The Vice Chair of Blackrock, interviewed on Bloomberg a few minutes ago, reckoned that the household savings accumulated worldwide during covid will run out about middle of this year, so reality may merely have been delayed...
While I am sure that is the case, it sounds a little patronising - are people really just going to keep spending savings and then go -oh, ran out...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64235996 Money borrowed to pay for Christmas could take years to repay, according to debt advice charity StepChange. The charity said worries about debt had led to a surge in enquiries as soon as the festive season was over. Its warning comes as a poll for the BBC suggests fears over unmanageable debt. A third of respondents to the poll who used credit to help get through Christmas and the holiday season said they were not confident about their ability to repay. StepChange said it had advised more people on 3 January, the first working day after the festive break, than on any day last year. "Christmas can put great financial pressure on people, causing some to rely on credit and spend more than they can afford. In some cases, this can lead to a debt hangover in the new year that may take many months or even years to repay," said Richard Lane, from StepChange. He said many people were unable to adjust their spending habits or have a sufficient income as bills and prices soared, and he urged those struggling not to "suffer in silence"...
The Vice Chair of Blackrock, interviewed on Bloomberg a few minutes ago, reckoned that the household savings accumulated worldwide during covid will run out about middle of this year, so reality may merely have been delayed...
While I am sure that is the case, it sounds a little patronising - are people really just going to keep spending savings and then go -oh, ran out...
If they are spending them because they have no choice then yes. They will spend them until there is nothing left.
The Vice Chair of Blackrock, interviewed on Bloomberg a few minutes ago, reckoned that the household savings accumulated worldwide during covid will run out about middle of this year, so reality may merely have been delayed...
While I am sure that is the case, it sounds a little patronising - are people really just going to keep spending savings and then go -oh, ran out...
If they are spending them because they have no choice then yes. They will spend them until there is nothing left.
In the context of holiday bookings?
If those savings are being spent on day to day living they are not available to spend on holidays.
The Vice Chair of Blackrock, interviewed on Bloomberg a few minutes ago, reckoned that the household savings accumulated worldwide during covid will run out about middle of this year, so reality may merely have been delayed...
While I am sure that is the case, it sounds a little patronising - are people really just going to keep spending savings and then go -oh, ran out...
If they are spending them because they have no choice then yes. They will spend them until there is nothing left.
In the context of holiday bookings?
If those savings are being spent on day to day living they are not available to spend on holidays.
Sorry - perhaps I am just conflating two stories - one was about robust holiday bookings from Nerys and the other is the idea that the savings will run out.
So do you think it isn't and that it is all a fabrication?
Everyday there seems to be positive economic news, its all a bit odd as if you read this site in isolation you would think we were in an histoically bad recession.
Morning all. On topic, why is it that the UK, is the only developed country where ‘the nurses’ can get directly into a row with the government (to be accurate, this includes the devolved administrations) over pay?
Presumably because the UK is the only developed nation where nurses are directly employed by the government?
But be careful what you wish for. By being the overwhelmingly dominant employer, HMG is able to hold wages down pretty effectively. If you have multiple employers competing for staff when there aren't enough to go round, it's likely that their pay will go up.
It's possible. But it's also possible that a more decentralised and less unionised system would be able to pay better nurses more, and worse ones less (or sack them without risking a nationwide strike), thereby raising productivity and requiring fewer nurses for the same amount of healthcare provided.
So do you think it isn't and that it is all a fabrication?
I think, as always, its complicated. No doubt for a lot of people the CoL is huge and a massive issue. For others, especially with government handouts, its a bit more pricy to heat the home but life goes on.
There is also a sense that things are not quite as bad as some forecasts (of course there will be a range). Its interesting that the head of Natwest (I think) on BBC yesterday now things it will be a shallower recession than previously thought. Lots of indicators are saying this. Inflation will start falling very soon as we approach the anniversary of the war.
So do you think it isn't and that it is all a fabrication?
Everyday there seems to be positive economic news, its all a bit odd as if you read this site in isolation you would think we were in an histoically bad recession.
The economy isn't in the depths of a recession. However that is completely different to the economy being in robust health. A significant number of people are seeing their spending power squeezed hard by a lack of payrises keeping up with soaring inflation. And the lower down the chain you are the bigger the inflation rises and the lower the payrise.
At least twice you have posted stories about supermarket chains really struggling and made out they are smashing it. I have to ask whether you don't know what you are talking about, or do and think we're stupid enough to swallow pro-Tory spin despite the evidence of our lived experiences.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
You mean cut everything that does not affect you, how surprising.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
The Vice Chair of Blackrock, interviewed on Bloomberg a few minutes ago, reckoned that the household savings accumulated worldwide during covid will run out about middle of this year, so reality may merely have been delayed...
That's certainly true of me. But that's largely because 2022 was a massive splurge with the excuse of 'we missed these opportunities during covid'. Five holidays and a knee operation. Back to living within our means this year.
The Kremlin is belatedly conducting personnel mobilization, reorganization, and industrial actions it probably should have undertaken before launching its invasion of Ukraine in Feb '22 and is taking steps to conduct the “special military operation” as a major conventional war. https://mobile.twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1614825184766185473
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
So do you think it isn't and that it is all a fabrication?
Everyday there seems to be positive economic news, its all a bit odd as if you read this site in isolation you would think we were in an histoically bad recession.
You need to look at it in more detail. Lots of these are just puff pieces or fillers. Note it said they are not up to or just getting up to pre pandemic figures of 2019. Also note the Tesco story you misunderstood, understandably because Tesco are always going to put on a positive spin on their figures. And everything isn't doom and gloom of course. I certainly don't think this site is more negative than the evening news on the economy as you imply. On the contrary.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
You mean cut everything that does not affect you, how surprising.
Whether you agree or disagree, surely Rishi deciding to change Scottish Laws is beyond the pale
You think the article which allows him to do it shouldn't exist, or just that this is a bad case?
I'm not sure which side I sit on re the article existing but I do think it sets an extremely bad precedent to use it to change/replace/stop a landmark Scottish bill, whatever you think about it. It will surely only lead to enabling the independence cause, I cannot see any good coming out of it.
Hardly, given over 60% of Scots oppose Sturgeon's Gender Recognition Bill anyway
Just reflecting - three cancelled TPE services but still spare seats on the Northern train.
A lot of people must just have given up on trying to get from Leeds to Manchester by train.
For my sins, I am making this journey every day this week.
So you'd seen the 08:00 and 08:07 TPE services cancelled. Before that the 07:45 was cancelled as well, after that the 08:45 was cancelled. The 09:00 ran! First train across in 90 minutes and it was a 3 car train for added fun.
Situation normal. So everyone piles on to the M62, and it starts snowing...
Just reflecting - three cancelled TPE services but still spare seats on the Northern train.
A lot of people must just have given up on trying to get from Leeds to Manchester by train.
For my sins, I am making this journey every day this week.
Have had a look and its gruesome. This morning's Transpennine Express service from Dirty Leeds. So far this morning there have been 46 booked arrivals / departures, and 25 were cancelled...
Remember this is a non-strike day...
I can see why people are not keen on specifying exact trains for their ticket! Heck, best not to specify a destination either.
All this comparison with services in other countries, from cornerd of the country where trains are not running that badly.
TPE is in total meltdown and is not comparable with any other train service I have ever experienced anywhere, in any country, at any time, (including the UK in 2019) and the stats don't fully show it because they heavily use "planned cancellation", cancelling great swathes of trains at 10pm.the previous night, enough notice that they do not form part of the stats.
I'd guess that for the entire duration of 2022 possibly less than 40% of the express service that was supposed to run between Leeds and Manchester, actually ran to time (within 15 minutes).
Their full timetable is to run 5 direct tph each way between Leeds and Manchester each hour and this is around an 16 hr per day 7 day per week full service (some evening frequency drops balanced by airport night services).
They were running 3tph COVID timetable up until December, now increased to 4tph.
Any weekend with any engineering works (i.e. most), line blocking or not, is reduced to 1 tph x 15 hrs that only runs York - Manchester (no Hull, Newcastle, Liverpool etc). They usually run far less than the normal service for the entirely unaffected lines!
Adjacent to and on strike days, and TPE strikes have been constant through 2022, it's often been 1 tph x 10 hrs. I'd be surprised between engineering and strikes if less than 100 days were affected last year.
I'd say an, unseen by stats, 20% planned cancellation rate below the 3/4 tph on normal days, and concentrated during peak hours, is the absolute norm.
You still have the normal roster of delays and in running cancellations.
And forget about advance tickets, or even a full cost day ticket on anything other than walk up. The website will typically only offer a wayfarer type ticket for about 3x the cost of a full fare return.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
Whether you agree or disagree, surely Rishi deciding to change Scottish Laws is beyond the pale
You think the article which allows him to do it shouldn't exist, or just that this is a bad case?
I'm not sure which side I sit on re the article existing but I do think it sets an extremely bad precedent to use it to change/replace/stop a landmark Scottish bill, whatever you think about it. It will surely only lead to enabling the independence cause, I cannot see any good coming out of it.
Hardly, given over 60% of Scots oppose Sturgeon's Gender Recognition Bill anyway
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
You mean cut everything that does not affect you, how surprising.
A cynic might trawl Max and CR's posting history to see whether education and childcare etc were noted priorities before the arrivals of the little Maxling and Royalelet
I, of course, am completely objective and my priorities for government spending never change according to my personal circumstances. We do of course need much better paid academics if we're not going to fall behind other countries!
Whether you agree or disagree, surely Rishi deciding to change Scottish Laws is beyond the pale
You think the article which allows him to do it shouldn't exist, or just that this is a bad case?
I'm not sure which side I sit on re the article existing but I do think it sets an extremely bad precedent to use it to change/replace/stop a landmark Scottish bill, whatever you think about it. It will surely only lead to enabling the independence cause, I cannot see any good coming out of it.
Hardly, given over 60% of Scots oppose Sturgeon's Gender Recognition Bill anyway
The Vice Chair of Blackrock, interviewed on Bloomberg a few minutes ago, reckoned that the household savings accumulated worldwide during covid will run out about middle of this year, so reality may merely have been delayed...
That's certainly true of me. But that's largely because 2022 was a massive splurge with the excuse of 'we missed these opportunities during covid'. Five holidays and a knee operation. Back to living within our means this year.
Sounds like a good title for a film, that Or maybe a franchise: - Five holidays and a knee operation - Living within our means this year - Oh, shit!
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
A robot tax? Would also reduce the incentive to automate jobs
Whether you agree or disagree, surely Rishi deciding to change Scottish Laws is beyond the pale
You think the article which allows him to do it shouldn't exist, or just that this is a bad case?
I'm not sure which side I sit on re the article existing but I do think it sets an extremely bad precedent to use it to change/replace/stop a landmark Scottish bill, whatever you think about it. It will surely only lead to enabling the independence cause, I cannot see any good coming out of it.
Hardly, given over 60% of Scots oppose Sturgeon's Gender Recognition Bill anyway
In answer to @CorrectHorseBattery surely whether you agree with the bill is irrelevant (although you may have strong feelings about it). Key is surely whether the Scottish Govt has a right to pass it or whether it is inconsistent with UK law. I haven't a clue who is right on this point, but that is all that should matter.
In answer to @hyufd comment re 60% oppose it when a similar argument is put on other stuff your argument is always - tough, win an election and then you can have what you want.
From a personal point I don't know enough about the bill to say whether I agree or not.
Whether you agree or disagree, surely Rishi deciding to change Scottish Laws is beyond the pale
You think the article which allows him to do it shouldn't exist, or just that this is a bad case?
I'm not sure which side I sit on re the article existing but I do think it sets an extremely bad precedent to use it to change/replace/stop a landmark Scottish bill, whatever you think about it. It will surely only lead to enabling the independence cause, I cannot see any good coming out of it.
Hardly, given over 60% of Scots oppose Sturgeon's Gender Recognition Bill anyway
The Kremlin is belatedly conducting personnel mobilization, reorganization, and industrial actions it probably should have undertaken before launching its invasion of Ukraine in Feb '22 and is taking steps to conduct the “special military operation” as a major conventional war. https://mobile.twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1614825184766185473
No doubt their state media will rival The Day Today once "war" becomes official.
So do you think it isn't and that it is all a fabrication?
Everyday there seems to be positive economic news, its all a bit odd as if you read this site in isolation you would think we were in an histoically bad recession.
It's always a bad idea to take news from any outlet and any opinion on here as gospel as it is very often incorrect. 0.1 decrease in GDP last time was treated as though it was the end of the world as we know it... of course it wasn't just as a 0.1 increase is not paradise regained.
Just reflecting - three cancelled TPE services but still spare seats on the Northern train.
A lot of people must just have given up on trying to get from Leeds to Manchester by train.
For my sins, I am making this journey every day this week.
So you'd seen the 08:00 and 08:07 TPE services cancelled. Before that the 07:45 was cancelled as well, after that the 08:45 was cancelled. The 09:00 ran! First train across in 90 minutes and it was a 3 car train for added fun.
Situation normal. So everyone piles on to the M62, and it starts snowing...
It really is a joke. Get tunnelling!
Road tunnel? The M67 was supposed to connect Manchester city centre at one end and the M1 / A1 at the other end. Whilst a Woodhead-style tunnel was mooted that seems to have been a pipe-dream so most likely another high level motorway susceptible to snow.
Project largely scaled back then scrapped with a few basic problems. At the Manchester end was supposed to connect to the cancelled Inner Ring Motorway. So the whole Hyde Road section was scrapped. And you can't dump transpennine motorway traffic onto the M60 at Denton island as that's already full. And the other end? M1 through Sheffield also chocka, and the link across towards Barnsdale Bar makes no sense without that section of A1 being motorway which the viaducts at Wentbridge and Sprotbrough make that *expensive*
Rail tunnel? Planned as far back as Victorian times when the L&Y planned a Pennine base tunnel to connect Littleborough and Sowerby Bridge. Now, the NPR project seems dead and besides its the political football that gives everyone a headache as how do you do high speed between Manchester / Sheffield / Leeda and not disappoint Huddersfield and Bradford?
Literally any of our neighbouring / competitor countries would have built both long ago. But this is Britain and we are shit at planning and shit at long-term thinking.
So do you think it isn't and that it is all a fabrication?
Everyday there seems to be positive economic news, its all a bit odd as if you read this site in isolation you would think we were in an histoically bad recession.
It's always a bad idea to take news from any outlet and any opinion on here as gospel as it is very often incorrect. 0.1 decrease in GDP last time was treated as though it was the end of the world as we know it... of course it wasn't just as a 0.1 increase is not paradise regained.
Just wanted to say what a sensible post. I have given you are hard time in the past, but this is just one of a few of your posts I have liked in recent days.
Part of the sending tanks story which is not much discussed.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/14/tanks-will-help-kyiv-break-deadlock-but-its-ukraine-allies-now-face-a-fork-in-the-road ...Despite these sound operational reasons for providing Ukraine with armour, the provision of Nato-designed main battle tanks presents some major challenges. The Leopard 2, weighing about 69 tonnes, and Challenger 2, weighing 72 tonnes, are more than 20 tonnes heavier than the Soviet-designed main battle tanks currently operated by Ukraine. There is little Ukrainian infrastructure along which such heavy vehicles can travel, while their engineering and recovery vehicles are optimised to support Soviet designs. Putting aside the training needed to maintain and fight with Nato-designed tanks, they would also need to be provided alongside combat engineering and mobility support vehicles if they were to be employable at any scale.
It is this requirement for enablers that poses hard choices on Nato members wanting to offer Ukraine their vehicles. After the cold war, frontline tank fleets declined significantly, while the cutbacks in bridging, breaching and transport and recovery vehicles have been even more severe...
Trans Pennine Express totally failing to provide a service today.
08:00 from Leeds to Liverpool is announced, rolls in, and is then promptly cancelled. 08:07 was already cancelled and so is the 08:30. Thankfully Northern can get me to Manchester.
Coming back is going to be just as bad - three TPE services in a row in the evening peak already cancelled.
Yebbut we need that Mick Lynch to answer the nice Tory MP's question at the select committee about whether he feels the unreliability of the strikes are causing people to stop travelling. Because everything works brilliantly when not on strike, as you have seen. Nobody travels anymore post Covid, so no trains are needed between backwater places like Dirty Leeds and Manchester.
I think the union retort to the Government demand for minimum service levels on strike days is brilliant - "We'll consder it, if the Government imposes an equally binding promise of equal service levels on non-strike days."
It's not brilliant it's pathetic.its the sort of rabid left wing thinking that causes so much trouble. Bugger the passengers. Keep the red flag flying.
Random question for people who like computer games:
Actual physical classic console & games, or emulator? Considering whether its worth the faff of collecting / restoring / maintaining old machines and having a stack of phys games when you can just emulate them all with less faff and cost.
Morning all. On topic, why is it that the UK, is the only developed country where ‘the nurses’ can get directly into a row with the government (to be accurate, this includes the devolved administrations) over pay?
Presumably because the UK is the only developed nation where nurses are directly employed by the government?
But be careful what you wish for. By being the overwhelmingly dominant employer, HMG is able to hold wages down pretty effectively. If you have multiple employers competing for staff when there aren't enough to go round, it's likely that their pay will go up.
It's possible. But it's also possible that a more decentralised and less unionised system would be able to pay better nurses more, and worse ones less (or sack them without risking a nationwide strike), thereby raising productivity and requiring fewer nurses for the same amount of healthcare provided.
The union militancy is a function of management hostility which as function of… it’s the classic union vs management thinking.
A modern system of industrial relations would mean better conditions for the staff, more productivity and less strife.
Think British Leyland vs the modern car makers in the U.K. How often do they go on strike? Why is that?
Just reflecting - three cancelled TPE services but still spare seats on the Northern train.
A lot of people must just have given up on trying to get from Leeds to Manchester by train.
For my sins, I am making this journey every day this week.
So you'd seen the 08:00 and 08:07 TPE services cancelled. Before that the 07:45 was cancelled as well, after that the 08:45 was cancelled. The 09:00 ran! First train across in 90 minutes and it was a 3 car train for added fun.
I wonder why TPE is cancelling all those services?
Random question for people who like computer games:
Actual physical classic console & games, or emulator? Considering whether its worth the faff of collecting / restoring / maintaining old machines and having a stack of phys games when you can just emulate them all with less faff and cost.
There is even the physical emulator thing - chap at my last company bought and built this hardware kit you could load classic games onto… sort of mini arcade machine.
Whether you agree or disagree, surely Rishi deciding to change Scottish Laws is beyond the pale
You think the article which allows him to do it shouldn't exist, or just that this is a bad case?
I'm not sure which side I sit on re the article existing but I do think it sets an extremely bad precedent to use it to change/replace/stop a landmark Scottish bill, whatever you think about it. It will surely only lead to enabling the independence cause, I cannot see any good coming out of it.
Hardly, given over 60% of Scots oppose Sturgeon's Gender Recognition Bill anyway
In answer to @CorrectHorseBattery surely whether you agree with the bill is irrelevant (although you may have strong feelings about it). Key is surely whether the Scottish Govt has a right to pass it or whether it is inconsistent with UK law. I haven't a clue who is right on this point, but that is all that should matter.
In answer to @hyufd comment re 60% oppose it when a similar argument is put on other stuff your argument is always - tough, win an election and then you can have what you want.
From a personal point I don't know enough about the bill to say whether I agree or not.
They have a right to pass it - but it's also claimed that it conflicts with U.K. wide equality legislation, and the U.K. government reserved a right to block Scottish legislation. Whether or not it is inconsistent doesn't affect the right to pass the legislation, only determines either the U.K. government may then block it.
As the U.K. government has never before exercised that right, such an action would be something of a watershed in U.K./Scottish relations.
Part of the sending tanks story which is not much discussed.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/14/tanks-will-help-kyiv-break-deadlock-but-its-ukraine-allies-now-face-a-fork-in-the-road ...Despite these sound operational reasons for providing Ukraine with armour, the provision of Nato-designed main battle tanks presents some major challenges. The Leopard 2, weighing about 69 tonnes, and Challenger 2, weighing 72 tonnes, are more than 20 tonnes heavier than the Soviet-designed main battle tanks currently operated by Ukraine. There is little Ukrainian infrastructure along which such heavy vehicles can travel, while their engineering and recovery vehicles are optimised to support Soviet designs. Putting aside the training needed to maintain and fight with Nato-designed tanks, they would also need to be provided alongside combat engineering and mobility support vehicles if they were to be employable at any scale.
It is this requirement for enablers that poses hard choices on Nato members wanting to offer Ukraine their vehicles. After the cold war, frontline tank fleets declined significantly, while the cutbacks in bridging, breaching and transport and recovery vehicles have been even more severe...
There are a fair few recovery vehicles (tank conversions) on the collectors market. There was a fashion for them in the tank collecting circles a while back.
So do you think it isn't and that it is all a fabrication?
Everyday there seems to be positive economic news, its all a bit odd as if you read this site in isolation you would think we were in an histoically bad recession.
It's always a bad idea to take news from any outlet and any opinion on here as gospel as it is very often incorrect. 0.1 decrease in GDP last time was treated as though it was the end of the world as we know it... of course it wasn't just as a 0.1 increase is not paradise regained.
Just wanted to say what a sensible post. I have given you are hard time in the past, but this is just one of a few of your posts I have liked in recent days.
Plus the figures are then revised months later - IIRC at least one smallish recession was revised out of existence.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
Also: It seems perfectly possible that over the coming years big companies will outsource their human resources, legal and marketing departments to ChatGPT, while algorithms will buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts, and won’t need lunch.
Germany’s beleaguered defence minister is expected to stand down in the coming days as Berlin comes under renewed pressure to approve the delivery of Leopard battle tanks to Ukraine.
This isn't really anything to do with die Leoparden but a sustained sequence of Truss level performance.
I reckon the CR2 donation was because #globalbritain wanted to be first with an MBT donation and were worried a Leopard deal was imminent.
I really don't think so. Given the prior extreme reluctance to supply MBTs (and Germany's to permit the supply of Leopards by third countries), it's not unreasonable to think that it's just as much about building pressure to change that ahead if this week's Ramstein meeting.
The German defence ministry was where idiots were sent, for years. Ursula von der Leyen was the *successful* one.
Interesting to hear how the goalposts are moving. The new line is that no tanks can be ready before 2024.
What will be the timescale for delivery of the 12(!) CR2s with trained crews and adequate support? I read somewhere that currently the AFU has no suitable tank recovery ability for Challengers so that would have to be organised.
Afaics from a distance and as a non military expert (so much like almost every other PB military expert), though Germany’s aid is delivered furtively from a pacifist mindset while the UK’s comes with much bellicose self praise, the level of help doesn’t seem to differ that much. Not to restate the bleedin’ obvious that’s what happens with different countries with different histories and politics.
Just reflecting - three cancelled TPE services but still spare seats on the Northern train.
A lot of people must just have given up on trying to get from Leeds to Manchester by train.
For my sins, I am making this journey every day this week.
So you'd seen the 08:00 and 08:07 TPE services cancelled. Before that the 07:45 was cancelled as well, after that the 08:45 was cancelled. The 09:00 ran! First train across in 90 minutes and it was a 3 car train for added fun.
I wonder why TPE is cancelling all those services?
A scan of the reason codes showed "a problem with the traincrew" as the usual issue. Many of the cancellations are done the day before so are not counted as a cancellation - the train simply disappears despite being timetabled.
TPE had a simple enough premise - roster drivers and guards to crew trains. Then some bellend came up with the whizzo idea of ordering three new sets of trains - all incompatible with each other - to run alongside the existing fleet. DfT sees the bellend plan offers the most cash to the DfT, knows nothing about trains and says "congratulations, you win the franchise."
So 4 types of train. All very different. So crews need extensive type training and route training on all of them. At the same time as the new operator has to make big cuts because of its business plan. And Covid. So the solution is to reduce the route knowledge of crews. Instead of having drivers at various depots who sign the two trains used on the routes they operate, you now have drivers who sign part of the fleet on part of the route.
Even the shorter South Transpennine services from Manchester to Cleethorpes now needs multiple driver and guard changes. If one is missing the entire service gets cancelled. And because the politicians have been getting it in the neck about poor service provision, they issued an edict to prioritise training. So places like Scarborough and Cleethorpes have seen more trains cancelled than running - even though the trains are actually running empty on a training run.
The solution is to hire more drivers and guards and train them to sign more routes. But the DfT won't pay for it so it remains permafucked.
Could still be reopened, but the route would need re-engineering to make it fast, and there is the minor issue of where it goes east of Dunford Bridge. You'd need a completely new link to head north to Leeds, and the same to head south to Meadowhall and Sheffield Midland. Probably cheaper to build a new base tunnel.
Could still be reopened, but the route would need re-engineering to make it fast, and there is the minor issue of where it goes east of Dunford Bridge. You'd need a completely new link to head north to Leeds, and the same to head south to Meadowhall and Sheffield Midland. Probably cheaper to build a new base tunnel.
It's full of very high voltage cables, they mean you cannot run trains (or cars) through the tunnel and would have to be re-routed if you wished to do so.
Germany’s beleaguered defence minister is expected to stand down in the coming days as Berlin comes under renewed pressure to approve the delivery of Leopard battle tanks to Ukraine.
This isn't really anything to do with die Leoparden but a sustained sequence of Truss level performance.
I reckon the CR2 donation was because #globalbritain wanted to be first with an MBT donation and were worried a Leopard deal was imminent.
I really don't think so. Given the prior extreme reluctance to supply MBTs (and Germany's to permit the supply of Leopards by third countries), it's not unreasonable to think that it's just as much about building pressure to change that ahead if this week's Ramstein meeting.
The German defence ministry was where idiots were sent, for years. Ursula von der Leyen was the *successful* one.
Interesting to hear how the goalposts are moving. The new line is that no tanks can be ready before 2024.
What will be the timescale for delivery of the 12(!) CR2s with trained crews and adequate support? I read somewhere that currently the AFU has no suitable tank recovery ability for Challengers so that would have to be organised.
Afaics from a distance and as a non military expert (so much like almost every other PB military expert), though Germany’s aid is delivered furtively from a pacifist mindset while the UK’s comes with much bellicose self praise, the level of help doesn’t seem to differ that much. Not to restate the bleedin’ obvious that’s what happens with different countries with different histories and politics.
There are recovery vehicles with the power required available second hand. Heavier tanks have long been a thing in the West. A chap I knew had a Centurion AVRE which he used to pull all kinds of stuff around. Including his Challenger I (sort of prototype).
Historically, the way to deal with having a vehicle too heavy for your recovery vehicles was to daisy chain the recovery vehicles. This is how the Germans dealt with their early foray in to 50 ton+ AFVs, in WWII
There have been reports from around Salisbury Plain that tank training has been in overdrive for a while - that might be either the Army increasing training for the deployments to Eastern Europe or training Ukrainian crews. Given that it has just come out that the US has been training Ukrainians on Bradley’s for quite a while…
Whether you agree or disagree, surely Rishi deciding to change Scottish Laws is beyond the pale
You think the article which allows him to do it shouldn't exist, or just that this is a bad case?
I'm not sure which side I sit on re the article existing but I do think it sets an extremely bad precedent to use it to change/replace/stop a landmark Scottish bill, whatever you think about it. It will surely only lead to enabling the independence cause, I cannot see any good coming out of it.
Hardly, given over 60% of Scots oppose Sturgeon's Gender Recognition Bill anyway
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
Could still be reopened, but the route would need re-engineering to make it fast, and there is the minor issue of where it goes east of Dunford Bridge. You'd need a completely new link to head north to Leeds, and the same to head south to Meadowhall and Sheffield Midland. Probably cheaper to build a new base tunnel.
The 'reengineering to make it fast' would mean a brand new tunnel on a brand new alignment. Woodhead just isn't suitable for a high-speed line. It's not just the tunnel itself; it's the curves on the western approaches past the reservoirs and further down the line.
If you want a true high-speed route, then build a high-speed route and gain the extra capacity. But then we have the problem of the geography of the north, and the closeness of its settlements, not being ideal for true high-speed services anyway...
That doesn't mean Woodhead should not be reopened; just that it would not make a good high-speed route.
Part of the sending tanks story which is not much discussed.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/14/tanks-will-help-kyiv-break-deadlock-but-its-ukraine-allies-now-face-a-fork-in-the-road ...Despite these sound operational reasons for providing Ukraine with armour, the provision of Nato-designed main battle tanks presents some major challenges. The Leopard 2, weighing about 69 tonnes, and Challenger 2, weighing 72 tonnes, are more than 20 tonnes heavier than the Soviet-designed main battle tanks currently operated by Ukraine. There is little Ukrainian infrastructure along which such heavy vehicles can travel, while their engineering and recovery vehicles are optimised to support Soviet designs. Putting aside the training needed to maintain and fight with Nato-designed tanks, they would also need to be provided alongside combat engineering and mobility support vehicles if they were to be employable at any scale.
It is this requirement for enablers that poses hard choices on Nato members wanting to offer Ukraine their vehicles. After the cold war, frontline tank fleets declined significantly, while the cutbacks in bridging, breaching and transport and recovery vehicles have been even more severe...
The recovery element is particularly important. Without a CRARRV a Challenger just becomes a 70 ton metal roadblock when it breaks. It also has the 10 ton crane needed to do an engine/transmission swap.
The transport element is easier to solve. When QRH deployed with their Challengers to Finland last year they had no HETs so just used civvie Finnish contractors (who must have been coining it).
Any fucking idiot can operate a tank (as anybody who has ever member of the RTR will attest) but the logistical and technical support burden that comes with them is very significant.
Total number of 'spare' British CR2 (ie the ones that are going to be scrapped, not upgraded to CR3) is 88.
Could still be reopened, but the route would need re-engineering to make it fast, and there is the minor issue of where it goes east of Dunford Bridge. You'd need a completely new link to head north to Leeds, and the same to head south to Meadowhall and Sheffield Midland. Probably cheaper to build a new base tunnel.
It's full of very high voltage cables, they mean you cannot run trains (or cars) through the tunnel and would have to be re-routed if you wished to do so.
Could still be reopened, but the route would need re-engineering to make it fast, and there is the minor issue of where it goes east of Dunford Bridge. You'd need a completely new link to head north to Leeds, and the same to head south to Meadowhall and Sheffield Midland. Probably cheaper to build a new base tunnel.
It's full of very high voltage cables, they mean you cannot run trains (or cars) through the tunnel and would have to be re-routed if you wished to do so.
I know a fair bit about this. In practice, cables are probably making the best use of the tunnel. If it was thought there was a case for reopening the alignment to rail and/or road, it would, as Rochdale says, in all likelihood be more cost-effective to bore a new tunnel which could accommodate overhead wires/whatever width you thought you needed for road/both. This comes up periodically on the rail side, and there was a study done a few years back for a road tunnel. It's quite hard to make a positive Benefit-Cost ratio using traditional transport economics, but traditional transport economics aren't the whole picture (just the part of the picture it's easiest to quantify).
Tunnel boring is getting cheaper and cheaper (and is considerably cheaper in the tunnel-friendly rock of the north of England). And acquiring land on the surface is getting more and more expensive.
Could still be reopened, but the route would need re-engineering to make it fast, and there is the minor issue of where it goes east of Dunford Bridge. You'd need a completely new link to head north to Leeds, and the same to head south to Meadowhall and Sheffield Midland. Probably cheaper to build a new base tunnel.
The 'reengineering to make it fast' would mean a brand new tunnel on a brand new alignment. Woodhead just isn't suitable for a high-speed line. It's not just the tunnel itself; it's the curves on the western approaches past the reservoirs and further down the line.
If you want a true high-speed route, then build a high-speed route and gain the extra capacity. But then we have the problem of the geography of the north, and the closeness of its settlements, not being ideal for true high-speed services anyway...
That doesn't mean Woodhead should not be reopened; just that it would not make a good high-speed route.
Having lived and worked in Sheffield with family on the other side of the hills I was a frequent traveller. The transport connections are significantly below what is needed for both road and rail. A new motorway AND a high speed rail line are needed. And the chances of either happening are as close to zero as makes no odds. Sadly.
Part of the sending tanks story which is not much discussed.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/14/tanks-will-help-kyiv-break-deadlock-but-its-ukraine-allies-now-face-a-fork-in-the-road ...Despite these sound operational reasons for providing Ukraine with armour, the provision of Nato-designed main battle tanks presents some major challenges. The Leopard 2, weighing about 69 tonnes, and Challenger 2, weighing 72 tonnes, are more than 20 tonnes heavier than the Soviet-designed main battle tanks currently operated by Ukraine. There is little Ukrainian infrastructure along which such heavy vehicles can travel, while their engineering and recovery vehicles are optimised to support Soviet designs. Putting aside the training needed to maintain and fight with Nato-designed tanks, they would also need to be provided alongside combat engineering and mobility support vehicles if they were to be employable at any scale.
It is this requirement for enablers that poses hard choices on Nato members wanting to offer Ukraine their vehicles. After the cold war, frontline tank fleets declined significantly, while the cutbacks in bridging, breaching and transport and recovery vehicles have been even more severe...
The recovery element is particularly important. Without a CRARRV a Challenger just becomes a 70 ton metal roadblock when it breaks. It also has the 10 ton crane needed to do an engine/transmission swap.
The transport element is easier to solve. When QRH deployed with their Challengers to Finland last year they had no HETs so just used civvie Finnish contractors (who must have been coining it).
Any fucking idiot can operate a tank (as anybody who has ever member of the RTR will attest) but the logistical and technical support burden that comes with them is very significant.
Total number of 'spare' British CR2 (ie the ones that are going to be scrapped, not upgraded to CR3) is 88.
"Any fucking idiot can operate a tank "
This is a typical fucking @Dura_Ace pissing on everybody comment - you're a poster who virtually never has anything positive to say about anyone.
I'll alter what you say above to make it accurate: "Any fucking idiot can operate a tank; but to use one effectively requires training, experience and not a little skill."
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
A robot tax? Would also reduce the incentive to automate jobs
"Robot tax" just means more (doubled?) corporation tax if everything everywhere is automated and AI-ed. The disincentive will only work at the carwash level, unless your robot tax is so high it is expected and intended to be a pretty much expressly Luddite piece of Rage Against the Machines.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
Also: It seems perfectly possible that over the coming years big companies will outsource their human resources, legal and marketing departments to ChatGPT, while algorithms will buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts, and won’t need lunch.
We (or rather Wall Street and the City) already have "algorithms [that] buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts".
And they brought us the Global Financial Crisis as well as other multi-billion dollar glitches that were contained, such as the collapse of LTCM and various Flash Crashes.
So fusion has been in the news quite a bit. Have y'all ever heard of the "only known way to get fusion power NOW" (paraphrasing Teller)? It is known as Peaceful Nuclear Explosion Reactor (PNER) or Project PACER! Set off thermonuclear bombs and make steam power! ... https://twitter.com/GBruhaug/status/1614666932296237056
Could still be reopened, but the route would need re-engineering to make it fast, and there is the minor issue of where it goes east of Dunford Bridge. You'd need a completely new link to head north to Leeds, and the same to head south to Meadowhall and Sheffield Midland. Probably cheaper to build a new base tunnel.
The 'reengineering to make it fast' would mean a brand new tunnel on a brand new alignment. Woodhead just isn't suitable for a high-speed line. It's not just the tunnel itself; it's the curves on the western approaches past the reservoirs and further down the line.
If you want a true high-speed route, then build a high-speed route and gain the extra capacity. But then we have the problem of the geography of the north, and the closeness of its settlements, not being ideal for true high-speed services anyway...
That doesn't mean Woodhead should not be reopened; just that it would not make a good high-speed route.
Having lived and worked in Sheffield with family on the other side of the hills I was a frequent traveller. The transport connections are significantly below what is needed for both road and rail. A new motorway AND a high speed rail line are needed. And the chances of either happening are as close to zero as makes no odds. Sadly.
It would most likely be one or the other. Doing one would kill the case for the other. Interestingly, the paucity of road connections between Manchester and Sheffield makes rail mode share between the two unusually high - with the effect that it's rather easier to make a case for improvements to rail on the Sheffield-Manchester corridor than it otherwise might be.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
Also: It seems perfectly possible that over the coming years big companies will outsource their human resources, legal and marketing departments to ChatGPT, while algorithms will buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts, and won’t need lunch.
We (or rather Wall Street and the City) already have "algorithms [that] buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts".
And they brought us the Global Financial Crisis as well as other multi-billion dollar glitches that were contained, such as the collapse of LTCM and various Flash Crashes.
Be careful what you wish for.
They have also reduced typical fees for investing from a couple of % to less than half a percent and close to zero if chasing the lowest cost options.
Germany’s beleaguered defence minister is expected to stand down in the coming days as Berlin comes under renewed pressure to approve the delivery of Leopard battle tanks to Ukraine.
This isn't really anything to do with die Leoparden but a sustained sequence of Truss level performance.
I reckon the CR2 donation was because #globalbritain wanted to be first with an MBT donation and were worried a Leopard deal was imminent.
I really don't think so. Given the prior extreme reluctance to supply MBTs (and Germany's to permit the supply of Leopards by third countries), it's not unreasonable to think that it's just as much about building pressure to change that ahead if this week's Ramstein meeting.
The German defence ministry was where idiots were sent, for years. Ursula von der Leyen was the *successful* one.
Interesting to hear how the goalposts are moving. The new line is that no tanks can be ready before 2024.
What will be the timescale for delivery of the 12(!) CR2s with trained crews and adequate support? I read somewhere that currently the AFU has no suitable tank recovery ability for Challengers so that would have to be organised.
Afaics from a distance and as a non military expert (so much like almost every other PB military expert), though Germany’s aid is delivered furtively from a pacifist mindset while the UK’s comes with much bellicose self praise, the level of help doesn’t seem to differ that much. Not to restate the bleedin’ obvious that’s what happens with different countries with different histories and politics.
There are recovery vehicles with the power required available second hand. Heavier tanks have long been a thing in the West. A chap I knew had a Centurion AVRE which he used to pull all kinds of stuff around. Including his Challenger I (sort of prototype).
Historically, the way to deal with having a vehicle too heavy for your recovery vehicles was to daisy chain the recovery vehicles. This is how the Germans dealt with their early foray in to 50 ton+ AFVs, in WWII
There have been reports from around Salisbury Plain that tank training has been in overdrive for a while - that might be either the Army increasing training for the deployments to Eastern Europe or training Ukrainian crews. Given that it has just come out that the US has been training Ukrainians on Bradley’s for quite a while…
There has been a significant Ukranian presence in the army bases around Salisbury for many months.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
A robot tax? Would also reduce the incentive to automate jobs
"Robot tax" just means more (doubled?) corporation tax if everything everywhere is automated and AI-ed. The disincentive will only work at the carwash level, unless your robot tax is so high it is expected and intended to be a pretty much expressly Luddite piece of Rage Against the Machines.
So do you think it isn't and that it is all a fabrication?
Everyday there seems to be positive economic news, its all a bit odd as if you read this site in isolation you would think we were in an histoically bad recession.
It's always a bad idea to take news from any outlet and any opinion on here as gospel as it is very often incorrect. 0.1 decrease in GDP last time was treated as though it was the end of the world as we know it... of course it wasn't just as a 0.1 increase is not paradise regained.
Just wanted to say what a sensible post. I have given you are hard time in the past, but this is just one of a few of your posts I have liked in recent days.
Plus the figures are then revised months later - IIRC at least one smallish recession was revised out of existence.
Germany’s beleaguered defence minister is expected to stand down in the coming days as Berlin comes under renewed pressure to approve the delivery of Leopard battle tanks to Ukraine.
This isn't really anything to do with die Leoparden but a sustained sequence of Truss level performance.
I reckon the CR2 donation was because #globalbritain wanted to be first with an MBT donation and were worried a Leopard deal was imminent.
I really don't think so. Given the prior extreme reluctance to supply MBTs (and Germany's to permit the supply of Leopards by third countries), it's not unreasonable to think that it's just as much about building pressure to change that ahead if this week's Ramstein meeting.
The German defence ministry was where idiots were sent, for years. Ursula von der Leyen was the *successful* one.
Interesting to hear how the goalposts are moving. The new line is that no tanks can be ready before 2024.
What will be the timescale for delivery of the 12(!) CR2s with trained crews and adequate support? I read somewhere that currently the AFU has no suitable tank recovery ability for Challengers so that would have to be organised.
Afaics from a distance and as a non military expert (so much like almost every other PB military expert), though Germany’s aid is delivered furtively from a pacifist mindset while the UK’s comes with much bellicose self praise, the level of help doesn’t seem to differ that much. Not to restate the bleedin’ obvious that’s what happens with different countries with different histories and politics.
There are recovery vehicles with the power required available second hand. Heavier tanks have long been a thing in the West. A chap I knew had a Centurion AVRE which he used to pull all kinds of stuff around. Including his Challenger I (sort of prototype).
Historically, the way to deal with having a vehicle too heavy for your recovery vehicles was to daisy chain the recovery vehicles. This is how the Germans dealt with their early foray in to 50 ton+ AFVs, in WWII
There have been reports from around Salisbury Plain that tank training has been in overdrive for a while - that might be either the Army increasing training for the deployments to Eastern Europe or training Ukrainian crews. Given that it has just come out that the US has been training Ukrainians on Bradley’s for quite a while…
There has been a significant Ukranian presence in the army bases around Salisbury for many months.
Another issue with heavy tanks is weight loadings on things like bridges: though that can be mitigated, particularly in war. Oddly, AIUI smaller bridges can be more of a problem than larger ones.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
Also: It seems perfectly possible that over the coming years big companies will outsource their human resources, legal and marketing departments to ChatGPT, while algorithms will buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts, and won’t need lunch.
We (or rather Wall Street and the City) already have "algorithms [that] buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts".
And they brought us the Global Financial Crisis as well as other multi-billion dollar glitches that were contained, such as the collapse of LTCM and various Flash Crashes.
Be careful what you wish for.
LTCM was the fault of some conceited dorks plus the Asian crisis, which itself was a good old fashioned bubble.
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
So fusion has been in the news quite a bit. Have y'all ever heard of the "only known way to get fusion power NOW" (paraphrasing Teller)? It is known as Peaceful Nuclear Explosion Reactor (PNER) or Project PACER! Set off thermonuclear bombs and make steam power! ... https://twitter.com/GBruhaug/status/1614666932296237056
I’ve long advocated this. As part of the theory of Madmen’s Defence - a version of MAD where you try and be the craziest country out there.
“Welcome to the negotiations” “Why do the teacups rattle every 30 seconds?” {lunatic gleam in eyes} “We love nukes so much we set them off continuously to power the country. Now about that border…”
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
Also: It seems perfectly possible that over the coming years big companies will outsource their human resources, legal and marketing departments to ChatGPT, while algorithms will buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts, and won’t need lunch.
We (or rather Wall Street and the City) already have "algorithms [that] buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts".
And they brought us the Global Financial Crisis as well as other multi-billion dollar glitches that were contained, such as the collapse of LTCM and various Flash Crashes.
Be careful what you wish for.
If robots take over more of the economy and act rationally, does that mean economic models will start working?
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
His chapter on an authoritarian Tory Home Secretary of the 1920s includes:
“The Home Office could have been invented for Jix and he for it. His nature and its function closed with each other in inseparable embrace. Here was the seat of awe, if not of majesty. Here were the brakes, the cold douches, the wet blankets, the Great Book of Don’t, the little cane and the big stick, the king’s ear, the dear old codes all laid out in lavender, the Union Jacks and the succulent rubber stamps, all of them, though dusty from disgraceful neglect, in splendid working order. Jix entered upon his heritage with undisguised joy.”
— The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties, 1919-1940 by Dr Ronald Blythe
A century on….
Oddly, however, almost every word he wrote about Joynson-Hicks was a lie.
His most famous book, Akenfield, was also plagiarised from a book by two anthropologists which had been mysteriously rejected by Blythe’s publishing house…with the TV series, made him a fortune but they never got a penny.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
Also: It seems perfectly possible that over the coming years big companies will outsource their human resources, legal and marketing departments to ChatGPT, while algorithms will buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts, and won’t need lunch.
We (or rather Wall Street and the City) already have "algorithms [that] buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts".
And they brought us the Global Financial Crisis as well as other multi-billion dollar glitches that were contained, such as the collapse of LTCM and various Flash Crashes.
Be careful what you wish for.
LTCM was the fault of some conceited dorks plus the Asian crisis, which itself was a good old fashioned bubble.
LTCM was the fault of some conceited dorks with PhDs, Nobel prizes and very smart algorithms, and the Russian bond default.
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
Also: It seems perfectly possible that over the coming years big companies will outsource their human resources, legal and marketing departments to ChatGPT, while algorithms will buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts, and won’t need lunch.
We (or rather Wall Street and the City) already have "algorithms [that] buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts".
And they brought us the Global Financial Crisis as well as other multi-billion dollar glitches that were contained, such as the collapse of LTCM and various Flash Crashes.
Be careful what you wish for.
If robots take over more of the economy and act rationally, does that mean economic models will start working?
What is rational for an AI might be very different from our understanding.
Recent comments from Stonewall have sown confusion about how gender recognition obtained outside the UK is handled here, and how that relates to the changes proposed in Scotland. There is no automatic recognition in the UK of any gender recognition certificates issued elsewhere.
A UK gender recognition certificate (GRC) is always required to obtain such recognition under UK law. However, if a person comes from one of a list of “approved” jurisdictions, they need not show that they meet all of the tests usually applied here and have access instead to a fast track application process.
Only jurisdictions with similar system to the UK have been placed on this list. It was last revised in 2011. Places on it that have since reduced their requirement for access to a GRC are now belatedly now being removed from it. Ireland is not and never has been on it.
The list cannot be a vehicle for dealing with any GRCs issued in Scotland as its coverage is limited, in primary legislation, to places outwith the UK. The changes now proposed in Scotland would create a system of automatic recognition of all GRCs, issued anywhere in the world, whatever the rules applied locally.
Stonewall Scotland specifically welcomed this change, and so the confusion the organisation is now creating here is not only unhelpful but also hard to understand.
Germany’s beleaguered defence minister is expected to stand down in the coming days as Berlin comes under renewed pressure to approve the delivery of Leopard battle tanks to Ukraine.
This isn't really anything to do with die Leoparden but a sustained sequence of Truss level performance.
I reckon the CR2 donation was because #globalbritain wanted to be first with an MBT donation and were worried a Leopard deal was imminent.
I really don't think so. Given the prior extreme reluctance to supply MBTs (and Germany's to permit the supply of Leopards by third countries), it's not unreasonable to think that it's just as much about building pressure to change that ahead if this week's Ramstein meeting.
The German defence ministry was where idiots were sent, for years. Ursula von der Leyen was the *successful* one.
Interesting to hear how the goalposts are moving. The new line is that no tanks can be ready before 2024.
What will be the timescale for delivery of the 12(!) CR2s with trained crews and adequate support? I read somewhere that currently the AFU has no suitable tank recovery ability for Challengers so that would have to be organised.
Afaics from a distance and as a non military expert (so much like almost every other PB military expert), though Germany’s aid is delivered furtively from a pacifist mindset while the UK’s comes with much bellicose self praise, the level of help doesn’t seem to differ that much. Not to restate the bleedin’ obvious that’s what happens with different countries with different histories and politics.
The main differences are that the UK has given what it can much more quickly and with less agonising, but Germany has more in the way of useful and usable kit than the UK.
The British Army seems to be in a terrible state in terms of usable equipment, and, nearly one year after Russian tanks started heading towards Kyiv, there doesn't seem to be much urgency in fixing those issues, or producing new kit for either the British Army or Ukraine.
It means Britain is in the position of hoping that Germany and the US will do what we would like to do, but can't.
Part of the sending tanks story which is not much discussed.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/14/tanks-will-help-kyiv-break-deadlock-but-its-ukraine-allies-now-face-a-fork-in-the-road ...Despite these sound operational reasons for providing Ukraine with armour, the provision of Nato-designed main battle tanks presents some major challenges. The Leopard 2, weighing about 69 tonnes, and Challenger 2, weighing 72 tonnes, are more than 20 tonnes heavier than the Soviet-designed main battle tanks currently operated by Ukraine. There is little Ukrainian infrastructure along which such heavy vehicles can travel, while their engineering and recovery vehicles are optimised to support Soviet designs. Putting aside the training needed to maintain and fight with Nato-designed tanks, they would also need to be provided alongside combat engineering and mobility support vehicles if they were to be employable at any scale.
It is this requirement for enablers that poses hard choices on Nato members wanting to offer Ukraine their vehicles. After the cold war, frontline tank fleets declined significantly, while the cutbacks in bridging, breaching and transport and recovery vehicles have been even more severe...
The recovery element is particularly important. Without a CRARRV a Challenger just becomes a 70 ton metal roadblock when it breaks. It also has the 10 ton crane needed to do an engine/transmission swap.
The transport element is easier to solve. When QRH deployed with their Challengers to Finland last year they had no HETs so just used civvie Finnish contractors (who must have been coining it).
Any fucking idiot can operate a tank (as anybody who has ever member of the RTR will attest) but the logistical and technical support burden that comes with them is very significant.
Total number of 'spare' British CR2 (ie the ones that are going to be scrapped, not upgraded to CR3) is 88.
"Any fucking idiot can operate a tank "
This is a typical fucking @Dura_Ace pissing on everybody comment - you're a poster who virtually never has anything positive to say about anyone.
I'll alter what you say above to make it accurate: "Any fucking idiot can operate a tank; but to use one effectively requires training, experience and not a little skill."
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
If there are any senior police officers reading this, next time one your staff has a nickname such as the rapist, or the bastard, at least don't give them a gun!
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
“Inconceivable!" "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
If there are any senior police officers reading this, next time one your staff has a nickname such as the rapist, or the bastard, at least don't give them a gun!
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
A robot tax? Would also reduce the incentive to automate jobs
"Robot tax" just means more (doubled?) corporation tax if everything everywhere is automated and AI-ed. The disincentive will only work at the carwash level, unless your robot tax is so high it is expected and intended to be a pretty much expressly Luddite piece of Rage Against the Machines.
If automation leads to high unemployment and few permanent jobs, a robot tax would have to be high to fund the much higher welfare bills and/or a UBI
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
Also: It seems perfectly possible that over the coming years big companies will outsource their human resources, legal and marketing departments to ChatGPT, while algorithms will buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts, and won’t need lunch.
We (or rather Wall Street and the City) already have "algorithms [that] buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts".
And they brought us the Global Financial Crisis as well as other multi-billion dollar glitches that were contained, such as the collapse of LTCM and various Flash Crashes.
Be careful what you wish for.
If robots take over more of the economy and act rationally, does that mean economic models will start working?
What is rational for an AI might be very different from our understanding.
If AI is truly intelligent, it may be corrupt, stupid, arrogant and/or taking drugs.
The idea that AI is automatically Plato’s Philosopher King made manifest has always seemed bizarre to me.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
We’re very disappointed by the High Court’s decision today that the long waiting times experienced by trans people seeking treatment are lawful. We don’t believe this is right - and will be appealing the judgment.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
Also: It seems perfectly possible that over the coming years big companies will outsource their human resources, legal and marketing departments to ChatGPT, while algorithms will buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts, and won’t need lunch.
We (or rather Wall Street and the City) already have "algorithms [that] buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts".
And they brought us the Global Financial Crisis as well as other multi-billion dollar glitches that were contained, such as the collapse of LTCM and various Flash Crashes.
Be careful what you wish for.
If robots take over more of the economy and act rationally, does that mean economic models will start working?
What is rational for an AI might be very different from our understanding.
If AI is truly intelligent, it may be corrupt, stupid, arrogant and/or taking drugs.
The idea that AI is automatically Plato’s Philosopher King made manifest has always seemed bizarre to me.
As is the idea that a truly intelligent AI might think in a recognisably human manner.
Comments
Money borrowed to pay for Christmas could take years to repay, according to debt advice charity StepChange.
The charity said worries about debt had led to a surge in enquiries as soon as the festive season was over.
Its warning comes as a poll for the BBC suggests fears over unmanageable debt.
A third of respondents to the poll who used credit to help get through Christmas and the holiday season said they were not confident about their ability to repay.
StepChange said it had advised more people on 3 January, the first working day after the festive break, than on any day last year.
"Christmas can put great financial pressure on people, causing some to rely on credit and spend more than they can afford. In some cases, this can lead to a debt hangover in the new year that may take many months or even years to repay," said Richard Lane, from StepChange.
He said many people were unable to adjust their spending habits or have a sufficient income as bills and prices soared, and he urged those struggling not to "suffer in silence"...
Cost of Living Poll – BBC – 16 January 2023
https://savanta.com/knowledge-centre/published-polls/cost-of-living-poll-bbc-16-january-2023/
There is also a sense that things are not quite as bad as some forecasts (of course there will be a range). Its interesting that the head of Natwest (I think) on BBC yesterday now things it will be a shallower recession than previously thought. Lots of indicators are saying this. Inflation will start falling very soon as we approach the anniversary of the war.
At least twice you have posted stories about supermarket chains really struggling and made out they are smashing it. I have to ask whether you don't know what you are talking about, or do and think we're stupid enough to swallow pro-Tory spin despite the evidence of our lived experiences.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/goldman-sachs-and-the-culling-of-the-surplus-elites/
But that's largely because 2022 was a massive splurge with the excuse of 'we missed these opportunities during covid'. Five holidays and a knee operation. Back to living within our means this year.
The Kremlin is belatedly conducting personnel mobilization, reorganization, and industrial actions it probably should have undertaken before launching its invasion of Ukraine in Feb '22 and is taking steps to conduct the “special military operation” as a major conventional war.
https://mobile.twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1614825184766185473
https://www.christian.org.uk/news/two-thirds-of-scots-oppose-scot-govts-gender-self-id-bill/
It really is a joke. Get tunnelling!
TPE is in total meltdown and is not comparable with any other train service I have ever experienced anywhere, in any country, at any time, (including the UK in 2019) and the stats don't fully show it because they heavily use "planned cancellation", cancelling great swathes of trains at 10pm.the previous night, enough notice that they do not form part of the stats.
I'd guess that for the entire duration of 2022 possibly less than 40% of the express service that was supposed to run between Leeds and Manchester, actually ran to time (within 15 minutes).
Their full timetable is to run 5 direct tph each way between Leeds and Manchester each hour and this is around an 16 hr per day 7 day per week full service (some evening frequency drops balanced by airport night services).
They were running 3tph COVID timetable up until December, now increased to 4tph.
Any weekend with any engineering works (i.e. most), line blocking or not, is reduced to 1 tph x 15 hrs that only runs York - Manchester (no Hull, Newcastle, Liverpool etc). They usually run far less than the normal service for the entirely unaffected lines!
Adjacent to and on strike days, and TPE strikes have been constant through 2022, it's often been 1 tph x 10 hrs. I'd be surprised between engineering and strikes if less than 100 days were affected last year.
I'd say an, unseen by stats, 20% planned cancellation rate below the 3/4 tph on normal days, and concentrated during peak hours, is the absolute norm.
You still have the normal roster of delays and in running cancellations.
And forget about advance tickets, or even a full cost day ticket on anything other than walk up. The website will typically only offer a wayfarer type ticket for about 3x the cost of a full fare return.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-02/wall-street-slashes-bankers-bonuses-as-talent-war-comes-to-an-end
I, of course, am completely objective and my priorities for government spending never change according to my personal circumstances. We do of course need much better paid academics if we're not going to fall behind other countries!
Try placing a New Order
- Five holidays and a knee operation
- Living within our means this year
- Oh, shit!
In answer to @hyufd comment re 60% oppose it when a similar argument is put on other stuff your argument is always - tough, win an election and then you can have what you want.
From a personal point I don't know enough about the bill to say whether I agree or not.
However opposition to the Gender Reform Bill by most Scots does make it easier for Westminster to overrule Holyrood on that
Project largely scaled back then scrapped with a few basic problems. At the Manchester end was supposed to connect to the cancelled Inner Ring Motorway. So the whole Hyde Road section was scrapped. And you can't dump transpennine motorway traffic onto the M60 at Denton island as that's already full. And the other end? M1 through Sheffield also chocka, and the link across towards Barnsdale Bar makes no sense without that section of A1 being motorway which the viaducts at Wentbridge and Sprotbrough make that *expensive*
Rail tunnel? Planned as far back as Victorian times when the L&Y planned a Pennine base tunnel to connect Littleborough and Sowerby Bridge. Now, the NPR project seems dead and besides its the political football that gives everyone a headache as how do you do high speed between Manchester / Sheffield / Leeda and not disappoint Huddersfield and Bradford?
Literally any of our neighbouring / competitor countries would have built both long ago. But this is Britain and we are shit at planning and shit at long-term thinking.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/14/tanks-will-help-kyiv-break-deadlock-but-its-ukraine-allies-now-face-a-fork-in-the-road
...Despite these sound operational reasons for providing Ukraine with armour, the provision of Nato-designed main battle tanks presents some major challenges. The Leopard 2, weighing about 69 tonnes, and Challenger 2, weighing 72 tonnes, are more than 20 tonnes heavier than the Soviet-designed main battle tanks currently operated by Ukraine. There is little Ukrainian infrastructure along which such heavy vehicles can travel, while their engineering and recovery vehicles are optimised to support Soviet designs. Putting aside the training needed to maintain and fight with Nato-designed tanks, they would also need to be provided alongside combat engineering and mobility support vehicles if they were to be employable at any scale.
It is this requirement for enablers that poses hard choices on Nato members wanting to offer Ukraine their vehicles. After the cold war, frontline tank fleets declined significantly, while the cutbacks in bridging, breaching and transport and recovery vehicles have been even more severe...
Actual physical classic console & games, or emulator? Considering whether its worth the faff of collecting / restoring / maintaining old machines and having a stack of phys games when you can just emulate them all with less faff and cost.
A modern system of industrial relations would mean better conditions for the staff, more productivity and less strife.
Think British Leyland vs the modern car makers in the U.K. How often do they go on strike? Why is that?
Whether or not it is inconsistent doesn't affect the right to pass the legislation, only determines either the U.K. government may then block it.
As the U.K. government has never before exercised that right, such an action would be something of a watershed in U.K./Scottish relations.
It seems perfectly possible that over the coming years big companies will outsource their human resources, legal and marketing departments to ChatGPT, while algorithms will buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts, and won’t need lunch.
Afaics from a distance and as a non military expert (so much like almost every other PB military expert), though Germany’s aid is delivered furtively from a pacifist mindset while the UK’s comes with much bellicose self praise, the level of help doesn’t seem to differ that much. Not to restate the bleedin’ obvious that’s what happens with different countries with different histories and politics.
TPE had a simple enough premise - roster drivers and guards to crew trains. Then some bellend came up with the whizzo idea of ordering three new sets of trains - all incompatible with each other - to run alongside the existing fleet. DfT sees the bellend plan offers the most cash to the DfT, knows nothing about trains and says "congratulations, you win the franchise."
So 4 types of train. All very different. So crews need extensive type training and route training on all of them. At the same time as the new operator has to make big cuts because of its business plan. And Covid. So the solution is to reduce the route knowledge of crews. Instead of having drivers at various depots who sign the two trains used on the routes they operate, you now have drivers who sign part of the fleet on part of the route.
Even the shorter South Transpennine services from Manchester to Cleethorpes now needs multiple driver and guard changes. If one is missing the entire service gets cancelled. And because the politicians have been getting it in the neck about poor service provision, they issued an edict to prioritise training. So places like Scarborough and Cleethorpes have seen more trains cancelled than running - even though the trains are actually running empty on a training run.
The solution is to hire more drivers and guards and train them to sign more routes. But the DfT won't pay for it so it remains permafucked.
Inside Conservative Democratic Organisation
Boris Johnson supporter @team_greenhalgh on T… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1614941433386962946
Historically, the way to deal with having a vehicle too heavy for your recovery vehicles was to daisy chain the recovery vehicles. This is how the Germans dealt with their early foray in to 50 ton+ AFVs, in WWII
There have been reports from around Salisbury Plain that tank training has been in overdrive for a while - that might be either the Army increasing training for the deployments to Eastern Europe or training Ukrainian crews. Given that it has just come out that the US has been training Ukrainians on Bradley’s for quite a while…
If you want a true high-speed route, then build a high-speed route and gain the extra capacity. But then we have the problem of the geography of the north, and the closeness of its settlements, not being ideal for true high-speed services anyway...
That doesn't mean Woodhead should not be reopened; just that it would not make a good high-speed route.
The transport element is easier to solve. When QRH deployed with their Challengers to Finland last year they had no HETs so just used civvie Finnish contractors (who must have been coining it).
Any fucking idiot can operate a tank (as anybody who has ever member of the RTR will attest) but the logistical and technical support burden that comes with them is very significant.
Total number of 'spare' British CR2 (ie the ones that are going to be scrapped, not upgraded to CR3) is 88.
A Met police officer revealed as a serial rapist who committed more than 40 attacks, despite the force… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1614943852569268227
Tunnel boring is getting cheaper and cheaper (and is considerably cheaper in the tunnel-friendly rock of the north of England). And acquiring land on the surface is getting more and more expensive.
This is a typical fucking @Dura_Ace pissing on everybody comment - you're a poster who virtually never has anything positive to say about anyone.
I'll alter what you say above to make it accurate: "Any fucking idiot can operate a tank; but to use one effectively requires training, experience and not a little skill."
And they brought us the Global Financial Crisis as well as other multi-billion dollar glitches that were contained, such as the collapse of LTCM and various Flash Crashes.
Be careful what you wish for.
So fusion has been in the news quite a bit. Have y'all ever heard of the "only known way to get fusion power NOW" (paraphrasing Teller)? It is known as Peaceful Nuclear Explosion Reactor (PNER) or Project PACER! Set off thermonuclear bombs and make steam power! ...
https://twitter.com/GBruhaug/status/1614666932296237056
Interestingly, the paucity of road connections between Manchester and Sheffield makes rail mode share between the two unusually high - with the effect that it's rather easier to make a case for improvements to rail on the Sheffield-Manchester corridor than it otherwise might be.
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
“Welcome to the negotiations”
“Why do the teacups rattle every 30 seconds?”
{lunatic gleam in eyes}
“We love nukes so much we set them off continuously to power the country. Now about that border…”
I wonder what the Met will actually have to do before they get disbanded.
His most famous book, Akenfield, was also plagiarised from a book by two anthropologists which had been mysteriously rejected by Blythe’s publishing house…with the TV series, made him a fortune but they never got a penny.
Brilliant prose writer though.
See the documentary, Hot Fuzz
Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Recent comments from Stonewall have sown confusion about how gender recognition obtained outside the UK is handled here, and how that relates to the changes proposed in Scotland. There is no automatic recognition in the UK of any gender recognition certificates issued elsewhere.
A UK gender recognition certificate (GRC) is always required to obtain such recognition under UK law. However, if a person comes from one of a list of “approved” jurisdictions, they need not show that they meet all of the tests usually applied here and have access instead to a fast track application process.
Only jurisdictions with similar system to the UK have been placed on this list. It was last revised in 2011. Places on it that have since reduced their requirement for access to a GRC are now belatedly now being removed from it. Ireland is not and never has been on it.
The list cannot be a vehicle for dealing with any GRCs issued in Scotland as its coverage is limited, in primary legislation, to places outwith the UK. The changes now proposed in Scotland would create a system of automatic recognition of all GRCs, issued anywhere in the world, whatever the rules applied locally.
Stonewall Scotland specifically welcomed this change, and so the confusion the organisation is now creating here is not only unhelpful but also hard to understand.
https://twitter.com/mbmpolicy/status/1614897145634488321
“Sown confusion” - a charitable metaphor…
The British Army seems to be in a terrible state in terms of usable equipment, and, nearly one year after Russian tanks started heading towards Kyiv, there doesn't seem to be much urgency in fixing those issues, or producing new kit for either the British Army or Ukraine.
It means Britain is in the position of hoping that Germany and the US will do what we would like to do, but can't.
https://twitter.com/uasupport999/status/1592657304926633984
https://twitter.com/Euan_MacDonald/status/1568284610714570757
https://twitter.com/Globe_conflicts/status/1506742786246258695
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izKQAeSlbYM
No reason to get upset.
“Inconceivable!"
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
The idea that AI is automatically Plato’s Philosopher King made manifest has always seemed bizarre to me.
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
We’re very disappointed by the High Court’s decision today that the long waiting times experienced by trans people seeking treatment are lawful. We don’t believe this is right - and will be appealing the judgment.
https://twitter.com/GoodLawProject/status/1614934248250642436