Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: Next up: get rid of that pesky extra engine.

Who's going to read out the checklist, while the flying pilot pushes the buttons? Will it be an automated voice on an iPad? Who runs the radios while the pilot is flying the thing?

How much money is going to be wasted by planes screwing up in the airspace around airports, because the single pilots have to manage talking to ATC and going through the landing checklists while also working out what holding pattern they're in.

Not to mention splitting up the tasks during an actual emergency.

If we're going to do this, we should at least have every airline ticket entered into a free prize draw. The prize being that passenger gets to be copilot for the journey. They can at least keep the poor pilot company, if nothing else.

Re: re: slowing down transactions

Reading the above two posts I'm reminded of a number of others that I've read. When you manage to beat your way through the obfuscated jargon it seems that the whole point is to allow the traders to make more money.

I didn't think I'd used any obfuscated jargon. Please tell me where I have and I'll de-obfuscate it.

The purpose of a financial market is for people to make money.

And I mean this literally. The whole purpose of a financial market is that some people want money, in order to do stuff. That stuff might be starting a new company, buildling a factory, investing in some new piece of R&D, expanding into a new market.

So they can ask people who've got money to lend them some. This is done in various ways. But that's what it boils down to. And those people lending money are taking a risk of losing it, so want a reward. You take a small risk by putting money in a bank's savings account, so you get a small amount of interest.

Or for a little bit more you can buy government debt, or a corporate bond off Apple.

Or you might take more risk and buy shares. If this is an IPO (a company issuing new shares) then you're investing directly into a new-ish company (or one that wants to expand) and probably taking more risk, for the expectation of higher rewards. Or you might buy shares in a safer bet, again say Apple. Who've had their explosive growth phase, but make nice juicy profits you can share in. In that case you're not funding investment - but nobody would buy shares in new companies if they didn't eventually have a hope of selling them. So there has to be a market in shares willing to buy (liquidity) or nobody would invest in new companies. Venture Capital takes a stupidly large risk by early investing into a tech startup - you get to own a percentage of the company. Most of the time it goes bust and you lose everything, but maybe 1 in 20 times your bet will pay off and you'll own a small percentage of Google or probably something a bit smaller but still profitable.

This kind of investment wouldn't happen if there weren't people wanting to take stupid risks to make stupid profits, like say Softbank. But also then share markets for them to sell their few successes to, so they can cash out buy yachts and fast cars. And nobody would invest in those IPOs unless they had a chance to sell their shares to ordinary low-medium risk investors (like pension funds). It is complex, and there's no way to avoid that. But it also works. Most of the time.

A lot of the people who manage the money don't actually own it. They're doing it for other people. That's our pension funds, for example. Or insurance companies. They need to make a certain amount of return on the money they're investing. So they'll invest some in boring, but safe, government bonds. And try to make higher returns with some - because that's their job. To try and grow our pension pots.

There's a concept in economics called the agent problem. Which is that the people you hire to do stuff for you have their own interests, which may differ from yours. So as a shareholder you want regular dividends and a company growing in a nice predictable manner. But the CEO might want to get rich quick at the expense of long-term steady growth, or show what a genius he is by making some flashy deals and getting on the front pages all the time. Or a pension investment manager might be more interested in his bonus than he's worried about fulfilling your cat food needs in 40 years time. This causes problems, and it's almost impossible to devise pay and bonus structures to keep these people on the straight and narrow. So regular scrutiny is required, from investors, shareholders and government regulators.

The problem being we want to incentivise them to take controlled amounts of risk in order to grow our money (if we're lucky enough to have pensions or life insurance) without going mad and risking everything in order to make their next bonus stupendously huge. A balance that is impossible to strike perfectly.

If we take away the markets, then our only route to the investment that leads to economic growth is the banks or the government. The banks are no better at it than the markets, but more risk averse, so we'd certainly lose out on companies like Google and any kind of new business that's highly innovative that the bank manager can't understand. Government has a mixed record in business investment. And again, tends to be risk averse. So government investmtent banks can work brilliantly, in both Japan and Germany after the war for example. Because they were investing in known industries to build up their national economies. But then all but one of the Landesbanks in Germany (controlled by the State governments to invest in local industry) went bust in the 2008 crash and had to be bailed out. Only Bavarias was still being well run by that point. Similarly almost all the Cajas in Spain, regional semi-publicly owned savings banks, needed bail-outs in 20010-12. And the UK has a sad history of nationalising companies and then the government running them incredibly badly - with some exceptions.

Financial markets do some incredibly useful things, with annoying side-effects. And so far, nobody has found a reliably better way of doing it - and we've had modern (ish) style banking for 600-odd years and modern (ish) financial markets for 300.

Re: But it doesn’t scale

Well obviously the exchange has to keep data. But it doesn’t have to be in the live database, after a certain period of time. A blockchain is keeping all data ever. An exchange could dump data after ten years if it wanted to. But, as you say, storage is cheap. Data can be sold for research.

Re: re: slowing down transactions

Pseu Donyme,

How would your scheme provide more liquidity?

The point of allowing people to make small amounts of money off short-term trades is that this profit incentivises them to do that very thing. If they don't exist, then the only people interested in buying are going to be holding for longer periods of time. There are going to be fewer of those, and if supply doesn't meet demand in the short term, you will get much larger fluctuations in price because of it. Just based on whether someone wants to be holiding a few £ million of say Apple stock this week, or doesn't want it for another week or so.

Sometimes you may want to hold stock for a long time, but need the money for something else urgently, and change your mind. If you can't do that, then you will be less willing to buy. This is going to be particularly true for less traded stocks.

HFT may be a problem that needs solving. Maybe we should be going back to the old days of market makers, or something new entirely.

Also, trading is price discovery. The less frequently trades happen, the more you risk price volatility.

Basically giving profits to those willing to risk money in very short term trades is the price you pay for liquidity.

It's like people complaining about futures markets. That nasty old finance companies use them as a venue for gambling on the future price of wheat and this does no good for society and so should be stopped. The point is that there are people with money who want to buy risk - because they hope to turn that risk into profit. And there are say farmers growing food who don't like risk, they'd like to sleep at night. So are willing to forgo the possibility of future potential profit in order to have certainty of the price they're going to get for their crops. Speculators can be put to good use by other people, and that's one of the things financial markets can do.

Re: But it doesn’t scale

Def,

But isn't the point of a blockchain that it's a permanent record of all transactions? And an ever growing one too.

Whereas the point of a database of share or bond transactions, is to record current ownership and then the price/turnover history. Which is a lot less data.

Re: "Blockchain itself has not failed at the project"

Decentralisation seems a very odd decision for a stock market to pursue. Your very existence, your income and your customer lock-in all stem from the fact that they have to come to you. Push yourself out of the process, and eventually somebody might start asking awkward questions like - seeing as we're running all our transactions on the blockchain, what do we need an exchange for?

Plus there's the obvious security problem. If people can find ways to muddy the ownership of shares, then they might be able to steal them.

To be fair, there is a killer application that blockchain will be great for in financial services. If it ever works. And that's assets pledged as security. This can be for loans, short-selling, whatever.

Let's say I have a government bond that earns a small amount of interest. I want to keep earning that interest and also make some more. So I borrow against it to get money to trade with. I still own the bonds, and I've got money to try and make profits with, and at a set time I've got to give the people I borrowed from that money back (plus interest) or give them my bond. Maybe my bets go bad, or just my company is in financial trouble. Perhaps I got to a second bank and borrow some more money, secured on that same government bond. Now we owe money to two different people, secured on the same bond. Naughty. But the incentive is there for companies in trouble to double down, break the rules and take some extra risk in the hopes of salvation. Their collapse then risk huge ripple effects as those debts that should have been secured, turn out not to be. This is why the inter-bank lending system broke down in 2008 - which could have killed a lot of banks if the Central Banks hadn't stepped in. Trust broke down, and nobody was sure if they were the only ones who'd been promised particular assets as collaterol. Made much worse by the fact that people no longer trusted each others' valuation of mortgage bases assets - so only really high quality bonds were acceptable, and everybody only had a limited amount of that. Central banks lowered their standards on what they'd accept as collaterol to cover this problem too.

If you could set up an asset register on a blockchain, you could stop this happening. Which means if an institution collapses, there's much less risk of a cascade of failures taking out other institutions, because money they've borrowed will get paid off with the promised assets. Secured creditors get first dibs on the assets.

The amount of work required to make this work though would be immense. As you'd need a trustworthy asset register in order to make the blockchain. So would that mean government detb, shares, even blocks of mortgages, would also have to be on a blockchain? I know the Bank of England are doing research on this, but I really can't see it happening without decades more work and large changes in how financial markets are run.

Re: Experts are always Experts of legacy systems

Elon has repeatedly confounded industry "experts" and people embedded in legacy systems. I'm sure he has no idea how to design and build cars or rockets. What he does do is listen to disruptive engineers, who typically come from outside the industry and then give them the authority to tear-up the "rulebook"

Which may or may not work. Depending on whether the industry consensus is in fact correct, or whether his disruptive engineer from outside actually has a clue what they're talking about.

So, for example, Tesla's big failing for the last few years has been in manufacturing. Which they've been shit at, and had consistent problems of bottle-necks and slow production. Hence they've had long waiting lists of customers, which means they're leaving profit on the table that they should have had. Long waiting lists are inefficient, because they show that either your price is too low, or your manufacturing process is too shit. Either raise prices to capture that extra profit, or ramp up production, or both.

And that's possibly because he got in outside experts - when actually the motor industry has done pretty well at solving the problem of efficient manufacturing. The problem in the current industry is probably complexity of supply chain and lack of stock - which makes the system very efficient/cheap, but highly vulnerable to governments (and political/diplomatic events) changing what they're allowed to do - as well as economic shocks.

The car industry has also produced many perfectly acceptable electric cars. So in the case of Tesla, the triumph has been much more about good marketing and hype management than about technology.

And some of that hype has gone into the so-called "Autopilot" - where I don't care how many fucking disruptive outsiders you call in - self-driving cars are still not possible and will still kill people if allowed under anything other than highly controlled conditions.

SpaceX however have done genuinely innovative things. In an industry that had become so focused on mining government pork, to the exclusion of almost anything else, that they were ripe for a damned good kicking from an outsider.

Had Musk had the cash to buy ULA he could have done a lot of the SpaceX stuff, but maybe not all, as his customers were also likely to be risk-averse. And less incentive, because of all the lovely profits rolling in from fat government contracts. Had he bought a functioning car company though, he probably could have had Tesla producing a million cars a year ten years ago - if he'd been able to do the marketing effectively enough to sell them. Whereas I think they only achieved a million produced last year and it took them from 2008-2020 to build their first million cars.

Re: Human tissue printing?

Haven't they printed cartilage and then grown skin over it? I'm sure I read about a partially printed nose being gown then grafted to a burns patient.

Re: From Brazil directly to the CCP

Brazil has a very long delayed project to build its own nuclear submarines. Based on French technology though, and I believe the French were squeamish about passing over nuclear technology for reasons of either security or the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

So maybe they looked like someone who'd be willing to pay? Except the US use highly enriched (weapons grade) uranium for their subs and the French don't. Which means I'm not sure how compatible the designs would be anyway? Which might explain why Brazil weren't interested.

Re: This Is My Only Account

jake,

I don’t think they made any more gold badgers. The forums died a natural death, and only the article comments remained. I don’t think there were resources, or anything more than vague plans, for what to do with the commentards. In some ways a useful resource. I keep coming back here because of the articles, but also the often excellent posts in the comments.

The Guardian used to have a great resource in its commentards. Though nothing close to the relaxed and mostly pleasant atmosphere round here. But it was bringing a lot of engagement and thus selling a lot of ads. However their new editor, Viner, has gone way more campaign-y, and click-baity than the Guardian ever used to be. And also the paper clearly espouses some quite extreme views on social issues compared to its readership. Particularly on gender issues. So I think comments were inconveniently against the editorial line, plus moderation is expensive for such a popular site. And now barely any articles allow comments. I wonder if the extra clicks generate much income? For either El Reg or the Grauniad?

Is there software that mines a users' comments to try and target forum ads at them anywhere? Is there any targeted ad system anywhere online that even vaguely works as promised?

Re: Fine them

Freedom is pointless when the safety of everyone is at risk from environmental catastrophes, driven by capitalism.

Two points amongst all the hysteria.

Climate change isn't caused by capitalism. Climate change is caused by people's natural desire to make their lives better for themselves and their families. Capitalism is just part of the way that the most successful states in history organise their economies. With a few changes of incentives free market capitalism can be (and in fact is being) harnessed to make technology that is less harmful to the environment.

Other types of societies, from hunter-gatherers to communist empires, like the Soviet Union have done devastating enviromental damage to themselves - basically because people want stuff.

Also destroying peoples' freedom now is incredibly dangerous to those people right now. Whereas climate change is dangerous to them in the future. Which also changes priorities to, for example, defending that freedom now and worrying about future stuff later.

Addressing climate change is important. And, it should be pointed out, is happening. Lots of improvements are being made. But it won't be solved tomorrow, or the next day. And it will be harder to do if people think the ones suggesting it needs dealing with are dangerous lunatics who want to lock up the people who disagree with them.

Re: Faxing is often better

Is that because the pharmacy is now part if some giant chain that has the political muscle to make sure the NHS adapts to its systems?

Doesn't seem to be. My Mum's local pharmacy is an independent with a single shop. It's in a small parade of shops 30 seconds walk from the local GP surgery. She's been doing her repeat prescriptions from it for years. Or she could use some other pharmacy in town - but having one 2 minutes' walk away is better.

Re: Lack of energy policy for 30 years, nuclear costs

Especially when it leads you into 'yellow peril' racism, which is his intent.

What the hell are you on about?

Talking about the dangers posed by this Chinese government is important. Rather than ignoring the problem and hoping it'll go away as we've been doing with both Russia and China for the last few years.

Putin and Xi are now both effectively dictators for life - because they've committed so many crimes and stomped on, or purged, so many of their rivals that they probably don't dare retire. That's a problem for our relations with both Russia and China that we simply can't ignore.

Also we need to say this stuff out loud. Precisely because it's not about racism, but about us defending our own interests. Sometimes that means not being nice. For example we've all just had a demonstration of the risks of appeasement. And the risks of hope instead of strategy when trying to effect deterrence. People assumed Putin wouldn't invade Ukraine, beause it would be stupid. But he invaded Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 and it was stupid then too. But we didn't impose significant enough costs to deter him doing it again, and we didn't clearly say that we would count another invasion of Ukraine as a massive risk to our interests that would cause a devastating response. Had Putin know that, he might not have done it.

So now's the time to wake up, smell the coffee, and try and avoid a devastating Chinese invasion of Taiwan, before it happens. It's Xi's aim, and he's not made a secret of it. Of course he talks about re-unification through peaceful means, but that's a clear and obvious lie - as Taiwan's people don't want that. Even less now they've seen how the Chinese government are treating the people of Hong Kong. So it's an open threat of war, and should be treated as such, and peacefully deterred.

That was always hype. But also partly because we artificially increased the costs of nuclear power and ignored all the environmental costs of coal and gas - making them look much cheaper in comparison. And not just the theoritcal cost of climate change, burning coal causes massive amounts of deaths every year, just from soot causing breathing difficulties. Not to mention the diplomatic / military costs of being able to get oil from the Middle East.

Then there's all the extra costs of regulation. Mention nuclear and suddenly you're expecting a ten year planning enquiry - followed by ten years of often frivolous lawsuits, just to delay things, increase cost and make nuclear politically unattractive.

Or that nuclear plants have to expensively dispose of "low level" nuclear waste that basically is totally safe to just bury in a rubbish dump. It's the same level of radiactiviy as bananas, or the ash extracted from coal fired plants that's allowed to be dumped in the open air (or the smoke they emit).

Until we have some renewable energy alternative that's good for generating base load - the options are coal, oil or gas. Of which gas is by far the best - but it still causes climate change and still kills more people per unit of electricity generated (in just accidents and immediate effects of pollution) than nuclear. Same link I posted up-thread.

Re: Lack of energy policy for 30 years, nuclear costs

China sees it very well. The West bans its companies, subjects it to sanctions, and then somebody like you comes along and says the West is better.

VoiceOf"Truth",

China were invited into the World Trade Organisation. Given a seat at the table of all the big international bodies. We sent loads of investment so they could grow their economy. And traded with them on reasonable terms.

Their response was to steal loads of our technology and try to subborn a bunch of our academics to do more of the same and suppress free speach. I've no problem with the other spying, because not only do all governments spy, but actually I think it makes the world a safer place that they do. It means the more paranoid ones feel less threatened and are less likely to panic and start wars. China also explicitly subsidised loads of their companies in order to steal work from ours - which is again something all governments do or have done, but on a ludicrous scale that has casused massive disruption to our economies. And then they gave themselves the ability to control our infrastructure by subsidising companies like Huawei so they could out-compete our infrastructure and then openly having government controls on their choices - so they were giving themselves the power to spy on or turn off our infrastructure - and then get all surprised when finally we react.

And even then, only really after Xi Xinping took over, made himself dictator for life and purged all his more moderate rivals. Started the minor matter of a genocide against the Uighur people, which I believe is already being implemented in Tibet as well. Broke all the deals made over the handover of Hong Kong and publicly threatens to invade the island (Taiwan) that makes a large amount of the world's best chips.

So yes, finally people in the West are waking up to the potential dangers of being dependent on China. Well some, the German Chancellor has just popped across to China today to sign loads of investment agreements and undermine the rest of the EUs attempts to have a more sensible China policy. German policymaking on Russia having proved to be such a shining example to the rest of Europe...

Even with all the above I think it's taken Russia's invasion of Ukraine and several years of China's "Wolf Warrior" diplomacy to get a lot of people to realise the dangers and at least think about making some sort of policy response. Even if nobody quite agrees what it should be...

Re: Funny

No viable solution for the disposal or long-term storage of high-level radioactive waste with half-lives measured in millenia.

R Soul,

Stuff with half-lives measured in millenia aren't that radioactive. If they were, they would have a shorter half-life. That's literally what it means. It's a measure of how fast they're radiating. Not that I'm saying they're safe and you should immediately bath in the stuff. They're dangerous.

But the problem of storage was solved decades ago. You melt the stuff down, mix it with glass, pour it into barrels and stick it in a mine or a cave.

Vitrifying it means that there's no danger of leaks (as it's now a solid medium) that's been poured into barrels before solidifying - and also no danger of criticality accidents, as it's been diluted (I'm sure there's a proper scientific word for this - but I am not a proper scientist...

This means it's now much safer to handle, and much more stable. It's also less radioactive, by dint of being mixed with a whole bunch of glass, which I presume also means the heat output from radioactive decay can be lowered to a set amount.

Then you just need to find a geologically stable place to park it for the next ten thousand years. The problem with that is getting people to agree to it of course. Which would be a lot easier if we had less fear-mongering.

Or at least if the people who are quite rationally scared of nuclear accidents were equally scared of the dangers of all other means of power generation. Which are much greater. Nuclear is pretty much the safest method of generating power we know, bar solar I think.

Here's a link to back that up: link to Our World in Data which came up first when searched.

This is only data from deaths caused by accidents and air pollution. Even if the UN report on Chernobyl is wrong and it killed tens of thousands of people - it would still make nuclear way safer than coal or oil as a method of power generation. And the fossil fuel figures miss out the potentially massive number of deaths that will be caused by climate change in future if we keep burning them, as well as the political/military costs and deaths caused by the fact that oil and gas are often found in unstable bits of the world.

Re: Hmmm.

One of the reasons for the delay with Hinkley C was that the EPR still wasn't working anywhere.

The Finnish unit (Olkiluoto) only achieved full operating power in September. Construction started in 2005. According to a very quick Google it was only 13 years late - but then wasn't it the first of class so had all the teething problems. The French one at Flamanville is also famously delayed. Looking this up surprised me, as I'd totally missed that China already has one up and running - which is why I guess they were originally looking at getting the Chinese involved in the project. I think they started their build third - but probably benefited from having had a lot of the design teething problems ironed out.

I wonder if they avoided Hitachi because it was a boiling water reactor? I'm sure I read years ago that UK's regulators were against that design, but admit I'm going on very vague memory.

The problem with all nuclear decision making is how uncertain everything is. Plus how politically scary. If we'd kept our own nuclear design industry going by ordering new reactors in the 90s or early 2000s - we might have done better. But once you've lost that capacity it takes a long time to rebuild it, as well as the skills to build the damned reactors, even if you buy a design in. Hence there's then a limit to how many you can build at once, and you'll get inevitable delays in building them, because you're having to train half the workers at the same time they're supposed to be building.

Which of course then deters you from ever starting in the first place. Eventually the politicians hwo do bite the bullet then get massive criticism for what's doomed to be an expensive and time consuming project. The only upside, is that having built that industrial capacity you've got to hope the next lot realise they can now place an order and have it built with much less trouble, and can then pretend it was their genious intervention that fixed the problems the last lot couldn't...

Re: If an asset is used to support either side of a war effort, …

and Russia said publicly they wouldn't tolerate that Ukraine be part of NATO. So why are YOU whining ?

Zolko,

Ukraine wasn't about to join NATO. France and Germany (amongst others) wouldn't let them. So Russia had no reason to fear that they'd be joining in the immediate future.

However as you say Russia did complain about this. And Ukraine was willing to enter into negotiations to remain neutral back in January. I believe neutrality is still in Ukaine's constitution for example, it was when Russia first invaded in 2014. And could always be put back if they've changed it since - I'm too lazy to check.

But as it turned out neutrality wasn't all Russia wanted. They also wanted all NATO troops removed from every country that joined NATO since 1991. I don't know if that means all Polish troops would have to leave Poland, or if Poland would in fact have to leave NATO, because the Russia proposals didn't actually make much sense. Almost as if they'd decided to have the war anyway, and the negotiations were a pisspoorly disguised attempt to create a pretext. As in fact turned out to be the case.

But also there's a fundamental difference here. It is not legal under international law to invade another state to stop them joining a military alliance you don't approve of. Every state has the right to join what international organisations it likes. Although in reality upsetting your neighbours (particularly aggressive ones like Russia), might not be the greatest idea. However as it turns out Russia proved that even that was just a pretext and the real reason for invading Ukraine was straight imperialism, hence annexing large chunks of it in the hopes of keeping them forever. After failing to conquer the whole country first.

Whereas defending a sovereign state from invasion is specifically allowed under international law. Had we wanted to risk a nuclear war, we could have joined Ukraine as co-belligerents under our obligations under the UN charter and that war would be completely legal. We've chose the halfway house of arming Ukraine and giving them economic and intelligence support, so they can defeat Russia without us. Which they seem to be doing rather well.

Re: Eggs

It's not a problem. On Earth, we have paper!

Just so long as no idiot tries to fight them with scissors, we'll be fine.

Why would coming home from Mars be that expensive?

If we're sending people, we're doing it by ship. That ship is presumably coming back to Earth. So the only cost is the return trip from Mars to that ship.

For a colony on Mars to survive it's going to need to be able to produce fuel. And it's unlikely it's going to be using single-use spacecraft.

Some people might be willing to make their move to Mars a one-way trip. But probably not all.

Also there are loads of problems to solve first. Like radiation shielding. Both in transit, and then on Mars - given its lack of magnetic field.

Re: Not even close to what Bezos and Musk have done

Also Bezos (oh sorry) BEZOS hasn't achieved orbit yet. So while he's done landing on his rocket he's only done it from balistic velocities.

Musk and SpaceX on the other hand are the real deal.

Oh and NASA have definitely landed and taken off again. I saw that footage of Buzz Aldrin punching an idiot in the face again the other day, and if NASA hadn't been able to - his corpse would still have been sitting on the lunar surface.

Re: Here's hoping that it will work out

l8gravely,

I don't think the Moon is all that useful as a test bet. As well as being much more expensive than doing multiple testing on Earth.

The most dangerous part is the landing, which can't be easily simulated anywhere. Though we've tested Mars parachutes at very high altitudes on Earth.

Obviously you can't test a helicopter on the Moon.

And Moon gravity is too low, with Earth's too high, but Mars has an atmosphere that the Moon doesn't. Again with Earth's being too thick, though it's not hard to test in a low pressure chamber.

Building a whole new replica rover and launching it to the Moon to test the sample transfer process seems like a really expensive way to do a test that's as different to the conditions on Mars as Earth is.