I used to hold exactly that view, now I am not nearly so sure. Pretty much all of the major banks (and not just the ones were bailed out) were tied together with a hugely complex network of Credit Default Swaps - which are basically a bet on the long term stability of an organisation. As far as I can see the real reason the bailouts had to happen wasn't to protect the banks that were the subject of the bailouts but to stop a potential chain reaction where one set of failures spreads to other banks through CDSs having to be paid out. What I hadn't realised until fairly recently was how bad things could have been last October - it really was close to a total financial meltdown.
An excellent post! I would imagine that for most of history things have been run using the "subsistence farming and warlords" model. Extrapolating how income distrubutions are developing in most civilised countries I suspect we are being steered by the invisible hand towards a modern version of this, modulo a revolution or two.
Slight correction, in England and Wales it is the CPS. In Scotland it is the Procurator Fiscal (specifically the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service). No idea what it is in Northern Ireland.
Having worked on a number of EU and government funded research projects here in the UK I can say pretty clearly that unless things have changed a lot since the '90s (which I doubt) - research grants were used to pay for equipment, dedicated research staff, travel etc. but they weren't used to pay the salaries of the full time academic staff (lectures through to profs). Pretty easy to tell the difference: if you had a short term contract for the length of the project then your salary was being paid for by the project.
I don't know about an RPG but a Royal Marine managed to hit an Argentinian frigate below the waterline with a Carl Gustav. This was on South Georgia during the Falklands war.
http://op-for.com/2007/04/the_defense_of_south_georgia.html
I was only a schoolkid at the time, but the idea of a few Marines taking on a warship and winning has stuck in my memory!
Amazing - there are two decent people at BT! The problem we had was a dodgy line - once we got BT to accept the fact that it was the line (not the easiest thing in the world) we eventually got an engineer out. This first engineer had a look out the window and spotted a junction box on the line which he guessed was almost certainly the problem. However, this box was in a neighbours garden and they weren't in - so he couldn't fix it. So he asked me to arrange a time for them to visit our neighbour and our property. This turned out to be practically impossible due to their crazy attitude to arranging engineer visits.
However, we reported the problem again and this time a different engineer came round, found that our neighbours were out, jumped over the wall into our neighbours garden and fixed the junction box and things have been fine every since.
Many years ago ('95) when my then startup company was living hand to mouth we were approached by a rather slick character who had Big Plans - he was talking to lots of hardware and infrastructure providers about this huge project and he wanted us to to the software component - because we were Java specialists (not exactly very common back then). We had a lot of meetings - some with major 3-letter hardware vendors and we got rather excited about the whole thing. Turns out he was a dick collecting information for his MBA project - which of course he managed to forgot to mention to anyone. The hardware and telco guys were really quite upset and they were way more experienced than us (not to mention that they actually wore suits to the meetings). Subsequent experience with "really bright" people with MBAs from "top schools" has reinforced a view in me that is entirely consistent with your comment about them generally being a bunch of tools.
I seem to remember reading that it was something like 40% of combat infantry in WW2 (at least on the Allied side) actually fired their guns. Most people really, really, don't like the idea of killing other people even if they are "the enemy".
I watched a fascinating documentary last night about the history of the UK over the last 700 thousands years (a special by Time Team on UK Channel 4) which had a lot of fascinating stuff in it. However, one thing that was pointed out was pretty grim: there have been eight separate waves of human habitation in the British Isles - all of the previous seven were completely wiped out by climate changes (glaciation rather than warming, although there have been some pretty dramatic warming events too - 7C in 15 years in one case).
I don't know which forecasts you saw for the after effects of a nuclear war, but the predictions for countries like the UK were pretty grim - population dropping from the 50 million level (for the 60s & 70s) down to 5 million or so. I would guess that would be something like a 99.999% drop in economic output as the survivors wouldn't be doing anything other than trying to find enough to eat.
Or in other countries, since your country was invaded and anyone with any power/riches was disposed of by the invaders. Around here that is close to a thousand years.
Wow - we must have met the same guy. They do have at least one rather good engineer who fixed our line issue in a rather interesting and resourceful way. However, to protect him I won't give anything away otherwise they would probably use the information to track him down, make him submit to enhanced customer service retraining then shoot him.
I've also seen people writing their own web server in VB6 to run on Windows Server, for no apparent reason other than they didn't trust IIS. Which is perhaps an understandable concern, but implementing a replacement in VB6 is hardly a good solution to that problem.
I agree, servers are really cheap these days, especially application servers that don't even need to be on a SAN. For most situations and with relatively sane applications, the answer is usually "throw more servers at the problem". If you need to do heavy reporting then punt the data somewhere else before doing it - don't do it on your transactional database. Nothing particularly difficult or novel, but you'd be amazed at the number of times I've seen people trying to fix these kind of things in software.
Of course, if you are Google or similar you can write super efficient code and throw zillions of servers at the problem - but most of us aren't in that situation.
I don't have it handy but I'm pretty sure my UK passport has "European Union" on the cover with "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" under it.
Yeah, I strongly agree. When I graduated with a CS degree (a 1st) 20+ years ago I was told that no matter how bright I thought I was I would, in reality, be a liability to my employer for the first six months or so until I got some sound commercial experience. Employers expected to have to train graduates as to the realities of the job - which they are far better at doing than any university. And yes, I did have a steep learning curve in my first few months at work - but they allowed for that and I was far better at my job because of it.
"cool little things tucked all over the place" - I don't think there is anywhere that has quite so many of these as London (and I'm from Edinburgh, Scotland - so that's not an easy thing for me to say). A good example is that although I've been to London many times, I've never been to the Tower, so on the last family visit we went there for the day. All standard stuff.
Walking back to the Tower Hill tube station we took a shot cut through what appears to just be a wee park - actually it holds the memorials to the merchant navy sailors who died in Britain's wars since 1914 - with the names arranged by ship. With over 36,000 names it is quite a moving sight and I had never heard of it before!
http://www.merchantnavymemorial.com/thm.htm
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I used to hold exactly that view, now I am not nearly so sure. Pretty much all of the major banks (and not just the ones were bailed out) were tied together with a hugely complex network of Credit Default Swaps - which are basically a bet on the long term stability of an organisation. As far as I can see the real reason the bailouts had to happen wasn't to protect the banks that were the subject of the bailouts but to stop a potential chain reaction where one set of failures spreads to other banks through CDSs having to be paid out. What I hadn't realised until fairly recently was how bad things could have been last October - it really was close to a total financial meltdown.
An excellent post! I would imagine that for most of history things have been run using the "subsistence farming and warlords" model. Extrapolating how income distrubutions are developing in most civilised countries I suspect we are being steered by the invisible hand towards a modern version of this, modulo a revolution or two.
Slight correction, in England and Wales it is the CPS. In Scotland it is the Procurator Fiscal (specifically the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service). No idea what it is in Northern Ireland.
Having worked on a number of EU and government funded research projects here in the UK I can say pretty clearly that unless things have changed a lot since the '90s (which I doubt) - research grants were used to pay for equipment, dedicated research staff, travel etc. but they weren't used to pay the salaries of the full time academic staff (lectures through to profs). Pretty easy to tell the difference: if you had a short term contract for the length of the project then your salary was being paid for by the project.
I don't know about an RPG but a Royal Marine managed to hit an Argentinian frigate below the waterline with a Carl Gustav. This was on South Georgia during the Falklands war. http://op-for.com/2007/04/the_defense_of_south_georgia.html I was only a schoolkid at the time, but the idea of a few Marines taking on a warship and winning has stuck in my memory!
However, we reported the problem again and this time a different engineer came round, found that our neighbours were out, jumped over the wall into our neighbours garden and fixed the junction box and things have been fine every since.
Many years ago ('95) when my then startup company was living hand to mouth we were approached by a rather slick character who had Big Plans - he was talking to lots of hardware and infrastructure providers about this huge project and he wanted us to to the software component - because we were Java specialists (not exactly very common back then). We had a lot of meetings - some with major 3-letter hardware vendors and we got rather excited about the whole thing. Turns out he was a dick collecting information for his MBA project - which of course he managed to forgot to mention to anyone. The hardware and telco guys were really quite upset and they were way more experienced than us (not to mention that they actually wore suits to the meetings). Subsequent experience with "really bright" people with MBAs from "top schools" has reinforced a view in me that is entirely consistent with your comment about them generally being a bunch of tools.
I seem to remember reading that it was something like 40% of combat infantry in WW2 (at least on the Allied side) actually fired their guns. Most people really, really, don't like the idea of killing other people even if they are "the enemy".
Ouch - the design on that site makes my eyes hurt. The content just makes my brain hurt.
Ah yes, the same "underlying first principles" that were used to run LTCM, AIG, Enron, Bear Stearns, RBS and Dubai World.
I watched a fascinating documentary last night about the history of the UK over the last 700 thousands years (a special by Time Team on UK Channel 4) which had a lot of fascinating stuff in it. However, one thing that was pointed out was pretty grim: there have been eight separate waves of human habitation in the British Isles - all of the previous seven were completely wiped out by climate changes (glaciation rather than warming, although there have been some pretty dramatic warming events too - 7C in 15 years in one case).
I don't know which forecasts you saw for the after effects of a nuclear war, but the predictions for countries like the UK were pretty grim - population dropping from the 50 million level (for the 60s & 70s) down to 5 million or so. I would guess that would be something like a 99.999% drop in economic output as the survivors wouldn't be doing anything other than trying to find enough to eat.
Or in other countries, since your country was invaded and anyone with any power/riches was disposed of by the invaders. Around here that is close to a thousand years.
Wow - we must have met the same guy. They do have at least one rather good engineer who fixed our line issue in a rather interesting and resourceful way. However, to protect him I won't give anything away otherwise they would probably use the information to track him down, make him submit to enhanced customer service retraining then shoot him.
Doubleplus ungood thoughtcrime!! Copyright infringement is stealing. Copyright infringement has always been stealing.
I've also seen people writing their own web server in VB6 to run on Windows Server, for no apparent reason other than they didn't trust IIS. Which is perhaps an understandable concern, but implementing a replacement in VB6 is hardly a good solution to that problem.
I agree, servers are really cheap these days, especially application servers that don't even need to be on a SAN. For most situations and with relatively sane applications, the answer is usually "throw more servers at the problem". If you need to do heavy reporting then punt the data somewhere else before doing it - don't do it on your transactional database. Nothing particularly difficult or novel, but you'd be amazed at the number of times I've seen people trying to fix these kind of things in software. Of course, if you are Google or similar you can write super efficient code and throw zillions of servers at the problem - but most of us aren't in that situation.
Somehow I don't think a digital signatures will work too well in the Beyond or the Transcend. And we think security is tricky here...
I don't have it handy but I'm pretty sure my UK passport has "European Union" on the cover with "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" under it.
Yeah, I strongly agree. When I graduated with a CS degree (a 1st) 20+ years ago I was told that no matter how bright I thought I was I would, in reality, be a liability to my employer for the first six months or so until I got some sound commercial experience. Employers expected to have to train graduates as to the realities of the job - which they are far better at doing than any university. And yes, I did have a steep learning curve in my first few months at work - but they allowed for that and I was far better at my job because of it.
"do NOT bother unless you ARE quite rascally drunk: it doesn't work that way" - you have a gift for understatement!
Sorry, lol, but that is just plain nasty, lol.
Newcastle to Loch Ness in 2-3 hours? More like 6.
"cool little things tucked all over the place" - I don't think there is anywhere that has quite so many of these as London (and I'm from Edinburgh, Scotland - so that's not an easy thing for me to say). A good example is that although I've been to London many times, I've never been to the Tower, so on the last family visit we went there for the day. All standard stuff.
Walking back to the Tower Hill tube station we took a shot cut through what appears to just be a wee park - actually it holds the memorials to the merchant navy sailors who died in Britain's wars since 1914 - with the names arranged by ship. With over 36,000 names it is quite a moving sight and I had never heard of it before! http://www.merchantnavymemorial.com/thm.htm
I read it once, got to the end and started again and read it through again. It really is an excellent work.