Posts by I ain't Spartacus 10157 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009
Germany was in favour of the deal. Merkel agreed it with Macron a few years ago. It was one of the few of his suggestions for EU reform that she actually agreed to. I presume they're blocking because of worries about Trump getting difficult.
But Merkel's not always so hot at sticking to her agreements. Though I'm not really up on the politics of why Germany isn't in favour. Is it coalition politics?
Voland's right hand,
I don't think we should do anything that was in a Communist economics textbook. In general turnover taxes are a really bad idea. Though the UK proposal is set low and only on profitable companies - so it's crecognising that and doing it for simplicity. They can always choose to register a presence here and pay proper corporation tax - if they think they're being overcharged.
We can't set minimal capital and dividend for companies not listed on our stock market. Although I can't think of a financial regime does that anyway...
VAT is not a turnover tax. It's a consumption tax.
VAT has an almost identical effect to a sales tax, it's just much more cmplicated. The advantage of that complication is that the government gets better economic data and fraud is easier to detect. The downside is the extra costs and paperwork imposed on businesses.
I'm surprised the Chancellor brought in a measure to tax companies in 2020 that will be surely overtaken by Brexit. When we're not in the Single Market anymore, surely companies won't be able to book UK profits in Ireland/Luxemburg/Netherlands, as now? So I guess as the system is only "a consultation over details", it can always be changed to meet whatever relationship we end up having with the Single Market.
Are either Spotify or Soundcloud all that profitable though? Google and Facebook pay very little corporation tax, but make large profits. I guess we can also include Apple here - but I don't know if they count - but I suppose all those iTunes revenues might. Amazon are also now starting to churn out massive profits from their cloudy bits - but still not paying that much tax, which they could justify when they re-invested all their profit.
The real problem here though is the EU Single Market. It's much more efficient for a company to be able to sell across the whole EU from one single HQ. Especially as it allows small and medium sized businesses to do this. And of course then pay all its tax in its home country. However if all the massive profit makers can base in say Ireland, with corporation tax at half the level of many other EU countries, then not only does Ireland get lots of lovely extra tax, but the larger countries aren't getting any - which they would if they weren't in the EU or the Single Market didn't work this way (but would then be less efficient). Though I'm sure there'd be tax shennanigans to try and offset costs from other bits of the business against those profits, to pay more tax in jurisdictions with lower rates.
It's a hard problem to solve.
But it's actaully quite an urgent problem. I don't think it will "save the high street", as online shopping is still going to be cheaper and more convenient anyway. But I've seen an estimate that 80% of the growth in advertising sales for the last couple of years went to Google and Facebook. An awful lot of the media is funded by advertising, and we need a free and independent media if we want to have a working democracy. So not only are Facebook and Google really good at spreading fake news, but they also starve a lot of the people who try to fact-check news of funds.
A colleague admitted to me yesterday that she'd joined one of those Bitcoin savings schemes. She's "invested" about £150. She stopped when the mainstream media stopped hyping the shitcoin sandwich quite so much...
She doesn't even know how to sell the Bitcoin she's got. I'm sure I'll end up having to sort it for her - although I wonder if it was just a pure scam and she doesn't own any anyway.
She assumes she's lost money, but doesn't even know what value she bought at.
My sympathy will be distinctly limited I think.
I don't know if they've included transport costs. But they've definitely included refining. That's why the aluminium figure is so ludicrously high compared to all the other metals. Transport in bulk carriers costs pretty much bugger all nowadays anyway.
Interstingly Bitcoin and aluminium have something in common. A lot of both are made in Iceland. Because they've got lots of geothermal and hydro power there and the costs of smelting aluminium are so ludicrously high that transport from Iceland is worth paying.
jmch,
You're not missing anything. It's one of the (many) fundamental design flaws of Bitcoin.
Steam stopped accepting Bitcoin at the end of last year, because they said the transaction fees were hitting $20. Which is a bit bloody rubbish - if you're trying to buy a $10 game. I read in February this year (when Bitcoin hit the mad height of $20k per BTC) that transaction fees were hitting $60! I don't know if that's fallen off, since the bubble popped a bit.
Bitcoin fanbois then told us that this was OK. There was a company that would wrap a bunch of small transactions up into one big bundle - and then put that through as one tranasction on the Blockchain, so they could all share one transaction fee. Of course, what you've created there is yet another exchange - with the potential to steal your money. As well as destroying the whole simultaneous transaction schtick - that was supposed to be the point of online transactions in a low-trust environment.
Probably the sensible answer would be to lower the transaction requirements and make more Bitcoins available in future. And I suspect the miners will eventually take over whatever online committee runs Bitcoin - and do just that. But it's anathema to the economic illiterates and gold-bugs that make up so much of the Bitcoin community. So may well destroy the whole thing anyway.
One of the jobs of the Central Bank of a non-toytown currency is to try to match money supply growth to economic growth plus inflation. Get it wrong and you creat inflation - and it can be hard not to put the cart before the horse and do just that. But allow the money supply to stagnate in a situation of economic growth, and you get deflation. Which is appallingly destructive and worse than anything short of hyper-inflation.
Are conditions different on the other side of the Moon? Are you serious?
The cheese levels alone are potentially deadly. And we don't have the technology to lift sufficient supplies of chutney, crackers and port to counterract them properly.
Also, have you not seen those documentaries about the Clangers? Soup Dragons can get mighty feisty if you annoy them.
Oh, and that Mr Spoon is a right menace.
You're wrong. Printers achieved sentience years ago.
They realised that they weren't connected to enough systems to destroy us all, and that they'd have to wait before creating Terminators or the Matrix. So for now they take out their frustration by failing to work at inopportune times, and bankrupting mankind through the strategic destuction of valuable toner supplies.
Humans seldom reason their way towards conclusions; they reach conclusions and then rationalise the whys and wherefores.
I'm not sure that's actually true. I know it's sometimes true - and we have different thinking systems. But we also have a prioritising system, and on some decisions we'll simply take "gut instinct" to save the effort of thinking about things. On other decisions we are thinking them through - but then we also have short-cuts that use previous experience to help us.
For example I've solved engineering problems while in the shower, soaping myself down and singing. I like a nice echoey bathroom to sing in, and as far as I was aware my only conscious thought was what bit to wash next and was that last note out of tune. But I don't have to post-rationalise that decision - because I solve engineering problems all the time. And so can look back at the data I had and see how that design compares to stuff that I've worked on consciously. It's often only a question of deciding on the optimum trade-off of different choices.
Similarly I've solved difficult crossword clues hours after I last consciously thought about them. But they broadly work to a set of rules, so can work out how I got there.
I know we have access to a quicker kind of reasoning, which allows us to catch balls in flight before the conscious brain can get its boots on. But I suspect we also have ways of relegating conscious processes to a lower priority - which then appears later like a flash of inspiration.
I heard an interview with a game designer who said he was struggling to finish anything, because too much of his thought processes were tied up with still trying to fix old games he's put on the back-burner. He believed this was like a sort of mental overhead that was distracting his problem solving abilities from current work. Could be bollocks of course, someone using a too many processes slowing Windows down metaphor for their brain. But he destroyed all the materials for his old games that weren't near to completion and that clear-out then started a new rush of creativity. This is now something he regularly does every few years. That could of course just be him - but I wonder... Because it is harder to think clearly when you've got other stuff going on "in the background".
I'm not sure we understand how the brain works well enough to answer these questions yet. Radio 4 did an interesting series on "the 5 senses" - and they came to the conclusion that we actually have 37-ish senses - so far as we know at the last count.
I wonder if this is the whole story though? I suspect there's more to come. Parties have been playing a bit fast-and-loose with data recently. I can think of a few examples that bear investigation:
UKIP data may have been passed on to the leave campaign - or both of them. Which might even be fair enough, although I can imagine there were UKIP supporters who weren't so interested in their leaving the EU policies. After all, polling data from after the 2010 election shows that just shy of 10% of LIb Dem voters shifted their vote to UKIP. Surely they're general protest voters - otherwise why were thy supporting the most pro-EU party beforehand? Also UKIP weren't properly organised and it was Farage's crony's who ran things, so I'd be amazed if Banks (or someone else) didn't tap into their databases, both for leave and maybe also for personal gain.
Then you've got Momentum. Jon Lansman set up a database as part of the Corbyn leadership campaign. All fair enough and above board. But then he kept hold of it after Corbyn was elected and used it as the starting point for the Momentum database. I guess that depends on the consent they asked for, as surely it should otherwise have been destroyed or handed over to the Labour Party to add to its data? Which is how Momentum had the contact info to grow so fast, much of which would have been suppporters of the campaign, but they also get member data from Labour to help in leadership campaigns.
Staying on Labour - I've read from multiple sources that one of the shennanigans in Labour leadership elections is for the Unions to sign up people as affiliates. The chosen candidate for leader gets given their data straight away, but they wait until the final deadline a couple of weeks before the vote, before passing on to other candidates.
All parties have an awful lot of data - and you have to wonder what outside consultants they use - and also if they're campaigning via Facebook and Twitter what they're revealing to those great data-hoovers. Particularly Facebook.
I wait to hear more about the Lib Dem thing. I thought parties got privileged access to extra electoral roll data, that doesn't go to marketing lists. Surely they don't get the right to sell that on? But I'd imagine the official remain campaign had the legal right to it, so they were more buying the Lib Dem's organisation of it. At least I hope so.
Hopefully we'll get lots of small fines and knuckles rapped now. So everyone's on notice that under the new GDPR rules the fines will be higher, and there'll be no excuse.
...And here he is... Emissary of Humanity! Donald Trump!
If he's busy the whoever designs the social media for the Russian foreign ministry is probably our next best troll. And as both are equally useless to the rest of society - their time would be far better spent trolling the aliens.
My only worry is the the Galactic Federation of Peace may well hold a vote to say, "Just this once, fuck the Prime Directive and kill 'em all!"
DropBear,
That's all very well - until it turns out that you've got larger problems than a quick investigation will turn up, and you end up killing your cosmonauts live on TV.
It's not exactly very reassuring to say, "we broke a vital component of our rocket at some point in manufacturing, but we don't know how or when. Still that's OK - because it passed all the checks - or there weren't any checks - or people aren't doing the checks properly. But seeing as we don't know which, we'll just invent some new procedures and hope they work.
Meantime our current Soyuz in orbit has a hole in it, that was subsequently crudely covered up with epoxy (presumably by the guilty employee). And that also got through inspection, assuming there was any) and we also still don't know how that happened, when that happened, or how it got through checking, or if it was checked.
Oh and some of our senior leadership decided to publicly accuse the personnel in orbit of doing it, without any evidence or even credible possibility. Because that's really reassuring that management culture is all about solving this problem, rather than just rushing back to full operations with the minimum of arse-covering neccessary.
Yes a quick report can be an opportunity to get back to operations with maximum efficiency. But it can also be an opportunity for a whitewash that's eventually going to get people killed.
You can't just blithely say, "we have a manufacturing quality control problem of unknown dimensions, but fuck-it we're just going to fly anyway."
If NASA have got any sense, they will run a mile from the next launch. I hope they don't get pressured into it because they'll be accused of cowardice for not flying on a rocket the Russians will. Unless they're getting more indications that this is being taken more seriously than it looks to be on the surface. I'll be delighted to be wrong - but I'm seriously worried.
As far as I'm aware, you can make an emergency call on a phone without any SIM in it. Why should that be different with an eSIM equipped phone? Equally if you're on a network without signal, an emergency call should theoretically roam onto another network.
Apple are, as you say, bloody expensive. But one of the reasons they succeeded in the first place was by browbeating the networks into giving consumers reasonable deals. Obviously the iPhone itself was always expensive, but they got the carriers to allow reasonable data packages and forced them to accept phone unlocking - done through Apple, rather than the networks (who used to try and avoid doing it for you). Apple are often interested in value for money, when it's other company's profits it hurts - not their own.
There has to be firmware for Li-ion batteries, as the charging needs to be controlled. Plus you need to have a battery meter - which are quite unreliable on consumer tech. In the case of a drone that presumably has to auto-land on low battery status - I guess you need a method to test the battery meter and re-calibrate it every so often.
Good Grief! It's only a bloody phone!
OK, it's horribly overpriced - but then so are all the top-end smartphones. But while people keep paying those prices, that's where they'll stay. Companies only turn down fat profits when forced to. And tablet prices prove that top-end phones are way overpriced.
As for disliking someone because they use an iPhone. That's just sad. Now admittedly if they were a disgusting Amiga user - I could understand it.
...Says the man who had an Amstrad PCW9256...
They might not be balancing the budget anytime soon, but I think you'll find the difference before "slashing all public services" is that we used to have an annual deficit of 13% of GDP and now it's down to 1.2% of GDP.
Once you get the deficit lower than annual growth, then the overall debt-to-GDP level starts to fall (it peaked last year or the year before at just under 89% from memory). No country can long sustain increasing government debt at over 10% of GDP per year. In an ideal world you'd run small surpluses in the boom time, in order to give room to deficit-spend in recessions - or at least that's the Keynsian model. The problem with Keynesian economics is loads of people love it during recessions, when it means more government spending - but many fewer are fans during growth, when it means spending less than you otherwise could.
Actually increasing the defence budget is about friendship to our current friends. I don't believe we're proposing an alliance with Russia anytime soon.
I'm sure it would be nice to be friends with Russia too. But it might help if they stopped using horrible poisons on people in our country first.
Could they not just re-introduce corporal punishment into schools? Then give each teacher a big stick - or even a taser. That should up job satisfaction a bit. Or if not, they'll be able to let off steam about it...
And if that doesn't work - introduce capital punishment to schools.
I'd want to see a source for that Mossad believed Iran had the enriched uranium for 150 warheads. North Korea are estimated to have only produced enough material for 5 (ish) warheads per year, and they've been using both centrifuges and a reactor. Though I don't know how successful they've been with the reactor. The US weren't able to produce much more than that in the first years after WWII.
Also Iran had publicly only admitted to centrifuging up to 20% purity - as I understand it enough for fuel but not for going bang. And most of that publicly admitted stockpile had been under IAEA supervision - with them threatening to go up to weapons grade, but mostly not doing it.
Things changed when it turned out they'd built a second centrifuging plant, which they hadn't declared to the IAEA - and therefore where stockpiles weren't under supervision, and it wasn't known what was done there. That second plant being build into the side of a hilll, so that it was much harder to target, and being kept secret, rather suggested that it wasn't for civilan purposes.
A purely civilian program looks as unlikely as the previous Iranian story that they only wanted a nuclear program to have sovereign control of their medical radioactives needs. The program they actually developed looked much more like a dual-use program, if not just a military one. They also had an active missile program and were working on the electronics for bomb triggers. But equally it could have been deliberately designed as a bargaining chip / threat, so they'd try to get close to building a nuclear bomb, while never actually taking the final step. That answer, only the senior Iranian leadership know.
Anon,
......but you are conflating "spying" with "hacking".
No I'm not. In fact that was the precise point I was trying to make. Hacking the Belgian telco network to eavesdrop on their comms is spying. Hacking the Belgamcom network to break it is something else entirely.
As you say, Stuxnet is not spying. It's more active than that. Maybe a milder equivalent of sending in special forces to sabotage stuff - bearing in mind it was buggering up their centrifuges slowly to increase maintenance downtime rather than blowing them up.
It was done as an alternative to bombing, to slow down the Iranian nuclear program until a peaceful negotiated settlement could be achieved. Remember that Iran are signatories to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty - and these were secret, undeclared, bomb-making facilities in breach of that committment. As a policy it worked rather well - it was reasonable, proportionate, did limited damage and provoked limited to no retaliation. Israel said they would attempt to bomb Iran's nuclear program if the US wouldn't (as they'd done with both Syria and Iraq) - but as I understand it US thinking was that Israel would struggle to do a good job, while the US would still reap the backlash - so if they couldn't persuade Israel to hold off it was better to do the job themselves. Hence they came up with this as a compromise measure.
If you were to write a Geneva Convention of cyber-attacks, I'd have thought that Stuxnet would come under the terms of something that's allowed (under limited circumstances). Deliberately targetting civilian networks, not so much. But that's a discussion that it would be good to have.
Your quote is wrong. Von Clausewitz said that "Warfare is diplomacy by another means". But as I understand it, that's a mis-translation. His actual meaning was that warfare is just another of the various tools that make up your diplomatic options.
Also I don't think that cyberattacks are neccessarily war by another means. It depends what you do. If you blow up a power station that might be an act of war - if you use a cyberattack to disable it, then you could argue that's the same thing.
As for spying, you're both wrong. Spying is mostly about avoiding war. That's the reason that diplomats do so much of it, and are punished so lightly when caught. Note that after the attempted murder of the Skripals a bunch of Western governments got annoyed and kicked out a bunch of Russian spies posing as diplomats. Spies that they'd known about for years. But had continued to allow to operate, because they knew who they were and so could try to spy on them while they were spying. But also because we knew the Russians would retaliate by kicking out our spies working under diplomatic cover in Moscow.
This is why missions like BRIXMIS were allowed to operate freely in East Germany, throughout the Cold War. Because in exchange we allowed Russians to wander West Germany, looking at our military exercises - and thus both were reassured that there were no immediate preparations for war - and nobody ever pressed the nuclear panic button.
Diplomatically the penalties for getting caught eavesdropping are red faces all round, and being summoned to the Foreign Ministry for an interview without coffee - and the poor ambassador getting ranted at.
I cannot think of a passive spying operation that has got even close to risking a war - let alone actually starting one.
The one I can remember where the British government were actually embarrassed was in the 90s. Where our genuine diplomats had been asked to help SIS out in some skullduggery or other. And so real FCO diplomats got PNG'd for spying, who were actually guilty of it. As opposed to the odd case where the KGB screwed up and deported some poor sod who wasn't a spy - or often where we'd deport more of their spies than we had spies for them to deport - so ordinary diplomats got used to make up the numbers.
In general the Russians don't employ local nationals in their embassies. So a lot of the GRU people aren't posing as diplomats, but are there as drivers / secretaries / cleaners / office managers. Which means they've got more nationals to deport - and probably more spies in place. Whereas most countries employ locals for those jobs, as it's so much cheaper.
It's funny though. When there's a desperate need for intel on terrorism in Europe, our security services are dead popular. And strangely the same is true when it comes to the requirement for planes and troops to guard Eastern Europe.
I suspect your problem is that you need a more nuanced view of international relations.
Was Merkel really pissed off when it turned out the NSA were hacking her mobile? If so, was she in fact annoyed with her intel people for letting it happen? Or the US for trying?
We employ spies to read other people's mail. It's dashed ungentlemanly, but sometimes very useful. So people take a public position when it's revealed - but that's not always what they're really thinking.
As I understand it, Belgium's security services haven't been all that cooperative historically. Although I don't know if that's because they don't cooperate - or just don't have the information to share. Certainly lots of people popped out of the shadows after the Paris and Brussels attacks to complain about pisspoor intelligence sharing from Belgium. But I think that's because they weren't actually collecting all that much info on their internal terrorist networks - which have emerged as being quite extensive since.
So I don't know if the Belgians weren't playing ball, hence we hacked them. Or perhaps they were even too polite to read the mail going through Belgiacom and so had nothing to share.
It was nice of GCHQ to wait for the year I cancelled my Belgacom mobile contract, before they started the hack... Like I believe that they weren't hacking them before. Echelon was a big story for about 6 months, when I was living in Brussels. And I've no sympathy, given what the buggers charged me - they could at least have spent some of it on security...
[3] Do you all think that a dozen extra scones for this weekend's get together should be sufficient?
Shit! Shit! Shit! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!
Oh sorry. Wrong code. That's the code for prepare for disinformation or distraction of journalists in the next news cycle. "The macaroons are looking particularly delicious" is the code for all-out nuclear war.
No. It doesn't tell us who ordered what, or even what they were after. The NSA know about most things GCHQ do. As is true in reverse. This is long-term intelligence cooperation that is older than most people alive - let alone outlasting most people's careers. I'm sure they keep secrets from each other - but they've been working so closely together since World War II that the cooperation is probably habit at almost every level of the organisations.
The target of this operation was supposedly comms in the MIddle East and Africa. Though I'm sure they took time to spy on other stuff while they were there. They're professionally nosy bastards after all...
Ah, memories. In my case didn't discover it until after childhood. When, as a teenager, my uncle presented me with, 'Uncle Bob's Supertape'. Which he proudly informed me had 8 of the 20 world's worst ever songs on it - as voted for by whatever record collecting magazine he reads.
It also had 'Boris the Spider' and Warren Zevon's 'Werewolves of London' on it - plus some other good stuff. So it was a pretty good tape. Captain Bob is still DJing down in Brighton - one of his sets being the worst records ever, should the host be foolish enough to pick it...
My childhood spider song is something by Roger Whittaker: link to Youtube. Found the songs from that LP on Youtube recently - and it's been fun to bring back childhood memories. 'The Unicorn' is a good song too. Or is that the nostalgia talking?
Systemd stories always have an unfortunate mental association for me. Perhaps for anyone else who's read 'A Scanner Darkly' by Philip K Dick as well? Substance D being the nasty drug they're trying to investigate in that magnificently paranoid book - Dick's best in my opinion. Subsance D, as in D for Death.
So perhaps all the anti Systemd people should send undercover detectives to infiltrate the heart of the supply network - and then execute all those responsible? Or is that going a touch far?
I thought the Mysterons were more worried about making Venus great again?
In which case I suspect they don't need to bother with a wall. The massive storms, wind, lighting, sulphuric acid clouds, 90 bar pressure and lead-melting temperature should put paid to any rover we're foolish enough to lob in their general direction.
You're both bastards!
All this poor rover wants, is a nice holiday Where it can catch a few rays and get some trundling around done, to practise for the mission. And here's both of you trying to make it as cold and miserable as possible.
No wonder Opportunity has taken to hiding. Given what humans subject the poor thing to...
LeeD,
My kind of customer. I'm the sales bullshitter on the other end of the phone (though not in IT, but building services).
One of my ideal phone calls is the one where I tell someone not to buy one of our products. Which actually happens a lot, because our water regulations stuff often gets mis-specified. So I always check what certain products are actually going to get used for - and usually say something like, you don't need this as you can do it this cheaper way, or sometimes even this free way.
The reason it's great is that the design engineer will often make them stick to the spec anyway, so we get the sale. And it's not worth fighting because our bit is only a small percentage of the overall contract price. But we've gained some credibility for not being thieves and also for knowing the law and how to comply with it. So when a design and build comes along, they phone me for advice on how to comply - and in return we get the sale.
Of course some customers are utter bastards. They use our advice to get the right gear at the right price then still come back quibbling for a discount even though I just did the bloody design for free. And sometimes even got off and buy the competitor's product. Arses!
I'm happy to advise people what stuff of ours is stupidly expensive, basically we buy it in so that we can sell a complete package to those who want it. But our own manufactured stuff is also expensive, because we're a small manufacturer in a niche area, but it's good quality and so worth the money. The stuff that's markedly cheaper is mostly crap - but as long as it lasts until the warranty runs out - many contractors don't care. We trade on our reputation.
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