Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Coo!

Re: interesting one to watch

From listening to sports journalists, I seem to remember that most of the player heights come from the clubs - either press releases or even just the player info on the website. However that height data is often ludicrously inaccurate. Possibly demonstrating that the clubs don't care, or sometimes because the player might be a little insecure about not being tall enough or somesuch.

Re: Hmmm... decisions decisions

Allan George Dyer,

I prefer first past the post, but accept and understand it has major flaws. But then so do all political systems. I was starting to waver as in the UK the two big parties were getting a consistently smaller share of the vote - which makes FPP much less legitimate as a system. Since those numbers have gone back up in recent elections, on relatively high turnouts, I'd say I'm still happy to stick with what we've got. As I still think the disadvantages of PR are slightly worse and the downsides of FPP.

in the UK, ordinary voters don't choose the Prime Minister.

Seeing as you're compairing to German, neither do the voters there. Israel were one of the few (only?) countries to directly elect their Prime Ministers, but haven't they stopped?

At least in the UK though, you know who the Prime Ministers are likely to be, because it's a choice of 2 that you know beforehand - and if you voted for a Conservative candidate at the last election you knew that this was more likely to mean Boris Johnson as PM. In the recent election in Germany the polls were pretty close - although I believe it was obvious the Greens had fallen away in the final weeks. But otherwise you were looking at 3 parties on similar percentages, and so had less idea who'd be Chancellor. Also if you're a smaller party voter, you've less idea what effect your vote might have. In the UK voting Lib Dem in a Lib Dem/Conservative marginal is making it less likely that Boris Johnson will become PM. That's an advantage of PR, it's eaiser to vote against a candidate - which I know some pepole don't approve of. But if say you're anti-FDP or don't want die Linke in government - it's much harder to cast your vote accordingly.

Who stands for a particular party in a constituency may be decided by a small, local party selection committee, or heavily influenced by the central party, either way, the ordinary voter in the constituency doesn't have a say in the candidates offered.

That's true in most systems. And PR list systems are much worse for that, because the party hierarchy can put their favourites higher up the list.

However you can join parties to get to choose that. And the Conservatives in the UK have recently experimented with open Primaries for candidate selection. But I'd say this is much more a problem with the existence of political parties, and if the voters don't like the candidates, the obvious solution is to vote for another party until the buggers get the message.

If Germany's system is working, then those games are actually a balancing of power and policies between the different political viewpoints:

This is true. But it is one of the big problems with PR. This is the point where the parties all get together and agree amongst themselves, and there's not a lot the voters can do about it. In first-past-the-post systems - this coalition negotiation has happened more-or-less openly over the last electoral cycle - and each party has published a manifesto to tell you what they've decided. So you've a much better idea of what you're getting - and usually the winning Prime Minister will appoint most of his major shadow-ministers to the jobs they were spokesmen on. So you've even got some idea of what government you're going to get.

So the trade-off is really between the electorate having more of an idea of what government they're going to get under FPP and more power for smaller minority voters (and parties) - but less influence for the voters on the evntual make-up of their government under PR.

I would argue that the two major parties in Germany have been in coalition with each other for far too long, depriving the voters of choice and influence. And I'd suggest the voters agree, in that neither are getting the percentages they achieved 10-20 years ago and before.

Re: What's the end result of incresingly asymmetric warfare? More terrorism?

Warfare has become increasingly something that militaries inflict on civilians, rather than each other.

I very much doubt that's true, in any historical context or timeframe you can think of. Western forces take incredible amounts of care (and sometimes even increase their own risks) in order to avoid hitting civilians. Including developing all sorts of "smart-weapons" to make them more accurate. One of the advantages of more accuracy is that you can use smaller warheads, which means the area effect of a weapon is also lower - which is another aspect of reducing the casualties you might cause to civilians.

It's nowhere near perfect of course, but in comparision to warfare last century we're capable of being far more accurate. Whereas in World War II of course we resorted to an awful lot of city bombing - because accuracy was so appalling - even at trying to hit factories.

Contrast that with say Russia. They were accused of deliberately using unguided bombs in a campaign of attacks on Syrian hospitals, because then it would be harder to tell if it was them or the much less well-equipped Syrian airforce that had done it. Well a lot of hospitals got hit anyway, and then the Russian ministry of defence put out a video this Summer showing a montage of shots of their planes blowing stuff up, which actually included an attack on a Syrian hospital from 2016 I think.

But actually I think you're mis-understanding what you're quoting. What I think he's talking about is the ability of UK forces to sustain conflict at a low-intensity for long periods. This is aimed at people like Iran, who've been using a mixture of drones, Revolutionary Guards in speedboats placing mines, Revolutionary Guard just kidnapping whole ships (ship-napping?) and sometimes possibly outright missile attacks. We don't want to escalate, which is mostly what we can do at the moment. And it's expensive to increase our navy patrols. So maybe what we need is a few unmanned vehicles so we can hit back at the Revolutionary Guards ourselves - or if not, at least make them worry that we might. But that probably means the abilty to catch them while they're placing the limpet mine on the Israeli bitumen tanker (as they did last month) - when Iran is much less likely to retaliate and escalate if they're caught red-handed. Even the USA don't have the resources to keep 30 ships hanging around the Persian Gulf though. But how about 2 or 3 (as the Royal Navy currently does), each operating 5 or 6 drone speedboats, a helicopter and some aerial surveillance drones? That can be achieved at not much more expense than having the frigate, patrol vessel and minesweepers we already permanently base there.

Re: "our platforms will be designed as uncrewed"

They aren't looking at having a warship without a crew. Or at least, not one on its own. However the new Type 26 and Type 31 frigates will have mission bays to put on board extra kit. Which might be fast unmanned motor boats with machineguns or small missiles onboard, to fight off Al Qaeda suicide boats or Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboats planting mines.

The Navy are also planning not to replace the minesweeping fleet. But to have various autonomous minesweeping vehicles. All presumably short range, so will need some sort of mothership. Which could be a cheap merchant ship they lease to take them round the UK coast, doing sea-bottom surveys or an actual warship to defend them while they do their work in hostile areas.

For the moment most of this seems to be similar to the loyal wingman concept that various airforces are looking at. You have drone aircraft/ships as force-multipliers for your existing assets - which you task to do the really dangerous or really easy stuff that you don't want to either risk or waste your crew's time doing.

The US Navy have just successfully tested a drone tanker aircraft. Put a few of those on their carriers and they can use their aircraft more effectively, rather than have some of them fly as tankers for the others. The Royal Navy are looking at similar for our carriers, including possibly fitting small catapults and traps to launch/recover them.

Re: WHY do we have to go to them and start trouble?

As the saying goes, if you desire peace, prepare for war.

The nastier regimes aren't going to leave you alone, just because you're unarmed. We had a nice period of relative calm after the Cold War - but that looks to have come to an end.

Which doesn't mean we had to stick our noses into Iraq obviously. That was a choice, and we could have just let the situation ride and hope for the best. Though we did have troops in the Kurdish northern areas and air units enforcing no-fly zones in both North and South to stop Iraq from continuing their genocide against the Marsh Arabs in the South or attacking the Kurds. I also think we made a mistake in the 90s not to intervene to stop the genocide in Rwanda - but obviously you could argue that it was right to let it happen. Particularly as that would have been easy to stop.

On the other hand of course, it's one thing stopping the massacres happening - as we did in Libya. It's another what you do next. So perhaps the attempted nation-building bit afterwards is an over-stretch? Though ignoring problems, as we've done with Syria, doesn't mean they'll leave you alone. There's been quite a lot of refugees and terrorism come of that conflict, even though we've barely got involved.

Equally ignoring a civil war far away in Afghanistan was doing quite well as a policy. Up until September 2001 - when it wasn't. And what was Bin Laden's excuse? Both that we had repelled Sadam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and so had troops near the Islamic holy sites and that we hadn't got involved in intervening in Bosnia because we hated Muslims. Obviously we could have ignored that attack and not got involved militarily in Afghanistan. Are you going to try and claim you seriously believe that Al Qaeda would have then given up on massive terrorist attacks on the West?

Re: Love the misdirection in the title.....

Afghanistan attacked our treaty ally and killed over 3,000 people. OK Al Qaeda weren’t the government. But their leader was married to the daughter of the head of the Taliban government, and it was done with a coordinated hit on the leader of the "Northern Alliance" who were fighting the Taliban. Their forces had actually reached quite near to Kabul by that point. It’s not certain the Taliban would have held the country, even without the NATO intervention.

Argentina is rather mote simple. They launched unprovoked, outright aggression against British territory, and Britain’s response was entirely defensive in nature. No attacks happened on Argentinian soil.

The War Office point is purely semantic though. In other countries it would have been called an army ministry. Given that the Admiralty was a separate department. And after WWI, so was the Air Ministry. Churchill made himself minister of defence in 1940, as well as PM. Though the Ministry of Defence wasn’t actually formed until 1947. But Minister of War was actually a subordinate position, and Britain actually had both a minister of defence and a minister of war from WWII to 67. As well as a First Lord of the Admiralty and Minister of the Air.

Re: The only credible regional threat Australia faces is China

They tried going to war with the emus in the 1930s and lost - see link to wiki. There's no way the Aussies would be stupid enough to take on the spiders.

Do even nukes work on drop bears?

Re: change of requirements

Britain spent the 1950s desperately trying to find a new tech for submarines. We kept (and always planned to) some diesel/electric ones for shallow water work and defence of choke-points. But spent lots of money on looking at nuclear and peroxide. The peroxide subs were based on the German Walther cycle engines developed (but not fielded) during the war - but were rejected on the grounds of being a horrible death-trap. The prototype, HMS Explorer (nicknamed by the crew HMS Exploder) took so long to get working that her first captain never even got to sail in her before being promoted. When they finally got it going, starting the engines created so much smoke in the boat that the control room once failed to notice that they were actually on fire - and the Chief Engineer had to the shut-down because they were being overcome by fumes.

So we did a technology deal with the US. Apparently our reactor designs were interestingly different to theirs - but theirs were now developed enough to actually use. So we were given the US designs to play with, in exchange for our data. If I remember rightly we built HMS Dreadnought with a copy of the US Westinghouse reactor, but later subs actually used a Rolls Royce design - which I'm guessed nicked some bits from that, but was actually different. For details see Peter Hennessy's excellent 'The Silent Deep'.

Also as part of that treaty we apparently swapped plutonium, which our nuclear power industry provided lots of, with US enriched uranium that we used to fuel our submarines.

I guess the US didn't need this deal, but having the Royal Navy build a decently sized fleet of excellent quality nuclear submarines was defintely in their interests too. Given the alternatives, I suspect the Rolls Royce reactor would have been finished anyway, just a bit later.

I suspect one thing we also really benefited from was getting to look at the USA's SUBSAFE program. Without having to have a submarine accident ourselves (the loss of USS Thresher) - we were able to learn from the US's mistakes - and they were keen to share their experience. For which I believe we have Admiral Rickover to thank in large part.

France has sold a nuclear reactor to Iraq before, why wouldn't they sell them to Australia - with their submarines? Or didn't the Aussies want nuclear before?

Re: A hint at the UK's future

It's interesting that the UK is involved in this, rather than just the US. In general I believe Aussie military kit is interoperable with the US first and any other potential partners next. Because that's the navy they expect to be in their waters. So the Aussies are buying our type 26 ASW frigate design for example, as are a few other allied nations (Canada + can't remember). But they Aussies aren't having the decent air defence system we're fitting - but are going for the US AEGIS system - so they can fully integrate with US ships. Which clearly makes sense for them.

I'm sure they don't need technological help from both the US and UK. But there is an advantage to asking both, because they can then play Rolls Royce off against the US manufacturers for the reactors - which I'm going to guess they won't build domestically. Although on checking I see the US have already got 3 of their own manufacturers, so I'm surprised they're bothering. but I guess it also helps with buying in the sonars and other plant, if they don't have their own from previous subs.

Advancing one of the only industries that the UK still has and is extremely successful. (Weapons)

This is utter balls though. People really do need to get a sense of perspective about their own country. The UK is the world's fifth largest economy. It's the second largest exporter of services in the world and the 9th (last time I checked, let's just say top ten) largest exporter of manufactured goods.

We have a massive and hugely successful pharmaceutical industry. We've also actually got a large (and growing in the last two decades) car industry. Admittedly nationalisation didn't do a lot for the domestic companies, so we're doing manufacturing of other cars. But the reason the UK is top in world motor racing design and manufacture is that we've also got a lot of car research and design going on here - or possibly the big car companies have come here for design because of the motor racing? Or both. Add in aircraft. Weapons, as you mentioned. But also lots of other engineering stuff goes on in Blighty.

Then we come on to services. Where we're a huge exporter of architecture and building design services. I've worked on loads of projects in the Middle East and North Africa where the first question you ask will be, is this being done to US or UK building regulations? ARM, is of course a UK company - again selling design services. Much of global insurance, currency and commodities trading happens in London. Plus we're a rather large exporter of legal services - lots of international contracts get done under UK law or have UK arbitration clauses - thus keeping London full of lawyers and bankers. Ooh, lucky us...

Oh and to mention the bloody pandemic, much of the research on what treatments to use came from the UK. Most of that was what pre-existing drugs to use, but UK pharma has also come up with a few new drugs that also help. Not to mention a certain vaccine that's now been given to a billion or so people with 3 billion doses planned this year. I understand that the UK only had one vaccine factory (other than ones for test doses) before all this kicked off - which was for cat vaccines. Although the government was in the process of building one, to come on stream next year, so they could start taking advantage of the Jenner institute's process, presumably for the malaria vaccine. However we now do have a vaccine industry, because it's not just AZ that set up factories, so that should be another export area. Though I can imagine much of that might end up being paid for by us taxpayers, as the UK has been buying vaccines made in India for various global programs for twenty years - and I guess we might start buying those here.

Re: Airstrip Two is much bigger than Airstrip One

I hope they welcome their new star-spangled overlords.

There's a huge difference between the US and China (or Russia). Which is that countries actually want US troops to be based there. It's generally a sign of security.

The Iraqi government kicked US troops out ten years ago, and the US left willingly. They were soon desperate to get them back when ISIS attacked - and even though Iraq's government are ideologically much closer to Iran, they still seem to want the security of the US presence. I'm sure the Taliban are glad the US have left Afghanistan, but nobody else is. And those are the the two controversial places.

When Trump talked about removing US troops from Germany - the German government were shocked, and wanted them to stay. Equally the Japanese government are very keen to maintain US troop as part of their defence - despite the fact that in both cases those troops arrived as conquerors 70 years ago.

The Polish government tried to bribe Trump with $2 billion a year to base troops there permanently - and tickle his ego by calling it Camp Trump.

Ukraine wants to join NATO and have US troops there. Of course they've already tried hosting Russian troops in a leased base - and it didn't turn out so well - as they came right out of those bases and ilegally annexed Crimea. Not that they had a choice, Russia had to force them to give a lease on those bases a few years before by shutting off their gas supplies in December.

For all the rude things said about the USA - when it comes to it, people want their help. And complain just as loudly when the US military doesn't get involved. There's no long queue of countries desperate for Chinese or Russian troops.

The story is actually similar with the UK and France - although to a lesser extent. Both have sent a carrier battle group to Asia in the last few months. Both were welcomed with open arms by the countries there, who wanted to train with them and have goodwill visits, in the hope that their navies would stick around and bolster regional stabilty. Both have smaller detachments of troops in trouble spots around the world helping to keep places secure and are asked by governments to help them maintain security.

SpaceX is not a public company so maximising profit is much less of an issue for it.

James Ashton,

SpaceX has investors. Presumably they are smart enough to know that Musk isn't entirely in it for the money. But I seriously doubt if they'd have invested if he hadn't promised them a certain return on their cash. Depending on what the ownership percentages are, they could even be in a position to out-vote him - if he annoyed them all at once?

Plus, I'm guessing here, Musk probably believes that the only way to a colony on Mars is to have a viable and self-sustaining space industry. Seeing as we can't realistically go straight from struggling with getting to low Earth orbit to regular Mars trips, that means some at least reasonably self-sufficient outposts in Earth orbit, or on the Moon or on asteroids. Mining / satellite repair / space manufacturing / other. Which means profits from more than just satellite launch. Government is currently happy with a bit of astronomy/science, satellites for communications, spying and environmental monitoring and a minimal amount of human spaceflight. So Musk needs to generate more demand for space industry, which he can partly do by making satellites cheaper. But it's going to take the lure of profits from some actually space-based industry to attract the kind of long-term investment into the space industry he wants to see.

So he also needs profits to fulfill his dream. Just ideally not the short-term small extra ones you might get by cutting corners on safety. But big, fat juicy ones you might get from space mining or manufacturing of clever stuff in low-gravity and with limitless solar energy - if that's even possible / worthwhile.

Re: “ the university's vaccine worked safely and would be made available cheaply across the world”

It’s coming on amazingly fucking superbly thanks.

New vaccines developed in record time - thanks to good scientific work on speeding up vaccine development, plus work on SARS and MERS. And now we’re dosing about 1.5 billion people per month worldwide and have already saved a few hundred thousand lives. As I said, bloody brilliant.

Even better, lack of funding, paperwork, natural caution and lack of prioritisation meant that these new vaccine techniques were still a few years from frontline use. And would be very expensive to manufacture at scale. Although the UK government was already building a mid-sized vaccine plant to start producing them. And a trial for a malaria vaccine was due to start. The biggest killer disease in the world, and the vaccine trial was successful this year!

We now have the tools, the supply chain and the political impetus to create vaccines for many of the worlds' diseases and save millions of lives a year. Vaccines are cheap, and even governments that can’t afford good healthcare are already extremely effective at delivering them. Global vaccination rates for measles and a few other diseases are now around 90%.

This new vaccine tech will be seen by future historians as one of the great advances in human history, saving millions of lives a year. It’s fucking awesome.

Re: Who was the developer?

JohnG,

I used to know a missionary who was returning from New Guinea in the 90s. I've had dysentery and lost 50 pounds. As I paid for this return ticket when I weighed more, you should let me bring two suitcases back free to make up for it.

I still know several missionaries, and they are all experienced and talented excess baggage blaggers. Including one who got a brand new washing machine from Heathrow to Lagos as well as an extra two suitcases without paying. But flights to Africa always go with loads of unpaid excess baggage - presumably because the airlines can't sell the hold space for air-freight - and know it's easier to put a bit extra on the ticket prices than argue with every single passenger.