Posts by LucreLout 3039 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2014
The Opium Wars were a shameful part in the UK's history.
Indeed, as was the quashing of the boxer rebellion, and a great many other less savoury events. No country is without its skeletons, but I think glossing over or hiding away from these past events denies us the best opportunity to learn from them.
@AC
On balance I'd tend toward the view that if you can't do the time, don't do the crime: it's a dodgy proposition from the outset
Your view that everyone doing "the time" has in some way committed "the crime" is ill thought out. In every relationship where someone is cheating, the person most hurt by revealing the truth of that is the innocent partner.
If by any small chance some particularly fragile innocent bystanders get hit then I'm truly sorry for them personally but life's tough and always fatal.
Innocent bystanders like all the faithful spouses that just got "hit" with these revelations and had their lives turned upside down? Those innocent bystanders? If you have a million cheaters then you can pretty well guarantee that when you tot up the wronged spouses that get hurt, and the children that have their home lives shattered, that you'll more than double that number.
Childish moralising and absolutes are ultimately only about your own ego. I.T., you, the rest.... you've no right to involve yourselves. Which part of "Mind your own business" is particularly difficult for you to grasp?
(And no, I'm not on the list and I haven't checked for my wife or anyone else I know)
@Triboolean
If someone did off themselves because they were found it, its because they knew they were found out. That is was the AM leak, a phone call from the "friend" to wife, or a neighbor with a camera, no difference really.
Are you sure?
Were I to tell my mates wife that he is cheating on her, I can be reasonably sure neither will top themselves. If you tell a million peoples spouse their partner is cheating, you can be reasonably sure some of them will kill themselves or their cheating spouse. The scale of numbers involved all but guarantee it.
As someone married with kids, I'd hope my mrs isn't playing away. I'd also hope to never find out if she is, at least not until the children have grown up. They come first, before my ego, and it would be better for them to grow up with a stable home life. I'd prefer Impact Team et al simply stayed out of my families business.
You seem to be assuming that the rash of crude opportunist extortion is being perpetrated by the original leaker(s). I very much doubt that
I doubt that too.
However, given the widespread geography affected, I wonder if they could be held vicariously liable for any adverse outcome of the leak? Surely there's a lawsuit waiting in America for instance, from the family of the deceased?
I'm not suggesting they should be held liable by the way, or that they should not - I've not thought that part through, I only wonder if the *could* be considered part of a joint enterprise or similar. It would only need one country with strange laws that considered it had global reach......
Either we have a single European market, or we don't. Free movement of people and goods must include media, digital or otherwise.
If Elbonia can provide a good or service cheaper than the UK then that's what happens - it works for everything else, so why should sports & music events or movies be exempted?
The reason it should happen in various places is to help the UK economy, by allowing growth.
Deliberate destruction of wealth, for that is what the value of existing housing stock is, never leads to growth. You can't build your way out of population growth, but you can build your way out of greenbelt and quality of life.
We have enough housing in the UK, for there are very very few homeless. What is required is an adjustment in terms of the expectations of would be first time buyers. Your first house will not be the same standard as your parents last one - the one you grew up in.
@Greg16
You'll just have to suck it up fella and work a little harder for a little longer. You're not getting a half price house in Cambridge any time soon. You might as well face reality now rather than waste time becoming increasingly bitter about it.
You can't double the size of a city and expect prices to remain static. If you don't already understand why, then you've a lot to learn before anyone could even begin to explain it to you.
If it was well planned it would actually improve the town.
It won't be well planned. It wouldn't improve anything. And it ain't happening.
@Codejunky
I dont see any way out of this scenario. Housing is an investment and suffering the highs and lows of being an investment, but actually it is shelter which is a necessity.
The necessity is the use of a property, not the ownership of it. Rent, then, works societally just as well. What causes the most unhapiness among the young is the loss of the capital gains they see owners accruing.
The over inflating and long boom has caused prices to be massively excessive without making people richer.
Some people get richer. My folks recently sold their pad and moved into rented housing. They've made out like bandits on capital appreciation over the decades. BTL landlords will one day bank the capital gains too.
How can regular people win?
I'm afraid that comes down to stumping up the purchase price to get on the ladder, then hanging onto it for dear life. Property moves in cycles - I had years of negative equity to get through - but over the longer term it is the main leveraged investment open to regular people (Try borrowing money to invest in emerging market equities!)
I'm the best contraindicator I know when it comes to property. Do the opposite of what I do and you'll do well. But even then I've managed to accrue a capital gain slightly ahead of inflation having bought at the worst time in a generation and then just waiting.
Somehow the property prices must come down. Either a crash or stagnating for a long time.
I'm not so sure they will come down very far or for very long. Property as a place to live is affordable (I've previously posted detailed numbers on this) even if that place isn't as desirable as what can be rented for the same outgoing.
When I was young I used to think that one day, when renters outnumber the owners, the government could be made to act. The thing is, as time went on, more and more of my generation bought a place such that most Generation Xers are now property owners. The same is happening to Generation Y too. Renters won't out number owners for a long time to come and MPs own self interest would have to be overcome.
Changes in the workplace (women working, in essence) have driven prices permenantly higher than would otherwise be the case. The days of a normal mortgage being 25 years seem numbered to me too, if we're all to be made to work until 70 then there's no specific reason not to take a 30 year mortgage, which would lead prices higher still.
I know that what I'm saying is going to be unpopular with the young. I just wish I'd understood it 10 years sooner than I did, as I could have been mortgage free by now.
Or maybe a population restriction could solve it
I just don't see how that would ever fly with voters. Either you all but stop immigration, or you restrict the number of children people are allowed to have. Any rational argument you may make either way will be shouted down by the more... emotive elements of society. The left can't even stomach restricting how many children the state will pay you to have, never mind somehow preventing you having them; and Scotland would explode with tartan rage at the thought of BrExit form the EU without which you cannot control immigration. I'm not lobbying for or against either, by the way, just pointing out that electorally neither is likely to happen.
@Greg
councils do charge developers money for infrastructure when they grant planning permission
They do, but it is nowhere near what would be required to fund the infrastructure.
Also I think you could double the size of Cambridge and not see any fall in house prices
Then you think wrong, I'm afraid. The value of the property is mostly in the restriction on the planning system, as detailed by Tim.
Look further down the Cambridge-London train line and you'll find Baldock. It's a small town on the edge of a larger one, but still pleasant. That is going to roughly double in size in the next ten years and prices are already static there before the ground has been struck. Nobody wants the expansion and its out of all scale for their town.
Much of the value in Cambridge is because it is a very small very old city with excellent transport links to London, and almost unlimited supply of highly educated people wanting to make a home there due to the colleges. I can't afford to live there, but would love to do so. Double it in size and prices will drop like a rock - it won't be nice anymore and it won't be what it is today. Look further up the paralell line and see St Neots for an example of that - Massive expansion just being finished with all of the wholly predictable problems I raised earlier.
@Greg
The main problem in the UK is nimbyism
No, the main problem is decades of under supply coupled with a soaring birth rate, a lingering death rate, and mass immigration. The Uk has a similar population to that of Germany, with rather a lot less land. I'd agree NIMBYism obviously exists, and it is a feature, but it isn't the main problem.
So the NIMBYs. Lets be logical. You own a house in Cambridge. The government decide to double its size over ten years. On the face of it, that is fine, however... Nobody is allocating funding for infrastructure - new (good) schools, more doctors surgeries or dentists, new road capacity, new carriages on the train into the large city where everyone goes to work etc etc.
The schools are full, the hospitals are full, the roads are full, and the train into / out of London is full. So what you're doing is taking the value of all that missing infrastructure and you're taking it from the existing owners; owners who are already facing significant negative equity because of your rampant building program. Logically then, you should expect rational people to object to the new housing, especially if it is social housing which will further devalue their property.
The only alternative is to add an infrastructure charge onto the new housing, which will make it manifestly more expensive than the existing stock, which is hardly solving the problem you're trying to solve.
Think how much we could bring down the cost of Home Counties housing if we did something about that.
Agreed, but then take a moment to do what no politician ever does, and think another step ahead.
Dropping the value of existing housing dumps recent buyers into permenant negative equity. It drops the book value of the mortgages through the floor as people elect to go bust. You now have a banking crisis from which there is no escape and a generation trapped forever in their starter homes. Economic destruction quickly follows, and people become far more concerned about feeding their family and keeping them safe than they ever were about affording a bigger house or buying rather than renting.
That is not to say that society should accept ever higher prices, only that simplistic idealism won't work. House building, in order to stabilise prices, must be matched to immigration, birth, and death rates; and to household formation and seperation. Stability would allow the gradual backing out of the problem with none of the economic end of days that simply deregulating planning or meaningfully increasing the housing stock would have to cause.
The answer is for the council to buy some land not currently zoned for such housing and then so zone it.
Can you imagine the uproar? You paid $$ Million for your pad and the council come along and dump a trailer park next door? Your house just halved in value, and in the land of the free lawsuit, the council zoning department will be busy from now until doomsday.
Ultimately, the answer is that employers will, if they want to employ people in a location, have to pay enough for their employees to live a commutable distance to work. Anything else is tinkering around the edges and trying to buck the market, which as we know, never works.
Most people can't, by definition, afford to live in an expensive area. Subsidising a small handful to live there at the expense of vastly more that would like to live there but can't, is manifestly unfair, and in the longer term, unsustainable.
@BobGameon
Even with the free upgrade its still a staged roll out with only devices with absolutely zero compatibility issues in internal testing getting the update
None of my four PCs has been selected for update yet. As I needed to rebuild my little notebook, it got volunteered for Operation Tethered Goat. So far I quite like the OS, but Edge is in all fairness, not production ready IMHO. Is Win 10 perfect? No. Is it as good as 7? Maybe... still haven't made up my mind. But it does reboot a lot quicker :)
MS could have grabbed market share away from Win 7 and 8.1 but has chosen not to do so just yet. As my other laptop is due a rebuild, I'll probably go to Win 10 and live with the foibles - Small kids, plus full time work, plus long commute, plus further studies, doesn't leave much time for upgrades, so any kit I have going to Win 10 this year will be going this month.
I consider a conversion pause after moving part of the market sensible. Work out the issues that are being reported then move on. When your next market share grab works out with few additional fixes required, then push it out to the remaining devices.
@Mikel
I can see it taking the world by storm, knocking the iPhone from the number 2 spot and trending to best Android soon after.
Hahahaha
Ok, sure, very few people use Windows Phone OS. I am one of them, just getting that out up front, but my current plan is to swap over to Android next time out (80+% market share means its all over bar the shouting).
Moving to a situation where WinPhone runs Android apps is an incredibly astute move for MS. The major cost of changing OS is that the users apps aren't compatible. Removing that stumbling block, provided it could be done properly, should allow their market share to rise. Any new app purchases are unlikely to migrate back to Android, so it could provide them some medium term customers.
Android ate the lunch of every proprietary OS out there, including Apple. Any vendor that wishes to steal back some of that cheddar is going to have to offer a migration strategy away from it. Apple will have to follow suit sooner or later, but with such a low market share, MS don't really have a lot to lose.
As a dotnet developer, Android was surprisingly easy to build apps for. It works really quite well, though AS is many years behind VS.
Will left the WSUS server “buzzing the 5 Mbps WAN link overnight” and arrived to find "users not happy that they had to restart their machines, and some had a few hundred updates to apply”. Some were even running Windows XP and had also been left unpatched.
Where I work he'd have been arriving to find he'd been sacked.
Nobody with an ounce of common sense would dispute the patches need applying and that there is a definite wisdom in taking the hit in one dollop. That being said, there has to a be a better way than taking out the staff for a day while hundreds of updates are applied.
Its just yet another tale that makes me long for an industry regulator. "Sorry Mr Lout, but your code sucks and you need to find another profession"
"Monetary cost is a question that should have been left in the 1990s," Chuvakin says.
Yeah, good luck with that. The 90s were all about ignoring the monetary question, hence the dot com bust. "You have more money than time." - Anyone else remember the war cry of the fishies? As a way to bill people it was genius, but as a way to run your business, not so much.
@Richard
AM still has it´s data, nothing has been deleted. If something is stolen, its no longer where its supposed to be. So i guess, it was no theft, it was copying.
No, sorry, but data doesn't work like that. Yes, the original instance of the data still exists, but the value it once had has been taken and destroyed. As the value was taken without permission and it has permenantly deprived the rightful owner of that value of its use, then that rightly should be considered theft.
It's not the same as copying a high quality rip of Bat Outta Hell because you already bought it on 8 track, cassette, vinyl, and CD; and consider that the great Mr Loaf has had fair value from you for your use of his work.
@Harmony
I wouldn't like it if someone kept inhaling and blowing cheap perfume at me, either.
Presumably you're ok with limiting the size of bottles and the amount that can be dispersed in one hit then? There's not a day goes by where I'm not greeted by the scent of a woman apparantly dragged backwards through the Boots perfume counter.
Point is, it's not suddenly a way for smokers to disregard others around them like the old days when smoking in restaurants was normal.
Anti-smokers making a song and dance about vaping is exactly that same behaviour though. Disregard for others.
Passive smoking has never been proven to damage health, though lets face it, it quite likely does. Passive vaping does not. The stuff in e-cigs is just the same base content as your local nightclub/theatre/bands smoke machine, with nicotine added, before it gets scrubbed by the vapers lungs, and some flavouring that you detect as scent. Whatever you're eating at the restaurant will almost certainly be worse for your health, and whatever perfume you've selected will be offputting to a similar quantity of people as the vaper.
Live and let live.
Most people who don't smoke stopped going to pubs/clubs long before the bans.
Wholly untrue and you must realise that.
I've never smoked. 95% of my mates have never smoked. We used to be in the pub several times a week before the ban. Anti-smokers != non-smokers. Anti-smokers may not have gone to the pub much, but nobody in the pub missed them.
A lot of the pressure to "drink more" has gone away as has the culture of competitive drinking (for the most part).
Among your friends? Probably because you're getting old, like me. Among the young that pressure is every bit as strong as it ever was. Stronger even.
If you want to take a full sample of reductions in alcohol consumption you'll need to do better than selectively taking the smoking ban years and the ones immediately before them, given there's been a steady decline in consumption happening since at least the 1960s and that covers at least 2 other recession cycles.
Cool. State your source and I'll go look.
Did the start of a long recession just before the smoking ban started have nothing to do with falling pub attendance
No, nothing.
The reason being the smoking ban arrived in July 2007 (2006 in Scotland) whereas the UK dind't enter recession until 2009. The effect on pubs was immediate and on going:
Year Litres consumed in pubs per capita
2007 9.2
2008 8.9
2009 8.3
2010 8.4
2011 8.2
2012 7.9
2013 7.7
Consumption dropped substantially before the recession then failed to recover after it, despite pubs historically doing ok in recessions.
The facts diagree with your views, as does pretty well any pub landlord operating at that time.
Figures from the BBPA. Dates for bans and recession from the BBC.
@Bob
What most non-smokers don't understand is how hard giving up smoking is. Nicotine is just about the most addicitive chemical there is.
I watched my father fight it most of his life.
So I would hazzard a guess that it stops the psychological impact on smokers, from seeing someone vaping, especially on long haul flights.
It seems to me the answer there is to carry an e-cig yourself for the duration? My father would certainly have done so were it permitted: he used to chain smoke to the extent that a box of matches could last almost a month. Even short flights were not an enjoyable experience for him.
@Ac
You're forgetting that vaping is costing an established industry a fortune, and with it it removes a source of tax revenue: the tobacco lot.
The tax issue is a red herring - just apply the tax to the liquids and that job is done. Nil additional cost to smokers, but massive benefit to the NHS.
Capitalism, for I am a capitalist, requires that old inefficient or ineffective industry be allowed to die. So big tobacco fails, most investors take a bath (anyone with a tracker or pension fund will have shares in big baccy), and the world turns - that spending will show up somewhere else.
E-cigarettes are already banned in Wales, and at the BBC. But what on Earth compels people to do this?
Perhaps there's indignation and envy amongst the health professionals that a successful technology became widely adopted without their involvement, making them look redundant? Perhaps they simply can't stand people enjoying nicotine?
For years all the whingers in the anti-smoking lobby campaigned to have smoking in pubs banned. After promising there would be no loss of pub trade because the reason THEY didn't go to pubs was that they disliked cigarette smoke, not because they're social leppers. Too late they realised it'd take more than a glass of pinot a week to sustain the pub trade. Pubs fought back, as too many were going bust, by making their outside spaces pleasant - heaters, shelter, music, seats, etc. This upset the anti-smoking lobby, because they'd been hoping to laugh at smokers stood outside in the cold & rain.
Then came vaping. Suddenly, smokers could consume a replacement product in doors again. Not only that, but vaping at work came back on the table. As there are no proven harmful effects of vaping, they're now seeking to restrict it due to spite. They want to punish smokers you see, for some perceived slight, and to massage their own right on egos. Should people vape at work? Probably not as the smell isn't wonderful, but the old smoking room can easy be reprovisioned as a space to vape.
The biased ranting of a smoker? Not at all. I've never smoked (2 or 3 cigars a year at most). I have, however, lost too many relatives to smoking related cancers, and very much see vaping as a large part of the way forward. Vaping isn't the cure for cancer, but its pretty bloody close in terms of health effects - we're at least 10 years away from any medical treatment that could cure enough cancers to compete with it, and in that time another million British smokers will die, unless they switch to e-cigs.
Vaping unpicks all of the "progress" the anti-smokers have made in 30 years of campaigning. They restent that immensly. They'll gnash and wail and make excuses, but behind these new attacks on vaping, is nothing but spite.
@Sabroni
One quick question pls....
I guess you believe "everything just exploded into being" is a better explanation than "god made everything explode into being". They both sound pretty similar to me...
Two mutally opposing statements, one backed by faith, the other by current scientific understanding. Given their similarity to you.... what's the third choice? Space aliens, or Bill Hicks "all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves".
@Skydweller
Surely about time Yahoo! or Microsoft bought ALM; both companies are after all well known of paying cheaply for winners and getting the biggest bang for their buck, as it were.
Given the apparent lack of interfacing with others most ALM users were doing, Apple is surely a more appropriate buyer?
Why is gender imbalance within a profession perceived as such a problem? Where are the campaigns for more binwomen? Trawlerwomen? Why did mining come and go with no outcry about the estrogen deficit? When was the last government compaign to get more men into HR? (stop sniggering - I only realised after I'd written it)
Given that certain academic subjects are mandatory at GCSE level, why not simply make Computer Science another of those? Instant rebalancing.
The government could couple that with various initiatives to make computing a more appealing industry to women - such as sorting out ageism and offshoring. Going on maternity leave in your 20s or 30s is a much bigger problem if your career is toast in your 50s than it is if there's going to be work into your 60s. Having your department offshored is more of a problem if you're only a week away from notifying your employer of your pregnancy.
@Flossy
Apologies for the confusion - that will be my fault. I realise I'd written Chapman, but what I meant to write was Champion. Ron Champion. The brain fart on my part is due to the book describing how to build what amounts to a Lotus 7, created of course, by Colin Chapman.
ISBN-10: 1859606369
Chris Gibbs updated the book to reflect better chassis technology.
ISBN-10: 1844253910
for example, going to be producing the centre console for a 1992 Escort Cosworth in 50 years' time? It's made of plastic, it's an interior item. But it'll start to degrade and crack just like all plastics do.
I could make a latex and fibreglass mould of it in about 3 hours, then produce the consoles in a range of colours with curing time being the longest part of that operation. "Lime green sir? Are you sure?"
For the electronics, you could look to a specialist such as BBA Reman (El Reg - I have no association with this company or anyone in it - I name them as a well know specialist featuring in the trade mag Car Mechanics regularly) who can remanufacture your ECU or gearbox controller for you for lower cost than the deal will charge to supply and code a new one.
Body panels can be made by hand, as they used to be... Parts won't be a problem in my view.
The pre-ECU cars you are talking about will continue to exist (mostly in museums), but none of the current generation of vehicles will be driveable in 40 years time. At some point one of the many irreplaceable, unrepairable and undocumented blackbox control units will fail and that will be the end of it.
Whipping out the EFI and retrofitting carbs is a well worn path for most vehicles - absent a blower it can be the cheaper route to bigger power gains. Alternatives are home brew ECUs like MegaSquirt / MegaJolt or another aftermarket ECU.
Under all the advanced electronics, live the same greasy bits of the old carburettor based vehicles, and for the most part it can be torn out. The car may suffer somewhat in terms of performance, and things like a GTR will flat out die, but taking inspiration from Cuba, petrolheads have been a fairly resourceful bunch in the past. I have faith in us.
@Werdsmith
Ahh, goalpost moving. Terms of the bet weren't explicitly laid down at the time of the wager.
From my initial post:
£50 to a charity of your choice if humans are banned from driving on any existing classification of road anywhere in the UK in the next 10 years.
How can anyone be banned from doing that which they were never permitted to do, and which they were not so permitted at the time the wager was struck?
Seriously dude, in your rush to be perceived as being right, you're spoiling the fun of the bet.... a bet between Tony S and I, for which I have already made the donation (I may be dead in 10 years!)
Even if they managed to do an ad-hoc handshake, verify they are both talking to the right car and agree on a safe combined course of action in a small number of milliseconds (which I find unlikely)
Why would all self driving cars not be in constant communication with all others within their stopping distance using a standardised protocol? It would seem a trivial thing to implement in the scope of self driving.
The first has already been mentioned by other posters, namely deliberately increasing risk to unrelated third parties e.g. the people in the car that is not about to have an accident.
If both cars brake and lane share there may not need to be an accident. Certainly there is no risk if your car knows having 'spoken' to the other car, that it will stop and in what distance, and your car knows it too can stop in the remaing gap.
even if the two cars agreed in time to cooperate, you can't program your car to use someone else's lane just because it "thinks" the lane will be safe & the other car will brake
As I said, it won't think, it will know for a fact because the other car will have confirmed it. Lane ownership doesn't exist the way most people think it does. How many people only look right before turning left onto two way traffic road, for instance? Yet you don't own the nearside lane, it is a shared space. Direction of traffic flow is a convention, not an absolute, and there are numerous legal exceptions to it.
I love driving. I am good at it. Yet a computer could be safer, due to the ability to communicate almost instantly with all traffic around it (post full automation), which allows rational strategies that humans could neither agree on nor communicate in time. They could even pass data about blind spots, corners, etc so your car would know about what it could not yet see, such as fallen trees or cyclists.
@Werdsmith
I fully expected at least one petrolhead to cry about this one, they almost all have an inflated opnion of hemselves but are in denial.
And I fully expected you'd respond like this, which is why I took the liberty of detailing the reasons for my self belief in my response. Anyone that thinks they're a good driver probably isn't. Good drivers know why they are good drivers, and have test passes well in excess of the basic L test.
And your sex in the bedroom analogy is probably the most blatant straw man I've ever seen on The Register
You must be new.
Driving fast can be safe on a track, and it can be dangerous there too. Driving fast on a public road can be safe and it can be dangerous. Your blanket assuption that nobody can drive safe and fast on the road is based more upon your own limited skills and experience than it is mine. That you are not safe when driving fast does not imply that I am not.
Frequently the speed limit is too high for the prevailing conditions, and frequently it is too low.
Try calling your insurance company and saying "I'm a petrolhead, and I like to drive fast, give me a discount please".
I have, and they do. I pay under 50p per BHP for 10k miles on comprehensive SDP cover. It is well known in advanced driving circles that we tend to drive faster than L testers. The insurance companies know this too, and they don't really expect anyone with a 400+ bhp car to be sticking to limits. The claim stats quantify that we are in fact in the top 1% of drivers in the UK, at least on an claims basis, hence the insurance discount.
If you really want to go to the top, then you'll need to try and join HPC, but I warn you in advance that it is properly difficult and rather expensive. Start with IAM for that is the cheapest and easiest to pass - the test is only a couple of hours.
@Werdsmith
10 Year Wager £50
Guided busways already exist. Pay up now.
I already did, as the time value of money on £50 over 10 years would suck for the charity, whereas if I win I can afford to eat the loss.
That not withstanding, humans have never been allowed to drive on guided busways, so I don't believe it would meet the terms of the bet.
@Werdsmith
Driving for pleasure can stay (emissions allowing) in its appropriate place, which then just as it is now, will be on race tracks.
Thats about as rational as saying "sex for pleasure should only occur in bedrooms", which self evidently ain't so.
The petrolhead attitude to driving on public roads is what will keep them out of the top 1% of drivers.
Only it doesn't. I enjoy driving fast where and when it is safe to do so. That may or may not exceed the posted speed limit, because that is wholly irrelevent to safety. There's a great many roads around Ireland, for example, where the posted limit is higher than can safely be attained and maintained.
Safe driving has three constituents: Observation, anticipation, and correct and timely reaction. Theres an important difference between seeing and observing. Outside of that you have to remember to leave the other guy room to make a mistake, because he will.
I spend significant amounts of both time and money on continuous driver training for both road and track driving. Compeltely without ego I can attest that I'm the safest driver I know and I am the person most of my acquaintances would name as the best driver they know. I've never had points in over 25 years of driving, haven't had an at fault accident since.... oh some time in the last millenium (I was a 17 year old boy once too!), have never written off a car, and yet... I'm a petrolhead. I always have been. And yes, I drive quickly. Fast and safe are not mutally exclusive any more than slow and safe are causal.
It can still get damaged in other ways (a tree falls on it, for example), or it is stolen. Those are risks people would be willing to insure against.
Sure, but that has more in common with home insurance than motor insurance. It would not, in any case, be impacted by presence or not of self driving cars meaning the price would remain static.
I'm aware of how stupid this will sound too, given the lax automotive security lately, but it should be possible to prevent vehicle theft by tying its proximity when in motion to my phone, wallet, and other gps/nfc/rfid equipped devices.
@Electron Shepherd
it may be that the petrochemical companies don't make the fuels any more, since the demand won't be there
Demand hasn't been there for a while for leaded fuel, but alternatives remain available.
Small scale biodiesel plants are affordable and small enough to be kept at home, and can be powered with cooking oil. Ok, that may mean most survivors run on the devils fuel, but there will always be something to run an engine on.
@Captain Daft
Pro tip: You're more likely to score at the supermarket or laundromat than you are at a pub or online.
You'd be surprised by how many rather good looking women have almost no social life.
Sounds to me like you're going to the supermarket or laundromat AFTER going to the pub :)
@Fogcat
I'm going to assume that it was an honest question
It was, so thanks for responding in the manner you have.
Just for example... spouse/child/favourite pet falls sick, you're up all night waiting in ER. You go into work in the morning, you're tired, you don't perform your job well that day. Some sympathy and empathy means that people understand why you're having a bad day and you don't end up with loss of pay, "performance management" or notes on your HR file.
I've been there (sick child followed by hr notes). I just thought, correctly, that the manageress was a bitch, and pretty quickly moved on to a better job elsewhere. You can't make a bad boss into a good boss, so you're better off out in my view - unless your bad boss is in fact Jennifer Aniston. There's a million companies within 50 miles of you and you don't have time to work for them all.
I require my employers pay the market rate for my skills, no less (more is nice, right). I'd like interesting work, but frankly, it's optional because no matter how interesting the work I'd rather be with my kids. Sympathy & empathy have never really figured on my list of things I want from an employer.... That said, your points seem valid and I'll certainly give them further consideration, but I expect they'll remain way down my list of things I want from work - they'd genuinely never occurred to me as desirable up to now.
@Bernard
Happy staff are more productive, and ensuring your staff are engaged with the product and service you provide is essential. They need to feel part of what you're doing rather than just an unimportant statistic. From a capitalist POV, simply put, it pays to look after your people at all levels.
Agreed. What I wanted to understand though, is why empathy and sympathy make people happy.
You can't buy or demand loyalty; you can only inspire it....We don't need to be bastards to be capitalists.
Also agreed. And thanks for the link.
I would point out though that many large employers don't value staff loyalty. I'm not saying they're right, by the way, but they don't want it because it makes people stick around rather than moving on, so they get stuck with people they might no longer want. The first boss that explained that one to me was a revelation.... I was very young and idealistic then.
...employees claiming they are treated with little or no empathy.
and
If they cannot keep up with targets, there is no wriggle room or sympathy from Amazon.
Empathy and sympathy are not why I go to work. I go to work to do the best job I can for the most money, and then I go home. That's pretty much all I require from my employer.
I realise I'm a tad more of a hard nosed capitalist than a good many El Reg readers, so please could some of those who are big on the huggy feely stuff like sympathy and empathy educate me on why you want or need such things at work?
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