor drivers (even logitech), they did have an invert option

Re: Foot pedal

On the other hand there REALLY WERE foot-operated pointing devices too.

They tended to be giant trackballs rather than mice

Re: "Old' and "solicitor" doesn't narrow things down...

Sending number might be traceable, but getting the destination right can be problematic

A large finance house in New Zealand had the same fax number as my residential number in another area code

in the 1990s I started getting annoying fax calls which didn't stop, so I attached a fax machine and out popped credit application after credit application with all kinds of sensitive information attached as branches in other cities faxed this stuff off to head office (none of the origin points were in my area code)

Phone calls and a lawyer letter to the company complaining and asking that they cease/desist were ignored for months

Faxing the applications back with "Application rejected, poor credit risk" in big fat marker over top (to the originating fax and the helpfully supplied number of the applicants) stopped it in 72 hours

This highlights the risks behind the reason why the NHS got ordered to stop using faxes.

These days I'd just take the faxes to the ICO and let them know of GDPR breaches by the senders. Back then the right sort of privacy laws didn't exist

Re: Another snowflake

Let's not forget (in the 2016-2020 period)

"Suck it up Snowflake, you lost!"

"We won, get over it!"

"Quick, call a WaaaaaAmbulance!"

They absolutely hate that boot being on the other foot

It's called crybaby bullying

Re: Another snowflake

3: The first amendment does not protect against CONSEQUENCES of that speech

In this instance, AWS (and others) decided they no longer wished to be associated with Parler

Had AWS continued hosting Parler, it could have been that a lot of others might decide to vote with their wallets and no longer associate with AWS

Boycotts are perfectly reasonable.

Just as the USA courts say I cannot force a baker to make a cake for a gay couple, they also cannot dictate that I must continue to do business with that baker instead of supporting a baker who will make the cake

Re: Censorship by Private Companies

s/barrel/tankerload/

See: Brexit

Relevance: Driven by media barons (who were chasing keeping their tax dodges)

Not exactly a new phenomenon: See Willam Randolph Hearst and Spanish-American war

(tl;dr: USA government didn't want a war, Hearst forced it anyway in order to sell more newspapers)

Secondary relevance: Yellow journalism and triumph of Propaganda

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_Spanish%E2%80%93American_War

"The Spanish–American War (April–August 1898) is considered to be both a turning point in the history of propaganda and the beginning of the practice of yellow journalism."

Re: Censorship by Private Companies

"It is also about the government trying to force you to say something. This happens a lot in non-democratic regimes,"

It happens in a lot of so-called democratic ones too. You'd be surprised what courts have compelled people to say at times

Re: Lost leadership

"Spite" is a hallmark of the Trump adminstration and Trumpette projectionism

"Spite" is what destroyed the USA's pandemic response program in 2018

Artemis is a classic congressional pork exercise. As such it can't be cut anyway.

Re: Bridenstine's marching orders?

bluefooted, or barbaraellas?

Re: Spam call-and-response

"I'm also aware that the people manning these call centers are probably desperate for a job, and that while Social Security fraud is a crime in the US, the call center personnel in India or Pakistan or Sri Lanka, wherever, may not be criminally liable in their country. "

Under USA law they can be (and have been) extradited to the US to face charges - long arm statutes apply

It's WHY the US FBI has field offices in Lagos and Mumbai

Re: Spam calls

" They also have a an individual copy of "the list" for each person called."

Which is why you use the words "Put me on your organisation's do not call list"

Beyond that point the costs start escalating rapidly

I know it's harder to enforce with "foreign call centres", but 'follow the money' applies. Sooner or later someone has to handle the financials

Re: Landing on his feet..

"He'll get a cushy job using his connections to further his employer's interests. Like before, actually."

Don't be so sure

Forbes have made it clear that henceforth they're treating anyone employed or appointed by Trump will be treated as as toxic radioactive garbage inasmuch as media interactions are concerned - they've actually issued an advisory against anyone employing these people as in Forbes eyes it wil rub off on the employer