andrewducker

I noticed a couple of years ago that Vodafone’s “content control” blocked most wine merchants’ web sites as being adult content. It stopped access to Berry Bros, Lay & Wheeler, Virgin Wines, and Majestic Wine. On the other hand, Tesco wine wasn’t blocked.

Thankfully my employer was happy to remove the content control on my work phone.

Well, if the pound does go off a cliff, the Tories are finished, the electorate won't forgive them for that in time for the next general election.

It’s the consequential impact on inflation that would undue them in those circumstances I think.

First the hit to credibility as the AAA rating goes and the pound falls then impact on prices for food and energy and holidays that unfolds over the following 12-18 months before the income effects from extra exports kicks in.

That statistic that damns their claims for reducing the deficit is going to be problematic for them too, we've had all these cuts to spending, and the deficit is still going up? Something is very wonky somewhere.

It's really going to lay bare the true horror of Thatchers principle that the country could make a living in the service sector.

I saw Vince Cable speaking some sense a few months ago, he said his department had a plan to move the country back towards a manufacturing base, but that this plan was likely to take 5-10 years at least, so people just had to be patient.

Gosh I didn't realise it was quite that bad.

So politicians just think they can continue repeating brazen lies to the press, and the press are dumb enough to keep repeating it, so we the people, or enough of us, believe that something is being done about the deficit?

It just underlines that the changes the Tories are making have nothing to do with deficit reduction, and everything to do with an ideological war against the poor and vulnerable in society doesn't it.

It just underlines that the changes the Tories are making have nothing to do with deficit reduction, and everything to do with an ideological war against the poor and vulnerable in society doesn't it.

Yes, yes it really does.

I think the problem is they're trying to cut spending, but when people are doing these unhelpful things like 'becoming unemployed' (which may have resulted from the spending cuts), then the number of people claiming goes up.

Except that it's not just welfare spending that is up, it is most major government departments - health, pensions, defence, education - all increased since the last general election.

The figures here:
http://mainlymacro.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-uk-and-austerity-some-facts.html
and here:
http://www.ippr.org/?p=782&option=com_wordpress&Itemid=17

both seem to disagree with this. Can you explain where the disagreement is coming from?

No I can't. I can say that the page I linked to quoted its sources as actual Treasury statistics and provided a link to that report: http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/pesa_complete_2012.pdf
Checking that report (the table you want is 5.2), backs up his assessment. The second of your links is to the IPPR, which is a think tank with very close links to the Labour Party, and may not be unbiased, whereas we should be able to trust dry Treasury statistics.



(One of my old economics tutors Gerry Holtham went on to be director of the IPPR.)

It is in Labour's best interests to bang on about fictional "cuts" because it helps to paint the picture of the "Tories" as (as you say) waging "an ideological war against the poor and vulnerable in society".

It is also in the Conservatives' best interests to pretend that they are making cuts so that they can show that they aren't afraid to "do what's necessary" for the economy, when in truth they don't have the political stomach for that.

And so everyone seems happy to see no evil / speak no evil / hear no evil, say "la la la" and go along with the fiction.

I wonder how much of that Government spending goes away once (if) the economy returns to pre-Crash growth levels. If it’s a whole bunch then along with the consequent increase in tax receipts the deficit should start come to down.

Which is off course not the same question as what will things be like when (if) we see significant cuts to government spending.

The corn ethanol vs photovoltaics helps to confirm what I’ve long thought – if you can get efficiency of 10-20% and plug that straight into the appliance you are going to beat something with single digit efficiency and which requires a distillation process to access the energy.

I’m a little unhappy about more efficient photosynthesis through genetic engineering.

First off – it’s such a key component of plant competition that I find it hard to believe we could improve on it significantly and still remain with in the structures of plants.

Secondly – if we can then I’m a bit worried about a super-efficient plant growing all over the world.

Corn ethanol is a crappy biofuel. And when he says improving the efficiency of photosynthesis is a pipe dream, he means the chancing of it happening are basically nil in our lifetimes. Genetic engineering has not proven to be the magic bullet plant scientists thought it would be. (And speaking with my ecologist's hat on, plant competition is a hell of a lot more complicated than just the efficiency of photosynthesis. )

I absolutely believe you when you say plant competition is more complex than photo-synthesis efficiency.

I’m imagining a world where nettles or wild micanthus say were twice as efficient at photo-synthesis as every other plant and thinking that doesn’t sound like a good place to be, all other things being equal. I’d be interested very much on your insight on this because I’m sure I’m over simplifying.

Agreed on corn ethanol. When the carbon reduction figures started coming in at really low I sort of lost interest in it.

That’s what I understood when he said pipedream.

It isn't a good place to be no, but current GM plants don't seem to be showing signs of producing super weeds AFAIK - without actually checking the literature, which I admit I'm not up to date on given I'm not working in the field anymore and was a soil rather than plant scientist anyway.
Even plants do not live by sunshine alone. Nutrient availability, pollutants, selective grazing pressure etc etc can have big impacts, and taking over bare ground very successfully is very different from invading an existing stable plant community.

Also, we already have super weeds to some extent - look at japanese knotweed for example. A lot of these issues depend on whether these plants are already native or not.

In short, it's complicated and I could look stuff up and write an essay for you but I need to get back to work and that isn't my job anymore :)

(Also, sorry about stating the obvious re: pipe dream, I misunderstood your comment about it and am an expert at stating the obvious!)

I guess that quite a lot of GM plants are being modified for food yield directly (?) or for disease resistance.

I would much rather someone state the obvious than not. I’m a big fan of showing one’s workings.

The list you have kindly given is sufficient for me to see where you are going and to concur with your relatively expert opinion. I thank you.

Drought resistance is also a major area AFAIK, although I may be biased because people in my old department actually worked in that field. I know most rice and soya is GM these days but without doing some hunting around I'm not sure whether the primarily purpose is yield or not.

Glad to have been a help :)

I don't think those calculations are including the cost-of-manufacture (which includes an energy cost) for solar PV; which might make it less favourable. This is not to say that I like corn ethanol biofuel as an idea either.

Which does make a difference.

I wonder what is happening to the energy inputs required to make solar panels. Are they coming down or are they static?

Down a bit I think; because the technology is improving etc etc but they are still high. And some of the other inputs are AIUI not the most environmentally friendly of things...

(Solar powered electricity doesn't have to be PV; but it is the best option for micro-generation. I'm not sure how things like "use mirrors to focus the sun's energy onto a big vat of something you heat up and use to run a turbine" is working out)

Sterling is probably artifically high at the moment anyway because we have a central bank willing to buy bonds and also that the UK has been seen since 2010 (for political reasons) as a safe haven. However, since those political reasons were all about belief that the UK had a government that would bring some sense to public expenditure (i.e. reduce it), and that has singularly failed to happen, the UK's debt situation is a) one of the worst of the major economies and b) not likely to get better for the forseeable future, especially with the wrong election result in 2015.

And let's not forget a) quantitative easing and b) a trade deficit.

Accordingly, I would expect the markets to adjust and for Sterling to fall to a more appropriate level against the Dollar and the Euro.

So is this good or bad?

Potentially good - help for exporters certainly (although I 100% agree with danieldwilliam that there is a significant lag on this effect) and for industries like tourism, such that the trade deficit should decrease. Inflationary pressures because imports were more expensive - yes, and so people might be complaining about food prices and having to holiday in Cornwall instead of the Algarve this year. On the other hand, inflation would reduce the real value of the national debt.

And that would be the key concern - the national debt. It is true that most of the UK national debt is denominated in Sterling and is not linked to inflation. (There is some foreign-denominated debt and some index-linked bonds, but most of our national debt is denominated in Sterling.) Inflate and you reduce the real value of that debt.

However, if the real value of that debt and future borrowing (needed for the foreseeable future because of our frankly enormous budget deficit) is reduced, then investors are less likely to want to buy UK government debt at low interest rates. So, new government debt has to be financed at higher interest rates to make it more attractive. This means that not only does government expenditure increase again (because of higher interest charges, already a massive proportion of government spending), but domestic interest rates rise making it harder for the private sector to invest - a classic example of what economists call 'crowding out'.


In the end, the UK's economic situation for the foreseeable future comes down to the debt and the budget deficit. I'm only 40 years old. In my lifetime I can remember a time when the government seriously talked about a timetable to pay off the entire national debt. Now, it is difficult to imagine the annual budget deficit getting down to zero, let alone into surplus for long enough to pay off the national debt.

Ha. Well that's O2 off the list of potential employers. Patronising twat.

s/'geeks'/'women'/ and see how it reads...

Having worked in both geek-heavy organisations and more balanced ones, anyone claiming that geeks _aren't_ somewhat different has a massive hill to climb as far as I'm concerned.

Right. But having management-boy there come over all David Attenborough about this mysterious tribe of 'geeks' isn't helping anyone. I get the distinct impression that it's someone from a Widget Factory trying to divine the existence of Film Crews from first principles. (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/45776/why-do-business-analysts-and-project-managers-get-higher-salaries-than-programme/45814#45814)

You are aware that many people don't interact with that many geeks, and thus have to be told about them, right?

I work in a geek context right now, but whenever I stick my head out of it into the rest of the company I encounter people to whom geeks are just baffling, and they have no idea what to do with them.

Having someone say "In the main manage them the same as you do everybody else" is actually really useful in this context.

Oh, and I've been paid more than at least two of my last five managers, because we're not so bad that we pay entirely on hierarchy. That's a good article too - I'll be sharing it.

I must admit that was how it came across to me, at least at first.

I think his point was actually to say that these people aren't a special case really, but he sort of spoiled that by making generalisations. I suppose that making different generalisations for different groups of people is better than making one generalisation for everyone, but shouldn't managers be trying to manage each individual to get the most out of that individual? To do that, you have to recognise that individuals have different needs and respond to different management styles in different ways.

Do you think you'd see an article in a football magazine by a famour football manager talking about how "managing black players isn't so different from managing everyone else"? This article isn't that far removed.

The massive difference, to me, being that "geek" is a description of behaviour, while "black" is a description of skin colour.

Managing people according to their behaviour seems entirely reasonable to me. And if people aren't used to groups that have a particular style of behaviour then talking about how that differs from the cultural norms is useful.

"The massive difference, to me, being that "geek" is a description of behaviour, while "black" is a description of skin colour."

Yeah, that's a fair point. I still think that generalising about groups (or what you perceive to be groups) isn't especially clever management though. You risk mismanaging someone because you think they are a "geek" or "creative" or a "yummy mummy" or whatever and assume they will respond in the same way as others in that group.

I completely agree that managing people as if they were homogenous representatives of group X is bad. Being aware of tendencies while appreciating the individuality is definitely the way to go, in my experience.

(After all, I work in an IT department, if all geeks were treated the same then we'd have massive problems.)

It's always a tough balance to get right, this - acknowledging that there are differences between groups can very easily be read as making generalisations about those groups. Which I guess it kind of is, but it's probably only pernicious when people fail to bear in mind how much diversity is masked by any statement about generalities...

I found out the other day that 3 were blocking Everything2 for 'mature content' - to be fair, it does feature the occasional swear word and shit like that, but still, bloody annoying and surely unnecessary for a site that is made entirely out of text, and has no kind of adult focus. Anyway, what bugged me even more than that was the way they did it: to get access, I had to spend about half an hour on the phone to their support people, and then wade through several pages of official 3 soft-porn (with links to more hardcore stuff) in order to unblock my content filter. As far as I can tell, most of that soft-porn is freely visible to anyone at all! Granted it's mild and I don't really think anyone's going to be seriously depraved by a pair of breasts, but I can't say I was comfortable going through all that on public transport. :-/

They made you wade through official porn? What??

Oh for goodness sake. That's just ridiculous!

I buy a lottery ticket when the big one goes past $100 million for the pleasure of daydreaming how the heck I would get rid of $40 million after taxes free and clear . . .
If a first-run movie is ten bucks, that's in the neighborhood of 10 minutes/dollar. I can certainly get that much value out of my lottery dollar.

I'm similar - except it's the time between getting an email saying "You have won a prize!" and discovering that it was only £5 that does it for me :->

i play simply the lottery because i can't see anything else giving me a life-changing amount of money. i only play once a month, but several lines using non-overlapping numbers. winning a few quid each time at least makes next month's ticket cheaper. :>

my simplest lottery fantasy is just winning a million or two and buying a reasonable flat and putting the rest in a high interest account and then never *having* to work again.