* Posts by LucreLout

3039 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2014

IBM fired me because I'm not a millennial, says axed cloud sales star in age discrim court row

LucreLout

Re: Dear Millennials

Aren't unpaid internships and being paid thruppence ha'penny a kind of ageism too?

No, not at all. Nobody is forced to do an internship, paid or otherwise. If you choose to do one while you're young, or choose to do one while you're older, you're still making a choice. Nobody chooses to be middle/old aged - it just happens.

LucreLout

Re: Dear Millennials

I know you don’t really believe this now but you will be old too one day, and you will bitterly regret not stamping out ageism when you had the chance

The funniest thing about this is that "one day" is coming a helluva lot quicker than they can possibly comprehend. You're in your 20s forever, your 30s not long at all, and your 40s will pass by in a blink.

LucreLout

I mean, I hate to sound like an SJW type, but this is a pretty blatant and disgusting example of age discrimination

Indeed it is, and age discrimination is the stupidest of all discriminations. We will all get old - even the one legged black transgender lesbians - so far from being at the back of the pack in terms of legislative horsepower, this issue should be front and centre in terms of government policy and policing.

'Coding' cockup blamed for NHS cough-up of confidential info against patients' wishes

LucreLout

Re: The Online Opt-Out Does Not Work Either

I still do not see how they (UK authorities etc) can keep on failing at this simple stuff.

Because trite phrases such as "lessons will be learned" or "investing in public services" don't actually mean anything in the real world.

You invest in things that pay you a fiscal return - you spend on things that you want/need that don't. Hence, the correct term was always "spending on public services" - there's no investing in them.

Lessons, as they relate to public life, are only ever learned when heads have rolled, which, of course, they never do. Which is why nothing improves, and state ran/owned/influenced IT continues to be a joke, with a perfect track record of failure.

Four US govt agencies poke probe in Facebook following more 'oops, we spilled your data' shocks

LucreLout
FAIL

More El Reg B.S.

And to be frank, when it all does emerge, a lot of academics and some tech press – and we include ourselves in that – will be fully justified in standing up and exclaiming: "We told you so."

And yet almost directly below that, we have El Regs facebook link. How, how on Earth can The Register not be more embarassed at the blatant hipocrisy in it's facebook articles?

I'm quite happy if we kill facebook with fire - hell, take off and nuke it from orbit; it's the only way to be sure. But to bang the drum against them while directly supporting their revenue stream is... well, come on El Reg, what do you define that as?

As far as the gender pay gap in Britain goes, IBM could do much worse

LucreLout

Re: At the risk of being branded misogynst...

As I said, if a 22 year old is doing the same job, at the same or better level as a 45 year old then why wouldn't you pay them the same money?

Unless the 45 year old was a career change part way through, it simply won't be possible that a 22 year old would be doing the job to the same level. They'd have to have forgone university education, and college, in order to have a quarter of the experience of the 45 year old, whow ould be better educated.

Sorry kiddo, its possible you're too young to understand the value of experience, but the beauty of that is you'll learn all about it as you get some of your won.

LucreLout

Re: At the risk of being branded misogynst...

your assumption that higher pay should come with time served is nonsense. EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK. Age discrimination is just as bad as sex discrimination or gender discrimination or even racial discrimination.

There's no such thing as equal work.

I bring my experience (yes, this is valuable and no the kids don't have it), intelligence, aptitude, and drive to the job. There's isn't anyone else with the same balance of those traits as me, which is why my salary varies enormously compared to the person sat either side of me.

The same role != the same work. Sorry, must try harder.

My experience allows me to solve problems in minutes that take my millennial colleagues all day. Its not that they're not hard working, or bright, its just that lots of problems are new to them, whereas they were new to me decades ago and I can solve them from memory in seconds. Give it 20 years and they'll be in the same place I am today, and they'll be able to leverage their experience in the way I do, and they'll probably earn what I earn. Then, not now.

LucreLout

Re: At the risk of being branded misogynst...

If you think that all that matters is the numbers at the end of the day, i.e. equality of outcome

The main problem with this is that equality of outcome is a fairy story. It's not real. It never could be real. It's time those clinging to it like a life jacket moved on with their lives.

If you've[1] not made a success of yourself, try harder, but any expectation of levelling down those of us that put in the effort, the hours, and the personal drive to the success output of a couch potato ain't going to happen, now, or indeed, ever.

[1] not you, you. If you follow.

LucreLout

Re: Industry drenched in testosterone

But, hey, let's not worry about the real societal causes for such large inequalities in certain countries (but not all, but we won't mention those because that damages your little argument, doesn't it?).

As we all well know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and woman, and their are families.

so what you're really saying here, is that as a man working in IT, it's somehow my fault that enough women didn't take Comp Sci GCSE, A-levels, and university study? Ok, how precisely, do you work that out?

Imbalances in self selecting groups must always occurr because the under represented cohort choose to be under represented by choosing to over represent themselves in other occupations. And the western world is almost entirely self selective regarding what we study after school, and what we do for a living.

Ultimately then, womens under representation in IT is because women don't want to work in IT in sufficient numbers to balance the men. That's not the mens fault anymore than it is womens fault men don't often work in childcare, teaching etc.

LucreLout

Re: sample size, outliers, biases

Specifically, one of the common arguments about the gender pay gap is that women tend to be, on average, less experienced, less senior, less promoted than men because of they time they take off for maternity / child care.

Indeed. El Reg's own Tim Worstall did some very good stuff around this very issue. Quite why the Reg keeps pretending there's a gender pay gap when it knows very well its a maternity gap, is an interesting question.

Crime epidemic or never had it so good? Drilling into statistics is murder

LucreLout

Re: The law is wrong

Sure. You may be arrested while police ask questions. But they have a dead body. A crime scene to protect. What do you expect them to do

Give the survivor a chance to hand over the crime scene, and voluntarily answer questions under caution, but without arrest? All of the 'benefits' we have now, but without the screwing over someones career because some scrote didn;t want to work for a living but wanted to enjoy the trappings of it.

The arrest part is simply lazy and with a few minor changes, wholly uneccessary.

LucreLout

Re: The law is wrong

You can't just remove "intent" from consideration - the offence is defined by intent!

I didn't propose removing intent from consideration, only inverting the stack. you prove you didn't intend to kill the person you just stabbed or we should assume you did. Rather than us having to prove you intended to kill them when you bought, carried, pulled, and used a knife on them.

In the case of an assailed homeowner, the burden of proof is met by being in your own home which is being broken into by an intruder. In the case of the wannabe ganster on the street, well, they're going to need to work a bit harder to prove they didn't intend to kill someone with their illegally carried knife.

LucreLout

Re: The law is wrong

Changing the law in the way you suggest may have unintended consequences, e.g. making anyone who grabs a kitchen knife off their own kitchen counter defend themselves from a burglar a murderer, without any wiggle room to argue self defence.

We could easily allow being at home as a defence to the charge. If someones breaking into your home and you grab a knife, its not the same thing as walking the streets with one day in and day out in case you feel that you 'need' to stab someone with it.

The premeditation part is the taking the knife out of the house to walk the streets with it (exceptions already apply for camping, coutnryside activities). I certainly wouldn't take my camping knife to work - its rather large (and heavy), and I don't need a 9" blade to type with.

LucreLout

Re: We need gunlaws like in the US to fight crime

Well spoken, Batman. What we really need is more vigilante justice on the streets.

I don't want armed vigilantes on the streets, however, anyone who has been through the criminal justice system as a victim will know that theres plenty of criminals and plenty of people working in the system, but there's no justice.

There is no justice but that which we take for ourselves. Sad, but true.

LucreLout

Re: We need gunlaws like in the US to fight crime

It has been proven that armed citizens get harassed less than unarmed sheeples.

Citation please. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with you at this point, only that your post contains insufficient information for me to verify the facts as presented.

LucreLout

The law is wrong

Because murder is both anomaly (it is highly exceptional: around 600 to 700 instances a year compared to around 1.3 million reported instances of violence against the person) and it is quasi-random – accidental, almost – in when and whether it gets committed.

I'm sure it sounds highly exceptional, but considering that is around double the number of people killed on the roads where speed is a factor in the fatality (factor, not primary cause), things begin to look different. I'm not advocating abolition of speed limits, but given the hysteria around the subject and the overblown policing of the issue relative to its "highly exceptional" nature, the murder rate becomes a more significantly real problem.

Do most murderers "intend to kill"? A good question, since most would claim they did not. What we do know is that the most common method of killing someone in the UK tends to be using a knife or sharp instrument.

I'm going to Mandy Rice-Davis this. Nobody stabs someone with a knife while having the least little concern over whether the victim lives or dies. The act of arming yourself equates to premeditation - they aren't carrying a knife because they're going hiking, in Peckham / wherever. The intention to kill is obvious, and its time the law was tightened to remove this wriggle room around intent. If you stab someone, unless you can prove otherwise, the safest way to proceed is to assume you intended to kill them.

But the outcome (more murders) may simply reflect a growing tendency to carry – and use – a knife than any genuine rise in murderous intent among the wider population.

Carrying a knife with the intent of using it for violence is always an intent to murder. Claiming the violence was self defence simply doesn't cut it (no pun intended).

Creep travels half the world to harass online teen gamer… and gets shot by her mom – cops

LucreLout

Re: Great outcome, but what about over here?

It's very unusual for a dog to be turned against its owner but there was an amusing case in the UK of a criminal who was very experienced with dogs successfully getting a police dog to attack a police officer.

Indeed - its why my friend (met. dog handler) uses a mixture of Japanese, German, and Dutch for different commands. He never uses English, except for "seek" - he wants the suspect to know the dog is coming. The command for release is definitely not the dogs name followed by "let him go", "release", or "get off him", often issued in increasingly loud sequence and seeming deperation - after all, you never know who is listening ;-)

LucreLout

Re: Great outcome, but what about over here?

I'm a little more confused by the home security of having a gun but not having doors that can survive a brick being tossed at them. If that chap had tried that trick on my downstairs windows/door then the breeze block would have bounced back at him.

Try it with your lounge window and report back :) Mine are double glazed but won't stand up to a brick.

If you are genuinely concerned about your families safety, then get a big dog. Can't be turned against you, generally attracts less hassle and is much more effective against those who are a bit mental.

Big dogs and small children aren't always the best mix, unfortunately. While my wife knows where the weapons are (martial arts / camping stuff), she's not trained in their use and she isn't a big lass.

I don't want a gun in the house either, but I'd be more than happy for a Taser and some Mace. (Yes, I know deep heat has a similar if reduced effect as Mace). At least then if I'm away she can shock the scrote and peper spray him into a reduced threat until the police or the neighbours arrive.

LucreLout

Re: Psycho creeps will always be with us.

Until sufficient facts have been established by investigation the reason for the shooting is unknown. So are you saying that someone who has shot a person for reasons not yet established should be allowed to go free and possibly take themselves off from the scene on the basis that subsequent investigation might establish a self defence motive?

If I'm in my home, then you pretty much know where I live and where you can find me later, should a need arise. I even have a job to pay for the damn thing, so you know where to find me during a work day too.

Someone attacked in their own home who simply states "My home was attacked by an unknown intruder" should be assumed to be telling the truth and unless any evidence gathered from the scene / witnesses directly contradicts that statement then that should be the end of the matter.

If the injured party claims to have been invited around, they'd know the names of all the family members, dob's or career/job roles etc. They'd know something. Some scumbag burglar/rapist/murderer won't know enough details to convince anyone they had a legiitmate reason to be there and were otherwise attacked.

LucreLout

Re: Psycho creeps will always be with us.

America's stupidity is not a good reason to change our perfectly good due process procedures.

The problem is that they're not perfectly good. I get a trashed career because some scrote fancied my telly and had a pop at my family for having the temerity to be watching it when broke in? Perfectly good, it ain't.

It is however one of many good reasons to think about wanting to go there.

I go where my employer needs to send me. They need me in Asia, I go to Asia, they need me in North America, guess what? I go.

LucreLout

Re: I thought of the child(ren)

Does it encompass bystanders?

Why would she be shooting a bystander?

LucreLout

Re: Psycho creeps will always be with us.

Yes, she would for initial investigations

Which is the crux of the problem. People defending their families in their own homes should not be subject to arrest. Arrest for anything ever invalidates things like the USA visa waiver elligibility, and that very much does mess with your employment opportunities - at least in the City.

The visa waiver is used covertly as a proxy for not being a criminal, given the impossibility of determining if the person applying for the job is hiding behind the rehab of offenders act when completing the declaration of offences section. Whether it should or shouldn't is irrelevant - it is, and defending your family at home should not compromise your career opportunities.

LucreLout

Re: I thought of the child(ren)

She was two feet away from him, but couldn't see him to target because of a closed door. The safe option would be to shoot a single warning shot through the top of the door, at an upward angle.

The safe option is to clip him, reload, and clip him again. Repeat until the police arrive or you run out of bullets. When its your child he's attempting to kidnap, rape, and murder, your definition of safe simply doesn't encompass the offender.

LucreLout

Great outcome, but what about over here?

The thing that concerns me, is that if I were away from home, my wife & kids would have no chance against this guy. He's simply too big for them to fight. A kitchen full of knives probably won't help my wife much, even when her protecting the kids instincts kick in.

UK Foreign Office offers Assange a doctor if he leaves Ecuador embassy

LucreLout

Re: Pick your own poison

He's escaped accountability for years and that should be considered during sentencing.

Indeed. Realistically, its hard to imagine him not being given the maximum term. If hiding in an embassy, costing the country tens of millions in policing, trying to time out rape charges, year after year, while continuing public and wanton twattery all over the internet doesn't deserve the maximum stick, then what actually does? I think anything less than the full bid would leave the judge open to question and being forced to justify themselves.

LucreLout

It's struggling under Tory cuts, but it's still superior.

And yet it hasn't weathered a single cut. Not one. The NHS isn't short of money, its simply spending way too much on the wrong things - too many admin staff (middle managers, clerks etc), too much on pensions, too many very dated working practices etc etc etc

Reform is what the NHS needs, real root and branch reform. The NHS could be the best service on the planet, but for as long as people blindly lionise it, that will simply never happen.

LucreLout

Re: Many things but not a traitor to the US

You can't commit treason against a country of which you have never been a citizen.

Weirdly though, you can break their laws, even if you've never been there. Its that whole global reach thing again. Mind you, the UK does the same thing with tax, so we're not exactly free & clear on this ourselves....

Reality Winner, liberty loser: NSA leaker faces 63 months in the cooler

LucreLout

Re: Guilty?

She's as guilty as a puppy sat next to a pile of poo.

LOL!!! Lovely description.

Given her admission in court that she did in fact smuggle and circulate the document in question, her guilt is now beyond reasonable doubt. The bit I struggle with is the implication in the article that she hoped to be cleared by the courts. How?? On what possible basis? There must be some facts or evidence that have not yet been released, or she is in fact bat shit crazy. Raising grievances to change the telly channel does seem a little.... odd, but I'm willing to stick with the - we've not got all the facts option for now.

The unwarranted stupidity of the Intercept would, in any sane world, be considered criminally stupid. That they couldn't simply retype the document before sending it lock stock to the very agency whence it came is apalling. They care so little for the safety of their source that they willigly expose them to years behind bars in order to verify that they have a story. Really? It's not like the dots thing is new knowledge - deforming typewriter characters in some unique way was in use by various government agencies long before didigtal printers became common.

Top banker batters Bitcoin for sucky scalability, security

LucreLout

No.... really??

One of the purposes of digital currency is to prevent inflation - you can't print them. One of the main goals of a central bank is to create inflation - they usually have a target around 2%ish, like our own BoE.

Surely I'm not the only one seeing an obvious reason why central banks wouldn't like a decentralised unofficial currency?

I make no comment on the usefulness or otherwise of crypto coins.

Uber's London licence appeal off to flying start: No, you cannot do driver eye tests via video link

LucreLout

Re: Why is this so difficult?

There have been numerous independant tests, johnny with his sat nav has been beaten by black cab drivers hands down. The issue is black cabs take different routes dependant on time of day, weather conditions, etc, sat-nav sticks to one route, possibly changing if it has some traffic info, but most streets dont have the sensors.

Which is something they learned to do while driving those streets, sort of like the average person with a sat nav will do as they go, no?

LucreLout

Re: Why is this so difficult?

If they want to compete with the black cabs make them do the knowledge

Why?! The need for this died out decades ago now.

The Knowledge only exists now as an artificial and arbitrary entry bar to restrict the number of black cab drivers in order to drive up the price they can charge. There is literally no other reason for it to exist today.

Its understandable why the cabbies might like to keep it, and even the odd demented union rep, but it makes no sense at all for the customers.

LucreLout

Re: New York is probably the place that least needs them

Within Manhattan you merely have to stand out on a main street and within minutes you'll be able to hail a cab. It's a bit like central London really.

Unfortunately that is nothing at all like central London, really. Try this on a Friday night and report back - also, insist on going to Peckham or Brixton. "Don't go sarf of da rivva afta dark mate!" LTDA have quite simply priced themselves out of the market due to a combination of unrealistically high fares for what is a job that basically anyone can do (hello SatNav!), and an attitude towards customers (particularly ethnic minorities) that is not remotely acceptable.

You'd expect the dinosaurs to complain about the meteorite, but quite why TFL or anyone else is listening is beyond me.

Get a grip, literally: Clumsy robots can't nab humans' jobs just yet

LucreLout

Re: Screw the people this will put out of work then.

So that's lots of warehouse people, fruit pickers and cleaners out of work then.

Sure, but the cold hard reality of life is that if we worried about which jobs would be next to be replaced by technology, we'd all still be riding horses, and men would earn a living mostly based on age and muscle mass. Those days are gone, and they're never coming back.

I still think the only way all this automation can work is if we live in a world like Star Trek. Where there is no poverty or money anymore. All the boring jobs are automated and people just enjoy life. That isn't going to happen any time soon.

I sure hope not - the transition from an effort based capitalist society to a post capitalism work free world is going to be very bloody indeed. There's going to be no big bang - the transition will take a generation or more, and for most of those people without the financial resources to survive independent of a state (which will collapse well before private wealth / beans and shotguns run out), only misery and dirty poor subsistence await. I certainly don't want to be around when that happens - my personal guess is that fewer than 10% of those alive at the start of the transition will live to see it through (it'd take decades so you'd lose half the people along the way before the adversity tally).

Why aren't startups working? They're not great at creating jobs... or disrupting big biz

LucreLout

Re: Well progress is not creating new work

So even if startups were "successfull" they wouldn't create new jobs. "More Work" shouldn't be our goal, instead we should look at ways to make everyone feel needed while dealing with a potentially ever decreasing total amount of work.

The decreasing total amount of work seems like a fallacy to me. The work will change, sure, but there's lots of jobs relatively safe from automation - either they require too much brain power performing ad-hoc tasks, such that automation isn't viable, or they require beauty such that robots are undesireable, or else they require creativity out of bounds for all but the most expensive 'AI'.

Strength as a well remunerated attribute ceased to be valuable around the time of the industrial revolution - there's no value in muscle power. Endurance too - machines and software can work far more aggressive duty cycles than a human or animal. (I'm trying very hard not to slip into Fallout mode - what makes you S.P.E.C.I.A.L.?) Perception, via ANPR cameras, facial recognition, and other image recognition software is also falling in value and importance.

If we assume, however, that labour requirements will fall across the board, then having successive governments increase the costs of that labour (minimum wage, employment regs etc) can only possibly speed up the labour attrition rate. Unpopular, but logically correct whichever colour rosette you prefer.

The cost of hiring staff makes automation or outsourcing a prefered choice almost wherever it is available. Your average accountant simply can't compete with the prepackaged tax arbitrage solutions offered to startups by larger firms, and "pretty receptionist" stopped being the second hire sometime around the introduction of minimum wage - yes, it may be politically incorrect, but it also used to be the order of hiring for 90s startups - good accountant, pretty receptionist.

Great news, cask beer fans: UK shortage of CO2 menaces fizzy crap taking up tap space

LucreLout

Re: I thought ...

that the directors and managers of these companies that use this product were paid to plan for such exigencies.

It's almost like the CxO suite don't know what they're doing and haven't been doing their jobs well at all. Hands up all those who are even mildly surprised?

LucreLout
FAIL

Re: Bravo madam!

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." - George Orwell

Irony fail. Orwell wrote 1984 about a LABOUR government.

LucreLout

Re: Or ...

brew your own. Incredibly satisfying. And fizzing.

"Incredibly saitsfying" is a phrase that has been used to describe my home brew as often as the phrase "maginificent and large beyond comprehension" has been used to describe my manhood. So, not very often, or never, if you prefer precision.

LucreLout

A shandy drinkers idea of what a northern beer should taste like.

They don't call it shandy down here - they insist it's lager top. They think shandy is a half and half, thus proving beyond question that southerners know fuck all about beer.

National ID cards might not mean much when up against incompetence of the UK Home Office

LucreLout

Government departments can be (and are) competent and efficient

Ok, name one?

In 40+ years I've never dealt with a Government department that was the least little bit competent.

Bank of England to set new standards for when IT goes bad

LucreLout

Re: what would need to be a small book or long article

IMHO this is a topic that mot enough people are aware of what is going on behind their backs.

Its not really behind their backs, the only reason the algorithms are secret is that if you knew how our model responded to given market conditions you'd be able to trade against it and eat its lunch.

I'd love to do a Reg article on this, but I already post way more details about my specialist bit of the bank (tax arbitrage) - any more detail might give away the bank, my identity, and I could quite conceivably get fired for it.

LucreLout

Re: While they are at it... money grows on trees

And when algos crash, where go the losses ..... other than into private pockets/shady and shadowed numbered accounts?

That depends. One of my banks algos could be trading in the opposite direction to 'mine', thus my desk loses and theirs wins - they get a bigger bonus at my expense.

If the net direction of our algos suffer a trading loss then someone somewhere wins - FX is a zero sum game - my loss is your win and vice versa. It really is that simple.

Don't confuse algorithmic trading with tax avoidance and don't confuse that with tax evasion - they're three very different things.

LucreLout

BoE

Dear BoE,

If you're serious about reducing IT outages, then I have a very simple step by step plan that will see off most of them:

1) Stop outsourcing.

2) Stop offshoring - those guys are cheap because they are low skilled and inexperienced, not because they're feeling charitable.

3) Ensure a proper representation of developers and networks staff at senior level - If the CTO hasn't coded in 10 years then he doesn't know what's going on. Sorry, he just doesn't.

4) Root out bad management by having mandatory 360 reviews, and if the whole team are having issues with the manager, get shot of the bad manager.

Keep it simple and you'll get results.

LucreLout

Re: While they are at it...

Does anyone know the extent such "algos" lurk in financial trading apps?

Ken, I can answer this, but please forgive my crude attempt to squeeze what would need to be a small book or long article into a blog post.

I'm afraid the answer is no. Nobody knows the extent of alogrithmic trading because it is extremely secretive even within an organisation. The department I write algo trading apps for does not share knowledge of them outside the business unit. If your desk knew what my desks algos did, you could write an algo to eat our lunch - make the money in our place. Desks within a bank are in competition with each other to produce revenue and obtain funding from their treasury and var from their RO's.

Each algo operates in isolation of each other, even within our desk (business unit). I actually do understand the complexity involved in the algorithms my code implements - I won't pretend it's easy, but then we're pretty well compensated for the fact that there's very few people can do what we do.

I suspect many developers are not themselves aware because of complexity (how do you test every input/output?)

The testing itself is actually remarkably simple compared to what you'd imagine. Algos ultimately produce a signal which tells the OMS what to do trading wise. The data they take in to generate that isn't a wide data set, but it is fast flowing. You're usually looking at correlated pairs - so if Shell & Tesla move in opposite directions within a short space of time, the behaviour of one factors into your trading in the other - but by far and away most algos trade FX. You're swapping from USD to GBP and back, for example. There's a list of about 10 to 15 common pairs that have a large and fluid market that we use.

When trading FX you're selling the currency you hold to buy the one you don't. My dollars for your pounds for instance. The data used for that varies but typically will be the tick data for this session and possibly a couple previous, from a number of hotspots (data sources - LSE, NYSE, Simex for example). A tick is one millisecond, so we might have say 10 data items per millisecond to process, but they're all just decimals.

The current decimal is compared to the others for the tick in question and that is fed into the algo model which decides to either do nothing, or to change the balance we hold in the currency pair - reduce dollars and increase pounds, or increase dollars and reduce pounds.

The second class of data is the hotspot order book - what orders exist in the market, and where they are positioned in the spread. There are three prices involved - the bid, offer, and mid price. The mid price is halfway between the bid and the offer. Bid is the price you buy at, offer is the lower price you sell at. The difference between them is the spread, which is where market makers profit.

FX is literally a zero sum game - all that changes is the balance of currencies you hold - for me to hold more dollars, someone has to hold fewer.

I'm massively simplifying this and trying to use terms at least passingly familiar to most people. Hopefully you can see that the inputs are readily knowable and easy to test in terms of bounds etc. I'm not suggesting mistakes don't happen (google knight capital for a great example), simply offering that the difficulty in testing is lower than that of say a 777 software system, or lane guidance system on a car.

Scrapping Brit cap on nurses, doctors means more room for IT folk

LucreLout

Re: Errr

Your argument about tax is bizarre but suggests your win condition is that someone else loses, possibly all of us.

Only if you don't understand tax.

My win condition is that I don't pay an ever greater percentage just because of some arbitrary and utterly meaningless threshold has been crossed. If we had a flat tax I'd go earn more, but we don't, so I prioritise other uses for my time.

Your win condition, in expecting me to overlook an effective tax rate of 65% due to tax free earnings allowance withdrawl, is that I lose. Now, that might seem like a good idea to you, but it wouldn't if you were going to pay it.

Your idea about the next generation is plain wrong.

Actually its bang ont he money. The USA has grown a real terms 24% more than the EU over the past decade, China by manifestly more than that. Europe is increasingly economically irrelevant, and certainly isn't going to grow while the rEU are hamstrung by German fears of inflation from 70 odd years ago. The rest of the world is.

LucreLout

And as for making our ow trade deals, we can see how well this is going: we may be able to sign 1 new deal every 5 years, with countries that represent a fraction of our trade with EU

Clearly you don't understand trade agreements. We don;t have one with the USA and yet I can buy coke, levis, and harleys. Trade with the rEU doesn't stop because we don't agree a trade deal.

I expect we'll sign something like 20 to 30 trade deals the minute we stop negotiating with the rEU, because we'll novate the existing agreements with all their trade partners to stand alone agreements and tinker with each in turn. Meanwhile, we'll have a deal with the USA and probably China a lot faster than the rEU get there.

LucreLout

Re: Errr

Voting for leave means you are more interested in your personal goals that many other peoples goals.

No it doesn't. Quite the opposite in fact. No change is primarily to my own benefit - I earn as much as I'm willing to under the current tax system and have resorted to reducing my hours to keep my tax payments at least in the neighbourhood of reality. I'll be fine if we remain - I don't need us to sign new trade deals with the rest of the world. I could even vote labour, because when they (again) go broke and get turfed out, I'll still be fine.

I voted leave to benefit the next generation, to provide them with access to the global market rather than the increasingly economically irrelevant rEU.

some of the most compelling reasons to vote for brexit were xenophobic

Such as? Frankly I found the debate around immigration to be the usual fact free nonsense. Where will the skills and experience come from if we don't import it?

I genuinely couldn't find a good argument offered by eithe rcamp in relation to immigration and there are good arguments that could and should have been made. My vote came down to trade to benefit the next generations - I rather like working with my non-British colleagues, and hope & expect they'll stick around next year post Brexit.

we are not in a good place to negotiate

I disagree - we're in a better place than most of the world.

CIOs planning to snub Oracle for other cloudy vendors – analyst

LucreLout

Re: How odd

Oracle have hostages, not customers.

Yup. Where I work we couldn't be dumping them faster if they'd given us clap.

Swiss cops will 'tolerate' World Cup rabble-rousers – for 60 minutes

LucreLout

Re: Being sensible

It's generally OK to take a bath at night, just don't drain it - leave the water in and drain it the following morning. It's not OK to take a shower.

Interesting.

I get home from work at 6:40ish in the evening, then have an hour and a half family time while getting my child to go to sleep. I typically go for a run some time around 8pm or 8:30 start, finishing about 9pm or 9:30. It'd be impossible for me to exercise if I couldn't have a shower afterwards. There's no way I'm going to bed covered in sweat.

My neighbours don't care about my running the shower because they do pretty much the same thing. We all get along great - beers over the garden fence when we're supposed to be cutting the grass etc.

How does it work in Switzerland please? Do people not exercise on an evening? Always have a bath after then leave the water? (What if two people have gone running - how does the second runner bathe?)

I'm sure I'm missing something somewhere.....

What's all the C Plus Fuss? Bjarne Stroustrup warns of dangerous future plans for his C++

LucreLout

Re: Disagree....

Not quite a dead language, but one with increasingly little point

An interesting view, and not one I'm qualified to disagree with particularly. I'm a C# dev - have been since it was released. I've not looked at C++ since the 90s, but upon reading the article formed the view I should possibly look again at C++ as another potential tool, so I've ordered the 2018 book as a prerelease.

Keep your hands on the f*cking wheel! New Tesla update like being taught to drive by your dad

LucreLout

Re: Auto-crash-pilot

Actually stopping from 40 in 2 seconds only uses about 60 feet or roughly four car lengths

I'm not sure its even that far. At 30mph every modern (this millennium) saloon car will stop in its own length when doing an emergency stop, provided tyres, brakes, and shocks are working. I could see 40 requiring an extra car length, maybe 2, but an extra 3 car lengths sounds too far to me.

The slow part is always the meatsack. Which is why I've long suggested we move beyond this idea that almost everyone should be allowed to drive. Why? Its a skill where lapses in concentration, slow reactions, or just not being very good at it can have terminal concequences for 3rd parties. If we just took the bottom 20% of people in terms of capability off the road, we'd have probably fewer than half the fatalities we get now.