Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Also there can be much complication with politics. In this case it's probably relatively easy. As one single country is simply changing its ccTLD. But in the case of the split up of Yugoslavia you've got 2 new successor countries, so you can't just set up automatically on the new domains.

So there are many technical pitfalls. And if you're unlucky political ones too.

Re: Eyesight and subtitles

That's also a problem with all these channels. In the old days, you just pressed 1-4 on the remote, and got your channel. Job done. Now you have to read the onscreen guide thingy. Fortunately the one on my TV is nice and big. Also, if you've got a Sky box, you can use the Sky app on a tablet to remote control it. So long as you're willing to connect it to the network anyway.

I used to sit right next to the telly. I had a beanbag for the purpose for a while. Now I have a 50" telly and can sit on a comfy sofa. Better yet, I paid £500 for my 50" TV. As I recall the 29" my parents bought in the mid-80s was £400. Although that did come in a rather fetching fake wood cabinet.

Re: Hiding your TV in the cabinet...

Apparently there's quite a trade in turning old TV cabinets into something useful. My friend is a furniture designer (hand made bespoke stuff), and he's being asked to do something with the furniture he made for people back in the 80s to hold their TV, video and tapes. Now they've got Sky and a flat screen mounted on the wall.

He's been turning them into drinks cabinets.

I think my favourite of his over-priced stuff stories was from the mid-90s. He was doing pretty cabinets for a bathroom. The client was, of course, having gold taps. But the shower cubicle was having hand painted tiles - so they all had to go in the right order, and the guy doing the tiling was having ulcers because he couldn't break any. The cost of these tiles just, for the shower cubicle, was £14,000.

Re: 'ello Tosh....

Before the demise of my Mum's last TV (dreadful Bush HD Ready ugh!) I went round for dinner. I'd set the Sky box up to tell the telly when the piccie was widescreen and when not, as the TV didn't seem to be able to cope with this itself.

Something had gone wrong, she was watching a show that should have been in 4:3, but the sky box had decided to stretch it to widescreen, then the TV had for some reason decided that it was only showing 4:3 today. Because it was getting a widescreen signal, it had letterboxed it.

So she had a 4:3 program that had been stretched to twice its normal width, then had the top and bottom chopped off, and the TV seemed to have squashed the ends as well, so there were smaller black bars at the end. The whole picture was horribly distorted, and probably half the screen space was black.

I made some sort of comment about her picture looking truly hideous, and she said, "I can't see anything wrong with it". I pressed the buttons to make it go back to normal, and she didn't seem to think it much of an improvement. Even though the picture was twice the size, and the characters' heads were no longer horribly distorted.

I could understand ignoring it from not knowing how to fix it. The telly was crap, and the Sky box settings in an obscure menu. But not noticing it...

Re: 2015 class joke....

old PC monitors were just as bad.

I do not have fond memories of all the juggling you had to do in order to set up a PC in the late 90s. If the monitor was 19" (or even bigger) then you had to be very careful lifting the thing around. Plus they were very awkward, as the easiest bit to hold was often the front, and all the weight was at the back. Wheeee! Smash! Ooops!

Then, once you'd heaved the bugger onto the desk, you had to plug it in. As the VGA lead was usually fixed at the back, you had to sort of slide it onto the desk, and on small ones hold it precariously at half over the side, while reaching behind to connect the cables.

When I upgraded it was funny to heave the enromous 19" lump off the desk, then pick up the 23" LCD easily in one hand, while using the other to connect the cables.

Similarly I had to go round to help my friend move his Sony widescreen 38" TV as he couldn't lift it. When the LCD he replaced it with weighs bugger-all. And yet I carried my 50" LED easily enough, I'd only need help if I wanted to wall-mount it.

Re: Old Fart

My 50" TV looks ridiculously stupid in my small-ish living room. It's absolutely huge, and sticks out like a sore thumb. Thinking about it now, I can only bring to mind one person I know who has a 50" telly - and they've got a decently huge room to put it in. Most people have gone for the mid 30s-40s range. Even though you can now pick up a decent 50" for £400.

I sized it very carefully. I wanted to be able to read the TV guide and subtitles from over 6 feet away - which with my rubbish eyesight meant wandering into TV shops with a tape measure. I wonder if the guys in the shop thought I doubted their size labels...

Because of this, I did very briefly consider trying to hide my over-sized televisual embarrassment. I quite liked the idea of having a large painting on rails, so I could press the remote control to turn on the telly, and the painting would slide aside, with a satisfying motor hum. At which point it should probably activate the DVD player, to show a picture of circling sharks...

Re: @RyokuMas - "Good men"...

Graham Marsden,

El Reg do provide a block user facility. By every username on the forums is a stripy sad face. It's between their name, and their badge (if they have one). You simply click on that, and their posts disappear.

Of course the problem is that you can't block anon posters. Otherwise you could block a particular post and then work out which other posts that user has made - and de-anonymise them (at least a bit).

Then again, I don't see the point. If I saw the name Eadon, then I could simply ignore the post - i.e. let my brain filter what I read in the same way I do everywhere else. Which is why I notice so few online adverts.

It also helps that many of the more annoying posters give clues in their first paragraph. So if I see: LIBLABCON, ConDem, FRACTIONAL RESERVE BANKING, HARP, sheeple - lots of capitalisation in general - then I know that I can safely skip the rest of that post.

Mark 85,

I agree with most of what you say here. The trolls don't seem to believe anyone should curtail their "right" to say whatever crap they want. Even when they're on a forum provided by someone else. They have some weird self-centred notion of what's acceptable, and what their rights should be.

Although there's a weird subset of whiners who when you use the ban-hammer on them seem to sort of blame you as a moderator for failling to stop them from going too far. Why didn't you intervene sooner? Why didn't you stop him from winding me up? We had one user who wanted us to re-code our forums to have a special time based banning system, to stop him posting after about 10pm on Fridays and Saturdays. That's when he came back from the pub, in a bit of a confrontational mood...

Others just think you're out to get them. To which my honest answer would be, yup - you're ruining my online community - I'd perma-ban you if I was allowed to. But the site-owners are too fluffy for that. I won't treat you any more harshly than anyone else, but I will enjoy it when I ban you - whereas normally I don't.

Then again, forum culture does matter. El Reg can be a bit rowdy, but it's a pretty nice community. You don't see much nastiness. Although it can get that way, but most of the trolling is anti-company.

I used to mod on an international game's forum. We had our share of arseholes on the English forum, but it rarely became nasty - even when the Mods weren't around. And there didn't seem to be much in the way of grudges being bourne. Except a couple of troublesome users.

Whereas the Scottish forums were an absolute vipers nest. There were a few camps that seemed to have formed, and they'd all participate in bullying certain users. Sometimes it would be all nice, then an argument/discussion would go too far, and then it would just become poisonous. You'd often find yourself having to ban 4 or 5 people at once. And want to ban more, who were egging it on, rather than calming it down or staying out of it.

The Irish forum was different again. Quite rough-and-tumble, but almost always taken in good part. The only problem was we were supposed to crack down on swearing, as the game owners wanted the forums 'family friendly'. We could not stop the users swearing, and it got really silly when we were told we couldn't allow "feck". No power, no God, no force of arms can apparently stop an Irishman from exercising his right to say "feck"...

So I definitely think that user-tolerance is a big issue. Each forum develops its own culture. I've intervened and stopped unpleasantness on forums before, when not being a mod. And it often only takes one person to get the digital lynch-mob organised. The thing about fear of online bullies is that although they're anonymous (for a given level of effort), so is everyone else. There was a brief period on El Reg when someone started down-voting every post I made. Or at least going through my post-history and down-voting every post on a page. Don't know what I did to cause that. But it wasn't terribly effective as an intimidation tool, it's not even that easy to notice. And I guess they couldn't be more direct, as this site is well modded.

Re: Nuts! It is Not Big Tech.

Billy Catringer,

You do realise that it isn't just Central Banks that set interest rates. Sure they have a base rate that's conveniently used as a benchmark. But you can be sure that if there were safe high return investments out there, then money would be pouring into them.

Low interest rates are in fact the cause of the crash, not its symptom.

It was over-saving in the boom that caused interest rates to be so low, when they needed to be higher to stop the asset bubbles and over-consumption. This was by China (trying to boost exports by keeping its currency down), by Russia and OPEC (saving for a rainy day), by other far Eastern nations (saving and protecting their currencies from China) and by large companies (partly as part of international tax-avoidance, partly for other reasons). All this cash sloshed around the world, desperately looking for returns. It forced down global interest rates, and meant it was cheaper to invest in stupid things, like huge property portfolios.

That all went pop in the bust, but the savings were still there. China was still supressing internal demand, and exporting capital. The oil price was still high, so the oil exporters were still living high on the hog (and saving away happily). This is now reversing a bit, as with the oil price collapse they're now spending their savings - so taking some of that capital back.

But the global savings rate is still incredibly high, hence low interest rates. That's why Germany today was able to sell 5 years Bunds at negative interest rates. There's loads of savings out there, but the people with them can't find anywhere safe to put them. So they're willing to pay the German government to look after their cash for 5 years.

In microcosom this is what has caused the Euro crisis too. Too many exports from countries like Germany and Holland. They then had all this cash, but weren't willing to spend it on imports. So instead they invested it in Spain and Greece. Rather badly as happened. Whereas the interest rates were fine for Germany, growing slowly in the mid 2000s, real rates were actually negative in Spain and Ireland (who were growing much faster). Their inflation rate was higher than the rate German banks were willing to lend to them at. Which of course whacked up inflation, and caused the bubble.

Globalisation (and the way people have responded to it) has caused the financial imbalances that made the boom so huge, and therefore the recession so bad. Hopefully we can correct this, without losing the huge poverty reduction that globalisation has caused. But it seems built into the Eurozone design, which suggests that however good their Central Bank is, the euro is still doomed.

Mark 85,

Is there actually any evidence linking vaccines to autism? And not that shit research Wakefield mostly made up. I wasn't aware of any, but then I haven't looked into it for ages. The developmental signs of autism turn up about the same age as childhood vaccination. To re-use the old phrase, correlation is not causation.

I know parents of autistic children who believe it. But then given the choice between an explicable cause, or just "your child's life was ruined by random", that's understandable.

Re: Mountains and Molehills

I was listening to a program on Ebola last night. They were talking about relative risks, and contrasting with average risk. One outbreak of Ebola killed 90% of those infected, it tends to vary a lot by outbreak. The average death rate is about 60%-65%. Guess which figure the press went with recently...

Anyway the average mortality rate of measles is 10%, and it kills about 120,000 people a year. Mostly under 5s.

Obviously the West have been vaccinating for a while, or that average would be lower, as there'd be more cases with fewer extra deaths, with our better healthcare. But it's much more contagious than Ebola, being airbourne.

However it's not a trivial disease. One of the symptoms is possible meningitis, which is always bad. I have met kids who've had it, but then I used to do volunteer work at an RNIB Sunshine House school.

Interestingly enough, via the same route, I've also met children who were illegally used in his "research" by struck off Dr Wakefield. As well as making up some/most of his results, he was also making money from the parents he was lying to about the causes of their children's illnesses. And taking samples from them for his "research", without always bothering to get consent. Which is why he was repudiated by his fellow researchers, and struck off by the BMA.

Re: I'd think they're ready to come down on land

Didn't they have one rocket break up at the hypersonic stage, sometime early last year? They've had 3 or 4 successes since, where they've got down to ground (ocean) level in controlled flight, and where they were aiming for. But will probably have to succeed a few more times first.

Although this attempt will have helped them, as the 1st stage was going considerably faster this time, and yet they still managed to get it down to where they wanted it, in controlled flight.

However, flying across the continental US, where the rocket has to be under sufficient control to avoid air-corridors even if everything works (let alone cities), is probably a long way away. Much more reliable drones don't generally have permission to fly in civillian airspace. I'd imagine that what they can get permission for is flying in designated ranges out to sea, and then popping back to some nice landing spot on the coast. After a few years of success at that, they may be able to achieve more.

I wonder what the New York - London time would be in a Falcon/Dragon combo? OK the cost would be obscene, but it'd make a superb PR stunt.

I'd have thought it's more likely to be inflationary. Prices can't drop past a certain point - as the companies would go bust. So either certain services would disappear, or those services would have to get more expensive in order to attract their workers to not just sit on their minimum incomes and watch the Jeremy Kyle Show all day.

This would give an incentive for companies to automate repetitive tasks, where the current minimum wage is cheaper than tooling up with robots. Or at least similar, but less risky, as the capital costs of automation are so high - and take so long to pay a return. So I guess you'd have a mix of some things just no longer being economic, some getting more expensive and some rises in productivity as it becomes economic to automate.

I'd be amazed if anyone can come up with an economic model that'll predict all that lot...

Re: Hmm

codejunky,

Your position is somewhat absolutist. There will always be some level of unemployment due to people moving between jobs, large numbers of employers going bust in one particular area, recession etc. If we don't maintain a welfare state then some of those people get to spiral into absolute poverty and possibly do annoying things like starving to death. Which, by the way, is also bad for the economy. Plus looks really bad on telly...

We can see how this lack of benefits is actually even worse for the economy than the deadweight losses of taxation, by looking at what happened in the 1930s. The Depression was eventually cured by huge state intervention. It also has horrible effects on society and individuals. Some balance will therefore always have to be struck, which is why we have elections to decided roughly how we'll do that.

Finally China is another example of how government intervention can actually help an economy. The Chinese have pretty much nothing in the way of a social safety net. This means that families save a huge amount of their income, in case. This is having 2 side-effects. It means they don't have enough internal demand to stimulate their economy and so they have to rely on exports. And there's too much money available to invest (excess savings) which lowers the cost of interest, and leads to the mis-allocation of capital (mal-investment). In the last boom, lots of that cash was being invested in the West, and was one of the causes that lead to the asset bubbles which so spectacularly popped in 2007/8. Oops. Now lots of that cash has been invested into China, very badly, causing huge excess manufacturing capacity leading to deflation, and a big fat housing bubble, that the Chinese government are desperately trying to deflate without crashing the economy. The other side of the over-spending and over-borrowing that we in the West just indulged in was the over-saving and under-spending of people in Asia - plus the huge surpluses built up by the oil-exporters.

Some sort of social safety-net, either a government backed insurance scheme or tax-and-welfare system, is an excellent way to allow a modern economy to function more predictably. It also stabilises recessions, by automatically causing government spending to rise, in order to stimulate demand. See Greece for how utterly fucking this up for stupid ideological reasons will turn out to be a disaster. Not that the Greek state has ever functioned properly, but German inspired policy in Greece in order to achieve "moral" rather than economic aims has been a fucking disgrace for which the IMF have admitted they're ashamed, but the European institutions and governments are still claiming the moral high ground. History will not be kind to them.

We've had a recession. And that accounts for some empty shops. We've also had a revolution in buying patterns, where lots of people now buy things online. This also accounts for a lot of shops closing. Empty shops are therefore not a usable measure of economic activitiy.

Re: We already have this

Mike Bell,

You've mis-read that Wiki article, partly as it's very badly written. Particularly the table on lending. It also confuses bank capital and bank reserves. Banks are in fact regulated to maintain two main types of assets:

1. Cash (or very liquid) reserves - which is money they use every day to cover normal withdrawals, plus stuff they can access if there's a run on the bank.

2. Capital. This is money the bank owns (or its shareholders do). This is to cover losses on loans - so that even if say 5% of the people they've loaned to default, they can cover the losses without taking from savers' accounts. From memory minimum capital adequacy ratios in the UK are something like 7% - but the Bank of England stress tests last year meant you had to have over 10% to pass - and if you didn't you had to sell more shares or bonds to get there.

The thing that the loonies who don their tinfoil hats and scream about FRACTIONAL RESERVE BANKING fail to understand, is the bank balance sheet.

Banks aren't legally allowed to just loan money. They have to have it first. If you save £100,000 with the bank, there are 2 transactions in the bank's ledger. They get £100k of cash (an asset) and a £100k liability (the balance on your account). These match, so the bank's books balance.

Banks pay interest on cash on deposit (well not much at the moment...). This means that they must make a profit on that money, or they can't cover the interest. So they loan some of it to someone else at more interest than they're paying their savers. At that point they have created another 2 transactions, £90k of the £100k saved goes to someone else (debited from the cash ledger) and they gain a new asset - which is the loan to this person of £90k. The books now balance again.

Here's a simplified balance sheet:

CREDIT ------------- DEBIT

£10,000 ---------------------------- operating cash (part of deposit from person A)

£90,000 ---------------------------- mortgage debt owed by person B

--------------------------- £100,000 savings account balance (owed to person A)

£100,000 --------------£100,000 - totals balance

Some explanations get very confused by a couple of things. The counter-intuitive bit that if I've got cash in the bank then they have a corresponding liability in that they owe me that cash. And the rather weird terminology that gets used about money. Basically we use various definitions of money when talking about the money supply. Almost no-one uses M0, which is the actual notes and coins printed/minted by the government - most calculations for the purposes of dealing with inflation use M3 (there's M0, M1 to M5 each includes everything in the earlier ones, plus some extra). M1 includes bank current account deposits as money-equivalents, plus notes and coins not held in bank vaults (that Wiki article explains this badly). I can transfer cash out of my current account to someone else's in order to settle a debt - thus the bank has probably created some M1 money when it lends cash at the same time as holding an account for me. However this is complicated, as I'm unlikely to have all of my money in a current account if there's lots of it - savings accounts aren't measured in M1, plus banks also may borrow from the markets in order to lend (also in ways that don't add to M1). Finally the money they lend out won't all make its way back into banks as deposits in current accounts, and therefore will not all create M1 either. What "money" means in different circumstances is a very confusing topic all to itself...

The short version is, it's bloody complicated. But no, banks don't have a license to print money. They don't get the money they actually do "sort of print" anyway, because everything they do has to have an entry on both sides of their balance sheet. Plus money doesn't quite mean what it ought to mean.

Never going to happen, of course. There's no way that politicians will be be able to resist the temptation to take away from one group and/or give to another.

That's a ridiculous comment! If people are going to lambast politicians for being too stupid to think straight, they need to do so themselves. Almost everything politicians do involves taking something from one group, and giving it to another. Whether that's 'quietness' in allowing planning permission for something, taxation and spending, or a minimum income guarantee.

I know there's a need to be scepitcal of politicians and keep an eye on the buggers. But this mindless cynicism is really annoying, as well as being dangerous to the process of democracy (which is the only system we've so far found that at least vaguely works).