Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: There may be regional differences to consider...

Hubert Cumberdale,

What? Scones without jam? Nooooooo! Thin layer of raspberry on the scone, and then very large dollop of clotted cream on top. One shouldn't spread the cream, so much as squash it flat-ish with the spoon so that you can fit it in your mouth easily.

This is why the cream can't go on first, because then the jam will slide off the top.

I'm bringing greed to the jam/cream debate, and therefore there's only one way to go. Jam, followed by CREAM!!

Re: Yes but!

Everyone should know where their towel is.

Simon says it’s yours!

Be well.

Re: Ah Emanuels

Battered sausages really are the food of the Gods.

Admittedly, the Gods in question are probably angry and vengeful ones...

Re: Insert meme here

Fractional reserve banking means that banks don't have all the cash on hand in their branches for all the money in their savings accounts. It doesn't mean that can print money, or that they can create loans out of thin air.

When a bank takes a deposit, and puts it into a savings account, they've taken on a liabilty (a debt) to that account holder, to pay them the money they've just borrowed back - often with interest.

So lets say my bank takes £1,000 each in deposits from 10 customers. My bank's accounts now look like this:

ASSETS----|----LIABILITIES

£10,000-----|cash

10 x accs---|£10,000

Now my bank's making a loss. I've got to pay those customers interest, so I need to do something with that cash I've got, or else sadness. So I make a loan.

Now comes the fractional reserve bit. The law states that I have to hold cash, for when some of the customers want to empty those savings accounts. So I'm not allowed to loan out the whole £10k. So I loan £9,000 to a customer to buy a house. Let's say we're back in time here, where you could buy a house for £3,000 and still have change for a bag of chips...

ASSETS----|----LIABILITIES

£1,000-------|cash

£9,000-------|mortgage

10 x accs---|£10,000

==================

£10,000-----|£10,000

Obviously, this is stupidly simplified. Banks don't just lend from customers who open accounts. They can also borrow from the markets, in the form or short or long-term debt. They can also borrow from central banks (usually at higher than market rates of interest) in order to keep them liquid - and of course they can sell shares in order to gain capital, in exchange for a share of the profits in the form of dividends.

Banks also have a second requirement from the government, that they have to hold their own capital - which is what their original shareholders provided, and whatever new shares they sell would top up. They also sell bonds, called CoCos - which are a loan paid back in the normal way which will be converted to shares if the bank gets into financial trouble. This pool of capital is required to achieve their capital adequacy ratio, in the UK about 7% - but the Bank of England says you have to have that after a recession - and therefore the actual rate they make you keep is more like 12-13% in normal times. This capital is there to absorb losses from their loans, so that the depositors' money is protected.

Thus banks are prevented from lending more than about 9 times their level of owned assets, note not their level of deposits and bonds (money borrowed from the markets). The loans they make should about equal their total deposits and bonds - but they have to keep a reserve of cash on hand for immediately settling if people want to withdraw money, to avoid a run on the bank. However, if that happens, they still have a reserve of less liquid assets which they can give to the Central Bank in exchange for more expensive cash loans to keep them from collapsing, while they sort themselves out. Thus a bank can trade while illiquid (short on cash - and the Central Bank will help them), but its illegal to trade while insolvent - with more liabilities than they have assets.

The thing about banks printing money is a mis-understanding of money supply. Which we measure in varying ways. But basically money supply is often said to include short term deposits in banks (various flavours of M3 and M4) - This is called broad money. M0 (narrow money) is simply all the notes and coins in circulation - not a particularly important economic indicator. When the economy is booming, M3 and M4 will rise faster, because a new bank loan is new money. Why? Because the deposit in my savings account is counted as money, and so is the deposit in the bank account of the business who just borrowed money from the bank against my savings. Until that business pays back this loan, there's more money moving between people, because I've still got my unused savings - I'm just not currently spending them. But someone else is, and I'm still feeling rich, and may be spending other money because of this, rather than saving it. Hence the velocity of money has increased, hence more economic activity, hence more GDP growth and possibly more inflation.

When lots of loans start getting paid back, broad money supply drops - which is usually a sign of a fall in the velocity of money, which is a sign of a fall in both GDP growth and inflation. So the banks never actually see this "printed money", they're making their profits from borrowing money from me (my savings) more cheaply than they're lending it out. This is still all a simplification, this area is complicated and will make you sad if you try to study it.

Ok, I'll get my coat...

I'm fucking lovely, and anyone who says fucking different can... Stay right here!

Re: Not "divisive and discriminatory", but essential

Also, there's another point, which is that some people don't have a choice. They can't be vaccinated. Usually due to other medical coniditions that make them more vulnerable. We include them in the list of those who have been vaccinated, out of fairness. They may at times want to avoid public interactions, due to the extra risk to them - but we leave that choice to them.

However not getting vaccinated without medical cause, puts them at risk.

There are specific cases, where we should insist on vaccine certificates. Such as care/nursing homes - and probably the NHS in general. For example, when I last looked at the stats we'd only vaccinated 96% of people over 80, as opposed to 99% of the groups down to 65. This isn't because of some failure in the vaccine programme, it's that larger numbers of that age group can't have the vaccine. Therefore we're going to need to insist on the highest level of protection from those around them.

I believe we already insist in the UK that surgeons have the hepititis vaccine, but not other healthcare workers, because the transmission risk is much lower.

We're also going to need a vaccine certificate/passport/thingymajig of some kind for going abroad, since whatever our society may decide, other governments still get to tell us what to do once we land in their airports.

So this is basically inevitable.

There is also an almost philosophical argument about what vaccines are. Some people see a vaccine as just another medical treatment, something you individually choose whether you want, or are going to get. Something that you take to protect you.

But another way to see vaccines, is as a public good - as a way of protecting whole societies. Sometimes these interpretations can conflict. For example refusing to accept children into school if they've not been vaccinated (or can't be) - as happens in some countries.

For a much criticised example of this conflict: The UK chose to change the dosing regimes, early in the vaccine rollout. That was the JCVI, which is a joint government committee of epidemiologists, immunologists and other public health bods. They chose to extend the gap between vaccine doses. Fine in the case of the Oxford AstraZeneca one, which had been tested in both ways, but more problematic in the case of the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech ones, which hadn't. It's later been shown that they got that dead right, that increasing the dose intervals of those vaccines doesn't have a detrimental effect on levels of immunity - and may even improve it.

But the point was they were actually taking a small, but calculated, risk at the time. They were very slightly increasing the risk to those getting vaccinated, but doubling the number of people in the high risk groups that they could therefore vaccinate. And therefore massively decreasing the risk for those people - which is a trade-off that's probably saved a few thousand lives - and if other global bodies had followed their example would have saved tens of thousands of lives around the world.

These trade-offs are important, but harder to understand. Even one of our main doctors' professional bodies publicly criticised the decision at the time. Though they may have partly been out of habit, at criticising the government, but it was also due to not having fully understood the question.

i.e. in the case of vaccines, it's not all about you. Sometimes you have to accept a very slightly higher risk, in order to protect others. But in turn, that very tiny extra risk will be outweighed even to yourself. by the herd immunity of those around you protecting you from the same disease.

Re: Simple solution

Might be better if it's the first one to bring it back...

Next court fight being by the losing bidders for the contract to put that pile 'o money on the Moon in the first place.

Re: Nice obit, Iain.

jake,

Bought it to read during lockdown. Didn't really feel like reading during lockdown. I think for me reading is all about the pleasure of taking some time to be on my own and quietly thinking about stuff - and shall we say that life had suddenly granted me far more of an opportunity for solo contemplation than I really wanted... However, as we return towards normality (whatever that is), perhaps it might be an opportunity to pick up his book again and raise a nice glass of whisky to his memory.

Soon be time for that movie marathon of 'The Right Stuff', 'First Man' and 'Apollo 13'...

Re: I am disappoint...

My deputy headmaster bought us a few rounds in the pub on a sixth form trip in about 1990. Some of us were smoking in there too, which I remember because I won a pint of horrible cider by eating a cigarette.

Not a private school, and not exotic Costa Rica either. Physics trip to visit Sellafield. Which was fascinating. We did set the radiation alarms off though, which caused a modicum of shouting into phones and rushing about. My mate moved while being scanned as we were leaving the area where they open the spent fuel rods - and the machine retaliated by declaring him radioactive and setting off a surprisingly loud set of alarms. Either that or it just malfunctioned, but then they had to bring alternate testing kit and get approval to shut the alarms up and check they hadn’t accidentally irradiated a school trip. Which wouldn’t have been the best PR...

Maybe that explains the strip club visit? Cover-up! What really happened, that they’re trying to distract us from? This club has a no touching policy for all radioactive clients...

Re: Christian denominations in the country are now more likely to vote Conservative

Loyal Commenter,

Thanks for posting the link. Sadly it doesn't work. I've used his name as a guide to do some Googling, but sadly still can't find it.

Re: Ooh, Shiny

Nick Ryan,

I don't call it good design myself. It's designed to look pretty for a day, or a few months for the mythical person who never drops anything and always has perfectly clean hands.

For the rest of us mere mortals, a case is a requirement. So why not design the phone to be ergonomic out of the box?

Rember the old HTC Desire? Lovely ergonomic rubber coating on the back and sides, so non-slip and comfortable to hold. Also with bezels round the screen to protect it, from anything other than a direct drop face down to a non flat surface, as the rubber and bezel protected it on flat ones. Also looked nice, as there was brushed alumium on the bits that weren't rubberised. That was actual good design. The iPhones sacrifice usability for prettiness.

This being the company that brought you the glass backed phone, because apparently bars of soap weren't slippery enough for Apple...

Re: The report actually seems worse than this

Substitute Ericsson or Nokia for Huawei in that report and absolutely nothing changes.

True enough. Outsourcing core network management, rather than buying kit and managing it yourself means you've handed over the keys to the kingdom to someone else - and you're little better than an MVNO - except with all the insecurity of trying to manage a network you don't have the competence to control. It's like banks and supermarkets outsourcing their core IT - madness. A bank is just a database with branches attached, and a supermarket that doesn't control its stock control system is insane - which is why Sainsbury's had to do an emergency reverse-ferret in-source 20 years ago.

Though there is one major difference. The Swedish and Finnish governments are vegetarians, in comparison to the Chinese government carnivores (or is that wolf warriors?). Plus there aren't allegations that Ericsson and Nokia are under their governments' control - though it ought to worry the Dutch a lot less even if they were.

If you can manage a network without subscriber information then fair play to you.

The allegation in the original Dutch article, was that Huawei had put in place software to allow them to exfiltrate subscriber data, and had regularly updated this, as well as regularly using it to do so. Even after being told to stop. The manager of your systems has no excuse or legal right to steal data from your systems - though clearly they may need access to said data while operating your systems. I still think your statement above is wrong though, there should be little need for the people running the core network to ever look at individual subscriber info - that should be accessed by the customer service people.

Re: To do list

tfb,

The LEM was fly-by-wire. But you don't say that someone flying an Airbus manually isn't flying manually, just because the computer is still invovled.

Armstrong came off the automatic flight control and also flew in a way that hadn't been normally simulated, while searching for somewhere flat. That's manual flying by any useful definition.

You aren’t going to get Legionella from a boiling water tap. The word boiling being the clue.

Admittedly some keep the water under boiling, so make rubbish tea, and the ones I’ve tried that actually boil it spit steam when you first turn them on. I’d rather boil a kettle. And I’ve seen one drunk person scald themselves as well, despite the weird spring loaded controls that are supposed to stop that.

But hot water above 60 degrees will pasteurise your hot water system in 2 minutes. So even coffee from a normal hot tap should be safe, just horrible.

Re: on and off is a view feature.

I'm sure that behaviour was only the result of a bug, or possibly some "test code", left in by an innocent Google software engineer - who had definitely not been authorised to do so by management.

Remember, the computer is your friend!

Re: "It almost looks as though it was made of Lego"

It certainly is orginal. My friend had one, but with the boring grey plastic casing though. It was the first Mac I'd ever used. He brought it to me during the Superbowl, when we were students. I was drunk (it was 2am) and he was frantically finishing an essay - he'd hit print and not hit save first. Textbook error! It had got into some kind of loop of essay-death, where it wouldn't print or cancel the print job. I managed to fix it in the end and get back to the cheap cider I was probably drinking.

I hate Google Maps. It's good software, but the display is horrible. Contrast is great. One of the nice things about using a good A-Z is that it's really easy to see what's going on, while you're concentrating on the difficult task of navigating an area that you don't know.

And when displaying their traffic information, they choose a bizarre combination of the two colours that are most associated with colour blindness, red (well admittedly a dark orange) and green. Which I can't tell apart.

And the fuckers also only semi enable zooming. Yes, you can zoom in, but certain elements don't change size - like the aforementioned traffic lines. If they were bigger, I could have a stab at telling them apart, because I'm not colour blind in the normal sense, I just have very low vision and that makes it hard for me to tell similar coulours apart - make them bigger (or compare them directly against each other) and I can usually do it. They also use a fixed text size, so I can't zoom in place names.

Although at least Google have an excuse in that keeping the map to scale while changing the zoom level and adding extra information is a complex set of problems.

The arrrogant fuckers who design websites and use some setting to disable zooming on mobile browsers should be beaten with sticks! I'm pretty fucking annoyed that the browser makers gave them that option, rather than just ignoring them and letting their users operate their software as intended. A quick pinch to zoom to read a difficult word is sometimes really useful.

Still, mustn't grumble I suppose. There are so many better tools than the old days - so we're still basically living the dream. Although what exactly happened to my domestic robot that would make the dinner, do the washing up and tidy my bedroom for me?

How many software packages had all the useful features added between version 1 and (3 to 5), and subsequently later versions kept adding functionality that REDUCED the overall performance / usefulness of the software?

Sir! Sir! I know this sir! That's a trick question sir! All of them sir!

No software has ever been improved after version 5.

Re: intelligence sources

Some leaks are authorised.

Israel, like most countries' intelligence services, has an official "no comment" policy. But it's often useful for information to "leak" out - either because it's politically convenient or even because Israel wants other countries to know roughly what they're up to.

This could be a signal to Iran that "we can keep doing this so long as you try to build nukes" or a political signal to the US to "get a move on and stop Iran going nuclear before we do it", or anything in between.

Similarly Israel has not officially admitted to having nuclear weapons, as that has its political embarrassments. But nukes are only any use as a deterent if people think you've got them and might use them. Hence they also want everyone to know that they defenitely have got nuclear weapons.

...Extra points if it turns out to be a lie and they've had everyone fooled for decades (and saved a bundle of cash)...